Their Human Vessel Page 7

  There was a fleeting instant during which Corrie thought the being standing over her was the one that had escaped from the facility the previous night. But immediately she realized that this was not the case. While this alien was clearly from the same Terramaran species—he had the same dark blue skin and was equally heavily muscled—there were many differences in his appearance.

  For one thing, he still had both of his hard, curving, ribbed horns. The one in the facility had gotten one of his horns damaged by a shotgun blast. For another thing, this new alien had a dense, masculine beard covering his jaw, and his thick, muscular chest was lined with short hair too. His skin was spattered with a fine spray of red from his kill.

  Without thinking, Corrie found her eyes trailing down his monstrous body, and she discovered another difference from the facility creature. This new alien was not naked—not completely, at least. He wore a kind of loincloth made of a black, leathery material. While it covered his skin down there, it did little to conceal the shape of his arousal, which was straining against the material.

  His only other article was the weapon in his right hand. It looked like an oversized machete. A brutal weapon. Its razor-sharp edge glinted in the sun.

  “Don’t move,” the alien grunted, black eyes fixed on Corrie. “If you try to run, I will kill you.”

  Running was the last thing on Corrie’s mind. She had already seen the speed with which these beings could move. Now she was even more aware of it. Somehow, this alien had managed to sneak up on Vickers in the middle of a wide-open desert wasteland.

  There was a sound a few feet away.

  Gardner was finally recovering from getting knocked out. He groaned through his respirator and sat up, holding his head as if it ached.

  His eyes scrolled around, struggling to focus, and then they froze, staring up at the blue, horned alien. A moment later, his eyes flicked down to Vickers’ decapitated body and the spreading swath of red soaking the ground.

  “Oh fuck,” he whimpered. “Oh God. Oh fuck...”

  With surprising speed for a man recovering from a knockout punch, Gardner scrambled to his feet and sprinted toward the vehicle, the one that had not been driven into the ditch. His speed, however, was not enough to save him.

  The alien didn’t chase Gardner. Instead, with a motion so quick that Corrie didn’t even see it, the massive machete-sword was flung through the air. It winked sunlight as it spun and split Gardner’s torso in a diagonal cut from shoulder to waist before embedding itself in the supposedly armored windshield of the vehicle.

  The halves of Gardner’s body hit the ground with two thuds, raising little puffs of dust.

  Corrie struggled to contain her impulse to scream.

  The alien strode toward the vehicle. Gripping the handle of his weapon, he rocked it, unwedging the blade from where it had become embedded. Then he returned to Gardner’s body, raised the weapon, and brought it down on the already dead man’s neck.

  Corrie looked away a fraction of a second too late.

  She heard noises. The monster was doing something, moving Gardner’s body around. Corrie couldn’t look.

  Instead, her eyes went back to Vickers’ severed head.

  He still had his respirator on. She could use that. She needed it to survive.

  Tentatively, her fingers reached out toward the mask.

  “No,” the alien grunted.

  Somehow he had already crossed the distance from the vehicle, once again in total silence. Or perhaps Corrie simply hadn’t heard his footfalls over the hammering of her terrified heart and the rush of blood in her ears.

  Either way, it didn’t matter, the alien’s massive blue fist picked up Vickers’ head, palming it easily, and carried it away toward the vehicle.

  Still, Corrie couldn’t bring herself to look at what was being done over there.

  Part of her thought this had to be a nightmare. In another moment or two, her terror would reach its climax, and she would wake up panting and covered in cold sweat, but relieved to find herself back in her habitation unit at the Juvanis facility. Or maybe even back on the star shuttle. Or better yet, back on Earth, in her insanely overpriced Manhattan condo.

  Yes, that was it. This was a dream—a kind of premonition.

  She wouldn’t travel to Terramara. She would call the whole Juvanis investigation off and figure out some other story to reclaim her status as a top-tier journalist. Something simple. Something that wouldn’t require traveling halfway across the galaxy to a dangerous alien world.

