Forbidden

Chapter One

Holding the blood-soaked body of her baby, Anna screamed. Her living room was a bloodbath. The bastards who had so viciously murdered her family had already disintegrated her husband’s corpse. Now they were advancing on her. They’d dispose of her son’s little body without wasting any effort.

They were the Gothe’maran. Other worlders with the features of humans but a vicious killing streak no dictator on Earth, past or present, could ever hope to match.

Part of her mind was conscious of the three men deciding her fate. She didn’t think she could stomach being part of the deplorable process that would bring more such monsters into the universe. Her mind and body couldn’t survive being brutally raped day after day. When they found out that she was incapable of having more children, that they couldn’t use her as breeding stock, and they would kill her.

Perhaps that would be for the best.

She’d never even had time to draw her weapon, and her first instinct had been to help the two most important people in her life, not to kill their attackers. Now her main focus was her infant son. Perhaps she should have felt more for her husband, and she was sure she would later, but now she was lost in a mother’s grief.

Then, just beyond the three hulking monsters, in her front yard, another man approached through the haze of the smoke-filled air. He wore the uniform of the Gothe’maran, and she thought he was even taller than the giant soldiers before her, but his features, save the midnight hair escaping his helmet, were obscured in the distance. Her gaze froze on his approaching form.

He stopped.

She stared.

Silently, she pleaded for his aid.

The first warrior reached her and yanked her to her feet by her hair, breaking her rapt gaze. Her son slid from her arms to the floor. Suddenly everything in her screamed at her to fight. Where before there had been a willingness, if not an eagerness, to just get it over with, to surrender to their sadistic handling until she finally succumbed to the arms of death, now she was taken over by an all encompassing need to fight. If she was meant to die, she’d take a few of the bastards with her.

Anna didn’t just feel the need to defend herself, she wanted to kill. She wanted to do to these bastards what they had done to her family. Never thinking herself capable of killing, no matter how essential, she drew her weapon and fired into the belly of the assailant holding her up on tiptoe by her hair. Blood splattered from his back, bathing his companions in the black, almost gelatinous substance. She quickly turned to the next-closest attacker and tried to fire, only to find her gun wouldn’t discharge a second time. The Gothies had now drawn weapons, and she knew she only had seconds to live.

Glancing behind the warriors, she saw the newcomer within arm’s length of them. Without a word, he reached around one man’s neck and gave a sharp twist. The crack of snapping vertebrae seemed deafening, and the last Gothie turned to face the newcomer.

“General?”

The look of surprise and indecision on the monstrous face of her attacker was unexpected. The Gothe’maran were infamous not only for their brutality, but for their extreme control over their emotions during battle. Nothing caused a Gothie to show weakness.

Before the last soldier could decide whether or not to shoot his comrade, a smoldering hole appeared in the exact center of his chest. He gave a howl of rage that turned to extreme agony. The hole grew wider and acrid smoke rose from the wound as it crept toward his throat and lower abdomen. Ash fell from his body as it was consumed by the strange weapon. The stench of burning flesh was almost overwhelming.

The man who had just saved her life stood looking at her with harsh black eyes. As usual for one of his race, those black eyes gave away nothing of what he was feeling.

Had he not been what he was she might have found him handsome in a darkly masculine way. His face held harsh angles from his straight nose to his chiseled cheekbones and almost square chin. A pale scar ran vertically from just above his left eye, slightly off center down the length of his face. But instead of detracting from his handsomeness, it only enhanced his special brand of dangerous, manly beauty.

He took a step toward her, reaching out with one hand. She retreated two steps, raising her presumably useless gun with unsteady hands. She knew she needed to pull the trigger, knowing that doing so -- if the damned thing fired -- could mean the difference between life and a miserable death. But that same instinct to fire on her would-be killer insisted she not shoot the man before her.

She felt drawn to him. Something inside her wanted take his hand. The man whose people had just slaughtered tens of thousands of her own in a single afternoon, including the two most precious in the world to her. Self-loathing permeated her mind. And shame.

She gripped the gun more firmly and tried to take aim at him, only to warn him off. This man was important to her. She needed him. He needed her. She knew he needed her as surely as she knew she needed to breathe. Confused, she looked away, and her gaze fell to the body of her son. Alex. Oh, my precious Alex !

