Phenomenal

I knew the other three who’d come on board, but had never made the formal acquaintance. Nor from what I’d learned, would have cared to.

The other guys, no idea. I use “guys” loosely, without gender assignment. Which isn’t a horrible thing — people more than ever are just kinda people, despite the plucky can-do dementia of the Proud Boys and rollers and Florida and guys like my two new “friends” who seemed to swing dicks with random glee. Today’s vast uncertainty liberates me from the subconscious “rules” of attraction or aggression and the traps and travails that result from getting it wrong or acting on the primordial.

Not so much with the other “guys” — there was no context for humanity, much less the equipment or accoutrement that might tell me who I wouldn’t bang with a regulation 10-foot titanium pole or drunkenly flail at outside a sketchy bar at 1 a.m. on the ass end of town.

And, in fact, that’s the last thing my bros were doing before we became fellow contestants in Intergalactic Survivor. Or more literally, Ultimate Naked and Afraid. This was what I’d call a Kate McKinnon Scenario – all coot-coots and prune shoots and, in this instance, shriveled roots. Nothing like full disclosure to dowse male bravado or, to be frank and with all due to the fourth member of our little party, to make you reconsider why you considered busting skulls the ideal nightcap. For at least one of the bros, it was karma swooping out of the Central Illinois skies with an extraterrestrial roofie.

And the night – or morning, I guess – was still young, it would appear. Under abnormally normal conditions or at least those I’d recorded a dozen times, I’d expected to come out of this with a little invasive poking and prodding and, if I won the lotto, a blank spot in the tape over the P-and-P. Unlike my pals, I naturally was more intrigued than terrified. Now, I had a sense I’d have preferred the scheduled entertainment.

It looked like something out of a Nickelodeon awards show, except unlike Demi Lovato or Derek Jeter, nobody went home with a trophy and green pudding in their coot-coot or prune shoot. All honesty, the mangled thing on the seamless, luminescent floor seemed an improvement over the rest of the crew now milling about.

Nobody leapt out of the crowd howling at the heavens for their lost comrade; nobody wrapped tendrils or tentacles or whatever shit around anybody’s throats. Dead guy could have been the office douchebag, for all I knew, but nobody’s metaphorical shorts seemed particularly in a bunch.

**

Why I got chosen, I have no idea. There’s nothing about me that projects leader vibes, except maybe the glasses, which would have meant nothing in a galaxy likely minus a Lenscrafters or, seemingly, eyes. Maybe I was the only one of the Millington Foursome who wasn’t projecting pheromones, blood, Jagermeister, and Stetson Original Flavor. Maybe there was something their species found comfort in the lingering essence of Ranch Cornnuts (I’d left the fucking bag in the front seat of the Honda in the tractor turnaround 100 feet down the road).

The body and all attendant slime had been removed efficiently from the tiny chamber, which from the lights and panels and sensors filling one wall was probably the flight deck, which may have made dead “guy” the captain. Made sense, because from the corridor outside, there simply was no entrance, and Captain Demised’s residual slime had pooled and congealed where the invisible “door” had been opened presumably by somebody with the codes or the neural interface or whatever sci-fi horseshit these nerds used.

I’d been a true crime podcaster since WMIL had fired me for hiding my stash under the audio board and lifting the gear essential to launching a successful true crime podcast.

My host this evening extended a tentacle or tendril, and I tensed as it touched my hand. I momentarily considered that I’d been selected for all the wrong reasons, but then I sensed something like the warm vibration of an electric blanket kicking on, and something in my skull registered it as a reassuring gesture. Nobody’s mad; we just want to get to the bottom of things before we rip the flesh from all your bones and cast you still breathing into Jeff and Elon’s airless playground. After a moment, the tendricle withdrew, and I sensed a change in the ambient frequency. Broadcaster’s ear, some might say as I loaded up my bobbleheads in WMIL/WILF-FM/WCNT’s circular drive (the FCC had given up long ago). My senses had only heightened after I swapped the pot for the “pod.”

“Soooo,” I finally spoke. “What do we do here?” A ripple in a fold where we normally keep our bellybuttons was the only sign it hadn’t already moved on to Denny’s vs. IHOP.

Then my hand buzzed, and I felt something like a Venti Double Espresso hitting my brain. I glanced down, and I realized ET had plastered some tech on me. Teeny tech, like that thing above Kate Winslet’s lip I couldn’t look away from during the entire run of Mare of Easttown. They probably had better Best Buys in the Andromeda, because as I pondered my hand, it kicked things off. It wasn’t a question -- no Wookie purr or calming Christopher Nolan/Jodie Foster Babelfish Siri for Dummies. It was a sensation that sparked the right cerebral pathway in the rough form of a question.

“Hey, don’t ask me. Aside from the abduction thing, I got nothing against you guys. I were you, I’d call a staff meeting – this was clearly an inside job.” I raised a brow, and a tendril twitched. “Unless…”

It responded with an abrupt hum with a rising inflection.

