Chapter 8 Quetzalcoatl

Copyright David A. Kearns

“Another time, things will be like this. Things will be the same some time, some place. And those who live now, will live again.”
-Aztec Proverb

“The human beings lived in Aztlan and Posaztlan for a time, in great peace and prosperity. And they lived closely with the creatures the divine creator had given them, much closer than they do today.
“But they did not know that one of the creatures, with whom they had become very familiar, was not their friend. This was a jealous creature who had come to their lands from far to the south, from Kractumbam, the place of white death. This was Quetzalcoatl, feathered lizard.. " The Book of Aztlan

June 2011, Indian Harbor Beach -
It was good to seen them again, all of them together like this, all with their lives on course and moving in positive directions.
Tommy’s fame in Orlando was becoming hard for his wife to deal with, he said. Jay quietly listened to Tom bitch about women coming on to him, everywhere in O-town; the mall the gas station, the deli, the hamburger and sausage aisle at the grocery story. Now, no one could get enough of the Talk Monster.
He obliquely bragged about how much money he was making by bitching about having cracked one of the power units to his new fishing boat, and from there, he and Jay Malone took flight, verbally comparison-shopping the best hulls, the best engines, and the best places to fish.
Tommy was paunchy as ever, but thinning on top. Jay looked like a prematurely gray version of his younger self and he was in miraculous shape. He had also done the whole teeth-bleaching thing as well, owing to the need for a snapshot in the local real estate magazines, and to shine as a member of the Mel Beach city council. We gave him unmitigated shit about having bleached his teeth, not to mention having actually frequented a tanning salon, and participated in something called “Bikram Yoga” which he said kept him in excellent health.
“You know what Jay has become? He’s become a yuppie housewife! Holy shit, Jay, do you watch Oprah re-runs in the afternoon?” Tommy said, and it busted the group up.
Russ showed up in a rented Chevy Suburban with racks for his long-board, hopped the rail to the outdoor eatery like a kid and said “Dudes! There’s a wave!”
“Smokey!” we all shouted on cue.
Back slaps and hugs all around.
The waitress brought out a pitcher of beer for us and we all circled around it, passing out the frosty mugs. Tom did the honors.
Fifteen minutes later Chuck Naigle showed up in a rented vet convertible with Dave Finklestein in the passenger seat. We told them they would never be able to get any boards on the rag top but Finkles said Malone had a whole quiver of boards in his garage and he and Chuck would have the pick of the litter.
Chuck had gone slightly gray but Finkles essentially looked the way he did when we all graduated, with only a slight spare tire gathering at the midriff, and some salt and pepper on the temples.
“I’m trying to keep in shape. I jog every morning in Central Park, thinking about surfing,” he smiled.
“But not actually surfing,” Tom said.
“You know I heard about this thing going on down in Jersey, this Red Bull Challenge. Have you guys heard about this? These guys freeze their nuts off in midwinter surf competitions every year. They finish the thing off in freaking Nova Scotia for Christ sakes,” he said.
“I’m thinking about doing it,” Finkles added taking a sip from his mug.
“They got an old guy’s division?” Tom said and we laughed.
Finkles raised his finger, “ …as a matter of fact they do. Which was why I was trying to call you last year, Tommy. It would be a great promo deal for your radio show. I know a guy at one of your affiliates who could use the ad revenue. He sees a way to get one of his news jockeys out on the water, who also happens to surf.”
“Hey sure, bring it on,” Tom said.
“Loni keeps bitching at me that I’m not in shape anymore,” he said.
“How is she?” I asked.
“She’s coming down later in the week. I think she wants to go see Trisha,” he said taking a sip. This brought a moment of silence.
Trisha suffered a major collapse last year. She had been doing better, working for Jay as an assistant in his real estate office, but something went wrong again, as it seemed to happen every two or three years since she graduated college.
She got divorced, started partying hard. Now she was in a psychiatric facility in town, detoxing for twenty-eight days.
Everyone in the group was trying not to look at me. Tom finally broke the silence.
“How long did you guys date again?” Tom asked.
“On and off, all throughout high school. Then again when she went to UCF, we kept in touch for a while,” I said, taking a sip of my beer nervously.
Kept in touch. Yeah, that’s what we did.
She was too wild for me to handle, always had been but she deeply loved me, and Ryan. She dated us both on and off during high school and college.
When she wasn’t dating me, she and I were friends. Likewise with Ryan. In the strangest relationship I have ever been in, before or since, it never really seemed to matter. We never got angry at each other about what was going on between the three of us, and if people thought it was strange we told them to get stuffed. It was our business, not theirs. It was a lesson she taught me well: you can never possess another human being, nor hope to. When they loved you, they came calling and wanted you to do the same. That was it.
Trisha had been in love with both of us, not to mention the entire world. That was her problem. She had been selfish as a little girl, as little girls are sometimes. But when she blossomed into a woman - and what a beautiful woman she became - she learned how to love. And when she did, she didn’t know how to turn it off. She wasted time on girlfriends and boyfriends who didn’t understand or care for her the way we did.
But they represented new horizons, and she was always paddling for those, ever since Ryan and I taught her how to surf.
