The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

‘Pierced’

(mc, f/f, nc, sf)

DISCLAIMER: This material is for adults only; it contains explicit sexual imagery and non-consensual relationships. If you are offended by this type of material or you are under legal age in your area, do NOT continue.

Synopsis:

Alien bioweapons are unleashed on an human colony world.

Foreword:

Story contains graphic descriptions of people getting killed, alien critters rooting around in people’s brains, and similar yucky stuff. Also, sex. Do not read if this sort of thing is not your cup of tea.

Sadly, the story does not contain ‘Piercers’ from Dungeons and Dragons, although that’s an intriguing idea.

* * *

‘Pierced’

Chapter One ‘Arc of Sands’

Part One

* * *

Margot was not a fan of tattoos in general—she did not have any herself—but she made a definite exception for Xiulan’s. Most of all she fancied the two small roses which she had tattooed on her inner, upper thighs. They were mirror images save for the color: one a dusky purple, one a carnation pink, both delicate and striking against her golden skin. When Xiulan’s thighs were closed—as they were not at the moment—the two roses appeared to rise from a single stem.

Margot was just licking the pink one when the lights went out.

Xiulan had drawn the drapes to prevent any voyeurs with vidspecs from recording the hot girl-on-girl action, which meant that the room was suddenly very close to completely black.

Margot ineffectually looked up.

“Well?” Xiulan asked. “You can keep going.”

Margot snorted and slithered her tongue along Xiulan’s labia, resulting in a gratifying moan and shiver.

She worked Xiulan’s pussy in the dark, reaching up to squeeze her breasts, then down to stroke her hipbones as Xiulan’s breathing sped up and broke into quick pants. She let go of the right hip and slipped a wet finger into Xiulan’s pussy and crooked it, and Xiulan came, clutching at the bedsheets and emitting the high-pitched “ee-UNH ee-UNH” that Margot found so endearing.

Xiulan’s hand came down to rest on Margot’s head, and Margot detached her mouth and looked up. Her eyes had adjusted enough to see her lover’s shape, but not enough to see the colors of the shoulder tattoo, leaving it a black-and-grey shield on paler grey flesh.

“Oh, baby,” Xiulan breathed. “I love the way you do that.”

Margot snorted her amusement again and slipped out from under Xiulan’s hand and off the bottom of the bed. She strode over to the room’s large picture window and pulled back the drapes, though not the gauzy curtains. Any voyeurs looking across from the other towers would have to be using pretty advanced vidspecs to see through the curtains, although the technology did exist. They’d also have to know which room to look into, and that Margot and Xiulan were having sex at ten in the morning.

Xiulan raised an arm in front of her face, squinting in the light. “What? You don’t like to fuck in the dark?”

Margot turned from peering around the curtains and smiled. “I like to see you. You’re beautiful. You have a hot body. Why would I want to fuck you in the dark?”

“You say the sweetest things,” Xiulan replied as Margot crossed the room back to the bed. “I bet you say that to all your girlfriends.”

Margot slipped down next to her on the bed and cuddled up against her, savoring the warmth of her skin. “There’s only you,” she said, knowing it would lead to an awkward moment but saying it anyway.

Xiulan looked at her for a heartbeat, then lay her head on Margot’s chest.

Four days. Four days and Xiulan would be back with her unit for a few days of marshaling and then deployment to some unspecified—and probably classified—sector of Imperial space. The day after, Margot would rejoin her own unit, and ship out for somewhere else. Although she drove a desk these days, the demands of the Empire specified that it was a desk in space local to the objective.

Four days left on Strand.

Strand was a pleasure world. Sure, it had a diversified agricultural sector and a decent light industrial base, but really the only reason people came here from anywhere else was the beaches. Of the eighty million inhabitants, fully a third were involved directly or indirectly in tourism. Many of those tourists were military; Strand was the sixth most popular destination for servicemen and -women on R&R, and third for those not visiting relatives.

Booking a tower room at a beach resort such as Arc of Sands, meeting a hot bodied young—or recently rejuved—thing from some other service, drinking and dancing and fucking for a solid two weeks until your leave was up and you crawled back to the spaceport... it was an experience common to hundreds of thousands of Strand’s visitors, one eagerly anticipated and wistfully remembered by most of them.

The only thing unusual about Margot and Xiulan was: this was the fourth time they’d done this.

