by Hiwaru Kibi (火悪 木美)
(mirrors http://s2b2.livejournal.com/318061.html)
It wasn’t the weirdest thing that had ever happened to Delroy on that stretch up to Levelland, but it was close.
Of course he knew about the Marfa Lights, and he’d even been to that weird museum in Roswell once where an older lady with wild crimson hair had tried to teach him about “The Grays”, which was still on record as about the most uncomfortable half hour of his adult life. So it wasn’t like he wasn’t prepared for the possibility. But as time went on and he encountered only things well in the ordinary, well, his thoughts turned to skepticism. Truckers got tired and lonely and talked one another into the mindset of seeing things that weren’t there all the time, Delroy himself being no exception.
But his truck was off and his bladder was empty, and he hadn’t had a drop of beer nor anything stronger in nearly two days, but the two silver men were still right there.
They looked to Delroy like what would happen if you took one of those white naked man-statues you saw all over art museums, sent it through a chrome spray jet, and made it double without bothering to introduce it to the concept of clothes. He sure didn’t remember those statues’ nether regions looking like that, either, or the jokes he and his classmates had made would have been a lot longer, so to speak.
“Greetings,” said one. He had one of those silky nowhere voices like the people on CNN did. “Are you a human?”
Having not showered in a couple days, Delroy supposed it was a fair question. “Well, yeah,” he said. Maybe this was one of those fraternity pranks you read about sometimes. Maybe the naked silver man was about to ask him something about the nature of mankind or how Delroy knew he was a human, or some philosophical something like that. Delroy wondered if he had enough left in his bladder to piss on the man’s painted feet.
But the silver man just turned to his companion with a look of undisguised glee (which, to be fair, wasn’t far off his initial expression). “We found one!”
“We did!” answered the other silver man, sounding — and looking — just the same as the first. There was an unfortunate sort of set-cement fix to their faces, to the point where Delroy would’ve believed they were wearing masks if their lips hadn’t moved and they hadn’t blinked every so often. “Are you certain you are a human, and not, say, a clever armadillo?”
The first silver man shuddered, even if his smile never budged. “That armadillo….”
“Um, nope.” Delroy shoved his hands into his pockets. “Definitely human. I mean, so far as I know.”
“Splendid!” exclaimed one of the silver men; Delroy had by this point given up on trying to make a distinction that lasted more than a few seconds. “Would you mind coming with us?”
“Just for a bit,” said the other silver man. “It’s up to you of course.”
“Of course,” the first silver man echoed. “But it would be a great help to us with our work.”
“And our work is very important, you see.”
“To our species and yours.”
“Perhaps also to the entire universe itself.”
“And minimally invasive!”
“Yes, minimally invasive!”
Delroy at this point was sure this was a frat prank, but he was also by equal measure intrigued. He’d never been accosted before by two naked men under any circumstances, much less out on a lonely West Texas highway at a few hours before sunup. He wasn’t hauling anything time-sensitive, either, nor did he have anyone waiting at home for him, and he was about at the end of his legally mandated driving hours. In short, he was the living definition of ‘nothing better to do’.
“Uh, sure,” Delroy said. He tugged off his cap, combed his fingers back through his hair, and set it back on with the brim facing forward. The logo on the front was that of the garage where all three of his cousins worked. None of them had finished high school either. “I mean, okay. But is it far? I got to make sure my rig’s all locked up.”
“Far, yes.” One of the silver men nodded. “But not long! We will have you back soon.”
“Yes, soon,” said the other, nodding as well. They nodded in time with one another, heads rising and falling in unison for several seconds before they stopped, together, on cue. Maybe it wasn’t a frat prank. Maybe it was some damn travelling freak show act.
