I Hate It When That Happens by cmsix

Chapter 1

God dam I hate flying. It just sucks to be locked up in that aluminum tube with so many fucking idiots. That's not even counting the off chance that the pilot or co-pilot has his head up his ass and will do something stupid to get you killed. Of course, now days there's always the long shot that you'll be hijacked, bombed out of the air, or crashed into a building for fuck sake.

Getting to the plane is another hassle and a half. It was inevitable that the only plane going where I wanted to be left from DFW. To make matters worse, it left at nine thirty-three AM. That meant I either had to get there two and a half to three hours early or fight my way across town during the fucking morning rush. So it was sit on my ass in a terminal lounge for two hours or fight rush traffic Texas style for damned near that long.

Don't get me wrong, I love Texas - born and raised here. It's the other asshole Texans that I don't give a shit about. Not to mention the Yankees that drifted this way and the Okies and other assorted migrants.

There are three main things that bother me about Okies or Yankees that come to Texas. They're just like farts, they're loud, they stink, and they won't go back where they came from. No doubt the people in Spokane would be thinking similar thoughts about me when I finally got off the damned plane to pick up my purchase.

It had taken months to find one I wanted and I felt like I'd nearly worn the Internet out to do it. At this late date there just aren't many 1931 Model A Cabriolet Coupes left and somehow I'd come up with a jones for another one. It was the kind of car I'd learned to drive in.

The guy in Spokane claimed he had one, and that it was in excellent shape. He'd sent some great pictures, but if he was lying and got me on this plane for no good reason I'd probably wind up in jail for choking the piss out of him.

Since I hated rush traffic nearly as bad as flying, I'd opted for getting to the airport early. I'd had too much coffee while waiting, and right now I needed to piss. That wasn't the only thing making me want to get up and take a walk either. The fat woman in the window seat had cut three silent but deadly farts since she'd buckled in and I was tired of smelling ham and eggs strained through shit.

As soon as we hit our traveling altitude and the seatbelt light went out I unbuckled, was up and out of my seat, and on my way to the flying pisser.

Talk about the worst fucking luck in the world, just as I went by one of the emergency exits, on my way to the john, the fucking thing blew out some how and I wasn't flying anymore. That was the only good part; the bad part was that I was falling now, like fucking D B Cooper but without the parachute or the money.

Even a dumb Texan knows he's going to die when something this fucked up happens to him. Death was bad enough but why in the hell did it have to make your ears hurt so bad. I know, I know, it's the loss of pressure. Knowing what caused it didn't make it hurt any less.

The next piss off was not enough air to catch my breath. How fucking nice was that, I wasn't even going to be able to stay conscious for the whole trip. I wondered if I'd have time to clear my head before I died, since the air would get better as I got closer to the ground.

Then I was unconscious. It happened so fast I didn't even have enough time to bitch about it.

When I woke up my first thought was to wonder why I wasn't dead. Something really odd must have happened because I was lying in a bed and it was in a small room, a small room with metal walls.

At least I'd run across something strange that I couldn't really gripe about, yet. There had to be a story in this and I was going to listen damned carefully. In fact I was suddenly anxious to find out what had happened.

When the world sticks it up your ass and breaks it off, it doesn't just stop there. Oh no, it has to wiggle the broken splinters around inside your guts. Not sixty seconds after I came to, the single door in my metal room opened and a fucking little green man came through it.

"Greetings earthling," it said, but then again it didn't.

The message was clear, but it hadn't spoken, I'd been looking right at it and its thin-lipped green mouth hadn't moved. What the hell?

"Greetings," I said, and I had the common courtesy to actually speak, moving my lips and everything.

"It isn't necessary to vocalize, unless you just want to. You can simply think when you want to communicate."

"You can read my mind?" I asked.

"Of course I can, but I don't, we don't. Thinking about what you want to say will cause the thoughts to be communicated without me having to read your mind as you put it. I guess it sounds confusing but your actual thoughts and what you communicate mentally when you think about what you are about to say are completely different. It is a separate process."

"Oh," I said.

