A Scream in the Heartland
The sleepers awaken
Trevor stepped from between tall rows of corn and onto a dirt road. A group of people was looking up at the sky. They exchanged occasional comments in the oppressive July heat, but Trevor had trouble making out what they were saying. They sounded muffled and inarticulate, like they were talking in their sleep.
Mrs. Peterson was nearest. She had her hand up to shield her eyes against the cloudless sky even though she wore a visor with a translucent green brim that angled down over her face. A few steps ahead, her husband was in a much similar pose, shielding his eyes with one hand, while in the other he held a pair of sturdy binoculars at chest level, as if he’d been halfway through raising or lowering them when he’d forgotten what he was doing.
Strewn up the road in twos and threes was another half dozen or so neighbors, all gazing west. Almost all of them were in their forties or fifties and losing family acres to big-time buyers. Most of their kids had gone off to college and never come back, leaving the high school dropouts like Trevor to help their folks around the farm.
Hanging with the old-timers today — and Christ, wasn’t this just what he needed! — was Lucy, who had dropped out a few months before he had. She had her back to him as she too gazed west. She was wearing a summer dress of the rancid orange they only sell at Wal-Mart. A dark sweat stain ran from between her shoulder blades down to her buttcrack.
Trevor winced and looked away.
All these people, but no cars. No, wait, there was Devon Beecham’s blue pick-up parked at a slant half in the ditch, looking dangerously close to that point beyond which you can’t back out without a buddy to get out and push. The driver’s door was open and a faint ding . . . ding . . . could be heard coming from inside the cab, telling someone, anyone, to shut the goddamn door!
But Trevor didn’t see Beecham, who had graduated but never left the area, among those present. At least, he didn’t see the telltale Judas Priest T-shirt proclaiming such Hallmark sentiments as Hell Bent for Leather or Ram It Down.
“What y’all lookin’ at?” Trevor asked, coming to stand next to Mrs. P.
Her husband turned around. He was wearing an uneasy expression somewhere between can’t-sit-still excitement and fuck-I’m-rattled-shitless fear. He still had the binoculars held out in front of him. Trevor wished he’d put them down.
“We just saw them,” Mr. P said. He jabbed a knobby brown finger at the sky and pointed west. For a moment, Trevor just looked at the hand, like a dog, too stupid to look where the finger’s pointing, just looks at the finger that points, then shook his head, wondered what the hell that had been about, and looked west.
Nothing. A featureless wall of sky.
“They’ll be back,” Mrs. P said, slowly trailing off on the last word as if it were the last word of her last breath on earth.
Trevor felt a small hand slide into his and jumped. What the hell? Looking down, he saw — and Jesus, as if Lucy herself wasn’t enough! — Lucy’s brat, looking up at him. She had a sucker jammed in her mouth, causing one cheek to bulge. It clicked across her teeth as she lolled it from one side to the other.
“They don’t care if we see them now,” she said, “’cause we already woke up.”
“Who?” he asked, freeing his hand.
She didn’t answer. She pulled out her sucker and thrust its red, wet head at him. “You want a lollipop?”
“No, thanks.”
Everyone was still standing around with open mouths and googly eyes, like the dopeheads you saw on their front porches at night and behind the fry line during the day. He wondered if whatever his neighbors had caught he hadn’t caught as well. His thoughts felt slippery. Like they were sliding around something. Something vital. Something big.
He looked at the sky. It felt good to stand there like that with his hand over his eyes, looking west, just waiting . . .
Waiting for what? Jesus, what was the matter with him? He jerked his hand down, but kept examining the sky. Nothing. He blinked hard. Still nothing. With an effort, he turned around to face east and a buzz washed through his head so hard it hurt. A scream lodged in his throat, a nightmare scream, the kind that can’t be held down but won’t come out either.
Lucy’s brat had seen it, too. Her eyes were wide and her mouth was open, trying to get that scream out, but failing.
A giant object was in the eastern sky, but it was more like a hole than an actual object. Through a rhomboid opening in the flat, blue atmosphere, Trevor could see the interior of what looked like a hangar for . . . spaceships, he guessed. Spaceships was the only word that came to him, even though who knew where the hell this thing had come from. He couldn’t see the exterior — only the inside — as if it were camouflaged somehow.
