The Prom Goer's Interstellar Excursion Page 4

  I grabbed Sophie’s fingers. “Run.”

  “I can run faster if you let go of my hand,” she said, jerking her arm away. She was right—as soon as she was free of me, she went into another gear and was gone, and I saw how it was entirely possible for her to have won all those mud runs. She was a jackrabbit, zigzagging around cacti, leaping crevasses in the ground, sprinting out hundreds of feet in front of me in just a few seconds.

  Which was how the thing chasing us got her alone.

  The sensation of heat on the back of my neck went from warm to scalding, and then—BOOM—an explosion of sound knocked me to the desert ground. I felt an object accelerate above and I covered my head, but the object passed quickly, because it wasn’t interested in me.

  “Bennett,” I heard Sophie yell.

  I was on the ground, half deaf, slightly drunk, and the length of a football field from Sophie, when the UFO came to a stop.

  At first, to my eyes, it didn’t seem like much of a UFO at all—it looked more like a dog-catching wagon the size of a small boat, hovering ten or so feet off the ground. Painted on its side in neon blue were stick figures that reminded me of the man and woman symbols found on the doors of restaurant bathrooms, and where there would have been wheels on a normal wagon, there was a set of white, glowing skids.

  Because the UFO was hovering low, Sophie was staring straight at it rather than up at it, which a million movies had told me was the typical way that the soon-to-be-abducted confronted UFOs.

  For a moment, neither Sophie nor the UFO did anything. She knew she couldn’t escape, and the UFO seemed to be waiting to see what she was going to do.

  A small cannon emerged from the side of the van. There was a murmuring sound, and the cannon shot a cloud of red and pink confetti in front of Sophie.

  She looked at the confetti a beat, then dropped to the ground and began rolling in it like a feline in the throes of a catnip binge.

  “So…good…,” I heard her moan, rubbing the confetti on her face, grinning and laughing like a crazy person. “HA…hehhhhhhh. HA…hehhhhhh…”

  The UFO descended to the ground, barely scattering the dirt beneath its landing rails. A door opened on the side of the ship—though there were no clouds of gas or any dramatic light emitting from it, another tenet of UFOs I thought was pretty standard-issue—and two creatures nonchalantly hopped out, carrying a cage.

  The creatures weren’t anything I could have anticipated—no big black eyes and skinny limbs like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, no muscles and dreadlocks like in Predator. Though one was larger than the other, they were clearly of the same species, and both were wearing white lab coats and seemed to be carrying clipboards. They looked like screwed-up Vikings, for lack of a better comparison. Blunted horns grew out of their skulls, above foreheads that were shiny and golden. Their bulbous noses sat slightly off center in the middle of their faces, beneath tiny eyes. They had thick bodies with heavy red fur sprouting out from under their lab coats, and their feet were swollen and exposed.

  They calmly walked over to Sophie, who continued to roll around in the confetti, throwing it in the air and letting it rain down upon her like she was a child at a party, paying them no attention. She was rubbing the stuff over her body, putting it in her hair, tasting it, unfazed by the fact that a couple of enormous alien roughnecks were studying her, the smaller one making marks on his orange clipboard.

  All right. At this point, you’re probably wondering why I didn’t rush toward the aliens and pull Sophie out of there. It’s something I think about all the time too. Now that I’ve had some distance from the moment, the only way I can explain it is that the suddenness and the unreality of the situation overwhelmed me, and I was stupefied. My brain felt like it had detached from my nervous system, my heart felt like it was no longer pumping blood, and all I could do was watch. I guess there are a lot of ways that I could try to explain what I was feeling in terms of my physiology, but everything boils down to the fact that I was staggeringly afraid.

  When the Vikings were done making their notations, one of them grabbed the side of Sophie’s face, took out what looked like a label gun, and—pppffft—clipped a tag through her ear, which snapped her out of her strange feline state.

  “OUCH. What the—”

  She was about to protest further when she looked up into the faces of the aliens and let out the most piercing, extended yell of pure terror I had ever heard. I won’t try to replicate it here.

