Caveman Alien's Ransom Read online

  “This room isn't that big,” Aurora says and looks around with her big, brown eyes. “But I can't see any doors or windows. Feels like a cargo compartment.”

  Delyah stretches her neck and scans the room. “A perfectly circular cylinder, forty feet diameter, four and a half feet in height. Metal floor and ceiling. Walls of unknown material. Air with sufficient oxygen to be breathable to humans with no ill effects. Pressure about one atmosphere. Slight smell of sulfur. No visible windows or doors. One possible hatch in ceiling.”

  We all turn to where she's looking. And sure enough, in the middle of the ceiling there appears to be a round hatch about the size of a manhole. Or rather, a metal circle that could be a hatch. There are no handles or lock mechanisms on it on this side.

  I get to my feet and carefully walk over there, trying to avoid banging my head. I put one hand in the middle of the circle and push. And the circle gives a little, just a fraction of an inch before I have to let it back down. It's heavy. But not impossible to lift.

  “Come and give me a hand,” I hiss. Two girls come over and help me push the hatch up.

  “It's opening!”

  It's heavy going, but we gradually push straight up on the round hatch until we're standing on tiptoe. The opening is big enough that one of us should be able to crawl through.

  And now they're all looking at me again. Damn. They have a point. The happy-go-lucky one usually does a lot of dangerous stuff. I should have thought of that.

  “Fine,” I say, committing to my role. “This will be a walk in the park.”

  Two of the girls get on their hands and knees so that I can climb up on their shoulders. I peer into the crack between the hatch and the frame. It's just as dark there as down here, but the light is less yellow and more blueish. I slide slowly through the narrow opening. I read somewhere that if you can get your hips through somewhere, then all of you can get in. But my hips are pretty wide, and the crack is starting to feel narrow.

  I jiggle and wriggle like a worm, and suddenly my hips are through and I can pull my feet up after me.

  And then I'm standing on a new floor. I still have to bend over, because the ceiling is just as low here.

  It's a much smaller room than the cargo room below, and the floor isn't metal, but that plastic material. It's a junction in a hallway. Six corridors radiate out and end in doors.

  “What do you see?” Aurora hisses from the hatch.

  I kneel down so I can give my report without raising my voice from a whisper. “It's a junction in a hallway. Six corridors radiate out and end in doors. Can I please have some company up here?”

  Soon after, Caroline, Aurora and Emilia have joined me.

  “Does anyone have any weapons?” I whisper. “We'll try to find the control room. And I'm not sure we can hijack this thing with our bare hands.”

  We rummage through our pockets, and in the end we come up with six ballpoint pens, chewing gum and breath mints of various flavors, lab goggles, eight dollars and thirty cents, two tampons and a bunch of notepaper.

  I look at the sad little heap, trying to stay cheerful. “Unless they're extremely allergic to spearmint, I'm not sure this will work. But of course we will succeed. You know, in the end.”

  We ask the girls still below to come up with weapons. “Anything,” I hiss to Heidi through the crack. “Nail files. Scissors. String. Forks. I mean, someone has to have pepper spray, at least.”

  I can hear the call going around down there. Surely they must be able to conjure up something.

  In the end I have a surprising amount of string, but no scissors and no forks. I guess everyone was taken by surprise when they were kidnapped and didn't have time to get anything other than what they had in their pockets.

  “Is that it?” I hiss to Heidi. “String?”

  “That's what you asked for,” she says indignantly. “Some of the women here took the drawstring out of their sweatpants and now they have to hold them up with their hands. Oh, wait ...”

  She disappears and comes up again with something black in her hand. “How about this?”

  I take the thing in both hands. It's heavy.

  “Oh my fuck ...”

  It's a gun. Very black and matte and ugly. And I can't help but notice that it fits my hand perfectly. It's pretty small.

  Heidi is talking to someone down there and relaying information to me. “Glock twenty-six,” she says. “Nine millimeter, which I hope is not how far it can shoot ... what? Okay, it's the diameter of the bullet? Sounds kind of small to me. But whatever. You have ten shots.” She peers up at me. “Is that good enough, or do you need more string?”

