Yellow Journalism

“I want you to look into this exploding pig story. Oh, and I need an update on the Amazing Goat Boy. Write up a sighting, will you? Once you get back from talking to the farmer.”

My boss, editor of the tabloid newspaper Headlines, Hector Shaffield, dropped an envelope addressed to the paper onto my desk. I picked it upand  pulled the handwritten letter out. Some farmer out in Iowa claimed that his prize hog had simply exploded one day. The letter writer had gone into graphic detail. What had probably happened was the pig had died days prior and its carcass had exploded due to gas build up in the hot sun.

“This ought to be fun,” I said with a chuckle. “What kind of angle are we going with? Aliens? Or have we done aliens to death?”

“Aliens never get old, Alex,” Hector replied, deadpan. “People have been fascinated by aliens since the fifties. Just talk to this Jed guy and find out what he thinks happened. Maybe aliens.”

I took a short flight to Des Moines. The farm I was looking for was only about twenty miles away, just outside Prairie City.

Sure enough, Jed the farmer was convinced that aliens had first made the hog sick and then blown him up with lasers.

“They was experimenting on ‘im!” the weathered man declared as I took notes. “First, see, he got sick. Wouldn’t move, wouldn’t touch his slop. A few days later, I check on him and boom! Pig parts everywhere. I took some pictures if you want to see them. Hey, maybe you can use my pictures in your paper.”

“We use our own pictures,” I explained. “For legal reasons, you understand.”

We went out to the pigpen, which Jed claimed he had not touched since the pig blew up three days ago. It was just as disgusting as I expected, but I held my breath and snapped a few pictures with my old-fashioned camera. Then I thanked the old man, wrote him a check for $100.00 and made my way back to my hotel. I flew home the next morning and spent a few hours stitching my pig-explosion notes into a coherent narrative and then emailed it to the editor. Heck was going to love it.

With that done, I made up an Amazing Goat Boy sighting, setting it out in the suburbs and making the witness a local soccer mom out for a morning jog without naming her or the street where it happened. These little pieces of fiction were my favorite stories to write. Nobody who read Headlines took it seriously, so I could play with cryptozoological sightings and tales about alien interference in human affairs all I wanted. Maybe there were people out there who really believed this crap, but what was it to me? It came with a salary that paid the bills, plus expenses as I flew around the Midwest interviewing people who thought their dog could speak or that they had been abducted by aliens. I got to talk to a lot of odd ducks, which was always entertaining. I called them the Tinfoil Hat Brigade.

The next Monday, Heck was back in my office with another letter. This one was from a man named Darryl who claimed he was being visited by “creatures from another world” and he wanted to sell his story.

“There’s another for the Tinfoil Hat Brigade,” Heck joked, but I was intrigued, partly because the letter didn’t use the word “aliens” anywhere. The creatures were described as being seven feet tall, with the heads of giant bugs and six limbs. They had visited the man every night at midnight for a week. Darryl did not explain what they wanted from him or why they were there, he just wanted a journalist to come out and talk to them, and then get some money for his story.

Darryl lived in in the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio. I landed at about five and got a car, found myself a bite to eat, and then went to find the man’s house. It was in a quiet residential area some way from the bustle of the city. It was a quaint little place with a tree in the front yard and a deep porch with two lounge chairs and a small table set up on it. No sign of children, no toys or treehouse or tire swing. There was only one car, a nondescript Chevy, parked in the driveway.

The man who answered my knock was best described as “average.” Mid-thirties, average height, no piercings or tattoos that I could see. No jewelry. You wouldn’t look at him twice if you saw him on the street. He wore a t-shirt with a heavy metal album cover on the front and blue jeans. His feet were bare. The only remarkable thing about him was his hair, which was the color of a carrot and stuck out in cowlicks all over his head. He looked as though he had just woken up from a nap, but his eyes were bright and alert.

“Can I help you?” He asked, seemingly with genuine curiosity.

“I sure hope so,” I replied. “I’m Alex Fitzsimmons, from Headlines.”

This pronouncement always got a reaction, and this was no exception. The man -Darryl, I assumed- started, his eyes going wide and his mouth dropping open.

“I didn’t expect them to send anyone out!” he exclaimed. “Do you want to come in? I can tell you the whole story.”

Darryl led me into his living room. There was an overstuffed sofa facing the TV with a bowl of peanuts precariously perched on one arm. Darryl scooped up the bowl and sat down with a gesture to me take a seat. There was no preamble. He started talking as soon as I pulled out my notepad.