The things that happened that summer, though, marked her for life. Obviously, as with Ryan and I, alcohol, for a time, became a way to shut out the voices. The problem was, as she also found, those voices only made louder noise in the morning when the alcohol was gone and the headache came to town.
That would be another bitter pill: seeing her at the psych center, Whispering Pines.
I downed another sip of beer and shook off the memories, trying like hell to bask in the goodness of these fine people who I had been fortunate enough to grow up with. Nobody needed to see melancholy right now. It was about memories, celebration. We weren’t going to think about Ryan just yet. We had plenty of time for that.
Soon after all the chicken wings and the beers were gone, we headed south on A1A to Jay’s house, where Gary had been waiting for us, after getting everything ready. Jay’s wife Melanie had taken the kids to her mother’s house in Vero Beach. So the old crew could bond over Ryan’s death. It was tribal, male, totally foreign to her, and she didn’t want any part of it until the funeral. Jay understood.
It really was a gorgeous three-story home overlooking the ocean with wrap around decks and views that surely would stretch for miles.
Jay showed us to our rooms. Mine was the guest bedroom at the top of the circular home, and had its very own deck and bathroom. This was where Melanie’s parents stayed when they were in town, a place of honor, recognizing that I had been closest to the deceased and would need quiet time to myself over the next three days.
I was standing there looking out over the ocean and the new moon rising to the east. It wasn’t long before a friendly voice could be heard approaching from behind.
“Hey! Who the hell are you, man? What the hell are you doing in my brother’s house?” Gary said.
He threw an arm around my shoulder handing me a frosty can of Budweiser.
“Hey you son of a bitch! You dropped in on me!” I offered back.
“Tim, of all of us, this has to be toughest on you man. If there’s anything I can do for you…”
“You know, Gare. There is one thing,” I said.
“Name it brother.”
“Let’s play some music Ryan would appreciate,” I said.
Jay made an announcement over the home intercom system: that all party participants were to report to the main deck downstairs with a beer in hand.
As we faced the ocean with our glasses, mugs, cans and bottles raised, a familiar series of chords could be heard which resolved into deafening music, thundering from the living room, out through the sliding glass doors and on to the horizon.
“Good choice,” I said to the host, raising my beer in salute.
We all smiled and willed Ryan back from the dead out into the evening air; knowing that somewhere he was listening, and having one on us.
I drifted in my mind back to the night when that song was playing. The night we finally made contact; hostile though it was.
We told them we didn’t want them on our beaches, messing with our sea turtles, and they told us – in effect - that they didn’t give a shit what we wanted. It was the opening salvo in a war I wished we had never started.




July 1, 1981
It was dark. The new moon was on the rise and the sound of the road whizzing beneath the wheels of the El Camino could barely be heard over the din of Brian Johnson blasting “Have A Drink On Me!” from my sister’s boom box.
We were in the back of the vehicle; myself, Smokey, Ryan, Tom, Chuck, Finkles and the Malone brothers.
We felt like it was D-Day and we were on a landing slick getting ready to hit that beach. Even the illegally-obtained beer in our system couldn’t stop the flow of anxiety.
Myles Neiderman, Loni and Trisha were up front. More dangerous than what we were about to do, was Henry Neiderman, who had also elected to come with us, albeit in the co-pilot seat mashing Loni and Trisha between himself and his younger brother who nervously held the wheel with both hands.
The elder Neiderman had brought the beer. No weed this evening so a case of Old Milwaukee would have to do. Hank had already downed six of them.
Hank had wanted to see what all the fuss was about as I recall. I didn’t know he was carrying a gun, a .38 revolver it turned out. But then, there’s fate at work again. You never know when she’s going rise up and do her thing.
Each of us, with the exception of the sober Malones, held a cold can if to stave off the darkness as the dusty grit from the road blew up and swirled around us.
This was it. They had been seen, the lights. We had been three or four days trying to see them again but something always prevented it from happening, either the weather, or someone got caught sneaking out, or we would get to the beach with all of our gear and nothing would happen.
Tonight, we knew something was going to happen. Tonight we would see them and we would attempt to communicate. To do the very thing some strange government goon had warned us from doing days prior.
People at the inlet had told Ryan that between a new moon and a full moon was the best time to see the lights. Which, I suppose would have made sense if they were trying to find turtles who, in their breeding and egg laying activities, are guided by such natural things.
Ryan had mended fences with the Wabasso crew for the first time in history, so that together, we could all put our resources to work and come up with the proof needed for someone to listen to us regarding the lights, so that someone would believe those lights and the destruction of the sea turtles were related.
We knew the Wabasso crew was on the road somewhere south of us, looking for the same thing we were, armed with some of the same gear, also likely armed with a case of beer, or the like.
That was part of it: strange lights, stories of aliens, boredom and teenagers. You put all these components together and before long there’s an excuse to drive around in the darkness with a case of Old Milwaukee in the back of an El Camino. It all was as good as an excuse as we were ever going to get, I suppose.
The turtles had been washing up on Indian River County beaches just south of the inlet for a couple of weeks now; always with the same symmetrical, geometric chunks taken out of their reproductive areas.
