Genesis (5 page)

It bothered her that it didn’t cry. Was it too weak to cry?

When she lifted her head, she saw the yellow aliens had come out again. The one called Kole stood at the very edge of his yard, staring straight at her. She held his look for a long moment and, finally realizing the door hadn’t closed and locked behind her, took the infant inside.

She needed to warm him, she decided. She could at least do that.

Easier said than done. She had nothing but the shift they’d given her to wear.

Remembering the towels in the bathroom, she laid the infant on the bed and headed into the bathroom to grab a towel. It wasn’t soft, fluffy, or warm, but she thought if the baby was wrapped in it it would at least hold the infant’s own warmth to it.

There were no diapers to cover its bottom, but, search the room though she might, she couldn’t find an acceptable substitute. She finally simply wrapped it in the towel and cuddled it close to her chest.

It made a weak sound then. She loosened her hold, fearful she’d squeezed it too tightly and checked the wrapping. It didn’t seem too tight. The baby had closed his eyes, but he seemed to be breathing alright.

Deciding may it was a sound of gladness to be warm, she wrapped it snugly again, cradled it against her chest and finally went outside.

Kole was still standing watchfully. After a moment’s hesitation, she headed directly toward him. Halting when she reached the perimeter, she lifted the baby away from her chest and showed him what she held. “What do I do with him? I don’t know anything about babies. Nothing! There’s something wrong with him,” she added, unwrapping his frail body to show the alien. “He looks like he’s starving, and he’s so … listless.”

Kole stared almost dispassionately at the infant for many moments and finally lifted his gaze to her face to study her and said something that, needless to say, she couldn’t understand at all. There was something about the inflection of his words, though, that she didn’t like.

He held out his hands as if demanding she place the baby in his arms.

It wasn’t her baby. It was a yellow alien child.

But it didn’t belong to him.

The other aliens had given it to her for a reason.

Instead of handing the baby to him, she pulled it tightly, protectively against her chest again and stepped back. Spying Consuelo near the line holding a bundle similar to the one she held, Bri hurried toward the other woman.

Even before she reached the woman Consuelo began to babble a stream of Spanish, gesturing to the infant she held. When she unwrapped the baby, which Bri saw she’d wrapped in a towel as she had, Bri saw that it, too, was pathetically thin and listless. It was also another male child.

After staring at the other baby for several moments, Bri settled on the ground, folded her legs and rested the infant in her lap, staring down at him, trying to make order of her chaotic thoughts.

Where were the women who’d borne the infants? Had they died? Was that why she and Consuelo had been taken? To adopt the infants?

As
if
one only had to be a woman to know how to tend to a baby, damn it!

Why would the slavers care anyway? If they could snatch beings from anywhere they pleased and enslave them, why would they give a damn whether the babies lived or died?

She couldn’t wrap her mind around it, but she found herself stroking the baby’s cheek gently. A half sob, half laugh escaped her as she studied his little ‘old man’ face. “Poor, ugly little thing!”

A frown flickered briefly across the baby’s face, and she felt shame wash over her. He couldn’t help being ugly anymore than she could help thinking he was. And maybe he wouldn’t be ugly if he wasn’t so scrawny and underfed? After a moment, she lifted him up and brushed a light kiss of apology along his cheek. “I was just teasing, sweety. I didn’t really mean it. You’re not ugly. You’re a handsome little man!”

He reacted--either to her voice or her touch, a thread of emotion flickering across his tiny face, and she felt a peculiar sense of triumph wash through her, a strange warmth of pleasure. Maybe, like her, he needed to hear the sound of a voice? Needed to feel the contact of another being?

Maybe, but he also needed food.

She might not know much of anything about babies, but she’d observed enough to know they seemed to eat all the time--and need changing. She had no idea how old the infant was. He didn’t look very old at all to her, but she wouldn’t have been much of a judge of a human infant, and she certainly had no clue of the development of an alien child. She could tell, though, that he couldn’t really hold his own head up. He certainly couldn’t lift and support it.

