My day had already been the worst of my life, but Murphy's Law struck, so of course I was abducted by a spaceship.

It was after twilight had ended. The full moon shone brightly backlighting some thin high-altitude clouds but as far away from city light pollution as I was the brighter stars twinkled in competition. I was alone with the last of my belongings and speeding south on an unsealed outback road in my Ford Ranger somewhere in beef cattle country Queensland. Suddenly, the high beams flickered, the dashboard lights and stereo shut off, and the power steering locked. Despite braking, I was stopped by a fence post.

I got out of my ute to inspect the damage, to it and the fence, and tried to figure out what happened. All electronics had died quickly, including my phone, though there wouldn't have been a good signal out the back of Woop Woop anyway. I had heard of such things being portent of various misfortunes – solar flares, imminent lightning strikes, nuclear explosions – and then I saw the giant snag silhouette passing in front of the moon, a silver sausage shining in the starlight, an unidentified aerial polony, just flying along like the bad-year blimp.

“Oh, this time it’s just aliens,” I muttered, not believing I wasn’t dreaming.

It was heading upwind towards a nearby herd of cattle that I could hear mooing into the night. The chipolata encounter of the second kind came to a gentle stop over the cattle. A portal then irised open on the underside and some kind of searchlight shone straight down from inside, targeting one fat heifer.

A dark smudge spilled from the illuminated hole, resembling a sinking smoke cloud. A loud electric buzzing filled the warm night air, in stark contrast to the silence of the hovering space saveloy. It was some kind of massive swarm, but of insects or drones I couldn’t tell, and it descended on and covered the illuminated bovine. They layered on first covering every part of the beast, then layering on top of that until the swarm engulfed it in a ball.

“Them Martian mozzies are fair dinkum!” I exclaimed, still in disbelief.

Then like a spherical cow in a vacuum cleaner, the cow-ball seemed to get Hoovered up, or rather hovered up, with the droning buzz escalating. The herd heard and started to panic before they all suddenly became paralysed by fright, or perhaps neurotoxins. Meanwhile, the ascendant bos taurus continued to rise, then squeezed into the underside portal of the tyranny-sausage like an unlucky eight ball being sunk on the first shot.

“What a snafu, that snag snagged a Wagyu!” I accidentally rhymed into the night.

I was reasonably sure I was hallucinating, though I didn’t think any of my medications should have had that effect, but I could have been wrong. I briefly considered if I maybe was unconscious and bleeding out in a ditch after falling asleep at the wheel. It didn’t matter, I was a dead man walking anyway, not that I wanted to think about that. I felt braver. One way or another, it was time to make the possibly last moments of my life more interesting.

I turned back to my dual cab four-by-four and retrieved from the rack above the back seat my roo shooting rifle, a bolt-action point-two-two-three Remington. I quickly, but carefully, loaded six rounds with steady hands, practised enough to do so in the moonlight. The buzzing cloud had returned and was already picking up a second victim by the time I was loaded. The second beef ball was whooshed inside as I took aim and sighted at the centre mass of the big fly-by rustling gang banger.

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Safety off – Bang – lift bolt handle – eject the spent cartridge – chamber a new round – lower the bolt handle – Bang – lift bolt handle – eject the spent cartridge – chamber a new round – lower the bolt handle – Safety on. I maintained aim even though the two shots had sparked and ricocheted off the rounded hull of the silvered locomotive-sized twiggy stick with twin twangs.

“Stop and drop those bloody cows, you flaming duffers,” I shouted. As the swarm's buzz ended, my voice carried.

The giant space snag silently turned from the roughly broadside it had been to staring me down like a bull before the charge. Suddenly there was a loud moo-splat followed by another moo-splat. Well, I couldn’t say they didn’t drop the bloody cows.

Then it started to move towards me while also lowering towards the ground. Unlike the paralysed herd I turned and ran, but with nowhere to run, I just started to sprint down the empty unsealed road like a fleeing emu. It was silent, so at first, I didn’t know if it was still chasing me, but at the same time, I couldn’t relax enough to turn back to check. Then that point became moot as the nose of the mute spaceship overtook me at arm’s reach overhead and I suddenly had a chipolata encounter of the fourth kind. Something long, soft, and covered with hundreds of smooching lips wrapped me around my neck and chest and then yoinked me up inside. I was pulled towards the light, through the portal while my Remington was also pulled from my grip.

The bright searchlight shut off, the floor closed beneath me, and I was ingloriously dumped on the reformed bomb bay deck. It hurt a little, and that made me start to think maybe this was real after all. The lights were low, but I could tell I was in a cylindrical compartment like the back of a large cargo plane, except clean like a stainless-steel slaughterhouse, and high-tech as evidenced by the curved wall-mounted monitors and carbon fibre hexagonal grids. Looking about myself, I spotted what looked like vacuum-packed whole legs of beef, eight of them hanging from hooks, and several other primal cuts. So that returned livestock was barely alive stock even before becoming unalive stock.

At one end of the tubular chamber was a clear wall with a huge dark shape floating on the other side. Its outline was broken up and hard to see in the low light. I couldn’t make out much except a horizontally split yawning pink cavity below the darkest part with a row of pointy white spikes along the top and bottom. Then I spotted movement in some of the tiny hexagonal holes that filled recesses in the walls. Maybe they were bees or insect-like drones. And then, opposite the clear wall, I saw something my eyes wanted to slip off, but my Remington was twirling around it like a baton about a cheerleader. It was nearly invisible and writhed like a pit full of snakes, but whatever it was, I was sure it was what snagged me. My Remington stopped twirling and came to rest between me and the strange thing. I wasn’t foolish enough to try and pick it up, Chekhov’s gun be damned.

From somewhere amongst the rippling translucent chaos emerged two plushies, seemingly levitating or being held aloft by unseen means, one yellow and black, the other black and white. One was maybe of a mechanical bee, and the other was of a fat stubby-winged magpie with teeth maybe. They watched me with judgmental fake eyes before surprising me by talking.

“Who do you think you are, interrupting our ladies’ night?!” the beeish possessed plushie asked.

“Perhaps he longs for the feathery release of death so he can return to the dark nothingness from whence he came and be rid of his mortal woes?” The plush morose magpie poltergeist asked as I heard clicks and whistles from somewhere behind me. I assumed that question was rhetorical, or at least not directed at me

“Who do I think I am? My name is Claude, Claude McCook,” I answered the first question straight, “and this has been the worst, and now also weirdest, day of my life.”