Genesis
By
Kaitlyn O’Connor
(C) Copyright by Kaitlyn O’Connor, January 2007
Published by New Concepts Publishing
Smashwords Edition
Cover art by Jenny Dixon, (c) copyright January 2007
New Concepts Publishing
Lake Park, GA 31636
www.newconceptspublishing.com
This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.
Chapter One
Noticing her fingers had begun to cramp and her hands to sweat, Sabrina consciously relaxed her grip on the steering wheel, trying not to think about the poor decisions she’d made that had led up to her current situation. Outside the car it was as black as the inside of a cave despite the fact that it was a clear night. For that matter, it was as black as pitch inside the car, too.
She glanced down at the clock again--12:05--two minutes later than it had been the last time she’d checked.
Realizing her foot was getting heavier and heavier on the gas pedal the more anxious she became, she eased off on the gas, glancing in her rearview mirror, her side mirrors, flicking a quick look at the darkened woods that crowded close to the narrow highway.
With the exception of the greenish glow of her clock and dash lights there wasn’t a sign of any light in sight that said ‘civilization’. Even if there were any houses nearby, it seemed that everybody had gone to bed and she was the only person in the world still awake.
“Stupid,” she muttered, irrationally comforted by the sound of her own voice.
She should’ve stayed on the main highway, she chastised herself for the dozenth time. But she’d been stopping periodically since before dark trying to get a room, and everything was full. Of course, it hadn’t been until it was getting around nine o’clock that she’d decided to lower her standards and try anything that looked even reasonably respectable. By that time, though, even the cheapest, meanest looking places were full.
She hadn’t realized the middle of the country was still almost a no man’s land for travelers. She hadn’t fully comprehended the massive destruction and long aftereffects of hurricane Katrina. It hadn’t occurred to her that two years after it had hit every hotel for several states were still full to overflowing with the homeless and the construction workers that had piled into the area to rebuild.
When she’d stopped for a fill up around ten, she’d finally decided to try looking for something off the main highway.
She was scared shitless, and her eyes were still so tired from driving so long that every time she blinked it felt as if the inside of her eyelids were sandpaper.
She was almost tempted to speed in the hope that a state patrol would pull her over.
Almost.
The thought of being pulled over on such a deserted road by a cop was almost scarier than being alone.
Stories she’d heard of serial killers posing as cops immediately began to fill her mind. And then, of course, any position of power always attracted the unscrupulous. A real cop might be tempted to take advantage of a stupid woman, alone, on such a deserted stretch of back road.
Taking one hand off the steering wheel, she felt around blindly and finally managed to turn on the radio. The blare of static almost made her jump out of her skin. Feeling around again, she found the search button. Country music filled the car.
She hated country music!
After listening to the twang as long as she could stand it, she started punching the search button again. A road sign appeared in her headlights just about the time the search settled on an oldies station.
“Fuck!” she exclaimed in fear inspired agitation. “Shit! Shit! Shit! Hell! Damn it!”
She’d only caught a glimpse of the sign. It might have been indicating a town up ahead--or not. It could’ve just been a county line or the state line. She slowed down, wrestling with the temptation to find a place to turn around so she could see what the sign had indicated.
The music faded out, became an ear splitting static. At almost the same instant, the engine died.
It took Bri several seconds to assimilate the fact that the engine had flat lined. Panic swept through her, annihilating anything approaching common sense. Almost a full minute passed before she realized she didn’t have to come to a full stop to try to start the engine again because she was wrestling with the terrifying thought of stopping on the deserted road. The car had already dropped a good bit of speed before it occurred to her to slip it into neutral and try to re-start the engine.
Relief touched her, but only briefly. She was shaking like a leaf by the time she managed to shift to neutral and grabbed the key.
Nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. She didn’t even hear the whir of the engine trying to turn over.
The car coasted slower and slower.
She checked the door locks a little frantically, not terribly reassured when she heard the locks click all around.
Abruptly, light surrounded her.
Stunned, she simply stared at the blinding light for a time, blinking, trying to figure out where the light was coming from. Helicopter, her mind finally deduced as the car rolled to a halt. With an effort, she guided the car off onto the shoulder of the road, praying there wasn’t a deep ditch or a swamp. The alternative of sitting in a stalled car in the middle of the road wasn’t acceptable, however. She hadn’t seen a car in at least an hour, but that didn’t mean a semi wouldn’t come barreling out of nowhere and flatten her.
The light grew brighter. Her heart rate spiked as the thought flitted through her mind that the helicopter was going to land right on top of her.
There was no sound, she realized abruptly just about the time she began to feel woozy and heavy. The sensation of falling swept over her just before she slid into unconsciousness.
A sound rather like a clap of thunder jolted her back into awareness. Disoriented, sluggish, Bri struggled with that thought and finally decided it hadn’t really sounded like thunder. It had been more like the crash of something heavy and metallic against metal--like heavy doors closing. It took an effort to lift her head and open her eyes.
The disorientation deepened as she did. She was surrounded by a strange light, an eerie bluish-green glow that didn’t seem to have any obvious source. Blinking, trying to adjust her vision to the dim light, she stared uncomprehendingly at the cavernous room that surrounded her car, supported by curved arches of metal that looked more like the steel columns and beams of a building than anything else she could think of, and yet not the same at all beyond the fact that she knew it must be some sort of support for a structure.
Before she could even begin to sort through her chaotic thoughts to figure out where she was and how she’d gotten there, movement caught her gaze. A wave of shock rolled through her.
