First Chapters: Rocky to the Rescue as Carlie Simonsen

Here is the first chapter for Rocky to the Rescue.

When Rocky wakes up one morning, he discovers his house is deserted. With his mother, father and little sister nowhere to be found in-doors, he goes outside and discovers the animals are missing, too. When aliens arrive, Rocky realises that something has gone horribly wrong. Stowing away in the alien skimmer, Rocky sets out on his first and most important rescue mission, ever.

Carlie Simonsen’s Rocky to the Rescue is set on a station in the Australian outback, where help is often a long, long way away and the people must rely on themselves and each other. Twelve-year-old Rocky must either track down his family and take on alien invaders, or travel fifty miles to ask a neighbor for help. Well, what would any twelve-year-old do if they were in his shoes?

Rocky to the Rescue is available from Smashwords, and will soon be available from Amazon-Kindle, CreateSpace, Kobo, iTunes, and Nook.

Rocky to the Rescue

First Chapter: Rocky on his Own

Rocky woke to find the house empty.

There was no one walking in the hall or cooking breakfast in the kitchen. No noisy stockmen on motorbikes outside the window. No one whistling to the dogs.

He took two biscuits from the pantry and wondered where everyone was.

Maybe aliens had come in the night and taken everyone away. Maybe they hadn’t found him because he had been sleeping under his bed. He’d been pretending to be a famous explorer sleeping in a cave.

Or maybe a bunyip had come and taken his baby sister and everyone had gone out looking for it so they could get her back. Anything could have happened. Rocky knew he would have to be careful.

He knew he had to find and rescue everyone who had disappeared. He sat in the pantry and thought.

If he was going to find his mum and dad, he would need a few supplies. He packed some lunch and took two bottles of water.

It was summer and there wasn’t much water in the dams. There wasn’t any water in the river bed that ran past the house. Rocky made sure the two bottles were full. He thought about a third, but didn’t have anywhere to put it.

Next, he looked through the sheds and the school house and his teacher’s caravan. He still didn’t find anyone. He didn’t find any of the animals, either.

The dogs weren’t tied to their kennels. The horses weren’t in their yard, and he couldn’t see a single sheep anywhere. He couldn’t even find the cat.

“Something really strange is going on around here,” Rocky muttered to himself as he began walking back to the house.

He had just reached the back of the motorbike shed when he heard the sound of a car. He nearly ran out to see who it was, but then he remembered—something strange was going on.

He slipped through his secret door at the back of the shed and hid behind his dad’s work bench.

The car came closer to the house. It was the strangest sounding car Rocky had ever heard. Sneaking to the front of the shed, he peered out.

It wasn’t a car. It was a skimmer. Rocky had read about them in books.

His mum and dad said the books weren’t true. They said no one had built spaceships except to go to the moon. They said no one landed on other planets. They said there was no such thing as a skimmer.

Rocky hadn’t believed them. They didn’t know everything. He wished they could see the skimmer. They would have had to believe him then.

The door to the skimmer opened, and Rocky wished he was still under his dad’s work bench. The people inside the skimmer weren’t people at all.

END FIRST CHAPTER

 

If you would like to read more, Rocky to the Rescue is available from Smashwords, Amazon-Kindle, CreateSpace, Kobo, iTunes, and Nook.