by Erik Hyrkas
The roar of an engine came from overhead, and they looked up to find a gold and black triangular aircraft the length of a bus hovering above them. A beam of blue light followed briefly by a beam of red light shined directly on Brit and Marcy. Brit noticed that the ship had no exhaust or obvious moving parts. From below, the ship looked like a yellow triangle with some rounded black half-circles on the bottom and the rear, which she thought were probably some form of alien propulsion system.
Marcy waved both arms. “We are over here,” she shouted upward.
“What are you doing?” Brit demanded. “They might be worse than the creature.”
“If they have a plane, I’m sure that, even if they kill us, it’ll be in a less painful way to die than getting eaten by some sort of blue cave monster.”
“That creature was only intent on killing us because we’re food. Whatever is flying that plane may decide to keep us alive for the pleasure of hurting us,” Brit shouted.
Marcy stopped waving, but Brit knew it didn’t matter. Whether she had waved or not, Brit was sure whoever was flying the plane had already spotted them. There was nowhere to run except the cave, and neither woman made any attempt to run toward the waiting gullet of the azure creature.
The aircraft maneuvered cautiously to a spot ten yards away. When securely on the ground, the seamless wings rotated upward, revealing a door with a man outlined in white light. He was even bigger than Hunter had been, and he held a weapon resembling a shotgun.
He hopped out and went toward the cave while another man, stockier but still powerfully built and also armed with a weapon, emerged from the ship and walked in their direction. The craft’s engine purred and rumbled like a chopper, emitting waves of force that Brit could feel in her chest.
Chapter Thirteen
The man who had approached them was blond, muscular, and wearing clothes that resembled a black wetsuit with gold patches over his obliques. His gate was casual and unconcerned as he approached, like maybe he did this all of the time. His ice-blue eyes pierced Brit. She looked back, studying his perfectly chiseled face, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of breaking his gaze first. His lips twitched in a lazy smile.
He shouted at them in a language that reminded Brit of Italian. She didn’t speak Italian, and even if she had, she suspected that he wasn’t really speaking any Earthly language.
“What?” Marcy shouted back.
Brit gave Marcy an irritated look that went unnoticed.
“Please, follow me,” the man shouted in perfect English. He waved his gun casually at the ship.
Neither woman moved.
“Who are you?” Brit asked.
He leaned his head to one side as if listening for a long moment after Brit had spoken. He smiled and waved the gun at the ship again. He hadn’t pointed the gun at them directly, but it looked like he was too unconcerned that they would attack to bother rather than out of courtesy.
“We will talk when it is quieter,” he shouted.
Marcy and Brit looked at each other. Neither moved.
Brit thought that maybe she should have felt relieved that somebody had found them. This guy looked human, and his aircraft looked like something from a bad science-fiction movie. He had been polite, albeit not all that talkative, but that could be explained by the fact that conversation was difficult over the roar of the engine. She wasn’t sure exactly what had put her on edge. She thought maybe it was the fact that he hadn’t asked if they were okay. That wasn’t right. Somebody rescuing them surely would have. He seemed unconcerned with their condition and only wanted them to get on the ship.
The man rubbed his face with one hand then pointed the gun at them. “Get on the ship,” he commanded in a voice barely loud enough to be heard over the engines, but both women understood him.
Marcy pulled on Brit’s hand and dragged her toward the ship. Brit walked slowly behind Marcy, still assessing the situation and wracked with uncertainty as to what to do. The ship looked like a worse prison than the rock basin had been. The cave had the creature in it, and now there was an armed man who had also gone in there. Maybe the big man and the monster would kill each other, she hoped.
She glanced at the cave and saw the taller man had emerged and was carrying Hunter in both arms. They were both dripping wet. Hunter was unconscious, possibly dead. The man carrying Hunter had slung his weapon over his back and carried Hunter well away from his body. Rather than walking like he was carrying the weight of a two hundred-pound man, he looked like he was on the way to the bathtub carrying a puppy that had peed all over itself.
