The Alien Mate's Abduction: A Sci-Fi Alien Abduction Romance Read online

  I took off my crown and asked myself, if I had to die to save her, would I? I've never helped anyone before. I've certainly never saved anyone's life. In fact, I'd killed countless members of sentient species without ever feeling sorry for them. Now I was trying to save a member of a lesser species, and yes, I would give my life up for her. I hadn’t known the definition of good until I met her.

  The human definition of decency came to mind. They could only accept so much until their animal instincts kicked in and they started to panic. That's why she tried to attack me when I let her out. Her fight or flight instincts had taken control, and distrust was a huge part of that.

  Another instinct, one that I'd never felt before, was starting to rise to the surface. I had been told that it was called pity. She was in danger and she knew it. She also knew that right now I couldn't help her.

  The only person she'd be willing to trust was herself, and even then that wouldn't be enough to get her through this. She'd be led by caution, fear and anger, switching from aggression to panic, back and forth all while paralyzed in frigid temperatures.

  Why did I care?

  I was going insane. If I were to tell another Fiori about the way I felt about Lainey, they would turn me into the Minister for punishment. My feelings were so different from anything a Fiori would consider normal. Becoming human, and taking on their form had instilled me with their instinct, and their nature had become a part of who I was.

  The transformation was irrevocable. I would never be able to think like a Fiori again. We're a species that can kill one another and watch it happen without feeling a thing. That part of me was gone. Even if I tried, I couldn't allow Lainey to get hurt. Now the only question was how I going to get past the Fiori authorities.

  I needed her to validate my feelings and reciprocate them. We had been so close. There had been so many times when I’d looked at her and dared myself to tell her what I was, but I’d known that the second I did she would’ve run away screaming. Now I was facing the impossible task of trying to make her understand me.

  What was I doing? I was risking my life by letting another species take over my mind and all because of one person.

  Maybe humanity was like an infection. Taking their form too long might cause irreparable damage. So much of our minds changed when we shift. Strange things could happen.

  This was strange.

  My basic nature must've been altered. I wanted to stop myself. I should've ran in there and put her down before she controlled me any further, but that thought brought nothing but sadness. Who was I that I couldn't even kill a member of a lesser species?

  No Fiori would admit to such weakness. Was I defective? Should I end myself? I couldn't do it, because every time I thought of ending my life I thought about her, and how she would end up dead with nobody to watch over her.

  But she wasn't grateful. She didn't care how I felt—she didn't believe me. She thought I was a brutal monster sticking her in the freezer so I could eat her later. How could I possibly make a member of a lesser species understand what was going on inside me, and the compassion I was feeling? I couldn't even understand it myself.

  Still, I wasn't going to be able to save her if she didn't trust me, because she'd just wind up doing something rash and getting us both killed. I needed her to understand, and it wasn't just because I was worried about our lives. I needed to be with her, hold her and touch her. It was absurd, but that's how I felt, and I couldn't deny it. It was overpowering.

  Chapter 5

  Lainey

  The air was filled with a fading odor as the strange secretion that had covered my body started to dissipate. I was trying to distract myself from where I was. But I still kept coming back to the fact that I needed answers badly.

  Why was I there? He never answered my question and I’d asked him twice. He said they were studying us but why? What did these things want with us?

  They weren't trying to learn about us. I was a medical researcher. I knew what an experienced professional sounded like, and the Fiori conducting the study already knew as much about human biology as humans did.

  They were only using women, and none of us were older than forty, not as far as I could tell. We were all healthy, seemingly sane individuals. This was a fertility study, but why were they researching human fertility? What did they want with us?

  Maybe they needed organs. There were parts of the body that were too unique to replicate. They might need brains, and they couldn't print out working ovaries. Maybe they needed to keep us alive so they could make use of them.

  Instinctively I got the urge to reach out and grab my stomach.

  But, I couldn't even move. I was completely paralyzed. Trapped in my own body, unable to obey my brains commands.

  When Markathus left me back on Earth, I thought I was going to lose my mind, huddling under the covers for more than three weeks, leaving only when I had to. I didn't want to face a world where we weren't together. I got my wish. He was here, only now all I wanted was to be home, safe and sound, sitting on my couch eating a bowl of popcorn.

  I cared about him, at least the man I had believed him to be. He had been precise and poised, more intelligent than any man I'd ever met and strong. Life could've thrown anything at him, and he would've bounced back better than before.

  I’d thought I loved him. That's why I had dinner setup when he came to my house, and why I wore that red dress. I wanted our child to be welcomed into the world with love and passion. That night was supposed to be magical. Instead, I ended up burning the food while I was crying outside, and wearing that red dress for three weeks straight while I huddled under the covers.

  I never even got to tell him I was pregnant. Now, I didn't know what was inside me, or what that creature had done. I felt so violated. I didn't even feel like my body was my own any longer.

