At least a dozen women of various ethnicities and diverse attire, as well as a handful of stout men. A few other people remained tucked in the shadows of their bunks, but she estimated there to be nearly twenty people in the room, all in. But the question was, who were they? And how the hell did she get here?

She turned back to Maureen. The woman had the look of an aerobics instructor. Lean and muscled, contrasting with her own softer physique. Not that Darla wasn’t in decent shape, but the kind of shape that still allowed for pizza and ice cream once in a while.

“Better?” Maureen asked.

“Yeah. I remember driving. I had just picked up some coffee from the gas station. There was this cute guy there, but I blew him off and was heading home. And then—I don’t remember.”

“That’s how it is.”

“What is?” Darla asked, alarm flaring in her chest. “Wait a minute. You said it took a minute to wear off. Oh, no. Did that bastard roofie me? But there’s no way he could have spiked my coffee—”

“It’s not roofies.”

“Then what? And where are we? What is this place?”

“Well, you may want to sit back down for that part.”

Darla did not like the sound of that. Not one bit.

“Maureen, what’s going on?”

“Look around us. Not exactly like anything you’ve seen on Earth before, is it?”

“You talk as if we were on another planet or something.”

“Or something, yeah.”

Darla’s eyes widened. The impossible illumination of the metal, the strange design of the chamber. And her winding up here with no memory of how she’d gotten here. It was insane, but it was all starting to add up. Add up to an impossible answer.

“I was abducted?” she gasped.

“Now she gets it,” a deeply tanned man with broad shoulders and several days scruff on his square jaw growled.

“Be nice, Victor.”

“I am being nice, Maureen,” he snarked, turning his attention back to the newcomer. “You were abducted. She was abducted. I was abducted. Just about all of us were snatched up in one way or another, get it?”

“Okay, you made your point. There’s no need to be a dick about it.”

“Baby, if you think I’m an asshole, you’ve got another thing coming.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He flashed a look at Maureen. “You wanna tell her about the Raxxians?”

Several of the other captives seemed to shift uncomfortably at the mention of the word. It was unsettling to say the least.

“Okay, I’ll bite. What’s a Raxxian?”

Maureen shook her head.

“Fine,” Victor scoffed. “I’ll do it. You see, hon, the Raxxians are the scaly green bastards who took us.”

“Don’t call me hon.”

“Whatever you say, babe,” he replied with an annoying wink. “Let me tell you, you’re going to want to watch yourself around them. Don’t get their attention. They’re big sons of bitches too. Taller than any man, and meaner to boot.”

“Worse than you?”

“Ha, you’ve got some fire in you,” he said with an amused chuckle. “Okay, play it your way. We’ll see how long that lasts once you meet our hosts.”

With that, Victor strode off and took a seat against the wall.

Darla was keeping up with the flood of impossible information as best she could. The automatic flare of anger at being spoken to like that had kicked her defenses into overdrive, but as the adrenaline slowed to a trickle and her mind accepted the reality of her situation, she found herself falling into a state of despair. But despair mixed with a sliver of hope.

It was one of her traits her sister had always said she envied. How she could find something positive in just about any situation. But even for Darla, this one was going to take an effort.

“Okay, so this is real. I’ve been kidnapped by aliens.”

“We like to say abducted,” Maureen noted. “Kidnapping makes it sound like they want a ransom, and that’s not what the Raxxians are about.”

Darla nodded, numb from the rude awakening. “Fine. Abducted. We’ve been abducted by aliens and taken to their planet. Has anyone seen the outside?”

A murmur rippled through the others.

Maureen put a hand on her shoulder and looked at her with a sympathetic gaze. “Oh, honey, don’t you feel that? The little vibration in the floor?”

Darla was wearing shoes, and not her going out heels, but a pair of comfy trainers. “What vibration?” she asked, bending down and putting her hand on the smooth metal.

There it was. Faint but consistent. A low thrum that couldn’t be heard but was most certainly felt. She felt a new surge of adrenaline flood her system.

Maureen saw her look of stunned realization and nodded. “That’s right. We’re on their ship, and no one knows where they’re taking us.”

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER THREE

Darla had to give herself a little credit. She may have nearly passed out from the shock, but at least she hadn’t thrown up, though she’d felt her stomach do more than one flip-flop when the reality of her situation sank in. Her ass had become well acquainted with the floor in a hurry, though, as she slumped down in a heap.

I’m in a goddamn alien spaceship. And I may never see home again.

It was a lot to take in even in the best of circumstances. And these? These were far from the best. In fact, it downright sucked.

What was truly crazy was that her unbelievable situation was almost expected in a strange way. Darla’s mother had long claimed to have been abducted by aliens in her teens, taken and experimented on before being returned to Earth.

Her mom had said the aliens had been intrigued with her human reproductive system, injecting her with strange fluids and probing her at length for days or weeks, she wasn’t really sure. She said that she had felt her body changing from what they did to her, though she couldn’t put a finger on how.

Eventually, the aliens grew weary of their experiments and decided to be rid of her, and that was the end of it. By the time she was returned home—with a story no one believed—she had felt certain she would be unable to have children. But then, just a few years later, and quite unexpectedly, along came Darla.

And now here she was, in space, just like her mom.

“How long?” Darla managed to ask.

Maureen lowered herself down next to her. “You? You’ve been here for about eighteen hours or so. It’s hard to tell for sure, but that’s about how long whatever they do to us seems to last on average. It’s a guesstimate, of course. No one wears a watch these days, so we can’t say for sure. And on top of that, the lights are almost always on.”

“Then how do you sleep?”

Maureen shrugged. “We sleep when we’re tired. Hugo says it’s called a multi-phasic sleep schedule. Apparently, it’s common in Spain. Siestas and all of that, you don’t just sleep for one long time at night. Took some getting used to at first, but I guess it’s all about adaptation at this point.”

“But how do you track time? Days, weeks?”

“We don’t, really. All of us who had phones still on us, well, their batteries died a while ago. No signal, you know? If we’d been smart, we’d have switched one off to save some juice, but we’re in space, so it really doesn’t matter anymore. Not to mention, the roaming charges would be brutal.”

Darla took in the new information, along with several deep, calming breaths. Freaking out wasn’t going to make the situation any better. And if she wanted to survive this mess she needed all the intel she could get.

She looked around, taking in their surroundings with a more detail-oriented eye. Her initial impression had been correct. There were no rivets holding panels in place. In fact, aside from the two doors mounted on opposite walls from each other, there were almost no seams visible in the entire compartment.