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Welcome to my brain. If you’re reading this, you either know some of what happened and want to know more, or you have no idea what happened and enjoy reading teenagers’ journals. Either way you won’t believe me. I hardly believe it myself, and I probably wouldn’t if I didn’t experience it. The souvenirs I took with me in the form of blood and a huge scar prove that it wasn’t a hallucination.
But whatever anyone believes, I feel like I have to write this down. For the past year or so I’ve been having nightmares almost every night. Aliens, blood, death…everything I saw haunts me at night. Therapy was a bust. That was because the shrink, still green out of shrink school, didn’t believe a word I said. I don’t expect him or anyone else to believe my story, but I do, and I hope that I can relieve my nightmares by putting it all down on paper.
First, a little about me, The Incredible Mike Sullivan. I’m the stereotypical bullied nerd – Peter Parker without the super powers. I’m smart, geeky, I love computers too much, and I have a face that asks bullies to punch it into interesting new shapes. Needless to say, I fall for all the jokes and I’m very susceptible to them. I am also scared of needles and very lazy, and that kills my grades because homework can be a pain, but now I’m just ranting. I have a story to tell, and I don’t need to bore you with my life before things stop being boring. I just thought it might help to know the Before and After of my life – what happened changed me, and you will find out how.
My story starts one night while I was "doing homework", which is a euphemism for thinking of reasons not to do homework. It was simple biology, but my brain goes on strike at ten forty at night, no exceptions. I was turning the worksheet into a paper plane when the weird things started happening.
The first thing was a headache – the worst, most massive and painful headache I’ve ever had. Just writing about it gives me a headache. It almost knocked me out, that’s how bad it was, but it only lasted a few seconds. It was over as soon as it started. Then the lights in my bedroom went out, and at the same time things in my room began to glow. Not like they were on fire, but they began emanating a strange blue light. I realized that everything that lit up was metal, like the zipper and all the little teeth on my fly. I was confused; I thought that maybe it was an illusion caused by the killer hit-and-run headache, which fazed me. My head cleared, and I heard something: a faint buzzing sound, getting louder, then softer, then louder again. I wondered what on earth was going on (which is ironic, because what was going on wasn’t from Earth.) My smart science brain rushed to provide reasons and explanations. I came up empty. I was scared and confused.
I looked around for anything that could give me a clue as to what was happening, and I saw something out the window. It was a shimmering gray blob, out of focus, and in the darkness I could hardly make it out. I got up, feeling dizzy, and was about to walk over to the window when I heard a loud bang, and the window went completely black. What I saw next made my jaw drop and glued my feet in place. The window melted away like a hologram. Dumbstruck, I was able to make out what appeared to be a long, dark tunnel stretching from somewhere far away into my room. It terrified me; I was so scared I couldn’t move, like a dream in which running is impossible. I noticed a faint blue light either really far away or really tiny, but growing, rushing at me. It was coming closer very quickly and looked like a ball of blue electricity (which is the best way I could describe it.) I tried to duck but it was too late. It enveloped my head. The pain was intense; I fell, and the last thing I saw was the thing that followed it out of the tunnel.
I woke up in darkness, unable to open my eyes or move at all. I couldn't feel anything around my wrists or ankles so I didn't think I was bound, just paralyzed. I was lying on my back, stretched out on a cold, hard surface that was definitely not the carpet of my bedroom. I felt something on my head, and something on my stomach (was it in my stomach?!) and I felt terrified. I started sweating and tearing up. I couldn’t make a sound, but someone, or something, noticed I was awake because I heard voices. Not human voices, nor that of any animal I know. It sounded like a cross between a croak and a hoarse screech, and may have been some kind of language. There were a few of them, judging by the movements and voices. When they noticed I was awake they (walked? crawled? slid?) over to me. What happened next was like a nightmare surgery – I felt pin pricks all over. They were cutting away bits of my skin, cutting my hair, sticking needles (did I mention I’m scared of needles?) into me, and rubbing me with a foul-smelling liquid.
This went on for hours, days, seconds, I have no idea. Eventually they left me alone. From what I could hear they had left, and I assumed all of them had until one started making the croaking-screeching noises again. He adjusted something and I felt a shock go through my body. My eyes opened, and I was able to move. Eventually they propped me up in a chair and left me alone. Which was not unlike the sort of chair you'd find at a dentist's office, and bound my arms, legs, and neck. I looked around. I was in a small room, dimly lit, made completely of metal. My chair was made of some unknown material. The worst, however, was the thing immediately to my left, the thing that I saw come through the tunnel. It looked like a monstrous black frog, which explained the croaking noises. Its stomach was gray and had a lot of tentacles, some longer than others. The rest of the skin was bubbly and slimy; a disgusting mixture of black and dark green with one giant triangular eye in the middle that stayed open, surrounded by tentacles. The bottom half of its body was like a slug and it had three arm-like things coming out of its head; one was empty, one held a metal rod, and the other held a small black machine.
