She would die in some Nirreth city.
No one would ever know what happened to her.
She risked another glance out the open door of the hovercraft.
The vessel rose and fell gracefully in the wind, adjusting its height up and down. Jet noticed that the brick building was even further away now than before. Now it was clearly too far to jump. She might as well jump directly down onto the street, over 80 feet below.
She could wait.
Hope for a better chance, one she might survive.
They would probably pass over water at some point, either the Sound or an honest-to-gods ocean. Of course, the waters of either were dangerous as hell, just from pollution and toxic algae alone, not to mention the poisonous and deadly fish and sharks.
The creature kicked her again, forcing Jet’s eyes off the door.
It shook its giant head at her.
Again, its meaning was clear.
Jet looked away from the door, but her mind continued to chew through scenarios. Even with the risks, a large body of water struck her as worth trying.
Anything would be better than letting them take her back behind the high walls and force fields surrounding one of their “green zones.” She’d never seen one, even from the outside, but the traders she’d grown up with had. The parks and cities they’d built to dot the continent were more secure than any prison.
Getting in from the outside was all but impossible.
No one had heard of anyone getting back out again, not once they were inside.
Jet took another breath as the thought solidified.
Then another.
She needed to keep her wits about her.
She couldn’t give in. Not now.
That was the mistake most people made when the Nirreth caught them, she told herself; they missed their chance to escape before they’d been locked away in a place where escape was no longer possible. The lizard-skins seemed surprised about the sword, enough that she’d managed to wound one of them.
Maybe they’d be surprised by her willingness to jump into a toxic sea, as well.
She needed to be ready.
She was starting to get her focus back, to begin the semblances of a plan in her head…
When one of those snake-like tails darted sideways at her.
That time, it didn’t wrap around any part of her.
Before Jet could move out of the way, it slammed into her side.
She gasped in shock, thrown sideways by the blow.
It didn’t release her.
Staring down in a kind of horror, Jet saw the tail seeming to stick out of her side, the end of it stuck into her flesh. She pounded at it ineffectually with her fists, then struggled to pull it out, using her booted feet as leverage as she tried to force her body in the opposite direction. When Jet couldn’t free herself that way, she tore at the thick, dark-blue skin with her fingernails.
The creature’s skin flinched along the ridge where she dug in her nails, but the tail still didn’t let go. One sharp end caught her flesh, holding her in place like a bone hook. It punctured clothing, skin and flesh, and it did it fast. Apart from the hook holding her in place, it felt like a thin-bladed knife had slid between two of Jet’s ribs.
Once it penetrated a couple of inches, she felt something else.
Liquid forced its way into her flesh.
She gasped in alarm and pain as the substance was forced into the tiny hole. A feeling of pressure met the flesh under her skin, making Jet light-headed.
When the pressure worsened, she yelled out, struggling for real.
The tail left, as quickly as it had come.
She could barely follow the motion with her eyes. The smooth skin slid out from between her fingers like water…
And then it was gone, coiled back behind its owner.
Crying out a second time, more in protest than anything, Jet clasped her side with her fingers, nearly in shock from the pain. She’d expected a lot of blood, but there was almost none. Even with the barb at its end, the tail’s blade was thin enough and sharp enough that it didn’t leave much of a hole once the creature unhooked from her flesh.
The effects of whatever it had expelled into her lingered.
In fact, Jet suspected the pain came more from that substance, whatever it had been, not from being stabbed by the sharp end of its tail. The drug reached her blood stream tangibly. There was nothing Jet could do but sit there, letting it happen.
Whatever the Nirreth secreted into her, she felt it rapidly warm her skin.
The warmth slid up to the middle of her chest, then down to her stomach and legs. Her arms began to warm a few seconds later, even her fingers.
Her skin seemed to go numb.
Looking up at the creature standing over her, Jet realized it had been him.
That had been the Nirreth to stick her with its tail, maybe in revenge since she’d cut him first. Whatever his reasons, he’d expelled something from his body into hers.
She couldn’t quite move past that thought in her brain.
Still holding her side, she fought to slide her weight backwards on the floor. She had to strain to move her muscles, to operate her limbs. She shoved at her body sluggishly, using her booted feet as leverage.
She couldn’t direct her feet’s movements very well, either.
She wasn’t moving right.
There was something wrong with her.
The creature just watched, silent.
Even less successfully, Jet tried to use the wall to climb to her feet. Her tongue gradually thickened in her mouth, and it hit her again that the Nirreth had drugged her somehow with its tail. Whatever the drug had been, it made it nearly impossible for her to move, much less fight them. It made it hard to even think straight.
Her thoughts were repeating though, Jet realized.
Moving slow. Repeating.
As she realized that much, another thought occurred to her.
She wouldn’t be catapulting herself out of hovercraft doors anytime soon.
The window of hope she’d left herself, that stood shining before her eyes as she’d thought about the hovercraft skimming over the water, began to dim.
Jet had heard, of course that the Nirreth had poison in their tails.
