by Alan Black
He could tell they were having a good time because pots and pans banged around in a loud clatter, mixed with chatter and chuckles. Even though Larry was still stuffed from breakfast, the women were working hard to prepare lunch: moving this, grabbing that, and pouring stuff from here to there.
Although it didn’t say so, the refrigerator was having the most fun it had had in years, partly because the Teumessians were small enough that when they grabbed the door handle to open it, their fingers tickled a sensitive spot. The old machine was struggling to keep things cold with the door opening and closing so often, but it decided a little workout every now and again wouldn’t be a bad thing. The stove was of a different opinion, but the fridge and the stove didn’t discuss anything — ever. Their functions were too much at odds for them to ever agree on anything, no matter how often the blender tried to mediate.
Larry wondered where Jughead was. The little Teumessian had taken a liking to Ol’ Bucky, although the dog was more than a little leery of the additional attention and was far too old to play the chase-the-stick game. Jughead’s fascination seemed to stem from the fact that Ol’ Bucky was a pack-hunting meat-eater, but didn’t seem to consider the Teumessian as food. Ol’ Bucky tolerated Jughead’s attention because the little Teumessian seemed to have a fascination for roadkill, although the two had very different ideas about what to do with it.
Larry didn’t wonder where Dusty was. Being on a planet full of omnivores made Dusty even crazier. He was still trying to find someone to kill him, Doug Rickenhauser having passed on the offer a few days before.
The road out front was lined three cars deep. The first row of cars was every law enforcement officer in a hundred miles sitting bumper to bumper. The LEOs stood at the ready. Various expressions of everything from near panic to homicidal mania graced their faces as they held their shotguns and rifles at the ready. Their orders were to protect Larry and his property until the government could send in the national guard, the army, or a congressional committee to figure out what to do with aliens in Kansas.
The second row of cars was the media, with more arriving all of the time. Cameras and microphones were pointed at Larry’s yard and house like a bristling hedgerow. Reporters wandered up and down the road attempting to interview anyone who might foolishly make eye contact with them. The few media vans with high telescoping poles could manage to get a camera high enough in the air to capture a picture of the spaceship hovering about a foot above Larry’s backyard.
The third row of cars, trucks, recreational vehicles, and motorcycles had jammed the road closed and were parked every which way, even deep into the field across the street. The foremost vehicle was the Rickenhauser’s plumbing truck. The temperature was at the freezing mark, but Doug and Jeff were tailgating: drinking beer, grilling bratworst, and lounging in lawn chairs. They’d been at it since the first day. Fortunately for the boys, Racine from Racine’s Bar and Girls brought a pickup truck filled with beer and bags of beer nuts. And licenses be damned, she was doing good business.
Dusty was prancing back and forth in front of the crowd, cameras and all, daring anyone and everyone to kill him. Jeff Rickenhauser might have done it, but Larry wouldn’t let Dusty take a translator unit out there with him. Someday, someone somewhere would take the recordings of Dusty’s yips and yaps and interpret them to find out what he was really saying, but today, all heard his Teumessian voice and understood nothing.
The steers in the front pasture heard Dusty all too clearly, however, his similar appearance to a large Earth style fox was more than they could tolerate. They were clustered in a far corner as far away from the excitement as they could get. They were too far away to care about what Dusty was saying.
The steers were somehow more stupid than the average cow. Their minute level of intelligence dropped dramatically the same day they were downgraded from bulls to steers.
More than one steer would forget why they were clustered so far away from the house and the piles of hay Gary had left for them. In a fit of desire for some tasty bit of grass, he would wander closer to the house, trudging over the hill until he caught sight of Dusty and the humans with guns. He would then race back to his herd at top bovine speed.
All this should have seemed strange to Larry, but it didn’t. This was now his normal. What was strange — very odd indeed — was that Nancy was perched on the piano stool next to him. She had a firm grip on his hand as if she was afraid he would get away again. A look of contentment spread over her face as she leaned her head on his shoulder and kissed his neck.
He was content as well.
Larry wasn’t normally a conspiracy minded person. However, he was beginning to feel a bit paranoid and was thinking that someone had put a kink in his communication hose. He, and every American over the age of three, knew the NSA could listen in to every communication he received. He expected that.
For any agency, listening to phone calls was only a short step away from blocking the calls and stopping messages from getting though at all. The easiest way to get control of Larry’s spaceship would be to choke off competitor’s offers. Larry was a cattle rancher, but the phrase National Security wasn’t unknown to him.
He might not wonder about who killed Marilyn Monroe and made it look like an accident, why Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, or where Jimmy Hoffa was buried, but he did wonder if the government had black helicopters and stealth drones. No matter what he’d said to the president of the United States, he also wondered if Seal Team Six would kill them all when they came to steal his spaceship or if they would just hold them captive for a while.
He was sure the only thing that had kept the United States government or an agent of theirs from coming after them, was the media camped in front of his house and the internet cameras watching everyone’s every move.
Hearing the whomp-whomp-whomp of helicopters overhead told him someone had grown tired of waiting.
