An Alien soldier telling his platoon mates about an encounter with a monster he had while on a navigational exercise in his youth.
He’s following the map points when he finds a massive hunk of twisted metal a little ways away from his designated path, like a downed terrestrial rover but mangled and made of a metal alloy he’s never seen before. There’s shattered glass on the ground around it and small, oddly shaped footprints leading away from it. Too small and too thin to be someone else from the platoon.
Cautiously, he returns to his designated path because he can’t turn around just because he got spooked by what could very well have been an animal walking away from some old rover model he didn’t recognise. As he’s walking forward through a wooded area near a clearing, he hears a hissing noise out in the grass of the clearing in front of him and he’s quick to flick on his headlamp. It lands on something small hunched over in the grass.
It’s not an animal.
Not one he had ever seen. It’s wearing cloth with concerning red splotches all over it. It seems to know it’s been spotted because it freezes mid movement and seems to be breathing very slowly and quietly even as its body shakes. Why is it shaking? The soldier draws his weapon and freezes, expecting it to bolt away or turn to attack him, but it just sits there, it’s back exposed.
Suddenly, it twitches and its limbs start to rise above the sea of grass around it. Its limbs are long and stringy, and sit at right angles from its body, both ending in flat, square…paws…feet? Both with five long, thin, fleshy digits protruding from the palm.
Still trapped in the spotlight from the soldier’s headlamp, it begins to stand and the soldier fires a warning shot into the ground close to it in hopes of scaring it away, but it just jolts, freezes and then continues to stand, much more slowly.
Up and up it stands on two legs far too long for its body, balancing precariously between one good leg and one that seems bent at an odd angle. And it’s still shaking at him.
Why is it shaking at him?!
An intimidation tactic?
Slowly, almost cautiously, the creature begins to turn around, its upper limbs still raised. It seems to pivot on one foot and the soldier wonders how the hell it’s still upright until it turns to face the light completely and he sees it’s face.
Flat, white and almost featureless, it’s eyes pressed deep into its ovoid skull, it’s mouth a flat red line beneath the two black holes at the base of a small boney protrusion in the middle of its face. It’s looks almost embryonic, underdeveloped, all pink and fleshy and boney. The eyes are small and white and blue with two minuscule black spots in their centres, both pinned on him.
Predator’s eyes.
It doesn’t blink. At least, not until the same red liquid on its clothes trickles down its white face from a welt and into one of its eyes, making it wince and scrunch up its face, finally allowing the soldier to see that the bloody thing has teeth.
Lots of them.
He finally brings himself to move while it can’t see and turns to book it back the way he came, hearing the thing behind him shuffle through the grass just as quick. Is it chasing him?!
He doesn’t stop running at full sprint until he’s back on the hard concrete of the platoon base, and even then he only stops to draw his weapon again at the space behind him, his headlamp shining up into the nearby trees. He doesn’t budge even as his platoon mates ask him what the hell he’s looking at. He just waits. Nothing.
His sergeant is none too pleased with him for abandoning his exercise and running back to base like a coward until the soldier shows him his bodycam footage.
All rookies are ordered to stay inside for the night as senior soldiers scout out in groups to potentially find the thing from the footage.
No such luck.
The only thing they find is the mangled metal pile, the footprints and a trail of browned liquid leading to a tree that suddenly smells like rotting flesh.
The officials guess that the creature got hunted by one of the bigger predators in the area and dragged up the tree to be saved for later, but the soldiers are never truly convinced. No matter how much trouble they get in for deliberately missing a navigation point during exercises, no one dares to go near that tree again. The ones who do venture near it by the behest of jeering mates often claim to have seen a flat, white face among the branches, staring down at them. Some claim to have felt long, thin limbs that they almost mistake for part of the tree drift over their shoulders before they look and it’s suddenly gone.
They never go back in fear for their lives.
