By Cera

 

Autumn in the Kalahari begins during the month of May.   It is the time of year when the red sand begins to be seen again.  The lushness of the summer is ending.  The leaves of the acacias trees are still green, just not as glossy as when they were being washed clean by the summer rains.  The long green grasses that, just a week before, undulated in the wind are thinning, turning brown, and giving hints of the dry season about to begin.

 

It is a time of plenty, when the meerkats are at their sturdiest.  Well fed by the summer's bounty, these tiny denizens of central Africa are as comfortable as they will ever be in the vast plains of the desert.  With so much energy to burn, they are currently at the extreme outer limits of their territory, almost lazily conducting their daily foraging far from their burrow.   Instinctively, they are saving the territory nearer to home for later, when food is harder to find, and energy reserves are low.

 

An unusually large group of trees just to their north is shadowing the area.  Twisted and toppled, one of the trees is bent over with its top touching the ground.  The roots, wrenched from the earth by one of the powerful storms of weeks past, are still covered with the blood red earth of the region.   It is a marvelous foraging ground, grubs and centipedes are easy to find and the mob is stuffing themselves with the feast.

 

Flower, the Queen of the Kalahari and formidable dominant female of the Whiskers, lifts her head in sudden alarm.   The young male, Shakespeare, Flower's courageous son, stands sentry duty, his slender body perched high in the nearby scrub.  His dark, masked eyes are attentively scanning the horizon, doing his duty, and he is as relaxed as a creature of his diminutive size can be when living in the Kalahari where death is a part of every day life.   Still unsettled, Flower rises to her hind feet and stretches out to her full two feet in height.  She twists this way and that, searching the horizon, sniffing the wind.   Something is spooking her, something unseen, something … dangerous.

 

Flower has not risen to her status by chance.  She is smart, protective, unrelenting, and she has always trusted her instincts.   Now those same instincts that have made the Whiskers the largest family on the Manor, are screaming at her to –

 

Flower barks out a high pitched warning, a call to arms.  Her family, well trained to mind her, immediately groups together.   Long, and too often tragic, experience has taught them that their safety, their strength, their very existence, lay in their numbers.  They rush to her, surround her, and wait for her lead.

 

Still uncertain, still unsettled, Flower continues to sound the alarm.

 

Zaphod, her mate of many years, stands at the edge of the pack.  Seeing nothing alarming, he drops to all fours and weaves his way through his offspring to nudge Flower gently, his confusion evident.   Flower spits and hisses her displeasure at his questioning attitude.  Something is out there, something is watching, something is hungry.

 

Agitation makes her fairly dance on her hind feet as she twists her head searching for the danger.

 

Suddenly, the barest hint of movement, the tiniest flicker of … something … catches her eye.  

 

As one, the mob turns towards shadows beneath the uprooted tree. 

 

~*~*~

 

From where he lay behind the fringe of roots, half buried in the earth, haphazardly sheltered from the mid-morning sun, they looked like little aliens.   Tiny, fur covered Martians … complete with the proportionally too large heads balanced on skinny little necks.  He blinked his eyes, hoping to wipe the creepy little aliens away.   Oops.  Mistake, that.  Now they were all looking in his direction, their dark eyes masked and glittering with malice as they wove back and forth hypnotically on skinny little legs.

 

One of them, the one wearing the odd collar, dropped to all fours and hopped toward him spitting and sputtering and looking slightly ridiculous with its stick-like tail standing straight up.

 

"Bugger off," he managed to croak out through cracked lips and dust-filled throat.

 

At the sound of his voice, the threatening little bitch – had to be female with that nagging tone to its high-pitched voice and the bling around its neck - at the front of the pack paused and lifted her dust covered snout high to sniff.   Oddly, the ugly little thing seemed to relax.  She started creeping toward him, her mob slowly following at her heels.

 

"Great," he muttered as he pressed backward into his hole and prepared to either be experimented on by Martians or eaten alive by a pack of overgrown gerbils. He pulled his knees protectively closer to his chest; his sensitive hearing easily catching the cracking and popping as his nearly desiccated skin labored to stretch over bone.   Oddly enough, it didn't hurt much anymore.  Starvation and the desert's unrelenting heat had numbed his nerve endings weeks before, when he'd been … where had he been again when he started this southward trek toward suicide?   He couldn't remember.  Some place else on this continent that some bleedin' idiot of berk had named, 'dark.'  There was nothing dark about this land.  It was sun, sun, and more sun.  'Cept when it was night, then it was just plain hot, evaporating what little moisture remained in his flesh.   Soon he'd be too dry to move.  No, it wasn't funny at all when a vampire starved to death – just well deserved.

