Critical Path

“Or already dead,” Denver added, although a part of him hoped that wasn’t the case. He wanted to do that personally. He wouldn’t be happy until every last turtle-looking alien no longer set foot on Earth.

“Perhaps. Though I’m not so sure. One thing I’ve learned is that those at the top of their hierarchy have an uncanny skill in surviving. They’ve been here on this planet for so many thousands of years, waiting, in the ground… I won’t rest until I see them dead with my own eyes.”

Denver readjusted his backpack and shuffled the alien hunter rifle to his left shoulder. “You’re starting to sound like me.” His cheeks warmed with a blush, which made him feel even more ridiculous.

Although out in the wild, he was afraid of nothing and could comfortably survive in almost any conditions, conquering his feelings towards women was something Charlie had never taught him.

“I don’t think that’s such a bad thing,” Layla said with a smile. “Could be worse. I could end up sounding like Gregor.”

“And we can definitely do without that.”

“One’s bad enough, eh?”

“Something like that.”

“You look better like that, by the way,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“The beard, or lack of it.”

One of the men from Eastern Farm Twenty, now renamed to Freetown, had given Denver a cutthroat razor and showed him how to use it.

It was the first time in his adulthood that he was clean-shaven. All the time he ran around with his dad, he’d kept a beard and only trimmed it with a knife when it got too long.

“Thanks,” Denver said, giving her an awkward smile.

He broke eye contact, unsure how to react with the way she was looking at him as though he were one of her subjects of study. He brought his thoughts back to this clearing, noticing how the trees to the south of it were damaged, their branches snapped and their trunks leaning over, wrenched from the ground.

On a tip-off from Khan they had learned of this crash site.

Gregor, being his belligerent self, refused to come, preferring to stay back at one of the facilities with Maria, whose new role was to help reorientate the men and women whom the aliens used for cattle and… food.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out what Gregor’s motivations were.

Beyond the clearing, a shadow shifted.

A pair of rabbits dashed through the long grass, their khaki-coloured ears flattening against their heads. They hopped over thick redwood roots and disappeared into burrows at the edge of the dilapidated shack.

The wooden posts that made up the stanchions were rotten and jagged, the surface colonized by an empire of white and gray fungus.

For a brief few seconds, Denver shifted his weight to his toes with anticipation. He pursed his lips, readying to whistle for Pip, his dog, but he rocked back on his heels as the realization dawned on him that no, this wasn’t Pip.

She had run off shortly after Charlie had sacrificed himself, and Denver had never forgiven himself for not being able to find her.

The shadow and movement, he knew, was something bigger than a dog.

He crouched to a knee and brought up the rifle, placing the butt into the crook of his shoulder and bringing the sights to his left eye.

Layla had already dashed to the side behind a broken trunk and shot him a glance.

With the movement of a shrub and the twang of a broken branch, a figure moved into the clearing, with another closely following behind.

* * *

He was there—again. This was the third day Maria had felt the bed sink and her body rock inwards to the new weight. The weight created by Gregor.

She clutched the edge of the sheet and tried to pull it up to her chin, but it wouldn’t budge.

Gregor’s hot breath warmed her back, making her whole body shiver with repulsion. She closed her eyes and stifled a scream. She didn’t want to antagonize him. She’d seen and heard a lot of stories about what he’d done to people who got in his way. Despite that, she couldn’t just give in.

Although growing up on the harvester and not knowing a great deal about human reproduction, she was aware of how it worked. They were forbidden to sleep with one another on the ‘generation ship,’ and since she came out into the wider world, she had kept herself away from the increasingly hungry gaze of Gregor.

It didn’t help that Denver had started to spend more time with Layla. With him around, Gregor stayed away. She suspected the latter had a certain fear, or at the very least, trepidation, of the former.

Denver cut an imposing figure with his height, and since the croatoans left to go north and they all started to settle into a decent lifestyle, his previously wiry, skinny frame had bulked out.

Something Gregor clearly envied.

Realizing that he wouldn’t go away, Maria turned around to face him. The bastard was leering at her with a predatory look in his eyes. The bile rose in her stomach at the thought of him touching her.

She kept the sheet tight against her body.