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  Barbaric Alien

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  Barbaric Alien

  (An Alien Abduction Romance)

  By Stella Sky

  Chapter One

  Reina

  All we have are stories.

  Those who lived through them spoke their tales with terror in their voices. But, when you’ve been isolated your whole life, like me, you long to create your own stories.

  “You coming, Reina?” came the excited whisper of my best friend, Willow Jefferies.

  She’d snuck into my bedroom window, situated in a small mountain town in the Northlands.

  Even though I was nineteen, it still infuriated my parents if I left the safety of our log cabin at night. I knew nothing of danger, and not because I was one of those fearless girls, but because our town had always been safe.

  I wasn’t alive before the Vithohn took over our planet. This life was all I knew.

  To me, it was fulfilling. I could find joy in it.

  But, there were others: leaders in our packs of wild humans, who had known life before we knew of the Vithohn. They had known a life thriving with green fields and farmlands and tech.

  These were the ones who taught us how to hide. They told us what the Vithohn were like and how to stay safe.

  I had personally never seen a Vithohn, not even from afar. But I’d heard their fierce cries at the base of our mountain once and saw the fear that struck our village. It was enough to let me know I should stay far, far away from them.

  “Kennedy is about to start,” Willow hurried in a low tone: her black hair whipping against my windowsill as she hoisted herself back out of my room.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming!” I whispered with a giggle and chased after her, jumping onto her back and wrapping my legs around her as she struggled to keep us vertical.

  “Off!” Willow demanded through uncontrollable giggles as she looped my leg through her arms.

  “No!” I said stubbornly. “And for the record, don’t come into my house expecting me to make a stealthy escape when you run laughing and screaming from my window afterward.”

  She tilted her head back to meet my eyes and I just barely saw her wink through the darkness. “You’re welcome,” she teased before dropping me to the ground.

  My feet hit the moist earth beneath us, and I squished my toes into the damp moss. It was late spring, and the mountains had been damp from the incessant raining. Great for crops. Not for sneaking around.

  I followed quickly behind her, barefoot and all, escaping from my house to be regaled by tales of life outside the mountain from our new, mysterious guest: Alexander Kennedy.

  I’d never seen the other humans before until Kennedy came into our camp. He was thirty-something, tall, with dark skin and incredible green eyes. A real adventurer.

  He’d come from Sunnydale Ridge Trailer Park: located in a once densely populated city district that was now crawling with abandoned houses and a scattering of militia. He said they’d been attacked and he’d fled here.

  I’d heard of other militia groups out there: other packs of humans hiding out in abandoned buildings and forests. But they were different than us.

  They wanted to take the Earth back.

  We wanted to survive.

  They made it their mission to fight and kill the Vithohn, while we wanted nothing to do with them.

  “There were only about ten of us left,” I could hear Kennedy say, his low voice sounding sexy and masculine in the distance.

  Willow and I hurried our pace and met the rest of the stragglers around the large bonfire in the middle of camp.

  My father was the elder of the camp, even though he was far from the oldest one who lived there. Both he and our resident military man, Calrin, had warned us against lighting fires at night, saying that it might alert the Vithohn to our presence.

  Calrin had been pretty strict about it, yet I could see him around the first, swilling booze and equally as entranced in Kennedy’s stories as the rest of them.

  For the most part, Kennedy’s stories scared the camp and largely went unheard. But, those of us brave enough to hear them would gather around the fire in the night, drunk off apricot liqueur, and let him regale us for hours.

  I sat in front of the mysterious militia member, my butt settling into the muddy ground below me, and Willow took a seat right next to me, cuddling into my shoulder after snatching the passing flask from Calrin.

  “A Vithohn had come in with one of our females,” Kennedy continued.

  He had a habit of talking with his hands, which I found incredibly sexy.

  “To kill her?” Willow piped in before taking a sip from the flask and then passing it to me.

  Kennedy shook his head and pulled his wooly jacket closer to his body. “No. Something happens to them when they…”

  He paused then and took a look around our camp to make sure no children were around.

  “Erm…” he rolled his wrist, hoping somebody would fill in the blanks. “You know, when they mate.”

  My eyes went wide at the sentiment, and the apricot liquid went down my throat, hot and acidic as it reached my belly. I inched closer to Kennedy as he told us all how vicious the Vithohn attack had been.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “You’ve got to be kiddin’ me, boy,” Calrin said at nearly the same time as me.

  “No, sir,” Kennedy said with the proper respect. He put his hand over his heart as if to say: right hand to the Lord above, sir. But he never said the words aloud.

  Calrin Blue was forty-six. I always thought he had the perfect cowboy name. Or, at least, from what I had gleaned from the old Western novels he had stacked along the bookshelf in his house.

  He was a soldier who fought in the war against the Vithohn. He looked worn, tired, and much older than he really was. Losing the war hit him hard.

