“Could you tell me just one group that's like that?”
'The Amish.'
Dr. Anniston stared at the two words on his screen and considered it. They're hard working, honest, simple folks. They've never had an Amish serial killer or rapist that he'd ever heard of. They shunned most of society's modern contrivances and the more he considered it the more sense it made, at least from their standpoint. He was distracted as more words filled the screen.
'We're surprised at the lack of curiosity you've expressed toward the other race of aliens that have been living amongst you for apparently centuries. Or are you only interested in us?'
“What other aliens? I'm sorry, but if you mentioned it I must admit I didn't realize it. You have to understand, all this is quite daunting not to mention more than slightly disturbing,” he said with a tremor in his voice.
'We discovered them by accident. Their race is unfamiliar to us, but we theorize they may occupy several key positions throughout Earth's governments and corporations. We have just started trying to find them and determine their intentions. Their purpose may be benign or malevolent. Our communications network was seriously disrupted when we lost our primary communications link established in Palmerdale; hence we have chosen to ask you a favor.'
“A favor?! You tell me you're planning the extermination of damn near the entire human race, and now you ask a favor?! Are you serious?!” the old man screamed at the TV, as he stood up and walked shakily across his small room to look out the window. His frail body shook as he tried to focus on the people walking by in the parking lot.
He saw a young girl skipping beside her mother as she pushed a grocery cart with a baby strapped into the built-in infant seat. Tears flowed down his face as he let his forehead lean against the cool glass.
The only sound was the hoarse sobbing coming from the old man that went on for almost a minute. He wiped his eyes and refused to turn back to the TV. Who the hell do they think I am? I'm just an old man, what can I do about this? Is there anything I can do? Damn it all to Hell! He thought and slammed his fist into the wall. He felt several bones shatter and screamed in pain.
“Professor Anniston, please stop.” A voice that sounded like the actor who played Ted Baxter on the Mary Tyler Moore television series came from the TV as the words on the screen said the same thing. “We have little understanding of emotions but believe you may be suffering from extreme stress. If you just wait and let us communicate with you more we may be able to help you calm down.”
Turning back to the TV with tears rolling down his face, the old man's body shook before he raised his middle finger at the screen and shouted, “Fuck you! Fuck you, and your plans to destroy humanity! What does it matter if other aliens are here?! Have they planned on killing nearly every man, woman, and innocent child on Earth?!
Who knows? Maybe they have, but you fuckers have already began our extermination with the inoculations. So on behalf of all humanity, FUCK YOU!” He turned and walked shakily out of the room as the voice on the TV again asked him to stop.
Stumbling through the RV, with his hand screaming in pain, he reached the liquor cabinet and opened the bottle of brandy and poured half a glass.
The big screen TV in the room powered on as he drank the rich amber liquid. Relishing in the warm fiery liquor, he drained the glass.
“Professor Anniston. Please be reasonable. If you help us maybe there will be no need for any exterminations. Wait, come back. Where are you going?” The voice on the TV grew louder as he stumbled toward the stairs and left the RV.
The old man stumbled across the parking lot, clutching the bottle of brandy, narrowly being missed by several cars. Stopping beside a standalone ATM, on the edge of the parking lot by several small trees, he shuddered and sat down on the curb.
Drinking straight from a bottle was something he'd never done before, but the occasion seemed appropriate. Lifting the brandy, he drank as if he were a man dying of thirst in the midst of the desert. After several more drinks he stared up at the sky, reached into his coat pocket and pulled out his cell phone.
*****
“Are you going to try and win the car?” Betty asked Thomas, as she held the little girl's hand. She had awoken just a few minutes after being handed over.
“I don't know. Let's just wait until her momma gets back and get the hell out of here. My stomach hurts,” he said, looking equally nervous and nauseated.
“You can trust my discretion, grandfather,” she said, with a long drawn out emphasis on the last word.