Brit felt some relief at seeing Hunter uneaten. There was also something good in seeing that the wetsuit-clad man had somehow known Hunter was in the cave and retrieved him, and yet they had left Michael buried, which she took as a possible sign that Hunter was merely unconscious. Then she considered that maybe digging up Michael was more work than merely collecting Hunter and they were either saving him for last or wouldn’t bother. Hunter’s limbs were intact, which was more than she had expected. His hair was matted with blood and his skin looked pale and bluish.
“Take a seat,” the man with the icy-blue eyes said to her, and he gave her a nudge through the portal into the aircraft. “Please,” he added.
The moment she stepped past the entryway, the outside noise was gone. The inside of the aircraft was well-lit and smelled like her grandmother’s lilac bush. She had no desire to resist, even if she was pretty sure she was not being rescued so much as imprisoned. Wherever they took her, she imagined they’d have food and be able to sleep without fear of being eaten, however.
On the wall was a display of six pictures, each with symbols around them that she didn’t understand, but she knew each of the people. Michael, Hunter, Marcy, herself, the kidnapper Peter, and Jax were all staring at her blankly from the image. They weren’t still images. They breathed, but mostly they stood there, blinking occasionally and looking dully straight ahead.
Brit ran to the image and stared at Jax’s face.
“Ma’am, you need to sit,” her captor said.
“Why are these pictures here?” Brit asked.
The man swiped a hand over the image and it disappeared. “Taking off when you aren’t securely sitting can be hazardous,” he said. “Sit, please.”
She moved closer and pointed a finger into his chest. “Why do you have a picture of my husband? Do you know where he is?”
“Brit,” Marcy said in a pleading voice.
The man looked down at her finger poking him in the chest, shook his head, and then grabbed her by the shoulders and lifted her up. He carried her to a seat and forcefully sat her in it. His grip was so tight it made her arms go numb, and the jolt of hitting the seat hard sent a wave of nausea through her.
“Sit, please,” he repeated.
She tried to stand but found she couldn’t. Invisible restraints held her in place. Her hands could still move, but her body felt like it was superglued to the seat where it came in contact with it.
“Where is Jax?” she asked.
The man turned and, seeing his companion carrying Hunter, led the way to a spot behind her.
The two men spoke briefly in the language Brit didn’t understand before the doorway they had come through closed, then she felt a sinking in her gut that she speculated was caused by the aircraft taking off.
No sooner had they taken off than Marcy spoke up. “Excuse me!”
The taller of the two men looked at her but didn’t speak.
“I need to use the facilities,” she said.
“There is no facility here,” he said and turned around.
“Looks like they should have warned us before this flight,” Brit muttered, now also feeling a sudden urge to use the facilities.
“Pardon me!” Marcy said, and when he didn’t turn around, she said, “I need to use the restroom!”
The man glanced back at Marcy, shook his head at her, and then turned back around.
Marc
y gasped. “Oh my god!” she cried in alarm.
Brit looked over at Marcy, who looked unharmed but scared.
“What did you do to me?” she asked.
“I relieved you,” he said.
“What did you do to me?” she shouted.
“You needed to urinate,” the man said with a gesture at his screen. “I corrected that.” He glanced at the screen again and hit a button causing a rushing feeling to pass over Brit, and then she no longer felt the urge to use the restroom. “I’ve also corrected it for her,” he said with a gesture toward Brit.
She felt strangely violated. Nobody emptied her bladder without her permission, especially not strange men wearing wetsuits in an aircraft.
“Who are you?” Brit asked. “You said that we’d talk when it is quieter, and now it is quieter.”
“I am Captain Raguel,” the taller man said. A jagged scar ran down his right cheek, marring his otherwise beautiful face. His short, dark hair was trimmed to perfection. He gestured to his companion. “This is my lieutenant, Adriel.”
“Where are you taking us?” Brit asked.
