The Spawning (2 page)

They were brazen bastards, though, she reminded herself. Even the thugs that ran the white slavery rings were generally a good bit less blatant about shopping than the perps she was looking for—which was the one thing that bothered her the most about just accepting the most likely scenario in this case.

Moving to the bar after a moment, she ordered herself a mixed drink, glancing

around to study the patrons while she waited to be served. She noticed a few interested glances cast in her direction, but nothing particularly pointed. Most of the men were either perched at the bar, nursing their drinks, or gathered around the pool tables in the backroom.

When she’d collected her drink, she debated briefly whether to climb onto a stool and give her feet a short break from the sexy shoes that were already killing her or to troll and finally decided to troll. She hadn’t gotten nearly as much interest as she’d hoped.

Of course, from what she could see, the only females in the place getting any

attention were the ones wearing the wristbands that clearly marked them as legal to screw but illegal for drinking—eighteen to twenty.

How convenient that the management had found a way to mark the young does

for the bucks!

Ignoring the pinch of her shoes, she strolled around the club, pausing now and then to study the dancers on the floor. She wandered toward the backroom to watch the pool players awhile, and then back to the main club. Four hours later, the club had filled, her feet were killing her, and she still hadn’t been approached.

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Jeeze! What did a woman have to do to get a little attention these days?

Strip naked and wave their tits?

Roll back the clock, evidently.

Either she looked like a cop or nobody twenty one or over was getting any action.

She was putting her money on age discrimination. Even the men that were clearly thirty and up had no eyes for anything but the tender young things.

Disgusted, she decided to call the night a bust and headed for the exit, wondering uneasily if the kidnappers had already collected all the women they needed or wanted and had moved on.

There were a few loiters outside the club when she exited. A patrol car was

parked just outside to pick up the drunks. She didn’t recognize either officer and, in any case, she was undercover. With barely a glance in their direction, she struck off across the parking lot, headed toward her own vehicle, which she’d parked in the rear—not because the lot was overflowing when she’d arrived but because all the abandoned vehicles they’d found that belonged to missing women had been parked in isolated areas.

She tensed as she rounded the side of the building and moved beyond the view of the patrolmen and the few patrons that had been in the lot. Chances were, this was where she was going to run into trouble if trouble had spotted her—and marked her.

The thought shifted her mind to the neon wristband she was still wearing, and she abruptly realized why that circumstance had bothered her even though she knew it was standard practice at clubs.

She’d been tagged. Anyone that spotted her would know that she’d just come

from a club, was probably at least a little tipsy if not downright drunk, and that she was most likely single since she was a female and far fewer women who had attachments showed up in the singles clubs than men.

The thought had barely completed the circuit in her brain when she abruptly

found herself spotlighted.

She jolted to a halt, blinded, startled. For just a split second her mind leapt to the conclusion that she’d been marked by a police chopper. Even as it clicked in her mind, though, that she didn’t hear the very distinctive sound of a helicopter—in fact didn’t hear anything—her mind leapt in another direction entirely, to the realization that she’d been tagged, hunted, and bagged. Her mind had just shifted to the gun she had strapped to her thigh when she blacked out.

Adrenaline spiked in her system as she jolted toward consciousness and her

mind—temporarily suspended—completed the instinctive move she’d attempted before blacking out. She groped for her weapon as her eyes flew open. In one corner of her mind, she knew it was the wrong move. She needed to assess her situation before she acted, and yet her mind was completely disordered by the transition from consciousness to blackout and abrupt awareness again.

She reacted instantly and instinctively to the certainty of threat.

And she was still too sluggish to move with any swiftness or surety of

coordination, shoving awkwardly upright, grabbing for the butt of her pistol, and whipping her head around to target the threat almost at the same time. A wave of dizziness washed over her as she scanned the small, shadowy room. She blinked, trying to clear her mind of confusion and focus her eyes.

She’d nursed one drink throughout most of the night, had drunk no more than half THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 8

of the second. Her reflexes shouldn’t have been affected to such a degree as to make her head swim with so little motion, and yet it did.

She nearly dropped her pistol as she dragged it out of the holster and staggered to her feet, wavering as she gaped at her surroundings, or more precisely the thing she saw coming toward her. Her mind refused to supply her with an identification of the thing—

mechanical, metallic, threatening in its very strangeness.

Jerking her pistol up, she fired at it. The bullet made a dull clanging sound as it impacted with the thing, the sound registering as not quite that of metal against metal, though she thought that was what it should’ve sounded like.

Robot—her mind registered that. She just couldn’t grasp why or how it was even possible that she’d found herself faced off with a robot—the most bizarre looking thing imaginable at that—not humanoid in appearance or even anything that fit the catalogue of Hollywood representatives stashed in her mind.

The robot stopped. A hissing noise slipped past the dull roar in her ears from hours of being pelted by music loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss.

She’d barely had time to assess the fact that she’d been transported from the

parking lot to where ever this place was too quickly for her hearing to recover when she felt darkness fall over her again. The last sound she heard before complete nothingness engulfed her, and that with a vast sense of despair, was the sound of her pistol hitting the floor at her feet.

A buzz of voices was the first thing Miranda heard as she drifted toward

consciousness again. This time the transition was slower. She lay with her eyes closed for some time, a faint frown between her brows from the pain she’d become aware of and the struggle to figure out where she was and what she was doing there.

She was laying on something hard, and she was cold.

The ‘hard’ she could understand since the last thing she remembered was heading toward her car in the parking lot. The chill confused her.

It was a muggy summer’s night. Why would she be chilled?

Air conditioned room?

And who the hell were the people she could hear murmuring around her?

