by Louise Wise
EIGHTEEN
Jenny’s sleep was interrupted by the snuffling and low growling of animals from outside as they slunk around the spaceship looking for scraps, and she woke groggily, terribly tired, but finding it impossible to doze off again. She lay worrying about Fly, and his attitude towards Bodie and Matt.
She sat up, feeling weary, and climbed off the mattress that had been dragged into the cockpit alongside the men’s. After a brief pause by Bodie’s comatose form, she disappeared up the dim corridor to wash and dress in the privacy of the old cabin.
Matt kept his eyes closed, determined to hang on to the dream he had been having where he was back home with family and friends. But against his will his eyelids flickered open and, as if he felt an unwholesome presence watching him, he looked towards the doorway.
The alien was staring around the room as if scanning the scene and storing it deep in its memory for future use. It walked into the center of the room, and Matt felt himself pale when the alien fixed its strange stare on him. Its eyes were dull and almost sightless in appearance, and lacked any depth and character. Matt was certain the alien had no soul. Fear washed over him as the creature continued to stare, and Matt searched the dark space behind him, hoping to see Jenny asleep on the mattress. But her mattress was empty. There was only Bodie, still lying in oblivion. Matt looked back at the alien, whose unmoving stare was now on Bodie.
“Where’s Jen?” Matt asked, hating his squeaky-sounding voice.
The alien returned his gaze, but Matt couldn’t interpret the strangeness of it.
“Why do you call her that?” The alien spoke in a synthetic voice, clipped and emotionless.
Matt sat up straight, his face wary, but he remained passive. He had an uncanny feeling that any aggression, on his part, would result in his death.
“That’s her name.”
“Her name is Jenny.”
“Jen is an abbreviation of Jenny; and that of Jennifer, which is her real name.”
The alien averted his eyes towards the gloomy corridor. And as if he and Bodie had been forgotten he swept passed in a cool breeze and disappeared into the dark.
Matt let out a breath he didn’t know he had been holding. He looked at his hands; they were shaking so badly they blurred before his eyes. He clutched them together, afraid of his own fear.
He mustn’t lose it now!
Jenny had just finished dressing when Fly walked in. She returned his gaze with a cool one of her own, then deliberately turned her back and made a pretense of tidying the bed.
“I need the medical bag.”
“You know where it is. “
Fly said nothing. After a moment he moved forward and touched her lightly on the shoulder. She shrugged him off as though his hand were a crawling insect.
“It would have been better if I had told you there were only bodies in Taurus.”
Jenny turned on him, and stood spitting green embers from her eyes.
“Then why didn’t you kill them when you had the chance?” she spat. “And kill me too, because I won’t live in your shadow again!”
Fly took a step backwards, as if shocked by her anger. Then he collected the bag and left her alone.
She sat down, feeling shaky. She wished she had reacted differently, but the hurt he had inflicted on her by disappearing for the entire night and also by his callous - but with hindsight, probably unintentional - words just now, had touched a raw nerve.
She tried to decipher the look she had seen in his eyes; she had seen something similar in her mother’s the day she told her she had signed up for the mission, as if the woman had known they would never see one another again.
Matt watched the alien return. He knelt beside Bodie and checked his pulse and temperature, raising bandage after bandage with considerable care to check on every wound.
He opened the case he had brought back with him and took out a small object, clicked a button that bleeped, then placed the device close to Bodie’s temples.
Bodie gasped, as though coming up for air from underwater, but his eyes didn’t open; instead the balls rolled beneath their lids with great speed.
“Talk to him,” the alien commanded.
“What?”
“Talk to him.”
Matt licked his lips. “Bodie? Bodie, it’s Matt. C-can you hear me?”
The alien unzipped the case until it lay flat, and Matt could see a whole array of tools and instruments. Dead, emotionless eyes looked up: “More.”
Matt moved his gaze back towards Bodie. “Bodie, we’re safe -
Jen’s safe. She’s alive and well; the wolves didn’t kill her.”
