An hour later, they rounded a small bend in the ravine, close to the bottom. Before them, the ravine opened up as the ground leveled out, forming a large, fern-covered meadow. The brush just a hundred meters ahead hid the cave Mike intended to hide in, but there was an obstacle in the way.

Two of the tall, thin aliens stood at the edge of the meadow, fifty meters away. Back-to-back, they each held one of the rod-like energy weapons. Their heads swiveled as they scanned the trees around them for the fugitives.

“Look,” Jenny whispered, pointing.

Mike followed her pointing finger. A grilfen was laid across a branch, watching the aliens silently. “There’s another one,” Mike pointed out another grilfen in the trees a few meters from the first.

Over the course of a few minutes, they spotted no fewer than five of the elongated animals crouched in the trees, watching the aliens silently.

Mike laid a hand on Jenny’s arm. “Listen, baby, I’ve got an idea. We don’t want to make any more noise than we can help, but we’ve got to get past those two.” He laid down his Parks rifle, picking up his longbow and quiver, slinging the latter across his back. “I’m going to creep just a little closer. I’m going to try something. You cover me from here with your Remington, if either one of them starts shooting in my direction, plug him.” 

Jenny nodded.  “Be careful!” she added.

Mike grinned at her.  “Hey,” he assured her, “I’ve played this game longer than they have!”

He managed to sneak up to the cover of a pine tree thirty meters from the weird pair. Tipping his head away from them and back, he muffled his voice with one hand and barked, “Hey! You!”

The two aliens spun as one, weapons pointed, but neither saw a target. Mike hid behind the trunk. As he expected, the grilfens took up the chorus, a round of “Hey! You!” echoed from five points in the trees. 

The two guards spun again, firing bolts of green now into the trees. Mike saw one grilfen duck a jade bolt, leaping to glide to another tree. Then, when the aliens were distracted, he made his move. He nocked one of his flint-tipped arrows, took a deep breath, and moved.

Stepping from behind the tree, Mike quickly assessed the shot. One of the aliens had its back turned to him, the other stood facing just to Mike’s left; he had his weapon raised, aiming at a bounding grilfen in the trees above. You first, Mike thought. He raised his longbow, coming to full draw just as the arrowhead came to rest on the alien’s chest, forming a perfect sight picture. Attracted by the motion, the sticklike figure looked Mike’s way, but before he could react, Mike loosed his arrow. The shaft sailed across the meadow, landing with a wet thud in the alien’s skinny chest.

The alien soldier spun in a half-turn and started to fall, but Mike ignored him. He knew a fatal shot when he saw one. His right hand shot back over his shoulder, grabbing another arrow, nocking it even as the other alien made a half-turn to look at his companion. Before the second enemy could assess what was happening, Mike’s second arrow shot across the gap, penetrating one glittering black eye and slamming through the alien’s brain. The skinny form dropped in a tangle of arms and legs.

“Jenny!” Mike called urgently.

“Jenny!” the grilfens echoed from the treetops. A moment later, Jenny had sprinted to Mike’s side. Together they inspected the two fallen alien soldiers.

They looked even stranger close-up, scrawny, sticklike, snow-white skin contrasting weirdly with jet-black hair, lips, eyes. “Let’s get these two hidden in the brush,” Jenny offered, as she began to drag one of the almost weightless forms into a stand of woody brush.

“Get their cloaks,” Mike suggested. After a moment’s examination, they flung the weird, unfamiliar weapons as far as they could into the woods. Returning to the meadow, Mike kicked some dirt over the two pools of sticky, black blood. Then, the young couple finally made for the hidden caves.

They spent the balance of the day hidden deep in the cave, guided back to a small chamber by the light of a tiny battery lamp from Mike’s pack. At intervals, they heard the sounds of an alien ship passing overhead. At one point, just before sunset, a ship landed in the meadow. Mike crept to the mouth of the cave long enough to see three aliens recover the corpses of the two Mike had killed. After a prolonged, chattered argument, they loaded their dead aboard their craft and shot off down the valley. Mike slipped back to the tiny chamber in the rock where Jenny waited. 

