Time Control Read online

  “But you went to the dentist on vacation?”

  “Yeah. What happened, we were in the back seat, me and my sister and brother? Every time my dad got gas we’d stock up on candy from the little mini mart … I was chewing a wad of gummy bears, and I feel this empty pocket in my tooth. A filling came out.”

  “Oh,” she said. “So you didn’t wait until you got back home?”

  “I wanted to but my mom got nervous. She found someone in Albuquerque. He took care of it, though like I said, I didn’t feel great the day after. A few times we had to pull over. I leaned out the door and let it fly, which wasn’t the worst thing. The car smelled bad after, though.”

  “That’s … all pretty interesting,” Cathy said.

  “What? … Now you’re going to spend all night on the internet? …Searching for Can something happen at the dentist that can give you superpowers?”

  “Pretty much, yes.”

  Pike said, “You’re a piece of work, you know that? Come here.”

  Chapter 10 Sections

  Pike normally shut his phone off when he went to bed, but tonight he left it on because he needed it for the alarm.

  His friend Mac’s dad owned a moving company in town, in fact the only one. Sometimes he could use extra guys. It wasn’t the careful, more skilled moving work that the full-time guys were doing, it was repetitive grunt work, such as carrying 500 cases of Diet Coke out of a storeroom onto the truck, for who knew what reason.

  Mac’s dad was generous, paid them 20 bucks an hour, which was always nice for a Sunday.

  So Pike was pretty pissed off when the phone buzzed and woke him up at 3 in the morning.

  It was Cathy. The message read:

  Honey you need to check this out. The fifth one from the bottom. Thinking of you! -C

  There was a website link.

  Pike wanted badly to turn over and go back to sleep, but now of course that wouldn’t work.

  He flicked on a lamp, went over to his desk and sat down.

  The website had UFO Archeology in the title, whatever the heck that meant.

  Pike scrolled around for a minute before he went to the posting that Cathy unfortunately decided required waking him up. What it seemed to be, it was a place where regular people told stories about UFOs.

  There were sections:

  Abductions

  Sightings

  Unexplained Phenomena

  2nd-Hand Stories

  Pike thinking, What a total bunch of crap. I got up for THIS?

  Out of obligation, he went to the page that Cathy sent him. It was under 2nd-Hand Stories. Evidently there wasn’t much organization to the pages. People (all of them doofuses Pike was sure) wrote up their silly ‘experiences’ and they were posted in the order they came in, with the most recent one on top.

  That top one was a woman rambling on about how before her mother died, the mother tells her there was a UFO in the backyard. The woman goes back there and a patio chair is on its side that wasn’t that way yesterday, which confirms it.

  Jee-miny Christmas.

  Pike scrolled to the fifth one from the bottom.

  He didn’t know what to think after reading it the first time, so he read it twice more.

  There was a heading: Aliens Messed With My Brother’s Teeth

  The rest of it read:

  My brother Billy got his teeth messed with by a alien. Then he got super strong. He could snap a 2 buh 4 in half if he wanted. FOR REAL. This stuff’s happening, don’t let nobody tell you it isn’t.

  There was a small registration tag: longhaultrucker56

  Pike stared at the screen for long time.

  What a crock? Right? … Except he was pretty damn positive HE could march into Home Depot and snap a 2 x 4 down the middle too.

  He texted Cathy and told her he read it, the whole thing sounded off the deep end, but just to satisfy her he’d try to message the long haul trucker guy at some point.

  Cathy’s text came right back: I already have.

  Pike texted: U serious??? Not OK crazy dude knows who U are!

  Cathy replied: I don’t care.

  Chapter 11 Say Who

  On Sunday after helping Mac’s dad for eight hours, this time moving a financial planning company from one strip mall to a slightly better located one, Pike was relaxing in the bathtub.

  His mom knocked on the door. “PK, are you alive in there? Cathy’s here.”

  Pike didn’t expect this. He was going to call her later. She never came over without telling him first.

  He put on some sweats and they went down in the basement. Pike’s dad had half-finished it off a long time ago but never went any further. There was a couch and a TV, and a stack of old magazines, and books on a high shelf.

  Once in a while when there was too much chaos upstairs, Pike would come down here and grab a book at random. Most of them were pretty bad and he’d give up quick, but there was one about a guy who trades places with another guy in a different state, more to it than that, but they switch identities, and Pike was captivated by that one and read it cover to cover.

  Cathy said, “I’m jumping around for a moment … But did you get tired out today, helping Mac? I mean the soaking in the tub and such?”

  Pike stuck his hands out and pushed down, meaning we need to keep this conversation quiet.

  “I know where you’re going,” he said. “And I did … I do …get worn out … Not exactly the same as when I was normal, but yep.” He was whispering at the end.

  Cathy nodded. “Reggie Riley got back to me,” she said.

  “Say who?”

  “The man who posted about his brother. He was eager to talk about it.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Pike said. “Well first of all … where is he? … at?”

  “He drives a truck, back and forth across the country. I’m not sure honestly where he home base might be.”

