Chapter Five –

  Back at Lonetree Ridge, I dropped the octosheep onto the rock next to the main platform.

  Holly brushed her hands through the thick wool. “We don’t have a spinning wheel to process the wool, but I think I can rig something up. And there’s so much meat!”

  Khanna was already pulling out her stone knife.

  Billie stood back, frowning, with her arms across her chest. “We’re going to need some vegetables, you know. We can’t just eat meat and berries. And we’re almost out of the Twankie bread. Where can we get more bread?”

  Khanna looked puzzled. “Bread?”

  I translated the word for her. In her stone-age Arkadian, it translated into something like baked wheat paste. I had the idea that her culture thought bread was too hard to make and not really worth the effort.

  “Tell the young bitch we don’t need bread. We need salt for the meat.”

  I relayed the information to the other two women leaving out Khanna’s unfortunate word choice. God help us if she ever learned the English word for bitch.

  Holly struck her head. “Good gravy, I’m such an idiot. We can boil the seawater. For that, we need a pan, though. I am less inclined to use evaporation given the fact that we don’t know what kind of alien bacteria is in the water.”

  “Yeah, great, a pan,” Billie’s voice was so bitter. “Let’s just bop on over to Wal-Mart. No, wait, we can just order one off of Amazon. Why didn’t we think of that before?”

  “Sarcasm is not helping,” Holly said stiffly.

  It wasn’t. But why was Billie being so difficult? Well, more than usual.

  I told them about the gigantic power crystal I’d seen out near the skyscrapers. “I don’t know if we can find pans or not, but we need to try. We’re almost done with our canoe, and then I’m going to go out there.”

  “Not alone you’re not!” Billie stamped her foot to drive home the point.

  Khanna was staring at us. “What is the bitch saying?”

  “She doesn’t want me to go out on the canoe alone.”

  The huntress laughed sharply. “Sid Marshall won’t be going alone. Khanna will be with him. Tell the young bitch not to worry.”

  Billie scowled. “She keeps using that word, huncha. What does it mean?”

  There are times in life when the only good answer to a bad question is to lie. Huncha translated into “bitch” almost directly. In this case, it meant “rabid female dog looking to bite anyone that comes close because she is crazy and kind of stupid.”

  “Huncha means lady,” I lied. “But it doesn’t matter. I should go alone. Khanna can stay here to protect you. I’ll have Opal with me, doing scans. If anything huge comes up to take a bite out of the boat, I’ll oar my ass off.”

  Holly shook her head. “Khanna won’t let you go alone, but I understand the situation. Any extra passengers would only weigh you down more. Eventually, we should make two canoes and hammer them together as the Polynesians did. You are going to put a strut on the canoe to make it an outrigger, are you not?”

  “I wasn’t planning on it, Professor,” I said patiently. “But I’m glad you see the logic of what I’m doing. I’ll talk with Khanna. I think I can get her to stay.”

  In broken English, the huntress told me I was full of shit. “Khanna no stay. Khanna go. Khanna love Sid Marshall.”

  Billie suddenly was a bit less bratty. “Wow. English. She’s a clever huncha.”

  Khanna laughed. “Huncha!” She even smiled at Billie, and the two had a moment.

  That made me feel better.

  Billie, though, was only calm for a second. She threw her hands into the air. “Fine. You’ll go and die, and then we can’t go find this Waystation X place, so we won’t be able to recharge our guns, and I’m fucking useless, so we’ll die too, but okay. Fine.”

  Khanna chuckled and shook her head. “Huncha.”

  Billie rolled her eyes. “I’m so over this. I’m going for a walk.”

  “I’ll go with you. Let’s head north.”

  Holly gave me a long look, but I wasn’t quite sure what it meant. Was it desire? Jealousy? Fear? I don’t know, but then she glanced away, focused on the octosheep. “Khanna and I will start preparing the meat. We can smoke it until we figure out the salt problem. You two go but be careful. And hurry back.”

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  Billie and I collected some supplies—some dried elk meat and some baskets of water we could sling over our shoulders using length of ropes. I had Betsy, my multitool, as well as a quiver of arrows. We made our way through the bus and across the river, which fed our waterfall. We walked until we found the slope that led from the cliffs down to the beach, or in this case, the grasslands.

  We crossed into New Ireland and started over the hills, keeping close to the beach. I wanted to get a good sense of the landscape north of Lonetree Ridge.

  After about a mile of walking in angry silence, we hit the edge of the rolling green hills only to discover more of the Marusian see cliffs. The beach extended north as far as I could see. But there was another sector to the east, a blacker, darker place.

  Standing between sectors, we could see shapes out in the ocean, happily playing. They looked like huge sea otters.

  Billie didn’t seem to notice. She sipped water from one of the baskets we’d brought. “Thanks for coming with me.”

  “You’re welcome.” I felt like those two words were safe to say. Anything else felt like they would send Billie off into another explosion? It was like having a conversation with an atomic bomb.

