Perdition's Child

Chapter 5

"...didn't mean to, but that's how it goes. I definitely don't think they're with the Shitara group." A gravelly voice drifted into his mind and pulled him back to consciousness.

Mehk stayed perfectly still and tried to assess the situation. He was on his back and stones dug into his skin; he couldn't feel the weight of his pistol. Something tickled the back of his memory. Skjoll, aliens... Ah, the bomb. He'd activated it trying to get the damned thing away from himself, but he couldn't be dead if that damn rock there was digging into his spine.

A new voice spoke, this one smoother and closer to lellian in tone. "It hasn't twitched in awhile, do you think it's okay now?"

A growly voice chimed in, and Mehk gave up on differentiating and counting them while his brain was trying to ooze out from his ears. "Maybe it's awake, let's cut off a toe and see if it reacts."

Mehk opened his eyes at that and tried to fling himself away, but a weighty paw slammed him effortlessly back into the ground and his body decided to spend a terrifying few moments ignoring his commands and twitching involuntarily.

"That was cruel... Effective, but cruel." The gravelly voice was directly above him, and as soon as his body decided it was ready to follow his commands again he turned his head to look at the speaker.

A familiarly massive fangy maw grinned down at him. "You be a good boy now, okay?"

"...Shit." Understatement, but basically accurate.

Mehk sat up slowly, wary of another blow, but the aliens allowed it. Just no sudden moves. There were five of them gathered around him; one a giant bug, the deceptively beast-like creature he'd mistaken for a pet, a skithtiri, and two of a lellian-ish species he'd seen in movies sometimes but couldn't recall the name of. Squished faces, nearly bald, stocky, tail-less...

One was built like a tank and colored all over like sand, the other was less grotesquely huge and had speckled skin and was definitely an unnaturally bright colored mane. Hu-something. Hugar? Humans, that was it.

It occurred to him that his goggles were missing and he couldn't see beyond the circle of light their lanterns provided. Even if he ran he'd just hit a courl husk face-first.

"So," Mehk started. "I just want to start by saying thanks for getting rid of the Valarka caravan, literally no one liked them. I certainly didn't like them,"

This was coming out wrong, protesting too much too soon.

He tried to clarify, "I mean I was only here because they're awful, see there's this cop, also he does know where I am and he'll be coming to look for me soon. I don't know anything about you all by the way. In fact I'm practically blind, definitely could not identify you in, say, any kind of lineup if, if that thought had occurred to you. You aliens are basically all identical to me. Not to say, I mean I'm sure you're all very attractive members of your own species I don't mean to say you're ugly or anything."

Stop, just stop talking. Why couldn't he make his mouth stop?

"Anyway, that got off-track, this cop friend, I mean practically my father if I'm being honest, we are extremely close and he would not take it well if anything were to happen to me, said to go check on things and, and that's what I've been doing. Checking on things. Things are pretty well checked out. Aliens, that's fine, everything's fine, I'm fine. I was not associated with Valarka in any way before coming out to try and get them arrested today. Good work on that, uh, getting rid of them."