Chapter Three

“Ultimately, it is my job to see you all succeed on your own merits.” The English professor was a sad, tired guy in his fifties who wore thin square glasses and spent the whole class sitting slumped on his desk. “This class is not meant to be an obstacle. It’s meant to make all your other classes easier. I cannot do that, people, if you are not here learning how to do the work on your own.”

Seth had to wonder if every class got this exact same lecture. About half his classmates were paying attention. Maybe another third was trying to look like they were listening. A couple were asleep, and there were a few who had been surfing their phones the whole time.

Truth be told, it was kind of relieving. Seth wasn’t exactly a classroom kind of guy, and he’d been expecting to look a lot more out of place at the community college. So far, it was like high school, but the teachers weren’t quite as high on power.

“I encourage you, and yes, that means all of you, to come visit me any time I’m having office hours,” Professor Timmins said, looking around the room. “I’m not in this profession to intimidate you. I want to help, just like all your professors.” He looked at his watch, and for a second some life flashed across his face. “Okay. Well, that’s all the time I have,” he said. “So, good luck here at Canyon Bluffs and welcome. I will see you all Thursday afternoon. Have a nice day.”

Seth closed his notebook over the sheaf of papers he’d been handed at the beginning of the class. He’d been to three classes so far, and nobody had told him anything he needed to write down.

Next up was geology, though, which sounded sort of interesting. Rocks and stuff, and a class trip to some caves in the National Park.

Getting to the classrooms in a wheelchair was kind of an adventure itself. The building was older, and the elevators were kind of out of the way. It was starting to piss him off. He was calling enough attention to himself with his wheels and his tattoos—and his fairly recognizable face—without having to be late to class.

As he wheeled himself down the hallway past a yellowing bulletin board, he heard a familiar shuffle behind him.

“Hi again,” a woman’s voice said.

Seth turned around to see the girl with the walker who was in his remedial math class. She was dressed much better than most of the other students, but she looked like she’d only just graduated high school.

“Hey,” Seth said. He rolled up to the elevator. “Up or down?”

“Up,” the girl said. “Where are you going?”

“Same direction,” Seth said. “Geology with Miller.”

“Oh, cool, we have the same class again,” the girl said. “I’m Mary.”

“Seth.” He nodded to her. When the elevator door pinged open, he gestured for her to walk in. “Go ahead,” he said.

“Thanks.” Mary shuffled inside the elevator, leaning heavily on her walker. Seth wondered if that’s how he looked when his physical therapist got him hobbling around her living room.

He got into the elevator and got turned around, trying his best to avoid running into Mary. He let out a reflexive “Motherfuck!” when he almost took her walker out with his back handle.

Mary gasped audibly and leaned back.

“Sorry,” Seth said. “I’m not used to being in this thing.”

Mary was staring at him with her mouth open. “Oh,” she said. She turned to face the elevator doors.

His sister was right. Community college really was going to give him the motivation to recover from this shit.

***

The professor was a short, stocky guy, with black hair and a neatly trimmed beard and intense green eyes. He wore a button-down rolled up to his elbows, exposing half-sleeves of recent tattoos. As far as Seth could tell, they were mostly of trees and fish and flowers.

He fidgeted behind his desk while students walked in, looking up when someone new walked into the classroom. Every time he would look up, his eyes would flicker to Seth for a second before he looked back at his papers.

After he did this about five times, Seth shot him a grin. The professor spent the next several minutes staring at his phone while the rest of the class filed in.

At 2:15 he stood up. “Good afternoon, people,” he said. “If you’re not here for Geology 100, you should stay anyway because it’s a fun class and I’m desperate for attention.”

That got a chuckle out of a few people, including Seth.

“Now, the science departments are all teaming up to use less paper and save more money,” the professor said, “So you all have been sent a digital copy of your syllabus, which I will be showing here on our projector screen.” He leaned down to do something on his computer, and the projector screen beside his desk turned bright blue and then showed a picture of Bell Mountain.

“Before we begin, you may be curious about the instructor change.” Professor Miller was avoiding looking at Seth as he addressed the room. “Doctor Carver has had to deal with a family emergency, and she chose to take the semester off instead of having to have you deal with an instructor change mid-semester. She left me her teaching materials, and although of course I have my own teaching style, I will be using her curriculum. We may have some adjustments to that though.”

