The Guard

It was another boring night in the long parade of boring nights his life had become. Nursemaid to heavy equipment very few knew about and even fewer would bother, he had signed up for a security job guarding an EPA clean-up site. The site was adjacent to a public park on the edge of a tiny hamlet of less than 400 people, twenty miles from the nearest big city. Adding to the boredom was the time of year. The contract had started in early October and was supposed to be completed by Christmas. He had fairly good confidence that few, if any, criminals had enough personal ambition to attempt to steal an industrial-sized backhoe or caterpillar in freezing weather from a site next to a town so quiet the local cops could hear a mouse fart six hundred yards away at 2 a.m. Even the contamination was no big deal; lead. The only reason it needed to be cleaned up was so the site could be annexed to the park.

So he sat, night after night, in a rented office trailer, watching for criminals he knew weren't coming, his only companions some books, his lunch, and an old, beat-up radio that only added to the monotony. The local radio stations were all formulaic, computerized play-list broadcasters, or talk radio stations obsessed with politics or conspiracy theories.

Tonight they were talking about a supposed UFO crash in Nevada. Their witnesses were two average Joes from the area. One guy, an off-duty cop in Bullhead City, had gotten up at 2 a.m. to let his cat out. The other guy was on his houseboat on the Colorado River. Actually, they weren't Joes. They both claimed to be Bobs. The houseboat guy seemed to be fairly upfront about the name being a ruse. He probably feared repercussions if people found out he claimed to have seen a UFO. He thought the name appropriate given that he had seen the UFO from his houseboat.

The guard decided the cop was not fully awake and the boater had probably been fishing for beers all evening, given the number of boats he had seen in trouble on the Colorado while he was stationed in that area during his time in the Air Force. He spun the dial to switch back to the rock station.

"We play everything", was the station's motto. Maybe eventually, thought the guard, but this is the third time today I've heard Tiny Dancer. Oh, there's the one-hit wonder, Tommy Tutone!

Jenny, 867-5309 rose all the way to number four on the charts and finished up with a lawsuit. The next time you write a song, fellas, you might want to do a little more research to make sure it doesn't feature the daughter of your local Chief of Police! How humiliating, to have to hear that song for the rest of your life because some putz wrote your name and number in a men's room, which is not to mention how her father must feel! Good thing we no longer live by the rules of the Eighteenth Century, thought the guard, or there would have been some dead musicians.

Sometimes he felt like a sitting duck on this post, alone and unarmed, his only source of help being to call the police on the company cell phone that stayed in the office trailer. Big help, he thought, this burg might have its own cops but I bet their response time sucks given all the ground they probably have to cover. Besides, if anyone gets serious about stealing these machines, I'm an open target for over three hundred yards to the East and twice that to the South. There's no way that's going to happen, he reasoned. There are too many problems involved in stealing these machines.

Of the eight, only four are road-worthy, so you would need flatbed trucks for the other four. You could get by it done with three trucks, but it's hard to smuggle trucks that size into a town this small in the wee hours without waking the neighbors. You might get the machines loaded but forget actually getting away with them. And lots of luck fencing the equipment if you did pull it off!

The guard looked at the clock. 0347 hours; almost time for the 4 a.m. check-in. The guard company mandated that each guard must call dispatch once an hour to check in. They said it was to make sure the guards were all okay. Bull, he thought, it's to make sure we're staying awake on post. Still, it was easier staying awake on post here than at his last assignment. That seemed counterintuitive but it was true. His last post had been at a hospital where his every move was either observed by the hospital staff or recorded by the security cameras or both. He hadn't had a radio there and he wasn't allowed to read a book. He had felt a little more free in certain parts of the hospital; the parts that had no cameras. This included almost the entirety of the top two floors. Still, there was no avoiding the cameras completely to get to those floors.

