“Two months?”
“Yeppers,” Tibbs told the local as he handed her a jug of water out of the back of his truck.
“That’s horrible.” He shut the tail of his pick-up truck and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Well, miss, it’s good to know most of y’all are well and good now.”
I stood on the sidelines with Abis, suddenly uncomfortable with my, ehm, appearance. The guy, Landon, pretty obviously avoided eye contact with me and pointedly swore when he saw Abis, so we politely stepped aside and let Vil and Tibbs work on Leon while an ambulance was on its way. Maybe it was the adrenaline of the situation crashing, but my ears stung a lot more. It was pretty loud of a crash, so I guess that makes sense. All this time, I’d been thinking of what I would do when I got home, but… you know. I never considered the whole ‘I’m a raccoon now’ situation. Man, I wonder what Joan will think about that.
Or anyone, really.
The distant wail of sirens finally materialized into a procession of three separate police cruisers, a firetruck, and the long-prophesied ambulance coming around the long stretch of road and to a stop nearby. It just… it felt so relievingly normal after having to always deal with everything that I sat down and watched for myself. Three cops in khaki uniforms exited two of the vehicles, as well as a team of paramedics from the ambulance, and approached Vil and Tibbs, while the third cruiser and the firetruck went out to check out our crashed shuttle after a short pause. Eugene PD… Where even are we?
Vil remarked quietly, “Is tsat aoutomobiles?”
“Thank Christ,” Tibbs exclaimed, standing up to greet the paramedics making their presence known, two wheeling out a stretcher.
The third one of them, a serious-faced woman with a pretty face, stopped for just a moment.
“Ma’am. Is everyone here accounted for?”
Tibbs nodded curtly. “Just us five, yeah. Leon here’s not well, he’s out with a head injury and he’s got a severe fracture along the left tibia for certain, also maybe on the left seventh rib away from the sternum, somewhere around there?”
“Hmm…” The paramedic paused. “Much appreciated. Don’t worry, he’s in good hands now. Is anyone else here injured?”
The other paramedics quickly took Leon away to their vehicle.
“I’m fine, I think Ketty’s decent, umm… Vil, how are you holding up?” She turned to the soldier, still fully kitted out and just finished wrapping Leon’s leg.
He shrugged. “I suppose I should be exsamined, yes.”
The paramedic didn’t remark on Vil’s odd dress, accent, or either of the two rifles (one of which was glowing) he had strapped to his back. “Well, we’ll have you all out of here in no time, I’m sure, but–”
One of the larger policemen, bald and clearly annoyed, spoke over the paramedic.
“Alright, Janine, you had enough to say.” He focused in on my two friends. “Corporal Barnet, Eugene PD. Mind explaining just what the hell this is?” he said, waving over the scene of the spaceship being worked over by the fire crew. “We’ve had damn near half the town blowin’ up our phone lines over it.”
“U–um. Well, y’see…” Tibbs put a hand behind her head. “You might want a notepad for this.”
The officer grumbled and quickly flipped one out of his bulging pockets.
“Continue.”
“Aliens. It… it was aliens.”
Corporal Barnet raised an eyebrow and looked incredulous. “Do you really expect me to believe that?”
“I know, I know, hard to believe, but I swear it’s all true. See now, I was minding my own business over at camp in the late hours…”
Tibbs ran through a condensed version of her life’s story as started on the day of her abduction that nevertheless held the lead paramedic spellbound (at least until she had to go assist the others) and the cop slightly less doubting, but a lot more baffled; the experimentation, me and Vil freeing her from the tubes, barreling through green-gray-feathered aliens, living off of questionable nutrition, hijacking the shuttle, and our week of travel before we finally crash-landed. Her pointing out our forlorn former captive lended a great deal of credibility, but had the officer scowling.
“Fine, fine,” he said, throwing his hands up, “ya could’ve just said it was a paranatural situation, lady, jeez.”
“...What’s a paranatural?”
The exasperated officer said, “I’m not dealing with this,” before turning around and trudging back to his car.
“Rude.” She turned to Vil and asked, “Do you have any clue what he’s talking about?”
“Not a clue.”
I got an… uneasy feeling. Right, Tibbs wasn’t… from this time. She only caught a few years of post-World War Two, she wasn’t around for the massive, simultaneous spike in paranaturals that followed decades of nuclear testing and the turning of the cycle in the late ‘60s. I’m pretty sure they called paranaturals something a lot different back then, if they even knew about them at all… actually, I think ‘paranaturals’ is more of an umbrella term people just came up with to lump all the weirdos together? In any case, I sidled up to her. Explaining that she’d been in suspended animation for the better part of sixty years was going to be rough.
“Um…” I so gracefully started, “I think we need to have a talk. It’s… kind of the future?”
