Kidnapped by Aliens, Chapter 1. Down to Earth

Filed Under Creative Writing, Science Fiction

A Book by EZPowell

Chapter 1. Down to Earth

Where am I and what am I doing here? Perhaps the question should be how did I arrive here? I am sitting on a cold concrete bench, on a dirty station platform in a small town called Menton. I recognize the place because I have been here before, many years ago in my youth. I love this place, nestled in a small bay on the south coast of France, just shy of the Italian border. The mixture of stylish French and tatty Italian architecture, multicolored roofs and stone-cobbled streets, all obvious from the bench I am sitting on overlooking the town. It is a beautiful and wonderful sight. So…I am back down on earth after being kidnapped. And not just kidnapped, but Kidnapped by Aliens.

In order to tell this story so that it makes sense, I have to start at the end of it. What pops into my mind, sitting on that cold hard bench at God knows what unearthly hour in the morning, is:

“How did I get here? Why does it make sense and why do I feel so relieved?” I thought to myself.

I am about 5,000 miles from my current home and I am not really quite sure how I got here. It’s all gradually coming back to me, whilst I sit looking at the town in the early dawn light, pondering my good fortune at having escaped, or rather having been helped to escape.

There doesn’t seem to be a soul in sight —no trains, no lights, no people. I am hoping this is not all a dream. Perhaps I have returned to yet another plane in what appears to be an infinite number of planes or parallel universes, all co-existing with one another, all completely unaware of the existence of all the others. Or perhaps everyone is still asleep. I chalk that one up as the better out of other more horrifying options. At this stage it is all I can hope for.

Suddenly I hear birds singing, just one or two. My awareness is starting to reach out or perhaps simply slip back into reality. Perhaps those multiple parallel universes and that trip beyond reality was all a dream after all. All my senses are beginning to tune into reality. My eyes see the sky and the town. My ears hear a bird or two twittering, some faint traffic noises in the distance and my nose picks up the familiar smells of human habitation.

All of a sudden there is the squawking of a large bird in the distance and a fluttering of wings. I hear a faint screech of metal on metal, then another. A faint rumble begins in the earth beneath me. I drift inward a little again, retrogressing into fear and adrenalin-pumping excitement, and a fight for survival —one that perhaps no human being has ever experienced. Then I feel the rumble and hear the screeching metal again. I drift back to outer awareness slowly as the rumbling and screeching is a slow freight train beginning to pass in front of me on the tracks through the station. Of course, it is still only the time of dawn’s early light and nobody is going anywhere at this unsavory hour of the morning. The freight train seems to go on and on, as freight trains often do, seeming to pass slowly and without end.

“This train appears to be heading east!” My inner voice pipes up at me, silently panicking.

My unconscious mind is screaming a warning at me but my conscious mind —com-fortable on a cold concrete bench 5,000 miles from home, on what appears to be familiar ground— is pleading for all the good things to stay and all the bad memories to remain tucked away, safely hidden from view, and safely hidden from having to be dealt with. Besides, my body is so exhausted from the last few days or weeks or months or whatever it has been, it pleads for rest.

Suddenly my unconscious thought pops into the forefront. Once again my survival instincts break through to concentrate on what I can see, hear, feel and smell.

“Danger!” it says. “Survival!” it says.

I must survive, that is what my body is evolved for. The most primitive part of my brain kicks my fear response into action. In the space of a fraction of a second, my brain passes a signal to my overworked adrenal gland, which pumps prodigious amounts of crazy-juice into my already overstressed and overworked musculature. Once the adrenalin is pumping, my heart pounds in fury and the sinews of fibrous-power in my legs, arms and torso spring into action. It all functions well. At that stage I am not really quite sure why but my body seems to leap from the bench like a coiled spring and I am running down the platform next to the freight train.

My mind is screaming at me in full awareness now.

“Get out, get out fast. Get out NOW! Powerful politicos will not allow you to go and return to your former life.”

Two sides of a political fight will never let me go. They have to be sure I am dead just so I can never return and cause them even minor embarrassment.

“Good grief!” I think. “Why would I want to return there?”

The full scope of my experience is all buried in my memories and is beginning to return, but survival and staying alive is more important right now. I run along side the freight train. There are no open cars as one is always led to believe. Everything I can see is shut, bolted and padlocked. So I must take my chances, as I have many times in the recent past I seem to recall. I will jump at the rear car, a liquid-carrying car. There is no caboose. Those went out of style years ago. Now they have cameras and computers and electronic signal posts. There is a ladder on the rear of this last car carrying petroleum or natural gas or nitrous oxide, or Heaven knows what other unpleasantly explosive substance.

“Perhaps it is only carrying milk?” I think half-heartedly and hopefully.

I am running down the platform at top speed, leaning forward at forty-five degrees with adrenalin-filled legs racing —and running out of platform I might add. For a few brief moments I keep pace with the train and the last car with the ladder.