They made no promises; women in the Imperial service, at the whim of military bureaucrats light years away, weren’t in any position to pledge themselves to anyone. And Margot wouldn’t feel right trying to pin Xiulan down. Asking commitment when they both knew it was unavailable on either side? No. Ships in the night they were, sucking the pleasure from the moment, free to chart their own futures. No promises. Just fr....

And yet, here they were. Together again.

Coordinating leave was far from easy.

Time to change the subject.

“So,” Margot said, stroking Xiulan’s dark hair, “what’s with the power outage? I thought this place was supposed to be well-run.”

“Eh, groundcar hit a pylon or something. Or some drunken ground-pounders did something stupid involving beer and showing off.”

“Maybe.” Margot ran her fingers along the muscles of Xiulan’s arm. “You ground-pounders are like that. I would have thought—”

The first boom felt like an impact, like something hitting the building. Both women sat bolt upright, staring through the curtain at the window.

It was vibrating.

“What the—”

There was a second boom, softer than the first but still loud enough to drown out Xiulan’s voice.

As the third boom rattled the room, they slid off opposite sides of the bed and snatched up their clothes.

Margot yanked her panties up and pulled up her shorts after them; she pulled her baby-blue camisole over her head just as the building rocked.

“Holy Martyrs,” she exclaimed, leaning against the wall.

Across the room, Xiulan was pulling on the shirt of her service uniform.

“Uniform?” Margot asked.

“Couldn’t bring my utility camo on leave,” Xiulan replied curtly, threading the white belt through the loops of her black trousers.

“But why—”

Xiulan looked at her as she cinched the belt.

“Orbital bombardment,” she said, her face flat. “It sounded like this on Neu Batavia.”

Another boom sounded, further off.

“But,” Margot said, “this is Strand! Why would anyone...?”

Xiulan was at the window, sliding the drapes closed again, then peering around them. “I don’t know. Maybe the Young Pretender is trying to make a point. Maybe the rumors about Vice Chancellor Ratne were true. But that,” she squinted, peering around the drape, “was the sound of kinetics coming in from space.”

Margot, now dressed, snatched up her communicator. She tapped at the surface. She frowned and tapped again.

“No service. Nothing at all.”

“Not surprising. Sats are the first thing you take out. There may be a surface network, but it’s only gonna be local military and law enforcement, and even then with the electrical grid down...” Xiulan replied. She stood at the window, holding the drape open a crack. “Threefold Buddha, there’s another one.”

Margot looked at her useless communicator, then tossed it on the bed and moved to the other end of the window. She peered around the drapes.

There were two fireballs sliding across the sky, trailing smoke. Without a sense of size, it was hard to gauge how close they were—but they couldn’t be too large or they’d cross the Krishnavera threshold into strategic rather than tactical, so they had to be fairly small, and thus only a few dozens of kilometers away. The sound of an impact vibrated the window.

“The trajectories are almost flat,” Xiulan said, puzzled. “But why impair the yield so much...?”

“It makes no sense at all,” Margot complained. She stood at the other side of the big window and was looking around the drape from that end. “There’s nothing on Strand worth bombing. A couple light spaceports, three... yeah, three military bases, all of them level one, no defense industry... and it’s not like the locals are going to resist whichever Imperial claimant shows up in orbit. If you control space, you control Strand. Why...?”

She peered around the resort. The swimming pools, fourteen stories below, were ringed with confused bathers peering into the sky. The resort towers opposite them, standing between their building and the glittering blue sea, seemed normal; people in bright shorts and shirts were on the balconies, hands to their eyebrows as they scanned the distance. Past the towers, the long curve of white sand with its blue and yellow umbrellas seemed perfectly ordinary. Only the smoke trails in the sky were out of place.

Then, far too fast to react, there was a tremendous impact at the base of the number four tower. The people around the pools were blown over as though scattered by a giant hand; Margot stumbled back a step as the window flexed. It did not break, though hundreds of others did, and glass began to clatter downward outside. The sound was deafening, more of a giant full-body slap than an actual noise.

Stunned, Margot and Xiulan glanced at each other and stepped back over to the window.

At the base of the number four tower there was now, suddenly, a giant black rock, lozenge-shaped, tilted at a thirty-degree angle. The front was buried deeply in the ground beneath the building, the back jutting upwards three or four stories. It was veined and pitted like a chunk of raw iron and smoke billowed from where its superheated front had punched into the earth.

