AS THE NEXT DECADE passed, I heard a few stories that seemed so credible, I had little doubt they were anything but the truth.

While in grad school at Arizona State, I shared a house with one other mate and two young women, all students, and we got to talking one night about our various UFO experiences. As the conversation proceeded, Ellen became agitated.

“What’s up?” I asked, noticing she seemed unusually tense. “Does this discussion bother you?”

She nodded her head. “Not me. Doesn’t bother me, except my godfather told me something he experienced about an alien sighting. Didn’t scare me, but it would scare the shit out of you guys. It happened when he was in the military.”

We were beyond interested.

“He’s coming over soon with a friend who was with him at the time,” she added. “I’ll see if I can get them to talk about it.”

A few weeks later, I was in my bedroom and heard a knock at the door.

“Guys,” Ellen yelled. “My godfather Carlos and his friend Jimmie are here. Do you want to hear the space alien story we talked about?”

We met in the family room and introduced ourselves, then sat together after the beers were opened. I clearly had doubts about alien stories, as I’m sure my roommates did. We were halfway going along with it because Ellen seemed insistent that it was very credible and we should hear the tale.

Carlos was short, stocky, and carried a Southern Arizona Latino accent. Browned and physically hardened from years of outdoor life, neither he nor Jimmie were the kind of guys you’d ever want to mess with. Jimmie was a foot taller and lanky thin, with a matching accent.

After the introductions, we indicated Ellen let us know about their UFO story. Carlos was noticeably surprised at the mention and stared intensely at Ellen. It was almost as if he was being asked to share a state secret with people he had just met.

“Hey, girl, you should have warned me. I don’t go telling your average nobody about this stuff. Think your friends can keep quiet?”

Ellen smiled, glanced at us, and nodded. “I believe so.”

He stared intently at the three of us. “I’m telling you this secret shit because I trust my goddaughter Ellen, so I’m trusting her friends. This is classified military matters I’m divulging, from when Jimmie and me were in the Army and stationed at the Yuma base. It’s balls-cut-off info, man, so you’re not going to read it in the papers or hear it on the news because shit like this never gets to civilians like you. And if it ever does get out, you’d wished they only cut your balls off for the trouble it caused.”

Give the seriousness of his tone, we collectively pledged that our lips were sealed.

Carlos paused as if he was surveying our psyches.

“You guys know nothing about what we saw while in the military, right? You can’t, man. You’re in college, something most of us down where I come from never get to do. So Jimmie and me, we were doing base security at what’s now called the Yuma Proving Ground. But we didn’t call it that then. We just called it ‘the Base.’ They tested all kinds of shit there, man. New weapons and explosives. Probably the only shit we didn’t test was the big nuclear stuff since that’s been done in Nevada until recently. Ellen, honey, can you get us another beer?”

It was college and the refrigerator was stuffed with cold beer. With fresh brews in hand, Carlos sat back and relaxed a little.

He took a deep breath. “So Jimmie and me were out one fucking hot summer afternoon in the Jeep. Pretty late. We’d been doing our rounds all day. I can’t tell you, man, how many times we were forced to do rounds because some drunk hokey from town phoned up saying they saw strange lights hovering over the base or the testing grounds or wherever in the desert. People drink fucking way too much, and who hell cares what they see, huh? They should keep their crazy-ass thoughts to themselves. And what the fuck do you expect to see in the sky over a weapons testing base? Firecrackers? M-80s? We lit-off all kinds of shit in that range over a huge amount of fucking desert desolation, so strange lights were just a normal part of our business. Get what I’m saying?”

We nodded. Despite the air conditioner blasting at full steam, beads of sweat were dripping from Carlos’ head. Jimmie was stone cold quiet.

“So this one late afternoon, we get a radio report that a few soldiers on base reported seeing strange lights. I mean, not only lights, but an actual flying disk of some kind. Do you think if they’re soldiers they’d get themselves in trouble by spouting-off insane crap? How do you think a report like that looks to the officers? They’ll think you’re goon like a loon or doing drugs while on patrol, so those poor suckers knew what was at stake by reporting, right Jimmie?”