“I mean, I’m just sayin’…”

The hum raised an impatient decibel. I had that effect, and I grinned despite the sketchy circumstances. “Let me know if you heard this one. A vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost walk into a bar…”

**

I’d never really cared for the paranormal. As a kid, I’d cheated curfew more a few times to catch Art Bell and his syndicated late-night imitators –the original podcasters, you might say. Most all I ever got from it were sleepless nights because I was neither as cynical or worldly as I imagined.

And then Stephenie Meyer. The notion of seductive, heart-of-gold vampires and soulful werewolves who only need an empathetic tummy-adjacent rub was Flamin’ Doritos for emotionally mis-wired adolescent girls and the hormone-addled teen wolves and bloodsuckers sidling up for a peek up the skirt. I actually found Mom one day sneaking one of those Twilight cinderblocks over socks and towels, suspiciously leaning into the basement washer. That may well have been my cannabis origin story.

The day WMIL and I parted company, our morning zooboys interviewed some hot University multimedia prof who held that like opinions and assholes, every moron today has a podcast. Though she told me to fuck off as I stopped to chat on my way out of the building to torture my intern escort, the prof’s other words inspired me to take up my own mike, even with the station call letters scratched into it.

I had two major obstacles to podcasting fame. Well, two with several bullets. Every asshole with an opinion and an Amazon account indeed had a true crime cast, and many of them didn’t have a half-dozen public intoxication/pot busts on their sheet while trying to pull intel from the keepers of the sheets. And the local cops turned out to be better at solving midnight murders and geo-caching body dumps than I’d assumed.

Still, I lucked into a couple of lowlife, low-radar prospects with the necessary quotient of lurid stupidity – stuff that could be dressed up with a little NPR polish and a moody/broody royalty-free score so help you actually care about folks whose absence might not have registered for a couple weeks or whose departure might have been a low-grade net positive. I had a cousin in the Millington PD crime lab who cared about such folks even without the synthesized violins, and she tossed me a couple lightly-gnawed, long-discarded bones.

Five episodes into “Dollar Store Death,” I hit connective tissue. Three months before, Yalene Krautzer, a clerk at the Dollar Station on Main, had closed up for the night and trudged the brightly lit three blocks north to Barr Road and the moonlit four blocks west to the trailer park behind the community college. When Yalene failed to show up for another day of gassing Mylar balloons for backyard birthdays and early releases and calculating infinite multiples of $1.25 (you expect them to change the signage every time the supply chain breaks?), then failed to show three more shifts, the manager called the MPD for a welfare check, and the MPD determined Yalene had indeed made it home. Keys on the coffee (Mountain Dew) table, screen unlatched with the storm door ajar to loudly let Judge Judy and Kelly Clarkson out, and a single streak of crusted blood on a couch pillow. Blood matched Yalene, but according to Cousin Chris also contain a second salivary DNA contribution that couldn’t yet be traced.

I’d seen Krautzer’s Facebook wall, and found it hard to buy anybody was slobbering over her, and given Yalene’s known circle, that she was swapping blood for spit with anyone who didn’t have ink or DNA on file with the MPD, the county, or the Pontiac or Joliet Men’s Clubs.

There was one more “anomaly,” as Chris put it. Canine hair on Krautzer’s contaminated couch, breed unknown or more likely a Heinz 57, but nowhere else on the slightly funky premises. The neighbors hadn’t noticed any suitors around that or any other night, much less with a voyeuristic black lab mix in tow, but my sense was the ancient and self-medicated of Paradise Park were running on observational fumes. The Dollar Station crew testified Yalene enjoyed a lively sex life, if not precisely in those terms. Two guys in particular haunted the Station, hanging at Krautzer’s register for near-shifts at a time, creeping the clientele in irritable silence and binge-ing energy drinks and Paydays to keep the manager at bay.

Jason Truett looked something like what might happen to a lesser Jonas Brother if Proactiv ever went belly-up, and he made his rent under cars at the LightningLube a block up. Chad Salem had landed a suh-weet gig moving bongs and vape juice at the smoke shop between one of Millington’s bustling new dispensaries and the Dunkin’, which had seen a spike in hole sales and parking lot collisions with the neighborhood cannabis trade.

There theoretically might have been one brain and something hinting at a personality between them. Chad showed greater finesse telling me to go fuck myself, but they were working off roughly the same script, and like a lot of Gen-Plussers today, romantic rivalry seemingly had not damaged their bro-ship. There was little leverage to get either one on air, and I needed one or the other if I were going to play anybody besides the Dollar Station’s horny off-brand soda vendor as prime suspect.

Then, in a flash of inspiration, I visited the LightningLube and VAPE in big red neon (marketing geniuses they were not) for one last pitch. I left with a pair of fuck-yous, a half-can of Rockstar Pure Zero, and a grease-slick empty chug of Mountain Dew Ultra Midnight. Cousin Chris accepted my gift with a sigh, and as she added me to the bottom of her to-do list, I took one more peek at the (presumed) crime scene photos. I’d missed the big black brick next to the trailer keys on the coffee table.