“They’ve been coming for a week straight,” he began. “Always the same three creatures. They look like giant ants, but upright, you know? Like those things that are half horses with men’s torsos. Centoids.”

“Centaurs,” I corrected him before I could stop myself. One rule of interviewing nutjobs is to never correct them, but Darryl just nodded.

“Centaurs, right. Anyway, they call themselves Formians.” I knew I had heard that term before, and resolved to look it up. I associated it with some game but couldn’t recall the details.

“Did they say why they were visiting you?” Mostly people thought they had been chosen somehow, that they were special.

“They want me to come back with them, to be an ambassador for the human race. I don’t know why they want me. Maybe because I’m both left-handed and a redhead. They’re from another dimension where humans don’t exist.”

Even better than aliens!

“When do they usually show up?” I asked.

“Always at the stroke of midnight. The clock finishes chiming and then there they are, in the front yard. They can’t come into the house because they won’t fit, you see. But they call to me and call to me until I come out. I told them that I would go with them, but first I had to get somebody to take down my story and share it with humanity. They keep telling me that I will be living in Paradise, where I’ll never have to work again. I hate my job. But something about this whole thing just stinks. Maybe I need a second opinion, maybe I just needed to tell somebody about it. If nothing else, maybe you’d pay me for the story and I could take some time off.”

“Do you have any proof of any of this? Photos, footprints, anything?” I had to ask.

Darryl looked crestfallen. “No,” he admitted. “They wouldn’t let me take their picture. But I know they’ll be back tonight. Don’t you want to meet them in person?”

The idea of sitting around outside in the cold waiting for interdimensional ants that probably weren’t going to show up did not appeal to me in the slightest. But the extra pay I would get for doing it decided me.

“Sure. How about I come back at, say, eleven-thirty? That way we won’t have long to wait.”

We agreed, and I went to my hotel room to plug my notes into a Word document that I could later turn into a story. Even if the ants didn’t show up, I thought I could whip together a pretty good article. Maybe we could say that the ants knew somebody else was there and didn’t want to show themselves. I looked up the word Formian online and found out I was right, it was associated with a game. The creatures in the picture looked about like Darryl had described his visitors. Making note of this, I decided to take a short nap, just so I wouldn’t fall asleep on the job.

When eleven-thirty rolled around, I found myself sitting on Darryl’s front porch, an old and tattered army blanket around my shoulders, freezing my ass off and feeling like an idiot. Still, the man had insisted, and I was getting paid extra to do this.

“We have a little time. Do you want some cider? It’ll warm you up.” Darryl was trying hard to be a good host, but it was clear he was anxious about the whole affair.

I accepted the proffered paper cup of steaming cider. Darryl had been right; between the spices and the heat, the drink was making me feel warmer.

As I finished my cup, I heard the clock inside start chiming midnight. I looked over at Darryl, who appeared to be focused on a patch of air above the front lawn. When the chimes stopped, suddenly there was another noise, a deep thrumming that seemed to make the very air molecules vibrate and dance.

“They’re coming!” Darryl cried.

I followed his gaze. The air did seem to have some sort of shimmer, like the air over the surface of a hot car. Then, appearing out of nowhere, there were three creatures that almost made me scream.

Just as described, they looked like nothing more than giant ants with upright torsos and proportionately smaller heads. Their forelimbs were jointed in three places, giving them a broad range of motion, and ended in claw-like hands with two fingers and one thumb apiece. They were covered in glossy black chitin and wearing what looked like breathing gear strapped across their backs like saddlebags. One of the things approached, while the other two stayed back to observe. The one that came forward stopped just beyond the porch railing and looked at Darryl.

“He’s a journalist,” Darryl said, speaking to the creature, although I hadn’t heard anything. Then Darryl turned to me and explained “They communicate telepathically. They have no spoken or written language.”

The ant-monster looked at me, and I could hear its voice in my head, as though it was speaking six inches from my ear.

“You are a writer?” it asked. I nodded, but I felt violated. Was this thing reading my thoughts? I tried thinking something awful at it. I step on bugs like you! It didn’t react. Either it had not heard me, or it didn’t care.

“Very good,” it went on. “Come with us, and you will never have to work again. You will never have to worry about food or shelter or comfort; you will be looked after for the rest of your life.”

“Let me ask you some questions first,” I replied. “I want to know what I’m getting into. First, who are you? I know why you call yourselves Formians.”