Jimmie nodded and harrumphed, his whole body moving back and forth. He, too, was getting visibly agitated as Carlos continued, and he was scratching mercilessly at his chin as if he had contracted a bad case of poison ivy.

“Hey, so we think it’s funny, right? And we’re about ready to head back to base, and we get this call from the CO to check out a place about five miles from where we were. We didn’t see no hovering lights or anything ourselves, and we were used to traveling all over that fucking expanse. I can’t tell you, man, but we got to know every square inch of that ground. Every coyote and fucking rattlesnake and crap-smelling javelina. You ever sniffed one of those dudes up close? Worse than a skunk. Worse than ten, man. Musk and shit. Anyway, we knew the place so well, I could just about drive those fucking roads with my eyes closed.”

“Tell ‘em about the thing they saw, though. We saw,” Jimmie added.

“Yeah, yeah,” Carlos interjected. “I was just getting there. So, this report from the commander was different than any fucking request we’d ever got before or would ever get again. You remember, Jimmie? He said ‘get your asses over there quick. These guys swear there’s a fucking giant, ten-foot, hairless dude staggering around the place and they didn’t want to get near the thing.’”

“I screamed ‘What the hell?’ back at him, like this was some kind of joke they were playing on us. But the commander said it was no joke and these two guys saw this wobbling disk for a few minutes. It hovered over a hill, and then they saw this giant living creature on the ground. Big thing, kind of stumbling around, next to the road.”

“That was an ‘oh, fuck’ moment for me,” Jimmie admitted. “Like, I was ready to shiver my ass and shit my pants. It was getting dark, we were hungry, and I didn’t want to meet no shitass alien monster out in the desert. We had our standard issue pistols, but that was all. Nothing to match a fucking ray gun.”

Carlos laughed uncomfortably. “Fucking giant,” he mumbled. His head dropped down, and he stared at the floor for a few tense moments.

“So, yeah, it was like dusk, like 7 p.m., and we’d had a long day already. I didn’t want to go chasing some fucking cougar or whatever these bastards saw. Far as I knew, those guys had been drinking out there and this kind of screwball report would get their asses thrown in the brig for a few days. And if that didn’t happen for some reason, they’d get the long end of my fist when we got back to base. But the CO told me who the guys were, and I knew one of them. He was like a brother to me, man, and we’d only bullshit each other when we knew it was cool to. He wouldn’t send me out with poor Jimmie at the end of our rounds to hunt down some fucking giant who didn’t exist, just to get a laugh later. He’d know I’d beat the shit out him for doing that, right Jimmie?”

“Yeah,” Jimmie concurred. “I knew the other guy as well, and he was a straight-up dude. No bullshitter. Classic military. Muscle and discipline. He wouldn’t say nothing crazy unless it was a military issue. Dude was always climbing for a promotion, then got promoted and transferred a few days after this. I don’t think they’d promote some soldier with psycho visions.”

Carlos laughed. “No, man, he was no nut job, and the proof is in what happened to us.”

He paused to take a long swig of beer, and we were too intimidated by his presence to attempt to extract the story from him any faster. Beer frothed from his mouth onto his faded Hawaiian shirt.

“Fuck! Hey Ellen, honey. Can you get me a towel or something? I can’t keep my hand steady while talking about this. Got me shaking like a fucking three-year-old.”

Ellen sprang up and ran into the kitchen for a towel. We three stared at his hands which we really hadn’t noticed until that moment. He’d been hiding them from us, with one in his pocket and the other placed under his thigh. Since his secret was out now, he was open about it.

“Not normally clumsy,” he confided. “When I think of the shit we saw that night, it gets my hands going and they can’t stop.”

Jimmie was still rubbing his chin, creating a crimson mark the color of ruby lipstick.

“I try not to think of it at all, man. Have to take a few shots of tequila whenever it crosses my mind. Helps to settle it back in the recesses. The memory and images. Beer’s not strong enough to do the job for that.”

