Alien Skin Market by Lizzy Bequin

CHAPTER 5: MAUREEN

This time, it was an earthquake that roused her.

Not a major earthquake, just a tremor really. A shuddering vibration in the walls, a temporary tilting of the floor’s axis. It was small, but it was enough to agitate the cattle and set them mooing. And it was enough to cause Maureen to startle awake with a breathless gasp.

She must have dozed off at some point. That was bad. But the chamber was still enshrouded in pure, velveteen darkness, and Maureen had to assume that none of her keepers had entered the room while she was snoozing.

The dryness in her mouth and throat had only worsened. She was getting dangerously dehydrated, and she would need water soon. Plus, the shaking and rumbling of the ship was not helping the intense ache throbbing inside her skull.

Then, as quickly as they had started, the tremors stopped.

Weird…

What had caused that?

If Maureen was correct in assuming that she was in an alien spacecraft—and right now that seemed like the most logical assumption—then perhaps that momentary quaking had been the result of docking. It kind of resembled the jostling one experienced during an aircraft landing or a boat coming into shore.

Did that mean they had arrived at their destination?

That thought made Maureen shiver.

Where was their destination?

As she grew more alert, Maureen became aware of something warm and heavy settled on her lap. When she reached down to touch it, her fingers found a dense mass of thick fur.

It was a creature of some sort, about the size of a large cat.

With a shriek, Maureen flung the unknown thing off her lap and bolted to her feet with her gun at the ready, but in the total darkness she couldn’t see anything.

Hands shaking, Maureen leaned down and fumbled around the floor with her fingers until she found the flashlight. She flicked it on and aimed it in the general direction she had flung the animal.

The creature was sitting calmly on the floor in front of her. It resembled the little scurrying critters she had seen before, only this one was much bigger. Its eyes were bigger too, a pair of black marbles, and they stared up at her sympathetically.

“Rawn?” Maureen whispered. “Is that you?”

A wide grin split the creature’s face. “Rawn.”

Maureen made a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a gasp.

“Jesus, Rawn, how many sunflower seeds did you eat?”

The newly enlarged fluffball just opened his mouth in a massive yawn, revealing the bright pink interior of his mouth and curling tongue.

“Rrraaaaawwwwnn!”

“Mm-hm,” Maureen hummed. “You were supposed to help me stay awake, remember? No more seeds for you, pal.”

Rawn finished his yawn and looked up at her quizzically. With all that fluff, he didn’t have a discernible head separate from his body, but his face still tilted like a curious dog.

What the heck was this thing? Clearly Maureen’s earlier intuition had been correct. Rawn was different from the other little space-rats scrambling around this cargo hold. If all of them grew at the same incredible rate as Rawn, the enclosed space would have been overflowing with them by now.

But Maureen’s curiosity about Rawn was quickly pushed aside in favor of more important matters. If Maureen’s suspicions about the ship landing were correct, that meant her captors would probably be paying her a visit soon. She needed to be at the ready when they showed up.

“All right, Rawn, stay behind me,” she said. “This will probably get hairy. No offense.”

Maureen aimed her pistol at the door, turned the flashlight off, and waited.

She didn’t have to wait long.

Voices were speaking on the other side of the door. Ghostly, whispering voices that made Maureen’s skin crawl. The words were muffled by the thick metal panel of the door, but Maureen doubted she would be able to understand those words anyway.

With a hydraulic whoosh, the door slid open.

A blast of cool air spilled into the cargo hold.

The open door formed a rectangle of light framing three tall, slender shadows. The beings were not human, but they were roughly humanoid in shape, with a pair of long legs, a pair of arms, and a narrow head set atop their shoulders. The entities were silhouetted against the lighted backdrop of the outer corridor, and the only facial features Maureen could discern were their glowing pink eyes.

She clicked the flashlight on and shined the beam directly into the face of the central figure.

The beings recoiled at the sudden light, and Maureen’s jaw dropped.

“What the hell?”

With the flashlight beam shining on them, Maureen realized the entities were not simply silhouetted by the light behind them. They were living shadows. Their bodies were black and seemed to be formed not from solid matter but from darkly swirling smoke. Except for those pink eyes, their faces were totally featureless.

After a momentary hesitation, the beings started to advance.

“Stay back!” Maureen shouted. “Don’t come any closer or I’ll shoot!”

In the back of her mind, she recognized the absurdity of the situation. Whatever these things were—aliens, ghosts, demons—they probably didn’t speak English, and therefore they couldn’t comprehend Maureen’s warning. But the angry tone of her voice hopefully made her intentions clear enough: she was pissed, and she would fight if she had to.

The three shadowmen ignored her warning. They moved toward her like wraiths. They did not have articulated joints like a human. Instead, their arms and legs wobbled like cartoon limbs. The effect was disturbing, like something from a nightmare.

“I said stay back!”

The shadows continued to advance, and Maureen opened fire.

During her FBI training at Quantico, Maureen had been the top of her class in marksmanship, a fact that frustrated her male classmates to no end. After graduation, she had continued to hone her technique at the firing range several times a week. In her relatively short career, that skill had saved her life more than once.

Maureen didn’t like killing, but she liked dying even less.

