Ever So Boring

I stood on the cold gray concrete of the cracked sidewalk as a brisk September wind brushed against my face, and waited for a metaphorical tumbleweed to dance across the empty silent street in front of me. Unfortunately the only thing that showed up was a large yellow Gandmerlin county school bus.

A few of my classmates looked up as I walked into the bus, but most kept their eyes stoically fixed upon the floor.

“Hey Alex.” The bus driver said cheerfully.

“Hey Friz.” I responded. I didn’t know the bus driver’s real name. We all just called him Friz because of his frizzy red hair. He was overweight, freckled and friendly. I managed to contort my mouth into a small half smile for Friz’s benefit, and returned his wave with a half hearted salute and finger point.

I sat down and watched the dust motes I had released into the air, sparkle in the morning light for a moment, before they fell back down to cover the various surfaces of the bus's interior. The ride to school was as expected; uneventful.

Lockers clanged, and books fell with a bang on linoleum floors. The floors were so old they always looked dingy and gray. I managed to navigate the halls easily despite the perpetual movement of my fellow students, simply because there weren’t that many of them.

My homeroom teacher Ms. Eliza Baley stood, all of her 5’2” dominating, tight bunned, squinty eyed, large nosed frame filling the classroom with a dark cloud of intimidation.

“Career day.” Ms. Baley said while staring down each and every one of her students individually. “Is upon us.”

I rolled my eyes. Career day was for little kids I thought. Ms. Baley caught me in her glare. She smiled, In the way a cobra would smile at a mouse.

“You are kids.” She said firmly.

I swallowed and for one unhinged moment I thought she had read my mind, until rationalization reentered my brain and reminded me that no one, no matter how small and unsettling could read minds.

“You Alex.” She continued, her expression still sticky sweet like flypaper. “ I have something special in mind for you. A ride along with the county sheriff.”

I wanted to groan, but wanted Ms. Baley to look away even more, so I kept my face passive and my mouth shut.

***

The Police station was on Potter Street. When I arrived the sheriff, a tall heavy set man man in his mid-forties leaned against a police car labeled in dark black paint, squad car #51. I thought the number was odd considering the local police only had 4 squad cars in total.

As soon as he saw me coming the sheriff opened the passenger side door. I slid into the black interior of the squad car, the sheriff shut the door, walked around the front of the vehicle with his mirror aviator sunglasses reflecting me the whole time, until he opened the driver’s side door and got in.

“Ms. Baley told me your name’s Alex.” The sheriff's voice was a gruff baritone. It reminded me a little of batman. I nodded, stuck my feet up on the dash, folded my arms, and looked stoically out the windshield. Looking at my own doubled reflection was becoming disconcerting.

“My name is Sheriff Tommy Lee Smith.” The sheriff said, “but you can call me Sheriff Smith.”

“I smirked, “Okay Tom.” I said.

“You want an F.” Sheriff Smith said conversationally. My smirk fell away.

“No Sheriff.” I responded.

“Good.” The sheriff said, the way adults do when something is settled to their satisfaction. “Now get your shoes off my dashboard.”

***

A shiny chrome colored vehicle zoomed past us. Sheriff Smith flicked on the police lights and hit the gas. We sped down the highway in pursuit of the shiny gray sports car. At least I thought it was a sports car. As we got closer I wasn’t quite sure.

The car looked a bit too fat and seemed to be missing it’s wheels. Floating above rather than diving on the asphalt road, But the effect could be some sort of illusion caused by heat waves or light refraction. I couldn’t really get a good look as it was pulling away from us and further into the distance.

I thought we were going to lose the perpetrators when Sheriff Smith hit a button under the dash that propelled us forward, as if we were attached to a rocket engine. Outside my window everything had blurred into an impressionistic landscape that looked like it had been smeared from one side to the other by a child’s fingers.

It didn’t take long to over take the silvery thing and force it to pull over. The thing wasn’t a car, at least it wasn’t any kind of car I had ever seen. It was indeed floating and looked like two giant dinner plates made of aluminum foil had been stuck together.

Sheriff Smith got out of patrol car 51 and walked over to the side of the thing and knocked. A door appeared and three tall lanky grayish green creatures with elongated bald heads and big frog-like eyes got out. They looked like a cartoon drawing of aliens only they’re skin had texture (like a dolphin), they were clothed (in expensive Italian suits), and they were in 3-D.

They couldn’t actually be aliens though, because I didn’t believe aliens existed. They had to be something more reasonable like rich joyriders in really, really, realistically expensive masks driving some sort of experimental flying car.

I took several pictures with my phone to analyze later, because with the naked eye, as well as, with my phone’s zoom, the masks didn’t have any seam lines I could see and the texture didn’t look like rubber or plastic. It really did look like skin.

The eyes blinked sideways with transparent eyelids. It could have been animatronics, but the eyelids didn't look fake, and the eyes behind the lids looked exactly like my pet frogs’. Exactly! My convictions about the existence of aliens began to waiver the longer I looked at them.

I watched them wave their arms around, frog-like fingers poking out from their cuffs. They were also opening and closing their mouths. They were talking! I rolled down my window so I could hear. The three perpetrators spoke in high pitched gobbledegook. It didn’t sound like any language I ever heard before.

“I don’t care who you are.” Sheriff Smith said. “We don’t allow any unregistered UFO’s to fly through our county.”

The aliens, (the sheriff said they were driving a UFO, so they had to be aliens), did more hand waving and spoke more strange sounding gibberish.

