Getting hit by a truck is painless. The brain in all its magnificence protects us from pain. It is our three-pound pusher of amazing and powerful opioids and hallucinogens. At the moment of impact, epinephrine and norepinephrine flood our body and mind, sending our consciousness to a better place. We are ushered to an out-of-body waiting room until our body figures out what the hell just happened and how to break the news to us once it calls us back in. This is the hurt—when the screams and cries from every damaged nerve in your body break through the thinning cloud of drug-induced euphoria.
+++
Trevor wakes up on a padded bench. It feels like pleather. His chest is throbbing, his feet are cold, and the sun pouring in through the floor-to-ceiling window beside him whitewashes everything beyond arm’s length.
Bells jingle behind his head. He glances over his shoulder to see a string of tiny, silver bells tethered to the handle of a glass door.
Trevor props himself up onto his elbows and waits for his eyes to readjust and focus on the details within the room.
Old tin-sign advertisements for motor oil, tires, and classic cars hang on the wall above his bare feet. A long service counter takes up the wall opposite the front door. Nailed to the counter face are a blackboard listing the services offered and two framed mechanics’ certifications. Beside each diploma is a photograph of the man named.
Leo J. Griggs is, in one word, intimidating—a well-fed, bald, stone-jawed heavyweight of a man with dark skin and the greenest eyes Trevor has ever seen.
Jimmy Gerber is the guy who would hire Leo as a bodyguard if ever needed—baby-faced, clean-cut, and approachable.
The office opens up to a mini-mart. Three aisles of adjustable shelving are stocked with groceries, snack foods, toiletries, and your basic car-trip necessities.
Beyond them, refrigerated drink cases flank an open Dutch door to a repair garage and a breakfast station, complete with a dual coffeemaker and a revolving donut carousel.
Air squeaks from a cushion as someone plops down into a seat behind the office counter and clears his throat.
Trevor swings his legs around and sits up.
An obese, middle-aged man with wire-rimmed reading glasses and a blue ball cap with a triangular patch sewn onto it leans on the counter with his eyes glued to a beige behemoth of a computer monitor. The embroidered name tag on his blue-and-gray striped short-sleeve shirt reads, Ed.
As Trevor opens his mouth to speak, the sun reflects off something outside and into the eyes of the man.
“Hel—”
Ed slams his fist on the countertop.
Trevor jumps.
Blinds drop in front of the window, blocking the light.
Ed returns to his work.
“Hello,” Trevor says.
“Huh? Oh, you.”
“Where am I?”
Ed removes his glasses and massages the bridge of his nose with his thumb and index finger.
“Earth Station. What’s your name?”
“Trevor Beron.”
Ed tips his hat back and gives him a once-over.
“The name’s Ed, the manager and your new boss here.”
“What? What happened? How long was I out?”
“Not too long.”
“Did Adi bring me here?”
Ed snorts.
“I think I wiped out, but not that bad,” Trevor struggles to think back. “Is Adi here? Where’s my car?”
“No, Adi, no Car, and are you going to annoy me with questions all day?” Ed barks.
“Until I get answers, yeah.”
“Well, here’s the highlights as I got ‘em, kid. You were livin’ your life, doin’ fine, then did something stupid, were told to get in the water — boom, bam — and now you’re my chaking problem.”
“Chaking?”
“Excuse my language. It’s been a long day.”
“Whatever.” Trevor shrugs. “Just let me borrow a phone, and I’ll get out of your way.”
“No phones.”
“Then how about you let me on that computer so I can email—”
“No internet,” Ed interrupts.
“You’re kidding? How about some directions then? You gas-station folk are good for that, aren’t ya?”
“You’re here. Here is where you are, and here is where you’ll be staying, because there is no there. That’s it. Get it?”
“I’m sure you and your fellow pump jockeys enjoy the simple life around here, but I have a life of my own to get back to.”
“Actually, you don’t. That life in that world you knew doesn’t exist anymore, sport.”
“What am I, dead?”
“Yeah. Welcome to hell, tube,” a mid-thirties–looking guy in similar attire to Ed grumbles as he cuts through the mini-mart.
“Jeff! I thought I told you to scrub down the shop.”
“I’m on lunch break.”
A buzzer sounds behind the counter.
“Thank chaking God,” Ed exhales as he keys a microphone. “Loogbo to the office. Customer assistance.”
His voice echoes from the attached garage.
A short black man in his fifties with skin like aged leather and the physique of someone half his age swings open the front door and leans in.
“Whatcha need?” he says in a thick Jamaican accent while shooting Trevor a smile. “Hey, how’s da’ new guy?”
