Trudy sat stunned as she watched Earth explode outside the
port she crouched against in a spaceship she was still uncertain as to how
she’d boarded. Certainly it was through
no conscious effort on her part. Until
this very moment she had never even believed in UFOs, much less known anyone
who had ever claimed to be abducted, or particularly care for the science
fiction genre in general. She preferred
stories with dragons, thank you very much.
She wondered, absently, if she should have a towel. Somewhere in the recesses of her mind was a
vague reference, possibly something her eternally odd friend Barry (or, she
guessed, now to be considered the late
Barry) had said to her once, in which context she didn’t have the vaguest of
clues, and wasn’t about to begin trying to remember now.
It was dark, wherever it was she’d found herself in the
ship, so even if she wanted to guess about that,
she didn’t want to try. Trudy tended to
guess poorly. In high school she’d had a
particularly sadistic science teacher come up with a mock game show, and she’d
been a poor contestant. For some reason
she kept coming up with the same obviously (obviously!,
she still screamed inside her head, even now) wrong answer, and saying it in
different ways just as if that would make a difference (although to be fair,
Trudy’s British accent is top notch, which she wondered might come in handy
now, all considered), which of course it didn’t.
Strange, the things you’ll think about in times of crisis,
which Trudy assumed this must be, just as she had to believe that whoever it
was that had inexplicably kidnapped her at a time like this had not done so to
any expansive degree. Which was to say,
she was likely the sole survivor of the planet, the last human.
That was when she started to cry, in horror of all the
things her imagination told her would be different about the aliens
anatomically.
Sheer panic was the only thing that prevented anything worse
from occurring to her, in the immediate sense.
Later, Trudy would experience all the emotions and thoughts that are no
doubt, and in fact have been,
occurring to you as you’ve attempted to keep up with this gibberish.
When the door, or whatever variety of such a thing it
happened to be, for brevity’s sake, opened the very next moment, Trudy caught
herself in the midst of preparing a wild retort, since after all she wasn’t
sure whether or not to be grateful, if indeed there was anyone on the other
side. Except there wasn’t, and so she
determined to go in search of someone to address, if not for answers then for
something to eat.
Because, just before the world ended, Trudy had been
enduring intense negotiations with what she would soon find out to be the
responsible party. It was then she
regretted having run for office in the first place.
