by Leith Briar
Highland Barbarian Alien
Leith Briar
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Epilogue
Also by Leith Briar
Copyright © 2020 by Leith Briar
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the authors own imagination or are used fictitiously. Any likeness to actual events, locales, or persons, is entirely coincidental.
Cover Design: Leith Briar
Character Illustration: Andrei Militaru
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Prologue
I was fourteen years old when it happened.
I remember everything about that night like it was yesterday. Gran came in to my room at 9p.m to let me know she was going to bed. Her long white hair was wrapped loosely in a plait and tucked over her shoulder, and she was wearing a nightdress that zipped up the front. She needed it because her joints weren’t what they used to be, and it was easier to get on and off with the zipper. I teased her, because that’s the kind of relationship we had.
It had always been just me and her since I was a small child. I smiled when she told me she’d already taken her tablets so would soon be practically comatose. I told her I was going to watch TV for a little while. She bent down and kissed the top of my head. She smelled like roses. There was bread in the freezer if I felt like some toast later — which I often did. I was a bottomless pit as a teen — always ravenous.
Then she wrapped her housecoat tighter around her small body, and her soft slippers padded against the wooden floor as she left the room.
The memory of what I watched on TV is the only thing that is fuzzy. My gran had no interest in television, being partially sighted. She had always preferred to listen to the radio. We didn’t even have a set in the living room, the only one in the house being the small nineteen-incher that sat on top of my chest of drawers. So she never told me what I could and couldn’t watch, since she didn’t know any better. It might have been True Blood, or Lost, or maybe even Desperate Housewives. They were all favourites of mine.
I must have drifted to sleep. The television was off, but the nightlight was on. It was just a small one, the type which plugs directly into the power source. Mine had a Mickey Mouse face and was no brighter than a tea light candle, but still I kept it. It was out of place in my bedroom, which had long shed the toys and games of my childhood in favour of posters and piles of clothes. But that nightlight was one of the few things I had to remind me of my life before I moved here.
When I woke up to the sounds of whispering in my bedroom, it was the nightlight I kept my eyes focused on.
You always imagine you’ll squeeze your eyes closed in fear, don’t you? I didn’t. I couldn’t. My eyes opened, and I was completely frozen. It’s hard, even now, to describe the kind of fear I felt that night. I have only experienced it twice in my life.
Many people will never experience it.
Those people are the lucky ones.
I’ve been scared many times. I’m scared of bees (but not wasps, for some strange reason). The fear that took hold of me that night was nothing like the fear of coming close to a bee. That night was utter terror. Sheer panic. Crippling and relentless. My gut hollowed so much it was physically painful, and my heart hammered so viciously I could hear it pounding in my ears.
And still I stared at that nightlight.
I knew there were people in my room.
Even if I couldn’t have heard the whispers, I’d have sensed their presence. I didn’t know how many people, because I didn’t look. I just lay still, every fibre in my body hoping that they’d go away. Hoping that they wouldn’t hurt me, or take me, or kill me.
To my surprise, they didn’t.
They did nothing.
They took nothing.
I don’t think I even heard them leave.
In some ways, this was the worst thing about it.
Years later I’d be lying in bed awake at some hellish hour, and I’d start wondering what they wanted. Why did they come?
Burglars take items.
Rapists take souls.
Kidnappers take people.
Murderers take lives.
The men who came into my room that night didn’t take anything. And the question that has haunted me since that day?
Why?
I have only ever experienced fear like that twice in my life. The first time, I was fourteen, in my bedroom of my grandmother’s house.
The second time?
The second time, they did take something.
The second time, they took everything.
And the question why still haunts me.
Chapter 1
Sophia
I wake up confused and sore.
My neck and shoulder aches, and my arm feels numb, as if I’ve been sleeping in a horrible position.
Sleeping on something hard.
Something that’s not a bed.
I struggle to prise my eyes open, almost like I forgot to take my eyelashes off last night and the glue has softened and sealed them together. When I think they must be open, I doubt myself because everything is too dark.
My bedroom isn’t dark. Not like this. There is a nightlight and a window with a streetlight at the same level, and I never close the curtains.
I stretch my still sore arm out, feeling for something I hope to be familiar. I could have just fallen out of the bed? That would explain why my arm is sore, why everything is so hard, and why the temperature is so cold.
