by Mel Corbett
“Screw you!” Jordan spat. How could he be so brave with a gun pressed to his head?
Poole laughed. “That’s kind of the idea.”
Mikey wobbled in the middle of the aisle.
“If that’s what you want,” Jor said. His voice wavered, like it had before it finished changing. “Just leave Mikey alone.”
“I taught you both stick. So, I think you both owe my stick a little something.”
“Please, sir,” Jordan said. “I’ll do whatever you want. I won’t fight back or nothing.” Poole grinned that same weird smile. It didn’t reach his eyes. He gestured with the gun, pointing towards the floor in front of the passenger seat. Horrified, Mikey watched as Jor climbed between Poole’s legs.
“You’ll leave Mikey alone?” Jor asked, kneeling in front of the monster.
Mikey couldn’t let this happen. He couldn’t let Jor do this to save him.
“For now.” Poole shrugged. He gestured to his pants, and Jor reached up, his hands trembling, to Poole’s belt.
Mikey could see Jor tugging on the belt, but Jor didn’t seem to be getting anywhere in unbuckling the belt. Mikey reached into his pockets. He didn’t even have a pocketknife.
After a few moments of Jor’s hands shaking as he struggled with the belt, Poole slapped Jor’s hands away, set down the gun, and opened his own pants. He grabbed Jordan’s hair. Mikey staggered up to the front of the motorhome until he was right behind Poole. Jordan stared up at him, Poole’s fingers twisted in his hair. His mouth open—ready to—No. Mikey wasn’t letting it happen.
He held the guitar string in both hands and slammed it down in front of Poole.
“What the—” Poole started to say, but the string caught his throat, choking off the words.
Mikey yanked back, hard, tightening the guitar string. It cut into his fingers.
Poole grabbed at the guitar string around his neck. Mikey’s fingers turned purple.
Poole reached out for the gun. Jor punched him in the balls. Poole jerked forward, protecting his junk. Mikey leaned back, putting all of his weight onto the thick cord. Jor reached for the gun, but Poole thrashed, kicking Jor. Jor grunted. Mikey’s fingers shook. He was going to cut off his own fingers with the thick guitar cord if something didn’t happen. Jor reached for the handgun.
Poole kept kicking, his hands clawing the thick cord around his neck.
Mikey screamed. His hands were going numb.
Jor pressed the gun to Poole’s temple. Poole went still. Was he dead? Did Mikey kill him? Was he holding still because of the gun? Mikey released some of the pressure against the guitar string. His fingers were stuck. They wouldn’t move. Poole rasped.
The gun went off.
Brain and skull smashed through the open passenger window, and splattered both Jor and Mikey.
Ringing filled Mikey’s ears.
Tears streamed down Jor’s cheeks.
Jor’s mouth was moving, but Mikey couldn’t hear anything. His ears weren’t working.
Mikey tried to answer back, but even though he knew what he was trying to say, there was only that awful, silent ringing. He shook his head. Jor opened the door and fell out onto the street.
Jor threw up outside.
The world wobbled around Mikey. No. Mikey wobbled. The world didn’t move. Did it?
Mikey stared down at his purple, bloody fingers. He unwrapped his hands from the guitar string. It pulled at his flesh. He whimpered and dropped the string to the ground.
There was a car. Why was there a car in front of Jordan? A woman got out. Maybe she screamed when she saw the dead soldier. Her mouth opened. Stayed open for a long time. The world wobbled again. No. That was in Mikey’s head.
The woman’s mouth moved. She was asking a question, maybe. Okay. Mikey could read that on her lips. Was she asking if they were okay? They weren’t okay. Jordan’s body stopped heaving, but he stayed on his hands and knees.
God.
The woman went back to the boxy car and grabbed a big baby bag. She knelt in front of Jordan and pushed a water bottle into his hand. Her shiny brown hair moved as she knelt in front of Jordan. She must have been talking to him. Mikey’s ears still rang too loud. He couldn’t hear.
Then, the woman walked towards the main door. The front door of Grandpa’s RV. They’d ruined Grandpa’s RV now. Killed a man in it. Killed a soldier.
