This is an attempt for National Novel Writing Month. It is not perfect. It's probably not even especially good yet. Xen is not going back to revise anything until he is completely done. So, deal with it.
Jasmine looked up from her phone at the buildings now surrounding them, none of which she recognized.
"Where are we?" she finally asked when she could not find her bearings. She felt only very minor relief to note that her sister and Dylan were as startled by their surroundings as she was. It was one thing to blackout, but quite another entirely to mutually blackout. That suggested there was something concrete and objectively true, didn't it? Or perhaps this was a practical joke, but that would involve Chrys and Dylan conspiring to roofie her.
"We're in Walden, one town over," Dylan said. "It is not the sort of place you'd like. Lots of cameras."
Jasmine exited the car, partly to get her bearings and partly because whatever just happened involved the car and it was therefore somewhat culpable. The air outside was considerable more humid and stifling than that in the car. Dylan's car, of course, did not have anything like air conditioning. Even the seatbelts were a notional concept, as they would more than likely dissolve upon impact. While the day was forcasted to be in the ninties, it was only in the seventies when they'd left her house half an hour ago. Jasmine then noted the reading on the bank clock.
91 degrees, 4:31PM. They'd lost five hours of the day between leaving the Pine Bush Police station and appearing in Walden, a distance of maybe ten miles than none of them could remember.
Jasmine collapsed onto the curb, her head in her hands.
"Hey, no!" Dylan said.
"Dylan, how did we get here?"
"I have no idea. At all. I could offer my theory--"
"Please don't," she asked.
"--that we were abducted. Missing time is not unusual in cases of alien abduction and--"
"Shut up! Please, god, just shut up!" Jasmine shouted, rising to her feet. "We were just---I don't know--stolen away from Pine Bush, car and all over the course of hours. Then we arrive here perfectly parked and neither of you remember anything?"
"No," said Chrys, shuddering slightly. "Your phone buzzed and we were here. What happened?"
"I don't know, but--" Jasmine opened the car and searched through the backseat, producing her phone after a moment. "One of us should look at this."
"It's your phone," Chrys argued. "You should look at it."
"No way! Last time I did, we vanished for hours."
Dylan snatched it away and flipped it open. Both sisters flinched, but nothing happened.
"All your numbers and presents are back," Dylan said. "That's all. Alien cell phone restoration technology must be slow. Oh, and 'Mom' called twice."
Jasmine grabbed her phone back and shoved it in her pocket. "How can you act so casual about this?"
He shrugged, but found this insufficient too. "I don't know what is happening to us, but I don't see how panicking is going to help anything." He began walking toward a storefront and the sisters followed him after a moment. "I say we discuss this further over some Chinese food. I swear, this restaurant does the best General Tsao's Chicken you will taste outside of China… though I guess it's a different dish there, anyway. And their eggrolls are intense."
"I don't want any eggrolls," Jasmine insisted, holding her ground.
Dylan put his hands on her shoulder. "You were abducted by who knows what, of course you want eggrolls. My treat."
Chrys agreed from them both, half guiding, half shoving Jasmine through the doors of the dual glass barriers between the heat and the air conditioning of the restaurant, as through they needed to be decontaminated before they could enjoy pan-Asian cuisine. The restaurant was decorated in bamboo and deep red paint, seeming far more authentic than it possibly should in Walden, a town reputed to have only one set of teeth for all the residents.
A girl no longer than ten looked up from her homework, hopped down from a stool, and led the three to the table. In better circumstances, Jasmine would have had the wherewithal to find this child labor odd.
"What would you like to drink?" the girl asked.
"Are you our waitress?" Chrys wondered allowed.
The girl made a face as through tasting something sour. "No, my mom is. She's in the bathroom."
On cue, they heard a distant flush and, thankfully for their chances of enjoying their post-abduction meal, the whoosh of the sink as well. Jasmine said she would like a diet soda and rose to visit the bathroom. She grabbed Chrys and pulled her along.
"But I don't have to pee!"
"She'll have a Pepsi," Jasmine stated, dragging her sister. Inside the bathroom, cramped but with a dressing screen, Jasmine explained. "I think we should check our clothes and bodies. To be sure nothing is out of place or…" but she wasn't fully sure she could even give voice to her concern.
Chrys obligingly disappeared behind the screen and almost instantly there came the sound of clothes hitting the ground and the odd shuffling. When Jasmine was fairly sure Chrys wasn't going to leap out from behind the screen, all pale nudity, Jasmine disrobed herself and began to scrutinize.
"I'm clean," Chrys said. "No wounds, no implants, no nothing."
"You weren't… obviously molested or anything?" Jasmine asked.
There was a pause and a cough. "How obviously are we talking?" Chrys asked, and then laughed. "Because we were with Dylan--"
"I'm serious," Jasmine shouted over her sister, "tell me that you are fine."
"I am as fine as can be expected, I guess. You?"
Jasmine completed her cursory examination. "I think my underwear were on inside out."
"Are you sure you didn't put them on inside out this morning?"
Jasmine paused. "No."
"Then you are fine. No aliens probulated you either. Now, I would like some pork fried rice if you don't mind."
After redressing, the two returned to the table just as their drinks arrived. As soon as they did, Chrys stood up again. "Now I do need to pee," she excused herself. Jasmine shook her head. "I swear, this is all a very strange dream."
Dylan slid over a corner of his placemat on which was scribbled, "You are not dreaming."
Jasmine read it and then looked to Dylan for an explanation. "You knew I was going to ask?"
"No, not exactly. I knew a guy who did a lot of work with lucid dreaming and he once handed me this card he wrote that on. He said that I should look at it several times a day, so I would get in the habit. Then, when I was actually dreaming, I would look at the card and it would say, 'you are dreaming.' It never actually worked out that way, the card just dissolved into pulp from being refolded too many times, but I thought I could use a reminder too. However batshit insane this all is, it isn't a dream. So it must be something else."