As he spoke, the alien prized open Bodie’s eyelids and flashed a light inside. Then he attached some kind of small machine with detachable wires with suckers to Bodie’s bare chest. Matt craned his neck to see, and for a moment fascination overcame fear. The alien took no notice, and studied the small screen on the machine, occasionally realigning the wires on Bodie’s body.
“Are you a doctor?” Matt was granted the briefest of looks.
“No.”
The alien re-bandaged Bodie’s head then unplugged him from the wires and replaced the machine in the bag.
“Talk to him, make him wake up. I may have shot him too much venom. “
Horror flashed in Matt’s eyes, and he unconsciously touched his upper arm, knowing that his deep sleep was drug induced. He twisted his head and looked at the space just below his shoulder. A small puncture pitted his suit. He fingered the hole and gave a hiss of pain.
He stared after the alien as he retraced his steps along the corridor. He imagined he had mixed herbs and things from an allotment of some kind. The venom, he assumed, had been taken from a snake or some other poisonous creature.
From the storeroom, Jenny picked up two cartons of dried food and two pouches of tea from her own collection. Matt would be hungry and, considering his bruising and stiffened joints, this type of food would be the easiest to swallow.
In the cockpit she saw that Matt was awake. He had pulled himself up and was leaning heavily against a computer module; sweat sparkled on his temples and upper lip. When he saw Jenny, he scowled.
“This is your bloody fault!”
Jenny stopped, stunned by his outburst.
Still scowling, he sat gingerly on a chair. He inspected his leg, and lightly touched the bandage beneath the splint.
“Did the alien do all this?” he asked, and visibly shuddered when she nodded, as if feeling alien fingers on his body all over again. “Glad I was out cold,” he muttered.
Jenny put down the dried ingredients and went over with her hand outstretched to feel his head for rising temperature.
Matt slapped her hand away. “If it weren’t for you we’d be on our way back home by now.”
Reality created a ripple of anger to swell up inside her. “I see,” she said, tight-lipped. “You’re not ill or feverish, you’re just the same ungrateful, offensive bastard you always were.”
“Our mission would’ve been finalized by now had it not been for you. And look what bloody happened! What’s wrong with my arm?” he demanded before she could make any retort. “My arms were the only bloody things that didn’t hurt last night. Now my right one aches.”
“Fly gave you… a slight injection so he could straighten your leg.”
Matt looked furious. “I knew it! I was drugged! Jesus… how could you let an alien administer a drug? What was in it?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t ask.”
He stared at her. “You mean it wasn’t one of ours?”
Jenny shook her head, finding a perverse satisfaction in his discomfort.
Matt slumped back in the chair, his eyes on the high, charred ceiling. “What’s wrong with Bodie?”
Jenny rattled off the list, and Matt’s face became grimmer. “Guess I should be grateful, then, eh?” he said at last. “Pass me the blanket. Please,” he added as an afterthought. He shivered, and Jenny wr
apped the blanket around his shoulders. “Is it always this cold?”
“I’ve known it colder.” Sympathy for him and his distress softened her, and she squeezed his shoulder. “You’ll feel better after some food.”
“What sort of food?” he demanded, stopping her exit.
“A type of oatmeal.”
“Made by whom?”
Jenny was tired. “I’ll make it by my own fair hands, will that satisfy you?” She threw him a look of complete despair before turning away.
While she waited for the water to heat, Fly returned leading a large beast, and several small, bloodied creatures were hanging from rope tied around his waist. But it was the big animal that drew her eyes; it had thick reptilian skin with a sparse splattering of coarse black hair over its massive body. It was the same breed that they were preparing to graze, but up close she was dubious of her ability to handle them. Fly tied it to a tree, and the animal hung its head, subdued, and in obvious pain.
“They’re bigger than I realized,” she said, finding an excuse in the animal to crack the ice between them. “But the bridge won’t be ready for ages, and neither is its grazing land.”
