“New meat,” one of them announces as he pokes his gun between my shoulder blades. “May the best male get the first taste.”
Taste? Does he mean that literally? Are these miners cannibals, or is the guard talking about sex?
“Use her, but don’t kill her. Ryone wants her back in one piece,” the guard amends.
Okay, so they won’t eat me. Maybe this is worse—it will be torture. It’s okay, I tell myself. I see pickaxes. I’ll find a way to end my misery soon enough.
The guards haul me to the mouth of the mine and push me inside with a rough shove and some filthy speculation about what these animals are going to do to me.
Once I’ve crossed from the weak sunlight into the shade of the mine and am stumbling down the steep ramp leading deep into the soil, males of all sorts converge on me.
There must be twenty of them circling me, arguing, getting ready to fight for first dibs on me. Most are humanoid, some are different colors with vastly different facial features, but they all have two things in common—the look of unbridled lust in the shine of their eyes and the sneers on their lips. Is there no honor or respect in any of these males? Were they all like this to begin with or is this the effect of the harsh mine environment?
A hot stab of fear spikes through me followed almost instantly by a shiver of revulsion as I get a good look at the disgusting aliens tightening their circle around me.
“I get her first,” a big one says. His mouth makes grunting sounds, but the subdural translator my abductors implanted behind my left ear continues to translate all the alien languages I hear into English.
“Leave the female alone,” an older male with almost translucent skin says from the periphery. I wait to see if he’ll try to intervene, but even if he tried, he’s no match for this mob.
“We’ll fight you for her,” two hideous males with gaping holes for mouths say as they square off in front of the first guy.
A loud noise, somewhere between a grunt and howl echoes up from deep in the bowels of the earth.
“Slag,” one of the uglies says, his tone full of contempt, and . . . fear?
The frenzied action around me stops as the two guards at the entry step back out into the dim sunlight. Every head in the vicinity swivels toward the depths of the cave.
I thought the males around me were big. This male is almost a foot taller and his shoulders eight inches wider than anyone else here.
The first thing I notice are his glowing green eyes. Sooma Ryone said this was a green salt mine. Whatever its use, it’s obviously a glowing green substance that fills the metal ore carts and glistens with tiny green speckles from the black stone walls. Slag’s eyes are the color of the salt.
His skin is green, too, from the top of his bald head to the bottom of his rag-covered feet. It looks rough and impermeable. He’s lumbering at a run, his eyes scanning the space, assessing the sex-starved males, the brewing fight, and then his eyes swing to me.
He stops mid-stride, looks me up, then down, then up again, then lets out an angry noise that’s a cross between a bellow and a roar. Terrified, I cower back as far as the rock wall behind me will allow.
His fists are big as Easter hams as he enters the fray of lust-crazed males surrounding me. Once he’s knocked several of them aside like bowling pins, he backs toward me, his actions laying claim as if he owns me.
My eyes dart to a pickaxe lying on the rocky floor nearby. This nightmare that is my new reality is racing from bad to worse and I become more desperate to end this. I wonder if I can reach the axe while all eyes are on the life-or-death battle. I feel helpless trying to envision how to use the tool to kill myself. When I realize what I have to do, I’m ashamed to find I don’t have the courage.
Within a minute or two, twelve males are on the ground. None are dead, but Slag’s shoulders are still bunched, ready to attack as his head swivels, looking for any other comers.
“You have to sleep sometime,” one of the males at the periphery goads. “You can’t keep her to yourself forever.”
Slag grunts, then faces me, leans down, tucks his shoulder to my midriff, hefts me up, grabs a pickaxe, and carries me into the dark recesses of the cave.
Where before I felt calm detachment as I planned my own demise, now panic burgeons inside me like a rising tide. This guy’s humongous and his hands are lethal weapons. If all those animals at the mine’s opening were felled so easily, how am I supposed to escape him? My body freezes in terror as I fully comprehend there is no way out of this.
The tunnel seems to go on forever as it forks every couple hundred feet. Although I arrived by spaceship and the guards carry laser weapons, the mine is lit by substandard old-fashioned illumination that barely casts light onto the black walls.
Deeper we go until we haven’t passed another miner for long minutes. My captor is silent and not even breathing hard as he carries me further into the subterranean mine.
My emotions are spinning from fear to feeling resolved to my initial plan to end things on my own terms. As I bump along, his shoulder jabbing my
