Encounter
The craft hovered in front of where he’d stopped for the red light at the intersection of Belltower and Freedman. It was its pulsing light sequence that Zac first spotted much higher up in the sky, and to him it seemed helicopter…ish, but as it swooped downward in a steep waterpark slide-like arc toward him he realized he’d fallen victim to an optical illusion. It hadn’t started off way out there in the referenceless ink black, but instead only a couple hundred feet up.
Brightly lit, it was maybe a foot long and oddly rectangular shaped, which didn’t seem very efficient for flying, but Zac just shrugged What the hell did he know about efficient? And besides that the transluscent surface seemed almost fluid making the thing look like a flying see-through shoebox made of glowing water.
Zac cracked the window of his truck a bit to check if he could hear any type of gas-powered whirring that might give the object away as radio-controlled no doubt by some prankster sequestered nearby — most likely with a video camera set up to capture the YouTube-ready footage. But, aside from a decidedly unfamiliar humming, there was no other sound.
Zac was about to get out to see if he could manage a closer look without triggering some sort of Gamma Blamma deathraygun, but the machine rose up twenty feet and hovered there before he could even move his hand to the door handle, almost as if it could read his mind or anticipate his actions. When Zac relaxed and stayed put it descended again to its previous position, prompting an intrigued “Whoa!” from him.
Next came a series of tones and bleeps and clicks, faint at first and punctuated by changes in the ship’s color scheme. As it repeated and grew in volume, Zac figured it was trying to communicate but he had no idea what it was trying to say much less who was saying it.
Zach thought it probably wouldn’t be many more refrains until the little creature inside retreived some hightech version of a clipboard and added one more checkmark to the Unresponsive Human column before zooming off tofind its next test subject, and sure enough midway through the note sequence it abruptly cut off.
Instead of flying off however, it dropped again until it was almost level with the hood of the truck and slowly proceeded forward and right onto Freedman, where once across the crosswalk it hovered again.
Zac didn’t get it right away, so the tiny ship backed up to the truck’s grill again and then mad the slow right turn again.
“You want me to follow?” Zac asked incredulously.
The ship glowed a bright green, and Zac took a look around the empty intersection wondering what he was getting himself into. Then he turned right, pulling in behind it. When it proceeded forward, he took a deep breath and followed.
Follow