Ryan had managed to get the leader of the Wabasso bunch, a fourteen year-old student of Vero Beach High, to listen to us regarding the lights and the turtle mutilations. He believed us and wanted to do something about it as well.
“Stuff like this happens and nobody says, or does anything. I never gets into the paper,” he said. “It’s like, the weirder it is, the less people want to know about it.”
However we hadn’t told anyone, not one living soul the weirdest part, about what we had seen in Mr. Lansing’s now destroyed shed and home which some government agency had bulldozed with all those artifacts and relics. They never found the old man either. But this was attributed to nothing more than his advanced age. He obviously wandered off. And he hadn’t owned the land, although he had been squatting on it for decades, it had been held in trust by some huge corporation who donated it to the county for protection of environmentally sensitive lands. It became part of the Wildlife Preserve to protect the beaches from development and sea turtles, ironically, so they could continue nesting without the lights from buildings disturbing them.
For all our efforts that night, Smokey had returned from the Photomat with the blurriest, most useless images known to photographic science. He promised that this time he would get it right and we believed him; though I don’t know why, looking back. The blurry images weren’t his fault. But we couldn’t know that yet.
They say that one of the sure-fire signs to insanity is numerous convenient excuses for lack of proof regarding strange, unexplainable phenomena that somehow only happens to you. Snails show up from Mars, arrive at your trailer park, and speak only to you: no one else sees them. But of course, after all you were the one they wanted to talk to, not the others. They liked the way you wore your pink mumu and your oversized hair rollers, so they extended their “no-see-um” ray to everyone else in the trailer park, sat down and had Kool-Aid with you, told you how earth was going to hell in a hand-basket and how your job was to get to Washington D.C. so you can barge into the Oval office for a chat with the president. Why? Because that’s the way aliens do things.
Right. Well this night, I was about to learn a crucial fact about how they, indeed, do do things. I was about to learn that making witnesses sound like deranged lunatics dressed in mumus might just be as good a plan as any for keeping people from talking about them at all.
Ryan slurped on his beer like a man and turned the volume up ever higher.
“This is it boys!” he said.
“Don’t you think that shit’s up too loud? We might scare them away?” Finkles suggested mockingly.
“Hey, Rock and Roll ain’t noise pollution,” I said in dead seriousness.
Chuck Naigle shook his head. “Y’all damned crazy.”
“You don’t believe in any of this stuff do you, Chuck?” I asked.
“Man I didn’t see shit last time, and I expect I won’t see shit this time, neither. My old man says all this is bullshit,” he said.
“Ah, but, see, as a captain in the Air Force that’s what he’s supposed to say,” Ryan said.
“Hey, you callin’ my old man a liar?” Chuck said. “Cause I’ll kick your ass if you are.”
“No, man. You don’t get it. They all signed these agreements. My old man signed one too. They can never admit what they know,” Ryan said.
“Uh-huh,” Chuck said, but you could tell the way he said “Uh-huh” he didn’t mean it. What he meant was, he would speak to Ryan later about it.
We were silent for a moment.
“What about these agreements Ryan? What’s that?” I asked, hoping that by allowing Ryan to explain, this would mollify Chuck. None of us had seen him fight yet, but we had heard stories.
“They’re called confidentiality agreements,” Ryan began.
“Confidentihwoditty? Rye, what’s that bullshit you’re talking?” Chuck asked. “You’re making this up on the fly, man. Naw,” Chuck said waving his hand in the air as if to erase the nonsense from the blackboard.
“No seriously. These agreements have to be signed once they get past a certain level. My old man signed one. I saw a copy of it for one of his security clearances. You’re not supposed to reveal what you know.
“Also, in the Air Force, everybody knows that if you tell someone you’ve seen something weird like a UFO you’re not likely to get promoted. You get what they call ‘black-balled.’ Guys say you’re crazy and stuff, and they have an excuse not to promote you.”
“I think you’ve been blue-balled one too many times, man,” Chuck said. “That’s your problem.”
“Just you wait, man. You’ll be singing a different tune,” Ryan said.
“I might could say the same thing about you man,” Chuck said sipping his beer.
And now I was worried we would have a fight on our hands. Ryan could only be pushed so far and he would fight, no matter if it meant getting his ass kicked. We didn’t need that on top of everything else.
After a solid ten minutes of southerly driving on A1A, Alka-Hank needed to “drain the lizard.”
His younger brother gingerly pulled it over on the southbound shoulder and Henry stumbled into the roadside palmettos, nearly impaling his crucials on the spiky leaves, as I recall.
Ryan told Myles he, Smokey and I were going to check the beach for any lights again.
“You’re not back in five we leave your asses, Ryan,” Myles yelled.
We found a hole in the palmettos and scrub oaks, finally, and a pathway.


July 1, 2011, Melbourne Beach
“You guys are not going to believe this shit,” Smokey said, as the music continued to play.
I shook off the memory and stood up, walking across the living room floor and out onto the deck.
“What the hell is that?” Jay said, and Gary was by his side now too.
I remember standing between Chuck and Finkles.
“Christ, here we go again,” Finkles said.
“I thought you were Jewish,” I said.
