Chapter 8 – The X Files

A week passed quietly in the town of Normal, Ohio. There were no supernatural deaths, no rumors of ghosts haunting houses. Jacob enjoyed the peace by hanging out with Adam, Xavier, and Tiffany at the Coffee House in the mornings. They talked about the upcoming senior year of high school, and what kinds of plans they had; they talked about Half-and-Half, and where Adam and Xavier might have their next gig; they talked about the special mayoral election and who had the best chances. All three of his friends were already eighteen and planned to vote for Daniel. Jacob also, of course, planned to vote for his older brother, who had been surprisingly quiet and reserved the past week; but he didn’t turn eighteen until October 30th, the day before the special election.

From eleven thirty in the morning clear until eight in the evening, Jacob would train up his extra strength and speed. They fell into a pattern of strength training for the mornings/early afternoons, then a half-hour break for lunch and finally practicing speed in the evenings. Agent Mann, for all his snark and occasional pranking, was actually a very good coach—so good that Jacob wasn’t sure that this was the skeleton’s first time doing so. Upon asking whether Mann had tried any other assistants before, the older revenant quickly dodged the question.

“That’s unimportant,” Mann said. “Now, try and take this pen from me, and if you don’t manage it in under an hour, that’s two hundred more push-ups you owe me… using nothing but your pinky.”

“Mannage it,” Jacob said, snorting. “Good one.”

The skeleton paused, then grinned. “Hey, that was a pretty good—OI!”

While he’d been distracted by his own accidental cleverness, Jacob had dashed forward and ripped the pen in question from Agent Mann’s finger bones. Smirking, he backpedaled and tossed it up in the air. He let it twirl twice, and then caught it. Agent Mann pouted.

“Now that was just impertinent,” he grumbled.

“Impertinence is in my job description,” Jacob returned.

“Touché,” said Agent Mann. “Now give me back that pen and let’s do this the right way.”

“Yes, mother.”

It was on the seventh morning that things again took a supernatural turn—or at least, more supernatural than they already were. Jacob woke up yawning, shoved off his covers, and slammed his alarm. The clock crunched, and Jacob facepalmed; that was the third one this week. He really needed to get used to being a knock-off DC superhero, as Xavier liked to put it. Groaning, Jacob rolled out of bed, staggered to his closet, slid the door open, and nearly had a heart attack (despite not having a beating heart to attack him).

“Do you ever get that feeling of déjà vu?” he quipped in a high-pitched, girly tone, once he’d calmed down from the shock of seeing a grinning skull in front of his long sleeves.

“You are terrible at accents,” Agent Mann informed him, climbing out of Jacob’s closet, “and especially British ones. Please never do them again.”

Jacob rolled his eyes and sat on his desk’s swivel chair. “You know, most people only come out of the closet once.”

“Yes, well, most people also are not skeletons.”

“…Fair point.”

“Now, you may be wondering why I am here,” the revenant said with a roll of his own eyes, to which Jacob muttered something about obvious questions being obvious. “The answer to that is, frankly, aliens.”

“Er…” Jacob gaped. “Come again?”

“Aliens. Little green men. Possibly from Mars. Probably like to get the landmarks.” Jacob stared blankly, and Agent Mann frowned. “Oh, come on, you did see Independence Day: Resurgence, didn’t you?”

“You mean the Star Wars rip off?” Jacob snorted. “No thank you. Adam and Xavier saw it in theaters and told me it wasn’t worth the extra pricey popcorn.”

“Well, it was rather similar to Star Wars,” Mann admitted under his breath, then sighed and placed his hands on his waist. “That’s not the point. In a nearby town, there have been UFO sightings, three yesterday and one a few hours ago. Supernatural Relations apparently has enough reason to believe these incidents are connected and the sightings may be accurate, and have asked you and me to get to the bottom of this since we’re closest.”

Jacob blinked. “Well, I’ll be damned. The X Files really was right. Sorry, Scully, but I’ll have to invite my friends Adam Jones and Xavier Fairway. They really are interested in the extraterrestrial and might legit kill me if I don’t.”

“That’s a no-go,” Mann told him. “This is a Skul and Jacob adventure only. If the higher-ups find out I’ve brought other people on the job, they will not like it.”

“You’d be surprised what Adam could do with a computer,” Jacob told him. “And Xavier’s memory is better than anyone I’ve ever heard of.”

Agent Mann studied him, then sighed again. “Alright, I don’t bloody like this, but alright. Because I like you, your friends can come. Just make sure they dress up in suits and ties and look like they’re interns, or something.”

When Jacob called them, Adam and Xavier were ecstatic. They got permission from their parents, saying that they’d just be hanging out with Jacob all day, and he picked them up before heading off.

