by Reagan Woods
Questions and comments are always welcome at www.reaganwoods.com and facebook.com/reaganwoodsromancewriter.
Other Books from Reagan
Arianna’s Alien Earth Neverafter Book 1
The Lost Earth Neverafter Book 3
Found Earth Neverafter Book 4 – Coming April 2018!
Read on for exerpts!
Arianna’s Alien
Earth Neverafter Book 1
Reagan Woods
Prologue
The worst day of Arianna’s life was not her 28th birthday, when the aliens began their systematic take-over of Earth just as she was blowing out the candle on the one stale donut she’d salvaged from an abandoned Quick Mart. Nor was it when World War III broke out in the middle of her oral thesis on the disastrous effects of deep-core mining iridium veins. Nope, even the day her father was conscripted to fight in El Presidente’s army wasn’t the worst; though she would never see him again.
The worst day of Arianna Wellingcourt’s existence was fifteen years prior to the shit storm that would become life on Earth; the day Bellara disappeared.
“Ari, you big goof!” Bellara’s honey blonde curls tangled across her face as she dived onto the ground, glove outstretched for the softball that sailed past just out of reach. The breath left her deceptively fragile looking 13 year-old body in a grunt upon impact with the public park lawn.
“Next time you’re going to get it, Ari.” Bellara stood and brushed the grass clippings from her bright yellow nylon shorts and grubby cotton t-shirt.
The blades of bright green grass caught Arianna’s attention as they danced off on a swirl of warm air. Convection currents and thermal columns she understood. Sports…not so much.
“Sorry, Belle! I’m just not good at this stuff,” Arianna pushed her glasses back up on her nose with a frustrated huff.
She tugged the softball glove off her hand to toss it on the ground, really hating that she couldn’t play with Bellara like they’d done as little kids. Bellara had become a superior athlete over the last few years. Arianna couldn’t put one foot in front of the other without tripping over dust, as attested to by the numerous healing bruises on her knobby knees and bony elbows. It was hard not to envy Bellara’s easy, social nature and athletic talent. She was the most popular girl in their class in spite of her tomboyish ways.
“I’ll go get the ball,” said Arianna. “You’ll never clock all your practice time if you have to keep running after it. Maybe you should just play with Dad.” Arianna began trudging towards the woods lining the field where she’d last seen the neon pink ball. She’d rather take the time to study the clouds rushing to gather over their little family outing. Oddly warm gusts of late-summer wind were travelling in the opposite direction of the classification-defying clouds overhead. Fascinating.
Bellara met her half way across the open field and wrapped an arm around her twin’s slumped shoulders. They walked slowly toward the tree line with their heads tilted so close that their blonde curls swirled in the heated breeze and clung together.
“Ari, you need to pull your head out of the clouds. Literally. Can’t you just relax and enjoy the day? School starts next week,” She chided gently. “You’ll be in all your advanced Miss Smarty Pants classes and I’ll be gone every evening with soccer and tennis and basketball practice. Ease up for today, girl.” Bellara’s green eyes sparkled with excitement as she squeezed her sister’s shoulders. “It’s going to be so fun seeing everyone after the break. I can’t wait to see what Tommy Nunez thinks of my contacts. He’s so cute!”
“Yes, he is. He’s going to love your contacts,” Ari encouraged softly. She said the wrong thing too often, but she really wanted to be a supportive sister…when she wasn’t green with envy over Belle’s ease with other people and her vast popularity. “Belle, I’m going to miss the fun we’ve had this summer. It feels like things are changing, doesn’t it?” Arianna blinked earnestly behind the thick lenses of her glasses.
“Ari, things always change. That’s life.”
Belle strode into the unknown with confidence, the expectation that things would work out and people would like her. Ari hated change – it made her feel cold and sweaty at the same time, sick.
