Page 17 of There’s an Alien Down My Chimney

As I watched Stella go into the bedroom, her slender, lithe body imprinted on all my senses, I knew the truth. We had the capacity to feel, and want all those things. My eyes swept the chaos that had been wrought on Stella’s home, her Christmas tree and decorations in a broken pile next to the door. Her kitchen was a broken mess… After tomorrow, this home would no longer be hers. I had brought so much destruction with me when I’d crashlanded on her roof.

Pike’s footsteps sounded heavy as he climbed the steps onto the porch, and when he stepped inside, I saw his eyes go huge with shock. “What the fuck happened in here, dude?” the male asked, his eyes lingering on the shattered porcelain remains of the Santa and reindeer statue with the sled that I’d so admired that first day.

He was holding a long black bag over one shoulder, standing in a casual pose, but I could see the angry glint in his eyes. It was then that I really regretted not having a second translator device to give to the male, it would have been nice to be able to talk to him. Now I just started back into the kitchen, picking up the broom to properly sweep the floor. As my eyes lit on the tins of ingredients to make the delicious warm drink with, I was struck with the idea that like Stella, I might never taste those again.

I picked them up, strode across the room, and yanked open my emergency bag, chucking them inside. I heard Pike snort behind me, but the male was going around the room, stopping at each window and fiddling with the latches. I didn’t need to ask to know that he was setting small explosive traps. I wasn’t sure if Stella would approve, but if she couldn’t have the cabin, was it not better to make these bastards receive their price with a bang?

Stella came into the room, greeted her friend, and quietly explained what was going on. She had a black backpack with her, it looked a little bulky and I wondered what she had decided to pack in there. She was supposed to pack up her cabin and put all the things in her vehicle that she wanted to take with her. Then we were supposed to drive it to a back road in the woods where she’d park it safely while we liberated my ship. The idea was, that it would look like she’d left, as she was supposed to, should they come looking at the cabin.

Except she went into the kitchen and made us food from the metal cans in the secret pantry, and she never bothered with any more packing. Maybe all she needed was in her backpack then, with the Christmas decorations broken, did she just not wish to take anything else? It seemed important to her, because she even took it into the pantry with her, and it never left her side when she started cooking.

Pike leaned into my field of view, catching my attention. He had a serious look in his intense blue eyes, and when he clasped my shoulder with his hand, I knew he meant business. “You can understand everything I say, right?” he said, his voice pitched low so that Stella couldn’t overhear. I nodded, my muscles tensing in preparation for a possible strike.

“You promise me, you take good care of her,” the male said. “Promise!” The intense way he said it, the way his blue eyes glared at me, I instinctively started to nod. It was an easy promise to make, all I wanted was to care for Stella, to make her happy, and to see her safe. The newly discovered feelings in my chest churned in response, of course I would promise this.

“I promise on my clan, on my forebears, and on the land owed to me by the Kertinillian Army, I will care for Stella,” I vowed, rumbling it quietly at him. I still saw how Stella’s head jerked up from above the pan, she turned enough that she could look at us over her shoulder, frowning suspiciously. I put on a grin and waved, pretending I hadn’t just made the most important promise in my life.

Inside that base tonight, I would do anything I could to protect her, and her identity.

Chapter 12

Stella

My nerves were a mess as I sat crouched in the bushes at Ru’s side. Somewhere higher up, I didn’t know exactly where, Pike was hidden with his sniper rifle. When we had parted ways, entirely out of character, Pike had picked me up in a bear hug and wished me luck. Without looking at me, he’d given Ru’s shoulder one of those silly manly punches, and then he’d disappeared into the dark. I couldn’t help but feel like Pike had just said his goodbyes, did he think our mission was going to be so dangerous? Or did he have other suspicions?

I pulled the itchy ski mask better in place, tightened the straps of my backpack, and then I checked the gun I had holstered on my leg. Ru at my side didn’t fidget or move, like a statue, he sat still while he watched the patrol of guards pass our hiding place. We knew we could get to the ship, as it was outside in full view, but we had to sneak into the base itself to find the strange artifact that had sent Ru here.

The moment the guards had passed, Ru took the lead, running in a low crouch toward the fence. He had a little gadget from his emergency bag in hand and in seconds, a small laser had cut a hole in the chain-link barrier. The two of us crawled through and we followed the path we’d mapped based on the blueprints Daria had provided. We ran around a few low buildings toward what we’d determined to be the most likely place for the artifact.

Everything was stark concrete, serviceable but uninspired, covered in a layer of snow. Lights shone out above doorways and lit up the paths between each building, which were large enough to accommodate even a tank. Consequently, that also meant there was little to no cover to be found, but we’d chosen a good moment to cross the area, the last patrol had just come by so the road was empty.

