I was also a bit influenced by the general atmosphere of the movie "Predators," where the characters have been kidnapped by aliens and dropped onto an unknown world to fight for their lives.
Here's the plot of my book:
Jill Garrison, a maintenance tech at the Sectors
Amarcae 7 colony, goes to sleep one night as usual only to wake up in her
nightgown stranded in the middle of a forest on an unknown world. There’s no
time to think as she’s stalked by carnivorous predators and rescued by
genetically engineered warriors calling themselves the Badari. Turns out they
and she, along with her whole colony, are now prisoners of the Khagrish, a
ruthless race of alien scientists. Working for enemies of the Sectors, the
Khagrish have created the Badari to be super soldiers.
Aydarr, the Badari alpha, isn’t sure he can trust
Jill but his attraction to her is undeniable. He impulsively claims her as his
mate to prevent her death at the hands of the Khagrish.
Can he continue to protect her from the experiments
already underway? Will his claiming her
put his pack in jeopardy from their alien masters?
As Jill searches for a way to rescue her fellow
humans and get them all to safety, she finds herself falling for Aydarr,
despite the secrets he’s keeping. She has a few of her own.
The situation becomes dire when Aydarr and his pack
are sent offplanet on a mission, leaving Jill unprotected, prey for the senior
scientist. Can she escape the experiments he has in mind for her? Will she be
able to thwart the Khagrish plans and liberate humans and Badari alike? How
will she and Aydarr reunite?
And an excerpt, from the very beginning of the novel:
Why am I lying face
down on the wet grass in the rain?
Jill rolled over, putting a hand to her forehead in an
attempt to quell a ferocious headache. Opening her eyes gingerly, she blinked at
the vividly colored pink, purple and blue leaves on the tree above her, which
certainly had never grown on Amarcae 7. She’d been all around her home colony
on various repair jobs, and nothing there had riotous leaves in these colors,
much less with spikes at the tips. As she watched, one of the leaves snapped
into a tight roll to capture a slow moving insect.
“Thank the Lords of Space I’m too big a bite.” Wary, nauseous,
she sat up, swaying a bit, and examined her unfamiliar surroundings. She was in
the midst of an old growth forest, with other forms of vegetation besides the
carnivorous trees but nothing recognizable.
A loud roar in the distance gave her the shivers, and she
forced herself to stand, staggering a few feet to lean on a less colorful tree’s
broad trunk to stay upright. Despite the rain, her mouth was dry, and she had a
hard time swallowing. “What the seven hells?”
Her mind was curiously blank, no memory of how she’d gotten
to this place, or what had happened in the last few hours. She guessed it might
be late afternoon here, from the glimpse she got of the white sun above the
horizon, before the clouds drifted in front of the orb again. She refused to
contemplate the fact that the star providing heat and light to her colony was
yellow. If the sun here was white hot, the reality of where she stood, lost in
the galaxy, was terrifying.
She remembered eating dinner in her small modular house on the
edge of the colony, falling asleep watching an adventure trideo she’d seen a
hundred times then…nothing.
“And
now I’m here.” She took a closer look at her left arm and did a double take. A
black bracelet she’d never seen before was solid against her skin just above
the wrist, with no visible hinge or fastening. As she gawked at it, prying at
the edges in an increasingly desperate attempt to make the band move, flickers
of red and yellow pulsed inside the cool, hard surface. The bracelet and what
it might mean scared her more than the loss of short term memory or even the
unknown sun above her.
The
roar came again, closer, and was answered by another. Something hunting me maybe?
Distracted
from the ominous mystery of the bracelet, she was briefly tempted to try
climbing the tree, but the lightheadedness persisted. Also, the smooth trunk
didn’t offer anything in the way of handholds. She pushed off, realizing she
was barefoot, wearing her short, pink-and-black nightgown, molded to her body
by the rain. Lingerie was her secret luxury after a day spent in technician’s
coveralls, but certainly not suited to this experience.
Am I dreaming? She paused, gazing at the
sky and pushing her damp hair off her face. The shower had tapered off and now
the sun was shining but an ominous gray storm front was advancing. A bolt of
lightning arced across the sky, and Jill broke into a zigzag run, forcing her
body to respond to her terror. Standing anywhere close to a giant tree in a
thunder storm was a recipe for disaster.
I’m in a nightmare,
not a dream, but it’s all too real. In her headlong flight, she stepped on
a rock or a sharp root and cried out, but she kept going as thunder boomed. She
had to find either a stand of small trees surrounded by taller ones or a
ravine. Of course, an actual shelter would be better than either of those
make-do options but probably too much to hope for.
Running
full tilt, ignoring the pain from her foot, she suddenly slammed into an invisible
barrier and bounced off, falling on her back. Cautiously she rose, extending
her arms. The barrier was a tingling against her palms. She tried going right
then left, but the wall ran for quite some distance in both directions. Being
in an invisible cage was the most unsettling thing since she’d awakened, especially
when coupled with the bracelet affixed to her arm.
A boom of thunder directly overhead startled her into motion,
and she ran in a new direction, terrified of being struck by lightning. The
rain lashed her face and barely-covered body, like stinging nettles, adding
impetus to her desperation to find cover.
The
ground gave way under her feet. She teetered on the edge of the sinkhole or
pit, but her precarious state of vertigo betrayed her. Screaming, she half
slid, half fell into the deep hole, debris raining down with her.
Scrabbling at roots embedded in the wall as she fell, the
flimsy vegetation snapping off in her hands, Jill managed to partially break
her fall. Landing in a substantial mud puddle, she rose to her feet, staring
upward, realizing there was no easy way to climb from the pit. At least the
rain was tapering off.
A
rumbling sound like an engine behind her made her pivot, to find two huge,
faceted glowing eyes staring at her from a tunnel opening into the hole. A
giant body lurked in the gloom. The creature blinked and emitted the sound
again. Jill retreated one step at a time to the opposite wall of the pit and
snatched a loose rock from the small debris pile at her feet. Whitened bones were
mixed in with the rocks on the pit floor next to the rainwater puddle. She
shuddered and gripped her rock hard enough to make her hand sting.
The creature watched her and moved forward a bit from the
tunnel, the front segment of its body sinking onto the ground, while the rest
remained in the tunnel. The segmented body expanded like a child’s toy as the
predator closed the space between them. Opening an outsize mouth, revealing a
yellow, forked tongue, the animal hissed and reared as if preparing to charge
at her.
Jill
shouted defiance in a combination of rage and fear, and threw the rock hard,
striking one glowing eye in the center, shattering the facets. She dodged as
the predator made a high pitched sound like an exploding generator and lunged
toward where she’d been. As she scrambled in the slick muddy water at the
bottom of the trap, she searched for another rock, finding only small ones. She
gathered a handful of them as better than nothing and spun around as the half-blind
animal tried to locate her.
With
a hoarse yell, a man jumped into the pit from above and landed between her and
the predator. He didn’t seem to have a weapon but, as the lightning flashed,
briefly illuminating the scene in stark white light, Jill gaped. Were those talons?
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