Lives Of The Unknown Book 1: The Legend of Andrew Lockeford (6 page)

Andrew went to bed
later than the couple did—he didn’t want to try to sleep through
whatever business Troy and Leslie were doing in bed, so he took out
his tablet computer, plugged in some headphones, and listened to
some loud music for a good forty-five minutes. The loud music
worked in a gray area, since he could hear the faint humping in the
background while the volume of his music made his ears hurt a bit
as he listened. The couple finished for the night, and Andrew fell
asleep on the couch with some over-stimulated ears, still faintly
hearing the noise in his mind.
Well,
fuck,
thought Andrew,
if this was a motel, then this is definitely as cheap of a
stay as twenty dollars. I’ll actually be happy to be going to a
real inn tomorrow night.

Andrew had one intense dream last
night. It started off with him swimming in some black space—this
void, it seemed like—but he felt as though there was life all
around him. Next, he stopped and fell down to this red ground while
feeling unreasonably scared once he landed. It didn’t appear to be
hell, but there was blood and chaos everywhere. As he ran, colors
ran past him in a blur as if he were in a time warp, but he looked
down to his feet and saw he was running normally on the red soil.
Lastly, he saw a demon in the distance that was killing everyone.
The moment it turned its head to Andrew, it instantly appeared in
front of him. This monster was so grotesque and terrifying that he
could never describe it well enough. He saw the monster attack him,
leaving an image of red and black right before waking up. His heart
was racing and his eyes were wide open, but he was still lying down
on the couch.

There was a long
silence, with Andrew not talking nor thinking—he was too scared to
want to do either. After about three minutes, he thought,
Oh, God, that was scary. I haven’t had a
nightmare like that in years. And why did I dream of it? Was it
some warning for the future? Or maybe just some abstract
representation of something happening to me now?
Andrew was sitting up with his hands pressing
down on the cushion to the rear of him, acting like support
beams.

I need some
water.

Andrew’s nightmare still appeared
fresh and vivid in his mind as he went to the cabinet for a glass.
The dreams that scare or please us are the ones that tend to stay
in our memories for a long time. Sometimes it’s also the dreams
where you want to distinguish between dream and reality. After an
hour of being awake, he decided to go back to sleep, and this time
there were no dreams at all.

Chapter 7

Andrew wakes up at ten-thirty in the morning
when Troy rolls him off of the couch. Both Troy and Leslie were
laughing while Andrew regained his consciousness with a hint of
irritation.

“Ugh, seriously?”

“Oh, c’mon! It was funny! Besides,
it’s like, past ten now,” said Leslie.

“
What?
Aw, dammit!” Andrew pushed
himself quickly up to his feet, although his eyes had yet to adjust
to the sunlight shining in. “Why didn’t either of you tell me
earlier?”

“’Cause we just woke up too! Damn, why
are you freaking out so much?” said Troy.

Andrew accepted the fact that he was
late, although he was still stressed out about leaving so that he
wouldn’t waste any more time. “I just wanted to wake up earlier so
I could leave at eight o’clock. I especially wanted to get to Ely
before nightfall.” Waking up this late would cause Andrew to leave
by noon, thus arriving at Ely, Nevada, by roughly eight or nine at
night.

“Well, sorry dude, but at least you
can get ready and back on the road quickly, right?”

“Well, I’ve got to eat breakfast,
brush my teeth, take a shower, call my parents and
grandparents—”

“Alright, alright, I get it. There’s
some cereal in the top left cabinet over there.”

“Okay,” said Andrew as he nodded his
head.

He walked up to the cabinet and opened
it to find some oatmeal, Cheerios, Lucky Charms, and Reese’s Puffs.
He went for the Cheerios because it was quicker to make than the
oatmeal, whereas sugar cereals tasted nasty to him. Some people
lose their taste in sugar cereals later than others, he
thought.

As Andrew was eating his cereal, Troy
said, “So how’d you sleep last night? Me and Leslie sure slept
well.” Leslie giggled in the background.