 

And starving he was.

 

Unable to harm any living thing, unwilling to face the pain of the chip, he was like a man dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean.   He was surrounded by animals filled with warm, rich, life-sustaining blood and yet he couldn't drink a drop of it.  Couldn't even suck on the furry little Martians currently peeking down into the depression he'd dug in the sand.   Unless … they were demons?  Nah, he could hear their hearts beating a rapid tattoo and their smell was - he'd like to say making his mouth water, but you had to have spit for that, didn't you?   He couldn't even muster a drop as he rubbed his sand-paper tongue against his gritty teeth. 

 

The bitchy leader scuttled closer and he could see the inch long claws on her front feet.

 

He glanced up and twenty or so more of the rodents were blocking out the blue sky as they loomed above him, surrounding him, closing in on him.   He thought briefly of shifting into game face, trying to use the demon to scare the buggers off.  But he was too tired, too ready for the end, and besides, his bumpies emerging would most likely split the brittle flesh of his forehead.  

 

He might be doomed, but he still wanted to go out pretty.

 

~*~*~

 

Flower catches movement beneath the tree and very faintly, she catches man-smell.   Man-things were strange two-leggers that followed her and her family around with their shiny, strange-smelling toys that they held close to their faces and constantly put in her way.   They even went so far as to stick them down the burrow every so often.  Sometimes those strange things scared her when they put them right in front of her face and she thought she saw a rival female looking back at her in the shiny round part.   Man-things were a nuisance, but harmless.  And sometimes … they had treats!

 

She moves slowly toward this man-thing, careful not to scare it away. 

 

It had been a while since the man-things had spent time with her family and Flower desperately wanted a boiled egg.   It was a treat she got whenever she stepped up onto the flat metal scale that felt so unsteady under her paws and flashed red symbols that the man-things always wrote down in their scribble pads.

 

It only takes her a sniff to tell that this one had no treats.  In fact, Flower thinks this one smells bad; like the dry times, when food is scarce and her family sickens with hunger.   Confused, she fearlessly gets close enough to touch its cold cheek with her nose.  It flinches.  Not dead, but not quite alive either.   No longer interested in the starving man-thing since he has no boiled egg treats to share, Flower yawns.  She's napped with the man-things before, using their bulk as a windbreak or a shade tree.   Snuffling around the depression dug in the shadows, Flower decides it's big enough and comfy enough for a family nap.  She barks at Zaphod, still annoyed over his lack of confidence in her.   Once he crawls back out of the depression and takes up sentry duty, she curls up in the hollow between the man-thing's chin and its neck and goes to sleep, her family quickly finding comfy spots as well.

 

~*~*~

 

Truly, he'd gone right 'round the bend.

 

The endless miles of walking during the nights in a fruitless attempt to escape his reward and the haunted hours of the days trapped by the sun with nothing but his soul for company had taken their toll.   No surprise there.

 

But did the furry little bitch really just kiss him on the cheek?  He could have sworn he'd felt a dry little nose press into him.   Cracking one eye open, mindful of the claws he'd spotted, he peered carefully around.  Yep, there she was, little miss ugly, right in front of his face, her little mouth open to show a surprisingly impressive amount of needle-like teeth.   She yapped at one of the others, a hen-pecked looking bloke, who scuttled away with his tail all but between his legs.  Then the she-bitch cuddled up against his throat!   Cuddled, mind you.  Curled herself into a dusty brown ball and pressed right up against him.

 

If that wasn't bizarre enough, the rest of the little creatures followed suit and before he knew it, he was serving as mattress and pillow to a mob of the furry little beasts.

 

It was an odd feeling … being touched. 

 

Being touched without pain felt even odder still. 

 

How long had it been?  How long since he'd been touched by anything even approaching gentleness?

 

'Course it wasn't as if these ignorant little desert rats knew what he was, what he'd done.   If they did, they'd surely be laying into him with their miniature fangs and claws, gouging his eyes out, tearing into his chest and chomping down on his long-dead and broken heart.

 

Wouldn't they?

 

Instead, they were pressed against him, their lightly built, lean, delicate little bodies actually lying on him and around him.   Were they the stupidest creatures on the face of the earth? 

 

Or what?

 

Too tired to care, surrounded by the warm little buggers, Spike slept peacefully for the first time since winning the trials.   His soul, that long-forgotten initiator of guilt, shame, self-loathing, judgment, and retribution was finally silent – calmed by the wonder of these odd creatures' simple acceptance.