Frankentown (21 page)

Frank saw quite literally beside himself, scrunched under the blanket. His body lied perfectly still, breathing. Intensely.

His vision was not the same.
 

It was suddenly dark, though he retained cat-like vision. All the colors were amplified and the whole house appeared to be cloaked in a pale veil of soft shadows.
He really wanted to get back into himself, but he felt a presence.
It was Chichi, sleeping by his feet curled up and purring. She had never left his side.
But there was also another presence. Someone not yet in the room.
Subconsciously thinking of having to get up for work in the morning, Frank jumped back into himself, and awoke in two seconds.

Chapter Twentyfive

Nice to Meet You

In the time that Frank spent 'getting rid of his radiation poisoning' and smoking pot, he discovered it was the best aid in countering a hangover. He did so and proceeded to eat breakfast while pondering work.

 
The last few years students have been thinning out in favor of 'more practical' disciplines. He only had a few students now, all of whom were promising. He was supposed to have a class, half hour after noon, and surely by then he will be pretty sober and wide awake.

After a bacon sandwich breakfast and a coffee, he headed out to work to grade some papers.

That was at least what he recalled happening.

A Deja Vu. The 'illusion' of having been there was all too real. He had been there. And he had done things differently already. Only he couldn't recall them, but he remembered what had happened to him, the base, and the tall gray figures, towering above him twice as tall as his little self.

So many goddamn aliens.

He must gone through everything he remembered going through, if only because extraterrestrial beings became a certainty in existence. He knew of them for certain. He could describe what they looked like and smelled like. It was his knowledge; for certain. No doubt, but no proof either. Unless he had completely lost his mind and should have been visiting a psychiatrist instead of traveling time. Something was going on, but he couldn't do much more about it than make stupid faces.

Why did they want him to be sent back in time before he was kidnapped by the military into their fancy-pants secret underground research facility? Was this a second chance?
 

And if, what about Chida?

He hasn't seen her since the future.

Well, now that he was back to November, he actually hasn’t seen her since his brother and father disappeared. But that’s a different matter altogether.

He had gotten to thinking that the Oakland event had not actually started happening.

It would happen tonight.

What was the purpose of being sent back?

So now he has to relive all this time?

Given the memory, is his life now shorter by those few weeks?

It was time to take it up with those responsible, and tonight was the night.
Several blocked freeways and a bunch of blocked streets were in his path to the Oakland docks.

There was no quick way to get there.
He didn’t own a helicopter or a jetpack, so he’d have to go on-foot like most others seemed to be.

The downtown area was littered with people, all riddling with anticipation. Some carried signs and others dressed formally to welcome what had promised to be the festival to beat Woodstock, in one of the most dangerous cities in the states.

Taking the train to Oakland seemed like the more rational way to get to there instead of mere walking. When he got out, he walked for quite a bit, following the crowd. People carried signs. Some new, painted with hands that said:

“Welcome to Earth!”

or

“PEACE PLEASE”

That looked old and tattered, probably serving a common purpose back in the whatever mid century decade it protest it came from.

Even though the ticket system was suspended, and people could just walk in, it took him twenty minutes just to get down to the train.

When he finally got down, the trains arrived literally one after another. This made for slower travel, as the trains inched in stations like cars do on a four-thirty freeway, but everyone got there, and for free. Nice move from the transit company, whose trains were otherwise just a nasty experience. The seating upholstery was still the original set back from when the trains were made in the mid-to-late last century. Over four decades of history in those seats made for an interesting specimen of bacteria. It was even suggested that some of the bacteria may have been extraterrestrial.
People in the bay started having various rare diseases, all because they sat down on the Bart train one day and accidentally scratched themselves or inhaled too close to their hand. Literally anything you think of could have been on any of the trains.
On a less ceremonious occasion, the spit, piss and shit that have commonly decorated the stations were not even an item to note. Pure filth.
Hundreds of folks of all sizes and shapes filled every available inch of the train, redefining the number of sardines that fit into a can.
Frank had a lot to do not to go insane and soon regretted ever going onboard. Five warm, strange bodies rubbed up against him, sending him into a panic involuntarily.
No space. No privacy.

Over forty minutes worth of panic attack suppression later, the ride of horror was finally over and they arrived in West Oakland. Now he’d just have to swim through the enormous sea of heads, which must have flocked from all over Bay Area.
 
The only choice from here on out was walking.
He would have to will his way through the mob. This involved the sun going down and people inching closer and closer to where the three bright lights stood high above in the sky.

By the time the sun went completely down,

Frank found himself facing a giant mosh pit. There were so many people that there was literally nowhere farther to go, and no way to go around.

He has to get there.
This was the only thing he was sure of.
He was taken back in time to do something.
But what?
He hunched to tie his untied shoelaces and then started pushing his way through the crowd.
A multicultural rainbow of curse words, almost all of ‘The World Dictionary of Profanities’ was recited throughout the crowd at random, and all aimed at Frank.
Just because people were waiting for the aliens to show up didn’t mean they were having any of this. Somebody said “Some guy, pushing through? Hell no.” Another threatened to pull a gun.
This was the worst of the mosh pits and it didn’t even welcome bodysurfers. A man, in his late 40’s swung an arm at Frank and hit him square in the face. Not pleasant.

Frank’s vision went blurry for a second as he headed for the ground, only there was no space left for him to fall, so he attempted to keep going, but he leaned on a woman who then fell over and took several people with her.

This is no time for chit chat
∴

Lack of patience and overabundance of explosions of senses stood him back up on his feet.
People started moving away from him now.

He was pulled toward the lights up top and everyone got voluntarily out of his way; willing his surroundings into harmoniously allowing him through. He started feeling nauseous, and at the very same time, more empowered.