It started speaking in its horrible croaking language. It put the black machine in front of its mouth while it spoke, and when it was done the machine, apparently a translator, started speaking.
“What do you call yourself?”
I was shocked. Petrified. I couldn’t answer, speak, comprehend what just happened, or keep my bladder under control. I stayed quiet with my mouth and eyes wide open for a while when it spoke again into the machine. The black machine repeated what the alien said.
“Is English not your language?”
Some of my senses came back to me. “Yes…it is,” I stammered. The machine repeated what I said in the croaking language. Did I fall asleep while I was doing my homework? I tried to convince myself that this was all a big nightmare. I tried biting my tongue to wake myself up. Didn’t work. Why was this happening?
More croaking. “What do you call yourself?”
“M…Mike,” I answered. “What is this? Where am I?”
“I am understanding your life. Mike. Answer questions.”
Oh. I was being interrogated. Even now, as I write, I can’t get over the experience of having that thing talk to me though the translating machine.
“We have learned how you speak. How you think. How you do. What do you know of your species?”
My species? Humans? What can I say about humans? We suck, we’re dumb, we make laws and contradict ourselves. I had no idea what it was looking for, so I decided to be brave and take up the offensive: “What can you tell me about you? Where did you come from?” I prayed to the black translator that it would work.
“Your kind does not know of us. We study you and control you. You will soon learn this is the truth.” It paused for a moment while I digested what he said. “We are not from this planet; you don’t know our origins and you never will. You call us alien; you are alien to us.”
Aliens from another planet…classic. I almost laughed in spite of everything.
“I know you humans are scared. You think you are dreaming. You are not. I am real. Others are real. We will put you in a cell and study you. You are always watched.” And with that, it pressed a button on the machine, and I fell asleep.
The next thing I remember was waking up in a bed. It felt like my bed. It was comfortable and I was tired and aching. I vaguely remembered talking to an alien…I wasn’t sure if it was a dream or not. I took a look at the bed. Jabba the Hutt pillowcase. Lightsabers pictured all over the blanket. Dark blue sheets. It was my bed from my room. Looking around, however, I realized I wasn’t in my room. I was in a small room with padded green walls and a metal floor and ceiling and one other bed. It all rushed back to me: the weird occurrences in my bedroom, being poked and scraped and pricked on the chair, talking to the alien. Somehow, my bed ended up in this cell. I looked at the other bed. Another boy was sleeping on it. He was tall, blonde, and built like a caveman, almost too big for his small, ragged cot. On one side of the square room was a door that looked like it opened from bottom to top, but no handle or knob was visible.
I looked towards the boy on the other bed. His dirty t-shirt and torn jeans strongly contrasted with my neat button down shirt and pressed khakis. I waited a bit before trying to wake him up.
“Hello?” I called. He snored.
I got out of my bed and tiptoed over to him. I realized then that my shoes were gone, but I paid little notice. When I was a foot from his bed, he opened his eyes and sat up urgently. “Who are you?” he demanded.
“My name is Mike,” I answered. "Who are you?”
He paused for a second and told me that his name is Calvin. He looked at me suspiciously. I preempted his question.
“Were you also taken by aliens? Because that’s how I’m here.”
“Yes,” he replied. “They took me from my room.” He had a deep southern drawl. “Where are you from?” he asked.
“New York. And you?”
“All over. My dad travels, and I go with him.”
We talked for a bit, finding out about each other. I concluded that he had a way more interesting life than I did. He and his dad traveled all over the U.S. with a few others to make a traveling circus. Calvin rode a unicycle. I held in a laugh trying to picture all that hugeness balancing on one wheel; he must weigh at least two hundred pounds and he looked clumsy. One night, while staying in a hotel in Dallas, Texas, the aliens took him. All the things that happened to me in my room happened to him: the headache, the glowing metal, the sounds, and the blue light.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” he answered. “Could be a few days, maybe even a few weeks. Or months. I don’t know.”
“I just got here,” I said. “I don’t know how long I was asleep, though. Do they ever take you out of this room?”
“A few times. Sometimes they put me in a chair and put me to sleep. After that I usually feel weak. Sometimes they put me in different rooms like this one. They use me for experiments, and they’ll do the same with you.”
