Closest Encounter (3 page)

“All right,” he said. “You got me. Can I show you my real badge now?”

“Go ahead,” Beth said. “But do it slowly.”

He reached into his back pocket, brought out his wallet, flipped it open for her to see the ID on the inside, holding it toward her for her to read.

She read out loud—“Brad Henry, Special Agent for the Federal Department of Xeno-Cryptology…”

“More than a security guard enough for you, Agent August?”

“I don’t even think Xeno-Cryptology is a real word.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, what can I say? The President watches a lot of TV too.”

He put the wallet back in his pocket.

“Okay,” Beth said. “So if we both work for the government, why all the secrecy? Forget the fact that I’ve never heard of your department, how come you felt the need to pretend to be something else while I checked out the object you clearly already knew more about than me.”

“Not more than you,” he said. “We just knew it was here, and that it had a rather extreme effect on the behavior of some of the locals. But what is it? Where does it come from? That’s a mystery to everyone in my department. Which is maybe why someone thought it would be a good idea to trick you into coming out here and taking a look for yourself. Word is you have a sort of gift for these things.”

“And fucking me on the floor back there? Was that part of someone’s good idea, too?”

“Sorry,” he said, grinning. “I blame the object. That and the fact that you’re so hot.”

“Nice save, Agent Henry. I’d hate for you to attribute it
all
to otherworldly influences.”

“No,” he said. “I am sure I would have eventually acted inappropriately toward you under normal circumstances.”

“You’re sweet,” Beth said, frowning. “But maybe we should get out of here now before this thing has any more undue influence over our actions. I was just thinking about how much I enjoyed your cock a bit ago, which is an odd thing to be thinking about, given what you have just told me.”

“Maybe you should follow that line of reasoning,” Brad said, his hand resting on his belt buckle.

“Or maybe we should get out of this warehouse,” Beth said, “before we both end up as security guards for real.”

He nodded. “Maybe you’re right.”

Chapter Three

They took her government-issued sedan and drove north. North for no particular reason other than it was a right turn and it seemed that the more distance they put between them and the object, the better. She drove, of course. The car was leased to her. Maybe he had his own government car parked somewhere nearby but she did not bother to ask. They just drove north without talking until the roar in her head was a little less and the heat in her blood had simmered to a more manageable boil.

He was the first to speak. “So, Beth,” he said. “Do you have a particular plan? I mean, are we headed somewhere or—?”

“Call me Agent August.”

“What about the floor of the warehouse and all that?”

“I claim false information and undue extraterrestrial influence. And now I know you were lying to me about who you were.”

“Fair enough,” he said, slumping in his seat a little like a dejected boy. “But you can still call me Brad.”

“It remains to be seen what I will be calling you,” she said.

His frown deepened.

“I thought we had something,” he said, almost to himself.

“We do have something. We have a strange object that apparently makes people so horny they forget their job.”

“Something more than that, I meant.”

“A strange object that makes people horny would seem like enough, Agent Henry.”

By now they were at least five miles from the warehouse and other considerations began creeping their way back into her professional mind. Where
were
they going? And what should be done with the object? Upon more clear-headed consideration, leaving it unguarded in an abandoned warehouse in the middle of a city seemed, at best, ill-advised.

She also considered Brad, studying him out of the corner of her eye. It wasn’t just extraterrestrial influence. He was exactly the sort of guy she preferred—handsome, well-built and with a brain that knew how to use the tools nature had been kind enough to give him. It didn’t hurt any that they were in the same line of work. How much easier would it be to chatter over post-coital breakfasts with someone who also knew that the universe was enormous, well populated and always leaving its toys around? The most recent and closest thing she’d had to a boyfriend had ended because of secrets—and they had all been hers. Classified secrets.

She pulled the car to a curb and killed the engine. The street they were on was tree lined, with nice houses set at respectable distances from each other. It seemed a place as far away from a warehouse containing an unknown object of unfathomable aphrodisiacal properties as she could imagine. What could happen on these well-manicured lawns, behind these double-paned windows and winterized walls? She imagined families watching television shows, eating their suppers off plates balanced on their laps in front of the TV. Did they know that they did not inhabit this universe alone? That there were myriad passionate creatures living and dying around them, not just above them in space, but in dimensions they could not access, right beside them now on their floral-patterned couches…

As Beth had told Brad in the warehouse, she had seen plenty.

