Waking up strapped to a table never boded well in the movies, and somehow Louisa doubted she’d discover any different when it happened to her. It especially sucked that she also lacked any clothes.
“Dammit. God, or Aslan, or whatever the hell you’re calling yourself these days, if this is your idea of a celestial joke, then I’m not getting it,” she shouted at the ceiling, its surface bright with white glowing panels. She didn’t get an answer, not that she expected one. The suspicion that she’d left reality, and perhaps lost her marbles, grew stronger. She racked her brain, trying to see if she could remember how she might have ended up as a feature actress in a possible porn/snuff film. All she recalled after seeing the goblin with the lantern was slumping to the floor as gas filled the bus, suddenly exhausted, then waking to her current chilly dilemma.
Sifting through the recent events, she put what she knew together and emerged with a startling conclusion. Bright lights, plus ugly green dudes plus a naked Louisa equaled alien abduction. And as everybody knew, aliens liked to conduct anal probes. Over my dead body!
“Hey, you perverts, what are you planning to do to me?” she yelled, not willing to lie still and accept the penetration of any of her holes without a fight. The reply, in the form of a slimy hand on her calf, made her shriek. “Eeew! Get your hand, or thing, or whatever the fuck you have, off me!” Forget the years she’d spent as a teacher learning to curb her tongue—old habits returned quick.
A garbled answer, spoken in a language that resembled gargling and snorting, had her screwing up her face. “Oh gross. Blow your nose or something first, would you?”
More nonsensical speech accompanied slimy fingers gripping her ear. She screamed, some colorful invectives involving shoving objects up their holes, as something got jammed into her ear canal. Hopefully, not little alien eggs that would grow inside her brain and burst out at one point, killing her. Damn her ex-boyfriend, the jerk who’d forced her to watch the sci-fi channel. Because of her involuntarily induction into alien horror flicks, she couldn’t stop thinking of all the horrible things ET’s liked to do to squishy humans.
It took her a moment of totally losing her mind before she realized the phlegmy sounds of her captor now had meaning.
“You are a noisy creature. If you do not quiet, we will freeze your remains and sell them as stock for the herders on Hihala. Their beasts will eat anything, even tough, barbarian meat.”
Stunned, she stopped yelling. I didn’t just hear that. Or so she hoped. Needing clarification, she said, “Excuse me?”
“Be quiet or die,” announced the voice, the pronunciation of the English language choppy, as if being filtered through a machine. “You are our prisoner, barbarian female. You and the halflings under your charge.”
“Halflings?” Oh, her class. Nice job forgetting them. Guess I won’t be winning teacher of the year—again. It belatedly occurred to her to wonder what they’d done with her students. Sure, they were orphans with attitude and problems, but dammit, they were her responsibility, her very own little maniacs one step away from juvie. If anyone gets to kill them for misbehaving it will be me. “You better not have harmed a hair on their heads. They’re children and I insist you return them home.”
“Or else what, foolish female? Your backwards planet has no means of giving chase. Your threats are meaningless. Resistance is futile.”
She snorted. “Copycat. I know that line. You stole that from Star Trek.”
“Silence!” A face joined the stilted voice, a side effect she assumed of whatever translator they stuck in her ear. The visage glaring at her shut her lips faster than her ex-husband waving his thing around looking for action after a night of drinking. “We have taken you along to care for the little ones, but if you prove troublesome, we will not hesitate to terminate you like we terminated the male.”
They killed the driver? The knowledge should have tempered her tongue, but fear tended to make her do the stupidest things. “Go ahead and see how easy you find it taking care of those brats. Do you know Angelic, who is nothing like her name by the way, put Vaseline in my shoes? And, Betty, the one with the dimple, dumped pepper in my cereal.” Of course, that was before they discovered Louisa, unlike the teachers and group supervisors who took care of them before, wouldn’t tolerate any nonsense. Revenge was her middle name. Literally, her mother put it on her birth certificate right before she named her father and took his ass to court for child support.
Needless to say, with a name like that, she didn’t let anyone screw with her, not even little orphan girls. It took several months of her foiling their attempts to turn to the dark side, but they’d come to an understanding. Heck, she might even say she was fond of her charges—if forced at gunpoint.
The goblin face disappeared and she heard a whispered conference.
