OLWG #7 – The Thing About Traffic Jams

This week’s prompts at OLWG are:

1. Rain drumming on the roof
2. I don’t know about this,
3. Snickersnee

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I inched forward and looked over the edge.

“I don’t know about this, JP…”  I said and quickly backed up.

“What do you need to know?”  He said. “There’s nothing to it. They don’t feel a thing and we’ll throw em back after the procedure. The intelligence data that we get from these operations is invaluable; priceless. You heard the General before we left. He told you all this.”

“It just doesn’t seem right somehow.”

He blinked his big eye and leaned out over the edge to hock a big gob of spit out the side, “Listen, Eddie; I know this is your first time but there’s really no need to make a big deal out of it. Tell you what; you activate the beam and I’ll lean out to pull ‘em all into the ship when they get here. You don’t even have to get close to the edge. Katie will insert the probes. All you gotta do is flip switches and tractor ‘em up. We’ll take care of the rest. Well maybe you can take care of the neural neutralizer too. You know how to work that, right?”

“They’re going to see us though. They’ll get back down there and tell everyone. It’s going to cause widespread panic.”

“It hasn’t yet,” Katie said as she snapped the glove over her tentacle. “We’ve been doing this for years and, no one goes back and tells stories. You know why? It’s ‘cause we erase that part of their memory before we set them back down into traffic.”

“Yeah, and none of them ever will know, unless you screw something up with the neutralizer.” JP piped in, “One minute they’re stuck in traffic and the next thing they know they’re still stuck in traffic. They never even realize they’ve been up here or that they’ve had the procedure.”

They both glared at me and waited.

“The probes are undetectable with the technology they have down there,” JP added with a somewhat conciliatory tone.

“All right, all right,” I said. “The shit I let you guys talk me into.” I shook my head and reached up to activate the tractor beam.

“Not yet,” Katie instructed me. “Wait till Simon gets us positioned and don’t try to pull up more than thirty or thirty-five cars at a time. We can usually find a traffic jam that’ll be full of them when we hover over one of their big roads. The ones that they call expressways.”

She giggled and snorted just a little at the irony of what she’d just said. JP laughed out loud. Even I smiled and punched Katie lightly on the shoulder.  She could be pretty funny when she wanted to be.

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