On Surviving An Alien Abduction (Mates of the Zapharian Empire #1)

Chapter 1

one

. . .

Emily

A celebrity gets caught in an AI scandal.

My favorite indie video game gets pushed back another year.

Another person in the hand-dyed yarn community fakes their death to get out from under overwhelming orders.

World War III starts.

At this point in my life, I’d given up on filling my New Year’s bingo card with anything hopeful or life-goal related. The only way I was making it through the next year was with a hearty dose of cynicism, and a few good memes.

Kelsey, my BFF and roommate, had put “Alien Invasion” on her card, but I just laughed my drunk ass off, poured another drink, and counted down to midnight, kissing my cat, Bennet, when the ball dropped.

An alien invasion might just be an improvement on the current state of things, far too hopeful an idea for my bingo card.

But no, this wasn’t an invasion. The goopy, baby-poop yellow monster that appeared on New Year’s morning, just as I walked through the park to my favorite bakery for a hangover chocolate croissant, wasn’t looking to invade Earth. He was just abducting women.

The creature slid out of the trees in a loping roll, a long floating stretcher following behind, carrying an unmoving woman in a Barbie-pink sweatsuit.

I stopped my hungover stagger and squinted into the shade, needing a second to process what I was seeing.

Unfortunately while I sat there, loading wheel spinning above my head, staring at the sun casting golden rays through the translucent ball of poop, a pair of eyes within the mass of goo dilated as they spotted me.

Something that looked like a purple banana rose, and a beam of light hit me square in the chest. That was the last thing I remembered before waking up in a cage with eight other women, all in varying stages of consciousness.

I blinked and sat up. My head swam, my vision went fuzzy, then black for a moment and hands braced me before I fell.

“Easy. Go slow,” a voice whispered.

I blinked a few times until a sweet, round face and a bright pink tracksuit came into view.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“We aren’t sure,” pink girl said. “But the consensus is we’ve been abducted by aliens. Whoa there!” She reached out and grabbed me just as I started to sway.

My heart pounded in my chest, and my mind very much wanted to pass out again and wake up somewhere else.

“Keep it together, okay? We’re alive and we can’t afford for everyone to break down here.”

The pink girl shot a look to my left, where a stocky, round girl with dark skin and straight black hair sat curled in on herself, sobbing.

Sobbing right now didn’t sound like too bad of an idea.

Maybe if I gave it a minute, I could go catatonic until this whole issue was resolved.

My heart thumped erratically, and my breathing felt shallow. Yeah, wouldn’t be long now.

“Do you think aliens are really into BBWs?”

I blinked and turned back to the girl in pink. My mind spun, and somehow a laugh escaped my throat. “What?”

“I mean look around.” The girl in pink gestured, and sure enough, the other women in the cage were all various levels of thick and fat, just like me and my not even close to midsize ass.

“I thought if aliens were going to abduct anyone, it would be all young, skinny chicks, right? But I’m thirty-two and this tracksuit is just for show if you know what I mean. ”

I glanced down the woman’s body, and I mean, yeah, she was big, but she was also stunning. Curves in all the right places, and boobs even bigger than mine. I met her determined blue eyes. “Thank you.”

“For what?” she asked.

“You snapped me out of what was likely to be a pretty serious breakdown.”

Her face broke into a wide grin and her eyes sparkled. “Yeah, I thought that would work. Want to help me try to get these other women ready for a chat? We need a game plan.”

I nodded and crawled over to a pale girl with thick black eyeliner who was just starting to stir.

Most of the women remembered seeing the goopy guys, so there wasn’t complete shock at the concept of aliens, but the reality was far harder to accept.

While most of the women present seemed to get that the situation was dire and we all needed to remain level-headed, there were still a few who were locked up in catatonic fear.

When the goopy guys returned to open our cage and place another unconscious woman inside, I moved to the far side of the bars and watched them retreat down an empty-looking corridor.

They repeated the process, delivering a few more women as the hours ticked by.