Jasmine folded and unfolded the slip. "How did you even get involved with all this, UFOs and such? You're kind of out there, but not an idiot," Jasmine said. "No offense."
Dylan laughed. "None taken. I was a believer when I was a kid because I guess you have to be. When I was young enough to have already read through all the books my elementary library had on the paranormal a few times, I saw the Great Hudson Valley UFO. Well, one of them. It was not a fuzzy light on the horizon. I remember it as a triangle a city block on each side filled with even rows of lights. My mother ordered me to shut my window, more from fear of what we were seeing than the December air rushing in. We sped the quarter mile until we were home. I was agog with what I had just seen, feeling justified for my eccentricities. The UFOs were here and now things would happen..." He paused, eyes focused elsewhere, and took a slow sip of his water. "Only they didn't, obviously. I don't recall anyone mentioning it around me again and vaguely remember hearing a decade later that the craft was explained as ultralight aircrafts flying in formation to panic people. When I just asked my mom if she remember seeing the UFO, she had no memory. So did I just make that up? Did I hear about the story and just dream that I saw it at some point? I don't really know. It seems possible, but it all felt so real to me, you know?"
"Yeah, I guess I do," Jasmine said. "I had a fever once on Easter. In the middle of the night, my dad went to go get me aspirin. I think I must have been crying and woke him. Anyway, he ran into the Easter Bunny out there and had a conversation." Dylan grinned so wide that Jasmine could nearly see his molars. "What did they talk about?"
"My dad mentioned I was sick."
"And what did the Easter Bunny say?"
Jasmine smirked too, finally. "I couldn't understand it. It made the kinds of sounds you would imagine a giant rabbit would. I was petrified of it, actually. When my dad came back, I asked him about his meeting with the Easter Bunny. And, of course, like any indulgent parent, he fed me some line about how the Easter Bunny wanted me to get better and rest. I believed in the Easter Bunny even after my faith in Santa had crumbled because I had heard it."
"It still seems real to you?" Dylan asked.
"A little. I know it was just a really short dream that my dad made the mistake of confirming."
Chrys bounded back to the table. "What are we talking about?" she asked.
"The Easter Bunny," Dylan said.
Chrys rolled her eyes so hard it was almost audible. "You are still telling people that lame story, Jazz?"
"No, no, it was on topic," Dylan assured her.
"Is the Easter Bunny a space alien?" Chrys asked. "Because I will swear off chocolate right now."
They enjoyed their dinner together that was, if not the best outside of China, at least the best they had had in the Hudson Valley. Then, all a once a lul came tyo their conversation.
In unison, they turned to the door and, as if on cue, Sterling appeared there, his rotundity slightly preceding the rest.
Jasmine jumped from her chair and backed away, though Chrys and Dylan did not bother.
"What are you doing here?" Jasmine accused.
Sterling put his hands up to telegraph innocence. "This is a coincidence, Jasmine. Calm down, I am just here for the eggrolls."
"They are intense," Dylan added.
"Really? You didn’t follow us here?" she asked, relaxing only slightly.
"Yes! No need to get paranoid," he said. "What has you so riled?"
Jasmine glanced between Dylan and Chrys, silently commanding them not to say a word. "Nothing, I just got a little jumpy."
"Did something more happen?" Sterling asked Dylan and Chrys.
"We were abducted!" Chrys said. "Or were subject to a gas leak."
"Shut up, Chrys!" Jasmine knew her sister was only so loose-lipped because
Jasmine had urged her to be taciturn around this mental patient. "We were not abducted. Why can’t any of you just be satisfied with having a normal life?"
"We did experience some missing time, though," Dylan said. "Which does tend to be the symptom of an abduction experience. Especially when is all at once."
Sterling came closer, taking the liberty of pulling out a chair for himself at their table. "Do you have any memory? How much time was lost"
"No memory," Dylan answered. "Jasmine’s phone buzzed and, five hours later, we were in Walden."
"So you actually traveled? That is rare!" Sterling behaved in contrast to Jasmine. The scarier and more inexplicable this discussion became, the more delighted Sterling was.
"No offense, but I really don’t think we should be telling you any of this," Jasmine said.
"I am offended!" Sterling replied. "Why not? Who better?" Jasmine crossed her arms in front of her chest. "I want to forget this happened."
"But it won’t stop, you know that."
"I don’t know that. I don’t want to know that, okay?"
The waitress came to refill their drinks and offer Sterling a menu. "I’m not especially hungry," he said, looking toward Jasmine, who noticed that Chrys was sharing Sterling’s scowl.
Jasmine sniffed. "Why should we tell you anything? By your own admission, you are in cahoots with alien secret agents or whatever."
"Which you don’t believe in?"
"Of course not! I am not insane."
Sterling folded his hands on his lap and nodded slowly. "Would you believe that I am not either?"
"Do you believe a word of what you spouted at the UFOS meeting?"
He looked up at Jasmine, his blue eyes strangely clear. "No, I don’t. And that is precisely why you should let me help you because this is real, it is pressing, it won’t stop." He then looked up at the waitress, "And I will have the dragon and phoenix special, please."
Pine Bush is a serialized novel being written by Xen. It didn't happen to you, your best friend, or his cousin. Why? Because it didn't happen. All persons, living, dead, undead, or unliving are purely coincidental. Any real persons are used fictiously. What you are about to read is not a news broadcast. No portion of this book may be distributed without the expressed written consent of Xen. Feel free to rope your friends into reading it, though. Do it or I start shooting PuppyOrphans.
He is syndicated throughout the internet and will write for you if you pay him.
