Bright pink neon bounced excitedly off the face of Dan Lemmings. Propped by one arm against the metal support beam of the rest stop sign, he stood at a slight angle, admiring his surroundings in pure glee. Any other night, he'd have donned a cap out of embarrassment to mask his balding cranium, but tonight was different. The stars were out. A warm, playful breeze dusted the bare ground. He and his wife had just been on a wonderful vacation. An aura of bliss was spread on the air like a lovely thick butter. He basked in it.
"Cheryl, you out yet?" His gaze floated to the bright restrooms, that sat canopied against the neon by a cluster of palm trees. The doors had male and female aliens painted on them coinciding with the sex of the restroom. Nevada crickets chirped merrily against the peaceful backdrop. "Damn," he mumbled, smiling. If he had to wait out here for another twenty minutes, he wouldn't be too opposed.
Dan Lemmings' mind floated to that of baseball. His favorite player was Chuck Finley. Dan visualized himself in the place of Finley. The pale metal support beam he leaned on was a giant baseball bat. The copious trilling that the crickets swarmed him with at that very moment was rapturous applause. The pink flash of neon was a camera's bulb. He chuckled.
"Danny?" A woman meekly beckoned, emerging from the little aliens' room. She clacked over to Dan, her purple pumps echoing eagerly off the cooled pavement. She gazed down briefly, straightening out her leather skirt, then smiled at Dan. "Decor never gets old, eh?" She joked, gesturing over to the restroom doors.
After living in Reno, Nevada for nearly 15 years together, one can grow accustomed to the extraterrestrial aesthetic that store owners cling to for tourist money. Dan looked up, his baseball bat falling to the wayside, and the neon sign returning to its normal, non-camera bulb state. The crickets grew less excited.
The woman's cold, manicured grasp extended out to Dan, and stroked his right cheek. Her eyesight was trained on his forest green parka. A bent, tiny yellow tag stuck out from a bulky sleeve on his parka. "You never pulled the tag off, dear?" She said, batting a lock of bleached blonde hair out of her face. Her heel enhanced height left her at a disadvantaged, and she lobbed them off to her right. The dense plastic clicked against cement. She knelt down a bit, examining the tag. "We can pull that off right here," The woman said, the r in "right" rolling off her tongue like a mischievous rattlesnake.
The crickets silenced.
Dan gritted his teeth. "Look at me." The woman ignored him, continuing to fiddle with the tag. He cleared his throat. "I said, look at me." The choleric tone in his voice ripped voraciously through the bubble of silence like a greedy child. The woman slowly raised her head to meet his. Her eyes were pure black. "Y-you-you're not. Cheryl. You are not Cheryl!"
Dan Lemmings stumbled backward, further into the small garden he had been standing in that held the sign. Adrenaline strangled him. He gasped sharply against the dry dirt as he collapsed into it, unable to look away from the pool of black that recided in the being's eye sockets. The thing stood stagnant, flecks of happy pink reflecting in its dark eyeballs. Fear loomed over Dan with an axe at its side, a vengeful grip on the handle. A numbness torpedoed down his spine. With one final vehement sigh, he head dropped with an empty thud to the dirt. He drew his last breath.
The black-eyed being eyed Dan blankly. The man lay motionless among the pushed up daisies that surrounded his body. The small daisies bent around his form in concern, like a team of surgeons quarreling beneath hospital light. Meanwhile, crickets were still shocked into silence.
The being's gaze finally relinquished the man. With an abrupt flick of the wrist and waist bend, it quickly collected the purple heels. Not-Cheryl dashed with a slight skip outside of the familiar glow of the rest stop, and into the opaque inkiness of the desert. The stars didn't dare to touch it.
. . .
Billboards race with wispy streaks of clouds, as powerlines hop and leap cheerily under the overbearing sun. Scully drops her head tiredly with a thump against the rental car's headrest. She thinks back to the Flukeman case that they'd encountered four years ago. She'd take that one in a heartbeat right now, she thinks, tapping her manicured digits on the dashboard. Her stomach flip-flops as they hit a pothole, and her rhythmic tapping snaps Mulder out of his steely squint to see the road.
