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Rafter Fiction is short stories based on songs by Rafter. I am starting the series with the songs from his newest album, “Terrestrial Extras”.  This is the song, “Brains Define Me.” Buy the album here

“Hey…Adam…Adam…Wake up.” He feels Peter nudging him, and after deciding he cannot ignore him any longer, Adam’s eyes flutter open. “We have to go. We have to get out of here.”
“What?” Adam does not understand what Peter is saying because he has not left this building, this lab, for as long as he can remember. “Leave?”
“Yes. We have to go. I’m driving to the airport.”
Adam sits up and rubs his eyes. “What about Father?”
“He isn’t your father, Adam. He isn’t your father.”
This new pushes Adam backward. He shakes his head. His mind starts to speed up, the enhancements and technology making it spin faster and faster. He zips through all of the things that he has ever been told, ever been shown, every scrap of information he has ever seen or heard. “I have no information that tells me you are correct.”
Peter says, “You don’t have information that tells you otherwise either. You have to trust me. He is not your father, and he is in trouble. They are coming for him. They are coming for you. We have to escape.”
“I am confused.”
“It is okay,” Peter says. “You will learn quick enough. Right now we have to disguise you.” He reaches across and pulls Adam’s hair. The short wig pops off, and Peter stares at all of the microchips lining Adam’s cranium. “We have to do something.” Peter helps Adam put on a Detroit Tigers hat and a hoodie over the hat. “This will have to be enough. Now follow close and don’t make eye contact with anyone.”
Adam nods and stands up. “Wait. Why should I trust you?”
“You should not trust anyone, but you have no choice. We have to go.”
Peter throws some of Adam’s clothes into a gym bag. Adam watches and thinks about everything he has ever known. He knows that he is not really human anymore, that he is special, an experiment, one that Father, or not Father, says he has worked on his whole life. Father says he has found the potential for infinite brain power and that Adam is the prototype. Father says that he has loved him from the day that he was born and that he will never let anything happen to him.
Peter turns and hands him the bag. “Let’s go.”
“Wait. Where is Father? Shouldn’t he be here with us?”
“Something bad has happened, Adam. The military has come in and people are getting arrested and killed. I have to get you out of here and to a safe place before they get their hands on you.”
“Why would they want to do that?”
“Because you have power, and they want to turn you into a weapon.”
“Oh.” He followed Peter out into the hall and through some of the corridors. Adam does not get a sense that anyone else is awake, but the sleeping quarters are a long way from the lab. “I don’t hear anyone moving around.”
Peter pauses for a second. “They are all detained. They’re working their way toward us. We have to be really quiet to make sure they can’t hear us.”
They sneaked down the corridor toward a fire exit. Once Peter punches in a code, he pushes it open, and the night air hits Adam in the face. A car, a Lexus sedan, is idling at the curb. “This is the car.”
Peter helps Adam into the passenger seat. “You should duck down so they can’t see you.” Adam listens, and before he can protest, they are squealing out of the parking lot.
Within minutes of driving, Peter’s phone starts ringing. Adam notices the display before Peter turns it off. “Dr. Legranda.” He knows Father’s real name but does not know why Peter would not answer. “You should get that.”
“No,” Peter says. “It could be a trick. It could be the military using his number.”
“It could also be him wanting to make sure we escaped.”
“No. He knows.”
Peter turns the car toward the highway. After a few more minutes of driving, Adam starts to hear a voice in his head, “Adam…Adam. It’s Father.” He knows that this is not him making up Father’s voice, but his actual voice in his brain. “Listen to me,” he says. “I need you to think of the place where Peter is taking you. You do not have to say it. You do not have to do anything but think of the place. We will be there to meet you.”
“He says you aren’t my real father.”
“Adam. Adam. Adam. Of course he would say that, but we both know this is not true. I love you and you are my son. Just let us know where you are going. You are in danger.”
“He says I’m in danger with you.”
“No, son. He is the danger. We have to get you back before he destroys you.”
Adam thinks for a second. “What if he is not taking me to the airport?”
Father says, “Read the street signs. We will find you. Nothing bad can ever happen to you.”

