Nowhere (7 page)

              “It’s just a package that can’t be delivered because the sender had a crummy printer with no ink. It’s a bunch of chicken scratch on the label. I’m surprised it even got this far.”

              “Those lines and dashes, the stuff you think is chicken scratch from a busted printer, its really something else. Some kind of message.” Steven said in a husky whisper. “Look again, it’s really an alien language.”

              Richard pulled the box back off of the shelf and looked once more at the label.

              “Its the language of a race of beings that is superior in intelligence than we are. We need a common grouping of symbols in order to make sense of anything. We pick up on patterns and can learn the letters of our language, but what if we could read in a language that seemed chaotic, yet still made sense. It would be a language without patterns or learnable symbols, yet with our superior intellect, we could decipher any and all meaning from it.”

              “You’re saying these random lines and fragmented letters are actually a message? I don’t buy it. It looks like a faded label to me.”

              The vertical smudge lines may look random, but they actually contain the name that the package is for, and the letters are only smudged and faded where they were meant to be smudged and faded. To these aliens, this tells a location.”

              Steven paused and Richard saw him light up a cigarette in the darkness.

              “What if I told you that at every stop, this package gets pulled off the belt and put in a room like this, but somehow it arrives at the next leg of the shipment a few days later undeterred.”

              “And that would mean what exactly?”

              “They know how to get past these check points, they must have someone working on the inside. Now someone who is trying to help us has marked this particular package and we need to have a look see inside to find out what is so important.”

              “I… can’t it’s… I’ll lose my job Steven, you know that. How about you just take it, make it disappear.” Richard pleaded. “I don’t want to be involved with this anymore, I’m trying to move past this and just… normalize.”

              “NORMALIZE!! Are you serious right now?! Aliens are taking over the world and you just want to normalize! That quack put you on estrogen pills or something? You should kick yourself in the balls for saying crap like that. It’s time to cowboy up Rich, It’s time to take back the US of A from these piss ant, mother lovinoids before it’s too late. Now open the package Rich!!”

              Richard turned back to the counter and saw a box cutter in a pencil jar. He set the box down and looked once more at the white label. There did seem to be something to the large streak marks that went vertically across the label, and the random fading of letters was somewhat odd, because parts of the label were printed very dark which would be somewhat inconsistent with a printer that was low on ink.

              He looked back at Steven who merely stood there in the shadows smoking, waiting for Richard to take action against the lovinoids or whatever he had called them. He was sweating across the brow, and took his coat off to perhaps get a bit more comfortable.

              Then he took the box cutter in his right hand, and with his left he held the box. He sliced the box open across the white label. He cut either end so that no tape from the bottom was still attached to any tape along the lid flaps. Then he pulled open the box…

              It was an old turn dial hand radio, like the kind his dad had had out in his workshop when Richard was a kid, complete with orange dial stick to tell what station you were on, and a telescoping chrome antenna that swiveled from the back. There was no cord, only a compartment on the back to place a few D batteries. Richard opened the small compartment and saw that the radio had batteries in it already.

He spun it back around and flipped the switch to on. Instantly the radio came on and started singing some old tune from the seventies.

“You hear that?” Steven asked.

“Yea, its called music, it comes from radios.” Richard said sarcastically. He was still more than a bit nervous about being caught tampering with a package.

“No, not the music… the sounds behind the music.” Steven said while the glowing embers at the end of his lit cigarette bounced about his shadowy mouth.

Richard listened and at first he heard nothing, but then suddenly it was like his ears gained passage to some underlying level of hearing that wasn’t there before, and he began hearing short clicks and pops within the signal. There was also the sound of static, but even the static seemed to ebb and flow with rhythmic pulses that seemed to form some strange pattern.

“What does it mean?” Richard asked with his ear now up to the radio.

“Heck if I know.” Steven said. “It’s just gibberish to us, its an energy signal, a language of some sort maybe. It’s what creates their cloaking though. It’s what makes them appear human to everyone else.”

“How… how long have they been here?”

              “Maybe months, maybe years, who knows.” Steven said. “Whichever the case they seem well established…” He snubbed his cigarette to the wall and dropped it to the floor. “What station is it set to?”

              “101 it looks like…”

              “Huh, remember that, it’ll be important. Good, now smash it and make sure there’s nothing else hidden inside.”

              “Smash?! What! You want me to smash…”

              “Richard! What are you doing in here?” Victor asked as he surprised Richard at the door. “Why are you here? Are you still clocked in? It’s really gonna look bad if you’re trying to get more time on the clock by hanging around back…. What the?! Are you seriously opening packages?!”

              “I… I just…”

              “You’re done McPhrey, done! Don’t come back to work, you’re fired! I can’t believe this… this lunacy! God man, what is wrong with you?”

              “Who were they Victor?!”

              “What?” Victor asked with intense, angry eyes. “Who were who?”

              “Those men, the ones in the suits that came in after me, the ones that were waiting for me to finish with you this morning, what did they want?”

              “What?! There were no men…there was nobody there. You’re seeing things, making stuff up. You’re out of your mind!”

              Richard looked back at the corner behind the storage shelves, but Steven was gone. He must have slipped out the back door undetected as soon as he saw Victor walk in. He looked back at Victor, who looked disgusted and heartbroken all at once, then he looked at the box with the alien writing on the label, and finally he looked down at the small radio he held in between his hands.

