The billboards are a diversion.

Oblong and rectangle plaques littering Route 13. Meeting drivers headlong on their travels through the wastes in hues of dusk. The billboards scream of insanity. Intrusive thoughts become tangible. LSD dreams used as street signs.

Each message is more unhinged than the next. Watch Your Children; Portal to the Spirit World: 10 Miles Ahead; Embrace the Mystery; This is A Slow Peaceful Road; Extraterrestrial Crossing; You Must be Born Again; Beware: Big Pumpkins Ahead; Whoever Stole My Cactus U R A Piece of S***; Warning: You Are About To Enter Someone Else’s Dream.

They are meant to distract from the billboard miles and miles back wallpapered with ongoing desert-depicting imagery; the sand-ridden expanse of the desert, build up out of mesas and the occasional cacti dotting the terra cotta terrain. An illusionary twin to the surrounding environment. It repels both humans and rumors. Seeing as the latter have never reached civilized society.

You wouldn’t even notice the billboard is there until you walk up to it, and when someone is close enough to touch it, they’ll find themselves promptly back at the starting point where their car is parked. Inexplicable occurrences that feed conspiracies. All of it means employed to keep the town behind the billboard-wall hidden.

Strange Vale.

The promise of another hot day is palpable in the air. Clear skies so blue they’re almost grey. No clouds. Sweat cascades down my back as I climb down from the telephone mast. My grip calloused by the routine of climbing this thing every single day at dawn.

I much prefer the heat to the freezing hallways of the military base. The eyes that are everywhere and the cameras that never catch a break, not even to blink. Always watching.

The red terrain rises to meet me, the mesas towering overhead as I make my way to the wall. Where half a mile out of Strange Vale’s perimeter a small trapdoor lies hidden. A tedious job of sawing out a square big enough to admit me leave. I use the key to open the lock of my self-made exit. Many broken screwdrivers saw their death to attach the latch system to keep it closed.

I heed my back before I slip through, casting a glance to Strange Vale behind me. It is a ghost town, not a single thing apart from the heat stirring the image of the air.

I find my way to the gas station as I always do. In secret. The small building, with its diner, service store, and its few gas pumps are located on a mesa just a bit away from the Billboard Boulevard.

I tried plenty of times to see whether I really could not catch a glimpse that might tell of the wall on the other side. But the engineering is immaculate. The way the skies blend in with the wall. The climate feeding into the illusion as the wall’s façade seems to move in the imagery of desert heat.

I walk into UFO Boy’s Extraterrestrial Coffee Roasters and plop down in my favorite booth and ask for an iced cold brew. Or at least I want to. The glass is already in front of me, with a blue and white swirly straw. I look up to say something of it, but before I can speak, the straw changes colors into red and white.

I chuckle. “Nice.”

The brew washes its cold aura down my insides as I set the glass to my lips and drain it almost instantly. Like every other day, no one else is in the gas stations’ diner. A fact for which I am grateful. I like to pretend it is unique to be alone in here. Having come in at just the right time to enjoy the quiet of the leather red and white-booth interior. Before the rush hour, before the chatter that holds volume but no sound.

The familiarity of how no amount of cranking up the A/C can cool down this place brings me a certain ease; the perpetual warmth lined with the idea of effort to cool it down. It’s like someone saying, “Hey, I’m trying,” and you know it’ll never work, but at least they’re doing what’s needed. They’re trying. And sometimes, that’s enough.

“How’s the day going?” Xavier, the diner’s cook and barista, pops up behind the space-ship-shaped service counter. He puts the portafilter back into the coffee machine that stands at attention like a vessel of energy. He turns the knob of the steamer, and a cloud of fog erupts from the machine before quieting down.

I shrug, fixing him with a levelling a look for trying to scare me, but I don’t flinch as I keep sucking at the straw and let the coffee flood my cheeks before swallowing it down. “Yours?”

He shrugs as well, playing with his apron ties. He sits down opposite me. “Same as always.”

