Alien Slave (34 page)

The attacking force had seemed huge,
numbering at least two dozen. Where had they gone?

Krijero shoved him aside as he sat up.
Gelan joined Wynhod in scanning the trees surrounding them, sure
another offensive was going to be launched at any moment. But
Krijero’s horrified cry stole his attention.

Gelan’s blood ran cold at as the Imdiko
screamed, “Where’s Dani?”

* * * *

Dani ran blindly, her mind gibbering
panic, her vision still filled with the sight of hordes of Tragooms
with hog-like faces, curved tusks, and glittering knives. Of the
Kalquorians taking on two, three, four of the foul beasts at a
time. Of Krijero stumbling and falling. Of monsters reaching for
her only to be knocked back by the Kalquorians.

She didn’t remember racing off. Animal
instinct had taken over, sending her into flight the moment an
opening in the wall of fighting opened up. Even now, she wasn’t
bothered with coherent thought. There was only the need to run, to
escape, to hide.

Dani didn’t notice the branches
slapping her face and body as she dashed through the bog. The
splash of her passage made no impression. She felt no pain when she
stumbled and fell. She was on her feet again without thought,
running, running, running, not daring to look back.

Even as hard as her legs pumped, the
trees crawled past with nightmarish slowness. She might as well
have crawled for all the progress she seemed to make. Her feet were
blocks of concrete, her legs as sludgy as the muck that dragged at
her. The air she hauled into her burning lungs wasn’t nearly
enough, a mere drop of oxygen when she needed barrels to fuel her
flight.

Snarls and grunts chased after her,
growing louder as her pursuers gained on her. Their footsteps
quaked the ground beneath her. The snap of branches, the explosions
of trunks broken as they chased her down filled her ears and fed
her terror.

The stench of death, rancid like a
mountain of rotting corpses, invaded her nostrils. They were
gaining on her. They would catch her and add her to the pile of
broken, bloody bodies to putrefy in the hot, sweltering tomb of
LXS-42.

She saw the cloven-hooflike hand
descending from the corner of her eye and put on a desperate,
last-ditch burst of speed. It wasn’t enough. The grayish-armored
appendage clapped down on her shoulder, closed painfully on it, and
jerked her around to face the Tragoom that had caught
her.

She screamed, a long trail of audible
terror. Then they tossed her amongst themselves, a rag doll for
their amusement. The world whirled around her in nauseating turns:
pinkish sky glimpsed through tree branches, brown sludgy ground
trampled by heavy feet, thick gray rhinoceros-like hides, yellowed
tusks. And the rank stench that seemed to spell her doom more
succinctly than the grasping hoof-hands.

One of the fiends caught her, ending
the game of toss. It held her close to its hard, unforgiving body,
filling her gaze with its monstrous face. It leered and laughed,
rubbing itself against her. She screamed at the sight of sharp
teeth and the feel of a massive erection the size of her
thigh.

* * * *

“
Go!” Flailing impotently on
his injured ankle, Krijero shouted at the sound of Dani’s scream
unraveling thinly in the air. “I’ll be fine. Help her!”

He hadn’t finished urging them on
before Wynhod and Gelan set off, easily tracking the wide swath of
the Tragooms’ passage. A second scream, one filled with absolute
terror that made Wynhod’s guts curdle, followed.

They were badly outnumbered. They were
leaving a lame Krijero behind. But the vicious brutes that had
killed many a Kalquorian, including members of the Nobek’s own
birth family, had Dani. Wynhod had seen firsthand what Tragooms did
to females.

He and Gelan had paused only long
enough to snatch extra percussion blasters from the fallen enemy.
If they died, it wouldn’t be for a lack of firepower.

They swept through the heavily wooded
swamp, their passage eased by the knocked over trees the Tragooms
had left in their haste. Gelan paused where the destruction ended,
where the footprints indicated the beasts had stopped running. Had
they paused here to do something to Dani? Neither sight nor smell
indicated any trace of spilled Earther blood.

Yet.

