The Secret Race

                                                        The Secret Race

                                                      By Curtis Ray Jones



          Slumped and saggy eyed in his old pickup truck Lucas Hayes let the black featureless night whip past unnoticed. Twelve hours on concrete lugging seventy-five pound blocks of natural rubber from bale to belt had wrung the last drop get-up-and-go from his tall lanky frame. 

    Home, soft and easy, was all he had on his mind. A warm shower to wash away the stench of burnt rubber and carbon black then off to bed he’d go. That was the plan -his plan, not theirs.

    Teasing the tree tops just beyond his right eye’s field of vision four white spheres glided with elegant silence trailing his truck as it slugged it’s way home. 

    Lucas’ right leg relaxed and the accelerator rose. His truck slowed. His body slipped down into his seat belt. It cradled him as his truck veered left until it eased off the blacktop came to rest in the soft grassy medium.

  Jostled awake, Lucas reared up turned his wheel to the right and hit the gas. Everything went black. His truck was dead. Somehow even his dash lights blinked out. This made no sense to him. He had just installed a new battery two days earlier. 

  “Least it’s a warm night,” he muttered as he pushed open his side door and stepped out into the night. “It’s just mile home-been walkin’ all night one more mile won’t kill me. Guess I could call my somebody, but its goin‘on five in the mornin, no need to spoil somebody‘s else’s night. I‘ll just leg it,” He said as he clumped around the front of his truck, froze and rolled his eyes up and finally saw what had been following him since he left work.

The lights were much nearer now hovering above a small patch of fallow ground. Waiting?

  The only thing separating him from them was a short walk across a narrow strip of asphalt and an easy hop over a shallow ditch. Easy, yet he did not move. 

  “This is something normal.” He said much louder than he intended. “This not one of those things, I am not one of those people-I don’t see things. This is real, really normal.”

  He blinked willing it away. It would not go. “I know what this. It’ll come to me in a minute!” He was yelling now. They did not react. They not even radiate. They were just faceless white spheres that did not move. So he did.

  “Fine.” He said tromping up the medium, “I’m goin’ feel like fool when I get there look up and see a helicopter or a balloon looking down at me, but that’s all right-least I’ll know.” With that he marched across highway not bothering to look both ways before he crossed. He was not about to give the thing a chance to just fly away and leaving wondering for the rest of his life. The lights, however, did not move.

  As he stepped directly beneath them, he stopped straightened his spine and glared straight up. This is when they glared back.

  Blinding brilliance bore down into his eyes straight into the core of being-his DNA, bound within its irresistible pure whiteness potent intent and inescapable purpose-but more than anything justification.