Abducted: The Awakening

By Lee Cambule

Imagine waking up to discover that the world you know is no longer beneath you?

Gareth Oakley should have awoken to his unhappy existence as a primary school teacher in South Wales, recovering from the break-up of a long-term relationship and a long battle with alcoholism. Instead, he wakes up inside a cocooned chamber in a strange laboratory, unsure about how he got there or why he was taken. But he is just one of twenty-five strangers from different backgrounds, places and times who have been abducted and abandoned on a seemingly deserted alien world.

Bryony Jamesis a glamorous yet naive actress from 1930s Hollywood, hiding a dark secret about her past. Simon Gradyis an arrogant, impulsive Sergeant in the US Marine Corps who refuses to accept Gareths natural leadership.Christopher Veronia suave 80s music producer with dark plans of seduction and power. The group also includes a nineteenth century coalminer, a golf-loving Scot, two frightened children and a young WWI Medic. The challenges of surviving together are as complex as the mysteries of this unfamiliar world.

The abductees unite to discover a wild, alien jungle beyond this facility that offers hope that salvation may be away from the building in which they awoke. They are left with many unanswered questions but nobody suspects the dangers that may be waiting for them as they set off on their perilous journey to find the way home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Oct 22, 2008
• ISBN: 9781452070025

Lee Cambule

Lee Cambule was born in Swansea, Wales in 1979 and has been writing since a young age (receiving his first rejection letter at the age of ten). His diverse range of writing covers various genres including his second novel, the contemporary drama 'Demons Inside.' Lee is currently working on the second installment in the exciting mystery drama series 'abducted.'

Book preview

© 2008 Lee Cambule. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 10/15/2008

ISBN: 978-1-4389-1987-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4520-7002-5 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Contents

acknowledgments

book one

one

two

three

four

five

six

seven

eight

nine

ten

eleven

twelve

thirteen

fourteen

fifteen

sixteen

seventeen

eighteen

nineteen

twenty

twenty-one

twenty-two

twenty-three

twenty-four

twenty-five

book two

one

COMING SOON

About the Author

acknowledgments 

For those who believed in me and those did not;

for those who inspired me and those who endured me;

for those I owe my life and those I owe an apology;

for those without faces and those without names;

for those I love and those I have never met.

LC

book one 

Darkness follows light

save for the dawn of realisation

when the shadow of fear eclipses hope.

one 

Unaware that something was wrong, Gareth Oakley awoke with a headache. It screamed in echoes of the hangovers he used to wake with every morning; hangovers which had nearly destroyed him and probably should have. He groaned in semi-conscious suffering and was about to heave his eyes open when a fragment of memory returned through the haze.

Marie.

That had been her name; at least it was the name she had given last night. He could see the bar in his mind like a distant lighthouse through dense fog and there she was beyond the mist. Blonde hair (at least it was this week), dangerous legs and soft, pouting lips like red velvet pillows. Her skin had felt coarse and her breath smelt like she chewed cigarettes instead of smoking them, but she had been worth every penny.

As elements of the previous night fell into focus, he began to feel again. Remorse was a dominant emotion – as it was most mornings – but he could not decide on what he was really sorry about: the cramped fit of dirty passion on the back seat of his Fiesta, what people would say if they found out or the fact that it had all cost him nearly two hundred quid.

Well, Gaz, if the school governors ask any questions, tell them it’s your money and you can spend it on whatever you want.

Gareth kept his aching eyes forced shut against the pain. He could not bear to look at the emptiness of his bed (their bed) just yet. All he could picture were fractured images of that lewd prostitute directing him towards the good spot behind the garage overlooking the River Tawe. It disgusted him just thinking about what he had done and he was not ready to face the reality of the consequences of his actions.

What did you expect? His mocking mind was more alert than he was. When are you going to let it go, huh Gaz? Damn it, you’re supposed to be better than this. You’ve got a career to think about, a good one at that, you’ve got a brand new life, a couple of good friends and a loving family. Are you really going to let the memories of Karen drag you down like this?

Sobriety was a cruel trick, an illusion. Most addicts found that their problems ended when they quit but for Gareth, that was when the problems had started. The beer goggles had slipped off and he did not enjoy the view. After alcohol had played such an important role in the first twenty-seven years of his life, its absence had tormented him for the last six months.

And for what? None of it would bring Karen back. She was gone and not even the bitter sweat of unsatisfying sex could fill the void that was his life. As much as he enjoyed working with children, his job no longer felt enough. If he really wanted companionship, he could have made the effort with one of the other teachers or that dinner lady with the nice smile. Instead, he had plunged back into the bottle and paid a second-rate prostitute to…

Suddenly, Gareth halted his train of thought.