“Like a funeral parlor, then.” Slurping the dregs from the bottom, I emphasize each rattle-snake-pull, swirling the ice around and keeping the suction going long after the coffee is gone from the glass.

“How’s that brew?”

“Tastes like routine.”

“You must hate it then.”

“Absolutely loathe it.” I set down the glass, the insides all fogged up. Reaching inside my pocket, I toss a uranium pill onto the table. He slams his palm on the table to catch it.

“Watch it,” I hiss.

Xavier gingerly picks up the pill with his thumb and index finger. The oblong glows a fluorescent yellow in his touch. His glasses mirroring the highlighter hue. His eyes go wide. He studies it for a beat, then looks up at me.

“How –”

I hold up my hands in defense. “Just be glad I got it all the way out here.”

He pockets it in his jeans. Then he scoots closer to the table, leans in towards me and I do the same. Our bodies forming a little tent.

“Before you ask,” he starts, and I straighten. My days here are spent with the pretense of a cold brew and the continuation of small talk finalized by the answer to a question I ask time and again.

He shakes his head.

I know I shouldn’t get my hopes up like this, but I cannot fathom closure when my cranium was cracked open with an infinite equation of which the solution remains a mystery. “That’s fine.”

Xavier makes to grab my hands and I promptly pull them into my lap. My gaze fixes on him for a moment, eyes drawing to slits. “I’m fine, Xavier.”

Xavier gives me a pained smile which I pretend not to notice, the blue of his eyes reminding me of a particular desert night I wish rather to forget than remember.

I look away, take the straw from the glass, and start prying at the paper, nitpicking it apart until it lies in a heap of ripped bits on the table.

A moment of silence passes between us. Until a commotion from outside draws Xavier from the booth and towards the door of the gas station. “Uhm, Augustine.”

Detonating hour.

With a groan I stand up. “Thanks for another lovely brew, Xav. Next time I’ll try to stick around longer.” I climb onto the table right when military officers sporting big guns kick in the door to the gas station diner. That’s the seventh time this week.

“Comrades,” I say, arms wide. “Really? The door? Again?”

The barrels lock me in their tunneled gazes. They’re filled with tranquilizer darts.

My voice is a record on replay. “Fix me up, lads.” With my arms wide and face pulled into a smirk – I feel like a rockstar. I kick the brew-glass their way. The removal of the guns’ safety echoes through the diner.

The first dart hits me in the chest.

I fly into the window behind me, my head whipping backwards, and I can hear the rattling of the rolled-up shutters. I slide down into booth-bench, my head resounding with a high-pitched whistle. The world blurs before my eyes.

In the vignette of the fading diner I can see the soldiers reaching for me.

Darkness drags me down before they can restrain me and carry me back to Strange Vale.

*

I wake with a drugged headache and atrophied muscles.

I am surprised to find myself in my room. Not the laboratory broom-closet in the underground compound, but the one in the Nuclear District on the other side of the plains. Which is divided by a running track that lies between it and the military barracks.

If I focus, I can hear the midnight drills going on there right now. The many soldiers keeping in gear as they run laps time and again. I hate it whenever they make me run laps. Not on the track, but levels down beneath the mesas, sand, and desert floor. In a lab-room stowed away in the depths of the labyrinthine cold cement hallways and linoleum floors. All made stark by fluorescent lighting. Where wires get taped to my body, attached to a machine monitoring my heart rate.

At least I have great stamina.

I reach my hand up to my chest, the dart that hit me is still embedded there. I palm it, closing it into a fist and pull it out. I do not wince, a bead of blood that trails into a line from the entry wound. It has healed before I can properly sit up.

The outside world is the deepest shade of midnight. Stars flecking the skies. The heat is still oppressing even now, summer only having started two weeks ago. But Nevada might as well always be wearing its summer attire.

I often wish I was somewhere less pounding. Somewhere wind might stir more during the day than being a rare appearance at night. When the sand is a shade of blue in the twilight. As if someone has turned the saturation to the opposite side of the color spectrum. The world a canvas of midnight blues, my mood shifting into a darker corner of existence along with it.

