Contact of the Best Kind

By G. G. Royal

In 1947, Roswell, New Mexico, eyewitnesses swore that a UFO has crashed. Stories that extraterrestrial bodies were recovered have surfaced. Army intelligence refuted the story the very next day and gave an explanation that it was only a weather balloon that had fallen back to Earth. They have stood behind that story ever since.

In the summer of 2016, a young couple and their daughter along with a family friend were taking their spacious boat from Miami, Florida, to Baltimore, Maryland. In the most incredible sequence of events, they were shipwrecked to an uninhabited island. To the public, the missing group has now forever become a part of the conspiracy theory of missing cases in the notorious Bermuda Triangle.

Three young strangers blow the doors off that conspiracy theory with an even bigger truth and attempt to pull off the most amazing rescue of all time. Using just their individual strengths and intelligence, these young people learned to trust and depend on each other as they hide the answer to one of mankind’s greatest questions: are we alone in the universe?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984562807

G. G. Royal

G. G. Royal is a Georgia native and a US Navy veteran. His diverse experiences have given him a depth of empathy and insight few authors have to draw from. He retired from the dental industry and has since retired from a second career as an Emergency Room RN in his hometown hospital.

Book preview

Chapter ONE

On a crisp, fall afternoon, Levi Benjamin stood on the end of the 160 foot long wooden dock behind his home where he lived with his dad, Dan. He was throwing his shrimp net, trying to catch a few while the tide was high. There was a limited window for catching the most shrimp and his dad asked him to catch four or five dozen for dinner. He pulled the first of his two crab baskets up. It had six aggressive blue crabs in it. They had bright blue tips on the ends of their evil-looking oversized claws and they were backed into the corners, clicking their claws together at him to keep him away. He threw the basket back in and lifted the other. It had four. A couple were too small and Dad would throw those and the females back in. He threw it back and picked up his net to prepare to throw. His net was a little large for him but he could throw it. He had to grasp it along the edges with both outstretched hands, bunching it up as he crawled his fingers along the edge to control as much of it as he could. Then he would twist his upper body, bend low and reach back like he was holding a giant, floppy Frisbee. Then, using his whole upper body as if it were a coiled spring, he’d spin around, turning loose of the net and watching as it began opening up and unfurling out over the top of the water. Sometimes it worked better than other times. He knew practice made perfect when it came to throwing a net.

His solid black cat, Blackie, was eagerly waiting to pounce on whatever he pulled out, whether it was a shrimp or fish, Blackie always got his share first. The few shrimp Levi did catch with each cast was put in an ice chest with water and a lid on it. He knew they would try to hop out when he opened it.

He was about ready to go inside when he spotted a plastic Coke bottle floating, bobbing, being carried along by the current into his creek. He didn’t like trash in his part of the creek. He thought he could catch it as it came by if it came close enough. He watched it as it came closer, edging down the river, caught up in a little tidal whirlpool. It stayed in the current, he watched it come closer. He picked his net up and started cinching up a handful of it. He put a little of the edge, between his extended arms, into his mouth to take up slack and to get a longer reach. As he saw the bottle about to come into range, he twisted his upper body and whipped the net around in a wide arch. Perfect shot. He let the weighted circular ring around the outer edge of the net settle for a few seconds over the bottle and then began pulling it in by the line that threaded all the way around the outer edge and up through the middle with a slip knot that allowed him to close the net as he was pulling it in, capturing whatever was within its grasp like a giant cuttlefish. For a second it felt like the net was getting caught on something big but with a little tug it was loose. He guessed it was either a good-sized fish or maybe it was just the tide whipping it around.

He and Blackie came down here a lot. He liked fishing, shrimping and crabbing and he could do all three at the same time off his on personal dock. He took pride in keeping the area around it clean by pulling old trash out of the water when he saw it. Trash would get caught in the tall saw grass in the marshes around here and Levi thought it looked disgusting. Old bags and cups he could usually catch with his net or he would use his reel to hook it. This was his part of the river, he always removed anything plastic he saw floating in the water. He knew how important it was to the keep the area clean because he and others around here ate the seafood from this river. His dad caught a black drum fish in his shrimp net not long after they bought it. It had weighed about 50 pounds. Dad said he got 26 fillets out of that fish. We called the neighbor’s and had a Labor Day feast made from the seafood caught from this creek. Dad was excited that he could pull off a neighborhood feast that everyone loved with food caught from this creek. That was one of the reasons he had said they moved here.

Levi liked coming out here in the evenings. If the tide was nearly high, he would sit on the dock and watch his fishing line as the sun set. He was transfixed by all the colors of the sunset. Dad pointed out to him once that he should pay attention to how spectacular the sunsets could be here. He knew it was refracted light as the sun set on the western horizon, he had learned a little about it in school. The clouds made every night different, though. Sometimes they were spectacular. Now, he hardly ever missed one. He even hurried out to the dock that time of day just to witness it. He has seen dolphins and otters swimming past at near high tide and he would throw the net a few times to see if he could catch an unsuspecting fish or something else passing by. You just never knew. Every sunset was different because every day was different. In Levi’s mind, he knew he might catch something big the next toss.

He was optimistic because his dad was. He had an excitement about him to investigate lots of interesting things. Dad explained that he should meet every sunset as new; you would never see it or an identical one again. Then, he would continue on to some point he wanted to make, just like every sunset was different and beautiful, every person was different and beautiful, which was why we must treat each other with kindness and respect. Besides, he would say, it’s impossible to really get to know most people. Before you get to know someone, good manners are a universal language, or something like that.

They would sit out here together, spraying insect repellant on each other as the no-see-ums and mosquitoes claimed the night skies. On especially clear nights, stars filled the sky. Dad started pointing out constellations. He knew a lot about them. Dad said he had read a novel called Space by Michener as a kid and became interested then. He even made up a riddle. He asked, If the sun goes across the sky from east to west, which direction do the stars go? Levi has never forgotten that riddle. It was so dumb he literally waited for a cloudless night to convince himself his dad’s answer was right.

After that, he started looking for the familiar constellations every clear night he was out here. He liked the easy ones like the really big Big Dipper and the little Little Dipper. And Orion was pretty easy to spot with his three-star belt and his very favorite named star, Betelgeuse, at the top left of Orion. He could find the M or W, and the House and his other favorite, the Ice Cream Cone was easy to find because the bright star Arcturus was at the tip of the cone.

He would sit out here at night with Blackie sometimes and just fish while he listened to the splash of shrimp or mullet or some other small school of fish trying to escape before something bigger could catch them. He would listen to fiddler crabs crawl around over mud where the tide had carried the water away leaving the pungent odor of marshland, covered with these miniature lopsided crabs. Despite their size and odd claws, there is no doubt that it still looked exactly like a crab. That, Levi figured, he would never understand. Periwinkles clung to saw-grass stalks. He wondered why they did that. He never actually saw one move, but they did. Slower than a snail, he suspected.

He liked it here. His dad had taken him to Okefenokee once so he could learn about the kinds of dangerous animals that were around from the park ranger. Dad said once he thought God must have had it in for this place at some point because there was about every kind of annoying pest to poisonous snakes and humongous spiders, and if that wasn’t enough, he had seen alligators big enough to drag you into the river. The no-see-ums were the worst of all. They looked like a small splinter-sized speck, but they