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thing chasing us got her alone.
    The sensation of heat on the back of my neck went from warm to scalding , and then— BOOM —an explosion of sound knocked me to the desert ground. I felt an object accelerate above and I covered my head, but the object passed quickly, because it wasn’t interested in me.
    â€œBennett,” I heard Sophie yell.
    I was on the ground, half deaf, slightly drunk, and the length of a football field from Sophie, when the UFO came to a stop.
    At first, to my eyes, it didn’t seem like much of a UFO at all—it looked more like a dog-catching wagon the size of a small boat, hovering ten or so feet off the ground. Painted on its side in neon blue were stick figures that reminded me of the man and woman symbols found on the doors of restaurant bathrooms, and where there would have been wheels on a normal wagon, there was a set of white, glowing skids.
    Because the UFO was hovering low, Sophie was staring straight at it rather than up at it, which a million movies had told me was the typical way that the soon-to-be-abducted confronted UFOs.
    For a moment, neither Sophie nor the UFO did anything. She knew she couldn’t escape, and the UFO seemed to be waiting to see what she was going to do.
    A small cannon emerged from the side of the van. There was a murmuring sound, and the cannon shot a cloud of red and pink confetti in front of Sophie.
    She looked at the confetti a beat, then dropped to the ground and began rolling in it like a feline in the throes of a catnip binge.
    â€œSo…good…,” I heard her moan, rubbing the confetti on her face, grinning and laughing like a crazy person. “HA…hehhhhhhh. HA…hehhhhhh…”
    The UFO descended to the ground, barely scattering the dirt beneath its landing rails. A door opened on the side of the ship—though there were no clouds of gas or any dramatic light emitting from it, another tenet of UFOs I thought was pretty standard-issue—and two creatures nonchalantly hopped out, carrying a cage.
    The creatures weren’t anything I could have anticipated—no big black eyes and skinny limbs like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind , no muscles and dreadlocks like in Predator. Though one was larger than the other, they were clearly of the same species, and both were wearing white lab coats and seemed to be carrying clipboards. They looked like screwed-up Vikings, for lack of a better comparison. Blunted horns grew out of their skulls, above foreheads that were shiny and golden. Their bulbous noses sat slightly off center in the middle of their faces, beneath tiny eyes. They had thick bodies with heavy red fur sprouting out from under their lab coats, and their feet were swollen and exposed.
    They calmly walked over to Sophie, who continued to roll around in the confetti, throwing it in the air and letting it rain down upon her like she was a child at a party, paying them no attention. She was rubbing the stuff over her body, putting it in her hair, tasting it, unfazed by the fact that a couple of enormous alien roughnecks were studying her, the smaller one making marks on his orange clipboard.
    All right. At this point, you’re probably wondering why I didn’t rush toward the aliens and pull Sophie out of there. It’s something I think about all the time too. Now that I’ve had some distance from the moment, the only way I can explain it is that the suddenness and the unreality of the situationoverwhelmed me, and I was stupefied. My brain felt like it had detached from my nervous system, my heart felt like it was no longer pumping blood, and all I could do was watch. I guess there are a lot of ways that I could try to explain what I was feeling in terms of my physiology, but everything boils down to the fact that I was staggeringly afraid.
    When the Vikings were done making their notations, one of them grabbed the side of Sophie’s face, took out what looked like a label gun,