Seth wondered how old this guy was. He looked like he had kind of a baby face under that beard, and he didn’t seem nearly as dead inside as the rest of the faculty at this place.

He looked really, really easy to mess with though. That could make the semester much more fun, at least for Seth.

***

His Aunt Tracey, of all the people on Earth, was the one they sent to pick him up when his math course let out. She was driving a brand-new SUV in champagne pearl, and she wasn’t drunk yet, but she was on something.

“Trace, you gotta get out and get my wheelchair,” Seth told her once he’d gotten into the passenger seat. He was starting to get used to doing his own transfers, which was tight.

“Oh, shit, is it still there?” Tracey had already put the car in gear. “I’m sorry, sweetie.”

“No worries,” Seth said.

Tracey was something else. Back in the eighties she’d really been involved with some heavy stuff, and she spent most of the nineties doing time for it. These days she only cooked chili and her skin, but she still tried to party like she was nineteen and was wanted in five states.

She eventually figured out how to fold Seth’s wheelchair and stuck it in the backseat. “Where are we going today, sweetie?” she said.

“Can you just take me downtown?” Seth said. “I told Danielle I’d be by for a touch-up after class.”

“Sure thing, baby,” Tracey said as she got back in the car. “You want a smoke?”

“I’m good,” Seth said. He’d managed to quit smoking while he was halfway into a coma for a week, and his aunt’s thin white cigarettes were disgusting even when he’d gone through a pack a day.

Tracey went through three by the time they were cruising down the street in front of Danielle’s place. The county and city had made some pretty big efforts to keep Double Eagle businesses away from each other, but Watty’s had stuck around at one end of this neighborhood and Danielle’s place stayed in the other.

The place wasn’t crawling with cops as much as it used to be, but sure enough one of the city’s finest had been tailing Tracey’s car since Poncha Boulevard.

“Okay, just signal and pull over, Trace,” Seth said. “We’re not doing anything wrong.”

Tracey’s eyes and expression told him she was doing plenty wrong, but there was no need to get her more paranoid than she already was.

“What if they never cleared that warrant, though?” Her acrylics were about to pop that snakeskin wheel cover. “They could’ve…”

“Trace, we’re at the shop. They’re probably tailing me to make sure I get here and go in like I say I’m gonna,” Seth said. “Just signal and pull over.”

“Okay, sweetie,” Tracey said. She finally signaled and pulled the hell over. “Okay, we’re doing it.”

“Now, you gotta get my wheelchair,” Seth said, “and unfold it on the sidewalk in front of my door.” He opened the passenger door. “Oh, look at that, they rolled right on.”

The cop car was moving slowly, but it was moving past them. Tracey spent a few seconds shivering in her seat and got out of the SUV.

“Goddamn, woman,” Seth muttered while he unbuckled his seatbelt and shifted himself sideways. Getting out of a car was way easier than getting in, and he’d gotten a way of leaning on door handles that was doable while he gave instructions on how to get his wheelchair unfolded. He didn’t even partially crush his aunt while she helped him take the couple steps he needed to get situated there again.

“There you go, sweetie,” Tracey said. “I’m gonna go to Watty’s to meet your uncle for pool.”

“I’ll be by later,” Seth said. He could probably find someone at Watty’s who’d be more suitable to drive him home.

Down the street, he saw the cop car pull into a parallel parking space.

“You be careful now,” he said as his aunt got back in her car.

“For sure, sweetie,” Tracey said. “Bye, now!”

Seth watched and waited while his aunt drove down toward the bar at the other end of the street. The cop car didn’t pull out when she passed, but Seth hung out until he saw her pull in the back lot. No big deal then. Hopefully.

“Are you coming in, bro?” Mike Wachowski was standing on the sidewalk, holding the shop door open. “Danielle’s been bitching non-stop because you’re late.”

“Gimme a second,” Seth said. “Tracey drove me here and the 5-0 were trying to mess with her.”

“Son of a bitch,” Mike said. “She go down to Watty’s?”

“Yeah,” Seth said. “She’s fucked up on something, man. Good thing they didn’t decide to pull her over.”

He wheeled himself in the wide, low building with bright green woodwork around the plate glass windows. A big glass sign reading HELL’S GATE TATTOOS obscured most of the activity inside, along with a portrait of all three of Danielle’s big guard dogs.

