Collection

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. So humans say, anyway.

Awareness returns slowly, one cell at a time. My extremities begin to tingle first. I wiggle fingers and toes, arms and legs, fighting to restore circulation to limbs deadened by immobility. Or is it whatever they injected me with that prevents movement, that steals perception and leaves blankness in its wake? I stretch out fingers and toes—bare toes—to feel the edges of reality.

Where am I?

My body floats slowly from side to side of my prison. The air is stale, laden with chemicals. Artificial. When I draw in a deep breath, trying to clear the fuzziness from my head, the air burns the delicate membranes of my throat and prickles inside my lungs.

I can feel my throat. Feel my lungs. My eyes are still sealed shut.

How long have I been here? Wherever here is?

Tap! Tap! Tap!

A faint sound reverberates around me. I reach up to my face, my eyes. Taped closed. No wonder I can’t see. I peel off the sticky stuff and open my eyes.

Metal. Glass. Stars. I am looking upwards at a ceiling. Not the ceiling of my bedroom at 523 Hawthorne Place, Oneonta, NY. This is not my home. How did—

Who did—

Who did this to me? Where am I?

Tap! Tap! Tap!

I am floating, suspended in thin air. Beneath a glass ceiling, intersected by metal struts. Above me, another room. Another glass ceiling. But whoever is up there is dressed in some kind of costume. From down here, it looks like an alien out of Star Wars or Star Trek. Bulbous body. Floating filaments of long hair, in some color I’ve never seen before. The very sight of it is making me nauseous. Or is it the aftereffects of whatever I've been drugged with?

I’ve been kidnapped. This must be some kind of weird trafficking thing. People in furry costumes, engaging in furotic sex acts. I never thought I was attractive enough to be kidnapped for nefarious purposes, but here I am.

I am so screwed!

Tap! Tap! Tap!

Lifting my head, I realize that the glass ceiling above me is attached to glass walls. There are dim tube lights running along the intersections of ceiling and walls, and floor, too. I am in a glass room. Only one wall is solid, the one behind me. Shifting, squirming, I float upright against missing gravity.

How do they do that? Are there furry sex traffickers at NASA?

Tap! Tap! Tap!

I see it then, or rather him. There’s a man in the dimly-lit room next to me. A naked man. He’s leaning against the adjoining wall, tapping on the glass to get my attention. And I realize in that moment that I am also naked. No furry costume, for whatever this kinky situation happens to be. I instinctively wrap one arm across my exposed breasts and spread my other hand over…there.

Modesty?

Seriously, Liz?

I should be thinking about escaping whatever the hell is going on and yet I am embarrassed by my nakedness.

Some Amazon warrior princess I’ve turned out to be!

He taps again, the man in the next room. There’s no door in the wall, no doors anywhere in this glass cell. Peering down the row, I can see other people (all of them in furry costumes, so why am I naked?!? And why is he?) locked in a bank of rooms extending for what seems like miles, above and below. All glassed rooms. And outside…

Only blackness, pinpoints of light, too small to illuminate the landscape.

He taps again and points at a panel inset on the wall between our cells. He is studiously looking at my face, not…the rest of me. I prevent my own gaze from drifting downwards to his—

He’s pointing frantically. I drop my hands and squirm/wriggle/float to the panel, my eyes locked on his. He’s good-looking in a GQ sort of way. But his mouth is set in a grim line, eyes dark, stressed. I reach for the panel but there’s nothing there, just a screen, with lighted lettering in some kind of script I can’t read. Arabic? Korean? Vulcan, maybe?

His hand is spread across the panel on his side of the wall, so I place mine over his, on the other side of the glass. “Finally! I thought you’d never wake up!” His voice comes through a hidden speaker somewhere, tinged with exasperation.

“Wha—what the hell is going on? What is this place? How did I—”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, and I don’t know!” His shoulders slump. “I don’t remember anything. I was just driving my rig from Long Island to Charlotte. I must have fallen asleep. Next thing I know, I’m waking up here. Like—” He waves his free hand to indicate his—

Why are we naked?

“Why am I floating?” I ask.

“Oh, right,” he says. “The back wall,” he points to the solid wall that runs behind each of the cells. “There’s a control panel there. Like this one, but it seems to change the gravity, the temperature, etc. You just have to play around with it. Nothing here is in English, so…”

My qualms about exposing my naked butt to this stranger last barely a moment (no pun intended!). We’re both in the same boat here, at least until we get our furry costumes. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to—

Somehow, I manage to turn on the gravity after fumbling with the panel on the back wall, and my feet hit the floor finally. I look over my shoulder to see he’s giving me a thumb’s up, the man next door. On the other side of my cell, the furry-costumed person in there is curled up on the floor, asleep maybe. I turn away and make my way back to the other wall, feet thankfully staying on the floor, and replace my hand on the panel.

“What about you?” he says.

I shake my head, trying to clear the remaining fuzziness. What about me? Oh, right—

“I was studying for my calculus final,” I say. “I live in upstate New York. I must have fallen asleep over my books…Is this some kind of sex-trafficking ring? Operating out of New York City?”

He doesn’t have time to answer. At that moment, the entire building lights up. Bright lights. Everywhere. The solid walls at the rear of the cells turn transparent and I can see more people in furry costumes walking along a wide corridor. A cadaverously thin man (woman?) on stilts leads the procession, which comes to a halt outside our cells. I grab my privates again, trying to hide from the staring…

Furries?

My insides freeze solid in an instant, as I realize these are not costumed perverts.

Not weird SciFi/Fantasy/ComicCon participants.

They are not human at all.

“And now I’d like to introduce to you, most esteemed visitors to the Intergalactic Museum of Sentience,” the words I was hearing through the panel on the wall didn’t match the movements of the mouth—mouth?!?—on the extremely tall alien standing out in front of the small crowd of other aliens, “our newest acquisitions, from the planet Earth, in the Milky Way Galaxy, a matched pair of humans. This sentient race is the only one of its kind on Earth. The male is on the left and the female is on the right.”

The landscape outside the building is not obscured by darkness.

There is no landscape outside the building, because it is not a building. It is a ship. Floating in the blackness of deep space.

The crowd of sightseers gathers against the glass wall, entranced. Watching. Watching. Through the panel I hear one of them speak, translated by the device.

“What is she doing?”

And the tall one says, “Screaming, I believe. That sound is known as ‘screaming.’”

***

Thank you for reading! Likes, comments, shares, follows, and pledges are always cherished.

I intended to write a new story for every day of the New Worlds Challenge, but unfortunately, life happened. I only made it through three stories before I was forced to admit defeat. Well, three stories is better than none. This is New Worlds Story #3. If you enjoyed it, please feel free to check out story #2, Dust.