A Texas girl finds herself admiring a light in the sky only to find out it is indeed an alien, which transports her to another time long long ago in Africa and pairs her with a Neanderthal population in hopes that her descendants will populate Nort...
Sinomi opened his eyes. It took a moment to adjust - the knock on his head drove away his memory. His head pounded, his vision slowly came back. The Sun was directly overhead and it was beating into his eyes. He closed them and ran his tongue over his lips. They were dry and cracked. His arms and legs were stretched out. Someone had taken his charm and the precious stones he had collected on his journey on the Outsiders. His weapon, the knife his father gave him before this journey...gone.
The pounding took up anew only this time it was the familiar Outsiders drums. He tasted blood and his cheek was badly swollen. He could hear voices but not who was talking Slowly it came back to him, the walk along the lake, the forbidden jagged rocks he climbed over, and then...
There were several of the small people standing over him talking. But they spoke a strange language, or maybe they weren't. He felt nauseous, certain he would throw up. He heaved and heaved, but nothing came out. He was already covered in vomit, dried from two days in the hot Sun. His skin was hot and dry, burning. He smelled something odd. What is that smell? Like...like...rotten bird eggs left in the Sun too long.
Wait! It was coming back to him. As he crept over the top of the ridge, he slowly peered down at the scene below. There he saw a large hole in the ground filled with water. Smoke came from the surface, or did it come from below the water because this water wasn't still like a pool. This water boiled and seethed.
And from within the tortured surface came that foul smell and smoke as if wood burned there.
From atop the ridge, he saw the smoke and fumes trail along the ground and down the sides of the hills, and out of the many fissures there. What a barren land, black cinders, and dead trees that once stood on the shores of the Outsiders' Lake.
Then he saw the girls lying side by side near the smoking water struggling to get free of the leather thongs that bound them; two others were dead. They looked worried. One screamed when a man prodded her with a smoldering stick. He slapped her face and yelled.
Sinomi watched with a detached indifference. Human life was no more precious than any other animal. But what he saw shocked him nonetheless. Junga appeared with a small flint knife and began to peel the flesh from one of the girls. No deep cut, just enough to peel off her skin. He had never heard anyone scream as much as that girl did.
With great skill, Junga worked quickly and neatly until the skin was removed in near-complete form. So deft was he at this procedure that the young girl was now a bloody pulsating blob of barely living flesh, puss, and blood. That would not last long because the skinless girl was tossed into the hot boiling pool.
Sinomi had never seen anything quite like it and he felt unnerved, frightened even. When her body was finally removed from the water, her flesh was a dull grey, not pink or red, and those there descended upon the body and began to tear it apart and eat it.
He stood, about to run back and tell his friends, but he saw a bright flash of light and felt searing pain rip through his head, and he remembered no more until he awoke to see Junga standing over him with a small thin black knife.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
