Claimed By the Alien Huntsman (Clan of the Forgotten Tundra #1)

Chapter 1

ROBBIE

“Fucking hell, they need to put some lights along this road.”

I didn’t like driving at night, and today was no exception.

If anything, it proved my point as to why driving at night sucked.

My astigmatism was mild, but it caused me to see halos around street lights and car headlights.

But some light, even if it was artificial, was better than none at all.

Tonight was one of those especially sucky night driving experiences where the inky darkness swallowed up my headlights, there was no moon to give even a glimmer to help me see my way, and yay, the current route I was taking to get to the next stop on my route could only be accessed via long stretches of rural highway surrounded by pine forests.

“They need to pay me better for this shit,” I said.

“Ah!” I shouted as something leaped in front of me in the darkness, its large shape moving too fast for me to see what it was.

I slammed on the brakes, but it was already gone.

“Probably a deer,” I told myself. That was the last straw.

I was finding a new job after this. Being a quality control officer for a premade sandwich company sounded great in theory, and on paper, the job was simple enough.

Visit random locations in a two state area and check that the vendor was actually displaying my company’s product properly and that all the goods were arriving in a satisfactory condition.

Also, that they were disposing of the out of date food in the manner dictated by the agreement.

The reality was that the company sent me a list of places that included some that were very far away from each other, and only paid me a few cents a mile to travel to them. Oh, and they included places like mom and pop gas stations in the middle of no-fucking-where.

I took a deep breath. ”It’s okay. You didn’t hit it, " I said, just as something else came careening out of the dark, slamming into the side of my car. I screamed, the sudden impact startling in its intensity. This was no mere smack. It was enough to rock my car over onto its side.

“What?” I breathed heavily, trying to make sense of what had just happened.

I peered through the windshield and saw nothing but the empty road ahead.

Nothing but inky sky appeared through my driver’s side window.

“What the actual fuck?” My brain told me I needed to try to get out of my car to see if whoever had collided with me was alright.

I pressed the button to release my seatbelt only for the car to get impacted again, this time hitting the exposed undercarriage of my car.

Since I was unbuckled, the force threw me forward and a bit to the side, my head hitting the dashboard before I landed sprawled across the seats, the gear shift digging into my upper abdomen.

A strange clicking and chirping sound got my attention, and I lifted my head to look through my windshield again.

It had a large crack in it now, and I found myself wondering how that had happened when I’d been hit underneath.

A bright light dazzled my eyes, and I squinted, trying to make out the shape of the person I could see coming from whatever vehicle had stopped to help us. Green? No, that couldn’t be right.

A second figure joined the first, and they stepped closer. Yes, they were definitely covered head to toe in green and gray and wearing some sort of respirator mask.

One of them raised a hand to point at my car, and another flash of light sent me careening into darkness.

I woke up to more bright lights and hands holding me down as I moved along a corridor.

Hospital. I must have been there longer than I’d thought, and those had been paramedics or maybe firefighters responding to the accident.

The person who hit me must have called, or someone came along from a house nearby that I’d missed the driveway to, thanks to it being nestled in the woods.

I reached up to touch the mask on my face, only for a hand to slap mine away.

There was something wrong with the hand, and I struggled for a moment to figure out what that was.

Then it hit me - it was green, with too many finger joints.

I followed the gray sleeve up to look at the person it belonged to and screamed.

He cocked his head and chirped and a sweet gas filled my nose and mouth and I careened off into darkness once more.

I came to with the worst hangover of my life.

My mouth was dry and tasted like shit, my eyes were gritty, and someone was having way too much fun playing the drums in my head.

Also, I hurt all over. I opened my eyes as I remembered the car accident, then that weird hallucination I had when I regained consciousness at the hospital.

I made a mental note to tell the doc about it so he could list the side effects in my chart.

Wait, why did it smell so bad in here? Not a disinfectant sort of unpleasant either, but actually rank, like body odor, sewage, and decomposing trash. And was I on the floor? What the hell?

I sat up, hating how stiff I was and how my drug hangover made the world around me move oddly.

“And you’re awake,” a woman’s voice rasped. “Hi, I’m Beth.”

I twisted around carefully to look at her and wished to high heaven I hadn’t.

Greasy matted hair, the small blonde had definitely seen better days.

Her face was looking a bit gaunt, and she had bags under her eyes.

I could see a few more people in a more or less similar state huddled in a corner behind her, looking at me with curiosity.

Next to them was a row of long, stacked boxes, with blinking lights on the sides.

More boxes sat haphazardly against the wall behind them.

“Where the hell am I?” I asked, clutching my head as lightning crashed through my skull as I spoke.