  The aliens covered the holes in the sides of their heads and looked at each other like can you believe this? They were visibly annoyed with the volume of Sophie’s screaming. When she paused to take a breath so that she could yell again, the larger Viking took out a syringe and injected her with a liquid that knocked her unconscious, after which the smaller one picked her up by the back of her neck, tossed her into the cage, and threw the cage into the van.

  The duo climbed in behind her and shut the door, and with that, the van lifted into the air, hovered for a moment, and then—WHOOSH—disappeared into the sky in a streak of gold light, upward and out of sight.

  The desert was silent. From the moment we saw the UFO to Sophie’s disappearance, the abduction had taken five minutes, tops. If that.

  I heard a ringing. Sophie’s cell phone was stuck in a crevice between two rocks. I answered.

  “Hello?” I said weakly. All the air had left my body, and I felt like I was about to pass out.

  “Hey, this is Dusty at the garage. Your motorcycle is ready.”

  “Be…right there.”

  “Holy crap, man, that beer must have hit you hard. You sound messed up, hombre.”

  —

  Bizarrely enough, back at the garage, Dusty didn’t seem concerned that he had seen two high school students walk out into the desert together but only one return.

  “As long as somebody pays me a hundred for my work, I don’t care who goes missing,” he said. “For another hundred, I’ll help you bury her.”

  I had $146 dollars in my bank account—money left over from my eighteenth birthday—so I paid Dusty’s fee with my emergency-only debit card and hit the road with the motorcycle in the bed of my truck.

  My first instinct was to call somebody for help, but I quickly realized that was unrealistic. It wasn’t as if NASA had a 911 hotline you could dial to report abductions: “Hey, this is Bennett Bardo. Listen, the girl I’ve loved since I was five years old was just snatched up by a couple of deformed Viking dogcatchers—no, I don’t know if they were actually Nordic, I’m just making a comparison—and I was wondering if you could send up a shuttle to get her back. They sprinkled some confetti on her and she lost her mind. So you’ll handle it? Thanks, appreciate it.”

  If Sophie didn’t turn up, her parents would file a missing-person report, police would come around asking if I had seen her, and eventually somehow it would be revealed that she and I had walked out to the desert as a twosome and I had returned as a onesome. I was fairly certain my excuse that she was taken by aliens wouldn’t hold up in court.

  I considered my options. I could try to make a run for the Mexican border, but given I didn’t know anybody in that country, didn’t speak Spanish, was still technically not yet a high school graduate, and sunburned easily, I didn’t see a future for myself as a bandito in Juárez. In the opposite direction, Canada was two days away, but my truck would never make the trip, and I didn’t have enough money for gas. Going back to Gordo meant inevitable arrest and jail time, but I also couldn’t stay here in Roswell, unless I wanted to Dumpster dive for sustenance and sleep in my truck. Just trying to avoid the situation would make me look even guiltier when I was eventually apprehended.

  Driving my truck nowhere, I took lefts and rights aimlessly, obeying the speed limit so I didn’t draw attention to myself, watching the broken center traffic stripes disappear under my wheels like a drumbeat.

  I was worried about Sophie. I couldn’t imagine the terror she must have felt when she lo
oked up and saw the extraterrestrials above her, and I almost hoped that she was still unconscious so she didn’t have to deal with the dread of seeing Earth disappear beneath her without knowing where she was being taken. I hadn’t been able to deal with the fear of the aliens myself, and they weren’t even interested in me.

  Half of me was sick with worry about her, while the rest of me was consumed by the cold outrage of being so ridiculously close to going to prom with Sophie Gilkey, and then having her snatched away. I had waited all of high school for a break—which I thought was going to be an acceptance to Princeton—but instead, the universe had presented me with a chance to be with the girl who had occupied my thoughts since I was old enough to start thinking about girls, and then, in a very literal sense, the universe had taken her from me. I stared at the Big Dipper, and it looked like a huge bucket of crap about to tip over and spill onto my head. I was pissed.

