Women of the Grey- The Complete Trilogy

by Carol James Marshall

  Sunny laid on the floor next to Kia as well, but she didn’t bother with a blanket. The Grey was a cold place. They were cold. Their skin, their hearts, fingertips, eyelashes. The blanket Kia pulled over herself was nothing but another lie.

  “What do you think we are?” Kia tapped one of the cage bars with her fingertips. Tap, tap, tap Kia asked the question of Sunny, but also of herself. “I’ve heard the mothers talk. They talk of going out with the humans. Of being “on mission” with humans.”

  “We aren’t humans.” Sunny put one of her fingers on top of Kia’s. “The mothers talk here, too. They talk about stuff openly like I don’t exist.”

  Kia shoved her face against the cage bars now. She was lonely and wanted to be as near as she could to a friend. Lonely was the usual for the Women of the Grey, both big and small, but it was different when you were aware of it. It’s different when you know it’s there. Kia was very aware of the lonely that hung around her. Maybe that’s why she was always searching for answers. Always wanting to know the how and why of everything. Kia was looking for a way to cure the lonely that clung to her.

  “Then what? What are we?” The look on Kia’s face broke Sunny a little. Sunny’s calculated, cold, and murderous intent always clung to her, but with Kia it was different. Kia made Sunny feel less like the monster she knew she was.

  “I don’t know, Kia. I’ve never been out of a cage. I went from my mother, to seeing my father or a man I guess was my father, a box, then a cage.” Sunny slumped her shoulders. “I’ve never seen the sun. Sad, right? My name is Sunny. It’s stupid.”

  “You remember being born?” Kia wrinkled her brow at this. The look was both amusing and concerned. As if something confused her while also startling her wide awake.

  “Yes,” Sunny nodded, “don’t you?” Kia shook her head no, then Sunny second guessed herself and stopped to think for a moment.

  “I don’t remember anything,” Kia seemed to whimper, “and I wasn’t turned in till I was two. My mother went on the run with me. She didn’t want to give me up. They caught her, took me, and I don’t know the rest.”

  “How do you know this?” Sunny thought about her mother and felt just a touch of regret. Sunny was a truly awful daughter, a horrendous baby to grow in her belly. Sunny remembers being truly wicked, bloodthirsty. Intensely bloodthirsty.

  “One of the mothers likes to tease me about it.” Kia’s eyes were glinted with tears “She tells me about it every once in a while. It used to make me sad, but she hasn’t bothered me in a while.”

  Silence swept over both girls. Sunny was wishing she could go back to the womb, be less than evil to her gentle mother. She remembers sensing her mother was kind in nature. Sunny started to gag, trying her best to hold back the memory of ripping her mother open from the inside out.

  Kia started to rock back and forth on the floor, holding the blanket in her fists. She remembered her hands being tiny and her mother holding them. She’d hold Kia’s hands, then lift her up, pushing her face into Kia’s neck. Her mother held her a lot. Kia remembered that. Her skin hasn’t forgotten the sensation of her mother’s constant touch. A protective hug, a hand on her back. Kia could almost smell her mother’s hair.

  Eventually both girls fell asleep, each haunted by the concept of what mothers are and what mothers are meant to be. Kia woke up late in the night, her face layered with flakey, dried-up tears. She didn’t know she had been crying in her sleep.

  Kia fumbled her way back to her quarters where this batch of daughters of The Grey were held. She stood, blanket in hand for a long while, just staring at all the sleeping heads on pillows. Each of those girls had a mother once. Did each of them also have a story to tell?

  Teresa

  The world that was nothing but pain for Teresa was now pain-filled fuzzy. Her thoughts were jumbled, and she felt as if every fright she had ever experienced at the hands of the Originals was because of an overactive imagination. Teresa now felt smooth, as if someone had taken her out and scrubbed away her sorrow.

  Shaking her head, Teresa told herself that such feelings weren’t real. The feeling of calm that now lay on her skin was deceitful. Trying to open her eyes, Teresa reminded herself in the glimpses between her eyelashes that she was in Uni. Uni’s tentacles’ bite was sharper than usual. As if Uni was holding on to her for dear life.

