Teasing Tilly (2 page)

Something scary scratched at the back of her mind, but she ignored it.

She wasn’t alone.  She couldn’t see a lot beyond a few shadowy shapes, but she could hear the moaning—from feminine throats.

It shouldn’t have comforted her, but it did.

She wasn’t alone.

There were other captives.

A memory flitted through her mind—walking out of the club, being spotlighted, looking up ….

Horror swallowed her at the memory, her heart slamming so painfully against her chest wall that she couldn’t hear anything but the frantic hammering for many moments. She must be tripping! 

They’d put LSD in her drink!
He
had drugged her drink!  She was hallucinating.

“The alien slaver.”

He hadn’t meant
alien
, though!  He
couldn’t
have!  Maybe illegal aliens like Mexican slavers or Russians.

He’d planted that suggestion in her mind and drugged her and then she thought she’d really been picked up by aliens when it was actually just some horrible thugs!

The skunk had drugged her and then delivered her right into their hands and she’d walked into it like a complete moron!

Looking for Emily.

With that thought, she sat up.  A wave of dizziness washed over her, but it wasn’t disorienting enough for her to dismiss her perceptions and put everything down to drugs.

Which was a pity because that would’ve been some comfort for a little while anyway.  That would’ve allowed her to think that all the horrible would go away and she’d wake up in her bed at home, safe and sound.

She saw she’d been right about the women—the room was full of them—a
lot
of women—all sprawled or curled up on the floor as she had been, maybe conscious, maybe unconscious.

She still didn’t know where she was but, to her amazement, she saw that there was a row of windows along one wall and they weren’t covered.  She could see the night sky beyond!  Not much else but that, but that was enough to tell her she could see out of whatever she was in and, maybe, figure out where she was and where they were going with her.

Her mind had instantly connected the row of round windows with a plane even though she sought, in vane, with her perceptions for the sound of engines, the feel of motion, the bump and rattle of air resistance and turbulence.

But she wasn’t ready to accept that.  She struggled with the sense of hopelessness trying to take hold of her and turn her into a blubbering pile of spineless terror, rolling over and pushing herself to her hands and knees.

It took an effort to get to her feet.  She felt heavy—as if she’d been swimming for hours and gotten so used to the buoyancy her body was almost too heavy for her to lift.

The drugs, she told herself, fighting the pull of gravity as she strained to get to her knees and then to push herself to her feet.  She felt light headed when she’d managed it, but she didn’t blame that on drugs lingering in her system.  In point of fact, absolutely nothing went through her shocked mind for several moments after her gaze fastened on the view beyond the windows.

Her stomach took a freefall.

All
she could see was the night sky.

As if she was looking
up
at the night sky.

Unable to compute that bit of information, she staggered across the room, stepping on body parts as she tried to navigate the minefield of prone women around her.  She tripped and virtually fell against the outer wall, plastering her face against the frigid glass.

Earth looked like pictures she’d seen from space—a beautiful sapphire against black velvet and twinkling diamonds.

“Oh god!  Oh my god!  This … this can’t be real!” she exclaimed to no one in particular, barely aware she’d actually spoken out loud.  Shoving away from the window, she moved to the next and then the next and the next until she’d made it all the way to the end, expecting the perspective to change as her angle of view did.

When it didn’t, she couldn’t decide whether that meant the view was some sort of elaborate hoax or maybe just a poster—or if it was what it looked like it was—a view from a space ship heading away from Earth.

“Wait!  We aren’t weightless!  Shouldn’t we be weightless?”

Drawn by the voice, Tilly dragged her gaze from the view, her heart thumping, briefly, with hope.  She couldn’t tell which woman had spoken.  By that time, although she’d been too shocked to notice the commotion, it looked like all of the women in the room had raced to press their faces against the windows.  “If it was one of ours, we’d be weightless,” she muttered.  “But I haven’t heard anything about NASA abducting women to send them into space.”

“Bia-ch!” someone muttered.

“You don’t have to be sarcastic!”

Anger flickered through her.  “I was just pointing out the flaw in her logic!” she snapped.  “If it offends you … kiss my bee-hind!”

She was scared spitless and that ‘invitation’ had been gut reaction without engaging mental function.  Unfortunately, the other women were in the same state and might have turned their fear into rage and targeted her if not for the circumstance of the door opening at the other side of the room.

“Come!”

The command brought every bulging, wide eye in the room to fix on the mammoth being who stood in the doorway.

His size alone was enough to make him a commanding presence, because he looked every bit of seven feet tall and about four feet wide. 

He was wearing something that made Tilly think ‘uniform’ even though it didn’t look like any uniform she’d ever seen.  The being wearing the uniform looked human and male and actually rather handsome, she thought in a detached sort of way, but exotic and not like anyone belonging to any race she was familiar with.

It was a comfort that he looked so human-like, though.  She thought she might have died of fright otherwise.

Because he wasn’t human.  She knew he wasn’t.

He glared at the gaping women and abruptly clapped his hands together and took a step toward them.  “Come!”

As one the women screamed and raced toward the far side of the room.

He pointed at the door.

They looked bug-eyed at the door, but they didn’t move.  They remained huddled in a pile as far from him as they could get. 

He produced a whip, unfurled it and popped it against the floor.