The shockwave and the glass now raining downward—somehow, tower four had remained standing, although it now leaned at a disconcerting angle—generated a chorus of screaming from the ground. The noise sounded strangely faint, and Margot realized that her ears were still ringing from the impact. The men and women scattered around the pool courtyard struggled to take stand up or to drag the injured into the safety of nearby buildings.

“What the fuck?” Xiulan said, exaggerating her words to compensate for the clangor in their ears. “Something that size should have vaporized us.”

Margot stared at the giant black shape and shook her head. “It’s huge,” she half-said, half-shouted. “But it’s hardly even damaged. It must have been braking somehow. So it’s probably hollow. Did it, is it... did it fail to go off?”

Xiulan mirrored Margot’s head shake. “Doesn’t make sense,” she half-shouted. “No one drops explosives from space. Kinetics alone would... Why drop something that... that...”

Her eyes widened.

“It’s a fucking landing craft.”

The top end of the lozenge split open.

Margot and Xiulan stared as the giant oblong shape began to peel open lengthwise. Inside it was... organic, long sticky streamers stretching, drooping, and breaking as the top and bottom halves spread apart. As it split in half, the halves then split again, four flaps curling backward away from each other.

Inside the black shell was a lighter colored interior, some sort of insulation or padding or... something. But as it peeled open further and further, nothing was revealed. Rather than a ship interior or crash pods or even insertion-armored troops, the only thing they could see as the giant object pulled itself apart was... more interior.

Margot looked at Xiulan, who raised her hands in perplexity.

It kept opening, and opening, the seams appearing and then the quadrants pulling apart. Almost a third of the interior was visible now, but there was nothing inside, only the cream-colored flesh of the interior walls—cream-colored and polka-dotted. Visible within the padding were black spheres, a sharp contrast to the beige, seemingly embedded in the wall material like seeds in a fruit.

“It looks like a fucking papaya,” Xiulan said.

It did look like a papaya, though in black and almost-white. The bottom sections lay flat against the ground now and the top ones had curled past ninety degrees, exposing almost half of the pod’s interior. The peeling stopped.

In the distance, smoky trails continued to billow across the sky.

“It’s fucking xenos,” Xiulan said. “It’s fucking xenos.” She stared at Margot. “Threefold Fucking Avatar, we’ve got to go. We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Wait, what? Xenos? And go where?” Margot asked, her hand still holding the edge of the drape open. There was no further motion from the huge projectile below. The screaming had died down, but shouting and crying still rose from the central courtyard.

“Military base. No,” Xiulan corrected herself, “they’ll have hit that. Police station. No,” she said, throwing a finger up, “civil defense. There’s gotta be one nearby. Guns, Margot, we need guns. We need—”

“Look,” Margot hissed.

The black seeds of the papaya had started to split open.

Things came crawling out.

The black seed pods were as large as a man—larger, Margot realized, as the first creature dropped out of the landing pod onto a crumpled deck chair. Four legs, no arms, no head, it looked like a nightmarish table or a giant emaciated four-armed starfish. Their legs were hinged halfway down, like knees, and dozens of them were now crawling out of the landing craft. They were black, matching the landing pod’s exterior, and not quite shiny. Their exterior looked hard, chitin-like.

Three of them approached a small knot of people standing where some of the wounded had been gathered together on the ground. The xenos walked oddly, opposite legs moving together. Their ridged tops—backs?—were at shoulder height to a tall man; head height for Margot.

A resort guard stepped in front of the crowd. He had a trembling pistol pointed at the closest xeno.

“What’s he doing?” Margot hissed.

“Dying first,” Xiulan replied.

The guard didn’t even get off a shot. Suddenly, the xenos were in motion, one of them leaping forward and slicing the man almost in half with a front leg—apparently, the awkward stilt-like legs were blade-sharp, and the guard’s head flipped off of his neck with a backstroke that was just a blur.

Then the aliens set into the crowd.

Now there was screaming, coming from everywhere; the hundreds of people staring down from the towers had realized their immediate peril.

“Shit—we should already be gone,” Margot said, “We shouldn’t have stayed to look—”

“Now we know what we’re up against,” Xiulan snapped. “Look, we’re not going to be able to get out of here now. The stairwells will be filled with people, rushing down to get massacred.”

“So what do we do? We can’t stay here.”

