[excerpt from Truck Stop Earth]

Chapter 1

So like I came into the country over this long crummy-as-shit road, and right away I saw the black helicopters. What did I expect? I knew the bigheads had followed me all the way up from Canada and into good ol’ Truck Stop Alaska. “James Ignatius Malachi Obadiah Osborne (call me Jimmo),” I said to myself, “those black helicopters are gonna dodge you until the day you die.” That’s what I said, and let me tell you, it’s the damn truth.

Should I of been surprised to see the black helicopters at the border? Not I. Not you, either, if you hadn’t been duped by the big Cosmic Gray Conspiracy to mind your own damn business and just pay your taxes to the Alien Occupation Government, but you have been, that’s why I’m telling you this story.

Sure, some Rational Thinking Straight who isn’t on anti-psychotic drugs would say, “Those were Blackhawks, it’s the damn border, Alaska is crawling with military, that’s why you saw black helicopters.” And that damn RATS would be right, he would, in the particular reality he happened to inhabit. I don’t play in that reality, not since years ago oh never-mind, because I have seen the absolute all and everything and what-the-hey of the Universe, my dear reader, I have, I have. And I tell you, those black helicopters are real, they’re everywhere, and this whole planet is run by alien Grays, and you know what I found out? God’s truth.

Alaska is like the main pump island of a filling station on the Outer Milky Way Throughway. Truck Stop Earth, you betcha.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, and giving away the kicker, when I have exactly 323 pages (it’s in my contract, no more, no less) of double-spaced, Times New Roman font, 12-point typewritten text to go. So bear with me.

Let me start over.

*

First, I didn’t see the black helicopters right away. When I was coming into the country, on that rutted gravel road between Beaver Creek, Yukon Territory, and the Alaska border, first I saw the couple in the black jumpsuits. I had hitched a ride to Beaver Creek the night before, a nice midsummer night, clear and hot and with sunset about six minutes past oh-dark-hundred, only I guess you called it “oh-light-hundred” up there in the far north. I had had pretty good luck coming up the Alaska Highway. After a little unpleasantness at the border, which I solved by showing the customs guy my red-jacket US Passport, the one I got from when I was in the Foreign Service, and flashing him five big Dead Presidents, after that I got some good rides. A bunch of Coasties on their way to Kodiak, who told me about Della, God bless ’em. Then, a trucker hauling Snap-on-Tools to Fairbanks — that got me as far as Whitehorse. Then this really choice blonde babe who turned out to be a born again, sorta like me, who picked me up because I had a sign that said JOHN 3:16.

Hannah, the blonde, took me to Beaver Creek because I had some rare choice Plankeye minidisks, bootlegged from their Mark of the Beast tour. Plus, I think she wanted someone to talk to, on account of she was on her way to join this religious commune out of Big Delta up there where the Alaska Highway ends. Hannah had been betrothed and saw her youthful life fading away into babies and stacking hay.

OK, we did the beast with the two backs, too, but we prayed for forgiveness afterward. Of course we used raincoats, some nubbly glow-in-the-dark condoms I had bought in the restroom at a Texaco in Whitehorse. (“Watch it glow as you grow,” the package said.) So Hannah got me to Beaver Creek, har-har, but she dropped me out before the Canadian customs shed, right there on the edge of town, tellin’ me I’d have “to trust to the Good Lord” for my passage out of Canada. I understood. I wouldn’t cross a border with a hitchhiker, either. Hannah laid a big sloppy kiss with a wad of tongue as a farewell. God bless the lucky Delta dick who gets her for a wife, he’s going to wear out his johnson if Hannah keeps that up.

So I left Canada in the sense that I said good-bye to their customs, some surly fat bitch who made real sure she punched my SSN into her computer, so the Canuckadians would know they were rid of ol’ Jimmo, farewell. But it’s a long haul between the spanking new Canadian customs building outside of Beaver Creek and the big concrete building of US Customs right at the border, about twenty miles of road, and there isn’t a town, village, gas station, or anything the whole way. It’s just open country, a real no-man’s land.

The guys in the black jumpsuits wanted to give me a ride.

I was walking along the side of the road six miles out of Beaver Creek, real peaceful like, digging the wildflowers and the beer cans and the little shreds of filter fabric sticking out of the edges, when I turned at the sound of a car coming from down the road. Not even thinking, I stuck my thumb out, but before I had a chance to pull it back in, the white Jeep Cherokee stopped. At first I thought they were camo dudes, like the ones who patrol around Area 51 at Groom Lake. Man, I hate those rent-a-grunts, but I guess they made it personal after that little incident when I blew their cover and listed their names and home addresses on the Web. ’Nother story.

