Star Travels Tales of Science Fiction (4 page)

Silence.

Of course I’d lost him, and the
others, too.

I wanted to chew a blade of that
grass in the worst way, but I’d decided no more grass, and no more
lemonade, not that there was any more lemonade. If I was going to
die out here it was going to be on my terms and not theirs. I had
no idea what I was dealing with here. Maybe these were the children
of some cult who were breaking me down, attacking my resistance.
They probably drugged the lemonade, and soon their parents would
come to the field and on the pretence of rescue, take me to their
home, clean me up, offer me rest, and the next thing I knew I’d be
listening to their message of salvation.

If there was poison in the
lemonade, or on the grass, I certainly couldn’t tell. No bowel
cramps, no vomiting. In fact, except for thirst and hunger, I felt
pretty good, strong. I was ready for anything. I thought.

My first night in the
field started well. In fact, idyllic might have described it. I
made myself a nest. It was warm and comfy, and the sound of
crickets was full and soft but far off, not all around me as Id
expected. The sky was black and filled with stars. I’d never seen
so many shooting stars, not that I
’d ever
spent much time staring up at the night sky. I was tired, and the
night cooled the earth a little, so that I was perfectly snug. Just
as all the elements came together to lull me into a blissful sleep,
I heard something that yanked me out of my dreamy state.

I stayed perfectly still, but
realised that the moon had come up and spotted me like an actor on
a stage. I wanted to crawl into the shadows, but I dared not
move.

I heard it again.

The soft slow slither of
something heavy moving slowly through the grass, pressing down the
blades as it went, captured my attention. A snake! That was my
first thought. I wanted to scream. But I heard the sound again. It
sounded too big to be any kind of snake that could live in this
part of the world. Besides, didn’t snakes need sunlight and warmth
to move about? But it wasn’t a cold evening; in fact it was
downright balmy, even though it was the middle of the night. Then I
heard something else. A different sound. Moaning. At first I
thought it had to be the wind. But, no, it was a moan. A human
moan. Someone was suffering out there somewhere in the field. The
children? And then I thought about the saleslady. Had they left her
lost in the field, too? She seemed so assured, so at one with the
children that I was certain she had fared far better with them than
I, after all they’d given her cookies! And my heart sank. I would
have to look for her. Hoping it was her, and hoping it wasn’t her
at the same time, I rose from my nest and took a few timid steps
into the dark grass.

I wanted to call out, but afraid
to reveal myself, I stepped, then listened, stepped, then listened,
and this is what I did for fifteen minutes. I didn’t hear the
slithering, or the moaning, again for the rest of the night.
Neither did I sleep.

The urge to chew on the blades
of grass became unbearable. I was ranting, and talking to myself. I
willed myself not to chew but I wanted that grass. I was hungry.
Then, I saw a small rock, dusted it and slipped the stone into my
mouth. Every time the urge to chew a blade of grass swept through
me, I sucked hard on the rock. I stumbled around thinking I was
never going to find my way out, when I slipped and fell. Unhurt, I
scrambled away from the spot and began to stomp down the grass,
flattening it to get a better look at what it was I’d tripped over.
My pants were damp from having rubbed up against something. Now I
was desperate for a sip of water, and I hoped I’d found a small
spring where the earth felt damp.

Working hard to fell the
surrounding grass, and clear away the tangle on the ground, I
stopped short. The hair on my body prickled. I didn’t know what I’d
found. At first I guessed an old, soggy, garbage bag; clear, yet
crumpled and folded, making it difficult to see into. When I
touched it I realised it wasn’t plastic, but more rubbery and jelly
like. I worked at unfolding it, lifting it from the ground. The bag
was terribly heavy; hard to budge. Eventually I managed to flip it
over. The thing was oily and left a film all over my arms. I kicked
at it with my toe, and poked up a blobby corner of the mass. From
this side I could see a dark spot through the folds and I tried to
get to that part of it. Bits of rock and soil embedded throughout,
but the really odd thing was the lack of bugs. No worms or wood
lice took refuge in the damp shade it had provided. Yet, whatever
this was, I was convinced that at some point it had been living
matter. It might have been the jellied carcass of a farm animal. As
I examined the shiny dark mass, I noticed something moving in the
bag. At first I thought it might be trapped air bubbles.

