Chapter One

(Photo by Jay Grantham)

Officer JD Driggs knew something was wrong.   Though his instincts had been somewhat blunted by six years on the two-man Carbon City police force, where typical duties involved shooting stray dogs, breaking up the occasional bar fight or domestic dispute, or nabbing a speeder, he still retained much of his big-city-cop-muscle-memory, so to speak, gained in fifteen years with the Philadelphia P.D. both as a regular patrolman and as an undercover narcotics agent.  He got the feeling, creeping up his spine and embedding itself in his hair follicles, as he and his dachshund Howie picked their way through the sagebrush and greasewood outside of town.   A pale, luminescent full moon bathed the desert with a blue light, creating long shadows which, on bad nights, made JD jump to some repressed memory of a dank, odorous alley or a cockroach-infested crack house.  Tonight, the air was crystal clear, the stars shone down like laser points upon a landscape whose silence was broken only by the crunching of JD’s cowboy boots or the pittle-pattle of Howie’s splayed dachshund feet as he worked his way from one clump of sage to another making his deposits.  The prairie dog town, pock-marked with mounds of dirt and ankle-twisting holes, was also shut down for the night, the population burrowed deep underground.

 

One reason JD had come out to the high plains of Wyoming.  A man could think.   He could think almost all day and all night without interruption.  It was a blessing and also a curse.  Most days, he thought about things he wanted to think about, like philosophy or nature or God.  But some days, despite himself, he thought about bullets and blood and little children caked in their own feces, crying as their mother was hauled off to jail.  JD had always been prone to depression, and when it got really bad, he put on his old gray PPD sweats and jogged out the gravel road towards Lone Pine Mountain.  A jog chased the demons away.  Nobody else jogged in Carbon Creek.  The town was five blocks square and people drove from one street to the next.  The men worked hard all day at the mines and the women worked hard keeping the tiny houses and trailers clean and chasing the kids around.   Exercise wasn’t something Carbonites did.  That was something you did in Beverly Hills or some tony suburb someplace totally beyond the imagination of these tough Wyoming folks. 

 

JD had worked three weeks straight.  His deputy, Officer Slag, was on leave for a Workmen’s Compensation Claim.  One of the duties—one of the only duties—of a Carbon Creek policeman was to rattle the doors of the five businesses several times a night.  Officer Slag hated rattling doors.  JD had finally ordered him to do it or get written up.  That night, Officer Slag had thrown out his thumb rattling the door of the drive-through liquor store.  JD had fantasies about firing Officer Slag, but they both knew he’d never find a replacement, out here sixty miles from the nearest hospital and ninety miles from the nearest shopping mall.  Being on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week wears on a man, especially when the call never comes.  You still have to be ready for the call.  Things can get real, real quick.  A car can roll out on the highway.  A drunk can pull a pistol at the bar.  A husband can be beating the tar out of his wife while the terrified children watch.  You just never know.

 

Howie stopped and snuffled at a tangle of bush and cacti, his olfactory nerves kicking into overdrive.     Lots of little animals came out at night to avoid the sharp eyes of the eagles and hawks.  Maybe Howie had found one.  Or maybe it was the carcass of something dead.  As JD prepared to kick at the shaded spot with his boot, a flare of orange and purple light illuminated the sky, and he looked up in time to see a shooting star blazing across the sky.  Then, he noticed it was coming down.  It looked more like a huge boulder or a meteor, with flames pouring off of it, and it appeared to be aimed straight at where he stood.  Howie’s head shot up, his eyes widened, and he let out a howl of anger, fear, and understanding.  JD dropped to a crouch, but the meteor tumbled to earth on the top of a nearby ridge, out of sight.  A good thirty seconds later came the meteor’s sound waves, a cross between a wail and a whoosh, not terribly loud, followed by a dull thud as the rock impacted the sandy desert soil a quarter of a mile away.

 

“Holy shit!” said JD, like anybody would in that situation.  The hair on his head felt prickly, and his sphincter felt constricted.  “What the hell?”

 

He had his sidearm, a service Glock, but elected not to investigate with Howie along.  Howie was an excitable hound, given to prostatitis, and too much excitement sometimes made him shit in the trailer because he’d be scared to go outside.  The meteor could wait.  JD would take Howie home first and tuck him into his doggie bed by the washer/dryer, then come back and investigate on his own.  He began walking back towards the twinkling lights of Carbon Creek, asleep for the night, two a.m.  Even a town of four hundred looks substantial at night with its lights on. 

 

He returned carrying a small fire extinguisher, in case the meteor had started a grass fire.  He climbed the eroded slope of the hill, cresting it find the rock still glowing, but no fire, only a large, blackened donut that encircled the rock at a distance of about a hundred feet.  The rock had embedded itself about a foot and a half into the earth, throwing out churned mounds of sand, rock and dirt.   The land was silent, except for a gentle hissing and an occasionally cracking sound from the rock.

 

JD had been a cop long enough that he had acquired the skill, necessary to a long life and career in Philly, of sensing things.   He could sense things, and sometimes he could also sense if something was right or wrong, good or evil, benign or deadly.  This sense had saved his life on several occasions.  Now, standing in the middle of nowhere next to a hissing rock, he sensed something, and his hackles went up as quickly as if he’d been a coyote.  He closed one of his eyes for thirty seconds, because he had been looking at the glowing rock and he wanted to have night vision.  He slowly drew his revolver from its holster.  Then, taking a deep breath, he spun around.

