Chapter 3 Harb’k

The first thing I noticed after I realized I’d put way too much strength into opening the door was her scent. I recognized it even through the stench of the scented spray she’d doused herself in. I’d followed the right female after all.

Something had happened a few nights ago. The location where she’d stayed showed signs of being overrun by the scourge. She and another female had split from their group, and they were now chasing her. I was glad I’d decided to follow this female instead of the other.

I slapped my chest with a palm. “I am Harb’k.”

She blinked a few times, then looked from me to the door again. She was probably still shocked at the dramatic display of strength. It hadn’t been on purpose. I’d thought she’d piled furniture against the door to stop me. I’d misjudged and tore the door right off its hinges. Luckily, I’d taken care of all the scourge outside, and there were no more in the vicinity.

“I am Harb’k.” I repeated, tapping at my chest again.

My translator stayed silent since I was speaking in my best English. I even tried to mispronounce my name the strange way the humans at camp did. She didn’t react, and I wondered how badly I was butchering her language. Heather had assured me my accent wasn’t horrible, and it was technically only two words.

Her mop of curly hair, the color of the stars in the night sky, was a mess. And there was a smudge of dirt on her face. But those did nothing to mar her beauty.

While she didn’t reek of fear, she was also wary of me. It wasn’t what I was used to. The females back at camp were accustomed to Xarc’n warriors. Some even actively tried to initiate contact in hopes of a mate bond with a hunter.

She wasn’t immune to my physical prowess however; I noticed how her eyes had landed on my shoulders, then traveled down the expanse of my burly chest, and finally settled on my abs. She liked what she saw. I was glad human females were hardwired to like our bodies.

When she finally moved, it was to train her weapon on me.

I’d seen this type of gun in action before and didn’t want to be on the receiving end, but there was a high chance she was out of ammo. She hadn’t been carrying that weapon when she entered the home. I’d been watching her as well as the group who was tailing her.

“I am not here to harm you.” The translator worked from my belt, repeating my words in English. “But that weapon is not functional.”

Her face fell, confirming my speculation, but she tried to hide it. She squared her shoulders and continued to aim the weapon at me. “Oh yeah? Try me.”

She said it with so much confidence that for the split fraction of a second, I thought maybe the gun was loaded after all. Her bravery had me grinning as I walked right past her and sat down onto the couch.

“Tell me, female,” I said. “Why are you alone?”

Realizing I’d called her bluff, she lowered the weapon. “I’m not alone. My friends are following behind.”

It was only a half-truth. There was a group following her, but they were not her friends. I’d been watching from my shuttle as she evaded her pursuers. She knew this area well, and that had helped keep her one step ahead. She also had a small two-wheeled travel aid that let her zoom down paved roads.

Her pursuers had a larger electric vehicle. We’d been seeing more of those around recently. And by we, I meant my hunter group and the humans who worked with us. It used to be that only those working with hunters could continue powering their electric vehicles; they’d modified their technology to work with ours. But humans were ingenious in ways our kind was not, and now many groups, friend or foe, had means of transport.

“They are not your friends. Why are they chasing you?”

I’d listened in to the other group’s conversation, trying to see if it was because she’d stolen from them or had wronged them in any way. But all I’d gotten from them was that they believed she was traveling toward a human settlement called Sanctuary, which was located in a city that used to be called Albuquerque. Except, Sanctuary was back the way she came.

One of our human members, Heather, had lived there. Kan’n, a hunter in our group, had also stayed there, albeit as a prisoner.

“That’s none of your business.”

“It is my business, because I need to know you are not a thief before I bring you home to my people.”

She narrowed her eyes at me, and anger flashed in their gray depths. “I’ll have you know, Har-pig, I’m no thief.”

I grimaced at her atrocious pronunciation of my name. Humans usually have difficulty pronouncing our words, just like we had difficulty pronouncing theirs, but that was beyond bad.

“It’s Harb’k,” I said slowly.

“Listen, Harr-Pig,” she said clearly and deliberately. “I’m not interested in going home with you. And I ain’t meeting your people.”

Now, it was my turn to narrow my eyes. She’d mispronounced my name on purpose.

“Why are you alone?” I tried again. “Even the human males in our group forage and explore in pairs or groups. You were not alone before.”

“That’s also none of your business.” She shoved aside the low table in front of the couch, almost smashing my shin with it, before she lifted the carpet and wiggled free one of the floorboards. Inside were about a dozen bottles of water lined up neatly and a handful of what the humans called granola bars. They were not nearly as nutritionally dense as our food bars, but it was food.

She grabbed a handful and shoved them into her pack along with several bottles of water.

“Welp, this is the only reason why I’m here.” She gestured dramatically to the rest of the house. “Enjoy your stay.”

She strapped her backpack on and started toward the side door.

“You are not going back out there!” I leaped up from the couch to stop her. “The flyers are active now.”

She rolled her eyes and gave me a “Well, duh” look. “Look, buddy, I’ve been surviving in this for years. I know high noon is dangerous. As you so clearly mentioned, there are people after me. They can’t move right now, which means if I want to get ahead, I have to skedaddle.”

Ske-what? That was a new word for me. I ignored it and said, “My hunter group works with other humans. I can bring you to them.”

“I’m not interested.”

“Stay until the flyers thin out.”

