String Theory -1- Snatched!

I reflected that I’d been warned about traveling the back roads of the Texas panhandle alone on my motorcycle. “No one to help you if you get in trouble, Smitty, cause it’s just miles and miles of just miles and miles,” Deke Morgan had said. “And the cell reception is terrible.”

I wouldn’t know about that since I’d forgotten my charging cable when I left Norman, Oklahoma the day before and had turned my phone off when it started meeping piteously at me earlier. With luck, I’d be in Taos, New Mexico, at my girlfriend’s house before I needed the phone again.

Sandra Wells had been my girlfriend for two years when she suddenly got the idea we were breaking up. She’d withdrawn from classes, canceled the lease on her apartment, and headed home before I got clued in. Fortunately, spring break was beginning, so I had a week to track her down and persuade her that we were still a couple.

The Interstate didn’t go directly to Taos, where her folks lived, so somewhere east of Amarillo, I decided that I could cut the corner and see more of the country by using the state highways. I passed through a town that had almost the same name as my bike an hour or so before, and somewhere on the big flat mesa called the Llano Estacado, I met up with aliens.

Yeah, I know.

People had been having encounters, close and otherwise, with strange phenomena in and near Northern New Mexico for almost eighty years. I’d read about them but didn’t believe any of it. I guess I’m more of a Scully than a Mulder. Or I was. Why would any interstellar civilization cross such immense distances just to snatch people out of their ordinary lives to stick things in various orifices and then turn them loose?

It didn’t make sense unless you took into account the human ability to make myths and find magic where there really was none. Technology that could reach the stars was not going to be wasted on such trivialities.

I had my own favorite travel technology that could take me where I wanted to go. My bike was an H-D a few years older than myself, in good shape but maybe not as rugged as the road. Somewhere near the New Mexico border, I hit a pothole in an otherwise flat, smooth, straightaway and took a shortcut through the bushes.

I didn’t lose control completely, but bike and I parted company when we started down a sudden slope full of rocks, cactus and those shrubby bushes that smell like breakfast sausage. I got a few bruises but remained mostly intact, thanks to my brain-bucket-type helmet and leathers. Picking myself up, and looking myself over, I found most of the damage was a scrape along my inner left thigh where a branch or rock had penetrated my clothing and taken a half-ounce or so of skin and meat with it.

It hurt bad enough, (but only after I had seen it) that I wasted a few minutes cursing. I couldn’t really do anything about the tear in my leather pants, but I had a first aid kit on the bike, so I followed the path the machine had left further into the gully, ravine or what-you-call-it, to where the front wheel lay nose against a big old rock.

It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, I supposed. I pulled the bike over to a flatter spot and rummaged in a pannier for the disinfectant spray, gauze and tape to do my own repairs first. Then I examined the bike more closely while drinking some of my water to wash down the Tylenol.

It looked like a flat tire and a couple of busted spokes. I had a tire kit to fix the flat, and a wrench to remove the broken spokes, so I could get back on the road with only a short delay. Riding a motorcycle is an art, a craft and a science, but it helps to have the tools.

I stared at the western sky for a minute. The distant mountains showed purple-black against clouds turning red-orange. The only fluffy stuff was far away and high up, the sun shining under them rather than through them. I’d been on the road for most of seven hours, not having got as early a start as I wanted. All that to say it would be getting dark in less than an hour.

“Shit,” I complained. I had an LED battery work light in my kit, but the current workspace was less than ideal. I should get the bike out of the low spot to a flat space nearer the road before doing any real work on it. That took longer than it should have because I needed to find a spot where I could push or pull the beast up the incline while navigating around obstacles.

Of course, I stepped in a snake hole at the worst possible moment, almost losing control of my wheels. My sturdy riding boots prevented a break or sprain, but the twisting my ankle took added a sour spice to my mood.

I drank some water and ate a granola bar before laying out my canvas work surface and dismounting the front wheel. I clamped my work light to the handlebars and got busy. If I had a more modern bike, I wouldn’t be doing any of this since most H-Ds built since the 80s have neither tubes nor spokes. My fine leather driving gloves went into a pocket, I would work better barehanded and not get hard-to-remove oil on my gloves.

My new work table lay only about 30 yards from the highway, but there didn’t seem to be much traffic. I noticed a handful of semis go by and at least one boxy pick-up that might have been older than my bike. The sun fell further from the sky while clouds gathered, and by the time I finished repairing things and remounting the wheel, actual darkness seemed imminent.

The two bright stars now visible above the clouds near the sunset must be Venus and Mercury. At least, if I remembered my first-year astronomy correctly. Now the question became, did I motor on into the night or dig the sleeping bag and plastic tent out of the bottom of the right-side pannier?

I must have made a decision while I put away my tools and checked the wound in my thigh because shortly after relieving myself behind a creosote bush, I straddled my bike and brought her back to life. She sounded perfect, and I really smiled for the first time since hitting the pothole. I got back on the road, feeling optimistic.

