17/09/2021
The last time our cell door opened, two of the giant lizard-guys dragged Svetlana out screaming, so it was just me and Grr. Grr paced, his chains click-scrape-clinking. I staggered from the door onto my pallet, huddled up under the clear, crinkly blanket and cried. Iâd cried a lot since they started taking the other girls away. One of us every few visits. No replacements.
This was bad.
Really bad.
Worse than getting abducted by aliens in the Pennsylvania Wilds because youâre lost and the GPS doesnât work like itâs supposed to in a place where the chief attraction is a town with 1300 people and a tree-burning festival every fall.
Why had I agreed to go on an artistâs retreat with Mia again?
The room smelled like rusted metal, misery, and an overpowering minty scent drifting from the fancy hole in the floor they'd given us for a toilet. I was shaking now. Naked and sobbing under a bubble-wrap-like blanket.
Yeah, this sucked.
Iâm a pretty low-drama person. Growing up as the oldest of six siblings and with my parents working all the time, Iâd had to be. I was the one the others went to with their scraped knees, coughs, fights, problems with other kids, whatever. But even my general âroll with the punchesâ attitude was getting beaten down after however many days of this.
Who were these guys? What were they? Were they working with the government? Trading technology for...?
I should have paid more attention to my little brother Joshâs Roswell phase.
Maybe I had hit that deer, and I was now in a coma, making all of this up. If so, my coma-cracked brain was way too creative.
When Iâd woken up in this cell, thereâd been thirteen others, five humansâall femaleâand a bunch of other aliens. Iâd guessed they were female too, by the number of breasts (somewhere between two and six, depending on the lady). One of the aliens was visibly pregnant. Probably pregnant. Her name, as far as I could tell, was Keekyazeethee, and she had fur, like Grrr, but fluffy.
Keekyazeethee had been talkative, frantic really, pointing to the door, to her belly, and to us.
I didnât like what she was getting at. Abducted for s*x? To make babies? Me? Why?
Maybe it was the child-bearing hips. I had more than my fair share of those. Maybe I didnât get it at all. I hadnât really understood Keekyazeetheeâs chitters and clicks. Iâd barely understood Svetlana, whoâd spoken Russian or something like it.
Grr was the only male. Unless females of his species had... well... you know... swinging between their massive, furred thighs. Grr didnât talk. He mostly paced the inside of his force field, chains click-scrape-clinking. Sometimes he kicked the bones of an earlier meal against the force field to watch them spark.
The others had been terrified of Grr. I admit, heâd freaked me out at first too, especially when the guards had thrown in a live, giant armadillo-looking critter with like twenty legs through the field and Grr had snapped it up, cracked its neck, and peeled off its skin, biting into the soft parts.
But after a while, I just began to feel sorry for him. Unlike us, theyâd chained him to the wall. And the chains were too short. He could sit, barely, knees to chest and arms resting on them, but he couldnât really lay down. The lizard-guys taunted him when they brought his food, which was about half as often as they tossed in our square, foil-wrapped meal bars.
We had the mint-scented hole and pallets. He had the floor and a bucket.
He had scars, some old, like the one running from his temple and down his cheek, and others new, like the whip marks, dark with matted blood on the striped fur of his back. And they were starving him. He was built, yes, abs on abs, but you could see the lines of his ribs, and his gold round eyes looked sunken into his face.
Once, when it was just me and Svetlana, and Svetlana had fallen asleep, Iâd slipped a meal bar to Grr through the forcefield. It had sparked as it slid through, which made me figure the field really only worked to keep Grr inside. Grr had opened it, almost delicately, and finished the bar in three large bites.
âHey Grr,â I said, opening the box of todayâs meal bars. They came in three flavors: sweet chalk, salty chalk, and spongy, salty chalk.
It looked like theyâd filled the box with enough for me and Svetlana, so I took four of the bars and sat down next to the field.
âTry these,â I said, smiling without my teeth. Grr got antsy when you showed him your teeth.
I slid the bars through the field one at a time with enough force for them to tap his toes. Aside from the claws, his feet were surprisingly normal. Well, human normal.
Grr looked up, his eyes wide with gold-rimmed elongated pupils, like a catâs. He took the first bar and looked back at me.
âGo ahead, eat it,â I said, taking one for myself. He hadnât been this shy the last time. Maybe it was because we were alone.
I wasnât particularly hungry, but I opened the foil and nibbled at the corner. It was spongy salt, light grey with a darker spongy-sweet strip, slightly like cinnamon every few inches. Not bad.
âSssank Yuu,â Grr said and nodded, slowly, his eyes still locked with mine.
