by Amanda Milo
Almost.
Thankfully, I don’t have to get close enough to bite often. Many years honing my flame range makes me confident I will only strike my targets and no any innocent bystanders.
Uncomplicating matters further; there is only one innocent bystander here.
Somewhere.
I break them. I dismember them. I turn them to ash.
And I find her.
She is trying to pick herself up but she can’t. Their venom temporarily incapacitates - no lasting harm, normally. The amount of bites on her though…
If I didn’t know what I was looking for, I wouldn’t have been able to guess what she even is. She’s swollen, bruised, and covered in…
I angle my head away and burn a pile of bodies.
Gently, I wipe her matted forelock aside.
In the many spans I’ve had to dream about the day we’d finally meet; I never imagined it happening like this.
As I stare down, beyond distressed at seeing the female I have loved for my entire lifespan suffering - she looks up at me blankly; absolutely no recognition on her face.
Chapter 4
CALLIE
Arms come around me - the biggest arms that have held me down yet - but I don’t fight.
I’ve stopped fighting.
I learned very quickly that it hurts more.
But… he doesn’t hold me down. Instead, he picks me up.
Snarl-snarl-click-click-Cal-lee.
I twitch at that last sound; because it almost sounded like my name.
Without protest, I let him carry me. The world is a little blurry and nothing makes sense; it looks like wax creations strewn all over the ground, like some graveyard scene from a horror movie, complete with foggy smoke. I’m vaguely aware he’s not hurting me yet, but grateful isn’t what I feel towards any of these monsters.
I don’t know when exactly it happens, but I start to feel more alert. My stomach isn’t pitching and the relief from not feeling constantly ill is immense.
If I keep my eyes closed, I can pretend that this huge shoulder I’m resting my cheek against actually belongs to my leather sofa.
The suit material against my skin feels about the same, and it’s just as wide and solid as a couch arm.
But it’s warm.
It smells good.
And I hate it.
I don’t want to like anything about my captors.
Being more aware also makes me stupid. In a momentary fit of defiance, I weakly - but defiantly - push against his grip on me so that I’m sitting up in his hold.
He doesn’t slap me, or twist my wrists, or squeeze my arms or do any of the things I’ve come to expect one of the monsters to do.
Instead, I get a front row seat to being carried into a giant spaceship. It’s sleek, and dark, and scary.
Steeling my nerves, I look up at my captor.
His suit is sleek, and dark, and scary too.
And.
Where he’s not outfitted in suit, he’s covered in scales.
I close my eyes. Aren’t they all.
Beyond the impression of a pronounced, rounded, draft-horse type curve to his nose (and that’s where the similarities end because he is no horse) I can’t say that I actually get a good look at him - my mind can only handle the brief impression: MASSIVE.
And menacing. And as I feel his arms tighten around me - so strong.
Instead of feeling dulled and half dead, minute by minute everything is coming into focus and every corner of my body is filling up with fear.
I’m out of my mind by the time they hold a gun to my head.
I’d find out later that it shot tiny pieces of software-embedded metal instead of bullets - but still.
I scream like I’m about to die.
In the moment; I really believe I’m about to.
It feels like my brain is boiling - I grab my head and drop to the floor, screeching.
The terrifying monster alien loses his shit. He goes insane and attacks the one that just shot me.
When the pressure behind my ear eases enough that I can move again - I run.
While they are busy battling each other, I run, and hide, and I check out. This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening...
I’m in a terrorized otherplace, out of it and out of touch. My skin has gone clammy, and I feel that heavy body fatigue that happens after donating blood. I’m wedged tightly under something, and I feel crunched up and unwell. Everything is a dim roar. Sometimes literally. Sometimes figuratively. At least up until the moment I’m grabbed, dragged out from my hiding spot, and the terrifying alien licks behind my ear.
He’s tasting me!
He slowly extends my arm where I have a myriad of punctures and bruises and as his mouth gets closer and closer to my skin I think my heart is going to literally explode.
And right at this moment, I think dying of a heart attack is preferable to being eaten alive.
I’m so terrified I can taste it and that’s when he looks up at me, and I swear he looks… sad.
It makes my breath stutter, his expression.
I don’t know what it means. I can’t make sense of anything.
He sets my arm on my lap, and his lips curl up in a frustrated looking snarl as he slinks back.
What in the hell was that!
I was kind of in the middle of an acute stress reaction - but Zadeon would tell me later that it was my nightmares.
I was shocky, slipping in and out of consciousness, and sometimes I’d scream.
This set off a chain of events.
It triggered him at a primal level - and he stopped seeing his brother and instead, he saw another male - another male who was an adversary, a threat.
His brother, afraid at first that the rampage would get me killed; tried to defend me.
...An intention that looked very different to an enraged, protective male. An already possessive male.
His brother was on his way way to being reduced to a smear of collateral damage when he shouted the words that tripped Zadeon’s breaker: “That smell… how… you only just met her! Zadeon, be reasonable. No, don’t throw that-” Growwwl. “Damn it! Enough! You’re terrifying the females!”
