Return to Eden (10 page)

In fact, she was feeling less up to it
as time went on. She refused to consider the dependency she’d
rapidly developed—for an alien who also happened to be an enemy!
Physically, she was just done in. She’d always considered that she
was in pretty damned good shape, but she’d hardly had any sleep,
anything to eat or drink, and she’d been moving almost
constantly—in spurts of running for her life! The uneasy sense that
she wasn’t actually very well equipped for survival swamped her
abruptly. She tried to shake it, but it was as hard to ignore as
her aches and pains.

Aidan waited until she’d reached him
and began climbing. As she’d predicted they ran out of ladder
shortly after they passed into the shaft. “I hate to say I told you
so,” she muttered.

Instead of heading back down as she’d
expected, however, the alien surveyed the dirt shaft leading up
moved to the very last rung and then carefully positioned himself
so that he was braced against the sides with his arms and legs.
Anya studied him doubtfully, fully expecting him to come down on
top of her. Instead, he began to inch his way upward.

“
I can’t do that,” she
said flatly.

“
Yes.”

“
No!” she said more
forcefully.

He glared down at her, braced himself
carefully and then reached down. “Yes!”

“
My arms and legs aren’t
long enough, damn it!”

She could see he was determined,
though.

After debating, briefly, whether she
should just take her chances with the sewer and hope that somewhere
there was an access to the surface that she had a better chance of
navigating, she yielded to his determination and struggled up. He
pulled her between his spread legs, settled her briefly on his lap,
and then lifted.

“
Oh shit!”

With a lot of grunting,
straining, and cussing, she managed to inch her way up a few feet.
The opening at the top still seemed impossibly far away, but every
time she stopped to rest, Aidan planted his hands on her bare ass
and gave her another push upwards. It worked better the first few
times. The feel of his hands on her bare ass was enough inspiration
to get her struggling higher, but it didn’t take long for her to
move beyond caring
where
he put his hands.

The problem with giving up was that by
the time she reached the point where she didn’t feel like she could
climb anymore if there’d been a fire under her, they were a long
way from the hard concrete floor below. Feeling more than a little
nauseated from the strain and the gallon of water she’d drank, she
fought trembling, burning muscles, nausea and fear and kept trying
until the lip of the shaft was almost within reach. Her anxiety
then switched from fear of falling to what might be
outside.

Right up until the moment of truth,
she’d actually felt somewhat more secure to have Aidan below her to
break her fall.

Or to land on if they both
fell.

She began scanning everything that she
could see above her. Relief didn’t really sink in, though, until
she was high enough to get a 360 degree view of at least twenty
feet surrounding the manhole. It took the last of her energy and
Aidan shoving from behind to climb out and collapse on the dirt.
She lay panting, shaking, and struggling with the urge to puke
while she listened to Aidan climb out. He collapsed beside her,
huffing for breath.

That was somewhat mollifying. He looked
to be in great shape. If he was exhausted from the climb, maybe she
wasn’t doing too badly?

He was on his feet in a few moments,
however. Leaning down, he hauled her to her feet, checked the thing
on his wrist and began hurrying roughly southward. They’d emerged
in a utility cut. The trees had been cut down in a wide swath to
accommodate the high power lines, but there was vegetation that was
nearly breast high on her. With that as a yardstick, she deduced
that the cat alien must be between six and seven feet tall.
Certainly a good bit more than six!

So he didn’t just
seem
big and scary! He
was!

It was an advantage for him. He
trampled through the high brush relatively unfazed. Following in
his wake, Anya didn’t fare quite as well, for although he blazed a
path with his boots, there were still plenty of bushes to slap at
her as she followed.

When he stopped abruptly, she smacked
into his back and then fell back a step. He sent her a look over
his shoulder. “What?” Anya demanded irritably. “Like I can see a
damned thing!”

“
Looks like whatever this
is it’s running in roughly the right direction. We might make
better time to stick with it.”

“
Yes, well, gobble-dy gook
to you, too!”

He shook his head. “Dis
vay.”

Anya followed his pointing finger and
went up on her tiptoes to get a better look. Then she looked up at
the sky uneasily. “What about those things?”

Aidan studied the sky, as well. Without
a word, he led her to the edge of the forest. Except for the damned
briars, it was a good bit easier to follow the line of trees. Pines
just naturally worked as weed killers and not a lot grew beneath
them—except the briars—which Anya discovered still had some
blackberries attached! “Oh thank god! A food-type substance I’m
familiar with!”

Ignoring his tug to keep moving, she
stopped and plucked a handful, looked them over perfunctorily, and
then popped a couple into her mouth. Without sugar, they were a lot
more sour than she’d anticipated. She scrunched her face up at the
tartness, shuddering.

Aidan chuckled.

The sound caught her completely off
guard. Her eyes popped open and she stared at him with a mixture of
doubt and amazement. But she could see pure amusement in his
expression and that dispatched the last of her doubts that she’d
actually heard him laugh.

An alien!

Except that wasn’t what went through
her mind. It was a nice sound, created pleasure. Before she even
consciously acknowledged that she liked the sound, she felt the
effects on her spirits, felt a buoyancy arise from the pleasure
that seemed to ‘lift’ her. She found herself looking back at him
with amusement even as his smile faded. “They’re good. Really! Want
some?” she asked, lifting her hand to offer the last few she still
had.

He grinned, wryly, and shook his
head.

Anya used her finger to mark a cross on
her chest. “Cross my heart. They won’t hurt you.”