His southern accent made it more eerie. I knew I was there for experiments, and it still scared me. Maybe it scared Calvin even more that I was there; maybe he thought they had enough of him and kidnapped me to replace him. What exactly did they want?
Silence fell over us. I walked over to my bed and sat on it. At least I wasn’t there alone. Calvin may make for interesting company. Conversation was the only way for us to pass time, even though we could never tell how much time had passed. I fell asleep a few times after being overcome by what felt like artificial tiredness. Calvin also slept; sometimes we slept at the same time and sometimes not. It was like our sleep patterns were being controlled.
Food also came, but we could not tell if it was on a schedule or not. Every so often a panel in the ceiling would open and two biscuit-like things dropped, followed by two containers of water. I was always hungry when the biscuits came and completely full after I ate them, even though they weren’t very big. Maybe they controlled our hunger as well as our sleep. Neither of us needed the bathroom; apparently the food was fully used. I understood how Calvin didn’t know how long he was there; any time period could’ve been a day or a week or months.
Then some excitement came. After countless cycles of sleeping and eating and doing nothing, the door opened. An alien came in holding the rod that I saw the interrogator alien holding when I first came. It held the rod up and a blue light appeared at the end of it. The blue light shot at Calvin, and with a scream, he fell unconscious onto his bed. He pointed the rod at me, and I was nearly ready for it, but it came too fast. I tried to dive out of the way, but it hit my shoulder, which proceeded to burst into excruciating pain. My arm couldn’t move and my body weakened. I didn’t faint, though, and I felt the alien drag me out of the room with a tentacle wrapped around my arm. It felt slimy and disgusting and I couldn’t move my other arm to try to get it off. I was too weak to do anything but be dragged. My eyes were half shut, but I saw it drag me around corners, through hallways and rooms and ramps. Some felt like metal; most like materials I’ve never seen.
After a few minutes of being dragged, the alien picked me up and put me on a chair like the one on which I was when I first came. Once again I was bound by the cuffs on the chair, only this time, six aliens surrounded me. I was fully awake and alert, and I was terrified. The alien all the way on my right had a black translating machine like the one used earlier.
The alien with the machine started talking to me. “Do you want to go to your house?” it asked.
I was surprised at the question, and still freaked out by the croaking/screeching voice it ejected. “Of course I do,” I replied. I was skeptical.
It handed the machine to the alien next to it. This second alien spoke to me next. “Why do you want to go to your house?” it challenged.
“My family’s at home, my friends are there…I was happy there.” The machine translated and relayed my words to the aliens.
Alien number two handed the translator to the alien number three right next to it. My response had reminded me of home, and I felt homesick. I even longed to be doing homework. The aliens looked blurry through my teary eyes.
“Do not try to evoke sympathy. We will not put you at your house,” the alien said, dashing the little short-lived hope I had. “We don’t care for your wellbeing.” No kidding.
“So why did you ask if I wanted to go to my house?” I inquired.
The fourth alien, now holding the machine, ignored my question and asked its own. “How many of your kind are there?”
“Humans, you mean?”
I expected an answer, but they stood there on their gray slug-like bottoms and stared at me with their big triangle eyes. So I assumed they meant humans.
“About seven billion I think.”
He handed the translator to number five. The croak came out of its mouth and was translated as, “Why do you appear not like Calvin, or like other humans?”
To this I replied, “All humans look different. Genes from both parents combine to create a child, so we all look different.” Lucky me for doing bio homework. None of my answers was followed by a response.
I thought the alien who had just spoken would give it to the next one, but it didn’t. Instead, the alien shocked me and terrified me even more. “Your chair senses that you are scared,” it said without the machine.
I almost fainted. This alien could speak English, but it was the most disgusting and horrific way of speaking I’ve ever heard, even worse than the aliens' own language. It sounded as if each word came out of an empty, cold, lifeless void. It spoke again.
“I know that you are curious. You want to know why you are here on this ship. You are here for us. We study you, we watch you, we record everything you do. We manage your food and sleep. We will do as we need as long as we have need of you. When that is no longer, we will dispose.”
I’ll admit it; at that, I started to bawl. Tears poured down my face. I sniffled and cried for my family, for my home and school. I even cried for the bullies at school.
The alien didn’t care for it much. “We don’t have your emotions. All we seek is knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and it is at your expense.” It let the info sink in. “Now we will measure the effects of different stimuli on your brainwaves. Goodbye.”
The alien stopped talking. I was still crying. One alien went behind me and put something over my eyes. I suddenly felt myself grow weak and tired, with sharp pains in my forehead; they were probably injecting me with a strong sedative. That’s all I remember from my second time in the chair.
