The Spawning (3 page)

“Try me,” Miranda said grimly.

Carol gnawed her lower lip. “We’re pretty sure we’ve been ‘taken’.”

Oddly enough, Miranda didn’t feel any urge to laugh. She did feel perfectly

blank for several moments before she managed to come up with a definition that seemed to fit the connotations. “’Taken’ as in ‘the rapture’?” she asked cautiously.

“Taken as in aliens,” Deborah said flatly.

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 11

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 12

Chapter Two

Trying to ignore the sick feeling in her stomach that had nothing to do with a suspicion that they were all crazy and everything to do with the fact that the answer seemed a lot more believable than it ought to, Miranda studied every frightened face that met her gaze until she’d made the rounds. Finally, she looked at Deborah again. “What makes you believe this has anything to do with extra-terrestrials?”

Deborah’s face crumpled. “The beam of light? The robot? The transport room

we all woke up in when we first got here? The door none of us can see until that damned robot shows up with somebody else!” she finished, gesturing to the blank wall Miranda had examined.

“You think we were beamed aboard an alien vessel?” Miranda asked slowly,

trying to wrap her mind around it. At the same time, a dozen questions and doubts rose and tumbled around in her mind. There was no sense of movement … at all. She didn’t feel pressure like she always had when she’d been in an airplane or even when she went up in a particularly tall building. She felt gravity pulling at her, not a sense of weightlessness, and it felt ‘normal’, not artificial in any way, not less than or more than she was used to feeling.

Deborah let out a huff of irritation. “Why don’t you think about it a while and let us know what you come up with?” she snapped angrily.

The problem was she couldn’t think. Her head felt as numb as the rest of her

body.

Well, not numb in the sense that she was unaware of the chill. Her feet felt like blocks of ice from the little walking she’d done, and her entire body ached as if she was coming down with the flu. But numb as in clueless, confused, and unable to process the little bit of information that seemed to be getting through to her brain. After merely staring at the frightened, angry woman for a moment, she nodded, looked around until she identified the cot she’d woken on and headed toward it.

It was actually more like the floor than a cot. The moment she sat down, she

realized there wasn’t even a thin mat covering the hard platform let alone a mattress of any description. The ‘blanket’ she pulled up to cover herself with wasn’t a blanket either. It felt more like plastic sheeting or Mylar.

She lay staring up at the platform above her for a while, trying to sort her jumbled impressions, memories, and the comments the women had made and finally surprised herself by falling asleep.

She was awakened by a stir in the room that she identified as a wave of hysteria even as her eyes snapped open.

The robot she’d shot the day before, or one just like it, was standing in the center of the room. “Move to door to be processed,” the robot intoned in a strangely mechanical voice, sounding like the pieced together recordings of a human voice arranged and rearranged to say different things.

Startled gasps went up from some of the women, frightened little squeals from

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 13

others, but beyond that, their only response was to scramble as far from the robot as they could get and cower in terror. The robot swiveled toward the knot of women at one end of the cell. A beam of light about the circumference of a pencil shot from its boxy head, hitting one of the unfortunate women in the forefront. She jolted all over in spasms as if she’d been hit with a taser, her eyes rolling back in her head. When the beam ceased, she dropped to the floor, still convulsing.

Screaming, the other women in the room leapt up and stampeded toward the

opening that had appeared in the wall. Miranda bailed out of her own bunk. Still punch drunk from being awakened so abruptly, she stared blankly at the woman on the floor as the robot moved awkwardly toward her prone form on its three mechanical legs. A pneumatic arm extended toward her, the manacle like hand clamping around her ankle.

Miranda stared in horror at the thing as it turned, dragging the unconscious woman behind it.

It halted when it spied her. “Move to door to be processed.”

Swallowing convulsively, Miranda headed toward the opening. She discovered

when she’d emerged from the cell that she was in a long, curving corridor that seemed to go on forever.

It was clogged with women, far more women than those who’d shared her cell

with her. Her heart squeezed painfully in her chest, but she couldn’t seem to assimilate what her eyes were telling her.

She counted fifty women before the curve in the corridor cut off her view.

Wondering whether there were even more around the bend, or if there was some

blockage ahead that had resulted in the ‘jam’, Miranda glanced uneasily behind her as the robot dragged the unconscious woman from the cell and stopped behind her, cutting off any hope of retreat.

Not that it had occurred to her until that moment to consider it.

Struggling against the fear that was trying to edge past the shock that had

cocooned her, Miranda surveyed her surroundings. Except for the floor, which was flat and as smooth and seamless as glass, the entire corridor had the curvature of a tube.

There didn’t seem to be an obvious source of light. The ceiling itself just seemed to glow with a strange greenish-yellow light that Miranda found uncomfortable, that seemed to prevent her eyes from focusing properly.

There was nothing else to see beyond the robot Miranda was acutely conscious of behind her, but she wasn’t anxious to study it after she’d seen what it was capable of.

No one on Earth had anything like it.

She knew that.

She was as certain as she could be that she would’ve heard something about such a technological breakthrough as a robot fully capable and armed as a guard, a robot that at least appeared capable of assessing the situation on its own and reacting.

It was still impossible to accept the completely unacceptable explanation Deborah had supplied her with.

She wasn’t certain if that was because it just wasn’t logical or because she just didn’t want to.

She’d shuffled forward several yards before she heard a faint groan behind her that alerted her to the fact that the woman who’d been knocked out was coming around.

She flicked a glance over her shoulder as she heard the gasp that followed.

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 14

“Your cooperation will be appreciated,” the robot said. “Get up and stand in line with the others.”

The woman whimpered, hysteria edging her voice.

“I’d do as it says,” Miranda murmured warningly as she met the woman’s gaze.

