The Hatching

Author : Jason Frank

I walked around an hour ‘fore I found where they landed, no crowd, no cops, no reporters, not no more. They weren’t out yet so I unrolled my blanket and didn’t pay no attention to the dog hairs flying up off it. I had plenty of time to sit and start in on the wine I brought.

I counted five eggs. I’d seen more but hadn’t seen anything like the crazy colors the late October sun was throwin’ off of them. It was beautiful, I had to admit it. I felt a bunch of stuff swelling up in me. You had to have someone with you when you saw something beautiful so you could share it with them. I wished Cain was with me, even if no dog ever cared about a bunch of colors, even if I wouldn’t be there if he was still around.

I was doing pretty good on the wine by the time the eggs got moving and I was so caught up in looking and thinking and feeling that I didn’t hear her walk up behind me and I damn near jumped out of my skin when she said hello.

I could see she was there for the same reason I was. We got a little while yet, I told her and asked her if she wanted to sit a spell and have some wine. She sat down but said no to the wine, she had a flask. She focused in on them eggs solid but I couldn’t help stealing glances at her. She was some kind of woman, hair all braided around her head and her face beautiful without any makeup on it. I tried not to stare but some of the hairs that stuck out of her braids caught the sunlight and made it look like she had a halo on.

The horns started breaking through the shells, working back and forth to grow the cracks they’d made. It was a bit before them cracks got big enough for the things to start forcing their way out, stumbling on shaky legs like anything born regular on this planet. They didn’t walk around too much ’cause they were exhausted from getting out.

She got up and asked me if I was just gonna sit there or what. I laughed a little too hard and a little too loud from the wine and went to get up and stumbled a little bit. She asked me if I was okay and I said yeah I was fine and she said we should do this and I agreed we should.

Being a gentleman, I told her to go ahead first and she did this joke curtsey before shouldering up her piece. it was just a twenty gauge but her aim was dead on. I waited till she reloaded to start in with my twelve. We switched off like that, settling into a smooth rhythm. We blasted those little bastards till they were all gone and then we blasted them all again.

It was a hell of a thing that something could be hard enough to fall through space and get here alive and be able to live here but would be dumb enough to have a taste for man’s best friend, out of all the things we got here. Some things could make a planet inhospitable right quick.

At the bar, she told me she lost five dogs to those bastards and I told her about Cain and we both cried out half as much as we drunk.

There hasn’t been a day since we been apart.