Curiosity wouldn’t let her hold her tongue for long. “Hey, so you never said what the plan was? What do you intend to do with us?” To her surprise, she received an answer.
“The small females are to be sold as slaves to the pleasure planet where they will be taught how to become great courtesans.”
That she had no problem understanding. Nor did she like it. “No.”
“What?” A startled goblin appeared back over her.
“You can’t seriously expect me to condone that. They’re little girls.”
“According to our research most will achieve human levels of adulthood within the next two planetary rotations of your planet.”
“It’s inhumane.”
“And this discussion is over, barbarian female. Perhaps you are just jealous that your advanced years and overly large size make you good for nothing other than a menial labor slave.”
“I am not old.” Twenty eight was a perfectly respectable age. She had no rebuttal for the size part though. At almost six foot, with wide shoulders and hips, along with more pounds than she should carry, she wasn’t a dainty little thing.
A wet chuckle was the reply.
“Oh yeah, well if I’m so ugly and ancient then why did you take my clothes? Huh? Answer that.” Why she insanely wanted them to see as her attractive, she’d never understand.
“The primitive condition of your home world makes it necessary for us to cleanse. That includes decontamination of your pale, unappealing bodies to the incineration of your germ laden clothing. You will be assigned vestments appropriate to your station as slave.”
Burn her clothes? Damn! She’d only recently gotten those jeans broken in to just the right point. The jerks. They stopped speaking to her at that point. A good thing, because she fought not to giggle as a strange fluorescent light ran over her body, tickling her. Once it passed over her a few times, the bands holding her captive retracted into the bed, and she sprang from her prone position to confront the aliens. How she intended to fight naked, she’d not quite figured out. Maybe slap them with my boobs. Gravity was no woman’s friend once twenty five hit.
Alas, her confrontation didn’t happen, the ugly green dude left before she could act. The room held only the bed and a pile of cloth on the floor. Lifting the fabric, she again lamented the loss of her jeans, and now added to the list her underwear and bra. But, given the choice of her birthday suit or an item resembling a potato sack…
The linen shift they gave her didn’t exactly scream fashion, but the soft material didn’t chafe and at least covered her crucial parts, barely. It also provided a measure of comfort to the girls who wore the same outfit, although given their shorter stature, theirs went to their knees and calves, not mid-thigh. She discovered her charges when a door slid open and she went to explore only to find herself in another room filled with eleven familiar faces.
“Ms. Fontanna,” they squealed upon her return to them.
“What’s going on?” Lila asked, her voice rising over the others. “We woke up in this room, naked. Our clothes are gone and all we got to wear are these things.” Lila pinched the hem of her gown with distaste.
“Whoever it is, is going to fry in jail, ‘cause as soon as we get out of here, I’m calling the cops on the perverts,” Anne added.
Letting the questions flow over her, Louisa took a moment to assess their surroundings. The entrance she’d come through disappeared as a portion of the wall slid sideways to shut off the space with an ominous click. The rest of the room didn’t take long to peruse. A dozen shelves bolted to the walls with thin pallets and blankets. A cylinder that rose from the floor in the corner that she feared was their only toilet, and a large metal grate in the center. Probably for sluicing down the blood when they need to kill me.
She couldn’t let her trepidation over the situation show, though, or she’d have eleven sixteen-to-seventeen year-old girls shrieking their little heads off. And then I might be the one cleaning up blood when I snap and kill them.
But what could she do to salvage the situation? Abducted by space pirates, on their way to be sold, with nothing but the potato sacks on their backs, how could they save themselves? We are so fucked.
Giving up was not an option though, not while she still breathed.
“What do you all remember?”
“We went off a cliff,” started Katrina.
“Then ended up sucked into a light,” added Jasmine.
“And then some a-hole threw some kind of smoke-bomb on the bus and we all passed out.”
“Anything else?” she asked. Shrugs and blanks faces met her inquiry. It seemed she was the only one to wake while they decontaminated—and insulted—her body. “Okay girls, listen up. Here’s the situation. We’re no longer on earth.”
“Have we gone to heaven?” asked Chloe.
“Nope.”
“Have we gone to hell?” piped in Katrina.
“No to that too. Girls, we’ve been kidnapped by some butt ugly, alien goblins.”
Her class of orphans looked at each, rolled a few sets of thin shoulders, and then, began to laugh their little faces off.