  Pike said, “Well where’s the brother then? The one who got the special alien treatment.”

  “Billy … He died in Afghanistan,” Cathy said.

  Pike let that hang. “How long ago?”

  “Not sure. But he was in the Marines.”

  “Sheez … Did the guy … say anything else? … I mean, just one day, his brother woke up … and he was all of a sudden super strong? … Or what?”

  “Seemed like it,” Cathy said. “Reggie said his brother only told a few people … He was afraid he might get studied by the government, or something similar, if word got around.”

  “Okay, now we’re going in the Twilight Zone here,” Pike said.

  But at the same time he remembered a movie he once saw about a lab worker who goes invisible from an industrial accident. In the movie, the government WAS trying to track him down, in fact that was most of the story, the guy dodging ‘em.

  Cathy said, “He also said … there could be situations, where his friends that knew, they might not be completely safe.”

  Pike thinking, See, this is one of the things I was worried about. I still am.

  Cathy slid herself onto his lap.

  Pike said, “All right. First thing, you got some crazy trucker conversing with you now … What’s he gonna think, you contacting him like that? … On the other part … I don’t know what to say.”

  She looked up at him and smiled, “You don’t need to say anything. It’s not an issue.”

  “It’s not? … Well, what about the first part?”

  “I told him I’m contacting him on behalf of my husband,” she said.

  “Oh,” Pike said.

  Chapter 12 Recliner

  Manhattan Beach, California

  September 26, 2016

  Mitch Corrigan exited the ocean a little early this morning. He’d caught maybe five good waves, so it wasn’t a total waste. But his knee was bothering him, it hurt every time he stood up, which in surfing you had to do frequently and fast.

  There was
a reality that he slowly but surely was dealing with, that he was a senior citizen now. Not an old man exactly, still pretty vibrant and fit, and he still did his regular run down to Redondo and back, three afternoons a week along the paved trail, the Strand, which extended along the edge of the sand.

  Still, being able to buy a lifetime pass to the national parks now for a measly 10 bucks, one of perks of having turned 62, was a wake-up call. Melinda encouraged him to pick up a pass. She still had a couple years to go. Mitch kind of felt she was rubbing it in, but time marched on, which he supposed he needed to accept, though it was tough, having been a lifelong athlete.

  He carried his board up Manhattan Beach Boulevard and stopped in at Peet’s Coffee. There were regulars that knew him and it was a friendly scene. There were sections of the LA Times laying around and he skimmed the main news but zeroed in on the sports section.

  He always gave it about a half hour, and then headed back to the apartment. They lived only a block-and-a-half away, across Ardmore and then up the hill on the left. It was a one-bedroom, not much to it, kind of shabby, with plenty of street noise, but it was affordable in this insane south bay housing market. And you could walk to the dang beach.

  What they did actually, they had a little house in Pahrump, Nevada, the high desert. They got in at the right time, bought it for cash, and now rotated between there and the MB apartment. Depending on weather, ocean conditions, and whatever other factors they liked to bring into it.

  Life was pretty good. Melinda had her friends and her set activities and a couple classes that she took, and his day was pretty much his.

  The one thing she nagged him about was his website. She contended that he was putting entirely too much time and energy into it, and that he should at least be getting paid SOMETHING for his 7-day-a-week effort.

  It wasn’t that they urgently needed the money, since they had enough retirement income to be comfortable, though they couldn’t of course live it up like The Ritz. But for Melinda it was the principle of the thing.

  The not-getting-paid part didn’t bother Mitch at all. It had turned out to be one of the most rewarding things he’d done, and he poured himself into it every morning when got back to the apartment.

  He’d seen a UFO, he was pretty damn sure, when he was 20 years old and had a summer job working in a medical lab in Reno, when one night they had him drive something to another lab in Las Vegas. Somewhere in between, on the old two-lane US 95, he saw a glowing object hovering over the ridge to the east, maybe 10 miles away. He pulled over and fished out his camera to take a picture, but by the time he did all that the thing was gone.

  For several years afterward he didn’t give it too much thought, even wondering if maybe his mind had played tricks on him. But then he started hearing rumors about a place called Area 51, and the weird things that might be going on there, and which was located in the vicinity of where he’d been driving through the Nevada high desert that night.

  And he became a UFO junkie.

  And it was no accident, really, that he convinced Melinda to buy the house in Pahrump, which didn’t have a lot to recommend it except it was peaceful and right there on the edge of things.

  There were a ton of YouTube channels now that featured UFO videos, only a small portion of them real, Mitch decided, but a portion was good enough, and he enjoyed clicking around on the channels and he had his favorites.

  But he liked the way his own site was set up and had no plans to change anything. A few basic categories was all you needed, and it was essentially a throw-mud-at-the-wall-and-let-it-stick approach. Readers often told him they liked the random format, since you never knew what you were going to find on there at any given hour.

  People wrote in with their stories from around the world, or sometimes called in, and then Mitch would take notes and transcribe them. What appealed to him was the simplicity of ordinary people telling ordinary stories, except that sometimes something supernatural was involved.