“Immediate term we have to stay here. Longer term... longer term we need to get into the basement. The things will be all over the ground level. There are tunnels that connect the buildings, service conduits that should lead off the resort. Maybe even sewer tunnels we can get into. We need weaponry and we need to get away from here, in either order. But there’s no sense in joining the screaming herds crushing each other in the stairs.”

“Beloved Saints,” Margot murmured, staring down at the pool deck.

Below them, the aliens were killing everyone. Those lying on the ground were impaled with quick thrusts of sword-point legs. Runners were overtaken and bisected or decapitated or limbed.

Inside five minutes, there was no-one left alive in the courtyard. The swimming pools were turning red.

Margot watched in helpless horror.

“How many are there?” Xiulan whispered from the far end of the drapes.

Margot blinked.

“Margot,” Xiulan said. “Focus. This is a problem. It has a solution. We have to be sharp and we have to keep it together if we want to live. How many of those giant crab-things did you count?”

Xiulan was right. Giving in to terror would not get them out of this. Margot nodded. “Let me think. Thirty? Forty?”

“Mm. I saw fifty-six. A bunch crawled out and went around tower four down towards the beach.”

Margot scanned the area again. Something struck her. “Wait... where are the women?”

“What? They’re xenos—”

“Not them. The dead people. They’re all men.”

Xiulan squinted, then nodded. “You’re right. There’s not a bikini in sight. But what—”

Then a black shape appeared right in front of her, not one meter away.

Xiulan froze, her eyes widening involuntarily. It was one of the xenos—crawling up the side of the building. It was right there, just outside the window.

It could stab inward in less than a second.

Neither of them dared to breathe.

Its legs seemed to grip the glass and concrete of the building exterior via some sort of adhesion—there were no digits that Margot could see. Its skin looked hard, chitinous—at least, on the legs and the back. But the creature’s underside was covered in fleshy protuberances, different sizes ranging from fist to forearm, too large for cilia yet too... formless to be true appendages. They were plainly visible as it climbed past the window, black like the rest of the creature but slightly translucent, and soft where the rest was hard.

Margot fought to remain motionless. The xeno climbed up to the next floor.

Her eyes flicked over to Xiulan. “Did it see you?” she hissed.

“Don’t know,” Xiulan replied in the quietest whisper. “I didn’t see any eyes, but... I don’t know.”

But if it had seen either or both of them, nothing came of it. The creature did not return, did not suddenly break in through the window. Margot let herself relax.

Then she tensed again at a sudden crash from above them. Glass dropped past the window. More shattering sounds came in response, both from above and across the courtyard from the other towers. Looking out, they could see black forms clambering around the tops of all of the buildings.

“They’re breaking open the windows,” Xiulan hissed.

“From the top down,” Margot responded.

They looked at each other.

There was a scream from the top story of tower three.

“I think it’s time to get out of here,” Xiulan observed.

* * *

The interior corridor was empty, dimly lit by emergency power. Stairwells were at the north and south ends of the hall; since tower four and the impact site were to the southeast, Margot headed northwest. It was closer anyway.

It seemed eerily quiet—she had expected more screaming, more shouting.

They shoved open the ‘emergency exit only’ door and entered the stairwell; now she could hear voices, raised voices, coming from below. Without hesitation, she and Xiulan descended, bounding downward, not quite running. Eleventh floor, tenth. Ninth floor, eighth, seventh—a door opened on the floor they had just passed and Margot flinched, but it was just people, more would-be escapees leaving a moment later than they had.

On the sixth floor they encountered the source of the shouting. Two men were arguing; strewn around them were the contents of one of the five suitcases now piled at the stairwell turn. A woman stood between them and the new arrivals, shouting at them both.

“If you’re moving so fucking slow you need to stand aside! The fuck with all this luggage?”

“Fuck you!”

“Get the fuck out of the fucking way you assholes!”

Margot stopped, but Xiulan did not. She brushed past Margot, elbowed aside the woman sharply, and leapt onto the closer of the two men, both knees planting between his shoulder blades. With a whuff of surprised air he was flung down the stairs, Xiulan momentarily atop him like a waveboard, as he tumbled over the suitcases, until his head hit the concrete wall of the stairwell with a hollow thunk.

Xiulan hit the wall with her shoulder and fell back onto the suitcases. As Margot shoved past the woman and the other man, now both staring in shock, Xiulan got to her feet. She waited a second until Margot reached her, and resumed bounding down the stairs.

The other man found his voice. “You crazy bitch! I think you killed him!” he called after her.

