The Gray Machine

Rabbit, Abandon

Jerry dug through the junk on the floorboards and behind the seat, pulled out a plastic bag and a piece of PVC piping he'd been using as a cane. Blinking the dust out of his eyes, he tried to push the rabbit into the plastic bag with the pipe, but the bag was blowing around in the rising breeze, and the rabbit was a limp sack of blood.

Suddenly he was fighting back tears. He was remembering being five, that time the Senator had ditched him in an empty, sun-washed cement amphitheater in a park somewhere in Aurora. Five-year-old Jerry had panicked, realizing he was alone, and became certain his dad was dead. It seemed like hours; those same hot tears stinging past his defenses. Then his dad had leapt into sight, floppy gold comb-over swaying in the breeze, grinning like a man who just surprised his kid with a new Mustang for his birthday.

"Hey there, slugger. Did ya miss me? Did someone just poor a couple cans of tough on ya? Gimme five, kid."

That had always been the Senator's game: freak him out, toughen him up, laugh it off. Now look at him, out in the middle of fucking nowhere again, jumping at shadows, smashing his inner-stereo in, crying over a dead bunny.

Jerry finally lifted it up with both hands, ignoring the pooled blood, too purplish and viscous, like grape juice. It was soft and warm enough to still be alive. Meandering with his awkward limp, he laid it out in the sand about twenty feet from the road, wiping his hands on his jeans.

"Well, little guy..."

He had no words, no fitting eulogy. No apology worth an ounce of shit.

That was when he looked up across the reddish haze, and saw something sticking up at a strange angle, what looked to be the remains of a black, tear-drop shaped spaceship.

Jericho had made it two hundred agonizing steps from the highway when he kicked a pin cushion with his bare, swollen toes, and went down. His eyes stung with sun, hair, sweat. The desert terrain was uneven and treacherous. Nothing blocked out the sky and the wind and the vultures above.

His Ego stayed off – good riddance. If he hadn't smashed it, the metal thing he saw in the desert would without a doubt have been police-taped off, swarming with CIA or NSA or some other shady motherfuckers, whether or not it was anything abnormal. That was how it worked.

He had fought through mangy, dehydrated patches of devil's fingers, buckhorn, and clumps yucca like bouquets of swords, all the while glancing over his shoulders to make sure no one was stealing Rick's bikes. He'd thought about driving it off the road toward the thing he'd seen, then imagined the bike trailer face-down in a ditch, the harvester tires slashed by stones.

In the distance, the black piece of metal gleamed, bathed in a sweltering, mercurial mirage. He kept losing sight of it as the terrain swelled and sank. He'd heard legends of men in the desert, sun-blind and dehydrated, wandering off the road chasing oases. He was beginning to wonder if it might not be a chunk of scrap or some insane minimalist sculptor's idea of a sick joke. What the hell was he doing out here, hobbled, swollen, sunburnt, and useless? He could practically here his father laughing.

Jerry hadn't guessed it was this far. The desert lies.

But he had to see it. Not because he had ever cared about flying shit or space or anything, but because he could not back out. That's what a sheep would do, and he would not be a sheep.

He scrambled up a slope, and there it was again, black as all get out, maybe another hundred or so feet ahead. But he realized two things. One, a thin trench stretched out from it as far as he could see. And two, a body lay beside it. His head began to swim with the realization that this was something earth shattering, something unseen, totally off the fucking program.