1 Nina
“Is this the last time we’re gonna see your ass in here, Nina?”
I raise my eyebrow, giving the guard a cynical look. “Hell yes! Seeing your ugly face for five years solid is just about all I can take, Capella.”
She roars with laughter and radios through to the front desk, asking for permission to open the door.
My whole body is tense and coiled, desperate to get out of the hell hole that’s held me captive for half a decade. The only thing standing in my way of liberty is a prison guard and a three-inch thick metal door.
A loud buzzer sounds out and the door finally clicks open. I get my first sight of freedom and I step through the doorway without a backward glance. It clangs shut behind me and I hear the familiar echo of metal against metal resonate throughout the corridors behind me. Goosebumps instantly cover the entire surface of my skin. It finally sinks in.
I’m free!
Inhaling a huge breath I stand motionless with my eyes closed, holding it in as the reality of not being behind cold steel anymore sinks in. I fling my eyes open and I’m confronted by a scene from my dreams. The same scene I’ve had night after night for the last five years. It’s pure and simple, but this time it’s real.
There is nothing but a dusty highway in front of me and miles of desert. I smile smugly to myself. Hopefully, Capella wasn’t lying about the gas-station which she’d insisted was north of here—otherwise, my freedom would be short-lived, taken from me by either dehydration or night-time desert hypothermia.
I exhale in a long audible sigh, the happiness momentarily spoiled by the fact there’s no one here to greet me. I’m alone. I was disowned by my remaining family members as soon as the judge’s mallet hit the block confirming my sentence.
Looking up to the sky and clasping my hands firmly together on my chest I decide to try one last attempt at the ritual that had become my new norm—praying.
“Lord, I truly repent my crimes. Please give me a second chance to prove to you I can love unconditionally. All I want is a kind and loving man. Someone who wants the same thing as me, a family. I just want my own partner and family to love and to cherish forever and ever. Amen.” I do the sign of the cross on my chest but then decide to add a bit more to my prayer and clasp my hands back together. “That’s all I ask for, Lord. I’m not bothered about riches or fame…I just want a good man and some children before it’s too late.” I repeat the cross and then wipe my hands down my thighs. I don’t know why I do this every time but even though I’ve been conversing with the Lord for almost five years now, it still seems a tad too much to be holding my hands together while doing the actual talking bit too.
When I’m done I wait motionless a few seconds for a sign. A bird flying overhead. A gust of wind. Anything. But exactly like every time I’ve prayed for the last five years, there’s nothing.
Looking down at the only outfit I possess, I shove my hands deep into the pockets of my jeans and begin the ten-mile hike to the gas station.
It’s already getting dark and cold and I curse under my breath. “Goddamn idiots! They’ve purposely waited until suppertime to release me. How the hell am I going to see the highway out here when it gets dark?”
I sink into my daydream world as I walk, and get lost in my memories and my revelation of freedom. I don’t even notice dusk has fallen until bright white headlights from behind snap me out of my reveries. I quickly spin to face them and hold my thumb out. It’s a truck, and it blares a loud horn and sails straight past me, leaving me in a cloud of dust. It clings to my afro and lashes.
Coughing and spluttering I force my fist out in front of me and then give him the birdie, even though I know he won’t see me in the blackness of the night that has suddenly consumed me.
“Fuuuck, what’s his problem?”
Shaking my hair I continue on my way at an increased pace, trying to guesstimate how much ground I’ve travelled since leaving the penitentiary. The temperature has already begun to drop at an alarming rate and I shiver and draw my hands around myself trying to generate a little heat. All I have on my upper body is the flimsy little cotton shirt I got arrested in. The small black dots covering it are barely visible, but hopefully the attendant at the gas station will mistake them for a paint splash effect and not for the five-year-old dried blood spots that it really is.
My eyes spot lights in the distance, big enough to be the gas station. “Yes!” I almost punch the air in exhilaration.
But the lights don’t remain stationary, they hurtle towards me at an incredible speed and I jump back off the road in case it’s another truck and it doesn’t see me. But to my amazement, the lights aren’t on the road; they’re hovering about twenty feet above it in the sky.
Oh no! It’s a fucking plane about to crash!
I cower down with my hands over my head waiting for an impact. But when there isn’t one I look up shocked to see the lights motionless, meters away and suspended above the ground with the silhouettes of three short and very stocky men just in front of them.
