Ch. 5 Black-Eyed Kids

Today, I had a different debriefing interviewer, a much more normal seeming person. Although he wasn’t a Mr. Rodgers level of friendliness, he was calm, professional, and not rude, a huge improvement over yesterday’s guy. But, I'm sure you're more interested in reading about the road trip to Arizona than about me right now as a guy recovering in a hospital room, so here goes.

When Rachelle returned from the restroom, she acted like nothing weird had happened, as if a physics-defyingly long electrical cord had not emerged from and then disappeared back into her cargo pants, as if we had always planned to get our meals to go. She smiled a lot, cracked jokes, and seemed in good humor like before, but didn't offer any kind of explanation for the odd occurrence or even acknowledge it.

I took my cue from her and conversed back with her normally. Once at the vehicle, I got into the driver's seat and she got in the back for her nap as she had planned. I set my food container on the front passenger side floor so that it wouldn't spill. I was hungry and the smells of the food made me feel even hungrier.

As I pulled back out onto I-70, I heard Rachelle’s food container pop open and the tantalizing aroma of her entre drifted up toward me from the back. I tried to ignore it. She ate in silence in the dark. When she was done, she settled in for the nap that she had been needing for a while at that point. I gathered from her sighs as she got comfortable before dozing off that she was a little stressed out. She'd had a long drive, some strange incident at Denny's, and God knew what else was going on in her life.

I had been looking forward to hearing some of her life story as I had told her some of mine, but that would apparently wait. In the meantime, there were two more folks to pick up in Kansas City. I wondered what they would be like.

Rachelle had driven through the night from Chicago to pick me up in the morning in St. Louis. Now, I was driving us into Kansas City which is only about four hours from St. Louis on the Interstate. By the time we would stop and go to bed that night in a hotel, we’d be in Hays, Kansas. You might notice that we weren’t traveling to Dust Bowl, Arizona by the most direct route. That was because we were picking up the team along the way and one team member was in Denver.

So, you might ask why we weren’t flying. The reason, as it was explained to me, was that Control didn’t consider the events in Dust Bowl, Arizona to be world threatening or a cause of potential mass destruction. There were far more experienced (and heavily armed) teams for that sort of thing. This was even considered a training mission for me, the only newbie. Everyone else had been with Control for at least three years minimum. Liz, the team leader, had ten years experience.

The mission in Dust Bowl was based around a certain time frame, the seven days of the Dust Bowl “event”. We had plenty of time to get there. I think Control intended for some team bonding to happen over the course of our road trip.

We picked up Elizabeth Granger, aka Liz, and Montgomery Moore, aka Mont, in the parking lot of Kansas City’s Union Station. Rachelle didn’t even wake up. After placing his and LIz’s stuff in the back through the hatch, Mont greeted me with a soft, yet friendly “Hello” before gingerly moving to the vehicle’s middle row seats, not waking Rachelle in the back row. Liz sat next to me up front. She had a very managerial vibe coming from her. I felt without any doubt that I was in the presence of “the boss”. I’m sure she sat up there because she wanted to get her own impression of me, whatever any files on me that she had read might say.

Mont was slightly over six feet tall and athletically muscular, though not bodybuilder muscular. He had dark hair cut short, just a little bit past military short. Liz had platinum blonde hair, looked in her early forties, and had a strong, yet feminine jawline. She was a classical type of beauty like you would see in old-timey pictures in an art museum, not necessarily like a woman you would see on a magazine cover today or like a woman you’d see running around in a bikini on an old rerun of Baywatch. Her voice was a rich alto that would have been very sultry if she weren’t such an intimidating boss figure.

We stopped for fuel, drinks, and snacks before we left the Kansas City area. Rachelle still didn’t wake up. Mont and Liz had been on missions with her before and knew what she liked so we bought that. After finishing a small bag of beef jerky, Mont drifted to sleep behind me. He was too big to lie down as Rachelle had, but he was more adapted to sleeping sitting upright. Liz mentioned that before joining Control, Mont had been a police officer.