Not people, she corrected after a moment—women. All of the voices she heard

were women’s voices.

Opening her eyes, she stared blankly at the smooth surface above her head.

“She’s come around,” somebody said close by, drawing Miranda’s attention.

She couldn’t seem to focus her eyes at first but gradually the dark blob she was peering at through the strange glow of light resolved itself into individual shapes and she realized she was staring at a fairly large group of women, most of whom were staring back at her.

Her confusion deepened rather than lifting. “Where am I?” she croaked as her

gaze finally met that of a woman who looked to be around her age, in her late twenties.

Something flickered across the woman’s face—stark terror. Her voice was shaky with it when she spoke, although it was obvious she was struggling to preserve at least a surface calm—whether for Miranda’s benefit or her own Miranda couldn’t tell. “We don’t know … exactly.”

Miranda frowned at her as the woman’s eyes slid away. She was lying. It was

one of the first things they taught at the academy—people who lied generally shifted their THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 9

gaze away from their interrogators—the left indicated probing memories, the right indicated fabrication.

Miranda felt for her gun.

“It’s gone.”

She glanced at the other woman who’d spoken.

“Whatever you’re looking for, they took it.”

Pushing herself upright, Miranda ignored the group of women, glancing around

the room. It was a cell. Her mind registered that right away.

What it wasn’t was a jail cell, which ruled out the possibility that she’d found herself thrown in with a group of hookers even if it wasn’t for the fact that they certainly weren’t dressed as hookers.

They were all wearing identical shifts that were almost hospital-like, but the only hospital-like environment that she knew of that would include locking up the patients was a lunatic asylum.

She shied away from that assessment. They looked frightened—every face pale

and tense—but there was nothing but fear in their eyes, not insanity.

“How did I get here?” she asked finally.

“One of the robots brought you.”

Miranda’s head snapped toward the speaker, but she couldn’t tell which of the

women had spoken.

Not that it mattered. The moment the woman had said it memories had flooded

her mind. A bizarre sense of unreality settled over her. She remembered the robot.

She’d known that was what it was even though it had thoroughly rattled her that the thing had seemed so … purposeful—so real, not toy-like, not like some remote controlled bucket of wires and bolts that moved with the awkwardness of a person trying to manipulate a ‘body’ not their own. “What the fuck is going on here?” she demanded, feeling a surge of anger and fear.

The women all looked at each other and, almost as if some silent communication had passed between them, they began to disperse. Moving back to the bunks that lined the walls of the cell, they settled on the lowest bunks in little frightened knots.

“We were hoping you could tell us.”

Glancing toward the speaker, Miranda discovered it was the same woman who’d

first addressed her. The woman smiled shakily. “I’m Deborah Moss.”

Miranda stared at her, feeling a flicker of recognition for the first time. Coldness swept over her when she finally realized why both the name and the face seemed familiar.

She was one of the women who’d gone missing.

Scanning the faces of the other women, she also recognized the captain’s

daughter, Carol Sloan, her two friends, Lynn Patterson and Joy Freemont, Mary Jane Carter, Stacy Smith, and Jan Hutton. All in all, she counted nineteen women—twenty including herself, though she didn’t recognize any of the others—because they hadn’t made it to the ‘list’.

Aside from looking scared half to death, she didn’t see any obvious signs of

mistreatment—which was at least some relief. White slavers generally beat the hell of the women they took right off to show them who was boss.

After studying the women, Miranda finally swung her feet over the side of the

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bunk where she sat and examined herself. They were right, she saw without much surprise but with a good deal of dismay. Everything she’d had was gone—her weapon, her identification, her clothing, the fucking high heels from hell. A vague sense of nausea washed over her.

The wonder of it all was that she was still alive. They had to know—whoever had taken her—that she was a cop.

Why
was she still alive?

She was still reluctant to give up her own identity, but what was the point in trying to maintain secrecy? “Detective Miranda Hart,” she responded finally.

The admission caused a brief flurry of excitement before it dawned on all of the women that their ‘rescuer’ was locked in the cell with them.

“You would’ve had backup, though, right?” one of the young women said

hopefully.

Captain Sloan’s daughter, Carol, Miranda realized. “Right,” she muttered instead of pointing out that her backup obviously hadn’t managed to catch up to her or the perps or she wouldn’t be where ever it was that she was now. She didn’t particularly want to dwell on that unnerving circumstance herself.

“You were looking for us?” another woman asked.

Miranda nodded, standing up and moving around the room to examine it. There

weren’t any bars—no door that she could see. How the hell had they brought her in?

“The robot dragged you in through the door,” one of the women answered her

thoughts, pointing to a blank wall.

Miranda moved toward it, examining it closely, and finally turned to search the room for the woman who’d spoken.

“She isn’t crazy—not unless we all are. It brought us all in the same way.”

Miranda glanced at Deborah again when she spoke. She’d been among the first to go missing. “What do you remember?”

Deborah shrugged. “Probably not much more than you do. I’d been out

clubbing. The place was packed, and I’d had to park at the far back of the lot. I decided to leave around midnight—even though everything was still hopping. I never made it to the car, though. I’d just realized that I was completely alone when I was caught in this blinding beam of light. The next thing I knew, I was here. Everybody else’s experience was pretty much the same.”

Miranda glanced around at the other women for confirmation, but she didn’t

really need it. Not only had they already come up with that scenario regarding the missing women—at least the part where they’d been snatched on the way to their cars—

but it was pretty much like her own experience. “Any idea where ‘here’ is? Any theories?”

The women all exchanged uncomfortable glances.

“Yes,” Carol Sloan responded. “But you’re going to think we’re all crazy.”