I sneer at the irony of three men approaching me on my release day.
Is this going to be a helicopter kidnapping? I roll my eyes at the sky. Not again! Why fucking me?
Adrenaline spikes my flight response and I push off from my heels in the direction I was heading. I’ve kept myself fit and in tip-top condition for the last five years out of necessity more than anything else, but now I’m glad I did.
Necessity came in the form of unwelcome attention. There are some tough bitches in the joint and if your face doesn’t fit…well, it’s either going to drastically be changed in your term time from the numerous pummelling you receive, or the only thing that ever needs to get scarred is your fists from defending your face. My fitness let me choose the latter.
Apart from a couple of wrinkles and three grey hairs I found last month, everything on top of my shoulders is exactly the same as it was when I was incarcerated. The only thing that’s different about me is my body fat has seriously reduced, my muscle mass has increased, and I now have three knuckles that have been broken twice on my right hand, and a two-inch scar on my left hand. All thanks to a well-defended move saving my spleen from a toothbrush shank two years into my sentence.
Hell, I was lucky compared to some.
I hear heavy footsteps behind me giving chase. My heartbeat is exploding in my chest as I suck in air through my teeth and pump my arms and legs like pistons on an engine.
How can they be so fast when they are that short?
Another truck is approaching. I dare to run on the highway waving my arms frantically over my head trying to flag it down.
Is it going to stop?
Its brakes screech and the cab shudders as it tries to stop, forcing the truck’s back end to move out to the side as if it’s about to jack-knife. I’m frozen to the spot and on the verge of passing out. Luckily, it comes to a stop about ten feet from me. When it does the driver practically jumps from the cab as if it’s on fire, and I brace myself for a torrent of abuse. But instead of giving me the verbal mouthful I’m expecting, he stands mesmerised looking past me with his jaw scraping the ground.
I turn around to see what he’s looking at and my mouth also drops open. The lights hovering in the sky don’t belong to a helicopter, it’s a fucking spaceship. My eyes drop to the three figures who are now walking slowly towards us.
I begin to step back until the truck driver’s body halts my retreat. The alien beings are rodent men. Black matted fur covers their bodies but their faces are almost hairless. Just small evil red eyes protrude from their ugly faces.
I’ve lost my voice but the truck driver certainly hasn’t, it makes me jump with its velocity.
“What the hell are you?”
The rodent men don’t answer but stop abruptly about twenty feet in front of us. One of them raises a clawed hand and points a small round ball at us. But I’m not waiting around to see what tricks he’s about to perform; I spin around the trucker and sprint as fast as my legs will take me, only daring to glance back over my shoulder to see if they are following after thirty seconds into my sprint. But I wished I’d never looked back. I see the trucker enveloped in bright pale-blue light.
Fuck! That’s because I stopped him.
The sight spikes my blood with even more adrenaline and it surges through my veins into my heart and limbs. This time I don’t stop running. My heart feels like it might explode at any moment but I suck in oxygen and power through the burning in my chest and calves.
It’s not until ten minutes into my sprint that I allow myself to look back again. When I realise the lights are gone I slow down to a stop and drop to my knees shaking violently.
Oh my God, that poor man! It was my fault that they got him!
My whole body is trembling uncontrollably and I twist and fall onto my back, too weak to remain on my hands and knees as I suck in much-needed oxygen. I look up to the night sky through a different set of eyes and it fills me with terrified wonder. It’s full of twinkling stars, but this is the first time I’ve stared at them and felt afraid.
Was Earth about to be invaded? Should I warn my estranged family? Would they even take my collect call? To them, I was now the bad nut—the rotten egg. Whether they believed in my innocence or not, the fact that their precious name had been linked to a trial was enough for them to cast me out.
I shudder and close my eyes. No! I wouldn’t warn them. They hadn’t fought for me at my trial. They’d found the cheapest defence lawyer there was. If I’d had someone at least half-decent defending me, then all the evidence and facts would have been presented at my trial and the last five years would only have ever been a nightmare, not reality.
I needed to get somewhere safe. But where?
My breathing is almost back to normal so I open my eyes ready to get back up again and continue on my way to the gas station. But as soon as I do I instantly jump out of my skin.
