Alien Caller

Chapter One.

It was the silence that woke him. The nervous silence that usually meant a predator was in the area. A wild cat or a dog. But this was no ordinary predator. He felt it in his bones. He couldn’t really have said exactly what was different about this silence from any other, except for its scale. He knew it extended for miles, which was wrong in itself. Even in the furthest distance he couldn’t hear a bird call, a bush rustle or a cricket chirp. But it was more than that. Much more. Somewhere, deep in his very marrow he knew the silence just wasn’t natural. Nor was whatever was causing it.

He also knew it was heading his way. That was why the silence had grown.

Naturally his first thought was that Dimock had finally escaped from whatever high tech prison he’d been locked up in for the last six years. That was always his first thought, even though it had never been the case. So far. Still it could be. His blood chilled accordingly as he thought of what that monster would do to him and so many others. And how lucky he’d be to survive even with all the precautions he’d taken. But he quickly rejected it. Dimock was never silent, and he didn’t creep. If it had been him, his opening move would have been a rocket attack if not a nuclear missile strike. He wouldn’t lower himself to skulk around David’s yard like a wary thief in the dark. But that didn’t mean he was safe either. There were plenty of others out there who would wish him harm if they knew who he was or where he lived.

That was the problem with having been an agent for so many years. The work sucked, the pay was lousy and then if you were lucky enough to make it to retirement you had to spend the rest of your life in hiding.

David crawled out from under the thick duvet, padded across the floor as silently as he could in bare feet on bare wooden boards, and reached for the shotgun he always kept behind the door. It was best to be ready. You never knew when one of the local so called mountain men would turn up drunk and start shooting up the place. There were still a few of them around in these northern climes, and they lived up to their alcohol soaked reputations. It wasn’t that they couldn’t handle the booze. It was that on those few days each year when they did make it in to town for a drink, they didn’t want to.

But even as he grabbed it, he knew it wasn’t the silence caused by a local. The local wildlife knew them all and they would seldom be silent for more than a few seconds. Besides, a drunk usually made a heap of noise. This was something different. It was the absolute silence of the wildlife as something new and strange passed them by; like a hunter. Something they didn’t recognize. No more did he and the shotgun felt strangely inadequate in his hands.

Still barefoot he padded his way to the lounge in the dark. Despite his best efforts his feet made slapping noises on the wooden floor and he cursed them, hoping they couldn’t be heard outside the house. Not that any animal would care. Once again he thought about getting some carpet soon. Carpet muffled noise and besides, while polished wooden floors were pretty they weren’t that warm in winter.

He reached the front veranda and checked the sliding door, making sure it was securely locked. Too often he’d enjoyed the peace so much out here that he’d left it unlocked and even open at night, an invitation to trouble even here in this wilderness paradise, though the enemy was more likely to be raccoons then assassins. It was a serious lapse in judgement for someone from his world, but one he hadn’t been too hard on himself about these last few years. Maybe he should have been. But for once the bolt was safely home. The windows were locked and the back door was latched. He tapped the bolt softly with relief. No one at least was inside the house and thanks to his years of paranoia, no one was getting in either. Not without a tank. Or super strength.

Through the armour plated reinforced glass doors he could see the surrounding bush and lake, and he carefully studied it, looking for any sign of something unusual. There was nothing. But then he wasn’t sure that there should have been. Not if whatever was coming was a true predator. And deep down in the marrow of his bones he felt that it was.

Everything looked calm. Too calm. Years of undercover work in the army, more in the various government agencies, and still further years spent living in the wilderness told him it was all wrong. Very wrong. There was someone out there. Someone or something. Worse it was someone or something he didn’t know. It was not one of his long list of enemies who was finally coming to kill him. Nor was it any animal he knew of. It was something else. He felt the bristles standing up on the back of his neck.

Someone or something was out there, and the lord only knew what it was doing while he hunkered down in his cottage bunker waiting for it to make the first move, and that was wrong. He should have gone out and faced it, taken it head on, even if he didn’t stand a chance if it truly was Dimock. Still that was just his nature, and he couldn’t give in to it. Now was the time to be smart. He waited, knowing it was the clever thing to do. He waited and he watched, and then he waited some more.

Ten minutes, a half an hour passed and he saw nothing. There was nothing to see, but he still knew it was out there. And he understood that it was watching him even as he looked for it. He knew it even if he had no way of explaining how he could know. He trusted his feelings. After so many years of relying on them and of having them save his skin repeatedly, he knew that he could.

The moon was high but cloud covered its remaining light so that there was not enough to see much more than the outline of the bush, especially from inside his cabin. Regardless, he scanned the darkened forest looking for the slightest indication of who or what might be out there. Nothing could be seen. But even as he cursed the darkness he realized it protected him as well. If he couldn’t see out, then whoever was out there couldn’t see in either. Or at least in theory not very well. But the theory was little comfort.

The back of his neck said otherwise. He was being watched, intently.