“But I’ll ask anyone to make those damned lights go away,” he said quietly. “I never thought I’d see them again…”




July 1, 1981 Melbourne Beach
The beach was surprisingly white with light from the moon. The water was very calm, nearly flat.
The lights were moving stealthily from east to southwest. They were solid, bright dots of intense blue-white, they appeared to be about the diameter of an eraser head at about a half mile to a quarter mile off shore.
Every now and again they would zip in toward shore then back out to a position about a half mile off of it, all in a second. They were accompanied by shimmering stabs of light that would shine from beneath the surface of the water.
“What the fuck is that?” Russ said.
“Go get everybody, man. Go get them. Tell them to be quiet,” I said.
“Tell them to bring the stuff,” whispered Ryan.
It seemed to take everyone forever to come wandering up the trail. In those minutes when it was just Ryan and I watching some seriously bizarre things happened.
At one point, one of the lights went out, them seemingly whispered into existence on the beach, then blinked out again and returned on station off shore at nearly the same instant.
“Holy shit, man,” Ryan whispered. “Did you see that?”
“That ain’t no navy experiment,” I whispered back. “If only Russ could have seen it.”
Speckles of light spattered on the water near one of the lights, like raindrops or a school of fish jumping all at once. The speckles were accompanied by a sound similar to static electricity, or sparklers.
I turned and found Trisha was standing behind me staring, dead-bolted to the spot in fear and fascination.
Jay Malone was holding the compass up. The needle was pointing in the direction of the three lights, wavering back and forth slowly between them like a pendulum.
“You see that shit?” I hissed to Ryan, “Look at the compass needle, man!”
We all hovered around Jay.
“Damn!’ said Myles. “Would you look at that!”
“That’s got to be explainable, man,” said Tom. “That’s got to be submarines or something.”
“Subs don’t make compass needles spin away from true north, dumbass,” Gary said with contempt.
“Still…there’s got to be some reason,” Tom said, trying not to believe his eyes.
Trisha held my arm to her side. She was scared, but she wasn’t saying anything just yet.
“Hey what the hell is going on?” Henry said, stumbling up the trail.
“Shhhhhhh!” everyone hissed. “It’s them!”
“Them who!”
Slowly the three lights merged as one. Like a solid bar of light.
“Shit,” I said.
“You think they heard us?” asked Russ.
I shrugged. Was I a damned expert? No.
“Should we check your other theory Ryan?” I asked.
“Let’s get a photograph first,” he said.
“Not enough light, man. And they’re too far away,” Russ said.
“C’mon, Smokey!” Ryan pleaded.
“I would need super high-speed film man, and my dad keeps that in a locked cabinet,” he said. “I’m not paying ten bucks for another roll of blur shots. Then y’all get pissed and yell at me…”
“Okay okay, just be quiet, will ya?” I said. “Damn.”
“So what’s the move, Ryan?” I asked.
“Try the radio,” he said.
I carefully turned on the radio function set to a local FM station with the volume turned down low. There was nothing but static, accompanied by a high pitched sound similar to Morse Code, only much faster.
“What’s that? Is that them talking to each other?” I asked.
“I don’t think so, man. That sounds like output from the military or something.”
“How do you know?”
“My dad used to be a ditty-bopper, a Morse guy, you know, someone who dictates Morse code for the military. He listens to this shit sometimes on our HAMM radio. This is what it sounds like when we’re talking to each other.”
“What about the local radio? Where did the signal go?”
He shrugged and darted his eyes back out to the lights. The fact radio static was playing on local radio, that was them, or a symptom of their being here. The super high speed Morse code, that was our military.
“Does this make sense?” I asked.
He shrugged again.
“Look guys, the compass is going nuts,” Gary said and all of us stooped down for a look with the flashlight into Jay’s palm.
Indeed the red needle was spinning now, twice as fast as a second-hand needle on a watch.
We stood up and wandered back to the dune for another look.
A sinking feeling in my gut hit me as I saw Alka-Hank down on the beach with my sister’s boom box held in his hands.
He cranked the volume all the way up and popped in the cassette, and familiar bells from “Hells Bells” started playing.
“Oh shit,” I said. “There goes Katie’s boom box.”
As each bell sounded, Hank took another two paces, nodding his head, “Uh-huh! Uh-huh!”
“Hey! You sumbitches! How ‘bout this shit right here! How you like this!” he screamed.
“Look at the needle!” Russ said, staring down into the palm of Jay’s hand.
“Hey, fuck y’all!” Hank screamed. “Ya hear me? Buncha damned pussies!”
Hank now held the boom box aloft, cradling it with his left arm. He had something in his right hand. No one knew what it was but his brother.
“Myles what the hell does he have in his other hand?” I said, knowing then in an instant what it must be, there was no other answer.
“Oh shit. Is that what I think it is?” Ryan asked.
“Yup. Dumb son of a bitch brought him a gun,” Myles said.
“Come and git some, pussy-assed, motherfuckers!” Hank screamed to the beings inside the solid bar of intense light, which was now turning from white to yellow with red around the edges. Red, the universal warning signal. Stop, cease, desist what you are doing.
“Let’s get the hell…” I was saying.
