In the beginning, there was a crab.

Warnings: mild gore, animal death, and child abuse (implied).

(Image credits: Ivan Shiskin, The Forest Clearing.)

At the end, there was a garden. And then it was over.

---biologic.neocites.org 10/15/2022---

In the beginning, there was a crab.

The wind blew over the empty meadow, and there all the yellow daffodils were nodding in bloom. Wind caressed the grass like a wave on a golden sea. It rippled down the hillside. Gran Dolovis had her curly dark hair pulled back clumsily, but a gust caught a stray curl and tossed it playfully back in her face. It was spring, here, and there was something in bloom upwind. It was a windy day. The wind had a bite in it though, and all the birds had fallen silent. It was a wind that came from somewhere else, somewhere altogether harsher and more spiteful. It smelled of flowers and blood.

Gran Dolovis brushed the loose hair out of her weathered face with a bloody hand. A smudge crossed her eyebrow.

She was butchering a crab in the field. The crab's body was as big as a pony, and mud-green, except for the meaty innards that Gran was spooning out into a bucket. The creature wasn't a crab, taxonomically. It was some kind of alien insect. Like Gran herself, it had come here from somewhere else, and had made a place to live in the lush wilderness. From this, the blood-smell came.

Gran was one of many aliens that had come here from across the stars. Hers was a predatory species, anti-social and intelligent. Dolovis was an outlier in that she experienced a mutated form of rudimentary empathy. It made her vulnerable, and so she had left. This continent was a place that accepted interstellar rejects like her.

The meadow where she worked had a fence running the length of it, and trees on all sides beyond. The forest loomed like a green giant, with cold shadows below the boughs, great towering canopy of ancient growth. Without full sunlight, it was the quintessential creepy fairytale forest, gnarled trunks and twisted trees creating dark tunnels through the flora. Deeper within were metal mountains, rust grown-over with moss and ramble. Put a foot wrong, and you'd step through the glass windshield of an ancient car. Dolovis seldom went so deep. But the whole of the forest had grown up on that junkyard, and so danger lurked under her feet no matter where she walked.

It was not from this the unease came. The forest was ancient, the junkyard more so, and both had grown up around each other comfortably. But from where the fear grew, it could not be said - it was a golden day. The daffodils bobbed their heads in the gentle breeze, and apart from the silence, there was nothing to be afraid of in this place: nothing at all.

The fence had a deer-track that cut along beside it, little more than a hard packed path worn down to the dirt. It dipped into a slight trench, such was the foot traffic, as everyone along this fence used it as a community highway. The grass was a foot high either side of it, and lush and green besides. Along this road now a boy was walking. Gran hadn't noticed him yet.

Examine the boy. Scrawny and wiry, like a spring wound tight. He would have been tall for his age, if there were others to compare him with. Curly hair, cut badly, short and dark. He moved like a mouse along the path: furtive and fast. He wasn't wearing shoes.

His name was triple zero, pronounced in full as 'zero zero zero'. He wished he had been called Nils instead - the plural of zero - because Nils meant 'champion'. But zero zero zero was not a champion. He was running away from home.

Zero zero zero would remember this afterwards as the day he ran away properly. He had been running ever since he could walk, for all the good it had ever done him. He'd grown up here - in the middle of nowhere, in the junkyard groves - and there was all the room in the world to run among the overgrown mountains of trash and concrete. It was like something out of a fairytale (one of the bad ones) and he knew if he got lost in this wilderness, he might fall a thousand feet into a pit, or cut himself open on a rusted shard of hidden metal, or become tangled in rusty strands of barbed wire, or anything. There were a million secret clearings, a million trees to climb. Easy to hide in. It was the biggest backyard in the world, and not big enough, in Zero's opinion, to get away from some things.

He spotted Gran Dolovis before she spotted him.

Zero saw the stranger kneeling with her back to him in the field ahead, right next to a rip in the fence. She was on the other side of it. A little too close. He couldn't just run past. He'd be seen. So he slowed down, real casual, like he was just going for a stroll with a hiking backpack.