Larry shouted. “Okay, people. It’s Go time. On the double!”
This scenario had been planned from day one.
Bob and Ginger grabbed the kits over Grandpa’s objections and bolted out the back door. Nancy grabbed her camera and was out the back door before Larry. Larry was faster, but he’d stopped to give Dad a macho chin wag, Gary a thumbs up, Mom and Grandma quick hugs.
Despite his desire to be the focus of an alien autopsy, Dusty raced around the corner of the house. A trio of actual black helicopters overhead followed him closely. Dusty’s compliance with the go order stemmed more from his belief that the government would not pay him as much for his autopsy as some civilian business might. Larry had convinced him the US government probably wouldn’t pay him anything.
Dusty quickly grasped the capitalist concept.
Larry grabbed Dusty by the scruff of the neck and tossed him through the hatch. Scrambling up behind him, Scooter gave him a quick nod of the head. Someone had always been on watch in the spaceship since setting down in Larry’s backyard. Scooter’s nod meant they had a full count. Everyone was aboard, even Jughead, racing in from points unknown.
Scooter said, “Sorry, Larry. I was watching, but I didn’t see those flying things coming.”
Larry slapped the hatch closed behind him. They were effectively sealed in and nothing the US Government could do — short of dropping a nuke on them — would damage them or the ship.
“Don’t worry about it, Scooter. Those things are meant to stay hidden until the last moment.”
Scooter waved at Nancy and waved to her camera. “Race you to the bridge.”
That was Scooter’s standing joke between him and Larry. Scooter was on the bridge before Larry could even start moving. Scooter thought it was hilarious Larry ran so slowly.
Nancy followed Larry to the bridge, her little camera whirring along happily.
Larry looked out the windshield at the helicopters hovering overhead. Two landed and vomited out armed men. They were dressed in riot gear, but they weren’t military. They wore black uniforms
and were as unmarked as the helicopters themselves. Each man’s face was covered by a plexiglass shield over a black stocking mask that had very little to do with keeping out the winter chill.
Dad stood on the back porch. All he did was point at the spaceship and shrug. Larry waved back through the bridge windshield and gave his father a thumbs up.
Gary had completed his part of the go order. He’d gone out the front door and invited the hordes of newscasters to come on in. They swarmed around both sides of his house like flood waters around a boulder. Cameras and questions were stuck in the faces of the men in black. A multitude of cameras caught the spaceship from every angle, one young reporter even climbed a tree to get a higher view of the spaceship and the action unfolding.
The tree was quite happy with the attention. It had been years since Larry had bothered to scratch its limbs with his sneakers.
The black clad men were not happy with the tree climber. They ordered him down.
The reporter shouted back, “First amendment.”
A black suited man pointed a gun at the reporter and ordered, “Get down. I’m not interfering with your freedom of the press. You just can’t do it from that tree.”
The reported laughed, “I didn’t mean that part. How about the right of assembly?”
The man shouted, “You can assemble with the other reporters over there.” The man waved off to the side, pointing at a pasture. The armed men were trying to herd the reporters away from the house and the spaceship. Their herding was as useless as trying to teach fish to fly.
The reporter hugged a tree limb. He gave it a little kiss. “First amendment. Freedom of religion. I am worshiping Mother Nature by loving her tree.”
The tree was happy with the attention although it did want the reporter to climb a little farther up. It had a particularly itchy spot on the limb just above. It wasn’t overly enthusiastic about kisses, but it would take whatever attention it could get at this point.
The man in black gave up when a trio of reporters climbed the tree with the first man. He turned away when some of those reporters began focusing their cameras on him rather than the spacecraft. When asked, he refused to give his name or who he worked for.
Larry looked up. A black helicopter hovered above them. The obvious intent was to keep the spaceship from taking off.
“Scooter, take us up. As slow as you can go.”
The spaceship barely moved. It had been hovering over the ground, in typical Teumessian style. It creeped upward an inch at a time, blowing around bits of winter dust. The helicopter above them didn’t move.
Larry sighed, “Just a little faster.”
Scooter jerked the spaceship upward, racing toward the little helicopter at a blur. He slammed them to a stop without touching the helicopter’s skids. The helicopter pilot flinched and yanked the helicopter up and out of the way.
Scooter looked at Larry and grinned. “That worked.” With space overhead, Scooter shot skyward, narrowly dodging an unmanned drone that swerved around to follow them. He curved away from the house.
Larry leaned forward and flicked on the ship’s cloaking device. The drone, unable to see them, slammed into the side of the ship. Debris fell into the field behind the McDonald’s place.
Scooter said, “Now what?”
Larry said, “Let’s go to Silicon Valley and see if we can generate some interest from the private businesses there. We need to talk to someone with plenty of money, some private security, and a good enough imagination to figure out what to do.”
Nancy shook her head. “No. If that’s all you’re looking for, let’s go to Marin County in California.”
