Chapter Two: Stall
It was sort of amazing how much a life could change over the course of a few months. Someone could be a brilliant student and then go on to be well on their way to being a successful adult and then have that ruined in an instant. If something catastrophic and unstoppable happened, then that same person could be trapped in a life they had never wanted or imagined for themselves with very little hope that it would ever get better.
For Abigail Warren, this was less of a hypothetical situation and more the exact reality she was facing. In the span of about five months, she'd gone from having bright and happy dreams and plans for her future to...well. What she was now.
A tired, dirty young woman, with lank hair and dull eyes, trapped in a prison that she didn't think she would ever get out of. She didn't know what had happened to her parents or her sister. She didn't know if most of her friends were safe, or even still alive. She didn't know what was happening outside of the walls and bars that kept her in.
Even though Abby was pretty sure she was still on Earth, it may as well have been another planet for all the good it did her. The floating city that had come down out of the sky one day was a world apart. A world within itself, honestly, and nothing that was happening down on the planet proper was reaching the ones who were trapped in this prison. Maybe everyone on Earth was dead. Maybe they were being made into slaves or being harvested for some sinister purpose. Abby didn't know, and thinking about it made her head hurt.
All she knew was that she wanted to get out of here. That didn't make her special, really. Everyone wanted to get out of this hell hole and get back to their families, but when their beautiful captors heard their pleas for release and mercy, they just laughed and continued moving.
They were the most bizarre things, these creatures. Abby had always thought that creatures from other planets would be monstrous looking. They'd have sharp teeth and horns and claws or something, or else they'd look like the green or grey men that she saw in movies and television shows about aliens coming to Earth. She'd never seen anything about extraterrestrials who looked like supermodels.
There wasn't really a better way to put it, either. That's what they looked like. Every single one she'd seen so far had been tall and thin with nearly inhumanly beautiful faces. The only real variation between the different members of whatever this race was, was hair color and facial structure. Some of them had more chiseled jaws, some had rounder cheeks, and others had sharper faces. Without fail, they all had golden eyes, though, and they were so bright that Abby always felt the need to shield her face whenever one of them turned those eyes on her.
"Like they're seeing right through you," was whispered to her by one of the women who shared her prison, and Abby had to agree.
As far as the prison went, it was much like the captors themselves. For all this was cruel and unusual and they were being held against their will, the prison was made beautifully.
The bars were made of some sort of wrought, silvery metal that they already knew was indestructible. At least with any means they had. The bars divided the room into cells, and there were five humans in each one, along each wall of the room. There were cushions on the floor and piled in the corners, and when one of the humans had complained about being cold, she had been brought a blanket.
They were fed every day, one meal at first, but then one extraordinarily beautiful man had come up to the bars and announced that he had learned that humans required three meals a day, and then the food increased.
It wasn't anything Abby was used to or could say she'd had before, strange meats and vegetables and odd gelatinous blobs that actually turned out to taste pretty good, but it was food, and it kept them alive, which was more than she and most of the others had been expecting from their captors.
Honestly, that was one of oddest things about the whole affair. Despite the fact that they were most definitely being held against their will and most definitely the victims of some sort of invasion, it wasn't all that bad.
No one got killed, no one got probed, no one came to antagonize them. For the most part they just sat in their cells and waited. Though no one really knew what they were waiting for.
The minutes blended into countless hours, which turned into days and then to weeks and months, and while some people still made tick marks, wanting to keep track of what was happening, most of them had given up on that. What was the point of knowing anyway, right? If they were never getting out of there?
Abby tried not to think that way. She asked the man in her cell what day it was every couple of days, wanting to keep track. She'd never been one to suffer defeat lying down, and so she was determined not to give up hope.
Someone would rescue them. Somehow.
The government or the military or something like that. It would be fine. She just had to believe it.
"Do you think the Earth's a smoking hole in space by now?" someone asked as a new day started. As least Abby thought it was a new day. All she really knew was that she slept when she was tired, and woke up after a few hours of sleep. She still had her cellphone in her pocket from the day she'd been taken, but it hadn't been charged in months, so it was essentially dead weight. Sometimes she liked to pull it out and run her fingers over the screen, using it as a last tie to the world outside. Below. Whatever.
"Why would you ask that?" someone else muttered. The cells were separated by bars as well, so they could see the other people in other cells and all communicate well. Not that it was always a good thing.
"I'm curious," the first man said, shrugging a shoulder. He looked to be a bit older than Abby, scruffy with dark brown hair and bright eyes. He was just as dirty and worn looking as the rest of them, but there was a spark in him that the others didn't seem to have.
"Curious about if our planet's been destroyed?" Abby asked in spite of herself. Usually she didn't get involved in stuff like this. "Aren't you worried about your family and friends?"
He shrugged a shoulder, looking like he couldn't care less. "Don't have too much of either," he said. "And my family is the kind of family that deserves to be destroyed."
Abby made a disgusted face. "What a horrible thing to say."
The young man shrugged again. "You don't know my family. For some of us, this isn't as bad as it could be."
"Shut up!" someone snapped from the cell across the room, and Abby and the young man turned their heads to look.
A woman, probably in her thirties, sat huddled against the wall at her back. "Just because you want your family wiped out doesn't mean the rest of us do," she said. "My daughter's down there. She's only seven. Who's going to take care of her?"