“No, he’s right. This is what we’re here for. Let’s go down there and tell these things to fuck off,” Ryan said.
“Ryan, Crazy Hank has a damned gun!”
“Crazy Hank is with us, man, and we’re leaving him out to dry. Now let’s go down there with him!” Ryan said standing up.
“C’mon guys, this is it! Men from the boys now, right here!” Ryan said.
Reluctantly I followed, as did Jay who ordered his brother to stay back. Tom was next with an “oh well.” Chuck and Finkles were then followed by reluctant Russ.
The girls stayed with Gary who soon ignored his brother’s orders and was down on the beach running out ahead of all of us towards Hank who was walking point.
Hank turned around with smile, turned back toward the lights and said.
“That’s right! Fuck with us, cock-suckin,’ animal goddamned, dirt-bag, assholes!”
“Holy shit, does that man know hot to cuss or what?” I said.
Quivering with fear, there we all were on the beach throwing our arms up in the classic “get the hell out of here” signal that I assumed was also known to other planets, star systems, or whatever.
We tried to equal Hank in his cursing and screaming abilities but our high pitched, raspy little voices did not equal his tough-as-nails, scratchy drill sergeant baritone.
The solid bar of light turned red which deepened and began to pulse.
“That thing is getting angry, guys,” I said but no one listened.
The light separated into three blue balls again then blinked out. And when they did they sent spheres; shimmering spheres of translucent light out towards us, about eight or ten of them in different sizes.
They moved slowly at first, then accelerated as they approached the beach. The immediate effect of this display, even before they hit, was shear terror.
One of the smaller orbs floated over and struck the boom box punching a charred hole through-and-through carrying Hank pitch-poling backward with it. The gun discharged as he went down and Hank screamed as the bullet grazed his calf.
Another light sphere, this one larger, perhaps ten feet across, pulsed from out of nowhere knocking everyone down like bowling pins, then another bounced randomly off the dunes and up into the scrub oaks.
One of the oaks lost all its vegetation in a second with a thousand, crackling cinders. The tree was ash in an instant.
The big lights reappeared just off-shore, dimmed so that you could almost see inside them. Everyone scrambled to their feet as the objects closed on our position with terrifying intent.
“Holy sheep shit. I’m outta here,” I heard Gary say.
I don’t know how but I found myself climbing the dune like a madman as this pin-balling zig-zag dance commenced.
I turned to see another pulse sphere knock Jay and Tom into each other then down. Gary had dodged everything and was over the dune ahead of me like a scalded wildcat.
Russ was splayed forward by a pulse ball but he rolled like a stuntman. He was up on his feet and moving over the dune ahead of me, just behind Gary.
Two more balls of light, these very large bounced over the dunes into the scrub oaks and palmetto which likewise burned in the hissing, crackling sound of gunpowder sprinkles during fireworks.
The larger spheres containing the creatures suddenly appeared all around us. Inside these brighter, larger spheres I could see what looked to be like people, and though the spheres were but ten or fifteen feet across the areas inside them were much larger than this. The only way I can explain it; it’s as though they had curved space somehow to make it bigger inside these machines, whatever they were. Like a trap-door from another dimension that permitted more space to exist within these spheres. In a functioning model of the old circus act, ten-clowns-in-a-Volkswagen, it was as though the spheres let in space from another direction both parallel and perpendicular to our frame of reference.
The creatures appeared to be much taller than the average man, although I could only see those inside the spheres in partial silhouette. One of these creatures controlling a sphere looked at me, realizing that I was studying them and the ball whisked away, denying me any more information.
Then all was a roiling kaleidoscope of motion. Time seemed to be speeding up and slowing down over and over. Everything jumbled and blurred. These bright spheres disappeared and reappeared with such speed it was hard to determine where they were. They were among us, and off shore, then among us again, all at the same time, in a nauseating whirlwind that made no sense. You knew they were doing something to us, things, planting thoughts in our minds, taking samples of our skins. Beams of mildly painful and sickening light scanned our skin then vanished leaving a burning sensation that penetrated deeply into the bone.
Something knocked me to the ground and I rolled back down off the dune onto the sand with blinding pain surging through my back and spine. I felt as though an elephant was stepping on my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. I looked toward the lights off shore. There they shined while I slowly asphyxiated.
It was as if they had been there for hours after they danced among us.
For an instant there was a long tall, being dressed in a huge, flowing, silver robe examining the fried boom-box lying in the sand next to Hank who writhed on in pain.
Hank saw the creature and was up and scrambling away from him despite his wound. The being shook once and a ball of blue came out of nowhere and knocked Hank forward. He flew ten feet laterally through the air and landed beside me, clutching his throat and gulping for air.
The being looked down and kicked the box with his foot in disgust and actually cursed. I can’t clearly recall what it was he said, and it may not have been in English but I knew it was a curse word of some sort, some alien equivalent to bullshit.
This being turned his pumpkin-sized silver grey head my way and shook his slender boney finger at me, once as if to say “Do not fuck with us, ever again.”
He had no mouth that I could see, but he did have eyes and they were studying everything about me for future record, no doubt. They were horrific solid black, rounded triangles that surely held all the howls of hell in them.