Should he activate the defences, he wondered? He asked himself the question a thousand times with every heartbeat, torn between fear of an imminent attack and the need to always stay hidden. But he stayed his hand. His defences were for major threats. They weren’t for whoever or whatever this was. He could handle this with his walls and his guns. And besides, it was always possible he could end up killing a local. That he didn’t want. So he kept his peace and waited for whoever or whatever it was to make the first move.

For the longest time he just stood there keeping perfectly still behind the glass slider, trying to find his watcher, and failing. But he had infinite patience and he wasn’t about to give up. And so it was that an hour and then surely two hours passed without him moving a single muscle. Until of course cramp started setting in. First his arms holding the shotgun, then his neck and so on. He’d been trained to deal with cramp in the army. He knew how to control his breathing and keep his muscles limber even when he couldn’t move, but that training could only help him for so long.

Still he persevered as long as he could. He was determined not to give away his hand. But in time even he had to yield or be unable to move in the morning. He decided to make for the armchair, a more comfortable place to stand watch from. And he knew it was going to be a long night.

His decision must have been some sort of signal, since it was just as he was finally turning away that he saw it. The reflection of yellow, glowing slightly in the weak moonlight. He froze anew, the cramp suddenly forgotten.

David could see yellow eyes glowing in the weak moonlight down by the boat shed not more than fifty meters away. Cougar was his immediate thought. While there hadn’t been one seen in at least thirty years it was still the logical explanation. But even as he accepted that simple truth he changed his mind. There was something wrong with the eyes. It was their shape. They were too round, too small and they faced him directly. The head, a shadowy mass in which the eyes glowed, was too round. And it was nowhere near the bush where it should be. Instead it was out in the open near the water, watching him.

He shuddered knowing that somehow, even inside a darkened building, the creature saw him. More than that, it studied him. It was examining him like a soldier watching his enemies, or a scientist studying his subjects. There was some terrible intelligence in its eyes. Predatory. This was more than an animal. He grasped the gun more tightly and returned the stare.

Abruptly the eyes lifted, as the creature stood up. Going from a four footed prowl to a two legged stance as it searched the area, and sending his thoughts into a sudden tailspin.

It couldn’t do that.

That simple fact just kept running around and around in his brain. No animal could do that, not even a bear. But it had. There was nothing for it to put its front feet on, the ground between them was perfectly flat, and even if there had been something out there it hadn’t climbed up on anything. It had just stood up. It couldn’t possibly have done what he had just seen. But it had.

The creature had stood up, like a man. And like a man, those eyes were rock steady at their new height. The creature was bipedal. He almost squeezed the trigger in shock. It was a man, crawling around on the ground like an animal. And yet those eyes weren’t human. They weren’t animal but they most definitely weren’t human either. He held his ground and steadied his nerves.

The light began to improve as the moon finally emerged from behind whatever clouds had hidden it, and he saw the creature more clearly. He almost wished he hadn’t. It was like a man - almost, but its shape was wrong. Its legs were bent strangely, as though they were double jointed. It had body hair everywhere, glistening in the moonlight, and it had a tail that could move by itself as it swished back and forwards, angrily, maybe hungrily. So it wasn’t truly a man. Not even one in costume. Neither was it a cougar. Not even one trained in a circus. That little he could be certain of.

He was given little more chance to observe as it suddenly decided to move on. The creature started to search the surrounds, still on two legs. It moved in fits and starts, but always smoothly, silently and very fast. It was almost too fast for him to follow. He told himself he was dreaming but he didn’t dare rub his eyes. It was so quick it could cover the fifty meters between them in the few seconds before he opened them again. And while the glass between them was toughened and bullet proof, it had never been designed to stop whatever this was.

Fortunately, it didn’t approach. Instead it moved around the lake front, stopping occasionally to smell the air or scan the horizon, but at least moving away.

In under a minute it had disappeared from sight even though it had been out in the open under the pale moonlight. The distance had concealed it too easily. He didn’t dare assume it had gone. Instead he held the gun to him and waited. It was a crazy thing to do. The house was secure, and no normal animal would willingly come near a human anyway. But logic didn’t answer his fears. This was no normal animal. There was nothing normal about it at all.

Fully an hour passed before he moved, and then it was only to sit down in the ancient rocker chair with the gun across his knees. It wasn’t a comfortable position. He’d bought the chair because it seemed in keeping with his home and then never used it once he discovered how poorly it fit his oversized frame. Then again, he didn’t really want to be put at ease. He knew he would get no more sleep that night. He couldn’t afford to sleep with the creature out there.

Instead he sat there in his wooden rocking chair in the middle of the lounge, the gun cradled in his lap, both hands firmly on it, and kept watch for the rest of the night.

Chapter Two.

The following morning when David uncoiled himself from the rocker, he discovered two things. First he was as stiff as a board from having slept upright in the chair all night, and second, he was still alert for the creature. He could feel it. Like the sudden deafening quiet, just before a big explosion.

