by Rinelle Grey
Kerit would have laughed, if he wasn’t scared witless. At least it wasn’t another threat though. They had enough of those already. He turned his gaze back to the window. What did the creature outside want?
Silly question. They were in a deserted city on a planet in the grip of an impact winter. It wanted the one thing that didn’t exist here.
Food.
He backed slowly away from the window, pulling Folly with him. The creature didn’t move, just kept turning its head, searching.
A floorboard creaked under Kerit’s foot.
The creature’s head snapped around and it flew at the window. Kerit pulled Folly against him in an attempt to protect her from the broken glass. But there was none. The creature pulled up short of the window, it’s face inches from the glass as though trying to look in.
Kerit froze.
It made a softer sound now, almost plaintive. But still a growl.
Well, it already knew where they were. Hanging around wasn’t going to help any.
Sliding his hand down Folly’s arm until he gripped her fingers, he squeezed them. She nodded. Together, they made a break for the hallway, Kerit tossed the baseball bat and instead hooked up his backpack on the way. The creature’s roar followed them as they ran towards the back door. He hoped Chicken was hanging on tight.
Kerit skidded to a stop just before the door. The sound of wings flapping told them the creature had beaten them. He didn’t dare open the door. How were they going to get out? It could tell where they were going and had the speed to beat them there. So far, it hadn’t broken into the house for some reason, but it was only a matter of time.
Folly pulled her hand out of his and ran back towards the living room. “No!” Kerit followed her, determined to stop her before she ran out the front door. The creature would have her in minutes.
But she stopped in the living room and picked up a child’s recorder, sitting on the coffee table. She put it in her mouth and Kerit blocked his ears. The high pitched, off key sound made it into his brain anyway. Chicken echoed it in a high pitched wail.
There was a roar, a pained roar this time, from outside. The creature was out the front again.
Without a word, they both ran to the back door. Kerit opened it a hair’s width, but the space outside was empty. The creature wouldn’t be distracted for long. They had to take their chances and go now.
He sprinted through the dust, dodging a child’s bike lying on its side, nearly getting tangled in the washing line that flapped with dusty, ragged clothes. The fence in front of them was mercifully low, and Kerit vaulted it without a pause. Beside him, Folly did the same.
He could almost feel the sun burning his face—there had been no time to stop and put on his face mask, hanging off the side of his backpack. But right now, that was the least of his worries.
There was another roar from the house behind him, frustrated and angry. Kerit didn’t look back, just ran around the house to another street.
Where to go? Was there anywhere in this city that would be safe? Kerit looked around, but all he could see was more houses. Great. More places the creature could follow them in to and destroy.
His lungs ached, and the sound of wings behind him came closer by the second. Hopelessness filled him. There was no escape.
Folly tugged on his arm. “The sewers.”
Then he saw it, in front of him, the familiar round manhole cover.
Stopping and pulling it up took terrifying seconds. Seconds in which he expected those claws to rip into his back. There was a whoosh of air as the creature landed behind him.
The cover came free. Kerit lifted it and turned, swinging it like a throwing disk at the place where he’d heard the creature land.
Folly dropped into the dark hole.
The thing gave a pained growl, reaching for Kerit. He jumped in after Folly.
It was further down than he had anticipated. He muffled a cry as felt his ankle give way, stumbling into shallow water. Folly’s hands stopped him falling over completely. The cooler air washed over him, almost making him gasp in relief. It was as dark as night, especially when the creature’s bulk filled the hole above them. It wasn’t that much bigger than them, what if it could fit into the hole?
But it didn’t follow them, just roared, the sound echoing through the stone tunnel. It reached a hand through the hole, swinging that claw within inches of Kerit’s head. He stumbled back out of the way, feeling a ledge behind him. Crawling out of the water, he dropped onto the ledge, breathing heavily.
The creature clawed at the edge of the manhole. They needed to get out of here. And they needed to know where they were going, or at least if they were going to trip over something. Kerit reached for his backpack and pulled out the torch.
He shone it around, noting that the tunnel went in both directions. The ledge he had scrambled onto ran along one side, and there was another on the other side. The roof arched above them.
The creature roared, and instinctively Kerit swung the torch in its direction. It pulled back from the light. For a moment, Kerit thought the light might keep it at bay.
Then it pulled at the hole with more determination. They needed to keep moving. He scrambled to his feet, testing his ankle. It hurt like anything, but he didn’t think it was broken.
“Can you walk?” Folly’s voice sounded concerned.
“If the alternative is to stay here and be eaten, then you’d better believe I can walk. Let’s go.”
Kerit headed in the direction that meant he didn’t have to walk under the creature, moving as fast as his limping pace would take him. The pain wasn’t as bad as he expected. Even so, Folly jammed herself under his shoulder to help, despite his protests. Secretly, he was rather glad of her help.
Above them, he could still hear the occasional roar. Was the creature following them above ground? Just how good was its hearing?
After a few minutes, they came to a fork in the tunnel.
“Which way?” Folly asked.
A faint roar from above indicated that the creature probably could hear them. Not good.