  Her eyes wouldn’t stay open. What did the Originals do to her? Teresa fought sleep, trying to focus on the pain that came from her left side. That’s where they had cut her open this time, but Teresa’s head was bopping along. Thoughts seemed to fall off into a pit.

  It was nice to feel weightless, flying — Teresa was a bird now up in the sky. She flew quickly, far away from The Grey. Her beak cut through the wind, freeing her. She flapped her wings and started to whistle her birdie tune. All was well. She was free.

  One of Uni’s tentacles bit into Teresa, the fiercest one first, then other tentacles followed. A bee line of stingers forced Teresa awake. What have the Originals done to her? She remembered one of them reaching for a glass jar. She had stuck a finger in it, then applied — no, smeared — something on her neck. Some liquid, almost goop.

  What did they do? The calm that sat on Teresa’s skin was replaced with pure panic. It was something new. Something that took the edge off of her. A gel maybe. A drug in a gel? A drug that dulled her senses. The Originals knew. Those wicked grey things knew she was becoming more alert.

  The tentacles loosened their grip. Teresa’s head filled with a vibration. At first Teresa thought Uni was frightened, but that wasn’t it. Uni was crying. Mourning for Teresa. It grieved for her and with her like a true friend.

  “I’m awake now. It’s okay. We can’t wait any longer. They’ll do it again and again. Tomorrow, when the Originals leave. I’ll go out. I’ll find a way to end us both.” Teresa thought all these things, but with Uni her thoughts felt like speaking. She spoke to Uni with intention, from one being to another. This must be how the Originals do it.

  Intention to enter another being with nothing but thoughts. Teresa tried to clear her thoughts and understand it better, but the fuzzy was still present, despite Uni’s bites. The fuzzy shadowed Teresa like an uninvited guest that made everyone in the room uncomfortable.

  “Uni, let me go. I won’t go out, but please let go of me.” Teresa said this out loud. Maybe that wasn’t the smartest of things to do since there were probably cameras everywhere. Who knows if they could hear her, but she didn’t care. It had been so long since she had spoken. She wasn’t sure she still knew how.

  One by one the tentacles let go of Teresa, their sharp teeth disengaging. Teresa now lay at the bottom of Uni, no longer floating within. The bottom, like the rest of Uni, was soft and cool to the touch, a membrane that appeared slippery, but wasn’t.

  Getting her knees as close as she could to her stomach, Teresa lay in the smallest ball she could at the bottom of her friend Uni. She felt safe there, protected. Maybe, thought Teresa, this is what babies feel like in the womb. Encased in protection.

  The vibrations of sorrow and terror that Uni had were gone now, replaced by a hum. The soft hum flowed like ocean waves, some strong and some soft as they washed over Teresa. Uni was trying its best to soothe her.

  Teresa could see herself holding the daughter of The Grey that she could never produce. She’d hum to the baby, smooth its hair, marvel at the beauty of baby ears and toes, until the baby slept deeply, knowing that its life was warmth and comfort.

  Uni was doing that now. Humming to Teresa, trying its best to numb the ache of the day away. Maybe in doing this, Uni felt comfort itself from the sense of being full, of having something dear inside of you, dozing while you keep guard at its door.

  Under Teresa’s face was a puddle of her tears. All her time in The Grey, all her years of nodding in agreement with Superior Mother’s orders. Teresa had not once thought of what love was. What a true mother’s love could be.

  How could she? She had never
had love. Never known of this thing called love. The mothers told the daughters of The Grey that emotion, feelings, were a human waste of time. The Women of the Grey were efficient, stealthy. They had no time for emotions. No time for this human crap called feelings.

  They had no time for love, yet Teresa thought they all craved it. Every single one of them knew something was missing in their dreary lives in The Grey. They looked for it, day in and day out, without knowing what they were looking for.

  Teresa let go of her legs, lifting one of her arms and putting her head on it. She needed to get her face out of her growing puddle of tears. She laughed a bit; a half-alien woman, being held prisoner by her own kind, locked up in another alien species that felt such empathy for her that it held her, hummed to her, and smoothed her the best way it could. Like a mother with her child.