  He had played with my mind, my heart and now my uterus. The act of creating life is sacred. It takes love and passion—tenderness. There's nothing tender about taking a woman and implanting her with an alien fetus.

  Markathus had twisted the connection we'd shared, and he used it to create something blasphemous. Whatever the thing was inside me, it wasn't my child. It was a foreign object and it had to be removed. If I were given the chance, I would've ripped it out with my bare hands.

  How could he have touched me the way he had knowing that he was using me for some demented experiment? He was supposed to be the one. And now... he wanted me to trust him. This entire scenario was too surreal. It didn't make sense that he was there on Valice with me.

  I hadn’t planned on participating in the study. It just kind of happened. The only reason I dragged myself out of bed and got cleaned up was because I knew that I had to continue my research if I wanted to keep my grant, and that's how I was surviving.

  So I went down to the lab, and began pouring over the numbers. I remembered siting there with my usual scalding hot cup of chamomile tea staining a stack of papers. I tried, but I wasn't ready to go back to work. When I wasn't crying, I was trying to make sense of the numbers on my spreadsheet.

  After half an hour, I threw my cup onto the floor. It shattered, and I ran out to take the bus home.

  I hated crying in public. It was probably the most humiliating thing that could ever happen to a person, so I did everything I could to keep from focusing on him. I read the street signs and stared at the people on the bus with me when they weren't looking.

  Finally, I started reading the ads above the seats across from me and that's when I saw the ad for the fertility study. I figured that if I couldn't do my own work, I might as well make some money contributing to somebody else's.

  My decision to participate in the study was completely random. It made absolutely no sense that he was a part of the same study. I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that the Markathus I just saw and the Markathus back on Earth was the same person. It was impossible. But even if they were the same being, he’d tricked me back on Earth. He’d lied t
o me then. He had to be lying now. He was no longer the person I thought I’d known. I couldn't trust this creature.

  I stared straight up at the ceiling and watched a tiny, metallic ball fly above me. I knew that it was watching me, but I didn't know why it was focusing on me. When I leaned my eyes far enough to the right, I could see the woman next to me. There was nothing hovering above her.

  She was probably too frail. She reminded me of one of those commercials with starving African children. Her stomach was bulging but the rest of her body was so thin that she looked like she was ready to cave in on herself.

  Was I going to look like that? That woman wasn't going to survive. Maybe that's why Markathus said I was going to be killed. I closed my eyes and drifted off, focusing on my breathing to take me out of that place while the silence took me over.

  When I awoke, a harsh light hit the lower end of my eyelids and they shot open. I could barely make out the tall shadows, but I did see how easily they moved over the floor. They weren't walking or crawling they were hovering. There were six of them, one for every row of women. I didn't have any idea what was going on, not until I heard the sound of hydraulics. Something was being lifted. Then there was the unmistakable sound of something piercing flesh and shoving its way through it.

  If I could have screamed, I would've. I would’ve thrown myself off of that gurney and used anything I could as a weapon to get out of there, but here I was paralyzed, forced to listen to the sharp intake of air and choking sounds.

  Once they moved on to the third row, I managed to get a glimpse of one lifting a woman's body. Once she was up in the air, the sound started, and I felt like jumping out of my skin. Something was being forced into her body, and it didn't sound like her body was enjoying it.

  Once they started lowering her, I heard her starting to heave, and eventually the sound of liquid spattering all over the floor, resounded throughout the room. I tried to remain calm. I wasn't dead yet, and so long as I was still alive there was hope.

  I'm still alive. I'm still alive. I can survive. I can survive. I'm still alive.

  I repeated that to myself over and over while my skin swam and my stomach jumped up and down. I was lying to myself. No matter what happened, I was going to die. If it were just me, I could accept that, but what about my child? What if there was some hope for it?

  It was mine after all.

  I heard the whooshing sound of their hover engines flying closer. They were one bed away, which meant that I was next. What was the thing going to do to me? Were they going to cut into me? I needed to leave. I was gonna die.

  My eyes shot open. Death's face was a metallic arm with a sharp protuberance and two appendages like a forklift that felt like liquid ice when they touched my sides and forced their way under my body. Nothing would've gotten the chance to touch me had I not been paralyzed. I would've torn those things to pieces and used them to kill anything that moved inside that place.

  Instead I was forced to watch as the machine lifted me off the gurney and the mechanical arm with the sharp protuberance started moving closer to my face, positioning a nozzle over my lips. My body erupted in convulsions when it shoved itself down my throat, through my esophagus and into my stomach where a burst of something hot and scalding erupted out of it.

  It filled my stomach, and burnt through me as it moved up my esophagus and into my throat where my body began to reject the goo violently. I started convulsing and choking. I was trying to turn myself inside out, and every movement made the pipe that had been shoved down my throat move over my raw insides, causing them to burn violently.

  Eventually, after the hot goo had started gushing out of my mouth, the machine began lowering me. My body was still shaking and I started to wretch. The thing pushed my head to the side and allowed me to empty the contents of my stomach onto the floor. I was dry heaving when it set me down and moved on to the next bed.

