The Spawning (4 page)

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Miranda woke to the horror of drowning. She flailed mindlessly, trying to drag air into her nose, opening her mouth, even though she could feel the icy jell that seemed to envelope her,
knew
even through the madness of fear there was no air to breathe.

Abruptly, her chest heaved. She gagged, coughing up the thick jell that had surrounded her only seconds before.

Something hard clamped around her wrists and lifted her, making it feel as if

every joint in her body separated as she was hoisted clear of the pod. She was still too mindless and too beleaguered with the effort to expel the jell in her lungs, however, to have more than a fleeting awareness of being lifted and then lowered again. Her feet touched something solid, but although she tried to brace her knees instinctively, she sprawled on the hard floor as soon as she was released, coughing, gagging, and sputtering until she finally managed to heave in a lungful of air.

Something clamped around one of her wrists again, lifting her. Blinking, trying to focus her eyes, Miranda struggled to get her feet under her when she felt the pressure on her shoulder joint increasing to the point of agonizing pain.

“Move forward.”

She’d barely managed to lock her shaky knees to keep from collapsing again

when she heard the order. Shivering from the cold, her entire body feeling as heavy as if she’d just climbed from a pool after hours of swimming, thoroughly disoriented, Miranda nevertheless responded to the command, taking one trembling step forward with a tremendous effort. She couldn’t see, couldn’t fully open her eyes for the gluttonous mess that kept trying to slide into her eyes with every blink. Lifting a hand with an effort, she tried to wipe her eyes but discovered there was as much of the jelly like substance on her fingers as there was on her face.

Squinting, she finally managed to fix her gaze on the naked back of the woman in front of her and staggered in a drunken path behind her, halting when the woman stopped, shuffling forward again when the woman moved.

She was barely aware of passing from the room she was in into another room until she was blasted with water that was nearly as icy as the sticky jell that coated her skin.

The temperature took her breath. The water, pelting her from every direction, managed to make it up her nostrils and into her throat, strangling her.

The robots herding them, drove them all into a clumsy run once they’d emerged

from the ‘shower’ and been briefly blasted with air nearly as frigid as the water. Still weak, half blind, thoroughly bewildered, and coughing and choking from the water and the remnants of the jell their lungs continued to expel, the group slipped, skidded, and collided with each other, the walls, and the floor until they ran out of anywhere to run to.

Huddling in a terrified, shivering mass, most of the women were either wailing loudly or THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 17

weeping quietly when the doors shut behind them, sealing them into a profound darkness that might have been a tomb for all any of them knew.

The wails became screams as the ‘room’ they were in abruptly fell. It was the first Miranda had felt any sense of motion since she’d awoken to the nightmare, but she was one of the few who didn’t scream—mostly because she was just too terrified even to find her voice. The screaming was deafening, reached a fever pitch and rolled around them in waves as they continued to fall endlessly.

The most prolific screamers among them were hoarse long before the ‘room’ they were in began to bounce, shake, and jolt as if some giant held them and meant to shake them to death. They tumbled about the room, colliding painfully with each other and the walls, ceiling, and floor, over and over until gravity plastered them to the floor.

Or rather the ceiling.

They made that discovery when the ‘can’ holding them abruptly decelerated and

they all landed on the floor in a crumpled tangle of bodies, groaning in pain—those still conscious enough to manage at least that much.

Miranda was too stunned even to attempt movement at first, too wary that she

might discover they actually hadn’t stopped falling to consider trying to disentangle herself and get up. Instinctively, though, her mind performed an internal inventory for damage assessment even while it struggled for orientation that would tell her which end was up.

She hurt in too many places to catalogue and at that she still thought she might be better off than many of the others. She was conscious. She was pretty sure many of the others weren’t, might not even still be alive.

It occurred to her after a time that they couldn’t have fallen regardless of what it had seemed like. The fall hadn’t just
seemed
endless. It had lasted a very, very long time and, that being the case, they would all certainly be dead if whatever it was they were in actually had fallen.