He had not plunged back into the bottle last night; he had drunk nothing but water. Drinking on a school night was never a good idea for a primary school teacher, even though he had ignored that particular pearl of wisdom countless times in the past. But last night had been another sober notch on his belt…so where was this headache coming from?

And why was it so damned quiet?

Gareth Oakley opened his eyes and finally realised that something was wrong.

The view that should have greeted him was the ceiling of his (their) bedroom in his (their) cosy, terraced home, the bedroom window gazing out over the bluest border of the ocean. He had collapsed on the bed late last night and battled tears until sleep had conquered him. But the view that greeted his heavy, blue eyes through his heavy, brown fringe was not the bedroom ceiling.

A transparent, domed shell surrounded him about six inches above his body, an elliptical barrier of dense plastic framed by a pallid metal casing. The plastic distorted the sight of whatever waited beyond it apart from the flicker of a distant orange light. The dome was shaped like the inside of a sarcophagus and covered the entire bed (which was actually a turquoise, foam mattress). It surrounded the mattress like a cocoon with no visible means of escape.

Frowning, Gareth raised his hand to the dome. It felt solid and sturdy. He pushed but nothing gave. He raised both hands and started to push again, then to push harder. Nothing. A faint smell of sweat suddenly seemed to fuel his claustrophobia.

‘Hey!’ His voice did not sound hoarse, a further sign that he had remained sober last night (almost two hundred consecutive days, break out the champagne), though it did not echo. There was hardly room to move as the mattress was barely big enough to lie on and the logical part of Gareth’s brain started questioning whether any air was getting inside this cocoon.

‘Hey…HEY!’ Gareth yelled louder and started punching the plastic dome with both hands. Panic began to subdue his sagacity and his eyes darted around, searching for escape. When nothing but fear was evident, hysteria began to grow inside his throbbing head.

‘HEEEYYYYYY!’ Yelling turned to screaming, punching turned to stunted kicking.

Suddenly he sensed rather than noticed that the dome had moved slightly, followed by a dull thumping noise. It was the only sound in the universe beyond his strained breathing. He had just kicked the bottom of the dome hard with his knees and when he repeated the move, he noticed a crack of light between the dome and the mattress, no more than a bright sliver at the foot of the bed, which disappeared with a thump.

Up, his frightened mind yelled. It lifts up from the bottom!

Fighting his fear, Gareth slid further down the bed in snakelike slithers and raised his knees sharply. The dome jolted again as though the hinge were at the top of the dome like the lid of a kettle. Frowning through focus, he curled both legs against the underside of the dome and began to push upward. The dome slowly began to rise but it was too heavy to…

Without warning and just before his cramped back cracked under the weight, there was a click and the dome began to rise under its own power. The grace with which it moved was lost to Gareth. As soon as the dome raised high enough, he slid through the gap and rolled onto the floor.

The first thing he noticed as he landed was that there was no floor, just dirt; grey, lifeless dirt beneath his fingers.

The infusion of panic and bewilderment overwhelmed him and he scrambled backwards on his knees, smacking into the side of the bed he had just fallen from. The shock forced a hiss from his lips and a thousand questions without coherency spun inside his head.

He staggered onto unsteady feet and checked himself. Everything looked in order, even the same clothes he had worn out the previous night: faded denim jeans, creased blue t-shirt, trainers that had once been white. Had he not even kicked off his shoes before collapsing on the bed? The memory was hiding, too frightened to make itself heard above his shrill mind.

What’s going on? I’m not supposed to be here, it’s Thursday, the children have Christmas break coming up and I don’t want to give them homework over the holidays. Where am I?

Gareth turned to check what should have been his (their) bedroom and his jaw dropped.

This place was more amphitheatre than abode. It was a vast dome-shaped room with buff-coloured walls curving into a ceiling high above his head, just like the inside of an egg might look. No doors, no windows, just one cream cage (that orange light had gone, whatever it was). They were not painted walls either; they looked natural, the way you can tell that trees are not painted brown. It was bitter and uncomfortable in this strange room, stealing his breath for a dozen different reasons.

His bed was actually a sleek chamber a few feet off the ground. The part-plastic roof stopped in a vertical position where a headboard should be on a normal bed. There were eight round legs sinking into the soil beneath the mattress, tree trunk legs (if tree trunks subtly faded from sky blue to a drab grey colour from top to bottom). The yellow metal frame around the edge made the sight more bewildering. It was a piece of furniture that looked part built, part grown.