The hairs on the back of his neck, the unaccustomed tension in his guts, the way his fingers still clung instinctively to the gun. They all told him the same story. It might have gone, but he knew it hadn’t gone far. Whatever it was, wherever it was, it was close; watching, waiting, biding its time. Yet he also understood he was safe for the moment. It wouldn’t attack. Not by day. Night was its hunting time. Daytime was his time.

Dawn had just cracked the sky when he decided to investigate. Knowledge was always the key to survival, and he surely needed it.

The early morning light revealed another perfect day to come in the mountains, with the deep blue of the alpine lake reflecting the sun’s glorious brilliance directly into his living room. The sun itself was just ascending above the mountain range to the east, a hint of redness from the previous night’s rain shrouding it like a gown. The air even inside his house was crystal fresh and cool with the remnants of winter snow still on it. While all around animal and bird life were beginning their morning rituals with song.

Normally he would have simply prepared his breakfast and eaten it on the veranda, wondering as always how any place could be so beautiful, and how he could be so fortunate as to live here. Even to have been able to afford a cabin by such a beautiful lake. Anywhere else in the country, even in the relatively quiet state of Nebraska, and his house would have been out of his fiscal reach. But this was still an unspoiled paradise that was too far from any major cities to have been hit by the real estate market. And with only metal roads leading to it, no yuppies in Mercedes would be making it their home any time soon. Here he could not only afford a cabin, he could have another eighteen acres of prime forest to go with it. But then Helena was more than five hours drive away on a good day. On a bad one it was simply unreachable as the unsealed roads were closed. And even when they were open it was only to serious four wheel drives. That kept the property speculators away. Another advantage to life among the Rockies.

Sadly this particular morning even the serene majesty that was his home couldn’t draw his thoughts away from his nocturnal visitor. Coffee, breakfast and tranquil contemplation of the wonders of the Earth could wait until he knew what had been out there.

Clutching an MP5 machine pistol he grabbed from the wardrobe he eased the front slider open, grateful that he kept it oiled so that it didn’t squeak, and made his way down to the boat house, studying the earth intently as he went. The creature might not be around at the moment, but he knew that unless it was a ghost it would have left its prints in the soft earth.

Sure enough he found them. There were prints all around the boat house where he had seen it and he was grateful for that. At least it proved that it was real and not his imagination running wild. But no sooner had he found them then he wondered anew just what he’d seen. For the tracks were like nothing he’d ever imagined.

They were in two halves. The front half of the print looked like an animal’s clawed paw except that it had five toes with five claws on it. In that at least it was almost like a man’s feet, with claws instead of toenails. But it was the back half that really bothered him. The creature had a heal. While it stood and walked on the front balls of its feet, four inches behind it was the heel which suggested it occasionally stood straight back on them. No animal and no human in creation had that foot print. He might not be a native woodsman but he knew that much. Sadly he still didn’t have a clue what it actually was, or rather, he didn’t want to.

The ever wary soldier in him kept him from examining the scene any more closely. The night was still too recent and the creature could still be close. Safety first. Later, much later after coffee and breakfast, he’d make his way back and maybe take a plaster cast of some of the prints. For the moment he only really needed to know that the creature was at least some distance away.

He followed the trail from the boat house to the rest of the lake front, and saw tracks heading away for at least a couple of hundred meters. Beyond that the lake was surrounded by marsh and swamp grass. It had to have gone back towards the woods there and he shuddered at the thought of following it into the darkened woods. Good enough to know that it had left.

Instead he back tracked it to where it had come from, finding that for some reason it had been traversing the lake front. He followed its trail back for at least a kilometre before he decided to give it away. How much further it might have travelled before reaching his place he didn’t know but the lake was nearly thirty miles right around, and it could conceivably have done a complete circuit.

The obvious conclusion was that it was exploring. David mulled over that idea as he walked slowly back to his place, eventually accepting the unlikely premise. Animals didn't explore, not like this. This was no animal checking out its environment. That was all about hunting for food, shelter and danger. Scampering in quick bursts almost randomly as it rushed from place to place, led by what it sensed. Instead this was intelligent, methodical, organized scouting. The exploration an army scout might do in enemy territory. Looking for food, shelter and danger like any animal, but also seeking out transport, weapons and tools. It was learning all about its quarry.

In a couple of places, it had found man-made objects and done a very detailed examination. He even had the feeling that some of the items here and there such as the old bottles and engine parts had been picked up and studied. That was something that required both hands and intelligence which no animal could have. But the dust on them was disturbed, and in places he could see what looked like finger smudges so he wouldn’t deny the impossible. It was an animal and a man.

Meanwhile the old half decayed moonshine runners’ boat further down the lake front, which had been rotting slowly beside the derelict shed for at least seventy years, had so many tracks running around it the ground was actually mushy. And there were many more muddy prints inside the remains of the hull of his own small power boat tied to his jetty, as it had studied the outboard and controls. There were even smudges on some of the controls. Had the creature actually tried to operate the boat? Not that it could without the keys.

