Page 1 of The Alien Who Saved Christmas
Chapter One
On the first day of Christmas, my alien gave to me.
A gross leg severed at the knee.
From “The Twelve Days of Interplanetary Christmas”
A Christmas Carol for Non-Earthlings by Sadie Malone
Christmas in outer space sucked.
Her life had been in shambles for weeks now, and today was the final nail in the holiday coffin. How the hell was she supposed to ever enjoy mistletoe and gingerbread again, after spending the entire month of December stranded on this shithole planet and seeing such awful things?
Sadie Malone stared at the alien on the stage, empathy filling her. The guy had black horns growing out of his head, and he had four arms, each one the size of a tree trunk. He was half-naked, with wounds on his green torso. They crisscrossed his massive chest, disappearing beneath the ragged waistband of his pants, hinting that he was not going to be an obedient slave to whichever alien bought him.
Also, he’d just broken the auctioneer’s shoulder. While chained. And drugged. That was more evidence of his unwillingness to be subservient.
All in all, the man was so utterly feral, colossally huge, and undeniablyalienthat no one sane would ever bid on him. Sadie may have been marooned on a mysterious planet, but she was still sane. Mostly.
She cringed as one of the tri-legged aliens hit him with a laser-whip thing. It left another glowing red slash on hisskin. Which was green. He had green skin. Not neon, Area 51, cartoon-alien-on-a-t-shirt green, but green nonetheless. It didn’t look scary or unattractive. It was just… green.
The green man did not like being chained and laser-whipped. Who could blame him? He gave a roar of fury that echoed across the purple desert, and a second auctioneer went down. Weird-looking blood splattered on the wooden stage. It was gruesome. Sadie didn’t much care what happened to the writhing slaver, who was now missing one of his three legs. Fuck that guy. But the violent gore still turned her stomach.
She was a waitress from Toledo. She took classes at the local college. She had a crappy studio apartment and a barely running car. She wasn’t supposed to be here, dammit! She wasnormal.
A month before, Sadie had been abducted by aliens on her way home from the diner. She’d been working on Thanksgiving because she didn’t have a family. The people with kids and parentsalwaysgot holidays off, while single orphans like her were expected to cover their hours at the restaurant. It was unfair, but it made her feel like the Grinch when she complained. Because she’d been too damn accommodating with her schedule, she was now an intergalactic refugee.
Usually, Sadie loved the holidays. She loved the lights and the Christmas movies and the eggnog flavored everything. Her plans for Thanksgiving weekend had been to online shop for cute shoes during the Black Friday sales and watchCharlie Brown. Instead, she’d been snapped up by a glowing tractor beam.
Christmas was ruined. There was no way around it.
Sadie wasn’t letting this experience defeat her completely, though. Nope. She wasn’t a girl who gave up in the face of intergalactic hijacking. She kept moving forward. It was, by her inexact calculations, December 23. Maybe Christmas was shot, but there was still New Year’s Eve. She planned to be back on Earth for the ball drop in Times Square. She was salvagingsomeof her holiday season, come hell or high water. All she needed was a little help.
Several tri-legged slave-merchants dashed forward to dose the horned-man with more drugs. Sadie knew nothing about alien sedatives, but they were injecting him again and again. That couldn’t be healthy. Not that they seemed to care about his welfare.
The auction was being conducted on the edge of whatever-the-hell this dumpy town was called. It was absolutely soul-crushing to watch aliens buy and sell each other. No one tried to stop them, though, which seemed to indicate this was legal. The authorities (if therewereauthorities) must’ve been okay with cattle pens full of weeping beings and a dirty platform where creatures were sold off.
It made Sadie’s skin crawl.
Was this what the See-Through Alien Kidnappers who’d taken her from Earth intended for her? It seemed far too likely.
Her confusion and fear had Sadie huddling deeper into her stolen clothing. The See-Through Alien Kidnappers had been bipedal, with two arms. That meant her body shape was right to pass for one of them. They hadn’t been very big; just powerful. Everyone was giving her a wide berth, assuming she was one of them.
She didn’t look like any of the various men surrounding her. Some of them had scales. Some had tails. One had a rhino tusk growing out of his chest. The wildest thing about Sadie was her collection of snow globes. She was a totally average, slightly overweight, brown-haired, gray-eyed human.
The See-Through Alien Kidnappers who’d taken her wore thick Star Wars-y robes, though. Only instead of Jawa-brown, they were North-Pole-red. They even had white fur trim. She was literally dressed like Jolly Old St. Nick, right down to the puffball on the peak of the hood.
Sadie imagined the yards of fabric were useful to hide the See-Through-Alien Kidnappers’ see-through-ness. Their transparent skin had been unsettling, because you could see their magenta blood pumping and their food cubes digesting. No one wanted to watch that. Why were the robesred, though? And what kind of animal had contributed its fur to such a fashion faux pas? She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
Still, swaddling herself in the See-Through Alien Kidnappers’ garments allowed her to blend into the crowd. That’s all that really mattered. Her face stayed hidden in the heavy hood, and so far, no one had noticed that she was wearing Converse sneakers.
For most of her kidnapping misadventure, Sadie had stayed on the ship, raiding the supplies, hiding and praying and rocking back-and-forth in a corner. It had kept her alive, up until this point. Obviously, though, that plan wasn’t going to work forever. She needed to get home.
To do that, she needed a pilot.
Just as soon as the poor, drugged, four-armed man was auctioned off, two fluffy yellow things were being offered.The first auctioneer (prior to being carted off to the healer, screaming in agony) had said that the fluffy yellow things were pilots. Twenty-six days post-alien abduction, Sadie was ready to tryanythingthat might return her to Earth. Even bid on cute duckling aliens at some interplanetary eBay.
The words “Lot 25- Rtaharion, From the Planet Rtaharion” popped up on the big screen behind the auctioneers’ stage. There was a bunch of other gibberish too, but Sadie couldn’t read most of it. And even if shecould’veread it, she probably wouldn’t have understood it. The See-Through Alien Kidnappers had implanted her with some kind of translator device. It gave her the English equivalents of alien speech and writing, but it didn’t give a lot of context.