I was woken up in my bed in my cell. Someone was shaking me awake, someone who wasn’t Calvin or an alien. I didn’t recognize him, but he seemed to be around my age. I sat up in bed. Calvin was still asleep. There wasn’t a third bed in the room, but a small ragged blanket. The boy who shook me awake was short, dark-skinned, and had spiky black hair.
“¿Quién eres tú? ¿Dónde estoy?”
He was speaking Spanish, which was never my strongest subject. I replied with the little I knew.
“Uh…hablé…um…Ingles…? Do you know English?”
He looked at me weirdly. “Sí…I understand little.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Name is Marco, and I'm from Mexico. Your name?”
“I’m Mike, and that’s Calvin,” I said, pointing to him. “The aliens took both of us, and I guess they took you too.”
“¿Los monstruos?” He exclaimed, his eyes wide. “They come like nightmares!”
At that point Calvin woke up. I remembered then what the alien said about always watching us. Calvin looked at Marco, looked at me, and I told him what Marco told me so far. We had a similar conversation to the one I had with Calvin earlier, with Calvin and I learning about him and him learning about us. Marco was Mexican, poor, and lived in Arizona. He spoke English decently, and definitely subtracted from the boredom.
He described how he was taken. He was sitting in the bedroom that he shared with his three brothers, but he was the only one there. He saw everything I saw, was taken the way I was taken, and went through the episode with the chair like I did. The aliens, apparently, had a plan to capture a number of humans to study them. And for some reason, the three of us happened to be teenagers.
We all talked about this and theorized about it. Calvin thought that maybe they were studying us to take over our planet. I thought that sounded too science-fictiony, which was ridiculous because at that point nothing was too science fictiony. From what the alien told me, I thought they just wanted to study us for the sake of studying us – “knowledge for knowledge’s sake,” I remembered the alien saying. That put an end to theorizing.
Things were pretty much the same after Marco came. The food was the same, only this time there were three biscuits instead of two. Sleep was still out of our control; we’d get tired randomly, sometimes one of us at a time, sometimes two, and sometimes all three of us. We still had no idea how long we'd been there. This stayed the same until Marco was taken. That’s also when Calvin and I began our escape.
Marco was taken from the room the same way I was. The large door opened up from the bottom. An alien slid in, holding the stick with the blue light. It shot at Marco, and he was out. I was next. Blue light, boom, K.O.
Calvin woke me up. He looked drunk.
“Mike? You better wake up…the alien hit my arm, but I wasn’t knocked out…I was able to stop the door from closing.”
I got up and looked around. The door was a quarter of the way open, with enough room to crawl under. That realization hit my brain like a freight train hitting a mannequin. I jumped off my bed, and a sharp pain surged through my head. The inside of my skull felt like it was on fire, probably from the blue light. Calvin noticed me holding my face in my hands, and said, “Forget about your head...I know it hurts, but now's time to ignore it.”
I ignored it.
“Follow me,” he said.
He crawled under the door and I followed. Outside was a long hallway. It was brightly lit but no lights were visible, as if the light was coming from within the walls and ceiling.
Calvin looked at me, slightly scared. I don’t think his face was used to showing fear; if anything, I, the weak one, should be wetting myself, but I wasn’t.
“Where do we go now?” he asked.
“We’ll look for Marco, then the three of us will try to get out,” I replied. “The alien that spoke to me called this a ship, so I’m sure there’s a way back.’’
With that decided, I started down the hallway with Calvin following closely behind. There were corners and curves and forks, and I picked directions randomly. We walked in silence for a long time until Calvin heard a noise.
“What’s that?” he asked, his eyes wide.
I listened and heard it too. I put my ear against the wall, where the sound seemed to be coming from. The aliens were making the noise, but they weren’t talking. They were screaming, some in the croaking language and some, clearly, in pain. I ran along the wall, moving closer to the sound.
All of a sudden, the wall about ten feet in front of me opened up from the bottom, like the door in my cell. An alien slid out, screaming horribly. The sound sent chills down my spine. It slid down the hallway, right past me without noticing me or Calvin. That was because, I noticed, the big triangular eye was broken. Lime-green liquid poured out of it and left a trail behind the alien.
Calvin and I looked at each other, shocked. We walked cautiously towards the opening in the wall. There was still more screaming and sounds of fighting. I jumped back when another alien came out, this one even more injured than the first. It slid away without noticing us.
Fighting continued; I had no idea who could be doing this to the aliens. I waited outside the opening with Calvin, trying to listen to the brawl and calm him down at the same time. After a while the chaos stopped. Silence mixed with the sick, rotten smell filling the air. I tiptoed towards the opening and looked in. No one was there, but I saw two other doors like the one I was in. I went inside the room.