I bent closer to inspect a
discoloured section. I moved closer still, because I wasn’t sure
what I was seeing. It appeared to have rusted in this spot only.
And then it came together. I jerked away, but not before I again
noticed the interior bubble like movement. I couldn’t stop myself.
They were eyes, her eyes, and they appeared to look at me as they
rolled around like loose marbles in the rivulets of disturbed
moisture trapped in the tracks of the folds. I backed away. The
rust spot had been her hair, and just beneath it I could make out
the features of a face. Her eyes had fallen away into the sack that
had once been a body. But holes gaped where the mouth had been and
even a few teeth stuck out like small pebbles.

“Hey,” I screamed up at the sky.
“You kids get me out of here now!” And I ran. I tore through the
grass and it tore back at me. I pulled at it with my hands and
threw it down and stomped on it. “Let me out!” I spoke to the
grass. For all I knew it was alive. I stopped, collected rocks,
twigs, anything that would come freely from the ground and began
throwing them up and out, hoping to hit something, anything,
anyone. Eventually, I ran out of steam and fell down exhausted.

I awoke to my second night.

I was on my back staring up at
the night sky sprinkled with a dusting of stars. I’d put a fist
full of grass into my mouth and was chewing hard. I was afraid to
look at myself. Was I already turning into a sack of fluid? And
then I heard it, the slithering sound. It was definitely coming
toward me. Big, heavy, and it sounded like it was on a mission! I
felt like a rabbit being hunted by an unseen owl. I swear that just
as it was about to make its way through the deep clump of grass
separating us, I heard a calling sound, a high pitched trill. The
slithering thing immediately moved off. When I no longer heard it,
I relaxed, a little.

“Why don’t you give up?” I heard
a small childish voice ask. The lemonade girl. She’d never spoken
to me at any time, but I just knew it had to be her.

“Where are you?” I asked, trying
to remain calm, but wanting to grab her and hold her hostage. “I’m
thirsty. I want to buy more of your lemonade. Take me back to your
stand.”

Silence.

“Please,” I said pleading.
Where’s your brother? This is a good time to fish. Let’s go. I’ll
take him. I’ll take you both, now,” I promised. I was panting, on
the verge of tears.

“It’s not working,” she said,
sounding as if she spoke not to me but to someone close by.

“What’s not working? I’ll help
you make it work. Where are you? Come out and let me see you.” But
she was gone.

I spent another hot day in that
grass and discovered that the little lemonade girl was wrong. It
was working. Id given in and began to chew the grass like a deer.
By late afternoon my ankles were swollen, and I could see liquid
moving around inside my skin. I found a sharp twig and jabbed
myself until I punctured the skin and the fluid seeped around my
ankles into the ground. By evening I had a blister of fluid around
my belly. But I kept puncturing myself and pressing out the fluid,
which burned when it touched other parts of my flesh. Strangely, it
smelled nice, like lemons! That night, sacks of fluid from my
cheeks hung to my shoulders and burst when I touched them with my
stone-sharpened sticks. My shoulders burned as I writhed and
twisted in the grass.

I heard the same moaning sounds
as I had two nights ago. I stopped twisting and turning long enough
to listen. It was me moaning. I pulled my sucking rock out of my
pocket and put it back in my mouth. I didn’t want them to hear me.
I didn’t want them to think they’d won.

By now the stars, like little
sparkling rocks, were back, and I waited for the slither. I lay
helpless, filling with fluid in the grass. I wondered why things
had worked so quickly on the poor saleswoman and not on me, perhaps
because I’d been a little suspicious of the children the whole
time.

Suddenly there was a bright
flash in the sky, and a streak of light filled the air with the
smell of ozone. A huge thump in the field actually lifted me off
the ground. It was like a bomb going off, and it flattened some of
the surrounding grass. I smelled smoke and saw a small blaze in the
distance. The grass was on fire.

