Page 9 of Mates for the Raskarrans #1-6

CHAPTER EIGHT

Liv

T hings continue in much the same way for another couple of days.

We ration the food in the morning, we search for more throughout the day, we share out the watches throughout the night.

There’s a sense of impending doom that only heightens when Ellie returns from one of her trips to fetch more eggs and shakes her head, or when we decide to divide the remaining rations into even smaller portions, or when the water we’ve collected starts to run dry.

We scrape by, but we all know we won’t be able to scrape much longer.

Ellie appears to be taking this particularly hard, as if she feels somehow responsible for us, just because she caught that creature one time.

By day she walks great distances to hunt for food, enough to make anyone exhausted.

But night comes, and she’s the first to volunteer to take watch, and the others say she sits with them long after they’ve taken over from her.

“You need to get your rest,” I tell her. “You’ll collapse if you don’t. We need you.”

But she just shakes her head. “I don’t like to sleep. It makes me feel... unsafe.”

Sleep for me is the only solace I get. Every night I dream of my alien man.

Every night he worships my body like I’m a goddess incarnate.

The only thing he never does is put his dick inside me, and though the pussy licking is divine, I’m getting a little frustrated not to have the whole package.

But that’s dreams for you, you can only influence them so far.

Even when they’re crazy realistic and probably brought on by some hallucinogen in the air.

This morning, I bring Grace and Lorna their rations when they don’t appear from inside the escape pod.

While most of us sleep on the parachute together, Grace keeps Lorna separate, so she doesn’t get bashed by someone flailing in their sleep.

It’s a hazard when you have so many people sleeping so close together, especially when many of them are also having nightmares.

Grace looks exhausted when I hand her the meagre breakfast. Lorna is still asleep, her face growing paler every day.

Her arm is an angry purple, and black lines have started extending up towards her shoulder.

I think this is very much ‘not good’, but none of us have quite had the courage to ask.

The air inside the escape pod stinks of sickness, despite the wide rip in the side of it letting in a steady stream of fresh sea air.

“I don’t think she’s going to eat it,” Grace says, when I try to hand her Lorna’s portion. “We should probably save it for someone else. Someone who…”

She can’t bring herself to say it, but I know. Someone who will survive. Grace blinks fat tears from her eyes.

“You’ve done everything you can,” I say to her.

“I’m a medic, I should know what to do to help her.” There’s a desperation in her eyes and I don’t know if she’s looking for absolution or condemnation.

“Grace, Mercenia taught you to deal with sprained ankles and sore throats, it’s not your fault you’re out of your depth here.”

“I can’t save her.” The anguish in Grace’s voice breaks my heart.

I think about our diminishing food supplies, how if we don’t find something to eat soon, we’re all goners. I squeeze her shoulder, tell her to get some fresh air, then head back out on to the beach.

I spot Khadija eyeing the trees at the edge of the beach, her mouth pressed into a thin line, and head towards her.

“What are you thinking?” I ask her.

“You know what I’m thinking,” she says.

“That we’re nearly out of food and water and the only resource we haven’t tried to tap is the forest?”

“You see, it’s like you can read minds,” Khadija says, voice sour. It would be funny in any other situation.

“That cat thing came from the trees and it ran back in to them. God only knows what else is in there. At least out here we can see where we’re going.”

“Yeah. See the fat lot of nothing that’s out here.

Even if Ellie chances on one of those crawler things again, it’s only going to keep us going another day.

If we don’t start trying to find out what else is in the forest soon, we aren’t going to have the strength left to do it.

We’ll be easy pickings for predators. We need to go now. Today.”

There’s logic in what she’s saying, and she clenches and unclenches her fists as if thinking of her own strength.

Her climbing strength. I remember thinking about whether those trees at the edge of the beach bore fruits when we first crashed here, but the forbidding look of the forest has kept us from investigating.

Maybe now is the time to start thinking about getting over that fear.

We can’t subsist on fruit alone, but it would give us time to come up with a better plan.

Even as I think it, I know my only ‘better’ plan is rescue.

