The Alien Mate's Abduction

by Zara Zenia

  I've been to more than a thousand star clusters and I've come into contact with countless species. Not one of them has ever been able to change my outlook on life… until now. Humans were no longer insignificant. Within the human mind I’d found something powerful that I couldn't understand or name. I just knew that it was centered around Lainey and I never wanted to leave her.

  Eventually, as the data started coming in, we found that female humans were incapable of carrying Fiori children to term. The fetuses drained human bodies of all of their nutrients and eventually ate its way out, killing the women before the children could fully mature.

  We were once again thrown into a state of crisis, and were forced to begin mass testing on human females. They brought in thousands at a time to undergo experimentation, and the Fiori moved their efforts away from ground operations to the larger facilities.

  When I was ordered to leave the planet and return back home to Valice, I decided to retain my human form in honor of my experience with Lainey. Even though our relationship was over I needed to do something to give it meaning.

  I'd become used to the primitive body, with its dull senses, awkward limbs and most of all its biochemicals that I allowed to swim through my head, lighting up my neural pathways with happiness, jealousy and rage—all of the things that made men human.

  My behavior would be seen as eccentric. Shifters often settle on a form that they favor, but never one as weak and simple-minded as a human.

  When I arrived back at Valice, a blond human female with long blond hair and bright red lips was waiting for me. She identified herself as Rook, and seemed uncomfortable with her form. She showed me to my cube and told me that I would be powering a drone to watch the women.

  There was a plain hard bunk where I could rest my body, a machine for sustenance, another for waste and a crown that would attach itself to my motor-sensory system and allow me to control the drones that flew through the fetal chambers where the women were held, paralyzed at near freezing temperatures.

  There were three stages of testing in the facility: implantation, gestation and post mortem. Since we knew that the fetuses couldn't be implanted without killing the humans, we implanted as many as we could into fresh samples so that when they died, the researchers could study what killed them and learn how best to correct it. After their bodies had been thoroughly analyzed, they were recycled and their parts were used in other testing facilities.

  None of the women knew where they were, or what they were there for. They all thought they were undergoing a fertility study, but sooner or later they would all figure out that something was going on and they would be forced to watch themselves be force-fed, cleaned and ultimately killed all while they were trapped in their frozen state.

  My job was to move through the chambers and watch the women. My virtual eye scanned from left to right, moving from one gurney to the next while I scanned the women for sickness and inferiority. If a woman was deemed to be unstable, or physically incapable, she was put down.

  I couldn't deny my attachment to the species. With every face came an uncontrollable rush of compassion. They didn't deserve this. Wasn't there a better way? My thoughts would be considered heretical, even a sign of mental illness, but I'd lived with the species for a long time. I couldn't deny their sense of compassion anymore than I could deny who I was.

  Over time I started to wonder. Who were they? Mothers? Daughters? Lovers? Was there somebody on Earth that cared about them? What would happen when their parents found out their daughter had gone missing? Every gurney and every face became a tragedy and eventually a burden I couldn't bear. I spent long hours with my hands clutching my bunk trying not to run out of the room until something stopped me. The sensory connection on the crown was disrupted by a surge of neural synapses and potent chemicals crashing through my mock-human brain.

  How could she be here? Why would she do this?

  I had to do the right thing, and calm my mind, shift out of my human form and purge myself of human attachments because if my feet kept running through those black, carbon halls, I was going to be killed for dissidence. I couldn't shift back. This body knew things that the Fiori would never understand. It understood kinship, beauty, compassion and of course love.

  I ran through the rows, one by one, meeting the eyes of these victims of torture and finally saw her, lying naked on the cold metal—the last place I ever wanted to see her. I was going to be killed for this, but my human mind wouldn’t allow me to think about that—just the love I had for this woman and my desperate need to keep her alive.

  Chapter 3

  Lainey

  Something stabbed into my neck. I closed my eyes and shut the world out as soon as the creature came into view. I didn't know where I was, or what Markathus was doing running me out of that torture chamber, but I knew that I was in danger, and that whatever was happening was unlike anything I'd ever encountered before.

  I felt the cold subside and heard the sound of the door slamming behind me, but the light was fading. Something slippery was sliding over my arm.

  I opened my eyes. “Oh, please.” I could speak. “No. Please. Dear God! NO!” I looked down to see that Markathus had disappeared and I was being held in place by a raw, rock hard ball of muscle that was protruding out of the charcoal black floor.

  It was growing, spreading itself over my elbow, my wrist and hand while it moved over my torso, like hot fire beating steadily as it started moving over my cheek.

  I was hallucinating.

  The drugs they gave me were giving me fever dreams and I was laying on a hospital bed, not a gurney, while a nurse pulled a blanket over my face, not dripping raw muscle.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, and clenched my muscles to find something substantive within my body that would ground me and bring me back to reality while it crept over my forehead and the hot, gooey fluid covered my eyes.

