Saucer in the Dunes

33 Pinched

A few days went by without incident: no more bad dreams, no more weird visions. Life around my new home became strangely quiet. The highway remained closed, but townspeople stopped complaining about the detour. The highway ramp headed north was still blocked, but I heard Dad talking about the construction crew from the state coming by next week's end to at least start work on filling in the hole. The radiation, whatever there was, had been determined to be of low level and would be buried. The army had a man that would check readings every day at least two or three times. We would see him drive by in his jeep, all dressed in his bulky white suit, only wearing a regular Army hat. He would put his protective face covering on, walk around the pit waving his machine and writing things on a clipboard, then pile back into the Jeep and speed back through town, back to The Hut. He was staying at the hut. And even though we saw him speeding back and forth all the time, he never waved or spoke to anyone.

The radiation guy wasn't the only new resident. There were a bunch more army men staying at the hut. The fence was guarded, too, and if you drove by, you could see the soldiers with their rifles standing at the fence gates. I hadn't seen them, I had enough of Army men and guns, but Jimmy said he had seen them when his family drove by just out of curiosity.

All the grown-ups were a little upset about the new checkpoint at the detour leading into our town. The Army had set up a new post there and checked everyone coming in or out of Kingston. I had even heard my parents talking about people turned away, but I didn't know much more. I was going to ask the guys if they had heard anything, but I didn't expect much.

There were no more power outages, no more teardrops either. One strange thing that had been happening, though, was television and radio interference. It happened pretty late at night because it always happened after I had gone to bed. I could hear Mom and Dad talking about it. I even heard Dad bang on the television set one night and Mom laughing but scolding him. It happened when I was listening to Dynamite Don too. The station, WFOM, completely faded out like someone was turning the volume down, then what slowly came on in its place was a sound I can't quite describe. If I had to give you an idea, it would be like taking a saw or any piece of thin scrap metal and bending it backward and forwards really fast. It was deep and metallic sounding, kind of like that. It usually lasted fifteen minutes or less, and then the normal sound returned.

After seeing a television repair truck parked at two different neighbor's homes, I decided to try and find out more about it, more about everything. There was no way the UFO incident was over, but all the grown-ups sure acted like it.

I scoured the newspaper at night after Dad finished and didn't see anything even closely related. Ronnie and I still had our list, and we had talked about getting everything together on the floor of my garage and going over it one last time before we pitched the idea, or the lie, whichever we could come up with, to our parents. We both knew it would still be a stretch for them to let us go on a long camping trip. We were more convinced than ever that something had crashed in the dunes a few weeks before. The only other really strange thing that had happened since the crater was that Mr. Gibson was missing. No one had seen him since the night of the crater. The garage was open and doing business; his son was running everything. Ronnie had even been to work on Saturdays, and even the family had no idea where he was. Everything was left alone; his truck was behind the building, the safe was still full of cash, and nothing was missing from the garage.

His disappearance had made the news. Police believed that he had had a stroke and wandered off. A search for him had turned up nothing, and another search was planned. Some people believe he had been kidnapped. None of the theories really made any sense to us. Ronnie thought Mr. Gibson's disappearance had something to do with the crater, but again it was one of those things we, as kids, would have a hard time finding out.