The nearby shack, long since abandoned and falling into decay, had suffered similar treatment, with muddy foot prints running all around the shack, and inside as well. But there was little inside to interest it apparently. There were no boats, no machinery and no shelter, and it appeared the creature had quickly moved on.

It was different at the main boathouse still further round the lake. The creature had done more than just sniff the air. It had gone inside, something that unless the owners had been completely thoughtless and not even shut the door, required it to operate a door handle. But that wasn’t the clincher. What told him his visitor was a man, was that it had shut the door behind it. Some animals might learn to open simple latches, but none shut them.

His visitor had intelligence. He was an explorer. And he was searching for something. All human qualities. But that didn’t make it human either, not with those foot prints, or that speed. In fact he wasn’t quite sure what it made it. A freak maybe or a man in a strange disguise possibly. But most likely an experiment that had escaped.

It was not a pleasant thought but he didn’t rule it out. In fact he almost accepted it as fact which was a dangerous thing for a soldier to do so early into a new battle. And even though no fighting had happened yet, this was a battle. To a soldier everything was a battle. The most basic rule was never to take anything for granted about your enemy. Assumptions got you killed. But he had seen what the scientists could do. What they had done. The evils he had been ordered to cover up. The things no one outside of the intelligence community could begin to imagine. That no one should ever have to see. That above all he should never have had to know about. But he did.

Years in the secrets industry had taught him two things. First that seemingly normal and even nice people did inexplicable and terrible things in the name of science, and the results were often more horrid and frightening then anything ever seen in a movie. No matter what they created, the true monsters were the men in white coats who made them. Those people might have pretended to be civilized. They might have even claimed it. But in reality they were just criminals. More evil then Satan himself.

The second thing he had learned full well was that the government and especially the scientists, never ever told anyone about them. They lied, they hid and they pretended innocence while hiding behind the respectable mantle of science and the cries of national defence. And just occasionally they expected his help to keep them safely hidden, and cover up their secrets. He had complied with the agency’s orders to do so though it offended his sense of morality. It wasn't a choice.

Before he had retired David had been assigned to some of those experiments. He was part of the extra security assigned to defend the indefensible. To clean up when things went wrong as they so often did. Those experiments in large part were the reason why he had left. To know that people were doing such things was terrible. To feel the suffering of the victims, even to talk to some of them; those that still retained the ability after they had been experimented on, and to see the wrong that had been done to them, that was terrible. While being unable to do anything, even being a part of the machine that had done these terrible things, that was soul destroying.

It had sickened him down to his toenails and he had felt unclean for years. So when a stray bullet had removed the use of one of his legs he had found it remarkably easy to take the generous disability they offered him and retire. The fact that a lot of his leg’s function had returned with time, that was just the icing on the cake.

Yet as he chewed on his long overdue breakfast an hour or so later he realized he’d never seen anything as advanced as that which he’d seen the previous night. Of all those he had seen who had been turned into experimental super soldiers and whatever else the scientists wanted, none had been so advanced. Most had looked like little more than circus freaks, the result of wild experimenting when there were so many unknowns. The gorilla hybrids had been less intelligent than even monkeys and twice as difficult to train, though incredibly dangerous. The humans with other traits sown in had often - make that always - suffered from bizarre mutations. In fact he’d never seen one that could be called a success despite the doctors’ insufferable and grandiose claims.

The memory of the man they’d tried to give cat reflexes to suddenly flashed through his thoughts as it had too many times before. He would remember him until the day he died. The doctors had told David it was some form of gene therapy. And they'd smiled like saints as they said it, as if it was some sort of wondrous medical miracle. How they could say such things and even seem to believe them he would never understand. Therapy? To him what they had done was pure and simple torture.

But they hadn't been speaking about the victim. They hadn't even seen him. They were talking about the next minuscule step in their campaign of scientific advancement.

The man had become a hideously deformed creature, a pitiful wreck, and he hoped he had had no true concept of what they’d done to him. What he would know however, was that for months he had suffered unending pain and that his world had become one of permanent night. He’d been blinded in the process of rebuilding him. As such he couldn’t see the deformity of his skeleton, the lumpy growths on his skull, or the horrendous damage done to his skin. That had probably been a blessing. The only one he had been granted.

Yet for all his deformities, he was terribly quick. So quick he’d broken the neck of the head scientist one day when he’d come to take more samples. So quick that he’d killed four more lab coat clad torturers before the security guards had managed to bring him down. So quick and strong that despite dozens of machine gun rounds having been fired into him he had managed to sprint thirty feet across a room and out a window to fall eight stories to a merciful death.

