She shook her head. “No, but we’re all around the same age, and we were all alone when we were taken.”
That meant someone had been watching me, or how else would they know that a guy my age would be traveling that road alone? Were my bosses in on it? Did they send me out on those stops knowing I’d end up traveling that quiet highway, ripe for the picking?
The guy wiped his ass with his hand and I felt like barfing again. He smeared it on the wall above the trough in an effort to clean it off, then hitched up his pants. He strode over. “Hi, I’m Gary. They grabbed me from my hotel room. I was on my way to my kid brother’s high school graduation and had stopped halfway at one of those old motels along the highway.”
“I was on a camping trip with Carol and Sam,” the girl said, gesturing over her shoulder at two women who waved at me hesitantly. “We’d rented an RV and had pulled over for the night along the highway. We thought we were alone except for the occasional passing truck, the odd coyote, and the desert.”
I was sensing a theme here. “So they hunt the rural highways.”
“Looks that way,” Gary said. “We don’t know how they got the ones in the coffins.”
“Coffins?” Oh, that did not sound good. Not one little bit.
He pointed at the long boxes with the lights. “That’s what they look like, only the lids are also see through and the people inside have masks on and tubes going in. We think they might be some kind of stasis units, like on TV.”
“Yeah, we think they didn’t have enough for everyone, or else they package you up when they get an order or something.” Beth rubbed her arms as if to ward off the chilling thought.
A loud chittering sound suddenly echoed around the room.
“They’re on loudspeakers. We hear them like that right before they come in.” She pointed to the wall where her friends were huddled.
“We need to line up there or they’ll use the shock stick on us.”
Gary grabbed under one of my arms and helped me move across the space.
“Thanks,” I said, earning me a dirty look from one of the two girls who wasn’t Beth. I wasn’t sure yet which one was Carol and which one was Sam.
“Shh,” Beth rebuked me as the wall parted to reveal a doorway.
I shivered at the sight of three of the aliens, two with what looked like barbed cattle prods in one hand. The other one held a box from which he tossed a bunch of large cubes onto the floor. He chittered and chirped at us before turning to leave, the guards backing out behind him in clear warning to us to not try anything.
“Dinner is served,” Gary said, and they all rushed towards the cubes, snatching them up and ravenously taking bites out of them.
Gary glanced over at me and, with a pitying look, brought me one of them.
“Tastes like compressed cardboard and grass, but it’s all we get.”
“No water to wash them down with?’ I asked, taking it from him.
“When they turn the pipe on to sluice out the trough, you gotta stick your head in the stream where it comes out of the pipe and drink as much as you can, then let someone else have a go.”
We had to drink out of the toilet, basically. The thought made me feel too sick to even try to eat.
“You gotta make yourself eat it. They don’t come in at regular times and we’re damned sure aren’t getting fed three times a day.”
Fear gripped me. Now I knew why they looked so gaunt. They were on starvation rations. Correction. We were on starvation rations.
“How…how long have you been here?”
He looked at me sadly. “Sam has an old wind up watch that was her mother’s. At first, she kept it wound. She counted off fifteen days. I was here before she was, for several more days before that. And the coffins were full when I first got here. There was another guy here before you, Fred. He kept screaming and shouting, and they hit him with the shock sticks and dragged him out of here. We haven’t seen him since.”
I couldn’t decide if Fred’s probable fate was better or worse than what ours was going to be. I knew one thing, though. I wasn’t ready to die quite yet. I took a nibble. Gary was right. It tasted like grass and cardboard. Yummy.
2
ROBBIE
I touched the back of my head, wincing.
