As I was filling up in this awkward manner, I was distracted by the unlikely sound of a car backfiring inside the convenience store. How odd, I thought.
When it finally struck me what the series of explosive sounds signified, my passenger had returned and we were on the road again, looking for the left turn I had missed the last time around, a smoking gun lying heedlessly in her lap.
50th Night
It isn’t that all motel rooms look alike. Or perhaps it is. I speak or demur from limited experience. In any event, when we entered Unit 13 at the Hope’s End Motel in single file, my last concern was the general demeanor of the room I was entering at gun point.
My companion, who still hadn’t removed her dark glasses, wanted an offspring, or so she intimated, and had chosen me (by default perhaps) to be its father.
Why me? I wanted to ask, but I could see the question had no meaningful answer in present context. Like the motel, I was there.
I sensed that as soon as the transaction was completed, she would kill me so it was in my best interest — my only interest — to stall for as long as possible.
I suggested we first tell each other something about ourselves to take the edge off our strangeness.
“You no longer seem strange to me,” she said.
“Strange may not be exactly what I mean,” I said. “I need to feel sympathetic to the woman I’m with before I can perform.”
“Really?” she said, sticking a hand in my pants to test my claim.
“We need to tell each other our stories first,” I said. “Tell me something about yourself. For starters, what’s your name?”
She seemed perplexed by my question, her otherwise perfect forehead furrowed. “You can call me Mary. I don’t remember how I got here. I’ve tried to remember but I can’t. I don’t want to know anything about you so why should you want to know anything about me. You wouldn’t believe my story if I told it to you.”
“What else?”
“Every man wants to fuck me, that’s my story,” she said.
It’s hard to explain, given that my life was at risk, but her innocence moved me. “I know you don’t lie,” I said. “I’ll believe what you tell me.”
“I’m not from here,” she said.
It took me a few minutes to take in what she meant by “here” and by the time I figured it out we were already doing the dance.
To be fair, to put the best possible light on it, she fucked like an extra-terrestrial, which was something of a turn-off.
As I later learned, she was a hybrid, part ET, part humanoid, a scientific experiment gone awry. She was interested in others only in so far as they served her basic needs, which were survival and reproduction.
Mary had a particularly long, reptilian tongue and when we kissed open-mouthed it actually did reach down my throat, an odd not quite comfortable sensation.
I resisted climax, which made her impatient, told her I had meds in the glove compartment of the car that enhanced sexual performance.
“How do I know you’ll return?” she asked, riding me at some revved-up speed.
I measured my words, my life most likely in the balance. “I want you to have my child,” I dissembled. “I sense a sweetness in you, Mary, that you’ve never been fully in touch with.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, seeming to blush under the glare of the overhead light. “You can go to the car for your meds, as you call them, but if you don’t come back, I’ll follow you to the ends of the cosmos. Wherever you try to hide, I’ll be waiting for you.” A reptilian claw extended from her finger and she left a scratch mark under my eye.
I had no doubt she meant her threat. I put on my coat, leaving my neatly folded clothes on one of the matching dressers as hostage to my return.
Waiting for me at the car were a scientific team composed of three men and two women dressed in green hospital scrubs and armed with flame throwers. The apparent leader of the group showed me a blurred photo of Mary, which I reluctantly identified.
“She’s already killed five men,” he said.
I wasn’t surprised, not much. “She doesn’t seem so bad when you get to know her,” I said.
They asked me to wait around so that I might identify the remains after they completed their “intervention,” as they called it. I couldn’t bear to watch and I got into my car as the scientists made their way with calculated stealth toward our cabin.
Except it wasn’t our cabin they were moving toward but the identical one to the right. I had already started up the car and, though I didn’t want to look, watched them out of the side of my eye.
As they were torching the wrong cabin, burning it to the ground, Mary slipped out the door disguised as a man. I was the only one who noticed her.
Wearing my clothes, looking straight ahead, she headed nonchalantly toward the car. I had barely a moment to decide, rush off or wait for her to occupy the space next to me. For whatever reason, perhaps inertia, perhaps misguided sympathy, I didn’t leave her behind.
As we drove off, I noticed through the rear view mirror the owner of the motel emerge, bearing what seemed like an army surplus submachine gun. The scientists, searching through the rubble for Mary’s remains, seemed oblivious to the approaching danger.
51st Night
“I would say thank you,” she said as we sped off into the moonless night — the sound of fire engines in the distance — “but it’s not in my nature to feel grateful.”
“That you can say that,” I said, “is a hopeful sign. That you are aware of certain positive qualities you lack suggests that these qualities exist in you in embryonic form.” She laughed or almost laughed. “Don’t bet your life on it,” she said.
As we drove across the Maine border, I told Mary of the purpose of the trip, which was to rescue my former wife, Molly, from her kidnappers or, at the very least, from herself.
“When you rescue her, if you rescue her, what happens then?” she asked.
“Well,” I said, “I don’t really know.”
She inhaled my answer, seemingly amused by it. Then, after a few minutes of silent calculation, she offered me a deal. She would help me rescue Molly if we stopped at a motel first to complete our business.
“Is it in your nature to keep your word?” I asked.
“I’ve never given my word before,” she said, “so I don’t really know.” When she put her hand on my knee, I remembered that I was naked under my coat.
“Why don’t we rescue Molly first and then go to a motel,” I said, trying to edge away from the demands of her hand. “You can ask anyone. I always honor my agreements.”
“You think you’re trustworthy,” she said in this prescient voice, “but you’re not.”
A silent compromise was reached through no agreement on my part. Mary climbed onto my lap and attached herself. It made driving difficult especially when she bounced up and down obstructing my view and I began to swerve out of my lane.
When I could see the road again a steroidal SUV was coming at me and I had to bail out to avoid a fatal collision.
What I didn’t notice was the tree coming at me from the other side. I heard Mary’s unearthly scream before I blacked out.
I woke in what turned out to be a hospital bed, my head swathed in bandages, my left leg in traction.
The scientists I had met at the motel, four out of the original five, were standing impatiently at the side of the bed waiting to talk to me.
There were none of the bedside amenities one gets from most hospital visitors, no “how are you feeling,” no “what can we get you.” “Did you climax in her?” was what they wanted to know.