  3

  - Sophia -

  “I'm good,” I say hurriedly and show the gun to the other girls up here. Their eyes widen.

  “That should probably do the trick,” Caroline says. “Unless these guys are bulletproof. Or too small to hit. I mean, these ceilings are ridiculously low.”

  I hold the gun awkwardly out from me. “Aurora? You're Italian, you have some experience with guns, right?”

  “Hey, not every Italian family is in the mafia,” she hisses. “Mine are bakers, mostly.”

  Caroline and Emilia both look the other way when I try to hand off the gun to them.

  I sigh. “Fine. I'll go first.”

  Two doors are locked. The third slides aside when I get close to it. Beyond is space, and for a moment I think I'll die. But there's still air here, and I notice I'm looking either through a huge windshield or at a projection on a giant wall. I see millions of stars against the black infinity of space.

  And I see our kidnappers.

  They're small, gray aliens with huge heads and spindly little arms. They're sitting in little chairs that appear to grow up from the floor like mushrooms and they have enormous black eyes with no irises or pupils that I can see. They have two long, bony fingers on each hand.

  There's only four of them. And they're all looking at me.

  I point the gun at the closest one, hoping they know what it is. “Yeah. So this ship is turning around and going back to Earth.” I try to put some command and confidence into my voice, but I sound more like Minnie Mouse than anything else.

  They just stare and don't move.

  I look behind me. The other girls are bravely staying on the other side of the door, looking in with huge, curious eyes. “Guys, come in here. It's the control room.”

  I look at the aliens again. They appear frozen. They're not even blinking. “I said, turn this thing around right now!”

  They don't react. I hope I don't have to fire the gun to get my point across. I have a feeling actually shooting inside a spaceship may not be the best idea. And I don't like loud noises myself.

  I can feel the other girls behind me now. Then one of the aliens moves his finger a fraction and I freeze. As in, I can't move. At all.

  I try to turn around to check on the other girls, but I can't. I'm frozen with my arm and gun pointing straight forward, and I notice that even if I could move my index finger enough to pull the trigger, I wouldn't hit any of the aliens.

  The freeze starts to hurt. I don't know if it's because of the awkward position or if the aliens are punishing me for this hijacking attempt.

  A wave of intense pain shoots from my feet to my head and back again. Shit. Definitely being punished. I can hear myself groan. That's all the control I have over my body, and that groan was pretty involuntary.

  The pain travels up and down me two more times, and then it's over. I would scream in pain if I could, but I can't even draw breath. Am I even breathing?

  No. I'm not. And now the pain in my chest is not artificial torture, but due to my lungs being desperate for air.

  I fight mentally to gain control of my body, and I definitely panic, but I'm paralyzed. Tunnel vision starts setting in, and the last thing I see before I pass out is the star in the middle of the huge viewscreen in the control room. I can see planets in orbit around it, looking like little stars t
hemselves. The star is yellow and reminds me of she Sun, and the blue point of light in the perfect center of the viewscreen

  reminds me of the Earth.

  Did they turn the ship around after all?

  - - -

  When I come to again, the girls are kneeling around me. Some are weeping quietly, others are talking in very serious tones. The almost light atmosphere from before is gone.

  It's the cargo room, of course. I glance over at the round hatch. It's closed again.

  Heidi follows my gaze. “Yeah, that's well and truly locked now. It won't budge.”

  I suddenly remember that I wanted to breathe and gasp mightily a couple of times.

  “There, there,” Emilia says and pats my back. “You're not paralyzed anymore.”

  I take some deep breaths, luxuriating in being able to do so despite the stench in the room. “Where are the others?”

  The girls exchange glances. “We're fine. We were beamed down here again at the same time you were. You got it worse than us. But ...”

  I can see it's something bad they're not telling me. “What? Let me hear it now, don't make me go and dread it.”

