Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Ella’s feet dragged hard as she tried to walk, the sucking muck holding her legs back with every attempted step, as though she was wading through a murky swamp. She looked down. No swamp. No mud. Just the clean metal deck of the ship.
Ship?
Things were fuzzy. Hints of clarity trying to rip through the gauzy veil obscuring her vision, clouding her thoughts.
Yes, a ship. A Raxxian ship.
At the thought of the alien beasts, a flurry of images blasted through her mind.
She’d been out late, but not too late. A simple night spent with friends.
Nothing out of the ordinary. No reason for concern.
Ella had declined a ride home as she rather enjoyed the walk, and it was only a couple of miles in their safe little neighborhood.
Then… what was that? Something had happened. Something she had no recollection of. She was simply walking by herself on a quiet street one minute, then woke with a pounding headache aboard the alien craft some time later.
Abducted. That’s it. I was abducted. By aliens.
The haze began to clear, though her limbs still moved as though fighting some invisible restraints. It was the most frustrating sensation, compounded by the churning feeling of dread rumbling in her belly. Something was wrong. Something she felt in her bones but couldn’t quite put her finger on.
Time bent, her consciousness shifting, clearing. There were more of them now, all locked away in the spartan compartment. Aliens of several races, as well as a human man who seemed to be suffering from some injury to his side.
Bob? Bill? No, Brian. His name was Brian.
Ella’s gut wrenched. Was.
Brian was dead. Not just dead. He’d been eaten. Taken for food.
They didn’t take us for experiments. They took us for food.
The realization sent a chill through her body. Not a realization. A memory. Then the world flipped on its head.
Fast forward. A blur.
Raxxians coming and going, the inhabitants of her compartment, their livestock, being rotated, some of them to other compartments, others to feed the ravenous, green-scaled aliens who had snatched them up.
Friends. Several had become friends.
How do we speak the same…oh, right.
The sullen, tall, golden-tan alien named Heydar had come and tattooed some sort of translation thing behind her ear. She had no idea how it worked, but her incredulity vanished when she found herself understanding the aliens around her quite easily. Whatever the technology was, it clearly worked.
Not technology. They said it was some living pigment. A symbiotic something or other.
Ella struggled with the memory, but her mind was still resisting her. Disobedient to her desires.
Violent images burst into her mind’s eye.
A pair of Raxxian guards entering the compartment.
Coming to get her. She was going to be their next meal.
The only reason they didn’t take her immediately was because she was napping in her bunk, and as such was not in their direct line of sight.
But their intentions were quite clear. She was going to die.
The memory of the most visceral terror she’d ever experienced filled her.
She’d been powerless to do anything, just as the others taken before her had been.
But then the compartment abruptly bucked hard as explosions rocked throughout the ship, throwing everyone hard into the walls, the door sealing shut in a flash, cutting one of the Raxxians in half, trapping the other inside with the rest of them.
Whatever the emergency system was that had kicked in, it didn’t care one iota if someone was standing in the door’s way, the safety mechanism that was usually in place switched off for such an event.
Whatever was happening had to be very bad.
She was slammed hard into the wall of her bunk, her head clanging off the metal with a hollow thud. Things went black, only flickers of confusing images in the flashing light of the compartment presenting themselves to her concussed mind.
The others were thrown about violently, pinballing off the walls until they went limp.
That didn’t stop it, though. The faint memory of warm blood splattering on her from one broken body or another hit like a visceral slap to the face.
Then a hard pull as something stopped their chaotic descent.
Emergency rockets? She had no idea, and the G forces made her already wavering consciousness release its grasp on reality, at least for a little while.
There was smoke. Fire. A smell, like sulfur. A glimpse of someone hovering over her, and then the most excruciating pain. And then she blacked out, waking…
Here!
Ella’s eyes snapped open, her heart racing in the pre-dawn light. Her body reminded her very loudly to stay still, and she wisely obeyed, slowing her painful breathing as she looked around her environment.
That’s right. That man took me here. What was his name? Dirkus? No, Draikis. That’s it.
A faint hum ran through her body, inaudible, but she could sense it as nerve endings and flesh ever-so-slowly regenerated.
The machinery was a mystery, hidden from sight but somehow focusing some kind of energy wave over pretty much her entire body.
Dead flesh sloughed off one cell at a time, replaced by the best approximation the alien technology could fashion, stimulating her own healing factors and ramping them up tenfold.
Pain was minimal, the dampening devices not exactly muting the sensation but rather shifting how her body reacted to it. The result was a not entirely unpleasant feeling. At least, not so long as she didn’t think about what had led her to this situation.
The gentle vibration washed over her, up and down her body, gently massaging her damaged flesh back to some semblance of cellular integrity.
Oddly, despite the discomfort, brief jolts of almost pleasurable tingles lit up certain bits of Ella’s body when the energy’s intensity lingered. Unexpected, but not unwelcome.
She took a deep breath, dropping into her own body, claiming what good she could of the sensations. It could be worse.
Ella lay there, mentally floating, her body still, taking in the serenity of the silent room. Clean, ornate, but not gaudy. Some order of something, he’d said, but it was kind of a blur. Given her injuries, it was to be expected.
Speaking of injuries, her attention shifted focus a bit, and she noted that the prior burning of her skin had diminished greatly, most of it replaced by an annoying itching sensation.
Better than the alternative, she reasoned, breathing deep, inhaling the novel smells of this place, the gentle breeze through the open window carrying the aromas of the native plants and flowers.
There was also the smell of food. Baking, perhaps?
Someone was up early, preparing whatever they were making before dawn, just like so many did back home.
And she actually felt a little pang of hunger. A good sign, in her opinion.
Being hungry meant her body wanted nourishment.
It also meant she was probably out of the woods, at least of the worst of it.
Usually, she wouldn’t have any appetite if something traumatic had happened.
Of course, that was also during far tamer kinds of events.
Maybe it was the healing ointments. Maybe she’d just been out a long time, and her body needed food. She really couldn’t say.
How long was I out? she wondered.
The handsome man who’d been tending her was nowhere to be seen. In fact, she seemed to have the entire room all to herself. Ella was, for the moment at least, quite alone. The question would have to wait.
She closed her eyes, allowing herself to drift back to sleep. There would be time for answers.
Later, she mused, drifting back to sleep. Quiet and restful, thankfully devoid of further bad dreams. She’d have time to revisit her memories later. For now, she would rest.