David had no sympathy for those who had died that day and never would have. No matter how loudly the survivors had cried at him, as if they too weren’t part of the same evil, they were guilty. They had reaped what they had sown and there could be no more appropriate fate for them. Perhaps God would forgive them but he would not. But the real question was how many others were out there? The ones he’d never even heard of? How many other victims hadn’t had the good fortune to die? How many had begun and ended their short miserable lives on those cold steel tables, begging for mercy and being shown only hell?

Who cared if they were criminals and derelicts who had been picked up off the streets for the offer of food and shelter, or who had been captured while on the run? They were people too. They had rights. As did the animals that had been given enough humanity to make them self aware. Just enough to let them suffer as they knew what was being done to them and knew helplessness. But those were arguments for other days. For other people not bound by official secrecy and miles of red tape. Those not likely to spend the rest of their lives in jail if they uttered a single syllable. His problem was what to do with one of them today.

If this creature was one of them then he couldn’t let it return to one of those terrible places to be tortured anew. But he also knew it might well be dangerous. Very dangerous. Tormented out of its mind by scientists it was likely to also be crazed and with it very quick and lethally armed. He couldn’t let it stay loose either. Not when it might well hurt innocent people. He might have to take on the job of killing it himself. If he could. He had no idea how dangerous it might be.

Then there was the other possibility; that it wasn’t here by chance. What were the odds after all? That an experimental creature had just accidentally managed to escape and then had travelled surely many hundreds of miles from the nearest laboratory to an ex-agent’s door? Next to none. If it was an experiment, it had most likely come to see him. Maybe it had come to kill him. In fact that was almost a certainty. Why else would it be here? To pay a social call? He knew better.

No matter how they dressed it up, those poor victims had all been created with the single purpose of killing. Whether as soldiers, agents or assassins, they were bred as killers. This one would be the same. It was the only explanation that made sense. Whoever or whatever the strange visitor was, it would surely have been sent to kill him.

Which meant in all likelihood that David had now become the enemy. And yet why should they have decided to do it now? After all this time? After all he had sworn oaths to never to say anything and he had signed documents requiring him to keep what he had seen confidential and provided for some serious penalties if he breached that agreement. He could and probably would go to jail. He had also tried to be the perfect example of an ex-agent since retiring and had passed all the six monthly security checks they put him through. He sighed quietly, resigned to his fate.

Security was part and parcel of his life. He’d always known there could be consequences for leaving the service. But he had hoped for a peaceful retirement when he’d first arrived here in the middle of nowhere, and done his best to ensure it. Now maybe that hope was gone. Even after more than three years he would still be considered a security risk. Maybe someone had decided to finally remove that risk? Again it wasn’t impossible that they would use one of their lab bred nightmares. It might be expensive and unwise when they could just use a sniper or poison, but it was not impossible.

Whatever the truth he knew he had to do something. He had to look out for the local community, protect himself and just maybe stop the creature. It was a big ask for a single man and to do so in a single day but it wasn’t a choice.

First he needed to speak to the neighbours. As he swilled the last of his coffee he decided he needed to go and visit his closest neighbours that very morning. He wasn’t sure what he’d tell them, something along the lines of having seen a cougar. And he would definitely mention the yellow eyes. After all he had to warn them. After that he’d head into town and pick up the extra equipment he’d need to protect himself. Later still he’d activate his defences, ready his weapons, and prepare to confront the unknown.

But that morning as he set out towards his nearer neighbours, he had doubts. Not about warning them, that was only right and proper. Nor about setting up his defences as that also was simple common sense. But about whether the creature he had seen was actually an experiment. He might be three years or more out of date but he thought he knew all the American labs, and none were within five hundred miles of this peaceful Nebraskan wilderness. Which meant either it was a long way from home and had been delivered to his very door, or a new lab had been built nearby without his knowing. Besides, the creature was just too perfect for the doctors to have created it. Which left the third option; that it was something else.

It was the last that truly troubled him.

David clutched at the shotgun under his arm and felt the warmth of the machine pistols nestled under his jacket. If the creature wasn’t an experiment he didn’t know what it was. He didn’t want to know. But he would be ready regardless.

Chapter Three.

As the shadows fell and night closed in David finished with his afternoon’s work, washed up and prepared dinner. He hoped at least that it had been a good day’s work. His four closest neighbours had all been warned to look for a cougar. They would get the message out through the phone tree, a surprisingly simple and effective system that still existed in these remote places. Of course the warnings would probably turn into a chance to gossip, especially about their paranoid neighbour, but still his duty was served.

He was fairly sure his neighbours would be all right. They were well-armed and self-reliant types. Most of those living this far from the cities were. They had to be. The children would be brought in at night, the shutters closed and big solid doors locked tight. No animal would get through them, and if whatever it was did - well, all of them were better armed than the local police. Besides, it wasn’t coming for them.

Despite that he was still disturbed by the events of the day. And not simply by his visitor. The reactions of those he had warned had set off alarm bells in his head.