Mikey turned towards the door. It opened, the woman held out her hands, palms out. She was talking. The ringing was quieter now. Mikey tried to read her lips. She held up a pack of baby wipes and pulled one out. She tried to hand it to Mikey, but his hands wouldn’t work. So, she dabbed at his hands for him, cleaning the wounds where the guitar string had cut into his hands. She dropped the one wipe to the floor and pulled out another.
Her lips moved, and she rasied the wipe towards his face. He could almost hear her voice. Maybe she asked his permission to wipe his face? Mikey nodded. And she began to wipe at his face, the burning tears from his cheeks vanished. When she dropped the baby wipe, it fell away bloody. The gore from Poole’s head. She’d wiped the brains and yuck off his face. Mikey shuddered.
She grabbed his arm—her hands felt rough, and he realized her palms were scabbed over. She maneuvered him to sit at the kitchen table.
“Stay here,” Mikey thought she said. His lip-reading skills weren’t that good. Then, she went back out the door. Mikey didn’t want to stay. He shook. The woman came back with Jordan leaning on her. She’d handed him a baby wipe, too. She made him sit next to Mikey. Jordan was trembling, shaking so bad Mikey thought Jordan would shake so bad he’d accidentally fire the gun the gun clenched in one hand. Mikey put his arm around Jor’s shoulders.
The woman handed Mikey a water bottle from the bag. He reached for it, but knocked it over. His hands still wouldn’t work right. She shook her head and handed him a sippy cup. Mikey frowned, but he squeezed the sippy cup between his two ruined hands and sucked on it. The water was good. The woman spoke, but he couldn’t tell what she was saying. The ringing was quieter now. He just stared down at the sippy cup and cried.
SEVEN
KAILEY
“Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho, it’s off to work we go,” Kailey sang as the blue men marched them down the corridor filled with glow moss. Kailey stood near the back of seventy or eighty prisoners. She’d stopped thinking of them as abductees.
“Stop singing that!” snapped Mary.
“It’s just a joke,” Kailey explained for the millionth time. The seven dwarves were happy to work in the mines, but the blue men—the blue dwarves forced the humans to do it. The work sucked. Kailey’s hands had at least formed calluses so that the skin no longer burned and stung from the hard work. The rest of her body, however, was not so lucky. Her shoulders and back ached constantly from the hard work.
She felt like the mines and the soft mossy glow was going to break her. She needed the joke.
Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho, she hummed to herself. The blue man leading them turned left where Kailey was sure they would turn right. Maybe they were going to do different work. Like that was going to happen. The blue men were probably taking them to a different mine shaft. Kailey followed the train of workers down the mossy corridor deeper and deeper into the planet. Not the Earth. Never the Earth. The blue men’s world. The red skulls’ world.
The ground shifted upward. Was she going to get to see the sun? Were they going to get out of the tangle of corridors and see light? Kailey licked her lips in anticipation. She picked up her pace. Maybe, just maybe she could see what was going on at the front of the line.
They ground to a halt, and Kailey stumbled into a man in front of her.
“Two lines! Women left! Men right!” a gravelly baritone shouted over everyone.
It sounded like the blue men’s rocky grumble, but higher pitched. And this person was speaking English! Kailey tried to look, but she was still too short to see, and the others had spread out, trying to see around the edges to what was happening up fron
t.
This was new. She’d lost count of the days she’d spent in the mine, but nothing like this happened before. She’d never heard one of the blue men speak English. They always just gestured with their gun-things and shoved them when they wanted the humans to do anything. The group began to winnow down, and Kailey inched her way forward through the crowd. Whatever was happening, she wanted to see it.
Blue men were shoving women and men apart, forcing them through different doors. In front of them stood a tiny blue woman. She was more than a head shorter than Kailey. Inside the room, more blue women began tearing the jumpsuits off the women.
