The Abduction Part 2

Blinding, white light greeted her, so bright that when she shut her eyelids to block it out, they glowed like she was looking at the sun through thin lenses of amber. The air around her was warm and tinged with a chemical smell, and with every breath she took in her throat felt scratched. When she opened her eyes again, everything was white--still white--but not so overwhelming. Where the fuck am I? she thought, her head dazed, foggy and deprived of any recollection of the past. She was lying down on her back, she knew that; she could feel her body gently pressing against a firm surface underneath her, warmed by her own body heat. Above her was a clear bubble--glass maybe--covering her like a canopy, with a device that looked like a fat pen with a hole at the tip instead of a point, attached to the inside of the bubble, and a thin, metallic tube connected to it from the top of the bubble on the outside to the ceiling of the all white room she was in. 
    She looked down and saw that she was naked, her breasts down to her toes illuminated by the white lights moulded into the ceiling of the room. Her natural instinct to try and cover up and hide her self was not at the forefront of her mind; instead, she was curious and frightened. What's going on? Why am I naked? Let me out--somebody please get me the fuck outta' here!
    The bubble encased her entirely, leaving little room to move more than a few inches. She reached up her hand from her side as far as she could and felt the bubble with her fingertips: smooth and cool to the touch like glass--it had to be glass. 
    All of a sudden the bubble's atmosphere became that of what she assumed being in coffin buried alive under meters of soil would feel like: a place of confinement--claustrophobic. She bashed the glass with the base of her palms, but it didn't budge. Again and again she struck it, until her hands began to ache with a pulsing throb and she could no longer continue. She thrashed her body about like a wild animal, jerking her neck from side to side, unfazed that her head was smacking against the glass of the bubble with great force. 
    In the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of something that made her cease to a minor squirm--another pod? Yes, it was another pod to the left of her in the same small room, white with a glass bubble like her own, though without the pen-looking-device and the metallic tube. The bubble was occupied by a young man (also naked) who appeared to be unconscious or asleep. He looked familiar, somehow, giving her a sense of déjà vu. He had short, blonde hair; thin and muscular limbs; and strong facial features with a elongated, hooked nose. But nothing came to her; her mind was empty like the walls of the room. 
    She remembered green trees and grass; the wind in her hair and the way warm water felt trickling down her back in the shower. She recalled the sound of birds chirping and the smell of pine needles in the woods and the taste of apples--apples were her favourite fruit. But she could not remember her name or who she was. She could not match this room with any of the images that flashed like photographs in her mind. And she could not remember how she got here. But there was something about this young man that reminded her of home, whatever and wherever that was; it was comforting--or maybe she was just glad knowing she wasn't completely alone.
    An unusual sense of of nothingness swept over her; she was no longer plagued by fear but, she was not calm; she was not in a state of peacefulness; she was simply void of anything human--emotionless, as if without a soul.
    Outside the young man's pod, below his feet and facing towards her, was a panel that looked to be about the size of a TV screen, roughly 40 inches in width and 30 inches in height. On it was an image like a graph chart with skinny, vertical lines, each motionless and of a different colour: red, orange, yellow and blue. She looked down past her bareness, but no panel was visible. Was there even a panel there at all? Would it make difference? It didn't matter--not really. Not in this situation at least.
    A hole the size of a small car appeared without warning, in the wall between the girl's and the other young man's pods, opening up from what first appeared to be nothing more than a plain wall. Through it came a creature, foul and foreign in appearance, its fully exposed skin translucent and pale. The lights beamed down from the ceiling, shining through the creature's skin making it look like an X-ray image, exposing a dim, pink frame, (also translucent), underneath. It stood four or, maybe five feet tall, with four limbs--two legs and two arms--and four fingers like a human, but with two thumbs, one on each side of its small hands, both longer than its fingers. 
    What. the-hell. is-that? the girl thought, hit by a sense of foreboding. She had never seen anything like this before--she was certain of it. Her heartbeat began to rise to a steady thump, like someone was swinging a sledgehammer into her chest: ba-doom, ba-boom, ba-boom.
    The creature went straight for the panel at the foot of the young man's pod, and studied it for no more than a split second before reaching out its arm and swiping the screen with two fingers in a downward motion, transitioning the image from the graph to a multitude of oddly shaped buttons and visual controls. The creature commenced typing a sequence of codes into a search bar in the middle of the screen, too fast for the girl to take note and process what was little more than a blur of motion. The panel emitted a beep and the creature took a step back, withdrawing its focus from the young man for the first time since entering the room. However it still didn't make contact with the girl, not even a glance let alone eye contact. Was it ignoring her? Did it even know she was there? Of course it did. How could it not?
    The creature left the room through the rectangular door it came in from and, after what felt like an eternity, returned, covered in an insubstantial, cream coloured, full-body suit that looked as though it had been shrink wrapped to the creature's stick figure body. It wore a matching helmet connected to the rest of the suit by material that resembled rubbery webbing. It stepped forward to the side of the young man's pod and lifted the glass bubble off, which hissed back at him like a unscrewed gas bottle left open. It moved to the top of the pod and gripped the young man by the shoulder, twisting his body to roll him onto his stomach. The girl saw a flash of red and pink and screamed at the top of her lungs, instantaneously ripping her throat raw. The young man's body had been split cleanly in two and drained of its blood and any other fluids, exposing his evidently dry innards ranging from his organs to the marrow in his bones.
    The creature startled backward as though the girls screams had awaken it to her presence. It cocked its head to one side and stared at her as if unable to decide what to do. Then it turned and picked up the bubble from the floor and fitted it back to the young man's pod. It removed its helmet and paced in front of the pod for a moment, advancing haltingly towards the girl's. 
    Terror surged through the girls veins; she could not move and all that came out was a wheezing cry when she attempted to scream again, no matter how stoutly one side of her brain strived to convince the other of it--she lay motionless in silence, frozen with fear.
    When it got closer, the creature made a low, rumbling noise--almost a growl--unveiling more of a cavity than a mouth, without teeth and filled with sky-blue coloured slime stringing from the roof of its mouth to its wide yet, short, blue tongue. It stopped at the base of the girl's pod, standing near enough for her to see that it had two circular grey eyes, each with two upper eyelids: the outer eyelid the colour of its skin, the other a murky black that closed over separately from the first whenever the creature looked into the light, like a nictitating membrane over a shark's eyes. 
    It reached down in the same place on the girl's pod where the panel was on the young man's pod--there must've been a panel there after all. After a moment she heard the same beep from her panel as the young man's before--before the creature opened the bubble. That fucking things unlocking it, she thought, adrenaline shooting through her veins like a drug. Had it unlocked her bubble and was it planning to open it? Was it going to kill her like it had the young man, slicing her in half with one of the sharp knives that potentially hung out of view on the wall behind her? She had to do something when the bubble was removed. This...creature's physique was short and small, and the girl thought she could kill it, or perhaps catch it off guard with a strong kick to the vile surface of its face and then make a run for the door. 
    She had it mapped out.
    A pulse coursed through her like an electric shock, paralysing her not with fear as before, but by an unknown force within the bubble, leaving her entire frame levitating half an inch above the pod. The pen-like device at the top of the bubble came to life, the tip rotating like a drill, ablaze with redness. The hole in the spinning tip turned yellowy-white, and a thin beam like that of a laser pointer poured out from it, penetrating the girl's pliable skin. An excruciating heat consumed her chest, and an acrid smell perfumed the bubble, emanated by her searing flesh.