this ain't no place for no better man (shortchangehero) wrote in thefield, @ 2011-04-14 21:06:00 |
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Entry tags: | bethany, kurt |
Finding Someone, At Least
Who: Kurt and Bethany
When: around dusk
Where: the path around the woods
A ripple that was more than a ripple rolled through the mattress underneath Kurt. Only it wasn't his mattress, because he sank into it a little. A convulsive frown crossed his sleeping face, and he shifted his weight, only to sink in a little more. That wasn't right. A second later, the small itching sensation started on the skin of his legs and arms. It brought him around a bit more. He was brought around rather violently when something brushed up against his calf that didn't feel anything like the German shepherd he shared a house with.
Kurt sat bolt upright, blue eyes popping open. What. The. Bloody. Assfuck. He stared wildly around at the sand dunes he was surrounded by, feeling the wind ruffle his hair. It looked to be around dawn or dusk. He glanced down at himself ... everything seemed to be whole and uninjured, and his pillow and blanket were with him.
He didn't have long to ponder this, as the thing in the sand underneath him moved again. Kurt scrambled to his feet and darted a yard or two to one side. There didn't seem to be anything around him except sand and a smudge of color to his left. Mind still agape, he started in that direction at a quick clip, wanting to put whatever was under the sand behind him.
It was possibly the longest day of Kurt's life, and he'd had some bad ones. He'd reached the purple foliage, just grateful to be in the shade, and had started to make his way through it. He couldn't count the times he'd thanked whatever god there was for his callouses. He'd found a path eventually, and followed it's gradual curve, stopping every so often to rest. After staring at it for quite some time, he tried the water from a stream he'd come across. It was crisp, cool, and delicious, and didn't kill him right away.
He walked all day, and didn't seem to get anywhere. By the time the sun was going down again, he was dirty, exhausted, leg-scratched, and wondering where he was going to spend the night. Not to mention woefully confused. But he was alive and hydrated, and that was important. Coming to a stop at the edge of the path, Kurt stared into the purple woods and considered his options.
Bethany had explored the lookout and found a couple of notable tools. The first was a very crude, bad smelling bucket. She'd nudged it to the very edge, but hadn't tossed it over. It was made of clay and even seemed to be glazed. Someone had fixed it into a fiberous woven net with a handle. She suspected it was for traveling down and up the tree again. A second container seemed more like a jug. It had a pour spout. To her everlasting dismay, it was dry.
The third clay object reminded her of the patio fireplace that she had in her garden back home. It had a wide mouth which was sooty and some remnants of charred wood. There was a smoke spout on the top. Other than that, there was nothing else to see. She discovered that she could close the netting drapes around it to form a bit of a foliage teepee, if she wanted to hide herself from sight, but why would she want to.
She heaped her blanket and pillow near the trunk of the tree and was about to descend with the water jug. A bit of movement on the path caught her eye. It didn't take her long to recognize it as a man. "Hey!," she called out. After the words were out of her mouth, she realized that this might be the person who kidnapped her. She dropped down and pressed herself against the bamboo-like floor of the lookout. "Shoot..." she breathed to herself. "That was dumb."
The voice startled Kurt, and his first similar instinct was to duck into a crouch. It took a couple of seconds for him to register that it had been a woman's voice, and was the first sign of human life in this godforsaken place. He straightened back up, sharp eyes scanning the treeline, but not coming up with much of anything. "Hello?" he called back, taking a step or two into the forest. "Where are you? Help, please? I seem to be ... very lost." It occurred to him that whoever it was might've had something to do with him being where he was, but he found it unlikely. At this point, it would kind of be worth walking into a trap just to see someone. It would mean he wasn't alone in ... wherever this was.
Peeking over the edge of the floor, she watched the man turn into the bush away from her. She could clearly hear him though. He was too close for the forest to eat his words. "You're lost too?" So maybe he hadn't been the one to bring her here. If it wasn't him, that who was it? "And you're going the wrong way," she told him. "I'm up here. In the tree." Bethany pushed herself upright so that he might see her better. She wanted to ask for an assurance that he wasn't dangerous, but really, that decision was outdated. Now that he knew where she was, she couldn't run or hide.
He'd been looking for someone on the ground, so it made sense that he didn't spot her right away. Turning around, Kurt looked up and immediately picked out the shape of a small building in the trees. Well shit, he could've been sniped so easily, couldn't he? It made him trust the dark-haired girl on the platform a bit more. Now that he was looking, her pink-and-white stripes stood out pretty well. He stepped in a bit closer to where he could see the ladder up to the treehouse, but didn't go for it yet. If she was alone -- and it looked like she was -- he didn't want to scare her. "My name's Kurt Petersen," he told her, setting both pillow and blanket down at his feet to look even more unarmed. "I have no idea how I got here. You?"
