9. Tammy #3
A tentacle came into view, reaching toward my hair.
Forest. Seas. The hues of my world hovered in my sightlines.
The suckered appendage moving with hypnotic slowness through the air between us.
I jerked backward, nearly losing my balance again, my boots sliding on grass slick with alien excretions.
The tentacle’s tip hovered just inches from my face, close enough that I could see the small, center barbed suckers lining its underside and the strange, shifting patterns that rippled across its surface like living tattoos.
Not waves of color, but texture. Part of me wanted to let the creature touch me.
The other part of me wanted to run.
"Don't touch me," I hissed, brandishing the pitchfork with renewed determination. "I'm warning you—"
The movement happened so fast I barely registered it.
One moment I was holding the pitchfork, the next it was gone, snatched from my grasp by a lightning-quick tentacle from the blue-green alien.
The creature held my weapon aloft, turning it this way and that, its silvery eyes studying the tines with what could only be described as scientific curiosity.
The wooden handle looked absurdly small in its massive appendage, like a toothpick in a human hand.
I stood frozen, arms still raised in the pitchfork-holding position, my brain struggling to catch up with what had just happened.
The aliens' scents plumed into the air around me, stronger now, almost triumphant in their potency.
The Alpha musk intensified, sending my Omega instincts into overdrive—submit, appease, survive.
My head swam, turning my brain foggy. Heat in my stomach turned into a bonfire.
Cold waves of realization washed over me. I was completely defenseless now. No weapon. No backup. No plan. Just me, my trembling body, and three alien creatures that could probably crush me without effort. The same creatures that had survived a crash that obliterated my supply barn.
"Shit," I whispered, the words escaping on a shuddering breath.
The blue-green alien lowered the pitchfork, holding it almost delicately between two tentacles.
Then, with deliberate slowness, it bent the metal tines as easily as I might fold a piece of paper.
The protest of bending metal cut through the morning air, making me flinch.
It surprised me that the creature didn’t simply, barbarically, ruin the tool.
Instead, the twisting and turning began to create spiraling where straightness once existed.
When the galactic monster was done, even the metal portion of the handle was crushed and pinched.
It was no longer fit for farming or for protection, manipulated more into a piece of art than anything else.
And, despite working hard to change the pitchfork just so, the alien dropped it with zero care to the ground.
The message couldn't have been clearer if they'd spoken English: Your defenses mean nothing to us.
My legs threatened to buckle beneath me, knees turning to water as the remnants of my courage washed away.
These things could have killed me at any moment—last night when I first discovered them, or as I’d stood foolishly challenging them with a farming implement.
Yet they hadn't. They'd destroyed my weapon, yes, but with a casualness that didn’t suggest pure malice.
The creatures congregated, mercifully gathering which meant they no longer circled around me.
The purple-red alien made another series of popping, gurgling sounds, and his companions responded in kind.
Colors swirled. One seemed to grunt, the sound almost annoyed.
Eventually, after what I could only describe as a heated discussion, they each raised two long, serpentine appendages and touched one another.
Like freaking footballers huddled during a game.
Then, in that perfectly synched, unsettling way of theirs, they stared me down again.
Three freakish, silvery orbed gazes reflected a warped version of me.
The intensity of their focus was physical, a weight pressing against my skin.
Their scents changed again, warming and soothing.
Waves crashing on a midnight shore. The window open in late Spring.
The scent of saltwater threading through a dream.
Belonging. Home. Happiness. Peace. I wasn't sure if I was picking up emotional cues from their pheromones or if my Omega was creating something out of nothing.
I only knew that the smell that poured from them all right now calmed my frightened brain.
The creature made of ocean and land slipped over the grassy pasture in my direction.
It extended a tentacle toward me again, slower this time, the movement almost hesitant.
I remained frozen, caught between the instinct to flee—though I knew with horrible certainty that running would be pointless—and the growing desire to stay.
These things could catch me in seconds. If they wanted me dead, I would be dead already.
The fact that I was still breathing suggested they wanted something else.
Was my Omega truly picking up the right vibes?
Were these oddities some kind of outer space Alphas?
My voice, when I finally found it, emerged as little more than a whisper.
"What do you want?"
The tentacle paused mid-air, hovering just inches from my face.
It twisted its upper body, looking behind him at the other two.
The three aliens exchanged another series of those unsettling noises, their skin patterns shifting in rapid, complex sequences that seemed to correspond with their vocalizations.
“Don’t suppose you all could just, I don’t know, speak English?
Or somehow magically help me understand your wet, snotty language?
” My tone was sarcastic, and my voice didn’t quake.
If I was going to be abducted and probed, or whatever, I wouldn’t be a whiny, useless damsel about it.
I’d be strong, because I wasn’t a pretty thing with zero skill like Derek thought.
Their mirrored gazes were on me again, the closest untwisting its body to face me once more.
Each of them began to ripple in a new pattern. Their colors even coordinated, shifting into warm, lovely yellow hues. It was as if faraway stars had settled into their bodies, offering me light.
A few damp clicks.
A sloshy sigh.
A bubbling grunt.
And the warm colored one dropped to the ground and began slipping away.
The other two moved to flank me once again, six tentacles each rising to wave through the air. They curved those long, tentacular appendages into a circled barrier, fencing me inside.
“Don’t suppose either of you know a few good intergalactic ice breakers?” I murmured. I clamped my mouth shut, feeling stupid. They ‘said’ nothing, stood there rippling and flowing and preventing me from leaving.
“Okay, I’ll start,” the words tumbled out before I could stop them.
I chattered when I was nervous. “What did the human say to the squid aliens when they crash-landed into her barn?” I paused, butterflies nervously flitting in my uneasy stomach.
“Bloop, blip, snort, spit,” I said quickly, trying to mimic their weird ass sounds.
Their colors shifted.
Violent hues forced into once serene paint strokes.
Oh… crap. Maybe I’d accidentally said something offensive.