As I’d intended, Chad put two and two and his missing piss-drink together and, I assume, helped Jason with the math as well. I wasn’t surprised when I got the call a few days later, but the voice on the other end floored me. I agreed to meet her anyway, thinking maybe I could save the ‘cast even without a body, or more accurately, the absence of one. What could go wrong at midnight at the soccer fields at the edge of town? Right?

She was waiting in the shelter by the bike trail. No other cars in the lot filled every summer Saturday with Type A millennial moms and dads, but her profile was crisp in the single overhead the city’d installed to protect nocturnal joggers from their impulsive cardio. I got a little wary when I realized her rodent features were outlined in blue rather than municipal fluorescent orange, but I continued across the trampled, damp grass.

They sacked me halfway across the first field, one from each side. I didn’t need Chris to tell me who’d left dog hair on Yalene’s house, and as Fourth Jonas ripped at me, I felt a sharp stab in the neck, and momentarily caught Chad’s bloody grin as he dove back in for a second gulp…

**

I came to face to face, and yelped like a little girl — the little girl the other little girls are too embarrassed even to beat up at recess. Yalene clearly needed some rare beef and leafy greens — her narrow face was pallid, juiceless, her eyes dead. Unlike Kristen Stewart, however, the washed-out eyes were somehow also penetrating and expressive, and Yalene was smiling broadly, if in that Anthony Hopkins way right before he dishes you up with beans and cheap wine.

And whatever Benicio Del Toro/Robert Pattinson STD she’d caught from the fellas had had a miraculous effect on her new, neutral-palette complexion, and there was an energy that had to be more than just mainlining Rockstar or Dew.

“Someday you’ll wanna thank me,” she whispered in a frosty puff, as my nads pulled up somewhere around my kidneys. “I appreciate your kind words, but a simple fuck-off is thanks enough.”

Yalene rose, and then shimmered, is the only word I can put to it, and I spotted the guys waiting at the edge of the asphalt. Then she popped back into focus, and the former dollar store.

“‘Sides, everybody’s got a podcast these days, like assholes and, um, you know…”

S’okay. She had a few thousand years to work on her metaphors…

**

The musketeers jumped when I entered, probably ’cause I’d never learned to knock first and really didn’t need to stand on ceremony any more. I could feel if not see the fat and sassy moon beyond the hull in a way I never had, and I was still itching under the hoodie and jeans.

“Fuckers letting us go?” the ingloriously naked Serina demanded.

“Everybody went home for the night,” I smiled. “Coming in for a landing in a few — said we could let ourselves out.”

“You think to bring our shit, shit-brain?” Randy sneered. The poet of the group, and the guy who’d been the prospective star of my next crimecast until fate had intervened likely on Serina and Cody’s behalf.

Cody poked at a spot to the left of his bristly lips, then did the calculations and shifted to the right.

“You gotta little green shit on your… Oh.”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “Oh.”

**

My favorite John Mullaney routine is the one about the girlfriend who, having seen Ray, declares that she “didn’t care for the whole ‘dead brother’ thing.” “Neither did Ray Charles,” Mullaney notes. Science doesn’t care how you feel, nor the universe, nor whatever shit’s stowed in the drywall in the back of the closet. Still don’t care for the paranormal.

Or the extra-normal. We somehow believe aliens are telepathic, cosmically attuned, all-powerful /all-knowing, but once I realized their high-falutin’ tech didn’t come with a polygraph, I knew they put their metaphorical pants on one figurative leg at a time. Just flesh-and-slime like the rest of us, only better in science and vehicle design and highly susceptible to our special brand of terrestrial batshit.

Everybody loves a good scary story with a hook-handed twist. And mine was a great one. After I showed my new BFF my locked room cheat and dealt with the rest of Team Tendril, I requested a ride home and left him or it or them (I’m an ally when I can) with that sage principle of the Redneck Code: Tell Your Friends. While he/she/they/it fiddled with the GPS, I bid my bar buds a fond and final adieu, mainly to cleanse the palate.     

The Honda and the gear and the CornNuts were just where I’d left them -- the field behind already had been stripped to stubble and earworms looking for a place to winter. A couple Fords were angled into the front of the Double Tap, which at the dawn’s early light was dispensing biscuits and gravy and therapeutic dog hair to the guys who’d struck out on the bright to suck up the rest of the corn and beans or shoot the shit out of stuff as they wet-dreamed of being that first good guy with a gun who doesn’t instinctively plug the black cashier.

I was surprisingly still hangry despite my impromptu feast, so I pulled it out of the turnaround and crunched into the gravel across East Millington. I noted for the first time the Tap folks had dressed things up for the holiday with one of those 20-foot skeletons decked out in no-doubt handmade biker gear.

A vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost walk into a bar…

“Dude,” the bartender called after I took a two-top as far from the morning Fox crew moderating a literal farmer roundtable underneath. “You look like death warmed over. Rough night, huh?”

Probably as good a punchline as I was ever going to come up with.