I knew I could reach Taos in less than three hours. There I’d find Sandy’s parents’ house, and she would be there. All I’d have to do is convince the girl that she and I were both still in love. She’d avoided talking to me before she left because she knew that I could pretty much talk her into anything.

I decided that our problems came from the liberal crowd she hung around with because of her courses. Women’s Studies wasn’t a real major, anyway. Dropping out of school was probably the right thing to do, but I needed to talk to her to convince her that we belonged together.

She would see my reasoning was better for both of us if I could just be alone with her for an hour or two.

I figured I must be in New Mexico now because the shape of the road signs had changed. There’s a long stretch of flat deserty land before the broken-up terrain that marks the end of the Llano Estacado. It’s stark with a kind of beauty you don’t see in gentler lands, but at seventy miles an hour, it gets kind of boring.

The sun went down behind the mountains, and its two companion planets hovered near the horizon for a while. My headlight picked up glints of glass in the asphalt to match the twinkling of stars appearing overhead. The engine roar permeated my body and penetrated my soul with its soothing rumble.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t notice when things started to go wrong.

I don’t know when it happened, but I gradually noticed the absence of noise from the engine and road. My first thought was highway hypnosis, and I did feel a certain sluggishness in the way my brain processed what was happening. It all began to feel dreamlike. The huge light ahead that I had originally taken to be Venus or Mercury seemed to grow ever larger and brighter until the beams seemed to shine right through me.

“I’m transparent,” I thought inanely. “Maybe I’m invisible?” I tried to look at my hands on the steering bars. I could see my gloves, black leather with a few stains around the seams, and the stitching I noticed for maybe the first time was dark brown, not black. Had it always been so?

But why was I worrying about something so trivial when my bike and I were obviously flying through the air hundreds of yards above the road, hurtling toward the light?

I may have screamed. I certainly had reason to, but my response seemed to be aimed at waking myself up from a dangerous dream. “Your ass is gonna die, Smitty!” I yelled at the stars. The light surrounded me, and just as the bright glare achieved totality, it turned to darkness, the color of sky between the stars. “I’m dead,” I thought, but I could no longer make a sound.

In darkness and in silence, unable to move or feel my body, I had no reason to think I was still alive. This wasn’t like what I thought death would be, but I didn’t complain because there was no one to complain to.

I have no idea how long this lasted, but I became gradually aware that things had changed. I seemed to be floating in a chamber as big as a swimming pool. I couldn’t tell if I were floating in water or just suspended in mid-air. Whatever it was that supported me had a strange clarity like Lucite glass walls. Accompanying me were several raftlike —things!— made up of knotted tangles of threads and multi-colored cords, each messy bundle about the size of a bed or a couch.

“Get away!” I told them, but my voice had no force or volume. I had the sense that the rafts were alive and listening, but they made no sounds in reply. They surrounded me like a school of psychedelic squid, their slender ropy tentacles removing parts of my gear and clothing. I tried to resist, kicking and flailing and crying out, but it was hopeless.

They soon had me stripped naked, still floating in a bright empty space. I didn’t see my bike anywhere, though what I would have done had I been able to reach it, I don’t know.

It occurred to me that I had been snatched by aliens, just like the many stories that circulated on the internet of encounters and adventures. I had always assumed such stories were fabrications, in part because the aliens in them all seemed entirely too human. Not these guys! Cthulhu could take lessons in creepiness from these animated ragbags!

What I wouldn’t give for the sight of a nice homely Gray Alien with his too-large forehead and too-long middle finger. Because now, having stripped away my manmade coverings, the aliens scratched and scrubbed at my skin, pulling at my hair, fingers, ears and even my dick!

“No!” I screamed at them. “Nothing else comes off! The rest of this is me!” I tried tearing at them, pulling their threads and cords, yanking at their knots and tangles. One of them seemed to come apart in my hands, but the filaments wove themselves into a tube-like structure that tried to force itself down my throat. The tube, unlike other parts of the alien, was hard and stiff, like plastic tubing or boot leather.

I gagged, I choked, but I could no longer breathe, feeling the alien inside me! At least, I thought, they’re killing me before they start the anal probing. It wasn’t the stupidest thing that ever crossed my mind, but it had to be close. There was a rushing sensation in my throat, and I felt my stomach distending. How much of the alien was now inside me?

I didn’t know, and the ignorance became fear. I made as much noise and trouble as I could, but at some point, I passed out from panic, exhaustion and lack of air.

When I woke up and opened my eyes, my vision seemed blurry and distorted, but brown trunks, green needles and blue skies arched above me. I hadn’t expected to wake up at all, and for a time, I just kept still, soaking in the forest.

Forest? There are forests in New Mexico, but the Llano Estacado does a pretty good job of being a desert. Where the hell was I? It occurred to me that all the scenery was arranged oddly as if below me. Was I hanging upside down in a tree? I couldn’t seem to move my head to check that out.

I didn’t see any multi-colored mats of cords, so I tried to ask the question aloud. “Where the hell am I?” But I didn’t seem able to make a sound. Was my mouth still full of alien spaghetti? I tried to spit, to twist, to turn, and I distinctly felt a swaying, swinging motion.

