Alien Abduction Read online

  Alien Abduction

  Irving Belateche

  Laurel Canyon Press

  Los Angeles

  Laurel Canyon Press, April 2016

  Copyright © 2016 by Irving Belateche

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except for brief quotations in reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015919147

  ISBN: 978-0-9840265-9-3 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-0-9840265-8-6 (print)

  Edited by David Gatewood

  www.lonetrout.com

  Cover design by Kerry Ellis

  www.coveredbykerry.com

  Formatting by Polgarus Studio

  www.polgarusstudio.com

  Author Website

  www.irvingbelateche.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Laurel Canyon Press

  Los Angeles, California

  www.LaurelCanyonPress.com

  Table of Contents

  BEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  EDDIE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  JENNY

  CHAPTER FIVE

  EDDIE

  CHAPTER SIX

  JENNY

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  EDDIE

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  JENNY

  CHAPTER TEN

  BEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  EDDIE

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  JENNY

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  EDDIE

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  JENNY

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  EDDIE

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  JENNY

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  EDDIE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  ABEL

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  EDDIE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  JENNY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  EDDIE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  ABEL

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  JENNY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  EDDIE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  ABEL

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  EDDIE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  ABEL

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  EDDIE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  ABEL

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  EDDIE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  ABEL

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  EDDIE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  ABEL

  CHAPTER FORTY

  EDDIE

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  BEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  I wasn’t worried in the least about kidnapping Tess Payton, the target. This assignment was going to be a piece of cake.

  My job had become second nature to me. The fear of getting caught had disappeared. This was a bad thing, and I knew it. But it was also the truth. So I actively wished for fear to make an appearance. Fear kept me alert. Fear kept me from taking too many risks. And most of all, fear kept me from getting caught.

  I turned onto Orange Grove Avenue, a sad, narrow Hollywood street. It was one of hundreds of such streets in Hollywood, all crowded with rundown apartment buildings. Though these buildings didn’t have much variety, regardless of which street you found yourself on, the tenants did: young, wannabe actors, struggling writers, students, Russian immigrants, Latino families, and the elderly living on nothing but their social security checks.

  It was exactly this variety of tenants that made this an easy assignment. Plucking Tess here, even in plain sight, wouldn’t cause much of a stir, if any. This wasn’t the type of neighborhood where people looked out for each other. There was no “neighborhood watch” here. This was the type of neighborhood where, for the most part, people avoided each other.

  I wasn’t always given a target as easy to abduct as Tess Payton. But after four years of working for Abel—my employer—I knew this was part of his calculation. Abel wanted to keep a low profile, so whenever possible, he’d select a target I could scoop up without leaving much of a ripple in my wake.

  Halfway down the block, I swung into a parking lot that sat under a boxy, three-story apartment building known as a “dingbat,” probably so named because it stood on stilts, though I had never been able to confirm that. Dingbats had flourished in Southern California during the fifties and sixties. They provided cheap housing to transplants flooding into LA looking to make their dreams come true. And dingbats still provided the cheapest housing in LA, though now the vast majority of the buildings had turned into visual blights, littering great swaths of the city.

  I knew the history of dingbats because I had plenty of time on my hands. Running surveillance on my targets gave me hours of free time, which I spent surfing the net on my smartphone, digging ridiculously deep into whatever subject caught my fancy. And the days between assignments, waiting for Abel to give me my marching orders, provided me with even more free time to dig into random subjects. At home, I spent hours on research, while my wife, Diane, and my son, Mason, thought I was hard at work.

  I parked in the open parking space, the one I had scouted out in advance. The space would remain vacant until nine p.m. because the tenant who parked here worked long hours. I also knew that none of the other tenants would chase me away from this space. My scouting had revealed that each tenant had to defend his or her own turf. Besides, my wait under the dingbat wasn’t going to be long.

  Within the next ten minutes, Tess would pull into her parking space, two spots away from mine. She worked half days, then rushed home to grab a quick bite to eat, before heading across town to UCLA, where she was taking computer programing classes. Through my investigation—not an in-depth investigation, as this assignment didn’t call for one—I’d learned that Tess was expanding her skill set so she could rise above her lowly work as a production assistant. She’d been working as a PA since moving to LA three years ago.

