12:37 a.m.
Approximately nineteen miles out from Powder Springs, Georgia [USA]
Shadows jumped as Officer Jerry Reynolds swept his flashlight over the field again. A couple of eyes, low to the ground, reflected the light back for a moment when an opossum looked his way before scurrying into the underbrush at the treeline. There were imprints in the soft dirt of some animal, but he couldn’t identify them in the light he had. Otherwise, this area of the pasture was clear.
“This is going to be one of those stories that gets passed around the precinct, I can jus’ tell.” He spit into the grass and turned around to carefully make his way back to his waiting patrol car and the cuffed drunk in the back.
Officer Reynolds dropped into his seat and took a moment to buckle himself in while he started the old Buick up. He radioed in the situation and backed up around the parked pick-up that was near the gate which lead to the chuckhole-filled, nameless access road, which in turn lead him back to 278 and the county drunk tank. The patrol car bounced over the shallow culvert and he hit the gas once the wheels were on the asphalt.
“Hey,” Reynolds looked into his rearview mirror at the disheveled man in the back, “why don’t you tell me what happened out there, Marty? We got a little bit of ride back into town.”
Marty stared out the window morosely and shrugged, which caused him to belch loudly. “You wouldn’t believe me.”
“Try me.” Reynolds grinned. “I’ve been doin’ this job for nigh on six years now and I keep hearin’ all kinds of stuff. Besides, you’re gonna have to give a statement once we get back in. Might as well get that part out of the way.”
Marty grunted and slumped in the back seat, bouncing along with the old Buick’s shocks over the rutted road.
“Why don’t you start by tell me why I got called off patrol for a report of gunfire, just to pick you up in the neighbor’s cowyard, at midnight, trying to stuff a recently discharged firearm in to yer truck with your pants around your ankles and smelling like the back room at a titty bar?”
The drunk narrowed his blurry eyes at that remark and turned his head to sniff at the shirt he was wearing. He scrunched up his nose and then leaned back to get as comfortable as the cuffs would allow him to. “My rifle went off accidentally.”
“Of course it did.”
“I mean it!” Marty’s eyes flashed, scowling. “The safety was off, I bumped it while I was trying to get my pants back up. Had it tipped on a stump. It fell down and went off.”
“Yer lucky to be alive then, Marty. Don’t look so sad!” Reynolds chuckled and shook his head. Up ahead he could see the fences on both sides of the road end as the access road merged with Sawgrass Way.
“I’m lucky the noise scared away the aliens. Coulda been abducted tonight.” Marty burped, loudly, for emphasis. “I saw the lights between the trees. I seen ‘em going on fer a week now. Told myself I was gonna get to the bottom of it. Do ya blame me for taking a gun?”
Officer Reynolds stopped at the end of the bumpy old asphalt. “Out here? Nah, I don’t blame you for that. But it ain’t hunting season, and you were on a neighbor’s property. It’s also Sunday night and this is a dry county, Marty.” He checked in the mirror on his door but the pastures behind him were dark beyond the reach of the patrol car’s brake lights. The sky was a slightly brighter than the land and he could just make out the silhouettes of a few horses. Or maybe they were cows. Hard to tell in the dark.
“What does that matter? It ain’t illegal to drink on Sunday, just buying.” Marty smirked. “I bought it last Friday, been sipping off the case of Bud since then. It’s not like I planned for this to happen while I was piss drunk.”
“I don’t expect you plan much of anything, do you Marty?” Reynolds hit the accelerator again and the car rumbled onto the smoother State-maintained tarmac of 278. “Still don’t tell me why you had your pants down. I was under the impression that the pants came off during the abduction, to better facilitate the probin’, rather than before it starts.”
“I..” Marty looked back out the window at the passing trees and distant houses that lorded over the patchy farmland of the north Georgia hills. He sighed and looked back toward the front. “I saw two aliens, Jerry. You ain’t gotta believe me, but I swear it’s true.”
“What did these aliens look like?” Reynolds kept his eyes on the black stripe of pavement. “Little grey men with the big eyes?”
“They had big eyes alright.” Marty chuckled to himself. “But they weren’t no little grey men. They looked sorta like horses, really.”
Officer Reynolds laughed and cracked his driver side window to let in the cool air and the smells of a late summer night. “Marty, that pasture you were in is zoned for mixed use. It has cows and horses in it!”
