2. NOVA
NOVA
Compared to the rest of my life, being abducted by aliens did make the top ten list, but not first place. Not knowing what would happen and where they were taking me sucked, but I had worse things happen to me.
When I was six, I got snatched by a gator and nearly drowned when it pulled me into its underwater cave. I still have the scars from its teeth on my leg where it snatched me. Thankfully, my daddy had been sober enough that day to jump in after me. He killed the gator, gifting me one of its teeth, and made it into a necklace to remind me to be more careful in the future. It was the one thing the aliens didn't take from me. Go figure.
I'm not saying being almost eaten by an alligator is more traumatic than being abducted by aliens, but I was so young then I hadn't learned yet to control my fears. So, judging by the fear factor, the gator won.
I stared at the impenetrable black walls of the cage that held me and the other eight prisoners—four men and four women. No noise from outside reached my ears. I had zero indication of where we were or what was about to happen to us.
Us, as in eight other fellow prisoners, four women, four men, and me, the odd one out as usual. Not that the others had known each other or were couples or anything. They were as much strangers to each other as I was to them, which only underlined how little I fit in anywhere. Not even the end of the world, an alien invasion, or alien abduction bonded me to the members of my species.
A few months ago, an alien race—the Cryons, as I later learned—attacked Earth and took me and many others prisoner. At least, I'm guessing that it had been a few months. It could have been weeks for all I know as I lost all track of time since they took me and others from one place to another. The only thing they kept the same was that we were bound and thrown into cells. I had tried to keep track of time, but it was an impossible task. Lights dimmed at a certain point in time and remained dim for a certain amount of time, and we called it night. Usually, we would sleep during those hours, but I had slept throughout many day hours as well. There was just nothing else to do. Staying in some kind of physical shape was a challenge with my arms constantly bound behind me, limiting what little I could do. By my estimation, a month had passed between my abduction and my arrival on another planet. Which one? I never found out. But I probably spent another two weeks, with other prisoners there as they were brought in and taken away.
Somewhere down the line, a translator was shot into my brain, so I could now understand the despicable species that was my new enemy. Yay.
Not that it did me any good. All I gleaned was that we were being taken somewhere else to be auctioned off as slaves. In the end, there were ten of us left, and now we were nine.
I didn't blame the other eight, as I called them in my head. They had tried to talk to me. It was me who hadn't seen any sense in making conversation with them .
To what end?
I could have asked, h ey, where y'all from ?
They would have told me, Spain, North Dakota, Shanghai, wherever.
I would have said, Well, ain't that somethin'? I'm from Louisiana .
They would have squinted and strained their ears, trying to figure out what I said. What ?
Even if we got past that, so what? The woman with the blonde hair was from France, the guy with the big belly from Italy—so much for tall, dark and handsome—the older man came from wherever. The point was it didn't matter. We had zero control over where we were going or with whom. During the past couple of months, I had met hundreds of people, maybe more, none of which I had ever seen again. So why bother getting to know one another? It would only bring pain.
I knew. I had lost everyone I had ever cared about. And none of them to the Cryons.
Plus, people had never given a shit about me, so why should I care about them? Now, of all times, when if there was even a sliver of hope of escaping, it could only be one of us. The more of us there were, the slimmer the chance of getting away would be. Screw safety in numbers. Only one of us might be able to fly under the radar.
If someone had asked me why I wanted to escape, I wouldn't have been able to answer them. It wasn't like I could just hitch a ride back to the swamps. I might not have the slightest idea of where I was, but I did know that I was far from home. So far that my only option would be to hijack a spaceship—and trust me, I thought about that too—but there was that slight problem that I had no idea how to fly a fucking spaceship. My only option of escape was to find a place where I could hide. Alone. It was unlikely that any of the others had real survival skills—least of all on an alien planet. Selfish as it was, heroism had never been my thing. I wasn’t the kind of person who stood up for others. As far as I was concerned, it was a every man for himself situation. Missy would be disappointed in me. The thought of the only person who had ever been a mother figure in my life left me with a deep stab through the heart; then again, Missy had been very pragmatic too. She might not have lived by the everyone for themselves mentality that was second nature to me—probably courtesy of my dad's genes—but I knew that when push came to shove, she would have done the same thing in my situation.