Still, Delroy had said he would, and he wasn’t the kind of man to go back on his word. He gave the silver men a quick nod before hopping back into his cab and changing all the settings from ‘wait a second while I go take a piss’ to ‘stay there a while until I get back’. He considered leaving a note, just in case he ended up not making that return trip, but in the end he realized he had neither anything to say nor paper that wasn’t a gas receipt, and those he needed to turn in to Caroline back at the head office on Friday. So in the end he just set the bricks by the tires so they wouldn’t roll, put up a couple of reflective triangles for other drivers, powered down the electronics, and made sure all the door locks were engaged.
He was half-sure they were going to be gone by the time he got back, either because their frat-or-circus-friends had coaxed them away or because his own brain had finally stopped having whatever hallucination had created them. But nope, they were still there, standing statuesque while waiting. “Is your rig all locked up?” asked one, with the tone of voice that implied he didn’t know what most of those words meant.
“Yep.” Delroy nodded and stuck his hands in his pockets. “So what is it you were fixing to” –then he was on the spaceship– “show me?”
He wanted to think of it like having been beamed, Star-Trek-style, or at least somehow transported, or maybe even getting hit on the head and waking up somewhere. But the truth was far less invasive than that. It was just that one second he was on the ground by his truck, outside in the evening dark, and then he just suddenly wasn’t there. But because he couldn’t be not-somewhere and still be at all, he had wound up somewhere else.
The truth was, Delroy didn’t quite know what to make of the place. All the surfaces were the same silver-sprayed-chrome as the skin of his two … abductors? No, that didn’t seem right. Those two guys, anyway, they matched all the walls and consoles so well that when they stopped moving, sometimes Delroy lost where they ended and where the background began.
“Welcome to our ship, human friend!” chirped one of them.
Either Delroy and reality had just had their divorce papers signed, or he was actually on board of an alien ship packed with alien technology and actual aliens. Either way, his night had gotten a lot more interesting. “Cool,” said Delroy, affecting more nonchalance than he felt.
“Would you mind removing your clothing, human friend?” asked the other silver man. “Studies show that examinations are more effectual when humans are not wearing their supercutaneous protective layer.”
Well, Delroy figured, if he was crazy, at least they’d find him crazy and naked. Wasn’t nothing in the world worth doing only halfway. He started by taking off his hat, then sat on a low surface to unlace his work boots. “The name’s Delroy, by the way,” he told them. “I mean, you can call me whatever, but just so’s you know.”
One of the silver men — aliens, they were aliens, he was getting surer by the second — clasped his hands together to his chest. “They have names!” he cried at the other man-alien-person-with-a-chrome-penis, as though this information were just too precious for this world.
The other one brought his fingertips up to his cheeks. “They have names!” he cried right back. “The literature didn’t say anything about names!”
“Do you guys?” asked Delroy, who was now into the business of unbuttoning his shirt.
“Oh, no no,” sighed one of the silver aliens. “No, but it’s so quaint that you do.”
The other one giggled. “Like quantum field travel! Do you remember that?”
“Seems like only yesterday.”
“And on some quantum level, it was!”
They both laughed uproariously at their own joke for what seemed about three seconds, then stopped in unison. Delroy was glad for them, at least, that they had decided to pick up guys on a deserted stretch of highway instead of in a crowded population center. They never would’ve made it out of the mall.
“So,” said Delroy, looking for a point of conversation to make taking off his pants less awkward, “you two speak pretty good English for … foreigners.”
“Oh no, you hear us speaking English well,” one of the alien men told Delroy, who was pretty sure he was not only hearing it, but seeing their lips move appropriately at the same time. But that seemed too weird of a hill to die on, so he let it go. “Thank you, though. We designed the translation matrix ourselves. It takes the psychofibrous beta-output and polymodulates the aura particles into–”
The other one put his hand on the first one’s shoulder and smiled sadly — or as sad as one could with a fixed smile, anyway. “Names,” was all he said.
The first one sighed and nodded. “Names,” he agreed, before turning back to Delroy. “It’s magic.”
Delroy, who couldn’t have told you how his microwave worked, found this a satisfactory answer. “Underpants too?”
“If you please.”