“You guys want some tequila, Carlos?” Ellen asked, handing him a kitchen towel.

“Sure, baby,” he replied.

“Me too?” Jimmie added.

“Any of you guys?” Ellen queried.

We indicated we were fine with our beers, and Ellen scurried back into the kitchen for shot glasses and tequila.

Again, a painfully long moment of silence. It was clear they didn’t want to continue until she returned.

“How long?” I asked.

“What?” Carlos retorted, somewhat perturbed by my question.

“Sorry,” I apologized. “How long were you guys in the service?”

“Oh, that. Well, I did my years there, too many, then retired. Jimmie, you weren’t far behind me,” Carlos said, turning to his friend.

“But the military pension’s enough to live on, I guess. Not enough to be rich, but enough to get by. They fucking should pay us triple for what we did that night, though,” Jimmie added.

“Fuck. They couldn’t pay me enough in a lifetime to make up for the nightmares and shit I’ve had after that ordeal. It’s a miracle we’re still fucking sane, right Jimmie?”

Jimmie smiled and nodded. “Cuervo? Yeah! Just leave the bottle here between Carlos and me. We could finish this baby off in a few hours.”

Carlos looked up quizzically. “Don’t you guys ever drink tequila? Margaritas? This bottle looks like it’s never been opened.”

Ellen placed the shot glasses on the lamp table between them and began pouring. “Oh, we’ve got another open bottle in the kitchen of the cheap stuff. This is a brand new bottle of Cuervo Gold for my buddies.”

The three of us glanced at each other, miffed that she’d opened our good stuff. She rarely drank, and as poor college students, we three had split the cost between us.

“This better be worth it,” I pondered.

Carlos took the full shot and slammed the glass back down on the table with a loud “ah.”

Like a pitcher stepping off the mound before the big pitch, he sat back in the black vinyl recliner, closing his eyes and tossing his chest upward for a moment as if he needed to force the blood in his brain to collect a memory stored in an ancient archive.

Carlos had a way about him from the moment he stepped in the house, and we all sensed it. He was in charge, he’d run the conversation, and he had the podium. We were just lucky to be in his presence, hearing stories we shouldn’t be hearing and fearful to say anything disruptive that might interfere with his flow.

Jimmie was equally as deferential to Carlos and had finally found a use for his nervous hand that was incessantly rubbing his chin. In between the few shots he had taken, he would gracefully twirl the shot glass on his finger after extracting the last drop from its bottom. Jimmie was clearly in no hurry for Carlos to finish the story.

Taking a deep breath, Carlos leaned forward in the chair, staring at us intently.

“You guys, I don’t go around telling this to just any vato. But she’s my goddaughter. Besides, even though this happened like twenty years ago, Jimmie and me don’t want our favorite uncle to slam the hammer down on us for telling secret shit they don’t want out.”

We all nodded and again professed to keep the wraps on what he was about to divulge.

Carlos clasped his hands together and vigorously moved his fingers, as if to allay his shaking and avoid the motion from creeping up his arms.

“So where was I?” he questioned, staring at Jimmie.

“We were in the Jeep,” he replied. “Heading toward the site.”

“Oh, yeah,” Carlos recalled. “We had that fucking radio. Either you or I threw that bastard in the back seat, and it must have flown out while we were wailing over to the site.”

“No shit!” Jimmie exclaimed with a chuckle. “Those things never did have working seat belts, and I’ve been ejected from them Jeeps too many times.”

“But remember,” Carlos added, “when we found the thing, we were looking all around for that damn radio to report back to the base. Like, ‘What the fuck are we supposed to do now, mother fuckers? Do you know who or what we’ve found here?’”

Jimmie laughed uncomfortably. “Fuck, man. Worst time ever in human history to lose a radio. We didn’t know whether to treat the fucker’s injuries, get close to it, or shoot the damn thing!”