"We're in Reno, Nevada, Scully."
She doesn't look at him, instead choosing to scratch her damp scalp. Her glance drifts over to the horribly disfigured bumper of the vehicle adjacent to theirs. She wouldn't be surprised if the disfigurement had happened as a result of the simmering temperature, and not a collision. Her head turned to him, finally. "I can see that, Mulder. I can feel it, too," She grumbled, a smile hinted at her lips. "You know, just admit it. We're only out here because of the proximity to Area 51. You could have taken any of the other cases A.D. Skinner recommended to us. But you chose this one."
Mulder turned back to the bright strip of grey that stretched to the horizon. It was beginning to look almost white to him. "Hey, can I have my sunglasses?"
Scully shuddered internally, because she knew the exact ones he was referring to. The gigantic, obnoxious lensed pair that had a thin navy wire to hold it all together. She rifled through his duffel bag that sat between them, on the dusty floor. Sure enough, between a pair of black dress pants and atop a baby blue t-shirt, lay the wretched pair. He had told her that he thought they oozed a "mysterious appeal." Scully knew that was Mulder-talk for "I think they make me look like a cool alien."
Scully let out an exasperated sigh, and tapped the pair to the narrow steering wheel to get his attention. He quickly looked over, then threw them on in relief. "Mysterious?"
"Foolish," Scully said, unsuccessfully stifling a grin. "Anyway...the case," She said, now gripping the file that had been carelessly thrown to the floor an hour ago, "A man claims he saw a black eyed being masquerading as his wife while she was in the restroom. The man described a horrible dread washing over him along with a strong sense of fear that he has, quote, 'never felt before' un-quote, in his life. He dies on the scene, only to miraculously come to life a day later. His wife never saw a thing." She looked up from the casefile, and back at her partner once more. "Well, what do you make of this?" Mulder stares ahead at the grey stretch, wordless. "Mulder…"
"In short? I think this casefile is promising for extraterrestrial meat." Mulder said, popping a sunflower seed into his mouth with his left hand. "The police officer that filed the report also said he was at the scene and saw a bizarre object in the sky, hovering just approximately 50 feet off the ground. This is the stuff of Project Blue Book."
Scully smiled into her own reflection in the passenger side window. "Please don't ever utter the words 'extraterrestrial meat' in my presence ever again."
Mulder looked at her again, turning the car into a side street. "What do you think of the man dying of fright, then coming back to life, though? Pretty uncommon, almost supernatural. Like the rising of Jesus. That must interest you from a medical stand-point."
Buildings and dwellings began to crop up like weeds. The generic desert backdrop began to fade, and in its place, a town began to take form. It was a nice respite from the drab desert scenery, that was for sure.
"Uncommon, yes, supernatural, no." She side-eyed him, raising an eyebrow. "The massive rush of adrenaline that Dan Lemmings experienced in his fright temporarily stunned his cardiac heart muscle into inaction. Lemmings is also of age 57, and overweight, thus putting him even moreso at risk for this sort of unfortunate occurance. Any highly emotional event whether positive or negative can set this kind of thing off. The human body is amazingly resilient, sometimes it can bounce back even aft-"
"But we don't know what 'highly emotional event' did this to this man," Mulder interrupted, easing the car into a big, bright neighborhood.
"And you think it's aliens."
The tall agent simply offered a shrug. With their trek over, he yanked the keys out of the ignition, threw his long limbs out of the car with a loud sigh of relief, and shot straight up. It felt good to be out of that hot box. He looked back at his partner. The poor-red head drenched in sweat. Her normally tidy, copper locks were now frizzy and damp, and he looked down at the hot pavement, guilty.
She flung open the car door in defeat.
"Well, we should question them now, shouldn't we?"