The Journal of Observational Science posited that UFO sightings would quadruple if people simply looked up. Earl Manner couldn’t look up, and that’s why he didn’t see the flaming metal tube plummeting through the night sky a few miles ahead. He could barely see past his pickup’s windshield. The wiper fluid had run dry and his dull blades barely cut through the black spaghetti confetti of splattered insects. Even if he could see, he had dedicated his attention to fighting through the vitriol that Daniel, his twelve-year-old son, spewed at him.
“I wanted to go to the Grand Canyon as a family,” Daniel whined. If he crossed his arms any tighter, he would have shattered ribs. “But mom would push you in.”
“Daniel!” Earl struggled to avoid driving into the massive puddles creeping up to the highway, the result of rain falling too fast for the South Dakota soil to absorb. The water had become the breeding ground for the insects that danced their final jigs in the pickup’s headlights.
“Fire!” Daniel pointed out the window. “There’s a spaceship on fire!”
“There’s no such thing as space...Oh.”
A metal tube the length of a jet rose out of the puddle. Reflected in the still surface of the puddle below, the flames seemed immense. The tube hadn’t fared any better against the swarm than the pickup, which looked as though it had picked up a cheap fur coat along the way. On the tube, the insect corpses fed the flames.
“What do you do when you find a spaceship in the ditch?” Daniel asked.
“I don’t know, what?”
“I don’t know either. I’m still working on that one.”
“This is no joke.” Earl climbed out of the truck and waded into the puddle. It seemed to go on forever in the darkness, as if everything except the highway had been submerged.
Earl swatted through the cloud of indistinguishable bloodsuckers that buzzed toward every accessible orifice. Despite the insects playing tag in his nostrils, he caught a familiar scent. Darla, his ex, made one dessert: a baked apple. This wasn’t quite the same. Once, she had experimented with a baked pear. It had almost disintegrated in the oven. It hadn’t smelled quite right, like it was trying too hard to be sweet, like it wasn’t confident in its fruitiness. That’s what Earl smelled now.
Something floated to the surface of the water and grabbed his ankle. He jumped. When he saw what had attacked him, he composed himself.
“You okay?” Daniel asked from shore.
“Just a tree branch,” Earl replied, staring at the stick as the flickering firelight gave it the illusion of movement. “It startled me.”
“Dad,” Daniel said slowly, “there isn’t a tree for miles.”
Earl jumped at the sudden pain in his ankle. Stick claws tightened. He fell backwards into the larvae-infested water, kicking furiously.
Daniel splashed in and stomped on the branch, hitting a sweet spot. Claws withdrew from Earl’s flesh and he broke free. Dripping wet, he and Daniel ran to the pickup, not looking back at the mass that slowly rose out of water.
“What was that?” Daniel asked.
“I’m not interested in finding out,” Earl said, hitting the gas. “Let’s find someplace to dry off and call the police. That’s all we can do.”
Daniel hugged his father, a rare gesture. Whenever Earl thought about how much he loved his son, one moment reappeared: He and Daniel—then seven—lying in the football field outside Preven Elementary, burned out after learning that they both stunk at the game. Daniel hugged Earl and said, “You’ve got good dadness.”
Those words hadn’t been said since, but Earl heard them whenever his son hugged him.
Under the Holly Cove Motel’s neon pink sign, a woman in a short skirt, fishnets and high heels stepped out of the lobby, skittered across the parking lot and climbed into a semi-truck. Covering his son’s eyes, Earl parked the pickup. “Let’s just call the police and go. We’ll find another place to dry off.”
The white-haired man at the desk didn’t look up from the charts he examined, nor did he bother to hide his flask when Earl and Daniel entered.
“This is going to sound crazy,” Earl said, “but a spaceship crashed.”
“Already?” the white-haired man asked.
Earl looked closer at the charts: diagrams of the solar system. Xs and circles, words like “Yes!” and “Here!” scribbled so fiercely they had ripped the paper. “What do you mean, ‘Already?’”
“I thought it would be a while.” The old man shoved Earl and Daniel back into the parking lot. “Where did it crash?”
“Take a guess, Mister,” Daniel said, pointing down the highway.
“Oh my,” the old man replied.
