Page 12 of Meteor Storm

But that time, something was different.

The volts went straight to my spine, and I felt a terrifying zap of pain and pressure right where my implant was. For a split second, I lost all feeling in my whole body. When it returned, I felt so disconnected from the situation it was like I’d been hit over the head with a hammer.

I was beginning to wonder if I would even make it out of that cell. Even if I survived, that collar was doing damage. More than I could bear.

I spiraled into dizziness and plummeted to the ground. I barely felt anything. My nerves weren’t responding and I knew something had happened to my implant. I wasn’t sure if I was glad for it or if I was terrified. What if the electricity had damaged it for good? What if I didn’t regain feeling?

What if I was paralyzed?

But none of that stuck. The implant slowly rebooted and like blood rushing back to a sleeping limb, the awareness flooded my body in the last moments of what I assumed had been a violent fight. One of the guards was on the ground, trying and failing to get to his feet, while another one was on his hands and knees, one hand pressed to his severely wounded side.

Two new guards approached a giant mass on the floor near the wall. A mass I quickly realized was my fellow prisoner, the big, gray alien. The new guards crouched to take his arms, dragging his heavy body out of the cell while the ones with the sticks struggled to their feet and escorted me out behind him like I was cattle.

I was tripping over myself, my legs wobbly and not quite awake.

We walked down a long, dark hallway lined with rooms, each with a transparent, glass wall facing the passage. They were all different. One was filled with greenery and blue lights and in it was one of those giant, green beasts. The gek’tal. Another was completely dark so I couldn’t see anything at all. To my right, one of them was empty, but it was set up with an arid, desert environment and harsh, bright lights. Finally, the guards opened a large gate into a cell that was completely made of metal with a bed in one corner covered in furs. The lights were dim and blue in tint. The guards dropped the gray alien on the floor, careless, and then tossed me in the cell with him, closing the door behind me.

My legs gave out beneath me, and I stumbled straight onto the stranger. He barely softened the impact against the unforgiving floor. The man was all hard muscle, his chest so solid it felt as though a metal ribcage lay beneath his skin. Heat radiated from him, startlingly intense, like a furnace.

I quickly rolled off him and studied his face, waiting for some sign that the fall had disturbed him. A flinch. A groan. Anything. But he remained completely still, unconscious.

The air in the chamber was frigid and dry. I wrapped my arms around myself, but it did little to stop the cold. When I exhaled, my breath drifted from my lips in a thin cloud. Barefoot, filthy, and thoroughly confused, I glanced around the cell, wondering why the hell they’d locked me up with the same man they’d just shocked unconscious.

But it didn’t matter. I was stuck either way against my will. The only good thing was that I was no longer in that dome fighting for my life and those damn spiked menaces had finally gone. That and the fact that I was walking. That was something.

Looking around, I noticed there was a small incline of stone with running water flowing down into a basin with a drain. Hanging on the edge of the basin were a few rags. I imagined it was for cleaning and seeing as my roommate was asleep, I decided to help myself before he woke and I no longer had any privacy.

I took one of the rags and dipped it in the water, hissing at how cold it was before I started to run it over my skin. I cleaned dirt and grime off every inch of myself that I could reach, pressing the cloth to my sore flesh over and over. It felt both pleasant and horrible on the raw skin around my neck.

When I pulled the cloth away, there was a bit of blood. Not as much as I expected, but enough to tell me the collar was doing plenty of damage.

The realization that these aliens were willing to torture their captives into violent, sexual interactions was devastating. I shuddered to think how far they would go further down the line. Something told me we got lucky, the two of us, by being unconscious.

I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to think about how close I’d come to being raped by a goddamn alien. Yes, I told him to do it. It was a desperate attempt to get the whole situation over with, but if things had progressed, I wasn’t sure I would have been so casually cleaning myself off.

On Earth, sex wasn’t exactly some spontaneous act anymore like it had been decades earlier. Overpopulation had led to practically outlawing physical intercourse. Women and men were paid to get sterilized. Sex was done mostly in a virtual world rather than in the real one to avoid the dreaded results. A baby. Disease. Disgrace.

To say I was inexperienced was an understatement.

I’d been with only one man. Or… boy. I was young. It was awkward. And I was absolutely sure it was nothing like what would have happened in that room.

My body shivered at the idea.

I couldn’t even imagine…

Actually, I could. I imagined it would have been painful, horrifying, and awful, especially with all the creeps watching and drooling over the whole ordeal.

If I had anything substantial in my stomach, I’d have been throwing it up.

Perhaps I’d been electrocuted into lunacy, or my mind wasn’t processing things right, but I was thankful I wasn’t more traumatized. That would present an entirely different set of complications I didn’t need at the moment. I needed to keep myself together. I had to stay in survival mode.

When I was thoroughly washed up, I hung the cloth on the edge of the basin and turned, my teeth chattering. The man was still unconscious. Too cold to think, I went to the bed. Of course, it wasn’t so much a bed as it was a slab of metal with a thin pad over it and some blankets and gray furs. I peeled the furs up, too fatigued to wonder if the bedding was dirty or not, and climbed under.

It was still so freezing. I didn’t have much body heat to warm the bedding myself. I curled into a ball, shaking profusely. Getting myself wet to clean up hadn’t helped, but I couldn’t stay like that. If I had a choice, I’d take the dress off, too, but I needed all the layers I could get.

After thirty minutes or so when I accepted that I wasn’t going to get warm with damp clothes and furs that were far thinner than they looked, I sat up and hung my feet over the edge of the bed. I glanced at the unconscious alien on the floor, wondering if he was cold with nothing to cover him.

Judging by how hot he felt when I fell on him, he didn’t have much need for thick blankets.