Locating the smaller entrance to the main building, we were prepared for guards, and I was surprised it was only two. Maybe, because we’d just crossed a twice-fenced area, which was heavily patrolled, they didn’t think they needed much more. It was to our advantage, though neither soldier looked green behind the ears to me. None of the staff on the base that I’d seen so far had.

Ru leaped out of cover and darted across the stretch of snow and ice that separated us from the two guards. They saw him as little more than a shadow with glowing red eyes before he was on top of the first one. I ran after him, my gun in hand which I aimed at the second guy, he was too scared trying to figure out what had attacked his buddy at first to even notice I was there.

“Don’t move or I’ll shoot you,” I warned him, and he froze, his eyes going wide as they flitted from Ru pressing his buddy into the snow and restraining him, to me. I got it, I didn’t look like the bigger threat. I was just a human girl with a gun, which had to be obvious even with the mask on. Ru looked a bit like a demon in this light, with his glowing red eyes, black and red skin, and massive antler-like horns. Incongruously, my grandfather’s Santa hat was perched just behind his horns on top of his wild mane.

The guard froze, his hands dropping from around the semi-automatic rifle he had hanging from the strap around his neck. Ru had finished using weird alien zip ties from his kit on the other guard and seamlessly moved on to tie up the second one. We took their guns, disabled them, and then we used one of their access cards to get inside the base, leaving the two guys just inside the door.

It was a brightly lit square room with a bulletproof glass partition, a place guards could fall back behind and guard the entrance. There was nobody here right now so we dumped the two tied-up guards behind the partition where they’d be a little more out of sight. One of the two was making angry noises through the gag Ru had tied around his mouth so I gave him a cold stare, “You’re lucky we’re not leaving you to freeze your ass off outside.”

I followed Ru, with my gun at the ready but aimed at the floor, while my alien companion kept an eye on our surroundings, the other on a hand-held device he’d used to scan the blueprints. My heart was pounding from the thrill, the excitement of this mission, but it still seemed to take forever as we crept through empty hallways, down metal stairwells, and once even through what had to be a mess hall.

The labs we passed that had windows, showed us that people were still working inside, so sometimes we had to duck and crawl past those places, taking precious time. Each minute we took in here was another minute we risked those two guards being discovered. We’d gone down three levels at this point, and the labs were getting more crowded. Twice we’d ducked around a corner, just out of sight of a patrolling soldier.

Then we got to a door we couldn’t access with the card we’d swiped off the guards outside. I fidgeted as I watched the hallway, my eyes darting from the camera in one corner to the lit window where people were moving further away. Ru had pulled open the access panel and was hooking something up to it. He had assured me he could handle the locked doors but I was starting to think I knew less about him than I thought I did. Why did his emergency kit have a (probably) illegal lock-picking tool for instance? Didn’t seem like a standard tool for a salvage worker, or was it? Did he need that to do his job?

I heard booted footsteps thumping down the hallway behind us and my skin crawled, that sounded like more than two. Had they picked us up on the cameras? Hadn’t Ru assured me his com device could scramble those signals? Maybe they could still see our progress by virtue of the blank spots in their feeds… I should have thought of that.

The door snicked open behind me, Ru’s hand snapped around my wrist and he yanked me through. With the door slamming shut behind me, I could just hear the sound of excited voices that abruptly got cut off. If they had access to this door, we were toast.

Looking around, I realized this was a long, big space with to one side rows upon rows of shelves filled with metal crates and wooden boxes. The other side was partitioned off with glass walls, and figures were moving around behind it dressed in full-on hazmat gear. On a metal table, a big black cylinder was perched on brackets, three people in hazmat gear leaning around it as they looked at a spot on the surface like it held all of life’s answers.

“That’s it,” Ru rumbled softly, just as a door behind the table with the cylinder opened. Something slithered into the room that just absolutely boggled my mind. I couldn’t grasp what I was seeing, and at first, it looked like the humans in the room had the same issue. No, they were just concerned it wasn’t wearing protective gear, what the flying fuck?

The creature looked much like a jellyfish, with a big, round head, transparent so you could see almost entirely through it. Bulging black eyes dominated one side of that huge round head and what had to be dozens if not a hundred tentacles sprouted from beneath the rounded, frilly-edged cap. Despite being translucent, and having no visible brain, nervous system, or circulatory system, the creature moved along on its tentacles toward the table. It was even tall enough to rise above the humans standing around, gesturing wildly at the door. “John, you shouldn’t be in here, we haven’t determined that it’s safe yet!” one male voice said loudly above the din of the others.

An almighty crash sounded as Ru threw a metal crate from one of the shelves, straight through the glass wall. The humans all turned to stare in horror at the mess of broken glass and shards, the gaping hole that framed Ru’s towering frame. Then he growled, “That is my salvage, hands off,” and he stepped through the hole he’d just made, shouldered between two of the men, and picked up the cylinder like it weighed nothing.