A--thing was moving toward her car. Her mind was entirely unable to supply her with an explanation of what it was beyond the vague sense that it was bug like in that it had many legs. It was as big as the car and moved stiffly, mechanically.
Sucking in a sharp cry, Bri clawed a little frantically at her door handle and finally turned to locate it. As she did, she saw another one of the things was almost at her door. Screaming, she fought with her seatbelt and finally managed to unfasten it. The car rocked as she struggled to climb over the seat into the back. But she saw two more behind the car.
The crunch of metal and shattering glass filled her ears as she screamed again. Even as she sucked in another breath to scream, though, a fine mist filled the car around her. A sensation of cold washed over her, dizziness. Her body began to feel heavy, too heavy to hold her up. She oozed into a limp puddle in the floor, floating in an odd state of awareness, staring up at the things that surrounded her car and methodically shredded it. When the roof of the car vanished, one of the things reached for her. A pincher like hand moved over her, closed around one ankle, and lifted her from the wreckage.
She dangled head down for a moment, wondering why she felt no pain, wondering if the thing was about to dismember her the same way it had taken the car apart. She was too divorced from her senses to feel more than a vague relief when, after apparently studying her for a moment, the thing slowly lowered her to a hard, icy cold surface.
She should try to escape, she thought vaguely. She found she couldn’t put any other thoughts together, however, nor could she manage more than a twitch of any body part. She lay still for a time, feeling the coldness beneath her back slowly seeping into her. After a while, she felt the sensation of movement and realized the robot--it had been a robot of some sort, not a living thing--had placed her on something like a gurney, or maybe more like a conveyer belt. She passed from the dark, cavernous room into blackness and then after a time into a smaller room with the same strange lighting of the first room, except that it was brighter.
Uneasiness flickered through her when she saw that this room was occupied by what at first appeared to be people, but she still felt divorced from her body and her surroundings. After staring at her for a time, they moved toward her, and she saw they weren’t people at all.
* * * *
Bri’s first vaguely clear thought when she woke was that she felt hung-over. She was still grappling with that and the fact that she seemed to have fallen asleep on the floor when she finally managed to lift one eyelid enough to see. A brightly colored blurry image came into view. After staring at it for several moments, blinking, she finally realized she couldn’t focus on it because it was too close, and she gathered herself, pushing away from it.
The image resolved itself into some sort of floral print.
She stared blankly at the bright comforter and finally rolled onto her side, scanning the room she found herself in.
It looked like a hotel room.
The problem was, jog her brain though she would, she couldn’t recall checking into a hotel, much less making her way into the room and lying down on what was surely to god the hardest frigging bed she’d ever lain on in her life. Shifting until she was sitting up, she drew her knees up and dropped her face into her hands. Nothing became the least bit clearer. Bits and pieces of memories surfaced, but she thought they must be from a nightmare, because she could hardly make sense of the little she could recall.
Little by little, she became more alert, but she was none the wiser for it. She still couldn’t remember checking into a hotel.
Hang-over--hotel--no memories.
A flash of fear went through her, and she lifted her head with a jerk.
She was still fully clothed, she saw with relief.
Ok, so she could ditch the idea that she’d stopped somewhere for a drink, been drugged, and raped.
“This is just so weird!” she murmured, slipping from the bed and looking around the room as if that might jog her memory. When it didn’t, she headed toward the door she knew must lead to the bathroom.
The fixtures looked a bit old fashioned, but she was relieved to see they looked clean. She could remember thinking she would stop anywhere she could find a vacancy just to get off the road.
That wayward thought brought an avalanche of memories along with it, and relief. She’d been driving home, she remembered, from her business trip and hadn’t been able to find a place to stay.
Obviously, she had found a place, but it bothered her that she couldn’t seem to jog her memories past a specific point--that point being her car dying on the road. How could she not remember past that point? She must have gotten the car started again and made it to this hotel, or motel--it reminded her of one of the old motor courts that had been popular years earlier.
When she’d relieved herself, she automatically reached for the flush handle and pulled it. The toilet made an ungodly noise, and she nearly tripped over her pants around her ankles as she leapt away from it. A nervous chuckle escaped her as she righted herself and jerked her pants up, turning to look at the toilet. The half laugh died in her throat, though, as she stared at the toilet.
There was no water the bowl, and she could see that there was some sort of trap at the bottom, sort of like the toilets in an airplane or bus.
Feeling perfectly blank, she stared at it for several moments and finally moved to the lavatory. The lavatory didn’t work at all. After turning both knobs around and around and getting nothing, she finally gave up and looked at the shower rather doubtfully.
“Surely to god the shower works, at least,” she muttered, not believing it for a moment.
It occurred to her just then, though, that she didn’t remember seeing her suitcase in the room. “God! I was out of it last night,” she said under her breath, heading out of the bathroom toward the outer door. Turning the lock, she gave a tug at the door. It didn’t so much as budge an inch. She frowned, turned the lock the other way, and tugged again. Nothing happened.
Planting her hands on her hips, she looked around for a phone. She’d scanned the room twice before her gaze lit on the black, clunky, ancient looking thing on the table by the bed. “Geez! I must have touched down in the twilight zone!” she murmured. The telephone looked like an antique!
It didn’t work either, damn it! There was no dial tone. “Well, goddamn it to hell!” she cried, slamming the receiver back down. “Does nothing in this god forsaken hotel work?”
