Closest Encounter (4 page)

The car horn honked again. Beth quickened her pace, got in the passenger side and locked the door.

Brad rolled down the window a crack and shouted to the two amorous men behind them, “Sorry, fellows! We have to be moving. It’s a government vehicle, so I’m pulling away now…”

They responded just enough to not fall over into the street as the car pulled from the curb, but not so much as to actually stop fucking. A block away, Brad had to swerve into the oncoming lane to avoid a trio of curly-haired and naked women of thirty or so traipsing across the road like displaced nymphs from a Renaissance painting.

Beth looked back as they passed.

“Thank God. At least this turned out to be an exceptionally good-looking neighborhood.”

Brad glanced into the mirror and said, “Yeah. There’s that.”

They drove for a few more minutes in silence before Beth spoke again. “So this has certainly turned into an odd day.

Brad nodded in agreement, shifting in his seat a little to make room for yet another raging erection pushing against his pants.

Chapter Four

“Did you get a hold of anyone,” Beth asked him as their car sped down the eerily empty highway. The sun was low in the sky and its rays a honeyed hue.

How late is it? How much time have we wasted already?

She checked the car’s clock. It read six p.m.

“Yeah,” he said. She waited for more. It did not come without prompting.

“And?”

“The government is sending people,” he said. “Troops. In hazmat suits, if that makes any difference.”

“I don’t think it will.”

“At least those things don’t have zippers in the front. That should slow them down a little—”

“Always a bright side,” she said, looking around to find some other sign of life besides their own car traveling along the five-lane black-top. A station wagon drove by in the opposite lanes, a little unsteadily, she thought. About half a mile ahead, she thought she could make out the tail lights of a truck, but that was it. “Shouldn’t this be rush hour?” she asked.

On one side of the highway, a small city stood against the darkening sky. A few lights flickered on but most of the buildings stood in dark silhouette.

“I guess people are a little preoccupied this evening,” he said, looking more than a little preoccupied himself. “Spring has sprung and all that.”

“It has sprung with a motherfucking vengeance,” she said.

It was then that they heard a screeching of tires, saw the tail lights of the distant truck swerve off the road and into a ditch, then the speeding approach of a different pair of headlights, coming at them on their side of the highway.

“What the fuck!” Brad said, jerking the car to the far side of the road as the oncoming vehicle sped past, veering back and forth across several lanes before disappearing in the growing dusk behind them. Beth just managed to catch a glimpse of the driver and the blonde that was straddling his lap. They seemed to be enjoying themselves. Neither one of them was wearing a seatbelt. Or clothes.

A moment later they heard the crash and the sky was lit briefly by a fireball rising up in the darkness.

Neither Brad nor Beth said anything as the flames and smoke curled against the darkening sky. Brad put the car back in gear, continued on toward the warehouse. It was a little while before Brad broke the silence with a hoarsely whispered, “Funny thing is, I’m still thinking about you giving me a blow job while I drive.”

Beth pushed back the image of this from her own mind—
the thought of his cock hardening in her mouth, her hands cupping his balls, tickling them with her nails, the taste of his pre-cum on her tongue…
As pushing back images from her mind went, this had not been her most successful job of it.

“Yeah,” she said quietly, shifting in her seat, feeling the wet heat growing inside her. “That is funny. Drive faster, please.”

The only other vehicles they passed for the next several miles were the truck in the ditch and a city bus pulled over to the side of the road. The bus may have been rocking a little bit.

Beth said, “So what are we going to do when we get there? I think we should try to avoid fucking on the floor this time.”

“I thought maybe you had a plan.”

“Not a take charge kind of guy, are you, Brad?”

He smiled with one corner of his mouth. It was sexy when he did it, not like the way it looks on certain other men in the federal government of questionable character. “I have my moments,” he said. “But you have a reputation of knowing how to handle these things best. Why should I get in the way of that?”

“I have a reputation?”