  I opened my mouth to scream but something hot like a rod of molten metal was thrust down my throat and burning gas filled my lungs while the fleshy coffin that had surrounded me spun around my body. It dug itself into the spaces between my fingers and toes, and lodged itself in my armpits. The horrific experience of being caressed by raw alien flesh was too much for my already overwhelmed senses and sent me into a frenzy.

  Every time a moist swash of flesh passed over my face, I lost a portion of my humanity and forgot what I was. All that existed was the twisted, unsettling feeling that was building up inside me. I was so upset that I didn't notice when the thing stopped and started to open up. I did notice the light, but that part of me had taken a backseat and I flew out with bloody fists flying.

  Markathus cowered in the corner while I did my best to crush his skull. I threw a good punch to his temple and he flinched. “All right.” He stood up and seemed to grow ten feet. “Stop!”

  “What the FUCK is going on here?”

  “Sit down.” We were standing in a square room made of the same black substance as the rest of the building. He pointed to a black square that had been built into the corner. It felt rough against my hands like charcoal when I touched it.

  “Not until you tell me what is going on.”

  He turned his back to me and faced the wall.

  “What the fuck do you think you're doing? Start talking Markathus, because I have never been so scared in my entire life.”

  “Isn't it obvious?” he asked quietly.

  “NO!”

  “Strange buildings, machines you've never seen and creatures that don't exist on Earth.”

  “No.” I shook my head as I sank down onto the square. “I'm not buying that.”

  “Lainey…”

  He turned around to face me and walked closer.

  “You're lying to me, Markathus.”

  “If you can think of another plausible explanation, I'll humor you.”

  A thousand explanations came to mind. It could've been a government facility, a secret corporate study or some twisted hallucinogen the researche
rs were testing on us. All of those things, every single last one of them were a thousand times more likely than the explanation he was trying to give me.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “This is my planet.”

  “What kind of answer is that?”

  He met my eyes, and a shock went through me. “We're on my planet, Lainey.” I closed my eyes and scratched at a strip of coagulated blood that had dried on the back of my hand.

  I had once watched a video on robotics where the researchers were trying to move a caterpillar shaped string of balls. Programming the thing was so complex that they could barely get it to go in a straight line. That was cutting edge technology, not the thing in the freezer.

  That thing was far too advanced for humans to have made. I went quiet and traced my eyes along the natural lines in the floor.

  “Why am I here? I mean, it's obviously not just so I can say hello.”

  “No.” He sat down next to me and I got up to pace around.

  He didn't answer immediately. We both gave into the silence and sat mulling things over. I was in danger, but I didn't know whether or not I could trust him. How could I? He had lied to me about this. He’d left me crying in the middle of the street. Now he was inexplicably sitting in front of me in this demented torture complex.

  How did I know that he wasn't going to try to kill me?

  The Markathus I knew was gentle and quiet, a little eccentric but never violent. With an alien intelligence behind his facade there was no way of knowing how his mind worked, or what his motivations were. He could've been a predator hunting me or a parasite priming my body for infection.

  The universe was too big, there was too much out there and the environments were too diverse. Anything and everything I could've possibly comprehended existed.

  “You need an explanation.” He declared.

  “Yeah.” I said softly. “But I can't trust you. You're not human.”

  He didn't answer at first. “I'm not that different.”

  “That doesn't mean your motivations are pure. I'm covered in blood.”

  “It's more like sweat.”

  “What was that thing?”

  “It was a cover. Another species. I can't let anyone see you.”

  “What is happening?” I folded my arms close to my chest.

  “I know you don't know what I am, and that you don't trust me for lying to you…”

  “Well, how could I?”

  “I wanna help you, Lainey.”

  “Why am I here?”

  He didn't answer. Instead he got up and pulled a circle of metal off a hook behind him and placed it on his head.

  “What is that?”

  “It's a crown. It allows me to use my brain to access the planet's computer system.” He pulled a string of lavender light from the device and threw it at the wall where it became a circle, like a screen, showing vague gray shapes. “I want you to see where you are.”

  I watched as what looked like a black ground and white sky came into view. Then as the image shifted I saw that the ground was actually a vast array of buildings, roadways and formations that covered the planet, as if nature itself had gone extinct and the species had created an artificial environment for themselves. There wasn't a single patch of dirt—no water, plants or animals. The entire planet was one large city.

  I was horrified. “Where am I?”

  “You're on a planet called Valice.” He showed me a cube-shaped building, surrounded by a black wall. “This is where you are. It's a place where we store humans while we do studies on them.” Something white walked outside the building.

  “What's that?”

  “It's…”

  “It's one of you. I want to see.”

  He showed me picture after picture of the single-eyed race that resembled short, skinny yetis with two arms and two legs. They came in all colors, and most were covered in unique, complex markings with a strange aesthetic appeal.

  “What are the markings?”

