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ignored
her. 
    “That alien stuck a gun in your
face,” a little boy insisted.  “Were you scared?”
    “I don’t get scared,” Joe
muttered, hoping it would shut them up.  Even then, though, his bowels were
still twisting with residual fear.  He knew how close he had come to dying. 
Tril’s sticky brown eyes had wanted death.  He wondered how many more seconds
it would have taken for him to blow his head off.  One?  Two?  He got goosebumps
thinking about it.  And then Kihgl…
    The cool resentment in his gaze
still made Joe’s throat hurt with regret.  The one seemingly decent being on
the ship and Joe had humiliated him just as thoroughly as he’d humiliated
Lagrah.  And Kihgl had just finished making it clear to Joe that he was going
to make Joe pay for his transgressions with pain.
    Of course Joe was afraid.
    Apparently, though, the other
kids didn’t catch his lie.  They seemed to take it for granted that the big kid
hadn’t gotten scared, and drew strength from it.  Joe felt like shouting at
them, Of course I was scared!  We’re going to die here, can’t you see that?!
    But they couldn’t see that.  They
clumped around him like he was the designated soccer dad, with three of the
littlest ones even clinging to his stinky, piss-covered leg.  It was when
silence began to hum in their prison that Joe realized that all the little kids
were waiting for him to do something, so they could follow.
    Grimacing, Joe took a good look
at the huge, three-tiered, round, bunk-like objects lining the walls.  They each
had six sheets of what looked like folded tinfoil laid out on their surface and
were shaped almost like bowls.  He was pretty sure they were beds.  Or
industrial-sized microwaves.
    Eventually, though, he broke away
from the clingy, frightened kids and went over to inspect the apparent shelves
of bowls.  When he gave a test-push on the surface, he found it depressed
easily, almost as if it were made of foam.
    Beds, then , Joe thought,
running his hand under the crinkly metallic blanket.  Even from that brief
contact, he could tell that the flimsy metal blanket was going to be warmer
than anything he’d had back on earth.
    The kids, still clinging to the
far wall, were watching him nervously.
    “They’re just beds,” Joe said,
crawling into one of the big bowls on the bottom and pulling the metallic
blanket over himself pointedly.  Still, no one moved.
    “My daddy works in a morgue,” one
of the older kids said, giving the beds a dubious look.  “That looks like the
incinerator.”
    “Or a packet of popcorn,” another
kid said.  “Like you make on the stove.”
    Joe groaned.  “Everyone just get
in bed, okay?  It’s fine.  See?”  He stretched out over the bed, though the odd
scooped slope felt strange on his back.
    Most of the kids tentatively came
over to check it out, but a few hunkered down by the wall and refused to get
any closer.  They just spent the rest of the night like that, huddled and
whimpering by the door.
    Joe lay staring at the bunk above
him, stewing over his problems in exhausted, hungry silence.  The other kids
weren’t so discreet.  One kid huddled along the wall spent the entire night whining. 
It was a low, primal sound that grated on Joe’s nerves until his every muscle
was taut, his fists itching to plant themselves into the idiot’s face.
    What does he know about being
scared?
    Images of the days before Joe’s
capture returned to haunt him.  Bodies had littered the streets like trash,
their chests burned open or dripping purple glop.  The constant whimpering
reminded Joe of the sound Sam had made the night their father didn’t come back—
    Joe got out of bed and went over
to the boy.  He opened his mouth to tell him to shut up, just shut the hell up
and stop whining, that everyone there was dealing with the same crap and he wasn’t
special, but the kid mistook his intentions and jumped up from the wall,
wrapping his scrawny arms