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them and were pulled away and there was nothing you could do.”
    “That’s the gist,” I said.
    Bonnie nodded. “That’s what we saw.”
    “Bullshit,” David Ebler said.
    We hadn’t heard much from him thus far. David and his family had only been in the neighborhood less than a year. I had only talked to him a few times. He seemed practical, levelheaded, an accountant used to crunching facts and figures. What I had just told him threw him for a loop. It could not be crunched. It could not be processed. It refused calm, mundane analysis so he rejected it and me.
    “I wish it was,” I said.
    He shook his head. “No, no, no. That’s…that’s ridiculous.”
    Ray sighed. “I’m afraid I have to agree with David. It’s…well, it’s nuts.”
    “We’re not making it up,” I told him.
    David fired off some smart-ass comment about how I thought I was being funny but I wasn’t funny at all. He glared at me with eyes rimmed with hate. I think he wanted to take a swing at me. I believed he would have if Ray wasn’t there being the voice of reason. I didn’t give a shit what David wanted. I felt just as childish as he did at that moment. I’m not a violent guy, but if he swung at me, I planned on beating his ass right in front of his wife and sons. Then, soon as I’d thought that, I felt unbelievably embarrassed. No, I wasn’t going to lower myself to that level.
    “You gotta realize how crazy this sounds, Jon,” Ray said.
    “Oh, I do. Believe me, I do.”
    “Then why don’t you knock it off before you start scaring people?” David said, stepping closer.
    “Why don’t you shut the fuck up, you yuppie faggot?” Bonnie told him, getting her ire up. Her green eyes burned like fire in the lantern glow. The flames from the fire pits were reflected in them.
    Even though his wife tried to restrain him, David shrugged her off. “You better watch your mouth, you little bitch.”
    Bonnie gritted her teeth and made ready to tell him exactly what she thought of him, but Billy intervened. For a guy who was pretty drunk, he moved fast. He shoved David and David almost went on his ass. “You don’t talk to my wife that way, fuckhead. Keep it civil or things’ll get bad for you.”
    David was practically hissing. Anger seemed to be steaming out of him and I thought he was going to do something very stupid like make a try for Billy. Billy might have been loaded, but he was still an awfully big guy. David, on the other hand, was exactly how you might picture him: thin, sparse, and bespectacled with thinning dark hair and a very meek, very mild face. If he went after Billy, Billy would knock his teeth out.
    I got in between them. “Come on, guys,” I said. “Let’s just keep cool.”
    “Sure thing, Jon,” Billy said, going back to his beer.
    David cursed under his breath. Bonnie and Ray launched into an argument that got increasingly vocal and I had no idea what to do. Meanwhile, as we’d been acting like a bunch of kids at recess, Iris Phelan had been talking nonstop, mostly to herself. She was leaning there against her walker, sipping a beer.
    “…not that anyone should be surprised by any of it,” she said. “They’ve been coming here a long time, gathering things, studying humans and animals. Alien abductions have only been reported since the 1950s, or possibly the 1940s, but no doubt they’ve been going on since long before that. A conservative estimate places the number of abduction cases at somewhere around seventy thousand, but most are never reported. A realistic estimate is well over five million.” She paused, sipping her beer and smacking her lips. “And although most return from their abduction experiences, many do not. Which begs the question—what do these nonhuman entities want with us? Genetic material? Biological study? Are they simply looking for specimens for experimentation or to put in an alien zoo or is it something much darker? Is the reality of the situation that these