Alien Enslaved IV: Spoils of War Read online

  She wasn’t a disbeliever.

  She knew that there really was such a thing as ‘ghosts’.

  People had souls and when they died that soul was released.

  She firmly believed, though, that the energy that had once been a person, or their soul, left the body and entered a different dimension, another world, or a different plain of existence. They didn’t linger on Earth for any reason. They moved on.

  So ghosts, yes. Hauntings—not really.

  The house they were investigating was a point of interest, though, the focus of a real life mystery.

  Not long after the house was built, the owner had mysteriously vanished and had never been found. The supposed haunt they were going to try to ‘banish’ was his ghost.

  She’d gotten some off-the-charts readings on the place when she’d come before to check it out. It was situated over a very strong magnetic field. Her working theory was that the house had been built on a portal—time, space, or dimensional—and all of the reported phenomena associated with the house and area were actually ‘natural’ not supernatural.

  Natural but unknown—or at least not scientifically proven or accepted yet.

  Oh, it would send her visitors through the roof if she managed to get some footage of something really juicy—like maybe aliens!

  And then she could dump her job and make enough money to focus completely on her goal—which was to get rich, of course, but also to prove she was right and not a kook.

  Well, she didn’t honestly care if everybody in the world thought she was a kook if they’d pay her enough money to do what she wanted, but vindication would be a nice cherry topping.

  Billy Eagle moved up beside her as she opened the back end of the SUV, reached inside, and pulled a gun case from the back. Opening it, he pulled a wicked looking automatic rifle out, loaded the clip, and cocked it.

  Lori glanced at him questioningly.

  He scanned the sky and then the area around the house. “It’s pretty overgrown. I’m going to check the perimeter while there’s still plenty of light to look for recent activity.”

  The comment sent a shiver down Lori’s spine although she couldn’t have said why.

  Or maybe it was the gun rather than what he’d said?

  That thought triggered an elusive memory. It flickered through her mind and was gone as quickly as it had arisen, though, leaving her with a peculiar sense of loss—like she’d forgotten something important.

  She’d had these strange ‘waves’ since her first trip out to the place to check it out. She just didn’t know why.

  She couldn’t think of a damned thing that had happened that would explain it.

  But she wished to hell she could.

  It was really getting on her nerves.

  That and the damned nightmares she kept having that would jerk her awake in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.

  Linda scowled at him as he marched off. “Men—they’ve got all the muscles and they never want to do the heavy lifting.”

  Lori shrugged dismissively. “We can manage,” she said, grunting as she lifted the box filled with tools. “And he does have a point. It’ll be way easier to see if anybody anticipated us and came to make mischief.”

  “Well he’s going to have to move that heavy ass generator!” she yelled after him.

  He lifted a hand—the only indication that he might have heard the demand.

  Lori studied the machine, but she knew it would take some serious muscle to get it out of the back.

  And they’d need light to set it up.

  Shit!

  She glanced at the sky, as well. “I think we probably have an hour to an hour and a half of daylight. If he doesn’t make the rounds and get back pretty quick, we’ll have to try to unload it ourselves and set it up. No way am I going to sit here all night without some electricity.”

  “Particularly when that would be frigging pointless,” Linda growled under her breath.

  Lori glanced at her in surprise. Generally, Linda was as excited about their excursions as she was and filled with anticipation. “You guys have a fight?”

  Linda blushed but shook her head and hurried toward the dilapidated house they would be spending several nights in. The door was locked and Lori, who’d followed, had to balance the box of tools on her hip and fish the house key from her jeans pocket. The lock turned with a surprising lack of resistance and she glanced at Linda a little uneasily.

  Linda shrugged. “I guess the realtor sent someone out to fix the place up.”

  Someone that didn’t bother to tidy up the yard—which had knee high grass, wildly overgrown shrubs and leaves and trash?

  The house looked like a hurricane had hit it—as in teen house party.

  Lori relaxed as that sank in. “Guess this explains the door lock.”

  Billy was at the car unloading the generator when they got back for another armload of supplies. Every muscle on the man’s body flexed as he lifted it and then lowered it to the ground.

  Lori tried not to notice, but that sort of manly display of working muscle just did something to her.

  It wasn’t as if she was attracted to Billy or anything.

  Physically, he was appealing enough she could see where Linda could’ve been swept off her feet, but he was … like a throwback—a woman’s place was in the kitchen, when she wasn’t on her back in the bed.

  He wasn’t pretty enough to put up with that kind of bullshit in her book!

  “There’s one of those … uh … crop circle things out there,” Billy announced as casually as if it was commonplace to run across them.

  Lori nearly dropped the box she’d picked up. “Where?” she asked breathlessly, struggling with a mixture of excitement and pure terror. “Hold on! We’ve got to get some of this recorded!”

  A little frantic thought produced the fact that they weren’t set up to use the damned camera—no power. “I’ll use my phone and we can integrate the footage with the other later.”

