I glance back over my shoulder. In the distance, the military et al are building a physical barrier from concrete blocks and sand. Jerry and I couldn’t retreat now if we wanted to. We’re locked in. Potential collateral.
“It would be easier,” I suggest, “if you told them that you came in peace. Don’t make jokes about dominating the world. They won’t like it.”
“Who is they?”
“All of them.” I gesture to the ever growing crowd of weapon-wielding people in the distance. He glances at them briefly, then back at me. He doesn’t seem concerned by the fact that he’s being surrounded.
I don't know why I am bothering to suggest he speaks nicely. I’ll be shocked if they let him say anything before blowing him up, or interrogating him, or chopping him into little pieces. He and I are trapped in a little island of time between the action and the consequence. I know it will not last much longer.
“Nobody comes in peace. There’s no point coming in peace. It’s far too long a journey to make for peace. Nobody usually comes this way at all.”
“Okay. Well, I say this because there’s a military behind me, and I’m fairly certain they have the ability to destroy us both.”
He cocks his head and curls his lip in a sneer. “You’re afraid of your own forces, human? How weak!”
“Not weak. I just know that the tip of the spear is designed to break.”
He stops and looks at me with real interest for the first time. “They send a woman to handle me? A woman who has no apparent interest in survival?”
“I have every interest in survival. But there’s an army behind me, and a… you, in front of me, and I can calculate odds.”
I am establishing that I have no value as a hostage. Just in case he gets it into his head to try to take me as one.
“You’re very beautiful,” he says. It’s not a compliment. He says it as though it annoys him to have noticed that.
“Thank you.”
It’s also not uncommon for men, and some women, I work with to notice that I’m okay looking. Sometimes I think it is part of the stress which makes them think I’m beautiful. Like an angel, some have said, which is ironic given my name. Perhaps it was my destiny to appear at the right time and help people in their hour of need. Be their personal angel. Or maybe I have a messiah complex. Potato, Potahto.
“My name is Ariel,” I say. “What’s yours?”
“King Brawn.”
“Makes sense. King Brain probably would have missed the ferris wheel.”
His great spiked brow furrows. “Are you insulting me, human?”
“I am. And I shouldn’t be. It’s unprofessional. Sorry. You can file a complaint and get me censured.”
It’s actually not unprofessional. Distracting people with bad jokes and mild insults is part of my strategy. I’ve had to defend it multiple times, but it works. And it seems to work on crashed alien kings just as well as on humans.
“I would not bother to file a complaint with your ridiculous species. In a matter of hours, my war fleet will be here, and they will avenge your aggression.”
“You mean the aggression where you slammed into our pier, destroying millions of dollars worth of joy and history in less than a second?”
“The aggression where you built a trap right in the middle of one of our busiest thoroughfares.”
“The ferris wheel has been there for over two hundred years. That’s not busy, by anybody’s standards. And you just admitted that you were taking a shortcut.”
He grunts and he growls and he does a bit of snarling as well.
He’s actually injured. I didn’t notice it at first because his blood is greenish, rather like the rest of his exterior, but what I thought were darker patterns against his skin are actually bleeding cuts. Of course he’s injured. No creature could possibly emerge from that wreckage without sustaining serious wounds.
“Maybe you should sit down. Take a breath. Do you drink water? I have some water back in the cruiser.”
“I do not need your water. But I am thirsty.”
He needs water. He just doesn’t want to ask for it.
“Wait there. I’m going to get you something.”
He sits down on what used to be the sign that told people if they were too short to get on the ride. Now it says, “YOU MUST BE THIS TALL.” And then he’s sitting there, a big, monstrous, spiky, bleeding, green creature. It’s quite a sight.
I run back to the car, where Jerry is eating another donut. Slowly. Mechanically, staring straight ahead, as if he thinks he can control the strangeness of it all by being extra normal.
“How’s it going? Anything from the military? Anything on the radio?”
“Nope.”
“Nothing?”
“Nada,” he confirms.
That single world contains a multitude of potential horrors. If they’re not talking to us… I don't know. Maybe I’m just being paranoid. But I know that an alien appearing on the pier is not something that’s going to be handled normally. It’s going to be covered up. Buried. And anybody associated with it will be buried too. You spend enough time policing, you see some shit covered up. You get real suspicious of floor coverings because you know damn well what has been swept under rugs.