Page 3 of Infala: The Alien's Bond
Did I crash my car?she wondered.If I fell asleep at the wheel, I’ll never hear the end of it.
Memories of hot coffee and a scruffy, sexy stranger at the gas station flickered through her mind, but the taste of her coffee was nowhere to be found. In fact, her lips were feeling a bit dry and chapped. And that taste in her mouth? Definitely not the nectar of the gods.
“I need a toothbrush,” she muttered, trying to force her eyes open. They stubbornly refused, glued shut by a thin crust of nasty gunk. “What the hell?” she grumbled, rubbing at her lashes with the back of her knuckles, slowly loosening them up until blurry traces of light made an appearance on her retinas.
She felt at her waist, reaching for her seatbelt. If she crashed, she’d need to get out of the car and see just how bad it was.Shit. My insurance is going to go up, she realized.
To her surprise, there was no trace of her driver-side restraint to be found. She fumbled around and realized this wasn’t her car at all. Had someone pulled her from the wreckage? Was this an ambulance?
She listened to the quiet muttering of voices. Male and female, and quite a few of them from the sound of it. Was this a rescue squad? What happened to her?
Oh no. Am I in a hospital? How badly am I hurt?
Darla began feeling around her with a more frantic air. This wasn’t a hospital bed. It felt like some sort of cot, but the telltale railing wasn’t there. Also, she didn’t have any IV lines running into her arms, and there were no beeping monitors and electrodes wired to her chest, keeping tabs on her heart.
She shifted to her side and pushed herself up, banging her already pounding head on the cold metal above her with a softgong.
“Ouch! Motherfucker!”
“Hey, the new one’s up,” a less than thrilled woman’s voice commented from not far away.
The sound of others murmuring and coming closer filled Darla’s ears. With an unpleasant wet smack she forced her eyelids to part, blinking away the blurry bits and rubbing her eyes. What she saw was not remotely what she’d anticipated.
“What in the actual hell?” she gasped.
This wasn’t a hospital. Not by a long shot. And she wasn’t on a gurney. No, Darla was tucked into some sort of bunk set into an indentation in the wall. And about that wall, it was metal, like everything in the large, round chamber. Not steel, or any other metal she had seen before. This was a blue metal that seemed to give off a faint light. The ceiling was a lighter toned section, illuminated but without visible light fixtures, radiating a cool glow to every part of the compartment.
Not every corner, though, for this room was completely round, and as she forced herself to sit up and swing her legs out of the bunk, Darla noted there were at least two dozen identical bunks all evenly spaced, rising two high. It was almost like the catacombs beneath some ancient cities, only instead of the dead, these little nooks housed the living.
Darla needed a better look at this place. She twisted and glanced down at the floor. At least she was on one of the lower bunks. With the way her legs and head felt, she really didn’t want to have to climb down from any height.
Thank God for small victories,she morbidly chuckled to herself.
Darla carefully slid off her bunk and onto her feet, grateful whoever had brought her to this place had left her shoes on.
“You’ll want to go slow for a few minutes,” an extremely fit brunette with bleached blonde tips said, walking closer. “It’ll take a little before it wears off.”
“Before what wears off?” Darla said, stubbornly attempting to walk.
She found herself rudely introduced to the floor a moment later.
The woman chuckled and squatted down to meet her gaze. “Yeah, like I said, you’ll want to go slow. I’m Maureen,” she offered, reaching out a hand.
Darla accepted, gripping firmly as her new friend helped her to her feet. She wobbled a little but stayed up.
“I’m okay. Just gimme a minute.”
“Take all the time you want. Not like we’re going anywhere.”
Darla focused like she learned in that yoga class she took last summer.Breathe in, breathe out. Center yourself and connect with your body. She was already starting to feel more like herself. She moved her head slowly, avoiding sudden movements that might upset her equilibrium, and surveyed the faces staring at her.
At least a dozen women of various ethnicities and diverse attire, as well as a handful of stout men. A few other people remained tucked in the shadows of their bunks, but she estimated there to be nearly twenty people in the room, all in. But the question was, who were they? And how the hell did she get here?
She turned back to Maureen. The woman had the look of an aerobics instructor. Lean and muscled, contrasting with her own softer physique. Not that Darla wasn’t in decent shape, but the kind of shape that still allowed for pizza and ice cream once in a while.
“Better?” Maureen asked.
“Yeah. I remember driving. I had just picked up some coffee from the gas station. There was this cute guy there, but I blew him off and was heading home. And then—I don’t remember.”
