Another lizard, just like the first comes through the door. It takes a quick look at the carnage of its friend and in that time I raise my sword, readying for it.
I killed one. I can kill another.
With a growl it turns and uses its tail to knock me from my feet. As I hit the ground, so does the sword. I hear the clang of metal sliding across the floor and out of my reach. I can’t take my eyes off of it. It peers over me to where Shayla is. It lifts up a foot. I see how rough its skin is, the way his black claws curl inward.
It’s going to step on me and dig its claws in my flesh, ripping me apart.
I brace myself, but it steps over me with one foot and then the other. Its thick tail slides across my body. The heavy weight of it crushes me. I turn to follow where it’s going.
Shayla is trying to squeeze through a window. She’s half-way out, her butt and legs are dangling and kicking.
“Hurry, Shayla! It’s coming for you”
She screams out.
I should get up. No I need to get up. Grab my sword and stab it in its back.
Now.
But I can’t.
I’m frozen, watching in horror as it uses a hand to grab a hold of one of Shayla’s leg and pull her back with a yank. Shayla flies through the air and slams against the far wall with a thud. As if in slow motion her body slides against the wall and crumples to the ground. She’s lying in an odd position. One of her legs is bent awkward. Her head is hanging to the side. A trickle of crimson blood is forming at the side of her mouth.
“No! No! No!” I yell, finally coming to my senses.
I scramble across the floor to her. “Shayla! Wake up. Get up,” I yell.
Before I can reach her, sharpness pierces my side. Blinding pain erupts within me as I’m lifted off the ground. I kick and scream. I feel like I’m being stabbed with knives.
That thing has me in its grasp. It’s holding me up, inspecting me. I claw at its hand, trying to kick at its face.
“You will do,” It says, in a voice that doesn’t seem real. It’s too thick, too harsh for my ears.
“Let me go,” I yell. I try to scream as loud as I can. “My friends will kill you! They’re going to put fat-ass bullets through your skull!”
It tilts it heads at what I am saying.
“Bring it with us,” another voice, like the other, says behind me.
I crane my neck to see another alien. The only difference with the new alien is that it has an orange tint to its scales. The one holding me tucks me under its arm like a football and out the door it takes me, despite my kicking and screaming.
“Quiet it,” the new alien says.
Quiet it?
What does it mean? My mind races frantically. The alien holding me looks down. It blinks its eyes. A clear film covers his iris. I stare at him, horrified. I scream louder as its hand slams down on my face.
Darkness.
Chapter Sixteen
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“Why did you do it?” I ask.
I’m lying in my bed, looking up at my mother. She’s beautiful. I always thought that she was.
Her eyes are wide, feathered with thick, dark lashes. She doesn’t wear make-up, she never has and she doesn’t need to. Her nose is perfect and perky; that’s where I get mine from. Her lips aren’t like mine, they’re full and pink.
Her skin is darker than mine, a light caramel color. It’s vibrant, with a glow that is always there. Her skin is smooth and even; I’ve never seen a pimple or blackhead on her.
She’s sitting beside me on the edge of my bed, tucking my comforter in around my body. I haven’t seen or used this blanket in years. It has pictures of ponies on it, whimsical and childish. I’ve outgrown it, but right now it brings me comfort and warmth so I snuggle deeper into it.
“I can’t really explain it,” she replies. She’s looking down at me with a half-smile on her face, but there’s sadness in her brown eyes.
She’s wearing her naturally wavy hair down. It falls over her shoulders in controlled waves. I always envied her hair. So black and perfect, the kind of hair that women pay thousands of dollars to mimic. My hair isn’t one color but many shades of brown. My curls and waves can’t easily be controlled. I could never wear it down in public, not without lathering it with mousse and gels so that it doesn’t end up looking like a mop.
That’s when I see them. The small diamond earrings that dot her ears. She doesn’t think I know, but they were given to her by my father.
Looking at those earrings, it hits me. “You did it because you loved him.”
She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. “Love.”
“You still love him. Even after all of this?” I ask, aghast.
“I’m a fool.”
“Such a fool,” I say, not mincing my words.
Her eyes fly open in rage. “Sinta Marie Allen!”
I should cower, but I don’t. She’s never hit me. I’ve never been whupped with a belt or by her hand. And I’ve also never spoken to her the way that I have now. “He’s married, mom. He has a family. A real family. A family that he could give his last name to. We don’t mean anything to him.”
She shakes her head and makes a tsk sound. “That’s not true.”
She runs a hand down the side of my face and I pull away from her touch. “It isn’t?” I reach for the phone that’s on my nightstand. “Why don’t I just call him at home? I’ll ask him what we are to him.”
She hangs her head in shame.
My finger hovers over the dial pad. “Oh wait. I can’t.” I peer at her. “I don’t have his home phone number.” I hand the phone to her. “Do you?”
I don’t think she’s going to take the phone from me, but she does. She takes it from my hand and gently places back it on the base. “He loves you with all of his heart.”
I slam my head back against my pillow and cross my arms. “Does he? Are you sure? Did he tell you that he loved me in the same sentence he told you that he loved you?”