  It was for this reason that he usually stayed away from Kennedy, preferring not to hear what the Vithohn had done to the Earth since he had lost his battle to stop them.

  “Why would the girl go and do a thing like that?” Calrin said, shaking his head in disgust as he pushed a wooden stick further into the fire with a dull scrape.

  Kennedy shrugged, and for a moment, I wondered if he would answer the question at all. Then he said, “She loved him. Ran off with our crew to start some… hybrid race? I don’t know. We stayed in Sunnydale a few more years but, it all went to shit.” The handsome stranger blinked in surprise and looked back over to Calrin, biting his lip in apology. “Pardon my language, sir.”

  “Ah,” was all Calrin said, waving him off.

  “We had a pack of them attack our camp,” Kennedy continued.

  I was still stuck on the fact that a woman had actually slept with one of these alien killers. If they were really as bad as everyone was saying, why would a girl just a little older than me prefer to go run off with an alien rather than stay with h
er people?

  “Probably looking for the bastards who left,” Calrin score.

  “Maybe,” Kennedy agreed, leaning farther into the fire’s heat and then making flirtatious eye-contact with me. He offered me a small smile, which I returned feverishly, and then he looked back at our camp soldier.

  “I tried to defend our home but, ah…” then Kennedy’s eyes went lost in thought: a pain crossing over his face like I’d never seen before. “Well, anyway… I heard about this place: the only true safe haven in the pockets of humans left. That was the rumor and…” he looked around our small village and concluded, “looks like they were right.”

  “Who told you a thing like that?” Calrin’s wife, Melodie, said.

  Melody had been a doctor back in the glory days. She was the leader in new medicine: using risky forms of laser tech to heal patients.

  Kennedy seemed to think on the question, and for a moment I wondered if he was lying. Then suddenly he snapped his fingers and said, “Cunningham.”

  “Ah,” Melodie said, nodding to her husband. “Matthew.”

  “Disappeared two months ago and never came back,” Calrin added and nodded to Kennedy and then to me.

  “Ah, I’m sure he’s already,” Kennedy said, waving the couple off. He had an air about him that made you want to be his friend almost immediately. Something friendly, casual: the kind of man whose tones were so playful that he could insult you right to your face and you’d thank him for it.

  “Are they coming?” I asked, my honey-soaked voice now warm with suspicion and booze.

  “S’cuse me?” Kennedy asked with a blink.

  “They chased you out, and you led them here,” I offered sloppily: on the cusp of tipsy. “Are they coming for you?”

  Kennedy stared me down, and his eye nearly twitched: a significant look crossing his face that only I could see. “Nah,” he said quietly. Then, more assertively, “No, ma’am. I lost them a long time ago. Besides, they don’t travel far from their bases.”

  So that means the must have a base around here, I thought.

  “Come on, dear,” Melodie said suddenly, a tired, overwhelmed laugh escaping her lips as she set a hand on Calrin’s shoulder and used it to get up from her chair. “Get me back to my bed before this lad gives me nightmares.”

  Calrin nodded, getting up with a large exhale and pulling his stick out of the fire. He gave everyone a nod goodnight and then turned to his wife. “Don’t worry, dear,” he said. “I’ll hold you ‘til you fall asleep.”

  Melodie laughed quietly and batted him on the shoulder, pulling him along. “Oh, stop,” she chided. Melodie was not a fan of public affection.

  “Fine!” Calrin said with a laugh: suddenly serious before turning back to our small group with a wink in his tone, saying, “You can hold me.”

  The two laughed and slipped their hands into the others. I envied them, in a way. They had a shorthand: a playful, unspoken banter that only came from years and years of knowing someone.

  “You really could benefit from armoring up,” Kennedy said suddenly, not making eye contact with them.

  The couple turned briskly in their tracks, stopping to regard the newcomer with some fear in their expressions.

  “If they come…” Kennedy began slowly, still looking down into the fire, regretful to have to bring up such serious subject matter, “they’ll take the girls. Every girl.”

  Melodie pulled Calrin’s hand, desperately wanting out of this conversation.

  It was easier to live blind, as we had been, than to admit that we were the odd ones out. That there was a life outside of our village that we weren’t fighting for. That one day it might all come to bite us.

  “Alright then,” Calrin said with a ‘case closed’ tone. “Maybe that’s something we have to look into.”

  The couple continued back to their cottage, never turning back to look at us. Not even to tell us to put out the fire.

  I turned to Willow, and she smiled awkwardly at me. My eyes went comically wide, hoping to diffuse the situation as I used my equivalent of ‘jazz hands’ and exclaimed, “And the human race just couldn’t go on!”

  “That’s not funny,” Kennedy snapped at me, emptying another mouthful of booze from the glass before swallowing with a loud click.

  “It’s a little ridiculous,” I joked, but he looked stoic.