With a shudder of the thing’s shoulder’s the boom-box exploded in flames and the being was gone; carried instantly in a sphere back to the three lights off shore, leaving with a smell of rotten eggs in his wake.
Then, the three lights simply vanished.
It seemed like hours had passed, but checking my watch it all happened in less than a minute, from the time they attacked until we were rendered helpless with pain and fear.
I sat up and gagged, fighting to get air into my lungs. Hank rose to his feet and helped me to mine.
All was silent. The lights were gone, there was no music, no boom box, no screams, only the raspy gasps of Hank Neiderman still trying to catch his breath and the sounds from our group of erstwhile little soldiers calling to each other behind the dune.
I wandered back up the crest of sand. The pathway was surrounded by skeletons of palmettos and scrub oaks. The ash sticks were merely warm to the touch, as if they had burned hours ago.
Russ was stooped down among the cinders, behind the sticks of what had been a solid cover of vegetation. His fingers were in his mouth. He had been reduced to the mental state of a frightened, baby chimpanzee.
“Russ, Russ!” I called to him then finally resorting to “Damnit Smokey! It’s me!”
Russ looked up at me and said “Timmy, are you real? How long have I been here? What the hell happened?”
It was then that Hank noticed how much blood was leaking through the burned gash in his right leg.
“Where’s Ryan?” Russ asked me standing and gaining his composure.
“How the hell should I know? Where’s Trisha?”
“Where’s my brother I have to get the hell out of here,” Hank said.

July 2, 2011, Melbourne Beach Florida
“Tim, Tim,” someone said. I had been sleeping outside on the little porch to my room in a chair facing the blazing sun. Gary was shaking my shoulder.
“What?” I said dryly, my head felt like an old pumpkin slammed with a baseball bat. “What time is it, man?”
“Nine a.m., dude. Man…” he said. As in man, were you wasted last night or what?
I rose to my feet and every muscle ached, but none more so than the thundercloud that was my grey matter.
“What the hell happened last night?” I asked.
“C’mon man, get up. They’re waves on the way and eggs in the kitchen,” he said.
Everyone was in the common living room nursing hangovers, drinking orange juice, and coffee, eating eggs. It was a welcome, happy scene after what I had just relived.
“Tim? Want some?” Jay asked pleasantly. He looked like a million bucks. The only one who had nothing to drink, obviously.
“Can someone please tell me what happened last night?” I asked sitting down and rubbing my head. Everyone laughed.
“You, you happened, Tim. Here, eat up,” Jay said, coming around to me with a plate.
The light from the blazing sun shined like cathedral music into the room. The doors were wide open, letting in the sea air, along with the sound of the sloshing surf.
Russ was up on the landing leaning over the railing; “Where’s Elvis! Show me Elvis! Bring Elvis to me!” he yelled.
Everyone laughed.
There was something vaguely familiar with that phrase.
“What?”
“You man, like I said. It was you, you wanted someone to show you Elvis. You said he was hiding and you wanted to speak to him. Don’t you remember?”
“Hey, Tim. Have you heard anything about whether or not Sean’s coming to the funeral?” Gary asked changing the subject for my benefit.
“He’s still overseas. He was supposed to arrive in Germany yesterday. His mother is waiting for word. She’s hopeful they can get him out of there. He’s patrolling down near the border somewhere. Makes her awful nervous,” I said.
“Look, Gare. I’m confused here. Last thing I remember last night was, we saw the lights. We all went out on the deck,” I said.
“The lights?”
“Yeah, like that time back in the day, when we were kids man. The beach lights,” I said.
“Oh that? Yeah, it was nothing. Helicopters moving up the coast to Patrick Air Force Base. Smokey got spooked for a second,” he said. “The lights went out in here for a while. Somebody at FPL screwed the pooch putting in new power lines. Later you came in sat down on the couch and started telling us to find you Elvis,” he said.
“Elvis?” I said.
“Yeah, you said you wanted to talk to him,” he said.
“Jesus, how much did you have to drink?” he asked.
“Couple over at Ryan’s mom’s, a couple with you guys, then one here,” I said.
“Catches up to you man. We’re in our forties now,” he said.
I ate in silence and decided to take a walk down the beach after calling Sheila.
As I walked I watched the guys leap over the shore break one by one with long-boards from Jay’s garage and the storage basement.
“Hey,” Gary yelled.
“Yeah?”
“Be back quick. Don’t miss this man,” he said, and I nodded. I could relate to what he was saying, when would this happen again; after another one of us had died? These little gatherings would get smaller and smaller. I should enjoy them now. As in life, this moment. Sheila would like Gary.
I kept getting these horrible images in my mind, and I couldn’t tell whether they were from last night, thirty years ago or both. Every few seconds, I would close my eyes and become overwhelmed with terror. The images were grotesque, from a dream, all ambient light was blue. Someone was violently shaking me. Screaming noise in the background.
Elvis. What the hell was that about?
I imagined Elvis in all his Elvisness. For some reason the idea of Elvis surfing came to mind and a little voice in my head said “Yeah, that’s it. Keep going.”
Elvis, on his Blue Hawaii tour. Elvis, in a long sparkly cape…that was it, I called the thing, I called him….