As they sat silently in the car in the shadow of a tree, a couple walked toward them on the sidewalk. A young man and woman, both in their early twenties, attractive, normal enough-looking. They were holding hands. Beth was almost about to mutter something mildly cynical about young love when the couple stopped, leaned against a tree about thirty feet away and began kissing. The kissing quickly escalated, with the man’s hand sliding under the woman’s shirt, the woman’s hands sliding into the man’s pants, their hips grinding against each other in a distinctively urgent fashion.

“Hm,” she said, glancing over at Brad, who was also studying the couple, a look that was something like concern creeping into his face.

“That seems rather…bold,” he said. “Out in the open like that…”

On cue, the young woman by the tree tore open the young man’s pants to reveal an impressively raging hard-on.

“Just a little,” Beth said.

She looked around to see if anyone else in the neighborhood had noticed this rather amorous display. And someone had. Directly across the street the mailman had dropped his bag of mail and was furiously stroking his cock.

“Spring is in the air,” Brad said quietly, even a little grimly—as grimly as anyone can say a thing like ’spring is in the air’.

“Spring is never this much in the air. This is the object’s doing.”

“That’d be my guess, but from five miles away? And so far you and I haven’t jumped into the back seat. How are you feeling?”

“Oh, I could fuck,” she said, “but it’s not so overwhelming now that I can’t do my job first. How about you?”

“I could fuck too,” he said.

She waited. She nudged him on with the raising of an eyebrow.

He continued, “And that other stuff too. The doing my job stuff. Like you said…”

“Good dog,” she said.

The young couple was flat out fucking in the yard now, and the mailman had squirted his load halfway across the street and looked like he might be considering having another go at it.

Brad said. “Maybe I better call my boss.”

“I’ll call mine, too, “she said, pulling out her phone, opening the car door and stepping outside for privacy.

“Careful out there,” he said.

She thought he was joking and was about to throw some line back, but the look on his face showed that he meant it, so she just nodded, stepped out of the car, closed the door and called the governor.

It was not normal for a Special Agent of the Department of Ufology to call the governor directly, but Beth August was a bit more special than most Special Agents. She had gone to college with the governor, had held her hair a couple of times after some late-night pub crawling sessions had gotten out of hand and had served on the governor’s security detail before the Department of Ufology had been created. The governor trusted her, not just with her life, but with something even harder to trust someone with—her secrets.

While she listened to the phone ring on the other end, Beth found herself walking toward the young couple still fucking in the yard several houses down. They did not stop or even slow down. And slowing down might have been advisable—if only for variety’s sake. Beth preferred it when the man alternated the rhythm of his pumping a little. It was no good to start out in fifth gear and stay there until someone crossed the finish line.

What the hell?
Forget about sex for now.
There is big stuff happening. Big alien stuff.

She was close enough to the couple now to see the impressive length of the young man’s cock as it pulled mostly out of the young woman’s neatly trimmed, well enflamed and glistening pussy before plunging back inside again.

Big alien stuff
. Beth licked her lips.

The girl on the lawn looked over, met Beth’s gaze straight on and pulled the young man deeper inside her with her hands gripping his ass, nails digging in.

The governor finally answered. She sounded breathless.

“Sorry, Elizabeth,” the governor said. “I was on the treadmill.”

“It’s good to stay in shape,” Beth muttered, as the young woman on the lawn—now less than twenty feet away—turned over onto all fours, raising her ass invitingly in the air as she rested on her elbows in the grass and continued to look Beth in the eye. The young man, for his part, seemed fully oblivious to anything that was not his cock and where his cock was and what his cock was doing.

“Uh…yeah,” the governor said. “Are you okay, Elizabeth? You sound a little off.”