The smell was even worse in the room. I never smelled a corpse, but I imagined this to be much worse. The room was bare except for a chair in the middle – the chair I recognized as the one to which the aliens had bound me earlier. On the floor next to the head of the chair was an alien, apparently dead. The lime-green blood spilled out of many holes. I walked closer, trying to ignore Calvin’s unsteady breathing behind me. I walked around the chair, and what I saw there horrified me more than anything I’ve seen so far. I understood why it smelled so bad: Marco’s dead body lay on the floor. Marco was mangled; pale skin torn in many places. His ripped shirt was soaked in blood, both his red blood and the aliens’ green blood stained his clothes and the floor around him. His neck had a circular opening through which his blood had emptied out of him; apparently nothing was left. There were similar gashes throughout his body. Calvin threw up.
I was scared at that point. I looked to the alien to see what could have caused such injuries, and I saw it. The tentacles sticking out of it around the eye opened up into small tubes with razor-sharp teeth along the perimeter of the circle. Its size and shape matched that of the hole in Marco’s neck. These aliens were bloodsuckers; they used their tentacles to suck blood from Marco, killing him.
“Mike…look what it did,” whispered Calvin, nearly in tears.
“I see what it did,” I replied. “But now isn’t the time to talk, we have to focus on leaving.” How was I feeling so confident?
I looked around for anything that might be useful, wondering how I would ever be able to escape. Is the ship on Earth? If not, would I have to fly the ship? Those questions, among many more, ran through my head. I had to figure out what to do.
I looked at the dead alien. In one of the hands sticking out of its head was one of the rods used to shoot the blue light. I walked towards it slowly, trying not to step on the alien or in any of its goo. I bent down and picked up the rod. It was about a foot long. There was no handle, but on the tip there was a small ball, which turned blue when I picked it up by the other end. I squeezed the rod. The blue ball grew brighter and started crackling with blue electricity. The longer and harder I squeezed it, the more electricity there was.
“My new weapon,” I said to Calvin. “You should get one as well.”
He nodded in assent.
“We have to leave,” I asserted.
“Alright,” he mumbled.
We left the room through a different door than the one through which we first came. This led to similar hallways with similar twists and turns. Calvin and I didn’t make a sound as we walked. After what seemed like forever, we heard aliens talking, but not fighting. We approached the sound, which was coming from behind a door. The door seemed pretty simple to open: right next to it was a lever. The aliens, apparently, didn’t expect us to be running around.
“Should we pull the lever?” Calvin asked. “It looks like that’s how we can open this door.”
“It probably is…but do we want to open the door? I don’t want to be caught and overcome by more aliens.”
Calvin scratched his head. “We don’t have much of a choice, we won’t have many other chances to escape.”
“That’s true. We’ll go in…ready?”
“Yep,” he replied. He took a deep breath. “But you go in first. You have the weapon.”
I squeezed the little rod in my hand and looked at it. The bright blue electricity at the tip reassured me. I put my hand on the lever. It felt weird; it obviously wasn’t meant for human hands. I pushed the lever down using a lot more strength than I thought I’d need. The door opened.
I stood in the doorway. There were three aliens in the room. They looked at me, and then looked at each other. Then they started talking/croaking. I was hardly prepared for what happened next – all three of them charged at me, moving faster than I’ve ever seen them move. None of them had the rods, so I lifted mine, squeezed it and pointed it at them. They didn’t flinch, but one grabbed my arm and pulled me towards it. It stuck out a tentacle, and the razor-sharp edge almost pierced my stomach, but Calvin saved me. Calvin, with an enraged determination, seized the tentacle and tore it right off the alien, where it started to writhe in his hand. The alien screamed horribly, and I pulled my arm out of its grasp. I jabbed the rod, which was glowing bright and sizzling with electricity, into its eye. I was squeezing as hard as I can, and the rod electrified the alien. All of its arms and tentacles jerked out, and then they all dropped, limp and motionless.
I was breathing hard and unevenly. The other two aliens were on either side of me and Calvin. They were calculating; they were less aggressive. One of them pulled out a rod like the one I had. It pointed the rod at Calvin and shot. Without thinking, I stuck my own rod in front of Calvin, and it absorbed the lethal blue bolt. I realized that I was able to use my rod as a shield. I just had to figure out how to shoot. The other alien slid out of the room quickly.
“We’ll take on this one,” I said. “I think the other one went to get more.”
