[20: It’s true! They’ve landed. Chris said his brother saw them coming out of a
road on Red Mountain Pass.]

It’s been a year since they landed. 

Last May, there was a thundrous noise and we all looked up and there was a
plume of smoke, rock and dirt spraying up into the air from the mountains
outside town.  I thought a propane tank had finally gone up, even if I do know
that’s about as unlikely as can be. The damn things always give me the willies,
all that fuel in one place. 

Maybe that’s how they felt, when they landed, tip over fuel tank into the
wilderness. If you can call what they did landing. I think they felt more like
they smacked into a blue and green ball of rock at a few hundred miles per
hour. 

Half of them survived. They talk about it like we would a bus crash with a
spectacular ending, where half the people got off okay, and the other half died
in a horrendous hollywood fireball, trapped inside. Even if cars and busses
don’t actually explode like that, only on TV. They’re more likely to burn real
hot but never go boom. It’s the fire that’ll get you. Burns are nasty. Things
burning when they shouldn’t give me the willies, too. But then again, all that
fuel in one place, you know.

It wasn’t four hours later that the Air Force jets did a flyover. I bet it only
took them that long because someone had to fill out forms in triplicate,
because the people who showed up from the Air Force afterward were really
excited, but they all had briefcases. 

They quarrantined the whole county. My town, the next town over, and they even
flew in helicopters to barricade all the back roads, the ones you need jeeps or
ATVs to drive over. I was impressed they did it so fast. Of course, a bunch of
hotheads showed up and waved guns at them, and if our town wasn’t so small
they’d have had a full-scale riot on their hands. But instead, it was just
Joseph Alamo and Bob Hagar waving a couple rifles and a couple of their buddies
who weren’t drunk yet yelling at the Air Force guys as they put the concrete
blocks across the highway. 

Have you ever seen an armored fork lift? They’re kinda funny looking. It’s even
funnier looking watching little guys with rifles trying to look tough when
there’s something that weighs more than every car they own blocking their path.

The Air Force guys were actually really nice. You always see all these movies
where they shoot first and ask questions later, but these guys were pretty
cool. Young, all of ‘em. I think only the guy in charge was older than I am,
and I’m thirty-one. You always see movies with generals and stuff making
decisions, but this is a bunch of kids who are a little scared, but pretty well
trained, and used to being pretty polite to people. Maybe it’s the Army or
Marines who are more like the movies.

So we get cut off, and they’re told to keep us in, but I guess they got told to
be nice about it, because they were. They cut off the phones, and the internet,
too. One guy in town was talking to his girlfriend who was out in Atlanta, and
his cell phone just starts playing “This is the emergency broadcast system” for
like a minute or two, then just goes dead and says ‘No Service’. I guess they
just had the phone company turn off the tower or something.

So the quarrantine. Turns out it wasn’t needed, but I guess they figured that
whatever landed wasn’t from around here, and it had done the things that
meteors and stuff usually don’t, like slow down and try not to hit us and
stuff, so they knew it was special. They shut us down for a week, and then they
dropped food for us since nobody could go shopping. The government has way too
much crappy food. They dropped like a thousand pounds of beans and rice and
flour and stuff, but it was all ingredients and not really food. I guess you
can make food out of that if you’re hungry though. But there’s a store in town,
and there’s enough there that we didn’t run out or anything. Though I heard
that one guy sold a case of Dr. Pepper for like a hundred bucks. I guess some
people really need their Dr. Pepper.

The Air Force guys went up there and checked it out, and, well, they saw ‘em
first. The aliens. They’re weird looking, but I guess, if you think about it,
so are we. I mean, who ever thought of noses? Or chins? We just kinda take ‘em
for granted. They have four arms. Or arm things. And eyes on three sides. And
they were standing around the crashed ship, and I bet their alien eyes were
looking at each other and saying “Well, shit, what are we gonna do now? I’m
glad I was wearing my seatbelt.” or something like that.