Read Online The Trilisk Ruins by Michael McCloskey - Free Book Online Page B

fresh air in
and then sprawled out, resting her aching muscles. She fell asleep
quickly.
    At some point later, Telisa bolted
instantly awake. Something was wrong. She listened for a moment and
realized that something moved towards their camp, breaking branches
and rustling in the leaves of the forest floor. She sat upright,
reaching for her pack. She brought out her stunner and unzipped the
opening of her tiny sleeping tube.
    Magnus stood in the center of their
little clearing, holding a flashlight pointed out into the forest.
His slug thrower was level with the ground, the barrel pointed out
into the darkness towards the noises. Jack and Thomas seemed
content to watch from their tent flaps. Telisa scrambled to find
her own flashlight. The noises outside were getting closer. She
forced herself to calm and found the light.
    Telisa clambered out of her tube and
stood to Magnus’s right, clutching her stunner. She added her light
to Magnus’s and saw some kind of bluish tentacle waving through the
brush at the height of her chest. She took a deep breath and forced
herself not to shoot.
    The thing pushed aside Magnus’s
sleeping tube with another blue tentacle. A huge shell pushed
through the spiny branches, revealing the rest of the creature. It
had spiny legs and about a dozen tentacles. It moved slowly out
into the clearing, its tentacles wavering as it searched for the
next shrub.
    Suddenly Magnus yelled maniacally and
kicked the ground in front of him, sending a bit of forest floor
debris flying at the creature. The thing flinched away, moving in
slow motion, and then it altered its course. It pushed its way
though the spines on the perimeter and crawled away.
    Everyone let their tension drop. Then
Thomas started to laugh. The laughter spread. Even Magnus started
to chuckle.
    “ Well, I guess we showed
it,” Thomas said. “That’ll teach it to disturb us.”
    “ I don’t think I can go back
to sleep after that,” Telisa said.
    Magnus nodded. “I probably can’t
either, but I don’t want to try and walk in the dark. Let’s just
try our best.”
    Telisa crawled back into her tent. She
could still hear the giant shelled thing moving away through the
brush. She tried to go back to sleep. She tossed and turned for a
while. Her legs itched. Telisa scratched, then she felt a small
bump on her leg. She dug out the flashlight and examined herself in
the tent. Her legs were covered in welts. Some of them had tiny
splinters in them.
    She picked at the wounds for a short
while, convincing herself that they were nothing but a minor
irritation. Apparently some of the plant’s spines were able to
penetrate the chameleon suit. By this time Telisa became groggy
again, and she turned off the flashlight and went back to
sleep.
    In the morning they repacked everything
and moved out about fifteen minutes after sunrise. Telisa’s legs
were stiff, and walking sent shooting pains through them for the
first few minutes. Her pain must have been minor compared to Jack
and Thomas, who were complaining loudly.
    “ Oh, my legs! They’re gonna
fall off!” Thomas groaned.
    “ Mine too. And be careful,
some of these spines can go through our suits,” Jack
said.
    “ Yes, my legs are full of
them,” Telisa agreed.
    Thomas nodded. “Me too,” he
said.
    “ How bad is it? Do you feel
sick?” Magnus asked.
    “ They just seem like
splinters I got on Earth,” Telisa said. “What, you didn’t even get
one?”
    Magnus shook his head. “Momma
Veer...”
    “ Argh! I should have
known.”
    Not only did he seem unaffected by
yesterday’s hike, but he had been spared the needling as well.
Telisa shook her head. Somehow none of it surprised her. In the
short time since she had met him, he had given her the impression
of invulnerability. It wasn’t the kind of bragging,
pretend-out-loud sort of toughness, but a quiet, understated
acceptance of the world’s problems without slowing down. Telisa
found herself attracted by it, but she put