Her arm was slender, creasing where it was bent and it had very prominent thick hairs. He wasn’t aware that species from the opposite gender grew hair on their arms. Most human females that he’d taken notice of (a thing called teh-leh-vision and archaic magazines supplied his knowledge) were usually these wafer thin beings that always looked as if to procreate with sultry stares or just relatively happy with overtaking grins.
This ‘girl’ in front of him had a grim expression, pudgy nose, massive chaotic corkscrews sprouting out of her cranium and all around wide. There was a smudge of black taking over her…what were they called….fuzzy things on their faces….eyebrows. Yeah eyebrows…strange little things. Staring at the blob, he couldn’t make of it.
“What are ya staring at?” She asked, a harsh tone coming out. Weren’t female voices supposed to be lighter, flighty? What was with this one?
He pointed to his own head. She kept staring at his fingers, her eyes widening as she stepped back. “It’s a fucking mole! Take a picture of it!”
He cocked his head. The ‘girl’ gave him a great suggestion. Fuuuh-ken, what an alien word--he stored it into his mental file cabinet; when he was alone, he’d research it.
“Ain’t ya gonna eat me?” She asked, chest heaving up and down.
She flinched as he laughed. It sounded like a noisy garbage disposal, guttural and otherworldly as he tipped his head back.
“What a stupid notion! You must taste horrible,” he said. A very human thing to say.
“What’s that s’posed to mean?” She braced her arms, her stance defiant.
“You want me to eat you?” Now, this ‘girl’ was hilarious! “We do not eat human beings. We aren’t savages.” He stared at her screwed face. “Unless…” Her skin was beginning to blotch into a strange pink. “You want me to?”
“No!” She took a hold of make-shift stick that was on the ground and she poked it in his direction. Her arms were an amazing sight, the hairs rising in alarm as the blotchiness took over.
He snorted and said, “I am not going to harm you.”
“What the hell d’you want, then?”
“Obviously this planet is a decayed ball of crap. We are a rescue team, seeking out survivors.” His voice had such a condescending tone to it and his off-handed shrug wasn’t making it any better. “You are a survivor. We will be taking you to a refuge planet.”
“What if I say no?!” She had stepped back from his overbearing stature. He looked like the things she’d been studying at school—before The Outbreak, that is. Giant things, with a scaly skin, claws for hands nothing particularly pleasant to look at.
“It wasn’t a question. It was an order from the direct chief.” He stared her down, saw that the stick was trembling in her hands. “But I can easily erase this, take the ‘Hairy Girl’ off my record and look for other survivors as you rot in this,” he gestured all around. Their surroundings were concaved buildings, trash (like diapers, rotten meat, cans, bureaus, electronics, sometimes cadavers, etc) spilled out everywhere, rubble of cement and god-knows-what suffocating not only the land but the air that they inhaled. It was chaotic to the max, and had a scarce supply of alimentation, “place, it’s all the same to me.”
She warily eyed him as the wind carried her spirals called, ‘hair,’ (ridiculous concept, hair, he thought) in an erratic motion.
“Well,” he barked. “I do not have all day!”
She nodded and motioned with her stick. He took that as yes and he marched on, evading the ruins of so-called homes that once occupied this doomed planet.
