Starsnatcher - Trapped In An Alien World [COMPLETE]

Chapter 1.4

Only at night could I become one with loneliness. It was a refuge of sorts. Only me, the crescent moon, my bicycle lamp, the streetlights, and the sporadic lighting of a sleepless house. No traffic or noise. Once I left Ernstburgh and entered a rural road, it became dark enough to see the stars.

The autumn breeze was cold and fresh. Each breath let me forget society and let me become one with nature for a while.

"To the left," the navigation app voice in my basket said.

When I was younger, I had calibrated it so that it would automatically alert me once I had passed a specified distance on this road. To be 100% sure, I checked the road as revealed under my bike light.

Potholes resembling the Big Dipper, perfect.

Left to me was a trail leading into the forest. It was wide enough for a car to fit in. To its left and right, two treetops met as if they were a gate into a world of darkness. Anything unusual on this route would remain undetected until the last moment.

I drove up the trail. Fall leaves scattered the pebbly path, making it hard to tell where the road ended and nature began. The poor sight didn't help. To be fair, I don't recall this path being bright in daylight either. How could it be with all these trees looking like they had never seen an ax in their entire lives?

A bush rustled. Just the wind, nothing serious. Maybe a scarf would have been nice, given how cold the breeze was.

At least I wasn't far from my destination. Fog hung over the Leimfeld River before me and covered its bridge like a curtain. My final obstacle.

It's just fog, I told myself, but then I saw two humanoid silhouettes lurking in the mist.

I clutched the handles of my bike.

If I only had any weapons. I had my bike, but that wasn't enough in case one of these two suddenly drew a laser gun.

To my delight, they revealed themselves as fully human once they stepped out of the fog. A man of Mediterranean features and a blonde woman that was probably his wife. Or girlfriend, as neither was significantly older than me. Neither even turned their head as they walked past me. They didn't look like they had just run away from alien invaders. Maybe the UFO was indeed a hoax and the forest was harmless. In this case, I wasted my time, but I wasn't in any danger either.

I crossed the bridge where another trail waited for me. There were trails on either side of the Leimfeld River, given its surprising popularity among tourists. On my current path, I had the river to my left with only vegetation between us.

I was almost there. No mistakes now.

To make sure I didn't overlook anything, I pushed the bike while having my flashlight always on the trail. Way too much time had passed since my last visit here.

After not even one minute, I found the twenty saplings. Seven to my left, thirteen to my right. Well, technically twelve to my left as one of them had been torn off. There was indeed an entire path of damaged vegetation that started with the sapling and ended with a young pine that had been broken in the middle on the other side of the river. Were there hogs strong enough to do that?

Adding insult to injury, the pine was close to the place from which the video in the news had been filmed. The arrangement of saplings in the video mirrored the one before my eyes, after all. That could only mean that the UFO had floated on the path I occupied right now.

My pulse jumped up. There could have been other explanations for the damage though. Had the water been more clear, I could have seen footprints on the riverbed under my light. At least there was a "footprint" near the saplings, though comparing it to the foot of a human or an animal was misleading. It was more as if someone had rammed their shovel into the pebbles with full force.