The Alien

The Alien - Chapter 3

The Viper

Two days went by before I felt I could travel. It had been interesting trying to learn about Jarath and the way he did things. Frustrating didn't even begin to describe how I felt about the language problem, especially when a quick trip to my ship could solve that problem almost instantly.

The lesson on how to use the toilet had been more than funny, with Jarath doing the motions with a red face and me trying to keep a straight face. It wasn't as primitive as I'd feared. At least they used water to flush with. It wasn't too different from what I was used to. Thankfully.

Until I could get to the translator chips, I had to resort to some crude sign language and trying to create little scenes and act out what I wanted to say. I was hopeless at it and wouldn't be signing up for a career in mime any time soon.

Now that I thought I could actually walk the distance, the most important thing I needed to do was to get Jarath to help me find the ship.

I grabbed one of the small models of crude flying machines that he kept on a shelf in his living room. It would make my little scene easier to convey. I also grabbed two little bottles from his kitchen; one contained a white powdery substance and the other a brownish powder. He sprinkled them on our food sometimes.

I sat him down at the table and tried my best to play out my ship crashing with the flyer, pretending the brown bottle was me. I made it crash on the table, made the bottle stay with the ship for a short time, then made it stagger away. I grabbed the other bottle and tried to act out me bringing him to the ship.

Finally, I pulled the ship's locator from my belt and held it out in front of me. I pretended to walk around looking lost, then slowly brought the locator to the flying machine. I hoped I'd made it clear enough.

He seemed to be putting it all together in his head. I pointed at the bottle of brown powder and pointed to me. Then I pointed at the white one and pointed to him. I followed up by making us walk up to the ship again.

I could see the moment he understood. It clicked in his brain and our eyes locked. He asked me a question, and I could only guess that he was asking me where the ship was. I wasn't really sure. It had been dark and I was injured. And a little out of it, too.

I held up the locator again, hoping that he would understand that it was the key to getting there. I was fairly sure it was understanding I could see dawning in his eyes.

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───

Walking was hard on the uneven ground. My leg still hadn't recovered. Pain radiated from my hip to my knee and I wished that I'd been able to take the medi kit with me that night, but it was too heavy to carry, even if I hadn't been injured. The frustrating thing was, my injuries would be almost non-existent now if I'd been able to keep up the treatments. I sighed. No point in worrying about that now.

The beeping sound increased in speed and pitch on the locator. We were heading in the right direction.

I inhaled deeply, loving the smell of the grass and the trees and the damp earth. I was so glad to be out of that house. I knew I had to keep out of sight — there was no blending in with these natives — but it had been getting to me.

We'd been walking through the woods for about half an hour and it seemed like we were still on his property, but I couldn't be sure. As we followed the signal to our left, the trees thinned out and I worried that I might be seen. I pulled Jarath's cloak tighter around me in case we ran into some local aliens. They would know right away that I wasn't one of them. My hair and skin colour would give me away instantly.