Chapter 2

The face that greeted me when my eyes opened wasn't hers. Now awakened from my apparent dream, my memories of the single most gorgeous creature in the world were gone, dashed forever. The lady peering intently into my feverish face wasn't the slightest bit ugly or malformed, but she was merely humanly beautiful ... and with my fading dream memories that might never again be quite enough.

"My name is Roberta and I'm what passes for the local sheriff in this area. Can you remember your name?" The toothsome bit of well-tanned and quite attractive femininity asked me while she mopped my forehead with a cool wet washcloth. She seemed to be wearing a uniform complete with a Smoky Bear hat and the proverbial tin badge ... or rather a pair of them, as I seemed to have rather pronounced double vision at the moment. I was laying on something soft like a bed, and a fast squint around the room suggested that I was now recovering in some motel room, rather than the barred cell of some official county or village accommodations for otherwise unwelcome strangers. Except for a sheet that just barely covered my lower waist, I was naked. Apparently I'd been here for awhile since my accident, which probably explained why I felt like total shit.

"Jesse Spacey," I answered to her apparent satisfaction. She didn't even bother to check my wallet, so apparently she'd checked out my ID earlier. "I'm a bit lost probably; I was driving through the storm last night and might have gotten lost. Did you find my car, a vintage rust-gold colored Pontiac Firebird by the roadway?"

"We did. It's been towed here into town and Shipley already has it mostly fixed up for you. He said it was a bit of a mess but Ship's real good with older vintage cars and he loves a challenge."

"It's fixed already?" I muttered, risking another fast squint to the room windows. The easy coolness of the lighting suggested that it was morning, perhaps not too long after dawn. For someone to find my car, find me and get both of us patched in a few pre-dawn hours seemed rather miraculous.

I commented as much so on this and she laughed at me. It was not an unkindly laugh, but it suggested that I really didn't know what the heck was going on. I tried to sit up and get a better look at things but several sharp stabs of pain in my head put me right back lying down once more.

"I wouldn't try to get up or even move much for the next day or two," the tanned lovely suggested, "you've been out nearly in a coma for the better part of a full week, sick and burning up with a fever. We were worried that you'd never leave this room again alive, but it broke late yesterday and you seem to be on the mend. As for your car, since Ship's started to work on it, we've never seen him happier! I think he'll be done with it by the time you're ready to leave though."

"Assuming I can afford the repairs," I muttered. "Did I just crack my skull, or did I break anything else? I had myself a pretty good fall down a hillside and smashed my head really good with a rock. Don't remember anything really after that."

"No... ' she said slowly, giving my forehead a careful look right where I'd indicated I'd hurt myself, "there wasn't a cut or mark on you when we found you next to your car. There was just a hint of a bruise there, but Doc Bishop thought that was due to you slightly bumping your head when you fell down next to your car. He assumed that you had started to feel sick and then pulled over off of the highway before collapsing. He doesn't have any fancy big city equipment but his fifty year-old x-ray machine still works just fine and he didn't see anything wrong with your skull, at least that's what he told me."

"The plane crash!" I suddenly remembered. "I'd stopped because my car had stalled out from high water in the flash flood during the storm and then I saw some light plane or helicopter get hit by lightning and go down. I'd gone off to look for it, but I got lost in the dark and then had my accident. Has anyone else found the wreck? I thought it was just a hill or two away at about 90 degrees left of the roadway heading towards town, but I didn't find it ... or remember doing so."

"No. No one has reported any plane or helicopter crashes, but I'll double check." She casually replied and in a matter of moments she'd dashed off to apparently call in on her car radio to report my alleged crash sighting. She briefly returned to report that no aircraft had been reported missing in the area in the last week, but she'd check the area anyway, and have a search party take a look around. I thought my attendant nurse was going to give me a kiss on the cheek or forehead, but she instead just pulled up the sheet to my shoulders and stated that she'd be back later to check on me.