Nodding, Delroy tugged off his tighty whities and placed them on top of the pile of his clothes. He then took a second to look at himself as compared to the weird twins in front of him. He wasn’t too bad-looking himself, or so he’d been told, but compared to the two living god-statues in front of him, he was feeling a little hairy and soft. He felt an itch on his hindquarters, and before he could really weigh whether or not it was the polite response, he attended to it. One of the two tapped something excitedly into a console, and Delroy had to live with the fact that aliens had probably just preserved his ass-scratch for intergalactic posterity.
“Tell us about your penis,” said the one who hadn’t made the observation.
As pickup lines went, it wasn’t so bad. “Well, I mean…” Delroy frowned down at his nether regions, then looked over at the generous equipment his new friends were sporting. “Y’all don’t usually look like that, do you?”
“We don’t really look like this now,” said one.
“It’s magic,” the other reminded him.
“Well, does your magic usually work you up to a weird middle ground between gay porn and an art museum?” asked Delroy.
They both smiled blankly at him, leading Delroy to believe that something had just gotten very lost in psycho-matrix-whatever translation. “Our appearances are governed by the mental state and capacity for dimensional-positional transference of the subject we approach,” said one.
The other one shuddered. “That armadillo….”
“Therefore,” continued the first, “you remain, as always, the chief participant in your cognitive experience. Is your penis involved in your orgasm, and if so, is this typical of the human experience, or would you say you’re unique?”
Delroy had to think about that for a minute — the second part, at least, as he’d given up on the first as more magic. “I would say that yes, my penis is involved in my orgasm, and yes, it’s pretty typical of the human experience. I mean, among humans with penises.”
Both the aliens’ silver eyes went wide. “Humans without penises!” sighed one dreamily.
“Oh, we have to find one of those,” said the other. “Are they rare?”
“And are they anything like armadillos?”
Delroy was strongly starting to suspect that these two had not done any of their homework. “Depends on where you look, I guess,” he said at last. “And no. To answer your questions in order.” Delroy supposed they weren’t entirely dissimilar, what with humans and armadillos both being mammals, but he figured that was more explanation than the situation required.
“Fascinating.” One of them waved his hand and summoned up from the floor a contraption that looked like an exam table, the sort Delroy seen when he’d accompanied his teenage sister to the gynecologist a few months back. There were stirrups. It was weird. “Would you care to take your place on this examination frame?”
The way that had been phrased as a question gave Delroy pause. “What … if I didn’t care to?”
“Oh, that’s quite all right,” the alien answered. “We simply meant to suggest that if you do wish to assist us in our research, this frame will help align your body for optimum pleasant sensation during the procedure. Should you care to position yourself otherwise, though, by all means do as you like.”
“Your comfort is important to us,” said the other. He gave Delroy an appraising look, then lowered the table a few inches.
Delroy wasn’t a smart man, and he knew that about himself. His stepfather had once termed him ‘dumb as dogshit’, and while Delroy didn’t think that was fair, especially from a man who’d once burned down his whole trailer trying to get a possum out of the vents, he also knew that he hadn’t been cut out for the more cerebral pursuits in life. He supposed that included not quite knowing what to make of two aliens who’d spent the last twenty minutes getting him naked and onto their spaceship by asking politely. So he decided that his best course of action was just to continue to go with it. He got up on the table.
With fingers that were shockingly warm for how metallic they felt, one of the alien men eased Delroy’s feet into the stirrups. It was comfortable, and surprisingly so. If he’d thought he could get away with it and still see the road, he would’ve installed one of these in his cab. “Now what?” he asked.
One of the aliens began positioning small objects in midair, and though Delroy wouldn’t have sworn to it, they seemed to be cameras. The other placed his hand on Delroy’s stomach, just above where gravity had positioned his penis, which much to his surprise wasn’t as limp as he’d been expecting. He wondered how much of this had to do with how much of his adolescence he’d spent jerking off over that X-Files man, what’s his name, with the bald head. “We want you to indicate the level of comfort and pleasure you’re feeling at any moment,” explained the alien touching him.
