Human Specimen 5924 awakened in a puddle of vibrant amber liquid. As he hacked and coughed like a man who had nearly drowned, he slowly realized that he had no recollection of who he was or how he had come to be there. His spew matched the amber fluid that he lay in as it flowed into what appeared to be little drain holes in the floor.
Trembling, he listened. Aside from a slight mechanical humming that matched the faint vibration in the floor, his breathing was the only sound that broke the silence. The taste of the acrid amber liquid lingered in his mouth, but there was another taste, too: the metallic taste of fear.
He glimpsed an empty cylindrical chamber beside him, which also contained remnants of the mysterious fluid. Realizing that his bare hands were wet with the stuff, he slowly sat up and wiped them on the sides of the brown leather bomber jacket he wore.
As he looked down at the jacket, he saw that he also wore some type of uniform resembling a flight suit. “CPT H. REED” was stencilled on the left breast pocket. The same name appeared on dog tags that hung around his neck. Alarmingly, the name meant nothing to the man. But at least I know my name — my last name anyway, he thought. An inventory of his pockets further revealed a standard issue .45 automatic pistol and two spare clips.
Wincing in pain, he pulled himself to all fours and looked around the room, which contained several rows of identical cylinders, all filled with the same amber liquid. He turned his throbbing head around and saw a man, wearing clothes similar to his, slumped over what appeared to be the controls of the empty cylinder. Exposed wiring stuck out of the mechanism, and the man’s hands were scorched black, suggesting that he had been electrocuted.
The cylinder beside it contained another man. A hardened form of the amber liquid encased him and rendered his features nearly unidentifiable, but the captain could just make out the prisoner’s mouth: it was frozen open in an eternal scream. The captain looked back at the empty cylinder and faced the terrifying realization that he had been its occupant.
Frantically, he tore around the room, searching for a way out. He exited through a hatch and stumbled into a hallway that had curved walls and smooth, but uneven, rubber floors. His legs pumped furiously as he sprinted away from his holding chamber. I have to get out of here, his mind screamed. He took off, unsure where his legs were taking him. Sometimes, his feet carried him off the ground, and he felt as though he could almost fly.
It has to be some kind of crazy dream. It has to be.
But then the dream became a nightmare. Captain Reed turned a corner and saw a green haze emanating from a room ahead. What he saw next stopped his frantic flight dead in its tracks. Shadows of small, thin bodies with oversized heads danced on the wall.
Gathering his courage and staying in the shadows, he slid against the wall and inched forward. Instinctively, he reached for his .45. He flicked the safety off and pumped a round into the chamber in quick, practiced movements. The feel of the steel in his sweating hand was comforting.
He moved closer to the threshold to take a peek inside the hazy green room. Just as he was about to peer inside, he felt long fingers, ice-cold to the touch, slither over the back of his neck like a squid’s tentacles encircling its prey.
Without thought, he spun on his heel and raised his weapon. In the brief moment before he fired, he glimpsed a gray-skinned creature with enormous black eyes.
The gun roared. The sound echoed off the walls then died.
In the darkened corridor, the muzzle flash was so brilliant that for an instant he was blinded. When his vision finally returned, he saw that blue blooded brains now stained the curved wall. At such close range, the .45 bullet had passed right between the creature’s eyes and blown out the back of its head. Before he could investigate the motionless creature further, he once again became aware of movement in the shadows. They heard the shot, and now they’re coming for me. There was only one thing he could do.
He ran.
He ran through the seemingly endless maze of dark, tubular corridors, desperately searching for an exit, until his lungs finally demanded rest. Gulping air, he found a small niche near a circular chamber and crawled inside. Here he could hide, catch his breath, and contemplate his next move.
Looking down, he noticed that the weapon, as well as his hands, face and arms, were splattered with flecks of bluish blood and bits of grayish brain matter. A feeling of revulsion washed over him as he furiously wiped the strange, sticky substance off his face and forehead with the sleeve of his jacket.
As he continued to gasp for breath, he expertly hit the pistol’s magazine release with the thumb of his right hand and checked the spent clip. Only one round short. Fumbling for the spares in his pocket with his left hand, he inserted a fresh magazine and racked the slide. He was aware of the clacking noise it made more than ever before.
Weapon loaded, he peeked around the corner of his hiding place at the hallways that led from the chamber. Which one? Which one? He couldn’t tell which — if any — of these hallways he had been down before. One of these must lead out of this maze, he thought. He heard a growing rustling sound and felt them drawing nearer. It’s now or never. He boldly dashed into the chamber and turned down the first hallway on his right. He ran down the hallway until it dead-ended in a cavernous room that was about four times the size of any aircraft hangar back home.
Looking around, he realized that the cone-shaped room had to be some kind of storage facility, for it contained old vehicles, like a blue Ford truck and a ‘kidney-crusher’ motorcycle. In addition, five planes hung near the ceiling, like model planes on a mobile. The captain was surprised that he could identify the planes as TBM Avengers.
With these new sights, the captain’s memory began coming back in tsunami-like waves. An image of himself in the cockpit of a different kind of plane flashed across his mind. He wasn’t sure what kind of plane it was, but he knew it was flying over the Atlantic. Then he saw the faces of his crew members — all young, all smiles, all nameless to him. They were doing something important … searching for a patrol that had gotten lost. That’s what it was: a training mission that had gone wrong. It was up to him and his crew to find fourteen souls lost in the Atlantic — fourteen souls that had been flying in TBM Avengers.
