Copyright © 2017 by Clarissa Lake
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.
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Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Alien Alliances/Clarissa Lake -- 1st ed.
ISBN
CONTENTS
Meg Casey was running along the shoulder of Sackett Road near where she lived, in her modest ranch style home between two hay fields with a woodlot out back. Running was her favorite way to unwind from her hectic job as a nurse practitioner at the local Family Health Clinic. It was exactly a mile from her house to the crossing of Pine Road with only one other house on that stretch of road. She ran the same route about three times a week, on the evenings she got off work early. The exercise was good for her, and the endorphins gave her a natural uplift.
She alternated between jogging at a leisurely pace with wind sprints, her long blond ponytail bobbing up and down as she ran. She was fairly tall at five foot eight inches with long, shapely legs, wider at the hips than she would like with a rounded and toned butt. Her C cup breasts were stabilized by snug sports bra to keep them from bouncing too much as she ran. Her stark blue eyes were protected from the bright evening sun by UV blocking sunglasses.
She was almost to Pine Road when an ordinary SUV slowed and stopped beside her. The man inside looked older, partially bald, and harmless, so she stopped.
“Can you tell me which way to the main highway? I have gotten myself turned around, and this GPS is no help,” he said.
“Keep going in this direction. It’s about a mile down this road,” she said and pointed. When she looked back at him, he was pointing a small device that looked like a car remote at her and pressed the button. Meg jerked as though she’d been struck and crumpled to the ground. The man jumped out and opened the back door of his vehicle, picked Meg up from the side of the road, and tossed her in the back seat as though she weighed no more than a small child did. He slammed the door, jumped back into the driver’s seat and sped away.
That was the last thing she remembered until she woke up lying on a cot hanging from a wall in a nondescript white room with four other women lying on cots like hers wearing only her bra and panties. There was a fresh tattoo on the inside of her wrist, that resembled Cuneiform, which she had only seen in pictures back in school.
In the center of the room was a pedestal table with benches on each side, all anchored to the floor. There was a small bathroom with a shower and sink that opened off the corner of the room with what looked like a sliding door on the fourth wall opposite the wall with the bathroom opening. A faint line on the white wall seemed to mark a sliding door that Meg assumed was the exit. It remained closed with no apparent way to open it.
“Does anyone know where we are?” Meg asked the other women in general.
“We’ve been kidnapped by alien slavers,” said the woman with dark, short hair in the bunk like hers on the other wall.
Meg laughed out loud. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I wish I was,” the other woman said. “There are about a dozen of us that I saw. I’ve been aboard for about a week. They picked me up when I was walking my dog before work. I woke up as they were shuttling a few of us up to their mother ship.”
“You’re serious,” Meg gasped.
“I wish I weren't,” she sighed. “They are taking us to some planet for a slave auction. All the women I’ve seen are young and fairly attractive. I heard we would probably be sold as pleasure companions.”
“You mean sex slaves,” Meg shuddered.
“Yeah.” The other woman sounded as hopeless as Meg felt.
Even if they were on Earth, escaping human traffickers would be no small feat, but escaping them in space was nearly impossible. Even if they would get out of this cell and find the shuttle that brought them here, she doubted any of them could fly it or would know where to go if they could. They couldn’t even hope for rescue. No one who would miss them would have a clue where to find them.
“How did you find out their intentions?” Meg asked.
“The one that comes with the droid cart that brings us food told us. He said the Tenzari have been taking humans from earth for many years because it’s very profitable.”
“I’m sure it is,” Meg said. “I’m Meg Casey, what’s your name?”
“Kayla Elliott. Above you are Jane Edwards, and Liz Carson is above me,” said Kayla. “From what I’ve seen, there’s no way out of this before we land---and even then.”
Meg was about to ask what the aliens were like when the door across the room slid open with a soft whoosh. An automated cart rolled in followed by a hairless bipedal alien with purple wrinkled skin that sort of reminded her of a cartoon character. He was tall and slender with a humanoid face that had large dark round eyes, a flat nose with two nostrils and a wide mouth with thin lips.
