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White Castle sliders, Bart Simpson, did I mention sno-cones?…
Chapter 53
I DON’T KNOW how long it was before I came to-I wasn’t even sure if coming to was what I was doing. All I knew for sure was that there was a worried face floating maybe a foot above me. The i
I would have believed she was an angel-except for the terrible waves of pain throbbing in my stomach.
I looked down and saw that the girl had balled up my shirt and stuffed it into my wound. A tear rolled out of my eye onto the stone floor. Abducted, terrified, and most likely in shock, this little girl had probably saved my life.
Gestures like that were why humans were worth saving, I thought. Or even worth dying for.
“Thank you,” I whispered. “These ugly horse-heads better watch their step. They’re starting to get on my nerves.”
“Mine too,” said the girl.
“Hey, you! What do you think you’re doing in there?” came a voice. One of the aliens was crouching by the cell door. “Didn’t I tell everyone not to touch him?”
The little girl stared at him like a deer frozen in headlights, at least the way I’ve always imagined that cliché looks.
“Hey, give me back my wallet,” I croaked at her, loud enough for the thug to hear.
“Oh, why didn’t you say you were just robbing him?” the guard said, turning away. “In that case, go for it. You humans are lower than dirt. Tear each other apart. Go for it.”
Chapter 54
I SPENT the better part of the next hour lying there on the cold stone floor, writhing in pain, probably close to death. I’d lost what seemed like quarts of blood, and my intestines and vital organs must have been ripped apart by the gun blast.
Gut-shot down in the salt mine, I thought, starting to shake a little with the agony. Gee, my life had become the title of a country-and-western song.
A short time later, a door banged open and a couple of guards charged in. They were carrying electric stun guns.
“For me? You shouldn’t have.”
“Get moving, you filthy mammals,” one of the aliens yelled as he herded together the Earth kids I was sharing the chamber with. The little girl who’d helped me started to sob.
“Hey, guys, look! This one’s sprung a leak.” The alien laughed as he waved the cattle prod next to her tear-filled face. “I can’t believe we actually get paid to have this much fun.”
“You too, worm,” Seth said, tapping a couple of thousand volts near my face. “Get up! Get moving. Hold your intestines in.”
I probably should have been in an ICU, but I shot to my feet and stumbled out of the cage. No way I’d let them know how badly I was hurt.
“Nice acting job!” Seth said, and roared with laughter. “You could have been in one of my films. As an extra.”
It was pitch-black outside in the desert. And freezing cold. At two, maybe three o’clock in the morning.
Why did I have the feeling that we weren’t going on a nature walk?
Chapter 55
AS I TURNED to my right, I saw that the desert sky was filled with stars in every direction. Except one. Above the eastern mountains, there was a… hole in the sky. A hole that was moving closer and getting larger and larger by the second.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood at full, parade-ground attention.
The object hovering about fifty feet above me was black as the night itself, and about the size of a football stadium. I don’t know who started that UFO saucer nonsense, but they must have been nearsighted. This ship was undoubtedly rectangular, like a Dumpster. Or a giant coffin.
It just hung there above us, ominously floating. There was a disturbance in the air as some kind of energy field pulsated loudly across its massive length.
Then a telescopic column, possibly an elevator, dropped from its belly into the ground.
Some of the kids started crying, and I called out, “Don’t worry, it’s nothing. It’s probably just E.T.”
The elevator thingy landed less than thirty feet from where I stood. A hydraulic hum followed. Then a doorway opened.
Inside, a particularly huge and ugly horse-head in a black uniform was smiling, showing cobralike teeth.
“Hey there, kiddies. Want to go for a ride, huh-huh-huh?” he said in a pretty good imitation of SpongeBob SquarePants.
All of us abductees stared at the alien in the doorway. Then we stared at each other. And then, as if we’d finally reached a silent consensus, we started to scream at the top of our lungs.
Chapter 56
THE RIDE UP in the crowded alien elevator made all of the smaller kids scream again. It was like an upward free fall, or bungee jumping in reverse. I can tell you this-the open wound that was my stomach really appreciated the ride.
The back of the elevator opened, and we were hauled out into the mother ship.
Somehow the hot, cramped inside managed to be more horrible and despair-inducing than the grim exterior had promised. Those Star Trek writers were bugging when they dreamed up the dentist’s office-like Enterprise , I thought, as I looked around. Water and steam dripped from tangles of overhead ducts. The floors were slick with what appeared to be oil and discarded garbage. The place looked like a boiler room and a landfill combined.
A blast of hot air from somewhere swept across my face, and I caught the stink. Think the world’s hugest bus station bathroom.
We were pushed through a metal detector-like apparatus. Seth came over to me as it beeped. He ripped my List computer out of my backpack.
“You won’t be needing this,” he said, tucking it under his arm, “ever, ever again.”
We were sprayed with some type of stinging gas, stuffed into gray jumpsuits, and shackled together with leg chains. Very neighborly.
I turned toward one of the portholes when I heard a low rumble coming from somewhere inside the ship. Down below, the desert mountains were getting smaller and smaller at a mind-blowing speed. What was crazy was that, unlike in the elevator, there wasn’t the slightest sense of motion.
About three seconds later, there was Terra Firma, my beloved planet Earth. Even under the circumstances, its grandeur took my breath away.
The astronauts had never communicated how completely lonely it looks, though. Sad, blue, and sort of helpless against the endless void of space. I watched it get smaller and smaller, and then-with what felt like a pinch in my heart-Earth was gone.
Chapter 57
A COUPLE MORE black uniforms smacked and kicked us down a corridor toward a scary grinding sound that made me think of a transformer eating scrap metal. The hall opened into a tremendous chamber, and I had to wipe my eyes to make sure I wasn’t imagining things.
Down here were tiers upon tiers of cages and machines. At the machines, humans-mostly kids-were hard at work. They were hand rolling cigarettes, putting what looked like torture devices together, sewing animal skins into coats.
There were a few older humans too. The floor managers of hell, I thought. One of them was shaking a tiny Chinese kid back and forth against an industrial sewing machine. The kid was so dead-eyed, he wasn’t even crying.
The ship was some kind of flying child slavery sweatshop, I understood. A prison, a slave ship, and a sweatshop all rolled into one.
It really was hell, I thought. We’d actually arrived.
“Home sweet home,” one of the aliens said as he doled out the manacled kids to floor managers waiting by escalators. “No iPods or PlayStation 3’s here, you spoiled, hairless monkeys. Prepare to learn the true meaning of the expression ‘working your fingers to the bone.’ You’ve heard of tough love? Welcome to tough hate.”