  How absurd that in this moment, Teresa understood what love was. It was so profound, and so incredibly harrowing to know exactly what she lacked. What they all lacked. Closing her eyes, Teresa pushed her palm against Uni’s membrane and felt the hum slowing a bit now. They were both falling asleep.

  Teresa’s eyes slammed open with the rapid-fire way Uni’s tentacles bit into her and raised her so that she floated within it. Wild-eyed, Teresa had started to protest when she noticed the door opening and two Originals walking into the lab. Quickly closing her eyes, Teresa pretended to sleep.

  “This is the last day,” she thought to herself, forcing that thought forward so Uni would catch it.

  Superior Mother

  Scratching at her face, Superior Mother stood in her bedroom a bit too long, looking at nothing, and thinking of nothing but Red. She had been without it for three days now. Three days of feeling the constant freeze of the ring on her finger. Three days of ministering to each woe any Women of the Grey could possibly have. Three days of watching her assistant regard her with a furrowed brow.

  Three days of constantly keeping herself on high alert, because she had nothing to dull the pain with. Nothing to take away her continual need to listen for Lisa. Then she’d give in — there was no sound out there. No hint of noise from her daughter.

  She had now spent her morning biting her tongue, holding herself back. Trying her best to shove aside the rage that now tunneled in her arms and legs, and was weaseling its way into her brain. Thoughts of crashing into the Originals’ quarters and bashing those shiny silver heads in nagged at her.

  The desire to pour Red down her throat and then tear into her assistant was a daydream that she was having trouble ignoring. Superior Mother felt both manic and contrived. This fierce aggression was the result of her less than leadership-worthy habits.

  Superior Mother’s hair was knotted and there was a smell to her that should not be there. Pacing her room, she tried to recall how many days it had been since she left her quarters. It hadn’t been long. Only a day, maybe 2, no more than three.

  Eyes rolling to the back of her head, Superior Mother dropped to her knees, shaking with the intensity of wanting to slash at something. Her real face showing now, sharp teeth that left clean slices in flesh, and a strength that could tear through walls.

  She knew this was her own fault. There was no one to blame but herself. She knew that to taste Red was to want more, and the more she took the less control she had. There would come a time when she’d lose all control. What would the Originals do to her then?

  They had spent a millennium dousing their savage nature, the true nature of The Women of the Grey. They Originals did everything in their power to keep them hidden, like rats in sewers. Why deny the true nature of the beast? Why hide that The Women of the Grey are killers? Most importantly, that they were killers of humans for nothing more than sport.

  “And drugs,” Superior Mother reminded herself. Human blood was the Women of the Grey’s favorite elixir.

  Superior Mother’s tongue ran over her teeth. They were wicked sharp. She could easily rip apart the neck of an ox. Laying on her side, the teeth slowly dulled, and her face shrank back into place.

  A sense of quiet touched Superior Mother. This wave of madness was almost over. It would come again, because she knew laying there on the floor, acting like this, was the definition of insane. Superior Mother knew that she would not stop. She’d keep at the Red till she’d rip her own throat out.

  There was a quiet knock on the door. Rolling her eyes, expecting her assistant, Superior Mother said “Enter.” Instead, it was mother Cara, her Red supplier.

  “Sorry to bother you Superior Mother. I just wanted to tell you that your shipment isn’t here yet, but will arrive soon.” Mother Cara stood her ground. She expected retribution for not having her leader’s goods. She stood as though waiting for a slap.

  “How soon?” Superior Mother whispered this question, because it was filled with regret. She was beyond shame now for her addiction to Red. An addiction that was leading her down dark paths, but she accepted that. It was too late for her now. It was best to sink and not swim. Sink all the way down with regret tied to her ankles.

  “Soon, a day or so.” Mother Cara turned to leave then. She could not tolerate the idea of that slap any longer. It was better to run for her life than wait to be chastised for not having what Superior Mother needed.