“Clode sov!” shouted a man Kailey couldn’t see. He kept repeating it, and the blue women yanked on the other human women’s jumpsuits pulling them down. It took a while for Kailey to realize that the blue women were shouting, “Clothes off!” in a thick accent as they tore off the jumpsuits. Their voices were so deep that Kailey had thought they were men.
She didn’t want to take off her clothes, but she realized there were only women in the room. She swallowed and a blue woman caught her arm.
“Clodes off!” shouted the blue woman in her face. She yanked on the neck of Kailey’s jumpsuit, cut it deftly with a knife, and then tore it using the tiny cut as a starting point. Kailey tried to pull the jumpsuit together.
“Clode sov!” the woman shouted in her face. “Bad zzz.”
“Baths?” Kailey asked. The woman shoved Kailey deeper into the room, with one hand on the jumpsuit. Kailey stumbled, but the jumpsuit tore further. Most of it fell to the floor. Another blue woman shoved her towards another door on the other side of the room. Kailey heard running water and tore off the tatters of her jumpsuit to head through the door.
It was a bath… but more like a public pool than a bathtub. Steam filled the room, and Kailey’s eyes struggled to adjust to the steam and the strange light. Kailey stumbled down steps just past the door. Short blue women caught her before she could face plant in the water. The water came to Kailey’s mid thighs and the bubbles rose even higher. This was like… like the Roman baths she’d read about in school. Naked blue women were all around. A few appeared to be armed on the edges of the baths. They stood on higher ledges than the others and held the same sort of guns that the men held when marching the humans through. Otherwise, they helped the women bathe. They offered washcloths to the human women stumbling into the room.
The two that had caught Kailey led her deeper into the room, into the pool and Kailey felt weeks of grime melting off her legs. Every fifteen feet or so, there was a stream of water falling from the ceiling. The two women held her arms and led her to one of the streams of water. They released her arms, and Kailey put her hands in the water tentatively.
The water didn’t spray like a shower. Instead it poured straight down from the ceiling in a solid column of water. Still, it was warm, but not too hot. She caught handfuls of the water and splashed her face. She stood in the column of water and luxuriated in the heat and the clean. Dirt and grime sloughed off her.
One of the women tugged on her arm and pulled her out of the stream. The tiny woman knelt, pulling Kailey down with her. Kailey realized the woman wanted her to fully submerge and wash herself. The woman on her left handed her a small rough cloth and Kailey took it to scrub with. When she finally felt cleaned, Kailey tried to rise, but the women held her in a kneeling position.
The woman who had handed her a washcloth pointed to Kailey, then tipped her head back so that her long bluish hair was in the water. The woman’s face remained above the surface. Then she stood and pointed to Kailey again. Kailey glanced around and saw the blue women washing and braiding other women’s hair. Kailey could handle that. For as modest as she had been when she was abducted, she’d been peeing in a bucket in front of everyone for months. This was nowhere near as bad as that.
Kailey tipped her head back and the women tugged and pulled at her hair. Once they finished with her hair, they led her deeper into the baths, through yet another door. Two more blue women grabbed Kailey through the door, and the two that had washed her hair disappeared into the steam.
The new women buffed her with a towel. Well, a fuzzy thing that seemed to soak up the water from her body. They were almost gentle about it. Kailey reached for the fuzzy thing, but they smacked her hands away. They weren’t rough, but they were clearly in charge. Naked women were toweled off and then, halfway through the room, they were wrapped in sheer cloths that tied around their necks. They resembled nothing so much as the sarong Kailey’s mom had always called a “so right.”
This wasn’t just being cleaned to go back to the mines. Something else was going on here. The women wrapped Kailey in her own sheer white sarong and pulled her forward towards another room. Kailey struggled, but the women were stronger than they looked. They dragged her into the next room and shoved her through. Newly cleaned women of all shapes and sizes covered themselves as best they could with the sheer white sarongs only faintly covering their bodies. They were corralled into a roped-off line.
At the front of the line sat yet another blue woman wearing a purple wrap dress that covered a lot more than Kailey’s did. This one held what looked like a tablet computer as she growled at the women at the front. She seemed to be asking the human women questions, but surely she didn’t really speak English. Still, after she growled at them for some time, the women exited either to the right or the left. Kailey nervously talked with the other women in line with her, but no one else seemed to know any more than she did, and truth be told, she’d been working the mines longer than most of them had been on this hell hole.
