ALIEN ABDUCTION (Captured by Aliens)

by Fox, Jaide

  As they walked into the shadowy pine forest, Ebony felt a rising unease and tried to distract herself out of it. She glanced back over her shoulder. “Fallon. Hey. Tell me about these--these Zhala. What are they? The one I saw looked like a dinosaur with feathers. Are they dangerous? They sure look like they are.”

  She turned forward again to see where she was going, and then quickly looked over her shoulder once more. Fallon looked at her with suspicion, but then began to speak.

  “The Zhala are huge feathery reptiles. They are giant beasts that spew acid on their enemies. They are extremely dangerous. That’s all anyone needs to know about them.”

  “Acid.” Oh, fantastic. “Well, if it’s up to me, I’ll never see one again. What do we do about them? Can you kill them?”

  He merely stared at her. “You need not concern yourself about it. My men and I will deal with them.”

  “Yeah, well, you know, I like fantasy creatures as well as anyone else, but I don’t relish the idea of meeting some giant slavering beast that spews acid on its enemies. I might get hurt or maimed in the battle, and that isn’t on my agenda.”

  “Just out of curiosity, what is on your agenda?”

  She paused. “Home. I want to get home.”

  “The harem is home to you?”

  Ebony glared at him. “I despise the harem, but it’s the only home I have now. My sister is still at the palace and she is my only family now. I want to get back there whole and unharmed.”

  “All creatures want to go home, no matter what home is,” Fallon said, and Ebony was gratified to hear his voice soften just a bit. “Go on, now. I promise you that you will, again, see your home.”

  She gave him a small smile, and then turned back to walking. She was making progress.

  Ebony’s attention quickly turned to the thick dark forest surrounding them all. The tall pine trees, rather sparse at first, soon grew closer and closer together until they formed an interlocking pattern of needles in a vibrant green ceiling above them. The citrusy smell of sap leaking from their trunks permeated the air.

  The worst of it was the endless stacks and layers of pine needles, some dead and brown and some still green, that littered the forest floor. The needles held sap which allowed them to stick to the soles of her feet and to the hems of her sheer skirts. She frowned in irritation, wishing she could rub the clinging needles off of her feet and clothes, but also knew that dwelling on it was a lost cause.

  Trying once again to distract herself, she redirected her attention to Damon’s backside. Watching the play of muscles beneath his skin-tight pants proved to be quite a good distraction, mesmerizing her as they trudged through the forest.

  But they walked and walked without stopping even once, and soon the ache in her legs and the soreness in her bruised and battered feet were Ebony’s only distractions from walking. “Hey!” she shouted to Fallon, gasping for breath as she turned back to look at him again. “It’s been hours. You’ve been pushing us all day. The sun is going down. It’s nearly dark in these woods. We need to rest!”

  “You mean the women need to rest. My men and I do not,” said Fallon, in a low voice.

  Ebony stopped and stood still as anger made her forget her exhaustion. “Look, you’re the ones who took us away! You’ve got to take care of us or else--or else—”

  “Or else what?”

  Think, girl! “Or else--we won’t be worth much of anything to you, now, will we? What good are we if we’re hurt, or sick, or dead?”

  Fallon walked forward and stood right over her. She had to look up and up to see his cold blue gaze. “And if we do not let you stop, Ebony, what will you do?”

  She thought her rage would explode. She clenched her fists and began to pull them back--but then she heard the soft weeping of Suzanne and Cassie and the other captive women, and forced herself to smile up at Fallon.

  “I’ll run for it. I’d rather be lost and alone in these woods than dragged through them by you,” she said.

  “Would you, now.”

  “I would! And if--if all of you didn’t stand a foot and a half taller than me with legs as long as a stork’s, I’d do it!”

  He frowned at her, setting his hands on his hips in a combative stance. “Go ahead and do it. You are welcome to try.”

  Ebony felt perilously close to making a break for it, but the weeping of the exhausted women only grew louder. She snorted with as much insult as she could manage. “Never mind. I’d only be trampled to death by your big feet before I could make any headway.”

  He actually grinned, and then in a flash he caught hold of her bound wrists in a grip that felt stronger than steel. “Keep going. I told you before: Keep going and do not stop. You are helpless and you are vulnerable.”

  “I am not helpless, and I will not be vulnerable! Not to a gang of strange men. That does not sit well with me!” she shouted, trying and failing to pull away from him.

  “We’ll see about that,” Fallon said, and dragged her after him as though she were a rag doll. “Keep going!” he called to the other men, and soon the group was moving through the woods once again.

  The sun was setting and they were moving deeper into the pine forest--but after a little while, Ebony noticed that the sky--what she could see of it through the tops of the very tall trees--still retained a soft gray light. Glancing around, she found that she could still see the ground well enough and even see the faces of the men and women around her.