He heard the little girl asking Betty something, but ignored it as he peered through the crowd for any sign of her mother and brother. How long can it take to squirt? He wondered, as his stomach rumbled uneasily. And what's wrong with Betty anyway. She's acting like- well hell, I dunno what's wrong with her but something just ain't right. She practically accused me of something as disgusting as child molesting. All I did was think about it and she threatens to call me a pedophile. Me, her own grandfather! I need to call her momma when we get home. His eyes glazed over momentarily as he tried to remember her mother's phone number and again flashing disjointed images of Betty swiveling her head backward and grinning a monstrously impossible smile at him at breakfast filled his head. Simultaneously, his leg screamed in pain for a split second. It was so intense he gasped and a trickle of tears leaked down his wrinkled face.
“Jamie! How's my little girl?” The mother asked, quickly moving through the crowd holding tight to her son's hand.
“Momma! Where were you!?” The girl shouted, scrambling away from Betty to hug her mother. “You had me worried,” she added in a severely scolding tone of voice.
“It's okay, honey. My friend here offered to watch you while I took your brother to the restroom,” she said, leaning down to hug her daughter. After a second, she stood and smiled at Thomas. “Thank you again for your help. And who's this little lady?” she asked, smiling at Betty.
“That's Betty. She's very smart momma. She even told me how many beans are in the jug over on the stage,” Jamie said.
“That's my granddaughter, Betty. She came along while you two went about your business.”
Turning to Betty, the mother asked, “So, you know how many coffee beans are in yonder jug, eh?”
“I have a good estimation but, no, I do not know the precise number.”
“Could you whisper it in my ear? I could really use a car since my kids S-H-I-T for brains father ran off a couple of weeks ago,” she said laughing, but close to tears as she spelled out the dirty word.
“Should I tell her, grandfather?” Betty asked, looking up at him.
“I don't care what you tell her. Besides I got a pretty good guess too. I reckon there might be about a million of them coffee beans in there,” he said, fishing out a five dollar bill and handing it to the lady handing out entry forms.
“Your estimate is grossly overblown,” Betty said, as the old man scribbled on the paper.
The lady looked very happy to be with her kids and Betty stepped closer to her. “Ma'am, I believe there are approximately thirty-five hundred and seventy-five beans in the jug. Plus or minus about twenty,” she whispered the numbers softly and then added. “Also, you should not leave your children with strangers in future, especially him,” she said, gesturing at Thomas.
The lady had been writing on an entry form when Betty said the last part. Her face turned crimson as she stuffed the completed form into the shoebox with a hole cut in the top. Her flushed face looked confused as she grabbed her kid’s hands and led them away from the odd girl and old man.
“We need to go, now,” Betty said, looking at Thomas.
He saw the mother look over her shoulder at him as she led the kids through the crowd. Looking down, he saw Betty with her arms crossed.
“What did you tell that lady?”
“The truth. Now we should leave before I tell everyone else out here the truth about you, and very loudly.
The stunned o
ld man shuffled through the crowd as Betty followed.
CHAPTER TEN: No deliverance
The sound of his father snoring was something Jake had grown accustomed to over the years. It started with a reverberating snorting that went on as he inhaled followed by a soft exhalation. Sometimes is dad made a whistling sound when his nose was partially blocked, like when he had a cold or had been crying.
Jake smiled as he listened to the rhythmic cycling and whistling noise of his dad's snoring. He opened his eyes expecting to find himself in his bedroom. His domain, where a young teenager could have a little privacy, but was shocked and bewildered to see where he was. Through eyelids that felt as though they weighed at least a ton, he saw bright white ceiling tiles above and noticed a steady slow beeping sound mixing with his father’s snoring. The metal railing on the ceiling held hooks attached to a long curtain. Turning his head provoked a dull throbbing pain, but it faded away as he saw his father stretched out in a large low leather chair a few feet away.