I touch my arm and it’s covered in goose pimples, the tiny fuzzy hairs standing up. I’m freezing.
I sit up.
My hands feel around for something, anything, but all I get is the cold surface beneath me. It’s smooth to the touch and almost feels a little damp, like the inside of a refrigerator. I’m guessing it is metal.
Am I inside a giant fridge?
I tell myself to shut up as soon as the thought runs through my head. Why the hell would I wake up inside a fridge?
But it feels like a fridge. It’s certainly cold enough, and there’s a noise in the background. A humming of sorts, like a generator or a cooling system.
Maybe my suspicions aren’t all that radical.
I feel the panic threatening to rise, a harsh grip around my stomach that’s making me want to shake, making me want to stop breathing. That’s making my heart beat
faster.
Sitting up properly and shuffling back until I hit a wall, I convince myself panicking will solve nothing. Not when I don’t know what needs to be solved yet.
I try to focus on the last thing I remember. It was a Thursday night, of that I’m sure. I work late on Thursday nights in a bar. It’s one of our busiest nights and one of the other girls didn’t show up, which made it even worse than normal.
I had arrived home and hadn’t even bothered with pyjamas, that’s how exhausted I was. No pyjamas, no cup of tea, no half an hour of reading before bed.
I just hopped straight in and went to sleep.
Except I don’t feel naked right now.
I run my hands over my body. I’m wearing what I think is my silk nightdress. It plunges low at the neckline and splits up the sides to my hips. I can’t be sure since I’ve never really worn it — I’m more of a flannel girl really, and it was an impulse buy when I thought a guy I was dating was about to become boyfriend material.
His name was Stephen, and he never became boyfriend material. He turned out to be one of those types who didn’t know how to change a damn lightbulb. He just wanted to travel and experience shit. Pretentious.
We never made it as far as needing the silk nightdress, but I’m sure from the little bow at the bottom of the V-neckline, that this is definitely it.
Which means I’m either a sleep-dresser, or somebody dressed me.
Immediately my thoughts are taken back to that night when I was younger. I’ve lived in a constant state of being careful ever since then. I make sure the door is locked and bolted the second I get home, and then I usually have to get up again as I’m drifting off to sleep just to guarantee I’ve done it. I’m always careful. That fear is always in the back of my mind, the one that doesn’t know what they wanted. The one that wonders if they’ll come back.
Did they come back?
* * *
It’s some time later when I think I hear a sound above the low hum. It’s almost like heavy breathing — panting, perhaps?
I try to swallow before attempting to speak up, my mouth dry and my throat rough. “Hello?”
The word when it comes out sounds pathetic and small.
“Is someone there?”
A voice. A woman’s voice.
It’s here but at the same time, it sounds like it’s in another room.
“Where are you?” I ask, shifting my hands to push myself up. I cross the space with my arms outstretched, towards the direction I think the voice is coming from. About two meters away my hands connect with the same cold metal of the floor.
“Hello?” I repeat the word, louder this time.
“I’m here,” she replies.
She sounds as if she’s on the other side of this wall. I reach up, standing on the tips of my toes until I feel the very edge of where the wall stops. It’s like a cubicle.
I’m in a fridge cubicle.
“I can’t get to you,” I tell her. If it had been a few inches smaller, perhaps I could have pulled myself up and then maybe climbed over. But I’m only five foot one, and my fingers just barely skim the edge.
“Do you know where we are? Do you know what happened?” she asks, her voice sounding panicked.
I’ve long got over the panic threatening to consume me when I first woke up. In some ways, I think I was living my whole life waiting for this. I’m not saying the panic won’t return, but for now I’m doing a good job of staying calm.
“I woke up here a couple of hours ago. I don’t know anything else,” I explain. “Can you see anything over there?”
She takes a little while to answer. “Nothing.”
We both sit in silence after that. I guess we are both thinking about the same things, mainly what will happen to us. When I thought I was here alone, it was easy to believe that the same men who came to my room that night had returned. Maybe they’ve always wanted to kill me, for a reason I have no knowledge of. But now there is someone else. Who knows how many cubicles there are here? Maybe there are more. Maybe I’m not special. Maybe I’m just a number, who is about to become a statistic.
“What is your name?”
“Sophia,” I reply. “What’s yours?”
“Megan. Do you think we will die here?”
