My Cousin, the Alien (8 page)

“We can’t go back in there yet. Those two are looking for us.” I thought a moment. “In fact, when they don’t find our bodies or catch up to us in the main passage, they may remember this side stream. Let’s follow it. Quickly. The guide said it leads outside.”

That sounded simple enough. It wasn’t. As we moved farther back, the last trace of light from the cavern vanished. It was as dark as it had been during that tour demonstration. The dry rock beside us was as raspy as sandpaper. The rocks below were slippery with cold, wet slime.

After a while, the scared energy that had been driving me faded. I was almost numb from cold, and my arms and legs were shaking and bruised from banging into rocks.

“Let’s rest a minute,” I gasped when I found myself on a dry, flattish rock. “I can’t see or hear anything coming after us.”

I felt Ethan crawl up beside me. He was shivering. I put an arm around him.

“I’m sorry, little cousin,” I forced myself to say. I felt almost as numb from the truth as from the cold. “I never really believed you like I should have. Those guys
were
trying to kill you, and they have weapons like people . . . like
humans
just don’t have.”

“They
are
aliens, aren’t they?” he said faintly.

I nodded, but of course he couldn’t see that. I said what I didn’t want to hear. “And I guess you are too. I wish I’d believed you earlier. You probably
are
some sort of lost alien prince.”

“I don’t . . . I wasn’t . . . ” He choked to a stop, his body shaking now like he was crying. Suddenly, he pushed himself off the rock. “Let’s go. We can’t let them catch us!”

His clattering and splashing showed he was moving faster than he should in this dark. “Slow down!” I hissed. “Make that much noise, and they’ll hear us.”

He seemed to slow but was still ahead of me. Passing him up, I bumped my head. The ceiling was getting lower. The farther we went, the lower it got, forcing us to crawl. I started feeling like the whole mountainside was pressing down on me. If it hadn’t been for the cool breeze I might have panicked and fled back to face the aliens. But then, I had another alien here to try and protect.

As we floundered on, I heard new rumbling. Was more of the cavern caving in? Were our parents and all those other people all right?

Suddenly, my attention snapped back to us. Either the water was getting higher or the ceiling was getting a lot lower. There wasn’t much room between the two any more. Like salamanders, we half swam, half crawled along the stream. The current was strong, but when we tried to lift ourselves out of it, we scraped against rough rock. And now that rock ceiling was wet. At times there might be nothing but water in this little tunnel. We could drown!

The rumbling was louder. It sounded like . . . like thunder. Maybe it was raining again outside. That’s why the stream was rising!

“Hurry!” I said as water sloshed into my mouth. I jerked and scraped my head on rock.

Ethan got the point. I could hear him scooting behind me. In fact, when I looked back, I could almost see him. A black shape against lesser black. Were we coming to daylight?

My battered head pressed against the ceiling, and water nearly blinded me. But there was light ahead. I grabbed a breath between waves and scrambled on. Suddenly, water was coming from above as well. Out of a thunderous gray sky, rain poured down on us. I’d never felt anything so welcome in my life!

“Over here!” Ethan had rushed out. His voice now came from my left. “There’s a kind of shelter.”

Staggering to stand up, I stumbled his way. Soon we were crouched side by side under a rock ledge. It wasn’t much protection. A strong wind battered the rain right onto us.

Like a frog, Ethan scrambled further left. “It’s better over here. Almost dry.”

At the back of the overhang, the ground was dusty and scattered with dry leaves. I wondered briefly about wild animals but decided they’d be better than torrential rain or murderous aliens.

For a while, we huddled in silence. Ethan was shivering again, and there was enough light to see he was crying. I put an arm around him.

“Next time you tell me anything, Ethan, I promise I’ll believe you. Unicorns in your backyard—anything.”

“But you shouldn’t!” he sobbed. “You shouldn’t have believed me. I didn’t, not deep down. I knew it was sort of a game, but I wanted it to be true. So I pretended harder and harder until I almost believed it. But now. . . now I don’t want it to be true. I don’t want to be an alien! I want to be just an ordinary kid with ordinary parents. I know they’re not great parents, but they’re
human
. I want to be human too!”

He curled up in a ball and shook with sobs. I held him tight, crying a little too. Sure, boys aren’t supposed to cry, but they aren’t supposed to go through stuff like this either. I was worried about my parents. I was worried those ghastly bloated aliens would track us down. And most of all, I was worried about my crazy alien cousin. He was the real thing.

The rain looked like it would never let up. No one could move in a torrent like that, so I guessed we were safe enough for the moment. After a while, exhausted and huddled together in our cold dry den, we both fell asleep.

It may have been hours later when we woke up. The sky beyond the rocky ledge was clotted with dark clouds that flashed and rumbled. But the rain had stopped.

I started to move, then froze. Against the lightening-lit sky, I saw something. A dark, standing shape.

The dark figure snorted and swayed as it stood against the sky. Not an alien . . . a bear! Big improvement. I should have known sheltering in a cave was a bad idea.

