The Prom Goer's Interstellar Excursion by Chris McCoy Read Free Book Online

under my wheels like a drumbeat.
    I was worried about Sophie. I couldn’t imagine the terrorshe must have felt when she looked up and saw the extraterrestrials above her, and I almost hoped that she was still unconscious so she didn’t have to deal with the dread of seeing Earth disappear beneath her without knowing where she was being taken. I hadn’t been able to deal with the fear of the aliens myself, and they weren’t even interested in me.
    Half of me was sick with worry about her, while the rest of me was consumed by the cold outrage of being so ridiculously close to going to prom with Sophie Gilkey , and then having her snatched away. I had waited all of high school for a break—which I thought was going to be an acceptance to Princeton—but instead, the universe had presented me with a chance to be with the girl who had occupied my thoughts since I was old enough to start thinking about girls, and then, in a very literal sense , the universe had taken her from me. I stared at the Big Dipper, and it looked like a huge bucket of crap about to tip over and spill onto my head. I was pissed.
    I had no choice. I had to go after her. I had to help her. If she had been abducted, I could find a way to get abducted too. I wasn’t going to let a bunch of aliens ruin the one good experience I’d had in eighteen years. If I was in space, I wouldn’t have to explain to anybody where she went, nor would I have to talk to the cops. I wouldn’t have to figure out what to do with her motorcycle. I wouldn’t have to assume a new identity or learn Spanish. I wouldn’t have to give her up.
    It was time to get her back.
    Because in my haste to get on the road with her I had left my phone at home, I used Sophie’s to try to figure out how to offermyself as bait. In twenty minutes of electronic sleuthing—and I have to say, I was surprised by the wealth of information out there on the subject, God bless the digital hive mind—I found four common factors in alien abductions:
    The abductee usually drove a truck. Most of the time, it was the driver of an eighteen-wheeler who stepped out of his big rig on the highway, stared up into a strange light, and— shloop —was sucked up into the ship. But it also seemed pretty common for aliens to target guys in pickups, which was a lucky break for me, considering my mode of transport.
    The abductions normally took place along deserted roads late at night or in the very early morning. Roswell was in the middle of nowhere, so that prerequisite had taken care of itself. All I had to do was drive three minutes in any direction and I would be as exposed and kidnappable as a newborn, though I realize that’s perhaps not the best analogy.
    The abductee was usually at least a little bit of a redneck. The redneck culture of my hometown was one of the things that I was desperately trying to escape—on any weekend afternoon, you could hear the roar of distant all-terrain vehicles booming off the desert floor—but I thought I could fake the part by ripping my shirt, putting on a trucker hat, and focusing my thoughts on Friday night football, about which I had never, ever given a crap.
    Finally, to get the aliens’ attention, it seemed to help to have a physical ailment to set you apart from other individuals—something interesting that extraterrestrials might want to check out, a curiosity for them to write about in their research papers.I reasoned that if they had already passed up the opportunity to abduct me once, my gangly body wasn’t enough to satisfy this requirement, so I’d have to figure something else out.
    I had no idea why Sophie had been taken despite falling into none of the categories above. Maybe they were intrigued by her for intangible reasons that they didn’t fully understand. I could relate. She had my heart too.
    After a stop for supplies—I’d never been so happy to see a