The Tradrych Strain- The Complete Series Read online

  The hoses were turned on, and I stood beneath the flow of the one closest to me, the lukewarm water pummeling my body. It was uncomfortable but also rejuvenating, and I allowed it to wash away the sweat clinging to my skin.

  Heat waves rose from the red earth, and the horizon shimmered. Something caught my eye. I frowned and squinted. Was that a city in the distance? I didn’t know why the sight of it gave me hope, but it did. It wasn’t as though it would be a place I could escape to. I was on a different planet, with no way of getting home. The entire city would be full of Trads, and I certainly couldn’t blend in. The moment any of them saw me, they’d know exactly where I’d come from and would whisk me up and deliver me straight back here. Besides, I couldn’t run anywhere right now. My distended belly made it hard for me to walk, never mind run. I moved at a waddle, my hand pressed to my lower back, trying to suck in what felt like thinner air into my poor compressed lungs. And I wasn’t far away from giving birth. At least here I’d be able to rely on the cleanliness and equipment keeping me alive. I couldn’t imagine giving birth to an alien child out there somewhere, sitting in the dirt, terrified and in pain. And what would I do with the child after it had been born? I felt nothing toward it now other than loathing and resentment. I wanted the Trads to take it away as soon as it was born. I didn’t want to be tasked with trying to take care of it.

  I wondered if I could bring myself to just leave it out in the dirt somewhere, let it die of exposure, but I didn’t think even I could do that. I hated the Trads for everything they’d done to us, and for the death and destruction they’d brought to Earth, but the creature living inside me now hadn’t asked to be born.

  If it’s a male, it’ll grow up to become one of them.

  If I gave birth to a male baby and left it out somewhere to die, wouldn’t I be doing all the future women a favor? But then I’d be sentencing the baby despite it not having committed any crimes yet, merely in expectation of a crime it most likely would commit.

  Were all the Trads bad? It was a reasonable question. I certainly hadn’t seen any signs of any of them being good. They were a race that thrived on slavery and they thought nothing of destroying an innocent planet to get what they wanted.

  A whip lashed at my feet, splashing up a spray of water.

  “Get on with it, girlie!” Nadeusz snapped.

  I tore myself from my thoughts and focused on soaping down my body, ready to be hosed off again. The Trads wouldn’t physically hurt us if they could help it—not while we were carrying their babies, anyway.

  My body was so different now, I still hadn’t reconciled it as being my own. My breasts were heavy and threaded with blue and purple veins, and my stomach so big I was unable to see my feet. I had to reach below my bump to wash between my legs.

  I caught Zymunt staring at me in fascination, watching my hand move between my thighs.

  “What the fuck are you staring at?” I spat.

  A slow smile crept across his lips, and he lifted the hose, directing it right into my face. I gurgled and spluttered with a face full of water before turning myself around so it only hit the back of my head. I lifted my hands to protect my head from the gush of water, but the Trad only chuckled and lowered it back down again.

  I glared at him. “You’ll pay for that.”

  Frustratingly, he only laughed. “Yeah, how do you plan on doing that?”

  Gritting my teeth, I yanked my wrists apart again, hoping the silver bonds would stretch and separate, but they only hardened, making any more movement impossible. I gave a growl of frustration and lowered them again. He was right. There was nothing I could do, and I hated all of them because of it.

  “Relax, Tara,” Dawn hissed at me. “You’re going to end up in isolation.”

  She was right, and I clamped my mouth shut and gave her a nod to show her I agreed. I didn’t want to be in isolation, especially when I felt like the birth might be near. I didn’t know where we were taken to actually give birth, but I at least wanted the other women around for the first part. Of course, the bed to my right was empty now that Zoe was gone, but I doubted it would stay that way for long. Some poor woman would be brought here to fill it.

