Category : Books-Fiction

Sub Category : Science Fiction

I figure out a few things over the next day on the spaceship.
		I figure out that there’s no toilet. It seems our captors hadn’t thought through the whole stuff-the-hold-full-of-stolen-girls thing. We have to make do with a  bucket in a corner, hence the sewage smell. Dignity? Gone. Nothing like waiting your turn on the poop bucket to make you lose what little humanity you have left.
		I figure out that food is tiny little bricks that look like dried seaweed and taste like shit. We get two of those a day. Water? It’s dispensed from a faucet of some kind that reminds me of a gerbil feeder set in the wall.
		The welts on my arm go down over the next several hours, though one rough little bump remains. Through feeling it and peering at the other girls’s arms, I’m guessing it’s some sort of electronic tracking device they’ve implanted. Cattle tags, as Lily had called ‘em. At the moment, I think it’s pretty damn apt. 
		I figure out that there are two kinds of aliens. There are the fragile green ones that seem to be in charge and the basketball-headed ones that are security. I call them basketball heads not because they’ve got oversized brains, but because of the pebbly, hairless orange-ish texture of their skin. It looks bizarre above the collar of the gray bodysuits they wear day in and day out. The basketball heads are pretty horrific, no matter the stupid name. They have weird little bug eyes with an opaque eyelid over them and needle-like teeth. They have two fingers and a thumb instead of five, and they’re tall. The little green men, the ones that make the bird noises? They’re no more than three feet tall or so, and they rarely show up. The basketball heads, though? They’re in the hold constantly.
		Everyone’s terrified of them, too.
		I figure this out when I wake up the next morning—though I suppose it could be the afternoon—and see everyone else is awake. The last of the dopey meds seem to have worn off, and I stifle a yawn, blinking. I want to be silent, because silent is good. It takes me a moment to realize everyone’s moving to the far side of the cage, huddling away from the bars. The hairs on the back of my neck rise, and I follow the others, heading to the back. I want to ask what’s going on, but the moment I open my mouth, Lily shakes her head silently, her gaze fixed on something over my shoulder.
		I turn and flinch at the sight of a basketball-headed alien peering through the bars at me. I flinch again when he gives me a leering grin, and I scoot closer to the others.
		“No screaming,” someone murmurs as a warning.
		God, this is freaking me out. I nod. No way am I making a sound.
		The ball heads remain in our room all day. It’s like they’re waiting for something. I’m afraid to wonder what it is. We huddle in the corner of the cage, on edge, and another unconscious girl is brought into the room after a few hours. No one even tries to escape when they open they door. We just sit and watch as they shove the newest girl inside and close the door again.
		I can guess why no one wants to attempt a break out. Where would we go? And the consequences of disobedience must be bad, because everyone in the cage is utterly frightened by the basketball heads. 
		Someone grabs the new girl by the arm and tries to pull her into our huddled pile. She’s about my age and has pretty red hair. I notice the ball heads kept coming back to the cage and commenting on her in their weird garbled language, making hand gestures from time to time. Then they laugh, a high-pitched, eerie sound that grates on my frayed nerves.
		It’s almost like they’re taking bets on the new girl.
		A few hours later, she wakes up. I’m hunkered down next to Lily, and I startle out of my stupor when she inhales sharply.
		The girl sobs aloud, her eyes going wide. 
		“Don’t scream,” I hear a low voice hiss. I can’t make out who’s said it, but I know we’re all thinking it.
		The redhead isn’t listening, though. She takes one look around her, panics, and begins to scream. Her shrill cry echoes in the hold. She won’t stop, even though others are waving their hands and touching her, trying to calm her down. She’s hysterical, her cries getting louder and more panicked the more awake she gets. She flails and thrashes against our warning touches.
		Something beeps overhead.
		The others in the cage go utterly still.
		Weird bird-like chirps fill the air from the intercom.
		One of the ball heads touches a panel that lights up, and he garbles a response. The crowd of girls seems to shrink back as the other ball head approaches the cage and opens the door. 
		It’s freedom, but no one’s reaching.
		The redhead is snagged. She’s a fighter, I’ll give her that. She thrashes and flails as they touch her, screaming curses in French and shrieking for help. Everyone else sits quietly, watching.
		I can’t stand this. I try to get up, to go help. Lily grabs my leg. “Don’t,” she hisses. “Don’t call attention to yourself, Gariel. Trust me.”
		Even though it goes against everything inside me to do nothing, I’m terrified, too. It’s too easy to sit down and huddle with the mass of girls again. To sit and wait and see what happens when someone disobeys the unspoken gag order. And I hate myself for it.
		A moment later, the redhead’s dragged to what I thought was an examining table. I watch in horror as one of the ball heads slaps some sort of mask over her mouth. When she goes silent, I realize it’s a muzzle of some kind. My own mouth thins, my teeth clamping together. I feel sick as her hands are stretched over her head and bound at the far end of the table with a cord that snakes around her wrists. Her hips and legs hang over the edge and I start imagining the worst.
		She continues to kick and flail as one of the aliens grabs her skirt and rips it from her body.
		“Don’t look,” Lily whispers to me.
		I look, though. Someone has to look. Someone has to see.
		Sick at heart, I watch as the redhead bucks and tries to free herself. I watch as the first alien undoes the front of his uniform with a touch at the collar. I watch as his friend makes laughing comments as he mounts the gagged woman.
		I watch, dry-eyed and full of hate as they laugh and get on top of her over and over again. It seems to go on forever. At some point she stops fighting and goes limp, and I hope she’s passed out. I hope she doesn’t remember any of this.
		Lily squeezes my hand. “Kara says they have standing orders that they’re allowed to ‘discipline’ any misbehaving captives.”
		I nod and finally look away as the aliens talk in their weird language and switch places once more. I’m guess she’s good and ‘disciplined’ by now. I want to scream, but loud noises aren’t allowed. I dig my nails into my palms and gaze down the row of pale faces in the pen with me, trying to figure out which one is Kara. A girl at the end with silky, flat brown hair is weeping with her hands pressed to her ears. It’s as if she can’t stand to hear what’s going on, but the redhead is silent. There’s only alien chatter.
		That must be Kara. She’s the only one who can understand them, thanks to the device implanted in her ear. I scan the others. They’re in shock, eyes averted. One girl wears a look of horrified grief, and I wonder if she was a screamer, too. I decide I don’t want to know. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to drown out the world. Trying to exist in a quiet bubble where none of this is real. Where if I pinch my arm hard enough, everything will go away and I’ll wake up.
		But when I close my eyes, I see the redhead’s face as she’s raped. I see the ball head’s face as he jokes and yammers away in his alien language as he rapes the girl. As if it’s no big deal, just another day at the office, typical water-cooler shit.
		Lily is right. We’re nothing but cattle to these things. They’re going to sell us to someone else to rape, to eat, or both. Or something else more horrible that I can’t even imagine.
		I’m not going to take my fate sitting down, though. I cross my arms tightly over my pajamas, draw my legs up, and study my surroundings. I look at each nook and cranny of the strange walls, trying to determine if there’s anything I can grab that can be used as a weapon.
		Because I’m going to kill those pebbly, gross bastards if they ever try to touch me.