Left now on my own now, I took a moment or two to perform a quick physical inventory of my important parts and discovered that I seemed to be entirely intact ... albeit with a piss-tube stuck out of my second favorite organ that drained into a urine bag mounted on an old wooden coat rack next to my bed. I was terribly thirsty and even a bit hungry but my next attempt to sit up enough to even reach a half-full drinking glass tantalizingly nearby on my bed side night table caused me to black out again, this time for quite awhile.

It was probably mid-afternoon when I woke up next feeling slightly more clear headed, and with something closer to normal vision, but I swear I'd shut my eyes for just a moment to rest them when I opened them again to find it was now dark outside and that my angel of local law enforcement was helping me to sit up and drink. The water was slightly warm but it the best I'd ever tasted and she let me have another two full glasses of it, and even some cool fresh Jello. A quick look at my urine bag showed that it was virtually empty, so apparently my nurse had just changed it and the tubing out. I couldn't help but hope she'd been enjoying the view of my uncircumcised penis for the last week.

Now that most of my double-vision had gone away, I was starting to enjoy the view myself. The lady sheriff was tall and slender and with long brunette hair that seemed to twinkle with reddish gold highlights when the sun shown upon it. Her eyes had a green sparkle to them as well and had an extreme hypnotic quality to them that fascinated me. Her breasts were full and high, and rather adequately on display, especially when she bent over the bed to check upon me. Her khaki blouse had been unbuttoned to display a remarkable amount of cleavage

"Did you find the plane or the helicoper, or whatever it was?" I whispered, my raging thirst was now almost now quenched but my throat was still burning, feeling rough and very dry and sore.

"No ... but something was there a week ago, probably government, something hush-hush from one of those secret military bases. We found some small metal aircraft fragments, a torn-up leg from an Air Force flight suit, your first-aid kit with your name on it all opened up nearby on a rock and an old brown blanket with a few dark stains, probably blood. Doc is going to run a hemo-type and a few other tests on them but with his meager lab it won't tell us much other than someone was hurt out there. Gordon, our mayor and my half-brother thinks this was a military black project or a training mission that went bad and they showed up pronto in a couple of black helicopters to clean up after themselves. It looks like you made it there, but you were hurt yourself ... and the agents at the scene borrowed your kit and blanket, but couldn't be bothered to report finding you, so they dumped you back at the road. Doc thinks now that maybe you did knock yourself a bit silly and they, the Air Force search and rescue team, found you dazed and very confused and then decided to dope you up for a bit of extra insurance. Besides, if you did have a slight concussion from your fall, you'd hardly make a reliable tale-teller to report whatever you might have glimpsed from their black project. Probably some normal black ops helicopter training mission, so I wouldn't worry too much about it!" She laughed.

"So you don't think I'm nuts or more than the usual amount of crazy then?"

"Nope. Your story checks to every point. You've got car repair receipts galore between here and Utah in your car's glove box, and your baseball paperwork seems to be all still there in your briefcase so it was pretty easy to make a few calls to backtrack your trip here. You saw something up there alright the night of the storm, no doubts about that, but at least it wasn't little green men! We found you right before dawn the next morning when the dairy truck from Sedona saw your car. Some folks on the other side of the mountain reported lots of lights in that area, but when we called over to the local AF Base they suggested that some of their folks might be running an exercise in that area and to leave them alone, so we did. In any case, I've looked over the site myself and there's nothing there now. They've now completely cleaned up any wreck that might have been there, and with a fine toothed comb, too! So that's the end of all of that!" She did look at me rather firmly with more than just a hint that my involvement in this little adventure was now entirely over and done with!

"You did find the bit of the flight suit though?" I enquired, not quite sure I'd remembered our earlier conversation all that clearly. Roberta did seem to be extremely keen on the notion that there was nothing at all seen at the crash site and that I should get rested up so that I could move on and forget that anything happened there. Her green eyes began to flash with a touch of impatience ... or was it something else like fear?