I mind my desert bound life. The scientists, soldiers, and anyone who works at the compound knows it. I would never have chosen this life, nor the experiments that are inherently tied up with it.

I have always lived in Strange Vale, the little town that was a bit away from Billboard Boulevard. But when the invasion happened at the military compound two miles from the Nuclear District. The government began building a wall of sorts, to keep us from ever telling a single soul what we witnessed that day. Seven years ago.

I remember screaming. Things that looked too human while not being human at all coming out of UFOs and ransacking places all over the Strange Vale districts.

It was a weird momentum of everything happening at once. A green man came into my house. He took a hold of my father. Jammed a finger right into my dad’s skull. I watched the alien’s black eyes become television screens projecting my father’s thoughts and memories. I saw myself and my mom there often enough. Whatever the alien saw, was enough for it kill my dad. To watch him evaporate into ashes and drift out my bedroom window.

The creature had found my mom and did the same to her. Rifling through all memories she had ever suffered through. He saw something there. He left her alive.

He had not bothered with me. One look, and he had backed off.

Leaving me standing in our living room, shaking.

A lot of people died that day. And some UFOs left us alone again, but Strange Vale’s density had grown by an extraterrestrial few.

Some of the aliens who orchestrated the Strange Vale raid stayed. The one who killed my father, who christened himself Jeff, did. He and my mom ended up falling in love. Mom even got a second child out of it. She moved into the compound with them. I chose to remain back at the house. Occasionally visiting. When forced to. Sedated.

I look out through my window, my eyes traveling along the length of the desert mountain. At the top – my eyes delude me. It can’t be.

Someone is standing there, looking down at me. It is hard to see in the dark from this distance. But I can feel their weighted gaze. The person standing there is pointing to the other side of the billboard.

I open my window, pushing the lower part up and open. Heat rolls into my already sweltering bedroom. Suffocating me even more

Augustine, a voice like granite runs past me. As if someone has crept up on my bed next to me and put their lips to my ears. I turn around to find my room empty. I look back up at the mesa. Whoever was up there, is so no longer.

*

At the top of the mesa, I am alone. The person who I thought to have seen just before, nothing more but a mirage. Maybe my partiality towards my drug mosquitos isn’t the best way of getting a good night’s sleep. Xavier might be right about something for once.

I can see all of Strange Vale up here, every little part that makes up its peculiar nature. I can also look out over the billboard-wall, which is so high that I can only see the gas-station because it is far enough back and elevated. It looks small and infinitesimal from here. A little speck of twinkling light in the dark.

I can make out Xavier taking out the trash bags, at least I think it is Xavier. He always tells me that his co-worker, Marco, is very handsome. He is one of the aliens that came with the invasion, but he never took part in the raid, he was a youngling back then who had climbed aboard a UFO wherever it came from and stumbled out when they had landed on earth. Marco’s existence is a secret I keep, crossed my heart and hope to die, as per Xavier’s request.

I have never seen another employee at the station but Xavier.

I watch the figure’s lanky movements and recognize Xavier in it. Watching as he hauls a trash bag, half dragging it across the desert floor and tries to throw it into the container.

In between one blink and a next, a bright light suddenly hangs over the gas station, and I can see Xavier halt in his motions, dropping the trash bag and looking up at the spotlight falling on him.

From the skies, a flying saucer sheds its camouflage and its chrome exterior, green and blue flashing lights, comes into view.

My body locks into place. I am myself seven years past again.

I watch how the spotlight materializes into a glowing forcefield, and Xavier is sucked into the spacecraft like a piece of dust being sucked into a vacuum.

The spacecraft is there one moment and gone the next. Xavier with it.

*

Back at the house I upend my room looking for my ID-card to grant me access into the Division’s inner world. I got it when my mom first moved down there, as to easier grant me access to visit. I had thrown it into an old shoe box then and never looked at it again. My way into the compound usually paved by sedation and restraints.

