Dual Abduction (2 page)

“But there’s treasure.”

“Not—”

“Whoa, sword brother, let us not be too hasty.” Xarn placed a cautioning hand on Brax’s shoulder. “Tell us more of this treasure.”

“It’s virtually priceless. And forbidden, which is why it is so valuable.”

“How forbidden? The black market is a pain in my purple buttocks to deal with. Never know where that worm hole is going to spit you out. And I refuse to go back to that obsidian place. Damned thieves running that operation.”

The gnashing of her teeth overwhelmed even the blaring sound of the live band. “Forget the treasure then. I’ll pay you. I’ll pay you double your going rate.”

Curious, Brax asked, “To do what?”

“Kill the crew of a ship, but most especially, the captain.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s a cheating bastard.”

“Are you his wife?” Xarn asked.

“No.”

“His mistress?”

“No.”

“Then why kill him?”

She grimaced, displaying yellowing teeth that ended in jagged points. “Because he cheated me at cards, and no one cheats me and gets away with it.”

“What did you lose?”

“Ten credits.”

Brax’s brows surely hit the ceiling. “Ten credits? That’s not a reason to kill someone. Steal his boots and sell them. Put him over a barrel and spank him in public even, but you do realize, our going rate is much, much more than the ten credits you lost?”

Her eyes squinted in anger, making her uglier than before, which he would have thought impossible. “Frukxing cowards. I’ll find someone else to do it then.” She stomped off, a grand exit marred when a taller alien hip checked her into a server who spilled his tray of drinks on her. Brax turned back to the bar as she shouted out she’d have them both killed for their temerity.

“Crazy little thing, isn’t she?” Brax muttered.

“Yeah, like we’d take on such a poor excuse for an assassination. We’re not desperate for work.” Too late, Xarn slapped a hand on his mouth.

Brax still punched him. “You idiot. You better hope that stupid entity who thinks he’s a god didn’t hear you.”

“I thought that Murphy fellow moved onto another galaxy,” Xarn replied, his tone not entirely confident as he peered around the smoky room.

“That’s what I heard, but still. After what he did to us last time, you should know better than to tempt him.”

As many inhabitants of the universe all over already knew, while Karma—the minor goddess of the Lost Galaxy no one seemed to recall—was a bitch, her brother Murphy possessed a frukxed sense of humor, one the friends knew unfortunately well.

It wouldn’t be the first time Brax and Xarn ended up being the butt of Murphy’s joke. But unbeknownst to them as they continued tossing back shots of gut rot, this time, they wouldn’t be alone. Louisa was about to become acquainted with Murphy too.

Chapter Three

Waking up strapped to a table never boded well in the movies, and somehow Louisa doubted she’d discover any different when it happened to her. It especially sucked that she also lacked any clothes.

“Dammit. God, or Aslan, or whatever the hell you’re calling yourself these days, if this is your idea of a celestial joke, then I’m not getting it,” she shouted at the ceiling, its surface bright with white glowing panels. She didn’t get an answer, not that she expected one. The suspicion that she’d left reality, and perhaps lost her marbles, grew stronger. She racked her brain, trying to see if she could remember how she might have ended up as a feature actress in a possible porn/snuff film. All she recalled after seeing the goblin with the lantern was slumping to the floor as gas filled the bus, suddenly exhausted, then waking to her current chilly dilemma.

Sifting through the recent events, she put what she knew together and emerged with a startling conclusion. Bright lights, plus ugly green dudes plus a naked Louisa equaled alien abduction. And as everybody knew, aliens liked to conduct anal probes.
Over my dead body!

“Hey, you perverts, what are you planning to do to me?” she yelled, not willing to lie still and accept the penetration of any of her holes without a fight. The reply, in the form of a slimy hand on her calf, made her shriek. “Eeew! Get your hand, or thing, or whatever the fuck you have, off me!” Forget the years she’d spent as a teacher learning to curb her tongue—old habits returned quick.

A garbled answer, spoken in a language that resembled gargling and snorting, had her screwing up her face. “Oh gross. Blow your nose or something first, would you?”