A less destructive path swept towards
the northwest, showing the Tragooms had re-organized before
continuing on. The bastards, despite their clumsy looking bulks,
could move fast. They were no doubt heading straight to their ship
with their prize. Kalquorians weren’t the only race enthralled with
the sweet, soft flesh of Earther women. Now he knew why their
attackers hadn’t simply blown the clan away with blasters. They’d
wanted Dani alive. With barely a glance exchanged, Wynhod and Gelan
shot after their quarry.

Over a dozen Tragooms, armed to their
yellowed tusks, versus two Kalquorians, desperate to regain their
Matara. If not for Dani’s endangerment, Wynhod would find the odds
exhilarating. Even with the Earther’s life on the line, he looked
forward to the coming encounter. He couldn’t help himself; he was a
Nobek after all.

Half a step behind Gelan, he plunged on
through the swamp.

* * * *

As the Tragooms ran through the marshy
woods, the splash of their heavy treads turned to sucking sounds as
higher elevations took them to mucky ground. They huffed in bestial
grunts as they went, but they showed no sign of slowing.

Slung over a Tragoom’s shoulder, Dani
pounded its back. Its rancid, rotten egg smell made her gag and her
eyes water. She’d never known anything that possessed a more
noxious stench. She fought as much to escape the odor as the
creature that emitted it. The Tragoom wore ill-fitting armor that
hurt her fists much more than she could hope to hurt the beast
wearing it. Still, she couldn’t just surrender to her fate, so she
kicked and hit and squirmed and fought.

Dani had no doubt these monstrous
bastards had killed Gelan’s clan. They’d been so badly outnumbered,
there was no way the Kalquorians had survived. The despair that
came with that realization made her choke. She had told them she
didn’t think she could take another life, not even to save her own.
But if she’d been able to grab the percussion blaster slung on the
Tragoom’s hip, just inches away from her reach, she thought she
might prove herself wrong. Vengeance had its own power when it came
to quelling conscience.

Dani managed to grab a thick branch as
they passed a tree, partially broken off. She finished the limb’s
amputation and used it to whale enthusiastically on the Tragoom
carrying her. “Put me down you nasty hog-faced bastard!”

With a mighty heave, the Tragoom threw
her to the ground. Her body hit with a meaty thud, knocking the
breath from her lungs and the branch from her hand. She lay there
stunned as the beast loomed over her. With a grunt that sounded
full of cruel laughter, it peeled back the scrap of cloth at its
groin, exposing a warty male sex as big around and long as Dani’s
thigh. It kneeled down, grasping her ankles and spreading her legs
wide.

Dani shrieked, knowing the horrible
thing would disembowel her with the first thrust. “No!”

She struggled to no avail as other
Tragooms crowded around, squealing their companion on. It yanked
her hard, pulling her sex into position.

Suddenly another Tragoom, one wearing a
bandoleer full of knives, yanked her would-be rapist away. There
was a lot of loud snorting as the other one jumped to its feet and
confronted it. While they got into each others’ faces, screeching
threateningly one snout to another, a third Tragoom dragged Dani
across the ground and crouched over her, simultaneously holding her
struggling body down and freeing his horrid cock as he prepared to
take advantage of the dust up. A fourth Tragoom dragged him off
before he could do any damage.

Suddenly most of the group was
fighting, pounding each other with mighty booms of cloven fists on
armored skin. Dani leapt up to run, but another Tragoom, one not
engaged in combat, slung her over his shoulder and stepped back
from the battle. It watched, snuffling as its fellows beat the hell
out of one another, unmindful of Dani’s desperate punches as she
tried to get free.

Screams of pain and anger blasted the
woods as the fight raged. Suddenly, two percussion blasts rang out,
making Dani’s ears pop. She managed to twist in her captor’s grip
enough to see what was going on.

The Tragoom party had frozen, all their
tiny eyes directed at the bandoleer-wearing Tragoom. The creature
glared around at them, a blaster in each hand. Two of its fellows
lay unmoving at its feet.