“Are you kidding? You’re a legend. It’s why I asked to be assigned to this case. I’m surprised the Department of Xeno-Cryptology hasn’t flat out poached you yet. Maybe your boss has some compromising information on my boss.”

“I’m a legend, huh?” Beth said, smiling. “You’re not still angling for a blow job, are you, Brad?”

He laughed. “No, Agent August. Unless it would work. Then, yes, Agent August, I am.”

“Maybe I’ll give you a rain check on that one. We’ll see how I feel after we get this alien object into some sort of containment. Absent undue
xeno-cryptological
influences, we might find each other fairly repulsive.”

He was silent for a moment before answering: “You know, I don’t think that will be the case at all.”

She studied him in the fading light—his strong chin and nose, his dark eyes, his immensely kissable mouth. She didn’t think so either.

Chapter Five

They came up with a plan as they drove. Brad, as it happened, had access to both a forklift and a truck at the warehouse, so the first part was simple—load the object onto the truck with the forklift. This was not rocket science, but from there… What? Take it somewhere, sure, and by routes that went through the most sparsely populated areas would obviously be the best approach, but to what destination? What hole was deep enough, what walls thick enough, to block out whatever strange powers emanated from the object? Even three miles away, she could feel the effects of it growing. The hunger between her legs, the desire of her mouth to kiss and lick and taste.

It turned out Brad had an idea on that point too. Not the licking and tasting part—the part about where to put the space object.

There was a mountain about two days’ drive from where they were. It had been created for the storage of nuclear waste but the senator for the state this particular mountain was in had balked a little at the idea of storing enough uranium not only to kill his entire constituency in the most painful and ugly way possible, but also—and possibly more to the point—to prevent them from ever voting for him again. He had suggested, as an alternative, a different mountain in a territory off the coast and lacking federal representation. But the mountain in his state had already been prepped—the senator had still liked the idea a little when it was a matter of a few hundred construction jobs—and now, about half a mile beneath the earth, a perfectly good vault the size of a football field was going to waste.

So that was the plan—load it onto the truck, drive it to the mountain, try to avoid people and try to keep their pants on. It wasn’t a bad plan. It was simple and Beth knew simple plans tended to work best in these situations, but she suspected it was the last part of it that was going to give them the most difficulty—the keeping their pants on part.

Brad parked the car in the warehouse lot and they got out.

“I’ll take my keys back,” she said. He tossed them to her.

“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to take over driving duties. It just seemed like the thing to do at the time, on account of all the people fucking like lunatics in that neighborhood and all.”

“All is forgiven, Brad,” she said. “I don’t always have to drive. In fact, I’m kind of hoping right now that you know how to drive a semi.”

“How hard can it be?” he said.

As it would turn out? Pretty goddamn hard. Even the forklift gave him what seemed to Beth like an inordinate amount of difficulty. Starters strained, gears ground. It was at least an hour before they were on the road again, the object more or less safely strapped into the back of the semi, and during that hour, Beth had imagined doing and having done to her just about everything two people could do and have done to them. And to be fair, Brad may have been distracted by thoughts of his own. More than once, while he was struggling with this or that lever or clutch, she had caught him sneaking a glance at her, a particular and not unfamiliar look of lust occupying a good portion of his face.

Thankfully, the effects of the object seemed to have dissipated a little as they got closer. She did not know why, but it was no longer impossible for her to consider the drive ahead of them and its varying logistical considerations without being hopelessly distracted by the thought of Brad holding her nipples firmly between his fingers or slipping one discreet thumb into her asshole while he shoved his impressive cock deep inside her pussy. Even the thought of his mouth on the hollow of her neck was no longer all-consuming and she could forget, for a few passing moments, the idea of kissing the salty sweat from his well-defined collarbone as he plowed himself insistently into her.

So more or less, anyway.

She squeezed her legs together, as if holding something in, but even that action seemed to release another sensation of want.
Fucking load the goddamn truck already
, she had thought more than once as Brad had struggled with the forklift then the truck.
Fucking find a gear and let’s get this son of a bitch on the road so we can bury this cock-sucking space whatever the fucking thing is beneath a mountain already.