Bethany shook her head. "No. I just woke up here. Well, not here. Out in the sand." She gestured off toward the desert. "Do you have any water?" Her voice had the horse quality of someone who was extremely parched. She hadn't come across anything drinkable all day. It was much cooler in the oasis but still warm. It was starting to concern her. She'd exerted herself quite a bit on the dash to safety. Granted, she'd crashed for a lot of hours as well. More than anything, she needed to find something to drink and soon.
Whether this was all in his head or actually happening, it had just gotten stranger. Someone else in his exact same predicament. Who'd just happened to find a shelter before he did. He couldn't help but wonder if they'd come close to crossing paths all day. "Same here. And there's a stream not far from here," he said, making a gesture in the direction he'd come from. "If you come down, I'll take you there." He paused, then added, "I promise, I don't mean you any harm at all."
Bethany just peered at him for a moment. She was weighing her options. She could tell him to go away and wait until her left, then take the jug and try to find the water on her own. Or she could trust him and go with him. It wasn't an easy choice. She prided herself on making fantastic life choices, but this was a completely unquantifiable circumstance. "Ok. I found an empty jug up here. I'll bring it down." She left her bedding where it was, looped the handle in the netting around the jug through her wrist and carefully began the descent via handholds.
Kurt could practically see the gears turning in her head, and he honestly couldn't blame her. If he'd run across a male instead of a female, he probably wouldn't be quick to trust, either. Maybe that was sexist of him, but there it was anyway. He didn't get any closer to her, just stood still and waited for her to get her feet on the ground again. It was a good thing to have a jug, that was possibly a grand stroke of luck. It meant they could branch out farther to explore. Because he definitely was going to be doing that. Where there was one structure, there was sure to be more.
"Ok," Bethany said as she carefully picked her way over the roots to approach him. "My name is Bethany Milner," she offered her free hand to him with only the slightest hesitation. "I'm from Illinois and this..." She looked around them, particularly at a broad leafed plant with glossy purple veins that almost seemed to be...pulsating. "Definitely isn't Illinois." She turned her brown eyes up on his face, hope in their depths. Maybe he would be able to explain something, anything to her about this place.
He briefly followed her gaze. Walking along the path all goddamn day had given him plenty of opportunity to examine the foliage. His brain had already prioritized things, and survival was first, trying to figure out where in the hell they were was somewhere after that. "Kurt Petersen," he told Bethany again, giving her hand a gentle kind of shake. "Albany, New York. And it's definitely not New York either." He offered her a wan sort of smile, and reached to relieve her of the jug. "Come on, let's get you hydrated."
Bethany didn't hesitate to hand over the jug in it's strange woven net. She didn't think anything of the gesture because she felt as though she may be in mild distress. She was too strong to allow herself to faint from the heat and dehydration - yet - but she certainly felt bubble headed. "Where do you think we are?"
They moved down the path in the direction he had come from. Beth was careful about where she put her feet, mindful not to step on anything sharp. "Could it be the Middle East or Asia or something? Australia?" She rattled off the places on Earth that seemed the furthest from home.
Kurt had formulated and dismissed a dozen theories in his walking, which had been ultimately unhelpful. He'd been a lot of places in his military career, and he'd never seen anything like this. "I don't know," he told the girl honestly as they headed along the path. "Wherever it is, it's remote. That hunter's blind or whatever you were in is the first sign of civilization I've seen." Which, considering that someone had to have dropped them there in the desert, was a feat. There had been no tire tracks, no footprints, no nothing. Not that the dunes couldn't cover up such things, but still ... "Were you in bed before this? Everything seem normal?"
Bethany's face fell. She didn't know this guy and there was nothing to say that he was the foremost authority on geography or whatever, he still had to know more than she did, right? What did she know, other than how to make the latest fruit coulis to accompany something tasty. Speaking of fruit...
She paused and plucked a waxy orange fruit off of a short tree. It was about the size of a large starfish. "I've never seen this before," she murmured, more to herself than to Kurt. She liked to think that she was an authority when it came to desserts. She had experimented with just about everything exotic she could get her hands on. It was one of the things that made her bakery stand apart from the run-of-the-mill ones in town. People traveled for her cupcakes, dammit. A shiver passed right down between her shoulderblades and her stomach sank. "Yeah," she said, recalling his question. "I was in my bed, next to my husband. Do you know him?" She asked him, her gaze on Kurt's face.
