The only thing they had in common with other humans seemed to be their hatred of the Nirreth. While they seemed willing enough to raid the stores of others among their race, they still did most of their stealing from the Nirreth holdings further south, coming north to hide and regroup, selling spoils to the highest bidder.
Their real crime was the extortion-type prices they forced the skags to pay, especially for critical things like medicine and tools.
They’d even take the odd job freeing slaves, it was said.
For the right price, of course, and who wanted to trust their money to them?
Anaze told Jet if she ever ran into Richter or any of his people, she should run as fast as she could. He didn’t say it outright, but she got the impression he didn’t think females of her age were particularly safe with that lot.
Anyway, for as far back as she could remember, Jet had been hearing from her own mother that having a common enemy didn’t make all the remaining humans their friends. Her mother also had the annoying habit of warning Jet almost daily that a sword would only do so much, if she was ever really threatened.
Like Jet needed to be told.
Still, in this case, she didn’t have the luxury to be picky.
Any human was better than the Nirreth.
If help was being offered by someone human, she would take it. Especially if it got her underground. When it came down to it, it was still a lot less frightening to be caught by one’s own kind than it was by the Nirreth.
The devil you know.
Or maybe it’s just that some skag wasn’t likely to eat her, or to turn her into some kind of medical experiment while Jet was still breathing.
For this reason, and maybe a few other, less-conscious ones, Jet made up her mind.
She broke cover.
She entered the main street. There was no other way to reach that open manhole.
Once she stepped out into the sun, Jet threw every last ounce of speed she had left towards reaching that open manhole cover, and the familiar voice. Staring at those skag-white fingers, she felt a surge of hope, jerking her legs even faster.
The mere sight of that crack of darkness peering out of the ground felt like a lifeline, her only chance to survive.
Nothing could be worse than being caught by the Nirreth.
Just then, a sound echoed off the row of buildings.
It was soft despite the high pitch, a bare murmur above Jet’s panting breaths, but she knew that sound. She would know it anywhere, even though until that exact moment, she’d only ever heard it from a distance.
With that high, scream-like whisper overhead, came another warm flush of breeze.
The culler was over her.
Forgetting about her vague trepidation about who might be trying to help her out, she summoned a last burst of speed from her muscles, and managed to run even faster. She focused solely on the eyes and hands of the skag peering out at her from under the ground.
Feeling the warm air wash over her a second time, this time close enough to whip her hair in stinging strands against her cheeks, Jet realized the hovercraft was descending.
She let out a shriek, pumping her arms and legs faster.
Her backpack and sword swung hard against her back and shoulders, in a rhythmic, thumping, swaying pattern that probably left bruises by now.
As Jet ran, those eyes watched her from the crack in the ground, white fingers holding up the metal plate. Jet noticed that the expression in those eyes looked different now. They looked worried––like maybe they were assessing her chances and not finding them good.
Whoever they were, Jet agreed with them.
The eyes and dim outline of a face looked too far away for what she could feel behind her.
She barely had time to think that much when something caught hold of her foot.
Yanking abruptly on her ankle as it climbed up her leg, the vine-like appendage jerked her backwards and up.
Jet screamed as her feet left the paved road.
She reached out with her arms, hands out, fingers splayed, trying to grasp hold of something, anything, to keep her from leaving the earth.
There was nothing to grab hold of.
That tightening vine hauled her backwards, up into space, her leg and arms waving ineffectively in the air as she rose.
Throughout the entire ascent, she didn’t stop screaming.
She also didn’t stop trying to unsheath her sword.
2
The Open Hatch
Jet landed hard on a metal deck.
It felt as if she’d been thrown there bodily by two large men, each holding one half of her arms and her legs.
For a long-seeming second, she sat on the ridged metal floor, panting, gripping the wall with one hand. She gripped the hilt of her sword in the other.
The instant she could focus her eyes, blinking back the tears from the wind and her screaming as she rose in the air, Jet lurched drunkenly to her feet, holding the sword in front of her. Both of her hands gripped the hilt as soon as she pushed off from the wall.
She could barely see the creature in front of her, but heard a hiss as it backed off. She stepped towards the lit hatch door, moving sideways so that her eyes never left the tall, midnight blue shape in front of her.
When she finally chanced a glance down, her heart sank.
The hovercraft stood at around the fifth story of the nearest building.
If she jumped, she’d die. And she didn’t see a ladder, or even the vine-like rope they’d used to haul her up.
“Let me down!” she shouted, taking a step towards the creature with the sword.
He slid gracefully back, moving with an incredible lightness for such a tall creature.
“Let me down!” she insisted, louder. “I’ve broken no laws! I’ve done nothing wrong!”
Which wasn’t true, of course.
Just living underground, squatting in caves and growing their own food was technically against the law. Much less the poaching they did, or the bartering with other skags, including black marketeers. Really, the only way to live outside the Nirreth cities and not break the law was to work for the Nirreth directly and live in their assigned settlements, what humans called the “Hamster Cage.”