Just like that, he stopped. He took himself to cargo.
What Zadeon didn’t know was that when he left me, part of me noticed.
Part of me might have - must have? - even worried about him.
But he didn’t know that.
On a conscious level I didn’t even know that.
I’m not sure what I’m feeling.
And as I sit here, thoughts circling but growing less muddled in the quiet of the room, I know one thing:
The smaller one is coming for me.
Stalking me.
He’s circling closer and closer and, I’d learn later, knew perfectly well where I was. He could smell me fine, and he was hoping that, like the other woman they’d rescued, I would calm down and see events rationally.
Right then? I didn’t have a whole lot of rational left in me.
I watched a deer being hunted by wolves once. The deer was doing fine until one wolf deliberately spooked it; once the deer was flooded with panic, it was done for. It just blindly ran where they herded it.
All I can think is; that poor fucking deer.
I keep ducking and running and covering my mouth with both hands to stifle the panicked sounds that are attempting to leak through my fingers. I move from section to section on a freaking space ship, but it’s when I get to some kind of control room that I see him.
The monster. Part of me starts to engage as I watch him on a monitor. As much as this one scared me he hadn’t hurt me… why?
And… why did he take me from the others?
Why kill them?
Why didn’t he rape me too? Why did he save me?
I hear a noise from the other side of the control room door. It’s loud enough that I’m sure the smaller alien is being intentionally clumsy. It’s far enough away I f
eel like I’ve got a chance if I start running right now - and it’s loud enough that I don’t feel safe staying in place.
Just enough of a threat to keep driving that deer into the wolf trap.
Stalking me! Has been, ever since the terrifying one fought with him and disappeared.
The terrifying one. The monster. My eyes are drawn back to the monitor. Even on a tiny section of screen he manages to look intimidating. He is pacing and there are these long things trailing after him… I start to squint so that I can make them out.
“Hi.”
I jump straight up in the air, letting out that sound I’ve been working so hard to keep plugged, and cracking my arm hard on a globe of the world.
Right then, I hear a distant roar, but it could be coming from my mind because instead of looking like earth the globe I’m staring at looks… I swallow. Toto, we are so not in our solar system anymore...
Yet the original cause of my near heart attack is not because of an alien. Behind me is a woman. A human woman!
She winces, and shoots a quick look over her shoulder, in the direction of the Stalker. “Sorry.”
I look back at the monitor; there are several cubes displayed, but Stalker isn’t in any of the frames; just the other alien, his jaws open wide in a crazed looking bellow.
She tries to lean in, conspiring, “So that guy’s pretty scary.”
Hearing him in the hallway, I motion for her to shut the hell up. She looks confused.
“Tahmoh seems nice though,” she continues slowly. Like I’m the one that’s unbalanced.
Tahmoh? She’s on a first name basis with an-
“But Zadeon - the one that goes nuts every time you scream in your sleep?”
I jerk back in surprise. I know I’d been having nightmares but I’d been screaming? In my sleep? And that’s what set the big one off?
I have a flash - not of my attack this time, but of after, when this one, this terrifying one had reached into my hiding spot.
Had he… had he patted my back?
“Now that he’s got the chains on-”
“Chains?”
She answers, “Uh huh,” but I see her eyes slide to my front - where my torn and half gaping shirt does as much to reveal as it does to cover.
I jerk what’s left of it up and tuck it into my filthy, frayed bra strap, trying to hide at least some of what they did to me.
Annnnd the look on her face.
I am FILLED with self loathing at the pitying look on her face.
I wonder if she was there. If she saw.
My stomach wants to rebel at this possibility.
I decide I don’t want to hide here after all. “I’m not sticking around for Tahmoh to find us,” I tell her before I make to escape her probing gaze.
“Wait!” she calls way louder than is prudent. “I think you’ve got the wrong idea!”
At her panicked shout, Tahmoh appears.
This stupid girl!
I shrink back and hide under some wrecked furniture. It’s bubbled and melted, still smoking from earlier and reeks to high heaven but I hope that means it covers my smell.
Then I hear a whispered, “She went that way.”
Crazy witch!
I can run for it.
I can.
My teeth start chattering.
Tahmoh’s face appears in my field of vision and I choke back a scream.
He holds out a hand. He opens his mouth-
I make a break for it. I’m up and sprinting for the doorway.
To my surprise, I make it there. I don’t hear him chasing after me, but I don’t risk slowing down to make it easier for him to catch me either.
Chapter 5
CALLIE
I race through hallways, traveling in the opposite direction from where Stalker had been herding me. I slide through a doorway, taking a tiny thrill in watching the door zing open right before I impact, and wishing I had my fuzzy socks to really take advantage of this slick flooring.
Annnd shoes to go with those socks for the parts of the floor that looked like they’ve been blown up would be nice.
While I was at it, this all being a rotten nightmare would be great if I was going to be granted wishes.