“I
am
a little off,” Beth said. “This object you sent me to investigate. It’s unlike anything we’ve dealt with before. I’m not sure what it is, exactly. It seems more xeno-organic than a spaceship. And it has certain…properties…”

“Properties?”

“Powers.”

“Powers?”

“It gives off a distinct…energy. And so help me, Alice, if you say ‘energy’…”

“Well, you’re not exactly giving me a bunch of information at once here, Elizabeth. Properties, powers, energy… You wouldn’t care to give me anything more specific—or at least a couple of complete sentences in a row.”

“About an hour ago I think the object’s energy sort of caused me and the security guard at the warehouse to fuck each other’s brains out on the floor. And then I had some sort of transcendental, trans-dimensional orgasm just by touching the object itself—like I was part of some ancient alien psyche. And now, a little more than five miles away from the thing, I’m watching a couple fucking in the yard of a quiet, little upscale neighborhood while the mailman goes for his second jerk-off session across the street. Also, I’m pretty sure at least a couple of the resident housewives are peeking out of their curtains right now and having a fervent go at their own nether regions, even as we speak. So there’s that. Is all that specific enough for you, Governor?”

“Oh,” the governor said. “
That
kind of energy.”

“Yep. That kind.”

“You fucked the security guard?”

“A little. Yeah.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, he’s not so bad.” She glanced back at the car. “Sweet, actually. And turns out he’s a little bit more than a security guard. Not to be classist or anything—”

The girl in the yard interrupted the conversation with a particularly loud moan.

“What was that?” the governor asked.

“More influence,” she said vaguely.

“Do you think it’s dangerous, Beth?”

“I don’t think it’s going to do anything to improve the mail service around here, I can tell you that much.”

The young man in the yard was thrusting at full steam into the young woman, his hands slipping on the sweat of her hips, his animal grunts mixing with the slapping of wet flesh. The young woman, still smiling at Beth, moaned loudly then screamed, her hand reaching between her legs to rub her clitoris with blurring fingers as the young man finished and collapsed in the grass, rolling over onto his back and laughing at the sky, as his glistening penis deflated in the sun.

“Is that the couple in the yard again?” the governor asked on the other end of the line.

A middle-aged man came out of the house whose yard it was. He was maybe fifty or so, but a well-maintained fifty—neat gray hair, chiseled good looks and a firm body. He was opening his shirt, exposing a well-defined chest lightly coated with snowy white hair. The young woman lay back in the grass, spread her legs wide and beckoned to him with the classic gesture of curling one finger toward her.

“Yeah,” Beth said. “I think things could get out of hand here pretty quick. You might want to send in the National Guard or something. You don’t happen to have a eunuch brigade on hand, do you?”

“Maybe I ought to call someone at the federal level.”

“Oh yeah,” Beth said. “I think someone might already be taking care of that. When I said that the security guard I fucked was a little more than a security guard, it was because he is actually an undercover Federal Agent—from something called the Department of Xeno-Cryptology…”

“God damn it, Elizabeth! You don’t think you could have led with that? What are they even doing there? This is my jurisdiction. I need to be told about this sort of thing…”

“Sorry, Your Governorship,” Beth said. “I blame undue alien influence. But the point is… Call someone. Call whoever you need to. I’m going to try to do whatever I can at this end to get the object a little farther away from any population centers, which will probably entail me renting a flatbed truck if you find yourself wondering about some strange charges.”

“Whatever it takes, Elizabeth,” the governor said. “Just be careful.”

“I’m on the pill.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass. And seriously… Be careful.”

“I’ll do what I can, Alice,” she said.

She had just hung up the phone when she heard the honk of a car horn behind her. She turned to see that Brad had slid into the driver’s seat and was beckoning her with an urgent gesture. As she moved closer, she noticed that two men were fucking against the trunk of the car, knocking it up and down on its shocks, while in her peripheral, Beth could just make out some activity from a nearby house. She glanced over to see a woman of sixty or so, wearing an apron and nothing else and carrying a rather impressively shaped summer squash. As sixty-year-old women wearing nothing but aprons and holding rudely shaped vegetables went, she was not bad.