Grief overtook her once again, and she staggered to his tiny, lifeless body. As she took him in her arms and cried into his little neck, she felt a stillness come over her. Her crying slowed somewhat. This was a terrible tragedy, something that never should have happened, and there would be hell to pay for it, but she would survive. She would survive because the man before her would have it no other way. She couldn’t help her husband or her son now, but she could help him.

She looked back at him in astonishment. Those feelings were his, not hers. What the hell was going on?

He took a tentative step toward her again just as the medallion on his collar beeped. He pressed it to his throat as he spoke in his own language.

The conversation lasted less than a minute. When he finished he looked at her once more. “I’ll find you again,” he said slowly, his harsh accent very thick. Then he was gone. But so was the body of her son. Taken right from her arms.

“No,” Anna whispered. Then in a gut-wrenching wail, “NO!” She fell to her knees and wept bitterly until she embraced an exhausted sleep.

Sleep was no comfort though. Her dreams were filled with her husband and baby’s screams. Several times she woke from her resting place on the floor where her family had perished. Several times she cried herself back to sleep, unable to move from the only place she could feel close to them. She didn’t even have bodies to bury. No way to find closure.

It was only later, when she had managed to move deeper into relatively safe UWA territory, she learned the man who had saved her life was the general in command of the forces trying to conquer what was left of the United States of America and the United World Army. He was General Kahn Mak’un. Also known as Kahn the Merciless.

* * *

Anna gasped as her body became a heated, sensitized version of itself. She could feel his hands moving over her flesh in the most tender of caresses. As he feathered light touches over her breasts and followed them with a wet lick, she arched into him, offering him whatever he wanted to take. She felt her nipples tighten, harden with the exquisite torture, and she barely held in the whimper that threatened to escape. She didn’t want the pleasure to end. Maybe this time would be different.

He trailed his lips down her body, his hands never forsaking her breasts, until he found the little indention of her navel. There he laved that sensitive spot before starting his downward descent. Her hands speared through his mass of dark hair, trying to hold to the illusion.

Just before he would have delved into the nest of curls at the apex of her thighs, he stopped and looked at her over her outstretched body. “You are mine, as I am yours. Never think I’ll allow you to be lost in this madness my people have started on your world. When I find you I will give you pleasure of the flesh, but I’ll also give back to you some of what you’ve lost.”

He buried his face in her cunt then, finding her clit with the uncanny accuracy she always expected of him. The cry she tried so valiantly to suppress emerged and Anna screamed her pleasure …

And woke herself from yet another dream that left her heavy with an unfulfilled, aching desire that no amount of masturbation could ever possibly ease. She knew. She had tried many times over the last several months.

Every night was the same since she’d first seen Kahn the Merciless. He came to her in dreams and left her more aroused and sexually frustrated than she thought she could bear. In a way, she felt guilty that she should welcome Kahn in her dreams even though many months had passed since she’d lost her family in the Pilot incident. In her heart though, she knew she had to move on. She still grieved, but she had to dwell in the land of the living.

Was she insane to want to give her body to the man who was most likely responsible for everything that had happened on Earth? Was she finally losing her mind? Maybe. All she knew for sure was that she had to find him. Only then would she find the relief she so desperately needed and the answers he so cryptically hinted at.

* * *

Anna’s dreams intensified each month. Every night, Kahn the Merciless took her to new heights of ecstasy only to leave her hanging there, unfulfilled.

It had been two years since her family was murdered. Two years Anna had spent preparing herself to find the nemesis of her dreams and find answers for all that had happened on Earth. Answers for what had happened to her. She had searched every form of media she’d had access to for anything about Kahn the Merciless. The funny thing was, there were no pictures of him prior to the Pilot incident. After that, he appeared several times but he was never photographed with a weapon in hand. Apparently he did his killing through his army.

As she entered the recruiting office of the Somerset, Kentucky, branch of the United World Army, Anna prepared for the questions to come. Questions there was no way she could answer truthfully.

The sergeant, an African American named Mahoney according to the nameplate in front of him, sat behind a desk that looked too small for his massive frame. He wore camouflage fatigues with the sleeves rolled up to expose burly forearms covered with a myriad of scars and tattoos. His shaven head, also sporting scars, gleamed in the harsh fluorescent lighting of the underground recruiting office. A tattoo of some odd Celtic-looking design covered the majority of his head. Anna wasn’t sure exactly how tall the man was, but she was sure he topped her own five feet six by several inches. She didn’t think she had ever seen a more intimidating human.

“I want to enlist,” Anna said.

“And you are?” he asked, barely looking up from the stack of folders before him.