I wasn't somebody to just give up. Tucker, my older brother, gave me a T-shirt for my twelfth birthday. It had been old, from a Goodwill store, but it became my favorite. Several sizes too big, I grew into it and even wore it the day the aliens took me, incidentally exactly twelve years later. It featured the image of a guy beaten to a pulp, black eye, swollen lip, the whole nine yards; the image had faded over time, but not his extended middle finger. That part had survived the passage of time and lived longer than several of our washing machines.
That's you , Tucker said when he threw it at me, you never know when to give up .
God, I loved that shirt. Made it my mantra. Never give up .
As a thank you, I had stuck my middle finger at him, making him grin.
That's the last memory I have of him. A few weeks later, he disappeared. He drove out with some buddies into the swamps and none of them ever returned. Daddy found their boat a few days later. But there was no trace of the boys.
Gators , some said.
Ran away , others.
My favorite: got high and drowned .
Even now, standing in this cage with eight strangers, not knowing what happened to him bugged me. Had he run away? I liked to think that he wouldn't have left me with Daddy and Uncle Boone, but then again, he was eighteen and I twelve. I reckoned that spending eighteen years with those two would have been enough for him, no matter if little sis was all by herself. She never gave up… and never knew when to keep her trap shut. Tucker had taken quite a few beatins' because, in my place, men didn't hit no women, so any beatings I would have deserved were dished out to Tuck.
Yeah, I had been a brat. Sorry, Tuck.
In his place, I might have run away too.
My bare toes drummed to an unheard beat on the cold metal flooring of our cage. Two of the women whimpered, and asked where we were, what would happen, what they would do to us.
One of the men offered platitudes in English. It'll be alright. We'll be fine ; his voice wavered slightly, even he didn't believe himself.
"What are we going to do?" a man wailed.
The group huddled closer, none of them caring that we were all naked as the day we were born.
After the Cryons took me to their spaceship, I had been thrown into a cell with many others, probably twenty or thirty, I never took the time to count. Our arms had been bound behind our backs, making everything from sleeping to peeing incredibly hard. Not to mention the pain when the numbness set in. You'd think numbness would eventually become actually numbness. Nope. It hurt like a motherf...
I recoiled slightly at thinking the word as if Missy was here with me, ready to whip me over the head with her ruler. Fifteen years of swamp mouth trained out of me in three. A dry chuckle moved up my throat, and I turned my head so the others wouldn't see. I didn't feel like explaining why I would chuckle now, when we were at our worst… I rolled my eyes. Were we? Were we really at our worst? Sure, the Cryons had stripped us naked, but they had also washed us and even dried our hair. The oil on our bodies was weird, but they had fed us and unbound our arms, so I’d take that as a win. My arms had been numb for a while after they took off the restraints. I tried doing some pushups to get some feeling back into them and almost cried. It had been worth it, though, judging by how stiffly some of the others still moved their arms. At least I had been unbound long enough to get them working again.
It was hard to say what was worse. Sharing a cell with twenty or thirty other people or suddenly being groomed with eight strangers.
For me, escaping had seemed impossible from the cell and the spaceship. Now though… depending on where we were, I would give it the good old college try or die. Well, I'd rather not die, I liked being alive, even on an alien spaceship. The freaking out part about there are aliens! had worn off pretty quickly. At least for me. Some still screamed or recoiled whenever a Cryon walked by our cells. But that might have been more because they were our captors than because they were aliens. I wasn't sure. I didn't ask.
I had never given aliens much thought before. I knew people liked to debate about it, like they liked to debate about almost everything, but where I came from, debates were reserved for how to get food on the table the next day. Maybe it was because I had almost died in a gator's den that I took the whole Holy shit , aliens abducted us , thing more with a pissed-off attitude for having been abducted, rather than the, holy shit, aliens ! reaction.
"Madre Dios," a woman began to pray, clinging to a man.
Something changed. I couldn't have said what exactly, but the very atmosphere around us felt different: something was about to happen, and I sensed it in every single one of my bones. My body coiled, and I readied myself to jump. I would attack the first alien I saw, surprise him, and make a run for it.
The black walls of our cage changed and became translucent, revealing a large hall filled with aliens of all origins. That sight penetrated even my stoicism. Don't think about it, don't think about it , I repeated in my mind, they're just people . I took a deep breath. Seeing them as just people made it a bit easier, like when thinking of a bobcat as just being a cat , or of a gator as a giant lizard . I forced my gaze over the rows of aliens; took in the worst of them, like one scary dude with green skin filled with scars all over his naked torso. Or the alien next to him who seemed to have feathers. Just people, Nova, they're just people .