“Pleasure?” Despite his half-hard dick, that still wasn’t a word Delroy associated with naked medical examinations.
“That’s most important,” said the alien who was setting the maybe-they-were-cameras. “Didn’t they teach you in school that orgasm is the only universal constant among sentient species?”
They most certainly had not. “The only thing?” asked Delroy.
The alien with his hand on Delroy’s stomach was now the alien with his hand at the base of Delroy’s cock, stroking it with sturdy fingers that brought Delroy back to his initial marble-statue assessment of the situation. “That we’ve found so far. We thought for a while it might be orgasms and a love of cheese, but that latter theory was disproven by our unit eight galactic units ago.”
“I don’t really love cheese,” Delroy pointed out, hoping that wasn’t too disturbing of a revelation for anyone.
“No, but your species has the capacity to love cheese,” said the camera alien. “We were certain it was universal.”
“Certain,” echoed the touching alien. “Even if just from an aesthetic standpoint.”
“Your species, in fact, has a well-developed capacity to love cheese.”
“And has penises!” announced the other one. He seemed to be focused right now even more intently on Delroy’s dick, moving his fingers slowly up the shaft. Delroy wasn’t usually into the slow tortured handjob thing — growing up a small-town faggot meant fast and dirty were usually the way his clock got cleaned — but he had to admit, this guy was good at what he was doing. “Did you know that only three other sentient species we’ve encountered have had penises?”
That statistic seemed off somehow. “Uh, lots of animals on Earth have penises,” Delroy pointed out.
“Oh, animals, minerals, vegetables, and ideas all over the cosmos have penises.” The alien touching him rubbed his thumb over the slit at the top of Delroy’s cock, making Delroy gasp a little. The camera alien made a note. “It’s just that by the time a species achieves sentience, any penises have generally been evolved out for more efficient structures.”
Well, great, he was an evolutionary throwback. The aliens themselves seemed less than bothered by this, though, and the one stroking his cock even looked as fascinated as his steady-smile expression would allow. “Is that touch stimulating?” asked the camera alien, coming in closer.
“Yeah,” said Delroy. “Yeah, that feels really good.”
“Would you like a second source of stimulation?”
Why the hell not. “Sure,” said Delroy.
The second alien nodded and placed his hand near the base of Delroy’s cock, then slid his fingers back to cup at Delroy’s balls. Delroy groaned and leaned into the touch as much as his position would allow him. It was comfortable, sure, but it didn’t leave him a lot of leverage for motion or action. Maybe that was part of the aliens’ plan. This was supposed to be research, after all.
“The literature has also indicated humans enjoy internal stimulation,” one of the aliens pointed out. He looked down between Delroy’s legs and gave the closest thing to a frown Delroy had seen on either of their faces so far. “You appear to possess only a single orifice in the expected location. Have you removed the others for cleaning?”
He would hate to hear these guys operate a phone sex line. Delroy just shook his head. “No. One, uh, orifice is pretty standard. At least, for humans with penises. You tend to get more when you find the ones without.”
“Amazing,” said the alien giving Delroy the second weirdest handjob of his life. “And are you normative in this regard?”
“Am I…?”
“Are you a human who enjoys internal stimulation?”
To his entire family’s eternal chagrin, he was. More so, even, because he’d known it and acted upon it from a fairly young age, unlike his second cousin Lurlene, who’d at least had the decency to marry a man and have him die on her before she started carrying on with other women. But Delroy James Pitt, Jr. had never been anything but a dedicated sodomite. He had spent more of his public school career sitting in principals’ offices than in classrooms, because the kids who liked to try and beat him up for being a faggot liked to claim Delroy’d started it in the first place by being a faggot. Graffiti on his favorite bar’s bathroom wall identified him by name as a cocksucker, and when he’d seen it, he’d left it there, supposing he couldn’t fault it for truth in advertising. He’d once told a woman quite politely at a wedding reception that he meant no offense, but the truth was he’d rather have the phone number for her brother, if she had one or more of those.
