A sharp pain shot through my head and I could hear voices in the background. They kind of echoed softly but you could tell they were shouting. Then it was one voice. It was a voice I recognised – Hank my brother. Confused, I wondered where he had come from. As I got to my feet, a hand grabbed my shoulder. With a loud shout, I reached for the disintegrator but picked up a piece of wood instead.
“What in hell’s name is goin’ on with you, boy?”
Hank looked real concerned at me as I threatened him with the lump of a chair leg.
We were standing in the basement surrounded by broken shelves, furniture and an enormous jumbled pile of tools and fixings laying on the floor.
I scratched my head, trying to understand why I was back home.
“I come back for you when Pop died and I was just in time to catch the storm and hid under my truck. I watched the house get torn apart and hoped you were okay. Thank the Lord you are. You must have been knocked out.”
“How many days ago was that?” I asked.
Hank grinned. “Boy, you sure are out of it, ain't ya? The storm passed over ‘bout an hour ago, that’s all.”
I started shaking my head. “No, that’s wrong. It had to be at least three, maybe four days.” I recounted what had happened and how I had met the two agents from the Federation. Heck, I told him everything and all he kept doing was laugh.
He hauled me out of the wreck that was our home and up on the road. As far as the eye could see there was fields of corn and some grazin’ land. There weren’t nothing burnt.
‘I don’t understand,” I said. “I was a few miles away outside Jackson.”
“You been watchin’ too many sci-fi movies and the like. C’mon, let’s get some stuff together and get back to Miami. I got a good job there and an apartment for us.”
“But Hank, I’m trying to explain. The world was nearly taken over by aliens and me and my friends helped the Federation…”
“Stop.” Hank held a hand up. “I don’t want to hear another word about the aliens. They don’t exist. It’s all in your imagination.”
For the next hour we packed a lot of belongings into Hank’s truck and I kept thinking of ways I could prove what had really happened. I knew we had been abducted but I needed the disintegrator or the Decib Meter or no one would believe me. I was just pleased me and Ben had helped save the world but only we were going to know that.
A hour later, driving along the freeway, I turned the radio on for some music.
“ABC and top of the news this hour…three teenagers, Benjamin, Jed, and Drew are being interviewed by FBI agents in Jacksonville. The boys claim they have been abducted…”.
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