Page 36 of Homebound
On the plus side, the swelling almost covered up her crooked, misshapen ankle bones that stuck out at a wrong angle.
“I have an old injury on this foot,” she told him. “I sprained it yesterday pretty bad, but the swelling will get better in a day or two.”
His alien fingers probed her ankle, skin to skin. Gemma could barely tolerate the conscious touch of his hand, so emotional was the experience to her.
“Simon, please… It’s nothing. Let me be… And I have to take you back…”
She felt rather than saw him looking her in the eye. His attention was the familiar energy he emitted, and it made her tingle inside.
The charged moment passed when he dropped his gaze to her foot and pulled the cuff of her sock back in place, followed by her boot. Methodically, he went to tug at the laces to tighten them. She couldn't tear her gaze from the slow, painful, and unsure progress his fingers were making.
He managed to tie her shoelaces into an unfamiliar knot. His arched brows rose slightly as he regarded her shod ankle with great concentration.
“Your foot needs rest,” he advised in his lilting monotone.
The comment startled Gemma. She didn’t know how to handle this conscious Simon, a man with opinions, so different from the docile creature she’d made him out to be in her dreams. In her dreams, he never told her what to do. She was getting a strong suspicion the real Simon would be quite different from her imaginary one.
“We can’t always do what we need, can we?” she said mildly.
He didn’t reply. Their interaction seemed to have tired him out, and like a freeze coming down after a mid-winter thaw, he withdrew within himself, a familiar cocoon of waxy indifference enveloping him.
Immediately, Gemma felt bereft.
She removed her foot from his lap and tested it for stability. Thinking that she might yet have to tighten the boot to get extra support, blood flow be damned, she steered the chair back to the prison.
Chapter 11
The night was relatively warm when Gemma left for home at the end of the day. The clouds hung low obscuring any potential moonlight, and a fine misty rain hung suspended in the air.
She stopped briefly at the old church to pick up the empty yogurt jar from between the crumbling bricks, the action so familiar now that the absence of light didn’t slow her fingers from their precise dip into the hiding spot. She went alongside the junkyard, its rugged shapes customarily spooky, the ugly silhouettes of black against black.
The City was not calm. Gemma felt it once she turned to another narrow street that led toward the barracks. Up ahead, people were congregating again in a loose disorderly crowd that rippled and sloshed like disturbed water. There was going to be another fight.
The fall from yesterday too fresh in her mind, she proceeded with great caution, broken glass crunching under her uneven steps. Her swollen ankle throbbed inside her boot, pain gathering force until the act of walking became agonizing. When she passed a side entrance to the docks, she had to sit down on the ground and rest. The misty rain kept coming, dampening her garments.
People hurried by, single and in groups. Somebody broke into a run. Shouts reached her ears. Unnerved, she got up and trudged on openly dragging her foot, her only thought to get home safely.
More people appeared, forming a mob, blocking Gemma’s path, forcing her to stop and consider a different route. From the darkness, silent shapes glided on legs that bent backward, joining the crowd.
Perali.
Several of them surrounded two men. One man raised his hand and pushed at one of the aliens to stop him from advancing. And suddenly, a Perali charged the man and bit him on the neck. Gemma was too far to see the details in the darkness, but from the way the man’s body convulsed, legs kicking, and then falling to the ground, she was afraid he… died.
More angry shouts sounded from nearby, and a large group of men rushed the Perali attackers. They must have witnessed the bite, the killing.
The aliens formed a tight body of defense. The men attacked, hitting and punching, grunting and cursing. The aliens moved close together and then dispersed, schooling and shoaling like fish in the ocean. They bit, they stroke out, and they howled.
Gemma shrunk back, working to blend into shadows.
The altercation was swelling, attracting more participants from both the human and Perali sides. Someone produced a stun gun powerful enough for Gemma to hear its sizzling zaps followed by screams of agony and hoarse moans of the affected.
She heard a small sound, terribly near. Her head whipped around, gaze sharpening, heart rate going from zero to sixty in two seconds.
She saw nothing except the darkness. She heard her own shallow breaths. She turned again, slower this time, her eyes re-focusing from far to near, and a scream lodged inside her throat.
Alien eyes reflected the nonexistent light a mere two feet away. In the same split second that Gemma spotted the Perali, she realized that he had spotted her much sooner.
She ran. She didn’t know how, she didn’t know where to, she simply turned and fled. He tried to grab her but missed, the swipe of his hand passing close enough to brush against Gemma’s coat.