Andrew didn’t want to say anything
about the dream, thinking that Troy wouldn’t know much more than he
did, so he replied, “I woke up in the middle of the night and got a
glass of water, but other than that, I slept fine.”

“Okay, cool.”

That dream still lingered with Andrew
badly, and he decided that he should at least tell
somebody.

“Actually, I did have this one
nightmare last night. I fell down from this darkness, or void, or
whatever, and I found myself in this.…sort of disaster, and was
attacked by this giant, black, horrifying monster. I can’t describe
much more than that.”

Troy’s eyebrows rose up a little.
“Sounds like a bad trip.”

“The thing is though, it wasn’t a
trip....it was just a dream, yet it was so vivid. I don’t really
know what it means.”

“It doesn’t have to mean anything, it
could just be a dream, that’s all.”

There was that possibility. Andrew
typically thought that dreams were these abstract ways of
communicating what we really want—sometimes even visions of the
future, also he couldn’t explain that. If anything, this nightmare
was just a way for his subconscious to randomly scream out loud,
with or without reason.

As Andrew packed his suitcase of
clothes back into his car, Troy and Leslie went out with him to say
goodbye.

Troy said, “Hey, thanks for visiting,
Andy. Are you coming back here on the way down?”

“Sorry, but I’m heading along the
coast on my way down. We may see each other in another couple
years, though.”

“Alright, well, keep in
touch.”

“Hey, Andy,” said Leslie, “you seem
like the kind of guy that could get some decent girls, so why
aren’t you? Are ya really afraid of another girl getting killed?”
Andrew did say last evening how he had one girlfriend and that she
died in a car crash.

Troy had answered for him: “He never
had much luck with girls—besides, he’s all for personality, not
looks.”

Andrew added, “It’s more complicated
than that, but yeah, I’ve always been that way. Anyway, thanks for
letting me stay at your place.” For a fraction of a second, Andrew
thought about saying something funny and clever, yet this came out
of his mouth: “Don’t get into any fights now!”

Leslie said with suspicion, “What d’ya
mean by that?”

Andrew had a hint of fear, thinking he
shouldn’t have said that last part. “I….just meant that you two are
a good couple.”

Once suspicion entered Leslie’s mind,
she would not let it go easily. “Okay, if you’re just trying to
bullshit me, then you’ve got another thing coming—”

“Babe, he’s telling the truth,” said
Troy, trying to keep down unnecessary conflict. “He’s a nice guy.
Can’t you tell?”

“Well, if that’s true, then what does
that make you and I?”

Andrew wanted to leave already, so he
started up the car and said, “I can’t get into this, I really have
to go already.”

“Fine, whatever,” said Leslie, who had
her conflict now focused onto Troy.

“See you later, Troy!” Andrew had left
the street saying this, leaving Leslie and Troy in an argument in
front of the house. He felt somewhat guilty and selfish, but he
really didn’t want to get caught into the crossfire.

“So, what
do
you think of me? Do
you think we could have a long-lasting relationship like Andy did?”
Leslie had her arms crossed and her stare fixed onto Troy in order
to look for any subtleties.

“Well, he wanted a really nice girl
and nothing more, while we….um.…” Troy had a hard time trying to
say the next part safely, but he already made the mistake of
hesitating.

“
What
?”

“Hey, at least it’s not like your
dead, right?” Troy chuckled pitifully.

And so that was the end of the
two-week-long relationship period, and the beginning of the
decline.

