Ruth's Bonded (Ruth & Gron Book 1) (4 page)

Ruth tried to hold back her tears,
but she couldn’t. She didn’t want to cry, but her hand really hurt! That had
been really stupid. The alien had tried to tell her not to, but she thought she
was smarter than him. Well, who was the smart one now? She had a painful but
thankfully shallow burn about an inch from top to bottom stretching across all
four fingers on her right hand, and for now at least she couldn’t close her
fist. The damn bars were electrified or something! She should have guessed. If
her cellmate could reach the bars, something told her he would be out of here
by now unless there was something else keeping him in.

She knocked her head against the wall
and stared at the ceiling to try and keep her eyes clear but it wasn’t working.
She tucked her head between her knees and just let it go, trying to shut out
the cell around her. More than the pain in her hand, she didn’t want to be here
anymore! She wanted to go home, she wanted to be having a cup of tea at her
desk at work, being perved on by the office prick while she worked her way up
to taking the confidential waste to the shredder. She wanted to be by herself,
she wanted to be with people who spoke English, she wanted her parents. She
didn’t want to be in this over-sized lunchbox with Tarzan staring at her while
she cried. 

God.

Okay.

Lesson learned: from now on, listen
to Tarzan. He’d been here longer than she had, he knew the ropes. But she had
been startled when he’d got in her face like that. Getting electrified or
whatever by the bars had distracted her to say the least so she hadn’t caught
herself on the way down. Her hand hurt, and when she was able to look up, he’d
just been right there, those large dark eyes of his staring at her from beneath
that cliff-like brow. He’d touched her hand and she’d had to beat him away
because it
hurt
, damn it! He’d frozen and she’d retreated to a corner to
lick her wounds and now he probably didn’t think much of her. He’d told her not
to do the stupid thing, but she’d done it and then freaked out. Great. Now he
was back to being the broody silent type over on his side of the cell.

She’d try to avoid pissing him off
again. She was supposed to be making friends. She knew now that he didn’t want
to sit next to her and he definitely didn’t like being touched. And they
couldn’t talk. And they couldn’t escape. Okay. Well. At this point it didn’t
look like there was anything more she could do. It was a waiting game now.
Waiting to be fed. Waiting to be let go. Waiting until she inevitably needed to
go to the toilet, until she finally got tired enough to sleep on this bare
metal floor.

People had survived worse, right? She
could survive this. And then it would just be a story she would never tell
anyone ever because it was insane.

If this was some kind of
socialisation experiment, Ruth thought it was pretty safe to call it a failure.
Maybe they’d let her go soon.

 She looked at her watch. At least
she’d killed some time, Ruth thought grimly. She’d been missing for over two
hours now. Two hours and she’d already managed to injure herself in a room with
no sharp edges or moving parts. Great.

She stayed like that for a while, but
when she cried herself out she started to get stiff and bored. How had the
alien survived this solitary confinement with no stimuli at all? Either he
hadn’t been there for very long, or he was already mad. Or maybe there was a
routine to the day that she didn’t know about yet. Maybe they would be taken
out of the cell for yard-time. Maybe their purpose there would become clear. If
there was a purpose, she wished the alien could just tell her what it was and
put her out of her misery, even if it was gladiator fights or live bait for
some intergalactic sand-worm. If she knew what she was doing here, she could
make a plan. Maybe even a plan that looked like it would work.

Ruth sighed and stretched her legs.
She took her jacket off and rolled it up. With nothing better to do, she
decided she might as well try to sleep. She knew she would have to eventually,
and what difference would it make if it was now or later? It might kill a few
hours.

She hadn’t slept on a bare floor
since college, and she was more used to her comforts now. She lay on her back
and that was alright. There were no lights in the ceiling to glare into her
face. She wasn’t really warm enough to sleep though, and she was used to the
comforting weight of her duvet. It probably helped her now that she hadn’t had
her coffee. She turned her face towards her jacket and drifted.

