by Kurt Winans
SECOND MOON
Copyright © 2013, 2014 Kurt Winans
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by
Coaster’s Quill Publishing
Print edition ISBNs
ISBN-13: 978-0692317532
ISBN-10: 0692317538
Pilgrimage
(Book one of the New World series)
College Football’s American Road Trip
Left Side of the Road
With good cause, I mentioned a handful of people that were helpful with the prequel to this book. As Pilgrimage was the first segment of this ongoing saga, it is fitting that those same kindhearted souls assisted with Second Moon. I would therefore like to acknowledge them again for their efforts, and I can easily foresee their collective influence during preparation with the upcoming third segment and beyond.
First, there is my wife Cathy. As always, she provided the strength for me to carry on with this endeavor. Her faith and patience were an inspiration. Brian and I, as during work on the previous segment, discussed and shaped the content of the storyline. We met regularly with intent to escape the bonds of traditional thinking, and developed concepts that were both interesting and thought provoking. Good friends Karl and Ken once again read through rough drafts, and offered suggestions or asked questions if certain aspects were unclear. Renée was also involved with that same process, but she took it a step further. Her additional insight and observations were important aspects as polish to the finished product.
Thank you all for being there,
Kurt
Janet had never received such a greeting in her entire life. She was standing face to face with two people that were clearly much older than her current age of thirty-four, yet they were supposedly her children. Although the complexity of that possibility was fascinating, it was also shocking. The man, who claimed to be her son Ross, stood proud and tall a few inches over six feet in height. He was admittedly handsome, and his facial features and gray hair resembled those of an older version of her husband Robert. The elegant woman next to him, with the beautiful smile, claimed to be her daughter Jessica. Janet was pleased with the woman’s appearance, because if she was her daughter, then she provided Janet with a glimpse of what she herself might look like many years from now. A glance downward then revealed a leg brace on the woman’s right leg. Janet asked herself, could this truly be her precious little girl.
After all that Janet had been through, it was certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. Although the implication was daunting to mentally absorb during the first few minutes after being introduced, Janet knew that if their claim were true, then this wasn’t the first time she had met either of them.
Janet asked them each a few questions about their father, Robert, and then a few additional questions about their early childhood in an attempt to verify their supposed identity. Although it was true that most of the information about Robert could have been researched, it was unlikely that some of the minute details they were discussing would have become public knowledge. With each precise response to her inquiries, the unbelievable became more acceptable to Janet. These two people might actually be her children.
Janet’s inquiries then turned to what they knew about her own disappearance, as she asked, “What were each of you told about what happened to me?”
Their responses, which included the shocking revelation that came from their father on his deathbed, made all doubts vanish as a warm-hearted feeling washed over Janet. With misty eyes she extended her arms, and Ross and Jessica stepped into her embrace.
A moment later that silent embrace was broken when Janet said, “I want to know everything that has happened to you since I’ve been away.”
Ross assured her that he and Jessica would fill her in, and field all her questions in due time, but it could wait until after she told them her story.
It all began on a warm central Texas summer night in 1957 and Janet remembered every detail vividly. At the time, her abduction seemed beyond comprehension. One minute she was in the back seat of her family’s white station wagon with the red stripe on each side fetching some extra blankets for the campsite. Suddenly an intensely bright light enveloped the area immediately surrounding the car, and she was unable to move anything below her neck as the car mysteriously began to levitate. She screamed for Robert to help her, and several seconds later distinctively heard him calling for her to jump out of the car. She tried with all her might to move her arms and legs, but it was no use. Somehow the bright light, or something else, had paralyzed her.
Then the area around her suddenly became completely dark when the station wagon had become engulfed within a hovering spacecraft. That was just the beginning of what Janet termed “a wild ride”. She must have lost consciousness for a short time, because her next memory was that of lying flat on a table. She was still unable to move except for turning her head from side to side, and at that moment she began hearing voices in her head. Those voices informed her that she would not be harmed, but she found that information to be of little comfort. Although rapid and shallow due to the circumstances, breathing was not a problem. The air around her was comfortably warm and somewhat humid, almost matching the conditions of the campsite somewhere below. A bright cone shaped beam from directly overhead was the lone source of light within the room, and it only illuminated the area immediately surrounding the table.
Uncertain of exactly how much time had elapsed, she was startled to see four alien creatures suddenly emerge from the darkness and take positions near each corner of the table. Although she could not see any of their mouths move, she could hear and understand each of their thoughts clearly in her head. She thought the creatures looked familiar somehow, and then remembered the bodies she had caught a few brief glimpses of back at Roswell in 1947. To her it seemed likely that these alien beings were of the same species, but she couldn’t be certain. In the midst of asking several questions of her own, she verbally responded to a few that she heard in her mind. After several minutes of moving her head from side to side in an attempt to study them, the creatures turned and moved away as quickly as they had appeared into the darkness that surrounded her.