  But the powerful arm that coiled around her body and hoisted her off the ground felt all to real.

  “We go now,” the alien grunted as he tossed Corrie over his broad, muscled shoulder.

  Corrie let out a gasp. She needed her hands to steady herself, and her torn top fell open. Her naked breasts pressed against that hard shoulder, absorbing the alien’s body heat. Her hands clutched at his back, feeling the shift of powerful musculature beneath smooth, supple skin. The alien’s enormous hand clutched Corrie’s thigh, holding her in place. His fingers were precariously close to her tender place.

  And just like that, before Corrie even had a chance to protest, the alien was running, carrying her off into the desert just as fast as the vehicle had.

  As the giant alien began trotting away, Corrie made the mistake of looking back at those vehicles. When she saw how the creature had arranged the guards bodies, her stomach tightened, and her skin turned cold.

  The two heads had been placed deliberately atop the roof of the vehicle, looking back in the direction of the tire tracks—back toward the facility. It was the direction from which the search party would eventually come and find those two dead faces staring straight at them.

  It was a message.

  A warning.

  Corrie quickly looked away, but the grisly image had already branded itself onto her mind.

  It was then that Corrie knew that this wasn’t a rescue.

  The alien was no savior.

  CHAPTER 10

  When the alien finally stopped running, it was midmorning, but the sun was now hidden by the dense layers of volcanic clouds. Out here, the landscape was different. The flat, basin land surrounding the facility had given way to a gently undulating landscape of dark hills bristling with geometric crystalline growths. The air was still stiflingly hot and smelled of ashes and charcoal.

  They had halted by a particularly large boulder of porous volcanic stone. As they made their way around to the other side, Corrie’s ears were greeted by the sound of trickling water.

  At first, she thought it must have been an auditory hallucination brought on by her desperate thirst. However, as they came around the far side of the boulder, she saw it was no illusion.

  It was an alien oasis.

  The rock had been eroded by aeons of wind and curved gently over, providing some welcome shelter. There was a deep crack in its surface, and Corrie spotted the glitter of crystals inside—it was a gigantic geode!

  From the crystalline crevice there seeped a stream of clear water trickling down the rough stone to form a small, oblong pool.

  Around the pool sprouted all sorts of strange plants. At least Corrie assumed they were plants, although they looked so alien and out of place in this dry, dark land. If anything, they looked more like underwater life—corals, sponges and anemones. And the weirdest part, by far, was the way this vegetation seemed to glow with an internal light source. These strange plants were clustered at the water’s edge like thirsty animals come to drink, and their bioluminescence reflected off the surface of the rippling pool.

  With an unexpected gentleness, the big alien set Corrie down in the lee of the boulder where she would be sheltered from the hot, dirty wind. He went to the edge of the stone and peered out over the landscape, perhaps checking if they were being followed.

  In spite of the heat, Corrie shivered.

  She felt she should say or do something—anything—but she didn’t know what. She was s
till in a state of shock. Part of her still clung to the desperate hope that this was all just a bad dream, even though she knew now that it wasn’t.

  So, not knowing what else to do, she stared off into the reaches of the alien wasteland—the dark hills and even darker clouds.

  Despite everything, there was no denying the strange beauty of this place.

  But even that alien beauty couldn’t erase all of the ugliness that Corrie had born witness to in the last twenty-four hours. Vickers’ attempt to rape her. His and Gardner’s gruesome death at the hands of this brutal alien.

  And perhaps worst of all was her discovery of what was going on inside the facility. An atrocity of unimaginable proportions. Thousands upon thousands of sentient creatures held in bondage and farmed for their...fluid.

  Burgess had claimed that the Terramarans weren’t sentient beings, but Corrie knew that wasn’t true.

  This one had spoken to her. And despite the major differences in anatomy, his form was all too human.