Jacob drove everyone since Agent Mann didn’t own a car (with his teleportation, he himself usually had no need for one). The main reason they drove at all was to have some back up transportation over the next couple days, in case the job went on longer than expected and Agent Mann was off on his own for some reason. As they sped down the road to their next destination—a quaint town named Beaver Falls—neither of Jacob’s friends stopped thanking him or telling him about all the possibilities of what kinds of gadgets the aliens might have. Agent Mann sat with crossed arms in the passenger seat. The more Adam and Xavier fanboyed over the situation, the more the skeleton’s eye twitched and he shifted around in his seat; he purposefully stared out the window at the endless fields of grain, wheat, and corn (mostly corn).

His patience wore thin after around fifteen minutes.

“Can you STOP?” Mann exploded at last, throwing his bony hands up in the air. “This job isn’t some fantastical adventure to prove that the government conspires; it’s a special investigation into circumstances that have never before been explored. We have yet to make direct contact with the extraterrestrial on a governmental scale, so depending on how this turns out, if the UFO sightings are legit and tied with the recent disappearances, this job could either help further our race or doom humanity.”

Adam and Xavier fell silent, their mouths hanging open. Jacob’s skin suddenly felt rather itchy.

“Um… sorry,” Adam said quietly, fiddling about with his hands. “I didn’t realize this was that big of a deal.”

Xavier squirmed against his seatbelt. “Yeah, I’m sorry, too,” he said.

Agent Mann took a deep breath and then sighed and shook his head. “No, I must apologize as well. I didn’t mean to tear into you two like that. I’m afraid the stress of this mission was getting on my nerves.”

“But you’re a skeleton,” Jacob pointed out. “You don’t have any nerves for the stress to get on.”

The passengers blinked and paused. Then Xavier cracked a grin and Agent Mann snickered once. Finally, the dam broke and the awkward, tense silence was replaced with laughter. The rest of the ride was much more carefree and easygoing, although the weight of the job definitely put a noticeable damper on Adam and Xavier. The trip lasted around another ten minutes, and then they arrived at Beaver Falls.

Jacob, Adam, and Xavier had all been to Beaver Falls before, mostly for football and baseball games. Beaver High and Normal High had a long rivalry, and their students constantly competed in just about every major high school sport. Beaver Falls was a rather small town, though, with a population of around fifteen thousand. It mainly consisted of brick and plaster houses, several fast food joints, one or two great restaurants, and a downtown municipal/shopping district. There was also a large golf course on the outskirts of town, where Mr. Davidson liked to spend a considerable amount of time when he wasn’t working, moping, or drinking his past away.

“I’m almost getting nostalgic,” Xavier said wistfully, staring out the window as they entered town.

Agent Mann, curious, looked over his shoulder towards the black eighteen-year-old. “Why’s that?”

Jacob passed a particularly slow driver. “Xavier used to live here in Beaver Falls,” he explained. “His family moved to Normal when he was four. He still has a lot of memories of their old place, though, thanks to his photographic memory.”

Xavier nodded and tapped his head. “Everything I’ve seen since I was around three is all stored up in here. I can just pull out memories like computer files.”

“I see,” Mann said thoughtfully. “That’s quite useful, especially on this type of job.”

Xavier preened, and Adam rolled his eyes.

“So, where’s our first stop?” Jacob asked as they rumbled over some train tracks. The poor old Ford wheezed as it bounced over the steel girders.

Agent Mann reached into his pocket, pulled out a small notebook, and turned several pages. “21059 Genesis Road,” he read, and Xavier choked in surprise. The skeleton stared. “What’s wrong?”

“Sorry, I was just surprised,” Xavier coughed. “That’s my old address.”

Jacob raised an eyebrow. “Now, isn’t that just a cliché,” he stated, and promptly followed the directions Xavier giving. As they passed by Beaver High, the teen flipped it off and catcalled. His ex-girlfriend had left him for a Beaver High senior, so he hated the school even more than some of Normal High’s football jocks. Adam, amused by his best friend’s antics, shook his head and grinned.

“You are so immature sometimes,” he teased. Xavier sighed.

“Adam. Shut up.”

At last, they arrived at their destination—Adam’s old home, and the current home of a Mr. Law, a witness to one of the disappearances. It was a short, stout little one-story with soft yellow walls and a tiled roof. Longer than it was wide, it had flower pots with blooming lilies and a lawn that wrapped around the whole house. A white picket fence protected it from its neighbors’ dogs, and an asphalt driveway ran up to an attached garage. Jacob pulled into this driveway and his Ford rumbled to a stop; the engine shut off with one last cough for good measure. The group piled out, making their way up to the house’s door.

“I never pegged your family as the apple pie life type,” Adam told Xavier as they stopped. Agent Mann’s finger bone pressed the doorbell; a sweet little chime pinged inside the house.