Even those people starved unless they cut corners.
Jet knew that, because her settlement traded with the Hamster Cage humans for some of the staples they had no other way to get.
Things like rice. Flour. Even sugar on occasion.
The point was, the laws were just an excuse.
The Nirreth had to know everyone broke them, pretty much every day.
They picked up skags because they could.
“Let me down!” Jet yelled again. “You have no right to keep me!”
The creature met her gaze with its large, black eyes. It gestured towards her, in one of the few Nirreth signs she knew.
It was a peace gesture, an offering to parlay.
“No!” She shook her head, vehement. “No parley! Let me down! Right now!”
It took another step towards her, its three-fingered, claw-like hand held out carefully.
When Jet didn’t move, it took another step, until it was in range of her sword.
That time, Jet moved, swinging the sword expertly towards the creature’s upper body. The end of Black made a downward, then an upward slash across the front of what would be a chest on a human. She felt the blade meet flesh somewhere near its shoulder, and sawed forward, throwing her weight into the creature to press the sword in deeper.
The Nirreth hissed, louder and more angry-sounding.
Grabbing the sharp end of the blade with its three-fingered claw, the Nirreth leapt backwards and to her right. The sword cut its hand, of course, so it let the blade go, clutching its upper chest with its hurt hand.
Jet saw a streak of color in the dark, where her blade sawed through its midnight blue skin.
Somehow the fact that their blood was red, too, made the whole thing
finally seem real. She swung at it a second time, but the Nirreth moved faster, circling around her to avoid the arc of her blade. Its eyes appeared concentrated now, as they followed her sword.
Jet adjusted to follow.
…but she hadn’t been watching its tail.
She had just thrust the blade forward, narrowly missing its arm, when that snake-like, whipping tail caught hold of her from the other side.
Wrapping around her arm, it flung Jet into the wall, smacking her head against the metal bulkhead. Stunned from the hit, she straightened, but not before the tail uncoiled from her arm, then re-coiled around her wrist.
Before she could even try to free herself, it jerked the blade and her body violently to the side. That time, it nearly threw her to the ground.
She barely kept hold of the sword.
Struggling against the muscled appendage, Jet tried to loosen its grip, wrestling first with her own arm, then trying to pry the tail off with her fingers. The deep-blue flesh seemed impervious to her jerks and grasping hand. Solid muscle, even the very end of its tail was as thick as her lower arm, straining with effort under the dark-blue skin.
Jet finally managed to twist her body sideways, gaining enough leverage and angle to use the sword on the tail itself. Before she could slash at it, however, another Nirreth approached from behind. It grasped hold of her free wrist with a three-fingered hand.
She struggled with both of them as they tried to force her to drop the sword.
She started backing away, towards the open hatch door, when a third Nirreth, one Jet hadn’t seen at all, emerged from the darkness of the deeper reaches of the hold.
Ignoring her limbs altogether, it caught hold of the blade with another of those tails…
…and yanked it straight out of her fingers.
Jet watched it go in disbelief.
She’d never let go of her sword in a fight before. Never.
Before she could lunge after it, the nearest one, the one whose shoulder still bled down its dark brown shirt, shoved her in the middle of her chest with one thick claw.
It wasn’t a gentle nudge.
Her feet left the ground as Jet flew straight back.
The creature’s muscled arm propelled her so quickly, she barely knew what happened when her head and back slammed into the bulkhead a second time.
That time, the blow stunned Jet for real.
The backpack crushed into her back, making her gasp when it hit the bones of her spine. The wind knocked out of her, she leaned forward, clutching her stomach as she fought in air in ragged pants.
For a few seconds, she couldn’t move.
She was still sitting there when something grabbed at the pack on her back, forcing it off her arms. She tried to keep hold of it, wrestling them for it briefly, but they merely pushed her back to the ground with a claw-like hand. They took her winter coat in the process.
Jet felt briefly naked with both things gone.
She rarely left the underground without either.
Anyway, her backpack had her knives, even a small bow in a tube that she’d brought for possible trade with Everest.
Without that or Black, she would be helpless.
But there were more of them now, a sea of faces she could feel peering at her from the dark. Looking around at those reflecting black eyes, Jet got the feeling not everyone they netted fought back, much less managed to nick one of them with a sword.
She watched her pack and long coat disappear into the darkness. She could hear claw-like hands going through them both, pulling items out of the canvas knapsack and probably inspecting them one by one.
Biting her lip, she tried not to care when she heard the clatter and tug, the rip of cloth as they found her mother’s shirts, the sound of the bow she’d made and arrows she’d feathered fall out of the tube to the metal of the deck.
When she finally forced her eyes up, she found herself staring at the midnight blue face of one of her nightmares. The creature stared back at her. He continued to hold his shoulder where she’d cut him with the Japanese-style sword, but she couldn’t tell if it was still hurting him. He looked more puzzled than in pain.