She trained the pistol sights on the nearest shadowman and squeezed the trigger.

The strobe of the muzzle flash lit up the dark chamber with a fleeting yellow glow, and the surrounding cattle cringed away in terror. The .40 caliber pistol bucked in her hand, but she managed the recoil like a pro, and her shots landed dead on target. Two rounds, center mass.

A normal man would have dropped immediately, like he’d been struck by lightning.

But that’s not what happened this time.

The bullets zipped straight through the shadowman’s body like it wasn’t even there. Maureen could tell because she heard the bullets hit the wall of the corridor behind the shadowman. She even saw the sparks from the impact, saw them through the shadowman’s translucent body.

No way.

No freaking way…

Maureen braced herself against the swelling tide of her panic. She prepared to fire again.

Something glinted in the hand of the shadowman on the left. Something that looked like a chrome-plated hair dryer.

A weapon.

Maureen’s reflexes shifted her aim toward this more immediate threat. She squeezed off two more shots, placing both of them between the shadowman’s eyes.

No effect. Once again, the bullets passed through harmlessly and pinged off the wall behind.

Shit. Shit!

The armed shadowman moved quickly. He raised his chrome weapon, pointed it at Maureen, and pulled the trigger.

Maureen flinched away in expectation of a deadly energy beam…but it didn’t come. Instead, her body became paralyzed. Her arms and legs froze in place. She couldn’t even wiggle her toes, couldn’t flex the index finger that was still curled around the trigger of her pistol.

Her stomach lurched as her body levitated off the floor.

Maureen shouted in surprise. At least her mouth wasn’t paralyzed, but yelling wasn’t going to do much good against three invincible shadowmen. And Maureen doubted she would have much luck trying to reason with these guys. People tended to be less open to discussion after you shot at them.

“RAAAWN!”

From the corner of Maureen’s eye, a round, hairy shape hurled itself toward the nearest of the shadowmen. It was Rawn. The crazy furball had his teeth bared in a ferocious snarl, ready to protect his new friend.

But as with Maureen’s gun, the attack had no effect.

Rawn passed through the first shadowman and tumbled onto the floor behind. In a flash, the protective critter wheeled around, a wild tangle of pale fur and gnashing teeth. He sprang again.

This time, the armed shadowman was ready. He zapped the would-be attacker with the freeze-ray, and Rawn hung suspended in mid-air, growling viciously.

“RAWN! RAWN! RRRAAAWN!”

Despite the terrifying situation, Maureen couldn’t help but smile internally at Rawn’s protectiveness. The little bugger was definitely fearless and loyal. Maureen just hoped these creepy shadowmen didn’t hurt her new friend.

“Stay away from him!” she shouted as one of the shadowmen moved toward Rawn to inspect the furious, growling ball of fur.

But Maureen also had her own skin to worry about.

Another one of the shadowmen stepped toward her, and she shuddered. The dark, slender alien plucked the pistol from Maureen’s frozen fingers, gave the weapon a bemused once-over, then handed it off to one of its companions.

A different device appeared in the shadowman’s hand. Maureen wasn’t sure exactly where it had come from. It had just materialized out of thin air.

The device was a small narrow shaft of metal, about the size of a pen.

“What the hell is that?” Maureen shouted.

The shadowman ignored her, but her question was soon answered just the same. Dark, noodly fingers turned the device on, and a thread of pink light emitted from the tip.

A laser?

The shadowman aimed the thin pink beam at Maureen’s shirt. The fabric singed and sizzled, and the air filled with the acrid scent of smoke. The laser slashed through her clothes with scalpel-like precision, but it left the skin underneath unharmed. In a matter of seconds, Maureen’s T-shirt was sliced down the front, leaving her bra and bare abdomen exposed.

“Stop it!” she screamed. “You can’t do that!”

The shadowman obviously disagreed, for he continued with his work, methodically cutting Maureen’s shirt away from her body. Next, he made short work of her bra, exposing her naked breasts to the humid air. Then he moved down to her jeans.

Maureen tried to struggle, but her arms and legs were utterly useless. She had no choice but to let this happen. Her eyes filled with tears of rage and indignity as the shadowman methodically divested her of her clothing.

In the background, she heard Rawn snapping and growling while the second shadowman poked and prodded him. Meanwhile, the third seemed to be taking a tally of the cattle.

What the hell was this all about?

At last, the shadowman with the laser cutter finished his work. All of Maureen’s clothing had been removed and now lay on the floor beneath her feet in a heap of cleanly incised rags. Her jeans. Her panties. All of it. She was completely naked and exposed.

“What do you want?” she cried. “What the fuck are you bastards going to do to me?”

The shadowman’s inscrutable, featureless face drew close, filling Maureen’s vision with darkness and the pink glow of the being’s eyes. It tilted its head quizzically, then drew back. The laser cutter was gone now, replaced by a different tool.

A syringe filled with pink fluid.

Maureen’s entrails went cold inside her.

“What is that?” She tried, without much success, to hide the tremor in her voice. “Don’t…Please…Oh God, please don’t put that into me!”

The shadowman whispered something she couldn’t understand and raised the syringe to Maureen’s neck.