Tibbs cocked her head. “Well whaddya mean?”
Before I could get over my hesitation, Janine the paramedic yelled out to us.
“Y’all need a ride? Nearest hospital’s up in Cordova, and Cordova’s a bit of a way without a car.”
Tibbs gave a thumbs-up to her, and turned back to me. “Let’s talk it over on the way there, alright bud?”
----------------------------------------
“...I can’t believe this never came up,” Leon repeated for what must have been the fifth time in the quiet medical room.
He’d woken up on the way to the hospital, with me and Tibbs riding in the back of the ambulance (Vil and Abis just asked Landon for a ride there), but he hadn’t been all that cognizant of us or the paramedics. I’d given Tibbs a rundown on the past sixty years she’d unknowingly missed, which surprisingly enough she was actually fairly excited about (probably could’ve guessed that from how psyched she was about space and all the fancy tech aboard the spaceship), and then we all had to wait a while in the hospital lobby while they got Leon together and resting. It was a pretty late hour outside (I missed having a day-night cycle) before we all got to see him, and I’d waited to break the news to Vil and catch Leon up so I didn’t have to repeat myself for a third time.
Leon, stuck in his uncomfortable-looking hospital bed, dressed in a baby-blue hospital gown and strung up by one of those leg-holder things, shook his head in misery. “I have a daughter, you know…”
I cringed in my seat next to his bed. “That’s, um… that’s kind of why I didn’t tell you…”
Vil chose this moment to speak up.
“So we are not et war?”
“No, man, stop worrying about that.”
“Hm.” Vil, having been relieved of most of his wargear and his helmet for the moment, went back to savoring the bag of Bugles I’d stolen out of the vending machine slot in the hall (as it turns out, ridiculous flexibility and being fairly thin are an awesome combination to have when you’re hungry). The doctors already looked at him, don’t worry, he was just bruised a bit along his shoulder.
Tibbs, sitting next to me in the only other chair and now dressed in something slightly more dignified (a large, plain black T-shirt with some stains on it and a pair of jeans courtesy of one of the paramedics who’d had the foresight to mention the Scoutmaster’s posterity, not that she really cared all that much about it herself; personally, I think it made her look like a middle-aged mom, but it was a lot better than the near-rags she had on anyways), posited her own opinion in an effort to cheer up the morose cowboy.
“Hey, look at it this way: it’s the future! We have, ehm… robots–”
“Not really,” I inserted.
“Um… flying cars?”
“No, that’s like giving everyone a plane, that’s literally the government’s worst nightmare.”
Tibbs gave me a Look, one that could be aptly summed up as ‘Why do you hate fun?’
“...Gee, the future sure blows.”
“Yeah, tell me about it.”
Vil paused for a moment, obviously completely lost as to the entire trajectory of our conversation. Instead, he looked to the closed door and asked, “I do wondehr what tsey wantedt mit Abis?”
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
I recalled the suited men who couldn’t have projected ‘Government Agents’ more if they had the words tattooed on their foreheads approaching us in the lobby and asking us not to leave, then taking Abis away for… ‘questioning,’ and strongly implying that I would be next, and I cast my eyes down. Yeah… I mean, I know that non-human civil rights were established and expanded on in the late ‘80s and throughout the ‘90s, especially after mutant activism got picked up as the next big thing and those alien refugee ships were allowed to land on US soil (different aliens than Abis, the Ke Lufra; they kinda look like big, fuzzy crickets) so he’ll probably not end up on a dissection table, but the idea sure lingered in the back of my head. And then when they’re done with him, I… I don’t really know. As much as I’ve been studiously avoiding my own reflection, it still doesn’t change the fact that I’m not me anymore. My family wouldn’t recognize me, my voice is… well, it’s different, I don’t have any ID, and I barely know where I am. I think I saw a Texas flag on a huge flagpole while looking out of the ambulance’s window on the way here? Also I’m broke, and I’m pretty sure nobody’s bursting to hire a raccoon who didn’t graduate high school and can’t even provide a social security number (why didn’t I take the time to memorize that?).
In other words, I’m screwed. Completely and utterly. Oh, and I guess my friends are, too. I mean, Vil isn’t even American, let alone from this century; what the heck will Immigration have to say about that?
“...It’s probably nothing,” I reassured him, not feeling any of it myself. “It’s not every day a spaceship falls from the sky. They just need to get the facts straight.”
…And possibly arrest us and/or Abis for any number of the comically illegal things we did, from kidnapping and human trafficking to murder and illegal experimentation… or, you know, operating a spacecraft without a license, but I wisely chose not to expand on my growing list of possible crimes against humanity/aerial safety violations we could easily get tagged with. Man, and I thought coming back to Earth was stressful.