Andrew drove north along Highway 395
until he reached the town of Bishop; he had driven parallel to the
snowcapped Sierras, which looked amazing against the blue,
cloud-less sky and the green fields on the valley floor. Although
it didn’t quite satisfy his expectations. He expected to be blown
away by all the sights he saw, to feel joy throughout his body, but
unfortunately expectations always differ from reality. Andrew had
originally planned to find a fancy restaurant to eat out at in
Bishop, but his time was cut short and he ended up eating a
hamburger and fries at a Jack in the Box restaurant. The place was
busy and, as a consequence, it took a while before he got his
order. There were lots of tourists around anyway, and he realized
that it would be busy and crowded with people no matter where he
went in town. The meal filled him up and tasted all right, so it
was good enough. Too bad he didn’t at least enjoy it. He filled up
his car’s gas tank before he left Bishop. Onwards towards
Tonopah—the weather started to get cooler, considering how the
elevation was increasing as well. Andrew though it would be hotter,
considering how it was in a desert like the Mojave Desert. Then
again, most of the Mojave Desert was much closer to sea level, and
not every desert is the same. Looking at people driving on the open
road, as well as in towns, Andrew noticed that there were plenty of
people who were rushing to their destination. Plus, when he parked
on the curb of a street in town, he saw plenty of people with their
attention towards their phones. Andrew hoped that this trip was the
opposite—just meeting people that were content with what they had
and their simple lives.

Fifty miles east of Tonopah on Highway
6, Andrew stopped to stretch his legs—he stretched them not too
long ago back in Tonopah, but here there were no people for miles.
True, he was focusing on his destination because he was in a
hurry—hypocritical, again—but at least he was driving within the
speed limit. Often he would have some tailgaters who passed the
moment a dotted line on the road appeared. Sometimes they did not
pass at all, which had spooked him out a bit. Walking on the
shoulder he parked his car along, he noticed that he was near the
intersection of another highway, which was nicknamed the
“Extraterrestrial Highway”; there was a sign nearby the
intersection that had a silhouette of a bull with a UFO over it.
Andrew chuckled a bit as he walked back to his car, thinking that
maybe he would see some alien activity during this trip. He didn’t
go down the Extraterrestrial Highway, though; he had to continue
along Highway 6.

Another fifty miles
further, Andrew started to feel nervous without knowing why. He
found a dirt turnover on the side of the road and stopped. The
stars were all out at this time, and there were no humans in sight.
He got out of his car and looked up at the stars in fifty-five
degree weather. He wasn’t wearing a sweatshirt, but he didn’t mind
the cold. As the wind whistled through the bushes in the
background, he thought,
It’s a peaceful
night, so why am I so worried for no reason? Could it be that I’m
just out here alone in the middle of nowhere?
Just then he got his answer. One of the stars had shifted to
the left and began to glow brighter. As Andrew could see that it
was not a star and that sound was coming from it, he said out loud,
“Yup, it’s aliens.”

It was a flying saucer, just like many
people would expect to see, although it was much bigger than one
would think. The diameter of it was about as long as a football
field, and it must have been three or four stories tall. There was
a surprisingly quiet and fluent sound coming from it that sounded
like something from a synthesizer. How cliché. It was entirely
gray, and there were no lights coming off of it at the moment.
There were several circular doors, it looked like, for smaller
ships or escape pods to come out of. It hovered two hundred feet
above Andrew, who spread his arms out in an accepting manner that
conveyed, “Bring it on, show me what you’ve got.”

However, there was no tractor beam
like Andrew had expected, nothing to slowly pull him up in a
colored ray of light. Instead, he found his entire sight flashing
rapidly with light for two seconds, then he instantly found himself
in a small cylindrical space. There was sleeping gas in the space
that made Andrew fall unconscious in less than a second.

Chapter 8

After the spaceship left Earth along with the
solar system, the side of the cylindrical tube—a teleportation
cache—that Andrew was held in had opened up on the side. A creature
appeared before him while he was still asleep. It looked anorexic,
it had no hair at all on its body, it had holes where ears and a
nose should be, and its skin was gray. Just like how we think most
aliens would look. However, it had eyes similar to a human’s, with
white eyeballs, colored irises, and black holes for pupils—not like
the black marbles for eyes most commonly imagined. Unlike a
human’s, on the other hand, its eyes were farther apart from each
other and the major axis of each eye was forty degrees above the
horizontal axis.
The alien stood upright with a total height of five
feet, had two arms and two legs, and spoke with the vocal cords
inside its mouth. This is not a human, just to make clear; it
really is an alien—it’s just similar.