“This is dangerous”, I think to myself.

My recent memories remind me that what is probably coming to this spot, where I have fallen to earth, is probably a lot more lethal than running after a freight train in the early hours of a cold spring morning, in a seaside town called Menton, nestled in a small bay on the French side of the Cote D’Azur, of the French-Italian border.

I leap desperately at the train. I grab at the rungs of the ladder with both hands, clinging to what is now my only reality – cold, metal rungs on which my very survival may well depend. What of the residents of the town? There is little I can do, and little warning I can give. I have seen this before, more recently than I would like but I have seen it before. No one will listen. They will kick me out the door of the police station or lock me up and throw away the key. They might even perform experiments on me, especially if they discover I can sprint after a freight train at forty-five miles an hour and grab onto a single rung with two fingers and not manage to get myself killed in the process. The truth be said, there is much different about me since I left this home planet of mine – involuntarily of course. I was picked as a guinea pig but also as a representative of my race. Now I must represent it and perhaps help to steer its course for the future. Can I even return to my former life? Would I place my kith and kin in too much danger? Perhaps. however, for now I must use the vast resources I have been given to assure the future of humankind and all that lives on this planet. So for now I absolutely must survive!

The train continues onward, gathering up speed on the flat straight track along the coast. I can see the town, now in the distance, receding and fading into the dawn’s early glow. As I am looking back my vision spots a slight shimmering in the sky over the Mediterranean, just offshore and outside of the safety of the little bay. The shimmering would look odd to most of the town’s inhabitants. It would look so very odd that people would subconsciously block it out from reality, effectively consciously ignoring what they were seeing. I know this shimmering sight though, I have seen it before. There is no time to waste for horror is about to descend upon this quiet, peaceful, seaside town.

The part of my brain dedicated to my survival forces my body to act without mental deliberation and consideration. My body knows what to do. I climb the ladder, turning my back on what is to come. As I tightrope walk along the top of the slippery surface of the round, steel casing of the last car of this train (even James Bond can’t walk a moving train like this), I see in the periphery of my awareness the painted sign on the top of the car says “LAIT”. Well at least it isn’t something explosive, I think to myself. Milk can make quite a mess but it doesn’t go bang if it gets too hot. I reach the back end of the next car and drop like a stone down between the two cars, hoping for something to grab onto to stop my fall. I must be quick! I grab the rungs of the ladder on the other car, clinging on with the desperation of hopeful survival.

What will happen to Menton in the next few moments will give no hope of survival. I can hear a slight fizzling in the air, a surge of power that takes my breath away. I poke my head around the edge of the car to see a monstrous gray, shimmering, metallic shape hanging about 1,000 feet above the ocean, off the coast of this small, sleeping town. They can’t let me go and the only way to be sure is to nuke me from orbit, so to speak. Well, not exactly from orbit. A split second later a blue shaft of light extends from the shimmering metallic object hanging in the air. The blue shaft of light is of an intensity beyond human imagination, hotter than the core of the sun and burning through the very essence of what it touches, cutting through the top layers of the earth like a knife through butter. In micro-seconds, it heats the solid granite bedrock beneath the streets of the town, the harbor and extending out along the coastline. The beam cuts a swathe along the coastline and switches off. The huge shimmering ship ceases to exist, vanishing now that its brutal job is done.

They came for me, only me. Perhaps I should have made myself an easy target, somewhere out there, in the vastness of space, but there is work to do. I must accomplish what I set out to do or perhaps this entire planet will suffer a similar fate to that of this small sleepy, pretty town, nestled in the hills of Roman-Gallic antiquity. The town appears to bulge upwards from the edge of the swathe cut by the torch of light. And then all hell breaks loose. The rock under the bay and the coastline is superheated and bursting to get out. An entire section of coastline, three to four miles long simply erupts in a molten furnace of matter and antimatter particles colliding with each other on a horrific scale. The town of Menton ceases to exist in the most cataclysmic of explosions. The mushroom cloud of dust, debris, rock, and boiling seawater extends many miles high into the stratosphere in seconds. The crater is replaced by the rushing onslaught of the rest of the Mediterranean Sea. An ocean of salt water and muck fills the sudden hole made by superheated steam and vaporized rock. An entire chunk of the map, both ocean and coastline, have simply ceased to exist. Within twenty seconds there is a huge wall of water bashing against what is left of the surrounding bay. The backwash of the sudden surge of ocean water that filled in the large hole in the earth where the town used to be is now speeding across the Mediterranean Sea to the north coast of Africa, the east coast of Spain and the west coast of Italy, and all the countless numbers of islands in between. The tidal waves of Krakatoa and Santorini (Plato’s Atlantis) might equal the monster on its way. Rome may once again be sacked, this time by a small tidal wave. North Africa will be awash and the east coast of Spain might be drowned. As for the islands, that is anybody’s guess.

For now, I am alive and escaping, I hope without a trace. I have work to do, a lot of work to do.