Page 45 of Jessica's Protector

Jessica

What a mess. It’s only been what, a week, since I crashed here with the others? Except now as S’Tou and I are walking through some of the wreckage tossed around, everything seems to have happened ages ago. Tracks still lead to the mountains but have faded a little. All I see from the cave’s direction is what S’Tou and I made on the way here. Thanks to him, I now have these little filter things stuffed in my nose like ear plugs gone wild. One good sneeze and they’d be gone.

Speaking of things in the air, Quin’s hovering above us, stirring the dust. “I’ll look around, see if there are any other openings,” he says before taking off.

S’Tou asks while holding up a sandal. “Is any of this yours?”

“No.” It’s pretty and I wish I could claim it but have no idea where the other would be. “Maybe I could wear it if we found the right foot’s shoe, too.”

“Let’s go inside, then and see what else is there.”

He trudges off to the opening and I walk around various circular gouges in the ground. “What’s dug out the ground like this?”

“Not sure of the exact model, but it’s a Gharian ship’s landing gear.” He points to one of the depressions. “See the design here? It’s an impression of our solar system.”

Bending a little to see clearer, I shake my head. “You only have two planets?”

He nods, bending back a thin piece of sheet metal, holding it back for me to walk in. “There are more planets outside of the rocky zone. We have two solid surface worlds with ours being the only one with air.”

“Oh.” Yeah, the smell is overwhelming in here or I’d take a breath and ask him all sorts of questions. Instead, I hold my arm up to my mouth, breathing through the fabric to block the stench.

“Yeah, not as exciting as your system for sure.” He follows me in, saying something in Kostan a couple of times. The words and tone sound like a command of some sort but nothing changes. “Pless, no energy. I’ll bet the authorities took the power cells to keep others from salvaging the ship.”

“No flashlight or anything portable, perhaps?” I offer.

He digs around in a pocket before pulling out a quarter-sized disc, pressing it to make light flood the room. “Probably not around here, but I brought one. I had hoped we’d have another power source for the habitat.” He goes on, shining the alien flashlight everywhere.

I’d been dreading spotting any possible dead bodies because I know people died. Instead, no one else but us are here, not even aliens. I walk around, keeping my arm pressed to my mouth to keep the smell down. It doesn’t work. “Everything we find will be gross and dirty.”

“Sure, but anything can be washed,” he says behind me. “What is ‘dry clean only?’”

I turn to see him holding a shirt by its tag and laugh. “Nothing now. Maybe I could use the fabric for something else but I don’t know.” I want to cover more space and ask, “Do you have another one of those flashlights?”

“Afraid not. It’s my fault for not thinking and bringing you one, too. I’d hoped the power source would still be working.” He holds up a cowboy boot, then finds another. “Ignorant on my part because I knew better.”

“Hope isn’t stupid,” I counter because most of the time, hope is all I have.

“Not usually, no.”

There’s a whole lot of topics to dissect but later, after we’re safe in the cave again. I find a couple of men’s shirts in a pile, too, which would be fun to see Nilt or Quin in. One is a flannel, brownish tan, and would be great on either Cinq or S’Tou. I pick both up for them. There’s a cell phone in the pocket, a model like the one on my nightstand at home. I reflexively try to turn on the device but nothing happens. I hold it up. “Hey, S’Tou? Are lithium batteries useful?”

He snorts a laugh. “No, haven’t been for thousands of years.”

“Crap.” I think about letting the phone fall, but can’t. Too many years of struggle in keeping an uncracked screen won’t let me be so careless. Instead, I put it next to a gathered up mound of items. “How handy. You put all this together?”

“Yeah, there’s another cache over against the opposite wall. Not a lot, but some. We probably did triage here, left the torn or old garments, and dressed the victims in better outfits.” He pauses, inspecting a woman’s shirt before holding it against him. “I mean, the Gharian rescue team did.”

There’s something shiny in among the clothes, so I pull on the fabric. It looks like a scarf from India. A lovely orangy pink with gold threads. Gorgeous, and I retrieve the garment from the pile. It’s in one piece. I fold the scarf from a large rectangle into a small square, which fits in my pocket. “Are you finding anything for you all in here?”

“A few things.” He hums for a moment. “You Earthers are on the small side.”

I snicker, because most of us are the opposite. “Ha, that’s not what our medical community says. We tend to eat too much.”

“Sure.” He tosses the shirt onto the pile of keepers. “You’ll outgrow the tendency if you don’t exterminate yourselves first.”

“Well, that’s a happy thought,” I mutter, although, what we’re doing now is anything but happy.

S’Tou claps together two shoes to knock the dust from them. “True, though. Once a civilization discovers nuclear power, there are only two outcomes. Harnessing it or killing each other with it.”

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