Still feeling a little clammy skinned but not shaking nearly as hard, I look around.
This ship is a wreck.
It hadn’t been like this when I’d been carried in here. Everything is coated in black char, and some things are melted, evidently other things are fireproof.
Whirling and ignoring my aches, my feet slap the floor for two beats before I perform a bastardized split grand jete then lean back when I land, so that I slide fast right through the next doorway, this is almost fun-
I hit the door hard.
‘Sorry!’
Did the door just apologize to me? It slides open quickly, the mechanized sound soft and, to my ears, completely apologetic.
I’m losing it. Or I’ve lost it. I’m pretty sure I have a good excuse.
Limping now more than I am sliding, I move through and it is in this area I start to see something familiar: crates.
On the screen I’d been so focused on back in the control room, there had been crates in one frame.
I hear footsteps behind me.
This time, they aren’t being intentionally loud.
And they are coming up fast.
My heart kicks into high gear and I ignore all the innumerable pains in my body as I run full out.
I hear what almost sounds like, “NO, STOP!”
Right then, I don’t catch that I’m able to make out the words as if they are English, even though they are definitely not. It’s one of many revelations I’m going to ruminate on later.
Later, I’ll come to the conclusion that they shot me in the head and boiled my brains so that I could understand their language.
But right now, I am running for my life.
I know with every fiber of my being that it is Stalker chasing me and from the sound of it, he’s faster than I am.
A sort of anteroom comes into view, tucked just off to the side of this cavernous place, supplies are stacked all around in neat rows and this aisle is clear, leading straight for a door.
Everything in me wants to be behind that door.
I go for it just as Stalker rounds a stack, coming up on me so fast.
I want the door to whoosh open like all the others I effortlessly passed through to make it here. Instead, this one hesitates - opening just a crack, yet ultimately staying shut like the last one. I bang into it too.
But this time; it’s not just hesitating - the door is not opening! I pound on it and I can’t help it - I make a noise like an animal that knows it’s about to die.
In answer, a deafening mutant crocodilian-elephantine roar comes from other side.
Ah. That must be my monster.
That pretty much drowns out the fact that the door starts talking again - and is that the witch’s voice? “Hey, hey, calm down. It’s not what you think-”
Stalker shouts in a decidedly exasperated tone, “Just open it!”
The door jolts open, and I burst inside.
My feet slip - but this time, it’s not intentional. I stumble and barely catch myself before I go nose-down. A sound that falls somewhere between mountain lion and bird of prey is released, oh, about three feet from my ear.
I automatically drop and curl up in a defensive position.
A tired and ragged, “You’re a teveking idiot, Z,” comes from the doorway, to which the monster makes a retort in the form of a snarl.
When everything goes silent, I lift my top arm.
The monster is pacing hard.
I experience a Jack-fell-out-of-the-Beanstalk perspective; from down here, this one seems even more giant.
And there is no hidden exit; ‘alien-spartan’ is how this room could be described. Gadgets and futuristic tech looking things in here but… no escape.
Not that getting out of a spaceship
will get me anything but dead. There will be no getting away. Even if I could make it off this ship, say, using an emergency pod or something - what do I know about flying a ship?
I think of that globe.
I don’t even know where home is.
And now that this monster is stomping back and forth, and the Stalker is waiting for me on the other side of the door...
Being trapped breaks something in me.
I’m not even sure it’s irrational at this point; I can’t keep events and my perception of events straight enough to make any kind of call on what is or isn’t overreaction.
But my hindbrain wants to curl up and hide and for this to all just go away.
I don’t want to deal with this latest; I don’t want to deal with anything at all.
I hear metal drag.
Don’t look! DON’TLOOKdon’tlookdon’tlook-
I peek.
Eyes stare back at me.
My heart does the thing where it tries to make an escape through the rib cage.
My hiding spot is not a hiding spot.
I tuck my chin into my chest but I am too hurt and too scared to beg for my life.
Maybe if I pretend he isn’t here…
It’s just like lying in bed when I know there’s something under it. I can’t sleep; it’ll get me. I can’t scream; it’ll get me. And I sure as hell can’t run because it would love to chase me. And in keeping up the theme: it will get me then too.
But I can’t open my eyes either. I’m too afraid I’ll see it. It will make it all real.
I’m in the middle of hyperventilating but dimly, I’m aware enough to remember that every time I’ve let anything resembling a sound of distress out, this guy goes nuts.
I bite onto my wrist, blowing out wet gasps, and choking against sobs as I fight to calm down.
I feel a touch on my other arm and I flinch, falling back.
His finger and thumb are still poised in the air, in the “c” shape he’d used to grasp my skin. To gently grasp my skin. He’d been trying to get my attention.
“What?” I ask, wobbly.
I manage to rise to my knees, feeling braver with him calmer, and mostly still. He points to my wrist, the skin mottled with bruises - and now colored with my teeth impressions and wet with my saliva.