More nonsensical speech accompanied slimy fingers gripping her ear. She screamed, some colorful invectives involving shoving objects up their holes, as something got jammed into her ear canal. Hopefully, not little alien eggs that would grow inside her brain and burst out at one point, killing her. Damn her ex-boyfriend, the jerk who’d forced her to watch the sci-fi channel. Because of her involuntarily induction into alien horror flicks, she couldn’t stop thinking of all the horrible things ET’s liked to do to squishy humans.

It took her a moment of totally losing her mind before she realized the phlegmy sounds of her captor now had meaning.

“You are a noisy creature. If you do not quiet, we will freeze your remains and sell them as stock for the herders on Hihala. Their beasts will eat anything, even tough, barbarian meat.”

Stunned, she stopped yelling.
I didn’t just hear that.
Or so she hoped. Needing clarification, she said, “Excuse me?”

“Be quiet or die,” announced the voice, the pronunciation of the English language choppy, as if being filtered through a machine. “You are our prisoner, barbarian female. You and the halflings under your charge.”

“Halflings?” Oh, her class.
Nice job forgetting them. Guess I won’t be winning teacher of the year—again.
It belatedly occurred to her to wonder what they’d done with her students. Sure, they were orphans with attitude and problems, but dammit, they were her responsibility, her very own little maniacs one step away from juvie.
If anyone gets to kill them for misbehaving it will be me.
“You better not have harmed a hair on their heads. They’re children and I insist you return them home.”

“Or else what, foolish female? Your backwards planet has no means of giving chase. Your threats are meaningless. Resistance is futile.”

She snorted. “Copycat. I know that line. You stole that from Star Trek.”

“Silence!” A face joined the stilted voice, a side effect she assumed of whatever translator they stuck in her ear. The visage glaring at her shut her lips faster than her ex-husband waving his thing around looking for action after a night of drinking. “We have taken you along to care for the little ones, but if you prove troublesome, we will not hesitate to terminate you like we terminated the male.”

They killed the driver? The knowledge should have tempered her tongue, but fear tended to make her do the stupidest things. “Go ahead and see how easy you find it taking care of those brats. Do you know Angelic, who is nothing like her name by the way, put Vaseline in my shoes? And, Betty, the one with the dimple, dumped pepper in my cereal.” Of course, that was before they discovered Louisa, unlike the teachers and group supervisors who took care of them before, wouldn’t tolerate any nonsense. Revenge was her middle name. Literally, her mother put it on her birth certificate right before she named her father and took his ass to court for child support.

Needless to say, with a name like that, she didn’t let anyone screw with her, not even little orphan girls. It took several months of her foiling their attempts to turn to the dark side, but they’d come to an understanding. Heck, she might even say she was fond of her charges—if forced at gunpoint.

The goblin face disappeared and she heard a whispered conference.

Curiosity wouldn’t let her hold her tongue for long. “Hey, so you never said what the plan was? What do you intend to do with us?” To her surprise, she received an answer.

“The small females are to be sold as slaves to the pleasure planet where they will be taught how to become great courtesans.”

That she had no problem understanding. Nor did she like it. “No.”

“What?” A startled goblin appeared back over her.

“You can’t seriously expect me to condone that. They’re little girls.”

“According to our research most will achieve human levels of adulthood within the next two planetary rotations of your planet.”

“It’s inhumane.”

“And this discussion is over, barbarian female. Perhaps you are just jealous that your advanced years and overly large size make you good for nothing other than a menial labor slave.”

“I am not old.” Twenty eight was a perfectly respectable age. She had no rebuttal for the size part though. At almost six foot, with wide shoulders and hips, along with more pounds than she should carry, she wasn’t a dainty little thing.

A wet chuckle was the reply.

“Oh yeah, well if I’m so ugly and ancient then why did you take my clothes? Huh? Answer that.” Why she insanely wanted them to see as her attractive, she’d never understand.

“The primitive condition of your home world makes it necessary for us to cleanse. That includes decontamination of your pale, unappealing bodies to the incineration of your germ laden clothing. You will be assigned vestments appropriate to your station as slave.”

Burn her clothes? Damn! She’d only recently gotten those jeans broken in to just the right point. The jerks. They stopped speaking to her at that point. A good thing, because she fought not to giggle as a strange fluorescent light ran over her body, tickling her. Once it passed over her a few times, the bands holding her captive retracted into the bed, and she sprang from her prone position to confront the aliens. How she intended to fight naked, she’d not quite figured out.
Maybe slap them with my boobs.
Gravity was no woman’s friend once twenty five hit.

