"Aftermath"
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Disclaimer: Not mine (except for Beth) - so don't sue, don't nag.
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"So", the good looking guy who could be nothing but a military officer - Air Force was her first guess - leaned forward to squint at the name tag attached to the her left breast, "Bethany. Have you noticed anything interesting going on around here recently?" He gave her a brilliant smile that shattered and fell when it met Bethany's grumpy face.
"Depends." She grumbled, chewing her bubble gum in a manner she knew projected obvious disinterest.
The officer's smile flickered in strain but did not diminish much. "Something strange, perhaps?" He hazarded. "Something out of the ordinary?"
Bethany pushed a strand of colourless thin brown hair back behind her ear before fastening it in place with her pen. "Not really." She let her gaze drift over the collection of vehicles in front of the diner. The shiny black SUV, that the four people who were sitting at the table in front of her had arrived in, stood out like a sore thumb between the dusty and rackety jam jars of their usual customers.
The hot guy in glasses exchanged a look with the tall broad shouldered Afroamerican, while the talkative military one kept on grinning at her manically and the woman stifled a snigger. It was painfully obvious that they belonged to that horde of military types that had invaded the town this morning. She sighed. She could at least give them what they already knew. Perhaps, they would leave her alone afterwards. "Well, there was some trouble down at the Parkinson farm." She jerked her head to indicate the direction. Not that the place was visible from here, but, oh well. "But, I'm sure you've heard that already", she tagged on while giving another pointed look towards their car which positively screamed 'government'.
The group exchanged another look and Bethany sighed. Did they truly think that they were in any way inconspicuous?
The hottie in glasses coughed, effectively drawing her attention to him. "Yes, actually we've heard that." His voice was surprisingly soft, not at all what she would have expected from a military officer. "Something mutilated their cattle, yes?"
Bethany snorted. Oh, what the hell. She hadn't explicitly been told to not talk about it after all. "It was eaten by a dinosaur."
The guy blinked at her. "I'm sorry?"
She sighed. "A dinosaur", she repeated while tucking her notepad back into her washed out apron. "It was eaten by a dinosaur."
The woman who, judging by her pigtails was definitely not military, looked at her without showing much of a reaction. The big guy merely blinked slowly, but the other two males exchanged a look that said they were seriously doubting her mental health.
"Did you just say that a dinosaur is responsible for the cattle mutilations around here?" The glasses guy asked.
Perhaps she should have been a bit more precise. "An Alioramus, actually."
They continued to stare at her. It was beginning to freak her out a bit. Even more than the deep growling had freaked her out last night, when she had brought out the garbage to the back, and her hair had stood on edge, and a never felt before but yet well-known primeval fear had roared in the back of her mind, and there had been teeth, so many teeth. She shuddered.
"The Alioramus is a carnivorous dinosaur of the family Tyrannosauridae that lived in Mongolia during the Cretaceous period." She lectured. It was easier to fall back on facts and figures than to remember her rather personal face-to-face meeting from last night. "The one in question here was about 20 feet long and weighted about 2 metric tons. Although the average adult male is a lot larger than that. This one was a young one, see?"
"Uhm... yes."
Startled out of her thoughts, she witnessed another speaking look pass between the group.
"I'm sorry", Glasses looked at her in a nearly pitying way. Bethany found it rather degrading, thank you very much. "Bethany, right?"
She nodded.
"The thing is, Bethany, dinosaurs have died out a long time ago. And whatever happened at the Parkinson's Farm, I am sure that we will find a more reasonably explanation for it. There simply are no dinosaurs running around in the US right now."
Bethany snorted. Either the man was really bad at his job or, she squinted, he really believed that. She snorted again for good measure. "If you want to believe that."
The man took of his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Obviously trying to buy time in order to come up with something else to say.
The big black one, who had so far ignored all subtle hints towards how impolite it was to not take of your hat indoors, used the sudden pause as an entry into the conversation. His voice was deep and rumbling, but also very much controlled. A soldier, no doubt. "You are interested in these dinosaurs, then?"
Bethany shuddered. Why would he think that? Oh, right. Knows a lot about Alioramus'. Heh. She rubbed the back of her head with her hand. "No, not really. Never been interested in those."
"How do you know that it was an Alio-whatsit then?"
The voice grated on her nerves. Something about that woman had rubbed her wrong the very moment the group had stepped into the diner. Perhaps it was the childish pigtails.
Bethany didn't bother to keep the thin smile of her lips as she answered: "The guys who caught it told me. After they had stopped it from eating me, of course."
