Feast: A Rough & Twisted Sci-Fi Romance

by Lizzy Bequin

  Her legs started to give out, but Thusar caught her before she fell.

  “Easy,” he said gently. “We don’t know that he’s dead. There’s no body, and I don’t smell any blood.”

  “Then where is he?” Ika cried.

  Thusar touched her face, thumbing away the water spilling from her eyes and rolling down her cheeks.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But maybe our nith friend outside can give us some information.”

  The nith.

  Thusar’s reminder ignited a blaze of vengeance inside Ika’s chest. The strength surged back into her limbs.

  Before Thusar had a chance to react, Ika snatched the stone knife from this sheath on his hip and darted back outside.

  “Ika wait!”

  Outside, the other ukkur were handling the half-conscious nith who was propped up against the wall of the cliff. Gunnar had ripped away the sleeve of the creature’s uniform, and he was using the cloth to bind the creature’s wrists behind its back.

  The nith groaned in pain and protest. Its beady eyes rolled in their sockets, and its black tongue lolled from its elongated jaws.

  Ika charged toward the nith with a savage little growl.

  “Careful,” Muk gasped. “That thing’s still dangerous, Ika. It could bite you.”

  But Ika was unafraid.

  She had dealt with the nith once before, and she had been the one doing the biting then. That time, she had only been concerned for her own safety, but now it was Rolf’s life on the line. She was almost feral with rage and hatred.

  With viper-like quickness, Ika’s free hand darted out and seized the nith’s drooping tongue. She yanked that slimy appendage, stretching it to a painful length, and the nith yowled.

  Ika set the edge of the stone knife against the side of that tongue and nicked it, drawing some green-black blood. The nith groaned in pain and the tongue tried to jerk back, but Ika held tight.

  “Consider that a warning,” she snarled. “Just to let you know I’m not playing around. Now, here’s how this is going to work: I’m going to ask you questions, and you’re going to answer them. If you refuse to do so, or if I smell a lie, then I’ll cut out your rotting tongue and feed it to the ukkur who attacked you.”

  Slaine growled and licked his lips as if that sounded appetizing to him.

  “Do you understand?” Ika asked.

  The nith nodded its elongated head eagerly.

  “Good.”

  Ika let go of that repulsive tongue, and it slurped back inside the nith’s jaws like a retreating animal with a life of its own.

  “All right,” Ika said. “Let’s begin. What are you doing here, and what have you done with Rolf?”

  ***

  The nith spilled the entire story. It had all started with the nith that had captured Ika a few days before—the ones that Thusar and his pack had killed. When those nith had not returned to their base as expected, another squadron had been sent out in two vehicles to search for them. They had found the wrecked vehicle and dead nith. And they had found something else too.

  Rolf.

  The lone ukkur must have been out frantically searching for Ika (an image that made Ika’s heart ache with sadness and guilt) when he came across the nith wreckage. By dumb luck, the nith search party had arrived at the same time, following the homing beacon embedded in the vehicle’s circuitry.

  There had been a fight. Rolf had killed and maimed many nith, but in the end he was outnumbered and outgunned. The nith overpowered the lone nith and subdued him with the same tranquilizing injection that they had used on Ika.

  Then the nith had split up. The first group had loaded Rolf into one of the vehicles and taken him away. The other two had traced Rolf’s tracks to his den and set up an ambush in case there were other ukkur attached to the place. They had obviously miscalculated how many and how dangerous.

  “Where did the others take him?” Ika snarled, brandishing the knife. “Where did they take Rolf?”

  Despite its battered and swollen face, the captive nith sneered at her.

  “To the slaughterhouse.”

  A cold feeling seized Ika’s stomach. She had heard about the slaughterhouse before. That’s where the other nith said they were going to take her and turn her into meat. Is that what they were going to do to Rolf?

  The nith captive laughed bitterly. It was an ugly clicking sound. “The slaughterhouse is where we send all the escaped ukkur slaves that we recover. We cannot send them back to the ksh farms. Once an ukkur has tasted freedom, it is impossible to make him work again. But that doesn’t mean we have to let his meat go to waste.”