They’d all looked at him strangely when he’d brought them the warning but that at least he had expected. It had been decades since the last sighting of a cougar after all. But years as an investigator told him it was more than that. They looked almost guilty, as though he was cornering them. It had been many years since he had seen that look in another’s eyes and he told himself he had imagined it. Still, he simply couldn’t shake the feeling that they knew something they weren’t telling. Not something bad or evil. They weren’t criminals. They were decent people. But there was still something.

He hadn’t asked them. That wasn’t his job anymore and if they had secrets he didn’t want to know. They were his neighbours, not suspects, and he was no longer an agent. He had left it alone as he had ignored other oddities many times before. They were keeping something from him. All of his neighbours were. And they had done so for a long time. But it was only as he was returning home that he finally understood that whatever it was that they were hiding had something to do with his nocturnal visitor. That too was in their eyes. It made no sense but he knew it for a fact.

It wasn’t his business. Just as he hadn’t pried into their secrets in the last three or four years, he could happily continue not doing so for a little longer. He saw no need to do so. Regardless of what they might possibly know or what they could perhaps have told him he knew his first duty was done. They would be safe and so would their neighbours in turn. Taking the creature out was his job, not theirs, and even if they did know something, it was unlikely to be as useful as his preparations.

He would be safe, he hoped. His seemingly modest cabin was ringed with defences, and was tougher than any fortress. Far tougher. Though it looked like a simple log cabin, those split tree trunks that comprised its walls were bonded to heavy armour plate while the windows were a top secret armour glass composite designed to stop rocket attacks as well as bullets. While the roof appeared to be covered by clay tiles in fact it was made of even more armour plate covered with a resin coating styled to look like tiles. Of course the inside frame work of the house was just as strong and instead of simple logs that would have been far too weak for what was hunting him, he had used reinforced steel girders to hold everything together. He had transformed what he viewed as a picturesque log cabin into a twenty first century castle.

But the passive defences were only the beginning of his work.

Though never intended for this creature his concealed defences should work just as well against it. Though even he admitted they were a little over the top. After all, this creature couldn’t be any more dangerous than Dimock, the enemy which he had prepared them for. Nothing could be as deadly as Dimock. But even if the creature somehow got through the outer ring he’d also secured the thick wooden doors and barricaded the windows and slider to the house. No living creature could break through that into the cabin itself.

He was also extremely well-armed. Years of paranoia and the certain knowledge that when he eventually escaped there was at least one person who Dimock would come after, had motivated him to obtain an arsenal like no other. When he did escape and came hunting him, David would be ready for him. As a result he had built up an armoury to rival those of any arms dealers.

In addition if it was truly an animal he’d ringed the outside with trip wires, flood lights and sirens which should be enough to scare off any predator. And if it was a different kind of predator then at least it was enough to wake him from the soundest sleep, assuming he got any. He was as safe as any man could be.

If only he knew what he was dealing with.

****************

It wasn’t an animal. He finally accepted that the moment he saw her. But she wasn’t human or some weird experiment either. Caught by the spotlights, he could see his intruder - make that her - clearly in the white brilliance. He almost wished he couldn’t. Her very image rocked his world.

She looked like a cross between a cougar and a woman, but a very strange one. Her body plan was nearly human having the usual two legs, two arms and a head. But the proportions were all wrong. Her body was long, her legs were short, and she seemed to be almost double jointed as her ankles appeared to work like backwards knees. Then he realized she was standing on the balls of her feet with her knees bent. It must have been a distinctly uncomfortable position.

Her arms looked quite normally proportioned but the shining claws sticking out of the tips of her short fingers were completely wrong. Her neck was long and graceful supporting an almost elegantly elfin face. She had a pointy chin, a triangular lower jaw, large round yellow eyes, and pointed, tufted ears.

Then there was the fur or what looked like soft, golden fluff that outlined her from head to toe. And he could see just how much of her it covered as she chose to wear a short, home spun dress only just longer than a miniskirt, and a weird vest of puffed plastic straps which covered her upper body like some bizarre form of armour.

But it was the tool belt that truly caught his eye. Or actually what was in it. Hanging around her waist it held a variety of devices, all of which looked distinctly strange. All were metallic, though some were clearly made of darker metal than others. None of them though looked like hammers or screwdrivers. She wasn't a builder. That much he knew. They were technological. He wondered if any of them were weapons, knowing that if their positions had been reversed they surely would all have been. That tool belt was like nothing he’d ever seen.

Probably the thing that persuaded him most however, wasn’t her appearance. It was that she looked so natural. There were none of the monstrous deformities he’d seen in the other creatures, and her movements even on the cameras had been smooth and fluid as she approached. She also didn’t seem to be misshapen. She was different yes, but not a freak.

Perhaps the scientists had perfected their craft and developed a success. He doubted it. They were a long way from getting it right, whatever right was, and he wasn’t even sure they wanted to. Besides, if they’d been designing a super soldier as they usually did, she seemed to be nothing like their goal.