The door where they’d entered opened. Blinding light and a warm gust of air

spilled inside.

Miranda blinked at the sudden assault, her eyes watering.

“Please stand and exit in an orderly manner.”

Rage abruptly surged through Miranda at the calm, indifferent command after

what they’d just endured. If there’d been any way in hell she could’ve managed it, she thought she would’ve pounded that hunk of fucking metal and wires into a pulp. It took her several minutes even to extricate herself from the women around her and find a spot on the floor to place her feet that wasn’t already occupied with some part of someone’s body. Groaning, one by one the women around her also began trying to right themselves.

“Please exit in an orderly manner or I will begin firing randomly in twenty

seconds, nineteen, eighteen ….”

Screaming hoarsely, three women stumbled toward the door in a blind panic and

wedged themselves into the opening. Right behind them, frightened near witless herself, Miranda gave the nearest one a shove that broke the clog. She nearly rolled down the gangplank as she stumbled out behind the woman, still unable to see very clearly and caught completely off guard by the discovery that the floor beyond the ‘room’ was no longer a level corridor, but a sharp incline.

A chorus of weak, hoarse cries followed as the remainder of the women

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 18

scrambled to obey before the robot started firing on them. Several women were knocked down in the stampede to comply and either stepped on or tripped over by the women shoving behind them. In the melee, it was many minutes after she’d reached the ground before Miranda collected herself enough to look around and when she had she couldn’t assimilate what her senses were feeding her about her surroundings.

The heat was the first thing that really penetrated her mind but even that was slow in coming because the chill from the jell and the hosing had penetrated bone deep and it took her mind minutes to register something it would’ve recorded instantly under most circumstances. It took longer to recognize that the difficulty she was having breathing was from the humidity—not from the painful bruising of her ribs or the residual aftereffects of having her lungs filled with fluids … or jell, whatever it was that she’d been packed in for the trip.

She wasn’t on Earth.

Her mind told her that even while it scrambled madly to try to identify her

surroundings with information stored in her brain that was totally useless to her now. A jungle surrounded them, but it was no Earth jungle. Beyond the familiarity of colors—

shades of green, gray, and brown like she’d never seen, but still colors she knew—there was nothing that even vaguely resembled any plant—flower, shrub, tree, or grass she’d ever seen in pictures or otherwise.

As soon as she’d noted the alien landscape, she lifted her head to scan the sky, staring at the enormous orange ball and the murky, sulfurish-yellow sky until she was jostled by one of the other women. She glanced around at her traveling companions, then, wondering if she wore the same completely bewildered expressions they did, wondering if her eyes looked as vacant.

One of the three legged bots she’d encountered in the bath/horror room, she saw, was affixing manacles around the right ankles of the women while another busily threaded a chain through the eye of each. She watched them dully for several moments before she lifted her head to look around again.

A jolt went through her, penetrating the fog of her chaotic mind when she realized that one of the ‘robots’ she’d dismissed wasn’t a robot at all. It was … a being, a very alien being, in a spacesuit. She stared at it, trying to wrap her mind around the newest assault to her senses, wondering if her mind had simply shattered at some point.

After a few moments, she realized it—the thing in the suit which, although

humanoid, reminded her most strongly of a lizard—was assessing the condition of the women and counting heads. When that dawned on her, she looked around to assess them herself.

Bruised, battered … and naked, dazed, but with the beginnings of fear in their eyes, she discovered they were all looking around hopelessly just as she was.

She had no idea whether the group included everyone that had been driven into

the ‘cell’ or not. She didn’t notice anyone that hadn’t been in the cell with her at first, but there had certainly been more women than the original group she’d been confined with when they’d been ‘packed’. Turning slightly at that thought, she looked back up the ramp.

The ship that had transported them to the surface of the world was a clunky,

battered-looking thing that looked as if it had seen a great deal of use—maybe more than it should’ve seen.