  “Oh, it’s moonlight,” she whispered. “The moon is up!” Ebony turned back to Fallon and could not help smiling. “I haven’t seen the moon--or the stars--since I’ve been here. There are no windows in the harem and they never let us go out into the gardens at night. The gardens are the only place where we ever see the sky.”

  Fallon paused, and stared at her thoughtfully; and then, after a moment, he took her by one elbow and led her a short distance off the main path. Before Ebony could protest, he turned her around to face the way they had come.

  “Look,” he said. “See for yourself.”

  Ebony looked up through an open space in the trees. There, shining down on her face like spotlights, was not one--not two--but three different moons. One was large and yellow, one was rather small and pale sandy brown, and the third was very small and bright white and seemed to be slowly tumbling end over end even as she looked at it.

  And all around the three strange moons were stars unlike any she had seen before. A few were silvery white, but many others glowed fiercely blue or a garish deep red--and they were so thickly clustered together that there would be no true night in this place even without the moons.

  “Oh!” she said, and suddenly buried her face in her hands. “Oh...” She began to cry in a way that she had never cried since coming here.

  Fallon stepped over to her, and put his finger beneath her chin to force her to look up. “Why are you weeping?” he asked, and she could hear the genuine puzzlement in his voice.

  “You wished to see the moonlight. I have allowed you to do so, even though I should have made you keep walking. Why are you weeping?”

  She pulled her face away from his iron finger and struggled to get her emotions under control. “Seeing three moons in the sky, along with those crazy big red and blue stars, reminds me so much of how I’m not on Earth any more, and that I’ll never see it again,” she said, her voice shaking. “You wouldn’t understand. But I miss my home. Go ahead and laugh if you want. You can do it behind my back while I walk like a slave back to the other captives.”

  “I do not laugh at you, Ebony,” Fallon said quietly. “But perhaps I should tell you that Chalcydon actually has five moons. Only three of them are visible from here on this night.”

  Ebony closed her eyes briefly, and then raised her chin and went striding away. Soon she had caught up with the group. She made a point of not looking up to the sky again.

  It wasn’t until the outline of a building appeared before them in the dimness that Ebony stopped dwelling
on her frustration and fatigue and sadness, and began to hope that relief was within her reach.

  But that hope faded as soon as they got close to the building. She could see that the place had been built for the heat and the rain, not for cooler temperatures. It looked much like the Cherokee summer house where she had gone family camping one year as a child.

  The back wall, the roof, and the main support were constructed of pine logs taken from the surrounding woods. The remaining three sides were wide open to the air. Beneath the thatched roof, the floor of the hut had been scraped down to bare dirt. There was a crude stone hearth and chimney built into the back wall, but Ebony could see, by the blackened stains in the fireplace and the dry pine needles blown inside it by the winds, that it had been a very long time since a fire had been built there.

  Ebony couldn’t help the disgusted look that crossed her face. She saw it on the faces of Cassie and the other women, too. “You brought us to a roof? With one wall?” she said. “You’ve got to be kidding. We need a building. A safe place to sleep. That’s nothin’ but a roof! Are you serious?”

  “We’ll rest for the night here and continue on at daybreak,” Fallon said, and nodded to his men. Two of them walked under the roof and began cleaning the pine cones and twigs and other debris from the covered area, and carried away a few stray stones. Soon the floor was smooth, even if it was just bare earth. “There,” Fallon said. “Now you’ve got a clean place to sleep.”

  Before Ebony could answer, the men caught the women by the arms and walked them firmly into the shelter. She suddenly realized that each of the seven other women had one of Fallon’s men assigned to guard her at all times, for the same woman was always closely watched and accompanied by the same man.

  Again she could feel the tension within these men, just as she had with the guards who accompanied her to King Kore’s apartments--especially after the king had forced those men to watch what he did to her. Fallon’s men also went about as though in the grip of iron control, but they eyed Cassie and Suzanne and Rebecca and all the other women the way a wolf looked at a lamb. The women only gathered together and tried to stay as far away from the men who guarded them as possible, but should the men choose to make any moves on them there would be nothing Ebony or any of them could do.

  Fallon also walked Ebony to one corner of the shelter, and let her go only when she stood very close to the other women. She’d never known that one man could have so much strength in his hands. Damon stood close by, too, and she suddenly realized that Damon was the odd man out. He was the only one with no woman assigned to him to guard. Yet he studied Ebony just as closely as Fallon did--just the way the other men studied their women.

  She wondered what kind of night they could expect.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Cold, hungry, tired, and miserable, Ebony walked to the back wall of the structure--the only wall it had. She looked around in the dimness to make sure there were no lurking bugs, and then lowered herself onto the newly swept dirt floor. Sitting cross-legged, she propped her elbows on one knee and settled her face in the cradle of her bound hands.

  Fallon eyed her for a moment. When he saw that everyone had settled into a spot, he sat down on one side of her and then Damon sat down on the other.

  Ebony looked first left and then right at the two men flanking her. “What’s this about? Does it take two of you big oafs to guard someone as little as me? One ain’t enough?”

