One Door From Heaven

Yeller then tapped out a message on the keyboard.
        RUM, the dog had typed, whereupon Polly had decided that any dog able to differentiate one playing card from another and possessed of advanced numerical skills ought to be allowed to indulge in an adult beverage if it wanted one, assuming that it could hold its booze and exhibited no tendency to alcoholism. Polly would have prepared Old Yeller a pina colada right then, or a mai tai, thought she suspected that she had lost her mind and that paramedics with psychiatric training, medevacked her to the prairie from the nearest metropolitan center, were even now approaching the Fleetwood with a straitjacket and a drawn dose of Thorazine in a syringe of a size usually employed to treat horses. Unfortunately, she had no rum, only beer and a small collection of fine wines, a fact that she conveyed to the dog along with an apology for being an inadequate hostess.
        RUM had proved to be not the wanted word, but an error resulting from the understandable clumsiness of a dog gripping a toothbrush in its mouth as a stylus with which to type on a keyboard. With a whine of frustration but with admirable determination, Old Yeller had tried again: RUN!
        So here and now, but a minute after the dog had finished typing, Polly stood staring down at the laptop, on which continued to burn the entire six-line message that had motivated her to race to the bedroom and load the shotguns.
        

        
    RUM

    RUN!

    MAN EVIL

    ALIEN

    EVIL ALIEN

    RUM!
        
     On the face of it, the message was absurd, one level of order above meaningless gibberish, and if it had shown up on the screen as if resolving out of the ether or even if it had been typed by a preliterate child, Polly wouldn’t have acted upon it so quickly and might not have gone directly to the shotgun, but she felt justified in taking immediate and drastic action because the message had been typed by a dog with a toothbrush in its mouth! She’d never gone to college, and no doubt she’d lost a fearsome number of brain cells during the three years she spent in Hollywood, and she had no difficulty acknowledging that she was woefully ignorant about a long list of subjects, but she knew a miracle when she saw one, and if a dog typing messages with a toothbrush wasn’t a miracle, then neither was Moses parting the Red Sea nor Lazarus rising from the dead.
        Besides, considering his peculiarities, Earl Bockman made more sense as an evil alien than as the bumpkin proprietor of a crossroads store and service station in the great Nevada lonesome. This was one of those seemingly impossible things that you intuitively knew were true the moment that you heard them: such as the recent report that none of the members of the hit rap-music group calling itself Sho Cop Ho Busters could read a musical note of music.
        She wasn’t going to rush outside and blow Earl’s head off, if only because even in her fear and excitement, she could appreciate the difficulty of explaining this action in a court of law. She did not, in fact, know quite what she was going to do now that she had the shotgun, but she felt better with the weapon in hand.
        A crackling noise caused her to spin around and bring up the 12-gauge, but Old Yeller was the source of the sound. The dog had gotten her head stuck in the empty cheese-popcorn bag that Curtis had left on the floor by the co-pilot’s chair.
        Polly plucked the cellophane trap off the dog’s head, revealing a foolish grin, a wildly active tongue, and a popcorn-speckled face that she couldn’t easily relate to the determined messenger of alien doom that had labored so ingeniously over the keyboard. She turned to the computer once more, expecting the screen to be blank, but the exhortation to RUM! still burned in white letters on a blue field with five other lines of urgently conveyed information.
        Old Yeller swabbed her snout with a propeller-action tongue that cleaned nose to chin to nose again, and Polly decided not to question miracles, not to dismiss the message because of the unlikely nature of the messenger, but to act, God help her, as the situation appeared to require.
        And suddenly she realized: "Where's Curtis?"
        The dog pricked her ears and whined.
        Carrying the shotgun, Polly went to the door, took a deep breath, as she'd always taken just before she had disembarked, nude, from the flying saucer and had descended