Awakening (Earth Evolution Series Book 4)
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Authors: Kd Jones
Awakening
Earth Evolution Series Book 4
KD Jones
Copyright 2016 KD Jones
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Table of Contents
BLURB
A woman with no memory of who she is or her past, determined to make her own decisions.
A sexy alien who wants to keep her safe…among other things he would like to do to her.
Will they give in to their attraction?
Who knows what will happen during their Awakening?
Chapter 1
Squirrel couldn’t breathe. She felt like her lungs were being compressed tightly along with the rest of her body. She had tried to warn the aliens about the bombs but got caught up in the middle of it all. That would teach her to try to be a hero.
She should have learned a long time ago that to survive she had to go unseen and not interfere with things that had nothing to do with her. She couldn’t let it go, knowing that people who were trying to help the humans would die for no reason other than they were different—aliens.
Now she was going to die and no one would know or even care. Squirrel stopped moving to reserve her energy. This was what it felt like to suffocate. She could hear drops of water in the distance, and; a small furry creature ran in front of her. She would have screamed but she couldn’t since, the air was nearly out of her lungs.
Lack of oxygen had her seeing shadowy images, images of a man with dark eyes and a chiseled face. He was reaching for her. Maybe he was an angel—or the devil coming to get her.
She stretched as far out as she could, but just as his hands touched hers, she slipped from his grip and fell down, down into the burning pit below.
“No!”
*****
Squirrel woke up screaming and feeling extremely disoriented. The lights were too bright and she was on some kind of bed. She sat up and scooted back, clutching a pillow to her chest. “Where am I?”
“You are in a mediko on board the Drastan command ship Eclipse. What has distressed you?” a tall man said.
She put her hand up to block the light from her eyes.
“I’m sorry. Let me dim the lights for you.” He waved his hand over a panel on the wall near the door. It had some kind of sensor that went off. The lights began to slowly dim until she could lower her hand and see without it hurting her eyes. He could have spoken out loud to the computer controlling most of the functions like lights on the ship. It was all so strange to her. There was so much she was trying to become accustomed to since coming on board the ship.
Memories of a couple of weeks earlier started to flood back. She had gone out hunting for food in the subway tunnels, which had become her home over the last five years ever since Earth suffered a nuclear catastrophe when most of its nuclear weapons had been set off.
Some of the major cities had domes built by the government or military in case of a situation like that, but for some reason the leaders of the domes only allowed a certain number of people inside. Others were turned away and had to seek shelter wherever they could. Most ended up like her, under the surface.
None of them would have survived if they hadn’t found places in the subway tunnels where surplus food and supplies had been stored. Plus, if they needed fresh meat there were always rats—not the tastiest but when you’re starving you don’t care what you eat.
Squirrel couldn’t remember the day the nukes hit. All she knew was that several days after they went off, she woke up inside the subway tunnel on the north side of the city. She had no memory of who she was, where she came from, or if anyone was looking for her. It was scary enough to wake up not knowing where she was, but not being able to recall her own name was a shock to her system.
She remembered falling to her knees and crying for a really long time. She got back up when she heard voices from farther down the tunnels. She followed the sounds until she came across a group of people who looked like they were in the same shape as she was. She decided to approach them.
“Hey! What happened? Where are we?” she asked the first person who turned her way. It was a short man with a beard. He gave her a look like she’d lost her mind.
“Did you hit your head or something?”
She rubbed her head and cringed when she felt a bump on the back of it. “Yes, I think I did.” Her stomach growled and she was embarrassed. She had no idea when she last ate.
An elderly woman came up and handed her an open can of food. “We found cans and dry food not far from here. You’ll have to eat with your fingers because we haven’t found utensils yet.”
“Thank you.” She sat down on the ground and started eating the contents—which were string beans—like she hadn’t had anything to eat in years. She listened to the others talking around her and felt the hairs on the back of her neck standing up. She turned to find a group of men huddled together, watching her intently.
She turned back to the woman who’d given her the food. “What about something to drink?”
The woman shook her head. “This end of the tunnel had some power outage so the fountains aren’t working. We’ll be moving on to see if we can find a better place to set up living spaces. Drink the juice from the can. That’s what I did.”
She raised the can and cringed after swallowing the green bean juice. “Shouldn’t we find our way out, up to the outside?”
The woman shook her head again. “You really don’t know what happened?”
“No.”
“What do you remember?” The woman had asked her.
She tried to think, and closed her eyes tight. A tear trailed down her face. “Nothing, I can’t even remember my name.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Maybe it will all come back to you.”
She hoped so. “Please tell me what happened.”
“I was taking the subway car, on my way to go visit with my friends, when the woman I was sitting next to had received an alert notice on her cell phone that was calling for an immediate evacuation of the city. Once everyone heard that nuclear weapons for different counties had accidently been sent out, chaos erupted everywhere. Many people had less than an hour to find cover.”
“Who sent out the nukes?”
“Just about every country that had them released the nuclear weapons.”
“What do we do now?”
“We live, the best we can. Right now we can’t go up above. The, the radiation would be too much.”
The thought of being trapped underneath the ground made her feel like she would suffocate. “Will we die here?”
“Not today. Today we live. We’ll take it day by day. We’ve all got together and decided to live together. You’re welcome to stay with us.”
She nodded at the other woman despite not yet trusting her. “Thank you for the food. What’s your name?”
“Dora McAllister.”
“It’s nice to meet you. Wish I could tell you my name.”
Dora patted her knee as she stood up. “Don’t worry about that.”
“Hey, Squirrel!” one of the men yelled out. “Little girl who can’t remember shit, yeah I’m talking to you!”