Gran Dolovis was a tall woman in green work-clothes, like a gardener might wear, and she wore gloves soaked with blood up to the wrists. All Zero could see of her was her curly hair - like his - and the slump of her shoulders, unconcerned with her surroundings. She was butchering some kind of animal. Strangely, this was comforting to him. The violence was out in the open, clear and obvious, right in the middle of the meadow. It wasn't the sort of thing that came sneaking at night. It was blood in the sunlight; the threat was clear; this woman was dangerous. But he could see it, and thus avoid it. He was like a mouse running into a tiger - the predator had clearly fed already, and he was too small to be either threat or meal. It was comforting, and he relaxed.

Gran Dolovis' head twitched as movement on the road caught her attention subconsciously. She raised her head and glanced around. To Zero, her face was utterly alien. He flinched back - not in fear, but in confusion. She straightened up.

"You running away, mate?" Gran Dolovis said, casually.

Zero flinched and froze. In the next second he'd have bolted, except the next thing Dolovis said was, "I ran away once when I was a kid," and then nodded, squinting at a memory. Her eyes wrinkled, the strange skin rippling.

Zero paused.

"Didn't get far," the woman added. "But I didn't have anywhere to run to. You got somewhere to run to?"

Zero knew that he didn't.

The thing was, out in the middle of nowhere, there was plenty of room to run - but there was absolutely nowhere to go. This far out, what was he meant to do - trot along the deer-track? Great plan. The nearest station was half a day's walk, and he'd be abducted or attacked before he could get there. He'd planned - in a dim, indistinct way - to go feral, live in the wilderness. But he had only a dim idea of what was safe to eat. This far out there were no bystanders, no trackers. To a kid growing up in the wild, every stranger was a threat, and that sort of thing gave a growing boy a healthy sense of paranoia. And when the boy grew up, he would hold onto that paranoia as a useful souvenir.

Dolovis lived in the most remote place she had been able to find, but even here, the locals insisted on crowding together. There was no sense of personal space with these guys. There was leagues of forest in all directions, the road continued for miles into free wilderness. But no. She had neighbours right next door, a mile south. Gran Dolovis disliked it. But she also didn't dislike it. Her species wasn't given to exaggerated emotional reactions.

Instead, she simply packed up and moved further north every time the social bastards started building a 'community'. It was impossible to get any privacy. She was half expectant that she might one day be pissing against a tree, and a local would come over to piss right next to her. Every time she tried to get space, the bastards wanted to be social.

Like now. The wind had brought something with it - a boy. This was probably one of the neighbour's kids.

The kid was walking north along the road, carrying a hiking bag. He had short curly hair, as most of the locals did, and grey-green wooden skin. There was fear in his face. Oh, smoothed flat, sure. He was trying to appear normal, because he could see her watching him. But she was good at smelling fear, and the boy clearly had the skittish, wary look of the indiscriminately paranoid. He wasn't wearing shoes.

"So," Gran called out. "You running away?"

"...No."

"Don't lie. I can smell a lie as easily as a fart in a small room."

The boy found the fart joke amusing. His shoulders eased. "Fine, I am."

"Well, you're going the wrong way. There's nothing further north except junk, trees, and terrible bloodthirsty beasts."

"And you," the boy said.

"And me," Gran Dolovis replied.

The boy watched her work with wary interest.

"You live down the road?" she asked.

Zero nodded.

"Do your parents-? Ignore that." She cut herself off, sharply. Finding the right words was a strain. "Obviously your parents don't know you're here. You need anything?"

"No," Zero said, immediately.

"All right." Strange stripes rippled on the alien's face. She fumbled her knife, and kept at her work.

The thing was, apart from that first casual glance, she hadn't looked at him. She hadn't stared. It was easy for Zero to believe that this stranger - his neighbour - wasn't interested in him at all, that the kill was her priority, and that weird kids ran away all the time as far as she was concerned.

Something had torn through the barbed wire, leaving only disconnected wooden posts at this particular interval. There was a whole spool of new and shiny wire beside it. Zero circled closer, to better see what she was butchering.

"What happened to the fence?" he asked.

"Crabs, mate."

"Crabs?"

"The little ones crawl under, and the big ones step over, but what about the average guys, huh? Well, they get stuck half the time. Poor things." She jerked her head at the muddy crustacean corpse, and the bucket of gore. "Like this one. You wanna see him?"

Zero hadn't ever seen a dead thing before. Birds didn't count. He hadn't seen anything big. He wandered through the disconnected fence posts, and with a nod to paranoia, he kept a healthy distance between himself and the stranger. The dead crab was big. That's what he thought, when he looked at it - just a big pile of dead.