“You know, I think you need new glasses. You should have gotten contacts like me,” Bellara declared, giving an exaggerated toss of her blonde head and batting her eyes playfully. “Look! Mom’s waving us over. It’s time to get out of here. It’s definitely going to storm. You go on ahead and I’ll grab the ball.”
“I didn’t want contacts,” Arianna grumbled. She loved Belle and even liked her usually. But she was an individual, too, not just ‘Bellara’s nerdy sister’. “People have a hard enough time telling us apart as it is.”
“I know! Isn’t it awesome?” Bellara winked and sprinted after the ball.
The wind began whipping at Arianna’s hair and thunder cracked so loudly overhead that she just had to stop and look back for Bellara. She screeched when lightning sizzled and struck the branches of a nearby tree filling the air with the scent of burnt ozone and charred wood.
“Belle?” Ari called timidly. “Belle! Answer me!” She dug deep to find her courage and ran into the woods shouting her sister’s name, pawing her wildly whipping hair from her glasses. Belle could be hurt or scared. If they could find each other in the growing darkness…
“Ari, run!” she heard Bellara scream. Her voice echoed thinly off of the trees and a concussion of thunder chased all traces of it away.
“Belle! Where are you?” Arianna cried back, struggling to see through the debris kicked up by the gusting wind.
“Ar-!” Her sister’s terrified shriek was cut short.
Arianna spun to face the direction she thought she’d heard Bellara from. Her heart leapt into her throat. Bellara was thrashing in the grip of a giant – blue? - man. One of his hands covered Belle’s mouth, leaving only her terrified eyes visible. His other three muscular arms secured Belle’s arms and legs. Thunder cracked directly overhead and she recoiled and closed her eyes reflexively. When she looked back at the spot she’d last seen Bellara and her captor, they were gone.
She wheeled around, searching in disbelief and shock. Where had they gone?
Strong hands gripped Arianna’s waist, picking her up. She screamed as loud as she could. Drawing breath to shout for her parents, she recognized the familiar scent of her father’s aftershave.
“Daddy, Belle is back there,” she sobbed onto her father’s shoulder. “A man has her!”
“Go to your mother and wait in the car. Go on now, girl!” He shoved Arianna towards her waiting mother. Frank Wellingcourt sprinted off into the woods shouting Bellara’s name, and the storm unleashed its full fury in a drenching torrent of cold rain.
Chapter One
Thunder clapped, shaking Arianna awake. For a moment she was 13 again, shivering and cowering before the storm that would steal her sister away. Dreams about Bellara were bitter-sweet for her. For a few precious moments her family was whole, but waking up from those dreams left a lingering aching in her chest for hours.
Prior to the invasion and the god-awful war thunderstorms and the blue man who haunted her dreams were Arianna’s two biggest fears. Now, she lived perpetually on the edge of starvation. No one was left to care if she lived or died. Belle, Mom and Daddy were all gone. She’d had Peter for a little while but he was gone, too. His strong arms would never hold her through the night again.
Worse than dying alone was getting captured, and she needed to get out of her own head to avoid that calamity. She pulled herself firmly into the present and quietly surveyed her surroundings through the night vision goggles she’d worn to sleep. Reaching up slowly so she didn’t wake the bats clinging to the rafters nearby, she flipped the goggles to infrared and did another pass of the warehouse. The only other living things in the immediate vicinity seemed to be the horse-sized rats in the maze of rotting boxes below. Loath to disturb her cuddly neighbors, Arianna decided
it couldn’t be helped. She didn’t want to end up a glob of melted goo stuck to one of these steel beams if lightning struck.
Cautiously, she peeled back the modified military-grade survival blanket. The foil-like substance helped dampen her heat signature so that she blended more evenly with the critters of the warehouse. After unclasping her elaborate sleep harness, she silently packed her gear and climbed down to the rubble strewn floor.