I got up and hobbled in the
direction of the fire. I didn’t get far. My legs were bags of
fluid. I had to stop and empty them before I could continue. As I
sat there pressing the juice out of my skin, the children
appeared.

“Have you come for me?” I asked,
as I continued to puncture myself.

“We have to leave,” they said in
unison.

“Leave?” I stopped what I was
doing.

“
It’s time to go. They’ve
started burning the fields,” the boy said.

“And then I understood. You mean
they’re burning the fields to get rid of the evidence?” They didn’t
respond to that question.

“They won’t be using this field
for a while. You have to leave,” the boy said.

“I’d love to.
Show me the way.”

The girl held her hand out to
me. I let her pull me up, and the boy took my other hand.

They led me further into the
grassy land, but I was so confident that I hadn’t become what they
wanted, and so tired from my ordeal, that I trusted them to lead me
back to the road.

That was another mistake.

They began conversing in a
language I wasn’t familiar with. At first I thought it might be
Spanish, but I knew a little of that language and was soon
convinced that it was not Spanish, but some other soft sounding
Latin-based lingo. What they were doing up here in the north, in
the summer, was anyone’s guess. As if he were reading my mind, the
boy turned to me and said, “We’re adopted.”

“Taken from our mothers’ bellies
just before we were born,” she said.

“Who are your parents?” I
asked.

“You’ll see.”

And I did.

The children were human, at
least biologically, but their adoptive parents were something else.
Long limbs, with elongated heads like a fifth limb itself, they
reminded me of walking stick bugs. They snacked on crickets. In
fact their voracious appetite was obvious; they ate them like
peanuts. But they used this place as a more sinister rest stop.
They sucked on the converted self contained juices of adult humans.
When they saw me, two of the aliens fell to their bellies and began
slithering toward me across the flattened glade of grass. Their
alien ship stood like a grass-covered hill behind them. The only
hint of anything amiss was the aliens themselves, and the red glow
that pulsed from within the depths of the disguised ship.

The two adult aliens were
quickly upon me. Struck with terror, I didn’t move as their thin
grass like tongues whipped over my body, searching for a sweet,
pulpy drink.

“What about fishing?” I choked
out. “I can still take you.” I tried to look toward the boy but I
couldn’t make myself move. I was gulping breaths of air.

The boy spoke their strange
language and immediately the aliens stood up and walked away, back
toward the ship, as if I’d never existed.

“What? What did you say to
them?” I asked, in a whisper.

“I told them you were sprayed,”
the boy said.

And I wondered why he saved me.
I watched as he opened his jar of crickets and released them near
the aliens whose whip like tongues made the crickets disappear.

There were a few other human
children standing near the ship, and one alien stick-mother cuddled
a new human baby in the joint where thorax met abdomen.

“It’s not right,” I said,
staring at the human and alien family.

“
When I come back, you can
show me fishing,” the boy said, then he handed me a jar. My first
thought was that he was giving me some more crickets. But when I
looked I realised the jar was full of small change.

His sister took him by the hand.
“We won’t be back for quite a while,” the girl said. We don’t need
this stuff. And that was that. They walked to their families, and
around to the other side of the hill that was the ship.

The explosion from lift-off
knocked me to the ground. The air shimmered as a huge ball of heat
moved, almost invisibly, through the sky. The only indication that
anything might be there came when the ball of shimmering heat
caused the stars to distort as it moved across the night sky. The
grass burned in patches. Where the spaceship once sat, was a
perfect circle. In moments the evidence of its presence became
engulfed in a low, smoky blaze.

I’d started to swell again and
the urge to chew on the grass was nearly overwhelming. The
space-craft’s take-off flattened the grass for a half mile all
around. In the far distance I saw something moving steadily along
the horizon. As I watched, it slowly made sense. A car.

Hastily, I walked in the
direction of the road, keeping just ahead of the flames in the
burning field, stopping once to drain and bite down on a
rock
.