Earl pulled his son close. Down the centerline hopped things no human had seen before, things beyond the scope of comprehension. Just looking at them made his mind ache, as if he had been asked to calculate pi using forks and spoons. They each had a single leg like gnarled wood that culminated in a claw. Knowing he had been so close to one of these things made him shudder, a sensation amplified by the sound of their claw-tips dragging against the blacktop—a cat’s teeth scraped across a chalkboard. Something seemed familiar about their inverted light bulb bodies.
“Dad, they’re...pears.”
Earl agreed. Dark freckles covered pale green skin. At the point of greatest width, they peered through blackened divots lined with tarantula leg lashes that writhed at everything in sight. He saw hate in those non-eyes. Hate or hunger, or that combination of both that came from crows as they watched him pass on the highway while picking away at pieces of mangled squirrel. Some of the pear people had fared worse than others in the crash. Chunks of white fruit flesh, glistening with juice, had been torn or caramelized. Insects swarmed the wounds.
“Back inside!” Earl grabbed Daniel’s hand and pulled him back to the lobby. Doors slammed as other motel guests locked themselves away, screaming and cursing. The old man ushered Earl and Daniel up the stairs to the attic.
Standing by a small telescope, he introduced himself. “Doctor Tartan Smith, astronomer.” He spun the telescope like a cat playing with a string.
“Astronomer?” Daniel asked. “What are you doing here?”
“You’re not old enough to look for jobs yet kid, but when you are, tell me how many openings you see for astronomers. It isn’t an easy job to get, and if you do get it, you best not foul it up by discovering a planet populated by malicious fruit-like creatures and pissing in your boss’s thermos when she doesn’t believe you. If only that dumb broad had listened, we wouldn’t have to deal with this.”
“You knew about these things?” Earl asked. The sound of a single leg hopping up the stairs put fear in his voice.
“I’ve known about them for years. I watched as they devoured every last one of the meat plants on their home planet, as they built that crude ship and prepared to search the universe for nourishment. I never thought they’d make it here, not in that ship, but whatever alloy they used managed to penetrate our atmosphere.”
As the attic door rattled under the strength of the creature outside, Earl asked the most important question: “How do you kill them?”
Tartan stumbled around the room, shoving things aside until he found a long model rocket and handed it to Earl. “It’s a goddamn pear, man! Smash it!”
Earl held the rocket like a club. “Get behind me,” he ordered.
“What do you do when fruit knocks on your door?” Daniel asked.
Earl shrugged, recognizing his son’s old joke.
“Vitamin,” Daniel said.
Earl pulled the door open and let all the stored tension out of his shoulders with a single swing. The rocket struck beneath the bloated pear’s eyeholes, cutting out a swath of fruit flesh that splattered across the room, white chunks in a fine mist. He dropped the battered rocket and waited for the creature to fall. How could it not, with ten percent of its body dripping from the model planets that dangled from the ceiling, disintegrated like the pears Darla baked so long ago?
It didn’t fall though. It just stared, the cut a crooked smile under its eyes. With a sudden forward movement, it head butted Earl across the room.
The doctor charged, wielding his telescope over his head like a spear. He drove it into the spot between the pear’s eyeholes. It stuck, but the creature still didn’t stop. It rolled onto its back, reached out its stem-leg and grabbed the doctor’s neck. As it pulled the doctor closer, the tendrils around its eyes stretched and grabbed, like furry baby fingers. They dug into the doctor’s face, pulling out chunks of meat and dropping them into the black eyeholes. The old man’s screams couldn’t bury the sound of flesh being devoured by tiny teeth somewhere inside the creature.
As Earl lay shaking on the other side of the room, the creature wrapped its wooden foot-claw around Daniel. It pulled the child close, rolled out of the room and down the stairs with a seemingly endless series of thumps.
“It took Daniel,” Earl said to himself.
He sat cross-legged on the floor next to the doctor’s twitching, faceless body. Crying seemed like the natural reaction, but he didn’t give in. Darla had tried to take Daniel away during the divorce. She had not succeeded, and she had tried harder than that godforsaken pear. He could hear her grating voice: “You wouldn’t let me have custody, but you let some mushy pear monster take your son away?”
No. The answer was no.
He refused to let that creature do what his ex-wife couldn’t.