  “Fur dye. It's permanent like tattoos. They mark our kills.”

  “You're killers.”

  “We're survivors, we do what it takes to succeed.” He said.

  “There's no difference.”

  “We can't be blamed for taking advantage of the laws of nature.” He sounded like he was defending something important.

  “Do you enjoy killing?” I asked.

  “It's satisfying, but it's not like sex or taking heroin.”

  “Get me out of here. I wanna go home.” I got up.

  He didn't move. “Lainey… what would happen if a chimpanzee escaped a testing facility and started walking around a human city.”

  “I'm not a monkey.”

  “The rest of my species would consider it a realistic analogy. They would see you and kill you instantly. I have to bring you back in there.”

  “What? No. It's torture. I can't… please, Markathus.” I could almost feel the cold swallowing me up.

  “If you were found outside the gestation chamber, you'd be put down immediately. I can't allow you to walk around here. I'm going to help you leave, but it's going to take time.”

  “I don't believe you,” I declared bitterly.

  He sat down next to me. “I'm still the same man. I still care about you,” his voice broke, “and I'm going to do every single thing I can to get you out of here, but I have to bring you back, because if the other Fiori see that you're gone, we'll both be killed.”

  He was asking me to trust him with my life, but at the same time he was going to put me back into danger. Just a few weeks ago, I would've done anything for him. I thought this man was the love of my life, but now I didn't even know who—or what—he was.

  How could I possibly trust him? He wasn't the same man. He’d lied to me.

  “Do you look like the things in the video, Markathus?”

  He shrank back and hunched over. Then he rocked back and forth slowly with his eyes pointed toward the floor. “I really care about you, Lainey. I can't just sit here, vulnerable like this worrying about what you're going to think. I don't want things to change between us. I never wanted to leave you.” He was pleading with me. He didn't just want me to trust him. He wanted me to continue our relationship, and I didn't think I could do that.

  He was a monstrous killer from another planet that had abducted me and would probably kill me when they were done with me. I could never love him. We weren't the same species. I didn't even know him.

  God, why did this have to happen? Couldn't he have just been the normal guy I’d thought he was? Tears were flying down my face when I embraced him. We sat holding one another for what seemed like hours until he pulled away and had me lie down so he could inject me with the paralysis drug and carry me back to the freezer in a pocket of sticky, alien flesh.

  Chapter 4

  Markathus

  When I took Lainey back to the gestation room, I laid her on her side so she couldn't see while my body warped, and my bones cracked into place. Shifting was a fine art form, and extremely difficult to master. Its aesthetic appeal was prized in Fiori culture, but she wouldn't understand. If I shifted in front of Lainey all she would see was the fact that I lied to her.

  I had misrepresented myself when I met her, and she couldn't forgive me for that. She didn't know what I was, or anything about my basic nature. I was going to change that, but I promised myself that until she truly cared about me the way I cared about her, she would never see me as anything other than human.

  We were both going to die. It was only a matter of how long we'd have together before it happened. The consequences didn't matter. I couldn't stop myself. I'd give up my life for her and this newfound instinct she'd shown me. A warm glow flooded my system when I thought about what it would be like to hold her, kiss her and tell her once again that I cared.

  Would I ever get the chance to do that?

  I hated knowing that she was in that room, corralled by that vicious creature. She was
terrified, shivering and upset, questioning the nature of her reality. This wasn't fair to her. When I left, she was supposed to be safe. She wasn't supposed to be involved in any of this.

  Now she was being thrown headlong into a universe she didn't understand with strange creatures holding her captive. She was terrified.

  I needed to check on her, so I ran back to my room and threw on my crown so I could train the drone on her. She was soaked in a mixture of sweat and crimson orbital secretions, pale and breathing heavily. She was staring at the drone. I thought of setting the little metallic ball down next to her, but I knew that it would probably scare her, so I set it on auto and let it roam around the room on its own while I tried to think about what I was going to do.

  The fleet tracked the location of its citizens. They had an inventory of warriors and researchers that could be placed strategically and called upon should they be needed. The tracking systems paid special attention to shifters, not only because their skills were a huge asset, but also because it would be easy for a shifter to slip through the Imperium's border without being detected.

  Tracking was done a number of ways. Implants were considered to be an imposition so the fleet tracked space travel, and the use of alien spacecraft within its borders. There was no way that I could travel without them knowing, but if we stayed on Valice they would find us. I laid down and closed my eyes.

  I have to help her.

  I couldn't though. In order to do that, I would have to come up against my father, the general, and his nearly omniscient fleet of drones surrounding the planet. It would be impossible, especially with a human on board. They would detect her.

  She couldn't die. She was precious, loving and kind—smarter than most Fiori researchers. Her dedication to cancer patients was an inspiration. She was doing valuable work for her species when she was abducted, and she wasn't doing it because she was ordered to. She was doing it because she'd devoted her life to helping other people.