“No.” I say the word with little conviction, but I refuse to say anything else out loud.
“How can you be sure?”
Well, I can’t be sure. But I don’t see any use in working ourselves up over something that’s inevitable. We’re all going to die one day. “If killing us was the goal, why wouldn’t we be dead already?”
She misses a beat before she replies. “I guess you have a point.”
I close my eyes and let my neck roll from side to side, trying to release some stiff pressure. There is no point keeping my eyes open. I thought they might have adjusted, but there is really nothing for them to adjust to. It is truly the darkest thing I’ve ever seen.
Or not seen, as the case may be.
“You sound very young,” Megan says after a while.
I let out a sound that’s like a polite laugh. She’s not wrong. Once, I had to arrange delivery of a new washing machine and the driver on the phone asked me to put my mum on. “I’m twenty-one,” I tell her. “How old are you?”
“Huh. You sound way younger. I’m twenty-eight.”
“Everyone says that. Do you remember being taken?”
“No,” she replies. “The last thing I remember was going to sleep. And then I woke up here.”
“Yeah... me too.”
The pair of us strike up something of a conversation. Our answers are short and forced, but it’s passing the time. I tell her about my life before, about the bar I worked in and how I’ve lived alone for the past six months since my grandmother passed away. She tells me about her course at university. She’s training to be a vet, and would like to be vegan, but she has commitment issues.
I tell her I feel the same way about plastic usage, particularly paper straws. I know it’s the right thing to do but I just struggle to commit.
“What do you look like?” she asks me.
“I have dark hair and green eyes,” I tell her. “What about you?”
“Blonde hair and blue eyes,” she says. “Well, my roots would tell a different story. I was supposed to have an appointment on Friday. I had you pictured in my head as a blonde, too.”
I chuckle. “Not since an experiment when I was seventeen. It went that bright pumpkin colour and I’ve never tried aga—”
Before I’ve finished my sentence light erupts into the room, stinging my eyes like acid. I close them over quickly out of instinct and then force myself to blink a few times. It’s red. Everything is red. And I see I was right about the metal cubicle thing.
“Sophia?” Megan is shouting now, barely audible over the background noise.
The ground is vibrating.
The low hum getting louder with each passing second.
When the whole floor jerks violently, my mouth opens in shock. Megan screams while I try to find something to grip on to.
There’s nothing.
Another jerk.
A loud groan.
More screams.
And then the world turns the wrong way around as I’m slammed into the wall opposite.
Darkness again.
Chapter 2
Sophia
I’m woken up by a foot pressing against my ribs, trying to turn me over. I don’t want to wake up. I don’t want to leave whatever it is I’m dreaming about, but it’s already slipping through my fingers like sand.
I can’t escape reality.
I must face it.
My eyes squint at this new light. It’s no longer red. It’s bright. Daylight, but brighter than I’ve ever seen daylight before.
“Suas.” The voice above my head is loud and filled with venom. I turn around, trying to see where it’s coming from, but my eyes aren’t seeing anything very clearly.
Anoth
er nudge in the ribs. I shift my position and bring my hands down. Dirt. Dry dirt.
Whoever is above me must lose their patience, because I feel strong hands on my shoulders and the next thing I know I’m being pulled up. Arms close around my body and I’m being dragged across the ground.
And then I’m thrown — yes, thrown — into the back of a van.
My eyes are blinking rapidly, desperately trying to adjust. It’s darker in here. It’s not a van at all... It’s wooden, with beams of light sneaking in through the slits in the wood.
It’s a… wagon?
And there are other women here.
Perhaps twenty of them.
I look around the faces. All scared. All tear-stained. Some are trembling, while others just stare at some spot on the floor.
I swallow. My mouth is so fucking parched, and the air is dry and roasting hot.
Are we in the desert?
That would explain everything. The humming sound, the cold, the metal walls like what I can only imagine the hold of an aircraft would look like.
Have they taken me to the middle east?
I scoot over on the wooden floor, trying to get a look outside. Pulling my arm up to shade my eyes from the scorching pink light of the sun, my eyes get no further than the dirt directly below this wagon before the doors slam shut in my face.
Fuck.
Metal screeches as a hatch opens, and something is flung inside before it slams shut again.
It could be a bomb for all I know, but still I reach out and touch it. If it is a bomb then touching won’t change its mind, will it?