Kerit reached into his pocket for his compass. It was empty. A sense of unease came over him as he patted each pocket in turn, then pulled off his backpack and searched through it.
But the compass was gone. It must have fallen out of his pocket, either in the run from the house, or in the fall into the sewer. They were running blind. “I lost the compass,” he admitted. He looked behind them. How far had they come? Was there any chance they could find it in the shallow water?
Folly followed his gaze and guessed his thoughts. “We can’t go back for it. It’s better to lead that thing away from the opening. If he sees us again, then he might try harder and realise that he could probably fit down here. Being lost is better than being eaten.”
She had a point. Kerit looked at both options, tried to figure out the directions in his head. Sweat was beginning to break out on his brow. It might be cooler down here, but the humidity was far higher. “That way then.” He pointed rather than verbalising. It seemed unlikely the creature could understand their words, but better safe than sorry. “I think it’s the way that leads towards the ship building yards.”
“Right.” Folly nodded.
They stumbled on without talking. The pain in Kerit’s ankle grew worse, but he didn’t stop. He wasn’t even aware that the sound above them had stopped, until Folly said, “You need to rest.”
“No, we haven’t come far enough. It could still be up there.”
Folly stopped moving and pushed his arm from around her shoulders. She stared at him, arms folded in the torchlight. “There are several feet of concrete between us, I don’t think it’s a risk, and you can barely walk.”
“I can walk just fine,” Kerit protested and took a couple of steps forward without her support to prove his point.
Pain sliced up through his ankle and it twisted underneath him. He stumbled reaching for the wall to prevent himself falling. Heaving
a sigh, he leaned against the wall and slid down into a sitting position. “Fine. I’ll rest then.”
As soon as he stopped moving, the air seemed to close in around him. Not a single breeze to dry the perspiration that was beginning to soak his clothes. He pulled the jacket off.
Folly sat down cross-legged in front of him. “We can’t keep going like this,” she said quietly.
Kerit heaved a sigh. “I know,” he admitted. He rummaged through his bag until he found two bottles of water and handed one to Folly, taking a swig from the other. Then he pulled out the energy bars he had packed earlier and offered one to Folly.
The foil crunched as he pulled it open, and a tiny nose appeared out of one of Folly’s pockets, followed by Chicken’s huge ears. Kerit broke off a piece of the bar, and held it out to her, holding his breath.
Her delicate pink nose sniffed the air, and she looked at him, her huge eyes glowing in the torchlight. Kerit didn’t move, and slowly, cautiously, she inched out of Folly’s pocket and towards his hand. Then she snatched the piece of bar and scrambled back into Folly’s pocket.
Kerit felt like he’d won a victory. The look of surprise and disbelief that Folly gave him, followed by a slow smile, cinched it. If only he had more time to follow up on the edge he’d gained.
Instead, as Folly opened her own bar and chewed on a corner, he said, “We need to make it to the city and find your father, then we can get back to the shuttle.”
Folly was silent for a moment, staring at the energy bar in her hand, then she looked up at him, eyes haunted. “My father’s dead.”
Kerit’s stomach dropped. What other conclusion could she draw, having seen that monster? But he wasn’t going to let her give up. “You can’t possibly know that. He could be hiding somewhere, or be making his way out of the city.”
“No, I mean he’s been dead for twenty years. He died in the asteroid impact.”
Kerit stared at her. “Huh? What?” The meaning of her words hit him. She’d known all along. “You mean, this was all for nothing? Why did you let me think he was alive? What were you looking for?”
She’d known all along, that the life-sign Tyris had detected wasn’t her father. Had she known about the creature?
“I want to know where he died. And… to find some stuff he had with him. But it’s not worth us dying for. We need to go back to your ship and get out of here. I should have told you sooner. I knew all along that the life sign your brother detected couldn’t be my father, since he wasn’t alive, but I didn’t think it would be a monster. I thought it was just someone trying to… find what I’m looking for. I’m sorry.”
Her simple apology disarmed any resentment Kerit might have felt. “That’s fair enough. I don’t think anyone could have expected to find a creature like that one.” He paused. “What do you think it is? Were there creatures like this on this world before the meteor hit?”
She shook her head quickly and definitively. “No, nothing like that. Some smaller, dog-like carnivores. That’s the worst we had. And none of them would have survived the meteor impact.”
His mind didn’t want to accept the other possibility, so he shoved it away. “But you hadn’t explored the whole planet, right? I mean, there were only these two small cities. Maybe it had been hiding somewhere else, on one of the other continents?”
Folly shrugged. “Maybe. But it seems unlikely. The whole planet would have been surveyed before the settlements were approved. And it’s not like that creature can’t be detected by your life sign scans. Surely someone would have noticed it if it had been here all along?”
It seemed crazy that something that big and dangerous could have been missed. But what other explanation was there? He hesitated, but the idea in his mind wouldn’t be silenced. “Do you think… well… what if it’s an alien?”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he realised how stupid they were. Whether the creature had come from this planet or not, it was still an alien. “I mean, what if it came from somewhere else? Another planet? Not this one.”