  Ika growled. She was ready to jab her knife straight into this nith’s black heart.

  “How long ago did they take him?”

  “Over an hour ago,” the nith hissed.

  Ika’s heart sank at this news. Her throat tightened and her eyes filled with tears.

  “We’ll never be able to catch up with them,” she muttered.

  “Not on foot,” Gunnar said.

  Ika looked up at the bearded ukkur. “What do you mean?”

  Gunnar looked down at the nith captive.

  “You said there were two vehicles, right?” Gunnar seized the back of the nith’s collar and jerked the hideous creature to its feet. “If you want to live, then you’ll show us where the other vehicle is parked.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Gunnar jammed the throttle to the floor, the engine roared, and a surge of adrenaline coursed through his veins. Trees whooshed past precariously close on both sides as the vehicle careened through the forest. Gunnar had never driven before, and the steering mechanism took some getting used to, but he was starting to get the hang of it.

  He had to admit, as much as he hated the nith, those bastards made some great machines.

  The vehicle was a hovering personnel carrier, a rectangular craft of gleaming steel and black polymer with the driver’s controls up front followed by three rows of bench seats and a small cargo bed stacked with some big crates. There was just enough room for Ika, the other ukkur, and the nith captive who had become their reluctant navigator.

  Under the threat of torture and death at Slaine’s hands, the nith had shown them how to operate the vehicle. Since Gunnar was the most mechanically minded of the group, he was given driving duties.

  And he was loving every second.

  He had never experienced speed like this before. They were making good time.

  But not good enough.

  The nith who had taken Rolf had a sizeable head start on them. It was going to be hard to catch up before they reached the slaughterhouse facility.

  “Can’t this thing go any faster?” Ika shouted from behind.

  “I’ve got the throttle all the way down!” Gunnar called back.

  “I don’t know what that means!”

  “It means we’re going full speed. Unless…” Gunnar thought for a moment. “If we drop some weight, that could give us a little extra velocity.”

  No sooner had the words left his mouth than he heard a clatter from the back of the craft. Gunnar stole a glance over his shoulder and saw that Ika had climbed into the cargo bed, opened the tailgate, and was now trying to push the heavy crates out of the back.

  “Come on!” She cried to the other ukkur. “Help me get rid of this heavy stuff.”

  Slaine jumped back there and started shoving crates out of the rear of the craft. The crates crashed into the snow behind them, spilling weapons and other equipment. With each one that was jettisoned, the vehicle picked up speed.

  “It’s working!” Ika shouted.

  The captive nith was bound and tied in the passenger seat beside Gunnar. The creature chittered and clicked disapprovingly.

  “Fools,” the nith hissed. “Wasteful fools. That equipment is worth more than the meat on your bones.”

  “Shut up,” Gunnar growled. But then to Ika and the others he added. “Hang on to some of those guns. We might need them.”


  “Good thinking!”

  Ika grabbed five rifles out of the last crate before Slaine sent it over the edge.

  “That’s the last of the cargo,” Thusar said from the seat behind Gunnar’s. “How are we doing now for speed?”

  Gunnar checked the dials on the dashboard. Most of them were indecipherable to him, but the nith had showed him the ones for speed and fuel, which was all he needed to know.

  “Better. But it’s still not fast enough. Isn’t there anything else we can get rid of?”

  Gunnar was startled by a sound of wrenching metal and an unexpected rocking motion. For a moment Gunnar thought he had scraped the bottom of the hovercraft on a stone of a fallen tree trunk that he had not seen, but then the commotion of voices behind him clued him in on the real source.

  “Slaine! What the rot are you doing?” Muk shouted.

  Another quick glance over his shoulder let Gunnar know what was going on.

  Slaine, that crazy bastard, had never been one to hesitate. Once he got an idea in that banged-up brain of his, he was going to see it through no matter what.

  And right now, the idea that Slaine had in mind was to rip the bench seats out of the vehicle. He had started with the back seat where Muk had been sitting. With his raw strength, Slaine had wrenched the bench free. He held it over his head and cast it backward out of the vehicle where it tumbled in the snow.

