Breeding Ground Part 1

BREEDING GROUND.

JAID BLACK.

Part I:

The Haunting

Prologue.

She s.h.i.+vered from where she lay curled up in a ball on the red earthen floor, her arms wrapped around her up drawn knees, her eyes unblinking. She was cold, hungry, and broken-at last broken.

Just as he had planned. Just as he had always wanted.

He kept her in a cage, naked and half-starving, like a neglected animal in a zoo. Every day her will to resist him grew weaker and weaker. Every day the hunger gnawed at her belly until the pangs felt like sharp talons clawing at her gut.

She was weak. So f.u.c.king weak. She needed nourishment-food and water. Oh G.o.d, how she fantasized about water trickling down her dry, parched throat...

She would never be given water unless she did what he wanted.

No, she thought in horror. How can I let that...that...thing touch me? How can I-

"I would have your answer," he purred.

She closed her eyes against the sound of his voice. She was so frail that not even her hearing worked as acutely as it once did, for she hadn't realized until he'd spoken that he'd approached the cage. She could feel his devil's-eyes on her, though, just like always. Coiled up in a ball with her back to him, she still knew the precise moment when his eerie golden gaze flicked to her b.u.t.tocks...and then onward to the folds of flesh visible between her legs.

That flesh was what he wanted. That and a whole lot more. He wanted things from her that were so sick and frightening they didn't bear dwelling on.

"Answer me," he hissed, "or I leave you here for another night."

By the morning she would be dead. And escape would be a moot point. Her body was so d.a.m.n weak...

"Yes," she whispered. She closed her eyes tighter, feeling ill. "I've just consented to being the devil's wh.o.r.e."

His depraved laughter echoed throughout the underground cavern, reverberated against the impenetrable bars of the cage. "Much lower than a wh.o.r.e," he murmured. "At least a wh.o.r.e is permitted to live through it."

She wanted to vomit, could feel bile churning in her belly.

"Look at me!" he shouted, his voice angry. "You will look at me!"

Oh no-oh please no.

She drew her knees up impossibly closer against her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She didn't want to look at him. Anything but that. Sweet G.o.d above, anything but-

"Look at me!" he bellowed.

And then he was in the cage, his hideous claws jerking her up from the ground, forcing her to her feet. She wanted to fight him, but she could barely speak or stand, let alone rage against him.

"Look at me!" he demanded, shaking her. "Open your eyes!"

No! No! No! Oh G.o.d, please don't make me look at him!

She'd never been more frightened. Her heart was thumping like a rock against her chest, her breathing sporadic and growing more labored by the second. She was afraid to know what he looked like for she'd seen his kind before. Hideous. Freakish.

Monsters.

"I said look at me!"

Her nostrils flared in challenge as her eyes flew open. Her gaze clashed with serpentine gold-slitted eyes.

Oh G.o.d...

"Nooooo!" she screamed. "Nooooo!"

Alex gasped as she bolted upright in bed, her breathing heavy, the sheets soaked with her perspiration. Her eyes darted frantically about as they adjusted to her surroundings-and to the fact that she had been asleep.

"Just a dream," she breathed out, her eyes wide. "Just a nightmare."

Exhausted, she fell back onto the bed, expelling a breath of air as she did so. Three times in six months she'd entertained bizarre nightmares, though this one had been far more detailed than the others before it.

She had almost gotten to see what it looked like.

"What does it matter?" she murmured to the four walls. She sighed, closing her eyes. "It was only a dream."

Part II:

Descent Into h.e.l.l

Chapter One.

"Houston, the Methuselah has successfully left the Robert Frazier galaxy and is beginning its long-awaited return to the Milky Way."

Dr. Alexandria Frazier grinned into the microphone. She wondered what Robert would have thought about her naming a galaxy after him. The way she figured it, she had that right. She'd discovered the d.a.m.n thing after all.

Robert...she sighed. In Earth time he'd been dead for over fifteen hundred years. But only two years had pa.s.sed aboard the Methuselah, so she still considered herself recently widowed. Her husband lived on in her memories as though he'd made love to her only yesterday...or only two years ago as it were.

Dr. Robert Frazier's death during a routine flight to Europa XII, the s.p.a.ce station that had been erected on Jupiter's largest moon, had been as devastating to Alex as it had been unexpected. NASA had short trips like that down to an art form. Finding out that he'd died while taking pressurization readings in the cargo area aboard the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p he'd been traveling on had seemed like a cruel joke.

During a meteor shower-okay. While exploring alien terrain for signs of life-okay. But while taking pressurization readings?

Alex took comfort in the knowledge that Robert had died instantaneously. He'd died not knowing he was going to die. He never experienced fear, remorse, or any of the other countless emotions someone who knew they were about to meet their maker no doubt experienced. In that way, Robert had been lucky. It was all the comfort Alex had to hold onto, so she'd clung to it fiercely from the first day of her widowhood onward.

It had been her husband's untimely death that had spurred Alex into signing up for the mission she was currently completing. NASA had been hard-pressed to find qualified volunteers for the first human journey into deep s.p.a.ce, and for good reason. Doing so, after all, meant that the workers aboard s.h.i.+p would never again lay eyes on their homes and on the people from Earth they'd once cherished. Those places and loved ones would have been dead for over fifteen hundred years, remembered only by the explorers of the Methuselah and automated personal libraries.

As a result of that cold reality, mostly those with nothing and no one to lose had ended up going. The prospect of the journey was an exciting one to every scientist at NASA, but in the end most had decided against requesting pa.s.sage. Alex's crew, of which she was the captain, consisted of seven human scientists and four almost freethinking droids.

"The date on Earth that we expect to land in Houston, or whatever Houston now is," Alex intoned into the microphone, her thoughts straying back to the work at hand, "is October 19, 3679 A.D., exactly one thousand five hundred years from the day we left. Today's date in Earth years is August 3, 2701 A.D." She sighed. "Though you probably won't receive this message via satellite for another fifty years."

Due to advances in technology prior to the Methuselah leaving Earth, it had only taken the crew twenty Earth years to reach deep s.p.a.ce. The s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p had ventured as deeply into the outer bounds as planned, so far out, in fact, that it would take a full thousand Earth years to return. Time and s.p.a.ce were a confusing business.