Gulp. “I suppose the Area 51 people like to keep a low profile.”
The old car ran ahead at almost seventy miles an hour. The guy must have missed the part in our blog about how we kept it around sixty. The trailer oscillated and wiggled, so I rolled the throttle back to sixty-five and let him get ahead. No way would we miss a turn. There weren’t any. Brown desert stretched away to every horizon with mountains rising up at the ends.
At about five miles he slowed and signaled a right turn. We followed to a paved road that cut a black strip through the desert so straight as if someone drew it with a ruler. The guy ran again at seventy, even though the road wasn’t much more than one car wide. After four miles he slowed up to a guard shack no bigger than an outhouse in the middle of nowhere, with a Porta Potty behind it. A simple white board gate stopped us. The AK47 and uniform helped, too.
The guy went around to the driver’s side and bent to talk to Mr. Johnson. Then he stood abruptly and saluted, almost marched to the shack, and raised the gate.
“Apparently this guy has a lot of pull.”
Quilter Girl agreed.
We drove on a mile or so and came to a tee. Joe turned left and we followed. A dirt road. QG groaned and I tensed. With the small contact patch of the tires, gravel roads became arm wrestling affairs with the bike and pop top tent trailer. However, the bike rode smoothly, the surface hard packed. I accelerated. In moments Joe became a dot on the horizon again. His dust blew away to the right. We crested a hill and QG gasped.
“Wow,” she said. “Look at that.”
The valley below looked like an acne scarred face, littered with holes, some small, some large, and a few giant ones.
“Those are bomb craters, aren’t they?”
“I think so.” We continued down the hill and gazed in wonder at the strange landscape. Some conical holes looked like an ice cream cone and some were surrounded with mounds of soil. We turned at the bottom and the road shot straight ahead again. I pointed on the right. A school bus sat low, all the tires burned off it. In fact, everything that could burn was scorched or missing; it wasn’t yellow but brownish red, covered in rust.
“Look at that.” She pointed to a bridge—a wreckage that must have been a bridge—probably two hundred feet long and bent twelve feet in the center.
“What kind of force would bend a bridge like that?” she asked.
“I suppose a nuclear bomb.”
We rode on past demolished buildings, crushed automobiles, and burned structures, like a city that had been nuked. Over another hill and we saw another city. A military installation. Three airstrips lined up side by side and angled toward the distant mountains. A white 737 sat on the tarmac with an aluminum ladder against the door. Huge buildings bereft of any adornment dotted the landscape. Joe’s Taurus stopped ahead at another guard shack, this one able to stop a tank. Joe took quite a while longer and the soldier spent some time on the phone. Hopefully he won’t shoot us. At last he waved Joe and us through. We followed in his dust to a big gray building. I parked beside the Taurus.
He got out of the car and held out his hands. “Welcome to Area 51.” Like he owned it. “We like to call it Groom Lake. I advise you to do the same.”
With all the weaponry and damage we’d seen I’d call it Mr. Robinson’s neighborhood if he told me to.
“Come on inside. I can’t show you much, but you’ll love this.”
We followed him into a stark foyer with linoleum flooring that must have been sixty years old, but shone from a disciplined regimen of polishing. Joe escorted us to a plain wooden desk where a soldier sat in front of a pad of paper.
“Where’s Ageon?’
“He’s in the lunchroom.”
We followed Joe through a door into a room with wooden picnic tables in neat rows, four by three. In the corner, eating what looked to be a peanut butter sandwich, sat an alien.
I could tell it was an alien because of his lightbulb head, green eyes and four arms, each with four long fingers and a thick thumb. Except for the four arms, he looked rather similar to the alien dolls at the gas station. His skin looked like the Gulf water—turquoise blue. No ears. Tiny mouth. Two holes like nostrils. He bit little chunks of the sandwich, like a chipmunk.
“Too weird,” I said. “The blog will be interesting today.”
“No photography,” Joe warned, “or they will seize your camera and lock you up. Really.”
“It’s in the bike.”
“Kevin and Sherri Parsons, I’d like you to meet Ageon.”