Stewing over the fact that she couldn’t get out to retrieve her suitcase, or even call the front desk for help, she flopped down on the edge of the bed. It didn’t give one iota, and a jolt traveled all the way up her spine and into her skull. “Fuck!” she shouted, leaping off the bed and grabbing the coverlet and tossing it back.
Her jaw slid to half mast when she saw what was beneath the cover. There was no mattress, rock hard or otherwise. There was nothing beneath the comforter but a box. “What the hell?”
After staring at the thing blankly for several moments, she leaned down and rapped on the thing with her knuckles. The sound that echoed back told her that, whatever it was, it was hollow, but she couldn’t even determine what it was made out of. Oddly enough, it felt like some sort of metal--except it wasn’t cold like metal. The temperature and texture was more like plastic--cool but not cold, and smooth, but almost porous.
She studied it for several moments more and finally moved across the room to the easy chair. It was as well she’d begun to feel deeply suspicious of everything in the room because, although the thing looked like an overstuffed easy chair, it was just as hard and unyielding as the ‘bed’.
She settled on it anyway, looking around the room while it slowly sank into her mind that where ever she was at, she was not in a hotel room.
Fear began to creep into her, try though she might to hold it at bay. Flashes of memory from her ‘nightmares’ went through her mind, but she couldn’t seem to fully grasp anything. She remembered being afraid. She remembered that she hadn’t been able to run, or scream, but whereas before remembering that had reassured her that the images had been part of some sort of strange dream, it failed to comfort her.
She’d felt drugged when she woke up. If she had been, then that would also account for the gaps in her memory, and not being able to move or speak.
Trying to discount the fear clawing at her, Bri got up and moved around the room, checking everything. The TV, like the bed and the chair, was merely a hollow box, formed in the shape of what it was supposed to be. The ‘chest’ the TV was resting on wasn’t a chest either. The drawers didn’t open.
The light switch didn’t work.
The curtains didn’t cover a window, either. When she shoved the curtains back, she found that the source of the light wasn’t the sun at all. It was a glowing box.
Struggling with the urge to give into hysteria, she moved to the furthest corner from the door, slid down to the floor, and curled into a tight ball against the wall, staring at the door that should have been the exit to the room and wasn’t.
Time passed. She had no way of marking it beyond the slow cramping of muscles from being held tensely for a long time, the cold seeping up through the floor and into her until she began to shake. When she couldn’t stand the chill any longer, she got up and moved to the platform that posed as a bed and dragged the coverlet around her.
Like everything else in the room, it wasn’t actually what it appeared to be. It wasn’t nice, fluffy, insulating cotton or polyester fibers sandwiched between woven fabric panels. She’d been too disoriented earlier to notice, but the moment she gathered it around her for warmth she realized the thing was made of some material unknown to her but rather closer to plastic than fabric. She clutched it around her anyway, trying to hold her own warmth close, still tense with fear.
In time, the fear lessened because she became too tired to hang on to it and there’d been no overt threat. She knew the danger was as real now as it had been before she’d become aware of it, and since she’d first become aware of it, but high emotion was exhausting. She’d actually begun to doze when a scraping sound brought her to full alert again. Jerking upright, she looked around the room with wide, terror filled eyes. When she didn’t see anything she could identify as a threat, she calmed slightly and looked more closely.
There was a plate of food and a cup sitting on the table near the fake window. She stared at it, but she knew it hadn’t been there before. After looking all around it to see if she could figure out where it had come from and coming up empty, she settled against the hard ‘bed’ again, pulled the cover tightly around her, and lay staring at the wall with her back to the ‘offering’.
It would have been harder to ignore it if not for two circumstances.
She couldn’t smell it.
And nothing in the room, so far, had been ‘real’ in the sense that it actually was what it was made to represent. In all likelihood, the food was made out of the same stuff that everything else had been molded from and completely inedible, however appealing it looked.
She’d replayed her scattered memories over and over in her mind until she had begun to have a horrendous picture in her mind that she could not dismiss and still had trouble accepting.
She hadn’t gotten out of her car. She knew that now. She’d blacked out for some unknown period of time and woken inside something vaguely like a hanger. And the strange, horrible, many legged creatures had come out of the dark and disassembled her car.
There’d been blinding light before she lost consciousness. She could remember thinking a helicopter must be above her with one of those blindingly bright spot lights they used.
And after she’d been taken from the car, she’d been in a room filled with men wearing strange looking suits--except they weren’t men at all. They’d been humanoid, but they hadn’t looked human when they’d placed her on something like an examination table and studied her.
She’d finally narrowed everything down to two possibilities.
Either her mind had snapped and she had woken up in a mental institute.
Or she’d been taken.
Chapter Two
Bri discovered she’d been wrong about having no way to mark the time. Hunger came, gnawed at her, and dissipated. Her bladder filled, and she was forced to go back into the bathroom and use the toilet, which she found was an unnerving experience and hard to grow accustomed to. The light in the fake window dimmed and brightened as if marking the cycle of the sun.
She was in a habitat, she realized, not a mental institution, a habitat designed specifically for the human animal by a species not human and therefore unfamiliar with the objects they had so carefully placed inside her cage to make her feel ‘at home’.
The room had dimmed when she heard a hiss that startled her from a state near sleep to complete wakefulness.
She registered a strange smell a split second before she felt the effects of the gas they’d filled the room with. In spite of all she could do, she felt herself falling under the effects of it, growing heavy, weak, and very quickly unable to move at all.
She would almost have welcomed complete unconsciousness, but she supposed they were afraid that might kill her.
She hung on to the thought that they wanted her alive.
