Taking Tilly (2 page)

She couldn’t see a hell of a lot from
where she was lying—which seemed to be a floor. But of what? The
surface she was lying on felt cold like metal, but she could see
that she was in a sizeable area, not contained in a trunk or the
back of a van.

Metal, but not a vehicle.

Something scary scratched at the back
of her mind, but she ignored it.

She wasn’t alone. She couldn’t see a
lot beyond a few shadowy shapes, but she could hear the
moaning—from feminine throats.

It shouldn’t have comforted her, but
it did.

She wasn’t alone.

There were other captives.

A memory flitted through her
mind—walking out of the club, being spotlighted, looking up
….

Horror swallowed her at the memory,
her heart slamming so painfully against her chest wall that she
couldn’t hear anything but the frantic hammering for many moments.
She must be tripping!

They’d put LSD in her
drink!
He
had
drugged her drink! She was hallucinating.

“
The alien
slaver.”

He hadn’t meant
alien
, though! He
couldn’t
have! Maybe
illegal aliens like Mexican slavers or Russians.

He’d planted that suggestion in her
mind and drugged her and then she thought she’d really been picked
up by aliens when it was actually just some horrible
thugs!

The bastard had drugged her and then
delivered her right into their hands and she’d walked into it like
a complete moron!

Looking for Emily.

With that thought, she sat up. A wave
of dizziness washed over her, but it wasn’t disorienting enough for
her to dismiss her perceptions and put everything down to
drugs.

Which was a pity because that would’ve
been some comfort for a little while anyway. That would’ve allowed
her to think that all the horrible would go away and she’d wake up
in her bed at home, safe and sound.

She saw she’d been right
about the women—the room was full of them—a
lot
of women—all sprawled or curled
up on the floor as she had been, maybe conscious, maybe
unconscious.

She still didn’t know where she was
but, to her amazement, she saw that there was a row of windows
along one wall and they weren’t covered. She could see the night
sky beyond! Not much else but that, but that was enough to tell her
she could see out of whatever she was in and, maybe, figure out
where she was and where they were going with her.

Her mind had instantly connected the
row of round windows with a plane even though she sought, in vane,
with her perceptions for the sound of engines, the feel of motion,
the bump and rattle of air resistance and turbulence.

But she wasn’t ready to accept that.
She struggled with the sense of hopelessness trying to take hold of
her and turn her into a blubbering pile of spineless terror,
rolling over and pushing herself to her hands and knees.

It took an effort to get to her feet.
She felt heavy—as if she’d been swimming for hours and gotten so
used to the buoyancy her body was almost too heavy for her to
lift.

The drugs, she told herself, fighting
the pull of gravity as she strained to get to her knees and then to
push herself to her feet. She felt light headed when she’d managed
it, but she didn’t blame that on drugs lingering in her system. In
point of fact, absolutely nothing went through her shocked mind for
several moments after her gaze fastened on the view beyond the
windows.

Her stomach took a
freefall.

All
she could see was the night sky.

As if she was
looking
up
at the
night sky.

Unable to compute that bit of
information, she staggered across the room, stepping on body parts
as she tried to navigate the minefield of prone women around her.
She tripped and virtually fell against the outer wall, plastering
her face against the frigid glass.

Earth looked like pictures she’d seen
from space—a beautiful sapphire against black velvet and twinkling
diamonds.

“
Oh god! Oh my god! This …
this can’t be real!” she exclaimed to no one in particular, barely
aware she’d actually spoken out loud. Shoving away from the window,
she moved to the next and then the next and the next until she’d
made it all the way to the end, expecting the perspective to change
as her angle of view did.

When it didn’t, she couldn’t decide
whether that meant the view was some sort of elaborate hoax or
maybe just a poster—or if it was what it looked like it was—a view
from a space ship heading away from Earth.

“
Wait! We aren’t
weightless! Shouldn’t we be weightless?”

Drawn by the voice, Tilly dragged her
gaze from the view, her heart thumping, briefly, with hope. She
couldn’t tell which woman had spoken. By that time, although she’d
been too shocked to notice the commotion, it looked like all of the
women in the room had raced to press their faces against the
windows. “If it was one of ours, we’d be weightless,” she muttered.
“But I haven’t heard anything about NASA abducting women to send
them into space.”

“
Bitch!” someone
muttered.

“
You don’t have to be
sarcastic!”

Anger flickered through her. “I was
just pointing out the flaw in her logic!” she snapped. “If it
offends you … kiss my ass!”

She was scared shitless and that had
been gut reaction without engaging mental function. Unfortunately,
the other women were in the same state and might have turned their
fear into rage and targeted her if not for the circumstance of the
door opening at the other side of the room.

“
Come!”

The command brought every bulging,
wide eye in the room to fix on the mammoth being who stood in the
doorway.

His size alone was enough to make him
a commanding presence, because he looked every bit of seven feet
tall and about four feet wide.

He was wearing something that made
Tilly think ‘uniform’ even though it didn’t look like any uniform
she’d ever seen. The being wearing the uniform looked human and
male and actually rather handsome, she thought in a detached sort
of way, but exotic and not like anyone belonging to any race she
was familiar with.