At that moment she noticed an interesting feature on the back of one of the alien’s heads before it disappeared from view, and her training as a former nurse made her wonder if it was a normal aspect of their anatomy. She was then once again left alone for an unknown amount of time to contemplate her destiny, while she remained hopelessly paralyzed on the table.
Janet stopped her story for a moment and asked, “Do the two of you really want to hear all of this?”
As Ross and Jessica nodded positively with anticipation, Ross said, “Yes. Please tell us everything.”
She continued by stating that her next memory was of light suddenly pouring into the dark room, as a doorway opened along a portion of a distant wall. She once again heard a voice in her head instructing her to rise from the table, and use the doorway to exit. After testing her mobility by slowly raising her right arm, she quickly realized that she could stand from the low lying table of her own free will. Understanding that in her current situation she was completely powerless to resist the will of the alien species, she complied with the i
nstructions given to her and moved toward the doorway. She emerged from the spacecraft to discover that she had somehow been transported to the inside area of a much larger alien vessel. Within that vessel, there were humans of multiple ethnic backgrounds from various locations on Earth living in peaceful captivity.
She assumed that she must have been the most recent of the abductees, for she was immediately approached by other humans who wanted to know what significant events had been taking place on Earth since the time of their own abductions. She met people from various times in recent Earth history, and began to realize that the alien species had been visiting and studying Earth for nearly two centuries. She tried to wrap her brain around everything that was happening, as she witnessed humans and alien creatures mingling about and communicating with one another.
Her series of questions toward them revealed that there had been no acts of mistreatment by the alien species toward humans, or heinous medical experiments performed, but the humans could not leave the vessel. The only glimpse that she, or the other abductees, would ever have of the outside world was through a series of viewing windows much like the one that was currently behind Ross and Jessica. Unfortunately that view consisted only of pitch black water. She learned from the alien species that the giant vessel she was held captive on was, at the time, resting on the floor of what was known on Earth as the deep southern Atlantic Ocean.
When she had been lying on the table unable to move her arms and legs during transport to the vessel, she had lots of time to think. She had initially wondered if she was chosen because of accidentally seeing the bodies of similar looking aliens a few times at Roswell in 1947. She knew that she had nothing to do with those three dead pilots or the supposed crash of their spaceship, so that line of reasoning seemed rather sketchy. It appeared unlikely now that she had been grouped with what she guessed to be a few hundred other abductees.
As for her human counterparts, each new encounter seemed to always begin with their question to her of, “What year was it when you were taken?” That was usually followed by a discouraging realization of just how long each of them had been held in captivity. Some abductees, whose clothing style suggested they had been held captive for close to, or more than, a century, seemed to have a quiet peacefulness with regard to her response. That was probably due to accepting the likelihood that all of their friends and loved ones had passed away long ago.
Four very important facts about her new life on board the deep water vessel suddenly became apparent to her. First, she had been thrust into, at least until some new abductee came along, the role of the teacher. She, like those before her, would need to fill in the gaps of Earth history for those who hadn’t been around to see, hear, or read about it as it unfolded. Second, it appeared that she would now age very slowly. She had already met a few people that had been aboard the alien vessel for over one hundred years, and they looked to be younger than she was. Third, there would be no escaping the captivity, as it was abundantly clear to her that the alien species was far more technologically advanced than her own. If they had taken, and held, some of the people around her for well over a century, then she would be one of their captives for as long as they wanted to keep her. That led to the fourth fact, which was perhaps the most unsettling. She realized she would probably never see her husband Robert or their two children Ross and Jessica ever again.
In retrospect, she realized that the supposed quiet peacefulness associated with some of the humans she had recently met, was in reality a complete numbness of the senses and a resignation to their plight. She vowed at that moment to become not just a teacher, but a student as well. She had the rare opportunity to learn from people who had actually lived some of the history that she had read about throughout the years, while informing those same people of the more current events. In time, the process would be reversed as she would converse with future abductees. She felt that could be a useful way to become more educated and to occupy her time, while also attempting to avoid the resignation that others displayed. It would be challenging, but she was determined to keep a hopeful and positive attitude that the alien species would someday allow her to be reunited with her family.
