Page 19 of Marked

K endra

For moments here and there, I opened my eyes and saw red blinking lights.

Jail bars. I thought it was a dream, a sordid dream of being held prisoner, so I’d turn over on the tiny little cot and fall back to sleep.

I had zero concept of time. Five minutes could have passed, or five hours, or even five days.

It was nothing but darkness. Just the never-ending flashes of red lights and bars holding me captive.

I tried to think, but my brain felt sluggish. My body felt like it was stuck in a pit of cement. Even just moving my fingers or blinking my eyes felt like too much work. Once, I tried counting the intermittent flashes but gave up after a count of three.

I couldn’t even remember my name.

I went back to sleep.

More darkness. More red lights. Nothingness.

I knew nothing else for so long that it didn’t even matter anymore.

Eventually, I started waking for longer periods of time. I could use my limbs a bit more each time I woke, but it still seemed to take forever for me just to bend a finger or scratch that itch on the top of my nose that had been bothering me for what felt like forever.

I tried opening and closing my eyes, but it still remained too dark for me to see much beyond the bars of the cage. When I finally felt like I had the strength, I pushed myself into a seated position and leaned against what felt like a cool metal wall. It was comforting, at least for a little bit.

I groaned and found out that I still had use of my voice. I called out, the sound weak at first. When I attempted speaking for a second time, I sounded much stronger and surer of myself.

“Is anyone there?” I asked.

No one answered.

I took stock of my limbs, finding that each of them still worked. I could roll my wrists, point my toes, and wiggle my fingers.

I felt something like joy, but it was muted under whatever was pumping through my veins. My core would pulse from time to time, but it mainly felt like jabs of pain rather than anything else. I couldn’t quite figure out what to make of that.

I had to be drugged; it was the only explanation.

Eventually I had enough energy to pull myself together and get off the cot. I stood there for a long moment, finding my balance as I wavered from side to side. Finally, I put one foot in front of the other and started to move.

My jail cell wasn’t very big, just large enough for me to stand up and walk around in a little square. There was a small container on the floor with something that looked like porridge, but my stomach turned just looking at it. I wasn’t hungry or desperate enough to eat that.

I couldn’t even go off my hunger to figure out if I had been sleeping for hours, days, weeks, or months.

My memory started coming back to me. Recollections came in rapid flashes. Faces. Sounds. Of home. Of Alaric.

I curled my arms around my chest. I missed him.

More time passed and the pieces started coming together.

I did realize that I was still clothed. I was wearing my jeans and t-shirt from the night when I’d returned to The Salty Dog, found Alaric, and got attacked by some kind of aliens called Ghengrills.

I searched my little prison for a weapon, anything I could use really, but found nothing.

They’d apparently taken my knife, and I couldn’t recall if I’d grabbed my phone in my hasty exit from the apartment.

Not that it mattered. It wasn’t here anyway.

With a sigh, I walked over to the bars of the cage and looked out.

I blinked several times and looked around.

After several seconds of focusing, I started to make out shapes. There were large and small crates, some wooden, some metal, and others made of materials I could only guess at. It soon became apparent that I was in some sort of cargo hold.

I didn’t quite know what to do, but I didn’t really get to think about it before a strange, low buzzing noise cut through the silence.

Suddenly, a door slid open on the far side of the room, and I was blinded by a silvery white light.

A series of long rectangular beams turned on overhead, and the room was illuminated entirely.

I covered my eyes with the back of my hand and quickly retreated to my cot, which was the furthest point from the newly opened door.

After being in the dark for so long, my eyes struggled to contend with the brightness and started to water.

I blinked rapidly several times, and after about a minute, they finally began to adjust.

The same clicking sounds I’d heard the night I was taken echoed through the space.

Three tall Ghengrills walked in, only these were dressed in what looked like white lab coats.

Scientists of some kind, by the looks of it.

They talked amongst themselves, and one walked over to a white crate close to the door.

It scanned a badge in front of the crate, and it popped open.

Then it reached inside and grabbed a vial.

It looked like medicine to me, but how was I to know?

