After Earth

Stories

### Chapter 1: Chapter 1

Please note that this story deals with some distressing themes from the outset involving physical violation, violence, child abuse, child separation and intense emotional distress.

Mature | mature | Adult themes | Sci Fi | Romance |

Sarah is an ordinary young mother from Lancashire, England, living a quiet life with her husband, baby daughter, and dog, when an evening walk ends in darkness.

She wakes strapped to a metal table in a windowless room, stripped, drugged, and watched by creatures that cannot possibly exist. Humanity has never reached beyond the Moon. Aliens are fiction. Yet Sarah soon discovers she has been taken far from Earth, imprisoned aboard a hidden vessel with two frightened children and no way home.

After weeks of fear, hunger, and brutal experimentation, an alarm tears through the ship. In the chaos, Sarah fights back. She is found by a strange alien man with black eyes, green-black skin, and a quiet, unsettling intensity. His name is Sonn, and though he is not human, he seems to understand her terror better than anyone.

Rescued into a wider galaxy Earth was never told existed, Sarah must face unbearable truths.

As Sarah struggles to survive grief, displacement, and the mysteries of alien civilisation, Sonn remains a constant, enigmatic presence — blunt, watchful, sometimes harsh, but never indifferent. And whatever binds him to her may be far stranger than rescue.

Complete Chapters 24

Rating 4.7 ( 15 reviews ) Age Rating mature

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Chapter 1: Sarah

Sarah woke to white light.

For a few seconds, that was all there was. Light. Hard, white, artificial light pressing through her eyelids and turning the inside of her skull red. She blinked against it, once, twice, her lashes dragging as if she had been sleeping too deeply or for too long.

The ceiling above her was not a ceiling she knew. It was metal. Smooth, grey, faintly reflective, broken only by a long strip of fluorescent light that hummed overhead. The sound was thin and constant, almost insect-like in the quiet.

Sarah tried to lift a hand to shield her eyes. Her wrist did not move. For one foolish second, she thought her sleeve had caught on something.

Something tightened around her wrist. She looked down.

Empty in the way a room goes silent when a glass smashes.

She was lying flat on a metal table. Her arms were fixed at her sides, wrists bound by dark restraints. Her ankles were strapped down too. She jerked one foot, then the other, and the restraints bit immediately into her skin.

She pulled harder. Her body reacted before her mind could catch up. Shoulders twisting, spine arching, fingers clawing at the empty air. The table beneath her was narrow and cold. Her skin stuck slightly to it where the hospital gown had ridden up around her thighs.

Her sweatshirt was gone. So were her leggings. Her trainers. Her socks. Her underwear.

The panic rose so fast she could not breathe around it. Someone had taken her clothes off. Someone had touched her while she was unconscious. Someone had put her here, strapped her here, left her here under this terrible white light.

She tried to sit up and could not. Tried to turn onto her side and could not. Tried to tear one arm free and only made the restraint cut deeper into the soft inside of her wrist.

The room came to her in pieces. Metal walls. Steel floor. Crates stacked against one side. Other tables arranged in a line around her.

A new horror opened inside her.

She had been walking. That was the last thing she remembered. She had put Isobel down just after seven, kissed the warm curve of her cheek, smoothed the dark little wisp of hair from her forehead. Isobel had been born with so much hair. Everyone commented on it in those first few weeks. But now there was only little whisps left. Sarah hated it and loved it.

Lewis had been in the kitchen loading the dishwasher badly, because he always loaded it badly, and Sarah had laughed and told him she was taking Twiglet out before it got properly dark.

A stupid, precious, ordinary evening.

The path had been dry beneath her trainers. Gravel and stone crunching underfoot. Fields on either side, wheat whispering in the summer air. Twiglet had trotted a little way ahead on the extendable lead, ears bouncing, nose down, small wire-haired body full of importance. Sarah had held her water bottle in one hand and the lead in the other.

She began to fight properly then. Not carefully. Not sensibly. She thrashed against the restraints until the table shuddered beneath her.

A sound broke out of her, half grunt, half sob. Tears gathered but did not fall. The panic was too physical for tears yet. It lived in her ribs, her throat, her wrists, the frantic animal need to get up, get out, get away.

The sound ripped at her throat.

The room swallowed her voice. The light above her flickered. Sarah froze. For a moment there was only the electric hum and her own breathing, ragged and ugly in the sealed room. No windows. No clock. No voices. No clue where she was.