An image came to me of a cocoon-like sack swaying from a tree branch surrounded by more trees with sky and clouds in the distance. Was this where I was at the moment? The swinging sensation seemed to confirm it, but where had the image come from in the first place? I blinked several times, but I still seemed to be looking through a fine mesh of gauze, blurry and indistinct.

I tried calling out again, but I couldn’t tell if I made any noise at all. I didn’t hear anything except a gray squirrel who made a rude comment about my ancestry and my political affiliation. At least, I think that’s what he said. I found myself smiling, listening to his antics, imagining that he was swearing in squirrelese that he would certainly pack my skull full of acorns at his earliest opportunity.

My situation felt terrible, but that I could be amused listening to a squirrel seemed like a hopeful sign. Or had I really totally lost my mind? Become unhinged by my experience as an alien captive? What kind of reasoning could be behind them letting me go by hanging me from a tree in a bag?

I thought I ought to be more frightened than I felt at the moment. But I didn’t feel the numbness of despair. In fact, I had an irrational conviction that everything was going to be all right. I wasn’t exactly enjoying myself, but the current situation was an improvement, and there were even elements that seemed funny, if not a little ridiculous.

I wanted to laugh out loud at the tree-rat, but I realized my mouth was full of stuff that felt like twigs and needles and that something rather like netting still covered my face. The image of a large sack hanging from a tree came to me again. I could coordinate this image with my own sensation and the rather limited view I had of my surroundings.

If I could cause the sack to swing, maybe I could rub it up against the tree and tear it open. I didn’t know how high up in the tree I might be, but it seemed worth the risk. It wasn’t a plan, but I began to time my squirming and bending to the swaying sensations. Every kid knows how to do this in a playground swing; it probably goes back to our monkey ancestors.

The first impact came at one of my shoulders, another swing, another impact and now my sensation included spinning, and I closed my eyes against the dizzy images. A shoulder impacted what felt like tree bark, then a hip, and my head —ow— and then….

I felt the bag, or cocoon, or whatever it was, rip, and I tried to cry out as I slid through the opening I had made and fell onto the forest floor. It was only a few feet, but it knocked the wind out of me, causing me to spew sticks, twigs and bits of cord out of my mouth.

I took in as big a breath as I could (not very big at all!) and screamed, but again, I didn’t hear any such thing, just gasping and whistling noises. I tried to cough more of the stuff out of my mouth and throat, but nothing was happening. I could breathe if I forced myself to be calm, but speaking or calling out seemed beyond my abilities.

My vision was still odd, with colors that felt saturated and bright, but not as sharp as I might have wanted. Things at any distance seemed to be viewed through a gauzy filter.

I lay there on my back, feeling the usual sort of forest floor debris underneath me. I tried to lift a hand to my face to see if something was still in front of my eyes, I felt the hand moving, but when I got it up to look at it, things were definitely not normal. I brought the appendage closer to my face and stared.

The hand seemed small, the fingers slim, the fingernails pink and shiny. “The fuck?” I asked, or tried to, coughing again. My eyes followed the small slender hand up to a delicate wrist and fine-boned forearm, but then a large soft, rounded object got in the way. And more, when I moved to investigate the softness, golden hair fell around the hand and wrist I was using.

The filaments caused me to remember the thready rafts of the alien investigators, and I tried to sit up suddenly. But that wasn’t happening. Some sort of large weight sat on my chest, holding me down. I could feel my hand, which seemed to be the same small hand I was seeing, pushing at a soft, yielding mass.

I lifted my head to try to get a view of just what I was feeling. I brought my other hand up at the same time, another little butterfly with pink nails. Hysteria bubbled up, and I might have screamed if something didn’t still block my voice.

I could see that two large mounds of flesh sat on my chest. They had to be breasts.

The boobies, the juggs, the hooters, the gazongas! were each too big to hold in either or both of my tiny hands. Enough is enough, and too much is too much!

I had breasts, bad enough, but I could look down my chest, down the wide fleshy Valley between the Tetons, to see a slight roundness further down, past the peaks of my private mountain range.

“No! No, no, no!” I choked. The nipples seemed as outsized as the breasts, and when I touched them, they turned out to be hugely sensitive, too. Each of the protuberances seemed designed to fit into the palms of my tiny hands. I grasped them, wrapping my fingers around their textured sides. I squeezed, and the sensation felt like nothing so much as using my hands to pleasure myself.

Back when I was male and had a dick.

I was suddenly convinced that my dick, and my maleness, were both gone. I tried to feel down between my legs, but my gunboats were in the way. I put my hands and arms behind me and levered myself into a sitting position, which caused my oversize melony parts to sag a bit against my belly.

But now I could reach my crotch, though I had to bend a bit more forward to see. Golden threads nested there, much like what I seemed to be growing on my head. I felt around, finding only a damp slit between plump, fleshy lips.

I made more coughing and choking noises, unable to express my anger and panic in words. I’d not only been snatched by aliens, but they had given me a snatch too!