“We are from another dimension, one in which there was no asteroid, but instead a virus that wiped out all higher life forms, leaving only insects. Ants became the dominant species, getting bigger and bigger and smarter and smarter. We are now a flourishing civilization.”

“And what do you want from me? Are you looking for an ambassador, like Darryl says?” It was sounding like it may be a pretty cushy job.

“Yes. We want you to represent your species for some important guests.”

I thought about this. I thought about my job, and my apartment, and about that junker car I could never afford to replace. Then I pulled the company checkbook out of my jacket pocket, wrote Darryl a check for $5000.00, and dropped the whole checkbook on the table beside me. I got up and went to take the creature’s outstretched hand.

---

“Day two of my captivity.

I’ve been played for a sucker. When they said “ambassador,” they really meant “specimen.” I’m representing my species, all right, and I guess you could call them guests.

When I took the creature’s hand, I felt a brief sting that I wrote off as a static discharge. Then there was another thrumming sound and I squeezed my eyes shut. When it stopped, I opened them again and saw that we were no longer in Darryl’s front yard. We stood in a big room with a dirt floor and domed roof. There was some equipment around the space that could have been scientific apparatus. The thing told me to follow it, and we went out through a massive round door, the first of several that I have seen. I trailed behind it as we made our way along a labyrinth of corridors, every now and then passing through another door or turning. At first, I tried to keep track of the turns and where we were going, but I quickly got lost. Finally, we came to a door that opened into a tiny anteroom. In the wall opposite the one we entered was another door, which my guide -or rather, my keeper- opened for me. It told me that here were my quarters, and it would see me in the morning. The room was dark, but it said that there was an automatic light that would come on when I entered but turn off while I slept. The light comes from somewhere up above, but I can’t see any fixtures. It is just a warm glow that’s brighter in the center. The Formian explained that the light goes off at night but the heat remains on, keeping the space a comfortable seventy-five degrees at all times. Then it casually told me that when it touched me, it implanted a chip in my palm that allowed them to track my movements. Before I could react to this, it pushed me sharply through the door, which slammed closed behind me. When the light came on, I looked around.

Let me describe my “quarters,” or rather, my habitat. I am in what is basically an aquarium, approximately fifteen feet wide and twenty feet long. On three walls, the view is of dirt. One wall is transparent, showing me some kind of viewing room. There are some plants that look fake scattered around the perimeter. Against one wall is a sort of cot with some soft gray fibrous stuff that acts like memory foam and a folded blanket on it. Next to it is a rather large bookcase full of an eclectic collection of books, including about a dozen journals. There is one human-sized door that leads to a tiny bathroom with a toilet, a sink, and a shower stall. There is another door in the back wall, the one I came in through. This one is round and easily eight feet in diameter. I cannot open it. I’ve tried. On one wall is a TV screen. It seems to only play old black-and-white movies. There’s a treadmill, and in one corner a little table with a bowl of some kind of pellets that taste like expensive cat food. There is another sink here, one that only dispenses cold water, and a tall plastic cup next to the faucet. Bolted to the floor in the middle of the room, facing the viewing room, is a large comfortable chair and a writing desk. The drawer of the writing desk is full of pens.

In the enclosure across from mine is some weird thing that looks like a six-armed orangutan with a tail that wraps all the way around its body. I’m unlikely to find an ally there. Otherwise, all I have seen are these giant ants, coming into the viewing area three and four at a time and just staring at us. They still cannot hear my thoughts, but I can hear fragments of theirs. I have learned a few things from these fragments: I am in an enormous underground city that houses their entire species. They call it the Hill. Their society is a constitutional monarchy with a queen -who lives for around 1000 years and is also the mother of every Formian in the Hill- as their figurehead. They think I’m fascinating because I can read and write; all communication between Formians is telepathic and they are born with the collective memories of the species, so they do not have a written language. There are smaller ants that I first mistook for juveniles, but I asked the one that brought me my morning bowl of pellets, and it told me that it was a member of a subservient species that the Formians had conquered long ago and made into slaves, creatively called Lesser Formians.

Basically, I am expected to do nothing but eat, sleep, exercise, and then read or write in the chair for these creatures’ entertainment. I am told that the pellets contain all the calories, nutrients, and vitamins I need, and that the morning pellets also contain caffeine. Up near the ceiling is a vent, too small to climb through, and I can hear some kind of hissing from it, probably piping in a more human-friendly atmosphere. They did their research, see? They know what we need to survive.

I’ll never work again. I wonder if I can convince them to let me have coffee.”