He studied the gesture and then her
face, looking vaguely puzzled but intrigued. Shrugging, Anya popped
the last couple into her mouth and searched for more, filling the
pockets of his jacket. Sour as they were--and she couldn’t handle a
lot of that at once—they were food and she had no intention of
missing out on it when all she had to do was pick it.

They’d been walking about an hour when
Anya realized the viewing area ahead of them was widening. About
fifteen minutes later she caught a glimpse of asphalt and then
commercial-type metal buildings. Her heart skipped several beats
with a mixture of hopefulness and anxiety.

Well, bits and pieces.

Chapter Six

Anya decided that they’d reached an
industrial park after surveying the area thoroughly.

It was almost more bizarre than
anything she’d seen since the alien landing/invasion!

There were patches of asphalt. Some
even still bore the paint stripe that indicated it had been a
parking lot. Ditto the buildings and everything else that had once
made up the industrial area. Nothing looked corroded, as if time
was the culprit for the missing pieces, and yet it still looked
rather like a ghost town, something that had stood long, long ago
and had been worn away by time and the weather until there were
only pieces left here and there.

There were parking lots around each of
what she could see had once been massive metal buildings, but no
sign of cars or of people, no sign of bodies
either—thankfully!

Was everyone in hiding, she wondered?
Or had the alien things …?

She shook that thought. There were
bound to be casualties, but there had also been plenty of time to
take cover. Even the people on the interstate like she had been and
away from home had fled to safety. They were just smart enough to
hide.

It took them over an hour to traverse
the industrial complex. By the time they had the sun was hovering
near the horizon and Anya was thinking uneasily about shelter for
the night before it got too dark to look for a place.

“
We need to find a place
to spend the night,” she said, pointing to the sun’s
position.

Aidan studied her when she spoke and
dutifully looked when she pointed out that they were looking at
sunset very soon and then shook his head.

“
We’re close now. We
should be able to find the ship before dark.”

Anya glared at him. She was
exhausted—weak with fatigue, lack of food and water. She wasn’t in
any shape to run for her life and she wasn’t in the mood to try
sign language! “Look, fucktard! It’s almost dark! There’s no
telling what will come out to eat once the sun sets!”

Aidan glanced at his wrist
thingy and then glared at her. “Ah-na
fckd
ard! No Aidan! Ned ship! Go!”

Uneasiness slithered through Anya
despite her anger—for several reasons. First off, it seemed pretty
clear that Aidan had figured out enough of her language to know
when she was being insulting. And she didn’t think it was really
safe to insult him if he was aware of being insulted, seeing as how
he was a really big and potentially very dangerous alien! Secondly,
it seemed to her that he was suggesting that he intended to carry
her away on his ship. And while she wasn’t especially happy about
the way things were going on Earth at the moment, she damned well
wasn’t going off to alien land with chewbacka!

Ok, so he wasn’t hairy enough to fit
that particular name, but she still wasn’t going off with
him!

She set her jaw stubbornly. “I’m not
getting on any damned ship!” she snarled at him through gritted
teeth.

Aidan stopped, glaring back at her. “On
ship, yes!”

“
On ship, no!” Anya
snapped back at him.

He studied her speculatively for
several moments and then, quick as lightning, his hands shot out to
grab her. Before she’d even had time to suck in a startled breath,
he’d tossed her across one shoulder and manacled her legs to his
chest with one arm.

“
What the hell? Put me
down you son-of-a-bitch!” Anya snarled.

Instead of complying, he
popped her ass—her
bare
ass! “
Quiet! Call
narltacter
!
Eat Ah-na and Aidan!”

She had a bad feeling he was talking
about that thing that had chased them into the sewer system. That
thought killed the urge to vent at the top of her lungs. It didn’t
take the fight out of her. It was the very fact that she was
concerned about being bait for something like that, or worse, that
had inspired her to object strenuously before.

It was still useless—a
case of determination
not
paying off. She
had
no nails. She’d chewed them off
to the quick. She couldn’t get close enough to bite him. And every
time she boxed him with her fist, he popped her bare ass—a little
harder.

When she finally subsided, he deposited
her on her feet again. Pushing his face close to hers, he glared
and shook his finger in her face warningly. Anya resisted, barely,
the temptation to chomp down on it. Instead, she glared back at him
malevolently.

His expression hardened.

Anya decided he could do ‘evil threat’
way better than she could. After a few moments, she looked away,
discovering that they’d entered what had clearly once been a fairly
sizeable town. She frowned. “Is it just me, or does it seem strange
to you that those insect-thingies are leaving more and more stuff?
I mean, they cleaned up everything in sight when they came out of
that missile thingy.”

She saw when she glanced
at Aidan that he was looking puzzled, as well, but naturally enough
there was no way to tell if it was for the same reason
she
was
confused.

She supposed, if those insect-like
things actually were something out of nature, that they might have
gotten their fill and just hadn’t gotten around to polishing off
everything in sight. She’d had the impression, though, that they
weren’t actually insects of any kind, nothing natural, at any
rate.

So had they just worn themselves out
consuming everything up to this point? Or were they malfunctioning?
And if they were malfunctioning was that a good thing? Or might
they do something worse?

Aidan had also noticed
that something wasn’t quite right. He wasn’t a little uneasy,
however. He was extremely unnerved. There were clear signs that at
least one of the terra-formers was malfunctioning—the one nearest
their location—and he couldn’t think of anything good that had ever
come of
anything
malfunctioning.