At the top of a rise, roughly a mile away from the huts, I pause, catching my breath and peering back from behind my supposed cloak of invisibility. Vehicle lights illuminate a series of huts. I can’t see anyone walking around at this distance, but they know I’m on the run.
I head down into a gully, getting out of the wind and following the terrain away from camp. I’m hoping there’s a road or some houses further down the valley. Although I have no idea where I am, this must be upstate New York. I can’t imagine I’m more than ten miles from some form of civilization. Just keep those legs moving, keep those thighs pumping.
The sound of rotor blades drifts by on the wind, and I huddle under my mattress beside a rocky outcrop. Search lights flicker across the forest, but without coming close to me, and as quickly as they came, the helicopters are gone. They’re moving in tandem, flying methodically over the forest, which is good as they’re circling away from me.
I push on through almost waist-deep snow, trying to find high ground above the drifts to make my trek easier.
I’m stupidly cold. Over time, my forced march deteriorates into a drunken walk, which further degrades into a frantic stumble. After collapsing a couple of times, I realize I need to get out of the storm and try to get warm. Good idea. Not very practical, but good. I’m in the middle of a forest with few options. I’m utterly exhausted—physically and mentally. I pull the mattress against the base of a pine tree with low hanging branches, and huddle there shivering, waiting for a dawn that may never come.
Hypothermia is setting in. Not good. And what’s worse, I know the symptoms. Once the shivering stops, it won’t take long until I lose consciousness and die.
“Sorry, Sharon,” I whisper into the dark night. “I tried.”
Snowflakes tumble around me, twisting and twirling like acrobats at the circus. They’re beautiful. So fine and delicate, and yet so bitterly cold.
I’ve made a fire.
I’m not sure how, but flames flicker over a bunch of twigs piled beside me on the ground. I warm my hands, rubbing them together and holding them out, only there’s no warmth radiating into my palms, which is confusing.
I blink, and the fire is gone. The twigs remain, but the warm glow was nothing but a dream.
I’m delirious.
There are more lights in the sky. At first, I think they’re stars, but they dance across the heavens. Search lights flicker over distant treetops. Like spotlights shining on a microphone stand set alone on an empty stage, they entice me out of the darkness. Getting to my feet, I shuffle out from beneath the pine tree, leaving my precious mattress lying among the dead twigs and broken branches.
I’m hot.
I’m sweating.
In the back of my mind, I’m vaguely aware this is an illusion marking the final stages of hypothermia. My internal organs are shutting down and my body is on the verge of dying, but I feel as though I’m sitting in front of a furnace.
“So hot,” I mutter, unzipping my jacket.
I stumble out into deep snow, leaving the shelter of the trees behind.
“Can’t breathe.”
Staggering through the snow, I pull off my boots, and cast my socks to one side. Within a few feet, I’ve shed my trousers, my underwear, and my jacket and my shirt, leaving them lying on the snow. Still, I feel as though I’m burning up. I’m on fire, I’m sure of it. Naked, I wander through the storm, wading out into what is probably a beautiful meadow in spring but nothing more than a frozen wasteland in winter. Wind howls across the open ground, but I’m past feeling.
The clouds have parted. The stars fall to Earth like snowflakes, drifting slowly down in front of me. So pretty. Like fireflies. A blinding light erupts over me and I’m vaguely aware of the beating of rotor blades overhead.
“Sharon?” I ask, seeing her angelic face enveloped in light.
Suddenly, I’m soaring above the treetops, climbing high in the sky.
The light around me is blinding, forcing me to cover my eyes with my hands. A bright red glow permeates my skin. Warmth washes over me. A sensation like pins-and-needles runs down my back. My toes are painfully sore.
“I don’t understand,” I say, squinting, trying to see beyond the glare.
“You have frostbite,” a kind, gentle voice says, injecting something into the side of my neck. “But you’ll be fine.”
“Sharon,” I say. “Tell me this is real. Tell me, this isn’t a dream.”
Warm lips touch softly against my cold cheek. Words are whispered in my ear.
“This is not a dream.”
“Smart move,” a male voice says, and I recognize Mark’s distinct twang. “Pulling off your clothes like that. Made it easy for us to distinguish between you and the ground troops.”
“I told you Joe would do something smart,” Sharon says, beaming with pride. I want to correct her, but my mind is lethargic, still struggling to come to terms with what just happened.
The light fades, and I’m standing in the middle of a vast metallic sphere.
“Is this a—a UFO?”
“No, silly,” Sharon says, punching me playfully on the shoulder. “UFOs are unidentified. This is a Q-class explorer.”
“Ah,” I say, taking in the sight around me. “I meant, unidentified as in not an airplane.”
“Oh, no,” she says, yet again talking to me as though I were a child. “This isn’t an airplane. Planes have wings.”
Yeah, I got that.
The not-quite-a-UFO isn’t a flying saucer as such, more a flying sphere roughly fifty feet in diameter. Gravity pushes outward from the hollow center so that wherever anyone is within the sphere, all ways are upright, all pointing in toward the empty middle of the craft.
“Hey, Joe,” another voice calls out. “Good to see you again.”
Old Joe, the African American bus driver and part-time street bum, is the pilot. He’s sitting upside down above me, but from his perspective, it probably looks like Sharon and I are the ones upside down.
“Oh, Hi, Joe,” I reply, craning my next to look up at him. We’re both talking and acting as though this is entirely natural—an everyday occurrence. It’s as though we ran into each other again on the bus. I half expect him to ask, “How are you doing?” To which I’d have to say, “Fine,” being almost completely disconnected from reality. But thankfully the conversation doesn’t extend that far. He just waves and keeps going about something alien.
Aliens are so relaxed. Nothing seems to bother them. It’s like they’re all from Hawaii, and they’re running on island time.
Good old Joe’s got a bunch of glowing control panels around him with hundreds of tiny lights. He walks from one station to another, his feet above his head. It’s as though I’m hanging upside down from a building ledge watching him walk around on a movie set.
Mark walks down toward Sharon and me. As he passes the halfway point, he looks as though he’s stuck sideways to the outer wall of the sphere. There are a variety of sections within the UFO, but most of them look like the clustered lounge chair settings in an airline rewards club, set in groups around what looks like retro-sixties coffee tables. There are large portholes affording views outside, but out of necessity they’re all set into the vast, circular, all encompassing, spherical floor. Mark walks over one without a care in the world. Actually, I’m not even sure we’re still in the world for him to care. There’s an awful lot of stars outside that window and not a single cloud.
Both Mark and Sharon stare at me as though I’m crazy. I have no idea what I look like, other than that I’m naked.
Naked?
My hands shoot down to cover my groin.
“How are you feeling?” Mark asks. “Better now we’ve got you on board, I’m sure. As soon as we learned they’d taken you, we started looking everywhere for you.”