For Dolovis, crab meat was good, when she could get it. It had been a lucky find, running across this one tangled in the fence. But the real prize was the carapace. It was hard, sturdy, but bendable. It could be boiled and bound and bent into almost any shape or purpose - provided that the crafter had the skills. There were none more skilled than Gran Dolovis.

"That's a crab," the boy said.

"Yes."

"How'd a crab get here?"

Gran threw her knife down. "From space."

"Oh. How big are the beasts?"

"Very."

"Because I can hunt for myself," the boy yattered on, "And I know some plants it is okay to eat. Dad forgets to make me dinner some of the time, so I figured it out for myself. I can climb trees, and fight beasts. I killed some small ones already. But if they're, like, bigger than me, I might not be able to. That'd be kind of hard."

He was looking at her like he wanted an answer. Gran had forgotten what he was talking about.

"Hmm," she acknowledged, noncommittally.

"Yeah, so I think that'd be too hard. I don't know." The boy paused, and looked south momentarily. He then refocused on what she was working on. "That's a big crab."

"This is a juvenile."

"Wow."

"It wandered off on its own, got stuck, and died. They can run very fast. But how fast you run doesn't matter if you have nowhere to go. Infants of this species can't fend for themselves at this age. They require protection." Gran Dolovis drawled, sarcastically.

She wasn't expecting the boy to understand. She wasn't expecting him to be aware of his own situation enough to recognise it.

But he went silent. Then-

"Where was it trying to go?"

"South."

"That's stupid. It was obviously going to die. What about east, or west? Or north?"

"There's a great desert if you head east far enough. It's even harsher than here. No beasts, nothing to eat. West and North are the ancient junkyards. The infection gets worse out west."

"Infection?"

"Hmmm. If you have to ask what it is, it is clear you stand no chance of surviving it."

"I could." The boy shot back. "I could survive anything. How do you know?"

Gran Dolovis didn't say anything. She just looked at him full in the face, for only the second time since they'd started talking. There was a wealth of words in her expression, and tears sprang to Zero's eyes.

"Let me come with you," the boy burst out.

"You?"

"I can hunt, and fend for myself." His eyes were big and full of watery desperation. "If I slow you down, you can just leave me behind. But I won't slow you down, I won't. I'm fast. You'll see. And, and I'll protect you from any beasts that try to eat you! I've killed loads of beasts! I'll be your bodyguard!"

Gran's eyes went wide.

And then suddenly- "HA! Haha ha HA!" -laughter. Her mouth unhinged, like a dogsnake, and she cackled uproariously. Gran was not given to emotional outbursts, but this was because she lacked most emotions, and not because she repressed them. She laughed loud. Her eyes crinkled with true amusement as she regarded the whelp properly.

There was potential there. It had been some time since she'd had a true project, something worthy of her skills as a craftsman. And there was potential in the boy - in the wiry frame, there were good bones, a good build. And good spirit, too. The rest could be found anywhere, but a good spirit, now, that was a worthwhile find. He'd had the audacity to offer to protect her!

And he'd be useful one day, if he meant it. Food, training, and praise, and he'd be a terror to behold. He was obviously lacking all three, wherever he was being kept.

Nevertheless, it would be foolish to invite aggression from his captors.

"No." Gran turned back to work, having enjoyed the joke. "I've no need of protection. Carry on, boy. Run away."

Zero had flinched back when she'd laughed. It was too loud, and her mouth had opened way further than a mouth should have been able to open, and inside he'd seen jaws full of sharp, sharp teeth. But he didn't run away. Fangs were preferable to a smile, in Zero's experience.

"Okay," he said, and crouched down, hugging his arms around his knees.

Pity stabbed at her, unwanted. Gran Dolovis turned sharply from him, and started folding the tarp over the bloody carapace.

"I can't take care of you," she told the dead crab, without facing the boy. "I'm not built for it. You're an alien kid, I haven't got the right instincts to raise you properly."

"You're an alien?"

"Sure. I'm a Supremas. Kind of a snake thing. Lycan. You know snakedogs? Like that, but two legs. That's why my skin moves like this."

"Oh." The boy said, as this made sense now.