  Now, as the Terramaran scanned the surrounding badlands, Corrie found her own eyes scanning his nearly nude body.

  Her gaze traced over his broad back, following the lines of his bulging muscles. The alien’s broad shoulders tapered down to a proportionally narrow waist. For all his bulk, he was exceedingly lean and athletic.

  Corrie’s eyes drifted lower.

  The back of his loincloth was little more than a strip of black leather, and it left the better part of his thick, round butt exposed. She knew it was wrong, but somehow she couldn’t take her eyes away from that perfect backside—the deep, dimples on either side of his tailbone, the two perfect globes of his glutes, and below that, the well defined straps of muscle forming his inhumanly powerful hamstrings.

  She shut her eyes and silently chastised herself.

  What the hell was she doing? Was she seriously drooling over her violent male captor? He wasn’t even human. And less than an hour before, she had watched him slaughter two men like it was nothing.

  They weren’t innocent men, at least. But their deaths had been so brutal.

  And besides that, there was the matter of Corrie’s own looming death.

  Already she could feel herself growing weak. She had felt something similar on mountain climbing expeditions where the air got thin at high altitude. The air here had enough oxygen for her to survive, but just barely, and there were other toxic gases that weakened her body.

  It had been about an hour since Gardner took her mask away.

  Another hour, maybe two, and she’d be a goner.

  The sound of splashing water made her open her eyes.

  Apparently satisfied that nobody was following them, Corrie’s alien captor had moved to the bank of the clear pool. He had stabbed the end of his weapon deep into the sand, letting it jut out like the sword in the stone, and now he was crouching by the water, scooping the pure fluid in his cupped hands, alternating between drinking and laving the water over his head. It ran down his skin in rivulets and beaded in his beard.

  But Corrie wasn’t focusing on his head.

  Her traitorous eyes had gone right back to that muscular butt.

  Did people faced with imminent death become horny? Was that a thing? Maybe the knowledge that the end was coming made a person cling to the most carnal aspects of life and pine for one last dirty fling?

  The alien turned, his glowing green eyes staring at Corrie over his beefy purple shoulder.

  Her face, which had just started to cool, now heated again with an intense blush, and she looked away.

  The alien scooped more water, then rose and brought it to her, his cupped hands dripping. He crouched before her and extended them.

  “Drink.”

  Corrie didn’t move. The presence of this massive beast of an alien was overwhelming. The sheer animal power of his body was apparent. She had seen what he did to those men, and she knew he could tear her to shreds at a moment’s notice.

  “It’s clean,” the alien said, misunderstanding Corrie’s apprehension. Then, more insistently, he repeated his command. “Drink.”

  This time Corrie obeyed. Partly she didn’t want to piss this blue giant off. But the bigger part was her aching thirst, which had been gradually building over the past hour of running through the desert.

  She bowed forward, placing her hand cautiously on the rim of the bowl formed by the alien’s fingers. She dipped her face to the water and drank.

  The water was cool and clear, with a touch of mineral sweetness. Corrie drank greedily until it was gone, and she sat back, wiping her chin. That’s when she noticed a slight aftertaste. It was faint, but it was there.

  The taste of the alien. She could taste the flavor of his skin and the salt of his sweat that had mixed in the water.

  Part of him was inside her now.

  Summoning all of her strength, Corrie managed to raise her gaze up to those twin glowing eyes that were fixed on her with startling intensity. With his wet hands, the alien stroked Corrie’s face, scrubbing her cheeks firmly. She realized he was wiping away the blood that had dried there.

  Vickers’ blood.

  She shivered, remembering that awful violence, but she was grateful to finally be cleansed of it.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. After a moment, when the alien didn’t respond, she said, “What is your name?”

  “Vorne.”

  He did not ask Corrie for hers, but she offered it anyway, perhaps just to break the overbearing silence.

  “I’m Corrie. Corrie Pedersen.” She thought for a moment and then added. “You speak English.”