He remembered the last week there, when the company that was taking over had been trying to shadow them and his Major had said not to train them in any way or his company would be liable for what they did. Boy, it had been fun giving those guys the slip! Since he knew where all the cameras were, he could hit certain stairwells, get to the upper floors and disappear for long stretches. He still had the radio the hospital used to contact him when he was out of the office and the company cell phone, so he wasn't out of contact with his command chain. It must have driven those guys crazy, he thought, seeing me disappear into stairwell three and reappear thirty-five minutes later on the loading dock for twenty seconds before disappearing again in the boiler room.

No such problems out here, he thought. The client isn't going to show up until near daybreak, at which time they take over and I am relieved. The brass won't show up out here either, given the eccentric location of this post. Best of all, the reason we're even out here is because this outfit didn't want to spring for cameras! As long as I keep making my check-ins, they will all leave me alone. That reminded him of the time.

Another check-in call! The dispatch operator had caller ID and acknowledged the guard by name as soon as he picked up the call. Check-in accomplished, it was time for another patrol. The guard went to the door of the trailer and opened it. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Yep, they're all still here. So much for that patrol!

He returned to his chair and turned out the small desk lamp. He did this occasionally so he could look outside more easily without glare on the windows. It was a cloudy night without a single star. He wasn't surprised. It had been snowing at midnight when he relieved the Sergeant.

The Sergeant is a good egg, he thought. A black man in his seventies, he was slight of build. He was also an Air Force retiree, retired longer than the guard had been in. The Sergeant liked to tell people that when he enlisted, the only jets the Air Force had were the F-82 Sabrejet fighters. The Sergeant had been a gas-passer, doing mid-air refueling. He had been the first black enlisted man to qualify on that job. To hear him tell it, he had personally known several of the first black Generals in the Air Force, including Chappie James.

The guard looked down at his car, parked under what he considered to be the front window of the trailer. His gaze moved over to the portable outhouse by the corner of the trailer. That got him to mentally check the gauge on his bladder, finding it in need of emptying. He donned his coat and opened the door again. As he was opening the door, he stopped abruptly without realizing why at first. Then it dawned on him. The radio had been playing Bad Company and all of a sudden he had heard a woman's voice. He started to edge the door closed and the radio started playing a song by the Supremes. He thought this strange but noted that the radio changed back as he closed the door. He reopened the door and made a quick visit to the outhouse. With temperatures in the low twenties, the guard preferred quick trips when they involved exposing tender portions of his anatomy.

As he waited through the emptying process, the guard thought about the book he was reading tonight. It was a collection of short stories by a writer who specialized in science fiction and what he called dread. The author said that horror novels weren't that horrifying without a substantial element of dread of what might be about to happen or what might be lurking out in the dark. From the samples the guard had read so far, the author seemed to know what he was doing. The dread was pretty thick in a number of the stories.

The guard was trying to become an author, too. He was already an accomplished writer. He had written a number of different things in the past. There had been technical reports, personnel evaluations and award recommendations while he was in the Air Force. His gag awards for departing personnel had earned him quite a reputation in several units. The best one he had ever come up with was the Dubious Achievement Medal. Then there had been sermons he had written while he was a pastor for a short time, legal pleadings he had written during his disastrous tenure as an untrained paralegal and numerous poems and songs he had put together throughout his life. He realized he had continued musing after he no longer needed to stand in the outhouse with his nether regions exposed to potential frostbite. He zipped up his fly and stepped out into the frosty night.

As he was returning to the trailer, the guard felt something touch him between the shoulder blades. He turned around slowly and found himself facing a creature of a type he had never seen before. It looked like a mound of clay his daughter-in-law, the sculptor, might erect if she intended to shape a humanoid figure almost the same height as the guard's six feet. It had a sheen to its surface that made it seem almost gelatinous. It had stalks sticking out of it in numerous places. Its lower end was split into two parts to provide for bipedal locomotion, though the two parts seemed as if they could just as easily rejoin to one another and could not, to the guard's mind, be called proper legs. Most of the stalks seemed to end in eyes that looked all over with no regard for where the others were focused. Other stalks were split, apparently to allow grasping. It was one of these that held the guard's undivided attention.