Gareth was too sharp to believe this was a dream; his senses tingled too vividly. He could smell musty dampness in the air, a cold air which caressed the hairs on his arms with a chilling touch, an air which tasted sour and dusty. There was silence in the room, not the same void of noise from inside the chamber, just a bland quiet. And there was the sight before his eyes; the ground looked like, if there had once been normal flooring such as carpet or tiles, it had been ripped from the earth. There was light in the room but he could not see any light fittings.

It’s the walls…they’re glowing!

He had to step closer to check but there was definitely a pale ember burning deep within the wall. His hand strayed towards the light but he pulled it back sharply as the wall caressed his fingers. It felt like flesh, a coarse skin stretched over the dim light, tough but alive like a leather hide.

This room is alive…

Gareth jumped at a sudden a noise from behind him, turning in fear. The chamber he had just woken up inside was not the only one. The room was full of identical chambers, all closed. Rows…no, circles of chambers, dozens of chambers end-to-end in ever decreasing circles within circles. Gareth had been trapped in a chamber closest to the wall in the outermost circle, providing him with a beautiful view of this bewildering room.

That noise came again and everything else – the prostitute, the children, the pain of sobriety, the pain of loneliness, the pain of losing Karen, even the shock of waking up in this place – was forgotten. Gareth recognised that noise because he had just made a similar sound.

It was the dull thumping noise of somebody trying to escape from a chamber.

two 

Paralysis gripped his body and waited to discover how Gareth would react. When the noise came a third time – accompanied by a muted scream – the paralysis broke, his headache was forgotten and he ran towards the opposite end of the room in search of the screaming.

He darted between chambers, scarcely registering that there were shapes and colours inside some (though not all of them). Possibly other people was a thought that flitted across his mind between stunted breaths as he hurried towards a chamber two rows in from the far wall; a chamber which was shuddering slightly. As he closed in on it, he noticed what looked like a naked thigh kicking around through the gap that was closing as the dome began to fall.

‘Hold on!’ His voice bounced around the room like an echo in an empty concert hall, which made the kicking stop.

Gareth reached the dome just in time to jam his fingers underneath. He bit back a curse as they were crushed by the weight and heaved it open, struggling until the mechanism kicked in. The chamber dome began to rise under its own power.

Inside the chamber was a woman in her late twenties wearing a black, classical evening dress with a sequinned pattern running down one side. Her kicking had tangled the dress, revealing one slender, bronzed thigh. Other features become a blur as she writhed around on the brink of hysteria.

‘Hey,’ he whispered soothingly, grasping her wrists to prevent her arms from lashing out in panic. ‘It’s all right, you’re going to be okay, sshhh.’

Those practiced tones started to calm her until she settled a little and stared up at him. This woman was beautiful and more. She had masterpiece features decorated with a rich tan. She wore a crucifix necklace that may have been diamond and earrings that definitely were. Tears had messed her mascara and a fading bruise on her left cheek could not overshadow her sapphire eyes or cropped, golden hair. There was elegance in her suffering; majesty in her misery like a weeping angel on a neglected tomb.

And something familiar…

‘You all right, love?’

Gareth was immediately conscious of how Welsh that had sounded. The woman had fear evident in every aspect of her features but she appeared slightly taken aback at being called love. Considering everything she had been through in the last thirty seconds, it should not have been the most shocking part of the experience.

‘I…who are you? Where am I? Where’s Tony?’

Her words were refined, if a little jittery, and pronounced in a smooth American accent. Gareth felt humble in her presence, with his guttural South Wales intonations, a dirty mop of brown hair and three days worth of neglected stubble. He raised his hands defensively as the dome settled on its vertical position.

‘Whoa, slow down, one at a time. My name’s Gareth, I’ve got no idea where we are or who Tony is.’

The woman opened her mouth to ask another question before she noticed the wondrous room behind her somewhat scruffy saviour. ‘Jesus Christ!’

Her arms dropped from his grasp and the refinement in her voice was forgotten, giving way to a natural tone, more real and less dignified. She gazed around the room before fixing Gareth with frightened eyes.

‘What is this place? Where are we? H-how did I get here?’

‘Sorry, don’t know those either. How about I ask one…what’s your name?’

The woman’s face changed again. There was still something familiar there but she frowned in a peculiar way. Gareth recognised the look. Back in College, he had met a local radio presenter and (being on the radio) Gareth had not recognised him whilst asking for his name. The stare that arrogant disc jockey had given him then was the same stare this frightened woman was giving him.

Don’t you know who I am?

