Brian Keene - Tequila's Sunrise

Getting the job done was something Kaine took very seriously. That was why he sat here tonight, listening to Neil Diamond while the rain beat upon the roof of his non-descript sedan. Sitting on a quiet suburban street in Idaho. Sitting outside the home of Sylvia Burns, a woman who, like thousands of young, unwed, or divorced mothers before her, was burdened by evil.

A blinding flash burst silently above the house like a miniature sunrise. Kaine glanced at the dashboard clock. 12:47 a.m . Right on schedule. Then the clock flashed zeros as ‘Sweet Caroline’ dissolved into static. Outside, the streetlights dimmed, plunging the housing development into darkness. Kaine knew from experience that the neighbors would sleep undisturbed throughout the occurrence.

A ball of light appeared, soaring down from the sky and hovering just off the ground. A ramp descended and six diminutive figures walked out of the sphere. They approached Sylvia’s bedroom window, and vanished into the house. After a few minutes, they reappeared, carrying a comatose Sylvia between them. The gray-skinned beings disappeared into the craft. The ramp began to recede.

Pausing only to smooth his tie, Kaine crept through the darkness, clutching an unregistered semiautomatic pistol in one hand, and a black briefcase in the other. Swiftly, he leapt onto the platform. The figures had retreated into the depths of the vessel. Kaine shuddered as he recalled Sylvia’s description of the craft’s interior.

The hatch closed behind him. Kaine examined the dimly lit corridor. A distant humming reverberated off the walls and floor. A bluish-green glow emanated from a doorway at the end of the hall. He examined the strange symbols scrawled across the door. Kaine placed the briefcase at his feet and touched the cold metal. It throbbed from deep inside, as if it were a living thing. Seconds later, the door slid open, revealing a nightmarish scene.

His client lay naked on a table, surrounded by dozens of the alien beings. They were vaguely humanoid, with two arms and two legs, but their heads were much larger than the rest of their bodies and their eyes were huge, dwarfing their almost nonexistent noses and mouths.

Kaine had seen them before. His mind flashed back to a supermarket tabloid from ten months ago: WOMAN IMPREGNATED BY ALIEN ABDUCTORS. Beneath the garish headline had been a photograph of Sylvia. Two weeks later, Kaine became her caseworker.

“Nobody move.” He raised the pistol with one hand and unlatched the briefcase with his other. Kaine pulled a stack of papers out of the briefcase. The aliens cringed, fear flashing in their black eyes. Kaine held a document before him like a shield. “My name is Kaine. I am a Domestic Relations Officer, as well as the caseworker for the young woman you have strapped to that table.”

He flung the paperwork toward the tightly clustered aliens, and undid Sylvia’s straps. She clung to him weakly, as if waking from a dream.

“This, gentlemen, is a court order for child support. You are hereby ordered to appear in domestic court one month from today for a child support hearing. My client claims that you impregnated her; therefore, you are financially responsible for part of the child’s welfare. Bring whatever pay stubs and supporting documents you may have with you. Also bring a copy of your most recent tax return. If you can not afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you by the state.”

Still brandishing the gun, Kaine backed Sylvia towards the exit.

“The next time you decide to abduct and impregnate someone in my state, gentlemen, I suggest you remember that we do not go lightly on deadbeat dads. Good evening to you.”

The door hissed shut behind them, leaving the aliens to stare at one another in bewilderment.

“Shit,” said one. “We haven’t fucked up this bad since Roswell.”

***

***

The original version of this story appeared in my first short story collection, No Rest For the Wicked (which is long out-of-print). I revised it considerably for its appearance in A Little Silver Book of Streetwise Stories . I’m not sure where I got the idea. I think it stemmed from drinking a six-pack of beer while watching The X-Files.

GOLDEN BOY

I shit gold.

It started around the time I hit puberty. I thought there was something wrong with me. Cancer or parasites or something like that, because when I looked down into the bowl, a golden turd was sitting on the bottom. When I wiped, there were gold stains on the toilet paper. Then I flushed and went back to watching cartoons. Ten minutes later, I’d forgotten all about it.

You know how kids are.

But it wasn’t just my shit. I pissed gold. (No golden showers jokes, please. I’ve heard them all before). I started sweating gold. It oozed out of my pores in little droplets, drying on my skin in flakes. It peeled off easily enough. Just like dead skin after a bad case of sunburn. Then my spit and mucous started turning into gold. I’d hock gold nuggets onto the sidewalk. One day, I was picking mulberries from a tree in a pasture. There was a barbed-wire fence beneath the tree, and to reach the higher branches, I stood on the fence. I lost my balance and the barbed-wire took three big chunks out of the back of my thigh. My blood was liquid gold. And like I said, this was around puberty, so you can only imagine what my wet dreams were like. Many nights, instead of waking up wet and sticky, I woke up with a hard, metallic mess on my sheets and in my pajamas.

Understand, my bodily fluids weren’t just gold colored. If they had been, things might have turned out differently. But they were actual gold—that precious metal coveted all over the world. Gold—the source of wars and peace, the rise of empires and their eventual collapse, murders and robberies, wealth and poverty, love and hate.

My parents figured it out soon enough. So did the first doctor they took me to. Oh, yeah. That doctor was very interested. He wanted to keep me for observation. Wanted to conduct some more tests. He said all this with his doctor voice but you could see the greed in his eyes.

And he was just the first.

Mom and Dad weren’t having any of that. They took me home and told me this was going to be our little secret. I was special. I had a gift from God. A wonderful, magnificent talent—but one that might be misunderstood by others. They wanted to help me avoid that, they said. Didn’t want me to be made fun of or taken advantage of. Even now, I honestly think they meant it at the time. They believed that their intentions were for the best. But you know what they say about good intentions. The road to hell is paved with them. That’s bullshit, of course.

The road to hell is paved with fucking gold.

My parents started skimming my residue. Mom scraped gold dust from my clothes and the sheets when she did laundry and from the rim of my glass after dinner. One night, they told me I couldn’t watch my favorite TV show because I wouldn’t eat my broccoli. I cried gold tears. After that, it seemed like they made me cry a lot.

Everywhere I went, I left a trail of gold behind me. My parents collected it, invested it, and soon, we moved to a bigger house in a nicer neighborhood with a better school. Our family of three grew. We had a maid and a cook and groundskeepers.

I hated it, at first. The new house was too big. We’d been a blue-collar family. Now, Mom and Dad didn’t work anymore and I suddenly found myself thrown into classrooms with a bunch of snobby rich kids—all because of my gift. I had nothing in common with my classmates. They talked about books and music that I’d never heard of, and argued politics and civic responsibilities and French Impressionism. They idolized Che Guevara and Ayn Rand and Ernest Hemingway. I read comic books and listened to hip-hop and liked Spider-Man.