“Next,” croaked the blue woman at the front.
Kailey had thought they’d maybe learned the couple words to better control the humans, but boy was she wrong.
“Date of birth,” the woman growled. Her voice was deep and gravelly, but the accent was much clearer than the blue women who had told her clothes off and baths. Kailey stammered out her date of birth and the woman grinned, blue lips stretched back to reveal white teeth.
“Fifteen-year-old?” the woman asked.
Kailey nodded. The woman grumbled to herself as she poked at the tablet screen.
“Number of sexual partners?” the woman asked in the deep, gravelly voice.
Kailey’s mouth dropped open. What was this all about? She felt her mouth working like a fish. She couldn’t. She’d never.
“Number of sexual partners?” she repeated, sounding impatient.
“I—I never… I’m only— ” Kailey stammered. Her cheeks burned.
“Zero?” asked the woman.
Kailey nodded. The woman noted something and then reached into a basket beside her and handed Kailey a red piece of cloth.
“Put this on.”
Kailey grabbed the cloth, but it was just a yard of sheer fabric just like the white sarong she wore. Was she supposed to put it on over the sarong? She wrapped it behind herself.
“No.” The woman tugged on Kailey’s white sarong. Kailey clutched at it, but it was too late. It fell off with the woman’s tug. “Now.”
Naked, Kailey raced to cover herself with the red sarong. She put the middle of the fabric behind her and tied it around her neck as the woman had done the one before. She was the only one that she saw wearing a red cloth. The other women stared at her. Tears burned at Kailey’s eyes. She didn’t like this. Why was she being singled out? Why were they asking her if she’d had sex before?
“No cry,” the woman growled. She pointed at the door on Kailey’s right. “Go.”
Kailey blinked hard, trying to keep the tears in. Still, she felt them splash her cheeks. It was one thing to work in the mines, certain that the digging would kill her. It was another to be plucked from the mines, washed, and then questioned about her sexual history.
“Please,” Kailey whispered. “I don’t want to be a whore.”
“Not whore,” the blue woman growled. “If lucky, be courtesan. Receive much honor.”
/> EIGHT
MIKEY
Mikey’s ears finally started working again. He could hear Jordan whimpering.
“Jor,” Mikey said, putting a hand on his brother’s shoulder.
Jordan didn’t answer. Maybe he couldn’t hear yet either.
“Jor, it’s okay. You’re okay.” Mikey murmured, but he couldn’t really hear himself.
To her credit, the woman didn’t ask what happened. The corpse with half a head and a shriveled boner made it clear what happened.
“You boys… You boys need a new ride?” the woman asked. Her voice still sounded far away, even though she was right in front of him.
“Yeah,” Mikey answered.
She made a face, and Mikey wondered if he’d shouted because he still couldn’t hear right.
“I’m Connie,” she said.
“Mikey, and that’s my brother Jordan.”
“They took your parents, huh?” she asked.
Mikey nodded.
“How’d you wind up with…” She nodded towards the front seat.
“Our parents had the keys to the motor home. We were stuck on the side of the road… and well… soldier showed up to rescue us. Was going to take us to ride it out in the desert. Then…” Mikey started shaking. He couldn’t keep going. Couldn’t say any more.
“Aliens took my husband and my kid. Just left me sitting alone. What’s wrong with me that they didn’t take me?” She shook her head.
“What happened?”
“I don’t… I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Gotcha.” Mikey didn’t press.
“I didn’t do anything special to save myself,” Connie said.
Mikey just sat there, staring out the window. Jordan sobbed beside him.
“I’m a coward,” she said. “I just… I just ran.”
“We saw them take apart houses to get to people hiding,” Mikey said. “We ran, too.”
###
A loud engine’s roar cut Connie off mid-sentence, but it didn’t matter. The rest of her story was a given. She’d been running until she found Mikey and Jor.