“They weren’t,” Xavier confirmed. “They tried to be, but Dad was too ambitious with his accounting job, and so we ended up moving into the city instead. They were always much happier with an urban jungle full of people around them then a quiet, boring town where nothing ever happens.”

“Except, apparently, alien abductions,” Agent Mann supplied. Jacob rolled his eyes.

Xavier shrugged. “Yeah, well, Beaver Falls didn’t have any UFOs back in 2003.”

Jacob, still somewhat skeptical about the aliens being real, frowned. “And still might not have them now,” he said. He would have added more, but at that moment, the door opened, allowing the two revenants and two humans to see the house’s owner.

The current owner of the house was an eccentric man. Tall and disturbingly overweight, with a purple-stained white V-neck and spaghetti sauce dribbling from his beard, he looked like a much fatter Albert Einstein. He had pure white hair that stuck up wildly, like hay straws.

“Can I help you?” the man asked, confused.

Agent Mann dug into his chest pocket and pulled out his wallet. He opened it up to show off his FBI badge. “Good day, sir. I am Agent Skul Mann, FBI. These here are some interns that I’m allowing to shadow me today. May we ask you some questions about last night?”

“Since when are we interns?” Adam whispered to Jacob.

The black teen rolled his eyes. “Just go along with it.”

The house’s current owner, who evidently hadn’t heard the two’s exchange, opened his mouth in an o of understanding. “This is about the abduction, isn’t it!?” he exclaimed excitedly. “I promise you it wasn’t a figment of all that Bud Light. Please, please, come in—no government agent is turned away at the home of Newton Law.”

The fat man stepped aside, clearing the entrance. Adam and Xavier snickered quietly at his name, and Jacob stared somewhat pitifully.

“Your name is Newton Law?” he repeated.

Newton sighed. “My parents were Harvard science professors and also hated me,” he said. Agent Mann kicked Adam and Xavier when they only snickered even harder. Jacob just snorted and rolled his eyes at them fondly.

“If you two are done, let’s enjoy Mr. Law’s hospitality,” Mann suggested, although from his tone and the mirthful shine in his eye sockets, he clearly was having trouble holding back laughter of his own. And so they filed into Xavier’s old home one by one. They didn’t bother taking off their dress shoes. Newton Law lead them to the living room, a messy place where conspiracy theory books lay strewn about the floor and coffee table, and posters of alien movies had been taped over every inch of the walls.

“It’s always the nutcases,” Mann muttered with a forlorned sigh into Jacob’s ear.

Xavier frowned deeply. “I don’t know whether I should gag, puke, or laugh,” he told the other three as Newton hurried off into another room with a claim of having pictures. “This bastard turned the place into a pigsty.”

Adam patted his shoulder. “Don’t let it bother you; it’s only one of the dirtiest rooms in the tri-county area.”

“Says the one whose room hasn’t been cleaned in over a year,” Xavier said evenly.

“Oi! That’s an organized mess! This is just a mess, nothing organized about it!”

“You two act like an old married couple,” Agent Mann deadpanned, and Jacob threw his hands up in the air.

“Thank you!” the Right Hand user exclaimed, relieved. “That’s what I’ve been saying for ages!”

Newton waddled back into the living room with a large and expensive-looking camera clenched in his hands. “I took a bunch of pictures,” the man said hurriedly, as though the group might not hear him if he spoke at a normal pace. He popped a thin 8-GB SD Card out of the camera and handed it to Agent Mann. “They’re all contained on this SD Card here.”

“Er… thank you.” Somewhat perturbed, Agent Mann wiped his finger bones off on his dress pants after securing the card in his pocket; the damned thing was already coated in grease from Newton’s stubby fingers. “Mr. Law,” he said, “where and when did you observe the UFO?”

“Just outside the men’s club on Cougar Street,” the fat man replied immediately, and Jacob blanched while Adam and Xavier once again descended into snickers. “At about midnight,” he added.

“Who puts a men’s club on Cougar Street?” Xavier whispered, grinning widely.

“Are you kidding me?” Adam wheezed from the hilarity. “Where else would you put one?”

Unimpressed, Agent Mann discreetly kicked them each a second time.

“Can you describe what you saw that night, Mr. Law?” Jacob asked, pointedly ignoring his friends.

Newton Law nodded, his little, beady eyes widening in excitement. “I sure can! So, after I left the club, I started to head for my Jeep. But halfway down the parking lot, the sky suddenly shown bright as day, and there was this whirring sound, like a plane’s rotors. I looked up, and there was the UFO, this big, massive cylinder hovering over the parking lot a couple rows down from me. A yellow beam shot down from it and sucked up a girl who was leaving after her shift. She’d worked at the club until that time. Then the whirring sound grew louder, and the UFO sped off into the night sky.” His whole recounting, he spoke a million miles an hour; he was so fat that his b’s were slurred.