“Hey!” came a voice.
I turned quickly and found Finkles and Chuck Naigle jogging up to me. I started jogging so they wouldn’t have to slow down.
I needed a run too, to sweat out the beer.
“Guys?” I asked. “What’s up?”
“Hey, we hear we’re not the only ones who have blank spots in our memory,” Naigle said.
“Oh really?” I asked.
“What’s your excuse?” I asked. “I had two double shots of Cutty Sark with Ryan’s mom and oh, about three beers so…”
“We had some Cuervo, but to be honest, it really wasn’t any more than I normally have on a vacation and in my entire life I have never blacked out, unless you count that time back in…,” Finkles said.
“Dave, we’re getting older,” I said, not liking the sound of where this was going especially since I was on the verge of discovering the Elvis mystery.
“Well, check this out. All either of us remember, is seeing the lights again,” Naigle said.
“Me too,” I said.
“You think it’s that same old bullshit from before? You think somebody’s up to something?” Naigle said.
“I was trying not to think about it. It scares me but we have a funeral to get through,” I said. “The other guys are saying it was Air Force helicopters scooting up the coast on the way back to Patrick.”
“Aw, negative man. That’s a negative. It was definitely those lights again,” Chuck said.
“I guess at some point I was screaming about Elvis,” I said.
“Ha-ha. Big time, that I do remember,” Finkles said.
“Yeah, all the lights were out. You were sitting in a chair downstairs saying bring me Elvis, show me Elvis!”
“Yeah,” I said. “Well here’s the kicker, guys. Elvis is the name I gave to one of them, the one I used to think of as the boss, because he wore this silly cape, really long and dramatic like, and it was shiny like the one Elvis wore during his Blue Hawaii tour, only much longer.”
They got a kick out of that.
“The dude was pure evil, man. It pissed him off whenever I called him Elvis,” I said, remembering it now.
“How come we can’t remember this stuff? I know there’s stuff I’m missing from way back when, and this was before I ever tried pot, before I touched a drop of alcohol,” Naigle said. “In some ways, it’s like that summer never happened.”
“You get us all in a room together and I will bet you $100 we’ll all remember it differently, if at all,” I said, quoting something Ryan once said to me.
“Why? How?”
“You’re job is to take over a population, subjugate them through whatever means, what do you do first?” I asked.
“Go kick some doors down, go in and kick some ass,” Chuck said.
“Before that,” I said.
“Espionage,” Finkles said.
“Right, and they’ve been up to that, what else?”
“Divide and rule, like the Romans,” Chuck said.
“Excellent,” I said, “Ditto, as with Cortez in Mexico. What else?”
“Confuse them,” Finkles said.
“You got it. You have all sorts of tools at your disposal, what now? What, specifically did Cortez have at his disposal?”
“Weapons,” said Finkles.
“Technology,” said Chuck.
“Good guys, keep ‘em coming,” I said as the run was kicking the cranial energy factory into gear.
“They say Cortez raced one of his stallions across the beach with a fully-armed soldier on his back. When the horse reared up, he had his artillerymen fire rounds off until the Mayans bowed down to the horse,” Chuck said.
“Exactly, Chuck. I didn’t realize you were a fan of Cortez’s nor a historian,” I said.
“There’s a lawsuit going on in LA now, for the rights to the Bernal Diaz del Castillo story. Descendants have come forward and have challenged a studio’s right to make money on the conquistador’s memoirs while cutting the family totally out of the picture,” he said.
“Geez, he’s been dead nearly five-hundred years,” I said.
“Get this. They got his DNA from a crypt in Guatemala, they can prove they are his direct descendants,” Chuck said.
“They’ll lose the fight, right?”
“Copyright only lasts thirty to fifty years, then it’s public domain. But, the neat thing is, they’re writing a script themselves and all this publicity has a rival studio interested,” he said.
“Feint and jab,” I said.
“What?” Chuck asked. “Why are you talking boxing to me? You never boxed like I did.”
“Well, it’s an old tool my father used to tell me about when I was on the debate team. It works just as well. There, clearly, is a case of the old feint and jab. You know how it works, Chuck, make your enemy think you’re going one way, then you slide inside and jab him in the ribs. There’s your family, stalling this studio all the while getting the ball rolling forward on their project, feint and jab. I admire them,” I said.
“Well, in the legal world the proper term is ‘misdirection’ counselor. But don’t worry. I’ll school you,” Chuck said.
“There’s obviously some of that going on here with these things,” I said.
“Misdirection, then. Example, please counselor?”
“Elvis and his cape. That used to bother me, when I remembered it anyway. A cheap store-bought looking cape? What’s that? Advanced technology and the works and what does their leader show himself in, some Buck Rogers looking cape trying to scare us,” I said. “Either that or somehow human vanity over the years has infected this thing.”
“Like the thing looks in the mirror and says ‘damn, I look good!’” Chuck said. I got a laugh out of that.
“Alright, so they have no style but what else? How else are they misdirecting us?” Chuck said.
“Arguendo misdirection…?” I said.
“Preach,” he said.
