The way people think and behave doesn’t make logical sense.

Even by this point in my life, I should have just accepted that fact, and expected it. Instead, it surprised, baffled, and frustrated me every time this principle was demonstrated.

Case in point: my father and Allyson. She hated me, and I think she hated him almost as bad. She made no secret of it. And though I didn’t disrespect my father; mouth off to him; lie about him behind his back; or steal from him; I never was much more than chopped liver, so far as he was concerned. But boy, did he make an effort with Allyson—even after breaking it off with Mom. He bent over backwards trying to win love from that evil bitch, when she wasn’t even a blood relation to him. I never did figure that out, and stopped trying.

Anyway, while he occasionally came to visit when I had a birthday, he never missed one of hers—and always brought her a present, as well.

Allyson no longer lived under the same roof as me, thankfully, but Mom arranged a birthday party for her at our house, and of course my father had made time to attend. Mom told me beforehand that he was bringing Abel along with him. Abel was my half-brother (different mother; same father), and a few years younger than me. I was expected to entertain him whenever these awkward reunions took place. Sometimes we got along okay; sometimes not. Whichever way it went, though, his company was sure to be more tolerable than Allyson’s.

When my father pulled up in front of the trailer, with Abel in the car, I figured Allyson would be along in about an hour or so later, and the party would start. I figured if I didn’t go for my run now, I wouldn’t get the chance later.

As I pulled some shorts and a sleeveless shirt on, I heard the knock on the door, then the voices of my parents exchanging barely-civil small talk as my father came inside. I slipped out the back, let Ace out of the kennel, and off we went.

***

I ran farther than normal—not because I felt like running farther that afternoon, but because I wanted to avoid the party for as long as possible. Ace and I ran past the park and into a semi-industrial area for a few miles, then took the scenic route back to the trailer park. About a quarter mile out, I slowed to a walk and stepped out our “cool-down lap” with Ace panting happily beside me.

I had walked every foot of the trailer park a thousand times by then, and didn’t really need to pay attention to find my way back. Uncle Si had been reminding me to be aware of my surroundings all the time, but I slacked off sometimes. On that particular day I wasn’t paying much attention. When our trailer became visible in the gap between two other trailers as we walked, Ace began barking. I snapped out of my daydream and clipped the leash on her choke collar before she could tear off to chase somebody’s cat or something. The first thing I noticed was our trailer rocking around a bit on its foundation. Ace was barking in the direction of our trailer. I didn’t see any cats or another dog.

I followed the line of her sight, and almost missed it. But there it was: some weird visual anomaly right by the trailer—as if invisible prisms or magnifying glasses were passing in front of the scene, warping the light in unnatural patterns. It looked a lot like the scenes in Predator (that Arnold Swarzenegger movie) when the alien hunter uses his high-tech camouflage.

The back door of the trailer swung open and two light-warping anomalies emerged, with a solid, visible object hanging between them. An arm flopped down from the object, and hair trailed from one end.

Hair the same color as Mom’s.

The object disappeared, like it had just been shoved through a window in an invisible wall.

My brain lagged behind the visual input from my eyes, and it hadn’t yet quite registered that the visible object had been my mother’s body. Then my father’s body was transported to the invisible window in similar manner. His body leaked a dark liquid on the ground along the way. Then I recognized Abel’s body, dangling in an upside-down U-shape as if draped limply over a sawhorse, bobbing along through thin air with nothing under him but another distortion of the scenery beyond.

Ace continued to bark. Barking dogs were nothing unusual in my trailer park, but for whatever reason, her barking finally drew attention. Several light distortions made sudden, jerking moves, interacting with each other, it seemed. One of the anomalies seemed to split, and a dark opening appeared within it—like the doorway to a tent. Out of that opening, something long and dark extended, pointing in my direction. I don’t remember the sound it made, but I saw a flash.

I had been pretty slow on the uptake since first coming on the scene, but my instincts came through for me right then. Before my mind processed the word “danger,” it had signaled my body to duck. I dove flat in the weeds. Ace had been slow on the uptake all her life; never very protective or faithful in other classic dog-like ways…so I don’t know exactly what caused her to jump out in front of me in that instant.

A split second later, my poor retarded German Shepherd lay spasming and bleeding profusely on the ground, having taken a bullet, or death ray, or something for me.

My brain was still playing catch-up, but stark terror set in almost instantly. Some nearly-invisible predators had murdered my family, and were now trying to murder me.