“UFOs,” Lucy’s brat scraped through her contracted throat. “We saw UFOs.”
No shit, Trevor thought. Only he didn’t think the Petersons and the others had seen the hangar. Something told him this thing didn’t move, it stayed. Only you couldn’t see it unless the door was open, like it was now. He looked away, hoping the buzz would stop, but it didn’t. He felt like his reception was fucked up. Mr. and Mrs. P and the others were standing just as they had been, looking the opposite direction with their hands over their eyes. In fact, they were all in exactly the same position now, and silent, like statues in some bizarre roadside attraction. Mr. P’s binoculars lay in the gravel at his feet. Trevor looked at Lucy’s brat. Her chin had dropped to her chest and her eyes were closed. She looked asleep.
What was wrong with everybody? What was wrong with him? He suddenly wondered how long he had been standing there looking at everyone. Moments? Minutes? Shit, it felt more like hours. He looked back up at the . . . mothership, to see several smaller craft, white milk-carton shapes with flat black windows like photos of missing children, emerge from the bay. The foremost had dropped down over the corn and was coming toward them.
Despite a signal running through his body ordering him to DON’T MOVE STAY RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE, Trevor turned and ran in the opposite direction. Before he had reached the edge of the road, however, he stopped, cowboy boots grinding to a halt.
Lucy’s brat.
He ran back and threw the girl over his shoulder. Hell, she was his brat, too, and she could be sweet when she wanted. Seconds later, he was back in the corn, running as fast as he could.
Sorry, Lucy, he thought. But I can’t carry two. He thought of her standing back in the road with the others in her ten-dollar dress, waiting for whatever it was that had rounded them up to come and collect them. He was sorry about a lot of things.
The corn leaves ripped at his arms as he ran south. He was in a small field between the road and the Steadman place, where he worked. The aging couple paid him $20 an hour to ride the John Deere in circles around their trees without scraping the bark. Scrape the bark and by God you were in for it. He’d been headed there when he stumbled upon the gathering back in the road — but suddenly he wasn’t so sure about that. Maybe he had come from there. He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember at all. What would he have been doing wandering in the fields anyway? Didn’t people usually use trucks to get from one place to another?
He could see the attic of the farmhouse over the corn. Lucy’s brat — Ramsey — was limp, one small fist clutching her lollipop. How many licks would it take to get to the center? He saw an owl in his mind’s eye. Mr. Owl. That was a commercial from his childhood. For Tootsie Pops. I don’t fuckin’ know kid, Trevor thought, but I feel pretty close to the center of something.
A fresh buzz washed through him — THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU JUST DID NO RUNNING IN THE HALLS — and the world went black. He stumbled on. He’d be damned if he’d let those fuckers — whoever or whatever they were — get him. His vision returned, wavered, and blackened again. He banged the funny bone in his knee against something and his stomach went queasy like it does when some joker in the locker room thwacks you in the balls with his towel. He stopped to let the feeling pass and the blackness retreated to the corners of his vision.
The unnatural buzz remained.
He looked to see what he’d hit and saw it was one of the milk-carton pods, landed right there in the field not more than 50 yards from the farmhouse. The corn stalks were pushed down flat, but not in a nice spiral like in photos of crop circles. It looked like this baby had crashed ’n’ burned. Corn ears, stalks, husks and clumps of silk were strewn everywhere, many of them charred. A few were still raising fingers of blue smoke. That scream was climbing up through his throat again, because where there was a pod there was bound to be a driver.
A door — more like a hatch — was raised DeLorean-style in the side of the small shuttle. The windows were tinted black the way the police would nail you for, so Trevor couldn’t see in. A tinny sound came from inside: ding . . . ding . . .