“As your souls are no longer suitable for sale, you will be utilized as labor. You should become accustomed to serving without question. So, from this point on, I suggest you not speak,” Raguel said.
We’re to be turned into slaves, Brit thought. She was trying to decide if things had gotten better or worse since their encounter with the azure creature.
“What is wrong with our souls?” Marcy asked. Marcy’s face had gone white and her eyes darted back and forth.
“I see you are struggling to take my suggestion seriously,” Raguel said. “Now you must make the remainder of the trip with the jaw lock on. It is rather uncomfortable, and I had hoped not to use it. Ah, well. This will be a good lesson for you, human.”
The way that he called Marcy a human made Brit wonder if Raguel was not. As she looked at him, she realized that this wasn’t the first time she had seen him. She saw him the night Aiden died. He was wearing a police uniform that night, but she remembered him. He was hard to forget. He was the most muscular and tallest person she had ever seen, easily eight feet tall and probably over three hundred pounds. That would have been enough to remember him alone, but the scar on his cheek removed any doubt in her mind.
She remembered that he had spoken to Peter, the man who had kidnapped Jax and chased them to this place. Then she remembered that Peter’s picture was also in the image she had seen when they first boarded the aircraft. Were they looking for him as well as Jax? Maybe Raguel had already found both of them.
“As for what is wrong with your souls,” Raguel continued, as if to himself, “that you have seen this place and seen us makes your souls unfit for sale. Our king would never want any of his secrets revealed, and to be honest, it would be more trouble than it’s worth to erase the unwelcome bits and try to create a false ending. Why not simply get guaranteed maximum value for the least effort? That’s good business. Of course, we don’t use many human workers since they are fragile and short-lived, but as the old human saying goes: waste not, want not.”
Good business. Did Brit’s continued existence hinge on “good business”?
The swooping sensation in Brit’s stomach faded and she speculated that the aircraft was no longer accelerating upward. Raguel walked over to her and began patting her down, and as she was inexplicably stuck to the chair, she couldn’t resist or move. When he found the lump in her pocket, he paused.
“Stand up,” he said.
“I can’t,” she answered with exasperation.
He looked at her disapprovingly. “I gave you instructions not to speak, and I gave you instructions to stand. You managed to disobey two direct commands at the same time. Not a good start for you. Stand now or you will spend the remainder of the journey like your companion.”
Brit tried to stand and found she could. She was uncertain when she had been released.
“Take everything out of your pockets,” he instructed.
Brit saw no point in resisting, saw no way that defiance would end well. Not yet. She would find a way to resist subtly enough that they wouldn’t know it was her until she was already dead. She pulled out the two black glass disks, one from the passage with the loud car and the one she had found at the time of Michael’s death.
Raguel smiled. “Perfect,” he said, and then he handed them to Adriel. “Destroy the tainted soul and transfer the other one for sale.”
Adriel nodded. “Yes, Captain.”
Brit’s mind was reeling. When Raguel said “tainted soul” was he referring to the disk that seemed responsible for replaying Michael’s last defiant words? She had no delusions that souls were real, except that she had held this disk and seen Michael’s final moments replaying. Even if it was a hologram, the idea of them destroying Michael’s memory was repugnant to her.
“Please, sit,” Raguel said to Brit, and he walked through a door at the back of the room.
She paused, looked around, and saw that there was no way out. So, even without him in the room, there was no point in not sitting or trying to go anywhere else. She studied the wall where the image of Jax had been, but it was blank and without any indication of a computer screen. She looked at Marcy, whose eyes were still darting around the room and filled with panic.
“It’s going to be okay,” Brit whispered, hoping that Raguel wouldn’t know she had spoken against his command.
Chapter Fourteen
Alone with her thoughts, Brit was beginning to realize that, even if Jax was alive and in the custody of these people, she might never see him again. They had a picture of Michael, who was definitely dead, and that realization caused a wave of terror to pass over her. Thus she couldn’t know from that image alone if Jax was alive, and whatever sense of hope she had upon seeing that picture wilted into despair.