  I thought her smart. She was improving her marketability while she was still young—twenty-eight—rather than waiting until it was too late. She was hoping to avoid the fate of so many other young people who moved to LA hoping to break into the film or TV industry, but who, years later, in their mid-thirties, found themselves stuck in low-paying, low-skill jobs that were at best peripheral to the film industry, or at worst, not in the film industry at all.

  I wondered if kidnapping her would alter her career plans. But I never checked on a target after I completed my assignment. It wasn’t worth the risk. And I had never asked Abel what happened to the targets. Not that he’d tell me. He rarely spoke about his operation. If I had to sum up what I knew about the operation for sure, it would come down to one sentence—

  Alien abductions are real.

  Absurd, but true. And more absurd was the fact that I, Ben Kingsley, a once successful executive with DirecTV, was part of the operation.

  Yeah, alien
abductions were real all right, but they were nothing like how the kooks and conspiracy theorists described them. They weren’t high-falutin’, high-adventure exploits, chock-full of advanced alien technology.

  Instead, the abductions were low-tech, more akin to common, street-level crime. Though my employer was an alien, the abductions I pulled off were no different than they would have been if he’d been a human. They were no different because a human—meaning me—was the one actually doing the abducting.

  The alien part of the operation—the part I wasn’t privy to—happened after I delivered the target to Abel. But what exactly that alien part was, I didn’t know. I saw no evidence that Abel was “examining” the targets, as was alleged by those who believed in alien abductions. And I knew for a fact that not one target had any idea that she’d been abducted. So those kooks who told the world that they’d been victims of alien abductions also got that part of their conspiracy stories wrong. Abel wouldn’t have been able to keep a low profile if his targets even suspected they’d been abducted.

  I glanced at the dashboard clock. Tess would be here any minute.

  I prepared the tranquilizer.

  Sedating the target was a part of the operation that did involve alien technology, though the technology was remarkably simple. My bet was that Abel could have given me more alien tools. But more alien tools meant more risk, and the key to the whole operation was minimizing risk—the risk to him.

  As I waited, the tranquilizer ready and my eyes glued to the spot where Tess’s car would soon appear, my thoughts went back to the mystery of what Abel did to the targets.

  I had long ago concluded that the targets provided the alien with something of value. It had been obvious almost from the start that he wasn’t some sort of alien biologist assigned to Earth to “examine” the human species in order to learn as much about this form of life as possible. He wasn’t curious about the human species in the least.

  I also had long ago concluded that Abel selected specific targets because only those targets could provide him with this thing of value. Otherwise, he would have chosen any human from anywhere—humans whose disappearances would never register—reducing the risk of getting caught to almost zero.

  But even after four years on the job, I had no clue as to what this thing of value was. It didn’t show up when I researched the targets’ lives. Nothing in their backgrounds pointed to it. And I didn’t see it when I was doing surveillance on them. Nothing about their current lives—not their behavior, not their physical characteristics—revealed anything about it.

  Though the targets shared very similar demographic characteristics—they were single women between twenty-five and thirty-five, and from what I could tell when I researched them, all of them were smart—this wasn’t nearly enough for me to deduce what Abel wanted with them.

  Tess’s blue Honda Civic rounded the corner at the end of the block.

  Without hesitating, I leaned down across the front seat of my car so she wouldn’t see me when she pulled in. From scouting her, I knew exactly what she’d do next. In my prone position, clutching the thin copper straw in my hand—the copper straw loaded with the tranquilizer pellet—I counted off the seconds.

  Forty-five seconds later, I heard the Honda’s engine echoing under the dingbat as Tess pulled into her parking space. Then the roar of the engine died as she turned off the car. Five seconds later, I heard her car door open, then slam shut.

  As I counted off twelve seconds, I pictured her moving around the front of her car, then walking briskly, as was her style, in my direction. She’d pass in front of my car when my countdown was over.

  At eleven seconds, I lifted the thin copper straw to my lips, sat back up straight, and saw Tess just clearing the front of my car to my right. I aimed the straw at her back and let out a gentle breath.

  The pellet—moving at lightning speed—traveled through the windshield, and Tess’s brisk pace took a hit. She slowed down—way down—then stopped. She grabbed one of the dingbat’s stilts and started to sway.

  I got out of the car and hurried around the front toward Tess, timing it perfectly so that I caught her—just as I’d caught dozens of women over the past four years—as she collapsed. I’d had to let some targets tumble all the way to the ground only because those abductions were more complicated and had required elaborate ruses.