“Thank you for your time, sir,” Agent Mann said with a curt nod. He turned to the teens. “Come, men, let’s get going; we’ve several more people to interview yet.”

He headed for the door, and the three boys followed suit. Newton thanked them for the visit and told them they could come back anytime to hear his Bigfoot theories; rightly disturbed, the group hurried out of Newton Law’s house. Jacob couldn’t have been happier to exit that disgustingly messy house, and sighed a breath of relief when they had returned to his Ford.

“Do you think we can trust his word?” Jacob asked as they all entered his car.

Adam stared. “He believes in Bigfoot. Never trust anybody who believes in Bigfoot.”

“Adam, shut up. I wasn’t asking you. Although I do agree.”

“Whether we can trust him depends on the statements of the other witnesses, and on how well his pictures match up with his story,” Agent Mann mused. “Of course, that assumes that his pictures are even legit to begin with. If they’ve been photoshopped, his entire story can be immediately discarded as untrue.”

Adam clicked his seatbelt into place. “Leave that to me,” he said proudly. “I’ll find out whether these photos are the real deal or if they’ve been edited and messed with.”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The skeleton nodded. “That’ll be your job, then. Xavier, can you and your photographic memory record every interview, including this one?”

“Can do,” Xavier promised. “I’ll remember everything without fail.”

“Brilliant. Then Jacob and I will handle the interviewing. Now, then, let’s see about the next house…”

~o~

“Ah, that hits the spot,” Jacob sighed happily as he set down a steaming cup of coffee on a circular table before him.

The group had finished their witness interviews early and decided to take a break at a local Starbucks. It was now around two-thirty in the afternoon, and although the fast food joint was busy, it had free internet and, of course, coffee. Both of these perks were something the revenant and his charges desperately desired. Xavier was busy finishing up his reports of the afternoon’s interviews, and in the meantime, Adam used his laptop to make a map of each UFO sighting. Thanks to a computer app he’d developed himself in the past, based off of pre-existing web apps, he’d proved that none of the photos taken had been tampered with. Now he was just using Newton Law’s account of the abduction he’d witnessed, as well as those of the other witnesses, to come up with a crime map.

“Guys, check this out,” Adam said at last, turning his computer around for all the others to see. He’d pulled up a map of the city and had marked each reported sighting with a red dot. “These sightings all seem to fall in a pattern. Do you see the shape they make?”

Jacob squinted, pop music drifting into his ears from the store’s speakers. One dot was located near the top of the digital map of Beaver Falls. Another was placed diagonally down and to the left of the previous one. A third had been marked on a spot below the second, but horizontally halfway between the first and second, with a fourth on the same height as the third (but located on the other side of the uppermost dot). Lost, Jacob shook his head.

“Sorry,” Xavier, glancing up from his notebook, said. “I was never very good at connect-the-dots, and to me, that just looks like a weird quadrilateral.”

“Yeah, you’re going to have to throw us a bone,” Agent Mann told the computer whiz with a glint in his eye socket. “I can provide one for you if you like.”

Adam stared. “It is so weird to try and picture you as a skeleton. You look like the twin of Daniel Craig.” He shook his head in amazement and turned his laptop back around to face him. “Hold on a sec, guys.” He right-clicked the mouse, plugged into one of the laptop’s USB ports, several times, and dragged it across the circular table. Jacob, Mann, and Xavier watched curiously. When he was done, he showed the screen to them again and asked what they saw that time.

Jacob blinked. Lines now connected the dots, but had been drawn in such a way that the shape resembled…

“A star,” he said suddenly. “It’s a star!... But it’s missing its fifth point.”

Agent Mann’s eye sockets widened. “Hey, you’re right! That’s… weirdly symbolic.”

Xavier raised an eyebrow. “I think Jacob’s rubbing off on you, Agent Mann.”

Adam rolled his eyes. “Ignoring that, precisely! It is indeed what I believe to be a star with the fifth point missing. All the other points, as you can see, are located at the dots representing the UFO sightings. And since a period of seven hours exists between any two chronologically adjacent sightings, I believe that the UFO’s next appearance will be at the missing fifth point in half an hour—three o’clock.”

Xavier gave a standing ovation. “Bravo! You actually sounded smart!”

“Xavier,” Adam said flatly, “shut up.”

“Oi, that’s our thing to you,” Jacob said. “You can’t just steal it like that.”

“I can do whatever I want, it’s a free country.”

“Boys,” Mann sighed, and they quieted down. He peered at the map. “That missing dot looks like it’s near the riverbank.” Beaver River ran southeast from Normal to right past Beaver Falls, which had actually gotten its town name from a miniature falls in said river.

Jacob stood up and stretched. “Well, then what are we waiting for? Let’s go find those aliens!”