The women screamed as one and ran to the other side of the room.

“Out!” he bellowed, popping the whip again.

Ignoring the door, they ran to the opposite side of the room.

A second giant appeared in the doorway.

Screaming at the new threat, the women split up and began to run in every direction—except through the doorway—like chickens who’d discovered a fox in their pen.

Clearly, neither man was pleased with the idea of chasing them.  The second produced a whip and between the two they herded the women through the doorway by popping the stragglers with the tips of the whips, transmuting the screams of terror into screams of pain.

Tilly discovered when she burst through the doorway in a desperate attempt to avoid the whip that there was yet another giant alien standing guard in the corridor to make certain the women were driven in the right direction.  They were chased into a large room so far down the curving corridor that Tilly was weak and faint from running by the time she reached it and holding her side against a pain that had developed there.

She didn’t think it was altogether the distance, though. 

It had become clear that the gravity she was feeling was stronger than the gravity she was accustomed to.

The women had been corralled into a corner by two other alien giants by the time she got there.  The three who’d herded them appeared in the door directly behind the last few stragglers.  Instead of herding them toward the group, however, each grabbed a woman and dragged her toward waiting gurneys.  When they fought like wildcats, the men simply pressed something to their necks that looked like a taser or a small pistol of some kind, zapped them, and the women wilted to the floor. 

Lifting the now completely limp women, they settled them on the gurneys, fastened them to the table with straps around their wrists and ankles and then stepped back to some sort of control console.  A bubble of some kind formed around the women.  Different colored lights began to track up and down their bodies.

Their clothing was vaporized—simply vanished—right down to bare skin.  Then the smell of burning hair began to filter through the room and she saw the pubic bush of the woman closest to her vanish as her clothing had.

Her kegels spasmed uneasily. 

Her bowels threatened immediate evacuation.

Flicking a look at the woman’s face, she discovered the woman had regained consciousness at some point.

She didn’t seem to feel any pain.  She looked … confused and disoriented at first and then fearful when she discovered she couldn’t move.

The bubble vanished and the manacles released.

“Up.  Go stand there,” the man attending her said, pointing to a corner opposite the women who hadn’t been processed.

Turning without bothering to see if she’d obeyed, the man strode toward them.  She recognized him as the one who’d first entered their cell.

Their gazes locked.

She was deeply regretful she’d allowed it because he grabbed her and hauled her across the room.

It took all she could do not to fight like the other woman had, but, then again, it hadn’t helped her at all.

There didn’t seem to be any sense in fighting when it wasn’t going to do any good and might encourage them to hurt her.

He looked surprised she didn’t fight.  Something flickered in his eyes as he lifted her to the gurney and met her gaze once more.  “Lie down.”

Struggling with panic, she turned and lay down.  She was stiff with resistance as he clamped her wrists and ankles into the manacles, but he didn’t seem to notice.

Terror twisted inside her when the lasers came on, but she discovered it was only mildly uncomfortable to have her clothing burnt off and then her body hair.

She was relieved when it was over, regardless, and he released her to stand with the other women that had been processed.

The other women looked at her resentfully—as if she was a traitor or something because she hadn’t seen any benefit to trying to fight them!

How was that going to help her case?

Except, maybe, to encourage them to break her neck and end it for her.

And she wasn’t ready to face death … yet.  She might get to the point of wishing for it, but she wasn’t there yet.

Somehow, she was going to survive this!

The thoughts had scarcely flickered through her mind when some sort of alarm went off.  She located the source—the pod in the center—just as the woman who’d been taking the treatment shot through a black hole that appeared at the head of the gurney and vanished into the cold darkness of space.

When the portal closed and the bubble vanished, the alarm went silent.

You could’ve heard a pin drop in the room.

Everyone—except the aliens, of course—was staring at the spot where the woman had been.

“Is she … you think she’s … dead?” one of the women in Tilly’s group whispered hoarsely.

Tilly thought it was the dumbass that had made the previous totally illogical observation that had nearly gotten her in a fight.  She decided not to snap the moron’s head off. 
Naw!  They shot her toward deep space in an air bubble!  She’ll be fine.

“Meth-head,” one of the other women whispered.

“She looked diseased,” one of the others muttered.

“Probably was.  It isn’t unheard of for drug addicts to sell their bodies for drug money.”

Contamination, Tilly thought abruptly.  She’d been ejected because she had ‘bugs’, posed a threat.  Undoubtedly the scanner was programmed to detect potential deadly contaminates and immediately remove them.

By the time the aliens had finished the processing, they’d reduced their number of captives by three more and the one’s they kept to absolute mindless terror.

Despite that, or possibly because of it, the women began to babble terrified questions as soon as the aliens rounded them up to herd them out of the processing room again. 

“What are you going to do with us?”

“Where are you taking us?”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I want to go home!”

“I have children!”

The aliens surrounded them and herded them into a tight group.

“Are toys, now, sex.  Sell at slave market. Train now be good f-ck slave.”

It was the ‘commanding’ one who spoke.

They had to ‘sedate’ three quarters of the women.

Tilly didn’t have to be sedated because she was so near to fainting she wasn’t really able to protest or struggle. 

She was shoved into a box-like room barely big enough for the bed and torture device it held.