Dragon Romance: Dragon Fire (Paranormal Shapeshifter Hero Protector Firefighter Romance) (Fantasy Shifter Werewolf BBW Pregnancy Women’s Fiction Short Stories) (73 page)

This calmed Rosy somewhat, but the sounds were still close to intolerable. “I don’t know how much longer I can take this,” she said. “They will be here soon.”

“Yes,” Elion said. “They are talking about coming this way.”

Elion stood up, quietly, and looked around the room. At the back there was something that looked like a wardrobe-refrigerator hybrid. He walked over to it and regarded the handle and the hinges. “We’ll have to hide in here if they check this building,” he said. “Bring the things.”

Rosy brought the goggles and gloves, as well as Elion’s bag, and put them in the tall, rectangular container. She looked within and saw that there would just be enough room for the two of them.
But let’s hope that you do not need it,
Rosy thought.
Let’s hope that we can just sit here and sleep and then when we wake up the Enforcers will be gone and everything will be okay
. She knew she sounded babyish, but she didn’t care. The last thing she needed, the last thing she
wanted
, was for those scary-sounding Enforcers to crash through the door.

Minutes later, Elion was rushing her into the container. “Quick,” he whispered, as he climbed in next to her.

The sounds of the Enforcers were loud, now, almost as though they were
in
the room. And then the front door began to squeak open. Elion pulled the door closed from the inside, plunging them into darkness.

Through the thin gap between the container’s doors, she saw three men walk in, holding what looked like guns.

*****

As a girl, Rosy had loved playing hide-and-seek. The wardrobe had been the best place to hide, because she could see if someone came in the room looking for her, but
they
couldn’t see
her
. It was like magic. Now hide-and-seek had come into her adult life, and it wasn’t so fun, let alone magic. She could see when the men walked around the room, hands on their hips.

“Grassshhhkala,” the tallest one said. Rosy named him ‘Tall’.

Rosy gave them all names. Tall was even taller than Elion, around nine feet. There was Podge, whose belly seemed to be trying to burst from his tight-fitting robe. And then there was Dead Eyes, whose eyes seemed to hold no life, just a faint blackness.

Dead Eyes muttered something and then began walking around the room like a hound. Rosy’s heart was beating so loud in her ears she was surprised the men didn’t hear it; her palms were so sweaty she was surprised they didn’t smell it; and she needed to pee worse than she’d ever needed to in her life. She squeezed her legs together and tried to shut her eyes, but that just made it worse; her imagination went to work.

She imagined the three Ka dragging her from the container and putting those guns against her head; imagined them pulling the trigger; imagined her brains splattering over the floor. And she could see it all, happening before her, even when her brains were on the floor. She snapped her eyes open and viewed the reality, a little less discomfiting. The men were walking around and around now, and then Dead Eyes’ eyes alighted on the container. He muttered something in his language and began to walk towards them.

Rosy nudged Elion, and he nudged her in return.
No,
she realized.
He’s not nudging me.
He was nudging the back wall, the one at the back of the container. He nudged it again, and again, and then began bumping it with his ass. He nudged it harder, with more urgency, as Dead Eyes grabbed the handle to the container. He was opening it when Elion threw his whole weight backwards upon the wall, and then Rosy was falling, collapsing backwards. She fell into the street, just had time to look at the wall – it was crumbling and structurally weak, and Elion had smashed through it with ease – and then Elion was pulling her to her feet.

Dead Eyes, Podge, and Tall scrambled through the container towards the collapsed wall. Before Elion set Rosy to running, she saw them pull out their guns and heard them scream something at Elion. Rosy ran without thinking, just clinging to Elion’s hand as they twisted around this corner and that: the steps of the three Enforcers too loud behind her; as though they were inside her head. “Where are we going?” she grunted, as Elion pulled her around another corner.

“I don’t know,” Elion breathed. “Away from them.”

They turned another corner, and another. It was near-impossible to keep track of the direction in which they were running. The gray stones with which the building had been constructed were too uniform. Rosy knew that the Ka were not big on aesthetic, or they would have painted their walls. But this might work in their favor. Perhaps the uniform grayness did not lend itself well to chasing people. Perhaps there were no definite markers the Enforcers could use to track them.

Elion went left, left, right, left, without any apparent purpose. Rosy could feel her breath running short, and yet somehow her legs kept moving. She clenched her hand so tight around Elion’s she was surprised he didn’t yell out in pain. But he didn’t. He just kept running, pulling her along like a child. Then he collapsed against a wall, breathing heavily.

Rosy made to talk but Elion said: “Quiet, please.”

She bit her lip and watched as Elion tilted his head like an excited wolf. His pointed ears stood taut and he put his head against the wall. “I cannot hear them,” he said.

“That doesn’t mean they’re not close,” Rosy said.

“I know. But we have to think the best. Isn’t that what humans do?”

They stood in the dim, nondescript alley for five or so minutes and then Elion led them, heads lowered, half-crouching, towards the exit. The alleys snaked like a Minotaur’s maze. Rosy could not keep track of where they were even if she tried, which she didn’t; there was no point. She realized that she trusted in Elion completely. There was no doubt in her mind that he was leading them to safety.
Oh, how quick you are to trust in the strange!
she chided herself.
How quick you are to dismiss the quite natural fear of this man you should be feeling!

But she didn’t feel fear. She felt as she had felt when she hurt herself as a girl and her parents had picked her up. She squeezed Elion’s hand harder as they sneaked through the alleyways. After half an hour Elion stopped in another alleyway and put his ear against the wall. “I cannot hear them,” he said.

“What do we do?”

