Alien Avatar: An Alien Sci-Fi Romance (11 page)

Naeesha awoke, cold. It was perfectly dark in the tent. The fire was long out, and the starlight couldn’t penetrate the thick canvas roof above them. A space had grown between her and Marko during the night, and she inched closer to him until she felt the reassuring warmth of his chest against her back.

She pressed into him, and he stirred, wrapping an arm around her shoulder and pulling him tight. He kissed the back of her head and wiggled around to find a comfortable place.

Ten minutes later, they were both still awake. Marko was lying perfectly still, but she could hear his breath. He breathed differently when he was asleep that he did when he was awake. She reached up and stroked his arm with her free hand, idly running her fingers over his skin, feeling out the ridges and furrows of his muscular body. He pulled her closer and she could feel the heat of his breath on her neck, and the firmness of his hips pressing behind her.

She felt behind her, grasping for him. She found his stomach, and slipped her hand down the front of his tunic, finding flesh. His breath quickened in her ear as she went further, her fingers brushing against his cock. She took him in her hand and teased him hard. There was no doubt in her mind as to what she wanted to do with him, and nothing on Alderoc that was going to stop her tonight.

Fumbling with her other and, she pulled her pants off her hips, just past the curve of her ass, and felt Marko open his robe. He clutched her tighter as she rubbed bare skin against him. She could hear how much he wanted it and feel how much he
needed
her.

She pushed her hips back and guided him inside. They both held their breath, afraid to let out the moans that they both very much wanted to make. This wasn’t the first time that they’d had a discreet encounter, but with any luck, it would be the first time that they didn’t get caught.

Marko’s hand slipped under her shirt and she craned her neck to kiss him. It was a wonderful kiss, the heat of his lips matching the heat deep inside her. They moved without words, without sound, guiding each other with their lips and their hands, moving by instinct. Questing fingers slipped over her hip and between her legs, the other moving to stifle the moans that she could no longer hold back on her own. She rocked against him, feeling the effects of her action through the sound and the heat of his breath.

It wasn’t long before she felt him elsewhere, quaking and shuddering with one last thrust. His fingers didn’t stop until she joined him. His hand slipped from her mouth, replaced by his lips. They shared one long, sweet kiss, fixed their displaced clothes, and settled in to sleep.

***

              The morning came too early. After waking up in Marko’s arms for the first time in almost five years, all Naeesha wanted to do was to stay there. And for a few minutes she did. But then Marko woke, and she knew it was time to get to work. They’d be pushing a harder pace today. Their group was stronger. Better rested. Better fed. Better healed.

There was no telling how many good mornings they would have, and it was imperative that they make the most of each of them. After sharing a kiss and stealing some leftover dinner for breakfast, they returned to their packs and started off.

They continued the previous day’s routine. Marko moving from tree to tree marking signs, Naeesha coming through with the machete to clear a path. Today, the work would be harder. Marko didn’t have the strength to shift into his combat form, which meant that she was on her own in the brush removal department.

It could have been worse. At least she still got to cut some shit up.

Trailblazing is thankless work. It’s slow. It’s labor intensive. And sometimes, when you look back at your progress, you can hardly tell that you’ve done any work at all. See, completely severing woody branches from the root plant is a huge pain in the ass. It means taking a shitload of work, and turning it into two or three
more
shitloads of work on top of that.

So except when absolutely necessary, Naeesha took one good swing at every offending branch, and moved on. By the time the rest of the group arrived later that day, the branch would be drooping and lifeless. The first couple of hikers would knock it to the ground without even noticing it.

But after an hour of hacking, the jungle still looked very much the way that it did before Naeesha poured a bucket of work into cutting a path through it.

She hated that feeling. Of working as hard as you could, standing back to look at your work, and realizing that you’d accomplished nothing. Of course, that feeling was a lie. She’d done everything she had to do. All that was left was to wait for the results.

Why couldn’t she accept that? Why couldn’t she just be patient and trust that she’d done her job well? How much energy did she waste beating herself up for a failure that only existed in her head?

It didn’t matter.

All of that is behind me
, she thought.
All I have to do is accept this moment, and do the best that I can.

She knew that message wouldn’t sink in right away. Knew she’d be struggling with it for a while. But that was okay. She had her whole life ahead of her. There was no rush to get anywhere.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. The faster they made it to camp, the more time she’d have alone with Marko. Their little tryst the night before had been
wonderful
, but in the end it only managed to amplify her desires. It was everything she could do now not to chase after him, push him against a tree, and jump him right there in the middle of the jungle.

But she knew that she’d never be able to get back to work. The rest of the survivors would find them sprawled out on a grassy patch, fucking like wild animals.

That wasn’t the part that bothered her. She was really just worried about letting them down.

