Alien Freak - Calista Skye Page 0,8

if I push up on the bars, using the phone to isolate me from the zaps…

Zap!

“Ow!”

Okay, I’ll dry my hands on my bra so they don’t slide along the phone and touch the bars at all.

I don’t get zapped this time. But the lid won’t budge, even if I push so hard upwards that the phone creaks.

Trying the other walls of the cage, I conclude that everything is locked up solid.

“That makes sense,” I say softly. “The way out isn’t that simple. There would be no challenge.”

So there must be a latch.

And there it is. A mechanical latch, a simple design without a lock. So simple that it’s plainly impossible to open from the inside. I guess the slavers know all about us positive thinkers and our tricks.

“I will find the way out.”

I’m not sure how long I can maintain this positive mindset. In most of those disaster documentaries, the survivors didn’t have to stay chipper for days on end.

But some did. They just had a framework to hang their thinking on.

Like, ‘this is all a game, and I choose to keep going’.

A man lost in the desert: ‘I will survive, because I want to see my son’s face when he sees me.’

A concentration camp inmate: ‘I will make it, because everyone must know what’s going on here so it will never happen again.’

A woman trapped in the rubble of a collapsed building: ‘I’ll break the world record for surviving without water with a broken leg.’

They didn’t give up.

I turn on the phone’s camera. I can actually make a disaster documentary of my own. Nobody will ever see it, but it gives me something to do that will help take my mind off the fact that my future is pretty damn bleak.

“I’ve been abducted by an alien poacher,” I state the way a narrator would. “I’m held in this cage.”

Not bad. But let’s try…

“We’ve been abducted by an alien poacher. We’re being held in this cage, and it’s locked with this mechanism that you can see here.”

Yep. Saying we makes it better. I’m not alone. All the viewers are in here with me.

“The cage opens upwards, and the bars have electric current flowing through them. I must use the phone if I want to touch them. Now, that mechanism doesn’t look like it can be opened from the inside.”

I peer at it. I can’t reach the one part that can move and is now holding the latch closed.

And yet…

“I have an idea of how to open it. So I will now take my bra off.”

Placing the phone on the bottom bars, I slide the bra off. Disaster documentary-slash-soft porn. Should be a total hit with audiences.

“Now I’ll try to get the bra around that one moving part.”

Keeping my fingers away from the bars, I swing one velcro end of the sports bra between them, then pull it down to me so it hangs over the one bar that holds the latch. There’s no zapping.

“It should be possible to slide the fabric along until it catches,” I narrate. “Then if— yes, I can feel it now. It’s definitely caught on one of the parts. Now if I try to close the loop with the velcro on the other side… ow!”

My finger gets zapped, but the sting is nowhere near as bad as the one the implant in my arm gave me back on Earth. It doesn’t deter me.

“A little bit of a shock, but it’s okay. Now the bra is closed, and if I pull at it right here, then…”

I pull at the stretchy fabric, and there is some movement in the latch. “Just a little harder…”

I concentrate so much on the mechanism that I forget where my feet are. One of my toes touches the bars, zapping it.

“Ow! Oh no… no!”

I reflexively pull away from the zappy bar, but then I lose my balance and fall backwards into the bars on the other side. I barely notice the zap to my naked back, because now the whole cage is tipping over.

With a metallic rattle the cage rolls over on one side, and there’s a flurry of zaps to various parts of my body as it comes to rest and I land on my back inside it. I’m able to catch the phone so at least I won’t get shocked by the implant.

“Okay, that was not ideal,” I say. “But maybe it’ll make things easier— oh.”

What used to be the bottom of the cage is now the side. And it’s hanging