And it’s been a few days now. If there was another ship in our area, surely they would have responded to the distress signal our ship sent out when the systems started failing.

Surely they would have been heading in our direction before the captain made the decision to eject us, the passengers, in the escape pod.

Surely they would have arrived here to collect us by now.

Every day that passes, my hope grows a little thinner. And it wasn’t particularly thick in the first place.

“It’s still early,” I say. “Let’s scour the beach first. If we don’t find enough, we’ll face the forest this afternoon.”

Khadija nods, and though she looked determined to head into the trees, I don’t think I’m imagining the hint of relief that I’ve given her an out.

For the rest of the morning, we search the beach.

The smaller, less confident girls stick to combing the shore for any shellfish.

Those of us with the inclination to use one of Ellie’s spears grab them and head off in different directions, searching for crawlers.

Ellie’s going after the birds she saw, hoping that one will be careless enough to come within her reach.

I track vaguely in the same direction. Mostly because I’m interested to see the birds, but also because I don’t like the slightly haunted look in her eyes.

I wonder what’s made her transition from her insistence that she would ‘survive the hell out of this’ to the shadow of herself she’s quickly becoming.

The sun beats down on the back of my neck, hot as all hell.

The air is sticky, too, unbearably so at times.

We’ve taken to sitting in the shallow edges of the sea, and so far none of us have been bitten or grabbed at by anything, so we think it’s pretty safe.

Even if it wasn’t, I think I’d still risk it, just to feel less disgustingly sweaty.

Of course, now our clothes and hair are crusted with salt.

Sand has gotten just about everywhere in our bodies, and the fair skinned among us have burned to a crisp.

My own cheeks have blistered. I try to stick to the shade, but there just isn’t much on a beach.

The carcass of our escape pod gets so hot inside it’s unbearable to sit in until night falls.

But worse than all that is how thirsty the heat makes us.

Even now, I can feel my throat tight and dry, my tongue rasping in my mouth.

The sea water looks so inviting, but it’s full of salt and no help in quenching our thirst. Sometimes, I hold it in my mouth for as long as I can bear, then spit it back out again. It helps a little bit. Maybe.

Walking on the uneven surface of the sand seems to sap all the energy I have left out of my legs, but I keep pace with Ellie, trying to make it look like I’m not following her by keeping closer to the line of the trees.

I scan the floor for fallen fruits, but don’t see anything.

I’m still too afraid to cross the threshold into the jungle.

Ahead of me, Ellie moves with purpose, walking like she’s not operating on less than half the sleep and food a reasonable person needs to function.

But I can see she’s struggling - can tell by the way she wanders a little, as if she doesn’t have it left in her to keep to a straight line.

I don’t know if I’m more afraid that she’ll get herself killed, or that she intends to do it deliberately.

On the one hand, I’m pretty sure we’re all going to die.

But on the other, I want to put that off for as long as possible. Just in case there is a rescue.

We’ve been walking for some time when cliffs loom ahead of us, the beach narrowing down to a point where rocks jut out into the sea, too craggy and uneven to climb.

A natural border to our territory. Overhead, birds circle, but their nests are clearly high on the clifftops.

There’s no way we can bring them down with spears.

Not unless one decides we look like easy pickings and dive-bombs us.

Although, thinking about that makes me wonder about perspective. Because those birds look fairly harmless from all the way down here. But how high are the cliffs? How far away are the birds? They could be enormous close up.

I decide I’m not hungry enough to want to find out. Not yet, anyway.

“You going to come help me, then?” Ellie calls back to me. “Seeing as you followed me all this way.”

I shake my head and walk over to her.

“I’m curious what you’re actually doing all the way down here,” I say. “I don’t think you’re going to catch any of those birds.”

“Rocks,” Ellie says, pointing. “Might be some creatures using them as shelter.”

They look far too forbidding to me, but not every creature desires a comfortable bed. It’s as good a place to look as any.

We head over, silent as we go. It’s half out of some attempt to be stealthy for our hunt, half out of a lack of things to say - at least on my part. I won’t apologise for following her, and I’m sure as hell not going to explain myself.