The creature stood and extended an arm. The second one from the top, I guess. I shook his hand. Warm, thin like a bird’s leg with spindly fingers. Sherri stood with her arms crossed as if she was cold.
Just too bizarre.
“Sit down, sit down.” Joe motioned us to the table and asked us what we’d like to eat.
“I’d like a turkey sandwich.”
“Nothing for me,” Sherri said. She looked pretty weirded out. I patted her hand.
“Drinks? I bet you want a Diet Dr. Pepper, Kevin.” He did read the blog.
“Greetings, earthlings.” Ageon held up all four arms.
“Knock off the alien stuff,” Joe smacked him on the back of the head, more of a friendly gesture.
“I’m just kidding around.” The being put his arms down and returned to nibbling at his sandwich. The two lower arms tapped on the table. “I read your blog,” he said. “Very interesting.”
Wow. Now not only do people from all over the world read my blog, aliens from... wherever… do, too. “So where are you from?”
The alien—I guess I should call him Ageon—wiped his little mouth with a napkin. “That’s classified. If I told you I’d have to kill you.”
Joe returned with the lunches. “Will you knock it off? I apologize. He’s watched too much television.”
“Ah, television. You beings have managed to develop something that can waste your time and your mind.”
I started to agree when Joe answered, “There’s good and bad television. Discovery and the History channels, for instance.” He turned to us to explain. “Ageon’s superiors sent him here to study us. But we intercepted him and are studying him.”
“They are holding me against me will. Help me. I’m a prisoner.”
“Will you knock it off? I apologize for him… again. He’s gotten dramatic lately. Yes, we’re holding him against his will. But we are exchanging information, a fair trade, and he gets all the peanut butter sandwiches he likes. Around six a day.”
“They are delicious.” He continued tapping on the table with his lower hands. I couldn’t figure out if he was nervous or perhaps picking up the gamma rays from the wood or something. I watched him nibble away, then glanced at Sherri. She sat with her hands in her lap, eyes wide, taking it all in, but clearly not enjoying herself. Something about talking to a blue alien sets one off.
“Ageon is their anthropologist, and so am I,” Joe explained, “and we are learning much from one another.”
“Oh, yes. You’re learning from me. You’re learning that I’m in such a low class that no one is coming to rescue me. Earth is so low on our scale that they send Ageon, and ‘Goodbye.’” He saluted with his lower arm while the upper one held the sandwich. If he managed four arms simultaneously, this life form must be much more sophisticated than us. Then I remembered spiders.
“So, Ageon,” I set my sandwich down, “what have you concluded from your study of us?”
“You want to know the truth? You can’t handle the truth.”
Joe shook his head. “I am cutting you off of television. Completely. Just answer the question.”
“Or else what? Another session in the torture chamber?”
Sherri sat up straight.
“No. Look you’re scaring them.”
“Let me finish.” He nibbled at the sandwich while the lower fingers tapped on the table. Good manners prevented me from holding down his fingers and telling him to stop. He’d prob
ably hit me with his Death Star or laser beam or something. My sci-fi experience didn’t extend past Star Wars.
Ageon wiped his mouth and slid his plate over to Joe. “Serve me, earthling.”
“When you get back home, you can do stand up.”
“Take my wife. Please.”
Joe picked up the plate and threw it in the trash. “Very funny. Okay,” he gestured to Ageon, “you have the floor. Go ahead.”
“Thank you. My superiors sent me here sixty years ago to study your planet.”
“He doesn’t look a day over forty, does he?”
“Now who’s the comedian? I flew here and landed not too far away and your government people captured me and have held me all this time.” He turned his lightbulb head to Joe. “Correct?”
“That’s right.”
“For sixty years we’ve studied one another and exchanged information. I send it regularly to my planet. They are sending an envoy to recover me and return me to my planet. They should be here in 140 years.”
“143. And three months, by our estimates.”
I exercised my will to close my gaping mouth. “How long do you live?”
“A thousand years. Give or take.”
