Page 2 of Caveman Alien's Terror

I add some weight to the drill, and it bites into the wood, shaving off bright yellow flakes.

A light shiver goes through the tree and I stop. “Did you feel that?”

“What?” Alba whispers behind me.

“I think it moved.”

I wait for a few seconds. But the shiver doesn’t happen again, so I keep drilling. The wood gets harder, but the caveman-forged drill is sharp and cuts easily into it. Before I know it, a hard stream of clear liquid starts flowing, covering the drill and my hands.

“The pot!” I urge as I lean out of the way.

Alba puts the clay pot under the stream to catch the liquid sap. “Nice. That was easy. I never knew it would flow like this!”

“Yeah, I thought it would be more of a trickle—” I stop as I spot movement from the corner of my eye.

Something vanishes behind a tree trunk at the other side of the clearing. Something blue.

I freeze and stare. Random movement in the jungle is never a good thing. And the velociraptor-like dinosaurs calledrekhcan be any color, including blue. What the heckwasthat?

“Getting full,” Alba warms me. “Maybe plug it up?”

The pot she’s holding is filling up fast. I fumble through the pockets in my stiff and shapeless dinosaur-skin dress. Finding the wooden plug I brought, I push it firmly into the hole in the tree, getting my face sprayed with watery sap in the process. “There.”

Alba puts a lid on the pot. “That’s a lot of juice. Should be more than enough for the Sword Ceremony.”

I wipe the liquid off my face, noticing it has a faint spicy taste. “I hope so. I’m not eager to come back here anytime soon.” I scan the edge of the clearing, but the blue flash doesn’t appear again.

Alba secures the lid with thin leather straps and looks up. “It would be cool if we could return with a salen fruit or two. They’re not that high up.” She puts one hand on the bark.

There's a hard sound like'thwack',and something shoots out of the salen tree trunk and tugs at the side of Alba's dress.

“What the heck?” She frowns and picks something out of the leather. It's a black spike as long as her index finger, but thin andpointed, with cruel barbs all along it. “Did that tree justshootat me?”

Morethwacksounds are coming from higher up the tree. Little arrows are shooting straight out with great force, high up the trunk, but coming lower fast. Soon there will be hundreds of those things hitting us.

I grab Alba's arm. “Run!”

As I say it, I know it's not going to work. That wave of shooting spikes is coming down the tree too fast. And those things are coming out like gunshots. The noise is deafening.

We barely have time to move before spikes start shooting out right above our heads.

I freeze in fear, knowing I'll be pierced like a sieve.

There's suddenly a blue wall between me and the tree. A very strange-looking wall, with silver pants and six-pack abs and big chest muscles and a thick neck. And a face. He's electric blue and so beautiful I can't believe he's real.

I hear the spikes shooting out of the tree, but none of them hit me.

The sheer surprise makes me fall on my butt.

The world goes silent as the tree exhaustes its defenses. Alba is frozen beside me, staring at the newcomer with a jaw that hangs almost to her chest.

I realize that mine is too, so I close my mouth and stare up at the blue apparition.

He's unspeakably beautiful, too much so to be real. In his eyes he has white stars that sparkle like welding torches. His hair is achaos of gold, silver, and copper and probably a good few metals I've never heard of. He smiles with an icy, dangerous warmth that my brain can't process. There are scales all over him and sharp spikes along his forearms.

He's an otherworldly creature, a god of some kind, too wonderful for this world. I want to cower, to beg for mercy. But I'm too scared to move.

“Little girls in the jungle,” the newcomer says. His voice is as clear as church bells, as deep into the resonant bass as that of any caveman, but with a menacing iciness to it that convinces me that I'm about to die. “You should be more careful. It's such a difficult planet.”

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