She shakes her head. “You’re mad at me. You think I’m weak for loving a married man.”
“Yes and yes.”
“I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry that you don’t have a father that can spend all of his time with you.”
“I don’t want him to spend all of his time with me.” I swallow a cry. “I just want to be able to count on him. To know that I have a dad who would move heaven and Earth to be by my side.”
“If he could, he would stay with you forever.”
“Then why doesn’t he?”
“He’s far away. I know he wants to rescue you from this.”
“Tell him to do it then.”
“If I could, I would.”
“I need him. I need him right now.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I need him so much that my head hurts. It’s pounding so hard I feel as if my skull is going to explode and my brains will splatter everywhere.
“Crap,” I mumble. “This hurts.”
“You’re awake. Finally. I was getting bored just sitting here and staring at you.” I hear someone say. A female.
I struggle to open my eyes, but even that is painful. As they do open, I focus on the face hovering above me. She doesn’t look much older than me, maybe nineteen or twenty years old, Caucasian, with blue eyes. Her blonde hair is in her face as if, wanting to get a better view of me, she curled it behind both of her ears to peer down at me.
“How do you feel?” she asks.
“Like I’ve been beat up.”
She sits back on her heels. “Well, if they would have beaten you up, you’d be dead by now.”
I lift up on my elbows. My side hurts so bad that I want to hit something. I close my eyes, willing the swimming sensation to go away, and take a few steadying breaths.
“My side,” I groan, remembering how it sank its claws in my skin.
“I cleaned it as best as I could. But I didn’t have anything clean to cover it with. I figured fresh air would be bet
ter than a dirty shirt.
I reach for my side. As soon as my hand touches the open wounds, pain rips through me. I pull my hand back in a flash. “Hell.” I glance down at the three holes. “That’s going to leave an ugly scar.”
“Yeah, well you’ll be lucky if that’s all you walk away with. A lot of other people fared worse.”
The vision of Shayla’s lifeless body pops into my head. I bite my lip. I shouldn’t be complaining about the sores in my side, not when I don’t know what happened to her.
“Where am I?” I ask glancing around. I’m in an open field. There are about seven others with us. And them…
The aliens.
Three of them standing together talking.
I scramble away. “No, no, no,” I cry out.
She grabs my foot, not letting me move farther away. “It’s okay.”
It is not okay.
I kick at her hand. The pain in my side worsens, but I ignore it. The need to get away overrides everything.
She pulls her hand back and yelps. “Crap. Why did you do that?” She flicks her hand in the air.
“We have to get out of here.” I scan the area. I need a way out.
“We can’t escape.” She points to something sticking out of the ground. “Some kind of containment field.” I focus on what she’s pointing at. “There are four of those things. We can’t get pass them, but they can.” She points to the lizards.
“But…” I stare at the aliens in horror.
She shrugs. “They don’t seem to bother us. They give us food and water, but don’t pay us any mind.”
“What do they want with us?”
“Hell if I know, but I think we’re waiting here for something.”
“What have they told you? What did they say?”
She rolls her eyes. “Oh yes, on one of our many in-depth conversations, they told me their entire diabolical plan to take over Earth and destroy mankind.”
I squint at her. “Don’t be a smart-ass. I am not in the mood for it.”
She takes a deep breath and then holds out her hand. “Let’s start over. I’m Jasmine Parker.”
I take her hand in mine, shaking it in greeting. “Sinta Allen.”
She lets go of my hand. “Where did they find you?”
“We were in a church. We just wanted somewhere dry to spend the night. A lot of good that did us.”
“You said ‘we’. Where is everyone else?”
“Hopefully far away from here.” I can’t expect for them to hang around after everything that happened. They’ll move Shayla somewhere safe, get her some kind of medical attention and keep moving to Michigan.
They’ll leave me.
But. I’ll escape and catch up with them.
I resign myself to this thought.
Run away and catch up with them.
She nods toward me. “So the people you were with, you think they escaped the aliens?”
“They did. I know it. They’re all fine, well, except for Shayla…she got hurt.” She’s dead. I shake the thought from my head. “They took care of her and got her to safety.”
Jasmine nods slowly. The look on her face says she’s not so convinced. She fishes something out of her pocket and then grabs my hand, palm-up, and drops three brown pellets into it. “If you believe that, then you’ll believe we aren’t actually their prisoners. They’re holding us here so that they can give us candy canes and rainbows.”
She says it with such a straight face I can’t believe the callousness of her words.
“I don’t know what your problem is, but you have some deep personal issues. Shayla is my friend and she’ll be fine. Keep your two cents to yourself.”
She pops one of the pellets into her mouth and, tilting a black bag up to her mouth, she gulps loudly, swallowing whatever is in it. “Whatever. Pretty soon the ship will come and take us away and it won’t really matter what I think.” She pops another pellet into her mouth and takes another swallow. “I was just trying to make a friend my age. If I’m going to be stuck in a space ship, I wanted to at least have someone to talk to.”
