The Disappearance of Cow Creek

Dipped

I woke up still buried in the heap of bedding, and every one of the other women were hidden as well. A noise had disturbed me from my unrestful, exhausted sleep- a noise I immediately recognized as footsteps. The door swung open, and it was the normal alien this time. The alien who had peered in at us was nowhere in sight. No other aliens where anywhere in sight. The normal alien, (The toothed alien), was holding a box, and I really hoped it had food. It opened the box and set it down on the ground, which was its usual food routine, but no food appeared. The toothed alien was scanning our cage, clearly picking out where we were based on the hidden lumps in the bedding. Then, it suddenly put its whole arm inside our cage, and swept us all, bedding and everything, onto one half of the cage. Multiple women screamed, in fear, but also likely that their feet or arms had been scraped along the floor. I had not been disturbed yet since I was on the side of the cage it had swept everyone to, but I  could hear many women trying to surface from the dusty and choking bedding. The alien seemed to notice this, and then stuck both arms into our cage, and encircled the entire day heap of bedding and humans in its arms, and swept us towards itself in one fast movement. I pushed up off the floor and shook the bedding out of my tangled hair, gasping in shock. I was only upright for a short moment, as the alien put one of its long arms behind us all, and brushed us all towards the the entrance again. I screamed as I was flipped off my feet in the tidal wave of bedding, buried under the mess for a short moment as I could feel myself sliding across the floor with everyone else, then suddenly the floor was gone. I fell through the air in a waterfall of sand, grass and wood shavings, then-whumph!-landed hard in a dark box. My vision blurred as I gasped for a breath i could not catch, my insides heaving as the wind was knocked out of me. Through my grey-splotched eyesight, I could just barely see more and more material falling on top of me, and could faintly hear other women landing all around me on the hard floor.

Crunch, crunch.. my senses flooded back in with my breathing, and I sat up quickly to avoid inhaling the dirty bedding and sand. We were all in the box, us women. It seemed we were being carried by the alien to someplace. I could hear its heavy footsteps crunching into the plants covering the ground. I stood up, no point in trying to hide. Other women were doing the same, and trying to help others pull themselves from the sand and dust themselves off, regaining their breaths, - a difficult thing to do in the dust filled air that reeked of our old bedding. The alien had made no distinction between the sand we used for sleeping sand that we used as a bathroom. Everything, and us with it, was swept into the box. My legs were unsteady from the fall, and the movement of being carried didn't help. I looked down at my hands in the dim light - they were violently shaking with the low blood sugar, adrenaline and injury. Suddenly the footsteps stopped, and we all fell to the ground again as the box was set down on something. The top opened, and the face of the toothed alien appeared. Someone screeched as it reached its hands in and started grabbing us. I heard a yell, and a splash. I had no time to process what was happening before I too was grabbed, and the alien lifted me and a couple other women out of the stench-filled box, and into the open air, my heart dropping to my stomach. I could not process what I saw, but we were on a flat area surrounded by strange objects. I caught a quick glimpse of our cage in the distance, then I was going down again, my heart jumped to my throat and the alien let go. I fell, again, (did I mention that I hate falling?) and splashed into a pool of water. It wasn't deep, maybe four and a half feet, and turned brown around me as something like three months of dirty living conditions and no hygiene but sand baths leached off of my skin. A strange chemical smell filled my nose, and I noticed a bubbly film coating the surface of the water. Nevertheless, I dipped beneath the surface, scrubbing my hands through my tangled hair and into my armpits. I surfaced, panicking again, as much as I loved water, I now remembered where I was. I whipped around to see more women falling into the water. Blessed sunshine warmed my skin in the rather cold water, though it came from two suns - not one. I looked around. We were in a bin of sorts, but long and filled with water. On one end, the top was covered, but beneath it the floor of the bin sloped out of the cold water. I half-walked, half swam over to it, the other women following suit. Climbing up on the dry surface, I enjoyed the feeling of clean skin after so long. All of us were now in the water or climbing out, and the alien seemed to be poking around in the box looking for stragglers. I helped a few shivering women up the slope onto the dry area, and then sat down.
"C-c-c-can we Hud-d-d-dle?"
One of us asked through chattering teeth. Wordlessly, we all crowded together in a bunch to get warmer. It's not easy to stay warm on a stomach that's been empty for two days. I shivered hard, as did everyone, from fear and cold. We all were up on the dry area now, the water, now brown and dirty, sloshing beside us. The toothed alien had not found anyone left in the box, and walked over towards us. We all squirmed into each other and cowered away from it as it looked at us from above the bin. Suddenly, it grasped something in the outside wall of the bin, and a wall shot up from the floor beside us, its top edge previously level with the floor of the platform. A couple of us squeaked in surprise as darkness overtook the space we were in, but only for a short moment. The roof was slid away, and light flooded us again as the toothed alien came into view. We were now in another box, but effectively separated from our bedding and relatively clean. Then the alien reached down and grabbed a woman again. Terror filled her eyes as she was lifted away, and out huddle immediately broke apart and we milled about in a panic. I looked up to see the alien lift her over to somewhere else, and I could not see her, but heard a clicking noise, a scream, and another click.
"Hey! Are you okay?" One of the women called out to her. I could hear her breathing hard, even from twenty feet away or so, and then her reassuring, unintelligible whimper of confirmation. Then I heard her get dropped somewhere on the other side of the wall of the bin, and the alien grabbed another one of us. This repeated a couple of times, the remaining women more desperately trying to avoid the alien's grasp each time it returned for another one of us. Its hand descended, towards another woman, and she somehow just managed to slither out of its fingers in the nick of time, then it snapped foreword and grabbed me in its heavy and rough grasp. That vertigo returned as I was quickly lifted up away from the women. I was placed in between two padded sides of a machine, and the clicking noise sounded as they pressed into me too fast for me to react. No pain, but I couldn't move. Then the alien grabbed my hair, and another click as it was chopped away. The device released me, and the alien dumped me into yet another container, now with all the other women it had already grabbed. I looked around as someone helped me to my feet. All of us had horrendous looking, and very short hair. One of them was crying, I think it was the first woman who had been grabbed, but I knew it was not because of her new look but rather that she had thought that she was going to die. Within minutes, we all were standing around in this box. The alien seemed preoccupied with cleaning something up that I could not see, so us women had returned to our huddle. A few of the women were trying to work together to lift one person up so she could tell us what was going on, but everyone was too slick with the chemicals that had been in the water to do much of anything climbing-related effectively. Just about the same time as they gave up, the alien returned, and I could hear running water. It looked us over, then suddenly a shocking cold spray of water hit us. It had a hose of sorts, and was rinsing the dip we had been through off of us. Most of us screamed, the water was cold and rather hurt because the alien had a finger over the nozzle, the same way you would do with a hose to wash a car by hand. That lasted for a minute or two, the alien spraying back and forth until we were all drenched and an ankle-deep puddle lay at our feet. Then it turned and I could hear it spraying down other things as well, maybe the bin we had been washed in? It was nice to have just normal water on me, not the Chemical-y stuff. About five minutes later, the spraying sounds stopped and the alien came back and looked at us for a moment, then started grabbing us in bunches, and quickly moved us all to a different, dry box, where it promptly covered the top and all went dark.