 

A man was standing about five paces away, hands shoved into the pockets of a long black overcoat.

 

“Hello,” said the man, and a thin smile crossed his narrow face.  The man was about six feet tall, bony and angular, his face all cheekbones and deep-set eyes beneath dark brows.   His dark hair stuck out in all directions, like the rays of the sun. 

 

JD lowered his sidearm.  “How did you get here?  I came up alone.”

 

The man shrugged.  “I came in that vessel you see there.”  He nodded at the meteor.

 

JD pondered the likelihood of this.  He hadn’t seen anybody in town, or on the ridge.  He looked at the Casper highway, a good quarter-mile away, but could see no car parked on the side of the road. 

 

“You’re kind of big to have fit in that,” he said at last.  The rock was only three to four feet in diameter, and appeared solid.  It had no portholes, no doors, no indications of hollowness, and certainly didn’t look like anything made by a sentient life form.

 

The man gave a musical, tinkley laugh.  “Oh, it’s plenty big all right.  You see, I don’t really look like this.  But I didn’t want to scare you, so I took a shape like one of you.”  He spread out his hands.  He was wearing  black gloves with the ends of the fingers cut off.  “How’d I do?”

 

“Not bad.  We don’t really dress like that around here, but you’d fit right in in a trance music bar in New York City.”

 

The man shimmered like a mirage, his body splitting up into slivers and then rearranging themselves.  He wore a ten-gallon hat, a western shirt with pearl buttons, denim jeans, a rodeo buckle the size of a dinner plate, and boots.  “How’s this?”

 

“Better, but a little over the top.  Get rid of the buckle and maybe the hat.”

 

Both instantly disappeared.  “Now put on a baseball cap.”

 

The man thought.  “Not sure I have a template for that.”

 

“No problem.  I’ll lend you one.  Wait a minute!  What the hell am I saying? Who are you and how did you get here?”

 

The man laughed.  “Just like I said.  I would never lie.  I’ve never lied in my life.  That’s one of the  they sent me.”

 

“Who sent you?”

 

“My kind.  I’m from another part of the universe.  You’ve only recently glanced the galaxy at a distance with your new Hubble telescope.  We have a telescope that is a million times more powerful, or so I’ve been told.  I’ve never seen it.  We’ve been watching you for oh, about three million years.  We recorded everything.   Your planet is still very young, but we have recently been having some concerns and it was decided to send an emissary to see if we couldn’t help out a bit.  I am that emissary.  I’ve been traveling in a state of suspended animation for about seventy of your years.  I left about the time you first used the atom bomb.  We knew then things were going to get dicey.”

 

JD glanced at the rock.  It was still hissing but looked to be cooling down.  He looked around and saw a boulder and eased himself down on it.  The man dropped to his haunches, smiling.

 

“So how do you plan to save us?”

 

“Oh, not just me,” said the man.  “Both of us.  We picked you to help.”

 

“I wasn’t even born seventy years ago.”

 

“You were picked long after I left.  The vessel is flown by remote control.  I’m just the passenger.  Hundreds of scientists, philosophers, holy men, engineers, charlatans, writers, mathematicians, professional gamblers, artists, poets, historians, and others have been working on this project.  I’m the least important of them all.”

 

“Why did you pick me?  There’s six billion people on this planet.  I don’t even have a college degree.”

 

“You, sir, are the only man we could find who has the right mixture of intelligence, empathy, trustworthiness, pragmatism, flexibility, open-mindedness, righteous anger, love, and courage.  We had a formula for it.   It’s way over my head, though I’ve seen the formula.  They checked it for three years, over a thousand times, just to make sure, and every time, you came up.  Every time.  That, my friend, is not chance.  That is destiny.”

 

 JD sat on the rock.  He wished he still smoked and drank. 

 

“Where do you plan to stay tonight?” he asked at length.  “I have a couch, but I also have a dog who’s not particularly keen on strangers.”

 

The man smiled again.  “Oh, this isn’t what I really look like.  I actually don’t take up much room.  Would you like to see what I look like, but in my current size?”

 

I need at least a couple of shots of Jack Daniels, thought JD, but he nodded his head slowly.

 

The man fractionalized and turned into slivers of colored light once more, each sliver shimmering like a heat wave on a hot asphalt highway.  When the light reassembled, JD found himself looking at what appeared to be a gigantic, emerald-green brine shrimp, its antennae twitching, the glow of the moon lighting up its internal organs.

 

“What do you think?” said the brine shrimp.  It’s voice had changed, and it sounded like the air to make the sounds was oozing through a layer of mucousy tissue. 

 

“If you had the cowboy hat, you might get by.”

 

“You’re joking!  That’s funny!”  The shrimp held out one of its cartilaginous, crackly arms, upon the end of which was a two-pronged pincer.  JD slowly raised his own arm and shook it, and the arm crackled like a shell on a grasshopper when you crush it.

 

“Nice to meet you, James Denton Driggs.  It is indeed an honor.  My name is Marcellus.  I’m now going to revert to my normal size, and you will not be able to see me, so I would ask you to step back about twenty feet.  We’ve invested way too much in this venture only for you to accidentally step on me.” 

 

JD moved back.

 

Marcellus disappeared.

 

“Can you still hear me?”  JD looked around, backing up carefully. 

 

But there was no answer.