He had been looking over at the fruit she'd pulled down, mentally agreeing that it didn't look at all familiar. At the question, Kurt's eyes darted up and he arched an eyebrow. "No," he answered, though it sounded a bit questioning. "Should I?" He gave a half-hearted attempt to remember anyone in his life with the last name of Milner and came up empty-handed. It was an odd thing to ask on the surface, but maybe she had something there, about them being connected in some way.
A little frown appeared between her brows. He didn't seem to be lying. "It's just that you're the only person I've seen. I just can't imagine how this would have happened without, you know, his help." She was keeping it together, she thought. Trying not to fall apart because now was just not the time for it. But her voice quavered when she'd said "his help." She was still trying to figure out what she'd done that was so wrong, wrong enough to dump her in some terrible wilderness with no civilization. "And I've been getting the sense," she said as she reinserted the steel in her spine, "that he hasn't been that happy with me lately." She didn't know why she confessed that, but she supposed she was looking for anything, a spark of recognition, in his face.
There wasn't one. There was more of a dark kind of frown and a hesitance to say a lot. So she thought her husband had her kidnapped and dumped or something? That didn't sound like a sign of a very stable marriage to Kurt. Not that he would know anything about marriage. "Well," he said slowly, trying to think of something that didn't sound awful. "You never know. Maybe he's out here somewhere, too. I'm here, after all, and I'm pretty sure I dunno anything about your husband." Enemies, though? He was sure he had some with the right connections to make something like this happen. Whatever this was.
Bethany nodded. His expression was utterly believable and so, she chose to believe. "You're right. We might have gotten separated. I shouldn't..." Think the worst? Why had she? Because they'd had some awful fights? That didn't seem sane at all. Then again, neither did this place. She could hear the water now, smell it and feel it on her skin. "Oh, thank goodness," she said as the path turned damp and a bit boggy. It was clear that animals traveled this path and drank here as well. In fact...
Bethany gasped as three heads came up, six pairs of eyes focused on them. She only had snippets of impressions - long, cone-shaped heads, increadibly graceful long necks. Six delicate, dainty hooves each and a long, long tongue reminiscent of an anteaters. One had a rack of riotously curly antlers, the other two had bare heads between ears that were long and slender, cocked forward. She brought her hand up to her chest and they were gone, all three of them turning at once and bounding into the bush with tremendous leaps. "Four...four eyes...each..." She tried to get air into her lungs.
His eyes had turned forward to automatically follow her gaze as Bethany gasped. The second he spotted what she was looking at, Kurt's arm had shot up in front of her chest to block her from moving forward and he'd stopped walking. They were unlike anything he'd ever seen -- like deer on some kind of acid trip -- and then they had fled. They'd had more legs than normal deer, in addition to eyes. "Shit," he exhaled, his blue eyes raking over the foliage around the stream. He was hunting for something else, anything potentially more dangerous than mutant-deer. Nothing moved, however, and he heard nothing but the babble of the water. Realizing his arm was still lightly against Bethany, he lowered it. "I don't think this is Australia," he murmured, turning to look behind them, too. Nothing. With a grunt, Kurt moved toward the water again, crouching to lower the jug down into it.
Bethany was frozen, still on the path, but she felt like she was shaking. That was not earthly. She knew that. There weren't large mammals with more than four legs and two eyes. There just wasn't. Especially not something so large. "Ok," she said, accepting that he was right. "Ok, ok, so...so..we've been abducted. Like, my little green men." She just had to say it out loud. She accepted the jug from him once it was full and tipped it back. She's have loved it to have contained a nice expensive shiraz right about then, but water was good too. She badly needed water.
When the jug was almost empty, she crouched to fill it again. They would need to take it with them. "I don't have a lot of...outdoorsy skills. I don't know what to do in this situation." You know, like when you get marooned on an alien planet.
Kurt was not jumping to aliens quite yet. That was a rather large stretch for his practical brain. He watched her drink and tried to think straight. Maybe they were in some experimental place. Somewhere in the desert, where someone was running tests on radiation, maybe. Or some other kind of chemical. Maybe both of them had been drugged fairly heavily, and they'd had a similar hallucination. "First, we're going back to the blind. Elevation is useful," he said. She hadn't exactly asked, but he didn't mind taking the lead in this kind of situation. It was what he was used to. "Then in the morning, we'll look for more structures. See if there isn't a more suitable place to hole up."