I didn’t even have to look at their plates — Alaska blue ’n’ gold NRG lettered plates, and in Alaska they only go up to the J’s — to know who they were: AOGs, Agents of the Grays, Alien Occupation Government. They looked like batfags, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms goons, right down to the thin Kevlar vests. Two of ’em, though, in the slick black jumpsuits.

“Need a ride, son?” asked the guy in the passenger’s side as he rolled down the window. Tinted windows, thick windows: armored, I knew.

“Just hiking, sir,” I said. Old habit from when I was in Delta Force. Any guy calls you “son,” you call them “sir.” I’d of saluted, but when Delta kicked me upstairs on special assignment as a deep cover agent in the Foreign Service, I swore off saluting. With my dreadlocks tucked up into my baseball cap, and the hair buzzed on the side of my head, that guy might of thought I was military with a high and tight, in civvies.

“We can give you a ride up to the border, son,” the guy went on.

“Only a couple of miles. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

Then they got out. Right then I knew they were Grays because they had the mirrored sunglasses and the jerky legs. The Grays on bottom duty get face surgery so they look normal — real noses, mouths, and ears — but the big triangular eyes are hard to fake. Takes a lot of bone surgery, so most of them just wear big sunglasses. And the Grays have long torsos but stumpy legs, kind of like that Frog painter Hangin’ Too Loose Lowtrec, so to look human, they walk on these like stilts. Our high gravity really messes them up, though, so they never get good at it. You learn these things when you become an enemy of the bigheads like me.

The driver was a wymmin, I mean, I knew the type, feminazis: big broad shoulders and almost no boobs, and fat hips. She had short hair just over her ear flaps and long bangs. Female Grays don’t like to alter their ear flaps. They’re really weird that way: they think those vestigial flaps are the sexiest thing. For all I know, that’s how they screw. Go figure. Aliens are really strange.

So the wymmin Gray got out, same klutzy walk, and they both gimped over to me, looking real tall, but I knew I could kick their legs out from under them. ’Course, iffen I did that, they’d blast me to cinders, but it’s nice to know I had the option to damage them before I died. They leaned up against that white Jeep Cherokee with the funny windows, hooking their thumbs in their belts. Those Grays watch too many of our Western movies, if you ask me. Someone ought to tell them, or at least turn ’em on to some Mel Gibson thrillers so they can learn a new attitude . . .

“You’re kind of out here in the middle of nowhere,” the wymmin says. She had one of those squeaky high voices their females have. It always flips me out. You see a big momma like that, and then she has this high voice.

“Yes ma’am,” I said. “I’m used to walking.”

“So we’ll give you a ride to the border,” she said. “Across the border, make it easy on you. Into Tok. You must be going that way.”

“Might take a right at Tositna and go up to Chicken,” I said. “Do some gold mining.”

“Yeah.” The guy scratched his balls, in that sympathetic gesture guys make to each other, sort of like saying, Balls, what a pain, huh? Only I knew he was readjusting the servos on his stilts.

“So you sure you don’t want a lift?” The wymmin Gray glared at me through her glasses. I knew she was scanning me. Hell, I knew they had me pegged already. They’d put a chip in my butt after my first abduction near Cedar Key (see Chapter 16), so they could track me like that, you bet.

“Don’t wanna trouble you,” I said.

“No trouble,” the guy said.

“Still . . .” I stared off into the distance, thinking of Hannah. I figured if they were scanning me, they’d pick up the increase in blood pressure and the little woody I was working up. “I’m sort of hoping for a ride with this babe I met in Beaver Creek.” I grinned, and the guy Gray grinned back, showing me his stumpy little tongue.

“Gotcha,” he said, winking and making a little gun with his fingers and shooting it at me. Really. They ought to watch some old Bond movies if they wanted some better clichés.

“Dude,” I said.

The wymmin nodded and the guy nodded and they got back in the white Cherokee and drove over the hill and probably to one of their shuttle crafts. A few minutes later, the Coasties who had given me a ride 500 miles down the road picked me up again.

When the Coasties dropped me off just before the border, I saw the black helicopters.

Welcome to Alaska, I thought. Now go home.