  The alien nodded.

  “I learned it from your people.”

  “Were you...did you...did you escape from the facility.”

  “No,” the alien answered with a shake of his head. “When your people first game to this planet, they were willing to trade with the Terramarans. It wasn’t until much later that they began to enslave us and farm us for our seed.”

  Corrie was surprised by the alien’s directness.

  “I don’t like what they do in that facility,” she said. “I didn’t even know about it until—“

  “It doesn’t matter,” Vorne growled, cutting her off. “Soon things are going to change on this world. Soon the Terramarans’ long bondage will come to and end. And it will all start with you.”

  “With me?” Corrie gasped. She laughed bitterly. “You must be mistaken. Besides, I’ll be dead soon anyway.”

  The cool water had refreshed her temporarily, but already she could feel her energy leaching away again. Already, she was becoming resigned to her fate.

  “No,” Vorne rumbled. “You’re not going to die.”

  “What do you mean? I can’t breathe the air here. Not for much longer.”

  Vorne shook his head.

  “That doesn’t matter. You’re not going to die. I’m going to save you.”

  “Save me?” Corrie whispered. “How?”

  Without another word, Vorne raised himself from his crouch and stood at full height. He towered over Corrie like a great blue demon.

  His fingers went to his hip, loosening the strap of his leather loincloth. A moment later, the minimalistic garment fell away, revealing the alien anatomy concealed beneath.

  Goosebumps chased over Corrie’s skin as she stared up at that massive member. As she looked on in amazement and fear, the alien’s cock moved, engorging with arousal until it was fully erect and angled upward, revealing to her gaze its textured underside and the heavy, smooth testicles dangling from its base.

  “I’m going to save you with my seed,” Vorne said.

  “You...you mean...”

  “That’s right.” Vorne gripped his thick shaft and stroked his aroused length slowly. “You will drink my seed. It will keep you alive.”

  Even with her astonishment, Corrie picked up on something in Vorne’s wording.

  It wasn’t an offer. He didn’t say “you can,” or “you may,” or even “you sh
ould.”

  He had said, “You will.”

  As he stroked himself, his cock seemed to somehow grow even longer and harder. The smooth, supple, outer skin slipped and shifted over the hard inner core of his erect shaft, which was lined with ribs and textured with all kinds of alien bumps.

  Corrie felt a surge of desire wash over her, which was immediately followed by shame and then anger in quick succession.

  “If you had just let me get one of the respirators from the guards—“

  Vorne stepped closer. He was straddling Corrie now, his feet bracketing her legs. He lowered himself to his knees, bringing that pulsating member right in front of Corrie’s face.

  “It would have made no difference, human. The battery charge in the respirators would have lasted a day, perhaps. And then you would be in the same predicament you find yourself in now. You can’t return to the facility. I don’t know what you have done, but obviously they want you dead. And you will be dead soon unless you do as I tell you and swallow my seed.”

  Corrie’s flesh heated. She couldn’t believe what Vorne was demanding.

  “Your people have been coming to Terramara for decades to steal our seed,” Vorne growled. “It has healing properties, and you humans use it as medicine to slow down and reverse aging. However, when it is fresh—and with a much larger dose—it is even more powerful. It can transform your body, adapting you to the atmosphere of this world.”

  Dose? Had he really just said dose?

  Corrie flushed with a mixture of shame and anger. How the hell could she know this alien wasn’t tricking her? He might just be making all of this up just to get some quick pleasure from her before she died.

  Sensing her apprehension, Vorne spoke again.

  “I have no reason to lie to you, human. If all I desired was the pleasure of your body, don’t you realize I could take it whenever I wanted?”

  It was true. The massive alien could easily overpower her. He could take her mouth by force, and there would be nothing Corrie could do about it.

  He really had no reason to lie. And she knew that Terramaran semen was being sold throughout the galaxy as medicine.