“We haven’t got any time to lose,” the skeleton agreed, his smooth British accent pleasing to the ears.

Xavier grinned and snapped his notebook shut. “Now this is getting me excited!” he exclaimed. He high-fived Adam and laughed manically. “We’re about to make history, my man!”

“HISTORY!” Adam whooped.

Agent Mann groaned. “Did you already forget what I told you about the importance of this job…?”

“Probably,” Jacob deadpanned.

And so the two revenants and two humans left the Beaver Falls Starbucks, driving as fast as they could through town without breaking the speed limit. The old Ford drowned and hacked as they went. Adam and Xavier stared up at the sky through their windows, keeping watch for any circular, flying objects. None came, though, and twenty minutes later, they fought their way through traffic and arrived at the missing point of the star as indicated by Adam’s digital map.

They found themselves at a sprawling picnic area by the riverbank, where fire stoves and picnic tables had been set up for anyone who wished to use them. Scarcely spaced trees, short and stocky, grew from the ground, and the grass was freshly cut; chopped blades still lay scattered about like some mad scientist’s sick experiment to mess with allergic kids’ heads. That day, a surprising lack of people made use of the picnic area’s public utilities, although this pleased Agent Mann. The less people there were, the less who were able to be potentially abducted or become witnesses.

The group of four picked a table and sat down. Minutes crept by like tortoises, and they waited with bated breath.

“Do you think it’s really going to come?” Adam wondered after several minutes of inactivity.

“A map correctly depicting the next appearance of the target is a cliché in stories with these kinds of situations,” Jacob said. “It’ll come. Hey, what time is it?”

Agent Mann checked his iPone. “It’s three now.”

Everyone stiffened, training their eyes on the sky around them. Large puffs of clouds hung in the air like anti-gravity cotton candy, but nothing that looked a large, cylindrical alien spaceship. Silence fell on them all as they scanned the heavens for anything extraterrestrial. The only sound was the rushing of water from Beaver River, which flowed by a mere twenty feet away.

“Um…” Jacob tilted his head. “Nothing’s happening.”

“So much for clichés working in real life,” Adam muttered. “That’s disappointing.”

Agent Mann nodded, almost about to agree, when a thought crossed his mind. He blinked and smacked his bony forehead. “Wait, I forgot!” he said quickly, drawing the others’ attention. “My phone’s clock is a minute fast!”

“Of all the things to forget—!” Xavier started to grumble, but at that moment, a low-pitched drone filled the air. It started soft and quiet at first, but increased consistently in volume before dying down, and Adam yelped and pointed up in the air. Down at the other side of the picnic park, a family of five enjoyed some sandwiches, but as Jacob watched in escalating horror, a spaceship zoomed into existence above them and slowed to a stop with remarkable efficiency. A yellow beam dropped down from a hatch that opened in the middle of the ship’s bottom, and the family started to scream and flail their arms as they were pulled up into the sky.

As Newton Law had described, the spaceship vaguely resembled an airplane, except it was much wider and longer than any plane Jacob had ever seen before. Grey and menacing, it hovered in place through some unknown means. Wings extended from either side, each one carrying two rotors that were currently unpowered. A thruster had been constructed in the butt end of the ship.

“Shit!” Agent Mann cursed as the family slowly rose up higher. “They’re being abducted! We need to save them, but we can’t let that ship get away! We don’t where it might escape to, or how fast it is!”

Adam stood up quickly, tensing. “What do we do?”

“Leave it to me,” Agent Mann said. “I’ll bring that ship down.” He got to his feet and his right eye glowed blue. But nothing else happened, and he stiffened. “I can’t teleport through that hatch the beam’s coming out of! I think the beam is blocking it somehow!”

Xavier gaped. “No way! Shouldn’t that be, like, impossible!?”

“Not unless it’s made out of some strange kind of material,” Jacob muttered, narrowing his eyes.

Agent Mann nodded, clenching his teeth. “Or magic.”

Adam thought for a moment. “You’re super strong, right? Try punching through some weak point on top of the ship. If you can do that, you might be able to make it crash.”

The skeleton considered this. It would take tons of force to pull that off, and for anything but a demon it would normally be impossible, but by adding his soul power into his fist… “That might just be possible,” he said. “Wait here; I’ll be back in a few seconds. When it crashes, we’ll board it together.”

He took a deep breath, then the skeleton revenant disappeared from their picnic table. When he returned to sight, Mann clung to the side of the alien spaceship using nothing but his finger bones. He started to slide off, but even as he did so, he caught sight of the ship’s top. The skeleton teleported to an area where he could safely stand. Mere moments later; he heard a metallic grating; the hatch through which the beam blasted was closing. The aliens had completed their abduction.