As he’d watched her through the various camera feeds approaching the house, she’d shown no sign of having noticed that she was under observation. Nor did she seem to have any great strength as she crawled over objects even he with his damaged leg could hurdle. She didn’t seem to have a gun either. Not in her hands at least. And then, despite his fears, she had approached the house directly. No hiding, no stealthy approach. If she was a soldier of any type, she was forgetting all her training.

She made a small wailing sound as she stood there, and he noticed her arm covering her eyes. The lights had blinded her as he’d intended. But perhaps they’d done more than that. It was almost as though she was in pain from them.

Please! It was about the fifth time that he heard her wail that he understood she was speaking. He understood her words. She was asking for him to turn off the lights, they were hurting her as well as blinding her and in shock he almost did exactly that. But caution ruled and he held back. If she didn’t like the light she could leave. Besides, she still frightened him, the obvious animalistic nature of her form as disturbing as anything he’d ever seen.

Back away, I won’t hurt you. He opened the sliding door a few millimetres and yelled it at her, suddenly understanding that it was true. She frightened him but he still didn’t want to hurt her. There was something vulnerable about her. Something more than the obvious distress she suffered from the light. Perhaps it was the fact that she was a woman and as such she appealed to the chauvinist in him. Or perhaps he’d just gone soft in his retirement.

She did as he asked, backing up slowly, step by awkward step until she was thirty meters away, and then she stopped, unwilling or unable to go any further. Yet from where she was she had a clear path to the woods another thirty meters on either side of her, and if she turned around all the lights would then be behind her. He shouted at her again, hoping desperately she would just go and never bother him again.

Slowly she began to do as he asked, and he watched her turning, painfully slowly, and he wondered why she took so long. Then he saw the blood and understood. She was injured. The back of one of her legs had taken a wound and the blood was trickling down. But it was the colour that was truly wrong. Trickling down her leg it was more orange more than red. Very orange.

For the first time as he stared at her, the implications began to push their way forward. Possibilities he had never wanted to admit were forcing themselves to the front of his mind, making themselves heard, until finally a single word dominated.

Alien.

She couldn’t possibly be, but orange blood was something he’d never heard of in any animals. Even fish and reptiles had red blood. There was no other explanation, but it was still impossible. His thoughts ran around in chaotic circles, always returning to the same impossibility. She wasn’t human. She wasn’t animal. She wasn’t an experiment. And she wasn’t local. Not by a country mile.

She was from somewhere else. Somewhere where the people had orange blood, and fur. Somewhere where they had strange tools and stranger clothes. Somewhere, not of Earth.

The bizarre thing was that even though it shocked him to his core and shook his entire belief in the world, on some level it didn’t. This was the very thing he hadn’t wanted to accept. But it was also something he’d suspected. He’d almost guessed it but then denied it even to himself because it was impossible. For a while he wondered if he might be cracking up. He almost hoped so. It would be much easier to accept than the idea that there was a real live alien in his front yard.

He would have stood there gaping and stared at her all night long too except for her next act. She fell down, face forwards, and he understood she was hurt badly. Perhaps very badly. She couldn’t walk; she might even be dying.

Ohh shit! Even as he spoke he was opening the bullet-proof, bomb-proof glass sliding door and heading for her, forgetting to think again. Before his common sense returned he was within a body length of her, seeing close up what he had refused to believe before. She was truly an alien. It was in the way her prehensile tail lashed her injured leg like a tourniquet, trying to stop the bleeding. It was in the tools hanging from her belt, which whatever they might be had never been made on Earth. It was in her toe claws that shone like transparent glass. It was in the strange pattern of her fur.

She had not come out of a lab, or at least not an Earthly one.

Hold still, I’m armed. Quicker than he ever had as an agent he had his knee in the small of her back, her arms tight behind her and cuffed them. Then he remembered the toe claws and cuffed her feet even faster. Her only response was a sudden exhalation when his knee accidentally forced the air out of her lungs. Her belt came off with the snap of a buckle and he suddenly had an unarmed and defenceless prisoner.

For a second he breathed a sigh of relief. But then came a new shock as he suddenly remembered that he had no idea what to do with her. He had captured an alien. What next?

First aid. Years of army training once again took over as he remembered she was injured, and so he carefully inspected the wound. It was a nasty rent, half way up her inner thigh, and when he touched it he realized she still had something embedded in it.

With a sinking feeling he realized it had to be removed and soon. She was losing too much blood. She needed a hospital, but he knew he couldn’t bring her to one. Even if they could treat her she would be picked up in hours by the government. Meanwhile the doctors and nurse who attended her would all be picked up as well. They would not be treated well.

From there he had absolutely no idea what would happen to her. No, actually he did have a fairly good idea and it would not be nice. The agency people weren’t nice people. They eliminated threats and she was most definitely a threat. So was anyone who knew about her and that included him. Meanwhile those lab coated respectable scientists would get their hands on her, and they were monsters in truth. What they would do to her in the name of science was unthinkable.