Another realization for her was that each day on the alien ship was significantly longer in Earth time. What seemed to be only hours or days to her and the rest of the abductees, was in reality years. Although the exact ratio was still unknown to her, she did have a rough estimate. A series of discussions with more recent abductees from various years had proven her thesis. She knew that the millennium of 2000 had come and gone, and was also aware that she had passed her personal fifty year mark as a guest of the alien species. That was verified when she met a young woman, with extremely low fitting blue jeans, who was abducted in the fall of 2007. She had counted seventy-nine days since her abduction when the vessel rose from the deep ocean floor to the surface and took flight, but was unaware of the actual year and date. There was one factor that could have altered her count of captive days significantly. She did not know how much time had passed when she was on the flat table aboard the first alien spaceship that had abducted her. She knew that she had not remained conscious during that entire timeframe, but how long had she been asleep?
Janet once again paused to ask her captive audience, “Shall I continue?”
Without waiting to hear Jessica’s response, Ross said, “Of course. You can’t possibly stop now!”
Janet looked at Jessica, who nodded in agreement with her brother’s sentiment, and resumed her story.
If that amount of time aboard the alien vessel hadn’t been enough to endure, then her wild ride would continue as she was taken into outer space. The vessel landed for a brief time on the Moon in a position where the Earth could not be seen. She later learned that was done so the spacecraft could gather personnel and equipment. Then the vessel took off again, and moved into a higher orbital position above the Earth. During that most unbelievable ride, and subsequent time of hovering, it became almost impossible for her to do anything other than gaze out the observation windows. In her opinion, the view of both the Earth and the Moon were far beyond anything that she had ever imagined during her lifetime on the planet surface. She had attempted to calculate the passage of time on Earth as opposed to what ticked by on her own wristwatch, but couldn’t do so. The Earth below was spinning quickly like a record on a turntable, and the relative position of the orbiting Moon was visibly changing as well.
To continue the mind altering view of just how small Earth was in the truly big picture of the galaxy, she and many other abductees at the viewing windows could then see twelve large alien transport vessels pull into formation alongside their own vessel. Those ships remained at their station in high Earth orbit for a very brief time before heading toward the planet, while the Moon moved more than half way around the Earth since their arrival. None of the abductees had a clue as to why the other ships had come, but there was speculation that the spaceships were headed toward the planet surface to abduct a large quantity of human specimens. She then heard, like many times before, a voice in her head assuring her that was not the case. The next aspect to the wild ride was when she was singled out by the aliens to be transferred onto a small three seated scout ship. Once on board and en route to this vessel, she learned that she was to meet two other humans, who had supposedly volunteered to come with the aliens into outer space.
Janet concluded her recollection of the events since her abduction by pointing toward Ross and Jessica while saying, “The two of you are those so called volunteers, and imagine my surprise to discover that you could be my children!”
There seemed to be a reasonable amount of evidence to show that Janet was indeed their mother, but it had not yet been proven. Before either Ross or Jessica could verbally respond, the alien projected his thoughts into their minds as well as Janet’s. They learned that the alien species advanced computer system had already verified that Janet was indeed the mother of the other two humans. As an abductee,
Janet had been fully scanned for DNA without ever knowing it when she was motionless on the table. Ross and Jessica, along with all the other humans on the transport vessels, had been scanned as they passed through the multiple doorways when they first came aboard. The computers had run a series of compatibility tests with the samples, and found that Ross and Jessica were the offspring of a long term abductee aboard the deep water vessel. They also learned that there were a few other unlikely cases of family DNA aboard the transport vessels that had been discovered during the compatibility tests. Those humans were currently being reunited in the same way that Janet, Ross, and Jessica had been.
The three of them stared at the alien in bewilderment for a long silent moment, and then Janet said, “Your species has the ability to map DNA that easily?”
Ross quickly responded, “So does ours.”
He informed the woman who had now been proven to be his missing mother that, “A tremendous amount of medical advancements have taken place on Earth since your days of working as a nurse, and the ability to correctly map DNA was considered one of the most significant.”
She looked at Ross and Jessica with a smile, and then said, “Well kids, please pardon me for asking, but what year was it on Earth when we left, and how old are you?”
Ross smiled and replied, “It was late August of 2022 on Earth when we departed, and I turned seventy-two last month.”
Jessica hugged Janet again and said, “Mom, I celebrated my sixty-seventh birthday this past January.”
Janet held the embrace of her daughter for several seconds, before Ross wrapped his arms around both of them. Then she took a deep breath after quickly calculating the math and said, “Well, since we all celebrated Ross’ seventh birthday just a few days before I was abducted, that means slightly more than sixty-five years have passed since I went missing!”