When you walked in, there was a little waiting room on the right where people smoked and hung out and bullshitted. Roxie’s desk was right in front of you, where you checked in, and the studio went for a ways to your left. Seth remembered helping Danielle varnish all the woodwork when he was a kid.

“Where were you?” Roxie said as soon as she saw Seth. “I had to give your slot to someone else.”

“Sorry, babe,” Seth said. “It took my aunt a while to find the school.”

“That’s probably why she never learned to read,” Danielle said from her work station. She was doing an upper back piece on a broad, muscular guy who already had sleeves done up both shoulders. “Give me half an hour with this guy and I’ll be right with you.”

“Oh, no, did I take your spot?” The guy getting tattooed had a soft, familiar voice. When he turned to look at Seth, he had a familiar face as well.

“I’ll be damned,” Seth grinned, “I thought I recognized you from somewhere.”

“Um.” Professor Miller gave him a weak smile. “I don’t think I’ve, uh, been here before.”

“This guy teaches my geology class,” Seth said to Danielle.

“No shit?” Danielle raised her eyebrows and “gently” put Professor Miller’s head down where she wanted it. “Aren’t you a little young to be a professor?”

“I’m kind of a substitute,” Miller said. “I’ve got a friend who’s teaching here while he does graduate work at State.”

“Huh.” Danielle was doing something with a deer’s head between his shoulder blades.

Seth rolled himself closer. Miller’s arms were covered in plants and animals in different colors and styles. It all went together pretty well, actually. Lots of good color work.

“You got a lot of woodland creatures going on there,” Seth said.

It took a second for Miller to respond. “I started getting tattoos when I was a park ranger,” he said. “I just like the theme and it gives me a lot of options.”

“Park ranger, huh?” Seth said. “Like a jacking-off-antelope park ranger or a rent-a-cop park ranger?”

Miller made a disgusted noise. “I was a firewatcher and I worked on a trail crew in the Sierra Madres,” he said.

“So, you were a jacking-off-antelope park ranger,” Danielle said.

“I was not...okay, so firewatcher does involve some jacking off,” Miller said. “You sit in a tower all day and literally just watch for fires.”

“Every government job involves jacking off,” Danielle said. “Mostly just a question of who’s the jacker and who’s the jackee.”

“Damn, Danielle,” Seth said. “That’s some philosophy.”

“So you ever see any UFOs?” Danielle said.

“Actually, one time I did report a UFO,” Miller said. “It was shortly after sunset, and I was doing my dishes.”

“Sure you were doing your dishes,” Seth said.

“I swear to God, no, I shared this tower with another park ranger, and we were cleaning up after dinner,” Miller said.

“Okay,” Danielle said, cutting Seth’s smart-ass reply off with a wave of one blue-gloved hand. “And?”

“And we just hear this humming sound, like when you’re in a crappy apartment and someone’s running a dishwasher or a big fan above you, right?”

“Yeah.” Danielle ran a wet wipe over her piece. “And?”

“And it’s just after nautical twilight so it’s not all the way dark, but you can’t see much.” Miller’s body stiffened a little when Danielle took into him with the tattoo gun again. “We’re out here completely off the grid in the middle of nowhere, so we both go up to the observation deck and the humming cuts out, and then it starts again.”

“No shit?” Seth said.

“Swear to God,” Miller said. “When it restarts, we see just this blue light moving above the ridgeline, definitely way too fast to be part of anything on the ground, and then the humming stops and it just disappears.”

“Hmm,” Dannielle nodded, “That’s probably all they’ll let you tell us.”

“No, that was the whole story,” Miller said. “It never happened again. I’ve never seen anything else like it.”

“What happened when you reported it?” Seth said.

“Nothing,” Miller said. “You know, I am sure there’s a rational explanation…”

“You know what, that’s probably true,” Danielle said. “Aliens don’t give a shit about us, but the government?”

“I mean, it could have been a military thing,” Miller said, “but you’d think they’d know there’s, like, two government employees in the area whose job it is to watch for weird stuff.”

“Maybe you got abducted and didn’t know about it,” Seth said. “You ever see a wendigo?”

“Novak, if you’re gonna run your mouth go do it over there,” Danielle said. “I’ve got work to do.”

“Fine, I’ll go,” Seth said. “See you in class, Professor.”