Through the tops of the trees, she could see the shadow of the biggest damned bird she’d ever seen in her life and it was diving!
Uttering a scream, Anya jerked free of Aidan’s hold and tore off through the trees.
Aidan caught up to her, grabbed her arm and kept going, pulling her behind him so that she had to take great leaps to keep up. She landed wrong on one leap and sprawled out.
Aidan whipped a look back at her, flicked a glance upward that made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end, hesitated, and then bent down, grabbed her arm and yanked her to her feet again. Grabbing her, he leapt behind the trunk of a tree.
The thing wasn’t a bird, Anya discovered as it swept past the tree they were hiding behind. It looked … well, it looked an awful lot like the pictures she’d seen of pterodactyls. Either the pictures weren’t entirely accurate, though, or this was something else—far more colorful than the pictures she’d seen—a bright, sky blue rather than the dull brown she remembered.
She could see it bank to land as it swept past and her heart fell to her toes.
Aidan jerked her into motion again, whipping around the tree they’d been hiding behind and tearing off in the other direction. The bird-thing screamed its frustration at them and she heard thrashing as it struggled to chase them on the ground. She didn’t dare spare the time to look back to see if it was gaining. Aidan seemed to have the right idea, run and zigzag.
She heard a clapping sound behind them and felt a cold chill run up and down her spine as it instantly leapt to mind that the damned thing was close enough it was trying to catch them with its long, pointed beak. It spurred her to more speed.
They broke from the forest so abruptly that Anya was halfway across the field before it dawned on her that they’d left their cover behind. Aidan apparently realized it about the same time she did. He slowed, looked behind them and then took off again, heading for the nearest cove of trees.
He began gaining on her. If she could’ve spared the breath she would’ve screamed at him to wait for her, but she had a bad feeling he was putting on more speed for a reason.
Abruptly, she took a flying leap to catch up and when she came down she kept going.
Chapter Four
The world went dark. Anya hit bottom just about the time her brain managed to process the fact that she was falling and communicated the urge to scream. She managed to get out a beginning note before she hit the ground and had the air forced from her lungs in a grunt.
She crumpled up like a spider that had been hit by a broom, too stunned for many minutes to figure out what had happened.
She managed a hoarse cry as a shadow cut out the little light filtering to the bottom and whipped a look upward in time to see the bird-thing fly over the top of the hole.
Relief flooded her. Either the thing hadn’t seen her disappear when she’d fallen or it was still focused on the easier prey of the two.
“Poor bastard,” she muttered and was a little surprised to realize she actually meant it.
She dismissed Aidan’s plight in the next moment, huffing for breath as she performed a mental check to see if she’d broken anything and then, when she convinced herself she hadn’t, examining the hole she was in. It didn’t look like a natural hole, she decided. The clay walls above her were rough but even enough to look man-dug.
Frowning, she thought that over, trying to gauge the distance to the top.
It didn’t seem deep enough to be a well. She thought she must be a good ten to fifteen feet from the surface, but even in south Georgia where the water table was really high, most shallow wells were dug at least twenty feet deep.
Plus they weren’t very big around and she doubted she could’ve fallen in one—maybe with one leg.
As she slowly gathered her wits and recovered from the fall, she finally realized that she could feel more air wafting around her than she thought she ought to given the depth of the hole. Grunting, she shifted around with an effort to examine the walls of the hole and discovered there was a shaft leading off in two different directions. A shiver raked through her.
Unlike the shaft she’d fallen down, though, she could see the edges of concrete culvert leading off in both directions.
She frowned, trying to figure out why the shaft she’d fallen down wasn’t lined with concrete and the intersecting tube was.
She remembered then that the ‘bugs’ had eaten the culvert she’d taken refuge in the night before and wondered if they’d eaten the concrete. If they had, though, why stop?
Maybe they just weren’t through?
She scrambled to her feet and tried to find hand and foot holds to climb out. She’d exhausted herself with the effort before it dawned on her that she hadn’t seen the little swarm clouds.
So … maybe they couldn’t get down this far?
Why wouldn’t they be able to, though?
Anya was still trying to puzzle it through when she heard Aidan calling her.
It troubled her that her first reaction was gladness.
* * * *
It disturbed Aidan that he wasn’t certain of when Anya disappeared. He’d been aware of her running with him, knew when she’d fallen a few steps behind, but he’d been too focused on trying to escape the hungry narltacter to know the exact moment that she’d vanished.
It hadn’t gotten her. He was convinced of that. If it had, it would’ve stopped to eat, not continued to chase him.
But how had she vanished?
Had there been another narltacter he hadn’t been aware of? Or something else?
He shook that thought. From everything they’d been able to learn about the beasts of that time, the narltacter was a loner. They didn’t hunt in packs and everything tended to hide when they were hunting. He didn’t think anything else would’ve been hunting food at the same time. It would’ve run and tried to hide like he and Anya had.