“People who think now is the time for suitcases are all going to die,” Xiulan replied, not looking back. “Removing obstructions improves the rest of our chances.”

Fourth floor. Third.

Margot didn’t know how she felt. Incredulity at Xiulan’s nonchalant violence mingled with admiration of her decisiveness; disapproval of her callousness struggled with attraction to her display of power and the will to use it. Margot was not a stranger to killing, and the Arc of Sands resort had suddenly become a combat zone.

Still, that had been cold.

And forceful.

Second floor. First.

Ground.

And downward, to the basement. The metal door at the very bottom of the stairwell was closed.

Xiulan tried the handle.

“Locked.” She looked at Margot, who had bent over to peer at the keyhole set into the door handle. “And it’s a mechanical lock. Fucking provincials...”

“Mechanical is good,” Margot said. “With tools I can probably get that open.” She frowned at Xiulan. “But I haven’t got any.”

“Then we go the other way,” Xiulan said, and the two of them climbed quickly back to the ground floor.

Xiulan slowly opened the stairwell door. It opened into a service hall, a concrete-floored corridor that connected the kitchens and the utility rooms with the reception area.

There were a dozen people already in it.

From beyond the service hallway came shouts, and screams, and crashing noises, pouring in from the opening which led to the main lobby.

Margot looked at Xiulan. “Tools,” she said. “We need tools. If I can get a stiff wire and a screwdriver, I can probably open that door. There should be a maintenance room around here somewhere.”

Xiulan nodded and started forward.

A bespectacled young woman in a bikini top and shorts, sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, looked up at them. “It’s pandemonium out there,” she said. “The crabs have surrounded the building. Everyone’s bottled up in the lobby; they kill anyone who tries to get out.”

A man in swim trunks and a t-shirt next to her said “No. Just the men. They’re just killing the men. The women they herd back inside.”

“Move,” Xiulan said to a woman standing in the middle of the hall, pushing her to the side. The woman said nothing, just let herself be shunted. The man in front of her stiffened and turned around, so Xiulan added “Now”, and he too made way. Her being in full dress uniform, in a crowd of extremely casual dress, probably helped.

Margot followed in her wake. They reached the spot where the service corridor opened into a larger room with marble-tiled floor and red wallpaper, which itself attached to the main lobby. Another woman stepped aside to let them pass, and they could see all the way across the room.

There were dozens—maybe as many as a hundred—of people in the lobby. They had thrown up a makeshift barricade around the entire circumference of the building. Where formerly there had been giant windows, all of which were now broken, was now a single long pile of everything people had been able to move. Sofas, coffee tables, vending machines, the check-in counter—even conference tables, which must have come down the main staircase from the meeting rooms on the second and third floors. Everything was piled up against the shattered window frames, to roughly the height of a person.

People cowered behind the barriers in various degrees of panic. Some, probably military, had armed themselves with makeshift clubs or knives, and huddled next to the barricades in ready postures. Others had collapsed weeping at the base of the stairs.

The noise was considerable, and without power, the heat was oppressive. The air outside was humid and tropical, and with so many people crowded into the interior, within the building it was worse still. Everyone was sweating and panting.

It smelled like fear.

There were several knots of people standing in the tiled antechamber; a pair of doors led to restrooms, another door led to an office suite, and a third had the word “maintenance” in brass letters displayed on the door. They walked around the people and up to that door.

Xiulan tried the doorknob. It was locked.

A dark-complected young man in naval shore dress stepped forward. “We tried to break it down,” he told them. “Tools in there, maybe some stuff we can fight with. But the door is too solid.”

“The maintenance man,” said a voice behind them. Margot turned around. It was the girl with the glasses and bikini top who had spoken to them in the stairwell corridor. Apparently she had gotten up and followed them. Her face was light brown with a spray of freckles, as was her mostly-exposed chest. She had curly brown hair, and powder blue eyes. She was cute.

“I saw him,” she went on.

“Where?” Margot demanded.

Freckles raised her arm and pointed. “Out there. He’s dead.”

They all looked at her for a moment.

“Did he have his keys?” Margot asked.

Freckles nodded.

“Well,” Xiulan finally said, “They’re not killing women, right?”

The young naval serviceman shook his head. “That’s not entirely true. They’ve killed a few. Mostly they’ve been herding them back inside, but there were a few that saw what they were doing and tried to run past.” He drew a finger across his throat.