Alas, her confrontation didn’t happen, the ugly green dude left before she could act. The room held only the bed and a pile of cloth on the floor. Lifting the fabric, she again lamented the loss of her jeans, and now added to the list her underwear and bra. But, given the choice of her birthday suit or an item resembling a potato sack…

The linen shift they gave her didn’t exactly scream fashion, but the soft material didn’t chafe and at least covered her crucial parts, barely. It also provided a measure of comfort to the girls who wore the same outfit, although given their shorter stature, theirs went to their knees and calves, not mid-thigh. She discovered her charges when a door slid open and she went to explore only to find herself in another room filled with eleven familiar faces.

“Ms. Fontanna,” they squealed upon her return to them.

“What’s going on?” Lila asked, her voice rising over the others. “We woke up in this room, naked. Our clothes are gone and all we got to wear are these
things.
” Lila pinched the hem of her gown with distaste.

“Whoever it is, is going to fry in jail, ‘cause as soon as we get out of here, I’m calling the cops on the perverts,” Anne added.

Letting the questions flow over her, Louisa took a moment to assess their surroundings. The entrance she’d come through disappeared as a portion of the wall slid sideways to shut off the space with an ominous click. The rest of the room didn’t take long to peruse. A dozen shelves bolted to the walls with thin pallets and blankets. A cylinder that rose from the floor in the corner that she feared was their only toilet, and a large metal grate in the center.
Probably for sluicing down the blood when they need to kill me.

She couldn’t let her trepidation over the situation show, though, or she’d have eleven sixteen-to-seventeen year-old girls shrieking their little heads off.
And then I might be the one cleaning up blood when I snap and kill them.

But what could she do to salvage the situation? Abducted by space pirates, on their way to be sold, with nothing but the potato sacks on their backs, how could they save themselves?
We are so fucked.

Giving up was not an option though, not while she still breathed.

“What do you all remember?”

“We went off a cliff,” started Katrina.

“Then ended up sucked into a light,” added Jasmine.

“And then some a-hole threw some kind of smoke-bomb on the bus and we all passed out.”

“Anything else?” she asked. Shrugs and blanks faces met her inquiry. It seemed she was the only one to wake while they decontaminated—and insulted—her body. “Okay girls, listen up. Here’s the situation. We’re no longer on earth.”

“Have we gone to heaven?” asked Chloe.

“Nope.”

“Have we gone to hell?” piped in Katrina.

“No to that too. Girls, we’ve been kidnapped by some butt ugly, alien goblins.”

Her class of orphans looked at each, rolled a few sets of thin shoulders, and then, began to laugh their little faces off.

“I’m not kidding,” Louisa stated, planting her hands on her hips and giving them her fiercest scowl.

“Sure, you aren’t,” snickered Angelic. “Did you get a buzz off that smoke? Or maybe get your hands on some roofies?”

“Of course not. I’m telling you the truth.”

“We’re not idiots,” Betty said with a roll of her eyes. “We can handle the truth. Admit it, we’ve been in an accident and we are all like in a coma or something.”

“That’s just stupid,” Josie said. “If we’re all in a coma then how can we be talking to each other?”

“Did you just seriously call me stupid, biatch?”

Moving quickly, Louisa stepped between the girls before the fists flew, but it didn’t stop the glares and muttered threats of ‘later.’

“You’re both idiots, so shut up. We are not in a coma,” Nancy spoke, her eyes seeming large and owlish without her spectacles. “We’ve obviously been kidnapped by white slavers looking to sell us into prostitution overseas.”

Screams accompanied her announcement—along with boastful claims of how so-and-so would fetch a better price than that skinny so-and-so.

Louisa held up her hands. “Quiet!” It did nothing to reduce their freaking. She planted two fingers in her mouth and blew, the piercing whistle rendering them silent. “Jesus Christ. Stop your bitching and moaning. Since when do we allow ourselves to be victims? Did you not learn anything these last three years? I taught you better than this.” She let her gaze roam over them, catching each of their eyes, trying to instill some of her false calm and confidence. “It might look pretty impossible now, but there’s got to be a way out of here. So let’s put our heads together. We need to think of a plan before the aliens come back.” A snicker met her words, but the girls quieted when she stared them down.