“Well, this whole alien concept, Ryan wasn’t sold on that”
“Clarify,” Chuck said.
“You come from all the way across the galaxy, maybe the next spiral arm band, even the next star, you’re talking forty light years or so, and to what?”
“Fuck around with some turtles,” Finkles said.
“Yeah, what the hell is that? Cow mutilations, abductions and that, jerking people off into a bottle for experiments? Who or what does that sound like to you?” I said.
“Sounds like a sick pervert, a galaxial pederast,” Chuck said.
“That doesn’t sound like an explorer. As long as they have been around, by now they have enough samples of DNA to know what we are, don’t they?” I asked.
“So,” said Finkles.
“So, the misdirection here? Not explorers, farmers,” I said. “Farmers, doing crop inventory, or worse.”
“So we’re what to them?” Chuck said.
“Livestock,” I said. “Doesn’t that make more sense to you, looking at the whole phenomenon?”
“Come forty-light years to farm us?” Chuck asked.
“Misdirection again. What was Cortez happy letting the Mayans and Aztecs think he was?” I asked.
“A God,” Finkles said.
“A God. Right, a vastly superior leader of a vastly superior, godlike race. Aren’t they doing the same thing, here? The whole act, I mean a shiny robe for Christ sakes? ‘ I come from a zillion light years away. I am an explorer of galaxies. My technology is vastly superior to yours, so damn it’, you know…fear me humans!”
“All an act?” Chuck asked.
“Some of it at least. Again, back to misdirection: If you’re from the planet Cruton in XYZ galaxy, right? Isn’t your DNA going to be just a little bit different than DNA found here?”
“A whole lot different,” Chuck said.
“ Right,” I said.
“How’s that?” Finkles asked.
“Well, isn’t it going to have evolved in a set of physical and chemical conditions vastly different than it would find around these parts? Chemistry 101 guys. Change the air pressure and the water boils at a different temp. DNA is just another molecule.”
“Yeah, so why the need for human DNA all the time?” Chuck asked.
I said nothing but raised my eyebrows. Yes, keep going.
“So, they could be from around here. From Venus or something,” Chuck said.
“Could be, they’re from here, here. From Earth, just like us,” I said. “You never hear this theory any more. Ryan was fond of that old Charles Berlitz book, The Bermuda Triangle. And before you go laughing, Berlitz, with a calm, very open mind, had several theories he put out which no one else has ever seconded, even though they are more logical than all the hokum you hear related to this UFO deal.
“Look out there guys. Statistically you’re looking at the surface of planet earth, not green - blue. Earth is covered by water to the tune of seventy-five percent. Most electromagnetic frequencies wash out in water, within three or four hundred feet of penetration. There could be whole societies down there beneath the waves that we remain blissfully unaware of. This was only one of his theories,” I said.
We stopped jogging and looked to the east, into the rising ball of flame.
“Sixty-five million years ago a comet struck the earth, wiping out more than ninety-five percent of all life on this planet. How did our ancestors survive that?” I asked.
Chuck wiped the sweat from his brow with his hand and smiled, squinting into the sunlight.
“My biology teacher told me than back then, we were little fury mole creatures buried deep in the ground and because we were chased ass-ragged by dinosaurs, we were safe in our little burrows,” Chuck said.
“And we’ve been around for how long?” I asked, “As a species now, not as just a hole digging mammal.”
“Conventional wisdom says, maybe two-hundred fifty thousand years,” Finkles said.
“How long have civilized societies been around?”
“Say, five thousand years, maybe six,” Chuck said.
“You guys listened in college. I’m impressed. Both right,” I said.
“So what’s the point, teach?” Chuck asked as I stooped down to tie my shoe laces again.
“The point is, someone else obviously survived that comet impact, and had plenty of time to evolve,” I said taking off running again.
They caught up with me easy enough.
“Is this the stuff you and Ryan used to talk about?” Finkles asked.
“Yeah, why?”
“It’s kind of neat. I was always a little jealous he didn’t let us into the little clique going on between you two,” Finkles said.
“There wasn’t any clique!” I protested.
“Aw, c’mon, Tim. You guys were like brothers, man. You two would answer each other’s sentences,” Chuck said.
“They spoke in code,” Finkles added. “Tim would say one word and Ryan would smile and say ‘exactly’ like gotcha!”
“Made me want to kick y’alls’ asses most of the time,” Chuck said.
“Yeah, you were such a hard-ass, Chuck. Until we taught you how to surf,” I said.
“Shit made me give up boxing. I had a future as a light heavyweight,” he said.
“No, you had a future as a punch-drunk, walking speed-bag. We saved all those brain cells for you by turning you on to something better, something more positive that stoked the fires of your mind,” I clarified. “Now you can kindly repay me all the millions you owe me since you’re such an LA hot shot attorney now.”
“Ha, check’s in the mail, my brother,” he said.
“I won’t hold my breath,” I said.
“You’re probably right, Timmy. But I nearly lost my balls on that first paddle out, as you recall,” he called after me with a smile. “C’mon Dave, let’s go surfing.”
I kept running south, they turned back to be with the rest of the gang.
After a while the cadence of my own exhalations and sandy footfalls had me in a sleepy rhythm.