For several moments she wondered if the woman was even rational enough to

grasp the warning, but she clamped her lips together and, when the robot released her, she scrambled to her feet and bolted into Miranda, nearly shoving her into the woman in front of her.

“What are they doing? Where are they taking us?” the woman babbled, digging

her fingernails into Miranda’s arms.

“I don’t know. None of us know,” Miranda responded, trying to disentangle

herself from the woman, then added in an attempt to soothe her, “They want us alive. We wouldn’t be alive now if they didn’t have some use for us. Try to stay calm.”

The woman nodded jerkily, but her eyes were still wide with terror. “You think?”

she whispered hoarsely, an unmistakable note of pleading in her eyes.

Miranda didn’t have a clue and what was worse, the woman’s hysteria was

beginning to infect her and every other woman within hearing. “Some of the women have already been here a couple of days,” she pointed out, as much to reassure herself as everyone else.

It
did
seem to reassure them—even reassured her—and she didn’t have a fucking clue of whether she was right or not.

It seemed logical, though, she told herself. They’d been kidnapped. They,

whoever, or whatever ‘they’ were, wanted something.

She discovered when she’d shuffled forward several more yards that there was a door beyond the bend. Every twenty minutes or so, by her best guess, it opened silently, the robot standing at the front of the line shoved a half dozen women through, and then the door closed again.

Miranda’s stomach knotted with fear.

As hard as she tried to convince herself that there had to be another explanation for the situation, the presence of the robots—and no humans besides the captives, the strange lights, the unfamiliar materials that surrounded them—everything seemed to point to the unlikelihood that anything human, from Earth, could be behind their captivity.

She tried to direct her mind away from her churning bowels and the aching

bladder she hadn’t noticed before, wondering how many hours had passed since she’d been kidnapped. The full bladder indicated at least three or four, but then she’d had one and a half mixed drinks before she’d left the club.

She’d visited the lady’s room before she’d left, though.

Her hearing seemed to have returned to normal. That usually took several hours.

She’d been knocked out, though, twice—and she’d slept at least a few hours. The sluggishness she felt seemed to be the aftereffects of not enough sleep, but could have been the result of the alcohol in her system and/or whatever they’d knocked her out with.

She managed to occupy herself with trying to calculate the time until she reached the doors that had caused the slow build of hysteria inside of her until it was all she could do to refrain from screaming and trying to claw her way over the robot behind her. She almost felt let down when the doors slid open and she discovered she’d been shoved THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 15

inside what looked almost like a community bath.

It would’ve looked more like one and banished much of her terror if she hadn’t discovered a spider-like robot on the other side. “Empty bowels and bladders and then proceed to the decontamination showers,” the thing intoned in the same eerily

mechanical voice as the other robot, lifting two arms/legs and pointing to either side of the room.

As jolting as that order was, it was nothing compared to the discovery that more robots were waiting to ‘assist’ in the evacuation. Miranda discovered she was terrified enough by that time that her bowels had turned to water. She didn’t
need
a fucking enema, but she got one anyway.

Weak and thoroughly rung out from the experience, her legs felt like jelly as she was herded with the others to the decontamination showers, sprayed down with

something foamy from the top of her head to the bottoms of her feet, and then hosed off.

Her eyes and nose were still stinging when she was blasted with air that drove the excess fluids from her skin but still left her damp and shivering as she was shoved through another door that appeared just beyond the decontamination area. The woman at the very front of the line balked when she saw what was beyond the door.

A robot clamped a manacle-like hand on her wrist and snatched her through,

dragging her toward one of the waiting gurneys. Knowing it was useless, they all fought.

And it
was
useless.

What followed was an examination that was more nightmarish than anything

Miranda had ever experienced and painful enough she wondered if it was actually intended as torture. She was stabbed with needles, every orifice thoroughly examined, including her sex. She was clamped to the table so that she couldn’t actually see what was going on ‘below’, but her legs had been clamped into something frighteningly similar to the support stirrups of a gynecologist’s table and when her womb spasmed painfully she knew they’d removed her IUD.

She didn’t know why, but the pain in her belly on top of the pain still radiating through her from her bowels was too pervasive to allow for much thought. She was just relieved when the poking and painful prodding finally stopped and the clamps opened.

A robot grasped her wrist, half lifting, half dragging her from the table.

“Diseased.”

The pronouncement pierced her shock sufficiently to capture her attention.

Miranda glanced around in time to see a robot dragging one of the women out a different door than she and the other women were being herded toward. Her heart squeezed painfully in her chest, although she wasn’t actually aware of what had caused her fear to spike, whether it was some vague awareness of the woman’s fate or just fear of what her own was to be.

It seemed frighteningly significant, though, that the woman had been pronounced

‘diseased’ and promptly separated from the rest of the herd.

She
felt
like a herd animal—an animal being led to the slaughter.

She tried her best to close her mind to that terrifying thought.

Each door had seemed to lead them all deeper into nightmare, though, and

Miranda discovered the third door was no different. She saw as she was dragged through it that she’d stepped into a cavernous warehouse-like room filled with strange lozenges that seemed to be on some sort of rotating shelves. She struggled mindlessly against the THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 16

grip on her wrist, fought for all she was worth as the robot, with the single-mindedness and complete lack of emotion of a machine, dragged her to one of the lozenges, shoved her inside, and closed the lid.

She began battering against it the moment she was released, screaming, cursing—

making so much noise she didn’t hear the hiss of the gases entering the chamber, had no awareness that she was being knocked out until the cloudiness enveloped her mind and she lost tone in every muscle. Terror filled her briefly as she felt the liquid filling the coffin she’d been shoved into and then even that floated away.