One Drop In Time
By Darrel Bird
Copy©right 2013 by Darrel Bird
One Drop in Time
Gene Gordon was a genius, at least in one way. In most other ways, he was a complete klutz. He couldn’t get a date if his life depended on it…and it did, at least he felt like it did. He had been to Las Vegas once, and with the peculiar way his mind worked, he got it into his head that women were more promiscuous in Vegas than anywhere else, and might jump in bed with him for a drink or two.
He headed out in his old beat up Ford from Los Angles to Vegas, and decided to take the long way around through Death Valley. His old Ford tooled along the road, the rods knocking like they had been for a month, and Gene Gordon couldn’t fix a car if his life depended on it, which it might for anyone going through Death Valley in the middle of summer. It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford a new car. He had stacks of money, because he never spent any. It never entered his mind as long as the one he had cranked up. Gene Gordon was what some folks would describe as a couple cans short of a six pack.
What he could do is wade around in computers like he was taking a stroll in the park, and that was the reason the suits at IBM taken him under their corporate wing. He drooled when the young women passed him in the Los Angeles IBM installation, but they would have nothing to do with the likes of Gene Gordon. His desire for a female finally got the best of him, so there he was tooling along until he suddenly slammed on the brakes of the Ford, and nearly slid into a road ditch. There was a split in the road, and nary a sign that could tell him which way to go, because some teen-age boys had decided to take the bullet riddled sign for their bedroom the day before.
He sat idling the Ford, a soft bonk, bonk, bonk exuding from the engine compartment, “Huh; I wonder which of these roads lead to Vegas?” as his visions of curvy women melted in the heat devils coming off the hood.
He looked at one road, and then the other several times, taking deep swigs from his water bottle. “Take one you idiot!” His own voice sounding small, and hollow without much conviction. He eased the Ford onto the road on the right that led off across a flat to blue hills, the mirages, in the distance, beckoning lakes, and trees if a man just went a few feet further. A sand scorpion went running across the black top with its tail up in the air to avoid the awful heat, and his eyes followed the scorpion. He wondered if they were like chickens that just had to cross the road in front of a car.
After the scorpion entered the shade of a creosote bush, he let out the clutch, the throw out bearing whining to the tune of loves lost.
After driving like two forever’s, at least to Gene Gordon, he finally came out of the flats, and into hills. The hills that were the closest to him didn’t look blue any more; they looked gray, baron, and rocky with nothing growing on them, but an occasional creosote bush or a Cactus. The pavement stopped suddenly, and in its place was no more than a dirt trail that led off into more hills. He drove about six miles through steep gullies until he came to where the road was washed out. The road took up again after fifteen feet of wash that was at least four feet deep.
He began to see-saw the car around when the rods took one last hammer, and there was a terrible sound of metal on metal before the valiant mistreated little engine gave up the ghost once, and for all. The door creaked like the knees of a hundred-year-old man as he got out of the car, and slammed it shut. He looked back the way he had come, and with no little trepidation, saw that the sun had begun to fade behind the hills.
“Should I keep going on this road, or turn back?” He muttered under his breath. The strange way Gene’s mind worked was to figure that if he moved forward, that was obviously closer to Vegas, and curvy women aplenty, than to go back toward L.A. So he grabbed the water bottle out of the car, and plodded on. He plodded, and plodded until the road ran out, and his water ran out. That was the night of nights when it decided to cloud over with two eminent drops of water promised before day break, and it was so pitch black he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face.
He thought he was still on the road when it ended. He began to stumble into Creosote bushes, and the next step he took was into a large Cactus. He sucked on the burning wounds in his hands as he stood trying to pull the sharp needles from his reluctant flesh.
He thought it best to wait for day break, and laid down on the sharp rocks, and sand, praying he didn’t have a rattle snake for a pillow. He was almost asleep when he heard what sounded like a moan off in the distance, and he wondered if it was the ghosts of men who had lost their lives in the desert. He shivered in the cold desert air, rolled himself into as small a ball as possible, and prayed for morning.
His eyes felt feverish as they came open for the fifteenth time. The desert was again showing light. He got up, and saw the hole he wallowed out thrashing around on the desert floor. He rubbed the muck out of the corners of his eyes, then ran his finger around in his nose, and pulled out a stretch booger. He tried to wipe the booger off on his pants, but it clung to his finger. He wiped it hard, but the booger only moved to the opposite side of his finger, and clung there.
He bent over, and rubbed his finger in the sand, then checked it over, “Gottcha!”
His victory over the booger was to be short lived, because when he straightened up, he saw something that just did not fit the terrain right. He looked away, then back again, “Nope, don’t look right; it looks like some kind of machinery.”
It entered his mind that it might be some old mining machinery left behind years ago; he knew that these deserts were strewn with old mines. He had read it in National Geographic. One thing Gene Gordon did NOT lack was an insatiable curiosity which had taken him across the light-years of space with the likes of Stephen Hawkins. What he never ever dreamed in his largest imagination was that his ability in pattern recognition made Hawkins seem like an idiot. These things Gene did not know. He was just a sex starved twenty-two year-old determined to get to Las Vegas and chase women until he caught one. The great void of space was the furthest from his mind, as he lifted his leg to strain at a fart, grunted and began walking toward the shiny black dull object sitting on the desert floor.
The object of his insatiable curiosity looked as if it blended into the mountain behind it at five hundred yards across a large flat, but the closer he got, the stranger it looked, because it looked a dull shiny black, and that made no sense at all, and it was big! When he got within three hundred yards, he made out a metallic stair that ran out of the thing to the sandy and barren desert floor. When Gene Gordon’s wonder got the best of him, he was lost in whatever he was doing at the time, as he sometimes got lost in IBM’s large computer systems that were busy twenty-four hours a day, grinding out dollars for the suits who owned them.
Today, he was lost in wonder, as he neared the object, the desert he was in forgotten. He made out five bodies laying at the foot of the steps, as he mentally measured the machine as to be about twenty feet high, and one hundred feet long, it legs sunk deep into the desert floor, which told him that this darn thing was HEAVY.
As he walked up to the first body, he noticed the helmet that lay a few feet away. Ants were busy making a trail in and out of the body’s mouth, and if he had eaten any breakfast, he would have lost it, but he bent over and barfed up a little bile instead.
He looked around at the four other bodies which pretty much resembled that one, all except one, which still had the huge helmet on its head. When he walked over and gave it a gentle kick, its arms moved a little, and the large helmet moved ever so slightly. He kicked it again, and it tried to raise its head. Realizing that the man was still alive, he squatted down to try to figure out how to get the helmet off.
He eventually found a hidden latch mechanism. He gently twisted the helmet
, and it came off with a little whoosh of air. The man looked up at him with desperate eyes that had a yellow hue to them. The sun was making its way up, promising about a hundred, and ten degrees by noon, as Gene drug the man to the side of the stairs, and propped him up on them. He really didn’t care about the dead men, or the live one, as he had unhooked from society by the time he was nine. His parents had been killed in a car accident when he was five, and he had been shuffled to one foster home after another. He learned how to unhook from people, so he unhooked, and staid unhooked.
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