The five Avengers had to be the lost torpedo bombers he and his crew had been looking for. Well, he had found them, by God. Only in doing so, he had become lost himself. Hell, he still didn’t even know his own first name.
As he scanned the Avenger planes and the Ford truck for any signs of life, he saw the crown jewel of the whole damn collection and immediately recognized it: it was his plane, a Martin Mariner PBY flying boat, more affectionately known by her crew as the Hail Mary; all 124 feet of gorgeous wingspan. Normally, it was downed airmen floating in the Atlantic who swore that the big rescue plane was the most beautiful sight to behold, but to Captain Reed, she was now the Holy Grail. More importantly, she had every conceivable kind of rescue apparatus, from self-inflating rafts to a waterproof transmitter that could transmit a distress call for hours. I have to get up there somehow.
Just as he was contemplating climbing the room’s honeycomb walls, the captain took one step into the open, and his legs were suddenly pulled out from underneath him. It was as though he were caught in a bamboo-tree snare trap, but instead of falling to the floor, he was immediately catapulted toward the ceiling at an alarming rate. Before the captain had control of his senses, he slammed face-first into the underbelly of the Hail Mary. He was stuck there, suspended at least forty feet in the air.
It took a moment to get used to being weightless, but the captain eventually used his hands to move from a gun turret to a steel strut and then to the side hatch. He clung to each handhold as if his life depended on it. While he figured he wasn’t in any danger of falling, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get back up to his plane again on the first try.
He gained access to the cockpit through the side hatch and immediately made his way to the radio. He flicked a switch, and to his surprise, the radio still had a full charge. He picked up the mic lying on his seat and pressed it firmly to his throat. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is the Hail Mary.”
Captain Reed repeated the transmission once more and then froze. Looking out the cockpit window, he saw that there was no ceiling to the cavernous storage chamber, only stars — stars that streaked by at impossible speeds. Until this point, despite all that he had seen, he hadn’t really believed any of it was true. But it was true. He, his crew, and the crewmen of the missing torpedo bombers had been abducted by aliens that traveled among the stars.
The captain realized that he was still holding the microphone, and he dropped it in disgust. Still in a daze, he spotted what appeared to be a flight logbook floating in the lighter gravity just inches above the flight console. Its worn leather cover was also marked with the name “Captain Reed.”
His hand lunged at the suspended logbook and grabbed it. He took comfort in the book, part of a deeply ingrained practiced procedure, and suspected that it might help him cement his grip on reality. Gathering his thoughts, his right hand absentmindedly pulled a pencil from his left breast pocket. He began to write in the small logbook — slowly at first, and then rapidly — documenting the strange events of the last hour of his life — the only hour he could clearly remember.
#
Date: Unknown
Time: Unknown
Location: Unknown.
To anyone who finds this:
As incredible as it might sound, I suspect that I am being held prisoner on an alien spacecraft. My abductors had encased me in some sort of amber liquid that hardens, but I somehow escaped. I believe it was with the assistance of one of my crew. Our captors are hideous creatures with black, soulless eyes, grayish skin, misshapen heads, and they appear to infest this ship. I killed one of them with my service pistol. I’m going to attempt to locate the rest of my crew. With their help, I hope to take over the vessel.
May God have mercy on our souls.
#
The captain was about to toss the journal onto the seat but spontaneously stuffed it into his pocket instead.
Just as he was contemplating his next move, he glimpsed something crawling across the windshield, and his mind went numb with fear.
He suddenly felt what seemed like hundreds of cold hands — hands with long thin fingers — slide across the nape of his neck and over his face and shoulders, grabbing him from behind. They yanked him roughly from his seat and threw him to the flight deck.
As he lay on the flight deck and looked up between the splayed blue fingers clamped over his face, he saw dozens of penetrating eyes staring down at him. He felt his will rapidly give way as more and more of the slender fingered hands enveloped him, and he began to slip out of consciousness. As he struggled to stay awake, he heard a muffled scream. He realized it was his own just before everything went black.
#
When Specimen 5924 came to, he was encased in a semi-transparent cylinder in the same room from which he had earlier escaped. The shock of cold fluid flowing over his body had startled him to consciousness. He slammed his fist into his cage and screamed for his captors to reveal themselves. He thought he detected a flash of blue.
Amber liquid poured into the cylinder, swiftly rising to the level of his knees, hips, chest. His legs and arms flailed, trying to gain purchase on the slippery sides of the container. He pressed his cheek against the ceiling in an effort to keep his head above the rising liquid.
Suddenly, his swishing legs began to feel more resistance. The luminous liquid started to thicken, rapidly turning from gel to solid. It encased his lower limbs and worked its way up his body, coagulating around his skin.
The liquid now covered his face. Blinking madly, his eyes tried to adjust to the gooey fluid. His lungs threatened to explode, and he pressed his face up to the glass to scream at his captors. The gelatinous fluid seeped into his mouth and hardened, forever preserving his final act of defiance. As his mind began to shut down for what he believed would be the very last time, he finally remembered his name.
It was Harry.