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 19

It was a ship, though, clearly a space going vessel.

She was almost surprised that she didn’t feel any surprise.

Maybe her mind
had
broken? She felt oddly detached—in mind, at least. Her body was throbbing from so many assaults that it seemed one mass of pain, not

excruciating pain, but certainly at a miserable level. She supposed by that that she’d arrived miraculously unhurt—nothing broken or damaged beyond repair.

She moved forward when she was ordered to and allowed the machines to clamp

a manacle around her right ankle as it had the others. When they’d been chained together, the alien fell in behind one of the robots, which appeared, from Miranda’s perspective nearly at the end of the line of women, to be flattening the jungle growth and creating a path for them all to follow.

When she reached the edge of the clearing where the ship had landed it seemed

that supposition had been borne up. The freshly crushed vegetation was still sticky under her bare feet. It was prickly, as well, uncomfortable and in some places downright painful to trod on. She tried to watch for sharp splinters after the first one she stepped on.

The wondrous sense of detachment that had gripped her began to dissipate as they were engulfed in the alien jungle. She thought, if it had been a jungle on Earth that it would’ve given her the creeps. The strangeness of the trees and plants and the possibility of equally alien creatures slithering through the bizarre foliage—and the possibility of something big enough and ferocious enough to eat them—only made it more unnerving.

She felt her skin prickle despite the heat and the humidity, glancing fearfully to either side of the narrow trail for any sign of threat.

They’d been trudging for at least thirty minutes when Miranda spotted a wall

rising above the jungle. Her heart thudded dully in her chest with uneasiness as the realization slowly sank into her that they’d come at last to the destination the aliens had had in mind from the time she’d been taken.

Now, for better or worse, she’d have the answers she’d set out to discover the night she’d gone to the club to try to find out what had happened to the women who’d gone missing.

Much good it would do her or any of them!

There were gates in the wall—gates that stood open, banishing the thought that had popped into her mind that it was some sort of prison, or at least a fortress. The lizard-man stopped at the gate, apparently counting heads as the robots continued to herd them forward until they’d all passed through the opening in the wall.

Limited in her movements by the tether on her ankle, Miranda stopped when

everyone else did, lifting her head to stare assessingly at her surroundings. There wasn’t much to see. The place seemed deserted and there wasn’t anything dotting the broad courtyard where they’d halted beyond three containers that reminded her of the large, open trash bins she’d seen at construction sites. Two of them appeared to be full almost to overflowing with something, but she certainly couldn’t identify it.

Lizard-man followed them into the compound, looked around, and finally pointed to the wall they’d passed through. Miranda turned to look. Seeing that the wall had cast deep shade over a wedge of the bare dirt, she headed toward it with a sense of relief.

It was short lived. The fucking chains on their ankles made sitting in any real comfort nearly impossible and damned awkward to achieve. Finally, though, they all managed to sit, their backs against the cool, if uncomfortably rough, stone wall. The THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 20

coarse soil wasn’t particularly comfortable against bare buttocks, if it came to that, but all in all, it was the closest to comfort any of them had had since they’d been snatched from the storage pods they’d been transported in.

Weak and shaky, Miranda drew her knees up and propped her cheek on them.

The temptation to close her eyes and yield to the weakness and just sleep was aborted when she discovered that the courtyard gave way to a vast expanse of water. It was hard to say what sort of water—possibly man-made—or at least artificial. The walls of the fortress, she saw, extended well out into the water, encompassing perhaps three times the area of the courtyard itself—which became beach-like in her mind. The water was relatively still, though, probably due to the walls.

She was still scanning the water, trying to ignore her parched throat when she saw something bob up in the water. Her eyes instantly focused on it and then she saw several other ‘things’—heads, she realized after a moment. As she stared, dumbstruck, she saw necks, chests, torsos and then legs as the man-like creatures seemed to walk, not swim, out of the sea.