David wasn’t aware of having fainted, but evidently he had, because he came to laying down on the hard ground with small rocks boring into his back.

  Fuzzily he could make out Charis’s voice, “is he awake yet?”

  “Forget him,” that sounded like Scott. “I can’t believe you’re still in your feet. Do you feel okay?”

  “I’ll survive, but God I could use an espresso.” Charis sounded like she was about to fall over.

  Dave groaned, throwing an arm across his face. He most definitely did not want to wake up. After the last two weeks he’d had, he would be okay with never waking up again.

  His arm was sore and his whole body hurt; it took him a while to figure out why. He felt like he’d been through the tumble cycle in a giant clothes drying machine.

  He groaned louder and cracked open his eyes to see a very blurry starry night sky and the dark shadows of people standing nearby.

  “There there, take it easy young man,” Miradon said, kneeling next to Dave to poke and prod him gently. “I don’t think anything is broken.”

  No, not stars. As his blurry vision slowly sharpened, he saw pinprick phantom lights that spun slowly from some kind of head injury. Then as that cleared, Dave saw a dirty, smoke-blackened ceiling above him punctured with little nail holes that let the daylight in, looking a lot like stars.

  He licked his dry lips and managed to whisper hoarsely, “What the fuck happened?” Focusing on Miradon’s face was difficult.

  “We had a little fight,” Miradon explained in a soft voice as if he was speaking to a small child, “and we took a little tumble.” His red hat was scorched and he had a black eye. He’d lost his yellow goggles.

  Dave blinked hard until his eyes cleared and looked around at the shack and his bruised companions. “Did that little tumble involve a city bus used as a baseball bat?”

  “Almost,” Scott smirked without humor.

  Charis was near a cloudy, grimy brown window staring anxiously at the sky. Her hoodie was torn, she was so pale she was nearly green, and she looked like crap. Her perfect platinum hair was no longer perfect. “I don’t think they figured out where we went. I hope. At least there’s that.”

  There was a new guy with them that David recognized instantly. Long blue hair to the floor, blue skin, white robe… he was pouting in the corner with a bandage on his head. The spot of blood soaking through the cloth was dark blue, and so were his eyes… without any whites to them. Another physical ‘angel’ like Dusty.

  “I liked that charrik,” the pilot grumbled, “I had it all fixed up. And I had to be the guy on duty when YOU guys showed up.”

  “So we had to ditch the charrik,” Miradon continued to tell David the story with a sigh, “and now we are somewhere in the middle of Nevada.”

  Dusty murmured to himself, “I guess we really are going to Salt Lake… now.”

  “Nevada.” Dave slowly pushed himself up on his elbows, glancing at the dirty window. “I get sucked into a UFO and wake up in the desert. Go figure.”

  Charis noticed his movement. “You okay there, Dave?”

  “Aren’t we a little off course, Charis?”

  She pouted. “It wasn’t my fault!”

  “It wasn’t mine either!” The blue UFO driver yelled. “We had a whole squadron of enemy charriks on our ass! What the hell do you guys have that they want so bad?”

  Scott pointed accusingly at Dave.

  He groaned and flopped back onto the ground, covering his eyes with his bruised arm. “It’s Jim Cragley’s fault. I swear to God, I’m going to kill that crazy old fart. I might as well, the cops already think I did.”

  “Okay. Look,” Charis said, standing up and facing the room. “I think they are gone, they didn’t see us running in here. I think we can move out.”

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  “And go where? I don’t want to walk through the desert at two o’clock in the afternoon!” Scott argued. “Do you know how hot it is out there?”

  “Well? What else do you want to do?” She crossed her arms and glared at him.

  “Wait here until they send another charrik!” Scott said as if it were decided.

  Suddenly Charis’s face went pale and her eyes flew open wide. “Oh no.” She quickly patted herself down, then threw open her purse and dug through it frantically. “Shit. It’s gone. The cell phone. It’s gone. It was in the car.”

  Everyone moaned except for Dave who started laughing. The sound was tinged with hysteria.

  “Does anyone have a pigeon?” She looked pleadingly at her friends.

  Dave laughed harder.

  The driver climbed to his feet. “Wait. I’ve got a dispatch radio! We can call the charrik tower.”

  “Thank God!” Charis uttered with a glance upward, like a little prayer.

  He lifted up his long white robe and dug a small silver disk out of the ripped blue jeans he wore underneath. (Angels wore jeans?) The radio looked like a miniature version of his UFO. “Sally? Sally? This is Inu.” The blue guy waited expectantly. And waited. And waited.

  Everyone watched.

