Chapter 2
Peony
“I think he thanked me,” Peony said, smiling as she bit her lower lip.
“Is that what happened?” Scarlet asked, one eyebrow rising. “I thought he was growling.”
Peony shook her head. She couldn't understand the half growled, half mumbled words, but the meaning was still clear in his grateful expression.
The last week or so had been, without a doubt, the worst of Peony's life.
She had been walking home after work, her feet sore, smelling of grease and beer that one of the patrons accidentally spilled on her, when she had been grabbed from behind.
A strange, rough hand came down over her mouth, covering her reflexive scream, as something jabbed into her arm, then nothing.
She woke up with a pounding headache in this weird, dirty, metal room.
Her uniform was crusty and stiff from having slept in it and her entire body ached.
Her messy hair still smelled like frying grease from the diner, but it was harder to detect under the familiar scent of metal and totally different stench of machine grease that permeated the room.
She didn't know the girls she woke with, but they all had similar stories. They had all been out walking alone, in the dark, in the same general area of the same city. There had been no warning when suddenly someone grabbed and injected them with something before waking up here.
They had panicked that first day. Beat on the walls, attempt to open the large metal door, tried to figure out who had kidnapped them.
Alanna was the one who said it was aliens.
But Alanna was also weirdly detached from the entire situation.
Completely convinced she was in shock, the others hadn’t paid attention to her words until the door opened.
And it was, in fact, aliens.
A big, green, scaled, lizard-dinosaur-man-thing with a long snout full of unforgiving, sharp teeth had stood on the other side.
He had a baton in one hand that sparked like a taser all along its length.
He put a tray on the ground, snapped something at them, then left the way he came.
What he put down was five bowls of water and five bars of something that tasted like bland granola.
Enough food and water for them, but not for the alien in the cage.
It had taken them a bit of time to find him. The room wasn't large, but the low cage he was tied down in was in the corner, a strange, dark crate on top of it, a tarp concealing him from their view. Scarlet had been the one that lifted the tarp on day two.
All of them had freaked out again.
He wasn't the lizard man, but he was also obviously not human.
His skin was gray, perfectly matching the plain metal walls around them.
A long, dark, fleshy tail curled around him, unmoving but somehow unnerving.
His ears were pointed like an elf's, and so long they could touch the back of his head – which was kind of cool.
But most strangely of all, he had three eyes.
Two that were about where theirs were but angled sharply downward at the outer corners.
The third eye was on his forehead, completely turned on its side with a lid that closed vertically.
The three eyes pointed towards each other, all of them closed, but rolling under the thin skin.
He grunted and growled at times but didn't struggle against his chains.
After the initial shock of seeing the inhuman creature wore off, Peony's heart started hurting for him.
It looked like his claws had been driven into his skin before being bound in place so he couldn't pull them out.
There was dark, dried blood across his face, down his sides, staining the floor.
A dark mark on his chest looked like a scabbed burn.
Unlike them, he wasn't offered food or water. He was bound up like a dangerous animal then left starved and injured. They were in the same place, in the same situation, but seeing someone so much worse off than them had, somehow, steadied Peony's mind.
Every day, the dinosaur alien returned with more food and water. Never very much, only enough to stave off death. But he never offered any to the guy in the cage.
A guy that took ragged, rattling breaths like his lungs were filled with fluid. Whose flanks bled anew whenever his fingers accidentally twitched. Whose eyes sometimes fluttered open, but never for long, and never all at once. He growled at times, groaned at others.
She was pretty sure the alien was a he. They had a broad, bare, muscular chest like a man – or what a man could only wish his chest looked like anyway.
But the loose fitting, dark pants of the same color as his skin hid his legs, and his awkward, bowed crouch covered his crotch.
Not that she was looking! But seeing a dick would at least confirm he was a male.
Then again, he was an alien, so maybe she shouldn't count on that. He could reproduce asexually for all she knew. Maybe females of their species just happened to look like large men with deep, growly voices and thick, heavily corded muscles all over their bodies.
But she kind of hoped not.
As each day passed and he was still offered nothing, Peony could no longer eat her cardboard granola or drink the stale, oddly metallic water without guilt. They weren't given much, but it was still leagues more than what he got.
The others protested, pointing out that there must be a reason that he was kept trussed up tighter than a Christmas turkey, but Peony wouldn't hear their logic.