"A bit of it, not much more than about the bottom half of the left leg where it had been cut away. We found it pretty much buried under the dirt, so their cleanup crew missed them. During the rain they'd gotten dropped or stepped on and sunk a bit into the mud, probably. Why they left your first-aid kit, I haven't got any idea. Beneath them to pick it up, I guess."

"Probably," I agreed, "but can I see the scrap of fabric anyway? It might help with my memory of the incident."

I could sense her reluctance, but after our eyes met and held for several moments she shrugged and then offered me the cut away bit of flight suit to examine for a minute. Her eyes didn't look happy and she didn't seem particularly enthused about answering any more questions. I'd seen a lot of military folks, especially fly boys from the Air Force base nearby our AA farm club and they often attended our games. I'd seen flight suits before plenty of times and this piece of one looked exactly just like the ones I'd often seen. Nothing remarkable about it at all, this just looked like normal green nylon fabric. Oddly, this normality bothered me. It was not the sort of garb I'd expect from a test pilot. Wouldn't they wear something safer, more burn and crash resistant? Heck, I think even NASCAR drivers wear something more high tech than this under their jumpsuits to prevent burns after a crash.

For a half-a-minute I had a suspicious thought that my dark-haired angel and her half-brother were hiding something, but after thinking about the matter for another minute I figured that they were probably right. This whole thing smacked of a secret government black-book project, testing something or another that wasn't quite ready for primetime. I'd seen and then found something, and then had been drugged with something, been sick for a week as a result, but now I was better ... mostly. In a day or two with some more rest (and some food) I'd be fit for the rest of the drive home and could forget all about this whole thing as just a bad adventure!

My angel, whose name tag proclaiming her to be Roberta Salazar I could now read without dizziness, was indeed the town police chief and local sheriff of the small village of Ram's Mine, and I reluctantly handed her back the scrap of fabric. Nothing about it seemed to be familiar and it hadn't triggered any fresh memories of that evening. I had hoped that it might induce some vague memory, or perhaps even of the pilot, but nothing at all came to my mind.

A few minutes later after Roberta had left, the local doctor, Tom Bishop, then showed up, looked me over and made sounds of general approval at my improving condition. He double-checked my piss-tube and laughed that his temporary nurse Roberta had rather been enjoying that part of the job... and the daily sponge baths while I was unconscious and feverish.

"I think she'd rather enjoy some time spent with you when you're ready to be up and about ... seeing as Berta doesn't normally have many male admirers!" He laughed. The 'up' part more than hinted what sort of fun she might be interested in, although if Berta was a lesbian, I wasn't sure why she'd taken an interest in me. Sure I was a minor league pitcher, but a shelf-worn one carrying a bit too much stomach and other body padding. I guess the pickings were slim out here in the middle of nowhere.

"I doubt she's my type," I grunted, "I tend to like my gals preferably blonde and dumber than a proverbial tree stump. Bonus points added if they giggle and bounce their really big tits a lot and enjoy spending a great deal of quality time on their knees!"

"Won't find many of those sorts around here, but then again there are only twenty-four people here in the entire town." He laughed. "You'll be on the road home soon enough and won't miss any of us one little bit!" He was almost darned right!

Then the old evil laughing bastard gave me a couple of vitamin shots and promised that I could have some real food tomorrow morning, if I felt up to it. Then he helped me wash down two big pain pills with some tomato soup that Roberta had left for me in a thermos and a few minutes later I was fast asleep once more.

That night I had by far the strangest and screwiest dream of my entire life! I've had smaller bits of this dream on odd occasions since then, but never again this vivid or as complete. It was a dream I'd never forget and most certainly did not involve the rather attractive Roberta!

In the dream I was back that rainy night in the hills weaving my way through the darkness and trying to avoid tripping or banging myself into nearly invisible rocks, when I found her at last! The wreck of the silver triangular plane hadn't caused any fires and I only saw her face that first time when a flash of lightning illuminated her and the crash scene.

