Page 1 of Feast

CHAPTER 1

A storm was coming.

Mara Thompson glanced skyward through the dark and twisted branches that intertwined above her like a wicker cage. The low clouds showed through the interstices, gray and roiling like muddied water, bringing an early evening to the world. Thunder growled like a hungry belly, and a cold wind rattled the limbs overhead, bearing with it the scent of the coming rain.

Mara pressed on. She had to find shelter before it started coming down. She had to find a place to hide and weather the storm. But shelter was hard to find on this harsh alien world.

The farther Mara ventured, the denser the forest became. Dark, gnarled trees hemmed her in on all sides as if intentionally trying to slow her progress.

And Mara’s progress was slow enough already, considering her condition.

She was pregnant.

Nine months. Ready to pop at any moment. The child residing inside Mara’s distended belly weighed her down. Her back ached from the strain, and her thighs burned like fire with each awkward, waddling step that she took.

To make matters worse, she was naked too. The nith had stripped her bare.

Those vicious aliens had taken every article of clothing from her. Everything except her silver ring inscribed with her name. A gift from an old boyfriend that she’d hung on to all these years. The nith bastards had missed that, and now she took an odd comfort in that small, simple item. It was the only remnant of her humanity that the nith had left her.

To those horrible aliens, Mara was nothing more than an animal. A piece of chattel to be traded and sold like livestock. A piece of meat.

Mara hated the nith. She hated and feared them.

Not that her own fellow humans were any better. After all, weren’t they the ones who had sold her out? She had been traded to the aliens along with hundreds of thousands of other humans like herself.

Earth’s government justified this by only selling criminals to the nith.

And that’s what Mara was, after all.

A criminal.

A whore.

Mara had only done what was necessary to make ends meet. On Earth, jobs were hard to come by, but the so-called oldest profession never went out of style. It had been unpleasant work, and dangerous too, but it had put food on the table and a roof over her head. For a while at least.

Then she had ended up with a baby in her belly. Not long after that, she had been arrested.

The cops didn’t really care about prostitution. They had only arrested Mara to meet their quota of criminals. It was important that there were enough human bodies to trade away to the nith every month.

It hadn’t mattered that she was pregnant either. At the spaceport loading docks, the merchants had joked that the nith would be happy about it. Two for the price of one, they had snickered. It was a sick joke, but it wasn’t until later that Mara understood just how sick.

She had been loaded onto a nith cargo ship along with hundreds of other criminals, and they had all been carted across the reaches of space to this horrible planet, the name of which Mara did not even know.

She had thought they were being sold into slavery, but once they landed, she had learned otherwise.

The place where she and her fellow humans were taken was a slaughterhouse.

The nith were going to butcher them and use them for meat.

Had it only been a matter of her own life, Mara might have resigned herself to that fate. But she was carrying a child in her belly, and some primal maternal instinct drove her to escape.

Her bindings had not been attached properly, and in the noise and darkness and stench of that alien abattoir, her escape had been surprisingly easy.

Now, in the shadows of this dark forest, the memory of that slaughterhouse was what kept her going. The sounds of human screams still echoed in her ears, and her nose remembered the stench of blood on the hot, humid air.

Actually, the scent of blood was not merely a memory.

Mara was bleeding now as she fled through this dark forest. There were no trails here, and the thorns and brambles bit at her naked ankles like fangs. Hard stones and twisted roots stabbed her soles and stubbed her toes.