  Damon’s cheeks stained red as he flashed Fallon a look. It didn’t take much smarts to know that Fallon was the ruler of this group. All the men looked to him for everything.

  Finally Ebony turned and looked at Fallon. “When I was in the harem, there wasn’t much to do except listen to gossip. There was a lot of whispering about some ‘rebel faction,’ but I didn’t know who they were or if it was even real--until now.”

  She watched the two of them, but they merely stared back at her. “And I still can’t figure out how these ‘rebels” could get into and out of Auresial Palace without being seen, and why they wanted the king’s harem. Were y’all just that horny?”

  The men seemed not to have heard. Fallon returned Damon’s look and then rummaged around in a pack hanging from his belt. He pulled out a brown, wrinkled strip of something and handed it to Ebony. “Here. Eat this. We’re still too close to the city to risk lighting a fire or hunting.”

  Ebony’s nostrils flared and her lip curled in one corner. She took the brown thing in her fingertips and held it out at arm’s length to look at it. When she got up the nerve to give it a cautious sniff, she found that it looked and smelled like meat jerky.

  “I don’t want to know what kind of meat this is,” she said, “because right now I’m too hungry to care.” After a moment, with her tummy grumbling, she stuck a corner of the leathery strip in her mouth and ripped off a corner with her teeth.

  She nodded. “Pretty good. Or maybe that’s just the starvation talking.” And then kept chewing and chewing until at last she could swallow the first bite.

  “So,” Ebony continued, looking over at Fallon, “how about this rope on my hands? I’m going to have a hard time sleeping like this. It was hell trying to relieve myself and then get my skirt and panties back up.”

  “No. The restraints stay on,” Fallon said, chewing on his own piece of jerky. “We’re all tired and we’re not going to worry about you running away while we rest.”

  She sighed. “Well, then, how about you tell us why we’ve been taken? Maybe we’ll cooperate better if you explain it to us,” she said, catching the eye of Cassie and the others. The women nodded.

  “You will continue to cooperate, regardless of the circumstance. But since you asked--you and the others are to be ransomed. That is all I am willing to say.” The set of Fallon’s jaw brooked no argument.

  Ebony had never been one to take a hint, even if it hit her in the face. “Ransom? You really think the king wants us enough to pay to get us back?”

  A muscle ticked in his jaw. Damon walked up behind her and grabbed her shoulders. “Do you want me to gag her?” he said.

  Fallon swore under his breath. “Much as I would love to have you shut her up--no. Do not gag her.” Damon let go of her shoulders, and then stepped away with a little snort of frustration.

  “Finish eating and go to sleep, Ebony,” Fallon said quietly, for her ears alone. “Don’t make me change my mind.” His voice was soft but the menace in it was mildly alarming. If Ebony had not been certain that their captors did indeed need her and the other women alive and unharmed, she would be scared.

  She sighed again. She was getting pretty tired of his Big Daddy attitude, but decided it was still better to play along and nodded slightly. “Can I join the others? They don’t know much, but they’re more fun to talk to than you are.”

  Fallon gave her a cold stare. “Go. And tell them all to sleep. We march again at dawn.”

  Ebony smiled briefly at him and then got up and walked to the far side of the shelter where the other seven women were huddled together.

  “Listen to me,” Ebony said, sitting down beside Cassie. “By the looks of the men, they’re about as tired as we are. I imagine it was a pretty tough journey for them just to make it to the city, and it’s obviously taken a toll on them. Look.”

  Even as the women watched, all nine of the men sat down and began dozing off. Their shoulders and heads drooped with weariness, and one man simply allowed himself to fall onto his side on the earthen floor of the shelter. “Wow--they’re asleep already,” marveled Cassie.

  “Now, look at what I’ve got here.” Moving her hands together, Ebony reached down inside her panties and drew out the piece of seashell. “I’m pretty sure the sharp edge on this will cut through the ropes on our wrists--and then, with this place being open on three sides, escaping would be a breeze.”

  “Escaping!” said Cassie. Suzanne and Pamela came over to huddle near her. “What do you mean?”

  Ebony tried to summon up the pat
ience to explain it to them. “If we’re close enough to the city that Fallon’s afraid to light a cook fire, then we’re close enough to find a rescue party...if that pig everybody calls the king cares enough about his harem to send somebody out to look for us.”

  “But we can’t escape!” said Pamela.

  “They’ll kill us!” moaned Suzanne, and all of them collapsed together and sat huddled and crying on the cold earth floor.

  “Hey--hey!” whispered Ebony, as loudly as she dared. “Listen to me: Are any of you pregnant?”

  They women all looked up. The sobbing gave way to sniffling. “What?”

  “I said--are any of you pregnant?”

  Slowly the women looked at each other, and then began shaking their heads.

  “No,” said Famke, the tall, reticent, Scandinavian beauty, and Jane, the ill-tempered dark blonde.