When Beth was horny, she tended to swear a lot more in her thoughts.

It was painful to hear the truck’s protestations under Brad’s unskilled control. Gears one through three rattled through the entire vehicle like the world was being torn apart along non-perforated lines. But eventually they were on the road, speeding along a highway that slowly began to fill up with the more or less normal amount of traffic, with none of the passing motorists appearing to be engaged in carnal acts best practiced in stationary objects.

Beth took the opportunity of a relatively clear head and road to call the governor again. This time Alice picked up in the middle of the second ring.

“Elizabeth,” she said, perhaps a little too eagerly to maintain the front of their working relationship. “Is everything okay?”

“More or less,” Beth said. “We’re on the road now with the object. Taking it to a federal facility that might be suitable for containing this thing if it decides to go all sex-radioactive again.”

“I know,” the governor said. “The deputy director of the Department of Xeno-Cryptology called with an update about five minutes ago.”

Beth gave Brad a sideways glance, trying to figure out when in the last hour or so he had found time to be debriefed by his own particular authorities. Brad didn’t notice her look. All his concentration was focused on keeping the truck in just one lane at a time.

“Did you even know a federal Department of Xeno-Cryptology was a thing?” Beth asked the governor.

And the governor said, “Beth, I didn’t even know xeno-cryptology was a word.”

“I’m not entirely sure it is.”

Chapter Six

They drove on and Beth felt herself again, though maybe a version of herself that could still use a meal and a nap. She considered suggesting they stop somewhere for a bite but decided not to for two main reasons—the alien cargo in the back of the truck and the pain of experiencing Brad attempting to shift gears again.

In a moment of inspiration, she opened the truck’s glove compartment and found, amid several badly folded maps and wadded-up receipts, a candy bar and a half-eaten roll of breath mints.

“Score,” she said, holding them up. “Main course
and
dessert.”

“Any pancakes in there? I have a hankering for some pancakes.”

“It’s a glove compartment, Brad. No pancakes.”

She broke the candy bar in two and handed him half.

“Cheers,” he said, holding his half forward between them. She met it with her own half.

“Cheers.”

They ate their respective pieces quickly.

“Mint?” she asked.

“I’d better pace myself.”

She shrugged, popped a mint into her mouth and sat back.

“Tell me a story, Brad. It’s going to be a long ride.”

He grunted. “I’m not sure I know any stories.”

“How about the story of Brad Davis, Super Secret Agent. I’d kind of like to hear that one.”

“What’s to tell? I’m a Super Secret Agent.”

“Okay. And how did you get that way?”

“Same as most people, I imagine. I did a couple of tours in the Navy, majored in criminology in college then used a few connections from there to get on with the department. And here I am today, trying to drive a truck and prevent the sexiest national disaster in the history of time.”

“I don’t know, I’ve read about some pretty sexy national disasters.”

“When? In college while you were studying philosophy, art history and criminal justice?”

Beth frowned.

“I may have read up on you a little,” he said.

“You don’t think maybe that comes off as a little stalkery?”

“No. It’s research—and professional curiosity. I told you, you are a legend.”

She popped another mint in her mouth to keep from having to say anything else. Then she said, “You know I’m going to eat all these if you don’t jump in on them, Brad.”

“I’m good.”

* * * *

The sun was well gone from the sky when they crossed one of the five state lines they would have to cross before they were done. Brad’s eyes were open wide but there was a sort of wild animal quality to them that made Beth think maybe it would be time to either pull over or switch drivers. Unfortunately, she did not feel all that up to driving the giant truck herself. It had been a trying day, without enough food or coffee to make up for the fluids lost in other pursuits, and aside from a few lingering thoughts of fucking this way or that, she wanted nothing more at that moment than to crawl into the clean sheets of a reasonable respectable motel and let sleep overtake her. For the last ten miles at least, she had been negotiating with herself over whether or not shutting just one eye for a few minutes might not help a little, and Beth knew that was never a good sign.