Calvin grunted in agreement. The alien was sliding back cautiously, holding the rod out in defense and trying to look at both of us at once. Calvin and I spread out to either side, backing the alien into a corner. The alien didn’t look scared, but I don’t know what fear would look like on that face. Or if it even felt fear. Calvin, fortunately, wasn’t scared when he tackled the alien at the same time I swung my rod at it. I didn’t hit the eye, only one of the arms, but that seemed to do the trick. The rod, which was much more powerful from the voltage it absorbed, not only electrified the alien but totally fried it. The shock also threw Calvin across the room. The alien turned black and started smoldering. The smell was even worse than the smell when Marco died. Burnt alien. Yuck.
Calvin stood up, panting. His hair was standing on end. He pointed to the alien.
“What?” I asked.
“Stick. In its hand.”
I looked at the alien. The rod was still in its hand. I bent down, picked up the rod, and handed it to Calvin. The rod crackled in his hand. He looked at me.
“Lets go,” he said. “We have to find some way out.”
I looked around the room. The door we used to come in was open, but there were two other doors, both with levers next to them.
“Right or left?” I asked, facing the doors.
“Try the right first." He decided. "I like right.”
I walked over to the lever and pulled it down. The door opened and I walked in. My mouth dropped at what I saw – I was in outer space. There were stars all over, like tiny diamonds on a large black velvet surface. I looked down and my stomach almost came up my throat. The floor was completely invisible, so I looked like I was flying. So did Calvin, who was standing next to me, equally astounded. Despite the situation, I had to appreciate what I saw…I never imagined outer space to be so amazing and overwhelming. But that room, which must have been some sort of observatory, wasn’t where I was supposed to be.
“It’s nice here, but let's go,” I instructed. He followed me out of the observatory and into the other room, where we were met by another group of aliens. The one who escaped earlier returned with backup.
There were four of them, and we were ready. At once they all shot at us; we ducked out of the way. I was able to reach the lever for the other door and I pulled it down. The door opened and I had an idea – I yanked hard at the lever and it came out of the wall. I quickly followed Calvin into the room, parrying bolts of electricity with my own, pulled up another lever that was inside, and the door closed behind us.
“We’re safe for now, but they probably have another way to get into the room,” I said. “If there’s anything to do here, we have to do it fast.”
I looked around the room. It was filled with computers and machines and screens and monitors and everything that looked perfectly at home in a control room.
“Mike…you think this is the right place?”
“Looks like we can do something here,” I said. “I don't know how we’ll work these computers, though.”
Calvin didn’t know either, but we walked up to them anyway. We couldn’t hear the aliens outside, which probably wasn’t a good thing.
There were many consoles and control panels and screens, but one screen was bigger than all the others and dominated the room, like the jumbo screens at sports stadiums. It was blank and there weren’t any buttons around it. Not knowing what to do, I touched the screen.
It turned on. I jumped back; I didn’t expect it to be so bright. The large monitor turned white, and then lines appeared – straight lines going all the way across, with small lines intersecting at different angles. It was probably some kind of writing. I touched the screen again. This time, the screen showed a picture of a boy. He was around my age, but it wasn’t me or Calvin or Marco. More lines showed under the picture. Again I pressed the screen, and another boy appeared. I did this for a while, going through images and lines.
I did that until the screen showed a picture of Calvin. I stopped and looked at him. He was staring at his picture curiously.
“I don’t remember ever having that picture taken,” he said. We were quiet. Then we heard the aliens – there was a buzzing sound coming from the other side of the door, as if they were trying to saw their way through with a chainsaw.
“We have to do something quickly,” I said. “That’s them on the other side, and I don’t think they’re here to give us birthday presents.”
“No…they’re not,” Calvin said, almost dreamily. “Press the screen one more time.”
I pressed it. I took a step back even though I knew what I was going to see – my face, big and serious, took up most of the jumbo screen. I stared; the picture was almost 3D, and I never imagined seeing myself like that.
All of a sudden the door opened. I whirled around just in time to duck a ray of red light. I looked for a source – one alien held what looked like the child of a bazooka and a disco ball. Nothing happened when the red beam hit the wall behind me, but I expected that if it hit me it wouldn’t be pretty. The alien with the disco bazooka led its group of four. Two others had rods. The fourth, which surprised me the most, was carrying a large black steel mace, straight from the medieval times. Maybe these aliens were kidnapping teenage boys even then.
The bazooka alien stayed in the center while the ones with the rods went to either side. Calvin and I moved closer together; we were on the defensive. There was a moment of quiet before the brawl began.
The aliens with the rods shot at us. We ducked and dove out of the way of the bazooka. The one with the mace did nothing.