She had to at least give him water. Even prisoners deserved water.
She couldn't give him all of her water, unfortunately.
She still had to drink some for herself.
But she took only a single swallow before crouching by his cage and making her offering.
The others had watched on, weary and untrusting.
Holly had been at her side, ready to yank her away if he bit or grabbed her, as though those chains weren't keeping him from moving even an inch from that uncomfortable position.
But, somehow, despite their uneasiness, Peony wasn't afraid.
Maybe it was an enemy-of-my-enemy kind of situation.
After all, they were all in the same cell, and none of the other girls hurt her, so why would she assume that he would?
They were just as much strangers as him.
Maybe it was just because he was so obviously weakened and injured that she couldn't imagine him as a true threat.
Maybe she was an idiot and was letting her soft heart override her good judgment.
No matter the reason though, she couldn't let him suffer. He needed water, at the very least. That determination was what led to her kneeling beside his cage – because his head was closer to the sides than the front – as she struggled to push her bowl against his lips.
It took some time for him to even notice her. His black eyes were bleary with pain, the small circle of white around his large irises had been sickly pale, but he had seen her. Maybe for the first time since they’d been in there.
And he took the water.
Then, thanked her!
She couldn't be 100% sure that his half-growled words were thanks, of course, but the warmth in his three, strange, dark eyes had felt like gratitude.
She only wished she had more to offer him.
But, maybe, after today she would.
“We ready to do this?” Hattie asked, her voice shaking as she looked at all of them.
It was a bad plan, but it was also the only one they had, and they had to do something.
None of them knew what was going to happen on the other end of this trip, but they also weren't at all willing to find out.
Day one had been for the initial freak out.
Day two had been for the realization and freak out two: the sequel.
Day three through now had been determination to get out and reclaim their freedom.
The giant dinosaur guy who brought them food was easily twice their size, so they weren't going to be able to fight him. They had to be sneakier than that.
Scarlet was the one who had come up with the framework of the plan.
The woman had dark red hair and stood taller than all of them, her body was willowy and beautiful like a Golden Era Hollywood actress, and she was actually pretty smart.
She had been the one who calmed down first. Peony was jealous of how in control and brave she appeared in the face of such an unusual, dangerous situation.
Holly and Hattie, a blonde and brunette respectively, had been the ones who volunteered to carry it out after all of them had built on the framework of the plan.
Hattie was the shortest of them, with eyes almost too big for her face.
She had breasts like a shelf though and a curvy, luscious body.
She looked like a cuddly stuffed doll. Holly, on the other hand, was gangly and long-limbed, like she had never grown out of her awkward teenage phase.
While Hattie looked like someone you could snuggle against and sleep like a baby, Holly looked like she would break on the next stiff breeze.
Her constant shaking, like a wet chihuahua, didn't help.
She cried the most, but she hadn't backed down from volunteering for this stupid plan.
Alanna – weird, dreamy, distant Alanna – had agreed to go along with them, but she did warn them that, if they were caught, they would likely be heavily punished.
The big, sparking baton the dinosaur guy brought was a constant threat.
He was obviously not afraid of them, but he also didn't make it a secret that he would mess them up if he had to.
Alanna, who had a fluffy cloud of curly black hair around her head, always seemed like she was staring blankly off into the void. Peony honestly couldn't tell if it was a coping mechanism, or if she was just an oddly detached kind of person. It might be both.
It hardly mattered though because, since Alanna was always kind of out of it and Scarlet was the only one big enough to look like she might be a threat, it was up to Peony to go through with the main part of the stupid plan.
She was about medium height amongst the five of them, her hair was mousy and brown, her body wasn't squishy and adorable like Hattie or willowy and modelesque like Scarlet.
She was, in a word, plain. Easily overlooked.
Perfect for the task they had set for her.
But it was nerve wracking to imagine as Alanna put another dash on the grimy wall. She was in charge of keeping time. There were no clocks and the dim lighting overhead never changed to indicate the passing of days. They had to manually count each second.
Which was what Alanna was doing.
They knew approximately how many hours it took between each food delivery by now – about thirty – and they needed to wait until just before dino-man got here. So, they were literally counting seconds, tracking each hour as it passed.
First Alanna, then Scarlet, then Alanna again. Trading off counting and sleeping as though their lives depended on them being accurate stopwatches.
And, in a way, they kind of did.