Joe looked at his phone. “Listen, we don’t have a lot of time. Cut to the chase.”
Ageon stopped drumming his fingers and peered—I guess—at Joe. “Very well.
“You are a… how can I say it? A pathetic bunch.”
“What?” I said, “You’re kidding me. Have you seen the breakthroughs in the sixty years you’ve been here?”
He clucked his tongue. “You harness electricity, develop nuclear power, manage to get all the way to the moon, Mars, big deal. Why, you can’t even fly to commute to work.”
Ouch. “You have a point. When I was a kid we thought we’d be flying by now.”
“You haven’t even cured cancer. Or the common cold.”
“We’ve made great breakthroughs in medicine.”
“Then why do you have to fill out sixty forms to get your tonsils removed? And why can’t you cure them rather than remove them? Adenoids?”
Resisting the urge to punch this guy, I replied, “You’re the superior life form. You tell me why.”
He laughed. I think he did. Some kind of mirth. “Because of your technology. You went the wrong way. Between television, the computer, and the Internet, you missed all your opportunities.”
“What?” This guy sounded as weird as he looked.
“Yes. You spend your days rebooting your computers, waiting to load videos, staring at screens while they refresh, and searching for viruses. If you hadn’t invented the technology, you could use your brains more.”
“Here we go,” Joe muttered.
“Yes, here we go,” he replied. “Think about it. What if a million people focused on a cure for breast cancer? Say they spent two hundred hours a year on it? How long would it take to develop a cure?”
“You got me.”
“Around ten years,” Sherri said. Where’d she come up with that?
The alien stopped and stared at her. “Yes, that’s about correct. But what do your people—millions of them—spend billions of hours on instead?”
I shrugged. “No idea.”
“Angry Birds. If you took all the time and energy people spend launching birds at pigs, in around ten years you would have your cure for cancer. A billion hours a year for ten years. Instead, you have 10k runs to throw more money at it. Our data supports my theory that if you stayed with the abacus and slide rules, hadn’t gone to the dark side, that is—technology—you would have cured cancers—all of them—by now, found a cure, actually a prevention of the common cold, and eliminated malaria. And you would commute to work by flying. Ten years later you wouldn’t fly to work at all. But here you are, with your phones, texting people about inane, worthless things, riveted to your computers, watching a video of a dog dancing with a cat, checking out your friends’ status on Facebook, and launching birds at pigs. And that’s while you’re at work. When you get home you stare at televisions, even more passively, and watch ‘reality shows,’” he held up all four hands and put his fingers in quotes, “of pathetic people building custom motorcycles, women gossiping, and people buying houses. So not only are you wasting time, the television is draining your resolve, making you more passive than you are already.”
Joe spread his hands. “That’s his story. Ageon’s perspective on the human race.”
“The human crawl,” he corrected.
“Could I say something?” Sherri held up her hand.
“Sure,” Joe said. “You have the floor.”
“I suppose you’re right, although it’s just your opinion and you’re observing our society from a bunker in the middle of the desert by television, but we just rode around the country, and we’ve made some of our own discoveries.
“People aren’t what the media portrays. Most aren’t anyway. For instance, the bikers in Oregon. Kevin met them at church. Nicest bunch of people you’d ever want to meet. And when they say, ‘If you need anything at all, just call us and we’ll help you out,’ they mean it. Or the guy in Kentucky who helped us when our trailer hitch broke. Another group in Baton Rouge, Louisiana—good people who would do anything for a fellow biker. And most weekends they are out doing rides to raise money for causes. And sure, they aren’t curing cancer, but they can hold peoples’ hands who suffer from it. Pray for them. Bring them dinner. Okay, they can’t fly to their house, but they can love their fellow human beings. If you’re so superior, why did your planet send you alone?”
Ageon had stopped drumming halfway through her monologue, his little mouth open. “I never thought of that.”
“Neither did we,” Joe shook his head. “And we’ve been studying him for sixty years.”
Ageon folded both sets of hands in front of him. “So you’re saying that love is more important than a cure for cancer.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
I wanted to stand up, give Sherri a high five, point at Ageon and shout, “So there!” but that wouldn’t show love very well, so I just smiled and surveyed the group.