“Good thing they can’t track worth a damn,” he told her. “It’ll be dark in another half hour or so. They’ll be looking for us downstream, so I figure we ought to get out, climb the ravine wall on this side and take off south. There’s a big open valley to cross, but we’ll do it right after the moons set. Once we get past that, it’s heavy woods for a way. When we get to the prairies, we’ll decide which way to go then.” Jenny nodded agreement and crept into Mike’s arms. The two held each other tight for thirty minutes, until Mike announced, “It’s time we got going, honey.”

In the darkness, they slowly climbed out of the ravine, emerging onto a reasonably level stretch of pitch-dark forest. Mike consulted his compass, got a bearing, and they headed slowly off south.

At least the walking was easy and quiet. The foothills were reasonably gentle, as they dropped lower in elevation the trees grew larger, returning to the high-canopied giants that left no light for undergrowth; underfoot was a quiet, soft bed of needles. Mike checked his compass every hundred meters or so, to help keep their bearings in the darkness. In the distance, they heard the regular passage of the silvery, spidery ships of the alien invaders. Twice, they dove to the ground and lay flat as alien ships screamed overhead within a hundred meters. The message was perfectly clear. They were still being hunted.

Just after midnight, they paused at the edge of a large fern prairie. “We’ve got to wait until the moons go down,” Mike observed, pointing to the open area that was bathed in silvery light from two of Forest’s three moons. At the edge of the meadow, a colossal old pine had fallen, and the bole of its trunk had rotted out inside, leaving a hollow log with a space almost two meters wide inside; the two climbed inside, turning inside so they could lie down on their stomachs and keep watch over the meadow. From the sounds of things, the hunting ships had moved off to the east a little, concentrating on the forest in that direction.

“Good thing they don’t seem to have infrared or anything like that,” Jenny said, yawning. They were both desperately fighting exhaustion now.

“They don’t seem to be very good at this, do they?” Something about that was nagging at Mike’s subconscious, but in his exhausted state he couldn’t quite put a finger on it. He was still trying to pin the evasive thought down when he dropped off to sleep.

He woke slowly, grunting at the pain of Jenny’s finger poking him frantically in the ribs. How could he get any sleep with that going on? His eyes cracked open a minute amount, in response to the finger poking and Jenny’s insistent, “Mike! Mike! Wake up! It’s morning!”

Morning? The thought burned his brain like a brand, bringing him immediately awake. He tipped his head up, peering out from under his Stetson. The fern prairie in front of them was bathed in brilliant morning sunlight. A kilometer or so away, a female roc led two three-meter-long chicks along the edge of the woods, angling carefully towards a herd of twenty or so grazing bosers.

“Shit!”

“What are we going to do now?” Jenny asked. She had her old Remington at the ready, barrel pointing out the opening of the hollow log. Mike grabbed the barrels of his Parks double, bringing it up to where he could use it quickly if necessary.

“Well, for the moment, we’ll stay right here. At least until that roc moves off a little farther. Let’s listen for a while; I don’t hear any of those ships, do you?”

Jenny shook her head. “I don’t hear anything.”

Mike fisted the sleep from his eyes, rubbed one hand over the stubble on his chin. “At least we got some sleep. You just wake up?”

“Yes, I woke up and first thing I saw was sunlight. I almost jumped right out of our little hidey-hole, here.”

Mike almost laughed out loud. “Well, let’s not do that until our friend there gets into that boser herd,” he said, motioning towards the roc. As they watched, the roc turned, wagged her head at the two chicks. They crouched in the ferns as Mama stalked closer to the herd of grazing bosers. 

You have to admire something that big that can be sneaky, Mike thought. The roc stalked along a line of trees to within a couple hundred meters of the herd, and then, all at once, the great predator sprang into action. She charged silently, each stride covering ten or twelve meters, huge, three-clawed feet eating up the ground. She was within fifty meters before the first boser saw her. The herd broke up, scattering in every direction and bellowing in terror, but the roc closed in mercilessly. One boser showed a moment’s indecisiveness, turning first one way, then the other, and then back. Before it decided which way to flee, the roc closed in, leaping high in the air and slamming the beast to the ground with both clawed feet. The roc’s feet clenched, driving huge talons deep into the screaming boser. The huge bird leaned down then, and used her razor-edged beak to snap through the boser’s spines just behind its frill of feathers. As soon as the boser’s twitching ceased, the great predator stood up and stretched her neck out; she opened her huge beak and let out a piercing, ringing shriek. The victory cry was still ringing from the hills as the two chicks joined the mother in tearing the carcass apart.