“You’ll have to take it up with the galactic police squad.” Sheriff Smith responded. “Now get into the back of my patrol car.” He pointed to squad car 51, and I froze. The aliens were coming over. I was about to be riding in a car with aliens. My emotions spin cycled between excited and terrified.

The sheriff seemed neither as he opened the rear door for the aliens as they got in. He then spoke into the police radio on his shirt.

“Hey, Deputy Davidson, I’ve got a floater here that’s gonna need a tow.”

***

After dropping the aliens off at the station. We began a routine patrol of Gandmerlin’s Downtown area, which was a square grid consisting of Main St., Potter St., Asimov Ave. and Bolide Blvd.

We were just passing the cemetery when a large flash of light caused my retina to burn as if I had been staring at the sun. Several moments of blinking and seeing tiny little twinkling stars that weren’t there, and my regular vision returned. I don’t know what I expected to see when it did, but I never would have expected to see what was there.

A group of women in flowy black robes were chanting around a cauldron nestled amongst the graves. The cauldron was shooting out what looked to me like flash paper on steroids. Sheriff Smith handed me a pair of reflective sunglasses like his own. I put them on. The lens muted the flashes so they no longer burned my eyeballs.

However, with them on I also saw swirling colors of light around the witches, and within the cauldron. It was bright and sparkly. Call me crazy, but it looked like magic, and it swirled around all of them. Before this moment I would have said that I didn’t believe in magic, but less than an hour ago I didn’t believe in aliens, and I was proven wrong.

As a result of my observations (cauldron, black robes, magic). I concluded these women were probably witches.

Sheriff Smith opened his car door and walked nonchalantly towards the witches. My first thought was that he was an insane man with a macho ego and a death wish, but he had handled the aliens okay, so maybe he knew what he was doing.

Large blotchy black and red bat wings were emerging from the cauldron along with long shiny black spiralling horns. I was pretty sure that the body parts in question were attached to something rather sinister simmering within the cauldron. I contemplated whether my chances for survival would be better by staying in the car or fleeing it.

My dilemma became null and void when Sheriff Smith spat into the cauldron. The cauldron exploded in a cloud of thick yellow sulferace smoke. It stunk worse than an outhouse at a free campground, but at least the demon/monster thing was nowhere to be seen.

The witches were howling angrily at the sheriff and trying to claw at him with some impressively long fingernails. They couldn’t seem to reach him however. Whenever their nails got close to his face a shiny golden aura around him glowed brightly and repelled the women away from him.

“Ladies this is the third time in three years you’ve tried to resurrect Beelzebub.” The Sheriff stated, “And I won’t allow you and your shenanigans reeking havoc on my town. Now either disperse or I'll have to take you to the station and book you for disturbing the peace.”

The witches glared at the sheriff as they gathered the pieces of their broken cauldron and walked away.

“Why didn’t you arrest them?” I asked once the sheriff was back in the car.

“Witches and founders treaty.” He replied as if I knew what that was. “They can practice their magic as long as they don’t hurt anybody. If that thing had gotten out, I would have had grounds to arrest them, but I didn’t want it to get out.”

“How did you stop it?”

“ I added an ingredient that didn’t belong.” Sheriff Smith explained. “Botched up the whole spell.” A little half smile crossed the Sheriff’s face as he spoke.

My hands were still shaking a bit from almost encountering a demon and having my core beliefs shattered, but Sheriff Smith sitting beside me, made me feel I would be able to make it out the other side of this crazy rabbit hole just fine.

***

I recognized Ms. Baley’s voice as it spoke through the police radio. The line crackled making everything she was saying hard to make out, but what I was able to decipher was: school, A.I., and gone rogue.

Sheriff Smith switched on the lights, and turned the squad car around with a squeal and tremendous amount of G-force. He then proceeded to propel us back towards my high school at a speed I wouldn’t have believed, had we not chased down a UFO earlier.

I thought I had seen everything. I had seen aliens flying an unregistered UFO and witches trying to resurrect a demon, but I hadn’t seen anything yet.

The school was no longer a school. It was a brick and mortar, metal pipe, fluorescent light, white board covered mech like-monster. Wielding a bludgeoning device made of disfigured school desks.

I didn’t know how Sheriff Smith was going to handle this one until squad car 51 transformed, and we were flying straight for the head of my old high school.

My first thought was that, like any good action movie, rocket blasters or semi-automatics would appear on either side of the squad car, and we would start shooting at the rogue A.I. until it blew up in a blaze of glory. We did not.

Sheriff Smith flew directly into, what looked like the left eye of the monster. It was actually a window. He opened the squad car door and proceeded to climb through the eye/window.

I could see through the windows. Ms. Baley was fighting off electrical cords writhing around like carnivorous vines. Sheriff Smith raced past Ms. Baley towards a large computer console and started typing vigorously. Suddenly the screen connected to the console displayed a crudely pixelated version of tic-tac-toe.

The computer began playing against itself. Neither x’s or o’s ever won. Smoke and sparks started to come out of the computer as it played game after game, then all at once the whole system crashed, and the display went black.

“Works every time,'' the sheriff said, smiling to himself.

“We’ll have to rebuild the school again.” Ms. Baley said in a harassed sort of way.

“Not to worry.” responded the sheriff, as he ripped the motherboard out of the computer. “The giants will help. They always do.”

Sheriff Smith reentered the car after throwing the motherboard onto the back seat.

“Is it always like this?” I asked.

The sheriff smiled. “Of course. What did you think it would be? Boring?”