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that I had seen, I wouldn’t call a UFO. In fact, I still had no idea what it was that I’d seen.
    It happened just after my sixteenth birthday. Some of my friends and I were out at Jackrabbit Flats having a bonfire party. Mostly the cops didn’t bother with Jackrabbit Flats, so we were home free. The Flats were out of Dreamland Junctions jurisdiction, and the highway patrol preferred not to take their cars over dirt roads in order to get to the Flats.
    It was a wild night to begin with, but then the sky lit up with a blinding flash. That was about midnight.
    The next thing I knew, I was coming out of some kind of sleep, and I was flat on my back. My friends were all coming to at about the same time, and it was four in the morning. We had four hours of lost time and none of us remembered a thing in between.
    Most of us got into big trouble that night. At least I know I did. Uncle Sonny grounded me for a week. I tried to tell him what happened, but of course he’s a cop. He figured someone had drugged the jungle juice. Sonny was so sure I’d been assaulted that he actually took me to the emergency room to get checked out.
    The doctors did find some bruising on my arms, and my entire body was covered with some kind of strange rash, but other than that, there were no signs of assault.
    The rash convinced my uncle that I’d been drugged, which meant he didn’t take my episode of missing time too seriously.
    That was my one and only brush with the little green men, if in fact, that’s what it had been.
    After my usual breakfast of toast with peanut butter, and a glass of orange juice, I dialed Uncle Sonny’s number. There was no answer.
    That was definitely unusual.
    Glancing at my beer clock, I saw that it was almost seven. I had fifteen minutes to get to work.
    My uncle was a man of routine. I could almost set my watch by what he was doing. Between six thirty and seven on a Monday morning, he would be on his way to the office, but there would be a pit stop at the Landing for some breakfast and coffee to go. He would always treat himself to a 51 Jupiter Special, which consisted of a Sirius omelet with ham.
    Sighing, I locked up the trailer and started for my car. Glancing at Spencer’s place, I saw that his lights were still on. He had a bad habit of falling asleep with his lights on. He claimed it was an accident, but I suspected he figured that if he left the TV and lights on, he wouldn’t have any nightmares, or abductions, as Spencer called them.
    The parking lot at the Landing was packed, especially for the beginning of the week. With no parking near the building, I was forced to park between a Harley, and some chump’s RV, which just happened to be painted to look like a UFO.
    We got all kinds of people at the Landing, but especially UFO enthusiasts.
    I knew I shouldn’t be so harsh on those who believed, but most of their theories just left too many unanswered questions, like if there really were aliens visiting earth, why didn’t they just stop by the Landing for a cup of coffee, instead of all that cloak and dagger nonsense that seemed to be so prevalent?
    The common answer for that was that either they’d made a deal with the governments of the planet to keep things under wraps, or that earth people were really just guinea pigs and the planet was one big science project.
    I think I liked the first excuse better, though if I were to take either seriously, I’d probably opt for the latter. One day in Dreamland Junction would tell any sane person that something had to be up with the majority of the population. I figured that a good number of people in town either had their brains scrambled by some electrical force field, or they’d been probed and implanted. Either way, something was up.
    Take my boss for example.
    Every morning when I came to work, he was sitting on the roof of the Landing, his eyes fixed on the eastern sky.
    As I walked toward the entrance, Rafe waved from the top of the building, and I