She was placed on something that moved like before, a gurney she supposed, and taken to another room, the same room, she thought, that she’d dreamed before that had looked like an examination room in a hospital or perhaps a surgery room.
This time her clothing was removed. She wasn’t certain how. One moment, she was clothed, the next she was naked.
There as a strong similarity to the things they did to experiences she’d had over the course of her life with doctors. The instruments they used looked strange and unrecognizable, but then so, too, did most medical instruments, and her mind was too foggy for her to trust her perceptions. It could have been exactly the same things used by doctors on Earth, but she didn’t think so anymore than she believed the men around her were just ordinary human beings distorted by drugs into seeming like monsters.
Her perceptions were distorted, however. She knew that. Mostly, she was only aware of pressure here and there, occasionally almost to the point of pain, but she was only mildly discomforted.
The main reason she knew her perceptions were distorted, however, was because she knew she would have been terrified if she had not been drugged.
She still felt a vague sense of relief when they returned her to the habitat.
Assuming the light was an indication of Earth days passing, by her reckoning three days passed before she woke to discover a change in her circumstances that was more disturbing than anything before.
She’d been afraid to eat or drink. The hunger, after the first day of fasting, wasn’t as hard to deal with as she’d thought it would be because she wasn’t hungry all the time. The hunger was painful, but it would pass. The steady declining of her strength didn’t, and she knew she was becoming dehydrated very quickly.
The second time they came for her after her arrival, one of them spoke for the first time. He had leaned down until she could see his face clearly through the helmet he wore. “You must eat--drink what provided, or we must feed with tube.”
The words were clearly enunciated, and in English, and it had still taken her several moments to translate because it had sounded like those peculiar messages pieced together digitally from a recording of someone pronouncing a random collection of words. Without emotional inflection, with her mind clouded by the drugs in her system, she still had not fully grasped the implied threat until she’d been returned to the room where they kept her.
It comforted her in a way. Not only did they at least seem to believe they were providing her with sustenance to keep her alive, the threat that they would feed her if she didn’t feed herself assured her that they meant to keep her alive.
It was almost as unnerving, though. She’d finally accepted that she had been taken, but she had fallen back on those wild reports and claims that she had never believed before. Everyone who’d claimed to have been abducted by aliens had said they were studied and returned.
The implication that they might not have the intention of returning her seriously undermined her determination to keep her fear at bay.
When she woke the third day and discovered that her clothing had not been returned as before--that she was wearing nothing but a loose, shapeless shift like a hospital gown--she felt an instant stab of uneasiness that became more pronounced when she discovered she had been fitted with a thick collar such as one might place on an animal. As she sat up abruptly to tug at the thing, she saw that the door was open.
Her heart leapt immediately at that discovery and stilled in the very next second as the realization sank in that they would not have simply left the door ajar for her to escape. Dismissing her consternation over the collar for the moment, she stared at the sliver of light revealed in the opening, wondering if this was some new test they’d devised.
It was hard to escape the sense that she’d become a lab rat.
Had they decided, now that they’d thoroughly examined every inch of her body and run every lab test they could conceive, to run her through a series of tests to judge her intelligence? Like a rat in a maze? Or had they decided that she needed the exercise just as she needed the virtually tasteless food they provided?
She supposed tasteless was better than what it might have been, but the fact that, no matter what they made the food appear like, it still had the taste and consistency of mush hadn’t encouraged her to eat more than what she absolutely had to to keep them from shoving it down her throat with a tube.
The water was more bearable, and she’d never liked to drink water.
Ignoring the opened door for the moment, she got off the platform and went into the bathroom to use the facilities. The lavatory still didn’t work like a normal lavatory, but they had obviously been observing her from the moment she arrived because when she’d begun trying to bathe herself with the little cups of water, they’d provided her with a grudging supply for hygiene. Grudging, because the taps in the bathroom worked rather like the pretend faucets in a child’s playset. She could pump little spurts of water into her palm and mop off with it.
She supposed it was rationed, and for a good reason. But for someone who was accustomed to bathing at least once a day, preferably twice, and brushing her teeth three times a day, and washing her face and hands in between, it was miserable.
She hated being confined.
She hated having nothing to do with her time but worry about what they intended to do with her.
She hated having nothing but water to drink.
She hated being fed food that might as well have been saw dust for all the taste it had.
But most of all she hated having to struggle just to feel a modicum of cleanliness.
Ok, so maybe she was borderline OCD about bathing, especially her face and hands, but she couldn’t help it, and she began to think if anything was going to break her down into a blithering moron, not being able to bathe like she wanted to might do it.
When she’d bathed the best she could, she studied the collar in her reflection in the mirror-like thing they’d hung in the bathroom. It wasn’t an actual mirror, either because they were afraid to put glass where she could get to it, or because they hadn’t actually grasped what the point of the mirror was. But it did reflect a wavy image. Unfortunately, it was so distorted that she couldn’t really tell much more about the thing around her neck than she’d already been able to determine by touch.
It seemed to be made out of the same material they used for pretty much everything. She could not find a fastening on it. She looked for that first.
It wasn’t tight, but she wasn’t used to having anything so close around her throat, and it bothered her as badly as getting a ring stuck on her finger, or her hand or foot wedged into a crevice, in a claustrophobic sense.
She didn’t think it was just a collar. There was a reason they’d placed it there, and she feared it had to do with control, which meant there was no telling what the thing could do to her.
She wanted it off! After wrenching at it until she’d managed to rub the skin around her neck raw she finally accepted defeat, for the moment, and desisted.