“Get that one!” Calvin yelled, pointing to the one with the rod on the left.
I ran towards it, squeezing my rod, powering it up. I had no idea how to shoot it, but when the alien shot me I was ready – I blocked his shot with my rod. The alien with the bazooka was confused, not sure whether to go for me or Calvin. It decided on me.
The giant ray gun, which took a few seconds to load up before every shot, was pointed straight at me. I didn’t want to take the chance that my rod would defend me against that, so when it shot at me I rolled away. The thing with the rod took advantage of this and hit my leg. I screamed in pain.
I tried to stand up but my leg wasn’t working. I managed to dodge another ray from the bazooka while minding the rod. I stood up on one leg, holding up my only weapon like a sword. I looked up, only ten feet away from the bazooka. I hopped to the left. The barrel followed my progress as I moved. I preempted the shot, and rolled behind the alien with the rod – and the plan worked perfectly. The ray from the bazooka hit the alien right in the eye, and the top half of it exploded. Guts covered myself and the rest of the room.
Calvin was putting up a good fight with the other rod-alien, but I had no attention to pay to that. I had to deal with this bazooka, and I had to duck behind the remains of the blasted alien. Feeling was slowly slipping back into my leg, and I was able to limp.
That’s when the forth alien entered the battle. It swung its mace at me, which it wielded extremely well, better than any human could ever have done. All I had was an electric stick, and I didn’t even know how to shoot it. The disco bazooka, I discovered, wasn’t very difficult to dodge. It was predictable and took time to shoot. It didn’t harm the walls or computers, but I saw what it did to the other alien.
Calvin, at that time, finished his fight – he managed to slam the alien into the wall and stab it with his rod, which electrified his opponent from the inside out. Two left, and Calvin was behind them. The two aliens were closing in on me, and I slowly stepped back. I heard a low hum as the bazooka began to charge, but before it could shoot, Calvin stabbed his rod into the sluggy tail of the alien. It screamed and shot the ceiling.
The alien with the mace turned to Calvin and swung at him. He missed; Calvin was too far away. Calvin moved to the side, drawing the mace closer to him. I used the distraction to finish off the injured alien with the bazooka. One left.
“You are the first humans to do this, you know,” it said flatly.
My stomach turned over. This alien was the one who was able to speak English. The way he spoke scared me then and always will; his words were black oil steaming from a sewer.
“If you want to live,” I said, hoping this would work, “Let us go home. Bring us back to earth, to where you took us from.”
“You won’t be going back home, human. The closest you will get is what happened to your friend. I am sure you are jealous of him. There are many more of us here. You have no chance of going home, and I am not scared of you. I don’t have fear in me. And I can always grow back.”
That sent chills down my spine. I didn’t know what to say. These things grow back?
“I don’t care what you say,” Calvin interjected. “You killed Marco and many more humans. Say what you want, I’m not letting you get away with this.”
And with that, Calvin rushed at the alien, screaming and holding his rod. The alien reacted only a little too late, and hit Calvin with the long handle of the mace; Calvin was spared the heavy weight at the end with the cutthroat spikes all over. The handle knocked Calvin into me, sprawling us both on our backs. We stood up and ran in opposite directions to try to confuse it. It almost worked, but the alien chose Calvin – it threw the mace at Calvin’s feet, knocking them from under him. The alien moved over to Calvin faster than I could imagine and slid on top of him.
I ran over, but what I saw stopped me – the alien had its powerful slug tail wrapped around Calvin’s neck, choking him.
“Want to come closer?” It threatened. I stopped. “Didn’t think so," it said when it saw that I stopped moving. "You humans are so emotional, and you only hurt yourselves.”
I was stuck – either run at it and Calvin dies, or don’t run and maybe Calvin could be saved. I had to think fast. Then I remembered the holes in Marco – the aliens’ weakness.
I moved slowly in a circle around the alien, edging closer to where the mace lay on the floor. “Let him go. He hasn’t done anything to you,” I said. My mind raced.
“That’s true, but unimportant. I told you once: your lives mean nothing to me. That hasn’t changed.”
The mace was now behind me; I was between it and the alien.
“I know, but it means something to me,” I said, and turned around and ran towards the mace. I tried to pick it up, but I could barely lift it, especially holding the rod. I managed to lift it off the ground, but I realized I could do nothing with it against the alien unless the alien let me. Calvin was turning blue.
“I thought you’d do that…I know there’s no way a weakling like you can pick that up. Why don’t you try?”
If the alien were human, it’d be laughing at me, watching me try to pick up the massive weapon. But I didn’t need to. I let the mace fall to the floor and went down on one knee next to it. I pulled up my sleeve, stuck my arm on one of the spikes, and pulled my arm across quickly, cutting it open.