  I thought I was doing okay until the bomb went off. “I know, Sid! I know I’m the problem. I know I’m a bitch. I wish I could be a huncha, or whatever the fuck, but I’m not. So what in the hell are we going to do with me?”

  “You’re not that bad.” Fuck it. I wasn’t going to tiptoe around her. “But yeah, you can’t just keep losing your shit all the time.”

  I got unexpected laughter. And not just a little.

  Again, Billie and I started laughing our asses off, standing where the grass met the sand in a perfect line. It was like when we’d laughed about her G-minus joke. It made sense for us to laugh. The shit we’d gone through was insane, and yet, at the same time, we were surviving. We had a lot going for us, including a home that was protected from the Ravana Storms.

  Billie wiped the tears from her eyes. “Oh, that felt good. Seeing that black storm come through really scared me. It was like I was just starting to feel comfortable on Lonetree Ridge, and then, no, fuck you. You’re not safe, Billie.”

  “We’re about as safe as we can be here,” I said. “We beat the Sleezenak. And I have some ideas on how to add to our security.”

  Billie turned a little, eyes on the sea where those happy critters played. “It’s not just safety, right? It’s this tug-of-war inside of me. I think maybe we’ll find a way home, and I get excited. And then I really think about leaving, and I get sad for some reason. Then I’m upset at myself for the idea of staying. And then it all starts over again.”

  “What can I do help you, Billie?” I asked.

  She turned back to me and looked me in the eye for what felt like a long time. A blush painted her cheeks. “I think you know.”

  It was both a challenge and a request.

  I stepped up to her and took her hand. I then pulled her to me.

  She came along, eyes wide.

  “You look scared,” I whispered.

  “I am.”

  “Of what?”

  She swallowed hard, her mouth open a little. “Of how I feel toward you. You’re not just some guy I’m going to date. You’re different.”

  “How?”

  She closed her eyes. “I can’t say. You’d think I was dumb. But I had this dream the other night…”

  I thought she might let go of my hand, but no, she held it tight. In fact, she stepped closer, and I could feel her thigh against mine.

  “I won’t think you’re dumb. Tell me about the dream.”

  “Well, I’m on K’Shaul, and its night, like all the time, and I’m around Holly or Khanna, and we’re doing survival stuff. Then it’s like I go blind…I can’t see, and I feel so cold. Then, you come up, and you’re like the sun, and I just want to be close to you. It’s like you light up my whole world, and you’re so bright and warm, that you chase all the shadows away.” She kept her eyes closed even as tears leaked down her cheeks.

  I felt my own eyes fill with tears. I had never heard anyone say anything like that to me, not even my aunt and uncle, and they loved me like the son they never had.

  This was different.

  “It’s not dumb,” I said in a thick voice. “I want to be your sunlight.”

  Her eyes opened, and they looked into mine, and we stood there for a long time. She was gorgeous, passionate, and yes, she had gone from screaming to laughing like a fool to crying. At the same time, I liked standing in the middle of her storms. If I was the sun, she was the storm.

  Then she took her free hand and touched the back of my neck, holding my head, as she kissed me.

  I drank her in, smelling her, tasting her, feeling her soft, wet lips against mine. And then, her tongue touched mine, and I found myself growling.

  This felt different than the other times. This felt more like how I felt with Khanna, this love, this desire to protect her, to make sure the darkness never touched her.

  She pushed her leg against my cock as she straddled my leg. She was rubbing herself against me as we kissed.

  Then, all of a sudden, she pulled herself away and took a few steps away from me across the sand.

  “This is it—” Laughter clipped her words. “I’m going to go completely and totally insane with lust. You and I can’t…you know. Do the deal.”

  “Yes, we can.” That kiss had me feeling reckless. If she was an atomic bomb, I was going to run right into the center of the mushroom cloud.

  She whirled on me. “What?”

  “Khanna and I talked. She won’t tell me much about her past, but I have the idea she came from a tribe that was mostly made up of women. She says sharing isn’t a big deal.” I didn’t add that she had made a distinction between fochacha and momachecha.

  Billie eyes widened.

  “You look scared again,” I said.

  “Yeah. I am. Scared of what I’m feeling. Scared of this place. Scared of sharing. I’m not sure I can share you…not with how I feel.”

  It was clear that Khanna wanted love and not just sex. In short, she wanted momachecha from me, and that made everything more difficult.

  I was about to say something when a scream echoed across the landscape. From above, we saw three huge, winged shapes. My first thought was that we were being attacked by dragons. Then I saw the sloped shape of their heads, the long head with the big toothy jaws, and the leathery wings catching the winds coming off the ocean.

  I had to smile. “Holy shit, those are pterodactyls.”

  “And they’re coming right at us, Sid!”

  I grabbed her, and we ran not across the sand, but on the far firmer ground of grassy New Ireland.

  Remembering the threat the flying swarm toads posed, I couldn’t help but curse. Fuck.

  Those huge flying dinosaurs could rip our house at Lonetree Ridge to pieces. We needed something better than arrows to go up against them. We needed our plasma guns.

  First, though, Billie and I had to survive.

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