Red eyes stare down at me and a pungent smell invades my nose and makes me gag. The same blue-white light that enveloped the truck driver now surrounds me. I can’t move anything, I can’t even blink.
I’m levitating—I can feel it in my stomach. The stars are getting closer. Oh my God! How high up am I? Am I dreaming this? Did I fall and hit my head on a boulder hitchhiking on the highway somewhere between the prison and the gas station?
A cylindrical object appears to my right and I’m drawn towards it. I can see lights blinking along the edge of a sleek shiny gun-metal surface and an opening in the side of it. My heart rate elevates as I realise I’m heading towards the opening.
I breach the entrance and the same repugnant smell immediately makes my stomach convulse. It reminds me of a smell I’d sometimes catch a whiff of in my childhood home when the wind was heading south-west. It was the unmistakable smell of an abattoir.
Inside, as I lift higher and higher I’m overcome with a sense of doom and vile images flash in my head of the rodent-faced aliens chowing down on one of my muscular thighs. I’m covered in a layer of perspiration. I think I’m becoming slightly unhinged.
As I rise even higher inside the spacecraft, my body angles until it’s in a vertical position, enabling me to have a good look around for the last few metres that I rise until I stop abruptly. The three aliens that were chasing me on the ground now stand in front of me, scrutinising every inch of my body.
In my peripheral vision, I see that the trucker is also here, frozen in the same coloured blue-white light. It glows around his body like a halo from a street lamp. He too is motionless but I can see by the fearful look in his eyes that he’s just as aware of everything that’s going on as I am.
I try to concentrate on him. I need to slow my heart rate down or I’m sure I’m going to pass out, and I don’t want to do that—not here. God only knows what these vile creatures will do to me if I lose consciousness and by the way they’re ogling my tits it’s either fried nipple entrees for supper or bestiality performed the opposite way around, with rodent animal men forcing themselves on a Human. Obviously, neither is appealing.
The trucker is younger than me, maybe five or six years. He’s a white guy with dark almost black hair peeping out from his under his cap and chocolatey soulful eyes. He towers over the alien men and must be a good six-foot-six, with huge shoulders and biceps that his shirt is finding hard to contain. Every muscle in his body looks contracted ready to pounce as soon as the beam of light releases him.
I’m so busy distracting myself with the trucker’s appearance that I don’t realise my beam of light has disappeared until sharp claws dig into my wrists and upper arms.
“Ouch! Get your ratty little claws off me you nasty stinking vermin!”
I’m literally dragged by two of them past the trucker and down a filthy corridor. I squirm and fight to wriggle free but I swear the little fuckers have the strength of ten men. They drag me through a huge door into some type of docking station that has two small diamond-shaped shiny space crafts.
A door drops open into one of the space crafts and I’m carried onto it. They take me into a small room and hoist me up onto an oval table, pinning my arms and legs down. I scream and curse at them because it feels like I’m back in the slammer again, being held down by the guards while one of their colleagues does a body search on me. I hope to God that isn’t the case here. I’m actually snarling at them and snapping my teeth. I’m acting more like a wild animal even though they look like one.
Their words are just a clatter of ugly noise that hurt both my ears and my brain. The only one not restraining me walks over to a wall and waves a high-tech clasp he’s wearing on his wrist in front of it. A drawer slides out and he takes hold of a shiny object which looks like an inoculation gun.
Do they plan on ridding me of germs before they either eat or fuck me?
A moment later I’m writhing in agony, and my final thoughts are. Thanks a lot, God! Have you ever once listened to my prayers?
Zarros
This morning, I was woken to a spectacular display as balls of fire dotted the skyline. It had been six cycs since I last saw that glorious sight and it had me jumping up and down in jubilation. The cause of my delirious excitement was space debris entering the planet’s atmosphere. That was only two hincs ago, and now I am in an area I rarely venture in. That is because of two reasons.
One: the creatures that roam here are the deadliest in the whole of the Perinqual galaxy.
And two: the convicts that wander outside of the prisons and who pass through here are no less deadly.
The first hinc after spotting the space debris crashing to the surface was spent racing towards it and dodging wild creatures any other convicts who like me have also escaped the many penitentiaries that are dotted over the whole surface of Prismn, the planet that I’m trapped on. Unfortunately, they also have the same idea as me and want the many parts that the space debris brings to either use to trade with, or they too might be trying to find parts to find a way of communicating with ships passing close to the atmosphere of this prison planet.