  “It's Alesya,” Aurora says mildly. “They beamed her out of here, then beamed her right back. And she ...” She gestures to the other side of the room. There is someone on the floor there. Yes, that could be Alesya, the Russian girl. But she has something over her face, and everyone is keeping their distance.

  “Shit,” I say and lay my head back down as I understand what's happened. “They killed her.”

  Caroline crosses her arms over her chest and shudders. “She was dead when she was beamed back. It can only have been a couple of seconds. She didn't suffer.”

  “Punishment for rebellion,” I wheeze, although I really want to scream. “She was right. But she didn't deserve that. She was not the bitch here. Shit, I'm sorry.”

  I'm still light-headed from the lack of oxygen, but I feel new tears pressing in my eyes and my throat is closing up again. A stone has settled in the pit of my stomach.

  “No one deserved that,” Heidi says. “We all did our best to escape. We didn't know what would happen. And you're totally brave. You did the right thing. We just couldn't know.”

  This time I let some tears flow without choking it all back right away. I may be the happy-go-lucky one, but I'm still only human. That hijacking attempt was my idea. It was insanely stupid. And now Alesya is dead because of it.

  “So what do we do-” Aurora starts, but then there's a loud bang and a hard jolt and the whole room begins shaking. From the outside, there's a droning noise that soon becomes a roar so loud that we have to shout to talk.

  “I think we're falling down through the air!” Caroline yells into my ear. “We must be landing!”

  “If so, it's a pretty uncontrolled landing!” Aurora screams.

  And she's right – we all have to scramble to hold onto the floor because the whole room shakes so bad. Then we're all pressed to the floor as it hits thicker air and decelerates very hard.

  “I think they dumped us,” Caroline shouts. “Now we're falling through the atmosphere of a planet. Do you think it might be Earth?”

  I just shrug. I suppose it could be. But I have a strong feeling it's not.

  We fall for probably less than two minutes, but it seems much longer. Finally it feels like we're slowly drifting to the ground, and then there's a hard jolt and a bang and then we're down.

  We all sit in silence for a while, just waiting for something else to happen.

  “I guess we landed,” Heidi says. “And I think we can get out if we want.”

  She points to a part of the wall where there have suddenly appeared a pulsating circle of yellow light. “Who wants to be first?”

  I slowly get to my feet on knees that shake. I notice I still have the gun.

  And I feel guilty as hell about Alesya. I recruited her to the translator lab group. I selfishly kept everyone working in the lab when I really should have sent them home hours before the aliens came. And if I'd planned that hijacking a little better, and maybe waited this out instead of jumping into action the first chance I got, she might still be alive. I should probably just face that I'm not the cheerful optimist of the group like I wanted to; I'm the bitch. “I'll go.”

  Heidi puts a hand on my knee. “Don't feel like you have to do this, Sophia. One of the other ones can go this time.”

  I give her a smile I hope is at least a little wry, but I suspect it's only a hopeless grimace. “Hey, I have the gun. Want to fight me for it?”

  I get to the door and push a button beside it. It gives easily and then the door slides and rolls aside to reveal whatever's outside.

  Hot air hits my face. The stench of rotting vegetation is very strong. Everything is green. The sky is blue.

  I half-turn my head. “You know, guys, this actually could be Earth. Looks like a jungle.”

  Then I stiffen. There's movement among the leaves. I lean out and peer closer.

  Two big leaves part and then I'm suddenly looking into an eye from very close. It's a big eye. And beyond it ...

  “Shit!” I yelp, then stumble backwards and fall on my butt on the metal floor, then I bounce up again to slap the button to close the door. It clangs shut.

  I turn around, my heart beating like crazy in my ears.

  All the women are staring at me.

  I swallow. This has just gone from bad to worse. “On second thought, I don't think this is Earth. Because I think I just saw ...” I shake my head. No, it can't be. But it was.

  “What?!” Caroline yells.

  I take a deep breath. “A dinosaur.”