After everyone was awake, and no one new had been delivered for what felt like a few hours, Jen, the girl in the pink tracksuit, started testing the walls of our cell, as if the rusted and pockmarked metal, or the thick bars separating us from the hall, might give way with just the right tug.

They didn’t, and eventually she settled in a corner, a contemplative look on her face as she studied her fresh manicure.

No one talked much after the initial discussion of our fate, and I settled into silence, wondering if my cat, Bennet, would be happier with my roommate than he was with me.

That night, or what we treated as night, was long, cold, and lonely.

I curled up in a corner, ignoring the growl of my stomach, and rested my head against the hard metal floor and focused on the vibration of what had to be the spaceship’s engines.

I pretended it was the deep purring of Bennet, lulling me to sleep as he did every night.

The next morning I woke, depressed to see absolutely nothing had changed.

I took my turn with the dark, stinky hole in the corner of the cage and drank water from a trough against the wall.

No one had yet been brave enough to eat the brown pellets dispensed from a slot next to the water, but I shrugged and popped one into my mouth.

Someone gasped, and I glanced at the goth girl, Morgan, whom I had helped wake up. I made eye contact and chewed. It was dry and tasted like sour sawdust and maybe a little like pickles, but I swallowed it with some water and shrugged. “We can wait and see if I die before anyone else tries it.”

Jen snorted, but Morgan frowned and moved to sit across the room.

After a few hours, when I didn’t so much as burp, the others decided it was safe enough and we all had a lovely breakfast of compressed sawdust. As if the food encouraged socialization, a few of the women started theorizing why we’d been taken.

Jen tried to keep the conversation positive, if sarcastic, but the general consensus remained that the aliens either liked plump human roasts or planned to use us for sex.

While neither option seemed like a great time, Cindy, a cute, bombshell brunette with caramel honey highlights, pointed out alien romance books had done us all dirty.

Absolutely no one wanted to see how anything worked with the blobs of translucent baby poop that occasionally rolled by to check on us, their leery eyeballs and other objects drifting through their bodies, and a definite odor radiating off them.

They didn’t seem to try to communicate, but just stood there, their shape always slightly in motion.

That night, as I focused on the sound of the engines, trying to drift off to peaceful—if not uncomfortable—unconsciousness, but the vibrations through the floor weren’t quite so soothing, more of a rattle than a purr.

We continued on that way for a few days, or what I assumed were a few days.

It was hard to tell, never sleeping well, never eating well, the light never faded.

I was cold and hungry and stinky, but so was everyone else.

I wanted to whine and complain, but there was enough of that going on and I didn’t want to add to the noise.

Instead, I stayed quiet unless spoken to and tried my hardest not to give up hope completely.

On what I thought might be the fourth or fifth day, I fell asleep to the soft purr of the engines, and woke to the rattling knock of faulty machinery.

I jerked awake, heart racing.

The lights in the hallway outside the cell flickered, and the sounds of a faulty engine followed me from my dreams. Cassy screamed as she jerked awake, her eyes frantic, and anyone who wasn’t awake before quickly followed.

“What’s going on?” someone yelled, but before anyone could answer, one of the gloopy guys appeared and pressed his goop against a panel on the door.

The rough knocking clanks got louder and the floor and walls vibrated. With a soft click, the cell bars lowered into the floor.

“Should we try and run for it?” Jen asked, coming up next to me.

“Think we can take him? Have any of us seen how they fight?” another woman whispered.

“He doesn’t have one of those purple bananas,” I added.

“I’m going for it,” Jen said. I met her determined eyes and nodded, and we both crouched and moved toward the opening.

Before we got there, Bonny jumped to her feet and threw herself at the gloopy guy with a warrior yell.

I jumped up, ready to help, but the gloopy guy shot out a long tentacle of slime and wrapped it around Bonny.

Her war cry turned into a screech as she fought against the slime, but the alien easily lifted her off the floor, pulling her from the cage.