  “Yeah,” Kennedy said to myself and Willow before exhaling into his sweet glass of the hazy pink liqueur. “Tell me that again when you’ve actually seen one of those monsters face to face. You’re lucky to be here, you know?”

  Willow’s head popped off my shoulder then and she gave me a warning look, flipping her shiny black hair behind her shoulder.

  “Yeah,” I repeated in the same tone he had used before gesturing to the wild mountain farmland around us. The village of people that I would know for the rest of my life. No more, no less. “Living the dream.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like out there,” he cautioned, dismissing me.

  “Okay,” I said, drawing out my vowels. “I can’t tell if you’re being flirtatious or angry.”

  “Was he ever being flirtatious?” Willow laughed, taking another slug from the flask.

  “Funny, I didn’t think they were even in the same vicinity,” Kennedy said.

  “Funny, I didn’t remember you being this much of a dick five minutes ago,” I snapped back, flat out drunk now.

  Kennedy raised and lowered dismissive brows and Willow burst into a loud laugh, knowing I’d had too much and mistakenly let my desires for Kennedy’s affections slip out.

  “Alright, drunky,” she said, lifting me to my feet and slinging her arm under my shoulder. “Time to get you home.”

  I couldn’t tell, between my out-of-nowhere argument with Kennedy and my blurry vision, but it seemed as though Willow and Kennedy exchanged a significant look. Something I couldn’t put my finger on.

  Chapter Two

  Oron

  Crowds cheered before our glorious leader in the middle of a crowded clearing in the center of our gothic city.

  “Come on, come on,” I whispered to myself, hiding in the shadows of the grand city. “Just hurry up and finish.”

  Sylas, our Vithohn judge, had come out to give a compelling speech about dividing up the lands and tattered on about all the things we needed to do to rebuild all that we had lost when we were sent from our Udrenahine planet to this hell-hole of Earth.

  I’m not a bitter Vithohn by nature, but something sick shot up in me during that speech that I couldn’t shake.

  Perhaps it was the grand, over-emphasized way he gave speeches or how he felt his very presence should have been offered a rise in morale. Or maybe I just had trouble liking Sylas after he banished me from my people.

  I was a Voth once. One of the strongest generals amongst the Vithohn: able to sense heat, summon energy through our spires, and to use our energy shield to protect ourselves and our people.

  But with one mistake, I was taken from my standing, had the tentacle that crawled down from the back of my head banded and cut, and was banished from the presence of the Voth.

  Today would change all that.

  Hopefully.

  I waited until Sylas was finished with his ridiculous speech: waited until the crowds and cheers and warrior cries drowned out the sound of my footsteps, and when Sylas departed from the risen stage in the city center, I grabbed him and pulled him into the shadows of the nearby stone and metal alleyways.

  He yelped as I pulled him toward me and I wanted to laugh at the noise he made. Our fearless leader.

  Instead, I bowed down to him, showing him I meant no harm, and he jerked his arm back even though I had let him go, wiping it fiercely and taking a furious breath.

  “I’ve come to seek forgiveness from my Voth,” I said to him with my head down. Meek and humble. Two things I absolutely detested being. “Please, do me this honor.”

  “Oh, Oron, not now,” Sylas dismissed with a wav
e of his heavily armored hand. He looked out into the main streets from without the shadowy alley, checking to see if anyone had spotted our encounter.

  “With all due respect,” I said, trying not to bite my lip in frustration; still, my words came out through a set jaw. “Consider what it took me to get back into the city.”

  “Oron, stop it,” Sylas said in a hushed, frustrated tone.

  He pulled me up from my bow, looking annoying, and brushed off my chest plate. “We don’t have time for you.”

  Both of us looked up then, hearing a fight break out in the crowds he’d left behind.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he continued, gruffly tossing me backward with as much ease as sending a stone flying into a pond. Sylas was a coward on a good day, but he was also gigantic.

  “Sylas!” I said, hurtling back toward him and grabbing his arm.

  He gripped my hand and gave it an immense squeeze.

  “Touch me again, and I’ll make sure you’re torn apart in a viewing,” he enunciated. “You’re lucky I like you, Oron. Now leave the city before I report you.” He paused and then said to himself, “I should have done so, already.”

  “Sy—” I began but was quickly interrupted.

  “—Oron, surely you can see there are more important things going on here. There are rumors that…” he shook his head, thinking better of telling me whatever secrets he was hiding.

  “What?” I said, suddenly feeling a spike of adrenaline flow through me. “Tell me.”

  “There’s a traitor among us,” he said, lowly. He said it with so much care, it actually made me nervous. Then he looked me up and down and corrected, “Make that two traitors.”

  He must have caught the wounded look on my face because he quickly followed up with: “There is something you can do,” he said with a slow, distracted breath: his eyes flicking around the alleyway. “And when the time comes, I’ll allow you to do it.”

  “We were friends, Sylas,” I pleaded.