Larry grinned. “Of course, where else would we go? I don’t know why I didn’t think of going to Skywalker Ranch. Folks there have demonstrated they have fertile imaginations, maybe we can talk to Ol’ Obi-wan himself.”
THE END
Books
By
Alan Black
Science Fiction
Chewing Rocks
Empty Space
Larry Goes To Space
Metal Boxes (book one)
Metal Boxes - Trapped Outside (book two)
Steel Walls and Dirt Drops
Titanium Texicans
Christian Historical Fiction
(An Ozark Mountain Series)
(1920 Trilogy)
The Friendship Stones (book one)
The Granite Heart (book two)
The Heaviest Rock (book three)
(1925 Trilogy)
The Inconvenient Pebble (book four)
The Jasper’s Courage (book five)
The King’s Rock (book six)
General Fiction
Chasing Harpo
Western
A Cold Winter
Non-Fiction
How To Start, Write, and Finish Your First Novel
About the author
www.alanblackauthor.com
Alan Black has been writing novels since 1996 when he started Eye on The Prize. His writing tastes are as eclectic as his reading preferences.
Alan spent most of his adult life in the Kansas City area. The exception came at the orders from the U.S. Air Force when he was stationed in Texas, California, Maryland, and Japan. He and his wife were married in the late 70s and lived in Independence, Missouri, but now live in sunny Arizona.
Alan Black is an Amazon #1 bestselling author for Metal Boxes, a young adult, science fiction, military, action adventure. He is a multi-genre writer who has never met a good story he didn't want to tell.
Alan Black's vision statement: "I want my readers amazed they missed sleep because they could not put down one of my books. I want my readers amazed I made them laugh on one page and cry on the next. I want to give my readers a pleasurable respite from the cares of the world for a few hours. I want to offer stories I would want to read."
Novel Outtakes
(all grammar and typos have been deliberately left in)
This small section is the end of CHAPTER FIFTEEN. I’ve included it here as an outtake simply because as originally written, this was the end of the novel.
Larry opened the airlock hatch and leaned out. He stretched far enough to break the ship’s cloaking barrier. He smiled and waved at the cameraman.
The cameraman gave him a thumbs up.
Scooter took that as a signal to hit the button turning off the cloaking device. The ship popped into view.
Larry shouted, “Hello, Earthlings!”
Nancy became famous for the video of her head bouncing on pavement as she fainted.
The cameraman caught it all and chuckled.
So did the camera.
This change in CHAPTER TEN is minor, but I thought significant enough to show here.
On Earth, he had never traveled beyond the boundaries of his own country. However, he had read enough to know that many Americans traveled as if their way was the only way, slightly ethnocentric—stuffed full of Americanisms and jingoistic crap. The condition was the ugly American syndrome. He didn’t want to start giving the Teumess the wrong impression of humans. Well, a worse impression than they already had.
WARNING! GP13 content to follow.
This section is a small outtake from CHAPTER NINE. My beta readers (not all of them, but enough) believed the italicized section was a bit too graphic. Here is what it appeared like in the rough draft.
…he received another, and bigger surprise. Betty grabbed his penis.
“Is this your organ for procreation?” she asked.
Larry wasn’t normally shy about sex. He was a farm boy. The facts of life concerning the birds, the bees, the canine, feline, bovine, opine and porcine species were daily farm activities. As a hamburger farmer, Larry had—on more than one occasion—reached between a bull and a cow to help insert the bull’s one hundred percent all beef wiener in the proper cow part for fertilization.
He did use artificial insemination in many cases with some cows, but he still thought the old
-fashioned way of generating calves was the best. Every bull on his place agreed. Being bulls they sometimes missed the whole point of genetic diversity, but then so did Larry’s cousin Thumper, who converted to Neo-Nazism while cohabitating with the Arian brotherhood during an unfortunate stint in the big, grey house up in Leavenworth. Somehow, sex as an abstract concept and practical business activity was different from having an alien creature grab Mister Happy in a warm shower.
“Um—” Larry wasn’t sure what to say.
“It looks big,” Betty interrupted. “But, it is almost too soft for…oh!”
No matter what Larry thought about, having a female fondle his penis was only going to end in an erection. Even if the female was an alien.
“Yes. That is my organ for sex.”
Betty looked at Scooter and Veronica. They both shrugged in response.
She stopped fondling his penis. She put her hands on her hips…
Praise for Alan Black’s books
Chewing Rocks
Chastity Snowden Whyte only has a small chip on her shoulder. No problem. She’s an asteroid miner and works alone. But author Alan Black knows that comfortable characters don’t make for good reading. From page one, he piles problem after problem on Sno, keeping the reader turning pages to find out what happens next. Chewing Rocks is engaging science fiction and a fun read.
Goodreads review by Paul Bussard on July 06, 2014
Empty Space
Funny, disturbing, and poignant.
Funny, disturbing, and poignant...not how I would usually describe a SF space novel. This book, while well written SF has a lot to say about social class, society, humanity, and the human condition. Our protagonist is almost an anti-hero as he's someone you root for throughout the novel, even though he's a serial killer at heart.