Ramsey appeared to be waking up, so Trevor set her down, and, telling her to stay close, walked around to look in the pod. It was about the size of an ambulance but was sleeker in form. The interior was plush and roomy, good leg- and headroom. There were two reclining bucket seats, with something like a joystick between them, and a control panel with buttons and lights where Ford would have put a wheel. One light a color he couldn’t quite name flashed every time he heard the door signal. One of the seats was covered in blue goo like an enormous hard candy had been left out in the heat too long. He thought he saw something like clothes submerged in the mess.
Something had died there.
Trevor grimaced and leaned in further to look in the back.
“Fuck!” he yelled, jerking back and hitting his head on the door-hatch. Someone was back there. But when The Thing From Beyond didn’t come out and get him, he leaned in again for a better look.
It was Beecham. And he was dead. His hands were bound in a white chord that came out of a socket in the wall and wrapped around his wrists. He was leaning forward with his head against the back of the right front seat. His neck was bent at an angle that couldn’t mean anything good and blood was running from his mouth and stretching towards his feet in a particularly icky lugie. His T-shirt read “Metal Gods Are Back!” on the front. From what Trevor could see, the shirt appeared to bear a list of concert cities and dates.
Priest. Live. What else?
Another white cord extended from the opposite wall, its cuffs lying empty on the seat. They were bloody, as if someone had, at the expense of some skin, pulled his hands through them.
Trevor looked at his hands. They were abraded.
So it was me, he thought. I freed myself. And then what? Attacked the driver? Killed it?
He thought so. But he couldn’t remember.
The buzz went up a notch and Trevor staggered back into the light. It was like someone sticking a vibrator between the two hemispheres of his brain — his brain cheeks. That’s what it felt like. Someone sliding a big honkin’ jiggling dildo between his brain cheeks. GOOD BOYS GO TO HEAVEN, it said. THE MEEK SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH. But underneath there was another sound, one that sounded like his collection of locust shells had sliding around in their toothpick box when he was a kid: dry and restless.
He looked back towards the mothership to see the first pod pulling to a stop over the corn about a dozen rows over from where he and Ramsey were. Behind it, a couple more were coming out of the hangar and dropping down over the country houses. One appeared to be heading for the gathering he had just left. The terror welled up again and his vision began to darken. He felt his muscles lock up, but a voice broke his paralysis.
“I don’t wanna go with them,” Ramsey said.
Trevor knelt and placed his hands on her shoulders. He could see the shuttle hovering behind her. It had completely stopped now and he heard a click as the hatch began to lift. Ding . . .
“I don’t wanna go back to sleep.”
Sleep. That was the second time she had talked about sleep, and he didn’t think she was talking about normal sleep. He thought she was talking about the way the Petersons were back there looking west, about the way everyone had calmly walked out there and gathered in the road, about the way he’d been wandering through the corn . . . and probably about a lot more. If that mothership or wormhole or whatever it was didn’t move and was always there, then maybe they were always asleep, every day of their lives.
Sleepwalkers.
“Me neither, baby. Now hold on tight.” Trevor lifted her in his arms and started running. As he dove back into the corn, he looked back. A chinny, healthy-looking man dressed as a male nurse appeared from inside the pod and stood there in mid-air. He spotted them and flashed a white smile. A sandy-blonde curl flipped over his forehead and he brushed it aside.
The buzz was coming in waves now: STAY IN YOUR SEATS KEEP YOUR HANDS TO YOURSELF CEASE AND DESIST
Trevor thought that last one was good. This whole ordeal felt like a police action. They had all been asleep and for some reason woken up. Now it was time to corral them back into their pens.
OK PEOPLE VOTE CLEAN YOUR PLATE PUT YOUR HANDS AGAINST THE WALL PUT YOUR HAND OVER YOUR HEART HOLD STILL THIS COULD STING A LITTLE
Trevor looked back again. The male nurse was running towards them through the air like there was an invisible sidewalk over the corn. Trevor guessed it was the shoes — white, generic sneakers — or, more specifically, whatever the sneakers were hiding. Space boots? Antigravity feet? Tentacles?
He didn’t want to know.