Liz and I talked quietly in the front. I repeated my story about myself that I had told Rachelle back in the MIssouri Denny’s. I had the feeling that nothing I told her she didn’t already know about me from reading files. Or had my first day with Control just made me paranoid? I did manage to learn that Liz was married and had two kids, a boy and a girl, nearly adults. She lived in Minneapolis and had flown into Kansas City to be picked up. She kept things light and superficial about herself.

A few hours later, when we reached Hays, we found all the hotels full. Both Rachelle and Mont woke up as we drove past NO VACANCY sign after NO VACANCY sign. It turned out Hays was hosting the Kansas Corn Growers Association “Cornvention”.

Rachelle’s voice came from the back. “I’m no farmer, but isn’t this a time of the season that farmers should be busy in their fields?”

Mont chuckled. “Even farmers gotta party sometime.”

After repeated frustrations trying to find a place to stop for the night, we went on down I-70 and stopped at the first hotel that was situated at the south side of an exit. There was no town there, just an exit, although the north side of the exit had a McDonald’s that looked promising for breakfast in the morning. Little hotels like that always make me think of the Bates Motel from Psycho. Now, having been through what I’ve been through as a member of Field Team 42 with Control, the things I’ve seen for real make the Psycho movies pale in comparison.

Relieved to see a neon VACANCY sign lit at the place, we pulled in. Liz went inside to check us in while we waited in the car. Rachelle and Mont had fallen asleep again as we had cruised out of Hays. Everything was very quiet. I hadn’t managed to park in a way so as to be able to see into the lobby and watch Liz and the desk staff in there, so I pulled out my phone and got absorbed in it.

Thus it was very startling to hear a knocking on my window right next to my head. I looked up, set my phone on the seat next to me, and saw a boy there, about 13 years of age. He was wearing a formal white shirt and a long tie that made him look like a Jehovah’s Witness kid come to my door at home, except no Jehovah’s Witness I had ever seen had such long hair. He had long bangs in front, a real salad bowl haircut. He faced downward, like a kid in trouble in a school principal’s office. I couldn’t see his eyes through his bangs. I looked at the clock set in the Ford’s dash. It was after midnight. What was a kid doing by himself out there? Was he in some kind of trouble? I didn’t think he was there to hand me a free copy of The Watchtower.

I rolled my window down just a couple of inches to make talking easier. The kid just stood there, not moving, not saying anything.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“Please, sir, can I get a ride home?”

Without waiting for my response, the kid stepped to the side and tried the handle to the door behind me. Fortunately, it was locked. The kid only tried the door once, then calmly, without taking his hand off the handle, said, “Please let me in.”

Suddenly, from the other side of the vehicle to my right, Liz screamed “Get us out of here! Floor it!”

Liz had come out of the hotel at just that moment. The look on her face was the serious look of a commanding leader giving orders in a life-or-death emergency. From what I learned later, she might have been. She never took her eyes off the strange boy as she gestured toward her door, indicating for me to let her in.

I started the car, unlocked only Liz’s door, put the vehicle into reverse gear, and pulled away as soon as Liz’s butt hit the seat. Fortunately, in doing so, she didn’t bust my phone I had set there. Also fortunately, the kid didn’t do anything reckless like try to jump onto the car or position himself in front of it. I didn’t want to run over a kid.

As I pulled away, the kid’s hair whipped back and I saw his eyes. They were totally black, no irises or sclera, all pupils, one hundred percent black. My stomach felt like it was shrinking up inside at the sight of it.

“What was that? What just happened?” I asked as I got us back onto the Interstate.

“Yeah. What’s going on?” came Rachelle’s voice. She and Mont had been jarred awake by the Expedition’s sudden evasive maneuvers.

Liz seemed more composed and relaxed again as she answered. “You just met your first paranormal entity, Dr. Leighton. Pull us over at the next exit whether it has any businesses or not. As per protocol after an encounter with Black-Eyed Kids, or BEKs, I’ll have to check us all with a Geiger counter. I have one in my things in the back.”

Geiger counter? Black-eyed Kids are real? How many more times would my mind be blown before we even got to Arizona?