~ ~ ~
Knowing he couldn’t take the pear people on by himself, he assembled troops: the truck driver, Todd, with his forearms like roasted hams, and Hula, the lady of the night, who focused more on her hot pink manicure than her armament: an old baseball bat. Todd carried a tiny pistol. “My dickweed insurance,” he called it. Everyone else remained behind locked doors or splattered across the parking lot.
“Thanks for volunteering,” Earl said, leading his troops to his pickup. As they climbed into the back, Earl warned, “Watch out for bugs.”
“It’s not bugs I’m worried about,” Hula said, kicking off her stiletto heels.
~ ~ ~
When they arrived at the still-burning spaceship, Smiley and the other pear people waited. Tied to the ship, Daniel screamed for help. The creatures’ speckled skin seemed alive with movement in the firelight. Earl thought for a second they all smiled at him, taunting him to come closer. They didn’t need to taunt.
Three humans stood against six pear people. Earl wouldn’t have backed down if there had been six hundred of those things, not if they had Daniel. His troops by his side, he stared the enemy down, using his pocketknife to sharpen the end of a wooden broomstick before setting the point on fire. Raising his weapon overhead and growling, he charged. He splashed into the puddle, running straight for smiley. The enemy met him halfway, but he struck first. He stabbed the flaming end into Smiley’s smile. The telescope eye gazed at him critically, as if it had hoped for more. The broomstick slid in soundlessly and the flames fizzled out immediately, leaving only the lightest caramelized crust between Smiley’s non-lips.
Around him, his troops met similar failures. Todd’s bullets did about as much damage as the gun itself when he gave up and threw it at his target. Still, he didn’t stop. He wrapped his massive arms around the pear and squeezed. Juice bubbled under his grip and the pear shrieked. It coiled its stem-leg around the trucker and the two locked together in a mutually destructive bear hug. More than juice came from Todd though. Vomit came first, followed by blood, which gave way to a choking flow of parts that should never have seen the moonlight.
Hula had better luck. Her rapid-fire baseball bat blows put Earl and Todd’s attacks to shame. But when she stopped to dramatically wipe pear meat from her face with the back of her hand, the creature’s stem-leg coiled like a spring and launched it into the night sky. She stared up after it, mouth opened in awe. On its way back down, it twisted its claws together to form a stake. It landed right between Hula’s hot pink lips, emerging brain-soaked from the back of her skull.
Earl realized he could not fight this enemy.
But maybe he could outrun them.
Desperately, he dashed to the ship to untie Daniel. Before he could even set his fingertips on the strange vines that bound his son, Smiley grabbed him from behind. The creature shoved Earl to the ground. He went under, pinned down by Smiley’s claw-foot on his chest. Splashing and slapping worthlessly, he sucked in puddle water, getting the earthy taste of it on his tongue. He pushed up as hard as he could, barely breaking the surface to take in air.
Smiley hovered over him and Earl saw his salvation: the movement on the pear’s skin was not merely the play of flames in the night. It was the play of insects feasting on rotting fruit. Even as he stared, the layer of bugs grew thicker and thicker, so thick he soon couldn’t see the creature’s skin at all.
Earl wasn’t going to let them have all the fun. He tore off pieces of his enemy’s flesh. Insects swarmed his hands, biting indiscriminately. He dug until he reached pockets of black ooze. Then he dug some more, the pear’s insides collecting under his nails like dirty oil.
Smiley’s grip loosened. It teetered backwards, allowing Earl to squirm away. The rest of the pears didn’t chase him. They too had all fallen, desperately using their claw-feet to scrape the bugs from their hides. They couldn’t move fast enough. As Earl untied his son, bugs sped past him. Some collided with his face, pausing for a moment to ponder the sweat on his skin before following their brethren to the ever-shrinking mounds of sweet fruit.
Earl carried Daniel to the blacktop. “Are you okay?”
His son responded with a hug. “You’ve got good dadness.” Words unsaid. Words that never needed to be said again, because they would always be there, etched into that action.
“What do you do when you find a spaceship in the ditch?” Daniel asked.
Earl responded wearily, “I don’t know. What?”
“Disap-pear.”
“That’s the best idea I’ve heard all night,” Earl said, carrying his son to the pickup as pear seeds floated to the surface of the water behind them.