It took me a second to realize what heâd said. My mouth fell open, and a glob of chewed spongy salt dropped onto my thigh. âYou speak English?â
Grr stared at me. Of course he didnât speak English. Heâd probably overheard us talking. The girls had been polite, and Iâd learned how to say please and thank you in a number of languages, including the click-pop-ssh that did it for Keekyazeethee. âNever mind,â I mumbled, then more loudly added, âYouâre welcome.â
Only then did Grr break his gaze, unwrap the foil, and eat. Heâd finished all four meal bars before Iâd gotten halfway through my first. Iâd been carrying some extra pounds when theyâd grabbed me, but the menu here was unappealing enough that Iâd probably lost five of them since arriving.
Still, I was doing a lot better than Grr.
When Grr finished eating, he turned to the spigot beside him on the wall, and, twisting his body to catch the stream of water, opened his mouth to drink. He coughed and swallowed. I had no doubt the positioning of the water was another way to torture the guy.
âAssholes,â I muttered and made my way to our relatively more pleasant drinking area opposite the minty toilet-hole. The spigot was tall enough for us to stand at and put a cup under, and there was a second box, the size of an upright coffinâbest not to think of it that wayâthat buzzed the dirt off. Keekyazeethee had shown us how to use it after Svetlana had tried to wash her hands in the drinking water.
The lizard-guys had given us thick plastic cups, and I had a few left over, so I grabbed one to roll over the Grr. When I held it up, he growled, shaking his head.
âOkay,â I sat it down next to me. Looking into his cell, I realized the foil wraps, which we usually just shoved back into the box, were gone. Where had he put them? The bucket, most likely. My nose wrinkled.
Still, if Iâd had any doubts that Grr was a thinking person, just like me, his decision not to take the cup cemented it for me. He didnât want his captors to know I was helping him. Maybe he was watching out for me. I wanted to think so.
I took the bubble-wrap blanket and sat down again next to the forcefield. Grr wasnât the most sociable, but he was easy enough on the eyes, once you got past the fur and the growling.
âIâm Zoe,â I said, tapping my chest. âZoe.â
Grr stopped, and knelt, clawed hands on his knees.
âZoe,â I repeated. âYou?â
âSsZooohee,â Grr said, baring his teeth. He had two long incisors, which gave the Z a slight hiss as he said it.
âYes!â I nodded, excited. âIâm Zoe!â
Ktunch!
The ship lurched, and I was floating, dropping, careening through the air, with the bubble-wrap blanket the only thing to break my fall.
My heart beat in my throat and ears. I hit the wall behind, above, below the toiletâit was hard when everything was spinningâand bounced.
Thwack!
My shoulder throbbed. Minty liquid blobbed up beneath my feet as inertia sent me sailing back the way Iâd come.
Back to the force field.
Funny how TV made zero-gravity seem like so much fun, with the classical music and globs of orange Tang floating gently towards an astronautâs open mouth. The toilet liquid was nothing like Tang, and I was grateful none of it hit me as I pinwheeled over it.
Grr roared, pulling at his chains.
Another lurch, the room tilted again, and I dropped, hitting the floor with my left hand. Something in my wrist popped, sending shocks of agony up my arm.
Low light, red and blinking, shone in ribbons along the walls, ceiling, and floor. The ship was silent. Scarily silent. Iâd gotten used to the air conditionerâs white noise from the vents, accompanied by a faint whine, just loud enough to set your teeth on edge.
Was the room getting colder?
If I was on a spaceship, that meant we were in space, and if it stopped working, weâd definitely freeze to death. Or maybe boil. Josh had explained it to me once, when he was eleven and I was fifteen. I hadnât cared then. Now that I did care, Josh was zillions of miles away. Miles. Light-years. Parsecs?
What did it matter? If I didnât freeze to death, boil to death, or starve to death, Grr would probably eat me.
No, that wasnât fair. Grr was actually pretty nice, as far as the alien males Iâd met so far went.
âSssZoooeee!â Grr growl-shouted.
It took me a few seconds to realize heâd called my name. In my defense, it took me a few seconds, through the pain, to remember my name.
âGrr?â I sat up. My back and right shoulder ached. My left wrist was swelling up. I could move my fingers, but trying to move the wrist made me see white, so I just let it hang there.
The forcefield was down, and Grr stood and gestured frantically at a panel on the wall beside me. I remembered the guards doing something there to extend the length of the chains before throwing Grr his meal.
I walked to the panel and looked at the blank screen. I touched it. Nothing.
âSSZooohee?â
I looked back at Grr. He mimed grabbing the panel by the sides and pulling it.
Yeah, maybe Grr could rip the panel from the wall, what with his biceps stacked on biceps, not to mention the claws, but even if I had two working wrists, I couldnât have pulled that off. I ran my fingers along the edge of the panel, feeling for someplace I could wedge something in behind it.
Nope.
âSorry, Grr,â I said. I wasnât getting this off, but maybe I could short it out somehow. Get it wet?
One of the plastic cups had rolled up against the wall near the toilet. I wrinkled my nose. If the power was out on the force field, I didnât have high hopes for the spigot working.
This was going to suck.
Read more in Grr by Zeta Star. Link to book in first comment!