The woman who had started praying intensified her efforts; her words turned into louder sobs as she recited a rosary or whatever.
Ahead of me stood two men, aliens. One was large, his skin shimmered in purple colors, the other’s gray-silver. The gray-silver man was closer and stood before a sort of aisle that divided the aliens below and led to a door that had to be an exit. It had to be. I gambled everything that it was.
The silver-grey dude looked like a mountain. He had to be well over six foot tall, wearing some kind of dark auburn uniform and a cape. On any other man, it would have looked out of place, maybe even laughable, but there was nothing laughable about this dude. The uniform clung to him like a second skin, exposing a set of broad shoulders that would put any bodybuilder on Earth to shame. He was clenching at the butt of some weapon strapped to his slim hips, making his biceps bulge.
Short cropped, black hair made him look military, and so did his expression. He looked stern, disdainful, as if he didn't belong here, as if whatever was happening here was far beneath him. Cold, black eyes regarded the other alien, and when I say black, I mean black, as in eyes like a shark. There was only black, no pupil, no sclera, no nothing. Just a black abyss, which made him appear even scarier than the green guy, who stood not too far away, glaring at the silver dude as if he wanted to kill him but didn't quite have the guts to do so.
There was something about this silver alien that seemed to have all the others… not cowed; they seemed too violent for that—but wary, as if his presence demanded a respect born of fear or ruthless authority.
Don't think, rush , I screamed at myself, realizing I was wasting precious seconds by staring at the silver alien like a love-struck teenager, and made a run for it. I had no official self-defense training, but growing up in the swamps taught me a thing or two—mostly that the element of surprise was always best. I rushed forward, stretching my arms to push the giant off-balance enough to get by him. Now, Nova, now ! I shoved at him with everything I had, veering to the side, but he didn't even stagger when my palms made contact with his chest. His rock-hard chest that made my palms sting as if I had hit a brick wall. I knew I wouldn't make it, but still, I pivoted, ready to jump off this… Were we on a stage? Doesn't matter, doesn't matter , my brain cried, run !
I was about midair, jumping off the maybe five-foot raised stage, when an arm slung around my waist, stopping me mid-leap. My legs flailed, and I thought I would fall, but the arm pulled me back and crushed me against that same rock-hard chest I had tried to push against. My feet kicked uselessly into the air as I hung suspended, my back against him. I flung my head back as hard as I could, hitting something, his jaw? I saw stars but didn't give up; again and again, I moved my head back and forth, but after the first impact, he smartened up and held his head back, so all I accomplished was making myself dizzy.
I clawed at his arms, but whatever clothes covered them were impenetrable. I moved for his uncovered hand, got a hold of his pinky and pulled on it, moving it back. A satisfying crack announced that I had broken it or at least dislocated the joint. A sharp intake of breath from him was like music to my ears, and I began to work on the next finger.
"Starbane!" he cursed. "Stop! I'm trying to help you."
Hah, as if I would fall for that.
He rearranged me so that I was in his other arm. Turning my mouth, I found purchase on his upper arm and clamped down.
"Frygging darkfang!" He shook me, but my teeth held tight. Thankfully, I got good chompers from my momma's side.
His hand— the one with the pinky standing at an odd angle—clamped around my neck and pressed me into his arm so hard that I had to let go because I was suffocating. When I did, the pressure on my neck intensified as he guided my head from his body. He turned me under his arm, and I stared at a set of black shark eyes.
"Stop!" He pushed out in a barely controlled voice, matching his furious expression. Up close like this, he was even more impressive, his barely contained anger was giving him an aura of undiluted menace. I might have caved under this authoritative force, but I was far too focused still on getting away.
I was facing him now, though, which meant my legs were free to kick him. So were my arms. I slapped both of my palms over his ears with everything I had, making his head ring. His expression turned into a mask of disbelief as he shook his head, but I wasn't done. I reared my knee up and got him right between the legs, then I ducked under his arm, forcing him to let go of my neck.
Thinking he’s subdued, I made another attempt to jump but hesitated as my eyes took in the mob of aliens staring up at me. It wasn't just that they were so unequivocal alien, but their number. There had to be hundreds. Some did look human, somewhat, but besides me being naked and them being clothed, there was no way I could get lost in that crowd. Or make it the hundred feet or so to the exit. Leave alone what lay behind it.
I swallowed.
You never give up , Tuck's said in my mind.
Damn straight, I won't , I responded, but Missy taught me that sometimes you have to bide your time before you get to fight the next battle .