The Substitutes: Contract

The Little Factory of Horrors

If one were to search the term UFO on the internet, they would come across a picture-perfect copy of the alien device that Sam faced. A wide, silver dome like an upturned plate, capped with a black pod blinking tiny white lights, the night sky sealed behind glass. Just as Kyu predicted it cared not for gravity, hovering without the hum of rotor blades or grumble of an engine. But that alone would not have ensured its constant escapes from the authorities, and with its discovery it began to prove exactly how it kept them at arm's reach. The silver casing became hazy, shifting into a reflective state. Within seconds of Sam bursting in it had vanished into thin air, leaving only a ratty toy bear adrift for him to grab onto as the invisible disk lurched for the window. 

Out of all the many, many, many knick-knacks, odd jobs and bits and pieces that replaced the carpet in Sara's room, the Abductor had gone after her oldest and most favoured item: the yellowing, threadbare Chester. With a paw in one hand and the edge of the bedframe in the other, Sam held his ground. But it was a losing battle, his grip on the teddy bear failing from how it shook and bounced about in fits of petulant tantrum. The Abductor wasn't used to being denied its quarries, snapping back into existence in a flash of silver and blue as the underside that held Chester lit up, a brilliant beam of light engulfing them both. Any claim gravity could make to Sam was rendered null and void, a sudden weightlessness knocking his legs out from under him and taking his hold on the bedframe with them. With no options left but spite and defiance, he kicked forward and went screaming into the bright blue point.

With the benefit of hindsight, holding on had been a terrible idea, given that Kyu had talked about a disassembly beam of some sort, and even without that, the Abductor had a proven ability to chew up and spit out oak trees, and Sam weighed a roundabout ninety pounds soaking wet. But if Chester had been lost Sara would have been inconsolable, to such an extent that locking herself behind a magical barrier would seem sensible by comparison. The image of a small girl sitting dead-eyed in a corner, not talking, eating or moving for weeks on end projected itself onto the pitch-black darkness that he was falling through as he pondered on his condition. Wind was pushing his cheeks in and Chester was still nestled up in the crook of his arm, so he was very unlikely to be deceased if nothing else. Small comfort, but he had nothing else to cling to as a cacophony of mechanical noises rose up to meet him, none of them pleasant. Electricity sparked and sparked over the churn of spinning gears, led along by continuous bursts of high-pitched hums, snapping in sequence like whip cracks, and whether his eyes were opened or closed it made no difference to locating the source. 

Fortunately, he was given a clue in the form of the end of his descent, the darkness summoning a floor from nowhere for him to slam upon, landing face-first. Unfortunately, that clue did little to help him understand his situation, the bottom of whatever device he'd been falling through just as dark as the rest of it. He hadn't even been falling terribly quickly, but as he fumbled in the dark for his bearings, a swollen pressure began to blossom out from his nose. Not broken, but hardly pretty. Finding his phone, he lit it up and swung it round, doing his best to illuminate his new surroundings and gain an inkling of an idea of what was going on.

With a speck of light to guide the way, he found himself in a collection zone for the Abductor's gatherings, the floor littered with various stolen items, some mundane, some extraordinary. What he hadn't been expecting was how much room there would be. To whoever was running the show, a mound of dirt seemed as precious as a brand-new helicopter, and despite both being larger than the disk he had wrestled with outside the cylindrical room, they both found their way into this larger-on-the-inside prison. Thankfully, none of the other items the Abductor had taken that day belonged to Sara other than Chester, now tied to Sam's waist with a length of rope. After finding two left shoes that were two sizes too big and walking a couple more loops around the impossible space to assure that he wasn't going to be leaving anything important behind he set about finding a way out. Casting the light around found the walls mould from a wide circle into a long tunnel, so deep and dark that the meagre efforts of his phone could not penetrate it. Yet more rooms that should not have fit within the disk, and yet did thanks to whatever alien technology had been sent to spy on Earth.