The split stalk was holding a device the guard could only assume was some sort of weapon, level with and pointed directly between his eyes. He did not move, afraid his slightest gesture might be interpreted as aggression. The creature made some noises which the guard somehow understood as, "Hands up!" He raised his arms in the classic pose of surrender. The creature spoke again, apparently to someone behind the guard. "What do you know? It works." The guard realized he was hearing these remarks with his brain rather than with his ears.

"Turn around", he was told. He complied and saw another creature standing by the gate that allowed entrance to the contaminated part of the site. It held another device in four grasping stalks. The creature extended the device slightly toward the guard and pushed a button. The guard expected to die at that moment. Much to his relief that was not what happened. The second creature started manipulating levers, switches and knobs on the device. Suddenly the guard felt like a marionette with a psychopath for a puppeteer. He was no longer relieved.

He opened his mouth wide and clacked his teeth together. He walked forward like Frankenstein's Adam. He opened and closed his eyes and his hands. He squatted, jumped, lay down, and rolled over, at which point he was feeling like a circus poodle. He stood again and began to wiggle his ears. He thought this odd, since he had never been able to do it on his own. The guard felt a building tension and was able to look down enough to find a growing protrusion that made him wish he could double over or move his hands. Not that he could have caught it to cover it, as it wagged to and fro, high and low. If only I could learn to do that on my own, he thought, wouldn't the wife be thrilled!

"Stop messing around, Lieutenant! We need to get this done", said the first creature. "Aye, Captain", said the Lieutenant, manipulating knobs and switches. The guard began to walk, much more smoothly, out into the hot zone, toward the Bobcat end loader. He was compelled to sit in the seat and put his hands on the controls. The Captain approached the machine with something that looked like a hockey puck clutched in one stalk. He touched it to the machine, which began to vibrate.

Suddenly, the guard's hands and feet were guiding the Bobcat as it moved across the hot zone to the huge pile of lime the contractors were using in reclaiming the site. Now his hands and feet were working overtime, scooping and dumping, running forward and back, turning to the right and now the left. What the guard noticed most of all was that the machine was operating absolutely silently, yet it was flying about, doing the work of ten such machines.

After about twenty minutes, the Captain said, "That should do it, Lieutenant!" The Bobcat backed away from the pile about forty yards, the Captain touched it again with the hockey puck and it became still. The guard was made to exit the machine and stand beside it. The Captain raised something that looked like a pen and said, "Ready!" The pile of lime started to glow with a bluish hue and then it slowly disappeared. The Lieutenant turned to the guard and pushed a button on the device it was holding. The guard was free.

"Wait", he called after the retreating aliens. "If you need some lime, why steal it? We would gladly trade with you." In his head he heard, "Good luck explaining", as the two aliens started to glow. "Oh, no", he screamed realizing he had just become a cosmic patsy, with his prints all over the Bobcat, which was nowhere near where it had been! He continued to scream after the aliens, and then he fell to the ground, exhausted.

He started to get up and froze. He was back in the trailer. What was going on? He looked outside. The lime was still there. He had fallen asleep! He had dreamed the whole thing! What a relief! The guard went out the door of the trailer and looked for the Bobcat which was right back where it had started. He was so relieved and overjoyed that he sank down to his knees. Of course! A dream! It all made perfect sense now. He had heard the talk show about the UFO and he had been feeling vulnerable out on this site all alone. Why wouldn't he dream something like this? About this time, the guard started to notice that he was becoming very cold.

He couldn't shake this cold. Shake? Why had he chosen that word? Then he realized someone was shaking him. The guard opened his eyes. He was on the ground in the hot zone. He rolled over to see the site supervisor had been the one shaking him by the shoulder. "I hope you have a really good explanation for the twenty tons of lime that went missing on your watch", the supervisor said. "I do but you'll never believe it", said the guard. In his head, the guard heard the Lieutenant snicker and say, "I love that part!" Great, thought the guard, I've been punked by cosmic smart alecks!