Page 31 of My Big Alien Bodyguard

“It is a lot,” Zayne agrees. “But we will prevail. Do you know why?”

“No.”

“Because we’re not going to stop until we do.”

He is in a good mood. He is strong. He is capable. He is dominant. And he has a plan. I could whine and cry and pout. I could tell him we need to be careful, and that we should just try to live the rest of our lives without coming to Simon’s attention. But I don’t really think any of those things, even if it is tempting to think them because that would make life so much easier.

“You know what I think?” I say.

“What’s that?”

“I think Simon is in real fucking trouble.”

11

Lyric

Zayne wraps me in his strong, scaled arms and holds me all night long. I can’t say I sleep. I am too scared and too confused and too everything else to sleep, but I do doze, and the presence of the sun in the morning surprises me enough to make me think maybe I did sleep a little after all.

I am a mess. I am dirty, I am wearing a ripped car seat cover, and I am hungry. Zayne solves one of those problems by serving us meat. That leaves me less hungry, but with very sticky fingers.

“Alright,” Zayne says, rubbing his hands together. “Let’s get out of here.”

“How? That hovercar has no juice.”

I am beginning to resign myself to spending the rest of my life getting really familiar with different kinds of mud and dirt, because for all of Zayne’s ideas about freeing his people and taking me to his land, we are stranded here on this alien planet.

“I put out a signal on the hitchhiker band. We’re going to jump a ride on a passing ship and do our best to ensure that nobody on that ship has any idea who you are.”

“We’re going to hitchhike?”

“Yep.” He holds up a small instrument that looks more or less, actually, quite a lot less, like a banana. It is blinking with a little red light at the end.

“Oh,” Zayne says. “Someone responded!”

A moment later, the world disappears. It just sort of goes fuzzy and fades and refuses to be there at all anymore. I let out a shriek of fear because of all the strange things that have ever happened, the world disappearing is not one of them.

A second later, the world returns, but this time the world is the belly of a freighter. Zayne and I are standing in the middle of a bunch of crates marked EDIBLE. When I look closer, I see that the logo burned into the side of the wood crates is faintly familiar.Schlorp’s Fish Stock.Where do I know that name from? It seems really familiar.

“Excellent,” Zayne says. “That was a quick transport.”

“I don’t like being transported,” I say, clinging to his arm. “I didn’t like that at all. That was fucking weird.”

“It is unsettling the first time,” he says. “I should have warned you, but there wasn’t really enough time.”

“Now what? Now we’re…”

“Now you work!” A new voice interjects itself into our conversation. It is cheerful and friendly, and I am very glad for both of those qualities. An alien appears from around a cornerof crates. He’s a rubbery looking sort of humanoid, quite yellow and gummy in appearance. He is wearing blue overalls, and he has two more pairs in his wobbly arm. All of them are stamped with a big black curly word: SCHLORP.

“You two are going to have to work.” He says it again, as if we might have missed it the first time.

“That’s fine, happy to. Thank you for the ride,” Zayne says. “Just let us know where you need us.”

“We’re preparing to dock and unload at the next planetary port. You’ll be hauling boxes down to the unloading bay. We’ve got a lot of runaways and crims aboard, so keep a close eye on yourself, but not too close an eye on anyone else. You get my drift?”

Zayne

The Schlorp Corporation has a reputation for using illegal hitchhiker labor, and I am absolutely thrilled to discover that the reputation is true. A lot of corporate vessels would simply turn us over to the planet’s authorities since the interstellar act banning hitchhiking was passed. If that happened, I was planning on just claiming we were broken down, but this worker knows what we are, and he has use for us.

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