The Alien
The damaged portal spat me out like a bad taste onto a strange, unearthly planet. Slowly a purple sun rose in a yellow sky revealing that I was in the middle of what looked like a farm field. Rows of carefully tended plants moved slowly in the wind and diagonally across the carefully tended field was the dramatic evidence of my crash.
Some farmer, I thought was going to be incredibly angry at me.
At the far end of the field a figure appeared and stood still, assessing the damage. The sun accentuated the fact that whoever was standing surveying the damage was not human. There were too many arms, too many eyes and a lot of lethal looking appendages extending out in all directions, but the weary sag of the body spoke volumes about the despair at the loss of so much of his crop.
At last he seemed to see me and moved slowly and carefully down my scorched landing track.
He looked so dangerous and so menacing that I panicked. Frantically I tried to release myself. I hammered at the release catches of my harness but nothing worked. I was stuck. I was trapped in my craft as the fearsome looking creature headed purposefully towards me. The closer he got, the more menacing he became and the faster he moved.
Then I realised I had another problem, the craft was starting to burn and I would burn to death if I didn't get out soon. Problem was that getting out would then expose me to the farmer who was now racing toward me.
As he got to me he extruded from somewhere in his body a huge crowbar type implement that he raised menacingly above what passed for his head. I cowered back against my seat as the huge steel implement smashed down and across, taking the canopy of the craft off in one brutal, inelegant sweep. With the canopy gone, I could feel the heat of the fire. The farmer leant into my craft and tore me and the eject seat out of the wreckage as a single unit. He moved rapidly away from the burning craft. Once clear of the heat, he put me down, swatted out his burning clothing and stood watching the craft burn out.
As the last flames died, he looked at me carefully, bent over and extruded a vicious looking blade from somewhere. I shrunk away from him as the blade descended. In a vicious series of movements cut me loose of my harness and then lifted me out of my seat.
He carried me carefully and gently out of his ruined field and to a place of safety.
Back to Stories