‘Bryony.’

Nope, name doesn’t ring a bell Gaz. Maybe she’s a porn star, don’t need to know their names to remember their faces, right? Oh I forgot you don’t have any porn anymore because Karen said…

He pushed that irritating voice away and tried to smile reassuringly. ‘Nice to meet you. You…need a hand?’

He extended his hand but his trademark chivalry was lost on Bryony who suddenly realised that not only was she still lying down on this strange bed, her left leg was on display. Her blush brought a little colour to her face as she fixed the dress and allowed Gareth to help her down from the chamber.

‘W-what do we do?’

He shrugged. ‘I guess we try to find a way out or something?’

‘Okay, s-sounds good.’

Gareth glanced around; Bryony’s side of the room seemed slightly different and he quickly realised why when he spotted four peculiar tables just beyond the outermost circle of chambers.

‘Follow me,’ he whispered and began moving towards the tables. Bryony hesitated before following, removing painfully high heels as she went.

The tables were definitely odd. They could have been operating tables or conference tables or snooker tables or anything in between but they were unquestionably tables. About four-feet high, elliptical egg shapes in a sapphire colour like Bryony’s eyes, framed with a pale-yellow metal rim. The layout actually reminded Gareth of an air-hockey table.

There were buttons too.

Gareth edged towards the head of the nearest table (the top of the egg) with Bryony half a step behind him. The buttons, about a dozen, were a variety of complex shapes. One looked like the silhouette of two stars badly overlapped, another looked like a pattern of interconnecting fingers, the one next to it reminded Gareth of a football club motif. They were all a few inches wide, an inch thick and they all had…markings.

It was the best description he could come up with. They were scrawled grey lines like the scribbles of a three-year old let loose with pen and paper. The hollow markings were etched into the buttons but the scribbles did not match the shape of the buttons they were etched on. It was like a puzzle carved into an enigma.

‘What are they?’ Bryony added another unanswerable question to her list.

‘Not got a clue. They look like controls or something but…I just don’t know.’

He frowned at them – as if that might achieve something – but only silence followed, a silence broken by Bryony.

‘Well, go on…press one.’

He turned to her, startled. ‘I don’t think we should.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because we’re not sure what they do.’

‘But we have to try something, don’t we?’

‘Do we?’

‘Yes!’

‘Well…’

There were not normally many things Gareth Oakley did not know but this was hardly a school quiz. No gold star for the highest score in the class here. He glanced across at the other tables, three more in an arched row like misplaced dominoes, but no answers presented themselves.

‘Come on, Gareth,’ Bryony prompted in a nervous whisper, leaning closer and sending a shot of perfume up his nose, sweet like honey. ‘Maybe one of these can get us out of here.’

As unlikely as it sounded, Gareth considered it. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t noticed any doors but that doesn’t mean these buttons can…’

‘We won’t know until we try, will we?’

He sighed. ‘I guess…’

There was probably some wise proverb about punching buttons with disregard when you don’t know what they do, but nothing appropriate came to him. A cocktail of confusion, apprehension and adrenaline was flowing through his body, drowning out his natural caution. Those buttons could be anything: a video game, a microwave, controls for a nuclear arsenal. There was only one way to find out.

Gareth fixed Bryony’s eyes. ‘Ready to take a risk?’

She swallowed hard before nodding. Gareth sighed, unsure of what else to do but feeling that he had to do something. He smiled reassuringly, drew in a breath and pressed one of the buttons.

Nothing happened.

Frowning, he hit a second button. Then a third. Then he started punching them randomly. But the buttons did not make any noise, light up, spin around or even stayed depressed. He may as well have pressed his own belly-button for all the good it did.

‘Nothing,’ he sighed.

Bryony sighed too and Gareth had just realised that she was leaning on his shoulder with her hand on his arm when another noise came from behind them. Another dull thumping noise.

They both turned to see where the noise came from just as there was a sudden smash. To their left – three chambers in, four across – one of the plastic domes was broken by a huge black arm that punched straight through it.

Gareth sprinted towards the chamber and Bryony followed quickly, probably more afraid of being left alone than of seeing what could smash through dense plastic like that. They arrived at the chamber just as another black arm punched through and both arms began to rip the cover apart. Large shards of plastic dropped at their feet as a huge form sat up through the hole in the dome.

Gareth had spotted the black arms and thought that the occupant of this chamber was black; in fact, cleaner patches of skin proved that this man was Caucasian. But he was black…covered in soot. His hair was naturally black, even his substantial beard, though his eyes burned through the dust like grey lanterns. He was powerfully built with arms like boulders and a neck chiselled from stone. The fact that he only wore a thin, flannel shirt bulging to the point of ripping added to the impressiveness of this man’s physique.

