Alien Desire by Hannah Haze
Chapter three - Emma
Could anyone survive an impact like that, I wonder as I race into the garage. Fluffy bounds after me but I shoo him away. He lets out a put-out grunt and sits, watching as I jump up onto the saddle, grabbing the medic pack from a peg on the wall as I do, and rev up the snowmobile.
Am I on my way to discover yet more corpses?
This crash site is in a ninety degree direction to my own. Racing that way sends me over ground I’ve not yet covered. It appears flat to the naked eye, yet the landscape is anything but. I bounce and jerk about on the seat, gripping onto the handle bars for dear life.
The cold, as it pounds over my face, makes my teeth scream with pain and my eyes blur with water that freezes as it slides down my cheeks. I should have worn the snow gear provided at the station. The thick winter snood and a pair of goggles. But I was too desperate to get there. To rescue anyone alive.
If I can help it, I won’t let another person die on this planet.
I am doing it more for me than them. Out of a desperate need for company rather than a moral duty to help. It is selfish and I don’t give a shit.
The fire rages, drawing me closer. Red flames leap into the black night, embers spit, and the ship crackles noisily as it is consumed.
It is smaller than ours — I can tell by the condensed impact site — and the nearer I get, the stranger it appears. The shape, the metal, the smell of burning fuel, are all different to anything I’ve come across before. Even the fire, I discover as I draw up as close as I dare, burns a multitude of rainbow colours in its centre.
I stumble down from my vehicle and stare transfixed, unsure where to start, what to do. Even in the cold, the heat is fierce, and I raise my arms to shield my face as I skitter around the edge of the bonfire.
Panic bubbles up from my chest. My throat constricts.
I can’t help them. I can’t help them.
But I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to let another person die on this planet.
So I battle forward, marching closer to the flames, determined to beat a path through. The flames whip up around me, smoke fills my lungs and stings my eyes. I choke, and the heat fries my skin.
I retreat backwards, coughing and spitting on the ice, fleeing from the fire and the heat.
There’s nothing to douse this burning inferno, and I can’t fight my way through the flames.
Whoever is trapped in the wreckage will be burned alive. Scorched to a crisp.
I can’t save them. Just like my crewmates. It is useless. I am useless. I ball up my fists and scream, the noise soaring above the fire.
When I stop, there is a low groan in reply, and I almost jump out of my skin.
It came from the ground. I rake my gaze left and right over the wreckage, around the base of the fire, then further away, spotting bits and pieces of debris thrown far from where the ship crashed.
Heaving the medical pack onto my shoulder, I dash from one dark huddle to the next. Strewn across the ice are shards of the strange metal, and paraphernalia I don’t recognise — things spewed from the ship’s belly when it split.
“Hello?” I yell. But no sound greets me and I suspect I imagined that noise.
I’m beginning to trudge defeated to the snow mobile when I see a shape: the outline of a body.
I rush towards it, skidding down on my knees beside the large spacesuit laid out on its back on the ground. It is dark blue with strange markings, the material light and shiny. It’s not a uniform I recognise.
I peer into the helmet, but its visor is cracked and misted and I can’t see the person within. I know they are alive, though, because they are moving. Fierce shudders shake the suit violently.
The shape and size of the body tell me it’s a man, six-foot-five at least and far too big for me to lift and carry. Instead, I bring the snow mobile closer and drag him onto it. It takes me several attempts of heaving and groaning, needing to stop to ready myself and pull him along.
After several failed attempts, he’s slung over the seat and I hover behind him, cocooning him in my arms, and speed back to the station. He groans every time we hit a bump on our path, the impact jolting us both, and I flinch, imagining his pain.
The distance seems further than on the way out and it stretches with each of his yelps. I will us to get there; my fingers so tight around the handle bars they cramp
At the station, I fetch a stretcher, which makes the act of dragging him inside a little easier, if not by much. His trembles are weakening, and I fear I’m losing him.
I probably shouldn’t have moved him. What damage have I done to his head and his spine? But if I hadn’t moved him, he risked dying of exposure, freezing to death out there alone on the ice.
Inside the station, I tell the computer to ramp up the heat.
“Unknown arrival,” she says in return. “Please state your rank, name and ID code.”
“I don’t know,” I mutter.
The computer whirrs. “The arrival is severely injured. Medical attention is required immediately.”
“Shut up!” I shout, “I can’t concentrate when you’re talking at me like that.”
Kneeling by his side, I take a deep breath to steady my nerves.
What injuries will I find beneath this suit? The thought has my insides churning with nausea. All that training, all those simulations and practice runs, and nothing prepares you for the real thing, for the way adrenaline makes your hands shake. Does more death await me under this helmet?
I glance over my shoulder, spying Fluffy hovering in the doorway, and then bite my lip and turn back to the injured man.
My fingers discover the catches at the neck of his suit and I snap them open. Each click sounds like a bullet from a gun, echoing around the station. As the last one releases, a hiss of gas escapes and carefully, carefully, I lift it away.
In years to come, I will look back at this moment and still feel the disbelief and horror that hits me next. Forgetting that the first thing I feel is confusion. For long, long seconds I kneel, the helmet aloft in my hands, staring down at this stranger, and my mind does not compute what I see. It scrambles desperately to make sense of it.
Because the face that stares back at me is not human.
