I sighed.
Well, it wouldn’t be the first time.
AFTER TWENTY MINUTES of slogging through the swampy cypress woods in galoshes, the glowing spot we were searching for was beginning to seem like a mirage. Despite our best efforts to locate it, the thing remained elusive and out of sight.
If only Earl had.
My cousin had made it his mission to pester the living daylights out of me since we’d left the truck. Correction—since he’d left the birth canal.
“If you snort like a pig one more time, Earl, I’m gonna skewer you clean through and serve you with fried green tomatoes.”
Earl sidled up to me and whispered, “That last one weren’t me.”
My heart pinged with fear. Was something out here with us? I glanced around at the dark woods, then realized I’d been had yet again.
“Yeah, right,” I said sourly.
“I mean, it was me,” Earl said. “But it weren’t voluntary. That was my stomach a growlin.’ I’m about slap starved to death.”
“Ugh!” I said, relief filling my lungs. “Why didn’t you eat a snack or something while we were at the RV?”
“You kiddin’ me?” Earl said. “I checked y’all’s fridge. You ain’t got nothin’ in there ’cept ingredients.”
“Quiet!” Grayson hissed. “I think we’re getting close.”
I shot Earl some side eye. “We’d better be, for your sake.”
Grayson climbed a steep ridge about ten feet high, then stopped at the top.
“See anything?” Earl whispered.
Grayson didn’t answer.
Earl turned and looked at me, his eyes wide. “Maybe he’s done got zapped by aliens.”
“Right. Or maybe he just didn’t hear you, boy genius,” I said, trudging past him up the ridge.
BY THE TIME I REACHED Grayson, the climb up the ridge had my heart beating in my throat. But what I saw at the top nearly stopped it cold.
I stared, mouth agape, at what looked like the ghost of a solar eclipse. It was that weird, orange ring again. It hovered, silent and stationary, a few feet off the ground.
“What in Hell is that?” I squeaked, my lungs so tight I could barely breathe.
“Uncertain,” Grayson replied robotically, his gaze never leaving the radiating orb. “But whatever it is, it’s not from Hell.”
“How do you know?” I said.
“Easy,” Earl said, coming to stand beside me. “No horns.”
Stupefied by the strange orb and my cousin’s otherworldly stupidity, I stood motionless beside Grayson as he shone his flashlight into the dark middle of the orb. From within its center shadow, the vague silhouette of an oblong, silvery object came into view.
“Hoo doggy!” Earl said. “What you think that is, Mr. G?”
Grayson rubbed his chin. “Based on the information Garth provided, I’d say it’s most likely an ambassador ship from the planet Krull.”
My knees began to shake with sheer terror.
Dear God! If these two idiots are who make first contact, we Earthlings are doomed!
Chapter Twenty
“A ... sss ... spaceship?” I stuttered, my brain frozen with fright.
“It would appear so,” Grayson said, aiming his flashlight beam at the metallic-looking object in the center of the glowing ring.
As a block of ice replaced my once-functioning brain cells, I noted a band encircling the craft. Strange hieroglyphic symbols adorned the raised strip around its middle.
I giggled as hysteria set in. Whatever the thing inside the glowing orb was, my haywire mind had decided it was the basic shape of a Tootsie Pop. But even in my impaired state of consciousness, I still had enough functioning synapses to know that I had no desire whatsoever to find out what awaited me in the center of that thing.
I put a hand on Grayson’s shoulder and whispered, “Let’s get out of here.”
Suddenly, Grayson’s flashlight went out.
“For God’s sake! Turn the light back on!” I screeched.
“I can’t,” Grayson said. He slapped the bottom of the flashlight. “It’s not working!”
“That’s not possible!” I said, my knees wobbling so bad I nearly collapsed. “I put fresh batteries in it myself!”
“I should have anticipated this,” Grayson said, shaking his head. “The vast majority of abductees report power drains to their equipment.”
My knees nearly gave out. “Ab...ab...abductees?”
Just then, exactly like the night before, a strange, inhuman whine filled the air. Then came a thundering sound, like the pounding of a thousand horse hooves.
“Uh ... that sounds like a lot a boars, y’all,” Earl said, his eyes as big as boiled eggs.
In the darkness, a tree branch cracked somewhere near the spacecraft.
“Holy shit!” I squealed.
I grabbed my cellphone from my pocket and shot my reading light in the direction of the sound. To my utter horror, right before it blinked out, the beam landed on a white, triangular-headed form about six feet tall. Beside it, a dark figure loomed, sporting a headful of snake-like tentacles—a Medusa from Mars.
“Aaak!” I screeched. “It’s freaking aliens from the planet Krull!” Then I turned around and blew past Earl like a floozy in a brothel raid.
Grayson yelled something at me as I whizzed by—but I couldn’t hear him over the sound of my galoshes. They were squeaking like a flock of rubber ducks in a bathtub gangbanger.
“SO MUCH FOR THE THEORY that you’ve become desensitized to paranormal phenomena,” Grayson quipped as we piled into Bessie like a tragic, redneck version of The Three Stooges.
Earl stomped the gas pedal before Grayson could even get the door closed. Bessie’s tires spun, then grabbed the asphalt and lurched forward, plastering me to the bench seat with the G-force of a rocket launch.
Sandwiched between the two guys, I held on for dear life as Bessie hurtled down the narrow backroad, Earl’s foot jammed to the floorboard like it had been Superglued.
“Desensitized?” I gasped, as soon as I could catch my breath. “Excuse me, but I didn’t exactly see you hanging around to sign any peace treaty.”
“Fair enough,” Grayson said, pulling a device from his pocket. “But to my credit, I was able to obtain a fairly respectable reading on the EMF detector.”
“Oh, goody,” I said sourly, using my last speck of willpower to not slap the stupid gadget from
