Betts looked behind him again. He'd thought he'd heard another noise. But nothing. Was it just his imagination? Was it delusions brought on by walking all day in the parching hot sun? Or the wind? One thing was for sure, though. It was scaring the hell out of him. His face was taught and woven with dark creases of fear. He just knew something was following him. 

But he couldn't explain it. Not even to himself. To simply look around, everything seemed normal. Except...except in those moments when he thought he saw something. Something just out of the corner of his eye, like a lingering dark shadow. He'd turn to look and there would be nothing. But always there would be the unshakeable feeling of him being watched by someone...something. Like eyes burning into his back. Eyes that were cold, and scrutinizing...and somehow malevolent.

But he was tired. It could all just be fatigue. His mind going swimmy from pure exhaustion. It could be just that, couldn't it? Sure it could. 

He looked up from the macadam he was traveling on and saw a sign up ahead of him.

SONNY'S OLD TIME SALOON, read the sign in rustic wooden lettering.

That's what I need, thought Betts. I need a drink. Something to settle me down. I've just been walking too long, that's all. My imagination is starting to get the better of me.

He walked up to the front door of Sonny's saloon and went in. The saloon was barren this time of the day, one o'clock in the afternoon. Not exactly happy hour. There were several round tables with white tablecloths draped over them. Lyre back wooded chairs flanked around the tables. Betts approached the bar, but there was no one behind it. He heard a rattle in the back and called out toward the back room. 

"Hello? Anyone here?" 

More cacophony, then footsteps coming closer.

A portly man dressed in a white shirt and suspenders approached him from behind the bar. "Yeah, Mister. Something I can get you?"

Betts looked at the large man for a moment. His eyes had a vacuous glaze over them for a few seconds. Then he replied.

"Uhh...whiskey please."

"Coming right up, mac," said the big bartender as he withdrew a shot glass and bottle from beneath the bar. He poured and slid the shot to Betts. He set the bottle on the bar top. 

Betts downed the shot in a quick swig, flinching away from the hot blush that imbued his face. His eyes slowly pealed open and darted back and forth before finally jumping to the big bartender who was looking at him a little strangely.

"You okay, mac," inquired the corpulent bartender.

Betts's eyes jittered a little before answering.

"I guess so...I'm just a little edgy, that's all."

"So I see," said the bartender, widening a smile above his triple chin.

"I know how that can be. I used to dump em down that fast when I was going through my first divorce. I can sympathize."

"Umm," Betts grunted and pushed the shot glass back toward the bartender. "I'll have another."

"Yeah," said the bartender, smiling his rubbery smile again. "That's what I used say." He poured Betts another.

Betts swung the second shot back, seemingly even faster than the first. He flinched again, his eyes nearly tearing as he looked back at the bartender. His face seemed drawn with a lamenting kind of sorrow.

The bartender looked at him again, with a once over kind of visual sweep.

"You're not from around here are you, buddy?"

Betts ran the back of his hand over cracked lips.

"Nope...I'm not."

The bartender looked at the backpack that Betts had mounted on his back. Looked at his dry hands with the dirt under the nails. He new almost immediately that this guy was a vagrant. A nomadic kind of spirit that goes wherever the wind seems to blow him.

"Hitchhiker?" asked the bartender.

"Yeah. I bum rides...but lately it's been my feet that have been taking me where I need to go. And now I think I'm just dead tired. So God awful tired I think I'm cracking up."

"How so?" asked the bartender with moderate interest.

Betts jaw slackened. His mouth became an oval and his eyebrows sprouted up, making deep wrinkles in his forehead. He was just about to say something, but relented at the last second.

"Well, I may just tell you, mister." He looked at the shot glass with a fatuous smile and lids hanging heavy over his eyes. "After a few more of these."

Betts pushed the shot glass across the bar again. The bartender smiled and poured another.

About a half hour later, Betts sat at the bar, pretty well pickled. The bartender had taken to arranging his inventory and wiping down the bar and every few minutes or so, pouring Betts another shot of whiskey.  

"Say? Howz bout uh nuhther over here?" slurred Betts from the end of the bar.

The bartender walked down the length of the bar and stood in front of Betts, a wry tight lipped look on his face.

"Hey, pal. Don't you think you've had enough?" 

"Nope," said Betts, pushing the shot glass across the bar top once again. He took out a twenty spot and started dangling in front of the portly man's face. "Bartender, set me up another round!"

The bartender grabbed the shot glass and set it under the bar.

"Okay, buddy. That's enough. You're through...:

"Hey hey hey hey hey," yelped Betts, his brows lowering over his bloodshot eyes like awnings. "What seems to be the problem here? You got some sudden aversion to money or something? Correct me if I'm wrong, but this IS a saloon, isn't it?"

