Chapter 5

Ryker

I was startled awake by the sensation of pain in my back. My eyes flew open, and I could see my truck moving further away. "Did I not leave it in park?" My mind was foggy, and my thoughts muddled. Why am I on the ground? What's happening? Then I felt the pain in my back, which helped bring me back to the present. My truck wasn't moving; I was! When I looked down at my feet, I could see a distortion of the air snaking around my body and dragging me towards the ship! Everything that had just happened to Jeff came crashing down on me, and I knew if I didn’t break free, I would be dissolved into a mist like my friend.

I clawed, kicked, and raged against the forces that bound me, but no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t get any purchase. The energy that made up this thing was hard as steel but flexible as rubber and was wriggling and writhing around me like a tentacle straight from a horror movie. My muscles bulged under the strain, but nothing seemed to work. Then I felt myself rising into the air and braced for what I knew would be a grisly end, but nothing came. I just kept floating towards the ship.

I then looked around and could see thousands and thousands of others floating through the sky at what seemed to me a ponderous pace. “I guess these sick bastards want to take their time with us so we can suffer.” As we grew closer to the center of the craft, everyone was brought closer together, and I could hear the people screaming. I could see the terror on their faces—people like me struggling to break their bonds to no avail. Men, women, children; I even saw babies floating through the sky alone. But as I looked closer, I noticed everyone here was healthy, whole, no sick, no old, no injured. An even worse feeling started to take root in my heart, and one word ended up on my lips: “cattle.”

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As we approached within a hundred feet of the ship, everyone had been pulled together within inches of one another. We floated there in a spherical mass of humanity. All I could see in any direction were bodies and struggling people; the deafening roar of all these desperately trying to be heard made me want to join in. The cries for parents, children, spouses, and ultimately God made it hard for me to string two thoughts together. All I could think was how unlucky I was to be towards the bottom of the massive ball of flesh. I tried to ignore all the smells and sensations of wetness I felt raining down on me. Right on cue, I heard retching above me and winced when I felt the splatter. "Son of a bitch."

Then I felt a familiar vibration, and everything went still. All cries came to a screeching halt, and our struggling stopped. The paralysis took hold of us, and all I could do was look around with my eyes. Abruptly, the people around me were quickly shuffled into an orderly line and stretched out into a semblance of the anatomical position, with the arms and legs extended and their palms out. A panel of the ship slid to the side, and a soft glow could be seen coming from inside the vessel. Quickly, one by one, the people were streaming into the gap, barely big enough for the human frame to fit through. Thousands of people rushed by my sight in mere moments, and I began to worry if my bulk would fit through the space that I thought could hardly fit a grown woman, let alone someone of my size. I could see my time was rapidly approaching, and I gathered myself for what was to come. I knew those last moments suspended in the air would be the last I ever spent on earth. An out-of-place feeling began to bubble to the surface; it felt wrong, but I couldn’t help but acknowledge it. It was anticipation, excitement, and relief, but most of all guilt for allowing myself to feel this way. Before I had time to process my feelings, I felt my body lurch forward, and I was pulled headfirst into the breach. The walls around my head and face were almost touching me, but somehow the material that the passage was constructed of flowed around my body to allow me to travel forward without any problem. After what felt like hours in this claustrophobic place, I found myself in an absolutely massive cavernous space within the bowels of the ship.