“Oh, it was doing enough to itself that we didn’t need to shoot it. I mean, the fucking foam and stuff,” Carlos replied.

At this point, the three of us were on pins and needles, tied to every word and perturbed that Carlos and Jimmie seemed to be having a conversation between themselves, as if we weren’t in the room.

“What thing?” I dared ask.

“No, no, no, man,” Carlos objected, throwing his hands upward to stop me from going further. “Give me some space.”

Embarrassed that I had interfered with his subtle but precise storytelling protocol, I hid my facial embarrassment by rubbing my beard and glancing down at the floor.

“Well, shit, we didn’t know the radio fell out along the way,” Carlos admitted.

“You were fucking ripping it, brother, and that Jeep had the worst headlights. The arroyos were blocking any remaining light. I don’t see how the fuck you were driving so fast,” Jimmie laughed.

“Man, parts of the whole thing I can’t even remember. Like, it seems we got there in twenty minutes, then it seems like only a minute.”

Jimmie nodded. “You were grinding gears like no tomorrow, and the clutch smelled like burned tires, but you got us there.”

“Do you remember coming up on it?” Carlos asked.

Jimmie quickly snatched the Cuervo bottle and started to pour it in the shot glass. Noticing how bad his hands were shaking, Ellen sprang up instantly and took both gently from his hands.

“Here, let me pour that. I’m a terrible hostess,” she admitted, grabbing the kitchen towel she had just used to soak up the tequila spill now dripping on the carpet.

“Do you remember?” he repeated.

Jimmie was frozen. His hands were glued onto the sofa chair’s arms, and his clenched teeth caused the tendons in his neck to burst from the skin. He stared wide-eyed at Carlos, saying nothing.

Ellen pried Jimmie’s hand from the armchair, opened his fist, and closed it with the full shot glass inside, then helped him lift it to his lips.

Noting his friend was incapacitated with fear, Carlos spoke for him. “We were getting close to the coordinates they gave us. I drove up this small ridge, not expecting to see nothing. There was lots of fucking dust everywhere, you know. The Jeep tires kicked it up from the road since it hadn’t rained for weeks. So as I slowed down, this choking shitcloud of dust caught up with us, and you couldn’t see nothing in front of us. Hell, I was straining just to keep my eyes on the road.”

“It was standing,” Jimmie uttered in barely a whisper.

Carlos looked at his buddy and saw he was recovering from his fright. “No, man. I don’t think it was standing up when we got there. It was like down on its knees, or whatever the fuck you’d call those things.”

“Maybe so, maybe it was. It’s a blur. But it stood up when we got there.”

Carlos chuckled. “If you could call it standing. It wasn’t doing that for long, though.”

After this massive buildup and anticipation, and now understanding the proper protocol, we three were mouths open, dead silent.

Carlos took pity. He smiled, then grimaced. “You don’t know what the fuck we’re talking about, do you guys?”

We nodded our heads.

“Shit!” he exclaimed, rubbing his hands through his short, black hair. “How the fuck do you describe the indescribable? Let me see. Let me see.”

He stopped for a second to ponder how to explain it to the uninitiated.

“Picture this. Some sort of being. Like, eight or nine feet tall. Jimmie, do you recall measuring it, top to bottom?”

“We had that tape measure under the seat,” he responded. “You had me up at the top, by its head thing, and you were down at the ends of its legs or whatever the fuck they were.”

“Okay, we don’t know its real height, because it wasn’t standing up anymore when we got to it. Hell, our fucking challenge was not to measure the son of a bitch, but to get it back to base and pronto. I mean, the day was getting darker and we’d lost the radio. Last thing we wanted was to have them sending helicopters out like we were a team of fucking rookies who’d lost their way. We had pride, man, and I’m gonna obey orders and take this thing back to base.”

“You picked it up?” I dared ask.

Carlos ignored my question. “So I’m good with eight feet or so. When standing. I’d say, if you can imagine a large dude, eight feet, like big and round and no hair on him any fucking where. And no fucking clothing at all, like not even a pair of shoes for whatever those things were at his feet.”