“Anna Garrett. I’m a registered nurse and I’d like to do all I can as close to the Front as possible.”

She knew that would get his attention. The life expectancy of soldiers fighting on the front lines was less than two tours of duty. That of Mobile Army Surgical Hospital unit personnel wasn’t much better.

As she expected, the sergeant’s head snapped up and his dark-eyed glare pierced her. It was a few moments before he actually spoke.

“You’re aware the Gothe’maran do not distinguish between medical and combat personnel?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Then why?”

“I believe I can do the most good there. It is where the most people are needed.” The response was, of course, total bullshit, and the sergeant would have to be moronic not to know that, but it was the expected answer to that question. There were only two reasons anyone would ask to be assigned to the Front. One was condoned, the other was not.

He regarded her a moment. “I’ll have to pull up your civilian file. The UWA needs people at the Front too badly for me to dismiss anyone willing to go, but we will not help someone commit suicide.”

“I understand. Would you like me to save you the trouble and tell you my experiences with the Gothe’maran?”

Again, she saw the surprise at her straightforwardness and had to smile inwardly. Humans were nothing if not predictable. It was a wonder they had managed to last this long in the war. All good humor faded with that thought.

Sergeant Mahoney sat back in his chair and regarded her thoughtfully. “Where are you from?”

“It’s called Pueblo, Kentucky, but you will know it as the Pilot.”

At the mention of the Pilot, the obviously battle-hardened man blanched. “Dear God! And you expect me to believe you aren’t suicidal?”

“Sergeant, I want to kill as many Gothies as I can. Now, as a surgical nurse, I probably won’t have the opportunity to actually kill any at all, but maybe I can patch together a few of our men and women who can.”

“Well,” he said, his focus once again on the files and papers scattered on his desk, “if there are no other more recent incidents, you’ve cleared the waiting period by exactly one day, but I suspect you did that on purpose.” He referred to the mandatory two-year enlistment waiting period set up by the UWA just after the Pilot incident. Too many men and women had thrown their lives away needlessly after that massacre, and Earth didn’t have the people to spare.

“I watched them butcher my husband and my son, Sergeant. The only reason I’m still here is because I can still have children.” A lie, but then again so was the rest of her story. “I should have been on a transport back to their home world, but I managed to get away after I killed a couple of them.” God help her if anyone found out differently.

Mahoney sighed. “You realize that just being a nurse isn’t going to cut it at the Front. There will be other training you’ll need before we can send you in.”

“What other training, Sergeant?”

“For one thing, the doctors and nurses at the M.A.S.H. units there do more than surgeries. They actually have to go into the field and get the wounded more than half the time, so you’re going to need some training in emergency evacuation and medical intervention. That can take at least six months to complete at best.”

“Would it help speed things up if I told you I am a nationally registered emergency medical technician paramedic as well as a nurse?” she asked with a smirk. She knew very well it would make a difference. She had been planning this since the day her family died… and he left. “I’m perfectly qualified in the areas you just mentioned.”

“I see,” Mahoney said. He paused to stare at her as if sizing her up. “Well,” he finally continued, “I’ll run this by the regional commanding officer and see if we can get you out there in a couple of days.” He stood and offered her his hand. “I’ll be in touch, Ms. Garrett.”

When she would have pulled her hand from his, his grip tightened. “I want you to really think about what you’re doing, Anna. That place is as close to hell as anyone can ever see. Some of the weapons they use are designed to make the torment last as long as possible. They make what they used at the Pilot look like squirt guns.”

Anna smiled. “Thank you, Sergeant. I’m making this request with my eyes wide open. I know what I’m getting myself into.” That statement was only partially true.

She knew about the Front, but she didn’t know about Kahn the Merciless, and he was the reason she was going there in the first place. She knew that, if she could survive, she would eventually find the man because his forces would push back the battle lines and the chances of her getting captured were great. She was taking a huge gamble that he’d see her before she was killed, but it was one she had to take. She had dreamt of the man every night since he had saved her and two things were very clear to her -- he needed her more than ever, and if the dreams didn’t stop soon, she’d probably die from unfulfilled lust.

* * *

A week later, she sat on a bus filled with determined, if frightened, men and women headed to a little place near what used to be Lexington, Kentucky -- the state’s own little piece of hell nicknamed the Front. She was going there intending to be taken as a prisoner of war by a race of people who didn’t take prisoners. She was walking into the lion’s den and, God help her, she had never been more excited in her life.