Capturing the Alien Raider (Turochs of Earth #2)

Chapter 1 Taz

Our plan was simple. Stupid, but simple.

We were going to rescue our friend or die trying.

It had been almost twenty-four hours since Hope had ventured out of the restaurant where we'd all been working when the world ended. She'd wandered into an alien apocalypse, armed with only a paring knife and disappeared.

Penny had been calm for exactly twelve of those hours, and then my best friend started to lose her shit.

Honestly, I was shocked it took her that long.

After all, we'd watched aliens invade Earth a week ago, and we'd been hiding in a walk-in refrigerator, and shitting in a bucket since then.

It wasn't the worst situation, I'd seen the other options.

Being crushed by falling buildings, and getting snatched up by alien spaceships ranked pretty high on my list of things I was glad to avoid.

But you could only huddle in a dark metal box, smelling the fumes from that damn bucket for so long before you started getting desperate.

And Hope had gotten desperate. I carried a small amount of guilt for the role I'd played in her striking out alone.

I knew I was best taken in small doses, and I could admit that I was probably the worst person to be locked in a room with for a week.

I was a cranky bitch when I had access to plumbing and sunlight. The apocalypse did nothing to sweeten my personality. So, maybe I paced a little too much and made my friends antsy, maybe I said a few of the things I was thinking out loud when I should have kept my mouth shut.

But I hadn't. And Hope had taken her life in her hands to get the fuck away from me. I'd make it up to her. We just had to find her. And she had to stay alive until we did.

Penny had returned to her usual composure after we decided to go after Hope.

We'd collected what was left of the food, said goodbye to our makeshift bunker and stepped out into a world I didn't recognize anymore.

The town was as quiet as a graveyard. The silence was oppressive, and I didn't realize just how drastic the damage was until we were outside.

Buildings had collapsed, cars were abandoned, many of them in piles like everyone had swerved into oncoming traffic when the aliens arrived. Trash was scattered everywhere, and there wasn't a single sign of life. Not even a fucking seagull.

Not for the first time, I wondered if there was even a point in looking for Hope.

Don't get me wrong, I wanted her to be alive, but looking at the wreckage of our once-hectic town, I couldn't imagine a scenario where we found her safe and sound.

I might have driven her crazy, but the girl wouldn't just up and walk away from us.

"Where do we even start?" I asked.

Penny straightened her shoulders and quickly scraped her riot of curls into an elastic band. As usual, she looked ready for anything, unfortunately, I'd seen her an hour ago when she'd been hyperventilating with anxiety over Hope's fate.

"She was going to find her car, so we check the parking lot first. We'll look for clues and track her down."

Yeah, because we were fucking boy scouts.

Yet another thought I needed to keep inside before I sent Penny running, too.

"Sounds like a plan," I said instead.

Penny gave me a determined nod and strode across the empty street, toward the lot where Hope usually parked.

I jogged after her, keeping an eye out for little green men as I did.

Aside from the giant spaceship that had hovered in the sky when the invasion started, and several smaller, bubble-shaped ships that had swooped through the streets, I hadn't seen a single extraterrestrial yet.

My imagination had drawn on every horror movie I'd ever seen, and the mental picture I assigned to the invaders kept switching between Roswell and the Predator.

Hopefully, the lack of alien foot soldiers meant we were dealing with mini men-from-mars instead of space trophy hunters.

Every car we passed looked like it had tangled with a trash compactor and by the time I spotted Hope's ride, I knew for sure she hadn't driven off without us.

No one was driving anywhere in the twisted hunk of metal that used to be her crappy car. Penny stared at the corpse of Hope's vehicle and took several deep breaths. I sensed another freakout on the horizon and decided it was time for me to offer a plan B.

"She knew we were low on food, maybe she saw her car and decided to look for supplies." Then got lost in a town she'd lived in her whole life, I finished silently.

"Yeah," Penny said, her voice strangled. "Okay, we'll go with that. Find food and we find Hope."

***

We found food. A lot of food actually, every store and gas station was filled to the brim with food.

My shriveled stomach was thrilled, but if there was a single human left alive, odds were high they would have looted the place.

Looting in crisis was what humans did best. Which meant there weren't any people around.

It also meant that we'd hit another dead end in our search for Hope.

We scoured the town all day, only stopping when the sun went down and the shadows and the silence got too eerie to keep wandering around.

We holed up in a pharmacy near the restaurant and I claimed a creaky office chair as my bed.

I offered to take the first watch, but Penny was so wired with anxiety she couldn't sleep.

I slept better than I should have, considering our friend was still missing and the world had ended, but if my life had taught me anything, it was that worrying didn't fix anything.

My childhood had been spent bouncing from foster home to foster home, I'd given up on feeling safe and secure years ago.

Now I slept when I could, ate when I could, and didn't expect either option to last long.

"Taz."

I jolted awake as Penny kicked my chair for the second time. My friend looked like hell. Her eyes were ringed with dark circles and her expression was haggard. I guarantee she'd kept herself awake all night.

"There's something out there," she mouthed, tilting her head toward the pharmacy's back door.

The tension in her body set off all my alarms, so I quietly slid out of the chair and crawled toward her.

There was a small frosted window beside the door, and a large shape stalked past it.

The movement was all wrong, slow, and jolting, and the shadow was way too big to be human.

My mouth went dry and I strained to hear past my rising pulse.

The shadow paused at the edge of the window, and I swore I saw two bony limbs rising above the thing's back.

Whatever the fuck that was, it wasn't supposed to be on Earth. Every Predator movie I’d ever seen came rushing back to me and I stared at the blank metal door that stood between us and the thing outside.

Neither of us moved, we crouched beside each other, frozen for what felt like an hour, until my knees were burning and my calves were cramping. Finally, the shadow lurched away, and I let out a lungful of air.

"What. The. Fuck. Was. That?" I hissed.

"I don't know," Penny sounded sick. "We have to find her, Taz. I should have never let her go out alone."

"Hey," I turned on her, hating the miserable tone of her voice. "Hope's a big girl, you're not her mom, and you aren't responsible for whatever happened. We'll find her, but you've got to stop beating yourself up."

Penny glared at me.

"I'm scared for her. Maybe you don't get what that feels like, since you don't care about anyone but yourself," she growled.

I jerked my head back like she'd slapped me.

Penny never lashed out, she was the calm one, the responsible one.

I was the one that flew off the handle and wrecked friendships.

We'd been friends for years, she was the one person I let myself get attached to after years of getting abandoned by my mom and dozens of foster homes.

"That's not fair," I said, wishing her words hadn't cut me so deep. I knew I pushed people away, but damn, I cared about Hope, and I definitely cared about Penny. I figured she'd know that after all these years.

Her face crumpled and she rubbed her hands over her face with a groan.

"I'm sorry, Taz. I didn't mean-"

"No," I stood up. "I get it, I'm a bitch. Sorry you got stuck with me."

I strode to the door and jerked it open, half expecting an alien monster to be on the other side. I was half right. As soon as I opened the door, a spaceship crashed through the wall and the ceiling caved in on us.