The air smelled of metal and antiseptic and something dry and filtered, as if it had been cooled and cleaned too many times. Tiny specks of dust hung motionless in the fluorescent light above her. Nothing stirred them except her breath.

She swallowed. Her throat hurt.

Not the kind of thirst that came after a summer walk.

Her tongue felt thick. Her lips felt dry. The realisation moved slowly through her, colder than the table beneath her. She must have been here for hours.

Then another sensation pushed through the panic. An ache. Deep, hot, insistent. Sarah went still. For a moment she could not place it. There was too much fear, too much cold, too much wrongness. Then the ache sharpened across her chest, heavy and swollen and horribly familiar.

She looked down as far as the restraints allowed. The front of the hospital gown was damp. For one confused second, she did not understand. Then she did.

The sound that came out of her was worse than a sob. Her breasts were full. Painfully full. The skin felt tight and tender beneath the thin gown, her body strained past comfort, past routine, demanding relief. A slow, warm leak had spread into the fabric.

The thought did not arrive gently. It tore through her.

Sarah had fed her before putting her down, but not enough to last all night. Not yet. Isobel was still too small, still waking hungry, still rooting blindly against Sarah’s chest with those tiny furious sounds that broke Sarah’s heart even when she was exhausted. If Sarah was this full, then Isobel would have woken. She would have cried. Lewis would have tried to settle her. He would have tried a bottle, if there was any expressed milk left, if he could find it, if Isobel would even take it from him while frightened and hungry and wanting her mother.

The thought was panicked and absolute. She needed to sit up. She needed to go home. She needed Isobel’s warm weight against her, the soft pull of her mouth, the little hand that always pressed against Sarah’s skin as if holding her there.

Instead she was strapped to a metal table, leaking through a hospital gown while strangers had done God knew what to her body.

“Please,” she pleaded, though there was no one there to listen.

Her voice broke on the last word. She forced herself to breathe.

She had to think. She had to know what had been done to her.

The question steadied her because it was practical. It gave her something to do besides scream.

Sarah shut her eyes for one second and worked her way through her own body.

She tensed, released, tensed again.

Thighs. Hips. Her stomach clenched.

Nothing her panicked body could identify, unless shock was hiding it from her.

She kept going. Hands. Fingers. Arms.

She opened her eyes again and looked down as best she could. The gown was white except for the damp spread across her chest.

Her bare shins looked ordinary beneath the fluorescent light. Pale skin. A few old bruises she recognised from real life. A faint line of stubble along her shins.

The thought was so absurd, so viciously normal, that for half a second she almost laughed.

Not loudly at first. Just a hot spill at the corners of her eyes, sliding into her hairline because she could not lift a hand to wipe them away. She stared down at herself, forcing her gaze over every visible inch.

There was a mark in the crook of her left elbow. Small. Red. Precise. A faint bruise had begun to form around it. Sarah stared at it.

The small amount of control she had clawed together broke apart.

Someone had put something into her. Or taken something out. Drugged her. Sedated her. Drawn blood. She did not know. She had no way of knowing.

She looked wildly to either side, expecting a drip, a monitor, wires attached to her chest, anything that might explain what had been done.

No machines. No bags of fluid. No electrodes. No heart monitor beeping steadily beside her. She was simply strapped down in a windowless metal room.

Sarah went still so fast it hurt.

It was set into the wall to her right, so smooth she had not even noticed the seam. It slid open with a high, pressurised hiss that made every muscle in her body tighten.

At first, her mind refused them.

It did not try to name them. It did not try to understand. It simply stopped, as if whatever part of her knew how to recognise the world had come up against something it could not process.

They were roughly human-sized, no taller than an average man, the same height as Lewis, perhaps, but broader through the body. Dense. Sturdy. Their clothing — if it was clothing — was fitted close to them, grey and black and faintly shiny, like rubber or wet stone.

But it was their faces that trapped the scream inside her. Four eyes. Black, glossy, arranged in pairs across the upper face. No whites. No pupils she could see. Just blackness reflecting the fluorescent lights. Where a nose should have been, there were two narrow slits set high and flat. Their mouths were too wide.

That was the detail that made her stomach turn.

Too wide, too long, stretching across the lower face in a line that might have been expressionless or might have been smiling. She could not tell.

Their skin was grey-brown and patchy, thick in some places, folded in others, leathery like an old turtle’s neck.

The word came whole and ridiculous.

There were no aliens. There couldn’t be. Humanity had barely gone farther than the moon. If aliens existed, if contact had happened, it would be on every screen, every phone, every news channel in the world.