His head seemed disproportionately large to her, but she thought maybe it was because he was so skinny and not a sign of some birth defect. She couldn’t help but feel like the fact that he kept watching her so hard must be a sign of intelligence.

Where was his mother? Had she died when it was borne?

The thought made her glance at Kole. She saw that he’d knelt as he had the day before. His gaze was keen, unwavering, and focused on her hands as she moved them soothingly over the baby, patting his back as she’d seen mothers pat their babies. As if he sensed her gaze, his own lifted to meet hers.

Frowning, she looked away again.

Consuelo might be a mother--she looked old enough, Bri thought, that she could have had children. Unfortunately, even if the woman had vast maternal experience, Bri couldn’t ask her a damned thing.

The realization scared the hell out of her. She held the baby’s life in her hands, and she was pretty sure she was going to fail him.

“I need help,” she said plaintively, knowing Consuelo couldn’t understand her.

She seemed to grasp the desperation in Bri’s voice. She began to act out tending a baby.

Or maybe she was trying to tell Bri she wasn’t holding him right?

Tamping her fear of inadequacy, she watched the woman carefully, mimicking the way she held the baby.

Her frustration surfaced in anger, though, when she’d returned to the room.

“I don’t know how to do this!” she screamed at the ceiling. “I’ve never had a baby! I’ve never even tended to a baby! And you didn’t give me anything for him either, damn it! How am I supposed to feed him?”

There was no answer, but she hadn’t really expected one. She discovered, though, when her noon tray of food appeared, that they had decided to feed the baby, too. A bottle appeared and wraps, which she decided must be to use for blanket and diapers.

* * * *

Trying to figure out how to take care of the baby was as frustrating as it was rewarding when she seemed to get something right. He consumed her time, but she welcomed it, preferring to worry over him and work to keep him fed, warm, dry, and clean than to think about her situation.

Each day she was herded out into the ‘exercise’ yard as she thought of it, although they didn’t seem to care if she did nothing more than sit face to face with Consuelo, rocking, or feeding the baby, each of them talking just to hear themselves, because she still didn’t speak Spanish and Consuelo still didn’t speak English.

She’d decided after a few days that he needed a name besides baby. After giving it some thought, she’d settled on Corbitt, her mother’s maiden name, and then found herself shortening it to Cory.

He never cried.

She would’ve liked to think that that was because she was so good at taking care of him, but she couldn’t convince herself of that because she knew she wasn’t. She had no idea how often she should feed him but because he didn’t eat much and he was so skinny, she fed him every couple of hours at first until he began to take more of whatever it was in the bottle.

It looked disgusting and smelled worse, but he seemed to like it. He didn’t make faces when she fed it to him and after a week he seemed to be filling out some.

“What do you think, Consuelo?” she asked the other woman, pointing out his rounding belly and arms and legs. “Does he look better to you?”

Consuelo dutifully watched and seemed to catch the drift after a moment. She nodded vigorously and displayed her baby, whom she was now calling Manuel. She said something about
gordo
and then puffed out her cheeks.

Bri chuckled, but she felt a flicker of irritation, too, because it seemed to her that Manuel
was
getting fat and all she could say about poor little Cory was that he wasn’t as skinny as he had been. “Cory’s getting fat, too,” she said somewhat defensively. “And, watch this,” she added, smiling down at him and cooing at him.

His lips curled tentatively, and Bri looked up at Consuelo triumphantly.

“See! He smiled at me!”

Consuelo looked suitably impressed, and Bri felt a little less defensive. It occurred to her, though, to wonder if she failed at mothering the infant if the slaver aliens would decide she was worthless.

A flicker of fear went through her at the realization that her own life might depend on keeping Cory alive, helping him to thrive. She’d taken to him because she needed him as much as he needed her, needed something warm, and alive, and responsive. And also because she simply couldn’t ignore his needs. And because she was going slowly insane with nothing to do but twiddle her thumbs and wait for the ax to fall.