“Promise?”
“Promise.”

Rafter Fiction is short stories based on songs by Rafter. I am starting the series with the songs from his newest album, “Terrestrial Extras”.  This is the fourth song, “Kulture Krimes.” Buy the album here

This song has a video.

I tell my sons about when the aliens invaded. The first thing they showed my great-grandparents was that they enjoyed driving fast and driving large luxury cars from the 80s and early 90s, Oldsmobiles, Buicks, and Cadillacs with long hoods. People were able to tell it was an alien driving when they saw a Delta 88 or a Fleetwood flying down the road, too fast and reckless, sometimes going over the yellow line. Most people started pulling over when they saw them coming. The aliens drove fast, crashed hard, and left wreckage strewn across every highway in the world. They never saw dead alien on the side of the road with their crashed vehicles. They wrecked, and they just walked away.
The invasion lasted for a long time, a two decades before it was even called an invasion. At first the aliens landed and negotiated with world leaders, shaking hands with promise of sharing of technology, worlds, and cultures. The aliens seemed to want to integrate into the earth’s society. Except for their love for large cars and driving too fast, the transition was seamless. For the longest time, nobody saw anything wrong, and those who did were considered paranoid. The car mechanic trade started to boom and new car models were designed with the large cars of the past in mind.

This went well for a twenty-five years, until all of the school age males between six and twelve years of age went missing. Frantic parents searched neighborhoods for their boys, and after a few days of looking to no avail, not even finding a child that escaped or a random body part, the focus turned from the victims to the perpetrators. All aliens were blamed and the military started to round them all up and place them in camps. In these camps at night, the guards heard the aliens talking to each other with clicks, screeches and garbled, an alien language that they never used before. Even when communicating to one another in public, before the children went missing, they used a slightly accented English. Now there was no doubt that the aliens were planning something, the clicks, garbles, screeches, and grunts frightened all of the guards. They stood to the ready for anything, grips tight on their automatic weapons, but they still could not stop the attack when it came. The aliens overran them in minutes, broke free from the detention centers, and decided that it was now time to take over.
I told my sons the same thing the history books told, that the bloody war was more of a massacre. Even though the aliens shared a great deal of technology with the world governments, they kept most of their knowledge to themselves, and they unveiled devices nobody had ever seen and were defenseless against. The fighting only lasted a few days before the aliens were on television saying, “Your government, military, and police have been wiped out. To the citizens, we will be living here, and we will be in charge. As long as you do not try to stop us, you will live. We enjoy Earth, the culture, and we enjoy you, the citizens, so as long as you don’t attack us, we can live in harmony. This is what we propose, and you will accept because you have no other choice.” Since then, the aliens had been in charge, driving around in their cars, and pulling up to anyone on the side of the road that they see walking to offer the people rides.

The biggest mystery to all of this was what happened to all of the boys that night. Some legends says that they were killed and thrown in the desert. Some said they were sent back to their home planet to satisfy their women. My parents, your grandparents, told us the stories of the people who disappear from earth were getting eaten by the aliens, and now I will tell you. One of my father’s friends growing up told him his cousin was trying to hitch a ride with a human in Arizona one day. In our distrust in aliens, we started trusting each other again, so everyone hitchhiked as long as a human was the person who stopped. He was walking down the road, trying to get into the city and was looking for a ride. He saw a car flying at top speed toward him, and he knew it was an alien. He stepped away from the road and planned to pretend he did not see the car as it sped by. To his distress, the car pulled up beside him. My father’s friend said that the alien leaned over and opened the door and said, “Get in.” His cousin shook his head, but he also knew that resisting the command was not something to do. When he saw the driver’s eyes widen and the alien said, “I don’t remember asking. I said get in,” the friend could not help but comply. They were driving top speed, the guy said the alien started to open up about his life and how he did not want to be seen as the bad guy. The friend did not tell him that by bullying him into the car, he already was a bad guy. He just kept nodding. The random alien in the speeding car told him everything about the invasion. He said this was the plan all along, to take over and live among subservient humans. When the friend asked what happened to all of the boys that night, the alien said, “Oh. We ate them. That’s the best age to eat humans.”