Folly didn’t answer, and for a moment, he wondered if she thought he was crazy. Then she said softly, “I was thinking the same thing.”
The possibility was even more alarming. With all the exploration the Colonies had done in the galaxy, all the alien worlds they had explored, no other intelligent life had been discovered. But whether the creature had originated in this world or not, it clearly had at least a degree of intelligence. If it was intelligent enough to have discovered space travel…
If it could think that clearly, then it wouldn’t take it long to find a way into the sewers. “We need to get moving,” Kerit said, attempting to stand.
The pain in his ankle was bad enough to need to bite his lip to keep from crying out. How had he managed to walk this far on it? It was amazing what fear and adrenalin could do.
“Here, let me look at that,” Folly offered.
Kerit sat down again and looked at his ankle. Folly gently pulled back his trouser leg and reached for the laces of his boot.
“Don’t take it off.” Her gentle touch sent pain shooting up his leg. If she took the boot off, there was no way he could get it back on. He reached for his backpack. Dr Benton had packed a first aid kit. There had to be something useful in there. He rummaged through it. “I have some painkillers to get rid of the pain and a bandage to bind it tightly. That will have to do until we can get back to the Resolution, where our doctor can look at it.”
Folly didn’t argue. While Kerit popped out two painkillers and swallowed them with some water, she wound the bandage tightly around his ankle, boot and all. To try to distract himself from the pain, Kerit looked around the underground tunnel. There was a small ledge on either side and dark, murky looking water, ankle deep he knew from experience, running down the middle. Piles of sticks, an old deck chair, and a child’s doll, missing an arm, littered the area.
Funnily enough, it didn’t smell anything like he had expected a sewer to smell. Sure, it didn’t smell like a steaming bowl of savoury stir fry, it was more like faintly mouldy cheese, but it wasn’t unbearable. Hell, he hadn’t even thought twice about opening the energy bar and eating it.
But they couldn’t stay down here.
“We need to keep moving. I don’t think it’s wise to double back, even if this is the wrong direction, just in case the creature’s found a way into the sewers,” he said.
Folly was silent for a moment, then said, “You should have brought your radio.”
“It was broken, remember?”
“I could have fixed it. Then we could have contacted your brother, and he could send another shuttle to pick us up.”
Kerit stared at her. “You could have fixed it? Why didn’t you say something?”
She shrugged uncomfortably. “Because I didn’t want us to find whoever the life signs belonged to too quickly. I wanted a chance to look around for… other stuff.”
“What were you hoping to find?” Kerit asked gently. “You do realise that anything of real value in this city was taken when the Colonies abandoned it? And general household items, while they’ve been very useful on our trip this time, aren’t going to be worth anything off this planet.”
“There could be something of value here. Something the Colonies missed,” she said, her voice defiant.
Did she have something in particular in mind, or was she just hopeful? Either way… “Well, we sure could do with that radio right now. Ty can’t send another shuttle, we only have one, but he could direct us back to the shuttle and help us avoid that creature. I really wish I knew where it was right now.”
“I’m sorry,” Folly said quietly. “I always seem to do the wrong thing.” Her voice sounded so miserable and wretched, that any annoyance Kerit had felt melted away.
“Hey,” he said quietly. When she didn’t look up, he put a finger under her chin and turned her face towards him.
Her eyes widened, but she didn’t pull away.
“You di
dn’t know that creature was out there, or that all of this would matter so much. But we’ll find our way back to the shuttle and get to safety. Then Tyris will work out a way to deal with this creature, probably it couldn’t survive the terraforming, and we can find whatever it is you’re looking for. I promise.”
She stared into his eyes for a long moment, and Kerit found himself holding his breath.
Then she nodded.
It almost felt like a date.
Chapter 7
Folly glanced at each ladder up to the surface that they passed, but Kerit didn’t even pause to look, and she didn’t want to let him get out of her sight. Not that she was concerned about being down here alone, she was concerned that he wouldn’t be able to make it out on his own with his injured ankle.
Hopefully it was just sprained, not broken.
She pulled out her water bottle and shook it before taking a small mouthful. It was getting low. She looked ahead to Kerit. Did he have any more bottles in his backpack? If not, they were going to be in trouble soon. Sweat poured off her. It had seemed cooler down here at first, but even if it was a comparatively lower temperature, it was still hot enough that they wouldn’t last long without fresh water.
Guilt dogged her footsteps constantly. It was her fault they were in this mess. Her fault that the alien had chased them, that Kerit had fallen and injured himself, and that they were now probably lost, and heading in the wrong direction.
“We should go up and find out where we are,” she said finally.
“We haven’t gone far enough yet. He could still be up there waiting.”
Folly was momentarily diverted. “How do you know it’s a ‘he’?”
Kerit paused, and sighed. “It was a figure of speech. Look, I don’t want to be drawn into an argument on feminism. Whether the alien is male or female, it has wings and can move a lot faster than we can.”
“All the more reason why we should go up and get our bearings. We need to be sure we’re going towards your shuttle, not further away from it.”
