first three chapters fiction novel

                                          ALIEN ADVANTAGE   
                                    [e-mail]
                                              CHAPTER ONE
    It was the air conditioner dying that woke me up. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve thought if only I hadn’t woken up, I’d be a rich fat cat lawyer by now.  The darn thing was, I’d become addicted to the soft hum of that air conditioner, like a lot of people in college dorms are. The white noise drowns out the clowns around you, lets you sleep. If it stops for some reason though, bang, you’re wide awake. That’s what happened to me even though it was three o’clock in the morning and I’d been dead to the world. Of course I wasn’t living in the dorms anymore then, I’d moved into an old apartment out in the Gainesville boondocks (translation: cheap) where I was a third year law student at the University of Florida College of Law.
    When that air conditioner died, I did oh so regrettably open my eyes, and what I saw was a strange vibrating green light flooding my bedroom. The window shade drawn by my bed looked positively aglow with it. I reached for the shade but just as I touched it, the light winked out. Blip. Gone. On its own, the air conditioner cranked back up. I shrugged it off, laid back down in bed and dismissed the phenomenon. But then that green light was suddenly there again, and the air conditioner sputtered back out. A transformer, I decided; an electrical transformer has blown up outside or something, who cares? Well, worth a quick look, right? I sat up and raised the shade, staring out at the street. Everything was bathed in that eerie green light. I saw the lightpole by the road --it was out. The opposite side of my street was just a pine forest, but on my side, all my neighbors’doorlamps were out. The green light winked off yet again, the air conditioner rumbled back to life and the streetlamps fluttered back on. The street looked normal, completely silent.
    It is certifiably, absolutely, one hundred per cent amazing, the colossally unfair tricks fate plays on us:  one moment you’re plodding along an anonymous contented law student, the next --finito.
    I was still sitting up in bed scanning the street when I saw the damn thing. About half the size of a house, a green ball of light floating up, up from behind the forest.
I didn’t believe in UFO’s, yet there was this thing! It was just there hovering. The rush of it overwhelmed me. My reason went on vacation. I was on my feet, running out the door in wild excitement to gawk up at the thing. I didn’t know. God, I didn’t know. My life was over. My good life, anyway.
                                                  CHAPTER TWO
    I know you want to hear about what happened between me and that thing in the sky, and I will tell you, but it’s best that I tell you about it in context with Little Island, a place you would like very much until you realized you wouldn’t be leaving any time soon. It was where I ended up after that UFO got me. Before that, I was just a poor Floridian (also known as a Cracker), raised in good ol’ Imperial Polk County, phosphate capital of the world, until the world decided it didn’t need phosphate anymore. Polk was left with a lot of jiggling slag piles developers erected quivering houses over, and unemployed miners, my Dad having been one of them. We didn’t move away like most of the other mining families did, ’cause Dad developed lung cancer right around then. Cigarette smoker. God  I miss that man now as much as on the day he died.
    Surprisingly, things didn’t change much after Dad died. Mom continued working and my two sisters and I collected absolutely wonderful Social Security checks, the motivation behind my subsequent college career. Mom died when I was a sophomore. I can still hear her saying, “Mark, you’ll achieve the moon!” If she’d only known. I guess I should be grateful that neither she nor Dad are around anymore, because if they were, you can bet the Doctor or the General would have surely used them against me quite effectively. But to be without a family --I haven’t seen my sisters since well before that night I brainlessly ran out to get a closer look at the UFO-- it hurts. Made me vulnerable. The people at Little Island knew that of course, it’s one of the things they tried to use against me, make me feel like they were my family. Crap, I’d shoot myself now before I ever felt familial to the Doctor.
    As to my arrival on Little Island, it came by way of sheer rotten luck, which I imagine you’re thinking --correctly-- I was having an awful lot of.  I landed only a few hundred miles from the place, though it probably wouldn’t have mattered, they’d have gotten me anyway, but I like to think that I would’ve gotten away. Ego, I suppose. I was piloting that little spaceship myself (yes, I’ll get to that) when I landed, all right, crashed then. I’d escaped the aliens who’d taken me that night in Gainesville after I’d so gleefully presented myself up to them.