So, for the last hinc, I’ve been scavenging for the remaining parts needed to add to the communicator I’ve been building for the last two yanas. A communicator that I hope will finally help me get off this netherworld and back home to the luxurious life I was accustomed to before I was betrayed by my step-sister and brought here.
A deep rumble draws my attention to the sky. It’s beginning to turn an angry shade of red.
Fuck!
I’m milics away from the cave I’ve called home for the last three yanas and the first drop of acid rain takes me by surprise.
It hits the skin on one of my upper arms and it sizzles. I almost drop the parts I’ve found as I grimace from the pain as it melts through the first layers of my skin. I frantically scan the area I’m in with desperate wild eyes for somewhere to shelter. The vegetation on this part of the planet has only just recovered from the last time it was decimated by acid rain, almost two yanas ago, and in less than a hinc, it will once again be void of any life. I’m thankful I was mindful to stockpile rations just two wids ago. I must have had a sixth sense because there is no predicting the weather on this planet.
I see a gap halfway up an embankment where two huge boulders are resting together. It might just be big enough space for me to squeeze in—if I’m lucky—I’m a big male.
I take off at high speed, leaping over smaller boulders and keeping my eyes primed for hidden dangers. The sky rumbles again and darkens overhead to a deeper crimson red, veined with the yellow streaks full of acid, a warning of an imminent downpour. My whole body tenses. If I’m lucky, I’ll have nodes to evade a scalding agonising death.
The splats of acid rain land around me, some bigger than my fist, mini bombs of death and destruction, and I grit my teeth and push myself harder as I ascend the rocky embankment.
One huge drop lands by my foot and tiny splashes jump up from the ground and explode onto the back of my calf. I dive through the gap in the boulders roaring with pain just as a tirade of acid bombs hammer down relentlessly.
Peering out at the vegetation I watch it hiss and wither away in nodes, becoming nothing more than blackened stumps.
Deafening thunder rattles in the crimson sky again but then I hear a different noise above the heavy torrent of rain. It’s a Taraquet shuttle bringing in another batch of convicts from the main ship that will be waiting up in the planet’s atmosphere for its return.
The last time I was on one of them was three yanas ago when I was brought here drugged, bound and gagged. Not as a convicted felon, but as a free male, brought here without my knowledge. I would have been none the wiser that the oppressor who’d arranged my underhanded abduction had been my devious sister Zyle, had it not been for the boasting Bissitorian guard who took great satisfaction in informing me it was my own kin who’d paid Taraquets and a corrupt warden and guards handsomely to make me disappear.
I find myself balling all four of my fists at the memory, but then a wicked smile spreads across my face when I remember the look of panic in his eyes when I was standing in front of him on the opposite side of my cell’s laser-beamed bars. Boy what an escape that had been! I’d purposely sacrificed one of my arms by putting it into the beams to break the circuit to get out of my cell. I thought I’d paralysed it forever, and it hung lamely by my side like a flank of meat, getting in the way as I fought my way to freedom through the last six guards. Luckily, it was only nerve damage, and my highly advanced regenerating cells had almost completely healed it two doons later.
The acid rain is now falling heavily, and I thank the guardian in the sky for looking over me and helping me find a place of shelter. Even though I am stuck here, I still have a strong belief system that was taught to me by my Human mother since niphood. I screw my face up as it’s ravaged by emotional pain thinking of her and my father.
I haven’t seen my parents for fifteen yanas. They paid a Taraquet ship a huge amount of credos to take them back to Earth. My mother had wanted to be able to see her family one more time and explain to them why she’d disappeared all those yanas ago. My father was suspicious about using them and worried about trusting their motives for helping a Human woman go back to Earth since it was their species who’d abducted her in the first place. But they were and still are the only species to know Earth’s co-ordinates—not even the Federation knows where Earth is, so he’d insisted on accompanying her back to her home planet.
At first, Zyle and I weren’t worried about the lack of communication, after all we knew Earth was in a different galaxy, but when cycs slipped into a yana, a bad feeling I’d had daily since they’d departed became a permanent boulder lodged in the pit of my stomach.