  Keeping my head down, I followed the other women in a line back toward the area where we were being held. The hot Tradrych sun dried our bodies almost instantly, so we were able to pick our dresses up from where we’d taken them off and slip them back over our heads. The material was different to anything I’d ever worn on Earth—the texture slippery, without a single stitch that I could make out. It had clearly been designed for our swollen shapes, the front longer to allow the material to mold to our bellies without rising too much at the front. But it left nothing to the imagination.

  Not that I should care. The Trads saw us completely naked when we stripped off to wash, and it wasn’t as though anyone was coming near me while I looked like this.

  It was after the baby was born that I needed to be worried.

  Chapter Three

  The boredom was one of the hardest parts of being here.

  When we weren’t shit-scared, or miserable, or forced to witness one of the other women go into labor, or lose her mind, there was nothing to do. Our time was divided between meals, health checks, our once daily trips outside to wash, and sleep. That was it. We weren’t supposed to talk, but that didn’t stop us from whispering to each other, only shutting up when it looked like the Trads were coming back into the birthing ring. With no television, books, internet, or even a pen and paper to keep us entertained, the time dragged.

  The empty bed beside me taunted me. I wished I knew what had happened to Zoe. I hadn’t known her long, but she’d seemed so young, and I hated to imagine her going through anything worse than we’d already been forced to endure.

  A day and night passed by. The days were shorter here than they had been on Earth, and I wondered if the Trads counted things in the same way. Did they have the same number of days to a year? Did they have seasons? I had no idea about any of these things.

  Kaja entered the room, rolling her equipment on a cart. She checked us every day, without fail, making sure our blood pressure and blood sugars were doing what they were supposed to, and scanning the baby to ensure it was in the right position and growing as it should. I did my best to just pretend like it wasn’t happening. I didn’t want to know anything about the creature growing inside me, and I certainly didn’t want to bond with it. This thing belonged to Rhett, not me. He’d known exactly what he was doing when he’d had sex with me, and I wanted no part in it. All I wanted was for this thing to be out of me, once and for all.

  “Come along now, Tara,” Kaja said, positioning the trolley beside my bed. “You know the routine by now.”

  I scowled but sat up, swinging my legs off the side of the bed to allow her to take my bloods via a silver cylinder. I remained silent, only flinching slightly as she stamped the cylinder down onto my inner wrist. The device issued a brief hissing, puncturing my skin and taking what was needed. Next, she wrapped a band around my upper arm and registered my blood pressure.

  “Good girl,” Kaja said, praising me even though her brow was heavy and ridged with scales, making her appear as though she wore a permanent frown, and her thin lips always seemed to be twisted with disapproval. Her long black hair was threaded with silver, and two short horns protruded from between the strands. She tended to move with her tail caught up over her arm, reminding me of an old fashioned lady catching up the hem of her dress. “Now lie back and pull up your dress.”

  I hated this part. We weren’t allowed underwear—just an unnecessary thing to have to wrestle off when it came to the birth, I guessed—so lifting my dress up to expose my belly also meant I was exposing the rest of me as well. It made me feel even more vulnerable than normal, but I had no choice but to comply.

  Lying back on the bed, I wriggled the dress up, exposing my upper thighs, my belly, and my most private of places. I was going to have to get over it. In a matte
r of days or maybe weeks, there would be something abhorrent coming out of that private place, and there would be a whole heap of alien males standing around me while it happened.

  Kaja placed a blob of cold, clear gel on my stomach and then placed a device that looked like a white tray on top of my stomach—similar to one of our MRI scanners back home, only in a far smaller size. I twisted my face away, not wanting to see what was on the screen. It was hard enough imagining what was inside me, without having to come face to face with it.

  “Good, good,” she said. “Everything is—”

  A scream came from my right-hand side—the same side Kaja and the equipment was on—and automatically, I turned to see what was happening.

  Kaja leaped to her feet. One of the women, Anna, had snapped, and was using her teeth to try and chew her wrists, perhaps either hoping to escape, or maybe to lose enough blood that she’d end things for good. It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened, and I was sure it wouldn’t be the last.