He couldn’t recall what other beasts had been roaming the landscape during that period, but he did remember enough to know that the terra-formers were already several million years into evolution of the planet and that meant that there were a lot of really huge, really scary-dangerous things roaming the countryside now.
“Shit!” He’d hoped he could find the damned satellite, retrieve what he could, and take off before things got extremely dangerous.
He hadn’t managed to find the satellite yet and he’d lost the damned evidence of higher life-forms!
He’d lost Anya.
He felt a tightening in his gut at that realization that he couldn’t entirely dismiss as frustration and disappointment at the failure of his mission.
Visions of the fear in her eyes and the bruises and scratches from her attempts to save herself danced in his head—and that had just been from the nanites breaking things down to release the necessary chemical components to jumpstart the beginnings of life-forms! She’d been starving and dehydrated. She wasn’t equipped to survive the environment the terra-formers were creating.
If it came to that, he wasn’t either, but at least he had some hope of escaping if he could find his ship and repair it. At least he had some idea of what to expect.
Dismissing his worries, he tried to focus on the exact moment he realized she was no longer behind him. He knew she’d still been with him when they left the forest behind, but that was as much as he could recall. Lifting his arm, he brought up a new screen and typed in the command to retrace his escape route.
The zigzags that appeared on the screen were more frustrating, though, than helpful. She could be hurt and it was going to take a while to retrace his path. Shaking his head, he began to jog along the lines indicated by his map, changing directions each time it beeped to let him know it was time to zigzag and double back. His sense of urgency only increased, though, and he began to call out to her, hoping she would be able to respond. Hoping she would respond.
* * * *
Anya was still trying to decide whether to take advantage of her ‘good fortune’ in
falling down the hole and losing Aidan, debating her chances in being able to get out by herself, when she heard a faint skittering noise inside one of the tunnels leading off from where she was. That decided the matter immediately.
“Help! Aidan! I’m here!”
She’d begun to think he couldn’t hear her when she heard a pounding noise from above. A few moments later, the sound stopped and she looked up to find Aidan staring down at her.
He studied her for a long moment and then straightened and looked around. “Get back!” he commanded her, waving his hand in a shooing motion.
Anya gaped at him. Surely to god the idiot wasn’t planning on joining her! “You have to help me out! There’s something down here!” she called back, not with any real hope that he’d understand a word of it.
He bent down, dangling his feet and legs over her. “Get back!” he said, and waved again.
“You stupid fucktard! We’ll both be stuck down here if you jum …!”
He slid off the ledge before she could get the rest of the sentence out of her mouth. She plastered herself against the wall—for all the good it did! Space was extremely limited to say the least. He practically landed on top of her. “Ow! Shit! Damn it! I told you not to jump!” she exclaimed when he landed on her, crushing one of her bare feet beneath his huge boot.
It occurred to her as she glared up at him that he was a lot bigger than she’d realized before, but then she’d had other things on her mind.
She didn’t like the things that went through her mind while they stood belly to belly in the narrow shaft. She’d noticed the warmth from his body when she’d put on the jacket he’d given her and she’d noticed his scent clinging to it—neither of which were repellent—far from it, but she’d managed to dismiss it from her mind.
She couldn’t breathe without rubbing her boobs on him!
And if the stiff thing prodding her in the belly was any indication, he’d noticed, too.
Or maybe that was something else?
“Uh. There’s something … uh … something …. Never mind! What the hell are we going to do now?”
Aidan grabbed her and dragged her down into a crouch. She caught a glimpse of something huge at the top of the hole as they toppled into one of the drain pipes. Dirt began raining down on their legs and Anya realized something was after them, trying to dig down to get to them.
As dark as the drainpipe was, despite the fact that she’d heard something in it earlier, she didn’t need any urging to crawl once they’d untangled themselves.
Aidan stopped Anya once they’d put a few yards between them and the beast trying to dig them up. “I think we’re safe enough here … for the moment, anyway,” he said absently, searching the suit for some kind of light. When he didn’t find anything in the pockets of the pants he was wearing, he turned to Anya and began searching the pockets of the jacket.
She began slapping at his hands. “Are you out of your mind! How can you think about sex at a time like this? That thing is trying to get us and eat us, you lunatic!”
“I’m looking for a light, damn it!” Aidan snapped indignantly. He had to wrestle her to search the pockets. Finally, though, he found what he’d been looking for and extracted it from the pocket.
“Oh,” Anya said uncomfortably when he produced a small object that turned out to be a flashlight of some kind.
He sent her a sour look and then held the light up to examine the pipe they were in.
“Oh don’t even!” she muttered as she followed Aidan a little deeper into the pipe. “Don’t try to tell me you weren’t happy to see me a few minutes ago! Now you want to pretend it never crossed your mind.”
They stopped again a few yards further and sat down, listening to the grunts and digging sounds until, almost as abruptly as it had started, the beast apparently gave up and decided to look somewhere else for an easier dinner.
Relieved, Anya looked at Aidan expectantly. “What now? I mean, where are we going anyway?”