The purpose of it was still prominent in her mind, however, as she left the bathroom.
A tray of food had appeared, and she moved to it and dutifully drank the water and nibbled half-heartedly at the food because she knew they were watching to see if she ate it, and she didn’t want to find out what they could do to her if she didn’t.
She studied the door while she ate, wondering if the collar was part of this ‘test’ and how. Would it shock her if she tried to go out? Or shock her if she retreated from the door and into the corner?
It might be to control her, but the underlying purpose might be to teach her the futility of trying to escape.
She knew that already, though, had realized it from the moment she finally accepted that she was in the hands of aliens because she very much doubted that they’d built this elaborate prison on terra firma. They weren’t on Earth anymore. She was convinced of that, and if that was the case then it wouldn’t do her any good at all to get out of the room because she still couldn’t escape them.
She had fought back hysteria for two reasons. One, it wouldn’t accomplish a damned thing except, possibly, to convince them she was crazy and therefore useless. And two, in the back of her mind, she hoped that they’d let her go when they were done ‘playing’ with her.
Deciding about the time she’d finished eating that they had left the door open because they meant for her to go out, she moved slowly toward the door, glancing around the room futilely to see if she could spot the camera they used to watch her. She hesitated when she reached the door and then placed her hand slowly on the knob, expecting any moment to feel a jolt shoot through her.
When nothing happened, she tightened her hold on the knob, pulled the door open slowly, and leaned around the edge to peer out.
Her heart nearly failed her when she did, and the urge to collapse on the floor and weep nearly overwhelmed her.
She’d been right. She’d been so right she felt like screaming and never stopping.
There was no end to her habitat. Beyond the fake hotel room lay an entire fake world that went on for as far as she could see into the distance.
Bri had already begun unconsciously backing away from the view beyond her room when a painful jolt went through her that stopped her in her tracks. She uttered a muffled cry as fiery pain slithered along her nerve endings. By the time it subsided she was no longer in any doubt at all that she was meant to go out or what they’d do to her if she didn’t comply.
Panting with fear as the pain finally began to subside, she moved toward the door, hovered there for a moment, and then stepped outside when another, milder jolt, urged her on.
The first thing she noticed, because she was already struggling for breath because of her fear and pain, was that the air seemed thick, and it was a struggle to breathe. It was also hot. Within a matter of seconds she could feel moisture begin to pop from her pores.
As accustomed as she was to high humidity given that she’d grown up in the semi-tropical region of the U.S., she was still uncomfortable within moments and she hadn’t even exerted herself.
Just above the ‘horizon’, a fake sun hovered in a strangely colored sky studded with stranger colored clouds. Beneath her now bare feet was black soil that still looked somehow different from Earth’s dark soil, possibly because of the texture, and a smattering of strange, low growing vegetation. A few trees and shrubs dotted the landscape between the almost dome-like habitats that surrounded the ‘green’, but none of the vegetation looked familiar.
Why, she wondered, would they go to so much effort to reproduce a landscape and not make it Earth-like?
Because she was the only occupant from Earth, she wondered, feeling faint at the thought? Because this looked familiar to the majority? Just as her ‘room’ looked like something she was at least vaguely familiar with, or that they had reason to believe would be familiar to her.
When she’d fully emerged, the door closed behind her. She heard a distinct click that indicated it was sealed and she would not be allowed to go back inside.
Her heart kicked up several notches in beat, but when she turned and surveyed the landscape again, she began to have serious palpitations.
Emerging from the other habitats were--beings. Even from a distance, she could see that they were alien, not human, although they were humanoid in appearance and their proportions appeared to be very similar to humans. Their flesh tones, though, were not like any race she was familiar with even if she wasn’t close enough to tell much about their features. It was golden, but distinctly more yellow than brown. Most seemed to have dark hair, brown or black, pulled back from their faces to the crown of their heads and worn in a ‘pony tail’ that reached to their waists. The light from the false sun brought out greenish-gold glints, but she wasn’t certain if it was just a trick of the light or if their hair actually had that color of highlights.
They all seemed to be male, every one that she could see from where she stood--either that or their women did not have breasts, because they were bare chested, covered only below the waist by some sort of breeches and either leggings or boots that came up to their knees.
As they moved further from their habitats and closer to her, she began to see their features somewhat better, but it was no relief to see that their faces were as human looking as their bodies. They still seemed alien. They looked fierce, somehow almost barbaric, although she had no idea what gave her that impression except, maybe, plain old fashioned fear. That didn’t mean they were, and she certainly couldn’t judge them by their clothing considering what she’d been given to wear, but that was still the impression she got. Maybe because, besides looking fierce and dangerous, they appeared to be tattooed--either that or they had really strangely patterned skin--not necessarily a sign of being primitive since everybody and his brother seemed to be getting them these days--and they were built like a people accustomed to hard physical labor. Also not necessarily indicative of primitives since there were plenty of body builders and professional sportsmen that were bulked up similarly on Earth.
They reminded her strongly of the hulk, except they were yellow not green.
She was relieved to see that although they appeared to have noticed her and seemed curious, they didn’t seem inclined to approach too closely, for they stopped before they’d covered more than half the distance that separated her from them.
She refused to actually look in their direction at first, fearful that doing so might encourage them to move closer. After a few cautious glances, however, she noticed something odd.
They’d formed almost a straight line--a line which she noticed several paced along as if there was some invisible barrier preventing them from moving closer, but they were considering attempting to breech it.
