**LJ Idol Season 4 Week 6 Entry: Introduction/Open Topic**

It’s been 60 years, but the details remain fresh in my mind. The world was my oyster in the naivatee of my youth. I never looked at anything the same after that fateful day and it altered the entire course of my life. Where would I have gone? What would I have done?

The day started like any other. Got up, showered, dressed, ate some oatmeal at the chow hall, and went on to work. My throat hurt a little, probably from that dust storm that kicked up the day before. I thought about calling in sick, but I didn’t want to mess around with it. Working in medical I knew I couldn’t get one past those guys.

Sometimes, though, I wish I had begged off for the day.

How was I to know that I would become party to one of the biggest urban legends known throughout the world? That I might become little more than a pawn in a governmental cover-up that would launch thousands of varying conspiracy theories?

I’ve long since moved from the dusty southwest to the cold, white north. Nine months of sunshine and summer to nine months of dismal winter. All for the sake of National Security they claim. They keep us all on a rather short leash, even now, because of what we know. Just a small cluster of us here in this Godforsaken town in the backwater of North Dakota know the truth and the powers that be intend to keep it that way.

Sixty lonely years and I am done. I will not hide any more. I need to get my life back, what life I may have left that is. I need to escape, I need free of this. At best, I have four more years to live and I want to live them. I want to get drunk, I want to get laid, I want to do whatever it takes to forget. Each day that goes by, the more my thoughts turn to reclaiming what once was lost.

I laugh at the world. You mock the science-fiction authors, the movies, and say they can never be. How small your universe is because you simply do not know. Was this what it was like for those people that realized the earth was not flat? Did they pity the misguided masses or did they long to be join in the fantasy? So many movies and books have come far closer to the truth than they could ever guess… until it is too late. We’re not there yet, but soon… so soon.

The thought is enough to drive one mad.

I was there that day, attending to my duties as an orderly. I remember counting bandages when they rushed in. They, the ones that found… it. Two died that day, though no one would ever know. If I still believed in a god, I’d probably thank the bastard that those two had no families. We got lucky, no fancy explanations needed. No children left behind to wonder what happened to their daddies and question if it had anything to do with some fictional weather balloon. Two men that I often played poker with, two brave souls that deserved better than what they got.

A weather balloon. The government wished. I still can’t believe someone would buy that garbage. Just goes to show how stupid humanity truly is. I suppose it is easier though, than the possibility of the truth. How dumb they will feel when they learn the truth.

The truth. That damned truth that I curse every morning when I wake up and every evening when I go to bed. It cost me my marriage, my family, my life. But what do you expect? Something like that changes a person.

When they rushed in I had to look twice. Knox’s right arm was missing and the wound looked as though someone burned it closed. That was the worst of his injuries, I thought, until he died an hour later. We buried him in the New Mexico desert two nights later. He’d never see the hills of Tennessee again. Smith’s wounds looked worse. He spent three hours in surgery until the doctor gave up. Smith rests beside Knox, two unmarked graves that no one visits. No flags for them on Veterans Day, no remembrance for Memorial Day.

Shame that they probably did more for this country than anyone else ever has.

The others’ wounds were superficial. A band-aid here, a stitch there. But, what they accomplished is what changed my life. All our lives. They had… it, and it was here. In our clinic, on our base, on our planet.

The nurses tended to the men, I got the bad luck of dealing with… it. The ugliest thing to ever walk this planet. Squat and grey with beady eyes. Forget that garbage about bug eyed monsters. It’s a load of crap the size of which you ain’t never seen. The thing had two arms and two legs like all of us, but it was as far from human as you can get. Near as I could tell at the time, it had plans to kill anything that got near it. So, I kept my distance. Uncle Sam doesn’t pay that well, you know. Four rows of razor sharp teeth and I swear I saw it melt part of a metal chair with its spit.

After a while, I learned the story. It is not far off from conjecture. A UFO crashed that day and the US Air Force got its grubby hands on a spaceship and a little green man from Mars. It would take years of studying to know what else we got. A look into the bleak future of our planet. Scientists tried to backwards engineer some of what they found on that ship. You can thank that alien bastard for Velcro and some other various household items.

I know way too much. They are out there, they have been here, and they are coming back. Next time it won’t be just one ship though. And next time it won’t just be two unknown soldiers dead in the sand of the desert. It’s gonna be us all. Neighbourhood BBQ with humans on the spit.

After the hubbub died down, we left New Mexico. People think we went off to some mysterious Area 51 to hide a flying saucer. Easy enough to fool people into that. No, we went to North Dakota. Who would look for anything there? Hidden under a layer of snow to your waist in winter and a population of less than a million, there is plenty of wide open space for us to hide in. We even get the support from two official Air Force bases.

So it’s those of us there that day, some scientists, a scary as hell monster from beyond the stars, a spaceship, and some dead aliens we autopsied. Dead aliens and we still can’t cure the freaking common cold. But hey, some idiot cloned a sheep, guess where that was figured out from.

You’d be amazed at the other secrets North Dakota holds. We got it all. When you get to be a part of all of this, you learn a lot of other stuff happens to be true, too. We have a zoo of the weird set up for us to study. There’s a yeti next to that little green man. Given the ferocity it showed so long ago and all those teeth, I’m surprised it hasn’t found a way to eat the yeti by now. There’s also a secret bunker for the government in the case of World War Three. Or what’s coming in a few short years…

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you don’t want to know what’s out there. Go about your daily life without a care in the world. Watch Big Brother and whatever other pointless show is on television. Enjoy ignorance as long as it lasts.

I gotta get out of here. I don’t want to die here. If that bastard really does have friends coming, I want to experience something before I die. And I plan on doing it, if I can find some way around the MP’s at the gate. Damn government brought in the marines for that. Those buggers take their job seriously about keeping us locked in. If you’re gonna go to that measure, why can’t you bring us in some cheap women. At this point I wouldn’t care how unfortunate looking she was so long as she was willing to share my bed.

The others seem fine with their lot in life. They don’t mind this base and the crap we do. Not me. I’m outta here.

I cannot take the lies we perpetrate any more. The documents we’ve faked. What will happen when the world realizes that they are only ushering in a regime that will bring about death if they elect another Clinton. At the time, I did not realize how bad that was. When those two found each other and ended up in the White House the first time, I knew everything that little green bastard said was true. Why didn’t we stop things, why did we let our human compassion for life get the better of us. We should have those two and all the other half-breed spawn we knew about locked into our “zoo”. Instead we let hope rule us, we let them live. They looked so harmless so we faked documents and changed names, and prayed to a dead god that growing up on earth and having some human genetics would make all the difference.

Now it is too late.

It’s been too many years of this. Too many truths revealed. Too many nightmares come true. You don’t wanna know about that KFC rat, but it is in our little “zoo”, too. We run Snopes on the Internet to make sure people don’t get wise. You may laugh it all off, you may think it’s not true. Just the stuff of make believe to scare the kiddies by the campfire, but trust me. There’s more truth than fiction in those supposed tall tales.

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This piece of flash fiction is brought to you by the LJ-Idol Gods that doled out “Urban Legend” as a topic this week. I hope you enjoyed the piece. If so, please vote for me. Also comment and let me know. I’m not really sure what to do with now that I have it, but it was interesting to write.

–Lady O