“I found it baying over its dead young.”
“It looks hurt,” she said with concern.
“It will not survive, in the meantime we can use its milk.”
It sounded callous. Use its milk while it was alive and meat and skin when it was dead.
“Have the men woke?”
“Matt has. His arm hurts where you shot the, er, venom. Look, Fly, I’m sorry for snapping earlier. I’m on edge because of Bodie’s health, and I - I know their presence isn’t what you expected or wanted.”
Fly wiped bloodied fingers on his clothes, then turned and looked at her squarely. “I expected to be comforting you over their deaths, not nursing them back to health. That makes me feel deceived.”
Jenny couldn’t believe he felt this strongly, but experience had taught her to tread carefully. “Can’t we talk about this?”
“Your friends are human males,” he was blunt, “and they will destroy me if I let them live.”
“Of course they won’t!” Jenny was distraught that he should think this way. “I can’t imagine Bodie saying a bad word against anyone, let alone killing someone.”
“And Matt?”
“Even Matt,” she lied.
“Throughout their evolution, humans have killed every creature that remotely threatened them. Why should Bodie and Matt be any different? I helped you, not only to clear the way for a sexual relationship, but because you were never a threat. Do you understand? In your friends” eyes I am an alien creature that could destroy them.” “So why are you helping them?”
His pause was long, and then he said, “Because of you.”
Jenny could see his anxiety and fear over losing her to her human friends, and wanted to feel sympathy but instead it made her realize that Bodie and Matt were in danger from him - and Fly knew that she realized this.
She sighed heavily as Fly walked away from her. She felt him distancing himself from her, and it hurt.
She walked back to the boiling water as steam began to curl into the air and prepared Matt’s food, her mind elsewhere, then carried it inside on a piece of sanded-down wood.
“About time,” Matt greeted her, and pushed himself up to a more comfortable position.
“Sorry, but the microwave’s out of order,” she said. “Don’t choke now,” she added with feigned sweetness, and carefully placed the tray down beside him.
Matt tasted the food by rolling it about in his mouth, and then devoured most of it in record time.
“Haven’t… eaten… for… days,” he said in between mouthfuls.
Jenny knelt beside Bodie and stroked his brow. “Do you want some more?”
He looked surprised. “Can you spare it? I - I mean shouldn’t it be rationed?”
“We’re living off the land; the dried food is a backup only. You can have some more now, but after that you’ll have to eat what we eat.”
“Not wolves?”
Jenny laughed at his aghast face. “No, Fly has an affinity with them and they, in return, respect him. “
“This is alien food, isn’t it?” He stared suspiciously at the last mouthful. “I thought you said you’d made it?”
“I added the water and mixed it myself, isn’t that the same thing?” She smiled at her own joke, and Matt smiled back and for a short moment they were as they used to be before their silly feud, which had developed way out of control.
Back in the days of studying and partying, they would only eat food that required the minimum of preparation, and the joke was that they would pretend they had lovingly cooked an exquisite dish for any visiting relative.
Matt opened his mouth to speak but closed it again just as quickly, as if he had thought better than to ruin his reputation by saying something nice.
“What’s he like?” His hands shook as he wrapped them around the mug of tea; he watched them as if fascinated.
“Are you cold?”
“Freezing…” his voice was full of nervous laughter. “I’m shaking like a jelly. What a wimp -” he stopped as his teeth began to chatter. “It must be the shock catching up with me.”
There weren’t any more spare covers at the spaceship anymore, so Jenny took off the top half of her Itor suit and placed it over his knees. Crouched beside him, she looked up.
“He has good intentions.”
“But does he treat you OK?”
“Yes, he’s been wonderful. After a rocky start, we teamed up. It works because we’d both hate to be alone again. Fly’s a good man, Matt, but he’s the governor here; realize that and you’ll both survive.” “He doesn’t want us here.”