  But my attention wasn’t focused on the other women. Instead, my gaze was locked on the screen where the image of the creature inside me stared back.

  Frozen in horror and disbelief, I barely even noticed the chaos happening beyond. I was locked on to the screen in front of me, and the image of the thing growing inside me. The picture was in horrifyingly detailed 4-d. Though the colors were different to how it would be in real life, I was able to make out every detail. The nose was a turned-up button, the lips pursed and moving, as though already sucking on a teat. The eyes were closed, and appeared to be strange hollows in the creature’s head. Already, I could see the formation of scales on its skin, the pits and bumps where they’d develop. On the head was the twin protrusions of what I assumed would become its horns.

  As I watched, it lifted its hand and gripped the cord that connected the two of us together, and I felt the movement inside me at the same time as watching it on screen. I wanted to look away, to not have this clear image of this monster in my head, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was a morbid fascination, like being unable to tear your eyes from a road traffic accident where you know someone’s been badly hurt.

  The baby moved, shifting enough to make my bump list to one side, then something I’d always taken to be a foot or a hand shoved at my inner wall, creating a little bulge on the outside.

  I stared at the screen in dismay. A thick, muscular tail had wrapped around the baby and was now pushing at the inside of me, as though it was trying to find a way out.

  With a scream, I shoved the scanner off my belly and then kicked out at the screen, spinning it away from me. I’d already known what form they’d take—or at least had been able to make a good guess—but actually seeing it for real was a whole different thing. My head swam, and burning bile rose up the back of my throat. I couldn’t even think about the relatively cute face. All I could think was that there was an alien growing inside me, and I had no way of getting it out.

  I lay back on the bed, breathing hard, trying to hold back a panic attack. Across the other side of the room, everyone was busy helping Anna, oblivious to my own internal self-destruct mode. I felt like if I could freeze, maybe the thing inside me would somehow no longer know I existed. I didn’t even know if it did know I existed, but I was in fight or flight mode, and I had nowhere I could run.

  “Breathe,” a deep voice said from beside me.

  I started, my eyes shooting open. The crazy-looking Trad with the bolt through his nose and the mohawk hairstyle was crouching beside my bed.

  “Hey, Tee,” he said, shortening my name. “Just take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Count down from ten.... Ten, nine, eight, seven...”

  I was too frightened to do anything other than what he told me.

  Thick, dark eyebrows drew together in concern, and there was a rim of fire around his deep-blue pupils. He had a square jaw and a slight cleft to his chin. What I assumed to be the Trad version of tattoos crawled up the side of his neck and down the backs of his hands, all in the same red and orange colors of his kind. I didn’t know what the intricate patterns and images were, but I found myself drawn to them, and focusing on them rather than the turmoil inside my head made the panic slowly fade away.

  “Mikotaj,” I managed to gasp his name.

  “You can call me Miko, and it’s going to be okay,” he reassured me.

  But I shook my head. “You can’t say that. None of this is okay.”

  The other Trads had wrestled Anna to the floor and were now carrying her between them. Miko quickly shot to his feet and stepped away from me, as though he hadn’t wanted any of them to see what he was doing.

  I caught Diarus watching in the background, too, ready to sweep in and clean up the spilled blood. There was something about him that made me think there was more going on in his head than cleaning up the Trad’s mess. I wanted to ask him for help, but he was as much a slave here as we were. If he had any way of getting out of this situation, I was sure he’d have taken it by now.

  One of the other Trads came in and removed the equipment that Kaja had forgotten in her haste to save Anna. I was relieved to see it gone, even though I knew she’d bring it back again tomorrow, and the day after, and every day until I finally got to meet the creature inside me face-to-face.

  Chapter Four

  “Get the fuck off me, you scaly sons of bitches!”

  The shout from the doorway made us all sit up and take notice.