  I had no choice. I had to go after her. I had to help her. If she had been abducted, I could find a way to get abducted too. I wasn’t going to let a bunch of aliens ruin the one good experience I’d had in eighteen years. If I was in space, I wouldn’t have to explain to anybody where she went, nor would I have to talk to the cops. I wouldn’t have to figure out what to do with her motorcycle. I wouldn’t have to assume a new identity or learn Spanish. I wouldn’t have to give her up.

  It was time to get her back.

  Because in my haste to get on the road with her I had left my phone at home, I used Sophie’s to try to figure out how to offer myself as bait. In twenty minutes of electronic sleuthing—and I have to say, I was surprised by the wealth of information out there on the subject, God bless the digital hive mind—I found four common factors in alien abductions:

  The abductee usually drove a truck. Most of the time, it was the driver of an eighteen-wheeler who stepped out of his big rig on the highway, stared up into a strange light, and—shloop—was sucked up into the ship. But it also seemed pretty common for aliens to target guys in pickups, which was a lucky break for me, considering my mode of transport.

  The abductions normally took place along deserted roads late at night or in the very early morning. Roswell was in the middle of nowhere, so that prerequisite had taken care of itself. All I had to do was drive three minutes in any direction and I would be as exposed and kidnappable as a newborn, though I realize that’s perhaps not the best analogy.

  The abductee was usually at least a little bit of a redneck. The redneck culture of my hometown was one of the things that I was desperately trying to escape—on any weekend afternoon, you could hear the roar of distant all-terrain vehicles booming off the desert floor—but I thought I could fake the part by ripping my shirt, putting on a trucker hat, and focusing my thoughts on Friday night football, about which I had never, ever given a crap.

  Finally, to get the aliens’ attention, it seemed to help to have a physical ailment to set you apart from other individuals—something interesting that extraterrestrials might want to check out, a curiosity for them to write about in their research papers. I reasoned that if they had already passed up the opportunity to abduct me once, my gangly body wasn’t enough to satisfy this requirement, so I’d have to figure something else out.

  I had no idea why Sophie had been taken despite falling into none of the categories above. Maybe they were intrigued by her for intangible reasons that they didn’t fully understand. I could relate. She had my heart too.

  After a stop for supplies—I’d never been so happy to see a twenty-four-hour pharmacy, though the counter guy gave me a strange look when he saw what I was purchasing—I was in my truck driving back and forth on the outskirts of Roswell, wearing an I Got Crabs in Maryland trucker hat while waving a set of crutches out the window. I’m not sure why a store in New Mexico would have a selection of I Got Crabs in Maryland hats, but I can only guess that a cargo shipment went to the wrong state, luckily for me. To complete the hillbilly effect, I smeared some chewing tobacco on my teeth—my first-ever heretofore forbidden purchase as an eighteen-year-old—which gave me enough of a head rush that I felt totally unself-conscious as I screamed out the window at the empty sky.

  “Come on!” I yelled. “I’m slow and not too intelligent and I know you’re up there. I already saw you once tonight. Come back and get me.”

  Nobody came to get me.

  “I’m here!” I yelled. “I will not fight you. I would maybe ask for some leeway when it comes to any sort of body cavity research, but if you need a couple of examinations for your files, I’m cool with it, as long as you tell me where Sophie is.”

  Silence.

  “All right. I’m not even going to use the word probe, because I’m sure you’re sick of the association. We’re all sick of it, and I don’t mean to stereotype you. But whatever you need to do, you can do. Just don’t leave me down here.”

  A pair of white lights shot out behind me.

  Right away, I cursed myself for offering the extraterrestrials such personal full-body privileges, but once I realized my tactics had been successful, I felt good for having cracked the alien code. If it was this simple to get abducted, I could probably start an extreme-adventure travel business and make a decent profit. Maybe that was what I would do with my future instead of Princeton. Be a self-made man. An entrepreneur who looked at the stars.

  I heard the whoop of a siren.

  It was a police car.

  I pulled my crutches inside the truck and watched in the rearview mirror as an obese cop squeezed out of his car and waddled over to my window.