  Standing, Superior Mother caught a glimpse of her assistant peering at her from outside her quarters’ doorway as Cara made her quick getaway. She walked in slowly, as if she too expected an ax to be drawn up.

  “Should I run a bath for you?” Her assistant’s eyes darted around the room. Superior Mother almost felt sorry for her.

  “Yes,” was all she could say. She wanted to tell her assistant everything. Spill it out on the floor, toss her the ring, slam on some shoes and walk out the door whistling. She could purge herself, cut her chains to both The Grey and Red.

  Superior Mother would leave, head out into to the outside world. A world she had not been out in… Superior Mother gasped. “Ten years.” She hadn’t been out of The Grey for ten years.

  “How horrid am I?” She ran her hands through her tangled hair, then stood and walked to the bathroom. She could hear the tub running and smell a hint of orange.

  Superior Mother’s assistant’s hands trembled. It was difficult to turn the nozzle on the tub. She had not seen their leader in two days. For two days, she’d made excuses to all who asked. Luckily, they feared Superior Mother, and when her assistant said their leader was occupied, they believed her. They believed her out of fear, maybe but also because they were all on Red nowadays. Most of the time the assistant believed she was the only one that wasn’t.

  “What do I do? What do I do?” Turning off the bathwater Superior Mother’s assistant felt her knees quake as she helped their leader into the tub. Superior Mother’s assistant would bathe her and make her presentable. She felt like such a liar. “I am nothing but a puppet master,” she thought.

  How much longer could she pretend that everything was okay, that everything would be okay?

  The assistant heard Superior Mother speak. “How horrid am I?”

  Superior Mother’s assistant looked at her leader with a heavy gaze and answered.

  “How horrid are we?”

  June

  “Here you go, honey bunny…” June slapped Clarissa on the ass. “Go make me some money.” She smiled at Clarissa, handing her the three glass containers of Red. Every day, Clarissa looked more and more unfrazzled. It wasn’t appealing. June looked away.

  June wanted a shower, clean clothes, some food. Something to distract her from the fact that she never bothered looking for Lisa. The clink of the Red drug in her pocket was more urgent. She had to get it to Clarissa as fresh as possible.

  “Keep quiet that I’m here, okay?” June, pulling off her boots, tried to make eye contact with Clarissa, who was busy putting the two glass bottles of Red in a little velvet box. “I am supposed to be on Lisa’s tail, and if the queen bee finds out I’m here…well, I’ll have hell to pay.”

  Cla
rissa plopped herself on the bed and responded “I don’t think so…your royal highness is distracted these days.” June felt tired. A tired that had dirt on it. Smudgy nasty street tired. June responded in turn “By what? Her never ending quest to capture Lisa?”

  Shaking her head, Clarissa gave June a sneaky cat smile then said “No, no my darling dear. Our one and only boss lady is on Red.” With this Clarissa took a bow. June stood up then and grabbed Clarissa by the hair, pulling her face inches from hers. “Do not lie to me.”

  Clarissa squealed out, “Not lying…in fact she placed the biggest order we’ve ever had.”

  June let go of Clarissa’s hair. Hair that had once felt silky and never knotted in her fingers now felt dry and grass-like. “Go on.” June spat out and then sat, looking intently at Clarissa.

  “She wants a cup of Red. One whole cup.” Clarissa planted herself on June’s lap, pushing herself into her like a cat. June almost excepted her to purr.

  “And she has no idea I’m the source?” June asked allowing Clarissa to stay on her lap, even though she wanted nothing more than to shove her off.

  “Not one single tiny little clue.” Clarissa responded to June then kissed her on the cheek. June thought she would vomit a bit at Clarissa’s kiss. Clarissa, who she could once hold in her arms, kiss, and release herself to, was now nothing more than a junkie in her eyes. June had told her not to touch the product. Clarissa didn’t listen.

  Picking at one of her black locks, June twirled her hair in bed that night. She’d grab at it, then twirl it, braid it, unable to keep her hands and mind still. She needed sleep. Tomorrow she’d go out and get that cup of Red, no matter what. No matter how.