  The vehicle sped up a little more.

  “It’s helping!” Gunnar called. “Keep going! Tear them all out.”

  In a matter of minutes, Gunnar’s pack brethren had gutted the interior of the vehicle. They had even dragged the nith into the back of the vehicle so that they could remove the passenger seat. Only the driver seat was left in place so that Gunnar could continue to drive.

  “Stupid, stupid fools,” the nith said. “You have ruined this beautiful vehicle.

  “Shut up,” Slaine grunted and thumped the nith on its leathery head.

  “Easy,” Gunnar growled. “I still need that bastard conscious to tell me where to go.”

  With the vehicle stripped down to its bare bones, they now zipped through the woods at almost double the speed. Trees streaked by in a blur and cold wind whipped around their ears.

  Soon the forest opened up onto a snow-covered plane.

  “There it is,” the nith said from the back. “The slaughterhouse.”

  Gunnar spotted their destination up ahead. At first it was little more than a dark speck on the horizon, but as they got closer, it grew into a bulky black structure with huge buttresses like black ribs and tall smokestacks belching out rancid fumes.

  He could smell it now. The stench of death. The air here fairly reeked with it, and it turned his stomach. Gunnar was no stranger to blood and death. He was a hunter and a carnivore after all. But this place was totally out of line with the natural cycle of life and death, and Gunnar could immediately sense that. He shuddered in disgust. He knew his pack brothers sensed it too.

  And most of all, he knew that Ika felt it. Gunnar understood that Rolf was an important part of her life. Rolf had been her caretaker for many years, and now he had been brought to this nightmarish place.

  Gunnar feared the worst.

  But there was still hope.

  Young Muk climbed to the front of the vehicle and crouched where the passenger seat had once been. The youngster had the best vision of all the ukkur, and now he squinted ahead through the snow-spattered windshield searching for any sign of another vehicle.

  “There!” Muk shouted at last.

  He pointed to a position ahead of them and a little to the right.

  Sure enough, there was another vehicle out there winking gray sunlight and raising a cloud of snow-dust in its wake.

  “Is it Rolf?” Ika cried, clambering in between Gunnar and Muk.

  Based on its location and direction, it could very well have been the vehicle that contained Rolf. But it was a different kind of vehicle with an enclosed top, so it was impossible to see if Rolf was in there or not.

  “Maybe,” Gunnar shouted over the wind. “I’ll try to catch up to them.”

  He still had the throttle pressed all the way to the floor, and the interior of the vehicle had been stripped bare. There was nothing left to do to accelerate more. All Gunnar could do was mentally will the vehicle to go faster.

  “You’ll never catch them,” the nith taunted from the back. “They are too far ahead. They have almost reached the slaughterhouse.”

  The nith clicked gleefully.

  It was unwise for the nith to taunt the ukkur that way now that it had outlived its usefulness as a navigator. It was even more unwise to taunt Ika.

  Ika melted from Gunnar’s side. A second later there was a strangled cry from the nith.

  “Wait human! What are you doing?”

  There was a loud thump, and the vehicle bounced as it shed more weight. Gunnar glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the nith’s body tumbling through the snow behind them. Its elongated head was twisted at a wrong angle, its neck broken by the impact of falling from cargo bed.

  At the back of the vehicle, Thusar grunted.

  “That was dishonorable, Ika. We told the nith we would let it live if it helped us.”

  “Rot honor,” Ika almost snarled. “You ukkur can worry about honor. All I’m worried about is getting Rolf back. And now that we’ve found our destination, that nith was nothing but excess weight.”

  Gunnar couldn’t help but grin at Ika’s ruthlessness.

  “Every little bit counts.”

  And sure enough, they were gaining on the other vehicle. But they were also running out of time. The dark shadow of the nith slaughterhouse was looming in front of them, and the vehicle that they were pursuing had nearly reached its destination. There was a large entryway on the side and that’s where the vehicle was heading.