  Even the fake stories, Mitch felt, had merit. Someone had to invent the story, after all, no matter how far out there it might be, and why not simply leave it to the readers to judge what was real and what wasn’t? If anything, the fake stories helped the real ones jump out.

  So he worked on the site much of the day, and sometimes at night too when he couldn’t sleep. When they were in Pahrump, he’d often sit out on the back patio with his laptop and fiddle with his site and frequently check the sky. There were enough local lights to sometimes interfere with optimum sky viewing, but you never knew.

  Today, like most days, Melinda was gone when he got back to the apartment in Manhattan Beach. He took a nice hot shower, getting rid of all the salt and sand, put on some loose clothes and sandals, and started getting organized. He always checked the answering machine first. His was old-school—the physical machine with the cassette tapes and the flashing red light.

  There were three messages. One from someone with an Indian accent saying they saw something outside of Vancouver and giving a few details. The second from a lady in Iowa, saying she thought there was a fighter jet chasing something unusual over their trailer park. The third from a young-sounding guy saying it was important and to please call him.

  Anyhow, he’d get to all that a little later. The good thing about his office set-up, in the corner of the living room, was that the recliner was only a few feet away, and he could head over there and take a little snooze whenever he felt like it.

  Chapter 13 Extra Buzz

  There was more of a buzz at school on Monday than normal, since this Friday was a showdown game against Walker Union. Hamilton and Walker were tied for first place in the league standings, and the winner of this game would be in good position to make the sectional playoffs, since the remainder of the regular season schedule was somewhat weak.

  Hamilton hadn’t made the sectionals in six years, and Pike was well aware that he was having a lot to do with this unexpected uptick.

  There was a guilt part to the whole thing as well, that it wasn’t really HIM doing anything out there, it was just happening. He felt kind of like a robot taking care of his job. More than once it entered his head: Should he stop this charade and quit the sport?

  But today he had something bigger on his mind. The digging around that Cathy had done, and the Reggie-guy truck driver with the brother and all that nonsense.

  This was all too friggin’ bizarre. And he’d bet anything the guy was making it all up. Every word of it.

  Except … An alien messing with his brother’s teeth? And the brother, Billy, suddenly getting strong, real strong … Like ME.

  Before he left for school this morning, Pike went back on that website. At the bottom, in small type, was the contact information for the Administrator.

  He clicked on it, and it took you to a page with a photo of some old guy, where it said you can email in your stories (the preferred method) or call them in if you need to. There was a phone number.

  Pike thought about it for five minutes while he devoured a bowl of Cheerios and dialed the number. There was a scratchy message on the other end, that we can’t take your call right now but it’s important to us and we’ll return it. Pike left his callback and email and went to school.

  Mid-afternoon he was on his locker room bench getting ready for practice, Marty Clarke on one side of him and Amos Stillman on the other, when his phone rings.

  “Hello, name’s Mitch from the UFO Archeology site,” the caller said. “Can I help you?”

  “Oh,” Pike said, getting up. “Oh yeah … I appreciate you getting back to me … Except right now’s not the best time, exactly.”

  “That’s fair enough … It there a better time? Or how about you give me the gist of it, 20 words or less.” The man seemed friendly enough, and he laughed.

  Pike walked to back of the locker room and pushed open a side door and stepped outside. “Okay in a nutshell,” he said, “you ever hear anything … this is going to
sound strange … but anything about someone … sort of changing … after going to the dentist?”

  “Ah,” Mitch said.

  “I mean,” Pike continued, “I’ll tell you right now, no way I believe in this UFO shit … but there was something about a guy and his brother and teeth … the alien part was a bunch of hogwash, but you ever hear anything else? Along these lines?”

  “This is quite interesting,” Mitch said. “And I thank you for inquiring. This type of open dialogue is what we’re frankly all about.”

  Oh boy. “Well, I have to go,” Pike said.

  Mitch said, “What I’ll do then, I’ll research your concern. And I will get back to you.”

  “Not really a concern,” Pike said. “More like a question.”

  “Understood,” Mitch said, and clicked off.

  Pike finished suiting up for practice, thinking what the heck did I just do.

  Ten minutes later they were on the field, preparing for the Walker Union game, and, at least for the time being, he was able to put the whole shebang on the back burner, and have some fun.

  ***

  Driving home from practice, there was a Cal Trans road crew working a small patch of asphalt on Elm Street. They had bright, portable lights set up, and there was a flagman.

  Pike knew the spot. There was a nasty pothole there, and it had gotten worse the last couple days. He edged forward toward the flagman until he we was next in line.

  There was another hardhat guy standing there with a clipboard, behind and off to the left of the flagman, and meanwhile a two-ton truck full of asphalt was backing up. Pike assumed the hardhat guy was aware of the truck, and he assumed the flagman was aware of the guy, but you never knew.

  Plus he could see that the hardhat guy had earbuds on, and like an idiot he was facing away from the truck, and he really might not know it was backing up toward him.