It wasn't the most intelligent comment, but what would you say? Hell, I was confused and I don't mind admitting it. Spaceman just kept looking at me, like he was waiting for me to think something to him. I gave it a shot.

"What happened?" I thought, to the spaceman, or to what I thought was a spaceman.

"We arranged for the emergency exit to open just before you passed it so that you would be expelled from the plane. We put you under, as some of you earthlings say, as you were falling and then we transported you here.

"We've given you a thorough examination and now that it is over we've let you regain consciousness."

"But why?" I asked, speaking aloud again since I forgot to just think at him.

"We need you for a type of experiment."

Uh oh, here it comes. Surely those tales aren't true. I know they hadn't gone to all this trouble to gather up subjects for anal probing.

"What kind of experiment?"

"In an alternate reality, the earth you are familiar with is at a different place in its time cycle. We intend to put you there, in what you think of as Europe. Of course Europe isn't even a gleam in its daddy's eye yet on the version of Earth that you'll be going to.

"Why?"

"We want to shake up what you think of as the Cro-Magnon man. We've been studying them and frankly they're getting a little boring." he said, or thought, or what ever he was doing.

"So you just plucked me out of an airplane that was flying perfectly well. You've used your technology to kidnap me?" I said, the old fashioned way, with a little added volume now that I think about it.

"It isn't that simple. The door was going to come off anyway and both the pilot and copilot owned precious little talent. The plane would have crashed and you would be dead now."

"Then the plane crashed?"

"No, we didn't allow that to happen. We saved them as a sort of reward for you. With a little adjustment from us, many of the passengers are sure that you noticed the impending failure of the latch mechanism and tried valiantly to keep it from opening. They are convinced that you gave your life to save them."

"So I'm a hero, so what? How does that help me?" I asked.

"It doesn't help you directly, but we project there will be a massive law suit in your honor and that your X wife and your daughter will come out smelling like roses. It was the least we could do."

"Actually, I appreciate that. I wasn't poor or anything, but I'm sure both of them will appreciate the money. They'll probably end up with a lot more this way, since I'm the only one that died.

"Hey, what about a body? Won't they wonder why the can't find my body?" I asked.

"We made sure you would fall into a large forest, or at least they will assume you did. A massive search will be made of course, but it isn't unreasonable that they won't be able to find you."

"So I'll just be gone?" I asked.

"Yes, but your bank account will keep growing. It's a good thing that you made a will recently."

Now I was suspicious. I had made a new will lately. The odd part was that an urge to do it had come over me out of nowhere and it hadn't let up until I went to see a lawyer to get it done. I'd bet dollars to donuts that the spaceman had caused that too. I guess it was for the best, considering.

"So what do you want me to do to these Cro-Magnons?" I asked.

"Anything you want to. We don't really have any specific goal for you; we just wanted to shake things up a little. Please do your best not to starve to death or get killed right away."

"Get killed? Starve to death? What, you aren't going to provide some food?"

"Well of course we're going to provide some food, and some other supplies and materials, but you're going to be there from now on, and it isn't as if you've taken excellent care of yourself. You've barely done any exercise since you got out of college and didn't get drafted by a pro football team. You didn't even try to seek employment as a free agent," it said.

"Hell, I wasn't that fast and I'd grown fond of having knees that still worked as intended, without surgical intervention. Besides, I got a hell of a good job with Microsoft and it paid a lot better than anyone's practice squad would have. I liked playing football fine, but I had no desire to be a low paid, animated tackle dummy," I said.

"That's probably why you never made it big, no confidence," it said.

"No, I never made it big because I could only run a 4.65 forty on my best day. There aren't any regular jobs in the NFL for slow linebackers. It might have been different if I'd been six foot six and able to carry three hundred pounds. At six two and two fifty I was decidedly run of the mill," I said.

"Whatever, you're carrying considerably more weight now," it said.

"Two seventy isn't all that heavy, but I will admit that most of it is gut," I said.

"If you'll look behind you, you'll see that quite a lot of it is a fat ass also."

"What are you, a comedian? Did you suck me out of that plane just to give me shit about my weight?" I asked.

