Alien Romance: RETURNED: An Alien Warrior Romance: (Acarnania Warriors Book 1) (10 page)

I woke up with a
bladder ready to explode. Easing out of my sleeping bag, careful not to wake Alrik, who slept soundly beside me, I crept through the abandoned house we'd settled in the night before. It was set back from the road, and while there were still some occupied houses around us, Alrik thought it a safe place to rest up for the remainder of the night.

I sat on the back step to slip my boots on before scurrying through the bushes to find a suitable place to squat. I was on my way back to the house when I was spear-tackled from the side.

We hit the ground silently. I rolled, springing back to my feet and attacking. I thought he was a cop; it was hard to tell with everything moving so fast, but it looked like he was wearing a uniform. We were well matched, even though he was taller and heavier than me. He wasn't as big as Alrik, and having sparred with Alrik, I almost felt like I had the advantage.

That was, until the bastard pulled a weapon and shot me. It jolted through my body and stung like a bitch, knocking the breath out of me. I slid along the ground on my back, winded, nerve endings tingling. Son of a bitch.

The cop positioned himself above me, gun aimed at my head, light shining directly in my face.

“I.D. Now!” he demanded.

“Geez, point the light somewhere else, will ya?” I complained, raising a hand to block the light.

The light moved from my face and I dropped my arm, squinting at the shadow of the man behind the gun.

“Sierra?” It sounded like he'd been chewing nails, his voice was so rough and raspy. Like my brother sounded when he was upset and trying not to show it.

“Daniel? Is that you?” I started to sit up, but he pushed me back down with his boot on my chest.

“Freeze! Don't move. Just ... don't move.”

I froze. So did Alrik, who I spotted out of the corner of my eye. I glanced at him, but he was watching the man who may or may not be my brother.

“Daniel?” I tried again. “It's me. Sierra. Your sister. That is, assuming you are Daniel Walker?”

He didn't respond, but his gun hand trembled ever so slightly. Good sign or not, I decided to keep talking.

“My name's Sierra Walker. I disappeared from this Earth on the seventeenth of May, two thousand and sixteen. At the time I was on duty, a patrol officer with Redmeadows Police. I was chasing a drug dealer down an alley. The alley between the Hi Five Music store and CheapSkate, the two-dollar store. I can't recall the name of the alley.”

“Muskeet. Muskeet Alley.” His voice was barely audible.

“Yeah, that's it. Muskeet Alley. Is it really you, Daniel?”

Daniel shook his head. “How can you be Sierra Walker? She disappeared thirty years ago. She was twenty-six years old. She'd be fifty-six by now if she was still alive.”

“I'm still alive Daniel,” I said. “It's me. Truly. Remember when I was six and you were eight and we were riding our bikes in the street and I threw a rock at you because you beat me in the race? It hit you on the eyebrow and you bled like crazy. I was so scared, I raced home and hid. You told Mum you'd fallen off your bike. You still have that scar. At least you did when I last saw you.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.” He lowered his gun. “How is this even possible?”

“Would the words ‘alien abduction and space travel’ sound too far-fetched?”

Alrik sucked in a breath, drawing my attention back to him. I shook my head at him. I had this. This was my brother. My Daniel.

The gun whipped back up, aimed at Alrik.

“And who the fuck are you?” Daniel demanded.

“Daniel!” I scolded. “He's with me. This is Alrik. He's my ... friend. He's been helping me.”

Moments passed in silence. I could practically see the cogs turning in Daniel’s mind, processing what I'd told him. While his gun was still trained on Alrik, I slowly eased to my feet. Daniel watched, but didn't lower the gun. I stepped in front of Alrik, who growled in protest.

Carefully, I placed my hand on the top of the gun, forcing Daniel to lower it.

“We don't mean you, or anyone, any harm,” I assured him.

Daniel sucked in a deep breath, blowing it out on a sigh. “We'd better get out of here. They're doing a grid by grid search.”

“How did you find us?”

“The disruption in the dome tipped us off. Then the alarm at Mum's place. I figured I'd let the others search the woods first and I'd go to Mum's. I picked up your scent there and finally tracked you here. You’ve covered a lot of ground. I almost lost you a time or two.”

I wrinkled my nose. “What do you mean, you picked up our scent? You smelled us?”

“Not me. This.” He held up a round blue object the size of a tennis ball.

“What is it?”

Daniel tucked the ball away into a pocket in his police vest. “Sort of like an electronic version of a sniffer dog. We don’t have those anymore, so we needed something to replace it.”

“Why don’t you have sniffer dogs?” I glanced around, realizing for the first time that I hadn’t heard any birdsong since I’d returned. “Come to think of it, I haven’t seen a single animal since I’ve been back.”

“That’s because there are none,” Daniel said. “After the event, after the dome, any animals that were caught in here with us were soon served up as food. They were our only meat source.”

I recoiled. “Oh my God. You ate your pets?”

“I didn’t have any pets, so it’s not like I ate Fido,” Daniel said, irritation edging into his voice. “Doesn’t matter now anyway. That was decades ago. They consumed all the fresh meat within a year. But I agree, it’s horrifying. It’d be nice to have a pet.”

“Wait a minute. Go back a step. You said an alarm went off at Mum's house? I didn't see any alarms. And where's Mum now. Is she okay?”

“Mum's dead. Died in the event.”

My world stopped in that moment. Mum was dead. I’d known it was a possibility, but I’d also hoped she was still alive, that I'd get to see her again. My chest hurt. I had a vision of Mum as I remembered her, smiling at me from the kitchen as she made us dinner, asking about our day. I swear to God I could smell her. My eyes filled and a tear trickled down my cheek. I sucked in my bottom lip, fighting for control, when my chin started to wobble. Alrik squeezed my shoulder and I nearly came undone. 