She hadn’t done it because she’d considered she was making herself useful to the cold blooded aliens who’d taken her and that her survival might depend on her usefulness.

Lifting Cory protectively against her, she glanced toward Kole. He hadn’t attempted to communicate since he’d tried to get her to give the baby to him, but he was generally hovering nearby, watching her, when she was outside.

She didn’t know what thoughts were running through his mind.

She wasn’t certain she wanted to know.

She’d caught a look on his face a few times that made her distinctly uneasy.

She’d had men look at her with interest.

She’d had men give her flirty or seductive glances.

He was the first male that had looked … hungry, and it startled a thrill of both fear and excitement in her when ever she encountered that heated look.

The fear she could understand. The guy was the next thing to a giant. He looked like a head bashing barbarian.

The excitement was something she didn’t especially want to analyze.

She
must
have lost her mind! The guy was probably a fucking caveman.

Her gaze flickered over him speculatively. The clothing was a long way from anything a caveman could manage, but then the slaver aliens might have given him the breeches and boots.

“N
iño
die.”

Bri’s jaw slid to half mast in stunned amazement when Kole spoke. She was so surprised that he’d managed to pick up enough English and Spanish to put a ‘sort of’ sentence together that it was several moments before she registered exactly what he’d said. When she did, fear and fury surged through her.

She’d known, instinctively, that he couldn’t be trusted with the baby!

“You bastard! That’s a hell of a thing to say. He’s … he’s whatever you are! One of your kind. How could you even
think
such a horrible thing!”

Anger contorted his own features, but although it seemed he’d grasped the general trend of her tirade, he couldn’t come up with a suitable response. Instead, he grasped the collar around his neck, tugged at it, and burst into a flood of words in his own tongue. “Better,” he ground out finally.

It dawned on her that he was suggesting Cory would be better off dead than a slave. She had the frightening feeling that he knew what he was talking about, that there was more to his fury than anger at being caged within the alien space ship.

She clutched the baby a little more tightly, squeezing him hard enough he began to whimper and struggle in her hold. Relaxing her frantic hold with a conscious effort, she put her back to the alien and soothed him. “Don’t pay that hateful thing any attention, darlin’. I won’t let that bad old alien anywhere near you,” she murmured to the baby, sending Kole a drop dead look.

His lips tightened. “Earth woman!”

He ground the words out like a curse.

Bri set her jaw. “I don’t think he approves of us, Consuelo,” she murmured, pointedly ignoring him.

“No like.”

Bri nodded in agreement, although she wasn’t sure if Consuelo was saying she didn’t like the alien, or agreeing that, no, he didn’t seem to like them much.

That was why she and Consuelo had been given the babies, she realized, because the yellow aliens
were
barbaric! They’d rather kill their young than allow them to be enslaved!

Dead wasn’t better, regardless of what he thought--what any of them apparently believed! It was certainly not pleasant being held against her will, but as long as she had breath she had a chance of escaping, maybe not home, but somewhere. They couldn’t stay in space forever. Sooner or later they were going to set this thing down somewhere.

She had to believe there was some hope. She had to believe that she wasn’t coaxing life into a child that would suffer endlessly because of a misplaced act of kindness.

They must be a very war-like race, she decided, if they could be so callous about their own young.

She discovered that she’d undoubtedly guessed close to the mark a week later when she went out to walk the baby as usual and got her first look at the females of Kole’s tribe.

The noise caught her attention immediately, and would have even if she hadn’t noticed that the voices speaking were higher in pitch than male voices. She couldn’t see where the noise was coming from at first, though. She’d nearly reached the back of her yard, where Consuelo stood, clutching Manuel and staring into the distance, when she finally caught a glimpse of a mob of yellow skinned aliens several sections over from her own.

They were still too close for comfort in Bri’s book.

A half dozen or so were lying on the ground twitching from trying to jump the line--or from being pushed over it. Bri wasn’t certain which, but even as she struggled to understand why they’d been grouped together, she realized that there was a distinct difference between this group and the males.