“Wow,” Jenny exclaimed, somewhat breathlessly.

“Well, at least we can go now; they won’t be paying any attention to anything but their food for quite a while.” After a final listen for alien ships, they crawled out of the log and stretched their stiff limbs. Mike shot another compass reading. Pointing, he said, “that way,” and they hurried across the open meadow into the trees on the far side.

“We’ll stay in the heavy trees,” Mike began, and then suddenly grabbed Jenny’s arm, yanking her to a stop.

“Wha?” she began; he silenced her emphatically, with one finger on her lips.

He inclined his head towards a narrow depression in the trees fifty or sixty meters ahead, two aliens were there, each with a strange little vehicle. The couple dove for the cover of a tree trunk.

The two aliens were standing, looking off to Mike and Jenny’s left. As they talked, one of them fiddled with some sort of instrument. Their rides resembled nothing more than a round platform with a domed underside; a tall t-handle on one end was obviously the control. The two platforms sat, like a skimmer, a few inches off the ground. They must use a presser field like a skimmer does, Mike told himself. A clump of knee-high ferns was a few meters away. The two humans moved cautiously in that direction, dropping into the meager cover unobserved.

Whatever the two alien scouts were doing, they were taking their time about it. Mike managed to squirm to a position where he could see them through the ferns. The one holding the instrument was waving it, slowly, back and forth, all the while examining some kind of readout on its upper surface.

“Get ready, baby, this might be trouble,” Mike hissed, “I think that’s some kind of a scanner they’ve got there.” Jenny moaned, softly, in fear, but she brought her old Remington around to the ready, even as Mike got into a good prone position behind the Parks double.

Whatever the two were scanning for, though, it wasn’t people. After a few tense minutes, they put the object away, mounted their platforms, and flew away to the west. Their mounts made an odd, buzzing noise, as though the domed enclosure beneath the platforms the aliens stood on were filled with a lot of angry black hornets.

With a sigh of relief, the two young humans hugged each other hard, and set off into the forest again.

They stopped at mid-day, at another large hollow log into which they crawled and napped until nightfall. Taking care not to wake Jenny, Mike crawled from the log at dusk, listening carefully to the normal, uneventful sounds of the nighttime. Pulling a map from his backpack, he sat down with his tiny penlight to try to place their location.

Jenny crawled from the log, yawning, as Mike frowned down at the map. “What is it?” she asked.

“Well, I’m not sure,” he admitted. He indicated a point on the map, “We’re about here, see, and we need to get through these prairies and over these hills here,” pointing again, “To get back to Outskirts, here.”

“Problem is crossing these open areas?”

“You betcha, sweetie. They’ve got transport, we don’t. We can cross at night, which ought to help us keep away from the rocs, but I’m more worried about them than the rocs. Rocs I can handle. These things are sure to be looking for us. They’ve got to know where the major human settlements are, and I’m sure they’re going to figure out we’re heading that way.”

“And you think they probably have some way to see at night? Infrared or something?”

“We’d be crazy to think otherwise, baby. They’re at least as advanced as we are, and even the Company security troops have night vision goggles.”

“So, what do you think we should do?” Jenny wanted to know.

“Maybe swing over here to the east, but there we’ve got a big river to cross. No, I guess we’ll just keep on south. We’ll cross open areas at night, and count on being able to hear any of their ships or those buzzing platform things.”

They set out just as the first of Forest’s three moons rose over the horizon, casting a pale light through the woods and over the intermittent fern meadows. Twice they ducked into heavy cover at the buzzing sound of alien flying platforms, and once for one of the spidery ships as it floated slowly along, playing a white guide beam for its blaster along the ground. Towards morning, Mike killed a little feathery flyer with his longbow, and as the sun rose, they kindled a tiny fire under a huge, branching “spruce” to roast the grouse-like creature. A small pond glittered in a tiny glen nearby, and after they ate, Jenny produced a bar of soap and a towel from her pack.