I find the oblong card in an old Adidas shoe box. My red hair a stark contrast against the black, blue, and green coloring of the card itself. Inside the box I also find some polaroids showing an old friend and myself. The friend is painted over with white paint, made to look like a little ghost in each image.

A pang hits me in the chest when I hold up one polaroid, taken inside the gas station. It is me and Xavier. The ghost the one behind the camera, but the way I seem to look over the lens, into the spectral eyes – it does something to my insides. I appear oblivious to Xavier’s arm around me and the kiss he jokingly drops on my head.

I drop the polaroid back in the box and kick it under my bed, I pocket the ID tag in the front of my shortalls and make a run for the base.

There’s no time to waste.

The Nuclear District is connected to Division 45 by a small western town.

Tumbleweed.

A long stretch of road littered with old buildings. A church, a graveyard, a saloon, an old library, a cult-society building, and the old barn house. I used to visit this part of Strange Vale all the time, until I no longer felt I had anything left to visit here.

At the end of the road, there is a long stretch of asphalt leading towards Division 45. About two miles. A motel and the crater of a UFO crash site pass me on my jog there. It takes me about an hour to make it to Division 45. Where a small concrete shed greets me.

A sleek black door is installed into the front, with a keypad on its right side. A red light blinking every odd minute. I take out my ID-card and touch it to the pad. Division 45 opens its cold hallways to me.

An iron spiral staircase leads me down into the depths of the compound, I can hear the locks of the door above slide shut, a hundred little clicks sounding all at once.

A long hallway illuminated by fluorescent lights draws me forward. I can hear the buzz of the laboratories and the movements of the scientists that never fades come up to meet me. I walk up to the service counter and a woman in a pin stripe suit gives me a slitted-eye one-over.

“Miss Strange,” she glances at the clock on her computer screen. “What are you doing here at this hour?”

“I need speak to Roach, now.”

Her eyes widen. “Absolutely not.”

“Call him.” I press out through gritted teeth. But the woman doesn’t move.

I reach down over the counter and snatch her telephone. She tries to grab it out from under me, but I am faster. I pound Roach’s code into the phone and the line starts going over. He picks up on the third ring.

“Samantha?”

“It’s Augustine Strange, I have a UFO sighting at the gas station, someone was abducted.”

Silence. Murmurs on the other side of the line.

It cuts out. Dial tone.

“Hello?” Nothing.

I toss the phone across the counter and hold out my hand to the woman. “I need your key card, please.”

“No way in Hell.” She hisses before punching the big red button in a hidden compartment of her desk and an alarm starts sounding throughout the hallway. Samantha vanishes in the room behind the counter, leaving me alone.

Shit.

The alarm is blaring, and a red light is flickering in the ceiling. One of the doors opens and some scientists and nurses come out. Roach is with them.

“Miss Strange,” he says, his voice sweet, solemn. “Your next appointment is in two days. I suggest you go back home. Or, if you want, you can spend the night in our guest quarters.”

I ignore his words. “You heard what I said on the phone.”

“Augustine,” one of the nurses holds up her hand, trying to touch me. “You need to calm down.”

“I am calm. Rather more annoyed because you’re not listening to me.”

The bell of an elevator dings. I turn to see who is admitted on this floor. Of all people to come out – Jeff and my mom. His dark gaze is set in a sad frown. Her face is a mask.

The nurse uses that moment to take a hold of me, her grip stronger than I had anticipated as she takes me into a lock. I start kicking, bucking my head back. I can hear a nasty crack and a groan as she lets go of me. I’ve broken her nose.

“You have been stirring up quite some problems these days, Augustine.” I turn around to face Roach. He is holding a sedation gun. Pocket sized. “Maybe we should reconsider therapy.”

I scream as he levels the gun with my chest. Trying to duck out of his way. But another nurse catches me. “No!”

Roach doesn’t hesitate as he empties the gun’s sedative cache into my chest.