Thus, Delroy figured this was hardly the time to be coy about his sexual preferences. “Yeah,” he said. “Don’t know how normal-tive it is, but I like it. A lot.”
The aliens looked at one another and their smiles widened so much, Delroy was worried for a moment their statue faces might crack at the jaw hinge. “Splendid!” said one of them, while the other hurried over to the wall behind Delroy. He couldn’t see what was going on, owing to his somewhat fixed position in the strange yet comfortable chair, but he could hear some rustling and a swishing sound that could have been a door’s sliding open. Seconds later, the other alien popped back into view carrying a silver dong.
At least, that was what it looked like at first glance. On further inspection, Delroy could see that it had several readouts and panels on its contoured surface, including a blinking light at what appeared to be a flanged base. But there was no ignoring its dong-like shape. As the alien stroked it in a very suggestive manner, it got longer. “May we have your permission to insert this anally?” asked the other alien, who was still stroking Delroy’s now-rigid cock.
He’d still never call that phone-sex line, but damn if the idea of getting rammed by that didn’t do the trick. Delroy took a breath and let it out with an eager nod. “Go right ahead,” he said.
“Fantastic!” said the alien holding the dong-instrument-probe-thing. He took a look at Delroy’s erection, though, then down at his own art-historically inaccurate cock, which still hung soft and floppy at the juncture of his legs. “Should we be turgid as well?”
“I think we should,” answered the other, and before Delroy could ask for a definition, he found himself staring at two silver statue-like alien-men now sporting massive erect penises. Their shiny cocks stood out from their bodies at sharp right angles, forward-facing as weathervanes on a still day. A bird could have perched on those without much effort.
Touched as he was by the display of camaraderie, Delroy still had questions. “Didn’t you say you didn’t actually look like that?” he asked. “If this is all in my mind, how are you in charge of, er, standing at attention?”
“Magic?” One of the aliens shrugged.
“Yeah, all right.” Delroy settled back down into the chair. If magic was going to be what got him laid, then he’d believe in anything.
The tip of the probe pressed against Delroy’s ass. He was expecting something cold and maybe a little sticky-slick, like the way things got when the doctor hadn’t put enough petroleum jelly on his gloves. But instead, the instrument was warm, a pleasant skin temperature, and though it felt dry, it was vibrating at such an intense, precise speed that Delroy felt the muscles of his ass relax to accommodate its entry. Maybe it was responding to him or maybe objects in his rear were just larger than they appeared, but one way or another, it felt even bigger here than it had seemed in the alien’s hands. Fortunately for Delroy, he liked that sort of thing.
The alien still stroking his cock gave Delroy a perfect nurse’s-bedside-manner smile. “If at any point you want to call a halt to the procedure, we will of course be glad to accommodate that request.”
“And if you choose to provide positive verbal feedback, we would certainly take that into academic consideration,” said the alien now easing a thick, vibrating probe up his fundament.
“Purely academic,” agreed the first alien.
“Purely and perfectly academic.”
Delroy swallowed. “Well, ah…” Damn it, he’d never been much for talking during things like this. Usually there wasn’t much to say on his end. Most of the talking during sex, in his experience, came from the other guy’s alternately praising Delroy’s ass/mouth for making his dick feel good and wondering if that noise out there was a cop, it was probably a cop, shit, it was totally a cop. Most of the sex Delroy had had in his life had happened in places a lot less private than a spaceship. “Feels good. Real good.”
The aliens looked at one another with unbridled delight. “Yes!” exclaimed the one holding the probe. “Tell us more!”
Delroy sighed. He knew better than ever to get anyone’s expectations up. “It’s, uh … well, you should probably slide it in all the way.”
“Oh! Certainly.” The alien stroking him off nodded to the other, who began easing the probe in further. It was good, definitely, and combined with the handjob he was still getting, it was pretty damn great. But Delroy found himself curiously disappointed. Aliens working on orgasm research really needed more definitive targets in mind.
