Chapter 1 #2
The face on the screen isn’t human. Purple skin, smooth and shiny, almost like it’s permanently wet.
A beastly head flares outward, a crown of hard ridges that adorn a wide forehead.
Where a mouth should be, there are clusters of slender, twitching tentacles curling back on themselves, each lined with tiny, glistening suckers that flex as it speaks.
Its eyes are much larger than mine, glossy and black like polished stone.
“No fucking way,” I say, nearly dropping my glass.
“Your planet currently faces an extinction level event,” the alien continues, suckers flexing with each word. “The Intergalactic Alliance cannot prevent it, but some of you will be relocated to other habitable planets. Please stand by for selection.”
The screen crackles again, and the face vanishes. The countdown clock returns, and we’re now less than twenty minutes from impact.
“We’re going to be spared!” a woman shrieks. “Praise Jesus!”
“Lady, I don’t think Jesus is an alien squid,” a man chuckles. “I’m not drunk enough for an alien invasion. Somebody pass me another bottle.”
“They’re not invading, they’re going to save us!” another woman cries out.
I stare at the screen in silence. There were conspiracy theories about this. One of my friends was convinced we weren’t alone in the universe and aliens would save us before we got wiped out.
“Guess Charlie was right,” I mutter, downing a little more whiskey.
Except the alien didn’t say we would all be relocated to other inhabitable planets.
The alien specifically said some. That doesn’t change much for me.
Most of us are still going to die, and unless the alien can relocate billions of people in less than twenty minutes, my odds of being chosen aren’t very good.
Either way, I’m too drunk to care. Or maybe I’m just too exhausted to process it. I’ve already accepted my death. I came to terms with it faster than most of my friends. They still have families to worry about. I don’t have anyone left.
If the alien is going to save some of us, they should go for the children first. They have a brighter future than everyone else.
Considering what we were doing to each other before the meteor was spotted, I’m not sure there’s much humanity to save.
We’re all just flesh-covered scumbags, in the grand scheme of things.
I knew that even before my parents were trampled to death trying to get a loaf of bread.
“You’re turning blue!” a man yells, and I turn around on my stool, the room spinning as the whiskey in my veins protests the movement.
Sure enough, in the middle of the bar, there’s a woman glowing blue.
I think it’s the one who praised Jesus, but I’m not certain.
She closes her eyes like she’s basking in the sun, then raises both hands.
The glow gets brighter, and she vanishes, except not everything goes.
Her clothing, jewelry, the purse on her shoulder, and the bottle in her hand all hit the floor.
The bottle shatters and several people jump back.
“She’s gone,” a man says, disbelief in his voice.
“She must have been chosen!” a woman cries, then she lights up as well. “I’ve been chosen too!”
The odds just changed. Two people in this bar alone?
Already chosen? There are fewer than twenty of us left, and another man is now turning blue.
He screams with joy and starts removing his clothes, but he doesn’t even get his shirt off before he vanishes and everything he’s wearing hits the floor.
A Prince Albert piercing rolls toward me and I laugh under my breath.
Then the blue light finds me.
“Wait, oh, wait,” I say, shaking my head.
“You’ve been chosen too!” a man says, then the rest of the people in the bar cheer. “I’m next! I know I’m next!”
That’s the last thing I hear before a buzzing in my head drowns everything out. The blue light feels strangely calming, like everything inside me is trying to panic, but it won’t let me.
Until I go from sitting on the barstool to spinning above the bar, going higher and higher until I can see everything for miles away. I’m completely naked, but it happened so fast I didn’t even feel my clothes leave my body.
The city looks tiny beneath me now. So small it’s almost unsettling.
A light flashes above me. I look up and see something so big it’s blocking the sun.
It must be the alien ship. I can still see the streak the meteor is leaving across the sky.
Hundreds of blue beams lance down from the ship, and as I look around, I see other people trapped in them, rising just like I am.
All naked. All likely wondering if this is a good thing or bad thing, like I am. I hope we’re being saved, not abducted. I sure hope most of the conspiracy theories about aliens aren’t true, because the last thing I want is to be experimented on.
As we get closer, the buzzing gets louder. It makes my vision blur. I can barely breathe, much less think.
Then everything goes dark.