She pulled her dark rain gear over her warm thermal coat and cautiously exited into the ice-slickened ruins of the St. Louis river-front warehouse district. It was risky to keep the night vision goggles on in a potential lightning storm but she couldn’t afford to be caught with her guard down. She needed to find a safe way into the warmer climes of Texas where she’d heard there was another group of survivors. She hoped the mostly unmapped feeder caves under the city that fed into the Meramec Cavern system would be her ticket at least as far south as Arkansas.
Arianna preferred to travel below ground whenever possible, but proximity to the river combined with the rain made that ill-advised. The alien hunters couldn’t locate her as easily under the layers of hard rock and dirt. At least, that was her working theory. She knew they scanned the surface of the planet from space. They’d boasted about such technology in their satellite broadcast, or sat cast.
They called themselves the CORANOS Galactic Alliance and had made themselves known to the general populace soon after the Third Great War came to a whimpering close. In their sat cast, they claimed that the governments of Earth rejected their overtures of peace and generous offer to join their Alliance. Rejection was no longer an option.
The few geriatrics left had claimed that in the olden days, the leaders of Earth would have banded together and fought the good fight, or at least tried to negotiate a peace treaty with the aliens. Arianna figured they’d mistaken feel-good classics like Independence Day for reality. She’d kept that unpopular opinion to herself. After all, there was certainly no way that the two former nations of Earth could have rallied for interstellar warfare after the damage they’d inflicted on one another in their quest for world domination anyway.
Now, humans not in alien custody were deemed “resistant”. Resistant meant “to be captured or killed on sight”. Arianna learned the hard way that the life of a loner was the only way to stay alive and free. Although, death just might be her ultimate freedom now. Alive sure was a lot of damned work.
She’d left her Eastern Indiana community of survivors in late August to search for the missing three-man scavenger team. They were nearly a month past their projected return from their foraging trip into Chicago. There hadn’t even been a sign that they’d made it to Chicago. Checking each small town and city surrounding for a geocached message from the guys had been fruitless as well. Holing up in the abandon Quick Mart feeling sorry for herself turned into a lucky miss. Good luck or bad, she really couldn’t say.
When she’d returned to Indiana nearly two months after her departure, she’d been stunned to find all of her fellow survivors absent. Hatchets were scattered around the wood pile as if dropped. Threadbare washing flapped in the cold breeze waiting patiently to be worn by people who were nowhere to be found.
Finding herself completely alone, Arianna began to feel hopelessness for the first time in her life. In the midst of a particularly miserable bout of self-pity, she’d remembered the security cameras at the perimeter of their little community. Re-establishing the neglected electrical feed to the digital memory cache, she’d witnessed the horror of the CORANOS technology at work.
One moment her comrades were going about their daily chores. The next, they were faced with heavily armed aliens. The aliens were huge, towering over the gaunt humans. Arianna briefly entertained the thought that maybe some advanced scouting team of aliens had taken Belle all those years ago. But these aliens looked nothing like the man who’d stolen her sister. They were humanoid, however, they only had two arms. What little of their hide she could see confused her. Their skin shades varied from light tan to very dark brown and appeared to be streaked and mottled like some type of camouflage.
The cameras didn’t have sound but the threat in the alien posture was clear. The few humans who’d dared to run had been shot with some type of gun that had vaporized their bodies instantaneously. She’d watched helplessly as her friends were rounded up only to literally vanish before her eyes.
Blocking out the horror as best she could, she reviewed the footage again and again. As a result of her determined study, she figured out that they hadn’t simply disappeared, they’d been cloaked. From there, she thought they’d probably been loaded into a similarly cloaked vehicle of some kind or been full-on Sci-Fi film transported.
Later, she’d evaded and observed them, learning that the time of day and the lunar cycle were key factors in detecting the sneaky alien bastards. They couldn’t surprise her nearly as easily at night as they could during the day. On moonless or cloudy nights like tonight, there was simply no light to bend around their cloaking shields. A spot of inky blackness moving in a vast sky of star-studded velvet was a lot better than nothing at all.