“I know that! But they wasn’t actually horses, Jerry, listen to me fer cryin’ out loud!” The drunkard rolled his eyes. “They looked kinda like horses. They had four legs, long necks, little pointed muzzle...mouth...things. Tails like one too. I didn’t get close enough to see if they had hooves too, but it sorta looked like it. One of ‘em, maybe both...I dunno...had wings and both of ‘em had like, a narwhal horn.”
“A what horn?”
“Narwhal, you know, long, pointy and kinda spinny. It’s some sort of fish.”
Officer Reynolds chuckled again, harder this time. “I know what a narwhal is, ya ‘git! But what yer describing sounds like a unicorn. My little girl has posters of them in her room. Your aliens look all majestic out there in the field?”
Marty burped again and grumbled an apology. “How is Katie doin’, anyway?”
“She’s just fine. Thanks for asking, Mart.”
“Good.” Marty paused, seemingly lost in thought for several seconds. The road rounded a corner, and for a moment, the glimmer of town lights and distant Atlanta came into view. The city vanished just as quickly as it appeared with the Buick followed 278 into a wide valley. “Unicorns could still be aliens, if they come from another world, right?”
“Uh...I guess so.”
Marty nodded to himself at that and straightened in the seat. “So, anyway, I been seeing lights through the trees. Colored lights that flashed at random times. Sometimes there was this buzz that I could feel in my teeth. I thought it was teenagers or something at first, ya know?”
Officer Reynolds snorted. “Understandable, I guess.”
The drunk leaned forward and squinted through the cage bars that separated him from the front of the cabin “You remember those reports over the news a few weeks ago ‘bout that school up north where they had that supposed alien visitation and the rainbow-colored lights? I read ‘bout that one. Lights all over the place, damage done to the school building. Some said it was a she-demon or something, but I don’t buy it. Satan’s got better things to do.”
“But it kept happening and I got this feelin’ something weren’t right at’all.” Marty flopped back in the seat. “So I went to scope it out. I knew I was onto something when I didn’t see any fresh tire tracks. It’s too far out for anybody to just...walk...ya know? I parked my truck away a bit and slipped into the treeline to get a good blind spot. Found me a deerstand and I waited for the show to start.”
Reynolds nodded and rolled the window down fully to rest his arm where the wind could hit it and cool him down. No sense running the AC when the Georgia weather was being cooperative. “How long you sit in the stand?”
Marty shrugged. “Maybe ‘bout an hour? Couldn’t tell ya cuz’ my phone died somewhere along the way or else I’d have pictures of the aliens. Prove to you an’ everybody else that they’re real.”
“Hmmph! Convenient.”
“Yeah...well, anyway, the lights started, right there in the middle of the field where there’s that dip? I can see it from my back porch. But there ain’t nothing out there to cause it neither. And before you think it’ll be funny, don’t go suggesting to me it was swamp gas! There ain’t even a creek back there.” Marty snorted. “Outta the lights walk these two horse alien things. They weren’t real big, understand. The biggest one was ‘bout my size, maybe? Iffin’ I was a horse. It was white colored, I think. But it had hair like some kid took a box of crayons and some glitter and colored a rainbow on the sky. It was like CGI in a movie.”
“Honestly?” Reynolds glanced back at his passenger in the rear view mirror again.
“Scout’s honor.” Marty bobbed his head back and forth, smugly. “The little one was purple, if I remember right. Had long dark colored hair that was all trimmed and neat.”
“What were they doing?” Despite himself, Jerry felt engrossed by the drunk’s tale.
“Well, they stepped out of the lights and then it got dark again. Those narwhal horns of theirs must be like fireflies or something, ‘cuz they lit up and then they set out a big red and white checkered sheet and a picnic basket. They even had a bottle of wine with ‘em, looked like one of the fancy kind you can get at the package store down on Sweetwater St.”
“Oh come on!” Officer Reynolds barked with laughter. “Jus’ when I thought you were going somewhere with this story, and the alien horses are having a picnic? Like with a real, honest-to-god picnic basket? Like, outta Yogi Bear?”
“Yeah, jus’ like the ones in the old cartoons!” Marty’s face lit up and he laughed along with Jerry. “I’ve never even seen one in real life, and then here comes a couple of horses with one out on a picnic. How’s them apples, huh?” Jerry didn’t answer as he was trying to catch his breath, so Marty continued. “So yeah, these horses...or maybe they were more pony-sized...aliens sit down and start talking. I could understand ‘em too. Thought maybe I had drunk the wrong stuff, and was hearing things again, or something when that happened. But it sure sounded like they was talkin’ in english.”