Jet watched the Nirreth take in the length of her body with a slow stare, as if she were as much of an animal to it as it was to her.
Black, opaque-seeming eyes scanned her hands and feet where she sprawled, as if looking for more weapons, anything that might be a threat.
After the faintest pause, it bared its teeth.
It smiled too wide, showing too much gum, ape-fashion. The effect caused her to recoil, until her shoulders met the ridged metal of the bulkhead behind her.
Her uncle Draven told her once that the Nirreth tried to smile because they knew humans did it. They tried to copy other mannerisms too, but she couldn’t remember what he’d said about that specifically.
The smiles were eerie. She remembered him saying that.
She knew she was just distracting herself, though.
Her mind churned through the reality of her situation.
She’d been caught.
The Nirreth had caught her.
Worse, they’d taken her sword.
It was the unthinkable thing, the thing she spent most of her days worried would happen to Biggs, not her. She’d always assumed it would be him, not her.
Or maybe she’d just been more afraid of it happening to him.
Biggs daydreamed all day, every day, no matter what she said. Biggs refused to follow the precautions everyone else did. He wandered alone, at night. He explored the overworld even when he didn’t have to. He was fascinated by the parks, which everyone knew weren’t safe, as the Nirreth often spent time there too, collecting samples and rooting out the squatters who tried to grow gardens and orchards in the relatively clean soil.
He even tried to catch animals.
Not to eat.
Biggs wanted them as pets.
He’d been found trying to rope a wolf once, down by the water. If old Kimchee hadn’t been there, he probably would have gotten his throat torn out.
But it hadn’t been Biggs who got snatched by the cullers.
It had been her, Jet.
She was the one who’d been caught off her guard. It would be her, Jet, who would be taken to one of their floating cities and be experimented on, enslaved, beaten, raped… maybe even eaten, once they were finished doing whatever else to her.
Assuming they didn’t just drop her out the hovercraft door to watch her body explode on the moss-covered pavement, just for shits and giggles.
Her mind went into a kind of static.
Somehow, that blank, empty state left her surprisingly calm.
Rubbing her ankle, which hurt from the vine that dragged her up into the air, she realized that the hovercraft still wasn’t moving. They’d remained over the same section of street where they picked her up, not far from what used to be the Gaslamp district.
She wondered again how high they were off the ground.
Maybe she really could jump.
Her chances would certainly be better now, from a stationary position, than they would be in a few minutes, when the culler started moving.
The thought was absent at first, almost a muse, but it quickly turned more pointed. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the flat top of a brick building. She couldn’t be certain, but it looked to be within landing distance.
It would be suicide to jump, her mind reasoned.
Anyway, they would only rope her back up into the hovercraft again.
But how much worse could it be than staying here?
Could she ever forgive herself for not at least trying to get away?
Jet pondered this as she tried to get a sense of the layout of the small cargo hold. She didn’t fully take her attention off the closest Nirreth’s face. She only took her eyes off him directly once, to look around the dark space behind him, where they presumably had her things.
Her eyes couldn’t penetrate that blackness, not en
ough to locate her sword.
She glanced at the brick building outside.
It would be a long jump.
Too long, she suspected.
Even so, Jet could feel the part of herself that wanted to try it. Her heart beat louder, deafening her, so Jet knew she was on the verge of making a dash for the opening.
But she’d already stared too long, shown too much interest.
The Nirreth she’d stuck with her sword kicked her with its two-toed, flat foot. It wasn’t a hard kick, or even a particularly threatening one. But she found she understood it well enough.
He wanted her eyes off that hovercraft door.
Looking back into the dark, she saw more black eyes staring at her, reflecting light.
A few bared teeth at her, as well.
Most only stared, their faces unmoving.
Fear clenched her stomach, knotting it. Jumping was crazy, but she couldn’t think of anything else––nothing else would come to her mind as a solution. Breathing was difficult, but the static in her mind remained. It didn’t seem all that realistic to try and fight them using only her body. The one standing over her had a hundred pounds on her, easy.
No, the sword had been her only chance at fighting them.
That chance had passed.
Jet saw tails flickering in the dark like snakes, seemingly separate from the bodies to which they were attached.
Realizing she was breathing too much, rather than too little, she clutched a hand over her chest, trying to calm herself down, or at least to keep from passing out.
They would pump less oxygen in here probably.
From what her uncle said, they needed less, pulling in an odd combination of oxygen and CO2 from the air slits at the sides of their necks, just above their shoulders.
One thought kept repeating.
She had to get out of here.
She had to get out of here now.
Once they took her out of the city, she was a goner.
As if taunting her, the hovercraft remained over the same street, too high for her to jump but close enough for her mind to toy with the idea. It felt like if she left this segment of asphalt and rusted metal, she would never see her family again.
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 3