His dad's chin rested on his chest and even at such an odd angle, he could see a thin line of glistening saliva running out of the corner of his mouth. As he snored, his head bobbled slightly with each breath. Jake wanted to laugh but held it in. He didn't want to wake him. His father hadn't shaved today and his familiar face looked very comforting.
Having never known his mom (except through photos and stories) since she died when he was just over a year old it had always been the two of them facing an uncertain world together. His dad always tried hard to raise him the best he could but wasn't perfect. He never developed the gift of great cooking aside from the occasional peanut butter and jelly sandwich or grilled steaks. And sometimes, he'd catch his father watching a dirty movie after he thought he'd gone to bed. But he rarely drank and almost never swore.
Helping him mend fences or work on any number of other projects around the farm would sometimes lead to an occasional swear word when his father hit thumb with a hammer or did something equally dumb, but Jake knew it was just part of being human. He wasn't the perfect father, like Mike Brady or Andy Griffith as they appeared on TV, and yet to Jake he was close enough to perfect for him.
Jake wondered vaguely why he was in a hospital. He tried to remember but other than a fuzzy memory of jogging with his dog, the only thing he could recall was an angelic face.
It belonged to a girl with blonde hair looking down at him with a dark blue sky behind her. Maybe she wasn't an angel. It could have just been my imagination. Of course, that still doesn't explain how I got here or what the heck is going on?
A soft click sound followed by a near silent whooshing noise made the curtain, separating his bed from the rest of the room, flutter for a second.
Jake tilted his head a little and saw a lady with a long red pony tail wearing a white lab coat walk in looking down at a chart. He saw the stethoscope hanging around her shoulders and smiled at her wearily. “Hi.” It was a small word, and his voice was barely above a whisper, but she jerked as if he'd pinched her on the butt nonetheless. The mental image that went along with that idea made him chuckle softly as she quickly moved to his side.
*****
This day just keeps getting better and better, Orlando thought, as he stared sullenly at the unconscious big man handcuffed around a small tree a few yards away. “Simon Hicks, Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he said quietly, holding open the big man's wallet and looking at his ID card. “What were you doing driving a crappy little car like that anyway? And why were you out here in nowhere land?” He scratched his chin and looked at the other items he'd salvaged from the wreck. Adding Hick's Glock to his growing collection of firearms, he smiled.
From the trunk of the sheriff's sedan he found a small cooler with a big piece of wedding cake inside, three plastic water bottles, and a backpack that had flashlights and all kinds of other goodies. As Orlando examined one of the road flares he'd found inside the backpack, the big man groaned.
They were still much too close to the wrecked cars and road for Orlando to feel very safe. Picking up a large pine cone he threw it across the small clearing at Hicks. It bounced off his head leaving a few tiny red pinpricks of blood where the sharp points hit.
“Mother fucking, son of a bitch! Who threw that?!” Hicks yelled, looking around, suddenly wide awake and pissed off. His head felt like it was full of broken shards of glass and his neck was aching. He spotted a young man he'd never seen before sitting cross legged nearby and then noticed the gun he held pointed at him as well.
Raising a finger to his lips with his free hand, the stranger smiled and whispered, “Shush.”
Hicks had a series of disturbing images from the movie Deliverance flashing through his mind and quickly fell quiet.
Orlando smiled and set the gun in his lap before resuming his search of the backpack.
Hicks lifted his hands and saw them handcuffed securely around the base of a scrawny tree. As he stared at the cuffs he heard several cars speeding by, not too far away, and hurt his neck trying to look all around. He recalled everything leading to the wreck itself, but had no idea how he'd gotten himself in this situation. He must have been the other driver. Okay, so he's the other driver- that still doesn't explain why I'm shackled around a tree, he thought, as his stomach rumbled ominously. “Hey buddy, how bout you unlock these cuffs so I can take a dump?” He asked, in the friendliest voice he could manage under the circumstances.