She and Marko had a responsibility. One of the most important responsibilities in the whole group. If these people were going to be her family, then she wanted to do right by them.

And that meant no fucking around on the job.

Marko tried going backwards through the alphabet in his head. He tried humming the Alderoccan national anthem to himself. He thought of the old Prime Commander - the old lady that had been around when he was a kid.

None of it worked.

He’d made the mistake of thinking about the night before, and now he was plagued with an absolutely unbearable erection. It went away if he could manage not to think about Naeesha for a few minutes, but that had proven to be a real challenge.

If he left his mind to its own devices, it always turned to her. If he tried to focus on his surroundings, he’d see a flower whose petals reminded him of her lips, or heard a bird whose song was almost as sweet as hers.

Pouring all of his focus into his work of marking the trails helped a little, but that quickly became boring, which meant that a few minutes later, he was thinking about his hands on Naeesha’s hips.

And thus, the cycle repeated. All. Fucking. Day.

They key walking, hacking a path, marking up trees to tell their friends where to go. Marko was halfway through a trail sign when an overwhelming stench washed over him. As soon as he was aware of it, he started gagging as his body tried to reject the air around him as unfit to breathe. He caught Naeesha doubled over in the corner of his eye, apparently suffering from the same malady.

He tried backtracking, but the stench was everywhere. It was only once the lack of breath got to his brain that he was able to take in air. Death would have been preferential. The air tasted so foul that Marko wished he could cut out his tongue and be done with it.

Naeesha was coughing hard, sucking in air to keep from asphyxiating, and then coughing it all back up. She fell to her knees, struggling to keep her head up. He wondered if she was going to make it.

His head started to spin. Whether it was from the lack of air or the pollution in it, he didn’t know.

Gradually, his body began to adjust, and Naeesha’s followed. The reek stayed with him, but he was able to breathe almost normally.

“What the fuck is that?” Naeesha asked, her face locked into a grimace.

“I don’t know, did you fart?”

She took a half-hearted swing at him, but ended up hunched over, hands on her knees, coughing violently.

“This fucking sucks,” she wheezed. “Let’s try and put it behind us.”

“Do you think it’s going to get better?”

“No, but I think we need to get to the other side of it one way or another, and the sooner that happens, the happier I’ll be.”

So they pressed on, moving fast. Marko’s eyes stung and watered and he took each breath with some degree of resentment for still being alive.

He was so focused on getting from one tree to the next that he didn’t notice the forest disappear until he looked up from the last tree in it and saw the vast expanse of destruction before him.

“Oh my Gods,” Naeesha said. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. I have no clue what could have done this.”

There had been a forest here, not long ago by the looks of it. Most of the forest still
was
here, but it had been violently rearranged. There wasn’t a single standing piece of vegetation more than three feet tall. Shattered tree stumps suck out of the ground every few feet, surrounded by the splintered trees that had previously sat atop them.

The carnage stretched out as far as Marko could see. Nothing stirred in the vast expanse. No birds. No animals. Not even insects, as far as he could tell. The air was still and quiet and he couldn’t shake an awful feeling.

***

              Marko and Naeesha plucked their way through the ruined forest. They stood up tall bough and saplings as markers. Even a five-foot long branch driven into the dirt was visible from hundreds of feet out. Looking back, he could see a clear trail, dozens of markers stretching towards the disappearing treeline behind them.

Looking forward, Marko still couldn’t see and end to the sea of broken trees.

“This is incredible.”

“That’s one word for it,” Naeesha said.

“There’s no rhyme or reason to it. I saw a forest that had been leveled by a tsunami once, it looked just like this, except that all the trees were laid down in one direction.”

“Maybe it was a whole bunch of tsunamis,” Naeesha suggested.

It looked more like the entire forest had been scooped up, run through a wood chipper, and spread evenly about as though the responsible party felt suddenly guilty and wanted to put things back where they belonged.

“You know, I’ve been thinking,” he said.

“Did it hurt?”

He picked up a small branch and sidearmed it at her. She ducked and returned fire with a seed pod, scoring a direct hit on Marko’s chest. He clutched the site of the wound and dropped to his knees, falling dramatically into the pulped vegetation beneath him.

“What were you thinking about, you great big wimp?”

He got up and brushed the twigs off of his jacket.

“The smell. What’s up with the smell?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well you’d figure that a smashed up forest would still smell like a forest. Maybe a little more sappy and a little less crisp and refreshing, but still. It shouldn’t smell like a sewage plant.”

“How do you know what a smashed up forest would smell like? Maybe this is the trees getting revenge.”

Marko laughed.

“Seriously though. You’ve seen a clear cut before. What did that smell like?”

“Not this.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“Well tell me your theory.”

Marko squinted and tried to put the pieces together. Problem was, they didn’t really fit.

“Haven’t got one,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“I said I don’t have the faintest clue.”