“A pain in the ass. Lucky for me, he’s now your pain in the ass,” Ed says. “Loogbo, Trevor. Trevor, Loogbo.”
“Good to meet you, friend.”
Trevor nods a hello back.
“The customer on pump three needs help. When you’re done, give the kid a tour of the chocolate factory, but prepare yourself for a lot of questions. He’s full of ‘em.”
“Aren’t they all?”
“And set him up in Nozus’s old room.”
“Really?”
“It’s not my call. This one is supposedly special for some reason. Here.”
Ed tosses Trevor a cap similar to his.
“Put that on. You’ll need it. Now get out onto my platform.”
“That’s good and all,” Trevor says. “I’ll just get a lift from someone out there.”
“Let me know how that works out for ya.”
“Have a good one, Ed.”
A wave of heat hits Trevor as he exits the office. The glare of the sun forces him to look down and shield his eyes with the ball cap. He takes a step forward, but his knees give out. A feeling of intoxication or seasickness twists his guts and spins his brain.
“What the hell?”
Trevor reaches out and steadies himself on a trashcan.
“Take it easy until you get your deck legs,” Loogbo warns. “Wait here. I’ll be right back!”
“Hey, Mr. Loogbo? Don’t worry about me. Just show me where my car is, and I’ll catch a ride with somebody.”
Loogbo doesn’t answer.
The only sounds are the wind and the man running toward the source of a steady and low hum.
“Loogbo?”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
Trevor ducks around the corner of the station office. He glances down at the logo stitched into the cap. A triangle of crop-circle designs borders an image of the planet.
“Earth Station,” he reads.
He bends the bill and fits the cap to his head.
In the distance, an engine louder than any aircraft or quarter-mile funny car in first gear roars to life.
Trevor turns and is jolted back by what sits before him.
A ship like none he’s ever seen, four stories tall and twice as wide, with countless fins of glowing blue light, lifts off the concrete platform. As it floats higher, the ship is erased from the sky as if slipping behind an invisible cloak.
Trevor’s body and mind shift into autopilot as the ship vanishes completely. He’s running forward but has no control of his feet.
Loogbo grabs Trevor by the arm and spins him around.
“Trevor!”
“What…” he stares up at the cloudless sky. “That?”
“A customer,” Loogbo answers as he drags Trevor back toward the office.
“Customer?”
“Here are the rules while on the platform.”
“Spaceship.” Trevor’s tongue finally finds a foothold. “That was a spaceship! A UFO!”
“First rule!”
Loogbo grabs the bill of Trevor’s cap and tilts his head back.
“Eyes up and the rest of you out of the landing zones when a ship is landing or taking off.”
He points to a yellow line painted on the platform.
Trevor spins away from Loogbo, leaving the cap in his grip.
“What is this place?”
The office, a six-story tower of metal and glass, sits along the edge of the flat, triangular platform. An antenna array extends up from the roof beside a three-barreled cannon pulled from a World War II–era battleship.
The mini-mart connects to four garage bays, each large enough to hold a school bus.
Inside, two men—the ones pictured in the office—work on a small ship about the size of a minivan.
Beyond the garage, the yellow markings outline the corner of the concrete platform.
To the left of the office, near an island of vending machines, three rows of cargo containers stacked two high shade a bus stop.
Waiting in the glass-enclosed shelter sit a thin man dressed in a black suit, two dwarfs with feline-type ears, and a six-foot-tall slug wearing a top hat.
Trevor shakes his head and looks away.
Two hundred meters of flat concrete, rippling with heat, separate the office and the far corner of the platform.
Beyond that, the ocean extends out into infinity.
Loogbo slaps the cap onto Trevor’s head.
“You still with me?”
“Huh? Yeah.” Trevor straightens the cap and spins back around. “What is this place?”
“What does it look like?”
“I don’t… I can’t even.” Trevor’s head swivels like an oscillating fan. “Insane.”
“It’s a refueling station.” Loogbo smiles.
“A gas station? For spaceships?”
“One of the busiest in the galaxy.”
Trevor’s eyes flutter as the fog lifts from his mind. He turns his attention to Loogbo.
“So you… You just pump the oil straight out of the ground?”
“Oil is a human need. We pump salt water here. Every ship in the galaxy runs on the stuff.”
A foghorn blares over the station platform.
“That’s the five-second warning. It means a ship is coming in, and you need to make sure you’re out of the three marked corners. Three blasts mean the main landing zone there.” He points to the far corner opposite the office. “Two means the small-ship zone beside the garage, and one is a shuttle coming down to pick up and drop off passengers.”
Trevor looks at the bus stop.