“I was scared shitless,” Jimmie added, “I can’t even remember what his feet looked like. I mean, it was dark, and I wasn’t out there to count if he had ten fingers and toes.”

“Naw, he didn’t have nothing like fingers and toes. I’d call it more like fins or flappy things that looked the shape of a tree leaf. He had a couple of those on each limb. Something like that. Shit, the years go by and there are things you’d like to forget. So recalling them isn’t that fresh, you know?”

“Carlos?” Ellen asked. “Can I get you guys anything? Any food or water?”

He glanced at Jimmie. “Naw, we probably ought to get going pretty soon.”

Still dead silent, we were wondering the same thing: ‘Was this all we were going to hear?’

“But I haven’t really described the beast, so I should probably do that. First of all, we didn’t see no lights or nothing, not that we did any hunting around for them with that half-dead thing in the back of the Jeep. I was fucking surprised, weren’t you Jimmie, about how light it was? I mean, if this were a man, he’d probably weigh close to four hundred pounds, given the size. At most, I’d say it was one-fifty. What do you think?”

“Yeah, Carlos. It didn’t weigh anywhere close to what I thought.”

“Okay, well, back to its looks. I say ‘it’ because I can’t tell you if it was a man or a woman or whatever. Fuck, I don’t even want to know. It had flesh of some type, but my idea of a good time would not be watching two of these guys trying to create a little version of themselves, if you get my drift.”

“Blue-gray, I’d say,” Jimmie observed. “I mean, it was pretty dark outside, but the skin or surface was not like any human skin. Almost like it was wearing a silvery, shiny leotard-like thing from top to bottom. Like the skin of a dolphin. Yeah, like a dolphin.”

“Probably right. We never got to see the thing in the light because once we brought it back, there was a crew of folks I’d never seen before. Jesus! They were surprised as shit when we pulled up with that son of a bitch in the back of the Jeep.”

Jimmie had relaxed a little and laughed aloud. “I think they thought it was a fucking weather balloon we’d picked up. Like, it’s skin looked kind of like that. Shiny. Wet almost. Maybe that was from the foam.”

“Oh yeah, I didn’t tell them yet about the foam and blade and all. Anyway, this thing had a head, like a big head that an eight foot tall man might have, but rounder, like soccer ball size. And you know what, I’ve kind of blanked on what its face looked like, if that was its face at all.”

“I didn’t want to look,” Jimmie confessed. “Man, I mean, I was up by its head when we hauled it into the Jeep, but I couldn’t look straight at it, not with that foam spurting out of its chest.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Carlos smiled uncomfortably. “I have to tell them about what it was doing when we came up on it.”

He turned his gaze from Jimmie and back to us, as if we should prompt the next set of words from him. Carlos paused to bite his lip a few times.

“So I stopped the Jeep, and we saw what we thought was this huge guy, like a silhouette in the fading light, standing in the road and staring at us. If I would have kept going, I would’ve plowed right into him, then the Army wouldn’t have gotten their prized specimen.”

“Yeah, and we’d be dead. Like hitting an elk in an open Jeep,” Jimmie said.

“But an elk’s what? A ton? Ah, either way, I’m glad I slowed down, or we might not be telling you this story right now. So, the thing is standing up, like on two legs, if you call them legs, anyway. Like, I didn’t see no muscles or bones or anything, but somehow, this guy was just standing up, or maybe like Jimmie said, he was on his knees at first or lower, and he stood up when we approached him. It all happened so fast. So we sat there in the Jeep, and it seemed like forever just sitting there in our headlights, but then it fell to its knees if you can call them that, too. Then it toppled over. Jimmie,” Carlos wondered, turning towards his pal again, “does that sound right to you?”

“Yeah, couldn’t have been more than twenty seconds we were there in a face-off. I remember the headlights shining on the thing. I don’t think it liked that. Seemed like it put its arms up to shield its face or whatever, then it fell to its knees and collapsed. Like that.”