    I should start my explanation by telling you that I could “talk” to that alien ship I piloted back to Earth. Or rather I could think at it. That’s how I flew it home. I would think “SLOW DOWN” or “TURN”, etc. That “thinking” (the experts at Little Island call it “thought projection communication”) was taught to me by the aliens to communicate with them. They also used it to run their ships and to communicate with each other. It was --and still is-- very hard for me. I’m not like Eugene, who could read you a whole book via it if he wanted to.
    You don’t “shout” your thoughts or concentrate hard and screw your face up like those fake telepaths on TV do. It’s just the opposite. You wash your mind clean and let everything just fall away until you’re left in a rather pure-feeling state. Then your thought (I can only communicate a few words) just sort of bubbles up and “connects” to something. In my case it was “GO EARTH” and whoosh! I was off. I’d stolen one of the aliens’ ships and I’ll never know who was more astounded, me or them. The General tells me I’m the only person who ever escaped the aliens on his own, much less steal a spaceship, but that’s the General speaking, so who knows.
    The ship was moving very fast, and when I finally thought I saw Earth through the window (the ship had a few small window-like portholes) I realized in lunchloosing horror that the ship wasn’t slowing down. The thing apparently needed landing instructions and I knew about as much about landing a spaceship as you do.
SLOW DOWN, I thought, and felt the connect, but couldn’t tell if the ship had truly slowed. I was sure the planet below had to be Earth, but I couldn’t make out what part of Earth I was looking at before the window got obscured by, I don’t know what, burning atmosphere or something. Ask an astronaut, not a law student. For all I knew I was about to go splat in the middle of North Korea.
    I washed my mind as clean as total panic allowed and pictured northern California as I’d seen it once from a satellite picture on the net. THERE, I whimpered. I figured I’d have a better chance of not crashing into some city there, as I would if I aimed for the east coast. There was a jolting shudder throughout the spacecraft, then darkness. The ship had flown into the night side of Earth and I could see nothing but fuzzy red streaks flashing by the windows.
    Think, I yelled aloud in an awesomely high squeal. Assume the ship is going to land in northern California. Should I tell it how? LAND SOFT, I thought frantically but not well enough, because I felt no connect. I tried again, picturing a large black flat area, and thought LAND SLOW THERE. Part of the thought connected but I wasn’t sure which part.
    That’s when the ship crashed. I realize now that the ship interpreted the “large black flat” area as a forest at night and the “slow” as just that. I did indeed land slowly, careening in slow motion into tree after tree, leaving me with a fractured skull from being thrown about inside and some pretty outlandish promises having been made to God.  I must have thought OPEN twenty times before the spaceship door did (I have plenty more to tell you about that damnable door) and I stumbled out hoping for people, preferably young nurse-like people, all waiting for me with outstretched arms saying “Thank goodness you got away!” and “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.” In short, I was a mess, physically and emotionally, and that’s why I was such a pathetically easy picking.
    I collapsed face down in soft forest dirt --I can still remember how delicious it smelled. Earth! I was free-- I’d survived! If my head hadn’t felt like it was cleaved in two and my whole body like a boulder was sitting on it, I would’ve danced a jig. Instead I apparently opted for just fainting, a stupefying choice I suppose, but one a charitable mind would forgive under the circumstances.
    It was the sound of the helicopters that brought me to.
    If you’ve never heard helicopters coming at you, you can’t possibly know what it’s like. Liquid thunder all around me. Sounded like an invasion force about to land on top of me.
    It was still dark and I couldn’t see much, with the trees blotting out everything except the hapless path I’d carved through them with my seemingly indestructible spacecraft. I could sure hear though.
    I wanted to be rescued, but at the same time the sound of that particular rescue force was terrifying, and the result was useless indecision on my part.
I should have run, not that it would have made much difference I suppose, but at least I would’ve made the effort, not been such a damned pansy cowering there in the leaves and dirt swirling up around me. But it felt like I was cemented to the ground, struggling to control the turmoil in my head, not to mention my bowels.
    The first of the helicopters set gingerly down on the swath of fallen trees I’d unfortunately provided for them. Lights appeared everywhere, giant burning searchlights finding me, concentrating on me. Men appeared everywhere too, shouting, pointing, an excruciating conflagration of noise that left me even more confused and frightened than I already was. I just wanted to go home, leave me alone I gulped, just let me go, please.