The aliens step out onto the platform as a ship the size of a trolley car appears above the station.
“And those?”
The doors of the shuttle open, and the aliens step, float, and crawl inside.
“Just passing through.”
Loogbo grabs Trevor’s elbow and pulls him to the side of the office where the vending machines stand.
“Come on. There’s more to see down below.”
+++
The brain and stomach have a similar defense mechanism. When you gorge either one too quickly on something they are unfamiliar with, they switch to a self-preservation mode. At this point, you are no longer in control, and they will violently protest the overload with projectile vomiting. Be it in a string of nonsensical questions about aliens and UFOs or a stream of partially digested soufflé and margaritas, it all has to come out…spewing uncontrollably from your lips.
In the end, all that’s left to do is spit out that last few bits, take a deep breath, and hope you didn’t make too much of an ass out of yourself. Only after the stomach and brain are clear will you be able to digest more and hopefully keep it all down.
The barrage being waged on the logical, common-sense, and rational parts of Trevor’s brain has blown him through the rabbit hole and into a place where giant caterpillars not only smoke pipes on toadstools, but they also ask you to top off the tank and, if you know a shortcut to Alpha Centauri.
Loogbo leads Trevor down a spiral staircase from the platform and into a narrow corridor with pocked and cratered walls. Gelatin-like tubes pulse with blue light.
As they walk, Trevor hits Loogbo in the back of the head with an endless wave of verbal puke. It’s mindless babble tainted with bile-like sarcasm that stings the back of Trevor’s throat.
“This is nothing like the brochure, Loogbo. And don’t get me wrong—I liked the Flintstones, too, but with total access to alien technology all over the universe, I don’t understand how you decided to go with rock walls and fluorescent lighting. I got to tell you, you could’ve taken some design tips from Star Wars or Battlestar. Kind of plays into the buyer’s expectations, you know? Give it some futuristic curb appeal.”
“Galaxy,” Loogbo responds as he pushes open a metal blast door and ducks through. “Not universe. And they’re chemiluminescent, not fluorescent.”
“Fine. Galaxy and chemi-whatever-you-call-it. I still feel like an ant in a dirt submarine.”
Trevor swings the door shut. A creak from the hinges echoes down the sterile corridor.
“And you guys should really invest in a vat of spackle. Fill in all these holes, maybe tile over these steel grates and open up a few walls.”
Trevor runs his hand over the rough surface.
“Careful,” Loogbo warns. “The entire structure of the station—these walls, the platform supports, floor, and ceiling—is made from calcium carbonate. It’s similar to coral, so extremely sharp in the places we haven’t gotten around to smoothing down.”
“Coral?”
“The metal bits, like the doors, these porthole windows, and many of the interior walls, were salvaged from the airplanes and boats marooned here.”
“Is that your nice way of saying trapped?”
“Forget everything you thought you knew, Trevor. But at the same time, don’t overthink everything you encounter here. That’s one of man’s greatest flaws, overthinking. Most of the time, the answers are right in front of us, but we blind ourselves with thoughts of what might be.”
“So, all of this is coral. Does that mean it’s alive?”
“A few things are living in and crawling on the station’s exoskeleton, but the only things alive on these decks are us tubes.”
“Tubes?” Trevor asks. What does that mean?”
“It’s what the aliens on the lower decks of Planktown call us humans, but don’t worry too much about them. They stick to their business, and we tubes are only allowed in certain areas down there.”
“Why tubes?”
“It’s what they see us as.”
“Huh?”
Loogbo spins the wheel on a heavy metal door and pulls.
“You hungry?”
“Actually, yeah.”
“Good. The mess hall will be a good place to start.”
+++
Trevor had never been into military history and had no interest in ever joining the ranks. Everything he knew about the military he learned from Full Metal Jacket and M*A*S*H reruns, which means he knew absolutely nothing and couldn’t tell you the difference between an F-14 and an F-15. But Trevor could tell that the fan spinning high above the metal box Loogbo called the mess hall is definitely a propeller; he just couldn’t tell you from what it was pulled off of.
A stack of tin trays, all of them beaten to hell and in need of a good scrubbing, stands just inside the door at the end of a chrome buffet station. The tray rail and sneeze guard seem in pretty good shape. They are at least clean. The food, on the other hand, which Trevor would only consider edible if given the choice between it and whatever he could dig out of his own orifices, moves. It could be the steam bubbling up around the burnt edges, but considering the theme of today so far has been “What the… Really?”, it could be something lurking beneath the leathery crust.
From a distance, it seems as if the vending machine at the end of the buffet offers bags of gut-friendly options, but it will have to be explored later.