She turned her head to glare at the men who were laughing. “That’s not my name!”
“Then what the hell is your name?”
“I—don’t know.”
“Well Squirrel is your new nickname; you’re small and wiry so it fits. Come on over here. We have a proposition for you.”
Dora took offense and glared at the men. “She’s a child, no more than fourteen or fifteen. Keep your filthy paws to yourself, Carlos!”
One of the men snorted while the other held up his hands in peace. “Easy, we need her to crawl through a small space where we believe more food is stored. There’s no one else here that is small enough to fit.”
Dora bit her lip and looked at her. “It’s up to you, honey. What do you want to do?”
She looked around at the small group of people gathered. They were adults, and except for the four men staring at her, they were in their late fifties and older. She was younger, smaller and thin. She wanted to help them because they were willing to take her in and feed her. She needed to do her part to survive.
“I’ll do it.”
The man named Carlos gave her a smile that made her skin crawl. “Great. Come with us this way and we’ll show you what to do.”
That was the beginning of her hell. Those men, especially Carlos, made it a point to pick on her and torture her in so many ways, from denying her food if she didn’t do what they asked, to physical abuse. Her breaking point had been when she came home from hunting for food to find Dora had been stabbed and her things taken. She had gotten close to the older woman and it ripped her heart out to lose the only person she cared about. She was determined to not let anyone close to her again.
She left the group and went out on her own, trading from tribe to tribe, never committing herself to stay in any one place. She was still small after five years of living underground and was able to continue to move around unseen and get into tight areas no one else could.
Squirrel was the name given to her by Carlos and his buddies and it stuck. Her memories from before the nuclear disaster never came back to her. She had lived separate from other people for a long while, and didn’t know exactly how to act around them.
That was the problem she faced now, how to act around others. Except the people surrounding her were aliens called Drastans. They came to Earth to help after the nuclear disaster but some humans weren’t happy about it.
Weeks ago she had seen the humans, the ones the Drastans called rebels but who called themselves Freedom Fighters, plant bombs in order to kill the aliens. Knowing she couldn’t let that happen, she’d tried to warn them but got caught in the debris from the explosion. She would have died if it had not been for one of the aliens.
Those hands that reached for her were real and they didn’t let her fall. She remembered him pulling her to safety.
“I’m dead, aren’t I?” Her voice was scratchy. The angel or demon gave her a smile showing off his adorable dimples. Would demons be adorable?
“You’re not dead, little one, but you came close to it. I won’t let anything else happen to you. You’re safe.” He lifted her up out of the pit of death and carried her through the subway tunnel like she weighed nothing at all.
Squirrel had felt safe in his arms until he passed her on to a bunch of alien doctors and left her to fend for herself. She had seen her rescuer, Lt. Quinn Estro, a few times over the past few weeks. He would come by and make her laugh. Just when she started to warm up to him and flirt with him, he would leave and stay gone for a day or two. It was frustrating to feel a bond for someone and it not be reciprocated.
“Are you okay, little one?” Mediko Jared asked.
Mediko was like a human doctor, and the word also referred to the place on board similar to a hospital room. She was brought to a mediko weeks ago for her injuries. She hadn’t left it even though Mediko Jared told her that she could move to her own quarters on the command ship. She wasn’t sure she wanted to commit to staying on board the ship.
“Yeah, I had a bad dream. It’s kind of late. What are you doing here?”
“I have your vitals being monitored by my computer and I was alerted that your blood pressure spiked. If you are still having trouble sleeping, I could give you a small sedative.”
She shook her head. “I don’t like the sedatives because they make me feel groggy and defenseless.” She watched him as he used his scanner to check her vitals. He was tall, dark, and handsome and—of course—taken. He wasn’t the one she fantasized about all the time; that was actually his cousin Quinn, her savior from the pit of hell.
“Do you want to talk about your dream? It might help.”
She shrugged. “It was about the day I got injured, except instead of being saved, I fell to my death.”
“Was there anything that you were thinking about before you fell asleep that may have made you think about that day?”
“I’m always thinking about the tunnels and my life there. When can I go back?” She didn’t know the rules here, in this clean and too bright place. It was too hard to disappear here.
Jared sighed. “I can’t advise you to go back. Even though you had less radiation than many others of your people, your system was badly nourished. Part of your lungs was damaged during that explosion. You need time to heal physically and mentally.”
“Shouldn’t it be my decision to go or stay?”
“Let me offer you a compromise. If you stay until your lungs are one hundred percent healed, get out of mediko and talk to someone about your experiences in the tunnels without a fuss, I’ll release you to go back, if you choose to.”
“How long will that take?”
“It could take three months.”
“Three months is too long.” She felt anxious to be somewhere that was familiar, though she would miss seeing Quinn. She pushed her hair from her face.
“Two months. Stay for two more months.”
“Fine, but I’m not talking to a shrink.”
“What’s a shrink?”
“It’s a head doctor, someone who makes you talk about your problems.”
“We don’t have those types of medikos.”
“Then whom did you want me to talk to?”
“I was hoping you would speak with my mate, Lily, and her friends. They share similar experiences and can relate to you.”
She bit her bottom lip. Squirrel had met his mate many times and had spoken with her some. Lily was absolutely beautiful and very kind, and worked with Jared as his nurse. She never put pressure Squirrel for anything and that was appreciated.
All of Quinn’s family had visited in medico, including his Uncle Devlon Estro who was the commander of the fleet. He was as tall and wide in build as his sons and nephew and had silver streaking his hair. He too was handsome but what surprised her most was how kind he was to her. Devlon also offered to take her on a tour of the ship but she felt nervous around him. Everyone made her a little nervous except for the human women Lily, Maggie and Rachel.