That low drone started up again; the rotors had begun turning rapidly. The ship would likely take off very quickly.

“Shit,” Agent Mann said again, and closed his eye sockets. He took a deep breath and imagined retreating inwards, deep inside himself. He searched for the warm radiance of his soul, and found it near where his heart would have been had he had one. He pictured his wispy soul enlarging, growing denser; Mann curled his hand into a bony fist, fell into a horse stance, and punched downwards with all the force of a train. He then teleported to a second location and punched there, too.

The metallic roof crunched where his knuckles struck it, and collapsed inwards, revealing pristine white halls. Air rushed out from the hole at him, and an alarm blared. The rotors whined and slowed, and Agent Mann teleported back down to the ground. Startled at his sudden appearance, Jacob, Adam, and Xavier jumped a little.

Adam leaned forward. “Did you do it?” he demanded, concerned.

Mann nodded groggily. “It should start crashing because of the change in air pressure any second,” he panted, and the boys cheered. The FBI agent leaned against the wooden table for support; increasing his strength like that so much had really used up way too much of his energy. He could feel his vision swimming and fading. “I don’t think I’ll be of much help to you guys for a while,” he gasped, clutching his skull. “I’ll leave the rest to you… whatever you do, don’t… do anything to make their species declare war on us… I’ll be sleeping now.”

He slumped forward and fell over the table, unconscious.

“Is he alright?” Xavier asked.

Jacob swallowed, but nodded firmly. “I’m sure he is,” he said. “He must’ve just overextended himself by punching a hole in that ship.” As he spoke, the spaceship in question tilted and slowly began to fall, picking up speed second by passing second. The teens looked up as it came down, heading on a path towards the river. Two seconds later, the massive ship crashed, shaking the very earth and throwing up a huge plume of water into the sky. Some of the ship tore off of the rest, revealing a pure white room that appeared to be some sort of bedroom; bunkbeds lined the walls, and cabinets were added wherever the beds weren’t.

Adam gulped nervously and stepped forward. “Alright, gang,” he said, both fear and excitement evident in his voice. “Let’s board that alien spaceship.”

“Right behind you,” Xavier assured him.

“Definitely,” Jacob agreed. He nodded and stepped up alongside his friend, frowning at the extraterrestrial construct before him. “Let’s rescue those poor people who were abducted and secure Earth’s safety.”

Together, the three friends picked their way carefully down the riverbank’s cement blocks, only coming to a stop when they’d reached the ship itself. It was almost as wide as Beaver River, and the side with the torn-off panel faced them, resting on the riverbank. They wouldn’t even have to wade in the water. All they had to do was simply walk into the ship, and so they did. They made sure to watch the ground for any loose shards of sharp metal plating.

It was cold inside the ship, chilly like after a rainstorm tears through town on a fall day. Cautiously, they strained their ears for the sound of footsteps, although with the ship’s ridiculously high-pitched, alarm wailing in their ears it was hard to hear anything else. They moved quietly through the bedroom to the opposite end, where a dent in the white wall took the general shape of a door. Upon reaching it, the dented-in wall automatically slid open to the left.

Skin crawling, blood racing, the boys crept into the corridor. It was long and as white as the bedroom had been; it seemed to stretch clear from the spaceship’s back to its front. Here and there, grey ventilation covers had been built into the walls near the ceiling. Light bulbs in said ceiling broke up its otherwise smooth, metallic shine, and cast bright light all throughout the corridor. More of the dented-in doors were unevenly spaced down as far as the hall went. Each had a grey screen on the wall directly to its right, and above this, a metallic panel with strange characters and symbols in an extraterrestrial language Jacob couldn’t make heads or tails out of.

Xavier tried approaching one door, but it wouldn’t budge. He frowned and tapped the screen next to it, and what looked like a passcode entry popped up.

“Great,” Adam grumbled. “I bet all the doors are locked from this side through passcodes or whatever.”

Xavier groaned. “How are we supposed to save that family, and the other abducted people, now?”

A door opened some ways down the hall, and tons of strange creatures carrying guns rushed out. They were certainly no “little green men” from the movies. They stood upright, balancing on three slimy legs with doglike paws attached. Their skin was sleek and grey, and each creature sported seven noodley arms with hand paws that had five fingers and a thumb. Their bodies were thin but sturdy-looking; their faces were tall and oblong. They had catlike, yellow eyes.

“…The fuck are they?” Xavier asked eloquently, both fascinated and grossed out by them.

All of the aliens present—around eight or nine—immediately swiveled their heads toward Jacob, Adam, and Xavier. The futuristic guns pointed directly at them, and the aliens opened their mouths to reveal yellowed teeth, and an otherworldly hissing, clicking noise slithered from their throats. The Earthlings backed up a couple steps.

“What’s it saying?” Adam gulped, eyeing the weird guns nervously.