It snorted and snuffed at everyone,
obviously issuing orders and threats. Everyone got to their feet
and fell in line. Then Bandoleer eyed Dani and grinned. It stroked
itself and nodded before grunting at the Tragoom holding Dani. It
also got into line, and they resumed running on as if the fight had
never taken place, leaving the fallen behind.

Hopelessness took Dani’s will to
struggle away. She knew her rape and death had only been delayed.
Her lone hope of escaping the horror lay in getting hold of a
blaster and keeping it long enough to kill herself. The chances of
that mercy were incredibly slim.

It can’t end this way. But Dani knew it
might.

* * * *

Gelan scowled at the two dead Tragooms.
“Damn it. They’re fighting over her already.”

Wynhod was prancing with impatience in
spirit, though not in body. Only minute twinges gave away his
desperate need to hurry after Dani. “She stopped screaming two
minutes ago.”

Both their heads went up at the sound
of faraway splashing back the way they’d come. Gelan blew out a
breath of tolerant frustration. “I wish Krijero would stay behind.
He’s in no condition to fight.”

Wynhod had already brought his
attention back to the task at hand. He bent to sniff at the ground.
“He’s in love with her, the same as we are. He’ll die trying to
save her.” He paused at a patch of ground, picked up a large
branch, and inhaled deeply. “Her scent. But no sign of Earther
blood.”

“
Only Tragooms were hurt
then. She’s still alive. Let’s go.”

They chased after, neither discussing
the terrible end Dani would come to if they didn’t get to her in
time. She wouldn’t survive a Tragoom rape, not even if they arrived
to stop it midway through.

Gelan fought off a surge of panic, but
he did encourage his Nobek to run faster. “Hurry, Wynhod. They’re
not hiding their trail, which means their ship is near. They could
take off at any moment.”

Wynhod growled in response, and they
raced as hard as they could go.

* * * *

Dani ached all over from bouncing on
the Tragoom’s shoulder and back. But when the group slowed, sick
terror bloomed. They were nearing the end of the journey, and what
waited for her would be a billion times worse than jolting across
the uneven terrain.

The trees ended in a clearing much like
the one Reggie had crashed his ship in. Another ship waited there,
so haphazardly constructed that at first Dani thought it too had
crashed on LXS-42.

But her mind was on much more terrible
things as the Tragooms began squealing their
fingernails-on-chalkboard speech at each other. Their headache of a
spaceship was the last thing on her mind.

Some Tragooms moved towards the ship.
Others stood in loose groups, staring at her and poking one another
as they planned … God, she didn’t want to think about what they
were planning. Bandoleer Tragoom stalked up to the one that held
her and began to screechy-squeal.

The Tragoom whose shoulder she draped
across returned the squeals. Its hold loosened just a bit. Seizing
the opportunity, Dani lunged for the blaster attached to its
belt.

The Tragoom grabbed to secure her,
possibly thinking she was trying to escape. At any rate, it didn’t
attempt to block her from grabbing its sidearm. The weapon was
huge, built for hands much larger than Dani’s, but she wrapped both
hands around it. As the Tragoom yanked her upwards, trying to get
her back into position over its shoulder, she used the additional
momentum to rear up vertical into the air.

Running on pure instinct, she shoved
the blaster into the Tragoom’s face and fired. With an ear-ringing
shoo-wup the beast’s head disintegrated. As it collapsed, leaving
her to fall too, she twisted and shot the bandoleered Tragoom as
well, cutting it down in a pounding crescendo. Then she hit the
ground.

Lips skinned back from her teeth in an
unknowing snarl, Dani balled herself into a crouch and fired at the
other Tragooms, who shrieked as they dove for cover. After a space
of five seconds, they recovered their senses enough to fire back,
and she was forced to hug the ground, using the now headless
Tragoom as a shield. The air shuddered, and the blasts deafened
her. Her arms howled agony at the kick of the blaster that she
continued to fire.

Dani had no illusions about her living
through this. All she could do was take as many of the bastards
that had killed her clan with her, a hollow victory at best. It
sucked that her greatest option lay in dying by blaster fire than
being raped to death.