Page 10 of Ice Planet Barbarians

I squint up at them, making sure I haven’t hit my head in the crash and am now seeing double. Sure enough, two of them. They look almost like a figure eight, with one tinier, much duller sun practically overlapping a larger one. Off in the distance, there is an enormous white moon.

“Not Earth,” I call below. Fuck. I fight back the insane urge to weep in disappointment. I’d so wanted to climb out and see a building in the distance that would tell me oh, it’s just Canada or Finland.

Two suns have pretty much destroyed that hope.

“What do you see?” someone calls up to me.

I stare around the crashed ship at the endless drifts of snow. I look up. In the far distance, there are other mountains—or at least I’m pretty sure they’re mountains—that look like big icy purple crystals the size of skyscrapers. They’re different from this mountain. This one is nothing but barren rock. There are no trees. Nothing but snow and jagged granite. Our tiny ship looks like it bounced off of one of the nearby jaggy cliffs; that was probably how it had torn open.

I look for living creatures or water. Something. Anything. There’s nothing but white.

“What’s it look like?” Someone else calls up.

I lick my lips, hating that they already feel numb with cold. I’m a Southern girl. We do not do well with cold. “You ever see Star Wars? The original ones?”

“Don’t tell me—”

“Yep. It looks like we landed on fucking Hoth. Except I see two itty bitty suns and a huge-ass moon.”

“Not Hoth,” Liz yells. “It was the sixth planet from its sun, and I don’t recall it having a moon.”

“Okay, nerd,” I call back to her. “We’ll call this place Not-Hoth then. You guys cover this hole with the plastic while I’m gone. It’ll help keep things warm.”

“Stay safe,” Liz tells me.

“Your lips to God’s ears,” I yell. Then I haul my ass out of the protection of the ship.

•••

Walking out into that snowy landscape with nothing but borrowed alien clothing and a gun I don’t know how to fire? Pretty much takes every ounce of courage I have in my body. I tremble as I trudge through the snow. I don’t know squat about winter conditions. I’m from Florida, for chrissakes. Palmetto bugs, I can handle. Gators, I can handle. My pinching boots sinking up to my knees in the snow with every step? I cannot handle that.

But there are half a dozen girls waiting for me back at the spaceship, depending on me to find something. Anything. And we don’t have much in the way of options. I can always turn around. I don’t think anyone would blame me for being afraid.

And then I’ll just sit in the cracked hull and slowly starve to death with the others. Or we’ll get picked up by the aliens again.

Or I can risk freezing and try to do something out here.

So I walk on.

I’ll say one thing for the ball-headed alien I killed: His clothes are decently warm. Despite the fact that every step is a struggle and I sink into the powder with each one, my feet are doing all right.

My face feels like a block of ice, though. My hands, too. The sleeves are too tight for me to pull them down over my hands, so I walk with one hand tucked inside my shirt and the other under an armpit. When it gets too cold, I switch them out. My bad wrist hurts like hell, and my ribs still burn. Actually they burn worse, now, because I have to take deep breaths, and that makes a stabbing pain shoot through my chest each time.

Most of all? I just want to curl up and cry.

But there are others depending on me. So I can’t.

After walking for what feels like forever, the ground starts to slope a bit more, and I follow it down. In the distance, I see stalk-like, tall, skinny things that I think are trees. At least, I hope they’re trees. There’s no other foliage to be found, so I head toward them. The wind is picking up, and my suit—no matter how well it endures the weather—is starting to feel cold. Actually, I’m cold all over. It sucks.

I wish I was back at the hull. I turn around and squint up the side of the rocky hill. The hull is like a small black dot against the hillside. It looks fragile from here. Broken. And there’s still no food or animals or even water. Just snow.

Well, shit. I guess I’ll keep walking.

The stalks are further away than I realize, and it feels like I’m walking forever down the slope of the mountain. As I do, I start to see things. Foliage-looking things. At least, I think they’re foliage. There are tufts of pale pinkish-purple that look more like feathers than actual leaves, but there’s a veritable forest of them. These must be the trees of this strange place. As I pass through them, I touch one. The bark—if you can call it that—feels moist and sticky, and I wipe my palm with a wince. That was gross.

Okay, I’ve found trees. If there are trees, I’m hoping there’s a way the trees are getting nutrition. Trees need sunlight and water. I squint up at the double suns. They’re moving toward the edge of the sky, and the enormous moon is rising higher.

A sudden thought occurs to me. What if I’m out here alone overnight? “That’ll suck,” I mutter to myself. I pull out the gun just because it feels good to have a weapon at hand. It means my fingers feel like ice as I hold it, but I don’t care. I’d rather have a shitty weapon than no weapon.

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