Stolen and Seduced - Christine Pope Page 0,1

on the car radio, wishing I’d bitten the bullet and sprung for a subscription to Sirius XM. Out in the middle of nowhere and at that hour, there wasn’t much to choose from in terms of listening options.

Even so, Coast to Coast probably wasn’t the best choice I could’ve made.

“…so you’re saying there’s been a concerted, cross-administration conspiracy to conceal these facts,” said a faintly ironic male voice.

“That’s what the records show,” the guest on that night’s show replied. He had a stuffy, faintly pedantic delivery that reminded me of one of my horticulture professors at Arizona State. “Other governments are leaning on the U.S. to come out of the ’50s, to step out of the Cold War mentality and acknowledge the fact that UFOs are real, that aliens are among us — ”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I said, and punched the power button. The radio went dark.

Like an idiot, I’d run out of the house so fast and gotten moving so quickly that I’d neglected to jack my cell phone into the stereo so I could provide my own soundtrack, and I didn’t feel safe messing with it while I was driving. No, I was stuck with the silence and the darkness on all sides, a blackness so absolute, it felt as if the road and its ribbon of reflective paint were somehow floating in space, unanchored to any solid ground. In a few more minutes, I thought I should start to see the glow of the Phoenix metro area touching the western horizon, but in the meantime….

I sat up a little straighter, squinting at the road. Had I really driven so fast that I was already approaching the sprawl of Phoenix and its suburbs? Because I saw light up ahead of me, too bright and too diffuse to be the headlights of an oncoming vehicle.

Fingers tightening on the steering wheel, I lifted my foot from the gas pedal and let it hover over the brake. Maybe I was coming up on some late-night road construction. That would explain the klieg-like glare of the lights ahead, so bright, I wished I’d brought my sunglasses with me.

The truck shimmied and shook, and my fingers latched onto the steering wheel in a death grip.

Holy crap, did I just blow a tire?

But it didn’t feel like a blowout. No, it felt as if something had grabbed hold of my small truck and was pulling it inexorably forward. I stomped on the brakes, but doing so only increased that horrible shuddering sensation. The acrid stench of burning rubber filled the cab.

Cursing, I raised my foot immediately — no point in destroying my new tires — and instead wrenched on the steering wheel, thinking that maybe pulling the truck off course would cause it to break free from whatever force had gotten hold of it. The vehicle swerved just a little, and then it jerked forward again, heading into the light.

That light surrounded the truck, brighter than the sun on a scorching desert day. White glare enveloped me, blinded me. I cried out, hands flying up to protect my eyes, and the light turned black.

Warmth soothed me, flowed over my body. I opened my eyes slowly, seeing at first only a soft golden glow that didn’t seem to have any apparent source.

I crashed, I thought then, feeling oddly unconcerned by such a prospect. I’m in the hospital.

But if that was what had happened to me out on Highway 60, shouldn’t I have been in pain? Or was the warmth I currently was experiencing only the dreamy haze of Demerol or some other drug?

I tried to push myself up on my arms so I could look around, and I found I couldn’t move. The surface I lay on cupped my body like a high-end Tempur-Pedic mattress I’d tried once in the store but knew I could never afford. Not a hospital, then. I’d only stayed overnight in a hospital once, to have my appendix out when I was a junior in high school, but I knew no hospital bed had ever felt like this.

Maybe I’d been drugged, and that was why I couldn’t move. But my thoughts seemed clear enough. If I really had some kind of painkiller cocktail flowing through my veins, shouldn’t it have clouded my brain?

Probably. Again, I tried to raise my arm, and it might as well have been bolted to the bed. When I glanced down, I saw that the limb was uncovered — no hospital gown covered my bicep.

Or