The Native Wildlife of West Virginia

1,000 word limit short story. Theme: animals in unexpected places

“I swear, Vern, if you don’t close those damn blinds, I’m gonna shove my foot so far up your ass, your tonsils are gonna catch my athlete’s foot.” Dawson threw his forearm over his eyes to cut down on the blinding light that was aggravating his hangover.

“Vern!” The throbbing in his head momentarily intensified with the exertion of bellowing for his roommate to oblige to his simple request.

Noticing the couch was feeling as comfortable as a morgue slab, and the fact Vern wasn’t around as he would have bellowed back that he could get off his own ass and do it himself if he was insistent, Dawson groaned once more before lowering his arm and cracking open an eye.

“Whut the…”

Dawson sat up and looked around, immediately noticing he was not home in his trailer, but in an empty room that was devoid of any furniture apart from the rectangle slab he was presently lying on. In fact, it wasn’t what he would have called a room at all as there seemed to be no corners to the bare walls that had this odd color that almost looked metallic. Overheard, a bluish-white light shone, the source of illumination that aggravated his hangover.

Putting his head in his hand while closing his eyes, the part-time tow truck driver swore aloud to himself, “I swear I’ll never drink Jimmy’s moonshine ever again.”

It was then Dawson noticed he was divested from every stitch of clothing.

‘Damn, I hope I didn’t soil myself and they threw my clothes out,’ Dawson wondered to himself, assuming he wound up at the County Medical Center.

The only logical thing Dawson figured was that he blacked out and crashed his tow truck while driving back from Jimmy Hartford’s place to get Jimmy’s truck unstuck from a muddy patch behind his house. As Jimmy didn’t have the whole fifty bucks to pay Dawson, forty dollars was forked over and a gallon of Jimmy’s best moonshine to make up for the missing ten bucks.

Dawson only had one slug of it to make sure it was palatable before hitting the road. But one slug was not enough to get Dawson buzzed, as white lightning was mother’s milk to him, having grown up drinking it.

Naked as a jaybird, Dawson levered himself up off the examination table and padded barefoot over to what appeared to be the door to the hallway.

‘Well, the nurses on staff are gonna get an eyeful, but nothing they haven’t seen before,’ Dawson thought, recalling the time when he came in after jumping out of the way of a car that was skidding on black ice only to fall down a steep embankment. He wound up in a muddy creek with a fractured ankle, but only after rolling over and disturbing a den of skunks in the process. They cut his clothes off, discarding them before putting him in the ambulance for him to arrive buck-naked at the hospital and stinking to high hell.

Pushing aside the curtain, that had a strange consistency as if made of silk and water, Dawson stepped out into what he thought would be the hallway of the Emergency Room at County Medical. The only curious stares Dawson was met with were of a dozen or more alien species walking, floating, or propelling themselves forward in a variety of configuration of limbs about Beta Quadrant Research Center in orbit above Selaxian 6, a mere forty-six light years away from Earth as the Promitaen maneuvers. But who wants to maneuver with an eldery Promitaen, the Selaxian joke went.

“Jesus Christ on a pogo stick,” Dawson swore under his breath, his eyes wide with shock at what he was witnessing, as if he had stepped into some sci-fi movie he watched on cable TV recently.

Before Dawson could contemplate that Jimmy may have spiked his moonshine with some shrooms as a joke, a Burtronius research assistant caught sight of him and let out a shriek of terror that sounded like a car alarm on steroids.

“The human is loose from the lab! Quarantine it before it infects the rest of the Center!” the research assistant, second class, screeched in panic, afraid it would catch one of the multitude of diseases, bacteria, viruses or other contagions the human was host to.

“Filthy beast!” a Vertraintian hissed, recoiling at the sight of such a primitive creature. “So unevolved, its sexual reproductive organs are on its exterior, and surrounded by unhygienic hair, of all things!” The Vertraintian gave a look of disgust at the Earth animal it was supposed to examine later, but almost laughed when he saw the frightened animal evacuate its bladder right there.

Hitting the communications button of its badge, the Vertraintian said, “Can you send a clean up crew to level four, corridor eight, gamma section? Yeah, the Earth specimen got loose and is so frightened, it pissed itself.”

The variety of aliens that were chittering, hissing and making other noises as forms of language and communication overwhelmed Dawson, as he stood there in shock, his brain frozen in panic as what to do next.

‘Run!’ But run where? Dawson contemplated he may not even be on Earth anymore, and he just might do something stupid like run out of an airlock.

Before he could think of what to do next, other than stand there like a cowering animal, a large alien that was twice Dawson’s height with purple and blue skin, walking upon what looked like crab legs, came up behind him and dose him with a tranquilizer.

“Sorry about that, everyone! My fault, I didn’t give him enough sedation,” Grunk, the research assistant, third class, apologized to everyone.

Now with the human lying on the ground, Grunk lifted him up and took him back into the research examination room.

Waking up on the couch in his trailer, Dawson noticed something was different.

“Huh, how did my athlete’s foot get cured,” he puzzled to himself.