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Carlos woke up at quarter-to-mother-fucking-five-in-the-a-m to find the entire galaxy about three feet from his car windshield, the cold desert night still utterly bemused by his presence, and the rest of his pack of wandering scientists getting utterly wasted and cannibalizing his car antenna to try and listen in on the echo of the Big Bang.
This is his life now.
So he did what any sane and rational man would do, which was to struggle out from under his quilted blanket, get out of his car, and walk over to the pride of scientists, muttering things under his breath. "C'mon, give it back, you assholes!
It just seemed to start up a round of tittering among the ragged circle on the desert floor, huddled around the makeshift tuner.
Carlos rolled his eyes. "Jesus. I said give it back." He stepped into the circle. Not just alcohol, to judge from the smell. And sure enough, someone tried to pass him a joint before he got more than a step or two inside. "Okay, how many of you assholes are actually planning to drive tomorrow morning?"
There was a low murmur, susurrating back and forth, before one of the scientists spoke up. "We kinda thought we'd get a late start out tomorrow."
"Did you, Ricky? Jesus." Cranky, and he knew it. He reached the device and inspected it. "Dammit, you guys broke it!"
"Sorry, Carlos." It was a girl with long, blonde, hippyish hair that spoke up. Carlos couldn't for the life of him remember her name or even seeing her before either on campus or during the road trip down. "We didn't mean to break it. Why don't you sit down and relax?" She sounded calm enough to start floating off any second.
"You broke my stuff!"
"Hey, man. It was an accident. We'll get you a new one once we reach civilization again. Promise." Carlos glared at the young--God, they were all so young--man offering out the not-quite apology. He sighed, deflating. He knew what he was getting into when he signed up for this. Sort of. He put down the receiver and somebody handed him the joint again. This time, he took it.
"Don't break my stuff, okay?" The antenna itself was okay, but the fitting would never be the same. But it was just a token protest, and he knew it. So he took a hit, dropping back to the edge of the circle, sitting down, and passing the joint along again. "You guys get any good signals?"
"Here." The blonde girl switched on the receiver again, and he drifted off, listening.
By the time the sun rose, most of them had either drifted off to sleep or wandered off in pairs, and Carlos was starting to wonder if he'd joined some sort of weird commune instead of taken a job setting up a remote research station.
He struggled up from his own cross-legged sitting position and grabbed the antenna receiver, stiffly waddling back to the car to plant his ass on his own trunk and dismantle it that way. In comfort. "If any one of you assholes ever touches the DeLorean again, you'll be pulling back your own missing fingers," he called out, still slightly buzzed, to the scientists who obviously weren't going anywhere for the next little while, and continued tinkering.
It wasn't, of course, a DeLorean. It was, however, gray, boxy, and looked like someone had dragged it kicking and screaming straight out of the 80's. It was actually a Buick; a Buick Reatta, to be precise, and he loved that car to pieces. Loved it enough to keep it on the road and running, enough to figure out how to fix it himself when it broke down, with the help of a wonderful friend named Mercedes, until now, twenty years later, the only pieces of the car that probably haven't been replaced or fixed up are the right wing mirror, a piece of the left front fender, and the name he gave it.
The name he slipped out with to a group of newly-minted grad students like they were his peers and watched them nod and smile like they were interested and thought it was vaguely cool...the cool of a sort-of-hip professor that's fun to talk to after class or lab or whatever before they went off and did their own thing without him, maybe mentioning once or twice to the kids that weren't there that Dr. Científico, what a quirky guy, went and named his car after a car in a twenty-year-old movie (that Carlos saw in the kids' section of the last video place he went to, for God's sake) and then dismiss it from their minds, except to maybe think on every once in a while what a cool old guy he is. Not knowing the history behind the name, the blood, sweat and tears Carlos put into his own degree, just like them; about going half crazy with papers and exams and lab work, about only being able to afford a five year old car with 200K miles on it already that was a good car except it only ran when the temperature was within a 20-degree span of pleasantly warm until he learned to fix it with his own bare hands, and...
Well, that's why he was here.
The antenna turned out to actually be in okay shape. It was the fitting that was unrepairable. No matter; he had a couple rolls of the Scientist's Secret Weapon in the trunk and they'd promised to replace it anyway. So he dumped the rest of the receiver in Juanita's snoring lap (for it had turned out to be her idea in the first place), and went back to finish duct-taping the antenna back on his car.
As midlife crises go, hey, it probably wasn't even a bad one. He didn't have any marriages to flunk out of, didn't go parading around with his students, and no way in hell was he trading this baby in for a convertible. He just...went. Packed up and left his whole world behind when The Dean apparently went crazy and offered him a position here, out here, with these babies, on their way to a little desert town called Night Vale that Juanita and The Dean had seen in a shared vision of a dark planet lost by the sun surrounded by weeping gods and angels, the town that The Dean had subsequently declared to be the site of their next research station, even though no one but them could actually seem to find it on a map. (The Dean was not actually the Dean. The Dean was actually the Vice-President of their little university. The Dean just liked being called The Dean. Because his name was Dean. Sanity was not his strong suit, but he could make sweet, sweet love to a balance sheet like no one else.) So here he was. Driving through the desert, following a mad, modern-day prophet on a Harley with a survey map that made everyone else's eyes water to look at it, probably only to turn back once they reached their final destination of featureless desert. So, all in all, not a bad midlife crisis. Certainly not a usual one.
By now, everyone else was sleeping. But Carlos, for some reason, was fucking wired. (Maybe because he'd gotten more sleep than the rest of them? He wasn't sure.) So he went to roll down the windows, put the car on battery for a few minutes, and test the radio reception.
The DeLorean, for all its quirks and surprising bonuses, did not have anything resembling power windows. Or one of those newfangled, crazy things all the kids nowadays had like a tape or CD player. Radio it was. So basically if his makeshift repairs didn't work, he'd probably end up killing everyone and hiding the bodies before they managed to reach the nearest town. He flicked the dial.
Nothing.
Shit.
Little more tuning.
Still nothing. Shit.
Up and down the dial, nothing.
Except...wait.
Faintly, from what sounded like a great distance away, rolled and coated and baked at 450 degrees in static...came a voice.
He couldn't make out any of the features of this voice. Was it high? Low? Male? Female? Something in between? But it was...soothing, somehow. And droning on about a lottery. Numbers, maybe? No, wait. Colors. That's weird. But interesting.
So he sprawled across both seats, listening to the voice talk, letting it lull him into a hypnotic half-trance half-sleep. Must be some sort of local soap opera. Either that or someone'd been hitting the LSD a little too hard before work. But it continued to be interesting, in its own weird little way. Until...
"Goodnight, Night Vale. Goodnight."
That made him bolt up straight. Okay, maybe Juanita fell asleep to this weird broadcast show. That would make the most sense. Or the three of them'd read the same comic book and forgot about it.
Or...it could be real.
Worth finding out? Definitely.