“You know what, Joe. You’re pretty fucking strange.”
Kenny’s rig, back on the highway. Joe is smoking a joint. Sherry reaches for it. “Son, don’t hog that doob.” He passes it to her. She takes a heavy drag. The cab is thick with smoke.
Joe delivers a stoned ramble: “See, we live in a seamless universe, but it has two sides. And one side doesn’t have a clue what’s happening on the other side. It’s like a highway, a two-lane highway. One universe going one way, the other universe going the other way. Sometimes you have head-on crashes. The atoms smash into one another. Like a wreck on the interstate. That’s how the aliens get here, during the collisions.”
Sherry takes a deep drag. “Right, Joe. Whatever.”
The DeLorean pulls off the main highway. Moe gets out and gives his dead and abandoned pickup the once-over. When he’s satisfied no one is around, he returns to the highway at breakneck speed.
Kenny’s rig, hours later. Kenny is drowsy. Joe and Sherry sleep. A highway sign looms in the headlight beam: WELCOME TO KANSAS. In his groggy state, Kenny doesn’t immediately grasp that something is quite wrong here. But when he does, he snaps to alertness, applies the brakes, stops. Joe and Sherry wake up. Kenny backs up, past the sign for another look.
“How’d we get turned around?”
Sherry yawns. “We were in Texas when I fell asleep.”
“And going due south,” Kenny says. “How in the fuck did we end up in Kansas?”
“I told you this would happen,” Joe says. “It happens all the time. People don’t remember is all.”
Kenny shakes his head, truly puzzled. He attempts to turn the rig around on the narrow-shouldered highway, temporarily blocking both lanes.
The DeLorean tops a hill going at least a hundred and ten, an alien at the wheel. Kenny, Sherry and Joe run from the rig. The alien applies the brakes and screeches to a halt inches from it.
The gull-wing door of the DeLorean opens in a cloud of rubber smoke.
Joe says, “It wants us to get in and go. We’re being abducted. I’m beginning to remember how it went. We have to do what they say.”
The DeLorean speeds around the rig and burns rubber down the highway. After an indeterminate stretch of time, it pulls to the shoulder on a lonely stretch of the same endless blacktop. The gull-wing opens. Sherry, Joe and Kenny get out. The DeLorean peels away and roars down the highway.
The sun, at mid-heaven, is ultra-bright. Bathing in its rays are endless fields of ripe wheat.
Joe has his saw and bow, wears his western hat. Kenny shrugs. “How in the shit did we get turned around like this?”
“This is where they dropped me off last time. It’s kind of familiar.”
Sherry says, “We got turned around some way.”
“I don’t think so, Mother.”
Kenny tries to orient himself. “Wait…a…minute.”
The temperature soars.
On the same highway, later. They plod on, sweltering.
Sherry and Joe pass a joint back and forth.
A huge swarm of man-sized grasshoppers passes overhead. Their mechanical wing-beats, in perfect unison, sound like rusty gates. “What are those?” Sherry asks.
Kenny and Sherry shade their eyes and look skyward as the flock’s shadow envelops them.
Joe yells, “Don’t look up!” He crouches, pulling Sherry down with him. The lit joint flies from her hands and lands in the dry grass near the road.
A heavy rain of grasshopper shit and piss pelts them in acidic drops. These drops scorch clothing and sting when they land on flesh. Kenny takes a full dose in the eyes.
He kneels, hands cupped over his eyes. “Jesus! H! Fucking Christ! I can’t see!”
A wheat field near a highway. The joint has ignited some grass. Flames quickly spread to the field of ripening wheat.
Fade to the same highway, farther on and later. Kenny has a bandana tied over his eyes. Joe has one dangling from his mouth. Sherry holds Kenny’s hand to guide him.
The wheat fields burn behind them. They haven’t noticed.
Kenny’s eyes smart and burn. “My fucking eyes are on fire!”
Sherry changes the subject. “What were those things? Geese?”
Joe shakes his head. “You wish. It’s the big green ones. They’re swarming.”
“Oh, Joe. Come on, we’re lost, and Kenny’s eyes are shot. Make some sense for a change.”
Joe looks around at the strange landscape. “We’re not lost. Don’t you get it?”
Sherry also looks around. “Get what?”
“We just got abducted.”
“To Kansas?”
“Not the same one. This is a really, really different one.”
They come to a road sign: WITCHY TOE — 6 KLICKS
Sherry cocks her head like a dog listening to commands. “Witchy Toe?”
“They got funny names for things over here. Witchy Toe. That’s where we register. I’m remembering now. There’s a reception area. We have to register and fill out some forms. Then they give us some tests.”
Sherry slides a stick of gum into her mouth, then another. “You’re scaring me. Stop it.”
Eight plumes of black smoke rise from tall smokestacks in the distance and a brown fog shrouds the outline of a small city. The sun sets in the east. A gibbous moon rises in the south. The air cools precipitously and a chill wind blows. In the background wheat fields burn.
Joe smiles, enjoying his tour guide role. “There’s Witchy Toe.”
A metal building on the outskirts of Witchy Toe. The DeLorean is the only car in a vast parking lot. Dripping sweat, Sherry, Joe and the blindfolded Kenny enter. Just inside the door and through a turnstile, a mechanical alien turns a crank, which drives a leather belt that spins the blades of eight ceiling fans. From the alien’s ass comes a plastic square with a number on it.
Joe takes the number. “We take a number now.”
Sherry takes the next number from the alien’s ass, then another for Kenny. “I don’t believe this, Kenny.”
“Where the fuck are we?”
“I’m not sure,” Joe says, “but once you get here you don’t remember much about back there. And when you get back there, you don’t remember much about here. It’s coming back. I know what’s happening.”
A dozen or so other new arrivals sit on uncomfortable metal benches, waiting. They seem dazed and confused.
At one end of the building are eight curtained booths, similar to arcade photo booths. When a booth is empty, a number flashes on a lighted panel above it.
Sherry sits Kenny down on a bench. “Let’s take that bandana off and look at your eyes.”
She removes the bandana. Kenny’s eyes are extremely bloodshot. He blinks and squints. “I can see a little. Not a lot.”
A new arrival exits a booth and the number thirteen flashes.
Joe says, “That’s me.” He enters the booth and closes the curtain.
The only light in the booth is from a small display screen. Behind a circular port covered with an opaque material, an alien head can be discerned. Its buzzing is audible.
Two other wall-ports allow the alien’s hands to extend into the booth. For now, they are retracted.
The word Deglove appears on the display screen.
Joe doesn’t understand. “I’ve been here before but I forgot what that means.”
The alien’s hands emerge from their ports. They are thorny and scaled, with six long, bony fingers and two fat thumbs on each hand. With amazing deftness, the hands unbuckle Joe’s belt and pull his jeans down to his knees.