Chapter 5 Taz
"Holy fuck!" I stared down at the unconscious alien. "I can't believe that worked."
The only upside to being alone in the apocalypse was that I didn't have to filter my thoughts anymore. Usually, I tried to keep most of my swearing and pessimism internal. But since there was no one to offend or depress, I could just say every thought that came to mind.
I'd spent the entire day dodging this male, staying close enough I could keep an eye on him, and far enough he never saw me.
It hadn't taken long for me to figure out he was tracking me by scent.
He was a regular alien bloodhound, and he'd caught up to me faster than I expected.
Luckily, I'd had just enough time to lay my trap.
Finding an alley to corner him in had been the easy part, figuring out how to communicate with him had been trickier.
After a bit of internal debate, I'd circled back to the pharmacy and scavenged through the wreckage until I found a dead alien that looked human enough if it wasn't for the tentacle hair and blue skin.
In one of his pointy ears, I'd found a small metal cylinder.
Hoping it was some kind of translator, I'd pulled it out and wiped it down the best I could with an alcohol wipe from the pharmacy.
Working up the courage to stick it in my ear took longer than I wanted to admit.
But once I got past the ick factor, I'd replaced one of my conch gauges with the alien metal and hoped it would work for me.
If not, I'd have to figure out some sort of simple sign language and I honestly didn't have the patience for that.
As haphazard as my plan was, it had worked. Though hauling that car battery up a fire escape had almost ended badly several times.
I hurried down said fire escape as quickly as I could without killing myself and crept up to the crumpled male. The car battery lay beside him and he looked dead.
"You better be alive asshole," I muttered, cautiously checking for a pulse. "This would be pretty pointless if I can't torture you for information." To my relief, a strong pulse beat against my fingertips.
"Okay," I let out a breath and stared at him.
Up close he was even more intimidating than I'd realized. His skin was candy-apple red, and marred with hundreds of gruesome scars. The edges of each old wound had darkened to a muddy purple. He was a strange mix of alien and familiar, his face was almost human, though his cheekbones and jaw were far too bulky, and his broad nose reminded me of a lion’s.
His ears were horse-like, long and mobile with short downy fur covering them. The coarse hair of his mohawk was pitch black and matched the two battered horns that stretched up from his temples.
I hadn't accounted for those horns when I'd chucked the heavy battery at his head, it was just dumb luck I'd missed them. I could imagine the shit show it would have been if my one shot had glanced off a horn and failed to knock him out.
Aside from the small leather loincloth covering his junk, he was completely bare and I couldn't find a spot on him that wasn't covered in steroid-level muscle. His thighs were almost as big around as my waist. He had a short tail, tipped with a tuft of black hair, that poked out over his loincloth.
The male was built all the way down to his black hooves.
Against my will I found myself checking out his body.
I'd never seen anything that looked this powerful.
Everything from his bright red skin to his scars to those huge horns screamed dangerous.
If this guy was a good example of his species, Earth had never stood a chance.
I remembered the brutal way he'd killed the freaky monster from the pharmacy and shuddered. There'd been a powerful grace in the way he'd taken down that beast, his movements calculated and efficient, and I didn't want to know how quickly he could dispatch me.
If Penny was here, she'd smack me upside the head for taking him on alone. Obviously, this wasn't my best idea, but it was all I could come up with. And Penny and Hope were depending on me. Shaking out my hands to work out my nerves, I forced myself to get back to the plan.
"Step two, bondage."
I grabbed the box of ratchet straps I'd taken from the hardware store and pulled his huge arms together, settling them on his stomach as I looped several straps around his wrists.
Doing my best to ignore his truly magnificent abs, I tightened the ratchets as far as I could.
The wide yellow straps looked like friendship bracelets on his huge wrists and I prayed they held up when he finally came to.
They were rated for over five thousand pounds. If he broke through them, I was completely screwed.
There was no way I could drag him up into the bed of the truck I'd found, so instead, I carefully backed it up to him and tied the other end of the straps to the convenient metal hooks welded to the frame of the truck.
When everything was as secure as I could make it, I grabbed a warm energy drink from the stash of supplies I'd collected and settled in to wait. He might be bigger and scarier than me, but I had a cattle prod, enough caffeine to kill an elephant and friends to save.
I took a swig from my drink and crossed my arms. This fucker didn't stand a chance.