Nodding, Bethany tested her knees by taking a couple of steps. They seemed firm enough. "Ok. You could certainly see a long way from the top. Like a ways out into the desert." Careful not to slosh, since they would have to ration it's contents until they came down in the morning, she turned back toward the blind with the jug. She liked Kurt's take-charge tone. It meant she didn't have to worry about making decisions for the time being. Her heart was still beating a mile a minute and she wasn't feeling strong enough to lead the way.
After hand-cupping a few swallows up into his mouth, Kurt stood and started to walk with her. After a couple of paces he reached for the jug and carefully took it out of her hands. Sure, he had been walking all day, and was just as confused and exhausted as she was, but ... he was the man. There was no room for ridiculous notions of feminism here. The jug was heavy, he would carry it back. Once they'd reached the ladder again, he motioned for Bethany go to up first. It was more or less dark now, and he kept a swivel-headed eye out while she climbed, then followed her up.
Climbing the tree a second time was harder than the first. It wasn't a proper ladder, just irregular hand and foot holds nailed into the trunk. She had to grope for them in the gloom. She was also glad she'd worn her capri pants to bed and not one of her nighties, or worse, some of her lingerie. She finally made it though and collapsed onto the pile of her blankets. She panted there for a minute or two before poking her head over the edge. "Hand me the jug, I'll set it aside." She reached down, one hand braced firmly on the opening to support herself. The strange purple cane flexed slightly under her weight, but she didn't feel as though it might give away. Even with both of their weight on the platform.
"Got it?" Kurt murmured as he handed the water jug up. He just hoped she wouldn't spill it -- he'd hate to have to make that walk in the dark. Once she'd disappeared over the edge again, he snagged up the bedding he'd left at the foot of the tree and climbed the trunk as well. It made him feel big and unwieldy, but he managed to make it up without too much trouble. He settled his weight on the cane in a testing sort of way, and un-shouldered his blanket. He peered out one side of the blind, though he couldn't see much, and crawled to check all sides. No signs of fires or villages or anything useful at all. But that didn't mean a whole lot. Settling back, he sighed and ran his hands through his hair. "Think you can sleep?" he asked his new bunkmate, looking up at her.
Bethany was already wrapping herself back up in her comforter. Now that the sun was disappearing into the desert in the west, it was getting chilly. There was a breeze up here. She set the water jug firmly back into the notch in the trunk she had taken it from. "I don't think so, to be honest. I slept most of the day. And I just...yeah, the sight of those animals has me rattled. I don't...know what to think about them. They are so far out of what I consider to be possible." She pulled a fold of her blanket over her head like a hood and curled up against the firm, safe tree trunk. Her face had disappeared into the shadow. Her eyes strayed upward and her breath was stolen. It was still barely an hour past sunset and the sky was swarming with stars. They blended together in milky streaks of light across the darkening sky.
"We'll try to find out more tomorrow," Kurt said. He tried not to be short about it, but the exhaustion was really settling in now that he was off of his feet. "But if you're going to be up, you've got first watch. Just ... keep an eye and ear out, wake me if you hear anything that sounds threatening." He wasn't sure how else to phrase it, since this whole place was strange, and he imagined the night-noises would follow suit. He wrapped himself in his own blanket and started to settle down, swallowing back the old-man-groans that threatened to emerge. He felt like he'd been marching for days with no boots on.
Bethany nodded, unaware that it was too dark for him to see her. "Sure," she said, sensing that he was settling in for sleep a few feet away. "Are you safe there? You're not a roller, are you?" The platform was big enough for three or four adults who knew each other well to lie down on, side by side. As virtual strangers, they were keeping a respectful distance. The night noises were picking up in the trees around them. Trills and whistles, deep hoots and a humming sound. Bethany huddled deeper into her blanket, determined to not give in to the hairs raising on the back of her neck.
"I'm fine," he assured her. He didn't move around a lot in his sleep. It woke the dogs, and he did his best not to do that lest they start squirming. The thought hovered in his mind, giving him a bit of a pang. Who was going to feed and water his babies? Kurt tried to push the thought out of his head. They wouldn't be here long. They couldn't be. There was a way out and they'd find it, and then he'd be back to life. "Wake me if you get sleepy," he added to Bethany, his own voice sounding a bit heavier.
Bethany rested her head back against the trunk and tilted her face upward. The sky above was almost dizzying. She imagined that she could watch it turning. She didn't answer him, since he sounded tired. Why keep him up. She felt better now that she wasn't alone. Sometime inside her told her that Kurt was someone she could trust. He was in the same boat as her and just wanted to get home too. They would find a way to get there, tomorrow....