Frowning, she transferred her attention from the aliens to the landscape again. She noticed the demarcation then. Stones had been set at regular intervals in perpendicular lines to separate each exercise yard.
Like dogs, they’d been fitted with control collars to keep them within their separate boundaries.
The aliens obviously already knew this, so even if they were primitive, they didn’t lack intelligence.
Curiosity surfaced, but she decided she didn’t want to test to see if they could cross the barrier.
* * * *
Frustration was not an emotion Kole had been intimately acquainted with before the Sheloni had raided his village and captured them--taken everyone they hadn’t killed outright. He’d become far too familiar with it since that time, though, and it irked him no end to be forced to behave as if he’d been cowed by their superiority, to sit idly by as docile as a grazing nyak and do nothing more than wait and watch for the opportunity to strike. His people looked to him to lead them, however. If he could not contain his impatience to strike back, they would not, and more would die uselessly.
They’d lost almost a third of the female warriors since they’d been taken. The knowledge made him sick with the rage he had to hold inside, but he was almost as angry with the women as the Sheloni. It was one thing to give one’s life in battle. Even ritual suicide was honorable in the face of defeat, but to throw their lives away only because they’d been impregnated just to destroy the lives they’d created?
He could not fathom why they had done that. There was no honor in it even though many had claimed it was to prevent the Sheloni from using them as leverage against the men, to prevent the unborn from being born to slavery, because they had known that they would not be able to fight if they were heavy with child.
None of those reasons were acceptable for aborting their seedlings, he thought with thinly repressed fury. The Hirachi race was being systematically wiped out and they had contributed to that directly and many of them had died forcing their bodies to abort.
At best it was insubordination, completely contrary to his orders, and it had weakened their force for the time when they could strike back.
At worst it had demoralized the men demoralized him, because their young were their hope for the future--an unexpected gift--something above themselves worth fighting for. They would have fought harder knowing it was to protect their unborn.
Now it wasn’t nearly as hard for the men to behave as if they were cowed--they were--not by the Sheloni and their machines and torture devices, but by their women. Many wondered if there was even any point in trying to throw off the yolk of the Sheloni. What future did they have anyway? With many of their women dead already and the lives of the others hanging on the decision of the Sheloni, and their young dead, all they had left to inspire them to fight was the need for revenge--and that was an emotion that made wise men into careless fools who would throw away their own lives without regard for the consequences to their brothers in arms.
He was so deep in his morose thoughts he didn’t at first notice the timid creature that emerged from the hut almost directly across from his own--or rather he did. The movement caught his attention at once. He simply didn’t consciously acknowledge what his gaze rested upon at first.
It moved cautiously. He imagined he could almost smell the fear emanating from it. The pale coloring of the creature threw him off, brought his mind to focus on it as he realized it walked on two legs. It was wearing one of the gowns the Sheloni dressed the female slaves in, which indicated that it was a creature of intelligence, not merely a beast –and female.
Curious despite himself, he moved to the perimeter of his yard to get a better look.
The creature halted, staring at him and the other men who, as curious as he was, had moved closer for a better look. After hesitating for several moments, she moved to a scrubby mushmi that grew in her yard and looked it over, then began to walk around it, studying it.
He more than half expected her to either mark it or begin to graze upon the leaves of the stunted tree.
What was it? It appeared to be much like the Hirachi in form. He could tell little about the features of her face from the distance, but she assuredly had two eyes, one nose, and one mouth--two arms, two legs and hands and feet. This was no Hirachi, though ….
Unless it was a child, he thought, realizing abruptly that it wasn’t merely distance that made it appear small to his eyes.
He had not seen a child since he had been a child. Fully half that spawning had been snatched away by the Sheloni, and the females had refused to return to the spawning grounds thereafter.
It wasn’t a child, he decided. It looked … mature if the round globes pushing against the top of her gown, bouncing and swaying with her movements, was any indication … and his cock said it was. Mindless marvel that that was, controlled purely by instinct, it roused in interest. It was a … miniature … something … not Hirachi, similar, yes, but not the same. The skin was such a strange color, almost pink, but more white … like the freakish things occasionally born without color at all! The hair, as well, not dark but a mixture of red and brown and even gold.
If he hadn’t been bored out of his mind, he might not have found the strange female so fascinating.
Then again, he thought wryly, he had been known to lie to himself on occasion.
It occurred to him, though, that the Sheloni never did anything without reason. They were not impulsive creatures. They’d brought the female for a reason.
He wondered, if he had not been in season, if he would have been more than mildly interested, but it was a mute question. He was in season, just like everyone else, and his reasoning mind took a back seat to his needs when that was upon him. His mind might be telling him--alien--small, weak, and strangely colored, but his body had no interest in anything beyond the fact that it was female.
I must learn what I can about this creature and the purpose the Sheloni have in mind for her, he told himself--strategically it could be of importance.
Torment, the primitive side of his mind told him. They have brought females too spindly and weak to mount and breed just to drive us mad. They know we have to fight the urge to spawn, and they are bent upon using our weakness against us!
* * * *
Unnerved by the watchful gazes of the aliens, and, if the truth were acknowledged, the tension she sensed in them, Bri moved to the closest plant-like shrub and examined it, thinking it must be as fake as everything else. On closer examination, however, she decided that, as strange as it looked, it was a real, living--something.
As she moved around the alien plant, trying to focus on studying it and ignoring the aliens that watched her so intently, movement caught her attention, and she looked up to see a tiny, dark skinned woman emerge from a habitat across from hers. After blinking several times in disbelief, a surge of excitement went through her. A smile curled her lips, and she hurried toward the woman.
