I hated waiting.
4
Dana
I still wasn’t sure why we’d stopped so early. The suns were still hanging in the sky, the last remnants of twilight casting light shadows across the eerily quiet terrain. It also felt like we had been moving slower than necessary, especially given the fact I was not walking. Yet it was not a captive’s place to question why, which I had learned quickly. Not that it saved me from everything.
“Come.” This was one of the bigger Caterri, one who grabbed at my hair and gestured for me to follow. I ignored the flash of pain, refusing to show it, and followed him towards the fire. Then he shoved me to sit, which I did. I just made the movement slower than he would have liked, showing it was my choice and not his even though it wasn’t.
“What’s up, boys?” I asked blithely.
“She is soft,” Caterri A said, almost stroking my hair. The gesture gave me the creeps, but I kept still. “So soft.”
“Yet I can still hit you with something hard,” I retorted. It was easy to cast my gaze around the camp, looking for anything I could use for a weapon.
It was just as easy to ignore the snort-laugh-buzz that seemed to serve the Caterri when they were amused.
“Her enlarged mammary glands are appealing,” Caterri B said, moving forward and reaching out a hand as if to touch them.
“Uh, no thank you.” I shielded myself from him as best I could with handcuffs, which only seemed to make them angry.
“Where do you come from?” A asked angrily, his black eyes seeming to glint as he squatted in front of me. I couldn’t help but wonder how his pants stayed together like that. Even in a woman, that kind of crouch could rip jeans, and there he was doing it in leather.
Maybe it was crushing his man bits. A girl could hope.
“That direction,” I answered, pointing back in the direction we’d came. “Same as you.”
B rolled his eyes in a distinctly human gesture, something that surprised me. Was eye rolling universal, or was it something his people had picked up from someone? Were there other humans on the planet? Had we ended up there intentionally? I couldn’t help but think about the mystery of the Twelve, how all the men had ended up dead and the women had survived. Was that on purpose? Was someone supposed to have survived to deliver us to the Caterri, but died instead?
“What is your purpose on this planet?” Caterri C asked. And so it went. For every question, I quipped an answer in return. It often got me disgust, a leer, or a blatant grope, but I ignored it and kept placid as ever.
“It is clear she will not give us the information,” A said bitterly. I half-expected to see ant antennae sprout from his forehead and twitch in my direction.
Damn right I wouldn’t tell them anything. I was loyal to my people, and maybe a tiny bit towards the obnoxious, self-centered N’Akron leader who had answered many of my questions over the time we had met.
“If she is not good for information, she must be good for something else,” B hissed, sounding oddly like the N’Akron in a way that made me uncomfortable. He stepped forward and then blatantly groped between my legs, making me kick out. He was able to stop my kick with a single hand, telling me the Caterri were much stronger than they appeared, but he looked at his other hand with distaste.
“What is it?” A asked impatiently, already moving to hold me down. C was stroking an erect dick through his pants, clearly excited by whatever was going to happen.
Great. I was going to get raped. By all of them. Definitely something on my ‘did not want to happen’ list, but it didn’t seem like there was much I could do about it.
“She is wet.” B showed the pale skin of his hand, covered in blood, to the other Caterri. I’d never been more grateful for the start of my period in my life.
“It’s because I have a sickness,” I said seriously. “A disease that will cause me to slowly hemorrhage and is highly contagious sexually.” I saw B shift and look uneasily at his hand like it was about to contaminate him, and A had left go of me and was backing up with C. “So by all means, put your dick in me. All of you should. I’m more than happy to share what I’ve got with you.”
I got a flash of delight as they ran to the edges of camp, sorting through something and pouring out a liquid on B’s hand that made him hiss. Probably some sort of bleach then, I thought with amusement. Not something that was helpful to bare skin, but I didn’t want helpful, not at the moment.
Turning my attention to my surroundings, I wasn’t surprised to see some of the Caterri asleep and a couple actively standing watch. Yet there wasn’t anyone in my vicinity, not when the bigger Caterri (no way in hell would I call them knights) had been all over me seconds before. I wanted to try to escape, to run away, but a quick pull at my handcuffs told me it wasn’t a good idea. Even if I could escape, where would I go? How would I get them off? The technology seemed above whatever the N’Akron had, so it was likely they wouldn’t be able to get them off me. If I didn’t run into any of them, there was no way in hell I could survive on my own with handcuffs.
In a way, I was stuck. I hated being stuck.
A returned dressed in what had to be the Caterri equivalent of a biohazard suit. He grabbed me roughly and dragged me back towards the cart, undoing my handcuffs
