“What are you doing?” Mitchell cried out, still pinned by the window by Helena. “Leave her, dude. If she wants to wait on a street corner, let her do it. You don’t owe her anything.”
Jason grabbed the emergency release lever and pulled. The door opened, but the bus was speeding along at easily thirty-five miles an hour. The concrete raced by in a blur. The wind howled through the open door, swirling into the footwell.
“Hey!” the driver called out. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get back in your seat!”
The driver eased off the accelerator and onto the brakes with the kind of precision that had been missing from his driving so far. He slowed the bus, pulling over close to the curb. Jason watched as lampposts and trash cans whipped past, timing his jump.
“Don’t you—” the driver called.
“No!” Mitchell yelled.
Jason jumped from the bus, landing on the concrete sidewalk, surprised by his forward momentum. He could have sworn the bus had slowed to a running pace, but it must have been still moving considerably faster than he realized, and he found himself rolling on the pavement with his arms up protecting his head.
“You stupid dumb fuck!” the driver called out. He’d brought the bus to a halt about thirty feet away and had opened the front doors, standing on the bottom step as he shook his fist at Jason. “Damn kids!”
Jason got to his feet, grimacing at the skin torn from his forearms and his bloody elbows. Pain surged, surprising him with how much it hurt.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Mitchell cried, stepping down out of the rear doors of the bus, followed by Helena.
“Just go on without me,” Jason called out, feeling stupid. He waved them away. What was wrong with him? This was unlike him. Jason wasn’t one to be impetuous and stupid. As far as stupid went, that stunt was right up there with the dumbest things he’d ever done. If his head had struck the concrete he could have suffered a serious, life threatening concussion. People had died from less, and he knew it.
“What the hell is wrong with me?” he whispered, turning his back on Mitchell and Helena and looking at Lily in the distance.
The driver of the bus closed the doors and the bus pulled back out into the traffic, leaving them on the sidewalk. He could hear Mitchell walking up behind him.
“Oh, my God. Look at your arms!” Helena cried.
Jason could feel blood dripping from his fingers.
“I’m OK,” he said, raising a hand and requesting some distance. “Just… give me some space.”
“No problem, dude!” Mitchell said, holding his hands out in a non-threatening gesture, his fingers splayed wide.
Jason ran down toward where he’d last seen Lily a couple of hundred yards away on the next block. He jogged across the street, barely pausing to look for traffic. She’d disappeared down a darkened alley. Rain began falling from the night sky. Twilight was over. Even with streetlights, the night seemed unusually dark.
As he approached the alley, Jason heard a deep, resonant hum like that of a generator. Lights flickered from the narrow alley between the buildings, flashes of blue-white like those from an arc welder cutting through the darkness.
He glanced back at Mitchell and Helena. They were waiting to cross at the lights.
Jason slowed to a walk, wondering what could be causing the flashes between the buildings. Wisps of smoke drifted from the alley. He stepped around the corner and into a gale not dissimilar to what he’d once felt from the downdraft of a landing helicopter. Flecks of dust and dirt whipped through the air. Scraps of paper tore around him.
Lily was no more than thirty feet away in the middle of the alley, bathed in a blinding green light. She was leaning slightly backwards, pitched at an unnatural angle, one that should have caused her to fall to the ground, but somehow she remained upright. Her arms were outstretched, as though she had been crucified on some invisible cross, while her feet drifted a few feet above the ground. White smoke billowed down from above. Bursts of vapor surged out of a series of flickering lights some twenty stories above the alley. The smoke swirled around her body as she slowly gained height.
“No.”
Jason’s one word was barely audible above the pulsating hum coming down from above.
The white light transformed into a kaleidoscope of color. Tiny, circular rainbows formed in the cold white mist, giving the view a trance-like quality.
Jason fell to his knees just a few feet inside the alley.
“No,” he repeated. “This can’t be happening.”
Lily was being drawn up toward the light, with her arms outstretched and her hands limp. Her body was pulled up into the swirling clouds still churning down from above.
The circle of lights above the building began turning, slowly building in speed as Lily’s body rose higher, becoming lost in the mist. From what Jason could tell, the lights were roughly forty to fifty feet across, but their exact width was obscured by the rooftop. Whatever this was, it had to be hovering no more than a few feet above the roof. Jason wanted to run for the stairs, to chase after Lily, but his body felt weak, drained of strength.
The rainbow of colors radiating above him reached a fever pitch, moving so fast the individual lights became indistinguishable.
And then it was gone.
The mist cleared, dissipating and disappearing into the night, leaving a clear view of the clouds thousands of feet above.
There were footsteps behind him.
“Tell me you saw that?” Jason said, his eyes still looking skyward.
“Saw what?” Mitchell asked, coming up beside him.
In the distance, well beyond the rooftop, bursts of light broke through the night. Spectacular splashes of color lit up the grey, moody clouds as fireworks burst in the sky over the river.
“Oh, damn. We missed the show,” Mitchell said with a hint of disappointment in his voice.
“We need to get you to a doctor,” Helena said, ignoring Mitchell as she reached out her hand and helped Jason to his feet.
Jason was shaking. His fingers were trembling.
“You’re in shock,” she said, looking into his eyes with compassion. She raised his forearms, taking a good look at the grazes on his arms. “Oh, that’s got to hurt. Come on. Let’s get you to the emergency room and get you cleaned up. I hope your tetanus shots are up to date.”
Jason was in shock, but it wasn’t the pain in his arms that had shaken his being. He’d spent the best part of a decade building a rational model of the universe in his thinking, establishing a framework for understanding the cosmos and formulating his theories and calculations, but here, in a matter of seconds, his world had unravelled. What seemed so crazy when Mitchell talked about it now seemed probable. No, he thought, not probable, actual.
Could it be that the anecdotes of UFO sightings were true?
Was Earth being surreptitiously visited by aliens from some other world?
Could his eyes be believed?
Should he discard his scientific training over some fleeting experience that seemed more like a dream than reality?
Could these two views be reconciled?
They couldn’t, he decided, and yet he had no plausible alternative explanation for what he’d witnessed. Although he knew eyewitnesses were notoriously unreliable in a court of law, he couldn’t bring himself to ignore what he’d seen.
Lily had been taken.
“There has to be another explanation,” he mumbled to himself. “There has to be.”
Chapter 07: Caught
Lee woke bumping around in darkness.
He was in the back of a truck weaving along a rough track. He bounced on the cold metal bed of the truck, sliding as the clumsy diesel engine rattled in his ears. His hands were tied behind him. A shroud covered his head. Dim light seeped in from around his neck. He felt sick. The smell of fumes wafted around him, making it difficult to breathe.