Floating was not an entirely alien feeling to him. This was much like when he flied the pod back on the base, except lighter. And it was just him. As he went up he attempted maintaining a balance while levitating, but kept straining - even though he didn’t have to. It reminded him of what it was like to learn to ride a bike as a kid.

As he rose higher and higher he looked down at the scene.

There must have been tens of thousands of people.

Tall figures descended from the points of light in the sky at right angles. Like arrows, darting towards the stable cement floor of the Oakland Docks. Colors flew everywhere and the crowd roared and wowed with excitement.
Over the extremely loud crowd afar, Frank could not have heard Al Cohen’s car crashing two miles away on an overhead road, his body smashed into pieces, leaking all over the freeway.

Three more tall figures appeared in the southmost light.
The being closer to the north, toward where the crash was, raised its enormous lanky arms and extended its hands up slowly.

It appeared to be concentrating energy.

The gray held his hands together and grasped at nothing with its shovel-like hands. Its enormous ancient palms, with knuckles enthrobed in the now-wrinkly alien skin that must have had once been smooth and elastic, exploded with light.
 

Its hands, grasped together and pulled in one direction. Simultaneously, the crumpled car and crumbs of Al Cohen lifted off the road and started moving in their general direction.
Telekinesis wasn’t just moving stuff with your mind. It's was a step beyond that. Frank tapped into the energy, and wielded it with his mind as he knew the beings must have, with his mind and hands.
Nobody believed they could move mountains.
So nobody did.

It took about 13 minutes before all of the wreck travelled over and bled many drops on a good deal of the people below. The crowds were ecstatic, but some of those hit with blood and blood hail started screaming and weeping in the worst terror of their lives. It was a religious experience.

 
Judgement day.

“Thousands of people believe this is a miracle. And while that may be just what it is, it certainly isn’t the way some may have expected it to be.”
The news reporters were there to filmed the whole bloody mess, shooting closeups of the bloody hail and bits of poor Al. The crowd’s eyes were not on the TV cameras.

The most bizarre in this apocalyptic theatre was yet to come.
 

The four aliens stood side by side. Al's body was slowly reassembling, parts peeling back onto his body, glowing, melting blood hail returning. His death was being reversed; body part at a time.

To all involved and crowded around the tall beings with arms not unlike spiders in thickness, this was a definite sign of peace. Al came back to life. It was the most disgusting miracle anyone’s seen for an age.
Reversal of death, which the act couldn’t be interpreted anything else as, was about as peaceful a message as the gray could have sent. Something felt quite awkward about it though.

Either it was a sign of peace and good intent, or it was so because they did not want to be responsible for the death of anyone in their outing. One way or another, they did not seem to be there to kill or exterminate. Al’s survival was at the very least their attempt NOT to kill.
A clueless Al Cohen was coming together and regaining consciousness as quickly as he lost it. He wasn’t exactly aware of what had happened. Last memory he had was that of rolling down the freeway, stupidly fast. All he knew was how beautiful it felt going 90+ with absolutely no traffic around. He almost got into a car accident, but he managed to speed ahead, and something bumped on the road. He was speeding further south without a car in sight, fast and easy as the wind; and body-less.
When Al’s body was finally put back together, with all his bits back where they belong, one of the alien creatures gestured in Frank’s direction.
It couldn’t have been at anyone else, unless others have developed the ability of flight.
Then he blinked and stood outside of his car, parked in the Oakland docks with millions of people standing all around.

Now was the time to return to their ships, so the four beings displaced themselves vertically towards the points of light in the sky above.
As they did, Frank went with them almost involuntarily. Perhaps his curiosity would’ve gotten the best of him anyway.

With them, Frank moved up toward the light, growing as he approached closer and closer into a enormous transparent ball, emitting a brilliant glow of a thousand lightbulbs. Then he merged in, and suddenly, he was inside.

It took several minutes to be able to adjust to the extreme brightness around, before he could see anything at all. The strangest of all sensations was no sensation at all. It was as though he had been ripped out of time and space, without being able to tell whether he’d left his body on the ground and floated a disembodied soul or whether he was truly flying.

Frank felt weightless, and weightless he was. His physical shell had transformed into pure energy and he could fly, at will. Then he suddenly felt small, like the head of a sewing pin.
A tiny driver in a big body. An insignificant little guy.

Human eyes were not used to such brightness, nor could they adjust to it in any reasonable amount of time, but he saw everything clearly; all the flowing of energy, grainy noise made of light and any colors his eye compensated with.
Everything had a rhythm, and appeared to glow. Frank started picking up on its pace and could almost start distinguishing his surroundings.
When his eyes finally adjusted and for the first time he could see, he found himself inside the ship. He got up and discovered he could move around. He stumbled down the hall, to the main room of the giant disc, which was hollow from inside. It was an enormous round hall, maybe a few miles across. When Frank started wondering about the number of rooms, he didn’t have to count. The knowledge came to him from the area. Psychokinesis. There were hundred and fourteen ‘rooms’ and several smaller sub-rooms around its circumference. And each of the rooms contained a gray.

While Frank stood in awe, all eyes around him watched him intently. Each gray clung to the its rounded wall-chamber from inside, all looking toward Frank, staring him down, observing. Was this a cruise of some kind?
Frank was really just a dude, nobody in particular; but not a usual guest among these creatures. Never this many at once yet.
His choices started feeling like they were his own a little less. He felt that it was his choice to come this far. He’d mastered the fear of it all entirely. Every single one of the messengers knew it.
He didn’t know it, but his body shivered in agony of an overdose of adrenalin going on a heart attack.

The tallest of the four beings closest to him approached Frank with an adult voice that came from inside Frank’s would-be head. It calmed him.