Looking as disoriented and frightened as she probably had when she’d first been thrust from the security of her habitat, the woman looked up and met her gaze. Relief seemed to flicker over her features. She hurried forward to meet Bri.
She didn’t know about the boundary, Bri realized when she saw the woman rushing upon the line. “No!” she shouted, breaking into a trot to try to stop the woman. “Don’t …!”
The jolt that went through the other woman made her body jerk and seize. When it stopped, the woman wilted to the ground. Bri stopped abruptly in her tracks, too stunned to react at first. Her throat closed. Tears clogged her nose and filled her eyes. “No!” she cried, rushing forward again. “No! Oh god!”
One of the nightmarish robots appeared--Bri had no idea where it had come from. She’d been focused on the woman lying in the dirt. She stopped again as the thing gripped the woman’s body and began to drag her back across the line. “You bastards!” she screamed, lifting her head and looking around as if she could see the aliens that had orchestrated the nightmare she’d found herself in. “You killed her! You slimy sons-of-bitches!”
Seeing that the robot had stopped dragging the woman when she turned in that direction again, Bri rushed to the edge of her compound, dashing the blinding tears from her eyes to study the woman hopefully.
She was breathing!
Bri wilted to the ground, watching, waiting, hoping the woman would regain consciousness.
Human! She’d never realized how happy it could make her just to see another human being! She’d wrapped her arms around herself and was rocking agitatedly when the woman let out a gasp and her eyelids fluttered.
“Hey!” she called, straining forward as far as she dared. “Are you alright?”
With obvious effort, the woman lifted her head. Finally, she struggled upright.
Opening her mouth finally, she uttered a string of … Spanish.
Bri stared at the woman blankly for several moments and then uttered a hysterical giggle. She couldn’t seem to stop once she started. She laughed and laughed until her sides hurt. The woman was giving her a look that spoke volumes, foreigner or not, about her doubts about Bri’s sanity. “It’s just so fucking typical! One Earth woman on this whole god damned ship, or whatever the hell it is, and you can’t even speak fucking English! And I can’t speak Spanish! Isn’t that fucking wonderful?”
“Si!”
Bri gasped for air and started laughing again. “I don’t care! It’s so fantastic to see somebody from Earth I’d kiss you if I could cross this line without being laid out!”
The woman gave her a strange look. “No habla Espanol?”
Bri mopped her eyes and face and wiped her nose. “Not a damned word! Nacho!” she exclaimed, chuckling again. “Taco! Oh god!” she added, chasing the laugh with a sob.
“Anglais?”
Bri nodded, recognizing the word. “At least--Gringo, or maybe that’s gringa? That’s supposed to be insulting, though--not that I am because I don’t know what the fuck it means. American.”
“El Savatore,” the woman responded.
Bri blinked at the woman, finally subduing the hysteria as she struggled with her geography. South America? Central? “We’re neighbors then!” she exclaimed, feeling a kinship--a closeness--she would never have felt before. The woman frowned, and she turned and pointed to the habitat she occupied and then pointed out that it was adjacent to the one the Hispanic woman had come from. “Neighbors.” She placed her hand against her chest. “I’m Bri … Sabrina MacIntyre, but most people just call me Bri.”
The woman stared for a moment before that sank in. She smiled wanly and placed her hand against her own chest. “Consuelo.”
“Kole.”
Both Bri and Consuelo jumped at the deep, resonant voice. Turning, Bri saw that the alien nearest them had come as close to the line as he could. He’d knelt down so that he was nearly on a level with them.
Not quite. Up close, she saw that he was … massive.
Bri stared at him uneasily for several moments before she turned and looked at Consuelo questioningly. They exchanged a speaking glance and turned to look at the alien again.
He placed his hand over his chest as they had. “Kole.”
He couldn’t cross the line--she was fairly certain, for she could see he wore a collar as they did, and Bri still felt uncomfortable, fearful. She might have felt that way if it had been any strange man that was so big and looked so fierce, but that went double because he was also alien.
She couldn’t seem to refrain from staring, though, studying him. Except for a few notable differences, he looked so human it was as if he was--just some race she’d never encountered before. The differences were striking, though. The strange flesh tones and even his hair. His eyes were different, too, not just a different color--a yellowish-brown, but the irises weren’t the same. His ears, exposed by the way he had his hair drawn back and tied, were pointed--sort of like the Vulcans from the Science Fiction TV show that had once been so popular.
The moment that thought popped into her head, she realized that his features rather reminded her of that character, too, for his face was all harsh plains and angles--not handsome by any means, but memorable--interesting.
Somehow she doubted he was the logical, emotionless sort of alien portrayed in the TV show, though.
He was tattooed, she saw now that he was crouched within a few yards of her. His nipples were pierced, too.
She dragged her gaze from his hairless, tattooed chest to the knotted ridge of flesh that ran along his arms from his wrists, across his shoulders, and along the sides of his neck, wondering if, like the tattoos and piercings, if it was something he’d done to his flesh to ‘adorn’ it or if it was a genetic trait. There was extra skin on his forearms, a loose flap of skin, a thin, almost transparent membrane that she didn’t notice initially. She couldn’t imagine what purpose it might serve, either.
He must be every bit of six and a half feet tall, maybe taller, she decided. Not that there weren’t humans that tall, but when combined with the sheer mass of muscles that bulged all over him it made him seem like a veritable giant, because he was no bean pole. He was large boned and fully loaded with hard, bulging muscles. She suspected he could play ‘make a wish’ and snap her in two without straining himself.
