Unidentified Funny Objects 7, page 11
There was a shitload of noise as it landed right on top of my car. I could hear twelve thousand dollars of luxury vehicle squealing and crunching under the weight of the ship as it settled down and came to a stop. Normally, I’d be pissed off about something like that, but, if I’m honest, I was too shocked just then to react like normal.
Luckily, Joey hadn’t made it all the way to the car. He was standing a few feet away from the flying saucer. Its lights were still on, so I saw when he crossed himself and dropped to his knees. Then I heard him praying. A lot of people don’t know this, but he’s a pretty religious guy.
“Holy shit,” I said. “What the hell is going on?”
I pulled out my piece. I didn’t know what else to do, so I just stood there. Joey kept praying.
Then a door—a hatch, I guess it’s called—opened in the side of the ship. A bunch of little guys came out. Well, I think they were guys. Hard to be sure.
They were about four feet tall, dressed in shiny silver jumpsuits, pretty skinny, and they had the same grey-green complexion that Mikey had these days. Their bald heads looked too big for their bodies, and they had eyes like cats—kind of gold, with weird pupils.
Joey switched to praying in Latin. So he was taking this real seriously.
The little greenish guys were running around their ship, chattering to each other—it sounded kind of like birds chirping. They all finally stopped at the same spot, looking at one portion of the ship. I could tell something about it really bothered them.
Since they had landed right on top of my car, something was bothering me, too.
“Yo!” I shouted, pulling myself together. “What do you bozos think you’re doing?”
They all flinched, looked at me, and shrieked at once. I mean, the exact same time—like they had rehearsed it or something.
“That was my car, you jerks!” I waved my gun at them. “Who’s gonna pay for it? Huh? I’ll tell you who. You are.”
Joey stopped praying and gave me a weird look.
“New tires!” I said to him, maybe not thinking so clearly yet.
The little strangers all looked at each other, chirped a bunch and moved around, like they were changing places. Then they turned to me and—again, at the exact same time, like they practiced this—all started walking toward me.
I pointed my gun at them. “Hold it right there. Don’t come any closer unless you want me to blow some great big vents in those little silver suits.”
They kept walking.
“Stop!” I ordered.
They didn’t.
So I fired a warning shot.
I’m not big on warning shots. If you’re gonna pull the trigger, then you’d better mean it—that’s what I say. But I could tell these guys were new in town, and I had a feeling they didn’t understand what I was saying.
They all shrieked again and froze in their tracks.
“That’s better,” I said. “Now stay where you are.”
“Oh, Jesus, Vito,” said Joey, rising to his feet. “You have a gun, they have a spaceship. Do you really want to be starting something?”
“So what’s your suggestion, Mr. Spock?”
“Let me handle this.” Joey cleared his throat, spread his arms wide, like he was welcoming people to his kid’s wedding, and said to them, “Greetings! Welcome to planet Earth!”
No reaction.
“Maybe don’t apply to Starfleet just yet,” I said to him.
“Should I try saying it in Latin?”
Then one of the little guys went, “Ping!”
I mean, he made a noise that was like the sound your beeper makes when you get a message.
He made that sound and held it. And then another one joined in, and then another. Once all of them were doing this ping! thing, they started high-fiving each other.
And then they all said at the exact same time, “We apologize. In our agitation, we forgot to activate our translation device upon landing.” Their voices were still chirpy-sounding. It was like listening to birds that could talk. “We are here on a peaceful mission, and we hope this oversight did not create a diplomatic incident that will lead to interstellar war.”
“Huh?” said Joey.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “This is the United States of America, not some commie hellhole.”
“Our arrival was unduly precipitate because our vehicle sustained damage while in flight above your region,” they said.
“I don’t know what precip . . . precip . . . Well, whatever that means, you wrecked my car.”
After some pinging, they said, “Is this ‘car’ your form of transportation?”
“Yes.”
“Is it your primary or your secondary mode of transportation?”
“Huh?”
“Do you possess another transportation vehicle?”
“What’s with all the questions?”
“We are trying to ascertain if the destruction of your vehicle has created an incident that will lead to interstellar war.”
“Seems like they come from a tough town,” said Joey.
I said, “How about you pay for the car? And then we don’t need to go to war.”
They pinged a little, then said, “What form of payment would avert interstellar war?”
Joey said to me, “I’m guessing they don’t have MasterCard or Visa.”
I said, “We need to get them out of here so we can cover up Mikey and . . . Now what?”
The little guys started chirping and fidgeting. Then they started shifting around, changing places. After that, they kind of hopped around in little circles while looking at the sky.
And then bright light flooded this Jersey landfill again. While the little guys hopped around and shrieked, me and Joey watched another flying saucer appear in the night sky, hover above us, and then float down to land—in the pit, right on top of Mikey’s body.
“Hey, that solves our problem, dontcha think?” said Joey with a pleased smile. “Ain’t nobody gonna find the body after it’s been crushed by that thing.”
I agreed we probably didn’t need to bother piling garbage on top of Mikey now.