“You, my dear man, need a bath,” she informed Mike, “and since there’s just one bar of soap, I’ll clean up our supper mess – or breakfast, I’m not sure which – while you go over to that little pond and wash. There’s a clean shirt, breechclout and leggings there by the big tree. I’ll go when you get back.”

Mike nodded, they hadn’t heard an alien ship in a couple of hours, and Jenny had her old Remington close at hand. A chance to clean up was very welcome. 

A few moments later, he returned to their tiny fire, hair dripping. The bath had helped, he actually felt distantly human. Jenny winked at him, taking the bar of soap, picked up another towel and a second leather dress similar to the one she’d worn during their flight from the mountain cabin, now badly soiled and sweat-stained. She pulled off her moccasins and, dimpling at Mike, padded off to the little pond.

Mike unrolled their bedding after kicking off his moccasins and removing his leather leggings he lay back on the blankets with his head propped up on his hands. Not a bad place to spend the day, he thought, big trees all around, a hillside behind us, water close by. If we take turns sleeping, we’ll hear anything or anyone coming in time to bug out. Immediately after that thought, he dozed off.

He awoke with a start as something light landed on his chest.  He opened his eyes to see Jenny’s clean dress lying across his chest. A giggle turned his attention upwards to where she stood next to him, pale-blonde hair wet, her tanned, naked body glowing in the morning sun. “I didn’t feel like getting dressed just yet,” she announced. She dropped to her knees beside him, taking his hand and placing it on her breast.  “Maybe I’ll feel like getting dressed a little later. It’s a little warm for leather clothes down here, isn’t it?” She lay down on the blankets next to Mike, one hand busily teasing in an area best calculated to produce an immediate response.

Rolling over, Mike kissed her slowly, lingering, his hands wandering over her minnow-slim body. Jenny pulled his head down to her breasts, groaning as he took one nipple in his mouth. She reached down, grabbing his old cotton shirt, drawing it off it over his head and pulling his head back to her breasts. Under his leggings, Mike wore a breechclout, a millennia-old design borrowed from the Shoshone Indians of Mike’s original mountain home. Jenny’s quick fingers found the thong, and a flip of her wrist discarded the clout.

Mike let one hand wander slowly downward, over Jenny’s flat little stomach. He moved his palm indolently in a tiny circle, reminded for a moment of her sleeping form the day he’d rescued her from the wreckage of her parent’s farmhouse. Jenny moaned softly, opening her legs as Mike’s hand wandered lower, over the downy patch of soft blonde hair; she arched against him suddenly with a small cry of pleasure.

Jenny rocked her hips slowly. Then, with a cry, she grabbed Mike’s shoulders, rolling him on his back. Smiling, her eyes hooded, she climbed on him straddling his hips, guiding him into her as she let herself down, slowly, her moist warmth enclosing him. She moved slowly, agonizingly, back and forth; arching her back, catlike in her passion. Mike held her hips, gently, letting her move as she wanted. After a few moments, her movements grew faster, almost frenzied. She dropped down on Mike’s chest, hips working against him. Mike moved with her now, faster and faster, until both of them exploded together.

Jenny hugged Mike, lying on his chest, beads of sweat coating both their bodies. He kissed her gently, grinning. “And here we are, being chased through a howling wilderness by murderous aliens from who knows where, and all you’ve got on your mind is making whoopee?”

“After all we’ve been through, don’t you think that as long as we’re alive, we should live? Doesn’t that mean grabbing any opportunities that come by?”

“Can’t argue with that,” he replied.

She insisted on taking first watch, sitting upright against the bole of the tree with her antique Remington in her lap as Mike slept. Waking at noon, Mike felt like new, refreshed by more than the bath and sleep. After a kiss, hug and a few minute’s’ whispered endearances, Mike sat up with his monstrous Parks double across his knees while Jenny curled up to sleep. Faint whines in the distance warned him to stay alert, but the aliens seemed to be searching in the wrong direction.

Jenny woke as the shadows were beginning to grow long. The two breakfasted on what remained of the grouse, a handful of pine nuts, and water from Mike’s canteen. They set off south just after dark, surrounded by a glow of contentment. 

That day was to be the last pleasant interval on their journey.

To see more of Animal’s writing, visit his page at Crimson Dragon Publishing or Amazon.