His palms were roughly the size of her face, his fingers--five she noted, almost surprised--were about as long and thick as an average human dick--then she wished she hadn’t thought about dicks at all. If his was proportionate to his size, it was a behemoth--scary thought!
She didn’t want to talk him. He was scary. Being deliberately rude wasn’t something she felt comfortable with, though.
Besides, she didn’t want to get on his bad side.
She managed a tremulous smile. “Bri.”
He frowned faintly and said something to her in a language that was as alien to her ears as he was to her eyes. She exchanged another look with Consuelo. Consuelo shrugged.
A look of frustration crossed his features. Finally, he lifted his head and pointed to the sun above them, making a sweeping motion as if following the path from horizon to horizon.
Bri frowned in confusion, but it occurred to her after a moment that he must be asking how long she’d been there. She shrugged and held up three fingers. “I think,” she added.
Consuelo apparently understood, as well. She held up five fingers.
Abruptly, the spurt of happiness Bri had been feeling from even a modicum of human contact deserted her. She needed to talk, desperately. She’d lived alone for years. She’d thought she was used to not having anyone to talk to, but she wasn’t. She’d always been surrounded by the sound of voices when she went anywhere, voices on her TV, her radio--not being able to hear any familiar sounds, not even being able to share work related conversations with her co-workers was worse than everything else.
She would’ve welcomed listening to Consuelo babble in her own language, even if she couldn’t understand a word of it, because it was at least somewhat familiar.
Resisting the urge to yield to another emotional outburst, she struggled to communicate with hand motions and finally began to draw in the dirt.
The alien, Kole, lingered, studying both her and Consuelo, but she couldn’t help but notice most of his focus was on her. Every time she glanced in his direction she met his gaze.
She couldn’t tell how much he understood of anything that she was doing, but there was a look of intelligence in his eyes that encouraged her to think he wasn’t as primitive as she’d first thought.
What possible difference that could make, she had no idea.
Apparently, the aliens didn’t particularly care for her efforts to communicate, however. They had not been together more than fifteen minutes when a shrill noise erupted around them. It brought her head up instantly.
Kole met her gaze and lifted his hand, pointing toward her habitat. Bri merely stared at him blankly until he rose to his feet and made the motion again.
Surging to her feet, she glanced around and discovered that everyone else had already turned toward their quarters. As reluctantly as she’d left it a short time before, Bri nodded her understanding, waved unhappily at Consuelo, and headed back.
Chapter Three
Bri found her safe corner and huddled when she had returned to the room, dropping her head across her arms and weeping for the first time since she’d been captured. When she’d finally exhausted herself, she moved listlessly to the bed and sprawled across the hard surface, trying to figure out why she felt like crying when she’d actually had the best day since she’d been there.
She realized after a while that it was a sense of hopelessness. She allowed herself to think of her despondency as disappointment for a while, that she’d finally gotten the chance to interact with a fellow human only to discover there was as much of a language barrier between them as between her and the aliens.
She was disappointed, vastly. She was also disappointed that she hadn’t been able to make physical contact. She’d yearned to just be able to touch, hug, hold hands--anything to feel the reassuring warmth and closeness of being around another human being after having been kept in a sterile tank for days.
After a time, though, she acknowledged that it was a sense of hopelessness that had brought on the bout of tears. She forced herself to face the fact that the root of that was a growing certainty that the aliens who’d captured her meant to keep her, not simply study her and put her back.
If she understood why, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad--maybe it would be worse. She tried to comfort herself with the belief that they meant to keep her alive for some reason. As awful as it was to think she might never go home again, she didn’t want to die. She especially didn’t want to die horribly.
She didn’t want to consider why there were so many male aliens, but she couldn’t avoid it.
However intelligent or technologically advanced the yellow aliens might or might not be, it seemed unavoidable that they had been chosen for their powerful physiques. She’d only seen the one who called himself Kole close up, but she’d noticed all of them at least appeared to be as big and strong as oxen--and that seemed to indicate the aliens that had taken them all needed or wanted them for something physical. She had only a vague idea of what the other aliens had been like, but she had had the impression that they were physically frail, taller than her, but thin and weak--robots seemed to do most of the physical labor for them.
The collars they had all been fitted with, she realized, might signify more than simply a means of controlling their ‘lab animals’. There was a very real possibility that they might all have been enslaved and just didn’t know it yet.
The thought boggled her mind, but as enlightened as the human race was, slavery still existed all over the world. It might be illegal everywhere, frowned upon, despised, but it was still going on--mostly sex slavery.
An image of Kole rose in her mind at that thought, and she shuddered.
She pushed the half formed thought aside. If the slaver aliens had taken her for a sex slave, it wouldn’t be to toss her to their other slaves--she didn’t think.
What purpose could she serve for them, though?
She’d never thought of herself as particularly weak, frail, or dainty, but beside this yellow race she certainly was, so she couldn’t delude herself into thinking they had taken her for physical labor or because she was an excellent physical specimen. They didn’t seem to have a great deal of respect for other intelligent beings, so she couldn’t imagine they’d wanted her for her mind either.
Maybe she was just scaring herself? Maybe she really was just a part of some bizarre experiment and they would take her back when they were done studying her?
She wanted to believe that, but, deep down, she didn’t, not anymore. The fact that they did not come for her that night seemed to support instead of refute that fear.