My idle thoughts were interrupted by a polite knock on the room’s door, which opened in earnest to allow what was presumably one of the doctors handling Leon in, a thin, aging black woman with a nametag hanging off her white coat’s pocket that read ‘Dr. Hannah Plesintyne’.
“Alright,” she started with a look up and a smile from behind her clipboard, “are y’all settled in alright, Mr. Cameron? Head’s feelin’ a bit better?”
Leon put his head up as much as he was comfortable to see her with an oddly embarrassed expression. “Just a bit, yep.”
She glanced over to the TV in the corner, off since before we’d come in, and back to Leon. “Good, good! If you’re feelin’ up to it, we just need some information to help your stay along, alright sweetie?”
“Alright…” Leon blushed.
Dr. Plesintyne went through a long list of questions with Leon, starting with physical characteristics and medical history and ending with address and family, only being interrupted by Tibbs suddenly being very curious as to whether she was really a ‘colored female doctor,’ which after Dr. Plesintyne figured out Tibbs wasn’t trying to be malicious about it and was genuinely fascinated despite her, um, rather dated choice of words, she confirmed.
“I take it back, the future is awesome!” she whispered to me, and looked starry-eyed back at the doctor. “I was a nurse back in the War, do you think I could be a doctor too??”
Dr. Plesintyne gave her a confused, but charmed, smile. “Well sure thing, sweetheart.”
She and Leon stumbled through the rest of his questions, especially the ones regarding an email (I helped him out by just saying he didn’t have one), his lack of insurance, and the fact that he was completely serious about being born in the 1940s despite looking like he was in his late 20s or early 30s, but the doctor was kind and understanding enough to go along with Leon as far as she could. After all, in her words, “I’ve seen and heard a whole lot weirder, sweetie, and that hasn’t stopped me yet.”
After finishing up her questionnaire and ironing out the details with me and Leon, the doctor beamed a kind smile. “I promise it’ll be as pleasant a time as you need to recover, whether it’s a few weeks or a few months, but as much as I’d like to leave y’all to rest,” she nodded to Vil who’d decided to sleep on the floor during her questions, bunching up his jacket into a pillow, “I got some men who’re wanting to have a chat with y’all in a moment.” Her smile turned apologetic. “If y’all need some rest afterward, we got a place down on the second story with some spare beds, but I can’t promise we’ll let’ch’all stay after tonight.”
I nodded along with her offer; generous, but fair. I know I sure needed some shut-eye and morning light before I could get to figuring out a way to not be utterly screwed. But those men… I drew my eyes to the window, overlooking a sprawling, low-density city suburb in dim night, and weighed the odds of me getting clocked by Men in Black against how well I thought I could climb down six storeys and not break anything in the process. Eh… I guess it couldn’t hurt to know what they were after, right? At least not as much as a broken leg.
Dr. Plesintyne left with our assurances, and I spent the next few minutes alternatively worrying about what unknown goals were driving those MIB and washing my hands and face in the adjoining bathroom for the fifth time today. It had been a very long time since I’d had the opportunity to not feel like I was encrusted with the ashes of a thousand squashed cockroaches, and I still really needed a proper shower and an avalanche of shampoo to feel better, but I could at least not look like a complete hobo for whatever scrutiny was coming up.
The door swung in without any warning while I was still washing myself; I quickly dried myself off and quietly exited to see one of the men from before, taking up seemingly the entire side of the room with his sheer presence. He turned a set of black-ops shades to stare straight through me, and I’ll admit I froze for a second before he nodded and turned to address the room.
“Special Agent McClusky, Paranatural Incidents Unit. We have ample reason to believe that there’s been a troublesome affair regarding an abduction incident, one that ended in a rather severe disturbance of public order. You are not under arrest, nor in detainment; I am simply here to gather the facts as they unfolded.”
Tibbs asked the question Vil had half an hour ago of the scary agent with no sense of the fear I felt.
“What did you do with Abis?”
I saw the agent’s eyebrow raise above the rim of his glasses. “Are you referring to your pet alien? It’s in the custody of my partner… for now.” Agent McClusky cleared his throat. “But that’s not relevant; we’ve already interrogated it for as much as we needed. Understand, the Federal Government has been dealing with this and similar abduction cases for a very long time. We’re not here to punish you for defending yourselves against foreign slavers and pressgangers, no, what we’re after is… justice.”
“You’re not gonna hurt him, though… right? Please, he wasn’t responsible for any of that, we swear!”
Tibbs’ sudden outburst for our former captive’s well-being gave the agent pause, but also sent Leon burying his ears into his pillow.
“Could you lot not talk so loud? My head hurts like Satan’s balls right now…”
The agent sighed, and said to Tibbs, “We’ll take it into consideration. Now, if you could recount your side of the events? Any descriptions of abduction sites, times, methods, your captors, possible motives, and the ship responsible would be immeasurably useful.”