"No, and in the first place, we didn't suck you out. We caused the emergency exit to open and the pressure inside the plane expelled you into the lower pressure outside. As it is you're going to need to do quite a bit of conditioning before we can place you there."

"What? I'm going back into training?" I asked.

"Of course, you can't possibly survive in that shape. Did you know that you were dangerously close to an early cardiac incident?"

"What in the hell is a cardiac incident?" I asked.

"Heart attack is what I believe it is commonly called. We have initiated a treatment to relieve your system of the arterial plaque, and induced some other corrective measures. They will take time to complete anyway, so we'll start your physical training tomorrow. You may rest for the remainder of the day, you might as well see the news coverage of the search for your body," it said, and then it left.

As the door closed one of those hospital type televisions, hanging on that stupid rack, came out of a wall across from me and damned if a remote control didn't drift toward me from it.

It didn't take long to get tired of the Headline News blurb about my tragic accident and I got sick of the longer CNN coverage of the search for my body even faster. I would have turned the whole damned thing off if it hadn't been for ESPN's back to back replays of the 2004 world series of poker.

I wanted to take a closer look at the remote and instinctively I reached for my glasses so I could read what I knew would be small print. Shit, I didn't even have my clothes on, just one of those fucking hospital gowns. I looked at the remote anyway and was surprised that I could read it fairly easily. I found the portion that controlled the TIVO and started recording at once.

We were on the show where Mike Matusow was giving Greg Raymer so much shit, right before Raymer mostly cleaned him out. I was going to save this for when the normal broadcast hit a real shitty episode. Any minute now Matusow would be begging out loud, "Please God, don't let me be wrong," and shortly God, or at least the dealer, would reveal that Matasow had indeed been wrong and that he would now have to fork over eighty percent of his chips.

Matasow was a childish asshole of the first order but normally he was a damned good poker player. The trouble usually came after he'd built a big stack of chips and started thinking he had some kind of natural instinct that let him know what the other guy was holding.

Invariably he would make a stupid bet on the strength of what he called his read - as if he could know the other cards by looking at the player. Once he started that crap he'd be broke before long, busted out of the tournament and crying all the way out of the room for the inhumanity of it all. One thing that was really funny was the way he kept begging God to help him. Like God is in the habit of helping paroled dopers with their poker playing. I could watch him get busted out over and over and never get tired of it.

After about fifteen minutes I realized that the little green guy's TV wasn't bothered by commercials, the show just played on until it was over and the next one started. Shit this was great.

We'd see about the physical training tomorrow. I could fuck off with the best of 'em. I'd put on a big show of working my ass off but there was no sense in being in a rush. Maybe I could find the Playboy channel on this thing.

Talk about a rude awakening the next morning. The bed started vibrating and it got stronger and stronger until I couldn't stand to stay in it any longer. I got up, took a piss, and then spotted some gym shorts and a set of warm-ups, so I put them on.

When I was dressed the little green man came by and took me to breakfast, sorta. He assured me it was food, and that it was very good for me. Hell, I knew it was food, it was oatmeal, and it even tasted good, but there wasn't that much of it. It surprised me that I felt full even before I finished eating it all.

The gym was next on my agenda and when we got there a normal looking human was in it. He was my coach. I thought what the hell, they've gone all out for this little fuckup.

Ten minutes later I knew that he couldn't really be a human and I also knew that I would not be fucking off, not even for a second. My coach put me on a treadmill right off the bat and it started at a slow jog, but it didn't finish there. Coach was controlling the speed and somehow, someone else was controlling my body.

Oh, they'd let me do it on my own if I would, but if I tried to lollygag, something would make my body start doing what they wanted it to do instead of what I wanted it to do. I even caught myself doing isometrics with my arms as my legs were running and my leg muscles were burning like hell.

It went from bad to worse, because when I'd finished my warm up run on the treadmill I found out that they weren't a bit afraid of the damage some people said you could do to yourself with sit-ups. I'd have never believed my fat ass could do a hundred of the fuckers and I knew I'd be sorry as hell about finding out by tomorrow morning.