“We get out of here,” Elion said. “There is no point sticking to my plan. It will not work now they know we are here. Our only chance is to leave this city and head for the station.”

“Okay,” Rosy said. “Let’s do it.”

Elion interlocked his four fingers with her five-fingered hand and then left the alleyway, emerging upon a street. Moonlight reflected off glass-like material set into the buildings and illumed the street, upon which detritus like that of a post-tsunami wasteland greeted each step. Elion led them further and further out of the street, until they were at the edge of the city.

With each step, Rosy expected the Enforcers to emerge from one of the alleys that broke off from the street, but miraculously they didn’t, and Rosy and her alien lover were able to keep walking. Soon they were walking away from the city.

“We have to run now,” Elion said. “Until we get over the next hill.”

“Okay,” Rosy said, not quite sure she was ready for anymore exertion but knowing it was necessary.

They jogged into the red grassland that rose into a hill, Rosy close to Elion, hearing the panting of his breath. She resisted the urge to throw a glance back, much like Orpheus, except there was no lover behind him. There was no Eurydice. No, all she had behind her – somewhere in the deep dark grayness of the city – were man-aliens who wanted to kill or capture her.

Her legs ached as they jogged up the hill, and then they were at the crest, looking down upon more red grass.

“Okay,” Elion said. “Let’s get moving.”

They ran down the hill, panting together, sweating, away from the city: away from that which would end them. But Rosy didn’t think anything could end their love. And if that was cheesy, near-death had made her feel cheesy.

*****

After two days of walking and running, they came upon the village. Elion told Rosy that the station was just beyond the village, about an hour’s walk from the small cluster of disused, abandoned, crumbling buildings. They found their way to a tavern-like building with seats and primitive beds and sat behind the counter, their backs to the wall and their gazes to the door. In the two days they had been walking and running, they had not seen the Enforcers, but that did not mean that they weren’t out there somewhere.

“We will have to watch the station to learn the guards’ routine,” Elion said. “It is not a much-used station, and I doubt there will be many guards. And I expect the guards that are stationed there will be fairly complacent. But we need to learn their routine nonetheless.”

“When, tonight?”

The stars shone down as they walked into the village.

“No,” Elion said. “We need rest.”

“But the Enforcers…”

Elion shrugged. “There is not much we can do about it. If we go to the station now, tired, we will most likely be caught, and then we’ll be taken back anyway. No, we have to be patient and smart about this.”

Rosy nodded and then laid her head on Elion’s shoulder. He put his arm around her and hugged her close, kissing the top of her head. She knew he had seen that human gesture in a movie, but it did not make it any less endearing. She nuzzled into him, her eyes fixed on the door at the other end of the room. Then her eyes were becoming heavy, until she felt her head bobbing. She didn’t want to sleep. What if they came whilst she was asleep? But the urge was too strong. She tried to keep her eyes open for a moment longer and then—

Hurtling through space, Elion by her side, Rosy could not scream. She wondered why there was no air, why she could breathe with no air. She spun over and over, flipping through space, Elion beside her, his hands on her shoulders. “We can’t go there,” he said.

“But you said we could,” Rosy snapped. “You said we could go back.”

Earth, as she’d seen it in innumerable space photographs, an inconspicuous blue-green speck, was growing bigger and bigger in her vision, and then Elion turned her away, and began kicking in the space, propelling them away from it. “It will not be the same,” Elion said. “Think. You know why.”

But Rosy couldn’t think. All she could do was writhe and struggle to return to Earth—

She awoke with a jolt, Elion’s face inches from hers. “Rosy,” he said. “Are you okay? It is morning.”

“I don’t—know,” she said.

She half-remembered her dream, and then her dream became the dream of a dream: something not even half-remembered. And then she was struggling to remember if she had even
had
a dream. She closed her eyes and thought, hard, but nothing came to her. All that remained was a profound feeling of foreboding and dread. She pushed it from her mind as Elion handed her water and food.

After breakfast, they emerged from the village into harsh red sunlight. “We need to scope out the station,” he said. “Are you ready?”

Rosy cast a glance at the way they’d come: the hill over which the Enforcers would emerge if they guessed their plan. The she turned back to Elion. “I’m ready,” she said.

They held hands and walked away from the village.

***

As Rosy and Elion lay on their stomachs on the outskirts of the station, she imagined what a primitive man, a man from a pre-airplane age, would make of a smaller airport. He would see these magical flying machines housed in naught more than wooden shacks, wondering how the silly future people could keep such treasures so poorly guarded. That is how Rosy felt as she observed the station. There were six ships in total, all housed side by side, with folded wings and sun-sails, with crisp gleaming windowless metal. And there were only two guards walking around the perimeter, which was nothing more than a token fence.

“This is even better than I imagined,” Elion said.

“What do we do now?” Rosy asked.

“We stay here and watch them. We need to see when one of them goes home. Or goes on a break. There is not even an electrical monitoring system. Before the singularity, when most of the population still held physical forms, this place would have been guarded by robots or something. But now most of our species has left. And these poor men can only feed their families by guarding something they do not care about, looking up at the stars and wishing they were pure, godlike data, too.”

“You sound like you’re describing your own jealousy,” Rosy said.

Elion nodded. “Before you came, you would have been right,” he said. And then he turned and faced her, leaning on his side. “But that was before I knew the pleasures of love. Bodily love. The closeness of another person.”

To demonstrate this he pulled her close and kissed her cheek, her neck, her forehead.

For the rest of the day and early into the nighttime they watched the guards. They learned that about three hours after lunch one of the guards went home, to return later in the evening. The remaining guard patrolled the grounds every twenty minutes after that. And when he wasn’t patrolling he sat in the shack at the top of the station.