Excerpt: Encounters

As they were heading in the direction of the blast, Alex shined his light in the general direction the they were heading and he revealed a small plume of smoke coming from inside the woods. He also noticed a shadow just inside the trees, in fact, two of them. One silhouette was larger, probably the size of an average man, the other was short, probably the size of a middle school child. There was no real civilization for miles around and there is no way anyone would be silly enough to walk around in the woods after two in the morning, other than themselves of course. “Hello!?” he shouted at the shadows.
“What are they?” Jennifer was starting to get scared, both of the darkness and the two shadowy figures in front of them. She hustled over to Alex and grabbed his left arm tighter than Alex ever though possible.
“It's okay, hun,” he reassured her while working within himself to bring himself to believe what he just told her. “Hello?” he called out to the figures in a softer more uncertain tone.
“They are killers!” Jennifer assumed. “Who else could they be. I'm scared!” She was talking a mile a minute and Alex was having trouble keeping up with her slurred speech.
“They are not going to kill us,” again Alex was quite unsure of what he had just said. The two pairs of figures drifted towards each other in the darkness. After a few seconds of walking, Alex shined the light onto their visitors and revealed something he never thought possible.
In front of him stood two extremely foreign looking beings. The taller one had a blue face, blue hands, and donned a red jumpsuit with five stars on the right side of its chest. The shorter one wore a similar jumpsuit without the stars and had green skin. The only thing Alex could think was “Aliens...” but he could not bring to himself to say anything. They both stood shaking in their shoes and Phobos began a low pitch rumble of a growl.
“Kazkee yourk smachek deblingtorgrab grasby torlingaska,” the blue alien spoke out loud to the two humans. Both looked back at the visitor with blank expressions of fear and confusion. They stood there clutching each other for dear life. The aliens didn't look violent at all. They were just standing there speaking in their strange alien tongue. But, unsurprisingly, the humans could not believe the sight before them.
“Wha...” Alex tried to say something but his fear didn't allow him to.
“Kazkee yourk smachek deblingtorgrab grasby torlingaska,” the blue alien announced again, this time almost proudly. Once again there was no additional response from the humans. After several seconds of waiting for a response, the blue one turned to the short green one and started speaking softly in the alien language. They exchanged sentences a few times before the blue one let out a massive groan, whacked the green one upside the noggin, shouted at him, and they turned around and retreated into the forest from which they came.
The humans had no clue what had just happened. They knew they were alive, and each thought they had seen two aliens try and talk to them, disagree with each other, and then flee off. “What the fuck just happened...?” Alex asked openly.
Jennifer had no response. She was just as confused as he was. The dog had even stopped his forward behavior. Alex broke the silence again, “I think we need to get some sleep.”
Pause.
“Yeah.” Jennifer finally spoke. “Yeah... I think we do.”