FAST FOOD

Copyright (c) 2019 by Randall R. Peterson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED This is a work of fiction. All persons, locations and actions are from the author's imagination or have been used in a fictitious manner.

FAST FOOD

By R. Peterson

            I was tired. It was just past 10 PM, and there were still many miles to drive before I got to Cleveland. My eyes hurt and every oncoming car refused to dim their high-beams. That’s the only excuse I can come up with for turning off highway 105 and onto a dirt road. All I wanted was to find a motel with semi-friendly cockroaches no larger than my size twelve shoes, grab a burger and crash for the night. I’d been listening to KNRR FM blasting out golden oldies from a few decades earlier. The drummer for Golden Earring was just edging into a drum solo when the radio-signal became a hurricane of static.

            It was as if I lost thirty seconds. I felt the car begin to slow and the next thing I knew I was making a right turn onto a graveled cow-path. The full moon silhouetted several dark and large shapes moving in a pasture. I prayed they were only cows.

Sure I was happy when the static ended and Rinus Gerritsen began thumping out the base lines to Radar Love but all I could do was beat my fist on the dash and yell “What the #&%$!”

The pounding caused my overflowing ash tray to spill cigarette butts onto the floorboards. I was driving a rental car and I couldn’t remember if the rental contract required the car to be returned in a clean condition as well as un-damaged. Both front tires slammed into a large hole in the cow path and I heard the muffler scrape the ground as we bounced out. The engine wasn’t noisy now, but it was going to be if I didn’t get back on the highway.

 Irrigation ditches ran on both sides of a road barely big enough for one car and I had to keep going to find a place where I could turn around. Five minutes later I found myself following at least three other cars and I still didn’t know where I was going.

Finally one of the ditches veered sharply to the left and the other kept going straight at a place where dozens of cars were stopping. I could see lots of flashing lights just beyond a group of trees and my first thought was some kind of rock concert or other night-time gathering. Most of the colors I could identify … at least two I’d never seen before. How can you describe a color no one has ever seen?

A pretty blonde girl, right out of Woodstock in 1969, wearing a vest and beads, stood with her arm extended pointing to a row where cars were parking and I stopped to ask her where the hell I was.

I rolled down the window, started to speak and then stopped. Something was not right with the girl’s face. She smiled every five seconds like clockwork but her skin and eyes looked like they belonged on a mannequin. She didn’t seem real and I was beginning to wonder if any of this was. I was going to turn around but I noticed at least a dozen cars behind me. One of the cars began honking his horn when I hesitated so I found an empty slot and parked.

-------2-------

I noticed the smell when I opened the car door. Heads shops that sold drug paraphernalia were a big thing when I was in high school. My buddies and I would spend hours looking at pipes, papers and strolling through the dark rooms where black-light posters showed you what glow in the dark colors could do to your mind. But that was many years and a life left behind.

Smoking pots of what smelled like vanilla incense lined both sides of a path that led into the trees. The smell was strong and at first I tried to cover my mouth and then I wondered why. I followed dozens of others walking toward the brilliant lights. Nobody was talking. Suddenly I was high and I hadn’t been stoned since my last year in college. Any fear I’d felt when I first turned off the highway evaporated as we came out of the woods into a large clearing. A lovely stream wound through a large grassy area filled with wildflowers and with a glistening pond at one end. I felt good, ready to accept anything … even the large metallic monstrosity that hovered just above the center of the subdued and gaping crowd.

-------3-------

I didn’t realize I was looking at a UFO … not at first. The massive forty-foot wide hunk of rusted metal hovering just above the water looked like the lid off from an oversized pressure cooker, the kind my mother used to can beans in when I was a kid. The elevator-sized glass cylinders on top could have been vent pipes and pressure regulators. Two concentric rows of openings covered the bottom of the craft and flames sputtered and crackled from some of them like the exhaust on a car with bad spark plugs. A stronger smell overpowered the vanilla incense and the closest I can come to describing it was the smell of coal oil being burned in a poor neighbors’ house when I was a kid. If this was an alien craft, their technology left much to be desired.

I was dazed and obedient. My eyes saw things that my brain refused to register. It was as if my mind was being controlled by someone or something else.

-------3------

A line was forming behind a ramp that led into the bottom of the craft. If I could have ran I would have. My conscious brain was working, but my subconscious the part of your mind that makes you walk, talk, run and scream was not. Two creatures right out of a B grade horror movie stood next to the stream and several looped cables dangling from the bottom of the craft.

The closest I can come to describing the aliens was that they were vaguely similar to bovines in their appearance. The creatures stood on two legs and where a cow’s hoofs would have appeared on their upper arms … flattened ovals of malleable flesh conformed like tools to any desired shape.