“Which is good,” I added, “because the shovels are crushed under the first spaceship, inside my car.”
“Oh, let go of the car, Vito. This here is an interstellar incident we’re experiencing!”
“Maybe an interstellar war,” I said. “Those little guys look real pissed off.”
They were by now screeching, leaping around like crazy, and waving their arms at the new ship. And it sure didn’t look like they meant it in a friendly way.
Joey pointed at the second ship. “Look!”
A hatch opened and a bunch of little guys came out. They looked exactly like the other set of guys, except for their jumpsuits, which were gold.
“Remember when Mikey had a tie that color?” Joey said.
“Don’t remind me.”
These guys did the same whole routine, running around their ship and chirping at each other, until they all found one special place on the ship that really bugged them, and they crowded around it.
Looking down into the pit, we had a pretty good view, so I could see what was freaking them out. “Looks like their ship had an accident.”
“Aren’t there big rocks in outer space?” Joey said. “Maybe one hit them.”
I looked over my shoulder at the first flying saucer. The little guys in silver, who said their ship was damaged, looked like they wanted to kill the guys in gold. Yeah, we were from different stellars and they were really weird, but you could just tell they wanted to rip out the other crew’s guts.
Then I looked up at the sky. “No, Joey, I think these two ships had a fender bender . . . somewhere up there.” I looked down at the guys in gold, and I saw they had spotted the guys in silver, and now they were doing all the same stuff—screeching, leaping around, waving their arms. “And now both sides want a war.”
Joey looked back and forth between the two crews. “Hey, I think you’re right.”
“Hey, you!” I shouted down into the pit. “Have you guys got a translation thing? Turn it on! Turn on your translator!”
“What are you doing?”
“We gotta get all these guys to calm down.”
“No, Vito, this is their thing, not ours. We should stay out of it.”
As the guys in gold started to scramble up the hill, kinda growling and howling at the silver guys now, I said, “This is gonna get messy.”
“We should get out of here.”
“How? We’re in the middle of a Jersey landfill, in the middle of the night, and we don’t have a car,” I pointed out. “Anyhow, we can’t cut and run. We gotta stop this alien war before it starts.”
“This ain’t our business.”
“Yes, it is. We’ve got the bodies of Little Mikey Corvino, two Bernini soldiers, Louis the Worm, and—”
“Oh, Christ, I forgot about Louis.”
“—and that cross-dressing hit man from Cincinnati—”
“Really? I hope he wasn’t still wearing that purple organza thing when he was dumped here. It would be such a waste.”
“Focus, Joey. They’re all dumped somewhere in this landfill. So the last thing we need is to have the FBI, CIA, NSA, IRS, and KGB crawling all over this place for months, looking under every piece of trash ever dumped here. Which is what’ll happen if a sanitation worker finds a dozen alien bodies lying around here in the morning.”
“Oh.” He nodded. “Right.”
“So instead of letting these guys go to the mattresses . . .” The howling and growling sounded real close now. I looked past Joey and saw that the gold guys were almost out of the pit. And they looked like they meant business. “We’re going to get them to come to the table for a sit down and negotiate a truce.”
“How are we going to—Vito, behind you!”
I turned around and saw that the silver guys were charging toward the gold guys.
I fired my gun in the air.
That got everyone to freeze.
“You!” I pointed at the silver guys. “Tell them to turn on their translation thing.”
“We are not in communication mode with them. We wish to annihilate them in retaliation for the damage they have done to our ship! We—”
I fired my gun again.
The silver guys chirped for a while at the gold guys. The gold guys did the whole pinging and high-fiving ritual we’d seen before, and then they said to me, “We apologize. In our agitation, we forgot to activate our translation device upon landing. We are here on a peaceful—”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it before, sister. Um, mister. Uh, whatever.” I raised my voice and spoke to both crews. “Pay real close attention. This is our planet, and you are our guests.”
“And you wasn’t even invited,” Joey added.
“So we are in charge here, not you. Capisce?”
There was some pinging, and then both crews said together, “Our superiors in the mother ship have communicated instructions.”
“We destroyed your transportation vehicle by inadvertently landing on it,” said the silver guys. “This is a grave offense in our culture.”
“And we have intruded on your sacred burial ground,” said the guys in gold. “That was a deceased humanoid entity we pulverized when we landed, was it not?”
“You’re sure he’s pulverized?” Joey asked.
“Quite.”
“Okay, then. You’ve solved a problem for us.”
“We are pleased by this information,” said the golds. “But intrusion on your burial ground is nonetheless a serious matter, and we wish to cooperate with all relevant protocols in order to avoid interstellar war.”
“Okay, then. Before we get started, let me introduce myself. I’m Vito Giacalone. And this here is my associate, Joey Mannino.”
“Call me Joey the Chin.”
The golds and silvers all called, “Joey the Chin.”
“I didn’t mean . . . Never mind.”
“We, too, wish to cooperate with all relevant protocols,” said the silvers. “Once they are concluded and you have removed to a safe distance, then we will annihilate them.” They waved at the golds.