  A girl with pink hair was hauled into the birthing ring, held between two of the Trads, Nadeusz and Mikotaj. Her stomach was swollen, just like the rest of us. The Trads dragged her toward the bed that had been vacated by Zoe only forty-eight hours earlier. She was tiny, making her stomach look even bigger, and the two large Trads practically lifted her off the floor as they made their way toward the empty pod, her bare feet cycling in the air.

  “I mean it!” she spat, still struggling. “Let go of me now!”

  But the larger of the Trads, Nadeusz, only laughed.

  I stared at Mikotaj, still confused by the moment I’d spent with him where he’d calmed me down from my panic attack. Would he glance over in my direction?

  They were walking directly toward me, carrying the girl between them, but Miko didn’t look at me. Why had he treated me as though he’d actually cared about how I was feeling? There had been compassion in his eyes, and he’d definitely acted as though he hadn’t wanted any of the other Trads to see him comforting me. The Trads were the bad guys. They didn’t have an emotional or caring bone in their scale-covered bodies.

  Still yelling, the new girl was carried over to the empty pod beside me and dumped onto the bed. Instantly, the liquid metal constraints lashed out from the back of the pod and secured both her wrists.

  “Motherfuckers!” she exclaimed, yanking on the restraints, which only caused them to harden, holding her in place.

  The big Trad, Nadeusz, straightened and pushed his hand through his dark hair, his fingers moving between the twin horns protruding from his scalp. None of the Trads here had bothered to use their human disguises with us, but for a flash of a moment, I couldn’t help but wonder what he looked like as a human.

  There was nothing the girl could do now she was held in place by the restraints—not that there was anything she could have done with the two Trads holding her either. Had she been brought in on another ship or moved from a different facility? I willed the Trads to go so I could speak to her.

  “Your meals will be brought to you three times a day,” Mikotaj told her. “You are expected to eat every mouthful, whether or not you’re hungry. You will be taken out to wash daily and get some fresh air. It is important that you stay clean and see the sun. You must remain silent and obedient at all times. Is that understood?”

  “Go fuck yourself,” she spat.

  He cocked his eyebrows and shook his head, exhaling a long breath out of his nose, which made a slight whistling due to the nose bar.

  The tw
o of them had clearly had enough of her, as they both turned together and left the birthing ring.

  “Hey!” she shouted after them. “Come back. Let me out of here.”

  “You’re not allowed to speak,” I hissed over to the new arrival, keeping my voice at a whisper. “You’ll get in trouble.”

  The girl didn’t even bother to lower her voice. If anything, she raised it to a shout, and I watched the other women flinch and cringe at the volume.

  “I’ll speak however much I want to!” She was clearly aiming her words at the Trads. “You hear me? You might have taken my body, but you won’t take my voice!”

  She was new and naïve. The Trads would do whatever it took to break this spirit from her, and it wouldn’t be pleasant.

  “What’s your name?” I asked her, still in a whisper, trying to divert her attention from making so much noise.

  She finally looked over to me. “Avery,” she said. “What’s yours?”

  “I’m Tara. This is Dawn.” I nodded over at my neighbor. “That’s Jennifer over there.”

  Jennifer and Dawn both lifted their hands in a wave, and a couple of the other women in nearby pods hissed over their names, too.

  “Where did you come from?” I asked her.

  “Los Angeles.” Then she added, “Earth.”

  I smiled. “Yeah, I figured that part.”

  She shrugged. “Well, with the way the world has gone, it could be anywhere.”

  Avery had a point.

  Nadeusz stalked back into the birthing ring, the whip in his hand. He lifted it up and lashed it against the floor, the whip cracking through the air.

  “Hey! No talking! You know the rules.”

  Avery turned to him, her eyes flashing. “Fuck your rules.”

  He glared at her. “You’re going to cause us problems, aren’t you?”

  She flashed him a set of small white teeth in a strange parody of a grin. “That’s my plan.”

  “Avery, stop it,” I whispered to her.