Meg rolled out of the bunk and strode across the room toward the alien. “Who are you people and what right do you have to steal us from our homes? We are human beings, not cattle,” she shouted at him forgetting she was barefoot wearing only her underwear.
“Because we can,” the alien answered in fluent English. “We are Tenzari. We take what we can. Once we take you from Earth, you belong to us. Your world is not a member of the Alliance of Worlds. They have no recourse.”
“That is unacceptable!” Meg took another step forward, and the alien raised a wand and pointed it in her direction.
“Step back or feel the pain stick,” he warned, brandishing a black stick with two prongs on the end.
Meg saw that another alien had stopped in the open doorway. She backed away toward her bunk. This was not the time to make a move. She had no fighting skills. Dodging blows from combative patients in her early nursing career didn’t count. She backed away and sat on her bunk while the alien placed food trays on the table, one for each of them. She didn’t move toward the table until he left.
“Now do you believe me?” Kayla murmured.
“Either, we are on an alien spacecraft, we’re trapped in a movie set,” Meg quipped. “But they have weapons, and we don’t. Is the food fit to eat?”
“So far, it has been. It’s Earth food. I guess they want to keep us healthy,” Jane said, “I’m hungry, let’s eat.” She jumped down from the upper bunk and padded over also in bare feet.
There were four identical frozen dinners, packaged fruit cups, and hot drinks that smelled like tea. Meg ate with the others. It was not the greatest, but it had been a day since she’d eaten. The simple food was at least filling.
“Come on, Liz, you need to eat,” coaxed Kayla.
“I’m not hungry,” she sniffed, weeping softly. “If I can’t go home, I would rather be dead. I want Paul and our baby. I love them so much. I don’t want to live the rest of my life without them. Why couldn’t they just leave me alone?”
“None of this is right or fair,” said Jane. “Slavery is just obscene.”
While eating, Meg tried not to think about what her life would be if she were sold into slavery to be some alien’s whore, or would she be relegated to a brothel and forced to screw any being that would pay. She shuddered as she wondered if the Tenzari might decide to sample the merchandise. That just creeped her out.
What bothered her more than her own possible fate was that her family and friends wouldn’t know what happened to her. They would think she had been murdered and dumped somewhere. Her ex-husband wouldn’t care. He’d already found someone else before their split, the bastard. However, her patients would be left high and dry. Everything she had worked for would be gone---she would be gone.
“I can’t believe that slavery can be legal in a civilization with this level of technology,” said Meg.
“It probably isn’t,” said Kayla. “He said Earth had no recourse because they are not part of the Alliance. These aliens are probably not either.”
“Yes, it sounded like they think they will get away with it because Earth can’t complain to whatever Alliance might stop them,” Meg added. “It doesn’t sound very hopeful for us to get out of this.”
“I know. It’s not like we can call nine-one-one,” Jane said. “Whatever or whoever this Alliance is, we have no way to contact them to see if they would even help us.”
So, we’re screwed. Meg thought. She fell silent and concentrated on eating.
“I wish they’d at least left me my cell phone. Even if I couldn’t call anyone it had games and stuff and a few books to read,” said Jane.
“I didn’t have mine with me when the old guy snatched me right off the road near my house,” Meg said. “I wonder what they did with my two-hundred dollar running shoes.”
Kayla laughed, “It’s not like you will need them. There’s nowhere to run on this ship---not like we can escape and run away in space.”
“Even if we can escape from them wherever they’re taking us, how could we get back to Earth?” Jane added.
Screwed.
Between meals and sleeping, the days seemed endless. There was little to do in the small cell but talk or exercise in place. They didn’t even have a deck of cards between them. Liz cried a lot about the husband, and the four-month-old baby boy left behind. She missed her baby and her husband. She just wanted to go home. To make matters worse, she was still lactating from breastfeeding and her breasts hurt and leaked. She spent a lot of time in the bathroom expressing the excess milk and crying more.
It was hard for the other women to encourage Liz because they were so discouraged. Their situation looked hopeless. Nevertheless, Meg kept telling herself that somehow, she was going to get out of this. Maybe she couldn’t escape from the ship but if she watched and waited an opportunity would arise.