  They were gavaging me with a white compound of nutrients. I was going to be force fed like an animal in a high tech breeding lab.

  Chapter 6

  Markathus

  I didn't move once, not for hours. All I could do was watch her laying on the gurney while she stared up at that drone. I turned on the heat sensors and started moving my eyes over the aura of colors that surrounded her. Sitting in the center was a white hot beating fetus, implanted there before I got a chance to save her.

  They already killed her.

  They were going to let that thing eat her alive. It would start by moving upwards and taking small pieces of tissue—skin, bone fragments—until it could ease its way into her digestive tract. Then it would begin to leech the nutrients they had just finished giving to her.

  She would be force fed daily while her body wasted away until her eyes were bulging out of her skull, and her lungs were barely working. I would have to watch, because that was my job. They put me in my cube so that I could make sure the women died the way they were supposed to.

  That was the whole point of the experiment. The facility was setup to understand why the women kept dying, and in order to figure that out, they had to keep dying so we could give them autopsies.

  I paced around my quarters for hours until I finally stopped and decided to take action. My shifting teacher, Ferryn, was working in the research facility. He was the strangest Fiori I'd ever met. If anyone could understand the aberration I was experiencing, it would be him.

  Before I left, I sat down on my bunk and envisioned my original form. My bones twisted and my skin changed shape. Cartilage formed where it hadn't been before and the peculiar sensation of my mind transforming worked its way down my skeletal structure.

  When I opened my eye, I shot up off the bunk and moved with caution through the halls until I reached Ferryn's cube and pressed my hand against the door.

  “Enter.”

  I walked inside.

  “You may sit.” He motioned at the ground in front of him. Sitting before a Fiori was a sign of great admiration. It represented accepting the superiority of the other. I sat down and met my eye with his, a sign that I wanted to converse.

  “What concerns you?”

  “Boredom, droll work and the sight of those pathetic creatures in gestation.”

  He let out a huff of air. “You didn't seem bored earlier, hovering over their beds like they were fresh meat.”

  “You were watching?”

  “I control the visual sensors on the walls. What's your problem?”

  “It's just…”

  “What is it?”

  “I want more. I want to know one of them. I know I've been to Earth, but I haven't had a chance to fully understand their dynamics. They're complex, Ferryn, more than most species.”

  “I've heard this, but you've been assigned to this facility.”

  I threw my mouth to the side, a sign of discontent.

  “What?”

  “I wanna leave, or at least take one.”

  “Heresy,” he spat on the ground.

  “A heresy sweeter than you've ever known.”

  His body went still.

  “Plenty of us have known secret pleasures, heretical acts—everyone strays at some point, and when they do it's not because they are acting childish, or because they're rash. It's because there's something that the Fiori are missing, and our stringent laws won't allow us to take part in it.”

  The old Fiori huffed and shook his head. “You're right, but what secret pleasure is this? Some are more dangerous than others. Many will kill you, and that's fine. I can facilitate that, but I can't allow something that would hurt the species.”

  “I don't know what it is. It's an instinct so powerful that I couldn't possibly overcome it. I feel attached to an individual.”

  He nodded his head knowingly. “And you don't want them to be hurt.”

  “Is there something wrong with me?”

  “Yes. It's a terrible, disgusting affliction, and it's highly potent. When you do inevitably lose her, you will be incapacita
ted to the point of lunacy, but to deny a Fiori this sensation would be a crime against the universe and I couldn't allow it.”

  “What do I do?”

  “They'll have you killed the second she's found missing.”

  “Are they given tracking implants?”

  “No. The Minister believes there's little risk of escape. So long as the women are properly subdued they are incapable of overpowering us. Aside from the surveillance drones, the only thing keeping track of them is an inventory drone that runs daily. They are counted and their condition is monitored—nothing else.”

  “So if an individual leaves?”

  “They'll be logged as missing and they'll be hunted, but if it's the one you've been watching, she doesn't matter. She wasn't counted in implantation.”

  “Why?”

  “I don't know, but she can't just be taken out of the facility. She needs to be hidden.”

  “So long as her DNA isn't registered…”

  “She can pass through the exits, but you can't leave the planet unless I can get you a proper transfer.”

  “I need to leave the Imperium.”

  “I can send you to Earth.”

  “No. They might find her.”

  “It's inevitable.”

  “I need to find someplace far away from the Imperium where they won't find me, and I need to leave as soon as possible.”

  “This is going to take time,” he grunted and turned to face me. “A solar week, maybe a month.”

  “No. I'm not letting her die in there.”

  “You need to be careful.” He puffed his chest out to assert his authority. “What kind of state will you be in if you lose this woman? You need to be able to function whether she lives or not. This emotion is going to consume you if you let it.”

  “Can you do it before she dies?”

  “I don't know.” He closed his eye and turned back to his screen. That meant that I was no longer welcome in his cube.