1
ROBBIE
“Fucking hell, they need to put some lights along this road.”
I didn’t like driving at night, and today was no exception. If anything, it proved my point as to why driving at night sucked. My astigmatism was mild, but it caused me to see halos around street lights and car headlights. But some light, even if it was artificial, was better than none at all. Tonight was one of those especially sucky night driving experiences where the inky darkness swallowed up my headlights, there was no moon to give even a glimmer to help me see my way, and yay, the current route I was taking to get to the next stop on my route could only be accessed via long stretches of rural highway surrounded by pine forests.
“They need to pay me better for this shit,” I said. “Ah!” I shouted as something leaped in front of me in the darkness, its large shape moving too fast for me to see what it was. I slammed on the brakes, but it was already gone. “Probably a deer,” I told myself. That was the last straw. I was finding a new job after this. Being a quality control officer for a premade sandwich company sounded great in theory, and on paper, the job was simple enough. Visit random locations in a two state area and check that the vendor was actually displaying my company’s product properly and that all the goods were arriving in a satisfactory condition. Also, that they were disposing of the out of date food in the manner dictated by the agreement.
The reality was that the company sent me a list of places that included some that were very far away from each other, and only paid me a few cents a mile to travel to them. Oh, and they included places like mom and pop gas stations in the middle of no-fucking-where.
I took a deep breath. ”It’s okay. You didn’t hit it, " I said, just as something else came careening out of the dark, slamming into the side of my car. I screamed, the sudden impact startling in its intensity. This was no mere smack. It was enough to rock my car over onto its side.
“What?” I breathed heavily, trying to make sense of what had just happened. I peered through the windshield and saw nothing but the empty road ahead. Nothing but inky sky appeared through my driver’s side window. “What the actual fuck?” My brain told me I needed to try to get out of my car to see if whoever had collided with me was alright. I pressed the button to release my seatbelt only for the car to get impacted again, this time hitting the exposed undercarriage of my car.
Since I was unbuckled, the force threw me forward and a bit to the side, my head hitting the dashboard before I landed sprawled across the seats, the gear shift digging into my upper abdomen.
A strange clicking and chirping sound got my attention, and I lifted my head to look through my windshield again. It had a large crack in it now, and I found myself wondering how that had happened when I’d been hit underneath. A bright light dazzled my eyes, and I squinted, trying to make out the shape of the person I could see coming from whatever vehicle had stopped to help us. Green? No, that couldn’t be right.
A second figure joined the first, and they stepped closer. Yes, they were definitely covered head to toe in green and gray and wearing some sort of respirator mask.
One of them raised a hand to point at my car, and another flash of light sent me careening into darkness.
I woke up to more bright lights and hands holding me down as I moved along a corridor. Hospital. I must have been there longer than I’d thought, and those had been paramedics or maybe firefighters responding to the accident. The person who hit me must have called, or someone came along from a house nearby that I’d missed the driveway to, thanks to it being nestled in the woods.
I reached up to touch the mask on my face, only for a hand to slap mine away. There was something wrong with the hand, and I struggled for a moment to figure out what that was. Then it hit me - it was green, with too many finger joints. I followed the gray sleeve up to look at the person it belonged to and screamed. He cocked his head and chirped and a sweet gas filled my nose and mouth and I careened off into darkness once more.
I came to with the worst hangover of my life. My mouth was dry and tasted like shit, my eyes were gritty, and someone was having way too much fun playing the drums in my head. Also, I hurt all over. I opened my eyes as I remembered the car accident, then that weird hallucination I had when I regained consciousness at the hospital. I made a mental note to tell the doc about it so he could list the side effects in my chart. Wait, why did it smell so bad in here? Not a disinfectant sort of unpleasant either, but actually rank, like body odor, sewage, and decomposing trash. And was I on the floor? What the hell?
I sat up, hating how stiff I was and how my drug hangover made the world around me move oddly.
“And you’re awake,” a woman’s voice rasped. “Hi, I’m Beth.”
I twisted around carefully to look at her and wished to high heaven I hadn’t. Greasy matted hair, the small blonde had definitely seen better days. Her face was looking a bit gaunt, and she had bags under her eyes. I could see a few more people in a more or less similar state huddled in a corner behind her, looking at me with curiosity. Next to them was a row of long, stacked boxes, with blinking lights on the sides. More boxes sat haphazardly against the wall behind them.
“Where the hell am I?” I asked, clutching my head as lightning crashed through my skull as I spoke.
“Shh, not so loud. If we don’t keep it down, they get mad. You don’t want them to get mad, trust me.”
My hand dropped in horror as my mind processed the facts as I knew them. Something had hit my car. Someone came and took me out of the car. Someone very weird looking had transported me somewhere and knocked me out. This was not a hospital. It was a storage room? In a warehouse? And there were hungry, dirty people who were terrified of other people who did bad things if they decided you were too loud. Shit. I was in a horror movie.
“I’ve been kidnapped,” I whispered.
“Got it in one,” she replied softly. “Abducted by aliens, to be more precise.”
My heart stuttered at her words. Those green hands and that face had been real?
My stomach roiled, and I turned away, dry retching.
“Try to do that in the trough,” she said, pointing to a section of wall I'd not noticed yet. I stared as a guy crouched over the trough, defecating.
“That’s our toilet?’
“Yeah. They empty it every couple of days, so it gets quite ripe in here. You’ll get used to it.”
I did not want to get used to it.
“Do you know why they took us?”