SAY YOUR PRAYERS SIDE EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE DROWSINESS DIZZINESS AND NAUSEA SAVE TIME GO ONLINE DON’T LET THIS AFFECT YOUR CREDIT RATING
They came out of the corn and into the Steadmans’ back yard. The clothes on the Mrs.’s clothesline were rising and falling in a breeze that had picked up. The sky to the west had that evil look that might mean twisters. The Steadmans’ dog, Scurry, was sitting at the end of his leash, looking choked and drowsy. Mrs. Steadman stood next to a basket of clothes with her hand over her eyes, looking west.
Trevor heard a rustle in the corn behind him. Looking over the tassels, he couldn’t see the nurse. Apparently their pursuer was on the ground now.
Saving juice in your magic boots, you prick? Trevor thought.
DON’T TALK WITH YOUR MOUTH FULL DON’T TALK BACK DON’T GIMME THAT LOOK BETTER NOT COME HOME LATE OR I’LL BREAK BOTH YOUR LEGS YOU LITTLE SHIT
Trevor ran around the corner of the garage to the driveway, where the Steadmans kept their automobiles: the ’87 Chevy Celeb, the new Grand Cherokee their son had made them buy, and the nameless rusty pickup. He would have preferred to take the jeep and give the aliens a good run for their money, but the keys would be somewhere in the house and there wasn’t enough time to get them, whereas the keys to the truck were always tucked under the sun visor so the farmhands could use the vehicle whenever they needed. At the moment, an old air conditioner was in the truck bed. Weigh us down, Trevor thought. But there was no time to remove it.
He opened the driver’s side. Ramsey climbed in and scooched over to the passenger seat. She was strapping herself in as Trevor slid behind the wheel, yanked down the keys, and jammed the starter key in the ignition. He was sure the truck wouldn’t start. Everyone knows from TV that cars don’t work around aliens. You’re out driving in the country at night and your car stops and gray forms come out of the darkness and take you away to stick a metal rod up your penis.
SIT STILL DON’T SQUIRM DON’T MAKE THIS ANY HARDER THAN IT ALREADY IS
The truck started without a hitch.
WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING MISTER
Trevor looked over at Ramsey and put a hand on her head and smiled. “I love you, honey.”
“I know, Daddy. Mommy always told me you did. Did you love Mommy?”
From the corner of his eye, Trevor saw the creep from the interstellar ER come around the garage. He was walking at a businesslike pace now, for all the world like a real doctor or nurse just going about his rounds. He held a long white stick with a metallic button on the tip.
“Yes, I did,” Trevor said. “She was a special person.”
Trevor slammed on the gas and whipped the wheel as he backed out. There was a thump and a bump as they hit something. Trevor hoped he knew what. He shifted into drive and the pickup jumped forward. In the rearview mirror he saw the male nurse pushing himself up from the dust of the driveway.
NOW YOU’VE DONE IT SAY YOU’RE SORRY
How did I kill the one in the pod? Trevor wondered. Then he remembered. Strangulation. He’d used the white cord of his handcuffs. Couldn’t do that now.
OR I’LL GIVE YOU SOMETHING TO BE SORRY ABOUT
The engine died and the vehicle rolled to a stop.
The nurse approached.
No! Trevor shouted inside his head. His body wasn’t cooperating again. He felt bile rise up and realized this little window of lucidity he had been granted — by God or whatever other power allowed the world to be the way it was — was about to close.
Ramsey’s body slumped in her seat. Out for good this time.
Trevor fumbled at the door handle, but his fingers didn’t have the strength or the coordination and slipped off. He fell back in his seat and moved his eyes to look out the window at the nurse standing on the other side, blonde hair feathered back from a Hollywood-handsome face. Blue eyes. Double chin. Hair a little mussed. Tread mark across one cheek.
Oh, please, Trevor prayed. Ohpleaseohpleaseohplease. Oh please keep your disguise.
For memories were slowly coming to the surface, bringing with them intimations of what his captors really looked like, and he’d seen them, oh yes, from within the vats, from atop the operating tables, and he didn’t want to see them again, didn’t think he could handle it.
Oh please keep your disguise.
But the alien didn’t, and that scream that had been trying to get out ever since Trevor had seen that hole in the sky finally found its way out into the heartland.
© 2021 J.P. Williams
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