“Are you all right?”
Alex opened her eyes slowly, unsure of what had happened to her. She found herself in a small cell, staring up at a naked girl. The bruises on her skin told their own story. Every single piece of Alex’s body hurt in ways she would have thought unimaginable. It hurt to try to open her mouth and speak. The pain around her breasts was horrific.
“Remain still,” the girl urged. “He’s cut you, the bastard. I don’t know if you’ll recover…”
Somehow, despite the pain, Alex managed to pull herself up into a sitting position — and instantly regretted it. Her buttocks felt as if they were on fire. Carefully, she inspected herself and saw red marks and cuts covering her skin. Some of them looked to have broken the skin, only to be allowed to heal on their own, without interference. She glanced around the dirty cell and realised that there was a good chance that one or more of the scars would become infected. And then… she doubted that they’d give her any medical treatment. Maybe the infection would finish her off quickly.
“What…?” She managed to say. Her mouth still hurt, even when she touched it. They’d slapped her, she recalled. Maybe they’d knocked out a tooth or two. Or maybe… hadn’t she read a book, once, where the hero had had his teeth removed to make him talk? She didn’t seem to be missing any teeth, but her mouth hurt too much for her to be sure. “What happened to me?”
“They dumped you in here,” the girl said. “I don’t think you told him anything. He was proper raging when he left you here and told me to take care of you. I think he’s probably afraid that the Leathernecks will be angry with him for failing to get anything out of you.”
“Good,” Alex managed, finally. Maybe they’d send him to be interrogated instead. A taste of his own medicine would teach him a lesson. “Where… where did they get you?”
The girl hesitated, and then shrugged. “My brother was killed by the bastards and I was taken away,” she said. “When I woke up, I was here — at his mercy. You… you don’t know what they’ve done to me…”
“I think I can guess,” Alex said. The bastard had raped her, just as he’d raped Alex. Part of her wanted to crawl into a corner and die, but the rest of her wanted revenge. There would be a chance to kill the bastard and she intended to take it. It was the only thing left to her. “Do you have more water? Something to wash?”
“There’s a shower over there, but the water’s always cold,” the girl said. Alex pulled herself to her feet, despite the pain, and staggered towards the little chamber. “They do it on purpose, the bastards.”
“Probably,” Alex agreed. Her body was stained with blood — and his seed. She wanted to be clean again, even though she felt as if she would never be clean. “But we will get them, one day.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Near Alien Detention Camp
United Kingdom, Day 40
“Jimmy!”
Jimmy Coates scowled as he heard his wife calling his name. What did the dumb bitch want now? It was bad enough that she picked a fight with him about each and every little thing, but she wouldn’t allow him to respond to her stupid arguments. So what if he drank too much and came rolling home drunk? She’d come rolling home drunk if she saw half the shit he had to see, as well as the looks people gave a collaborator when they thought one of the aliens wasn’t watching. And who cared if the fucking cooking club bitches had voted to throw Ginny out on her arse? Just because they didn’t want a collaborator’s wife…
“What?” He demanded, furiously. There were times when he thought that going to the whorehouses would be a good way to punish a shrewish spouse. It wasn’t as if there was a shortage of whores these days. Pussy was cheap when so many were starving, kept alive by the mush the aliens doled out every week to those who bent the knee to them. “What’s so fucking important that you have to drag me out of the bathroom?”
“They’re saying there’s going to be a national announcement in twenty minutes,” his wife shouted back. God — what had he been thinking when he married her? She’d trapped him, all right; she’d told him that she was on the pill. But she’d gotten pregnant and her father had insisted that he marry her, or else. Jimmy still remembered the moment when he’d realised that he’d been trapped, forced into a marriage to a girl he didn’t love. And even though they’d had three brats together, he still didn’t love her. “You have to watch it too.”
Jimmy snorted, but didn’t argue any further. The BBC was wholly controlled by the aliens these days and they used it to make sure that their subjects heard announcements that might otherwise be missed. When they weren’t issuing orders, they were showing old soap operas and movies, rather than anything else. The once-famed BBC news service had terminated two days after the aliens landed, never to be replaced. It seemed that the aliens believed that humans were only to know what they needed to know, rather than have news from all over the world pumped into their living rooms. Jimmy was almost relieved. His wife and her cooking group had held sales for every lost cause across the world, apart from Britain itself. No one was allowed to mention how Britain had problems…
He stumbled down the stairs, cursing the five pints of beer he’d downed after leaving work earlier, and crashed into the living room. She’d decorated it, of course, with all of her frilly decorations, rather than the beer table and fridge he would have preferred. Surely a man could design at least one room in his house. But no, it was all her own work — and it had cost him a pretty penny too! He sat down in the armchair and pretended not to see his wife’s lips thinning with disapproval. So what if he was half-drunk? It wasn’t as if he wasn’t providing for her, was it? She still got half of his salary — real alien money — and there were goods in the shops for those who had alien money. They ate better than all of their neighbours.
The television was showing the end of one of the soap operas he so detested, but he told himself to be patient. It wasn’t easy, not when his wife was either looking at the television or scowling at him, giving him the look that suggested that she regretted marrying him almost as much as he regretted marrying her. But it wasn’t as if he’d had any choice… and then there were the kids. He loved his kids, or at least he told himself he did, and he wouldn’t want any harm to come to them. They’d be shattered if mum and dad broke up… maybe he would go to the whorehouse after all. It wasn’t as if his wife was giving him access to her body any longer.
He looked up as the music announcing an alien broadcast caught his attention. The aliens always announced their broadcasts in advance, warning everyone to watch — or else. Jimmy had no idea what had got into their minds this time, but he knew better than to avoid watching, not when his very career depended upon them. The aliens seemed interested in recruiting thousands of humans and they paid well, although they were really the only paying employers these days, No doubt the wretched banking CEOs and others who made it impossible for a man to overcome his debt and stand tall had sold out to them. No one had any principles any longer.
“Case in point,” he grunted, as the collaborator-in-chief appeared on the screen. Alan Beresford was just another MP who proved that there was no point in being loyal to the country. Why should he be loyal to a government that pardoned outright criminality among its own members and at the same time hectored him to improve his lifestyle? What fucking business of theirs was it if he smoked twenty fags in a day, or drank himself senseless every weekend? It wasn’t as if there were any dreams any longer. How could they claim his loyalty when they so manifestly didn’t deserve it? The last Prime Minister was probably hiding in a aristocratic mansion somewhere, while his successor was an outright collaborator.