Orlando laughed as he shook his head and continued to rummage through the backpack.
“I'm serious pal. Something wicked bad is about to come out of me. I won't try anything; you've got all the guns anyway. Come on, help a brother out.” As he spoke, beads of perspiration broke out on his face and his voice took on a whining tone he didn't recognize or much care for. The burbling and pressure was increasing by the second and he really didn't want to shit his pants in front of this guy, whoever he was.
Getting to his feet, Orlando leaned against a nearby tree and grinned. “You never been camping have you, Mr. Government Man? I ain't gonna unlock those cuffs, but I'll give you a free woods craft lesson on how to take a shit in the forest. First get up on your feet, drop your trousers unless you like ‘em extra stinky, then grab a hold of the tree with both hands, lean back, squat down and let it fly. No muss, no fuss.”
Hicks quickly got to his feet, unbuckled his pants and slid them and his boxers down around his ankles. He felt things starting to slip inside, quickly squatted and leaned back as his bowels unleashed a hot foul smelling mixture of solids and liquids that splashed into the pine needles below.
Orlando clapped and laughed uncontrollably as Hicks continued to squat and empty himself.
“Damn man, you're a regular waterfall! Go man go, let it all hang out!”
After a few more seconds, Hicks felt much better and started pulling on the tree to stand back up.
There was a loud cracking sound as the skinny, mostly rotted, tree snapped in two.
Hicks' eyes shot open in surprise as time seemed to shift into super slow motion. Gravity pulled him back to Earth as he still gripped the top half of the broken tree with both hands. He turned to look at the strange young man and saw him grinning with his one good eye open wide.
Then time resumed its regular speed as he fell into the foul mess he'd just created. The splat sound seemed loud, but the stranger's roaring laughter was still impossible to miss as he clapped and cheered. Laying on the ground, feeling his back and butt coated in warm stinking shit, Simon stared up at the mid afternoon blue sky through the branches and thought, God, I wish that bastard would stop laughing and just kill me already.
*****
Perched precariously atop an old sagging piece of plywood, laid across two of the shed's rafters, Sally continued to shudder and tried not to look down. She'd heard people say that terror can only be sustained for only so long before a person gets used to it, but every time she glanced down at the group of agitated copperhead snakes on the floor her fear only gr
ew stronger. From the way they moved, crossing over and under each other, it was hard to guess how many there were. Of course, to Sally even one would have been too many.
She'd seen what a copperhead bite could do and every time the board she sat on creaked or she heard them hissing and moving below she'd recall how her oldest daughter Ashley had been bitten by one when she was twelve years old. When they brought her home, Sally couldn't stop screaming until Thomas slipped her a few glasses of moonshine he used to buy from the barbershop in town.
Ashley had been working to help bring in a neighbor's corn crop when it happened. The neighbor explained how she got bit while taking a break laying in a big pile of hay. One of boys heard her screams and ran to where she was. A copperhead snake about four feet long bit her on the cheek less than an inch from her right eye. The boy hollered for help, pulled it off the screaming girl, and sliced off the snake's head with his buck knife. But the damage had already been done.
Staring down, as the snakes moved across the floor, all the old lady could think about was how nightmarish and swollen her little girl's face had looked. Her head and face had swollen so much that the doctors at the hospital were forced to cut a hole in her throat so she could breathe. When the anti venom and antibiotics finally started to work and the swelling went down, Ashley had lost her voice from screaming so loudly for so long.
Eventually, she recovered somewhat but she wasn't the same little girl who used to run barefoot through the grass and fields anymore, and her beautiful face still bore the scars even to this day.
Thomas yowled from the open doorway below.
Sally looked down as the cat tilted its head and stared at her sitting up in the rafters. She knew it was bitching about an empty food dish but still liked to think Thomas might be just a tad concerned about her dire predicament nonetheless. She realized one cat versus a mess of snakes could have only one sad undeniable outcome; a dead cat.