She still had to fix the fence, and the boy hadn't left yet. He was sitting right behind her, and it was making her hackles rise. She licked the air nervously.

"You hungry, kid?"

He hugged himself and didn't answer. Yes, he was.

So she went back to ignoring him, and walking over to the fence, began to wind the wires back. This was what Zero had been hoping for. Now that she was away from the dead crab, he crawled over towards it and lifted the tarp. Close up, he was able to get a deep, long look of it. He reached out to pat it.

"Ah, ah ah." The stranger hurriedly shook her head. "Nah. Probably all sorts of illness on him, mate. Nothing you want to be touching without gloves."

"Oh."

"Here." The woman took off one of her blood-soaked work-gloves, adult sized, made of thick brown leather, and lobbed it gently across the ten feet between them. It landed on the grass. And then she turned her back on him - like she didn't care. Like she didn't mind if he patted the unhygienic dead thing, so long as he wore the glove. Like she didn't care if he ran off, so long as he had somewhere to go.

Zero didn't have anywhere to go. So he picked up the glove and put it on. The dead crab was like a toy, basically, if he ignored the pungent, musty smell of death. It was a little cute, even. And it was soothing to pat something. So while the stranger worked, fixing the fence, Zero just stayed crouched in the grass there behind her, patting the poor cold dead thing. The glove dulled the awful details of death, like the feeling of crab-fur pulling out as the flesh beneath it decomposed. The glove acted as a barrier between Zero and the death. And death acted as a barrier between Zero and the thing he couldn't run away from. If he cried a little, well, it was only because death was sad, wasn't it?

Later, that was the thing he would appreciate most. That his neighbour - Gran Dolovis - had never, not once, asked him what he was running from.

When she finished the fence, all she said was, "I can show you how to cook it, if you like. We can do it right here - don't have to go anywhere."

He stood up, anxious suddenly to be away. He looked over his shoulder, back south, fearful of pursuit.

Gran smelled his fear. She licked the air, and noticed he'd been crying.

"Or, if you still want to run away... you can come back to my nest." She nodded north, towards the dark and imposing treeline. "This is to visit, you understand? Not to stay. I will show you to cook crab, we will eat, and you will leave. Maybe visit later. But not to stay. If we stay attached to each other, you understand it will not end well, yes?"

He did, but didn't say anything.

The woman pushed it. "Visiting only."

"Okay." Zero stood up at once. "How can I help?"

"Carry the blood bucket. You can move quickly? The beasts will smell it soon."

"Yes."

One last time, she turned to him. Her alien eyes were orange and multi-pupiled, and the stripes rippled across her skin like a cuttlefish. She showed her fangs, full threat display. For the third and final time, Dolovis looked the kid dead in the eyes. This was a face Zero would burn into his brain forever. In all other memory, Dolovis' face would remain indistinct - she did not like to look people in the eyes, it was anti-instinctual for her species. But here, she remained clear. Like this, in fear: he remembered her.

"Maybe in the future, I could be your mentor, yes? Teach you to fight, perhaps." Her eyes rippled, the pupils moving around in the sockets. This was a test. He was meant to say no.

But how could he possibly refuse? This he would remember as the day he ran away properly. Because now, upon this agreement, he would at last have somewhere to run to.

"Okay," Zero said. It was always going to be that answer.

Gran turned away, her hackles falling back to neutral. She had tried to scare him off, and it hadn't worked. She would not resist, then, this mutated sense of empathy. Zero put both hands inside the massive, bloody glove, and gripped the bucket handle with it. He used his whole body to lift it, struggling not to spill. Gran sighed, and gave up. They had to move soon, or they would attract bloodthirsty monsters. There were things in the north that were even scarier than the Supremas Gran Dolovis.

Gran Dolovis bound the tarp around the kill, lifted the package onto her shoulder, and walked down the hill. Following came the boy, lifting with both hands the bucket of gore. The figures - one big, one small - went down the slope of the meadow and into a dark gap between two gnarled and ancient trees, and vanished into the shadows unseen. In their abscence, the field of daffodils rippled in the wind, golden and clear in the sunlight, and although the blood and the aliens had gone, there still lingered an eerie feeling in the clearing, like some danger hovering just behind was still waiting for its moment.

---biologic.neocites.org 10/20/2023---

New chapters to follow.