She was woken by a noise she didn’t
quite understand and jerked up. Her nap had made her more disoriented than she
had anticipated, or maybe it was waking up in a dark metal cell.

Some... things had fallen, or more
likely been thrown, into the cell. They sat under the hatch, between Ruth and
the alien. She couldn’t really tell what they were, but the alien hadn’t moved.
He was sitting directly across from her, watching her. Had he been watching her
sleep too? She hadn’t minded his staring at first, but it was going to get creepy
pretty soon.

Why hadn’t he reacted to the presence
of something new in their cell. She suddenly realised that someone must have
thrown it there and leapt up.

“Hey! Let me out!” she shouted at the
hatch. She couldn’t see anything through it. Had they opened it to throw
whatever it was in and she’d missed it? “Hey! You can’t keep me in here!
Please!” There was no response. She knew they probably didn’t speak English,
and had no intention of letting her go anyway, but the fact that no faces
appeared by the hatch to see what she was yelling about struck her as cruel.
She could be being eaten alive down here for all they knew, unless they did
have cameras watching them.

She turned back to look at the alien.
The stupid loser who could actually
reach
the damn hatch was sitting on
his butt, as usual, staring at her and not moving. Did he like being in here?
Maybe. It again occurred to her that he might just be some kind of strange
animal, bred in captivity, institutionalised, with no desire to get beyond the
walls of this cell. Or maybe what was outside was worse and he knew it. She
remembered that last time she had tried shouting for help he had growled at
her, whereas this time he was silent. Maybe he’d given up on trying to help her
since she’d ignored him and touched the burning hatch.

Well, whatever. She was interested in
the new arrivals even if he wasn’t. She looked down at her feet. There were...
some round things and some square things. Ruth knelt down to look more closely,
picking up one of the round things. It looked like a giant gel capsule, like
one of those things with bath oil inside, or one of those pills for sore
throats. It was the size of a large melon and a pale green colour. There were
four of them, two for each of them she guessed.

This must be their water. Ruth
suddenly realised she was thirsty. She looked at the alien but he hadn’t moved.
Maybe he knew something about them that she didn’t, and she wasn’t going to
make the mistake of ignoring him again. Maybe they were drugged.

The other things were large
rectangles, the size of four loaves of bread strapped together. Putting the
melon-capsule down, Ruth examined one of the two. Apparently, they each only
got one of these. Which was a little ridiculous given the difference in their
size, but she wasn’t prepared to give hers up, just in case. It had the
consistency of petrified sponge cake and was marbled red and yellow. She didn’t
want to think it, but she made an educated guess that this was some kind of
nutritious mixture of their daily requirements of meat and grain, blended,
compressed and dehydrated into a handy unpalatable cube. Space rations. Made
sense. She took a sniff and got nothing. Maybe it smelled vaguely of bread, or
her grandmother’s armchair, but she thought mostly she was projecting. She
doubted any atoms were escaping this dense block to be smelt.

She wanted to try it, but again, the
alien wasn’t doing anything. On the other hand, maybe he didn’t need to eat as
much as she did. Maybe they only got one of these care packages once a month
and he was saving it. Maybe he’d had one before she arrived and wasn’t hungry.
She could starve while waiting for him, but for now, she would wait. She put
the loaf down and crawled back a few steps, watching his face for any clues. He
didn’t look approving, like she’d made the right choice. Rather, he frowned and
looked at the ‘food’ as if wondering why she’d left it. Okay. He’d expected her
to eat it. But he wasn’t having any of it and that didn’t encourage her.

Ruth decided to watch for now and
retreated back to her corner. After a moment, he got up and walked over to
investigate, obviously confused. When he got up, she had to avert her eyes. She
didn’t know how she kept forgetting he was naked with the same obvious
reproductive parts as Earth men, but she did. Maybe it was because he was so
totally unabashed about it.