“Oh. Fancy that. How about we keep going. We’re bound to reach the end of this eventually.”

Except that they didn’t. Not for any reasonable amount of “eventually”, anyway. Three hours later and they were still trudging through a decomposing wasteland of destruction with no end in sight. The stench remained excruciating.

“We should probably start thinking about finding somewhere to camp.”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Naeesha said.

“And?”

“And I don’t know what to say. We’ve gone this far, and it’s just as bad as ever. We don’t know how far this goes, and I don’t know if our group could camp out in this mess if they wanted. Where would you lay down, right now?”

Marko looked around. There was what had once been a mighty tree laying a few feet in front of him. A sizeable chunk of the trunk remained, and with a little balance, was almost flat enough to sleep on, in a pinch.

As far as lodgings for the other 50 or so travellers went, he didn’t have the faintest idea of what could be done for them.

“We could probably clear a space. If everybody worked together, we could make room. There’s ground under here somewhere.”

“Maybe.”

“Or we could just drag a whole bunch of little stuff into a pile, smash it down, put the tent on top of it, and put our sleeping nests on top of that.”

“I suppose.”

“Or we can turn back, go to the forest, and try to find a way around this mess.”

Naeesha looked around.

“Do you think there
is
a way around?”

“Let me check.”

Marko shifted into a small falcon and took to wing. He breathed deeply, grateful that the bird form had a much less sensitive nose. He flew up into the air, beating his wings fast and flying tight circles around Naeesha, climbing higher and higher in hopes of seeing over the horizon and finding some end to the wastelands that stretched around them.

A hundred feet off the ground, and he could see see nothing except for the distant treeline behind them.  He went higher still.

Nothing.

By the time he was five hundred feet in the air, the horizon disappeared completely. Alderoc just vanished into a light blue haze. But buried in the depths of that light blue blur, there were trees.

He tried to estimate how far it was, and looking back at where they’d come from, he guessed it was at least twenty miles. A full day’s hike at top speed. And nobody was cut out to do that right now.

Disappointed, but equipped with the knowledged that he’d come in search of, he tucked his wings and dove to the ground, flaring just before he hit, swooping up, and shifting so that he dropped gently to the ground in his natural form.

“Well?” Naeesha said, indifferent to his theatrics.

“Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

“Don’t care.”

“Well the good news is that there are trees on the other side of this mess.”

“And the bad?”

“They’re really far away. Twenty miles, give or take.”

Naeesha spat a curse at the ground, turned her hands to her hips, and stared at her feet. 

It was her “pissed off and thinking” stance.

“We can either sleep out here, or turn back to stop the crew and try and get across it tomorrow,” she said.

“Have a preference?”

“Well, I don’t like the idea of going backwards.”

“Me either.”

“If we can do one night out here, we can do two.”

“Okay,” Marko said. “I don’t follow.”

“So we camp out here. A little further, maybe. Then we do the whole rest of the trip tomorrow. The two of us try to find somewhere nice on the other side of this shithole, maybe somewhere that the air is breathable.”

“And if we can’t find anything, we camp on the edge and go deep the next day.”

“Exactly.”

Marko turned it over in his head. It was a good idea. It meant that they’d make good time without marching a breakneck pace. It gave them a solid plan to work with, and even if it wasn’t a great plan, it was better than nothing.

“I say we do it. And hope like hell that we find somewhere before tomorrow night.”

“Agreed.”

“How much further do you want to try and go?”

“Just a few more miles. Make it an even half-way.”

“The rest of the group is going to be tired.”

“Well they can thank us when they sleep all through the night instead of laying awake. Do you think it’s even safe to light a fire? I feel like this whole place would go up in a flash.”

Marko shrugged and they kept moving, looking for long branches to turn into trail markers. He saw a tall sapling, bent over a bigger tree, but very accessible. It took a little muscle to get it free, but after a couple seconds of wrestling with it he had a nice tall marker.

“Here’s a good spot for it,” Naeesha called out.

The best places for the markers were in the dirt. They both agreed that they’d stand up the best there, and it was easier to drive a branch into the soil than to try and cram it into the loose vegetation.

Marko grasped the tree with both hands and thrust the splintered end into the ground. It sank two feet down, almost effortlessly. He turned and looked at Naeesha, who was just as confused as he was.

“Am I way stronger than I thought I was?”

“Those little chicken arms? I don’t think so.”

“Then can we talk about how I just buried that sapling under a yard of dirt without even trying?”

Naeesha bent down and examined the tree and the dirt that it had penetrated.

“Well,” she said. “I think I see what happened, and I don’t like it one bit.”

“What is it?” Marko asked.

“I don’t think this is dirt.”

“Then what the hell is it?”

“Use your brain Marko. What else is brown and --”

It hit him.

“Oh, shit.”