“Then we’ll have to be fast,” Margot said, and surprised herself by doing so. “Get to the corpse before the xenos become insistent.”

“Can you tell us exactly where it is?” Xiulan asked Freckles.

“I...” the young woman swallowed. “I’ll go with you. I’ll show you.”

Xiulan sized her up, then nodded. “Then let’s go.”

They hurried past the offices; the door was open. Through the office windows they could see still more people, huddled against the walls, as though the smaller space offered more comfort or at least one more set of walls the xenos had to get through.

A pair of women stood at the closest of the barricades. Margot could tell that both were military from the way they stood, although one was in a blue one-piece swimsuit and the other, impressively tall woman, wore a pair of short shorts and t-shirt.

“We need to go out there,” Xiulan told them.

“The won’t let you get anywhere,” the tall woman replied. “They’ll either force you back in here, or cut your head off.”

“We’ll come back in here. But she,” she said, tilting her head towards Freckles, “saw the janitor’s body. We want his keys.”

The two women looked at each other. “All right,” the tall one said, “We’ll pull aside this table and you can get out. We’ll leave it open for your return—but if any of the crabs try to get inside, we’re forcing it closed again.”

“Understood.” Xiulan looked at Freckles. “Are you sure you want to come? You can just tell me where he is.”

She shook her head. “He- he’s... his body is in the bushes. I- I’ll go.”

Xiulan looked at Margot. “You don’t need to come, Margot.”

Margot stared at her. “If you d—” She stopped, took a breath, tried again. “I’m coming. We may have to just grab the body. That will be easier with two.”

Xiulan nodded and said nothing.

The woman in the one piece suit and her friend took hold of a heavy conference table and pulled one end of it backward, pivoting it into the room. Someone shouted at them from elsewhere along the barricade and the tall woman raised her middle finger in that direction.

“Go,” one-piece told them.

They ran outside. The sunlight was glaringly bright after the dim interior of the powerless building.

“No stopping, go,” Xiulan said. Freckles obeyed, racing across the sand-colored concrete in her flip-flops. They ran around the edge of a planted bed, tropical shrubs with bright orange and yellow and purple flowers beneath palm trees.

On the other side was blood, lots of blood, spattered everywhere on the pale concrete. No xenos were in sight. At least, not on the ground—several were crawling around the sides of the tower buildings.

“Where are the bodies?” Margot asked.

“He’s over there,” Freckles said, pointing and breaking back into a run.

A small building held the pool filters and pumps; it was largely concealed by a ringing plantation of flowering bushes. A pair of sneakered feet stuck out of the bushes, the dirt around them soaked black.

Xiulan took hold of the corpse’s ankles and pulled him brusquely into the sunlight. “Get the keys, get the keys,” she said. Margot dropped to her knees next to the corpse as Xiulan scanned the area.

The keys were obvious, dangling from his waist—but they wouldn’t come off of the man’s belt. Margot grimaced at the man’s face, his mouth frozen open in a final rictus, as she fumbled at the carabiner that held them on.

Suddenly, the bushes rattled and enormous black spikes stabbed down on either side of her.

Margot froze and looked up.

It had no face, just long black legs and a black carapace and jelly-like sacs hanging from its underside. One of its legs rose from the ground, and hovered, ready to strike.

“Get up get up get up,” Xiulan hissed at her.

I’m not paralyzed, Margot told herself. I can get up and I can run. It’s not going to kill me.

Another one of the xenos crawled into view on her right, just three meters away.

Xiulan jerked the janitor’s corpse backwards and the xeno hissed; a strange almost cat-spitting noise from somewhere amongst the undercarriage. In a flash, it speared the body right through the waist, pinning it.

“We gotta go,” Freckles pleaded, huddling behind Xiulan.

The xeno on Margot’s right took a few long steps towards them.

Margot looked up. The Xeno with its leg through the janitor’s belly was practically above her; the gelatinous dangling things were emitting a soft hiss.

No, Margot thought. I am not a person who surrenders to fear.

She gave one more yank at the clump of keys—and the entire belt came free. The xeno’s bladed leg had cut it in half as it stabbed the man’s belly. Margot scrabbled backwards and got to her feet as yet another xeno lurched at them from the other side.

The three women ran back towards the building. Blue swimsuit was standing just outside the barricade, waving her hand. “Come on, come on!” she cried.

They dashed inside.

* * *

END Chapter One, Part One