Hiding in the basement of an abandoned farmhouse on the Illinois plains last week, she’d discovered another alien tell. She’d gone to sleep hidden in a dark corner just before the sun came up. At some point during the day, an alien patrol decided to check out the ruined house. The moment they’d opened the cellar door, they’d been swarmed by angry bats. She’d been frozen in place sure that she was about to meet her death, not knowing which direction the killing blow would come from. But the bats hadn’t let up. They’d chased the aliens until the bastards had uncloaked their personal shields which rendered them instantly visible, boarded their hover craft, and skedaddled.
She’d always hated bats, considering them flying rats. Watching them chase the five giant aliens had endeared them to her. Her mother always said it was a woman’s prerogative to change her mind. She’d quickly gotten over her dislike of dark, dank places and the little winged jerks. She was still mildly put-off by the idea of getting bit and contracting rabies but she’d take her chances. Her odds of surviving a shot from one of the CORANOS’ disintegration beams were lower. Much lower.
Only God knew what the aliens were doing with the humans. Eating them? Gathering them together for mass slaughtering? Shipping them off to be slaves on some alien home world? Arianna’s imagination was rife with grim possibilities.
She’d arrived in St. Louis two days ago. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being watched. In fact, she thought the group of hunters had been tracking her since the bat incident. This late in the year, the shortened days were on her side but the moon was waxing and that cut into her travel time significantly. She needed to take advantage of the cloud cover offered by the ice storm and find a way into those caves.
During the short hours of true darkness after the moon set last night, she’d gone to the Gateway Arch and retrieved a geocached message. She’d known immediately that it wasn’t from anyone she knew because the glyph signature it bore was unfamiliar. She exchanged the message for one of her own in which she detailed her recommended methods for avoiding CORANOS detection, the types of alien patrols she’d observed in the area and her intended direction.
Arianna made herself believe that she would find a message with directions to or information about a haven for humans. Even though she’d seen no recent signs of other free humans, she continued to hope and leave messages. If she could help someone else stay free, then she’d take the risk of making the information exchange whenever she was in a city or town on the geocaching route.
Focusing on her goal, Arianna took the time to scan each block with her infrared and her night vision before moving on. The necessity for caution made the three mile hike to the Soulard area slow and painstaking. Navigating the rubble of the decimated city streets and stopping to clear the sleet and freezing rain from her goggles further slowed her progress. With any luck, the hunte
rs’ equipment would also be adversely affected by the crappy weather.
A few hours before dawn, she spotted the tumbled brickwork and jumble of iron that denoted an old brewery. Heaving a sigh of relief, she crawled into the pile of rubble to look for the entrance to the cave that should lie beneath. She’d explore the connecting caverns and sleep below today. If this cavern didn’t connect to the larger cave system heading south, she’d come back up and try another brewery. God bless the city of St. Louis. The Bavarian expats had loved their beer. They were historically very gifted at locating the temperature controlled caverns that made brewing good beer possible before the days of central air and refrigeration. Hopefully, this cave system would shield her as she made her way south for the winter. God knew she couldn’t risk much more surface travel.
The CORANOS might be out there, watching. Most nights, she had to evade the sweeping search grids they flew in the two-man hovercrafts. Tonight, she’d barely seen any evidence of the search patrols at all. If she had more energy, she’d be suspicious. Right now, all she wanted to do was get out of the biting, driving ice storm.
With a grunt of satisfaction Arianna located the old steel grate and heaved it up. The squeaking groan of metal on metal echoed loudly in her ears. She should have thought to spray the hinges with oil before lifting. Giving herself a mental kick in the pants, she pulled the can of oil out and set about dampening further sound. Lowering herself slowly down the old rusted ladder, she began the painstaking process of mapping the cave.
Chapter Two
“Com on, please,” the annoyingly polite voice of the CORANOS Galactic Alliance ship Victory’s communication system hailed Vank.