  “Boy, what the living hell are you doing out here alone at this time of night?” he spat. I looked at the nameplate pinned to his chest—Officer Welker. “You high? Do I need to give you a Breathalyzer?”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “I was stargazing.”

  “Stargazing by driving on a deserted street in the middle of the night? Where’s your telescope?”

  “I don’t have one with me, but I do have one.”

  “People disappear out here all the time, you know,” said Officer Welker. “It ain’t safe for you to be doin’ this, driving around like an idiot.”

  I was trying to disappear, I thought to myself, but all I said was, “Yes, sir.”

  “I suggest you make yourself scarce. I’m only letting you go because I like your hat. Maryland crabs are the finest in the world. My wife and I honeymooned in Baltimore, had the time of our lives. But if I see you or your truck again tonight, I will find a reason to arrest you, and in jail you will stay. You got that?”

  “Going straight home,” I said, starting the truck. “Thank you for letting me go.”

  The police car rode my bumper to the main road before splitting off and speeding away in the opposite direction. I considered returning to the boondocks for another try at getting abducted, but then I thought, What’s the use? The aliens had already decided not to take me once. Nothing I did was going to get them to reconsider.

  I was discouraged, and my blood sugar was low. I felt twisting pains in my stomach. I’d been so distracted by the Sophie situation that I had forgotten to eat. I tried to remember my last meal, and realized I’d eaten a bowl of Rice Krispies for breakfast fourteen hours ago.

  If it was my last night of freedom, I figured I might as well have something good.

  Ten minutes later, I pulled into the drive-through of In-N-Out Burger, ravenous.

  In-N-Out—in case you’re unfamiliar with the brand—is the finest fast-food chain in the world. Never-frozen beef. Hand-cut fries. Thick, creamy Neapolitan milk shakes. Though I heard the restaurants were located only in California, Nevada, and Arizona, the chain had recently opened this particular location, perhaps to take advantage of tourists who came to the area for alien-themed attractions. I had been to In-N-Out once before with my parents, and the experience had made a profound impact on me. I had never known fast food could be like this. From my truck, I could smell the finely chopped grilled onions and special sauce. For a
brief moment, I forgot that my prom date was gone and I would most likely soon be going to jail for her murder. That’s how intoxicating the scent was.

  But there was an obstacle keeping me from those burgers.

  Blocking the drive-through was the largest, weirdest bus I had ever seen. It reminded me of a metal platypus—pudgy around the middle, where the wheels were, and then tapering out to a beaklike protrusion in the front and a thick tail in the back, which appeared to be an external trunk. A sharp sail ran down its center like a Mohawk, and its windows were tinted a heavy purple, nearly black.

  My stomach grumbled in anticipation of a meal, but the bus didn’t seem to be going anywhere. It was parked in the drive-through, its engine was off, and a team of In-N-Out employees was handing dozens of bags of food from the delivery window to the driver inside.

  The driver’s hand was as big as a baseball glove.

  “Let’s go. I’m hungry!” I yelled, honking my horn, but I was sure that nobody on the bus could hear me. Percussive music was pouring out of the vehicle—BoombabaBoombabaBoom. The bus was rocking back and forth, seemingly in danger of tipping over.

  The In-N-Out employees handed over the final orders to the driver, who handed back a thick roll of bills as payment. Finally, the bus rolled out of the driveway and parked in the lot, where it continued to vibrate from the music.

  I took my truck out of park and was easing it toward the drive-through when—thunk—my engine died. My seat shuddered underneath me, and I felt something fall from my car to the ground. I turned the key again, but nothing happened.

  It was over. My truck had loyally taken me to Roswell, and then it had perished. In asking it to drive over one hundred miles in one night, I had pushed it beyond its limits. This time, I knew there was no point in massaging its wheel and telling it I loved it. It was gone.

  I got out of the car and kneeled on the ground, and underneath the chassis I witnessed a pile of rusted gears and corroded metal. My truck’s guts had disgorged themselves onto the pavement. Well, at least when I was in jail, I wouldn’t need a car anymore. From now on, I was going to be on foot until the cops picked me up. I needed a cheeseburger for energy.