‘Bore da.’ This monster of a man greeted them in an even deeper Welsh accent than Gareth’s, but his tone was naturally light and easy as if he were greeting old friends.

Gareth could not respond with anything but stunned silence; he had just seen what was on this stranger’s head, which was perhaps the most surreal part of this nightmare. Forget about waking up inside a plastic prison, forget about a room which denied plausibility, forget about saving a beautiful blonde who seemed vaguely familiar. This was beyond weird.

The huge man sitting in the middle of a broken chamber was definitely familiar. Not the man himself, but the image. Gareth had seen the image many times; it was a part of what living in South Wales was all about. You got to know the pictures of your past.

This huge man – built like a labourer, speaking in a gritty Welsh dialect, covered from head to foot in black dust, wearing an old fashioned hard-hat with a broad candle fastened to the front – was a coal miner.

three 

Simon Grady awoke with a headache. It echoed the explosion that had nearly killed him and for a moment, he believed he was finally dead. He groaned in semi-conscious suffering and was about to drag his eyes open when a fragment of memory returned.

That last shell had landed just a few feet from the ditch, throwing him through the air like a discarded rag. It left a ringing in his ears and white dots dancing on the edge of his vision as he passed out face down in the sand, his Colt Commando assault rifle just beyond his reach.

The Gulf was not the place of heroes he had believed it to be; President Bush had sold him a false dream. It was a desolate place with sweltering heat and unhappy men fighting for a cause and a country they hardly knew. Simon had wanted to serve in the Middle East even though his family had begged him to stay in Chicago. But being with the Marine Corps meant the world to Simon, as did his country. This mission presented him the opportunity to serve both.

Then reality had blown down his door without even knocking. They had only been stationed in Saudi Arabia for seven weeks and he had already lost four of his best friends, guys who had been with him since recruitment. He had survived only to mourn them. Suddenly he had found himself in the middle of a real war, dodging rebel attacks on his transport and cursing Saddam Hussein’s decision to invade Kuwait.

All of this after what happened at Khafji…

Their jeep had been hit…

Somebody had screamed in agony…

Blood clotted with the sand…

He opened his eyes slowly. For the first time in weeks, he could hear no explosions, no sirens, no Black Hawk helicopters or SCUD missiles flying overhead. Only absolute silence. He should have savoured the moment, rested his eyes, maybe even fallen back to sleep. Why not? He deserved a little rest, after all. The nurses in this hospital would…

Simon suddenly halted his train of thought. What hospital? Where was he? Where were Geoff and Mitchell and Reggie? Who had pulled him from the battle to this place – Coalition Forces or…

He opened his eyes to behold a clear plastic dome a few inches from his face.

← →

‘Here’s another one.’

Anna Forbes called across the room and Gareth left the weeping teenage girl to be calmed by Bryony. He saw Anna standing beside a chamber in the middle of the room and sprinted towards her with Matthew Somerset – the coal miner – close behind. The chamber was shuddering as a sure sign that somebody was inside trying desperately to escape. That made six now. Six survivors.

But survivors of what?

His instinct to question and probe had to be placed on hold. He arrived at the chamber just as Anna – a lively brunette with a tough New York accent – yelled reassuringly to the occupant that help was on the way. She had grasped the reality of their situation quicker than the others and had been the one to suggest that they start searching for other survivors.

‘See,’ Anna pointed to Gareth as she yelled at the chamber even though there was no guarantee that the occupant could even hear her, much less see her. ‘Here they come.’

At least this one was still alive. The first few chambers they had prised open revealed empty beds, the third had revealed the gooey, fetid corpse of a woman in a Snoopy nightgown. The sight had orchestrated a chorus of screams and they had all been grateful when the next chamber had revealed the alive yet frightened teenager that Bryony was consoling.

‘Hang on in there,’ Gareth called as he positioned himself on one side of the chamber. ‘On the count of three, Matt.’

Matthew positioned himself opposite and together they clasped the underneath of the dome. Gareth drew in a breath, counted to three and together they heaved it open (Matthew’s mighty frame baring most of the weight). The internal mechanism clicked and the dome began to rise just as Bryony brought the teary girl to stand beside Anna.

Gareth was about to greet the occupant when there was a flash and a whirl. The occupant leapt out of the chamber and backed into the side of another with a thud, spinning as he did. Gareth had barely a second to register that this new survivor was over six-feet tall, wore military