At least, he thought this right up until the probe hit a spot inside of Delroy that made his eyes cross. “Fuck!” he gasped, hips bucking into the alien’s touch. Sure, he’d had guys hit what the internet told him was probably his prostate, but this was the difference between a half-assed punch and a targeted nuclear strike. “Oh, fuck, do that again!”
With an eager grin, the alien doing the insertion complied, slipping out the probe just far enough to move from the sensitive area before pushing back in again. It was buzzing inside him, some how vibrating with him in a way that sent shocks down to the tips of his fingers and toes. His cock was so hard it felt like the aliens’ silver dicks, like one harsh move might snap it off. “Would you describe this sensation as ‘pleasurable’?” asked one of them, Delroy couldn’t tell which.
“Oh, fuck, yes,” gasped Delroy. He licked his lips as he thrashed on the chair, though the design held him more or less in place. Some unoccupied part of his brain hoped that all the recording devices were getting a good eyeful of the procedure. The rest of his thoughts were all wrapped up in sensation and need. “Fucking fuck, stroke me, stroke my cock. Just touch me, I fucking need it.”
A hand closed more firmly around Delroy’s cock, and a second grabbed hold of his balls — and a third stroked at his thigh, and a fourth and fifth were pinching his nipples, and a sixth was pushing fingers into his mouth for him to suck, or maybe it was all just in his imagination, but Delroy wasn’t going to ruin the moment by opening his eyes and freaking himself out. Whatever was happening, it was good, and that was all that mattered. He heard himself making noises he’d never made before, crying out and grunting, unable to stop. It was beautiful, like all those things they talked about in church. All he had to do was settle into it and let go.
Two lips pressed against his ear, warm and just slightly wet. “Our research is very important,” whispered one of the aliens, only now that familiar regionless voice was breathy, sultry. “But now, we just want to see you come.”
As though the floodgates had been let open, Delroy had his very sentient, very scientific orgasm. Eyes still shut, he could feel enormous jets of come spurt from his cock, some of which landed back again on his chest and belly. He bucked and writhed and fucked himself on the probe, shifting his hips as he shot his load what felt like thirty times over. And all the while, those hands kept pulling, that probe kept vibrating, and those lips stayed right by Delroy’s ear, breathing hot and soft, never leaving him.
When at last he opened his eyes, everything was dark. …No, not completely dark; the green segments of his cab’s dash-clock numbers were still there, telling him it was about nine minutes later than it had been when he’d originally pulled over to take a leak. He was dressed and sitting upright behind the wheel, and while he wasn’t hard anymore, his balls felt totally drained.
Delroy ran his hands over his face a few times, then gave himself a good slap. Nope, he was awake. What the hell?
Shaking his head to try and get his bearings, he looked around. Maybe this was one of those fugue states like in Breaking Bad, only for real this time. Maybe next time he was near a doctor, he should get someone to look at his head, make sure it was safe for him to be driving, if he was having these weird, vivid, and curiously erotic hallucinations come from out of nowhere. He reached for the ignition to turn the key and start everything up again — but tucked into the folds of his usual keychain array, he found a slip of paper. He flipped on the dome light and found scrawled in silver calligraphy, We’ll call you both again sometime.
Both? Out of habit, Delroy looked over to the only other place in the cab someone might be. There, in the passenger seat, atop a pretty satin pillow, stood an armadillo.
Delroy looked at the armadillo. The armadillo looked at him.
“Weird night for you too?” asked Delroy.
The armadillo did not reply.
“Going my way?”
Again, the armadillo said nothing — but this time, Delroy somehow got the sense that the answer was yes.
Well, it was a big truck and a big world and an even bigger galaxy out there, and maybe there was something to be said for not inhabiting any of it by one’s self. The armadillo scratched its foot, and Delroy turned the engine over and flipped on the headlights. The armadillo turned around three times like a cat before settling down on its pillow, and Delroy fastened his seatbelt. Feeling a little less alone in the universe now, Delroy put the truck into gear and started them both on the long, dark highway west.
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