He approached the food and squatted
down beside it, his eyes flicking over it, clearly looking for flaws, something
that would make her reject it. Failing to find anything, he looked up at her
again, still frowning in confusion. Then he grabbed a loaf in one huge hand and
took the three steps necessary to bring him to her. He stopped well out of
arm’s reach and sat cross-legged on the floor which, wow, was not good table
manners in his current state of undress. If Ruth hadn’t been so focused on what
he was doing and the prospect of food, she might have laughed at his total lack
of shame. It was about the only amusing thing about this situation. 

He placed the space-loaf between them
and tore the corner off, then held it out to her. She took it, partly to humour
him, partly because she hoped he was about to prove she could eat it. He tore a
piece for himself and put it in his mouth, staring at her in a manner that was
probably supposed to be encouraging and gesturing to her chunk and miming
eating it. She did chuckle a bit at that. He must think she was as thick as a
brick the way he was making faces like a mother feeding her baby. She ate her
piece, just to end the charade and hopefully restore some faith in her. It
wasn’t so bad. It tasted mainly of starch, cardboard dust, and faintly of the
blood from a raw burger, but it had the consistency of stale cake, so she could
pretend. She’d had more unpalatable things in her life. At least it wasn’t
slimy or moving.

So they had food. The aliens upstairs
were feeding them. That was a huge weight off her chest, she realised, her mood
greatly improving. Sure, she didn’t know how long she was supposed to make the
loaf last, but she was okay for the next couple of days at least.

Her cellmate tore off another chunk
and held it out to her, but Ruth held up her hand and shook her head. “I’m not
going to eat yours, big guy,” she said. He looked like he was ready to press
the issue so she quickly went and snatched the other loaf and brought it back.
He looked pleased and ate the piece he had in his hand.

Eating with him was quite congenial.
All other attempts at making friends had failed, but apparently the way to this
man’s heart really was through his stomach. She didn’t know if all was
forgiven, but at least they were sitting in the same half of the cell now. Her
hand troubled her a bit, but she could use it to hold the loaf down while she
tore with her left. Watching him eat was an experience. He wasn’t a messy
eater, not by a long way, but the flashes of teeth she got were a little
unsettling. His front teeth seemed to be thick, more like molars, but she was
debating upgrading his canines from fangs to tusks. He was like a sabre-tooth
tiger. His jaw was huge too, she imagined if he opened his mouth all the way,
to show those teeth or use them, she would probably be able to comfortably fit
her fist in there without touching anything. She renewed her conviction not to
piss him off.

She felt like she’d eaten a lot, but
hadn’t eaten even an eighth of the loaf. She could easily see herself picking
at it constantly just for something to do in here. She wondered if it would
make her gain any weight. If the loaf didn’t, the lack of movement would. It
wasn’t like she could take more than ten steps at a time in here.

Her mouth felt like a sand-pit, and
she was done with eating anyway. She went and got two of the ball things,
wanting the tutorial on how to drink from them. He took the one she passed to
him happily enough and she sat down opposite him, mirroring his cross-legged
pose. She held the orb in her hands and waited. It felt like rubber. He looked
at her for a moment, but didn’t play dumb, obligingly leaving his loaf for the
moment to deal with the orb.

Ruth watched as he located a mark on
it that she had missed earlier and picked at one side until he’d raised
something like a tab, which he then took carefully in his teeth and after a few
attempts managed to pull off. With his lips already sealed around the new hole
he tipped his head back and drank. He lowered his head again and looked at her,
the ball back in his hands. She realised he couldn’t put it down now it had a
hole in it because it was perfectly spherical.
A bit of a design flaw
,
she thought.

She turned her attention to her own
ball, ready to make her own attempt. She looked for the tab thingy, and found
that it was actually like the top of a strawberry or a grape, the place where a
stem used to be. This thing was a plant. A perfectly spherical, liquid-filled
fruit. Okay. She peeled up one side and took it in between her teeth, pulling
gently until it separated from the rest of it and the liquid ran into her
mouth. It was thicker than water, but very refreshing. It wasn’t as nice as
fruit juice, but the cut-grass taste wasn’t horrible either. Yes, this would do
nicely under the circumstances.