“You’ll want to go slow for a few minutes,” an extremely fit brunette with bleached blonde tips said, walking closer. “It’ll take a little before it wears off.”
“Before what wears off?” Darla said, stubbornly attempting to walk.
She found herself rudely introduced to the floor a moment later.
The woman chuckled and squatted down to meet her gaze. “Yeah, like I said, you’ll want to go slow. I’m Maureen,” she offered, reaching out a hand.
Darla accepted, gripping firmly as her new friend helped her to her feet. She wobbled a little but stayed up.
“I’m okay. Just gimme a minute.”
“Take all the time you want. Not like we’re going anywhere.”
Darla focused like she learned in that yoga class she took last summer. Breathe in, breathe out. Center yourself and connect with your body. She was already starting to feel more like herself. She moved her head slowly, avoiding sudden movements that might upset her equilibrium, and surveyed the faces staring at her.
At least a dozen women of various ethnicities and diverse attire, as well as a handful of stout men. A few other people remained tucked in the shadows of their bunks, but she estimated there to be nearly twenty people in the room, all in. But the question was, who were they? And how the hell did she get here?
She turned back to Maureen. The woman had the look of an aerobics instructor. Lean and muscled, contrasting with her own softer physique. Not that Darla wasn’t in decent shape, but the kind of shape that still allowed for pizza and ice cream once in a while.
“Better?” Maureen asked.
“Yeah. I remember driving. I had just picked up some coffee from the gas station. There was this cute guy there, but I blew him off and was heading home. And then—I don’t remember.”
“That’s how it is.”
“What is?” Darla asked, alarm flaring in her chest. “Wait a minute. You said it took a minute to wear off. Oh, no. Did that bastard roofie me? But there’s no way he could have spiked my coffee—”
“It’s not roofies.”
“Then what? And where are we? What is this place?”
“Well, you may want to sit back down for that part.”
Darla did not like the sound of that. Not one bit.
“Maureen, what’s going on?”
“Look around us. Not exactly like anything you’ve seen on Earth before, is it?”
“You talk as if we were on another planet or something.”
“Or something, yeah.”
Darla’s eyes widened. The impossible illumination of the metal, the strange design of the chamber. And her winding up here with no memory of how she’d gotten here. It was insane, but it was all starting to add up. Add up to an impossible answer.
“I was abducted?” she gasped.
“Now she gets it,” a deeply tanned man with broad shoulders and several days scruff on his square jaw growled.
“Be nice, Victor.”
“I am being nice, Maureen,” he snarked, turning his attention back to the newcomer. “You were abducted. She was abducted. I was abducted. Just about all of us were snatched up in one way or another, get it?”
“Okay, you made your point. There’s no need to be a dick about it.”
“Baby, if you think I’m an asshole, you’ve got another thing coming.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He flashed a look at Maureen. “You wanna tell her about the Raxxians?”
Several of the other captives seemed to shift uncomfortably at the mention of the word. It was unsettling to say the least.
“Okay, I’ll bite. What’s a Raxxian?”
Maureen shook her head.
“Fine,” Victor scoffed. “I’ll do it. You see, hon, the Raxxians are the scaly green bastards who took us.”
“Don’t call me hon.”
“Whatever you say, babe,” he replied with an annoying wink. “Let me tell you, you’re going to want to watch yourself around them. Don’t get their attention. They’re big sons of bitches too. Taller than any man, and meaner to boot.”
“Worse than you?”
“Ha, you’ve got some fire in you,” he said with an amused chuckle. “Okay, play it your way. We’ll see how long that lasts once you meet our hosts.”
With that, Victor strode off and took a seat against the wall.
Darla was keeping up with the flood of impossible information as best she could. The automatic flare of anger at being spoken to like that had kicked her defenses into overdrive, but as the adrenaline slowed to a trickle and her mind accepted the reality of her situation, she found herself falling into a state of despair. But despair mixed with a sliver of hope.
It was one of her traits her sister had always said she envied. How she could find something positive in just about any situation. But even for Darla, this one was going to take an effort.
“Okay, so this is real. I’ve been kidnapped by aliens.”
“We like to say abducted,” Maureen noted. “Kidnapping makes it sound like they want a ransom, and that’s not what the Raxxians are about.”
Darla nodded, numb from the rude awakening. “Fine. Abducted. We’ve been abducted by aliens and taken to their planet. Has anyone seen the outside?”
A murmur rippled through the others.
Maureen put a hand on her shoulder and looked at her with a sympathetic gaze. “Oh, honey, don’t you feel that? The little vibration in the floor?”
Darla was wearing shoes, and not her going out heels, but a pair of comfy trainers. “What vibration?” she asked, bending down and putting her hand on the smooth metal.
There it was. Faint but consistent. A low thrum that couldn’t be heard but was most certainly felt. She felt a new surge of adrenaline flood her system.
Maureen saw her look of stunned realization and nodded. “That’s right. We’re on their ship, and no one knows where they’re taking us.”
CHAPTER THREE
Darla had to give herself a little credit. She may have nearly passed out from the shock, but at least she hadn’t thrown up, though she’d felt her stomach do more than one flip-flop when the reality of her situation sank in. Her ass had become well acquainted with the floor in a hurry, though, as she slumped down in a heap.
I’m in a goddamn alien spaceship. And I may never see home again.
It was a lot to take in even in the best of circumstances. And these? These were far from the best. In fact, it downright sucked.
What was truly crazy was that her unbelievable situation was almost expected in a strange way. Darla’s mother had long claimed to have been abducted by aliens in her teens, taken and experimented on before being returned to Earth.
Her mom had said the aliens had been intrigued with her human reproductive system, injecting her with strange fluids and probing her at length for days or weeks, she wasn’t really sure. She said that she had felt her body changing from what they did to her, though she couldn’t put a finger on how.
Eventually, the aliens grew weary of their experiments and decided to be rid of her, and that was the end of it. By the time she was returned home—with a story no one believed—she had felt certain she would be unable to have children. But then, just a few years later, and quite unexpectedly, along came Darla.
And now here she was, in space, just like her mom.