Jacob, mystified, shook his head. “Beats me. But whatever it is, those guns say they are not happy to see us.”

Xavier swallowed, then stepped forward, raised his hands, and made peace signs. “Please lower your weapons, er, whatever the hell you things are!” he said loudly. The aliens paused and frowned. The teen’s hands trembled a little, but he continued. “We do not wish you harm! We come in peace!”

Adam squeaked. “Xav, are you fucking kidding me!? They have guns pointed between our eyes and that’s what you say!?”

“Adam, shut up!” Xavier hissed, his voice unnaturally high and his ears pink. “I’m terrified out of my mind here and your snark is not helping!”

Meanwhile, the aliens looked at each other, chattered in their hissing/clicking language, and then the one in the middle and standing ahead of the others reached behind its back. The boys tensed, fearful that it might be reaching for ammo; Jacob slipped his hand into his pocket to grab at his dagger in case things went south. But before he could do anything stupid, the alien produced from behind its back not ammo, but some device that appeared to be a long, silver can with a button on the end. It pressed this and said, “Well, why didn’t say so?” in perfect English.

All the aliens grinned and lowered their guns, returning Xavier’s peace sign.

Jacob’s jaw dropped. “Okay, what?” he said.

“We are the Slydrinothgmnackians,” the creature said in a friendly tone. Now it was time for Adam and Xavier’s jaws to drop at the pure absurdity of the name. “We had assumed you were the ones who attacked our ship, but if you come in peace, then you clearly did not do so. It must have been those pesky Drantinokyiamites again. Pesky fishpeople with their constant bombardment of our ship, thinking the Galactic Supershell Games are still happening… they lost fifty light years ago! Yeesh. Don’t you wish they’d just accept that already?”

The other aliens nodded, chattering in annoyance. Jacob decided telling them that their mentor, Agent Mann, had in fact caused the damage might not be the best option.

“But enough about that,” the alien said, rubbing its paws. “What brings you Earthlings to our humble starship?”

Adam’s mouth opened and closed silently, his words dying in his throat before he could speak.

Jacob blinked and shook himself out of his stupor. “You… um… abducted some of our people and we’d like them back?”

“Oh, is that all?” The alien nodded, and some of its friends rubbed the backs of their heads sheepishly. “I assure you we didn’t mean to cause any alarm. Actually, we were already planning to return the Earthlings we took yesterday to their homes, safe and sound and not remembering a thing. So, you can have them!”

Everyone gaped.

“…Is this not going at all like anyone else expected it to?” Xavier asked blankly.

Jacob and Adam could only nod.

“Why… did you take them?” Adam managed to say.

The alien winced. “Oh, right. On our home planet, a seer named Ylsknnomasttma foresaw that prophets born on this planet could predict the end of the universe. We’ve been taking potential prophets and hypnotizing them to try and get them to reveal the message to us, but so far, no one has said a peep. We’re about to perform the next hypnotism test on the new prophets right now, if you’d like to watch… er, what’s your names?”

“Jacob Davidson,” Jacob answered on reflex.

Adam raised a shaky hand. “Adam Jones.”

“Xavier Fairway,” said Xavier.

Pleased, the alien nodded and glanced at its friends. “Men, kindly introduce yourselves to our guests.”

One by one, going down the line from left to right, the other slimy creatures did so.

“Zolswargz.”

“I’m Rakksolstnmy.”

“Bdesnjolsgax.”

“Strestanmebbes.”

“Fthzynmitas here.”

“Yttobobsie, bitches.”

“Genysmobbzots.”

The alien who’d done most of the speaking so far, and who appeared to be his friends’ leader, clapped. “Well done! And I’m Fred.”

“…What,” Adam said, which summed up Jacob’s own thoughts pretty damn accurately. Xavier facepalmed.

“Come!” Fred the alien said happily, motioning for them to follow him with all seven hands. “To the Observation Room!” And with that, he marched back to the room from which he and the other Slydrinothgmnackians had come. His buddies followed him.

Jacob, Adam, and Xavier exchanged flabbergasted looks.

“Do we… follow them?” Adam wondered, tilting his head.

Xavier frowned. “It could be a trap.”

“We have no way to get through the other doors or any idea of where they’re holding the abductees,” Jacob pointed out. “Plus, they could’ve shot us when they pointed their guns at us in the first place if they didn’t like us. I guess… we just follow them for now?”

The three teens paused, then nodded. They headed off to the room that Fred and his fellow aliens had left to; meanwhile, the alarm died off. Upon entering the new room, the door slid shut behind them and they took stock of their new surroundings. It was a long and cramped room that was empty save for a few benches placed near the opposite wall, which was entirely built of glass. The wall was actually one large window overlooking a darker chamber where the abducted family sat, strapped to four separate chairs with goggles over their eyes. Another alien paced back and forth alongside them.