“But you are here, and you’re being looked after by him. That doesn’t sound like he doesn’t want you here to me.”
“We’ve disturbed his cozy world with you.”
“Oh, bollocks, Matt. Fly’s glad for me.”
Matt looked at her incredulously. “You really believe that, don’t you?”
Jenny sighed, and rose to her feet. “Fly doesn’t mean you any harm. He’s going to help you because he wants to.”
Matt looked into his tea. “In the space of five minutes you’ve spoken his name four or five times.” He held up his hand. “Don’t preach about my “dirty mind”, but men of old are territorial about their women, and with us here he may -” be broke off with a shrug as Jenny glowered. “He may feel we’re in the way.”
“Then why did he bother to bring you here?”
He rubbed the back of his neck, and winced when he found a new bruise. “Well, that’s something he’s certainly regretting! You don’t need to be governed by him. Anyhow, you have us now. We can sit this out until Logan sends a rescue mission. You just mentioned there’s plenty of food. We needn’t hunt. We’re not animals or ancient cavemen, for Christ’s sake!”
Jenny’s mouth twitched at his disgusted face. “You haven’t heard me, have you? I like Fly, and I’ll not let you harm him. And I’m not governed by him, I was merely warning you not to insult him by treating him as inferior. “
Matt shifted uncomfortably on the chair. “I just thought that if he was making you do things in exchange for -” he broke off as color crept into her cheeks. “Shit, Jen. that’s disgusting! Look, I know our past hasn’t been ideal, but that doesn’t mean I’m not on your side. You don’t have to force yourself to have sex with him anymore.” He glanced at his knee. “Well, maybe for a couple of weeks or so, but after that.”
“Shut up! You’re a hypocrite, you’ve never been on my side!” She stomped outside, openly shaking in anger.
What she and Fly had was precious; magical and wonderful. And to have him soil it with his filthy words wounded her as deeply as if he had punched her.
Sighing deeply she looked up at the sky, knowing that Fly’s warnings about them was true.
NINETEEN
“Sue
… Where the hell am I? Sue?”
Jenny leaned over Bodie, gently soothing his ranting with soft words.
His head and shoulders were propped up with pillows, and she had been dabbing his dry lips with water. His tongue darted out to capture a missed drop and, encouraged, she pressed the rim of the cup to his mouth. Most of it ran down his chin, but Bodie swallowed. Jenny felt triumphant.
She glanced across at Matt, who was eating a thick, pale-looking steak. He sucked on a bone, determined to get every last flake of meat. He appeared much more comfortable, too, she thought. His leg was propped up on another chair, and a pillow was tucked behind his back.
“I think he’s coming round,” she said.
““Bout time; lazy bastard,” he replied flippantly, but Jenny knew his rough talk was a mask to disguise his relief.
Bodie had been unconscious for days. He was dangerously thin, and Jenny was very worried.
She looked back at the ashen-faced man on the floor. “Time you woke up, Commander. “
“Sue…” he said, deep within his dream.
“No, it’s Jenny. Remember? Sue’s back home waiting for you. You’re both going to become grandparents - are grandparents by now,” she amended corrected. “Your daughter had just announced her pregnancy before we left, do you remember? I’ve a baby cousin I’ve never seen, and you’ve a grandchild.” She spoke on, often repeating herself, stroking his cheek and giving him the occasional sip of water.
“Sorry, Diana, haven’t looked after… Jen like I said I would… sorry. Damn it Zack, why’d you open the portal?”
“Oh. Bodie, don’t…” Jenny’s eyes swam with tears. Then Bodie began to thrash, and his flying hand caught her on the shoulder and sent the cup of remaining water flying out of her hands.
“Matt!” she yelled, as Bodie’s upper body twisted, and one of his splintered legs fell off the mattress. But the large hand that settled on her shoulder wasn’t Matt’s. It was Fly’s, and he placed a firm hand in the middle of Bodie’s chest and forced him to become still.