She’d never heard anyone say what that poison did, exactly, probably because no one knew for sure. She’d heard rumors, like with anything related to the Nirreth. She’d heard that it was like a kind of happy pill, rendering their victims docile but still able to work. It was said by some that humans could get high off the secretions, like a street drug.
She’d also heard it made its victims die a horrible, painful and convulsing death.
She could be dying right now. There was no way to know.
In some ways, death wouldn’t even be all that terrible, not compared to what Jet heard they normally did with human captives.
All she had was rumors. Rumors of rumors. Underground myths whispered from person to person in the dark, like ghost stories.
No one escaped. The cullers came and people disappeared.
That’s the way it had been for as long as Jet could remember.
Gripping the lower part of the wall, she tried again to crawl away from where the tall Nirreth stood. That time, it grabbed hold of her arm.
Before she could try to get away, it yanked her unceremoniously to her feet.
“Captain wants to see you,” it said in stilted English.
The oddity of it speaking English stunned her briefly. Then she was once more lost in looking at the thing, in making sense of it.
She stared at his black eyes, at the strangeness of his features.
It occurred to her that whatever else the stinger had done to her, the pain had vanished. The hardest edges of her fear felt dulled, as did her ability to think, to even be angry. Her limbs remained almost soft in the tall Nirreth’s thick fingers. She found herself looking at its face in more detail, almost in curiosity, unable to keep herself
from staring at its odd features.
The Nirreth who held her was larger than any human she’d ever known.
He stood more than a foot taller than Edgar, their blacksmith, who was the tallest man in their settlement.
She’d known Nirreth were tall, though.
They found a skeleton from time to time, although it was rare, and usually from the first wars. But the height thing wasn’t rumor, at least; that much, people at the settlement could verify.
Generally speaking, they had broader shoulders, too, like this one did, and longer legs. Most, including this one, were proportionately leaner than humans, with long, dense muscles on their appendages, including their tails.
Their feet had only two large, flat toes.
They had only three very long fingers and an even longer, four-jointed thumb on each hand.
She stared down at this one’s feet.
Leather shoes encased its long, flat toes.
They made him look a little bit like a duck. Or maybe a goat.
Jet giggled, looking back up at it.
That time, it didn’t bare its teeth at her.
The Nirreth’s features were both strangely sharper than a human’s and stood out further on its face. Rather than the nearly flat countenance of most humans, the creature standing in front of her, as well as those Jet glimpsed in the darker segment of the hold, looked closer to fish, or maybe reptiles. In some ways, they even resembled a horse or a deer, or any animal where the face appeared elongated and more symmetrical.
Their large, black eyes still sat in the front of their faces, however.
Jet read somewhere that predators always had their eyes staring forward, never to the side. Cats had that, and dogs. Deer and horses had theirs on the sides of their heads. Probably so they could see more peripherally and run away faster.
So maybe its face was more like a big, fur-less cat’s, Jet thought.
Like a panther. A dark blue panther.
Jet wondered if humans would eventually evolve to having their eyes on the sides of their faces, from living under the Nirreth.
Thinking about that, trying to picture it in her head, she laughed again.
Looking closer at the Nirreth’s face, Jet noticed that this one had a rim around its eyes that was a lighter midnight blue, even lighter than its skin. Its black irises were flecked with pebble-like dots of the same color, giving its eyes a jewel-like appearance.
“Pretty,” Jet said.
Her voice slurred.
The creature smiled at her again.
That time, she didn’t flinch away.
“Better?” he grunted. “Feel better… person?”
It took her a moment to understand the question.
“Yes,” she said, a half-beat too late. Jet nodded seriously, feeling like someone jerked her head up and down on a puppet string.
“Yes,” she repeated, a little stronger. “What was that?”
The Nirreth grunted, making a kind of soft, hissing sound in its throat.
Then it turned, still holding her arm, and began to walk.
“We see captain,” it said only.
“Wait…” she began.
She had nothing to follow from that.
The Nirreth led Jet along a curved passageway that appeared to wind her deeper inside the ship. There was some reason Jet knew she shouldn’t go that way, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember what it was.
Feeling her panic return in muted form, she looked backwards at the open hatch door, feeling the rushing air and wind on her face, coiling through her long hair.
She couldn’t remember what she wanted.
She couldn’t remember why it felt so important to stay by that sunlit passage.
Somehow, an opportunity felt gone in those few seconds.
It brought a strange longing, but not really sadness.
Even as she thought it, noise and commotion by that same open door made Jet flinch back into the tall Nirreth’s arm. As she watched, another body came heaving and struggling over the rim of the hovercraft door, held by its ankles and one wrist by several green, coiling, vine-like ropes.
A male like her, meaning a male human, dangled from those coils of organic-looking rope. Maybe Jet’s age or maybe a little older, he was definitely like her, definitely human. The male human cursed while she watched, swinging his arms at the Nirreth who pulled him through the open doorway.