  She handed Linda her phone and recorded a short intro about their arrival and her observations thus far and then they rushed to the ‘crop circle’ Billy had told them about.

  Lori was pretty damned disappointed when she first saw it. It looked way more like some of the kids had done donuts in the backyard with their trucks than any crop circle she’d ever seen. She held her phone up and filmed it anyway. “We should get the drone out in the morning and take it up for an aerial view where we can tell more about it.”

  Billy nodded. “Whatever it was that landed here, it was huge,” he commented.

  It was unfortunate that she’d already shut the camera off.

  Damn it!

  But Billy never worried about the business. She suspected the real reason he was willing to tag along and ‘protect’ was because he wanted to make damn sure there wasn’t any kind of hanky-panky going on.

  Sighing with irritation and disappointment, she tucked the camera away and headed back to finish unloading their supplies and equipment while Billy set up the generator and connected it to the breaker box in the house. It was already dark and Lori and Linda were having trouble navigating the path from house to car and inside the house when he cranked up the gen and the power came on inside.

  Unfortunately, there were only a couple of working lights, but they’d brought a floodlight of their own and used that to light the place enough to finish settling in. Billy came in to inform them that he was going to do a final perimeter check and then make sure everything was locked up.

  Lori and Linda focused on setting up the cameras and connecting them to the recorder and then setting up motion detectors so that they activated the cameras. When they’d finished that, they set up the other monitors they’d brought with them to track changes around them and then headed for the cooler. By the time Billy had done the perimeter check and gone room to room to check the windows and doors and make sure no one was hiding inside with them, they’d put together a meal from the cooler and the thre
e of them settled to eat before they got the inflators out and aired up their mattresses.

  The order of business was that they slept in rotation with someone always awake to make sure the equipment was recording if anything unusual happened.

  Billy took the first shift.

  * * * *

  Lori knew it was a nightmare she was experiencing even before there was anything really frightening about it. It started like nightmares tended to with a sense of danger or threat. Her skin prickled and crept. And then she saw … them.

  There were five or six of them—tall, gray, hairless. They looked like an imprint on silly putty that had been stretched until the beings, the aliens, were unnaturally long and skinny.

  They weren’t really there, she told herself.

  This was a manifestation of the high magnetism of the place. Studies had been done and they’d discovered the magnetic field affected the brain in that way, making people feel as if they were having an alien visitation or a religious experience and the beings around them were angels.

  The question was, why was she?

  She’d worn her cap to bed, the headgear designed to filter out the high magnetism.

  She couldn’t move, of course. She was asleep and paralyzed.

  Just about the time she reached a peak in fear, despite her efforts to reason the alarm away, she was suddenly bathed in a blinding light—as if a star had gone supernova and engulfed her—and then …. Nothing. Endless darkness so thick it could’ve been a blanket.

  They were there, though—the aliens who had touched her with gentleness—the yellow giants and the demon man. She sensed their presence, heard the low rumble of their voices, felt comforted that they, at least, meant her no harm.

  * * * *

  The first thing Lori did, or at least tried, the moment she woke was to attempt to sit up. She slammed her head into something so hard above her she ricocheted off and hit the equally hard surface below her. This slapstick moment was followed by a cascade of snickers.

  Not only did it not sound like Linda and Billy, but there was clearly more than two and they sounded more hysterical than amused.

  It was so dark Lori couldn’t tell when she opened her eyes except for the movement of her eyelids.

  “You ok?” asked someone—a female that was not Linda—close by.

  Already disoriented, that discovery threw her mind into more chaos.

  She grunted a response, compelled to be polite by the courteous question regarding her state.

  She felt her head for blood. The tingling from the blow felt like blood flow, but she couldn’t discern any wetness. “I think so,” she murmured, lifting her hands to feel the space above her.

  It was flat and smooth and felt icy like metal.

  No wonder she’d nearly cracked her skull when she hit it!

  “Where am I?”

  The question elicited nothing but silence for many moments. Finally, the voice of a stranger responded. “I don’t know.”

  “None of us do.”

  “Us?” Lori repeated, picking up on that one word as a mind blowing circumstance considering her last memory was of lying down on an air mattress with no one around but Linda and Billy. “How many are there in here?”

  “I think … a dozen, maybe? None of us have been awake long.”

  “Linda?”

  “Yes!” someone responded, clearly excited.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t sound like the Linda that Lori knew. “Linda Eagle?”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  The woman sounded like she was on the verge of tears. “I don’t know what sort of place this is. I don’t know how I got here.”

  “Neither do I,” someone else responded, and then another stranger voiced the same response and another until it was clear that none of the people—women—had a clue of what had happened or how they’d gotten where ever it was that they were.

  A bizarre sense of unreality swept over Lori.

  It felt like … a continuation of the nightmare she abruptly recalled.

