Genesis (2 page)

She studied it for several moments more and finally moved across the room to the easy chair. It was as well she’d begun to feel deeply suspicious of everything in the room because, although the thing looked like an overstuffed easy chair, it was just as hard and unyielding as the ‘bed’.

She settled on it anyway, looking around the room while it slowly sank into her mind that where ever she was at, she was
not
in a hotel room.

Fear began to creep into her, try though she might to hold it at bay. Flashes of memory from her ‘nightmares’ went through her mind, but she couldn’t seem to fully grasp anything. She remembered being afraid. She remembered that she hadn’t been able to run, or scream, but whereas before remembering that had reassured her that the images had been part of some sort of strange dream, it failed to comfort her.

She’d felt drugged when she woke up. If she had been, then that would also account for the gaps in her memory, and not being able to move or speak.

Trying to discount the fear clawing at her, Bri got up and moved around the room, checking everything. The TV, like the bed and the chair, was merely a hollow box, formed in the shape of what it was supposed to be. The ‘chest’ the TV was resting on wasn’t a chest either. The drawers didn’t open.

The light switch didn’t work.

The curtains didn’t cover a window, either. When she shoved the curtains back, she found that the source of the light wasn’t the sun at all. It was a glowing box.

Struggling with the urge to give into hysteria, she moved to the furthest corner from the door, slid down to the floor, and curled into a tight ball against the wall, staring at the door that should have been the exit to the room and wasn’t.

Time passed. She had no way of marking it beyond the slow cramping of muscles from being held tensely for a long time, the cold seeping up through the floor and into her until she began to shake. When she couldn’t stand the chill any longer, she got up and moved to the platform that posed as a bed and dragged the coverlet around her.

Like everything else in the room, it wasn’t actually what it appeared to be. It wasn’t nice, fluffy, insulating cotton or polyester fibers sandwiched between woven fabric panels. She’d been too disoriented earlier to notice, but the moment she gathered it around her for warmth she realized the thing was made of some material unknown to her but rather closer to plastic than fabric. She clutched it around her anyway, trying to hold her own warmth close, still tense with fear.

In time, the fear lessened because she became too tired to hang on to it and there’d been no overt threat. She knew the danger was as real now as it had been before she’d become aware of it, and since she’d first become aware of it, but high emotion was exhausting. She’d actually begun to doze when a scraping sound brought her to full alert again. Jerking upright, she looked around the room with wide, terror filled eyes. When she didn’t see anything she could identify as a threat, she calmed slightly and looked more closely.

There was a plate of food and a cup sitting on the table near the fake window. She stared at it, but she knew it hadn’t been there before. After looking all around it to see if she could figure out where it had come from and coming up empty, she settled against the hard ‘bed’ again, pulled the cover tightly around her, and lay staring at the wall with her back to the ‘offering’.

It would have been harder to ignore it if not for two circumstances.

She couldn’t smell it.

And nothing in the room, so far, had been ‘real’ in the sense that it actually was what it was made to represent. In all likelihood, the food was made out of the same stuff that everything else had been molded from and completely inedible, however appealing it looked.

She’d replayed her scattered memories over and over in her mind until she had begun to have a horrendous picture in her mind that she could not dismiss and still had trouble accepting.

She hadn’t gotten out of her car. She knew that now. She’d blacked out for some unknown period of time and woken inside something vaguely like a hanger. And the strange, horrible, many legged creatures had come out of the dark and disassembled her car.

There’d been blinding light before she lost consciousness. She could remember thinking a helicopter must be above her with one of those blindingly bright spot lights they used.

And after she’d been taken from the car, she’d been in a room filled with men wearing strange looking suits--except they weren’t men at all. They’d been humanoid, but they hadn’t looked human when they’d placed her on something like an examination table and studied her.

She’d finally narrowed everything down to two possibilities.

Either her mind had snapped and she had woken up in a mental institute.

Or she’d been taken.

Chapter Two

Bri discovered she’d been wrong about having no way to mark the time. Hunger came, gnawed at her, and dissipated. Her bladder filled, and she was forced to go back into the bathroom and use the toilet, which she found was an unnerving experience and hard to grow accustomed to. The light in the fake window dimmed and brightened as if marking the cycle of the sun.

She was in a habitat, she realized, not a mental institution, a habitat designed specifically for the human animal by a species not human and therefore unfamiliar with the objects they had so carefully placed inside her cage to make her feel ‘at home’.

The room had dimmed when she heard a hiss that startled her from a state near sleep to complete wakefulness.

She registered a strange smell a split second before she felt the effects of the gas they’d filled the room with. In spite of all she could do, she felt herself falling under the effects of it, growing heavy, weak, and very quickly unable to move at all.

She would almost have welcomed complete unconsciousness, but she supposed they were afraid that might kill her.

She hung on to the thought that they wanted her alive.

She was placed on something that moved like before, a gurney she supposed, and taken to another room, the same room, she thought, that she’d dreamed before that had looked like an examination room in a hospital or perhaps a surgery room.

This time her clothing was removed. She wasn’t certain how. One moment, she was clothed, the next she was naked.

There as a strong similarity to the things they did to experiences she’d had over the course of her life with doctors. The instruments they used looked strange and unrecognizable, but then so, too, did most medical instruments, and her mind was too foggy for her to trust her perceptions. It could have been exactly the same things used by doctors on Earth, but she didn’t think so anymore than she believed the men around her were just ordinary human beings distorted by drugs into seeming like monsters.

Her perceptions
were
distorted, however. She knew that. Mostly, she was only aware of pressure here and there, occasionally almost to the point of pain, but she was only mildly discomforted.