It was a comfort that he looked so
human-like, though. She thought she might have died of fright
otherwise.

He glared at the gaping women and
abruptly clapped his hands together and took a step toward them.
“Come!”

As one the women screamed and raced
toward the far side of the room.

He pointed at the door.

They looked bug-eyed at the door, but
they didn’t move. They remained huddled in a pile as far from him
as they could get.

He produced a whip, unfurled it and
popped it against the floor.

The women screamed as one and ran to
the other side of the room.

“
Out!” he bellowed,
popping the whip again.

Ignoring the door, they ran to the
opposite side of the room.

A second giant appeared in the
doorway.

Screaming at the new threat, the women
split up and began to run in every direction—except through the
doorway.

Neither man was pleased with the idea
of chasing them. The second produced a whip and between the two
they herded the women through the doorway by popping the stragglers
with the tips of the whips, transmuting the screams of terror to
screams of pain.

Tilly discovered when she burst
through the doorway in a desperate attempt to avoid the whip that
there was yet another giant alien standing guard in the corridor to
make certain the women were driven in the right direction. They
were chased into a large room so far down the curving corridor that
Tilly was weak and faint from running by the time she reached it
and holding her side against a pain that had developed
there.

She didn’t think it was altogether the
distance, though.

It had become clear that the gravity
she was feeling was stronger than the gravity she was accustomed
to.

The women had been corralled into a
corner by two other alien giants by the time she got there. The
three who’d herded them appeared in the door directly behind the
last few stragglers. Instead of herding them toward the group,
however, each grabbed a woman and dragged her toward waiting
gurneys. When they fought like wildcats, the men simply pressed
something to their necks that looked like a taser or a small pistol
of some kind, zapped them, and the women wilted to the
floor.

Lifting the now completely limp women,
they settled them on the gurneys, fastened them to the table with
straps around their wrists and ankles and then stepped back to some
sort of control console. A bubble of some kind formed around the
women. Different colored lights began to track up and down their
bodies.

Their clothing was vaporized—simply
vanished—right down to bare skin. Then the smell of burning hair
began to filter through the room and she saw the pubic bush of the
woman closest to her vanish as her clothing had.

Her kegels spasmed
uneasily.

Her bowels threatened immediate
evacuation.

Flicking a look at the woman’s face,
she discovered the woman had regained consciousness at some
point.

She didn’t seem to feel any pain. She
looked … confused and disoriented at first and then fearful when
she discovered she couldn’t move.

The bubble vanished and the manacles
released.

“
Up. Go stand there,” the
man attending her said, pointing to a corner opposite the women who
hadn’t been processed.

Turning without bothering to see if
she’d obeyed, the man strode toward them. She recognized him as the
one who’d first entered their cell.

Their gazes locked.

She was deeply regretful she’d allowed
it because he grabbed her and hauled her across the
room.

It took all she could do not to fight
like the other woman had, but, then again, it hadn’t helped her at
all.

There didn’t seem to be any sense in
fighting when it wasn’t going to do any good and might encourage
them to hurt her.

He looked surprised she didn’t fight.
Something flickered in his eyes as he lifted her to the gurney and
met her gaze once more. “Lie down.”

Struggling with panic, she turned and
lay down. She was stiff with resistance as he clamped her wrists
and ankles into the manacles, but he didn’t seem to
notice.

Terror twisted inside her when the
lasers came on, but she discovered it was only mildly uncomfortable
to have her clothing burnt off and then her body hair.

She was relieved when it was over,
regardless, and he released her to stand with the other women that
had been processed.

The other women looked at her
resentfully—as if she was a traitor or something because she hadn’t
seen any benefit to trying to fight them!

How was that going to help her
case?

Except, maybe, to encourage them to
break her neck and end it for her.

And she wasn’t ready to face death …
yet. She might get to the point of wishing for it, but she wasn’t
there yet.

Somehow, she was going to survive
this!

The thoughts had scarcely flickered
through her mind when some sort of alarm went off. She located the
source—the pod in the center—just as the woman who’d been taking
the treatment shot through a black hole that appeared at the head
of the gurney and vanished into the cold darkness of
space.

When the portal closed and the bubble
vanished, the alarm went silent.

You could’ve heard a pin drop in the
room.

Everyone—except the aliens, of
course—was staring at the spot where the woman had been.

“
Is she … you think she’s
… dead?” one of the women in Tilly’s group whispered
hoarsely.

Tilly thought it was the
dumbass that had made the previous totally illogical observation
that had nearly gotten her in a fight. She decided not to snap the
moron’s head off.
Naw! They shot her
toward deep space in an air bubble! She’ll be fine.

“
Meth-head,” one of the
other women whispered.

“
She looked diseased,” one
of the others muttered.

“
Probably was. It isn’t
unheard of for drug addicts to sell their bodies for drug
money.”

By the time the aliens had finished
the processing, they’d reduced their number of captives by three
more and the one’s they kept to absolute mindless
terror.

Despite that, or possibly because of
it, the women began to babble terrified questions as soon as the
aliens rounded them up to herd them out of the processing room
again.

“
What are you going to do
with us?”