I wondered if I was still on Earth or on an alien ship of some kind. Quite honestly, either one was possible at this point. My world had turned upside down, and I had no way of telling what was going on anymore.

Finally, the Ghengrills turned to me.

My upper lip rolled in their direction, and I quite literally wanted to hiss at them.

Under the bright lights, their skin looked even more papery thin and translucent than I remembered.

Their eyes were even more bulbous and yellow, but it was their mouths that I couldn’t tear my eyes away from.

They had the thinnest lips I’d ever seen, so thin that it looked like they weren’t even there.

They had no hair, just pale bald heads that were incredibly shiny.

The complete image of them in the light was quite jarring.

Yup. Seven-foot-tall walking condoms with shark teeth.

Fucking fantastic. How was I so lucky to get such a pretty welcoming committee?

They moved toward me with a sort of slithering motion of their lower appendages, like a snake, only that much creepier.

I curled my knees into my chest and wound my arms around my legs.

I contemplated grabbing the bowl of porridge and throwing it in their faces.

Not only would the food splattering into their eyes bring me a great deal of pleasure, but the bowl it was in would probably leave a nice shiner right in the middle of their oversized foreheads.

The porridge was in a metal bowl, but there was sadly only one in my cage and three Ghengrills staring at me.

The math didn’t quite work out, so I just enjoyed the thought of my rebellion as they came closer.

“What the fuck do you want?” I retorted. It was clear I wasn’t getting out of this cage on my own, so I’d have to think of something else. Maybe I could negotiate with these guys.

“You are the female Lupenii mate, yes?” one of the creatures clicked.

“How do you know English?” I asked in confusion.

“Some of us can speak several hundred languages. It’s not unheard of on Ghengra,” he shot back. Well, this one had attitude then. Noted.

“Ghengra?” I asked.

“Are all humans this stupid?” the one on the right asked.

“Apparently, yes. The few I’ve run into on Ghengra are quite dim. They’ve been mainly house slaves though. Many of them are mute, or their masters had their mouths sewn shut,” the one on the left answered.

Well, fuck. That was disheartening. These three probably weren’t going to be sympathetic to my plight if they were used to that sort of thing.

The middle one sighed heavily and turned his putrid yellow eyes back to me.

“Ghengra is the home planet of the Ghengrills. You’re a Lupenii mate on the cusp of your heat. We’ve delayed it with medicinal help for a short time so that you may enter it once we’ve reached Ghengra. You’re to be transported to my lab now, and I came to oversee the transfer myself,” he explained.

There was that word Lupenii again.

“What’s a Lupenii?” I ventured. They already thought I was dumb, so why not lean all the way into it. I didn’t care what they thought. I was stronger than that.

“Unbelievable! You had a Lupenii male mark you, and you didn’t even know he was a Lupenii?” the Ghengrill with attitude answered.

“You mean Alaric is a Lupenii?” I pressed. I had my suspicions, but now I wanted the Ghengrills to confirm them.

“Yes,” the one on the left replied, clearly exasperated with my lack of intelligence.

He took a syringe out of his pocket and capped a needle onto it, before sticking it into the vial of liquid he’d taken out of the crate.

He turned his eyes on me. I’d never felt smaller and more like an animal than I did then.

“You will come with us either willingly or with betapharketamine pumping through your veins. I hear it’s very unpleasant for humans,” he spat, and I stilled.

“How unpleasant?” I questioned, narrowing my eyes toward him.

“I hear it makes them feel like their insides are boiling. That your brain is rupturing inside your skull. That tiny little fractures are splintering your delicate human bones. Something like that. It’s just what I’ve been told,” he replied rather nonchalantly.

It was almost as if he was daring me to fight just so he could inject me with it, like he wanted an excuse to hurt me.

Yeah, I was good with not getting that injection.

“I’ll come with you,” I answered. If I wanted to get out of here, I had to know more about where I was.

Even if by some miracle I could fight off these three, I could escape out of this room and be lost on a spaceship.

Hell, I could be even more fucked when I ran into more of them out there.

I had to weigh my options before I came up with a grand plan to get the fuck out of here and back home.