“What...heh...what were they going on about?”
Marty shrugged again. “I didn’t catch the whole thing. I was in that deerstand set back a pace when they started. But I know I heard ‘em talkin’ ‘bout a long weekend getaway and leaving someone called ‘Sunset’ in the care of someone else they called ‘Applejack.’”
“Like the drink?” Reynolds shook his head. Of course this all somehow still led back to alcohol.
“Maybe?” Marty glanced out the window at his side again as the traffic started to pick up and the lights from the city started to wash out the stars above. “I dunno, it was like a normal conversation. Like one our wives would have at a barbeque. Weird.”
“Weird doesn’t even come close to covering it, Marty. I still want to know why your pants were down ‘round yer ankles.”
“Uh...heh…” Marty cleared his throat and looked down at his lap. “Um, well, I couldn’t hear ‘em real good, so I climbed outta the stand and crept closer. I made it right up to the the edge of the field and hunkered down behind a log. The bigger, white horse with the weird hair was telling the little purple one that she was glad they could take a trip together. She sounded...I dunno...ya know how the ladies are like when they have those socials? Like that.”
“‘She?’” Reynolds flipped the old Buick’s blinker and shifted lanes to pass a meandering relic of a semi loaded down with crates of chickens bound for the processing plants. “So the alien was a girl horse? What about the little one?”
Marty made a sound that Jerry hoped was another belch. “Little one was a girl too. The big one called her ‘Twilight,’ I think. Never did catch the white one’s name.”
Reynolds wrinkled his nose when a foul odor wafted through the cab. He wasn’t sure if it was the chicken truck or the drunkard in the back, but he pushed the gas just a little harder to suck whatever it was out the window. “Ok, so, let me make sure I got this. You were investigating some lights, saw some alien horses that talked like plantation ladies and then took off your drawers because…?”
Marty shrank in his seat a little. “Well, after they talked for a bit ‘bout nothing in particular, they started eating what was in the basket. It was too dark by then to see real good, but their glowing horns kept them where I could see ‘em. The food smelled kinda good, actually. It just sorta floated into their mouths. They didn’t go for very long and then the horns went dark. I thought they might have just vanished...when I started hearing...well...hearing ‘girl noises.’”
“‘Girl noises?’” Reynolds frowned. “What does that mean?”
“Well, you know the noises the girls on those college spring break DVDs make?”
Reynolds coughed. “You mean the drunken hollerin’ part?”
“No, the part where they go back to the hotel room and start kissin’ an’ feelin’ each other up, Jerry. What other part would I be referring to, huh?”
Officer Reynolds cleared his throat awkwardly. “So, the horse-lesbian-aliens were makin’ out?”
Marty nodded and grunted. The patrol car topped the hill and the lights of Powder Springs lit up the car enough to reveal the blush on his cheeks. “Their horns started glowing again and I saw the whole thing. I...I was sorely confused, Jerry. They were horses, but they were also like people and the little purple one was on top and doing something I’ve only ever seen in porn to the big white horse. I’m sorry to say...it had an effect on me. I took my pants off cuz they started feeling tight when the purple one started pouring the wine from their bottle on the bigger one’s...well, you can guess.”
The old Buick was silent for a time. The road widened, traffic got heavier as they drew closer to the downtown area. “Long story short, when I was done, I stood up and knocked over my gun. The aliens panicked and then the lights started flashin’ again and this hole in the sky opens up - and Lord as my witness - there was this whole other world on the other side of it, Jerry. Colors like you wouldn’t believe and what looked like more of them horse-things, some of ‘em were ever wearing armor. I didn’t want to get abducted, so I grabbed my rifle and ran back into the woods. Then the light went dark again and I waited in a bush for a bit to throw ‘em off my trail. When it felt safe, I made a run for my truck as best I could with my pants down, and that’s where you picked me up.”
Jerry Reynolds rolled his window up and sighed. “Jeezus, Marty.”
“Please don’t tell my wife, ok?” Marty looked wretched in the back, his voice soft. “Thanks for letting me zip up before you cuffed me, Jerry. I appreciate that.”
“Say nothing of it, Mart.” Jerry shook his head again and turned the old car into the precinct car lot. “Please, say nothing of it.”
