Terrestrial Alien ✔

Chapter 58: The Stranger

"Shit— There, Arthur!" Lynch cries, her hand shooting to his shoulder.

Perkins jerks his attention back to the road and hits the breaks so suddenly, we all fly forward, engaging the jarring safety mechanism of our seatbelts. Sundo, who'd forgone his seatbelt to lay across the seats earlier, is tossed from his seat into the one in front of him with a squawk.

Dust and grit fly around the car as it skids to a halt, and Lynch makes a gritted, pained sound as her head jerks forward in her brace.

"What?!" Perkins cries, shutting off the radio with a click and turning to her.

"That's the goddamn turn!" She yells, gesturing to what appears to be... literally nothing.

"What?"

He squints behind us at the empty road and the dry, partly-grassy expanse that surrounds it. Just behind the car, a cactus is growing beside a faintly-worn trail in the dust that I don't notice until a solid minute of scrutinizing.

"What's going on?" Sundo grumbles, sitting up and pressing a hand to his head.

Staring at that path, trailing out into the open plateau... my breath is sucked from my lungs.

"I think... I think we're here."

"Almost here." Lynch corrects with a scowl directed at her partner, who's frowning at the cactus like it has personally offended him. "We would be if someone would remember the directions."

"I know! Okay! You say that like it's not incredibly easy to miss a road no one's supposed to even see..! I'm turning, I'm turning," Perkins grumbles defensively, as if warding off his partner's withering stare.

He hits the gas and turns the wheel round and around to crunch off the road, arching in a huge U-turn as he wheels towards the cactus and its mysterious, hidden path.

He over-shoots it a little bit, and the driver's side of the car scrapes against the prickly plant in long scratches. Unbelievably, the plant doesn't bend or tip, as if it isn't made of fleshy plant life at all. The metallic scraping sound it makes against the car has us all cringing, especially Sundo and Perkins, though assumably for two different reasons. If possible, Lynch's stare seems to grow even more withering, till even I'm amazed Perkins is still in one piece.

Miraculously, we make it past the oddly-stable cactus, and then we're flying down the plateau, sending dust billowing into the air behind us. Lynch gazes ahead, her lips pursed in a sour expression, and I can't tell if it's suppressed frustration or nausea from her head injury. Perkins is tapping his fingers against the wheel again, this time with more nervous energy than enthusiasm, and he keeps casting glances to his partner every so often, though she seems to be pointedly ignoring him.

The silence continues for an oddly drawn out time, and Sundo and I sit awkwardly in the back like forgotten stowaways. Then Lynch breaks the tension by slapping her arm across Perkin's chest once more.

"There," she says. "They're there."

The car rocks as Perkins hits the breaks again, and I lean forward in my seat, trying to peer beyond the grate of the partition to the windshield. Through the glass, the dusty path continues to wind into emptiness, and yet, the road is no longer empty. A couple meters ahead of us, a person stands to one side of the road, squinting at the car and looking utterly out of place in the barren, baking landscape.

The stranger's pristinely white, knee-length overcoat is completely unaffected by the dust around them. It gives them the appearance of an apparition, or something that has been artificially superimposed over an original image. They would look as though they've been dropped here by supernatural intervention... if not for how utterly undisoriented they seem. In fact, they seem to be waiting for us.