The woman was blonde, complete with a snowy complexion that suggested to me that she was Scandinavian or perhaps Germanic. Her features were prototypical Aryan and while I couldn't recall anything she had said to me, I had the feeling that she was foreign, perhaps with a strong accent. In any case she was utterly gorgeous, and also seemingly injured with a compound fracture of her arm. The broken bone tip could be seen poking through her flight suit, which was certainly not the usual green Air Force standard one. Hers was metallic, a bright silver colored, but it unzipped all the same right down the front exactly as the standard military suits did.

I had my first aid kit, which didn't contain much that would be useful for this severe an injury, but there was gauze and medical tape. She allowed me to unzip her suit nearly down to her waist, enough so to free the shoulder and arm, enough so that I could remove the metallic fabric from her parchment white skin and bind up her wound. Her breasts underneath the suit were on the smaller side of average and bare without a bra ... and inhumanly perfect. Her partial nakedness did not seem to bother her in the slightest and she smiled when I checked the rest of her upper torso for bruises or additional damage, but her ribs appeared to be undamaged.

My impromptu first-aid completed, it now became her turn to inspect me and my injuries, of which the most severe was my head. I thought I had a large scalp cut just over my right eye, as blood kept flowing down my face, which had made my work on the woman's upper arm wound more difficult.

She used some of the gauze from my first-aid kit to try to stop the bleeding, but the rest of the items in my emergency kit seemed to confuse or confound her. Instead, after a short absence that I barely recall, she reappeared by my side with a small tube of ointment and applied this to my bleeding skull wound, which did appear to stop the bleeding nearly immediately.

Then my dream became fuzzy. Time seemed to stop and restart, as if my skull injury and concussion were now causing me to black in and out of consciousness. I blacked out once more, this time for quite awhile apparently. When I awoke next, clearly some time later, I was mostly in darkness still, but I felt dry, as if I were now somewhere indoors. Other faces were looking into mine but they were foggy, nothing but a blur. There were voices too, but mostly in a foreign language I couldn't understand. My silver angel from the wreck was there and in a fresh clean suit and I don't remember seeing any cast upon her broken arm, but it might have been under the white robes that she was now wearing.

I couldn't hear a sound, but I had the sense that she was pleading on my behalf. Her companions didn't seem at all pleased and I didn't sense any particular warmness to me, as if my presence was necessary, but unwanted, or inconvenient.

As I descended back into darkness and a sleep that would last for nearly a week, I heard or perhaps sensed two words being spoken; 'obligation' and 'repayment'. I wasn't sure why. I'd helped her and she had then helped me ... there shouldn't have been any obligation. And what was this about a repayment?

And then I awoke again from my nap in the hotel room a week later and within minutes my weird dream was quickly faded into vague elusive notions that I couldn't ever re-gather again in my waking thoughts. Perhaps these were my memories, but perhaps also after my head injury I had instead hallucinated. I returned back to sleep once more after sipping some more soup from the thermos but this time I had no further dreams at all.

I was up early the next morning with the sunrise and managed to yank out my piss tube and stumble off to the bathroom under my own power. Feeling more or less stable on my feet I decided to stay there and I next took a long shower that almost made me feel like my normal self. Looking into the large nearly full length bathroom mirror that was on the interior door, I did have quite a shock. Those twenty extra pounds that I had needed to lose were now gone! I guess being unconscious for a week in bed with a high fever was enough to burn off a good bit of my body's extra fat stores. In fact, looking in the mirror and flexing a bit, I thought I looked pretty darned good!

I finished up the last of the tepid soup from the thermos and then for good measure chewed down a dozen or so crackers that I also found on the bedside table. I was still hungry, almost starving even after a week without food, but I felt pretty good. I found the jeans and shirt that I had been wearing on the night of my accident, cleaned, washed and folded on top of the dresser, so I dressed.