The sound was low enough to vibrate somewhere beneath her ribs. Long, drawn-out tones, not like words so much as pressure given shape. The other answered in the same language.

Sarah could not scream. She could not beg. For several seconds, she could only stare at them while her body lay rigid on the table, every part of her waiting to be hurt.

The one nearest the door looked at her. All four eyes fixed on her face. Then it moved closer.

“No,” she gasped. “No, please. Please don’t. Please.”

She twisted violently against the restraints, but there was nowhere to go. The creature stood beside the table and reached for the hem of her gown. Sarah shook her head.

“No. Don’t. Don’t touch me. Please don’t touch me.”

Cold air moved over her thighs, her hips, her stomach.

The fabric slid up and bunched beneath her ribs. She tried to clamp her knees together, but the restraints held her legs apart just enough that she could not protect herself, could not curl inward, could not make herself small.

A sound came out of her then. Thin. Broken. Not quite a scream.

The creature did not touch her at first. Somehow that made it worse. It only looked. At her legs. Her stomach. Between her legs. Her breasts.

The inspection was slow and methodical and empty of anything Sarah understood.

Not curiosity in any human sense.

Nothing she could appeal to. She was not a woman to them.

Not a person who had been walking her dog through a field at dusk.

Then the creature paused. All four of its eyes fixed on her chest. Sarah followed its gaze and understood, with a sickening rush of humiliation and fear, what it had seen.

The milk had soaked through the gown. Another bead had gathered where the fabric had shifted, warm and exposed beneath the cold light.

One long finger pressed against the leaking bead at her chest. Sarah made a broken sound and tried to wrench herself away, but the straps held her down. Pain flashed through both wrists.

The creature did not seem to notice. It drew its hand back and held it up, studying the thin white sheen on its fingertip. Then it rubbed the liquid slowly between two fingers. Sarah stared in horror.

The creature tapped its fingers together once. Twice. Testing the texture, perhaps. Measuring it. She had no idea. Then it made one of those low, drawn-out sounds to the other creature. The second stepped closer and looked too.

“No,” Sarah pleaded, the word useless in her mouth. “Please. I have a baby. I need to feed my baby.”

Neither of them reacted. The first creature spoke again, still rubbing its fingers together. The other answered. Their voices moved back and forth over her exposed body, over the damp gown, over the thing her body had made because Isobel needed her.

They were discussing her. Or the milk. Or whatever they thought she was.

The word came to her with such cold clarity that she almost stopped breathing.

“No,” she pleaded again. “Please. She needs me. My baby needs me.”

After a while, they seemed to reach some kind of agreement.

The first creature released the gown. Not down. Just released it. The fabric remained rucked around her ribs, leaving her exposed beneath the light. Then they turned and left. The door hissed shut behind them.

For several seconds Sarah could not move at all.

Then she started shaking so hard the table vibrated beneath her.

She worked her fingers desperately, catching at the edge of the gown where it had bunched near her side.

It took three attempts before she managed to pinch the fabric between two fingers and drag it down an inch.

Not nearly enough. But enough to cover part of herself. Enough to feel fractionally less exposed.

Lewis would be looking for her. Isobel would be crying. Twiglet might be dead somewhere in a field.

The thought came so suddenly that she made a sound like she had been struck.

He had to have run home. Someone had to have found him. Lewis would know something was wrong. He would have called the police. He would have called her mum. His mum. Everyone.

The ache in her breasts pulsed again, hot and insistent beneath the damp gown.

Her body did not understand terror. It did not understand impossible rooms or black-eyed creatures or metal tables. It only knew that too much time had passed and her baby needed feeding.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, though she did not know whether she was speaking to Isobel or Lewis or herself.

“I’m so sorry. Please help me. Please someone help me.”

Before she could unravel completely, the door opened again. The same two figures entered. This time, one of them carried a needle.

Sarah’s body began fighting before her mind formed the thought. She pulled so hard at the restraints that pain flashed through both wrists.

“No,” she cried. “No, please. Please, no.”

“No. No, I have a baby. You saw — you saw, I have a baby. I need to feed her. Please .”

The one with the needle took her arm. Its grip was firm and impersonal. Gloved, maybe, or perhaps that was its skin. She could not tell.

It turned her elbow outward with practised ease.

“No, please. Please. She needs me. I have to go home. ”

For one second, there was pain, sharp and cold.

Then the white light above her stretched.