  4

  - Sophia -

  The silence inside the alien cargo compartment is deafening for three heartbeats. Then they all react in their own way. Some start talking loudly, some start sobbing and some frown in disbelief.

  Emilia is among the latter ones. “A dinosaur? Are you sure?”

  My heart is still beating so fast and hard I can feel it in my whole body. “Pretty sure. I mean, it was huge. And ...” I'm not sure how to describe it. Because I'm basing my dinosaur theory mainly on the hugeness and the feeling I got when I looked at it. As if I was looking millions of years back in time. “Well, it looked like a dinosaur,” I add lamely.

  The girls exchange glances. “Okay,” Caroline says. “The thing is, we don't have anything in here. No food and no water. Also, there's no plumbing in here and some of us really have to go. Like, now. Ideally not in here.”

  I just nod. I understand all of her points. It's all very convincing. It's just that I saw a dinosaur and I'm not super keen on looking into a giant, yellow eye like that again.

  Aurora straightens her white lab coat. “We really have to get out of here. So we know more about where we are. We have to somehow do something about her, too.” She nods towards Alesya's dead body. “At the very least put her outside before she starts smelling. I think this room is heating up pretty fast. Hey, I hate having to say it. But someone has to.”

  “All right,” a woman calls from further back in the room and comes forward. “You lab coat girls have had your fun. And you've pretty much killed us all with your assholery. Let the adults take over now.”

  She comes over to me. She's tall and probably about thirty-five. I vaguely recognize her as one of the roaming security guards on campus, but she's not in uniform and she has no weapon that I can see. She's just wearing jeans and a t-shirt, like the aliens just took her out of her own living room while she was lounging. She's pretty bulky and tattooed, and I get the feeling that if the ceiling hadn't been so low, she would have towered over me. I'm not usually intimidated by women, but this one is doing her damndest and getting a little too close for comfort.

  “You want to get out of my fucking way?” she sneers, then pushes me aside and hits the button to the door. It slides aside and she leans out, looking around. “Where's that dinosaur of yours, science girl? You don't think it coul
d have been a tree you saw?”

  She steps over the threshold and pushes some greenery aside. I clench the gun in my hand. Any second now she will see the creature ...

  But she just stands there and looks in all directions. “Come on out, guys. Any dinosaurs here are just fantasy. It's just plants and trees.”

  I stand back as some of the girls come up to the door and look outside before they gingerly take a step out onto the ground. It's covered in fresh and rotting leaves.

  Caroline flashes me an apologetic smile when she passes. “When you gotta go, you gotta go,” she says. And that's true, of course. I kind of have to go myself. I take one careful step out and look around. The dinosaur is gone. Did I just imagine it?

  Nope. No way. That was a living eye I was looking into, bright yellow and with deep, dark pupils. The skin around it looked thick and rough, like elephant skin, except different. Very different. And I think I spotted some things that looked like feathers.

  There are some tinkling noises from all around, and for a moment I think that maybe there's running water close by. Then Caroline steps out from behind a bush and I realize that a lot of the girls had to go and are making the most of the opportunity right now. I probably should, too.

  I walk behind a bush of my own and look back at the thing we've been inside. It's not a flying saucer anymore, just a part of it. Like a giant, squat and shiny tuna can that the label's fallen off. The aliens just jettisoned us like we were trash. When it crashed, it flattened some trees and made a hole in the leafy canopy of treetops.

  The sky is blue and the sun looks yellow enough, like our own Sun. Except this one seems larger. Or closer. Maybe that's the way it looks in the tropics? This could still be Earth, for all I know.

  Except for the dinosaur.

  I take a chance on using one of the nearby leaves as toilet tissue, and it doesn't appear to sting me. On the other hand, it's not too effective, either.

  Finally the kidnapped women are lounging outside. Some are sitting down, some are standing in loose groups. We six translator girls are standing around in a huddle. No one's too talkative, and we all keep looking over our shoulders. Things are too uncertain, I guess. Well, someone has to say something. And since I've turned out to be the bitch of the group, I don't really have much to lose.