“War!” cried the gold guys.
I fired my gun again, before anyone could get too excited.
“Knock it off right now,” I said, pretty harsh. “There will not be a war. It ain’t happening, fellas. Not here, anyhow.”
Lots of chirping from the gold guys, who said, “But they ignored the rules of planetary navigation and passed directly across our flight path—”
“Your flight path?” the silver guys (also chirping a lot) shot back. “You didn’t even signal that you were changing your trajectory! That is a clear violation of—”
“You were flying in the same direction as this planet’s rotation! Who does that?”
“You shouldn’t even have been at that elevation without proper—”
“We could have been killed by your careless—”
“Oh, you can still be killed. We’ll be happy to—”
“Enough!” I interrupted. “Stop right there. We’re going to have a sit down. We’ll settle this with words, not bullets . . . or ray guns, or whatever you guys use. And then you’ll leave here without starting a war.”
“Or littering our handy landfill with alien bodies,” Joey muttered.
There was some pinging, and then both crews said, “Sit down?”
“Negotiation,” said Joey.
“Joey the Chin,” they all called.
“Stop doing that,” he said.
“What are the protocols?” the guys in gold asked me.
“Well, first of all,” I said, “everyone should sit down.”
Both crews sat, like they’d all rehearsed it together.
“Now I’m gonna ask each side of this conflict to tell me exactly what your beef is, and the other side will remain silent until it’s their turn to talk.”
Some pinging, and then, “You will listen to our bovine meat product?”
“This could take a while,” Joey said.
“Joey the Chin.”
“Seriously, stop,” he said. “You’re freaking me out.”
“Let’s get started,” I said.
The translation was tricky in places, and I know squat about planetary navigation, so getting the story straight took some time. In the end, though, since neither party in the mid-air collision was insured, I declared it a no-fault incident in which neither crew was entitled to cash or retribution. Things got a little hairy when they all decided that mass suicide would be the best resolution, but I talked them out of that, too.
“As you are aware, we’re on sacred ground here,” I said, “where we Catholics bury our dead.”
“Is that why there’s such a distinctive odor here?” asked the golds.
“And that means you can’t die on this spot unless you convert to Catholicism, and that takes time.”
“Speaking of which . . .” Joey tapped his watch, reminding me we needed to get everyone out of here before the early shift showed up for work.
“Okay, guys, that’s a wrap. I am calling a truce between your two crews. You will now walk away from this sit down as friends, or at least not as enemies. Leave this place without shedding blood and return to running your perfectly legitimate business interests.”
The guys in gold rose to their feet. They stood there for a minute, all swaying together, like they were moving in time to music I couldn’t hear.
Then they said, “Thank you for including us in this fascinating Earth custom! We are deeply moved by this experience and have so much new information to share with the social scientists on our home planet.”
“Always glad to be of service.” I raised my hand as they turned to go. “Arrivederci.”
“Live long and prosper,” said Joey.
The gold guys all started humming as they began going back down into the pit and boarding their ship. After they lifted off and hovered for a minute right over the spot where they’d landed, lights blazing, I could see there was pretty much no trace of Little Mikey Corvino.
“Better than a concrete mixer.” Joey patted my shoulder. “Hey, you done good, Vito.”
The little silver guys went back to their ship and studied the damage. We followed them.
“Can you get back to the mother ship?” Joey asked them.
“The ship is functional and can return on autopilot,” they said. “We will remain behind and find a suitable place to self-destruct collectively, as payment for destroying Vito Giacalone’s transportation vehicle.”
“Whoa,” I said. “No. That is not the payment I want. Come up with another plan.”
After some pinging, they said, “Our superiors agree with you. They remind us that we cannot complete our peaceful mission here if we are all reabsorbed into the Incorporeal Great Oneness due to collective self-destruction.”
“Huh?” said Joey.
“What is your mission?” I felt a little worried. I was tired and didn’t need more trouble tonight.
“We have the honor of collecting a humanoid specimen from this planet and bringing it back to the mother ship for scientific study.”
“Huh?” I said.
“Alien abduction!” Joey nodded. “I knew those stories were for real.”
A lot of people don’t know this, but he’s a pretty intellectual guy. Watches the Discovery Channel and stuff.
“Well, you ain’t taking us back to the mother—”
“No, Vito Giacalone, of course not. We seek a specimen whose removal from this planet will not leave a leadership void. Obviously, you are therefore unsuitable specimens. Who would conduct sit downs in your absence?”
“Good point,” said Joey.
“We hope that declaring you unsuitable has not offended you and will not lead to interstellar w—”
“Wait a minute.” I thought I saw a solution to an even bigger problem than making sure Mikey never got found. “You’ve come here to take someone away with you? Someone who our people won’t miss?”
“Yes, and we would be ardently pursuing our duty right now if we had not experienced a ‘fender bender’ in mid-air and—”
“Okay, then. I know exactly who you should take with you,” I said. “In fact, him remaining here is a big inconvenience to our family. So if you take him—”