  He shook the disk. “Sally?”

  Dave was still chuckling, waiting for things to get even worse and more absurd.

  Scott offered in his most Bostonian tone of sarcasm, “Maybe she’s out to lunch.”

  “Keep trying,” Charis told him. “I think we should keep moving. It will make pinpointing our signatures harder. A moving target is more difficult to focus on.”

  Scott yelped, “It’s HOT out there! This is the middle of the freaking desert! In Autumn!”

  Dusty opened the door and sniffed. “Not too bad out there.”

  Dave stopped chuckling, but he was still amused. “Why don’t you guys just pray? I mean, you work for God, right? Can’t he hear you, or is he out to lunch, too?”

  They all leveled a ‘that’s not funny’ look at him, except for Miradon who patted him on the head. “Lovely idea, young man. But I’m sure He knows already. Come on now, can you walk?”

  “Do I have to? I’d rather not meet a rattlesnake wearing these cheap shitty canvas shoes.”

  “Oh don’t worry about that,” Miradon chuckled. “They won’t come near me.” He doffed his hat and cloak and unbuttoned his shirt. Then he removed his scarf which he tied around his head like a bandanna, transforming his odd outfit into something that made him look like an extra for Lawrence of Arabia.

  Inu saw that and pulled off his long white robe, ripping off the bottom half. He put on the top half like a shirt and tucked it into the jeans he wore under it.

  Charis stole the bottom of the robe and made it into an Arabic style head drape.

  Dave sighed then groaned, rolling onto his side to climb unsteadily to his feet. He felt dizzy and his head was sore, but he could walk. He was pretty sure he had a mild concussion, though. Maybe. At least it felt like it… maybe… of course he’d never had a concussion so he didn’t know what they felt like.

  They abandoned what had once been a tiny gas station shack in the middle of nowhere and squinted into the noonday sun. Heat shimmered on the horizon; far away were mountains, and above them a merciless bright blue sky without a single cloud. Little brown bushes and scrub dotted a flat rocky plain to the edges of the world, and through it ran a straight sun-bleached gray asphalt road.

  Dave looked around, trying to spot the crashed UFO, but he couldn’t see even a column of smoke. The others began walking, single-file, down the road toward the East, putting the sun at their backs. He followed last of all.

  “What happened to the UFO? Where’s the wreck? I mean, you aren’t just going to leave a crashed UFO in the desert, are you?” Dave looked sidelong at the blue guy. “You didn’t have anything to do with Roswell, did you?”

  Inu scowled at him. “That wasn’t funny.”

  “Actually…” Dave snorted a laugh, and started to giggle again. “… yeah, it was. Pretty much everything about you people is funny at this point.” He kept giggling.

  Scott was in a very bad mood (as usual) and muttered to himself, dragging his stupid ripstop jacket along the road after him. “… so she says, ‘it’ll be fun! c’mon! we can do it in our spare time!’ and what happens? She has to drag along bum-boy gun-slinging psychopath.” He sang it in a sing-song mockery. “I thought I’d be back in my apartment by now watching Darkstar with a cold beer, and where am I? In the middle of NEVADA!” he yelled, hitting the asphalt with his jacket.

  · · ───── ??☆?? ───── · ·

  Hours passed. They stopped by the side of the road, taking shelter in the shadow of a roadside advertisement billboard that promised untold riches at a local casino. Scott at that point dug out one of his most precious elogic treasures, a never-ending can of soda pop. At least it would be never-ending so long as they kept drinking from it. The moment they finished it, it would be empty.

  Scott was grumbling. “You guy are so lucky I have that. Drink as much as you can. The moment we stop drinking from it, it will be gone. Hey! Don’t slobber on it, Dave, you Neanderthal! Eiw! Gross!”

  · · ───── ??☆?? ───── · ·

  Hours later they followed their shadows, which had slowly grown extremely long and thin across the silent gray asphalt. Tumbleweeds blew past and Dusty sighed heavily. “I’m hungry.”

  Everyone yelled, “Shut up!”

  · · ───── ??☆?? ───── · ·

  Hours later…

  …Crickets chirruped in surprisingly loud chorus. Out of the darkness of the starry desert night they finally saw headlights. A car was coming. At last.

  Charis did her best to look cute, and everyone stood to the side of the road and grinned in a friendly non-threatening manner. Dusty waved.

  It passed them without stopping.

  All six of them shouted angry obscenities, threw rocks, and gave the car the finger.

  “Yeah, keep driving, asshole!” Scott yelled after the tail lights.

  They all sighed, glanced at each other, and kept plodding.