Closest Encounter (5 page)

“Hey,” she said and Brad turned suddenly, as if the sound of her voice had been as startling as a gunshot. “Let’s pull over at the next hotel you see. We’re not going to make this in one shot and I don’t think crashing this thing into a ditch will be doing the world any favors.”

“Uh-huh,” Brad said.

She frowned. “You know, Brad, I sincerely hope I don’t find you to be a complete bore absent any xeno-cryptological influences.”

“What? No. I just… Driving trucks is fucking hard!”

“Fair enough,” she said. “So pull over next chance you get and I’ll take my turn behind the wheel in the morning.”

He nodded enthusiastically and said, “First chance I get.” Then he rolled down the window and slapped his face three or four times.

Thankfully, they found a sign for a motel a few miles later.

Chapter Seven

They parked the truck in the farthest corner of the motel parking lot. This seemed an almost absurdly feeble precaution given the effects the object had had previously on the inhabitants of a neighborhood five miles away, but there was nothing else to be done about it. They were tired. And anyway, the influence of the object seemed to be on the wane. She currently was no hornier than she might have been on any spring day at the right time of the month and after a couple of glasses of wine. This was perfectly manageable.

There was a moment at the front desk where she considered saving the government a little money by having her and Brad share a room, but the returning logical portion of her brain vetoed that. They got separate rooms several doors apart from each other.

Brad looked disappointed. It was possible that the same unprofessional idea had crossed his mind as well.

The motel itself was nothing that would inspire romantic aspirations on its own. There were cobwebs sagging in the corners of the lobby and the manager who gave them their respective room keys smelled strongly of Old Spice and cough medicine. He was a small and sweaty man with a T-shirt that may have started out white several years ago but had been made something less so by years of bad water and off-brand detergent. There was something both weak-willed and infinitely sleazy about the man, and the fact that he did not have one hand shoved down his pants when they entered the lobby struck Beth as further evidence that whatever strange powers the object in the truck might possess, they were currently dormant.

Good. We could all use a little sleep.

She left Brad at the door of his room and entered her own. Inside it smelled of a certain cheap dampness, but the mattress seemed more or less acceptable and the bathtub was clean and long enough to stretch out in. She started the water for a bath. All H, no C.

There was a knock at the door. She answered to find Brad standing there. He had a bottle of wine in his hand.

“We’re off duty, right?” he said.

“Sort of. That wasn’t in the glove compartment.”

“I bought it off the manager. I’m actually surprised it didn’t come in a carton.”

She stood back to let him in. It had not been her plan, but a glass of wine didn’t sound half bad. Also she was pleased to realize that even without the obvious influence of alien forces, she rather liked Brad’s company. For a second, she studied his face. Strong and handsome, she knew, but now, with the benefit of a clearer mind, there was something else appealing that she found in it. It was a kind face.

“Cups?” he asked. “Or a couple of straws. Or we could just take turns.”

She found a couple of paper cups in the bathroom, unwrapped them and placed them on the nightstand next to the alarm clock flashing twelve. She sat at the edge of the bed. Brad filled the cups and sat next to her.

“Just a glass of wine,” she clarified.

“Believe me, that’s all I have the energy for anyway. This truck driving business is thirsty work.”

They toasted with their paper cups and sipped the wine. He made a face.

“Not great.”

“Yeah, well I didn’t take the manager for a closet sommelier.”

But they sipped again.

“It’s actually quite bad,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said.

They sipped again.

“I think your bath is full.”

And it was. She got up and turned it off.

When she returned, Brad was standing by the door. A mixture of disappointment and relief shot through her. It would have been nice, she thought, to do something normal-ish on a bed with him. It would have been even nicer, right then, to just lie in each other’s arms for an evening and fall asleep like that. But who knew what sort of thing might trigger the sphere’s effects again? Maybe it could read sexual energy as well as project it. Maybe both their dreams together would shift it into overdrive. It’s not like it came with a manual—or even an off switch.