    I don’t know what I expected, anything from being shot to being hugged as a returning hero. I was kneeling beside an object any fool could plainly see was a UFO. I waited for hysteria, astonishment, or awe from those men as they raced about around me and the ship.
    They did not speak, but several at once surrounded me, keeping their lights concentrated on me. I saw no weapons. Seizing the last of my courage in my hands, I searched for a statement, some incredibly brilliant opening words of greeting that explained my circumstances reasonably and understandably.
    “Heh!” I called out.
    Nothing.
    “I’m not--”
    “Remain still, Sir,” one of them commanded. “Help is coming.”
    Did he mean help for me or help for them?
      “I’m hurt,” I shouted back. “I think my head’s bashed in! I need an ambulance!”
    “Help is coming, Sir.”
    “Who are you guys? Forest rangers? Where am I? Oregon?”
    No response. I dared a small step forward. They were, I saw, all wearing some kind of uniform-type jumpsuit that looked military to me, though I couldn’t place what. Through my bumbling and disorientation I did manage to figure out that I was in the hands of some special kind of group which sent my heart thumping even more wildly as I pictured what kind of  kill-em-all good ol’ boy militia might be calling these woods home. The kind of folks who don’t take kindly to a spaceship dropping in on them.
    “Look,” I said in forced rigid calm. “I’m Floridian! My name’s Mark Hemmings. I’m hurt, dammit! Don’t you have a medic or something?”
    “Certainly, Mr. Hemmings,” a warm and reassuring voice called over the din of the still rotating helicopter blades. “As a matter fact,” the man said slipping through the cordon of men around me, “I’m a doctor. And I’m here to help you.” His voice was compelling and earnest, just the sort you wanted to hear when you were in dire need.
    “You won’t believe what happened to me,” I jabbered in a rush of relief, “but that spaceship over there proves it. I was kidnapped, I was taken by--”
    “By aliens, Mr. Hemmings, we know. We are quite knowledgeable about this sort of thing. Who else is in the craft?”
    “No one. I stole it. Look, I need help here. Take me to a hospital. I’ve got insurance. I don’t have the card with me, but I’ve got student insurance.”
    “Don’t worry about that, Mr. Hemmings. We are going to take care of you.”
    The way he said that made me wince. He was being too patient, too determined to control the excitement in his voice. His eyes shifted from me to the ship and back again, like a kid greedily sizing up presents under the Christmas tree. He appeared to be about forty-five years old, twenty years older than me. He wasn’t wearing a jumpsuit like the others but a white lab coat. Who wears a white lab coat into a forest at night? It was as if he was deliberately announcing he was a doctor, sort of a have-faith-in-me statement. His salt and pepper hair was a bit too long, curling round at the nape of his neck trying too hard to still look the rebel. His face was both handsome and fatherly though, and his build was solid. A cut glass brandy decanter kind of man. He was six feet tall and looked like he could take any of the younger men scurrying about him easily, or even me for that matter, and I’m no slouch. When he looked at me, however, his smile was genuine and friendly.
    “If there’s no one else in that ship, who flew it here?” another voice demanded.
    I turned and saw a bear of a man, about fifty years old. He was dressed in what was unmistakably an Air Force uniform. I didn’t know how to tell rank from such a uniform, but from the glittering metal on his, I knew he had to be pretty high up there. Unlike the doctor, his hair was a standard military cut. His face was puffy. It was his hands I noticed the most though, they looked like giant meat cleavers that could crush my skull like an eggshell. Something about him was reptilian --his eyes I think-- but his voice was the most pleasant silken voice I’ve ever heard. It forced me into answering.
    “I did,” I said as agreeably as possible. Here was every I-am-God law professor I had ever miserably faced. “I stole it from the aliens.”
      “We’re here to help you,” he smiled congenially while his eyes bored into me.  “I’m General Peerless and this is Dr. Montgomery.”
    I wasn’t so sure I wanted their help. Something felt wrong. The Doctor and the General must have sensed my apprehension because without warning I was seized, a needle plunged into my arm, and I was laid down on a large cradle-like device, strapped in and carried off toward a helicopter.
    “This is it,” I heard the Doctor say quietly to the General. “This is the break we’ve been waiting for.”
    “Incredible,” the General said. Before I drifted off, I saw his stare fixed on me in delighted fascination.

---------------rest of novel available upon request:[e-mail]-----------------