Page 1 of Warrior
Chapter 1
Daisy
I brought the spade down with a thud. There was a satisfying crack as it broke through the hard-packed soil. I slowly lifted a mound of dark earth away from the tunnel's floor, adding it to the growing pile behind me. Despite the constant damp chill permeating the undergrown tunnels, a trickle of sweat rolled down my temple. At least my muscles weren’t screaming in protest. If there was one good thing about being abducted by aliens, it was getting my body returned to a youthful state. Well, maybe it was good. I wasn't sure yet. After almost two weeks in the mines, it was too soon to tell.
Two weeks.
My thoughts immediately flickered to my friends, resignation shifting to worry in the time it took me to blink.
The Tuesday night Outland Book Club.
We’d been together for twenty years. Ever since I caught Agnes using a hymnal to hide the copy of Outlander, she read during my husband's early morning church service. Twenty years, nine books, and one television show later, we'd been together on that mountainside when the bright light fell over us. It was the last time I saw them.
I tried to imagine how they might appear if sent through that weird machine like me. Aliens apparently didn’t believe in mirrors. From the reflections I'd found in puddles of water and odd pieces of metal I looked in my mid to late twenties, despitemy sixty-two years. I bet they were gorgeous. My friends were all beautiful women, even in their sixties. I was the plainest one of the bunch, and never more appreciative of that fact.
The odd cat-looking aliens that abducted us mentioned little about our fate.
Willa was the one I worried about the least. After a career in the navy, even at sixty-something years old, time had only served to strengthen her. Changed, she would be young and strong again, able to fight for herself even if she was no longer accustomed to it. I imagine she’d be a force to be reckoned with for any alien.
Emmy was a natural arguer with a strong will. My husband once said she could argue the spots off a leopard, and he wasn't wrong. I hoped her persuasive abilities would help protect her, no matter where she ended up.
Pearl's sharp wit and sharp tongue would be her greatest asset. She'd be okay if she controlled her smart-ass tongue and got to a kitchen to show off her culinary skills.
I worried about Clara and Agnes the most. Clara was fragile, trying to rebuild her life after losing her husband to cancer. She retired from teaching to nurse Curtis through his illness, but perhaps she could find a place teaching English to aliens.
Agnes… I knew what she looked like young. The woman never left home without a photo of herself. She was breathtaking, an attribute that might make her vulnerable to the perverts I had no doubt existed in the stars.
I shook away the building worry with a jerk of my head, the sweaty ends of my hair clinging to my neck in a clammy mess. My friends would be okay. I recited the prayer countless times, asking for their safety each morning and night, whenever worry creeped along like a spider, something that thankfully didn't exist in these tunnels.
Look on the bright side, Daisy. There’s a blessing even in the darkness.
I heard Gavin buoying my spirits, his voice still the same, not fading with time and loss.
Gavin.
A dull ache spread across my chest like someone squeezed a steel trap around it. Being trapped underground and at the mercy of aliens who didn't seem to smile, the pain for him was sharper. I missed the one person in my life who always saw the bright side and whose faith never wavered despite how bleak things might seem. I missed my friend.
Although my marriage was good, as marriages go, we were always better friends than lovers. Sometimes I wished for more passion between us like Willa and Clara had with their husbands. Gavin was an excellent minister, devoted to the church and its parishioners. Because of that, sometimes—a lot of the time—I ranked last when it came to his attention. Even so, I never regretted my life with Gavin—not once.
We lived a good life, despite never having children of our own, filling the void with mission trips to the poorest corners of the earth. The primitive living standards in some places were enough to give me nightmares. Of course, now I realize those mission grips provided excellent training.
While the tall alien guards with pale gray skin, snow-white hair, and curling horns were certainly better looking than the cat-aliens, accommodations they provided in the mine left much to be desired. Especially when I realized the miners I’d been bought to look after were children. Unusual species to be sure... completely alien, but all children just the same.
The tunnels coiled and spiraled like veins in a leaf. My poor sense of direction already kept me disoriented, so I stayed close to a few familiar paths, fearing getting completely lost. It was brighter than I expected of a mind, pockets of sunlightfiltered through craggy skylights like stars illuminating an underground night sky. Plus, the pathways and tunnels were of a generous size, so at least claustrophobia wasn’t an issue.
There was my room, of course, the kitchen—if one was being liberal in their use of the word, and a dormitory full of shabby bunk beds arranged in rows. In the bathroom, ancient spigots jutted out from the wall, and several oval metal holes lined the floor. There were no baths or showers; instead, one of the nearer tunnels held several underground springs, the water source for everything from bathing to cooking. There was also the common room, a wide space where the miners gathered every morning to gather tools and instructions for the day.
The damp cold was constant, seeping through my clothes and into my skin until all that remained was an icy dread that left me shivering under thin, worn blankets at night. During the day, however, there was no time to consider the miserable cold; there was too much work to be done.
It took me a solid week to clean up the rat trap considered a kitchen—yes, they had rats down here, and the alien versions were huge with long claws, beady black eyes and two curling hairless tails. After a week of scrubbing till my fingers bled, I at least eradicated the worry of getting salmonella from the place. The small supply room off from the kitchen was stacked with bags and jars of foodstuffs. I didn’t recognize most of it—some I didn’t want to know truthfully. There was a large container that might be oatmeal, one of something that looked like rice, plus barrels filled with dried meat. The alien version of flour—a gritty yellow powder that hung in the air like dust—made halfway decent biscuits once pounded to smoothness with a makeshift motor and pestle. Then came the spices, small glass jars full of colorful dried concoctions that ran the gamut of weak salt to saffron on steroids.
The daily menu was simple: oatmeal for breakfast, dried meat and biscuits for lunch and rice, dried meat, and whatever else the guards left on the kitchen floor that I managed to fashion into a dish that wouldn’t poison anyone for dinner.
It broke my heart when the miners carried on about how delicious everything tasted. The congregation would gag and order pizza if I served anything like this alien fare at one of our church socials.
What I wouldn't give to get these kids a pizza.
What I wouldn’t give to get these kids anything that wasn’t a scrap or rag.