One of the creatures expertly stripped the clothes off a middle aged woman standing at the front of the line with what looked like a curved bone with razor blades attached to one side. The other alien laid her head across a tree stump and decapitated her with one quick motion of a similar but much larger weapon. This was all done in complete silence but I heard her scream in my mind.

When I was in Junior High School we took a field trip to a butcher shop. Seeing an animal butchered was bad … seeing a human butchered by animals is even worse. The first alien attached the poor woman’s legs to a cable loop and her headless and naked torso was hoisted into the air. The cut from her crotch to the upper part of her chest was clean and efficient. With several quick movements the intestines and other organs spilled into the water. A blue light glowed and a door opened in the bottom of the craft. Suddenly I could suddenly see my breath. It was like artic air had invaded our summer night. One hundred and twenty pounds of meat was hoisted into a sub-zero compartment in the ship and then the door closed and a new cable descended.

What I was seeing was a butcher’s assembly line for carnivorous aliens with a taste for human flesh. Inside my body I was screaming but I watched dozens of humans being butchered without making a sound. My only movement, other than blinking my eyes, was to take two steps forward each time the line shortened.

-------4-------

I can’t say how many humans were in the line ahead of me … I would have to guess dozens. The stream running through a meadow of wildflowers was a frothing dark crimson with various floating organs glowing under the moonlight by the time I reached the front of the line.

My life was over and I was about to be put in cold storage to be eaten at a later date and I was powerless to do anything about it. It was there at what appeared to be the end of my life that I suddenly saw everything clearly. An almost opaque lens had been removed from my eyes and I could look at the world as it really is, not as how I perceive it to be.

For the first time I understood people as if we were actually brothers and sisters. When you truly know people you neither hate nor revere them. The fact that we are not alone in the universe, that we are mere food to some species, brings us together.

I don’t mean to say that I wasn’t afraid. We all fear the unknown. The interstellar food-chain must be very large indeed. That these creatures used some sort of aromatic substance to render us humans all incapable of resistance showed a high level of technology but the rusty and battered craft that they arrived on this world in would make even the dorkiest disciple of science fiction dump his Cheetos on the floor.

-------5-------

The first creature reached out to me with his bone knife intending to remove my clothes when another light went on. This time it was one of the new colors I can’t describe. The second creature shrugged what for him passed as shoulders and they began to gather up equipment. The hippy chick who had been directing cars to park scurried past me and up the ramp as if she had wheels for feet. She did. Just before she disappeared into the bottom of the craft her clothing fell away and I could tell she was a robot. The smoking pots of incense were stuck to her frame as if magnetized.  She was no more than a rusty collection of rods and gears attached to a remote control device that allowed her to become a coat hanger for 1960’s apparel.

We were forgotten. The aliens didn’t even glance at me or the half dozen people in line behind. This was all just a fast food stop on a cosmic highway. Evidently the freezers were full and the travelers were leaving.

-------6-------

When the fuming pots of incense disappeared into the craft I began to get feeling back in my arms and legs but the sensation was slow in coming. Not so with others. With a rumble, a hot air blast, and a smell like dozens of badly tuned semi-trucks starting up in a truck stop parking lot at the same time the rusty space ship lifted into the air.

Blistering hear from a dozen engines turned several of the people in line behind me into charcoal statues. I was send flying backward through the air where I landed in the pond at the other side of the clearing.

When I crawled out of the water minutes later the spaceship was gone. I wasn’t the only survivor. I heard at least two human vehicles start up and race down the dirt path toward the highway.

I was too sick to walk and must have passed out walking back to the rental car. I don’t remember the cops or the ambulance arriving.

-------7-------

This is at least the fourth time I’ve told the story, not exactly the same each time as you’ve pointed out, but my mind isn’t exactly working properly. I doubt that it ever will. I know you don’t believe me. The smiles of the officers standing behind you in the interrogation room are a dead give-away. We’ve been here for hours.

 I wonder if you really went to get a drink from the vending machine or you’re consulting with the other officers about what to do with me. A mental hospital? I don’t know if I can handle that.

I’ve decided that when you return I’ll tell you something that you can believe … something to put an end to the endless questions … and hopefully to my nightmare. There has to be a plausible reason for the stream filled with bloody intestines … and all the missing people and the abandoned cars. I really need a drink.

I’m so sorry. My mind is returning to what passes for normal ….

There was a small army of armed Muslim terrorists in an old rusty school bus. I think they were ISIS! They detoured dozens of cars off the highway. They were burning, butchering and gutting infidels in the name of their god Allah.

It was lucky … that I escaped.

 No, I didn’t get a license number ….

THE END ?