Blood poured all over the floor. The wound wasn’t too deep, but it was long, it hurt, and there was a lot of blood. The alien saw the blood, and its one eye bulged. Tentacles around its eye elongated and opened up, like tubular vacuum cleaners with razor blades. It glided across the room to me fast; I barely had time to move out of the way. It first went for my arm, but the blood on the floor managed to steal its attention. While it took care of that I ran over to Calvin, who was blue and barely breathing. I helped him back on his feet, and he started to get his breath back.
There was no more blood on the floor or the mace. The alien had sucked it all up, and was holding the mace above its head, the most murderous and evil look I’ve ever seen in its eye. It slithered quickly towards us, screaming. We moved out of the mace’s path. It missed me, but Calvin was not so lucky – the giant spike ball hit him square in the side of the face, demolishing it. I won’t describe that.
That made me, for the first time, truly angry. I wasn’t as close to Marco, but Calvin, besides being with me for longer, saved my life more than once. I was more determined than ever to kill it. An alien with a giant mace versus a human with a puny stick.
I ran at the alien, squeezing the rod tightly. I had to duck under the mace again, and I couldn’t come close. We kept swinging at each other; it had the advantage because the mace was so much longer than the rod. I was running around it, dodging and ducking and jumping and waiting for a time to strike.
The alien was pushing me back; once when I couldn’t move back quickly enough the mace made a cut in my stomach. That only made the alien more desperate. After that happened I tripped over something, which I recognized afterwards as Calvin’s body. The rod was still in his hand, and I took it.
I looked up. The alien was right in front of me, the mace about to come down. I rolled, and with a yell it crashed the giant weapon down, harder than ever. The enormous strength of the swing and the weight of the mace created a dent in the floor, and there was my chance. I took Calvin’s rod in one hand and mine in the other, squeezing them both until two large blue orbs crackled in front of me. I could feel the power. With a scream, I brought them down onto the mace, holding them there and hoping for the best.
The steel weapon conducted the electricity and shot it right into the alien. A burning stench filled my head and I continued until it was too much for the alien. It stopped for a second and exploded.
I sat down next to Calvin and cried. I wasn’t scared, like the last time I cried in the chair. I can’t even explain why, but I kept crying, maybe for an hour. Then I remembered what I needed to do: I had to find a way back to earth. I didn’t know if the alien was bluffing or not when it said that there are more, but I didn’t want to take the chance.
I walked over to the computer, which showed my face brightly. I touched the screen not with my finger, but with the rod – Calvin’s rod. The letters under my face disappeared and was replaced by something all too familiar – planet earth. I touched the rod to the picture of the globe.
What happened next amazed me further – The monitor grew in both height and length. The picture of the globe was getting larger, as if it were moving closer. The floor started to vibrate. The ship was moving!
I could hardly believe it. I didn’t even think what would happen when I’d get back and see everyone who missed me for however long it was, friend and family, all covered in blood and alien guts. I didn’t think about being there, I just thought about getting there.
Planet earth was growing – soon it took up the whole screen, then the screen only showed part of it. I saw clouds and oceans and countries. I saw the entire America, a new way of looking at home. The picture on the screen zeroed in on New York.
I waited about ten minutes until I was able to see my house. The ship stopped about a tenth of a mile to my house. Then the screen went blank.
I almost started to panic. What happened? I reached out to touch the screen, and my hand went right through it, like it wasn’t even there. I stuck my arm out, but I couldn’t feel anything. I took a step into the screen, and then realized that it wasn’t a screen anymore. It was a long black tunnel. I remembered the first time I saw this tunnel when the aliens first took me. One came right through with a rod, shot me, and kidnapped me. I entered, and I noticed a faint light at the end that was getting bigger. At first I was scared, fearing something sinister at the other end, but I soon recognized it as my room. My bedroom was at the end of the tunnel.
I threw the rod back into the control room and ran as fast as I could into my room. It took longer than I thought it would, but I made it. Through my window and onto my desk. I cried in happiness; I thought I would never make it back.
I looked at the clock on my desk. It showed ten forty, the exact time I was taken. I checked the date; that was the same too. I was utterly puzzled. Was everything a dream?
My arm and stomach stopped bleeding. There was a nasty-looking scab that will later become a scar. I was still covered in alien guts. I don't know how this happened, but my time with the aliens seemed not to affect time on Earth. Maybe their technology can make so much happen in an instant. Maybe so much happens every instant.
Needless to say, I didn't finish my homework. That's my story.