Deciding to put aside my attitude for a few minutes, so I can get information, I ask, “I heard that’s what they’re doing, taking people away in ships. Have you seen it happen?”
“Jim.” She points to man lying on his back about twenty feet from us. “He said he overheard the lizards talking about it yesterday.”
“He was right,” I say, almost breathlessly. I know that if I could see my expression it would be horrified. My eyes are wide and my mouth hanging open. I don’t want to go with them; going with them can’t be good.
“Who is right?”
“Captain Page of the Marines. He said that’s what they were doing. I didn’t want to believe him though.”
She shrugs like she doesn’t have a care in the world. “Guess he was right then.”
“What about an escape?” I glance around at the other people in our containment, a couple in their mid-thirties, an older man, and a mother with two small children. They don’t seem to be plotting or planning anything. “Has anyone talked about it?”
“Last night a woman tried to escape and they killed her. It was an accident though. I think, well, that’s what it looked like.”
Caught off guard, I inhale sharply. “What the hell happened?”
“She tried to run through the force field or whatever it’s called and got shocked. When they came for her she tried to crawl through. We could smell her burning, cooking her insides.” Her nose twitches, as if remembering the smell. I find that I’m covering my nose with my hand, not wanting to even imagine what it must have smelled like. “But that didn’t stop her,” Jasmine continues. “She just kept trying. She screamed and fried. We yelled at her to stop, to come back. When they finally reached her, they pulled her away by her leg and well…”
“What? They broke it?” If I were on a chair, I would have been on the edge of it.
“No, they pulled it off,” she whispers.
“Oh, my God.”
“It was gross. They were holding this dangling leg and looking at it like they couldn’t believe they had ripped it off. And it only got worse from there.”
I keep listening, knowing I should stop her but I want to hear the ending.
“One of them held her down while the other tried to re-attach her leg.”
I shudder, trying to imagine what that would have looked like. It would have been bad enough to have to watch a woman with her leg pulled off screaming and crying. There would be blood everywhere. But the idea of them holding her down and trying to get her leg to stay on her body would be another nightmare all together.
“When one of the lizards was holding her down,” Jasmine continued. “It crushed her rib cage and broke her arms. But I think that was by accident.”
“How do you know that?” I ask, maddened. “How do you know that they didn’t dismember her on purpose or that they enjoyed breaking her bones?”
“It was…it was the way they looked. Like they didn’t understand why her leg wouldn’t re-attach or why her arms were broken. Lizzie.” She points to the woman who was with the man. “She kept yelling at them, telling them they were killing her.”
“What did they do?”
“They stopped.” Jasmine peers off, as if she were reliving the memory. “They just stopped and got up and left her alone.” Jasmine turns back to me before she lowers her head to stare at her hands. “We…we went to her. There wasn’t much that we could do at that point. But we sat around her and tried to comfort her before…before she died.”
“Has that been the only death here so far?”
“As far as I know, but I just got here yesterday. Jim, he’s been here for two days.”
I nod and glance away. Days. They’ve been here for days waiting and wondering about their fate. Days to come to grips with the reality that they were never going to see their families again. I’d been here for… I take a glance at my watch. I don’t ev
en know. But I know that I can’t take it for very much longer.
There has to be a way out of here. I can’t give up. I glance around. Everyone here seems to have given up hope. How long will it take me to give up?
I can’t.
I have to get away—somehow I’ll do it. Then I’ll be what, maybe two or three days behind them? If I sleep for only a couple of hours a day, I can probably catch up with them in Ohio.
A sad thought penetrates my mind.
Jason and Ken will be gone by the time I reach everyone else. I won’t see him again—ever. The sadness that penetrates my mind now seems to wash over me and permeate me.
“I don’t know how you can sit here so calm. I’ll never stop trying to get away.”
She gives me a hard stare. “Even if I did get away, where would I go? Back home? My home isn’t there. There isn’t anyone waiting for me. I’m alone. I don’t have a lot of education, but I do know when to fold ’em. I’ve been caught. But I’m still alive. I’m way smarter than that lady last night.”
I don’t want to argue with her. Unlike her, I do have someone waiting for me…I can’t think otherwise. “How did they find you?”
“Well, they really didn’t have to look hard to find me. They found me in a super store.”
I cringe. “A super store? Wouldn’t that be the first place they would be looking?”
“Apparently so. But I was hungry and tired. And I thought, ‘the world is going to hell, so I might as well stock up on chocolate’.”
“Chocolate? You were in a super store and the only thing you could think to get was chocolate?”
“That’s how I wanted to spend my last days. I didn’t tell you that so you could get all judge-y.”
“I just…I don’t know…”
“What to say? Well neither do I. My boyfriend high-tailed it out as soon as the aliens came. He told me to stay in our trailer until he got back. And like an idiot, I did. Well, until they destroyed it. Then I went to hide in the only place that would have everything I needed to survive.”
“Super store,” I say. “Sorry.”
“Sorry for which part? For me thinking a super store was the best place to hide out or because my asshole of a boyfriend ran out and left me alone?”
Against The Darkness (Cimmerian Moon) Page 17