A door that hadn’t been there moments before slid upward and revealed a brightly lit room outside the aircraft. Brit found that she could not stand, as she had expected. She waited and watched for some hint of what lay ahead.
Raguel and Adriel walked past carrying Hunter on a stretcher, whose eyes were now open and moving frantically. That he said nothing to her made her think that he was unable to talk in the same way that Marcy seemed unable to speak. She wondered if the condition was permanent, and a wave of nausea passed over her at the thought. Permanently losing your speech for simply speaking when told not to seemed too horrible to consider. She was relieved to see that Hunter was alive, though he didn’t seem to be in great condition. Brit wondered whether being dead might be preferable to slavery.
Adriel returned a few minutes later and stood in the doorway. “Stand, please,” he said to them.
Brit stood and saw that Marcy did as well.
“I have reinstated your ability to speak, but doing so out of turn will create a very regrettable situation,” he said directly to Marcy. Then to both of them, he continued, “I’m going to take you to the processing center where you will be sanitized and fed before being assigned a task. For your own safety, keep pace with me and do not do anything foolish.”
He led the way out of the aircraft, and as the women followed him, Brit gave Marcy a look that tried to silently convey sympathy. Marcy’s return look filled with fear and panic.
They were in some form of hangar. The ceiling was high and there were hundreds of aircraft similar to the black and gold one that had picked them up along one wall. Along one wall were racks of devices that Brit speculated were spare parts, and small machines shuttled between the racks on the ships. There were hundreds of men and women wearing the same black and gold wetsuits that Raguel and Adriel wore, all going about unknown tasks.
Adriel led them to a small room with no chairs or furniture, blank white walls, a blank white floor, and a blank white ceiling.
“Wait here,” he said. “Do not speak.” His last words were an order, but Brit could detect small amount of pleading, a real warning that she b
elieved she should heed.
The moment he left, Marcy began to cry. She didn’t speak and barely a sound came from her, but she was completely breaking down. Brit gave her a hug and held her for twenty minutes, feeling more miserable than she had ever felt.
Adriel returned and a look of disgust passed over him. “No sexual contact is permitted for servants,” he said.
Brit was about to tell him that he was an ass, but the look in his eye told her that she had best not speak. She let her arms drop and pulled away from Marcy.
“Your quarters are prepared and your tasks have been allocated,” he said as he walked over to them.
He raised a hand, which Brit saw contained a torus-shaped piece of dark glass the size of a half-dollar, and he placed the item on Marcy’s forehead. It stayed there when he retracted his hand. Marcy made no indication that she felt the new decoration on her forehead. He did the same for Brit, and she didn’t even feel the touch of the torus against her skin.
“These halos will allow you to comprehend instructions from your superiors and also serve other important accounting, reward, and penalty functions,” he said. “You will not be as strong, intelligent, or fast as other servants who were designed for these jobs, but you must do your best. Though you were worth enough for us to not allow you to be found by others, you were barely worth enough to not be dead. Remember that from this point forward: you will serve or die without much consideration.”
In a time that maybe she should feel abject terror, Brit pondered the word “others” and whether there were people on this world who might shelter rather than enslave her. Something about the direness of the situation had clicked in her brain, and now, rather than worrying about her life sentence to slavery, she pondered the world she found herself in.
Both Raguel and Adriel looked human, other than their peak physical condition that clearly couldn’t be achieved if one ever sat on a couch. If it weren’t for the sky and the two creatures she had encountered, she might think they were definitely somewhere on Earth, maybe somewhere far north with really long days. She thought back to the stairs that had led her here, a technology clearly beyond modern science on Earth, perhaps for centuries yet or possibly forever. She had definitely gone from her house to this place in a matter of a few steps. Could one travel to another world in a few steps? The aircraft, the glass-like devices, and even the facility was technologically advanced well beyond the world she knew, but she was going to reserve judgement on whether this was a different world, as Peter had said it was, until she had more evidence.