“Now,” I told my boys when I warned them about the aliens. “The rumor about the aliens eating all of the children has not come from just this one source. Everyone knows someone who has been told that all of those boys were eaten. It might be one of those urban legends, but we can’t take any chances. You must never be alone with any aliens. Even if you trust them completely, they might just eat you, and that’s a chance none of us can take. Stay away from them as much as possible.”

Rafter Fiction is short stories based on songs by Rafter. I am starting the series with the songs from his newest album, “Terrestrial Extras”. This is the third song, “Stranded on a Dirt Clod.” Enjoy! Buy the album here

And the boss says during Jeff’s interview: “”So this guy comes every week, Thursday Friday, Saturday, and he’s one of those guys that sees the men coming in here and needs to tell them they’re going to Hell. We used to try to get rid of him, call the police, but after a few stories on the news and on social media, people come to see him and our business has skyrocketed. Everyone knows where Quadz is now, and being harassed by him has become something of a badge of honor.”

And the first time Jeff sees “Preacher”: He is tall, lanky, and weather-worn. He wears a wrinkled gray suit, needs a shave, and wears mirrored sunglasses. He swings a tattered Bible in his right hand through the air, shaking it while he yells at the men coming into the bar. He looks as if he has not slept in a year.

And when Jeff asks if “Preacher” ever comes inside: “Nah. I don’t think that he wants to be caught in this den of iniquity. He’s harmless though.”

And things “Preacher” yells at people coming in: “You are all going to be stuck here. Jesus is coming back, and you will all beg for help, but you’ll be stuck, trapped on this burning clod of dirt for the rest of your deprived life. No one is going to rescue you.”

And Jeff’s thoughts, as a bouncer, on whether or not to view “Preacher” as a threat:
“Preacher” can’t be harmless. There has to be something off about someone who wastes every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night yelling about sin in front of a gay bar. I have to keep a close eye on this guy and make sure that he does not get too close to the door or block that path of any patrons.

And  Jeff asks after watching him for a few months and realizing he is not the typical Bible-thumper: “Ask Avery behind the bar. He knows the Preacher from before.”

And reasons why Jeff is hesitant to approach Avery:  Avery is thick and strong, works out two hours a day at the gym and is would probably make a better bouncer than himself. He is kind of intimidating. Jeff watched him break up a fight between three men before Jeff even crossed the room, all three of them incapacitated with Avery’s weight. He then scowled at Jeff for not being quicker.

And how the conversation goes when Jeff finally approaches Avery:  The staff is doing shots when Jeff brings it up. “How long has the Preacher been coming here?”
Avery gives him an irritated look that quickly disappeared, almost like a twitch that Jeff is not supposed to see. “Maybe about a year. Percy was killed a year ago this January so a little after that.”

And Jeff does not ask anything about Percy, but what Avery volunteers: “I miss Percy every day still. I still feel him dying in my arms. You know I still haven’t washed the shirt with all of his blood on it? It’s stuffed in the back of the closet. I can’t look at it. Shit.”

And what Jeff learns about Percy after a Google search: He was shot walking home with his partner. They caught the guys who did it, charged them for a hate crime based on Avery’s statement, and the trial is yet to come. It took until he saw a picture of Percy, his lanky frame and thin face, for Jeff to understand that Percy is the Preacher’s son. This added even more questions, none that he wants to ask.

And things “Preacher” says the next time Jeff works: “You need to stop all of this. You will die. And nobody will help you. You take the penis out of your mouth and start walking the straight line. Otherwise your life will kill you.”

And realizations Jeff makes when he sees “Preacher”: So many things but he wonders most if the man is a preacher at all. Maybe these warnings are not from the Bible but from a grieving father.