Tibbs groaned about this being the second time today, then began recounting her tale… again… complete with campsite, big light, waking up in a tube and being rescued by me and Vil, then wreaking havoc across a ship full of those aliens, kidnapping our erstwhile pilot and jumping ship to arrive back on Earth where we crashed into that town next door. The agent, diligently taking much more professional notes than the cop had done, asked if he could interview the sleeping cavalry officer, and was informed that no, he could not, because the man had been awake for at least a full day by this point and was not going to be shook awake by anyone or anything less powerful than a gunshot next to his head. The agent accepted this as something he’d have to take care of tomorrow in no uncertain terms, then turned to interrogate me.
“You, uh… Ketty, was it? Guessing that’s a nickname… What’s your legal name, and were you a paranatural before this incident?”
“Um– Keaton, Keaton Radomir, and… and no… they did things to me… things I’d rather not talk about, if that’s fine…”
The agent didn’t press the matter, but wrote down some notes while speaking to himself.
“Suggests… biological manipulation… reason for intent unclear. Could you please recount your version of events, then, as best you can?”
I took the agent’s word and noncombative tone in stride, thankful that he wasn’t just about to disappear me or anyone else (as silly as that sounds), and did my best to unload everything from that terrible day onwards that was otherwise relevant… oh, and I guess I should tell you a bit about it too. It was April… tenth? Eleventh? One of those days, and like I said, I was out camping a bit outside of Lynchburg, Virginia with my girlfriend, Nicole Creighton, doing… normal intimate camping things (you know what I’m talking about), and when it was pretty late I got curious about this weird, faint sound, so like a normal person I went to go figure out what it was. As it turned out, it was an alien ship. Cue abduction, me getting stuck with things that really should not be stuck inside a human body, the whole transformation thing, and casually slipping out of my restraints and dodging every tranquilizer and laser shot with absurd ease while clocking every ugly bird-goat thing that confronted me, and eventually freeing everyone, whereupon my story converged with Tibbs’.
Agent McClusky asked a few pointed questions (“Was there more than one variety of alien aboard this ship?”, “How similar was the air composition to Earth standard – ahem, sorry – did you ever feel lightheaded or have trouble breathing the ship’s air?”, etcetera) that I tried my best to answer, but it was obvious that the agent wasn’t all that satisfied with what I knew.
“That’s enough info, thank you. You’ve both been fairly helpful, and I thank you for your continued cooperation in this investigation. I’ll be back tomorrow to interview your other comrades, but if you remember anything else pertinent regarding this incident in the future, you can call me–” he produced a set of plain white business cards and handed them to me, “–at this number.”
I stared at the card on top, ‘Agent Issac McClusky,’ the seal of the FBI printed in the background, and the phone number attached at the bottom, and realized with a sinking heart that I didn’t have a cellphone.
“I, uhh… I don’t have a phone. None of us do.”
The agent actually smiled at that.
“And that’s why I snagged a cell from downstairs.” He produced from a separate pocket a white-beige flip phone and charger, and pressed them into my hands. “There, no excuses. Oh, and if you need more, they keep a stock on-hand at most big hospitals, government grant. A bit old-school, but it’s free, so you can’t really complain about it.”
And with that last act of ‘just as planned’ smugness, he left to go be someone else’s problem… like Abis. Poor Abis. Eh, hopefully he’ll be fine with Tibbs vouching for her.
Speaking of Tibbs, she suddenly appeared over my shoulder and stared at the flip phone. “That’s a telephone?”
“Y–yeah… you gotta stop sneaking up on me.”
“It’s so small… so do you plug it into the wall, and it just connects you to the operator?” She poked at the sides, specifically the port at the bottom.
I blinked at just how… quaint – Is quaint the right word? – her completely off prediction was.
“Well…”
I wasn’t actually sure if it was charged, but in case it was, I flipped it open to show her. It was; the monochrome green-and-black display shined perfectly fine in all its low-powered glory.
“Woah,” she exclaimed. “How’s it all work?”
I considered how tired I was, and how excited Tibbs was for this tiny scrap of technology, and decided to humor her for the moment.
“Well, you can actually call any phone from this. You just store it in your pocket, and when you need to call someone, you just put their number into this keypad and it’ll ring their phone.”
“No wires?”
“No wires.”
“So it’s a pocket radio!” she gasped.
“...Close enough. Actually, it can also show the time. See up here?” I pointed up to the top corner of the display. It’s, uh, whoo, one-fourteen AM. And–”
I stopped in my tracks on seeing the other set of numbers displayed next to the time. The date.
3/23/24.
“...And what?” She gently asked.
“I– I…”
I’d lost fifteen years.