It was possible that a similar thought process was taking place inside Brad’s head as well. “Probably smarter if I head back to my own room now,” he said.

“Sure. I guess it wouldn’t hurt to be smarter for a little while.”

He lingered for another moment, then opened the door. “Enjoy your bath,” he said and was gone.

Beth sighed, undressed. Before she got in the tub, she called the governor to give her an update. It didn’t take long—there were not a lot of details to their plan. They had a truck and a place to drive it to. They had made a good enough amount of miles on the first day and things had normalized a bit, at least for the time being. The governor took a little convincing on this last part but eventually she was swayed by the fact that Beth had booked a room to herself.

“So what do you do now?” the governor asked.

“Now I take a bath and go to sleep,” Beth said, and the fact that she did not tell the governor that she was at that moment sitting naked on the edge of the bath as she talked to her was further evidence that things had settled down. There had been, after all, that one night in college…

“I won’t keep you from it then, Elizabeth,” the governor said and Beth grunted something like goodbye.

She set the phone on the edge of the sink and slipped into the hot waters of the bath. Almost unbearably hot, just the way she liked it. A hot bath was exactly what she needed. She closed her eyes, leaned back, resting her head against the edge of the tub as her hair fanned out in the water around her, tickling at the sides of her breasts that rose from the waters like perfect twin flesh islands. She half opened her eyes. Her nipples were rock hard. She let the palm of one hand graze over the top of one breast before sliding down the firm, curving line of her body, settling finally upon the mound between her legs. She slipped her finger absently between her pussy lips but, though it felt amazingly good there, she took it no further. She was suddenly impossibly tired. Her eyes closed in earnest. The motel bathroom dissolved around her.

* * * *

When she opened her eyes again, she was no longer in the tub but lying naked upon a hill beneath a turquoise sky streaked with elongated emerald green clouds. The hill was covered with a purple, moss-like plant that was softer than any mattress she had ever known. She sat up. In the distance were spiraling trees of a different, paler shade of purple than the moss, and beyond that, a calm black sea.

Clearly this was a dream
.
But in thinking this, and thinking it so clearly, it seemed somehow less like a dream than anything she had ever known. It felt, in fact, less like a dream than the motel bathtub that she presumed she was still sleeping in. And the more she thought of it, the more a hotel or a truck or a governor or someone named Brad seemed impossibly unlikely. The purple hill she was on—that was real. The feel of soft moss beneath her, the warmth of the sunless turquoise sky on her face. How could anything else have ever existed beyond this place at this moment?

She rose to her feet with hardly any effort, as if she were made of some lighter material—and even this, after she was standing and had taken several steps, seemed to be the way she had always moved, always walked, always felt.

A soft breeze scented by some sweet, flowering spice she could not name blew gently against her skin as she moved down the hill toward the still black sea. And as she moved, she grew lighter and lighter, until she was barely touching the soft, mossy ground beneath her. She hovered just above it, feeling its tickle against her heels as she moved faster and faster toward the dark shore.

It was like flying, but a flying that did not quite leave the earth—or, rather, did not leave the surface of whatever planet this was. As she moved closer to the black ocean, it seemed less still than before, with ebony waves crashing against gray sands in explosions of ivory foam. It was not long before she was at the edge of this sea, standing on a shore where the purple moss had given way to the fine gray sand.

The black waves that crashed here were less black than they had appeared from a distance. Not a solid color but a shimmering, oily hue made of a myriad of tiny living organisms, writhing in a liquid that could barely contain them. Some of the creatures were no larger than a speck of dust, others the size of sea urchins, and still others seemed to stretch out with barely visible tentacles just touching the wet sand or stretching out in the other direction to a point far out to sea.

The living waves reached her feet, overlapped them, climbing lightly up her calves before being pulled back by whatever tidal forces ruled these alien waters.

Beth looked out across the now-roiling black sea—stirred it seemed by her presence more than by any other force—and she wondered if she was still Beth at all. She did not feel that she was.