The main reason she knew her perceptions were distorted, however, was because she knew she would have been terrified if she had not been drugged.

She still felt a vague sense of relief when they returned her to the habitat.

Assuming the light was an indication of Earth days passing, by her reckoning three days passed before she woke to discover a change in her circumstances that was more disturbing than anything before.

She’d been afraid to eat or drink. The hunger, after the first day of fasting, wasn’t as hard to deal with as she’d thought it would be because she wasn’t hungry all the time. The hunger was painful, but it would pass. The steady declining of her strength didn’t, and she knew she was becoming dehydrated very quickly.

The second time they came for her after her arrival, one of them spoke for the first time. He had leaned down until she could see his face clearly through the helmet he wore. “You must eat--drink what provided, or we must feed with tube.”

The words were clearly enunciated, and in English, and it had still taken her several moments to translate because it had sounded like those peculiar messages pieced together digitally from a recording of someone pronouncing a random collection of words. Without emotional inflection, with her mind clouded by the drugs in her system, she still had not fully grasped the implied threat until she’d been returned to the room where they kept her.

It comforted her in a way. Not only did they at least seem to believe they were providing her with sustenance to keep her alive, the threat that they would feed her if she didn’t feed herself assured her that they meant to keep her alive.

It was almost as unnerving, though. She’d finally accepted that she had been taken, but she had fallen back on those wild reports and claims that she had never believed before. Everyone who’d claimed to have been abducted by aliens had said they were studied and returned.

The implication that they might not have the intention of returning her seriously undermined her determination to keep her fear at bay.

When she woke the third day and discovered that her clothing had not been returned as before--that she was wearing nothing but a loose, shapeless shift like a hospital gown--she felt an instant stab of uneasiness that became more pronounced when she discovered she had been fitted with a thick collar such as one might place on an animal. As she sat up abruptly to tug at the thing, she saw that the door was open.

Her heart leapt immediately at that discovery and stilled in the very next second as the realization sank in that they would not have simply left the door ajar for her to escape. Dismissing her consternation over the collar for the moment, she stared at the sliver of light revealed in the opening, wondering if this was some new test they’d devised.

It was hard to escape the sense that she’d become a lab rat.

Had they decided, now that they’d thoroughly examined every inch of her body and run every lab test they could conceive, to run her through a series of tests to judge her intelligence? Like a rat in a maze? Or had they decided that she needed the exercise just as she needed the virtually tasteless food they provided?

She supposed tasteless was better than what it might have been, but the fact that, no matter what they made the food appear like, it still had the taste and consistency of mush hadn’t encouraged her to eat more than what she absolutely had to to keep them from shoving it down her throat with a tube.

The water was more bearable, and she’d never liked to drink water.

Ignoring the opened door for the moment, she got off the platform and went into the bathroom to use the facilities. The lavatory still didn’t work like a normal lavatory, but they had obviously been observing her from the moment she arrived because when she’d begun trying to bathe herself with the little cups of water, they’d provided her with a grudging supply for hygiene. Grudging, because the taps in the bathroom worked rather like the pretend faucets in a child’s playset. She could pump little spurts of water into her palm and mop off with it.

She supposed it was rationed, and for a good reason. But for someone who was accustomed to bathing at least once a day, preferably twice, and brushing her teeth three times a day, and washing her face and hands in between, it was miserable.

She hated being confined.

She hated having nothing to do with her time but worry about what they intended to do with her.

She hated having nothing but water to drink.

She hated being fed food that might as well have been saw dust for all the taste it had.

But most of all she hated having to struggle just to feel a modicum of cleanliness.

Ok, so maybe she was borderline OCD about bathing, especially her face and hands, but she couldn’t help it, and she began to think if anything was going to break her down into a blithering moron, not being able to bathe like she wanted to might do it.

When she’d bathed the best she could, she studied the collar in her reflection in the mirror-like thing they’d hung in the bathroom. It wasn’t an actual mirror, either because they were afraid to put glass where she could get to it, or because they hadn’t actually grasped what the point of the mirror was. But it did reflect a wavy image. Unfortunately, it was so distorted that she couldn’t really tell much more about the thing around her neck than she’d already been able to determine by touch.

It seemed to be made out of the same material they used for pretty much everything. She could not find a fastening on it. She looked for that first.

It wasn’t tight, but she wasn’t used to having anything so close around her throat, and it bothered her as badly as getting a ring stuck on her finger, or her hand or foot wedged into a crevice, in a claustrophobic sense.

She didn’t think it was
just
a collar. There was a reason they’d placed it there, and she feared it had to do with control, which meant there was no telling what the thing could do to her.

She wanted it
off
! After wrenching at it until she’d managed to rub the skin around her neck raw she finally accepted defeat, for the moment, and desisted.

The purpose of it was still prominent in her mind, however, as she left the bathroom.

A tray of food had appeared, and she moved to it and dutifully drank the water and nibbled half-heartedly at the food because she knew they were watching to see if she ate it, and she didn’t want to find out what they could do to her if she didn’t.

She studied the door while she ate, wondering if the collar was part of this ‘test’ and how. Would it shock her if she tried to go out? Or shock her if she retreated from the door and into the corner?

It might be to control her, but the underlying purpose might be to teach her the futility of trying to escape.

She knew that already, though, had realized it from the moment she finally accepted that she was in the hands of aliens because she very much doubted that they’d built this elaborate prison on terra firma. They weren’t on Earth anymore. She was convinced of that, and if that was the case then it wouldn’t do her any good at all to get out of the room because she still couldn’t escape them.