Alien Skin Market by Lizzy Bequin
CHAPTER 4: MAUREEN
The unexpected sound made Maureen’s heart lurch and sent a chill slithering up her back. She snatched the flashlight from where she had placed it on the floor beside her butt and flicked it on. With the beam of light, she searched the floor in front of her for the source of the sound. It didn’t take long to find it.
“What the hell?” Maureen muttered.
It was one of the little fuzzballs. The solitary critter was right by Maureen’s foot, sitting up on its hind legs with its pink nose and whiskers twitching.
In her anger and frustration, Maureen considered booting the little bastard away, but she was just too exhausted to care. Besides, she had to admit she was curious. This fuzzball seemed different from the others. The rest of the vermin moved as a pack, but this one was all by itself.
“What do you want?” she whispered.
“Rawn?”
The sound was difficult to place—like a cross between a squeak, a purr, and a tiny little growl. It almost sounded like a word, but surely this little animal couldn’t be intelligent enough to speak, right? If it was, it didn’t seem to have a very big vocabulary.
In a blink, the fuzzball darted up Maureen’s jeans and perched atop her knee.
“Hey!”
“Rawn!”
Again, Maureen restrained an impulse to swat the thing away. Normally she didn’t like strange animals climbing on her. But this little critter seemed harmless enough. And now that Maureen was able to get a closer look, she could see it was not totally blind as she’d thought before. It sported a pair of dark eyes like peppercorns embedded in its tufted fur, and it blinked at her while its little nose wiggled curiously.
“Hey, you’re kinda cute, aren’t you?”
Maureen gave a tired grin, and to her surprise the little fuzzball grinned back.
For such a small animal, it had a proportionally large mouth filled with tiny fangs. But its bared teeth did not seem to be a threat or a warning. In fact, the fuzzball appeared to be imitating Maureen.
To test this theory, Maureen winked one eye, then the other. The fuzzball matched her gestures like a mirror. Maureen grinned, and the fuzzball grinned again.
“Smart too.”
“Rawn.”
“I guess you expect a treat, huh?”
Maureen remembered the sleeve of sunflower seeds tucked inside her shirt pocket. She knew it was probably a bad idea to feed this little fuzzball. If she did that, he would probably run off to inform his other fuzzball friends that he’d found a source of food. Then Maureen would be swarmed by hundreds of the little vermin.
Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that this one was different from the others. Special.
Wasn’t it a tad bigger too? And she could have sworn the other ones didn’t have eyes like this one did.
Perhaps it was her curiosity. Or maybe it was just the oppressive feeling of loneliness in this hopeless place that made her crave company. Probably it was a little of both. Whatever the reason, Maureen decided to indulge the small animal’s begging. She reached into her pocket, took out a single seed, and cautiously offered it to the creature.
A pair of tiny paws darted out and gingerly accepted the proffered seed. There was a bit of sniffing, a tentative lick, then the fuzzball popped the seed into its little fanged maw and devoured it amid a flurry of furious crunching.
Maureen giggled quietly.
“You’re not supposed to eat the shell, dummy. Look. Do it like this…”
She retrieved another seed from her pocket, placed it between her own teeth, and cracked it. The fuzzball’s dark eyes followed her movements carefully. Once Maureen had the shell split, she took out the soft inner seed so the fuzzball could see. Then she ate the seed and tossed away the remnants of the shell.
She took out another sunflower seed and handed it to the tiny creature.
This time, the little animal carefully cracked the shell with its tiny teeth, just as Maureen had shown it.
“See, you are pretty smart, aren’t you?”
A miniature pink tongue darted out and retrieved the seed, which the fuzzball munched happily. Then it proceeded to eat the empty shell too.
“Or not,” Maureen muttered.
Cautiously, she extended her empty hand toward the fuzzball and gently stroked its tiny head. The creature pressed against her hand, showing her that it liked being petted.
“I guess I need to come up with a name for you.”
“Rawn…”
In spite of the terrible situation she was in, Maureen laughed again.
“All right, then. Rawn it is.”
The newly dubbed Rawn just stared at her, blinking and twitching his nose. Maureen wasn’t actually sure if Rawn was a he, a she, or something else entirely—and she wasn’t about to check. But for some reason, the funny little creature seemed like he, so that’s what Maureen went with in her mind.
“I know, you want more food, right? But here’s the deal, buddy. I have to turn the light off, okay? I need to conserve the batteries for whenever the owners of the spaceship decide to visit.”
God, listen to her. Here she was talking to a glorified space mouse. She really must have been losing her mind.
Then again, who wouldn’t in her situation?
Maureen turned the light off and set it back on the floor beside her butt. Darkness enveloped her once again, but she could feel Rawn’s warm little body still perched expectantly on her knee, and there was something comforting about that.
She fed Rawn another seed, listened to his tiny teeth munching the treat. After a minute, she fed him another.
Maureen remembered the cold weight of the gun in her other hand.
“Listen Rawn,” Maureen whispered. “I’m willing to keep feeding you, but you’re gonna have to pull your weight around here. It’s your job to make sure I don’t fall asleep, okay? I need to be wide awake whenever the bad guys show up. If you help me do that, and we manage to get out of here, I promise I’ll give you a lifetime supply of sunflower seeds. Sound good?”
“Rawn…”