She raised a hand in front of her and was not surprised to find that it was not a hand at all, but the gentle, tapering tip of something more mobile and delicate. Nearly translucent, it pulsed with a liquid that was more shadow than blood. She looked down at the rest of her new body—her graceful curves and multitudinous limbs. She floated above the sand without indent, leaving it to drift out across the living waters, until the shore was a distant thing behind her.

In her center, suspended within her ethereal self, was a black spherical object, wavering like a stone beneath swift currents. She knew it now as her heart, her soul, her mind, and a part of her dimly still remembered a similar object in a warehouse an infinite distance and time away.

From the sea beneath her emerged something long and lithe. A pulsing and undulating thing that she recognized first by its want. It entwined itself into her appendages—circling, weaving, confusing itself among her parts. It felt warm, but not in any way in which she had ever experienced warmth before. It was a heat of thought as much as sensation. It was a heat of intention.

It continued insistently, its tip, like a glowing ember now, searching its way through the forest maze of her limbs, finding, at last, some opening to her that she had not known about until it was breached.

The thing was inside her now and the feeling of it was like an impossible sweetness exploding inside her brain. But not that either. It was like every orgasm she had ever had folding in on itself to become a white hot point of light. But not that either. It was like…

The bathwater had grown cold around her.

The strange world was gone and, with it, all thoughts that she was anything else but Beth August, Special Agent for the Department of Ufology.

She opened the tub drain with her toe and got out of the bath, drying herself with a towel that was every bit as soft as a car floor mat.

She went to bed naked, lay upon the covers, masturbated herself to a few orgasms that could not help but pale against the memory of her dream of some place far away and long ago.

She was almost asleep when the thought of Brad’s face crept into her mind. Just his face. Nothing else. It made her smile.

Chapter Eight

She woke to the knocking at the door.

“Rise and shine. You’ve had your time,” she heard Brad saying on the other side.

She squinted at the crack of light between the closed curtains.

“What time is it?”

“After eight.”

“Shit,” she said. “Give me a second to throw on some clothes.”

“If you must,” he said and she felt herself smile, thinking again about their time together on the warehouse floor. It had been fleeting enough, and inappropriate enough, and easily chalked up to otherworldly forces, but, despite all that, the thought of it pleased her now as she knew it would please her in the future.

“I’m pretty sure I must. Go bring the truck around. It’ll give you the chance to figure out first gear.”

She found yesterday’s clothes and put them on. They would probably have to stop at some point to buy something clean to wear. At least panties. Hers, she felt, had been damp more often than not in the last couple of days. And who knew what was going on in Brad’s pants.

The truck was just pulling up when she exited the motel room management office, bill paid and receipts neatly saved for the expense report she would need to file when all this was done.

Though
pulling up
may have been too kind a phrase to describe Brad’s handling of the semi. Whatever he seemed to have learned about driving it yesterday, he had forgotten again today.

She climbed into the passenger seat. Brad gassed the engine a couple times, shifted into something that may or may not have been first gear and promptly stalled the vehicle with a violent jerk.

Fewer than a dozen tries later and they were on the road. Beth had some memory of promising to take her turn behind the wheel but did not feel particularly inclined to bring it up now. The whole process looked a little difficult and she had never driven anything larger than a pickup truck.

Once he had got the truck into its highest gear, Brad was loath to stop or slow down, lest he have to go through the whole grinding and rattling process again. Beth was grateful for that on two fronts—one, it was the only truck they had, so it would be best if the clutch were not completely shot before they got to where they were going. And two, every time the truck shuddered under Brad’s amateurish gear shifting efforts, it did something to her inside. It was like sitting on the tip of the world’s largest vibrator, which wasn’t so bad really, but was bound to be frustrating unless Brad eventually learned to shift gears perfectly or not at all. Second to third had been particularly stirring for her, and she had clutched the handle by the window and bit her lower lip while the truck trembled epically beneath her.