The woman nodded her head, seemingly accepting the comment at face value. Her male comrades however were a different story all together.
"I'm sorry, did you say it tried to eat you?" the guy in glasses said at the same time the soldier blurted out: "What guys?"
They looked at each other irritatedly and seemed to hold a whole conversation just by glancing back and forth. Bethany felt vaguely impressed by that.
Finally the soldier one seemed to have won as he turned back towards her and asked: "What guys where that? And did you see what they did with the... animal?"
Bethany noted the careful not-use of the word 'dinosaur'.
"I'm not sure", she said, thinking back to the frenzied action of last night. "They looked like medieval knights", she finally offered, "but they had some really sci-fi technology with them. I think they used one of those things", she formed her hands into a vague approximation of a rectangular box not much bigger than a paperback book, "to open a rift in time and space." And God, how much she had wanted to use that term ever since she had watched the first episode of Torchwood on BBC America.
The group stared at her.
"Medieval knights?" The soldier seemed nonplussed.
"A rift in time and space?" Glasses asked gob-smacked.
Bethany nodded and grinned. Looking back, the whole fiasco was actually pretty cool. Of course, last night she had been too scared to properly appreciate it, but in retrospect she was very much aware that it had probably been the most exciting thing that would ever happen to her. It was definitely a story she would take great care to tell her grandchildren one day. With the proper embellishments regarding her own part in it, of course.
"They were wearing those kinda tunic-like clothes from the movies. You know from Merlin and Robin Hood and stuff like that." She waved her hands vaguely. The woman and the big guy looked stumped but the other two nodded. "And they used some kind of energy gun to shoot the dinosaur, and then... " she leaned forward conspiratorially, "well, then we kinda stole old Archer's truck." The group sitting at the small and dingy diner table blinked at her.
"Well, we had to", she defended herself, "the thing was heavy. And it needed to get back through the rift, didn't it?" They were still staring at her in silence, so Bethany huffed and stood back up. "Look, if you don't believe me, that's your thing. I'm just telling you that there is no monster out there anymore. 'Cause it was caught. And you're just wasting a lot of tax money combing the area for it. That's all."
She turned away resolutely. Let them think what they wanted, at least she knew what had happened. And she would keep the memory, may come what may.
"Ehr, Bethany?"
Glasses' voice was so quite she nearly didn't hear it. But she stopped and threw him a look over her shoulder.
"Those guys", he ventured, "did you hear their names or where they came from?"
She wasn't sure why she answered. At first, she really didn't want to. Perhaps it was the incredulous look the soldier boy gave the good looking one that made her change her mind.
"I'm not sure, but I think at least one of them was a god."
The incredulous look changed directions and snapped onto her. She bristled under it.
"Why do you think that?"
She shrugged nonchalantly, but it came out like a sharp jerk of her shoulders. "They argued. And one of them mentioned 'stealing fire from the Gods'. I had a class in Ancient history once, you know. That one was Prometheus, right? The blonde one kept laughing about it, but the other one kept nagging about how there must have been an easier way to..." she trailed off for a moment, trying to recall the half-annoyed, half-playful banter that had gone so completely over her head in the previous night, "to get an energy converter unit than to steal it from an Aurora class battlecruiser hovering 5 miles over the North African plains." She blinked a few times. It still sounded fucking awesome when you said it out loud. Obviously, the four Men-in-Black, or whatever they were supposed to be, thought so too. They looked completely taken aback.
Strangely enough, it was Glasses that broke the silence first. "What?"
Bethany felt the slightly manic grin reappear on her face. Thank God, it came without the manic giggling now. That had been embarrassing when her boss had found her in the diner in the morning, giggling senselessly, and with that horrible fixed grin on her face. She shook the memory away. "The dark haired one kept pointing out that they were just shot at, 'cause the blonde one had improvised on the plan. But I think he wasn't really angry." She put a finger to her lips in thought. "Actually, I think he was just bickering for the sake of it, you know?"
It didn't seem that they did. The whole group still stared at her in gob-smacked surprise. If they didn't get over that soon, one of them might start to drool. But then they did this whole 'conversation-by-looks'-thing again and Bethany shrugged.
She had other costumers to serve, and they would know where to find her.
On her way back to the counter she remembered one other thing, though. Surely, it couldn't hurt to give that information up. It was such a common name after all, and there was no chance they'd be able to do anything useful with it.
"You know", she called back while busying herself with the coffee cups, "I think the blonde one's name was 'Danny'."
This is my first published fanfic, so, please, review. ;-)