Aidan frowned, studying the thing on his wrist. She couldn’t remember what he’d called it but it looked a lot like a tiny computer—or maybe a game system. Somehow, she doubted it was anything like that, though. He looked at her after a few moments. “Were go dis ting?”
Anya gaped at him as he gestured at the pipe. For a few moments, she thought maybe he was just mimicking what she’d asked, despite the gesturing.
“Were go dis ting?” he repeated.
Anya gaped at him and glanced up and down the pipe. She shrugged. “Damned if I know.”
He gave her a look.
She thought a moment, bringing up a mental map of the clearing. “I think east and west.”
His lips tightened.
“Roughly.”
“Dis ting what? Go were?”
It was really hard to follow what he was asking considering his accent and the way he formed his questions, Anya thought irritably. On the other hand, he was speaking English … sort of. “Oh! You mean what is it used for? Uh … I don’t know.”
She could tell from his expression that he didn’t believe her. ““Well, Jesus! I’m not from around here, damn it!” She frowned, considering it. “It’s a … well I guess it’s a drain pipe, but I don’t know a damned thing about sewer systems. A reservoir, maybe?” She thought about it, feeling her throat close with thirst at the prospect of finding a reservoir full of water.
On the other hand, should she lead an invader to a water source?
One look at his expression was enough to convince her that a) he hadn’t caught one word out of three and b) it didn’t matter what she said. He was going to investigate.
He studied the thing on his arm for several moments, frowning. “Big ting no harm here.”
It took Anya several moments to translate, but she had to agree with his assessment once she had. They were going to be a lot safer underground—well, unless there were big things that could and would crawl underground with them.
Of course, there was the fact that the pipe wasn’t big enough for anything really big, but she didn’t want to meet up with anything that could if it had a lot of really sharp teeth like the things she’d seen so far.
She didn’t understand what was happening. She hadn’t exactly had a lot of time to think about it since she’d been awakened at daylight by those things eating her clothing and the pipe she’d taken shelter in. She hadn’t had time to do anything but absorb one shock after another, but she didn’t think quiet time was going to help a lot.
The monster bugs and then the … Well, they looked like dinosaurs. They didn’t look like any pictures she’d ever seen of dinosaurs, but they sure as hell weren’t natives to Georgia! She supposed something similar might have roamed the earth millions of years ago, but she was pretty sure this area had been part of the ocean then.
So she was also pretty sure that ruled out any kind of sci-fi time warp.
Granted, she’d already been shook up when she first saw the obelisk, and it was huge, but she didn’t think these things had crawled out of that thing, either. In any case, she couldn’t figure out any reason why the alien invaders would’ve sent these things down. That was probably the most bizarre way to invade another planet that had ever been thought up! Surely they would’ve used technology?
The alien—Aidan—nudged her and indicated with a jerk his head that he wanted her to follow him.
Duh! Like she was going to go the other way!
Particularly when he had the light.
Her bare butt felt cold and wet when she got on her hands and knees to follow him, reminding her that she hadn’t had more than a couple of sips of water since the day before. The hope that the pipe might lead to a reservoir encouraged her to ignore the pain the rough concrete inflicted as she crawled—to a degree. She paused after a few minutes and pulled the sleeves down over her palms. There was nothing she could do for her knees, unfortunately, and the crawling was way worse on them than her palms.
She began to consider whe
ther she was more worried about her modesty or her knees and decided the hell with it. The jacket was way big on her. She thought the sleeves might cover her legs.
Stopping again, she pulled the jacket off and shoved her legs into the sleeves. It was a struggle to get her feet through the wrist holes, but she managed it and pulled the jacket up around her boobs. When she’d finished adjusting the jacket she discovered Aidan had stopped to see what she was doing.
She could well imagine what was going through his mind, but he didn’t say anything. He merely turned and continued crawling.
The makeshift trousers were a mixed success. The sleeves fit her legs pretty tightly, but they did protect her knees and shins. It was loose everywhere else, though, and she had to keep pausing to adjust it.
They’d been crawling for an hour or two, pausing to rest briefly about every fifteen minutes or so, when Aidan stopped in front of her again. Instead of turning and sitting down as he had been doing, though, he remained motionless long enough to arouse her curiosity. She discovered when she leaned over to peer around him that there was an iron grate blocking their path.
“Could anything else possibly go wrong?” she wondered out loud, dismayed and envisioning another several hours crawling back the way they’d come.
Aidan settled his light on the bottom of the culvert and sat back on his legs. The pipe was small enough he was still hunched over as he grasped the bars with his hands and shook them experimentally. Anya hadn’t expected them to move at all. A flicker of hopefulness went through her when she saw that they were loose.
“Can you get it out, you think?”
He flicked a glance at her face. His gaze moved downward from there to her boobs for a few seconds and then he returned his attention to the grate that was blocking their path.
Anya hiked the jacket up again, but although it flashed through her mind that he seemed way more interested in her anatomy than she would’ve thought an alien would be, she didn’t spend a lot of time dwelling on it.
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