"Look, chum. I ain't got no aversions to turning an honest buck. I damn well make my living tilting bottle to glass. But I know when someone has put down more than they can handle. And you have." 

"Have I?" 

"I think so," said the bartender, emphatically.

Betts fingered the glass, stared at the bar top, then looked back to the big bartender.

"S'pose yer right."

"Of course I'm right. Why, what if you were to get loaded and stagger out in front of a car on that highway out there. Get killed even! They'd point fingers at me. Nuthin doin, chum. Like I said, this is my bread and butter."

"Okay if I just sit here for a bit then?"

The bartender sucked a breath and wrung the dishtowel he had in his hands between paunch fists.

"Sure, buddy. You just sit there and dry out. Don't know why you drank so God awful much anyway?"

The bartender began away down the length of the bar, but Betts's voice snatched at him.

"Cuz I think I'm losing my mind, that's why."

The bartender turned back to him and walked back up the length of the bar.

"Okay, mac, I'll ask you. Why are you losing your mind?"

Betts looked guardedly back and forth before he spoke.

"Cuz I've been seeing things, mister."

The bartender's sow-like face folded with thick dour lines. His beady eyes pinched little squints.

"Pink Elephants maybe?"

Betts didn't look amused, only bleary eyed.

"No...I can't explain it, but it...it's like something has been watching me out there."

"You mean someone's following you?"

"Yeah....they have been for hours."

"They? So there's more than one of em, eh?" asked the bartended, trying to make sense of Betts's blathering.

"I...think there's more than one," Betts mumbled under toxic breath. 

"Well, if someone's following ya, why not just report it to the cops. Have them check it out."

"Can't." whispered Betts.

"And why not?" asked the bartender with a regretful look on his face.

Betts looked around again, as if to check that no one was listening.

"Cuz ya can't SEE them."

Oh holy shit, thought the bartender, rolling his eyes. This guy's really gone gone gone!

"Let me see if I heard you right," said the bartender, screwing his face into a convoluted twist. "You can't SEE them?"

"Nope. At least not clearly?"

The bartender righted himself, fingered his temple and then said, "Okay...lemme see if I got it straight. You're being followed by some people you can't see, or at least can't see clearly. That it?"

"Basically."

"Buddy you don't need a drink...you need a shrink!"

"Hold on! Just wait a minute!"

The bartender turned back to Betts with a frosty look and tightly pressed lips.

"Haven't you ever had the feeling of being watched? The feeling that you are SURE someone is looking at you? And...you turn around and nothing."

"Sure that's happened to me. But that's just nerves or paranoia. It doesn't mean someone was really watching."

"Ahh. That's what they want you to think, mister. They don't want to be seen because they want to study us... our habits. Learn our vulnerabilities. Watch how we react to certain things."

"Who wants to study us?" asked the bartender.

Betts leaned over the bar and whispered covertly into the bartender's ear.

"The aliens. The ones who have come to observe us."

The bartender smiled at the idiotic statement and curled a fat lip into a fatuous grin.

"Aliens? Oh the gray little guys with the big black eyes! Did they take you for a ride in their space ship?"

"I'm serious, mista," said Betts, floundering over his thick tongue. "There are REAL aliens among us I believe. Only not the ones we think are the aliens. The REAL aliens are the ones we can't see."

The bartender smirked and pressed on with the line of questioning, if for nothing more that pure amusement.

"But you said you COULD see them. Or at least not clearly." 

Betts looked about again, then curled a finger at the bartender, gesturing for him to come closer. The big bartender complied and cocked an ear toward Betts's pale and puckered lips. 

"I bet you didn't know that I was blind at birth."

The bartender shook his head no.

"T'is true. Blind as a bat right outta my Momma's womb. But when I was around three years old my parents heard about this...this mystic. Heard that she had miraculous powers of healing. Could heal the deaf and the dumb and the maimed, just like Jesus. They took me to her. She made a salve out of plant leaves and bug feces. Put it over my eyes. Told my parents to keep it that way for two full days. And sure as I'm sitting here, when they took the salve off two days later, and I opened my eyes...I could SEE. Good Lord in heaven I could see!"

Someone puts shit on this guys eyes and he can see? thought the bartender.

"But what they didn't know was that I had more than just my vision, but something extra. I had extraordinarily acute vision. I could read things from long distances, bright light that hurt other peoples' eyes didn't phase me. I could even see quite acutely in the dark." Betts paused a second his wide eyes rimmed with mounting horror, then: "And now I can see little glimpses of those things. Those beings that are following me. I can't see them clear mind you, ...but out of the corners of my eyes...I can see..."

The bartender sighed, slouched his weight over the top of the bar, and looked at Betts with weary, half closed eyes.