“Shh, not so loud. If we don’t keep it down, they get mad. You don’t want them to get mad, trust me.”

My hand dropped in horror as my mind processed the facts as I knew them.

Something had hit my car. Someone came and took me out of the car.

Someone very weird looking had transported me somewhere and knocked me out.

This was not a hospital. It was a storage room?

In a warehouse? And there were hungry, dirty people who were terrified of other people who did bad things if they decided you were too loud. Shit. I was in a horror movie.

“I’ve been kidnapped,” I whispered.

“Got it in one,” she replied softly. “Abducted by aliens, to be more precise.”

My heart stuttered at her words. Those green hands and that face had been real?

My stomach roiled, and I turned away, dry retching.

“Try to do that in the trough,” she said, pointing to a section of wall I'd not noticed yet. I stared as a guy crouched over the trough, defecating.

“That’s our toilet?’

“Yeah. They empty it every couple of days, so it gets quite ripe in here. You’ll get used to it.”

I did not want to get used to it.

“Do you know why they took us?”

She shook her head. “No, but we’re all around the same age, and we were all alone when we were taken.”

That meant someone had been watching me, or how else would they know that a guy my age would be traveling that road alone? Were my bosses in on it? Did they send me out on those stops knowing I’d end up traveling that quiet highway, ripe for the picking?

The guy wiped his ass with his hand and I felt like barfing again.

He smeared it on the wall above the trough in an effort to clean it off, then hitched up his pants.

He strode over. “Hi, I’m Gary. They grabbed me from my hotel room.

I was on my way to my kid brother’s high school graduation and had stopped halfway at one of those old motels along the highway. ”

“I was on a camping trip with Carol and Sam,” the girl said, gesturing over her shoulder at two women who waved at me hesitantly.

“We’d rented an RV and had pulled over for the night along the highway.

We thought we were alone except for the occasional passing truck, the odd coyote, and the desert. ”

I was sensing a theme here. “So they hunt the rural highways.”

“Looks that way,” Gary said. “We don’t know how they got the ones in the coffins.”

“Coffins?” Oh, that did not sound good. Not one little bit.

He pointed at the long boxes with the lights. “That’s what they look like, only the lids are also see through and the people inside have masks on and tubes going in. We think they might be some kind of stasis units, like on TV.”

“Yeah, we think they didn’t have enough for everyone, or else they package you up when they get an order or something.” Beth rubbed her arms as if to ward off the chilling thought.

A loud chittering sound suddenly echoed around the room.

“They’re on loudspeakers. We hear them like that right before they come in.” She pointed to the wall where her friends were huddled.

“We need to line up there or they’ll use the shock stick on us.”

Gary grabbed under one of my arms and helped me move across the space.

“Thanks,” I said, earning me a dirty look from one of the two girls who wasn’t Beth. I wasn’t sure yet which one was Carol and which one was Sam.

“Shh,” Beth rebuked me as the wall parted to reveal a doorway.

I shivered at the sight of three of the aliens, two with what looked like barbed cattle prods in one hand.

The other one held a box from which he tossed a bunch of large cubes onto the floor.

He chittered and chirped at us before turning to leave, the guards backing out behind him in clear warning to us to not try anything.

“Dinner is served,” Gary said, and they all rushed towards the cubes, snatching them up and ravenously taking bites out of them.

Gary glanced over at me and, with a pitying look, brought me one of them.

“Tastes like compressed cardboard and grass, but it’s all we get.”

“No water to wash them down with?’ I asked, taking it from him.

“When they turn the pipe on to sluice out the trough, you gotta stick your head in the stream where it comes out of the pipe and drink as much as you can, then let someone else have a go.”

We had to drink out of the toilet, basically. The thought made me feel too sick to even try to eat.

“You gotta make yourself eat it. They don’t come in at regular times and we’re damned sure aren’t getting fed three times a day.”

Fear gripped me. Now I knew why they looked so gaunt. They were on starvation rations. Correction. We were on starvation rations.

“How…how long have you been here?”

He looked at me sadly. “Sam has an old wind up watch that was her mother’s.

At first, she kept it wound. She counted off fifteen days.

I was here before she was, for several more days before that.

And the coffins were full when I first got here.

There was another guy here before you, Fred.

He kept screaming and shouting, and they hit him with the shock sticks and dragged him out of here. We haven’t seen him since.”

I couldn’t decide if Fred’s probable fate was better or worse than what ours was going to be. I knew one thing, though. I wasn’t ready to die quite yet. I took a nibble. Gary was right. It tasted like grass and cardboard. Yummy.