There was only one option. He had to remove the object himself and patch her wound. It wasn’t as if there was a choice. She had come to him for help and he couldn’t hand her over to the authorities. It was all up to him.

Just relax I’m going to help you. But there was no answer.

He tried to help her to her feet but somewhere between her falling over and his cuffing her, she seemed to have passed out and he had to lift her. Her limp body would not help him. He could feel her pulse, rather more rapid than it should have been in a normal woman. He could hear her breathing too, and it also seemed too fast. But was that normal for her or was it because infection had set in? She didn’t respond to his words or his touch. Instead he found himself cautiously slinging the gun behind him and hoisting her as best he could like a sack of spuds.

She was heavy. Heavier than he would have expected for her size but that was no doubt due to her musculature. Her fur made it difficult to get a good grasp on her, but once she was in his arms he suddenly appreciated what it really was. It wasn’t fur. It was much more like human hair. Very fine, very thick human hair, soft and silky, and warm to the touch. It was long down her head and the ridge running down the middle of her back, long around her wrists and ankles, and very short like velvet around her shoulders. In short it covered her like a thick fur wrap.

He staggered the two dozen steps back to his house, surprised by the load, and limping badly, as his bad leg failed under the unexpected weight. But despite it all, he strangely still enjoyed the feel of the woman in his arms, even if she was both unconscious and alien. He had been alone too long.

Though it was a tricky feat of coordination as he had to open the sliding door wider with his injured leg while still holding her carefully in his arms, he finally got her inside. He took her into the lounge and laid her down on the couch. He then joined her for a few seconds as he caught his breath, finding himself unexpectedly winded. Despite his regular attempts to keep fit, he guessed he was more out of shape than he had thought. Maybe his leg had limited his fitness more than he’d realised. Maybe he was just overstressed and shocked. It wasn’t important just then though and he quickly forgot about it. He could berate himself for his failings later.

Instead he studied his prisoner as he recovered his breath, finding his first impressions had been off. She was humanly proportioned after all. She had just been walking on the balls of her feet with her knees bent, which made her appear otherwise. But it looked an uncomfortable position and he realized it was probably because of her injury. She couldn’t straighten her leg.

Standing straight he would have guessed her height at five foot six, and she was solidly built with it, albeit in a very womanly way. Any man would have had to be blind to not notice her hour glass figure. Child bearing hips, thin waist and ample cleavage, even under her strange plastic vest and skirt she cut a womanly figure.

The fur / hair itself was a mix. It varied in length considerably, being full length on her head and down the middle of her back while it formed a short mane around her shoulders, bracelets and anklets. But elsewhere it was shorter again, perhaps only a quarter of an inch long down the outside of her arms and legs where it formed thin lines. Elsewhere she seemed to have normal enough looking skin though tanned. In colour she was mostly a light brown with blond streaks, though it varied.

Her face itself seemed human enough, though her nose was tiny, and her eyes large and slightly skewed. But some of the features in it were impossible. The whites of her eyes were actually yellow, but not in a way that reminded him of cats. Yellow like the sun, with gold flecks. Her teeth were white, impossibly white, and with fangs that looked like needles.

Her irises when he checked them looking for signs of head injury, were violet. Slitted like a cat’s eyes, but not like any cat’s eyes he’d ever seen. Violet irises in yellow eyes. Not like any eyes known on Earth but at least they were of equal size and the pupils were even. She didn’t have a concussion.

Perhaps the strangest thing was that even though she had never evolved on Earth, and even though she was obviously neither human nor any other creature he’d ever seen, she seemed remarkably normal. Strange certainly, but not so much alien as simply strange. Exotic perhaps. But she had no tentacles, no green skin or slime covered eye stalks as he had always imagined aliens would. For an alien she seemed remarkably human.

She wore a strange mix of clothing. A short skirt, that looked distinctly homespun, filled with warm earthy tones randomly mixed up. The skirt had a sleeve in the back tailored especially for her tail. Though he'd never seen such a thing before, it made sense he supposed. Her top was some sort of plastic, or at least he knew it wasn’t fabric, and was basically a collection of straps somehow glued together to form a vest. That he guessed had never been seen before in a shop front window. It clung to her form and he could see her flesh bulging out of the thin strips between the straps. To complete the ensemble there were sandals, open toed to show off her glass claws. Glass. That concept shook him every time he saw them. How could any living creature have glass as part of them?

Next there was the belt he’d removed. It was a tool belt made of dull material, maybe some sort of leather, though not from any cow. It was three inches wide and had a variety of holsters filled with strange looking equipment hanging off it. In a while he would examine it closely. In fact it was going to be nearly the only thing on his mind. But first he had to help his patient.

A few more breaths and he rolled her over onto her stomach, the better to see her injury. Unfortunately the more he looked the