“I’m not kidding,” Louisa stated, planting her hands on her hips and giving them her fiercest scowl.
“Sure, you aren’t,” snickered Angelic. “Did you get a buzz off that smoke? Or maybe get your hands on some roofies?”
“Of course not. I’m telling you the truth.”
“We’re not idiots,” Betty said with a roll of her eyes. “We can handle the truth. Admit it, we’ve been in an accident and we are all like in a coma or something.”
“That’s just stupid,” Josie said. “If we’re all in a coma then how can we be talking to each other?”
“Did you just seriously call me stupid, biatch?”
Moving quickly, Louisa stepped between the girls before the fists flew, but it didn’t stop the glares and muttered threats of ‘later.’
“You’re both idiots, so shut up. We are not in a coma,” Nancy spoke, her eyes seeming large and owlish without her spectacles. “We’ve obviously been kidnapped by white slavers looking to sell us into prostitution overseas.”
Screams accompanied her announcement—along with boastful claims of how so-and-so would fetch a better price than that skinny so-and-so.
Louisa held up her hands. “Quiet!” It did nothing to reduce their freaking. She planted two fingers in her mouth and blew, the piercing whistle rendering them silent. “Jesus Christ. Stop your bitching and moaning. Since when do we allow ourselves to be victims? Did you not learn anything these last three years? I taught you better than this.” She let her gaze roam over them, catching each of their eyes, trying to instill some of her false calm and confidence. “It might look pretty impossible now, but there’s got to be a way out of here. So let’s put our heads together. We need to think of a plan before the aliens come back.” A snicker met her words, but the girls quieted when she stared them down.
“You took the Lord’s name in vain,” Sade said in the sudden silence, her cheeks turning bright red as all eyes turned to her.
“I hate to break it to you darling, but the Lord isn’t here to hear it. Now, the good news is we weren’t taken by white slavers looking to sell you into the sex trade.”
“So what’s the bad news?”
“It was alien pirates and they intend to sell you into some kind of galactic sex trade.”
“Let’s say for a minute, we believe the whole alien thing, how is that any better?”
“It’s not, but at least now you have the facts straight. The question is what are we going to do about it?”
Jasmine raised her hand and waved it.
“Yes?”
“What do the aliens look like?”
“Short, green and ugly.”
“Like that?”
All eyes followed Jasmine’s pointing finger and they stared with dropped jaws at the hulking goblin in the doorway. It brandished a metallic looking baton and grinned with jagged teeth when it realized it caught their attention.
Louisa held in a smug I-told-you-so. She also moved forward to stand in front of the girls. Crossing her arms over her chest, she glared at the alien.
“What do you want?”
“The captain says you are too noisy.”
“And? What are you going to do about it?”
Her answer flummoxed him, until he recalled he held a weapon. He waved it at her.
“Is that all you got?” She smirked, unable to resist the taunt. She’d taken down bigger thugs than the little green guy before. The situation reminded her of the time she took the baseball bat off Betty’s boyfriend when he came around not happy with a break up. Louisa taught him what bats were for—playing ball. Needless to say, once he managed to limp away, crying for his mama, he didn’t return.
“I will harm you if you do not behave,” it threatened when its evil grin and wave of its bat didn’t have the desired effect.
A chuckle slipped from her, probably partially caused by hysteria, and the ugly green face took on a perplexed expression.
Go big or go home, her dad’s motto flashed through her mind as she let her gut guide her. “I’d like to see you try.” She took a step forward and lunged, roaring like she did when the raccoons thought to attack the garbage cans. To her surprise, the green dude recoiled, dropping his baton which hit the floor with a clang and rolled toward Louisa. She dove on the weapon, and wrapped a fist around it. She immediately popped to her feet, only to see the alien exit the room, the door sliding shut behind him. What do you know, even evil Martians are pussies if confronted by a strong woman.
Turning back around, tapping her victory against her palm, she faced her stunned students. “Told you we were kidnapped by aliens.” The smug announcement matched her smirk.
“And you totally psyched him out!”
A true smile broke free as the girls high fived her.
Breaking into excited chatter, her students huddled, throwing the occasional suspicious glance over their shoulder to see if anyone spied. They came up with a few plans. Most unfeasible, but at least it gave them focus. And best of all, hope, which no matter how dire the situation, Louisa wouldn’t take from them.