  Except she knew she wasn’t asleep. “I … had this dream about aliens,” she said hesitantly.

  There was a chorus of vaguely hysterical laughter in response.

  Annoyance flickered through her.

  She supposed that answered the question of whether any of the others had had an experience similar to hers.

  It was impossible to wrap her mind around her situation and come up with any answers, she discovered—any.

  Beyond the dream, which she only vaguely recalled, there was nothing, not so much as a crumb to build a theory around. And there were no clues in the pitch blackness surrounding her.

  Well, except for the fact that it seemed to be a mass kidnapping.

  Naturally enough, human trafficking came to mind as an explanation, except that didn’t make any sense relative to what she could recall.

  She hadn’t been with any of these women—as in close proximity. If she had been, if she’d been in something like a bar where, conceivably, there would have been a possibility of a mass kidnapping, it would have made a terrifying kind of sense—they’d all ended up in the same bar and had their drinks spiked and woken in a cage. Drugs would even explain the memory loss.

  On top of the blow to the head when she’d slammed her head into whatever was just above her, the strain of trying to recall memories that just didn’t seem to be there gave her a blinding headache.

  It occurred to her when she tried to swallow and discovered how desert dry her throat and mouth were that some of the headache might be put down to dehydration.

  On top of that, her stomach felt like it was going to cave in and consume itself.

  Those two circumstances gave rise to more questions.

  Just how damned long had she been—where ever she was?

  And how much worse were things going to get?

  She didn’t have to wait nearly as long to have those questions answered as she would’ve liked. She’d had maybe fifteen to thirty minutes to dwell on dry throat and empty stomach when her mind switched to the discomfort of a filling bladder and then the lights abruptly came on and a voice thick with an unrecognizable accent filled the chamber she was in with instructions/orders her mind failed to decipher.

  Beyond the tone.

  Which clearly identified the message as an order even if none of the words sounded familiar.

  Blinded as she was by the sudden brightness after lying in the dark so long, the bellowing seemed to be ‘get up’ and ‘get out’, especially in conjunction with the lights and a sound Lori dimly identified as an opening door.

  She rolled off the bunk and fell on the woman climbing off of the bunk beneath hers. “Sorry,” she grunted out, in pain from the collision.

  The woman clearly didn’t give a shit about the apology or the fact that it was an accident. She shoved Lori hard enough she staggered back and into another woman. That woman also gave her a shove, but she’d regained some vision in that time and her equilibrium with it and she managed to follow the others out the door.

  Only to discover that the women who’d been determined to be the first out if they had to trample everybody else had seen something that instantly deprived them of all desire to vacate the tin box they’d been locked in. They immediately whirled and began trying to ‘swim’ back upstream.

  Fortunately for them, the women piling out behind were too focused on fighting their way out to give ground.

  Because the last one out got caught in the door when it was slammed shut again.

  Her horrible screams galvanized everyone else into a blind panic that sent them charging en masse across the open area beyond their cell.

  Lori and a couple of the other women had paused at the screams and glanced back to see if the situation warranted running or if they should try to help, but they were nearly run down by the runners and one glimpse of what had happened was enough to assure them there was nothing they could do for the poor soul that had gotten caught in the door.


  Lori desperately wanted to unsee what she had seen, to have it erased forever from her memory, and she had her wish granted shortly thereafter—because they discovered there were way more horrific things in the pen with them.

  In point of fact, those in the forefront, naturally enough, spotted the monsters first. They slammed on brakes, screamed ear splittingly, and reversed engines, running over the women behind them.

  Lori was among those run down so it was a few minutes before she gathered her wits enough that her mind was able to translate what her eyes were seeing.

  Oddly enough, fear was slow to grip her because the scene looked like something straight out of a popular science fiction movie—as in staged, not real.

  There was a yellow skinned giant not two yards from where she landed that shook her out of her shock induced popsicle state. His gaze zeroed in on her, scanned her from the top of her head to her bare feet. Then he dragged in a deep breath that expanded his massive, muscular chest and his eyes glazed over.

  With lust.

  A … massive something beneath his loincloth stirred, tried to rise against the confining material.

  Uh oh.

  Chapter Three

  The war cry—death to the puny white thing—came from the warrior two spaces ahead of him, instantly diverting Lori from the warrior that looked like he was about to charge her and fuck her brains out.

  This one was female—damned near as big and muscular as the male warrior—and really pissed off—that her man had a hard on for the alien female.

  Lori managed to scramble to her feet just in time to make it easy for the female to grab her by the throat and lift her clean off the floor. She thought for several seconds that her heavy ass was going to pull her head off—but that was later, when she had time to think and wasn’t running on instincts.

  Fortunately, there was nothing wrong with Lori’s survival instincts. Flight was impossible since she was dangling from the female’s hand. That left fight.

  Rather than trying to pry the manacle off her neck, she went for the face of her attacker.