Metal tanks, slapped with flammable and nonflammable gas and liquid warning labels, are strapped to steel I-beams. Gauges, dials, and other nautical instruments hang on the walls but seem to be more for decoration than function.
Two human men, at least Trevor assumes they are human, sit at opposite ends of a long metal table with their attention on an old, tube television in the corner. He recognizes one man as the guy who passed through the mini-mart.
“This is where we all eat,” Loogbo announces. “That there is Ted. Ted. Trevor.”
A beanpole in denim, topped with a dusty cowboy hat, gets up from his dinner, wipes his hand on his pants, and extends it toward Trevor.
“Welcome to the middle of nowhere, son,” Ted says with a born-about-an-hour-south-of-Houston accent.
“He’s been here since 1962. His Air Force KB-50 dropped off the radar and was assumed lost,” Loogbo explains. “Now he’s our tow-ship driver. And that’s Jeff. Went fishing one day and was never heard from again.”
Jeff, a look-down-on-the-world, dragged-through-the-dirt middle-aged man, looks up from his bowl and grunts. “You bring anything good with ya?”
“Don’t pay no mind to Jeff,” Ted says.
“You got here in 1962?” Trevor asks. “That’s impossible. You can’t be more than a year or two older than me.”
“I think I’m actually somewhere in my seventies. Don’t really know for sure. I stopped counting a while back.”
“How?”
“The anti-aging thing? It has something to do with the bubble around the station,” Ted explains. “And I think they put something in this grub they feed us. Our bodies just don’t break down as quickly as they used to.”
“A few Vamerians who helped build the pyramids in Egypt were through here a few nights ago, and they don’t look a day over forty,” Loogbo adds.
“For some of us it’s a curse,” Jeff grumbles.
“Again, you’ll have to excuse Jeff,” Ted says, throwing a thumb over his shoulder. “He stepped in manure a while back and is still picking the stink out of the tread.”
“Really? How is any of this possible?”
“This place is most egregiously a rooster.” Ted smiles.
The expression on Trevor’s face asks the question for him.
“A harsh wake-up call,” he clarifies.
Trevor focuses on the one familiar object in the room. “Well, at least you have TV.”
“Think again, Trev.” Ted tips his hat back. “That there is what you can call PV—pigeon vision.”
“Pigeons? Like the birds?”
“They’re not all birds,” Loogbo says.
“Okay, I’ll bite. What are they?”
“Haven’t you ever wondered why pigeons flock to wherever humans are?”
“Never. For food?”
“Some are cameras,” Ted says. “Cyborgs programmed to do one thing—put us tubes on the tube.”
“So, what? We’re entertainment for the universe?”
“Galaxy,” Loogbo corrects Trevor again. “And yes.”
Ted picks the remote up from the table.
“Pigeons are the perfect cover,” he says. “They can adapt to almost any area humans populate.”
On-screen, the picture changes from a couple arguing in their living room to a shady business deal taking place in a parking garage.
“I was watching that,” Jeff protests.
Ted continues to hit the button on the remote.
“You need to watch something more positive.”
The picture changes to a couple meeting for the first time in the park.
Jeff snatches up his empty bowl and stomps over to the buffet for more.
“Chaking rookies,” he grumbles.
“How many channels do you get?” Trevor asks.
“Somewhere around a half million,” Loogbo answers.
“The actual number depends on time zones and if there’s anything worth watching,” Ted adds. “No one is watching Granny toss bread crumbs in the park.”
“Loogbo.” Ed’s voice crackles through a speaker dangling on a braid of red wire from the raftered ceiling. “You’re needed in the garage.”
“Duty calls. Can one of you guys show Trevor to his room?”
Jeff’s attention quickly turns to the tray of goop.
“Sure thing.” Ted hops forward. “I’ll set him up.”
“If it’s any more glamorous than this, I can’t wait.”
“He’s in Nozus’s old room.” Loogbo tosses the key to Ted and then bolts for the door.
“Wow! Really?” Ted asks, but Loogbo is gone.
He turns to Trevor with a grin.
“No one has been allowed in that room since his disappearance.”
The spoon slips from Jeff’s fingers and splashes into the steaming swamp water.
“Chak!” he curses.
Ted jingles the key. “You must be one special VIP to get this gold star treatment, Trevor.”
“I’m not feeling the love yet.”
Jeff drops his bowl and leans against the tray rail. He stares Trevor down as if he were memorizing every freckle and glitter flake on a pole dancer to recall during a long shower later.
“Well, come on.” Ted waves Trevor towards the exit. “I want to be the first old fox to eyeball this chicken coop.”
