I jump up but collapse back down to the ground when my leg gives out. Shit. I’m hurt pretty bad.
He takes his hand off the velociraptor’s ribs and there’s a bloody hand print where his right hand was pressing. He turns slowly and looks me over, checking for something.
I squeeze my hands into fists and hold them up. I might not be able to move on my legs but I can still defend myself. My parents didn’t drive me across town to all of those boxing, wrestling and MMA classes for nothing.
“Just stay back,” I warn as I try to shake out my leg. It was numb at first but now the feeling is starting to come back and I’m immediately wishing for the numbness once again. It’s fucking throbbing.
He cradles his wounded hand to his chest and slowly reaches out for my leg with his good one. “Greanash tookaretie vulon oi qualuset?”
“Just stay back,” I repeat. I don’t want this guy’s blue hands anywhere near me.
I’ve seen nothing but horrible things from every alien that I’ve run into ever since that blue light ripped me out of the aisle of the movie theater. I was dragged to a movie that I didn’t even want to see by my sister-in-law when the ceiling ripped open and a UFO began sucking people up.
The aliens on board looked like children-sized praying mantises and I managed to kill all three of the pilots, and with the help of two friends and the galaxy’s most annoying robot, we landed on this planet where we immediately got chased by a Tyrannosaurus Rex and got separated. So yeah, I’m not trusting any aliens no matter how good looking they are.
He draws his hand back but continues to stare at my leg. There’s a little cut from where the back of my leg scraped on the ground but I’ve had much worse. But he keeps staring at it with his massive chest rising and falling as he takes deep breaths.
“Wait,” I say as he turns and hurries away.
He stops and looks at me over his shoulder. “Soukee?”
His back is a work of art. I could spend my whole life in the gym only taking breaks to shoot steroids into my ass and never even come close to looking like that. His back is pure muscle. It doesn’t even look real.
“Where are you going?”
Now that I’m fairly sure that he’s not a danger for the moment, I’m starting to wish that we had started on a different foot.
He did save my life by killing the velociraptor, even though I still think that I would have won that fight, and he could have killed me easily when I was pinned under the dinosaur but instead he helped me out.
And what did I do?
Scream at him. Threaten him. Stab him in the hand with an arrow.
Yeah, that sounds like me.
“Juju requitera bunco olika,” he says.
“Oh,” I say with a nod. “Well, have fun. Thanks for killing the velociraptor but it wasn’t necessary. I was just about to finish him off when you came.”
He grunts as he turns and disappears into the forest.
This planet keeps getting weirder and weirder.
I grab my broken spear off the ground and push up to my feet, grimacing as my leg throbs under me. I guess its back to the cave for me. At least until this leg heals.
A meteor slams into the ground in the distance and I nearly have a heart attack. “Fuck!” I scream at the direction of the sound. “I hate that shit!” It scares me every time. As if this planet wasn’t bad enough, it has meteors raining down on it all hours of the day.
I glance back at the dead velociraptor before dropping to my hands and knees at the entrance of the cave. It probably would have been better if he got me. What kind of life is this? Hiding in a cave and eating bugs like a rat.
I was going to be the UFC’s bantamweight woman’s champ. The recruiter said that if I won one more fight they would have given me a chance. I was two weeks away. Two. Weeks. Away. From making my dreams a reality. A few months away from fighting on the biggest stage in the world.
It would have been epic.
Now I’m stuck on this harsh alien planet. Alone. Tired. And now hurt.
“Juju,” a voice calls out as I duck my head into the entrance to the cold damp cave.
I pop back out and my heart speeds up when I see the blue alien come rushing back holding a large red leaf in his good hand.
What the hell is he doing?
He rushes over and drops to a knee beside me. He really is beautiful, whatever he is.
His brow is pulled tight as he stares at the cut on my leg with a concentrated look on his face. I’m no longer scared, more curious than anything. If he wanted to hurt me he would have done it before now.
He cracks the thick stalk of the leaf and squeezes out a clear gel onto his finger. “Juju,” he says as he shows me the glob of gel on his fingertip. “Juju hurtera caseee.”
“You know I can’t understand you, right?” I ask as he gently rubs the gel over the cut on my leg. The stinging stops immediately. So does the bleeding.