The Disappearance of Cow Creek

The Store

I never would've thought that I'd be one to get abducted by aliens, but here I am. Naked, alone, stuck on an alien spaceship going god-knows-where, and nobody on earth has any idea something's even wrong.

All of the people here were now out of the goo-filled cylinders and inside pods which were set into the walls. Amazingly, everyone looked fine, clean, and not malnourished or anything. In fact, it seemed that being in the goo-filled chambers had put everybody at about a healthy weight and cleaned them up a lot.
How long have we been here?
Most of we humans were recovered and able to take everything in now, and some of us were having panic attacks. Then the ship jolted, the quiet engine noise changed, and I could tell we were slowing down and descending. It started to get a little warmer in the room too.
We're landing.
There was another jolt, and all the noise stopped. Then the aliens, who had been hanging onto a row of handles in the wall, started moving again.
They were interesting; much bigger than any human, had four eyes, no hair, and blue-gold scaly-ish, but smooth skin.
They also had a weird looking face that I don't even know how to describe, and two legs, two arms, and some weird appendage that certainly wasn't wings on their backs.
One of them pressed a button in the wall, and the glass in front of our pods slid away, and they started lifting our pods and placing them on a conveyor belt of sorts. I whimpered in fear as I was lifted up in my pod then set on the moving belt. It traveled into the wall, and I couldn't see anything for a minute, then we burst back out into an even bigger room, a ship-deck full of different, high tech vehicles and smaller ships. The same aliens followed along and opened up many of the pods we humans were in, pulled us out — including myself — and put us in what seemed to be the cargo hold of a much smaller ship, then its door was shut, and everything went dark. I was too shocked by the five- or so minutes it all took that I didn't even move.

When the cargo hold we were in opened up again, it seemed we were in some sort of outdoor store or market. It was hot and bright, and way overstimulating. All sorts of different kinds of aliens were milling about, looking at objects, creatures, and, (unnervingly) us. One such alien, which looked fat and squatty, walked over to us and started talking to one of the blue-gold aliens. Then it pointed to a tiny, run-down ship and made some "hand" motions with its weird phalanges, and then handed something to the blue gold alien, and started picking up us humans one by one. The blue-gold alien helped it, and I just watched in silent terror until a hand wrapped around my waist. I sucked in a panicked breath of the dry air. Myself and a number of other people were carried over to the rickety ship, and I was dumped by the aliens into a dark, smelly cargo hold of the fat alien's ship. I shrieked, and was about to try to escape, but was blocked by more and more people getting dumped in on top of me.
Most of us retreated to the back corner instead to avoid getting hurt. Then the door slammed shut, leaving us in pitch-blackness. Someone started crying.
"Is everyone in here from Cow Creek?"
Someone's voice cut the relative silence.
"Yep"
"I am"
"Me too"
"I was sitting at the market"
"Same here"
"I ran out of my house because of a noxious smell and then I woke up here."
A bunch of people murmured in agreement.
The crying stopped, and someone asked: "what's gonna happen to us?"
Nobody answered. Nobody knew.
I heard a loud engine cough into life and we started moving.

About an hour later, I woke up to someone's elbow jabbing my side.
I hadn't realized I'd even fallen asleep. I stood up, seeing as we'd stopped moving. The cargo hold opened, and the two giant hands of the fat alien reached in and grabbed two unluckily people, who screamed and struggled. All of the rest of us, not even caring anymore that we were naked, crammed together into the back corners, desperately trying not to be the next one grabbed. I must've passed out in terror, because the next thing I knew, I was in a small cage on the ground with another female, surrounded by the rest of our group, also two to a cage, and we were being hauled into the back of a dim and dusty nearby building. I watched in fright as we entered, and passed rows of cages, supplies, junk, and bags of who-knows-what. We were carried into the main part of the building, and I could see many other cages, lined up on shelves, full of many strange and frightening alien creatures. We were carried to one shelf, which had two large glass cages on it, each maybe 10 feet wide, 30 feet long, and much higher than my head. Then the alien set our cage down, and with surprising speed, plucked me and the other woman from our crate and dumped us into the large tank. The bottom was filled with maybe 3 feet of something like sand, and had two water spouts coming in one side, and a large dish mounted to the wall of the cage. There was nowhere to hide in the cage, so I cowered in the corner with the other woman until the alien left.
Then I started looking around, and realized something.

"Is this a pet store?"
I turned to the other woman, who looked a lot older than me and was maybe forty. (I, only 15, still had the instinct to rely on elders for answers.
She looked around.
"Dunno."
I wondered if she was ill, the way she just stood there and didn't even look at me.
"Oh god. This is a frickin pet store."
The little bits of info I had were coming together.
I dug a hole in the sand in a corner of the tank, and hunkered down.
The alien came back multiple times, and eventually had everyone dumped in one tank or the other, seeming to sort us by gender. I was now sharing the tank with about 12 other females, some older, some younger than me, most about 30, 50, and 70. Nobody smelled like cow pies, hot dusty roads, or outdated carpeting anymore. Almost all of us had expanded my trench and joined me, or were milling around nervously, looking for answers or tools or something.

I heard a far off voice.
"Are you ladies ok??"
One of the middle aged men in the other cage had stood up, and was Hollering at us across the isle.
"Not any better or worse than all y'all are!"
One of the about sixty year old ladies answered back. Her voice wavered, and then she sat down, looking distraught.
It seemed these Midwestern, dusty old town people had the minds to maintain their standards of decency: Nobody was looking at anybody.
I curled up in the sand between two other younger women and a kid even younger than I, horrified that kids had been dragged into this. It seemed she was with her mother though. I guess these people are all from the town. I wanted to just sleep, and wake up back on the hot gravel road, with burning skin and horseflies and my phone. And my clothes. Gah, I wish I had my clothes. But I couldn't sleep. I think that when we all were in the green-goo compartments, we were asleep.
One of the ladies was across the cage, digging the sand up to make a wall type thing. It looked like she was trying to make a bathroom where she would be hidden from view of the men. I got up, walked across the cage, and started silently helping her. We never said a word, but when we were done, there was a sand wall about two feet high around all the edges of the tank on that side, and a wall between us and the rest of the ladies. It was the best we could do. Then the woman started digging a hole, so I left to give her her privacy. When she was done, I went and took my turn. It seemed the system was to bury one's business and draw an "X" in the sand over it so nobody dug it up. It worked well enough, but wiping with sand is not a fun thing to do by any means. Although, whatever we had (or hadn't) gotten into our digestive systems seemed to make for easier business. 

The sand pit where everyone huddled was sticky with nervous sweat, so I walked around our cage instead. We had water, and an empty trough I guessed was for food, but I didn't dare touch anything. Who knows if the water was poisoned or had some brainwashing concoction mixed into it? 
Aside from being furnished with captive alien creatures and all the guys in our group, the pet store as I suppose it was, had some plants here and there, and a few rows of shelves holding random supplies. I couldn't make out any particular language on the packaging of the items, but I couldn't see out of the dirty glass very well either. There were lights above each cage, but the rest of the store was dim and dirty. 

Standing around naked had made me cold, and I felt very exposed and unsafe in the current environment, so I laid back down in our sand pit with the other women, and a mental exhaustion from the extreme stress of the day overtook me.