There was an ear-splitting roar off to my left. A big, fast, loud vehicle, shaped like a sledgehammer, shot off the street, launching airborne when it hit the curb, ripping the turf asunder with massive tires when it hit the ground in the trailer lot beside me. Snarling like some mechanical beast, it fish-tailed through the lot, flinging clods of turf in twin geysers behind it, before rocking down on its nose, coming to a stop right in front of me—shielding me from whatever it was that just killed my dog. My eyes couldn’t get any wider as the passenger door of that strange machine swung open. Inside the cockpit, I saw Uncle Si leaned over from the driver seat, having just flung the door open. His own eyes were wide behind his shades, and his face pale, as he screamed, “Get in! Now!”

I scrambled to my feet, tripped over Ace’s body, and crashed inside the car in a tangled heap.

Uncle Si opened his own door and stepped outside, pulling some bulky, dark weapon with him. He aimed the weapon toward the trailer. I heard a unique bloop noise, and there was an explosion by Mom’s trailer. A large anomaly which had remained still up to that moment (thus harder to detect) lifted off the ground, transforming into something solid and visible. When it came back to earth with a tremendous smashing sound, it resembled something like a futuristic cargo van with fire and smoke billowing out of several jagged holes.

Before that vehicle hit the ground, I heard what sounded like a machinegun. Uncle Si was firing his weapon again—I could tell by the way it pushed against his shaking arms. Beyond him, I saw one of the smaller, mobile anomalies transform into the figure of a masked, helmeted man wearing a glittering poncho, brandishing some sort of weapon. The figure staggered backwards, then slumped to the side.

The machinegun sound stopped. Uncle Si glanced down at his weapon and yelled, “Son of a blood sucking whore!” He dove back behind the steering wheel, tossed the weapon in the back seat, pulled his door shut, and yanked the shifter into gear. An engine that must have been even more powerful than the one in his Corvette roared bloody murder, and I was pushed back against the seat with such crushing force that my breathing was labored.

I cried out, asking what was going on, but I couldn’t even hear my own words over the tremendous noise of that engine. It only stopped roaring like the end of the world when Uncle Si shifted gears. During one such lull in the din, he yelled, “Buckle up!”

He attached multiple webbing straps to a metal disk that rested over his chest. I was being pushed back against a similar device on the passenger seat. It was behind me, but needed to be in front of me. Straining against the G-force flattening me against the seat, I tried to strap myself in, too.

I was thrown left, then right, as the big, fast machine slung around corners. Uncle Si’s intense gaze shifted from the streets in front, to the rear view mirror, constantly. “Keep down!” he yelled, between shifts. Outside my window I saw sparks and chunks of metal blow out of a traffic light pole and heard the sound of ricochets.

When he hung a hard right that flung me against the safety webbing on my left, I looked out the passenger window. Behind us were several huge anomalies. One of them must have had malfunctioning camouflage, because part of the vehicle was visible. The sucker was really moving. It was black, with windows tinted so dark I couldn’t see inside. I don’t know how many fully camouflaged vehicles were chasing us, but I saw light warping around at least two other ones.

This was the wildest ride I’d ever been on in my life. And then Uncle Si got on the highway.

The big mechanized monster I sat in took off like a rocket. The feel of the incredible speed made more of an impression than the sight of the scenery blurring by. I was still terrified, but strangely also took some comfort in the notion that we were rapidly putting distance between ourselves and whatever was after us.

Uncle Si slammed the shifter into what must have been his highest gear, because he left it there (and I couldn’t imagine moving any faster without shooting into orbit). Then, incredibly, he began fiddling with the stereo.

How could anyone think about music in such circumstances? How could music possibly be heard over the godawful racket of this rolling Doomsday Machine?

Something did blast out of the speakers from behind and to the sides. Before I could really try to recognize what was playing, though, my stomach went queasy. My vision went haywire. Everything I could see seemed to melt into a multicolored collage of blinding lights. Something bizarre happened to my ears—like a force pushing against my eardrums while simultaneously sucking all the overwhelming noise into another room or something.

Then, with a jolt, the sound came back. The blinding lights faded and melted back into discernable shapes and colors. My stomach stabilized.

We were still roaring along at astounding speed…but we were somewhere else, in a different countryside. Wherever we were, it wasn’t anywhere near St. Louis—that was for certain. Not only that, but it was too late in the day. Judging by the sun, it was hours later than it had been just a couple minutes ago, before the…whatever it was…happened.

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