“We didn’t know what the fuck it was, and we didn’t have time to ask each other. We both jumped out of the Jeep at the same time, right Jimmie? Then we slowly started walking towards it, talking to it, and saying we weren’t going to hurt it or anything.”

Jimmie nodded. “But sure as shit, we were soldiers and had our pistols out. No way would I go out in the desert at night and not have my pistol in hand. Not in that desert. Coyotes, cougars, fucking crazed javelinas, raccoons. Shit, I’d even heard of bears in those hills. You don’t fuck with wild animals in the desert at night.”

“So, we’re slowly walking up to it, talking all the time, and trying to calm it down like we were trained to do with drunk soldiers. And usually, you’d expect someone to react, but this thing didn’t even take notice of us. Like it was in its own dimension of space and had no idea we was there other than the Jeep with the lights that must have blinded it.”

“Assuming it had eyes somewhere,” Jimmie said. “There were multiple indentations and stuff on its body. I suppose any one of those could have been hiding eyes. I was damn afraid we’d blinded the thing and it might come back to life once it got its bearings. Come back angry.”

“Yeah, but not the way it was stabbing itself.”

“Stabbing?” we repeated in unison, barely able to control our anxiety.

Carlos raised his right hand to his chest and made a stabbing motion, in and out. “Yeah, man. Thing must have been on its last legs, literally, trying to kill itself before we got there. Like, what the fuck? Am I going to ask this piece of alien ass what planet it’s from and what it’s doing here? Is it going to speak English or Spanish to me from whatever slit of a mouth you could find on it somewhere? I don’t think so. But there it was, with this triangular piece of shiny metal in its hand or fin or shit. What would you say, Jimmie, like a knife blade?”

“No, more like a shard of metal from a thick chrome plate that just got blasted by a howitzer. It didn’t look like any knife I’d ever seen or will see. But I’m sure it was sharp as hell. I mean, I couldn’t stand to watch as it stabbed itself.”

Staring at the lamp table then off in unpleasant reverie again, Carlos added, “Fucking foam, man. Fucking foam. Every time he stabbed his chest, his big barrel chest, with this two-inch blade, it would bleed out this whitish foam from the holes. I didn’t see no blood, just this foam.”

Jimmie raised his hands up to his temples in disgust. “Yeah, you wouldn’t get me touching that shit. Might eat right through my skin. It was bad enough we had to handle the thing to heft it into the Jeep.”

“I know what you’re thinking, guys,” Carlos commented, staring upward at us and his head cocked down. “Wasn’t this just some big dude in the desert, maybe bitten by a rattlesnake and foaming at the mouth? Well, I’ve seen lots of foam in the mouth from both humans and animals in my time, many years in the service. First of all, you have to have a mouth to foam from. This was foam coming out of its chest. I mean, we could have offered it water if it needed any, but when we came up on it, the thing was apparently in the throes of death anyway. I’ve seen more than my share of death, and I know when something is about to kick the ass bucket. Hell, you don’t go stabbing your own chest if you’re having a nice day and enjoying the scenery. This guy, this being, was doing it on purpose. I think he was afraid to live, afraid we’d take him back and dissect him alive or whatever, so he wanted to end it as quickly as possible.”

Sensing how difficult it was for them to recall this event, Ellen finally interjected a thought. “Carlos, I know you guys have to get going. Do you want to tell them what you had to do with it, then we’ll let you guys out of here?”

“You’re right. We’ve got people waiting for us. Jimmie likes to talk a lot.”

We all laughed.

