The Spawning Read Online Free

way, not less than or more than she was used to feeling.
    Deborah let out a huff of irritation. “Why don’t you think about it a while and let us know what you come up with?” she snapped angrily.
    The problem was she couldn’t think. Her head felt as numb as the rest of her
    body.
    Well, not numb in the sense that she was unaware of the chill. Her feet felt like blocks of ice from the little walking she’d done, and her entire body ached as if she was coming down with the flu. But numb as in clueless, confused, and unable to process the little bit of information that seemed to be getting through to her brain. After merely staring at the frightened, angry woman for a moment, she nodded, looked around until she identified the cot she’d woken on and headed toward it.
    It was actually more like the floor than a cot. The moment she sat down, she
    realized there wasn’t even a thin mat covering the hard platform let alone a mattress of any description. The ‘blanket’ she pulled up to cover herself with wasn’t a blanket either. It felt more like plastic sheeting or Mylar.
    She lay staring up at the platform above her for a while, trying to sort her jumbled impressions, memories, and the comments the women had made and finally surprised herself by falling asleep.
    She was awakened by a stir in the room that she identified as a wave of hysteria even as her eyes snapped open.
    The robot she’d shot the day before, or one just like it, was standing in the center of the room. “Move to door to be processed,” the robot intoned in a strangely mechanical voice, sounding like the pieced together recordings of a human voice arranged and rearranged to say different things.
    Startled gasps went up from some of the women, frightened little squeals from
    THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 13
    others, but beyond that, their only response was to scramble as far from the robot as they could get and cower in terror. The robot swiveled toward the knot of women at one end of the cell. A beam of light about the circumference of a pencil shot from its boxy head, hitting one of the unfortunate women in the forefront. She jolted all over in spasms as if she’d been hit with a taser, her eyes rolling back in her head. When the beam ceased, she dropped to the floor, still convulsing.
    Screaming, the other women in the room leapt up and stampeded toward the
    opening that had appeared in the wall. Miranda bailed out of her own bunk. Still punch drunk from being awakened so abruptly, she stared blankly at the woman on the floor as the robot moved awkwardly toward her prone form on its three mechanical legs. A pneumatic arm extended toward her, the manacle like hand clamping around her ankle.
    Miranda stared in horror at the thing as it turned, dragging the unconscious woman behind it.
    It halted when it spied her. “Move to door to be processed.”
    Swallowing convulsively, Miranda headed toward the opening. She discovered
    when she’d emerged from the cell that she was in a long, curving corridor that seemed to go on forever.
    It was clogged with women, far more women than those who’d shared her cell
    with her. Her heart squeezed painfully in her chest, but she couldn’t seem to assimilate what her eyes were telling her.
    She counted fifty women before the curve in the corridor cut off her view.
    Wondering whether there were even more around the bend, or if there was some
    blockage ahead that had resulted in the ‘jam’, Miranda glanced uneasily behind her as the robot dragged the unconscious woman from the cell and stopped behind her, cutting off any hope of retreat.
    Not that it had occurred to her until that moment to consider it.
    Struggling against the fear that was trying to edge past the shock that had
    cocooned her, Miranda surveyed her surroundings. Except for the floor, which was flat and as smooth and seamless as glass, the entire corridor had the curvature of a tube.
    There didn’t seem to be an obvious source of light. The