Barbarian Alien(3)

"Gross," mumbles someone.

"–A lot of other guys just eat them," I finish. "So you'll forgive me if I'm not willing to cut our captors any slack. The Little Green Men were not nice. They had guards, and those guards raped several of the girls while we were captive. They kept us in a cage. They made us shit in a bucket. They treated us like less than human. So you need to know that, so you can understand where we're coming from when we're smelly and tired and hungry and sick. Okay?"

The girls around me nod. Ariana starts crying again. "Someone's going to eat us?"

"Not now," Kira soothes. She should be talking. She's the nice one. But she looks at me to keep explaining, and so I do.

"Those aliens are gone. For now." I briefly explain our quick rebellion and how Georgie took out one of the guards, just as our cargo hold was dumped planetside. Now we’re residents of Not-Hoth, as we’ve come to name the place. It’s cold as hell, snow-covered, and completely inhospitable.

Our landing was pretty fucking rough. No one came out unscathed – two girls died. So did three of my toes, which left me incapable of walking further than a few feet. But at least I was alive. "Once we’d assessed our injuries, Georgie – our bravest girl and the least injured – headed out in the only piece of warm clothing we had, looking for help. The rest of us got to stay behind and freeze. Did I mention the rest of us were in our pajamas? Not exactly warm."

The girl next to me – Harlow – looks ashamed and offers me her blanket. I shake my head. I'm too tired to bother. And weirdly enough, I'm used to freezing my ass off. This is new to her, so she can keep it.

This last week was a week of huddling into a pile with filthy, miserable, injured women for warmth. It was a week of ignoring each other’s smells, abject terror every time there was a sound outside the half-broken hull of the ship, and wondering what was going to happen to us next. Our hair was filthy, our pits stank, and our poop bucket overflowed. But we had no shoes and barely any clothing, so it wasn’t like we could just saunter outside and clean up. Because outside it was one constant blizzard. We were trapped. Trapped, and our food and water supplies were dwindling. I fight back the memories.

Every night, I fell to sleep wondering if I'd live to see the next day.

"Georgie went off to get help," Kira prompts when I'm silent for too long.

I nod, picking up the story again. "Georgie came back after a few days, with a big blue hulking barbarian with horns, a tail, and glowing blue eyes. His name is Vektal, and he's one of the locals."

I skip the part where Georgie was clearly shacking up with Vektal. I mean, the guy came with food and blankets, so I didn't care if she was giving the Incredible Hulk hand-jobs on the side as long as he took care of us.

"They left us with some supplies and went to get reinforcements for our rescue," I say. "Those are the demon guys outside."

A few faces brighten. "So they're nice?"

"They're conditionally nice." I wonder how much I should tell them.

Because our story is pretty fucking grim and there's not a lot of choices to be had.

Not-Hoth, it turns out, isn’t a hospitable planet. In addition to being cold as heck and full of monsters that want to have us for dinner, our new home also some sort of poisonous gas that’s going to kill us slowly. It's already working hard on us. Tiffany's comatose off in the corner, and I'm so exhausted I can barely raise my head. Right now? I just want to fall over and sleep. And it's going to get worse. This element in the air is going to kill us, because we don't belong here.

But there's a fix. Sort of.

The ‘cure' for the death sentence on this planet? A symbiont that the natives call a khui and we humans call a ‘cootie’.

To live? We're supposed to get…infected. Now, I admit that I've been pretty gung-ho about a rescue here. I'm the chipper one to Kira's glass is half empty. But I am royally wigged out at the thought of getting some sort of bug to live inside me.

The cootie sounds like it’s the answer to our problems, except there’s a catch, Georgie has told us.

Because the cootie is interested in propagating species. So when it sees two people that it thinks should be good mates and will make a perfect baby together? There’s something called ‘resonance’ that happens. The cootie starts vibrating in your chest whenever you’re near your new ‘mate’ and it won’t stop until the baby-making happens. And Vektal’s tribe of seven-foot tall blue, horned aliens? They’ve only got four females.

If we stay, we’re getting more than a rescue. We’re getting husbands. Georgie's already been claimed by Vektal, and she's pretty happy about it from what I can tell. They can't keep their eyes off each other.