“So I says to Jimmie, ‘CO’s got to see this. We can’t leave it out here for the coyotes to pick apart.’ I mean, we’d seen so many carcasses torn to shreds in a few hours. Those coyotes are ruthless, dude, and vicious in large numbers. I’ve seen packs of thirty or more, and if they’re hungry, they don’t give a shit if you got two legs or four or however many this thing had. And the CO would have chewed my ass if we left it out there all night and came back to nothing but bones or whatever the fuck it used to hold its body together. So we picked this thing up with Jimmie at its head, me at its flappy feet things, and dragged it over to the Jeep, then hoisted it across the back seat, laying sideways. Since we’d lost the portable radio and the Jeep had no radio otherwise, the cheap Army bastards, we couldn’t radio the base and tell them what we were bringing to them. Can you imagine? ‘Yeah, this is Carlos. Jimmie and I were delayed a bit looking for these mysterious lights, and we came upon a giant bluish alien with dolphin skin who was stabbing himself in the chest. So we loaded him into the Jeep and should be there in a half hour. Make sure the base doctor is around to clean up the foam spewing out of his chest, with a sewing kit to stitch the holes. Is the mess hall still open? I mean, we’re pretty hungry after all this work.’”

We laughed again.

“So as we’re driving up to the entrance where there’s usually only a single soldier at gate guard, we see all these bright lights focused our way, as if they were intentionally lighting our path to get home.”

“I mean, shit. I was fucking blinded by those lights. We use those for night maneuvers, but I never had to stare right into one. I was always on the other side, shooting at something or using binoculars,” Jimmie chimed in.

“So I’m still driving the Jeep, blinded and all, and Jimmie and I are in fucking shell shock or whatever. I slowed down and saw this MP waving me forward. Like, where does he think I’m headed? Like, I need an MP to tell me how to enter that base gate like I’d done a million times before? But as soon as we saw the MP, we noticed a dozen or so other dudes I’d never seen on base. You’d never seen any of them, right Jimmie?”

“These were not regular base guys. Never saw them before that night. Never saw them since, nor did I want to.”

“So a fucking gaggle of MPs and special officer and suit types descend on our Jeep like we were fucking MacArthur arriving onshore in the Philippines. And before we knew it, they pulled us forcibly into another vehicle, a car, which took us over to one of the adjunct offices I’d never been in before. And there was just one guy in there, one guy in that dimly lit room who was sitting at a desk, smoking away at his pipe. Remember?”

Jimmie nodded. “Yep. Smelled sweet, like maple syrup.”

Carlos continued. “He says to us this: ‘You are to not discuss what happened tonight. Understand me?’ He had the wings so was a bird colonel, and I wasn’t about to tell him to take a hike and that the thing in the back seat of the Jeep was some fucking alien. Hell, it wasn’t ours to question what it was. We were just a couple of grunge soldiers out on our usual patrols, and we were bound by duty to avoid discussing shit with the other soldiers anyway, as were they. You don’t fuck around when you’re at a place where the armed forces of the U.S. are testing new weapons. You just keep your mouth shut about anything you see. So it wasn’t a new experience for us, not the ‘mouth shut’ piece of it, anyway. The silky, blue-gray skinned thing we picked up in the desert? The eight foot tall one who held a sharp, bright metal object in its hands and kept stabbing at its chest? The one who apparently died right in front of us, with his chest all foamy? The one we picked up with our own hands and placed in the Jeep? Now, that indeed was new to us.”

“But we were forced to pigeonhole the memory of that night away, buckle it up, put it in the shitter, close the lid, and keep flushing,” Jimmie complained.

Carlos sighed. “And you’d think after that crazy-ass night, somebody would’ve said something to us. That even our CO, a good guy, would have said ‘Hey, you doing alright after that night?’ But nobody said nothing to us after that, like it never happened. Hell, I was so fucking riled and full of adrenalin, I couldn’t sleep for the next week and started hallucinating. Ah, however,” he exhorted, “Mr. Cuervo and his friends have helped me through more than a few nights since then.”

“Me as well,” Jimmie agreed, raising another tumbler full of tequila in the air before swizzling it down.

Ellen moved behind Carlos and patted his shoulders. “You still turned out as good guys, both you and Jimmie, so the whole event couldn’t have done too much damage.”

“Couldn’t ask for a better goddaughter,” Carlos beamed. “Jimmie, you ready to get on the road?”

“Dude, my head’s buzzing. Glad you’re driving."