  But Tess was an easy target, and I had become good at timing a target’s descent into unconsciousness.

  I scooped her up into my arms and carried her the few feet to my car. Then I opened the passenger door and buckled her into the seat. The seat was already reclined, so that during my drive to Abel’s, anyone who glanced into the car would think Tess was sleeping.

  I pulled out from under the dingbat and turned onto Orange Grove Avenue.

  Once again the abduction had gone well—not that this one had been much of a challenge. I turned onto Santa Monica Boulevard, then onto Fairfax, and headed toward the hills, toward Abel’s house. I was relaxed and complacent, and didn’t feel even the slightest inkling of fear over getting caught. My heart wasn’t pounding, my stomach wasn’t in knots, and my breathing wasn’t quick and shallow. Again, I couldn’t help but think that my lack of fear was a bad omen.

  I’d soon find out it was.

  EDDIE

  CHAPTER TWO

  I looked up from my computer, took in the nearly empty newsroom, and thought myself lucky.

  But it wasn’t really luck, was it?

  Of course it wasn’t.

  And I knew damn well it wasn’t.

  What had saved my job—a reporter for the Los Angeles Times—was my willingness to take one pay cut after another. I much preferred this slow death, a death by a thousand cuts, to undertaking the grueling search for a new job, or worse, a new career. I just didn’t want to start over.

  Who does?

  I supposed a younger person would. But I was too old.

  So, by hanging on to my job, by accepting one pay cut after another, I now had a paycheck that was just as pitiful as the LA Times’s bottom line. For the paper—a venerable LA institution—was doing its own kind of hanging on. It was hanging on to a business model that was no longer profitable, just as I was hanging on to a job that barely made ends meet. And “barely made ends meet” was just an expression, because if you actually crunched the numbers, the job didn’t make ends meet.

  Bob’s voice boomed through the newsroom—and there was plenty of space through which it could boom, because there were very few reporters left to absorb the sound. I was a member of an endangered species.

  I watched Bob, the paper’s editor in chief, lead two men, both in their early thirties, across the vacant expanse of the newsroom. Bob was in full sales mode, his voice loud, cheery, and annoying. And while he was dressed old school, in a suit, the other two men wore jeans and pressed button-down shirts.

  My bet was that the two younger men—whose confidence reached across the empty newsroom all the way to my desk—were representatives of the LA Times’s new owner, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. According to the firm’s press release, our new owner was planning to “leverage” the LA Times’s “brand”—meaning the paper’s name—to support a “wide variety of news aggregators across multiple platforms.”

  In other words, the firm was planning to use the only asset the paper had left, its name recognition, to market whatever they deemed legitimate news sites. These sites, mostly Internet startups with very little in the way of news-gathering resources, and which dealt mostly with trumped-up news stories, would suddenly become the LA Times.

  I laughed. Man, was I feeling bitter today. And watching the two entrepreneurs step into Bob’s office did nothing to curb my bitterness. I knew that part of the discussion in that office would center on more job cuts.

  I shook my head, then looked back down at my computer and focused on the task at hand: coming up with an Internet-worthy headline for the story I was polishing. My story was good; that I was
sure about. But the headline was the critical missing piece. Headlines were now called “clickbait” and were more important than the story itself. Clickbait was what made the Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, and a slew of other sites the go-to sites for online news. Those sites were killing the LA Times and dozens of other traditional papers across the country.

  In the online edition of the paper, the number of times a reader clicked on your story was tracked. In general, my numbers were low. And once again, I was coming up blank when it came to a clickbait headline.

  “Hey,” Rick said, coming up behind me, which he often did, and which I hated. Bob had hired Rick, twenty-nine, as an editor. Rick’s strength was creating clickbait headlines. “We’re ready for the LA River piece,” he said.

  That was another thing I hated: there were no longer set times for posting stories. The online edition had to be kept fresh. So we posted a new story not when it was ready, but when the online edition became stale—when the readers stopped clicking.

  I turned to Rick. “Yeah, it’s done, more or less. But I don’t like the headline.”

  “I got a couple,” he said, even though he hadn’t yet read the story. “Go ahead and submit it.”

  I typed a few commands into my keyboard, then said, “Done.”