  “We have to stop them before they get inside,” Ika cried.

  Thusar appeared beside the driver seat with a rifle in hand.

  “How does this thing work?”

  Gunnar had seen the nith using these weapons before, and he had some idea how to fire one. He pointed at the gun.

  “Point that end at what you want to kill. Pull that thing to fire.”

  “Got it.”

  Thusar steadied the rifle against the top of the vehicle’s windshield and took aim. While Muk might have the best eyesight of the pack, Thusar had the steadiest hands and the best aim, at least when it came to a bow and arrow or a sling. A nith rifle was a slightly different matter, however.

  “Try not to hit the top part of the vehicle,” Gunnar warned. “The shot may penetrate through the metal, and if Rolf is inside, it could kill him.”

  “What am I aiming for, then?”

  “Try to aim for the thrusters,” Gunnar said. When Thusar gave him a quizzical look, he added. “The bottom part of the vehicle. Aim for the bottom part.”

  Thusar nodded and lined up his shot.

  The weapon barked and a sizzling red energy beam zapped off into the distance. The shot was wide. Very wide. It missed the vehicle ahead of them by a good ten paces or more, sending up a geyser of snow broth.

  “That was just a test shot,” Thusar grunted.

  Ahead of them, the vehicle had almost reached the entrance to the slaughterhouse, which was now blotting out the sun.

  Thusar fired again, a three shot burst this time.

  Three more spouts of muddy snow erupted, but this time the shots landed closer to their target, and the vehicle was forced to swerve to avoid getting hit.

  “Almost got ’im.”

  They vehicle was only yards from the slaughterhouse entrance now. This would be the last chance. Thusar aimed again.

  But this time there was a problem.

  Dozens of black-clad nith were pouring out of the facility now. The creatures were armed with rifles of their own. They fanned out in two broad lines and took aim at the oncoming ukkur.

  “Rot!” Gunnar roared.
“Everybody get down.”

  A volley of energy bolts hit the vehicle like a rain of fire. Gunnar tried to swerve, but it was useless. There were so many shots being fired that no matter which way he turned the vehicle, they were going to get hit. Snow and sparks exploded all around them. The windshield spiderwebbed with cracks from multiple rounds. Flames erupted from the engine compartment.

  Gunnar felt the vehicle slipping out of his control. They were going to crash.

  “Shit! Hold on to something.”

  The front levitation thrusters gave out, and the nose of the vehicle angled downward, digging a broad furrow in the ground and sending up twin spumes of snow on either side. The back end of the vehicle jolted upward, and Gunnar could feel himself being flung out of the craft.

  For a moment, he was weightless, and time seemed to stretch and slow down.

  Gunnar had no thoughts of his own safety. His only concern was for Ika.

  The only thing that mattered was her survival.

  Gunnar sensed her small body flying past him, and with lightning reflexes, his arms snapped out and caught her limp body. He tugged her against his front and twisted his body to protect her from the impending impact.

  Gunnar’s back hit the ground with a heavy thud. His body rolled, and he used his arms and legs like a protective cage to keep Ika from getting hurt. After three or four barrel rolls, his body skidded to a stop in the snow with Ika cradled beneath him.

  “Ika!” he said. “Are you okay?”

  She blinked and nodded up at him breathlessly.

  More gunfire shrieked past and rocked the ground around them. The crashed vehicle was a few yards away on its side giving off dark plumes of smoke. Gunnar rushed for it, using his body to shield Ika’s and together they took shelter behind the wreck.

  A moment later, the other three ukkur joined them. Everyone was dirty and badly bruised, but otherwise unharmed. Most of all, they were happy to see that Ika was safe.

  But that was in danger of changing very quickly.

  Yet more rifle fire was pinging off the other side of the vehicle that was shielding them. When Gunnar peeked around the edge, he saw that the rows of nith guards were advancing on them. Thusar and Muk had managed to hang on to their weapons during the crash, and they snapped off a few quick shots around the corners of the vehicle. But there were too many nith, and they were trapped out in the open with nowhere to run and no means of escape.