Chasing Cthulhu (Urf Oomons #2)
: Chapter 6

Okay. I’ve now officially been abducted by aliens. Not the tentacled kind like the one that had been hiding out in the cove, but the gray kind with big heads and flat-black oval-shaped eyes. The kind of aliens that you see in memes and on cartoons. Let me tell you they’re a lot creepier in real life.

Peach and I had woken up in a clear cage. The walls of this cage are so clear, light doesn’t reflect or refract as it would through glass, so you can’t see them at all. I only know about the cage walls because I’ve bumped into every one of them. I’ve also tripped across a mess of limp tentacles that are strewn over the floor because the tentacle alien is imprisoned with me.

I don’t have a stitch of clothing. Peach is missing her collar, harness, and bow. The tentacle monster/alien is just as naked and weird looking as ever lying passed out on the floor. Whatever those gray aliens did to knock us out seems to have worked twice as well on him.

There is something not right about this room. I mean, besides the aliens and invisible walls. It’s like a giant warehouse, but it’s foggy. Not real fog, but I can’t see anything at a distance. My eyesight is failing me at a couple meters outside this cage. Any distance farther than that is an indecipherable blur. The gray aliens keep moving in and out of this unnatural field. It gives a very disturbing effect that this cage is standing alone in the middle of a vast and empty room. I don’t know if the grays with their disappearing/reappearing act makes it more creepy or less creepy.

When the tentacle alien saw all those pictures of flying saucers, he looked worried. And then when he saw that one in the sky, he freaked the hell out, snatched me up into his arms and tentacles, and then tried to hide. I guess all this means is that these gray aliens are bad news. They aren’t doing anything though. They just come up to the invisible wall and look at us. Sometimes point an oval tablet-looking thing at us, and then leave without a sound.

“Hello?” A disembodied, feminine voice sounds behind me. I scramble over the pile of tentacles to the other side of our cage.

“Hello!” I yell back. I peer and squint as hard as I can, but I can’t see her.

“Oh, thank god! Do you know what’s going on? Where are we?”

“On a spaceship, I think.” I feel dumb saying it, but it’s the truth.

“What?”

The question is a gasp. A few snickers sound from another direction.

Another voice from off to the side says, “Shut-up girls and maybe we can get out of time-out.”

This command leads to a whole lot of commentary from all sides.

“Like I care!”

“Like I want to see your face anyway!”

“I like time-out.”

“Fuck off!”

“Go fuck yourself, Karen!”

“W-what is time out?” the first voice asks.

“It’s the fog. Whenever we get too rowdy, this fog appears so we can’t see each other.” Karen replies. That might not be her name, maybe she just acts like a Karen.

“It’s on a timer. It doesn’t matter if we talk or not,” a new voice says with an air of reason.

“Yeah, but they probably start the timer over when we talk too much,” says Karen.

“They never have,” replies the voice of reason. “It’s always around twenty minutes, no matter whether we talk or not.”

“How many people are here? All women?” I ask.

“Eighteen,” Karen answers.

“Twenty with you two new girls, and yes, all women,” the voice of reason corrects.

“What about aliens?” I ask.

There’s silence after I ask that, then, “What do you mean? The grays?”

“No, besides them. Are there any other aliens in cages? Ones with tentacles?”

More silence.

“No,” a new voice says tentatively. “But there’s a spider alien.”

Spider alien?

The fog is lifting. One second it’s there, the next it’s gone and I can see all the other women. They are just standing, everybody is staggered a couple meters apart. And they’re all by themselves in their own cages. Except I can see, behind everybody else, up against a far wall, a giant spider hovering over a prone human woman. I can’t see any details about this spider, but it is enormous, black, with eight long, spidery legs. Comparing its size to the woman’s, I would guess it’s more than ten feet tall.

“What the hell is that an octopus?” At first, I didn’t realize what Karen was talking about. It’s a giant spider, not an octopus—

Then I look at her, tearing my gaze away from the monstrous spider, and see that she’s pointing into my cage. Oh yeah, there is a giant octopus in here. Sort of.

“It’s an alien,” I answer primly.

“Why do you have an alien?” she asks like that is a reasonable question that I could answer.

I don’t answer her. I just take in her look. She is naked like the rest of us here, and there’s nothing wrong with her body. She has the soft, curvy form of a middle-aged woman. She has one of those soccer-mom haircuts. Short in the back and longer in the front, her light brown-to-dark blonde do is parted to one side and meticulously styled. There are highlights and lowlights, all obvious and chunky.

While I’m checking her out, she’s looking right back at me from about fifteen feet away. Her eyes suddenly get big, and she says, “You have a dog?”

I don’t know what she’s accusing me of. Maybe this screechy, blame-full tone is just her default. I’m done talking with her though. I turn away so I’m not even looking at her.

“Awwww, what a cute dog!”

“Ooooh, adorable!”

“What’s his name?”

All this fawning and questioning is happening at once.

I hold Peach up in front of me like a lion-cub in a Disney movie and tell them, “This is Princess Peach, she’s a small-breed mutt.”

She wags her tail, pleased with all the attention.

“She is so precious! How old is she?”

“I think she’s around five years old. I adopted her from the shelter when she was already grown, so I’m not sure.”

As I talk with all these naked women about my dog, I look at them and realize that we are all very different. Different accents, hair, and skin tone. Tall, short, fat, skinny, senior citizens, teenagers, and everything in between. There is nothing that we all have in common as to why we were abducted. Except that we’re all women. What could this mean?

It can’t be good.

“Girl.” It’s the voice of reason. I glance toward her to see that she is very pretty and very young with dark brown skin and short-cropped hair. Her eyes are big and very wide as she looks toward me. “Your alien is waking up.”

“Oh, Jeezus!” Karen yells.

I feel a tentacle slide across my hip and wrap around my naked waist, then I’m yanked backward into the clawed grip of the alien.