“Awwww Yeah!!!” The radio said. “Wild Man Mike Lightning here jammin’ out the hits of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, all day, everyday on K101 The Hits!”

              In one violent outburst, Richard ferociously heaved the small radio down onto the concrete floor of the warehouse. It smashed open into dozens of little pieces that flew in every direction across the ground.

              Victor stood there in silent shock, his mouth agape and eyes staring big at the crazy man before him.

              Richard stomped a larger section under his foot so that it too broke up into smaller bits. Then he dropped to all fours and began crawling around on the ground examining pieces, looking for anything noteworthy.

              Victor, clearly frightened and disturbed by what he had just witnessed finally spoke up in a shaky voice that cracked like a nervous teenager. “I don’t know what that was…, but you clearly need a lot of help Rich. I want you out of here immediately, you hear me Richard, I am calling the cops now.”

              Richard stood up from the floor, and without saying anything, he put on his coat and left out the same back door that Steven had exited through moments before.

              He jogged, half sneaking, thinking that Steven would be there waiting to hear what additional information he might have found, but Steven was long gone. By the time he made it back up to the main street, he could already hear sirens approaching. He lifted his hood up over his head and merely walked away trying to blend in with the morning crowd.

              He went up and away from the sirens, then made the block so that he could backtrack and perhaps get his car. When he got a clear vantage point, however, he knew that couldn’t be achieved. There were two police units in the parking lot of the warehouse. One had parked in front of the office, the officer most likely inside taking a report of the incident. The other had parked behind his car and the officer was out looking for his VIN though the windshield of Richard’s sedan.

              Richard decided that he would wait it out and come back for his car during the warehouses off hours. For now, he walked to the nearest bus stop and took the metro home. When he got there however, he saw that there was a unit in front of his apartment also, so he decided to go to the only other place he could think of to hideout and lay low as Steven called it. He stayed on the bus and rode it to the next stop which was closer to Dr. Hays’ office. He hoped that the doctor was in.

              “Richard!?” Doctor Hays said, surprised as Richard walked into his office. There was a woman sitting on the couch who looked as though Richard’s intrusion had seriously affected her train of thought. Richard put his hands up passively trying to express his apologies.

              “I’m sorry, It’s an emergen…”

              “Richard, you can’t be in here right now. I’m with another client. You cannot intrude on another client’s session!” Then turning back to the small framed blonde woman, he said, “I’m really so sorry, this has never happened.”

              “I know I’ll wait, I’ll wait outside.”

              He went back out into the foyer. The entire clinic looked like the inside of an old courthouse or legal office. It had wide hallways that all lead back to the main foyer. The floor was a dark grey tile with a white bull tile pattern that wrapped around the edge. The walls were painted slate grey and the doors were trimmed with a dark walnut wood trim. It was the fancy molding with grooves. Each door had etched glass that gave the name and profession of the various doctors that contributed as part of the clinic.

              Richard sat on the green cushioned bench that was just down the hall from Doctor Hays’ office. He waited for what felt like forever. All the bus riding had eaten away at the day and it was now three in the afternoon. Richard was both exhausted and starving. He got up and went to find a vending machine.

              “Excuse me Ma’am, do you know where there is a vending machine near by?” Richard asked the front desk clerk. She looked about 70ish and Richard pictured her being a recently retired nurse who was trying to squeeze in a little bit more of a nest egg before really retiring.

              “Take a left down the other hall and you’ll see it on your right hand side about halfway down Sweetie.” She said with a smile. Richard didn’t feel too flattered about being called Sweetie, she looked like the type that called everyone sweetie.

              “Thank you so much.” Richard said as he gave her his best Sweetie smile.

              He found the vending machines just as Grandma had described. The only problem was there didn’t appear to be anything within his price range. He fished around in his pockets and only produced a dollar. He could by any one of three different types of chewing gum for sixty cents, but other than that, the cheapest thing was a small bag of Cheese-its for a dollar twenty five. He walked back to Grandma.

              “Uh, excuse me again…” She put down the small paperback novel she was reading. It had a pink cover and looked like a sappy romance to Richard. She smiled at him. “You don’t happen to have a quarter that I can have do you? The machines all take more than what I’ve got in cash.”

              “Oh shoot, no I’m sorry Sweetie I don’t.” Her charm seemed to fade a little now that he was trying to bum money from her. “You may try having a look see around the vending room. Sometimes there is left over change.”

              “Ok, thanks.”

              “Anytime Sir.”

              As he walked back toward the vending room, Richard was somewhat saddened by the fact that he was now Sir and not Sweetie because he tried bumming money.

              He looked on the countertop, then the change receptacles of every machine, then he went through every drawer, but found nothing. Finally he got down to the floor and peered under each machine. Finally under the automated machine that spun with overpriced sandwiches and vacuum sealed salads to go, he thought he spotted a quarter covered in dust.

              He reached for it, but couldn’t grasp it. He stood up and took his jacket off and then rolled up the sleeve of his shirt. He got back down and eyeballed his objective once more before plunging his arm back into the dusty darkness under the sandwich machine. He had no idea how close he was to it now, but somehow it was escaping him. He pulled his arm out to look again and could see that his entire arm was covered in thick dust.

              “What the heck are you doing?” Doctor Hays asked as he suddenly was at the door.