Chapter 5

T.K. rubbed his throbbing head and moaned, the force of the impact leaving him disoriented. For a moment, he couldn’t remember anything that had happened in the past few hours. The last clear memory he could recall was of getting into an argument with his older brother Austin and storming out of the house. When did that happen anyway? That morning? Last night? He slowly opened his eyes to see Lee Hina sitting across from him, and the last five hours immediately came rushing back into his mind.

“Lee, are you all right?” T.K. asked him as he pushed himself off the ground.

“Uh-huh,” Lee replied with a brief nod. “I think …” He shakily rose to his feet, groaning all the while. “Man! What just happened, T.K.?”

“I don’t know! You tell me!” he retorted, throwing a nervous glance over his shoulder. “I just woke up to find myself staring up at these creepy … alien-looking things, so I ran! Then I bumped into you!”

“Well, excuse me! Don’t forget, you also—” Lee trailed off abruptly and his eyes widened in shock when he realized what he had just heard. “Wait …” he said in a low voice. “D-did you just say alien?”

“Yeah.” T.K. stared at him for a moment before folding his arms across his chest and stating, “You don’t believe me, do you.”

Lee rolled his eyes at the ceiling in amusement and thought to himself, I’ve already seen those aliens. They’re pretty creepy, huh? Out loud, he responded, “Oh, yeah, I believe you.”

“Is that supposed to be sarcasm, or are you actually serious?” T.K. queried to him crossly. “Because if you’re just being mean—”

“No, I’m serious!” Lee shouted defensively, taking a step back and raising his arms in front of his body. “Natalie, Alyson, Sukio, and I were just trying to get away from these aliens who looked like they wanted to kill us!”

“They probably did,” T.K. grumbled under his breath and looked behind him once again. “I mean, they were chasing me with a scalpel! Do you know what they do with those at the hospital?”

“How would I know? I hate hospitals. Hate them a lot,” Lee snapped back. “But I’m sure you would know. Josh is in medical school, isn’t he?”

“And Evan applied to one, hasn’t he?” T.K. argued in response. “But none of this is important right now,” he added hurriedly, getting back to the topic at hand. “I suggest that we find the others and get out of here fast before we … I don’t even want to imagine what’ll happen to us if we stay here.”

“Oh, yeah, a lot of things could go wrong if we don’t leave. For example, we could end up on the aliens’ dissecting table,” Lee suggested helpfully, his eyes darting apprehensively towards the ceiling.

With a loud and exasperated groan, T.K. slammed his head against the wall. “I said that I don’t want to think about it!” he shouted at the younger teenager.

At first a little confused by what his friend was grumbling about, Lee soon picked up on T.K. disgust. A mischievous grin found its way onto his face as the hazel-haired teenager continued, “Or suppose that they want to use us for some sort of—oh, I don’t know—human experiment?”

T.K. could feel his right eye starting to twitch involuntary. Clenching his teeth tightly in his mouth, the brunette growled furiously, “Stop. It. Lee.”

But his friend had no such thoughts. “Of course, they might not want us for experimentation. They could always just eat us—”

“Lee!” T.K. finally bellowed at him in anger. “Shut—the heck—up!”

“Hey, shush!” Lee quickly clapped his hand over T.K.’s mouth to silence him. Glancing left and right with a worried look, he sighed in relief when both sides proved to be alien-free. Turning to T.K. with an annoyed glare, Lee snapped in a low voice, “Are you crazy? Remember, we’re running from aliens who are going to hear you if you yell!”

“Get your hand away from my mouth, Lee!” T.K. hissed in response, grabbing his friend by the lower arm and shoving it aside.

“Pipe down, you idiots!” a woman’s voice harshly whispered to them. “Can’t you see that I’m hiding here?”

A look of confusion on both their faces, T.K. and Lee quietly made their way over to where they had heard the voice coming from: behind a stack of wooden crates. The two young adults peeked behind them only to find—

“Fioré!” they both exclaimed in unison. “What are you doing here?”

She rolled her eyes scornfully and rose to her feet to be at eye level with Lee and T.K. “Weren’t you listening? I said that I was hiding! It’s a pretty common thing to do when humanoid shish-kabobs are chasing you around!”

Her friends exchanged a brief look with each other; then they turned to Fioré and queried, “You too, huh?”

“What do you mean?” Fioré asked them, scratching her head in puzzlement. “Did you guys have an encounter with the other kid as well?”

“And Alyson, and Sukio, and Natalie,” Lee added, just to be annoying. “But I have no idea where those guys went.”

“I think that they’re the least of our problems,” Fioré retorted. She stepped out from behind her hiding spot and explained, “So now that we know for sure that Alyson was telling us the truth, that just leaves us to wonder, where are Krono, Mitchell, and Diana?”

“And more importantly,” Lee pressed on further, “are they alive?”

“No, no, no! I don’t want to think about that!” T.K. blurted, waving his arms around frantically. “We are not going there!”

“Yeah, Lee!” Fioré agreed. “Don’t be such a pessimist!” She slapped him upside the head, then she folded her arms across her chest and huffed. “Seriously!”

“Ah! That hurt! Fioré, what’d you smack me for?” Lee demanded of her as he massaged his aching cranium.

“For having such a negative attitude!” she answered. “That’s why?”

“Negative?” Lee repeated in disbelief. “Oh, come on! Besides, seeing how they went after us like they wanted to cut us up, it makes me wonder if Diana and the others are all right …”

“I guess,” T.K. agreed with him reluctantly, a dark look clouding his face. “But right now, we had better get moving.”

“Good idea,” Fioré muttered under her breath, glancing over her shoulder at five long shadows cast on the nearby wall. “Because here come the aliens.”

“What?” Lee and T.K. glanced in her direction and groaned once they saw the approaching extraterrestrials. The three young adults exchanged a look, then they took off running again.