Free Barbarian Alien by Ruby Dixon

imaginable.
    With the biggest junk. Not that I’m thinking about that. Dammit. Or his hand slowly stroking down the length of it, taunting me.
    My cootie immediately starts purring, jiggling my breasts with the force of its intensity. “God, cootie, you are such an asshole!” I tell it, thumping my chest again to try and make it calm down. Not that it works, but I do it anyhow.
    Then I pause, because in the distance I see a dark, threading line in the snow. Curious, I step toward it, and as I get closer, I realize that it’s a stream of some kind. There are some pole-type bamboo looking things sticking out of the water. They look lightweight and stiff. I wonder if I could use them? Encouraged, I slog forward. I can check it out, haul one out of the water, and then head home before Raahosh wakes up. I’ll hide my prize in the snow at the mouth of the cave and he’ll never know that I’m secretly constructing myself a nice, handy weapon so I can escape his ass.
    The suns are coming up on the far side of the sky, leaking a milky-pale color into the world that will never be bright enough to melt the snow. Even though there’s two of them, they’re such small lights in the sky I imagine that Not-Hoth (as I’ve taken to calling the planet) is a lot further out in its solar system than Earth is from the sun. Maybe that’s why it’s always so cold here. When I get to the stream, I can smell a faint hint of rotten eggs in the air – sulfur. It’s a hot spring, which explains why it’s running water and not a block of ice. Georgie mentioned seeing others when she was traveling with Vektal. I should be glad that it’s warm enough, because otherwise this planet would be that much more inhospitable.
    The banks of the stream are muddy but smooth, and I slide down to the edge of the water. The scent of sulfur is thicker here, but the water is blue and pretty. I wonder if I should swim. The bamboo shoots are at least ten feet tall and push out of the water like random toothpicks and I lean over the blue water, reaching for the closest one. I’ll pull it out and see just how sturdy the material is. If it’s lightweight like I think it will be, it might just work—
    “
LIZ
!” A familiar voice bellows, and I slide forward on the bank, almost into the water.
    Raahosh. And he almost made me do a face plant into the stream, that jerk. “Can you not fucking yell at me when I’m standing over the water? I—“
    I gasp, my angry words dying in my throat. There’s a horrible face with bulging eyes and big, jagged teeth on the other end of my stick. It looks like one of those monstrous creatures from the deep, dark parts of the ocean—except it’s about a foot away from my face.
    A scream rips from my throat and I stagger backward, clutching my bamboo.
    The creature comes along with the end of the bamboo, to my shock. It sticks to the end of it, thrashing and splashing wildly.
    I scream again, and fling it onto the snow. It hisses and starts moving toward me, and I glance around, looking for Raahosh’s spear. It’s a few feet away, where I must have flung it. Meanwhile, the thing thrashes and hisses on the far end of the bamboo, it’s mouth snapping angrily in my direction.
    Something big appears out of the corner of my eye, and I watch as Raahosh stalks toward the thing I’ve pulled out of the water, blade in hand. He looks extremely pissed off as he grabs the thing by one of its flinging flipper-things and slams it to the ground. Then, with an ease that astonishes me, he slams his knife into its eye.
    The thing’s flippers flail, blood spurts onto the white snow, and then it stops moving. As I stare, wide-eyed, he glances over at me and flings his blade to the ground, then stalks toward me.
    I crab-walk backward a few feet. “I didn’t know! Like I was supposed to know one of those things was attached to the end of the bamboo? All I wanted were some supplies!” My babbling doesn’t make him pause an inch. Of course