Rather than wait, the Nirreth dealt with him at once.
The vines hadn’t even dropped the man to the deck when they extended their tails.
Jet watched as they stung him multiple times as he hung there.
The boy/man screamed, making Jet wince, clutching at the arm of the Nirreth who held her.
“Don’t hurt him,” she whispered.
The Nirreth made a reassuring sound, a kind of softer hiss, almost a purr.
Craning her neck back over her shoulder, she barely had time to meet the male human’s gaze.
“Jet!” he screamed. “Jet! No! Don’t let them take you!”
The Nirreth holding Jet’s wrist tugged more insistently on her arm.
“Jet!” the boy screamed. “Jet! What’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you fighting them?”
She continued staring at the face of the human male as the dark blue creature pulled her backwards down the corridor. She and the lizard-skin-cat-creature rounded a curve a few seconds later, and Jet saw the image of the boy in front of her start to disappear.
“Jet!” he shrieked. “Jet! Don’t leave with him!”
But the Nirreth holding her wrist tugged more insistently on her arm.
“JET!” the other human yelled, even louder. “JET!”
Just before he dropped from her view, three more Nirreth were converging on him.
She’d recognized him, though. She knew his face, even in the haze of Nirreth’s sting.
It was Anaze.
Anaze followed her to the Gaslamp, even though she asked him not to.
Now he was a prisoner, too.
3
The Captain
Jet stumbled down a ribbed corridor, still hanging from the fingers of her Nirreth guide.
He took her down passages where the tunnels forked, leading her over at least two catwalks and up three cave-like stairwells bounded by a maze of different-colored pipes and wall tiles covered in dizzying geometric patterns.
Even without the drug, Jet might have been confused.
As it was, she only put her feet and hands where the Nirreth told her to put them, and she didn’t try to remember any of it. Only later would she think about how unusual this was for her. Jet would normally make a point of knowing everything about any structure she entered, even for just a few seconds.
The layout of the Nirreth ship should have had her riveted.
She could feel a part of her following the guidance of something else.
It wasn’t just that she was passive, exactly.
She felt strangely dependent.
The Nirreth told her where to place her feet as she walked, where to put her hands as they climbed a ladder or a wall dotted in hand and foot-holds.
He did it without speaking a single word.
After they’d reached yet another floor higher, Jet followed the prod of the Nirreth’s mind and squeezed along a long, narrow corridor with high walls. The Nirreth’s claw-like hand continued to tug on her as she walked, but Jet didn’t mind any more. After passing over several, round, ship-like hatches in the floor, the Nirreth pointed at the last one and grunted something.
Jet looked up at its face, bewildered in a passive kind of way.
“What?” she said, when it didn’t move.
Hissing a little, the Nirreth prodded her shoulder, pointing at the hatch in the floor.
Jet looked at the metal door, then back up at the Nirreth, perplexed.
“How?” she said finally.
The creature mimed turning the wheel with his claw-like hands.
�
��Ah,” Jet said.
She didn’t make a move towards the door.
“Open now,” the Nirreth said thickly. “Captain waits.”
Without another sound, the tall, blue-skinned thing reversed direction in the narrow passage, and began walking back the way they had come. The creature had to stand at an angle to navigate the small space, using shuffling half-steps over the smooth floor.
Jet was left staring down at the circular hatch.
Her body remained pliable from the Nirreth’s sting, verging on heavy, but her head felt slightly clearer than it had before, in the cargo hold.
So much clearer, in fact, the thought reached her again that perhaps she should try for escape. Looking around, she wondered where she should go. Back to the cargo hold? That didn’t strike her as a particularly good plan. Given the condition of her mind, she had her doubts she could even find it. She could hide out in one of the nooks and crannies on the ship itself, wait for the drug to wear off, hope for a chance to sneak back there.
Did a ship this small have any kind of emergency vehicle, or glider?
The Nirreth who left her here certainly hadn’t seemed worried.
She tried to assess her options, but her brain was still pretty fuzzy.
She couldn’t just stay here, or worse, knock on the door of the head Nirreth’s cabin like some kind of trained monkey. The lizard-skins, as most skags thought of the Nirreth, wouldn’t be any less likely to torture and enslave her if Jet was obedient.
She wished she had her pack.
Or really, just the sword.
She wanted Black.
On the other hand, if Jet had her tools, she might be able to cut open one of these walls, design a makeshift place to hide until a real chance to escape presented itself.
She started to edge back along the corridor in the opposite direction, when the wheel on the hatch in front of her began to turn.
Jet froze, watching it spin.
Then, moving jerkily, fighting dizziness from the drug, she fought to move faster, gripping the nearest wall and trying to use it for balance as she went back the way she’d come. For some reason, her arms were coming back faster than her legs, so she tried to compensate, using those. When her legs kept wanting to buckle, or she couldn’t lift her feet, she gripping a pipe, half-lifting herself off the floor. She tried to swing her lower body forward as far as she could, bringing her legs after her.
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 4