“We're going to have to catch up on the rest later,” Daniel said. “We need to move. I need to drop an air filter in here to wipe out your scent.”

“Where are we going?”

“Back to my place for now. I'll decide what happens after that.”

I could feel Alrik bristle behind me, knowing he disliked that this stranger had so much control over us. But I had to believe that my brother wouldn’t betray us. We had no choice but to trust him.

Daniel led us out to his car, a strange-looking SUV. Alrik and I sat together in the back while Daniel went back in and dropped the air filter, whatever that was. In a few minutes he was back, tossing our backpacks at us before sliding behind the wheel. Only there was no wheel, just a control panel. He pressed some buttons and the vehicle smoothly glided off. Wow. Hands-free driving.

Not liking the tense silence in the car, I asked the first question that popped into my head. “Where do you live?”

“Got an apartment in the city.”

“No house with a white picket fence, kids in the yard?”

“No. No wife. No kids.”

“Oh, Daniel.” Without thinking, I reached over and squeezed his shoulder. “I'm sorry. You always wanted a family of your own.”

“Could have had it, too, if it wasn't for the bloody event. I was engaged. Her name was Emily. She and mum were on a shopping trip to Adelaide when the event began. They never made it back.”

“I'm so sorry.”

“Why? It's not your fault. According to you, you weren't even on Earth.”

“Daniel. It's not like you to be so bitter.”

His eyes met mine in the rear-view mirror, and he shrugged my hand away. “You don't know me. You don't know me at all. If you really are Sierra, you've been gone for thirty years. You don't think things have changed since then? That I've changed?”

He had a point.

Reluctantly, I drew my hand back into my lap. “Tell me about the event. What happened?”

“Yeah, that's the strange thing. Twenty-sixth of January two thousand and twenty five, every single country in the world launched its nuclear weapons at the same time. All aimed at each other, like some sort of crazy daisy chain. Obliterated half the fucking world. Radiation did a whole lot more damage. A few cities far enough away managed to avoid the worst of it, but the Earth's atmosphere was severely compromised. We couldn't breathe. We couldn't go outside because the sun burned us. Then the domes were built. As far as I know, there are about a dozen across the globe.”

“Twelve.” It was such a small number. “Only twelve domes? What about everyone else?”

“Everyone else is dead.”

“So no one knows who started the war, if you can even call it that. It sounds like each country launched one pre-emptive strike and that was it, they'd taken each other out.”

“That's pretty much what happened,” Daniel affirmed. “The word is it was some deep web hackers that set it all in motion. Probably kids not realising the implications of hacking into military databases and firing off nuclear warheads. We'll never know for sure.”

“Who built the domes?”

“I guess the military knew there was a high probability of something like this happening. The technology for the domes had already been developed. It was ready to deploy immediately.”

We fell silent as we approached the outskirts of the city. The streets were bustling now with other cars and pedestrians. Fashion had changed, but I didn’t see anything outrageous. It seemed living in a dome precluded any real fashion trends.

The closer we got to the city centre, the taller the buildings became, their sleek lines and rounded edges unlike anything I'd seen before.

“Architecture has come a long way.”

Daniel nodded, his eyes glued to the road. “Building materials had to change. Lots of things had to change. But yes, we found a way to construct strong buildings with cheap material that was easy to manipulate. A skyscraper can be built in a week. It’s quite amazing when you think about it.”

We were in the heart of the city now. The streets had multiple lanes, with heavy traffic. Daniel turned down a side street, into what looked like the parking garage of a multi-level building.

“You really do live in the city!”

“Yup.”

He pulled into a metal cage and turned off the engine. The cage closed around us before jolting once and descending. Peering out the window, I saw we were in a dimly lit car park several stories below the surface. The cage jolted to a halt, then slid sideways before again stopping, spinning around and, with a clang, releasing the car.

Parking sure had changed too.

We got out of the car and Daniel led the way to the lift, where he placed his palm on the control panel as the doors closed. We were whisked to the fiftieth floor.

“How high does the dome go?” I asked.

“As high as it needs to,” Daniel replied. “It keeps a two kilometre buffer between itself and the highest object, be that a building, a mountain, or whatever.”

“So it's not a solid structure?”

“No, although it looks like mesh to the naked eye.”

“What's it made of, then?”

“Sorry, can't divulge that.”

In the light of the lift, I studied my brother. He had the same build I remembered—tall and broad shouldered—but now he had a slight belly where once there had been rock hard abs. His full head of hair, once brown, was now streaked with silver, and his face was lined with age. But he was still my brother. Still Daniel.

He was studying me in return. My hair hung past my shoulders, almost to my waist, in a tangle of red curls. I rarely wore my hair down. I preferred to put it in a braid for work, or tie it up in a ponytail when off duty. As a kid, I'd always worn it loose, wild and messy. It wasn't until I was older, when I had my sights set on the police force, that I'd started wearing it up.

The black pants and jacket I wore were dirty and grubby, the boots scuffed, and I probably reeked something terrible. Although I couldn't smell myself, I wasn't about to lift my arm to take a whiff. It'd been many hours since my rain shower and I’d done a lot of walking and sweating since then.

The lift came to a halt and the doors opened directly into Daniel's apartment. The entrance was at the back, in a laundry room by the look of things. He led us through a passageway and into the living area.

A wall of floor to ceiling windows showed the glittering city beneath us, and I made a beeline for it, eager to take in the view. “Wow. Nice place!”

Alrik stayed by my side, silent, and I realised he'd not spoken a word since my brother had found us. Glancing at him now, I wondered what he was thinking. He was in a foreign world, away from everything familiar, much like I had been when we first met. Reaching out, I curled my fingers around his. He glanced down at me.

“Are you okay?” I asked.