It was hard not having them around anymore—especially my mother. I was still only a nipseak at the time they went missing and I’d been indulged by her since I was a nip—spoilt even. She’d pampered my every wish and I’d lived like a prince in our huge home surrounded by hanakers of land, land worked by many of my father’s species who were loyal to his ancient link of royal blood—the time before the Federation appeared and began ruling a cluster of planets in the Perinqual Galaxy, proclaiming that royalty in species was no longer needed.
The noise of the shuttle draws my attention back to the sky. It’s veering unsteadily. One side of it keeps dropping and then readjusting its level. My body tenses excitedly. It’s in trouble, and if it crashes there’s a good chance that the communicator will still be intact. There will be a chance to finally get a signal back to Veerl, my lifelong friend, and possibly the only member of the staff working at the household who I can trust. The only problem is, I know my eyes won’t be the only ones trained on the shuttle and witnessing its struggle. The lands here are full of convicts who like me, have escaped the confines of one of the prisons. It’s harsh out here, but for all of us out here surviving, it’s the lesser of the two evils.
I’m lucky that since I was a young nip, my Human mother insisted I learn as many as I could of the individual combat skills from all the different species living in the Perinqual Galaxy, it was as if she’d had a sixth sense that I would someday be in a situation like this. As a Quislet, I don’t have a tail barb like the Deviads. Arm bone blades like the Cagodians. Or even venom in my claws or fangs like many other species. All I have for my protection is perfect night vision, my quick cell regeneration and my four arms. However, unlike those species, because of my two sets of arms, I have double the amount of upper-body brute strength.
The shuttle is now making whirring noises. It’s going to crash. I just have to work out its trajectory and I hope I got there before any of the other convicts also watching it do. All I have to do now is wait out this rain, because I’m damn sure like me, no other male out here is stupid enough to get maimed attempting to get to the shuttle first.
With my enormous shoulders jammed between the boulders, I can barely move. So when I feel a cold wet fuzzy blob creeping up my leg all I can do is freeze. My mind reels back to my boring private lessons which my personal tutor had given me about predators and creatures from other planets, trying to think what it could be. Way back in my mind where I only store useless information, numerous bleary images taunt me. However, it wasn’t fucking useless information anymore, and I wanted that information up in the forefront of my mind right now.
What in damnation can it be?
Then a heinous image appears as clear as doon in my mind’s eye with a name above it. It was a memory from a page full of images on a tech tablet. I remember it being from a quick lesson on the rarer creatures that inhabited Planet Prismn. The name of the creature slithering up me is a pithoc. I remembered it because compared to the other creatures on the tech tablet, this one looked the least sinister, but according to the description that came along the side of it, it was the deadliest of them all. At the slightest hint of a threat, it would release a poison through tiny hooks that it uses to move along with, hooks that cover the entire length of its body.
An icy feeling runs the length of my spine. If I were a Deviad, I could zap it with my tail barb. Turn it into a burnt crisp in less than a node. But what could I do? A Quislet?
Think Zarros!
I gently take hold of a piece of newly acquired salvage. It’s a long thin spiked rod. I hold it firmly in my upper right hand and slowly lower my head while lifting it and sliding it over my shoulder. The pithoc has now reached my thigh and I can feel the cold slime trail it’s leaving on my leg. I grit my teeth hard which pushes out the corded muscles in my neck. My blood is pumping hard through my veins full of adrenaline and staying this motionless is torture.
The pithoc is moving quicker than I anticipated and is now on my lower back making its way up to my neck. The thought of it sliming over me fills me with terror. If it feels my strong pulse through my skin it will know it’s moving on top of a living being and I’ll instantly be either paralysed or dead. I need to calm down.
It’s on the top of my back near my shoulders. In two nodes it will be slithering down to my neck where my pulse is twitching at an alarming rate in my bulging artery.
It’s now or never Zarros.
I’ve never moved so fast in all my life. In one swift motion, I skim my wrist back and lift and flick simultaneously. The pithoc goes hurtling out over my head into the rain where it instantaneously vaporises.
I close my eyes and breathe a sigh of relief, but then quickly open them to see if I can still see the Taraquet shuttle in the sky. I can just make it out in the distance and I make a mental note of where it might land. All I have to do now is wait until the last drop of acid rain falls.
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