More tentacles of slime shot into the cage, followed by screams of terror.

I tried to jump away as a rope of slime reached for me, but it wrapped itself around my wrist. I scratched at it, pulling and twisting, but it was stuck tight, like sticky fruit leather, yet impossible to break.

The alien began pulling us from the cage, and I stumbled forward, knocking into Cassy. I braced myself on her shoulder as we were pulled tightly together and shuffled out of the cell and down the hall.

I tried to look over my shoulder at the remaining blob, but there were too many bodies in the way, all of us bound together with the most disgusting rope imaginable.

The lights continued to flicker, and a horrible grinding noise rose from the floor, but all we could do was shuffle along.

Every hall looked the same, with doors and corridors breaking up the flow.

We were shoved down one hall and around a few turns to another stretch of blank wall.

The gloopy rope brought us to a halt, and a small tendril of alien flesh pressed against an indent in the blank metal.

With a whoosh, the wall opened and revealed a small chamber that we were promptly shoved into.

When the alien finally released me, there were too many women between me and the door to do anything.

All I could see over their heads was a single floating eye in the gloopy alien’s body as its tendrils reformed into its previous blob shape. The door closed.

The pod shook and jumped to the side, causing me to catch an elbow in the stomach as I stepped on someone’s foot.

I ignored the yelling and pointless questions as my eyes focused on the pattern of the wall next to me.

No, not a wall, a window. Outside the pod was a stunningly black sky with millions of twinkling stars, the brightest, most intense night sky I had ever seen.

It was breathtaking, and for a moment I was ten years old, lying on the trampoline with my brother, looking up at the sky as he made up names for constellations.

“Oh my God. Did we spring a leak?” someone screeched.

Startled, I looked around at the walls, wondering if I was about to be ripped inside out in the vacuum of space, before realizing what the woman meant.

Looking down, yellow goo covered the floor, slowly filling the pod.

Everyone screamed and panicked, shoving and pushing, trying to get away from the slime, but it was everywhere and rising fast. When it touched the gap of skin between my sneakers and leggings, I flinched and tried to raise up on my tiptoes, but the goo held me firmly in place.

A moment later, it passed my ankles and climbed above my calves.

To my relief, the liquid didn’t feel quite like the ropes of alien flesh. It was cooler and tingly, and I could almost imagine it was something nice, like mentholated jelly, not some gross alien creation.

The woman next to me, Sarah, reached out and gripped my hand. I met her eyes and squeezed her hand three times. We would make it through this. We had to, right?

When the goo reached my hips, I really panicked. Once it was up to my armpits, I figured I didn’t have anything better to do, so I joined in with the pointless screaming. When I had to lift my chin to keep it away from my mouth, the tears poured down my face.

I held my breath. This was it. This was how I died.

But what was the point of it all? Why take the time and resources to kidnap us from our planet only to drown us in goo when their ship failed?

Was this some sort of preservation technique and someone was about to get a delivery of jellied woman flesh for dinner?

My lungs burned, my head swam, and I squeezed the hand of the woman next to me like it was my last lifeline as my strength gave out. My body forced me to inhale.

The liquid was cold and painful as it filled my lungs, and I closed my eyes, ready to pass out for the last time.

But somehow, I didn’t lose consciousness.

Instead, my whole body, and even my thoughts, seemed to slow, and I opened my eyes and focused on the stars outside the window.

I don’t know how long I floated there in the endless goo, but slowly one star, or maybe a planet, seemed to grow, a sphere of deep indigo streaked with bright blue, floating in the endless night.

The planet grew bigger and bigger until it was all I could see out the window.

Then the pod started shaking, the glass glowing around us as we bobbed like pieces of fruit stuck in a Jell-O cup.

For a moment, I believed we might make it, we might survive this ordeal, but then a light in the pod started flashing yellow, and we slammed against something hard and the gel ripped around me. I crashed into someone soft, then into the wall, and then I finally passed out.