Other Worlds by Kody Boye

Author:Kody Boye
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kody Boye

That First Hour

That first hour was the worst I’d experienced.

On the night it all began—September 15, 2024, when I was just eleven years old—I was sitting on my back porch practicing chords I’d just learned on my guitar when I looked into the sky and saw what appeared to be a shooting star. Lone, white, and resembling a firefly in the dead of night, it broke through the upper atmosphere and began to trail across the horizon as if it were an angel cast down from the Heavens.

“Dad,” I said, setting my guitar down on the step beside me.

“I see it,” my father replied from his place at the grill, where he stood cooking hamburgers and hot dogs for the evening meal. “Pretty cool, isn’t it, son?”

I nodded, and continued to watch the star as it plummeted throughout the upper atmosphere, both impressed and somewhat leery over the event taking place before me. Though I’d been lucky enough to see shooting stars before regardless of the bright lights extending out from my hometown of San Antonio, Texas, I’d never seen one this close before, let alone one that appeared to be drawing nearer with each passing second.

My mother—who’d been doing dishes in the kitchen—stepped out the back door and asked, “Is that a shooting star?”

I couldn’t reply. Neither could my father, who’d seemingly lost complete interest in the food cooking in front of him. We were both so transfixed by the star that we couldn’t even open our mouths to speak, let alone utter a coherent sentence.

At one point it looked as though it wouldn’t stop falling, and though normally not one to be paranoid, I swallowed the lump in my throat, then turned to look at my parents and said, “Maybe we should get away from the house.”

“Don’t be silly,” my mother laughed. “It’s just a falling—”

She stopped speaking.

Her face paled, her mouth dropped open.

I turned, and stared.

It was at that moment that I realized it wasn’t a shooting star falling toward our house.

No.

It was an aircraft.

Shaped like a chrome disk and bearing along its edges many flashing lights, it came to rest in the sky above our backyard and caused the nearby trees to shift as it descended, whipping leaves from branches and knocking a bird’s nest to the ground below.

“Jason,” my father said as he descended the porch and took hold of my shirtsleeve, drawing me back several steps so that I stood beneath our back porch’s awning. “Get in the house.”

“What’re you,” I started.

“I said: get in the—”

He wasn’t able to finish.

A blinding blue light pierced through the night and struck my father dead center, illuminating him like a floodlight would a dancer upon a stage.

A short moment later, he was lifted into the air.

My mother screamed.

I cried out.

Within a moment my father was gone—sucked into the glowing nexus of the disk’s underside.

“CALL 911!” my mother screamed as she descended the steps. “Call 91—”

She, too, was struck by the light, and though she tried to flee,

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