Joe cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to stop the fun, but you two need to move. This is top secret, of course, and if you can’t account for two hours on Highway 375, we could have a problem. And you are sworn to secrecy.”
“You mean I can’t blog about this?” I joked.
“Not funny. Not a word.” He stood and indicated we should, too.
I shook Ageon’s hand, with his skinny fingers. “It’s been fascinating.”
“You’ve made me think differently. And I want to leave here, Joe. We need to walk the streets of some cities and meet some of these people Sherri refers to.”
“Right. A seven foot tall lightbulb-headed blue alien walking around Las Vegas, studying people. That’s not going to happen.”
“Have you been on the Strip? He probably wouldn’t be noticed,” I said.
“Not happening.” Joe escorted us out of the room and to the bike. “I thank you for coming out here. So happy I stumbled across you. I’ve enjoyed your trip and your blog so much.”
“Today, the pleasure is all ours.” I nodded to Sherri who agreed, too.
Joe shook our hands and returned into the building as we geared up, donning helmets and gloves.
“That was so amazing,” Sherri climbed on the back of the bike.
“No kidding.”
“Excuse me,” Joe returned with two other people. I thought they were others who followed the trip, but looked just like Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. Will pointed a chrome thing at us and fired it.
~
50 States, Day 386, Last Day
April 18, 2013
Highway 375
Because Quilter Girl and I prefer the offbeat and weird, we decided to return home after our long and wonderful trip by way of Highway 375, the ‘Extraterrestrial Highway.’ It sounded exciting, but riding throug
h the desert with vast expanses of land with almost no vegetation made the final leg of the trip a bit of a downer. Don’t get me wrong, I love the desert, but it is severe, silent, and solitary.
We stopped at a gas station—one of hundreds on this trip—and this one appeared to be a throwback. While the building looked old enough to have witnessed the Eisenhower administration, the pumps standing at attention each bore a card reader. The store took advantage of being along this highway with the clever name of ‘UFO Gas ‘n Go.’ Stuffed dolls of aliens hung inside the windows, with green lightbulb-shaped heads, huge black eyes and long fingers. Why do all aliens look pretty much the same? Oh well, everyone’s got a gimmick.
I slid the card, entered my zip code, and fueled.
“I think we made a mistake,” Quilter Girl peered at the vast expanse. “Sometimes you take the road less traveled and there’s nothing on it.”
“You got that right.” The gas clicked off. Funny, it didn’t need much. Great mileage, this tank.
We mounted up and I fired up the bike. “Too bad this trip ended on such a boring note.”
“We should have ridden down 95, I guess.”
The End
Acknowledgments
The pit crew doesn’t get the accolades of the racer, but is vital to the team’s success. I appreciate my crew, including Miss Tazzie. You first helped me believe I could write. I appreciate you, Terry Burns (Hartline Literary, www.hartlineliterary.com), because more than anything else, you exude integrity. Thank you, Jami Carpenter (www.redpengirl.com); you make me look good without destroying my fragile ego. Suzanne Campbell, graphic artist extraordinaire; thanks for the fine cover art. Thanks to the Henderson Writers Group; you have aided and abetted in a big way, too. Myriad other people contributed to this work as well, and I respect you all.
A special thanks to my wife, Sherri, responsible for much of the inspiration, along with reading and critique. Thanks, honey, for riding along. It’s been quite a ride.
About the Author
Kevin B Parsons has been published in numerous anthologies and magazines, including American Motorcyclist magazine. He’s a member of the Henderson Writers Group and American Christian Fiction Writers. He has also been a member of Toastmasters International since 2006.
He blogs twice a week, posts on Author Culture (www.authorculture.blogspot.com) and Geezer Guys and Gals (www.geezerguysandgals.blogspot.com). He’s a contributing writer to Choices eMagazine.
50 Stories in 50 States: Tales Inspired by a Motorcycle Journey Across the USA Vol 5, The West Page 10