Emily Devenport: The Long Ride

“You know there’s something wrong with them.”

“Yeah, so? What am I supposed to do about it?” He tossed his shirt onto a chair and sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Kill them.” She sat facing him, cross-legged, her nipples pressing against the cotton. She knew that he knew she was trying to manipulate him, but she also knew that he liked it.

“I beat up that greaser and his friends for you,” he said. “What have you ever done for me? ”

“Aren’t you scared of them?”

“Not the way you are. They just make me a little sick.” He pulled his undershirt off and kicked off his shoes. “They paid me fair and square. Why should I kill them?”

“They have something in their heads!” she insisted.

He shook his head. “You keep saying that. What are you talking about? You think that the Creepers from that Vincent Price movie crawled up their spines and sank into their spinal cords?”

The mental image made Elayne shiver.

“They’re going to do something bad—to the world,” she said.

He laughed at her. “I was only kidding about monsters from space. What makes you think I’m one of those movie heroes? I’ve done a few bank jobs in my time, and lately I find it pretty easy to sell grass for a living. How do you think I met Kal and Ross?”

“You wouldn’t be able to pull off bank jobs in nineteen ninety-two,” she said. “They have video cameras.”

Terry lay back on the bed with his arms behind his head and smiled at her. “Nineteen ninety-two,” he said. “When women dress like men and wear Mickey Mouse watches.”

“You believe me, then?”

“Sure,” he said. “And thanks for reminding me about the watch. Hand it over.”

Elayne put her hand over the watch, leaning away from him. “Why? Why do you have to have it?”

He made a grab for her hand, but she pulled away and seized the hem of her gown first, pulling it up over her head. She was kneeling on the bed with her legs apart, her breasts practically in his face, the gown tangled around her wrists. “Please, Terry, don’t take the watch. My dad gave it to me when I was sixteen, please don’t take it.”

He put his hands on her breasts and cupped them, sliding his thumbs over her nipples. “Say please again,” he said.

“Please!”

His hands slid down her waist and over her hips. “I like the way you argue, Elayne,” he said, and slipped two fingers between her legs, up inside her. There was no pain this time. She tossed the gown away and leaned over him, put her mouth on his nipples and began to suck. He groaned. “Put your hand there —yeah. Oh yeah, baby, that’s right. Say please again.”

“Please, Terry, please —”

“All right, sweetheart. All right.”

In the morning, he had a new suit for himself and a new dress for her, a blue one this time with a vee neckline, but otherwise the same as the other dress. “It’s your style,” he said, and grinned as she put it on.

But she could hardly talk. Her throat felt dry, and she couldn’t eat breakfast, though he tried to tempt her, and Kal and Ross had disappeared again.

This time, when they appeared in the back seat of the Chevy, she wasn’t surprised. Ross was now nearly twice as big as Kal; his jumpsuit was strained to its limit. Elayne put her mouth next to Terry’s ear and said, “You’ve got to kill them.”

He shook his head. “I thought about it, but—it’s that little black box. It does things—”

“What’s that?” shrilled Ross.

“Love talk,” said Terry.

Elayne tried once again to get comfortable with her back to the monsters, but she couldn’t. Finally she sank down on the seat with her head in Terry’s lap again. She couldn’t get it out of her mind that the things in their heads wanted into her skull, too.

For a long time, the drive passed in silence.

“You know what’s really sad about your delusion, Elayne?” Kal’s voice finally came from the back seat. “It’s that, in a way, your fears are true. There is something inside our heads, and that something is our brains. Our alien brains. You can’t accept that we’re not Human, and yet you know precisely where we are the most in-Human. Inside our heads.”

“So you admit that you’re not human,” she said wearily. She glanced up at Terry to see what he thought about that, but he had on his poker face.

“Yes, I admit it. Our little black box has been able to fool most people, even our good friend Mr. Cole. But not you, not enough, because you’re a glitch. You’re not in synch with nineteen sixty-two; at least not yet. How are you feeling?”

Elayne tried to answer, but couldn’t.

“Good. We’re getting close.”

“Close to what?” asked Terry.

“You’ll see!” sang Ross.

They drove for another hour or so. Terry stopped for a red light and looked down at Elayne. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever been with,” he told her. She started to smile at him, but Ross’s titter from the back seat made her wince.

“How sweet!” said Ross, his tone perching hideously between malice and genuine sentimentality. Elayne turned her face toward Terry’s leg and began to cry. She cried until her entire body shook with distress.

“We’re close!” Kal told Ross, delightedly, and the wet sound of huge bodies colliding warned Elayne that something was going on in the back seat that she didn’t want to know about.

Finally she just lay there, too exhausted even to shake anymore, her eyes dry and red. She felt the way the rat does when it’s trapped in the cage with the snake, and knows it can’t get out.

“Oh! Oh, Kal!” Ross was squeaking, and the car bumped and slowed as it pulled off the road and onto dirt. Terry put a hand on her head to keep it from hitting the wheel. The car came to a stop, and she heard the back door opening; the sound of heavy feet on rocks, crunching away from the car, and more, “Oh, oh!s” from Ross.

“You better look at this, sweetheart,” said Terry. “Come on. Take a look.”

Elayne sat up and looked. After a moment she said, “Let’s get out. I have to talk to them.”

“If you say so.” Terry opened his door and went around to her side, opening hers too. He helped her out, and the two of them walked over to Kal and Ross, who turned to look at them, triumph burning in the black pits of their eyes.

“Look at it!” gloated Ross. “Your doom.”

Elayne ignored him, addressing Kal instead. “It’s a ship, isn’t it?”

“Our ship,” said Kal, a little more sympathetically than Ross. “There are all sorts of wonderful, useful things inside.”

“How did you lose it?”

“Well,” he scratched his chin and glanced at Ross, his eyes sparkling, “It’s like this. We’re an invasion, as you may have guessed. We’ve traveled a long way and—perhaps you’ve heard about this in science class— we couldn’t exceed the speed of light, or even approach it, so we had to warp space instead.”

“A long, long way!” said Ross, emphatically.

“Yes, and it’s all very tricky,” said Kal. “It’s easy to make, you know, mistakes when you’re trying to get back into normal space and orbit a planet; because, you see, when you warp space, you warp time too.”

“I’m following you so far,” said Elayne, glancing at the deadly, monstrous ship behind them, which was so full of useful things. Like more of the black boxes?

“We meant to arrive in nineteen sixty-two,” said Kal. “And we did. But we also arrived in nineteen ninety-four.”

“Oops!” said Ross.