The muddled thoughts that flutter through my brain offer explanations. A mask? Injuries? A dream?
But the face is perfectly formed, perfectly complete. Pale, almost translucent skin, not unlike the strong thick hide of an elephant’s. Large eyes occupying the upper part of the face, nestled beneath a fiercely protruding brow. A mouth with thick, plump lips. Ridges run from the bridge of the nose and sweep over the forehead, one at the centre of the crown, one on either side, and one across each sharp cheekbone. Long white hair is drawn up in a braid that weaves over the crown of the head and down the neck.
For centuries and centuries, perhaps even from the beginning of our creation, my species has pondered the question of whether we are alone in the universe. Through the years, we have created monsters and gods, debated the possibility that there are others out there. But in all those millennia of our existence, in all that time, merely a blink of the eye in the lifetime of the universe itself, we have never, not once, made contact with another species that is not of our home planet Earth.
I peer at the creature in the space suit, motionless on the hard station floor, my heart hammering in my chest, and I am stunned beyond words.
Life beyond Earth exists.
And right now, the life in front of me is slowly fading away.
According to all the horror movies I’ve seen and sci-fi novels I’ve read, this creature — this alien — should be feared. It may be hostile. It may be dangerous.
But it seems so precious, the purest meaning of the concept rare. It is a living, breathing being and I am no longer alone. I cannot let it slip through my careless fingers.
I creep forward to get a better look. The alien is not grotesque, not frightening. In fact, it is quite exquisite. Beautiful in the way unusual things always are, and not too unlike myself.
Should this surprise me? Should an alien appear so similar to my own race? I don’t think it is so very strange.
Life formed on our own planet due to the pure chance of the right ingredients being present for which life could form. The Goldilocks phenomenon they call it — not too hot, not too cold, not too salty, not too sweet. That such an ideal spot exists elsewhere in the infiniteness of the universe is not so infeasible. And that life would form, adapt to those ingredients, those environments, in much the same way it has to those ingredients and environment on earth, seems almost likely.
Eyes to see light. Ears to hear sound. Mouth to take sustenance.
With a trembling hand, I reach out with my fingertips and touch the creature’s cheek. It is icy cold but although it appears rough, silky smooth. Once again I jerk away as my touch causes its eyelids to flutter as if it is dreaming.
I’m wasting time on fear here. I need to pull myself together and help this creature like I would a human.
Kneeling up a little straighter, I unbind the peculiar fastenings of the space suit, now understanding why I do not recognise the strange material or markings, peeling it open like an orange to reveal the body dressed in a skin-tight suit of what could almost be lycra but isn’t.
The creature has a torso like mine, two arms with hands, two legs with feet. We are the same, yet different. The skin is more hide than flesh with that same colourless hue and the hands are large with long fingers, four knuckles instead of my three. The feet are webbed and there is a tail curled around the left leg, thick at its base and slim at its flailed point.
The creature has broad shoulders and narrow hips — the shape of a human male — and through the tight material I can see he is strong and muscular. And tall, almost seven foot I estimate. No wonder I struggled to drag him to my vehicle.
Below what appears to be the creature’s ribs, the material of his suit is ripped and congealed with a deep purple substance. Blood? It is seeping from the wound.
Quickly, I open the medical bag and rifle through it for scissors, cutting away the upper half of the skin suit that feels almost like silk in my fingers, and revealing a torso of corded white muscle. Carefully I remove bits of material mingled in hardened blood and clean the wound as best I can with antiseptic wipes. The creature moans weakly as I do but his eyes don’t open.
“It’s okay,” I whisper, realising I’ve not spoken to him yet. He murmurs something deep and guttural back.
Language. He has language!
I suppose this is not surprising either. A being sophisticated enough to build a spaceship would have to have language. But I am amazed I can sense it. Hear it with my ears. He talks. His species talks like humans do.
However, the sound is like nothing I’ve heard before, melodic, more like the song of a bird than the speech of a human. To me the language is nonsense. Utterly different from my own. But then again, the words he’s uttering may be nonsense to him too. I don’t think he is conscious. In fact, he’s barely alive, his breath feeble.
I patch up the wound as best I can, not knowing what else I can do. There’s no way I could maneuver him into the medical scanner and even if I could, would it be able to deduce what is wrong with this non-human creature?
So I press my hand lightly to his chest, feeling for what might be a heart beat. Something thuds beneath the soft material, the hide skin. Not the puh-dum puh-dum of a human heart. A slower beat, a different pattern. A dadada dadada dadada.
His flesh is so very cold, like the ice outside, and with nothing else I can do for him, I fetch blankets and draw them over his body, right to his chin. I pause, examining his peaceful face, the intricate carvings of skin.
It is such a long time since I’ve seen another being so closely resembling me. I have been alone for so long. So, so long. And finally a stranger has fallen from the sky — like a gift from the gods.
I can’t leave him here. I will stay with him. But soon my eyelids grow heavy and I lie down beside him, watching the feeble rise and fall of his chest.
I’ve missed companionship. I’ve missed friendship and affection too. My body and my soul long for it now. And something primal compels me to crawl under the covers and curl up against his hard body, nestling into the crook of his arm.
It is worryingly comforting. Familiar and safe.
“Don’t die,” I whisper, his strange heartbeat thudding against my ear. “Don’t die.”