The aliens’ hissing/clicking language filled the room, although none of the ones in the Observation Room seemed to be chattering.

“This room plays any sounds from the Hypnotism Chamber through speakers built into the walls,” Fred the Slydrinothgmnackian told them. “The hypnotism process has gotten much efficient and faster to complete the more we’ve used it, so we should start hearing results any minute… if the, ah, subjects are willing to speak. Do not worry; none of those Earthlings in the Chamber will be harmed, nor will they have any adverse suggestions implanted in them. Please, have a seat.”

None of the Earthlings chose to sat down; it would be much easier to fight in the case of Fred having lied if they were already standing. Jacob watched the hypnotism carefully; if anything happened other than what Fred the Slydrinothgmnackian had claimed would happen, he’d immediately try to rescue the subjects.

After a few minutes of only the alien language coming through the speakers, the youngest member of the abducted family—a sweet little boy wearing a baseball cap, a striped shirt, and shorts—spoke.’

“Beware the left hand,” the kid said, and Fred’s eyes shot open.

“Results!” he gasped, leaning forward. The other aliens chattered excitedly.

“Shh,” Yttobobsie hissed. “He’s saying more.”

And so the boy was. “Beware the night of the dead,” he warned. “The bell shall open the gates of death, and man shall fall. Beware the left hand.” The kid’s voice was definitely not normal; it was hollow and toneless, as if an empty tunnel had been given the ability to speak. Something about it made Jacob shiver, made his hackles raise on end. He swallowed dry, cold air and turned quickly to Xavier.

“Oi, you getting all of this?” he said quietly.

Xavier, wide-eyed and pale as a sheet, nodded.

“Beware the left hand!” the boy continued to say, more intently this time. “The serpent’s servant shall corrupt the just! Beware the night of the dead! The virus shall gather the detested and the fallen. The black eyes shall wake the right’s bane! Beware the left hand! The key may be found only through the just man’s heaviest price! Four shall stand at the gates of death; three shall return to the land of life! Beware the night of the dead!”

The ship started to shake now, and the room grew ever colder. Jacob could see his breath. The alien down in the Hypnotism Chamber had long since stopped speaking in its extraterrestrial language; it ran around in circles, clearly terrified. The Slydrinothgmnackians up in the Observation Room with the boys also were panicked, chattering amongst themselves in fearful tones.

“Beware the men with black eyes!”

The glass looking out into the Hypnotism Chamber cracked; now the Slydrinothgmnackians stood up and began to backpedal out of the room. Down in the Chamber, the boy’s goggles sparked with electricity.

“Beware the left hand!”

“WHAT’S GOING ON!?” Adam bellowed as the ship’s alarm again blared, and he backed away from the quickly fracturing window.

“I don’t know!” Fred gulped, eyes wide with terror. “Nothing like this has ever happened before!”

“BEWARE THE CAGED SERPENT AND HIS SERVANT!”

The boy’s goggles shattered and fell away from his eyes, finally allowing Jacob to get a good look at them; to his shock, they were pure light. “BEWARE!” The word boomed throughout the Observation Room like a volcano eruption, easily overpowering the squealing alarm, and the glass window shattered. Any Slydrinothgmnackians still there scampered away, out into the hall, and the boys were hot on their heels.

For two terrible seconds, the ship rocked back and forth as though it might simply turn over on itself. Jacob’s ears rang, and he clapped his hands over them, howling.

Then, quite suddenly, the commotion died.

The Slydrinothgmnackians, cowering for safety against the corridor’s walls, slowly drew to their full height and looked cautiously at the Observation Room. The floor was littered with glass; some white panels on the ceiling had torn free and hung by only some metallic-looking rope.

“Um… Fred?” one of the aliens—was it Zolswargz? It could’ve been Fthzynmitas—spoke up hesitantly. “What do we do?”

Fred looked scared, but also confused. “Check to see what has happened,” he suggested.

They all hurried back into the room, which other than the dangling ceiling panels and shattered glass window, actually had not suffered much damage. In the Hypnotism Chamber, though, the abducted family’s hypnotism goggles had all burned off, leaving nothing but ashes on them and not even scarring their faces. They groaned blearily and sat up; their restraints had been broken. And as for the boy...

He hovered in the middle of the Chamber, his hands outstretched and his eyes still spotlights. Jacob thought he saw the faint image of feathery wings stretching out from the boy’s back. Then he blinked, and the boy’s eyes were normal again; no wings were there. He hung in space for a brief second, then fell to the ground.

“JAMES!” cried the mother suddenly, running and leaping to catch him.

Jacob stared, eyes wide. Adam, Xavier, and Fred and his aliens all stared, too.

The events that had happened that day would be something that none of them would forget for years.