“Well, I was going to, but somebody”— she stared at me intently—“blew the door off so all the bugs can come right on in.”

I leaned over and peered at the doorway and didn’t see any new scourge outside. “I have removed the threat. If we are quiet, they will not find this location.” But just as I said the words, the sound of scuttler feet against the gravel outside had both of us on high alert.

“I will eliminate the threat and keep you safe.”

I stepped outside, found the straggling scuttler, and beheaded it. It only took a minute, but the female was gone by the time I stepped back into the house, having snuck out the back door.

Krux !

I considered hopping into my shuttle and following her to ensure she was safe but decided it would be better for me to travel in the opposite direction, uncloaked, to lure any flyers away from her instead.

Usually, I’d never fly uncloaked at noon, but I’d manage. Returning to my shuttle, I plotted a course back to my camp, making sure to catch the attention of the flyers in the area so they’d follow me instead of her.

Once close to my base, I cloaked again and called in. Mo, the humans’ de facto leader, picked up.

“I’m coming in hot,” I said, using the Xarc’n version of the human lingo I’d picked up since working with the human warriors. “Flyers, three of them.”

The human language was colorful compared to our own, and I found their slang and expressions amusing. Coming in hot. Hot on my tail. Flyers did not breathe fire, but this phrasing worked very well.

The numerous turrets mounted around our base had been taken from defunct Xarc’n shuttles and adapted to their new use and were manned by human warriors. White-hot beams of energy shot out from them, whizzing past me to hit the flyers. They didn’t stand a chance.

I landed in the parking lot in front of the converted grocery store and then stepped outside. This was home.

I’d parked next to Haax’l’s ship, and the other hunter had his arms around his mate Aanya as they shared a meal, sitting on a park bench next to their shuttle. They were so engrossed in each other that they hadn’t even noticed my arrival. The two were so much in love it was almost sickening.

I turned away from the couple only to catch Nov’k and Heather doing the same thing.

Krux! There was love everywhere.

Even Kan’n, the one the humans here had nicknamed Loose Cannon because of his initial professed hate for humans, had a mate. Sam, our Tech Wizard, had fallen in love with him and his sentient shuttle Pip.

It was beginning to feel like I was the only lonely hunter left on the base. I knew it wasn’t true. Bael’k, the hunter who had come in with Nov’k from the Jasper group, was single, too. And so was Max’n, the hunter who’d joined us from the East Coast.

“Harb’k!” Heather waved. “Any luck finding those anomalies?”

Oops. That had been the original reason I’d gone out. With so much love in the air at the base, I volunteered for the job. I’d ended up distracted by the female instead and lost sight of my mission.

A few months ago, a shipment of supplies heading for Earth was hijacked by a new form of scourge life. It had attacked one of our motherships. We’d managed to stop the possessed ship from landing on Earth, but not before it fractured into many pieces.

If any of them had made it down to Earth, we’d be seeing the effects on this hemisphere now as the weather warmed and the days got longer. Worried about the unknown mutations reaching Earth, the humans working with us had scoured the videos we’d had of the attack, trying to get a view from every single angle. There were several locations where they believed a tiny piece of the mutated ship could have made it through to the planet’s surface. One such location was south of our base.

I’d been on a mission to look for anything strange when I found my feisty fighter of a female instead.

“Not yet,” I admitted. “But I did find an interesting female who you might know. I believe she is traveling to Sanctuary—”

Heather perked up at the mention of her old home.

“—alone.”

She frowned. “That’s dangerous.”

I grunted. “That’s why I tried to convince her to come back here with me.” That, and because she smelled like the first breath of spring, and I wanted to roll around in her essence.

I brought up the image my shuttle had taken of the female and turned my communicator around to show her.

“Oh! I know her!” Heather exclaimed. “She belongs to one of the nomad groups. One of the good ones, not the assholes. Joey. Or was that Zoey? Or something like that.”

“Her group now hunts her. They may be good to humans, but they are not Xarc’n friendly. They shot at me when I approached.”

Heather put her lunch down, looking very serious. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

I showed her another image, this one of the three males hunting her.

Heather shook her head, her brow furrowing. “That’s not her group. That’s their vehicle, but that’s not them.” She squinted at the image. “That one there, he reminds me of someone, but I can’t put my finger on it.”

I moved my communicator closer to her so she could reach it, but she did not, in fact, put her finger on it. It must be another one of those strange human sayings.

“You’re saying she’s on her own, being chased by these assholes, and you didn’t go save her?” Heather looked horrified. “How could you do this?”

Nov’k, her mate, just shook his head. He’d “rescued” her from a less than ideal living situation, and the humans had called it “kidnapping.” Now Heather was horrified I hadn’t done the same for Zoey/Joey.

“She refused to come with me. I did not wish to kidnap her.” That was a lie. I did. I’d wanted to pick her up, toss her over my shoulder, and march her right into my shuttle.

“Well, you must help her. Bring her back here. If she needs proof, call me. I’ll send a note with you in case she won’t stay around long enough to do a video call.”

“I will go find her,” I promised. “But first,”—I sniffed the air—“I smell food.”

Heather laughed. “Yes. We tried our hand at General Tso’s Faux Chicken. We used tenderized pieces of Xarc’n food bars instead of chicken. We don’t have old hens to butcher yet.”

“They are good,” Nov’k said.

“I can’t wait.”