Chapter 8 Zoey

We never made it to the last safe house.

“Krux! It’s on the ship.” Harb’k swore as I held on for dear life at the foot of the pilot’s seat.

When the flyer started attacking, I quickly realized there wasn’t anywhere safe for me in the shuttle. I was being thrown around like a rag doll. The pilot’s chair was the only place I could really hold onto. So I sat my ass down by Harb’k’s feet and clung on for dear life as he played roller coaster with the shuttle, even though it meant that I was directly next to Harb’k’s massively muscular thighs.

“Shuttle, show exterior display,” he demanded.

The walls of the shuttle disappeared, and I found myself face-to-face with the belly end of a flyer. I shrieked before I managed to stifle it. The creature clung to the shuttle, and with the walls seemingly transparent, it looked to be just a few inches from me.

Harb’k had explained that the shuttle had thousands of tiny camera-like sensors on the hull that picked up light and color, that it then replayed on the internal panels, which were all technically screens. The ship’s AI filled in any blind spots. With how lifelike the flyer was, I’d say the ship did an awesome job. Too good.

For some reason, I’d always imagined that the warriors were basically invincible when inside their shuttles. I was wrong because I could totally see the flyers piling on this shuttle and crashing us.

“Hold on, Zoey. I’m going to try to knock him off.”

Knock him off? On what? We were flying over a whole lot of nothing. But then, as the shuttle charged toward another flyer, I realized what he meant.

As bile rose in my throat, I squeezed my eyes shut and ordered my stomach not to spew.

There was a sudden jolt, which I took to be the flyers hitting each other, and I ventured to open my eyes. The two creatures were tangled together now and tumbling to the dried grass below. It worked!

“You did it!” I squeezed Harb’k’s leg excitedly.

“It is best if we find a place to land until the flyers thin out. The ones from that nest are particularly adept at spotting cloaked vessels.”

I looked where he pointed.

The nest was a deadly white splotch marring the landscape. I couldn’t tell from here what the nest had been before the scourge had settled in, but it had been a building once. Or rather, a set of buildings. Now, white tendrils of the scourge’s symbiotic fungus extended out from it, tainting everything it touched.

“What are those?” I asked, pointing to the mountains of crap around the nest.

“Discarded carapaces from molting scourge and eggshells,” Harb’k replied. “They like to keep the inside of the nest clear, and the scuttlers bring out dead scourge or cast-off carapaces every morning.”

I shuddered.

Curious, I asked Harb’k to pull up the map. Sure enough, someone had already marked a big red X on it, and the area around it was shaded in red as well. But under the new markings was the information I was looking for. The site had been a factory farm with an attached abattoir, and the doors to the slaughterhouse had become the nest opening.

How morbidly ironic. Creepy as fuck too.

We landed in the parking lot of a strip mall at the edge of town.

“Hey, look. A bowling alley!”

“Do you wish to go inside? I can secure it.”

It was probably safer in the shuttle, but I’d just imagined crashing in it, so maybe leaving the shuttle for a bit would be a good idea to preserve my sanity.

“Yeah, let’s go bowling.”

Harb’k stood and slapped his hand on one of the wall panels. It slid open to expose a closet full of armor and weapons. He strapped on a few choice pieces of armor, and elected to use an ax this time. To my surprise, he picked up a spare blaster and inserted a cartridge before handing it to me.

“You did not take any weapons from your temporary bases.”

“I like to travel light. There’s no silencers on any of the weapons. Bluffing is one thing, but the bugs are drawn to gunshots. I didn’t see the point. My survival strategy is to be fast, lightweight, and disappear before the first sign of trouble.”

“That is a good strategy. It has served you well. But our blasters do not make loud sounds like your weapons, and are lightweight.”

I hesitated. “I don’t feel comfortable taking your weapon.”

“I cannot use them all at once. You can help me secure the building, partner.”

I doubted he needed help, but I agreed anyway.

The blaster was super simple to use. One switch functioned as a safety, but other than that, it was just point and shoot. I didn’t have any way to carry it on me, so Harb’k jerry-rigged a belt harness out of some strips of leather he had in his closet.

Then, we stepped outside. The building was mostly bug-free, except for a single dead scuttler that was stuck behind the building, a dumpster crushing half its body.

“Sucker deserved it,” I mumbled as we walked by.

Suddenly, the dead bug sprang to life, scratching and clawing as it tried to reach for me. Adrenaline speared through my system, and I felt it like a stab in my stomach. But even as I jumped back, I realized it couldn’t reach me. It was alive, but it was very much still trapped.

“Target practice,” Harb’k said.

“Good idea. Let’s put this fugly thing out of its misery.”

We stepped back close to the door. I released the safety and found my first obstacle. The blaster was sized for Xarc’n hands.

“Some at our camp use two hands, one to stabilize the weapon and the other to depress the trigger,” Harb’k suggested.

That would work. I aimed and fired. Despite being a beam of energy and not physical ammunition, the recoil still pushed me back more than I’d expected, and the shot went high. The strange way of holding it also made it harder. I adjusted my stance, then fired again. This one hit the bug and blew it to smithereens.

“Ha! That’ll teach ya to come to Earth.”

We stepped back inside the building and descended the half-flight of stairs to the bowling alley.

It was dark inside, but the lantern Harb’k had brought from his shuttle had no trouble lighting up the place.

“Usually, it would collect and set up the pins for us, but we’re going to have to do it ourselves,” I explained as I went to the back of the lanes to find the pins.

We might as well have fun while we waited the flyers out. I set up several lanes for us as Harb’k collected all the balls he could find. It wasn’t long before we were ready to bowl.

“How does this work?” he asked.

“First, just so we’re on the same page, I’ve only done this twice, so rules and terminology are a bit foggy, and we’ll have to make some up as we go. But the goal is to knock down as many of those pins as possible. You get two turns each time.”

Harb’k hefted one of the balls, looking like he was about to whip it at the pins.

“Not like that!” I reached out to stop him. “You don’t throw the ball. You roll it. Like this.”

I picked up one of the balls, showed him how to hold it, then went for it. I only knocked down a single pin. My second try wasn’t much better, knocking down two more.

“Okay, your turn. Use a new lane.”

His fingers didn’t fit into the holes, so like I did with his blaster, he improvised, holding it in whatever way was best for him. He put way too much force into it, and the ball rolled into the gutter.

He immediately grabbed another ball and tried again, this time knocking down several pins.

“Now what?” he asked.

“Well, normally, the machinery resets the pins. We don’t have that luxury. We can go set it up again. Or we can be lazy and move on to the next two lanes.”

We chose the lazy option. Then, because we still didn’t want to go back and set up the pins again, we made our own rules and continued until we knocked down everything.

In the second round, we found more pins and decided to set them up creatively, spreading them across all of the lanes, and making up the formations as we went. I furrowed my brows at the strange formation Harb’k was setting up on the last lane. It was using a hell of a lot of pins and a good chunk of the lane.

I blinked as I realized what it was. Harb’k was drawing a cock and balls!

I don’t know why I found it so funny. Maybe it was because I’d expected it from a human dude but not a scary Xarc’n warrior, or perhaps it was the severe concentration on his face as he did it, but I burst out into giggles.

He grinned at me, for a moment looking much younger. He was having fun! And you know what? So was I!

We took turns, knocking the pins down in each lane. By the time we got to the one at the end with the dirty formation, I was grinning so hard my cheeks hurt. And for the first time in a very long time, I forgot all about the space bugs.