Don’t ask me why I was wackadoodle enough to be traveling in a hired car across the insanely miles-long Chesapeake Bay Bridge toward Maryland’s Eastern Shore at the height of beach season. Alone. Except for the Uber driver, who added to my angst by being nigglingly familiar. Even crazier, not a single alien was bossing me remotely in my ear.

The last time I used Uber was with my sister when I moved to Las Vegas, one year after the revelation that extraterrestrials were among us. That driver was Latino and chattered about evil aliens he called hada malvada—bad fairies—witnessed atop Mount Charleston. Ironically, he was only right about the fairy part.

After a fascinating tryst in Scotland two years ago, I learned I was part fairy.

I’m author and alien rights advocate Rowan Layne. My special gift is hearing aliens from afar, and some can also hear me because I possess extraterrestrial origins like everyone else on Earth, whether they accept it or not. Eighty-three percent of my DNA is alien, along with 14 percent fae, making me a whopping 97 percent nonhuman. Fine with me. I’ve sought to help my fellow human hybrids learnmore about their otherworldly DNA, but too many don’t like me and my alien pals because of it.

This driver wasn’t chattering, though she had my attention because her short sandy-blonde hair was reminiscent of someone, along with her faintly amused tone. She wasn’t in a flap about having to drive across this monstrosity of a bridge.

“You seem agitated.” She glanced at me from the rearview mirroras I gripped the backdoor handle for dear life, avoiding looking out at sailboats dotting the bay. “Is it about whomever you’re going to meet on the other side?”

The other side? Was this a clue that she was driving me to my doom? Or perhaps into outer space? And an Uber driver who said whomever?

Maybe if I could see her eyes, I could place her. But she was wearing mirrored sunglasses and an olive drab ballcap. Something about that…I’d been down this maddening déjà vu path before.

“I’m wiggy with heights, prone to vertigo and motion sickness,” I said through clenched teeth, fighting the urge to gag. “But, yes, I’m headed to meet someone who’s intense despite being a baby, and she told me not to tell anyone. That’s why I’m in a car instead of an orb or saucer or pistachio craft, and it’s going to get me in trouble. I just know it.”

“You’ve turned into quite a mess, haven’t you? Deep breaths. We’re almost halfway to the other side.”

Yes, but the other side of what?

“I suppose I am a mess.” I sighed, leaning forward to grip the back of her seat. “The last time RR Bellatrix suggested I hop in a car with strangers turned out to be way more than expected and everyone was mad at me as opposed to supportive like she said they’d be. But why on earth am I babbling this to you?”

And could the little messenger have picked a more hectic time than the day before the frigging Fourth of July?

My extrasensory ears intercepted an oddly eruptive sound beforeseeing its source. Stumpy red ribbons were streaking the sky and bombarding the bridge. “Labyrinthian lasers? Are you kidding me?” Ominous thumping and crashing noises pummeled my psyche, but no explosions ensued.

“More like reverse-engineered weaponry that isn’t working out for whomever attempted to copy alien technology.” The driver’s tonedripped with disdain as she smirked in the rearview mirror.

There she went with whomever again. But she was right. Because whatever was whizzing around up there surely weren’t lasers derived from Mars red diamonds. They looked more like wriggling red licorice candy—or bizarre sperm tails swimming through clouds. My baffled brain struggled to recall the candy name…Twizzlers, that was it!

A sperm-twizzle whizzed past our windshield, slapping against an SUV hood on the opposite side of the bridge, nearly causing it to careen off of it.

My palms sweated as one car after another smashed into each other and the bridge’s steel metal girders. Of course we were now at the highest point of this infernal feat of engineered torture, metal beams looming above and on either side of us. Like being trapped in a cage.

“Maybe they don’t work like lasers, but they’re causing one hell of a disaster up here.” It wouldn’t do me any good to put my hands over my ears to avoid screams and crunching medal sounds. No sirens yet, but I still wanted to puke.

“We need to get you off this bridge,” said my Uber driver, sounding urgent but otherwise unruffled after a pickup truck rearended our small hybrid vehicle, making my neck feel like it’d been zapped by a laser. “I’m asking you to trust me, despite being aware that it doesn’t come easy these days, but we know each other even if you haven’t fully realized it. If we don’t bail now, you’ll be stuck up here for hours, and one of these missile wannabes might work.”

Two weeks ago I’d been on the Big Island of Hawaii, where the only thing I had to fret over were active volcanoes and friends who seemed to think I should get married like they did. Though there weremaniacal men of Earth who’d plotted to attack the Kilauea volcano with a nuclear missile. Was this the work of dudes we hadn’t yet exposed for their crimes?

An alarming boom sounded just ahead of our vehicle as one of the odd projectiles whipped around a metal girder and exploded intoscattering red chunks. “I’m fixing to be sick,” I said as my Uber driver dashed outside, opened the back door, and pulled me from the car.

“Who are you?” I stumbled against her, trying to right myself as she propelled us toward the terrifying bridge barrier—the only thing keeping us from open air above water way down below. It was a wonder I could hear her reply in the deafening sounds of utter chaos, including the inevitable shouts about aliens attacking. People watched too many dumb movies.

“You first knew me in Austin as Sandy in our graphic arts class at the University of Texas. And yes, I’m alien. Now!” she said. I thought she meant I could now vomit—as if ordering me to do so over the side of the bridge.

But I didn’t because that crazy commandeering driver, who I finally realized was the badass US Marine I knew from college, gripped my arm and leapt with me over the side of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.

Copyright © 2025 Lauryne Wright

Print ISBN: 978-1-959621-91-1

Ebook ISBN: 979-8-88531-906-5

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author. Published by BookLocker.com, Inc., Trenton, Georgia.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. BookLocker.com, Inc.

2025

First Edition