Beside me, Ethan whimpered and pulled his knees up to his chin. The creature dropped to all fours and began waddling away. I blinked, trying to get the scale of the thing. Too small for a bear. It looked back at us, black eyes glinting from a mask of dark fur. Dark fur striped the bushy tail. A raccoon!

Ethan began giggling. And soon we were both gasping with laughter, loud enough to drive away a herd of bears. Or attract a couple of aliens.

“Quiet!” I whispered sharply. “They may still be looking for us.”

That shut down the laughing. “They may use some alien device to track us down,” Ethan whispered. “We’ve got to go!”

Ethan stood up quickly, grazing his head on the rocky roof. I stood cautiously. “Yeah, but we can’t just run. We’ve got to think first. Other people could be looking for us too—our parents and the police or park rangers.”

Ethan walked nervously to the edge of the overhang and looked out. “But they may think we were crushed by that falling rock and be looking for our bodies in there. Clyde and Bill must have seen us jump off, or they wouldn’t have followed us up the passage. The guide in their boat probably mentioned that side stream too. They could be following us now!”

“They’re too fat for that route,” I pointed out. “But maybe they’ve left the cave and are trying to find where that side passage comes out. Let’s move! If we can just find other people before those guys find us, we should be all right.”

As we stepped from under the ledge, hanging ferns scattered raindrops on us. The dark clouds were moving farther away, but the sky was not very comforting. It was pink with sunset. Soon it would be night.

“How are we going to find anything in the dark?” Ethan whimpered.

I looked down at the stream that bubbled past us before dropping into the little cave we’d crawled from. “Just follow the stream. That’ll keep us from walking around in circles like they say happens when you’re lost in the woods. The stream’s bound to run into a road or bridge sooner or later.”

Following the stream wasn’t hard at first. There was still enough pinkish light from the sunset sky. But soon it was harder not to trip over roots or get entangled in briars. From the darkening forest around us came sounds of frogs, insects, and mournful birds. The cool air smelled wet and moldy. Sometimes noisy things, raccoons or whatever, crashed through the bushes. We froze for frightened moments, scarcely daring to breathe.

Just as I was beginning to think we’d have to give up and find someplace to hide for the night, a full moon edged into sight beyond the trees. Its silvery pale light shifted with the wind-stirred leaves, showing us where to put our feet.

Soon afterward the little stream spread out into a reedy pool below a cliff and disappeared.

“I don’t get it,” Ethan complained. “How can a stream just stop?”

I looked at the base of the cliff where bubbles, silvered by the moonlight, rose through the dark water. “Maybe it starts here, from an underground spring. Bummer. Now we’ve got to follow something else.”

What I really wanted to do was cry like a baby and wait till my mother found me. We were lost, in the woods, at night. That was nightmare enough—even without murderous aliens. But I was the big kid here, the one supposed to look out for his little cousin. And, alien or not, he was still family.

I looked around. “Okay, this cliff will do. Follow it until we find a house or something. Then someone will call the police for us, and everything will be all right.” I tried to sound as if I believed that.

Following the cliff was not easy. Rocks were tumbled along its base, and if we moved away too far, we lost sight of the cliff behind the trees. But then the ground became more even and open. It was Ethan who figured out why.

“Hey, Zack, I think we’re on a road!”

I stopped and looked around. It was hard to be sure of anything among the jumbled shadows and moonlight, but along a strip in two directions there were no trees. The ground was hard with gravel.

“You’re right! Doesn’t look like it’s been used for years, but it’s got to lead somewhere!”

We moved on with hopeful steps, occasionally scrambling over fallen trees. Then the road divided.

The track to the left was more overgrown, so we turned right. We hadn’t gone far before we stopped, rooted with fright. Something was crashing through the woods. Something big. It was getting closer. I was too scared to run or hide or do anything except hope that whatever it was didn’t see us.

A big buck burst from the trees ahead of us. With only a fleeting glance, it charged past us down the road.

Ethan laughed nervously. “A deer. It sounded like Godzilla.”

“Or like Godzilla was after it,” I joked. Not a very good joke. What could scare a deer that badly? After all, it lived in the night woods all the time. It wouldn’t get spooked by a raccoon. But a real bear? Maybe. Or worse.

“Let’s hurry,” I said. “I’m getting really hungry.

“Right. I could eat ten triple cheeseburgers and a carload of fries. What do you. . . ”

I grabbed his arm to silence him, then pointed. Off to our right, where the deer had come from, a light moved in the forest. A flashlight maybe. Rescuers? There was something wrong about the light, though. It had kind of an odd violet tinge, like lights in science demonstrations that make rocks glow.

“If they’re rescuers, they should be calling our names,” Ethan whispered.

“And they should be using ordinary flashlights,” I added. “Back to the other road!” Hurrying back to where our road forked, we took the overgrown way. We weren’t much quieter than that panicky deer.