She looked on the verge of tears, and Abby averted her eyes, not wanting to watch the display of emotion. She didn't know the woman, but in the time since they'd been trapped there, Abby had seen her try to reason with the guards to release her, begging them to let her go to her daughter.
Abby hoped she would be okay.
"I'm sorry about your daughter," the young man said, and Abby was surprised to hear something like that out of his mouth. They hadn't spoken in the time they'd been there, but then there hadn't been a lot of talking amongst the prisoners. Either way, he didn't seem like the sort to be giving out heartfelt sentiments.
The woman turned her face away, shoulders shaking, and the man sighed and ran fingers through his hair.
"They're going to let us go," he said. “At the very least, they don’t want us dead.”
"How do you know that?" someone asked quickly.
"He doesn't," Abby said, rolling her eyes. "There's no way he could."
"Unless he was in league with those...things." The last word was said in a whisper, as if trying hard not to attract attention.
"I'm not," the man replied. "I just know things."
People were starting to pay attention, and despite herself, Abby was, too. There was something about people who said what they wanted to say with conviction. She had been one of those people back when she'd had a different life, and so she listened.
"What kind of things?"
He looked around, both for dramatic effect and probably to check and make sure that there wasn't anyone lurking around listening. "There's some kind of plan," he said. "Something they want to do with the Earth, probably. The day the city came down? Not the first day they showed up here."
"What do you mean?" Abby wanted to know.
"They've been walking among us. Not a lot of them because we'd notice a bunch of weirdly pretty people hanging around probably. But just enough that they could scope the place out."
"Is this some weird illuminati thing?" a woman asked, arching her eyebrow. "Like how celebrities are in a secret society and are all aliens or something?"
"No," the man said flatly. "This is real. I saw someone like them last year. I was at this bar, and this beautiful woman walks in, right? Tall, thin, hot face, long dark hair, golden eyes. At the time I was thinking that it was like winning the lottery, but she wasn't interested in me."
"Can't imagine why not," Abby muttered.
"Hey, I do alright," the man replied. "Anyway, she didn't talk to anyone all night. Just sat there in the corner with a drink she wasn't drinking, people watching. Thought maybe she was scoping out her husband while he was cheating or something, didn't want to make a fuss about it until they got home. But now I know she was one of them."
"What's the point though?" another man asked from across the room, keeping his voice down. "Why just watch us?"
"Who knows? All I know is that if they wanted to kill us, they could've done it already. They haven't done anything to hurt us, actually. We keep getting fed, and we've got all the comforts of home in a handy prison setting. They want us for something."
He had a point, Abby had to admit. She'd been waiting for their jailors to get tired of them and kill them already, but it hadn't happened. She would have said they were keeping them like pets, but the creatures barely spent any time with them at all. If they had been observing humans before, then they seemed to be done with that now. "We're hostages," she murmured, the idea occurring to her.
"There's an idea," the man agreed.
"But for what?" someone wanted to know.
"Bargaining, maybe?"
"With who?"
"I dunno. The government? 'Give us control of your planet or we'll kill these humans'. Something like that."
The man snorted. "Then we're screwed. What government would trade a handful of lives for a whole planet?"
"Hey," Abby said. "There's more than a handful of us in here."
"Whatever. It's not enough to warrant them turning over control of the planet or answering any demands. None of us are important. Not when it comes to something like that."
As depressing as it was to think about it, he had a point. They were all just people. They were sons and daughters and mothers and fathers and husbands and wives, but that didn't make them important enough to work as bargaining chips. It was hard to know if that was a good thing or not, especially considering the fact that Abby was sure the creatures who were keeping them weren't just going to let them go when their plan, if this was indeed their goal, didn't work. 'Sorry about that, won't happen again', and all that. It wasn't likely.
Which meant they would probably be killed once they'd outlived whatever potential usefulness the creatures were imagining.
"I don't want to die like this," whispered a girl in the back of Abby's cell. She couldn't have been more than sixteen years old. "I don't want to die here."
"None of us do."
"We need to find out what it is they want."
The man who didn't seem to be able to take anything seriously was named Nathan. He’d been a student before everything had gone up in flames. In medical school, which honestly shocked Abby right down to her center, because he didn’t seem like the type who would be able to focus long enough to make it through something like that. Apparently he had a serious side, though none of them had ever seen it.
In some ways, he was like a breath of fresh air. He kept them amused and from getting too serious when things seemed like they weren’t ever going to get any better. Abby was pretty sure one of the women who shared the cell with them had a crush on Nathan. It seemed odd that something like that could even still be happening when it felt like the world was coming to an end.
One night, when they were all settling down to sleep after being given their dinner, one of the guards came marching over to the bars of the cell. Everyone inside sat up, taking notice and trying to figure out what was happening.
“Quiet,” the guard snapped, but it wasn’t a harsh sound. “You.” He pointed to Nathan. “Will come with me.”
Nathan arched an eyebrow, but he unfolded himself from the cushion he’d been sitting on and got to his feet, walking over to the bars that kept them in. “What can I do for you?” he asked, lips twisted into a smirk.
“You can keep your mouth shut and follow me,” the guard replied, and he led him out of the cell and then out of the room entirely.
“What’s that about?” someone murmured, and Abby was just as lost as the rest of them. Nothing like that had ever happened before.
They’d been here for months now, doing nothing, learning nothing, and maybe it was finally time for this holding to stop.
Abby couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or not.