Chapter 7

I woke up to see my folks go driving towards the south side of the farm in my dad’s old pick up. If I had known that it was the last time I would see them, I would have been more upset and run after them. I took a shower and went down for breakfast. After a six-egg omelet with various veggies and bacon, I went out to get to work on the farm.

Around noon time, I came back in to find the house empty. The truck was still gone but I had no worries. After eating lunch, I went back to work and focused on doing things correctly, so I didn’t lose an arm or a leg in a piece of farm machinery. At the end of the day, the sun was getting low, so I parked the cultivator and shut everything down. I walked into the house to find no one at home.

I looked out front and there was no pickup truck. I took a walk through the house and found nothing out of order. Mom and dad’s clothes were still there, the suitcases too. After three days, I called the Sheriff and told him the folks were gone and that the last time I’d seen them they were driving off to the south.

That night there was a knock on my door and the Sheriff informed me that they found the truck at the southernmost edge of our property. There was no sign of a struggle, no sign of anything wrong. They did find footprints walking away from the truck and then they stopped. He mentioned that it reminded him of the disappearance of my grandparents.

When I asked him to tell me about that he told me that he was a first-year officer, and everyone was stumped. It looked like my grandparents had just walked south and disappeared. My dad never told me about that, and it made me wonder.

I went about running the farm and supervising the farm workers to get the work done. I’d been doing it for the last six months, so it was not a difficult transition going into the future. The nine sections of land were secured and I had plenty of help thanks to the homes my dad had built for his workers.

I was sitting on the porch one evening, several months later, watching one of our infamous spring thunderstorms approach. I always watched closely because tornadoes were common from the big storms at this time of the year. It seemed that this was going to be another dark and stormy night, and I was about to go inside when it happened.

I must have thrown my coffee cup twenty feet into the air when the bolt of lightning struck mere yards from my seat. I was thrown to the floor of the porch by the concussion, with my ears ringing and the hair on my body standing up straight from the static electricity in the air.

As the ringing in my ears decreased and I regained my composure, I noticed a very beautiful petite woman standing naked where the bolt had hit the ground. When I say petite, I mean it. She was less than five feet tall and soaked as she was from the rain, she might have weighed 90 pounds. There was a tuft of soft blonde hair between her legs that matched the short, curly, hair on her head. Her breasts were only slightly larger than they should have been to be in proportion to her body size. They were tipped with reddish pink nipples.

“Hello, Mick O’Dell, the Seventh,” she said joyfully just before she collapsed.

I ran to her and checked her for breathing and a pulse. Finding both, I picked her up and brought her into the house and lay her down on the couch. I went to pour a couple of glasses of bourbon for us.

I returned to the living room to find her standing there. She smiled a smile that stunned me. She laughed at my stunned expression. I knew that I looked stunned because I was stunned!

“I know that you have questions. Please kiss me first, then let me throw out some quick answers. OK?”

“OK,” I answered, but I don’t know why.

She pulled herself up to my face and locked her lips onto mine and passionately kissed me. It was so wonderful and compelling that I almost passed out. When she broke the kiss, I felt like I had loved this tiny woman forever. She looked through my eyes into my soul and spoke.

“My name is Angel.”

And with that she passed out again. I caught her before she could fall and hurt herself and I set her back on the couch, wrapping the blanket around her again. I was about to pour a small amount of the bourbon in her mouth when my old first aid training kicked in and I remembered that you never give a drink to an unconscious person. I set the glass back on the coffee table and pulled a chair close to the couch and sat to watch her.

I must have dozed off but I didn’t know for how long. My eyes opened to the sight of Angel looking at me from the couch.

“Hi. Are you feeling OK?”

“I am Mick, the Seventh. I’ll be better when I can get into some warm, dry clothes and get something to warm to drink. I’m sorry to be a bother, I guess I didn’t believe how disoriented I’d be. I shouldn’t have tried to stand and walk so soon. The trip I just took really drains the fluids from the body and makes you very light-headed. Would you please take care of those things and then we can sit down for a long talk.”

Not a word came out of my mouth as I turned and went to the kitchen and filled a large tumbler with tea from the pot warming on the stove and handed it to her. The normal sized coffee cup looked huge in her hands. She drank the whole thing down in one swig and asked for more.

“I’m really cold. Could I please have something to dry off with?”

“What? Oh! Yeah. Hang on.”

I ran upstairs, cursing myself for not thinking of covering her nudity. I grabbed a couple of towels out of the bathroom closet and then one of my sweatshirts. I ran downstairs skipping three steps at a time.

“Here you can dry with these, and this sweatshirt should be big enough to cover everything.”

“Thank you.”

She quickly dried her body right there in front of me. Modesty was apparently not something she was concerned with. Her breasts barely moved when she rubbed the towel across and around them. At one point she turned her back to me and my eyes were drawn to her miniature and absolutely perfect behind. When she bent over to dry her feet, I almost passed out. Everything about this tiny woman was perfect.

She saw me gawking and smiled as she pulled the sweatshirt over her head and shimmied the things down to her mid-thigh.

“Mick O’Dell the Seventh, thank you. This shirt is nice and warm. May I have some more of this?” She held out the cup that had once been filled with her second cup of warm tea.

I returned to her with the cup and she stood, carefully, and steadied herself before taking the cup in one hand. Then with it in one hand, she took my hand with the other and led me back out onto the porch. We sat on my swing and watched the storm roll away and to an end. The time between flashes and thunderclaps lessened and the inflow of winds that follows a storm began and it turned colder with each passing minute.

“We should go back inside.”

“No, Mick O’Dell the Seventh, we must stay and watch.”

“Watch what? And why do you keep calling me Mick O’Dell the Seventh?”

“That is your name, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But most people just call me Mick.”

“Very well ... Mick. We need to remain here so you can watch and then trust me.”

The cold winds increased, and Angel quickly snuggled to me to keep warm. She pointed off in the distance and I looked off into the blackened sky to see what she was pointing at. I focused and soon I could pick out a dark form in the dark sky.

“Mick, are you concerned?”

“No, but I’m not sure what I should be concerned about. Would you like to prepare me by telling me what I am supposed to be looking at?”

“That,” she said as she smiled and pointed up into the black sky out over the hole.

“And what is ‘that’?”

“It is a ship.”

“A ship? OK ... now I’m getting concerned.”

“No reason to be, Mick. However, you should prepare yourself for some truly fantastic information.”

“Fantastic information, huh? And other than a big floating ship landing in the hole, what would that be?”

“There is a lot of it, but the most important thing is that I am here for you, just as your mother came for your father. I love you and I am here to give birth to your sons. Beyond that, you will have to wait. The ship is going to land in the hole and bury itself. By morning the hole will look like it always has. The ridge around the hole will remain so no one will know that the hole has something under it.”

“Wait, that means that this ships arrival has been planned on for hundreds of years.”

“Fantastic information, right?” She smiled that smile again as she spoke.

“Yeah, right. What do I need to do now?”

“Are you ready for another bit of fantastic news?”

“Sure, let me have it.”

“First, you need to kiss me, again.”

Angel reached out and took hold of my head with both hands and pulled my head down to her face and she kissed me. Our tongues played for a bit and when she released me, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the truth that Angel was indeed my woman.

“That was nice. Give me another bit of fantastic news,” I said dreamily.

“As I said, I’m here to be your wife and the mother of your sons. Let’s go to your bed and begin the process. We can get married next week, but tonight we need to be lovers.”

“Lovers?” That WAS a fantastic bit of news.