"So...what does this all add up to, mister?" asked the bartender. 

"Don't you see?" said Betts, his groggy eyes growing fiery. "This is how the aliens do it. This is how they watch us without us really knowing!"

"Uh huh," grunted the bartender. "And what about these little gray guys with the black eyes that are plastered all over the tabloids and the internet? What about them?"

Betts looked up and seemed to stare into space. He spoke as if he were speaking in a trance. His eyes were glassy and far away.

"They're the decoys! They're what the real aliens want us to think are the aliens...but aren't aliens at all. They want to lure us into believing that so that they can observe us unfettered."

The bartender stood up straight again and cleared his throat. He shook his head, making his dark shock of hair wobble on his large skull.

"Like I said before...you've had enough!" The bartender began walking away. "Wait!" squealed Betts and lashed out and snatched at the bartender's thick wrist.

The bartender looked down at Betts's hand with a hard lipped stare, then coldly into Betts's eyes.

"You best let go of me, buddy, or you'll have more than a hang over to worry about!"

Betts's eyes trembled and his grip loosened. The bartender slowly withdrew his hand.

"Sorry...it's just that...I know there is something out there. I've heard things move behind me as I walked, odd little whisper sounds. Sounds I'm sure were footsteps. Things I couldn't have imagined!"

The bartender leaned over toward Betts again, he stared him straight in the eye and said, "Look, buddy, you're tired. The heat out there is hot enough to griddle pancakes on the asphalt. Your mind just started to wander, that's all. But now I have to ask you to wander too. This ain't no psychiatrist's office and I ain't no shrink. And seeing as though you are in no shape for buying, I'll just have to ask you to leave the premises. Cuz to tell you the truth, ya kinda spook me, mister." 

"NO!" yelped Betts. "I won't go!" 

The bartender's face grew firm and he started around the front of the bar.

"You're going, chum. I won't have you scaring away any potential customers coming in here with wild crazy talk. Now let's go!" The bartender grabbed Betts by both upper arms in a bear-like grip and lifted him off of the barstool. Betts tried to fight, but the big man's meaty claws were too strong for him.

"Let me go!" reeled Betts. "You can't make me go out there! They're going to get me! They've been following me! THEY'RE GOING TO GET ME!" 

"Yeah yeah," scoffed the big bartender as he wrestled Betts toward the door and pushed him out with one last mighty shove. "Give everyone on Mars my regards!"

The door slammed behind Betts with a thud and the bartender clicked the lock into its latch. He expected to hear Betts pounding on the door...but nothing. He turned and slapped his big hands together. A satiated smile hooked above his loose jowls.

"That's that." he said to himself. 

He walked back toward the bar and suddenly halted. He looked at one of the small round lunch tables he'd forgotten to clear. It made the place look untidy. He decided he had better straighten it up first, before sane customers came in. He didn't want to appear to be running a sloppy outfit.

He went to the table and took off the beer glasses and nearly empty pretzel basket. He brushed most of the crumbs from the tablecloth and dumped them into the tissue papered lining of the small whicker basket. He took the basket and glasses and set them over on the bar top. Then he turned back to the table and looked at the table cloth. It needed shaking out. He should take it outside and shake the crumbs off.

Hope that fucking whacko isn't still outside! he thought grimly to himself.

He bundled the tablecloth up and shoved it under his armpit as he made for the door. He opened the door with a small, cautious creak and poked his head out. His neck throbbed back and forth like a wary pigeon and he opened the door all the way. No sign of the guy in sight. He couldn't help thinking that he got out of sight mighty fast. Seemed to almost vanish! He shrugged and moved outside to where the weathervane was spinning in a slight fall breeze atop a pole mounted just outside the saloon. He started to unravel the tablecloth and then thought he heard something. Something like small gibberish mixed in with the faint rush of the wind. He listened for a moment and nothing. It must have been his imagination.

He flailed the table cloth out in front of him and flapped it in the air with a couple of sharp tugs. He suddenly looked down and saw that the cloth had landed on something. There was a figure underneath! It was the outline of some kind of small being! In terror he let the tablecloth go and backed up back into the saloon, a gagged scream caught in his throat. The thing under the sheet was heading toward him, scrambling with an eerie quick scamper. Then he heard the strange garbled sound of small quick voices scatter in the air behind him. Bottles fell off the bar top, as if something small and fast had run along the top of the bar and kicked them out of its way.

The little shrill voices grew louder...faster. He felt something small and slimy crawling onto him. First one being...then two, then three, four...more and more. He opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came. The horror was too thick to push up from his clenched and terrified throat and the last thing he heard amongst the shrilly voices was the sound of the saloon door slamming, as all of his consciousness funneled out of him.

And suddenly everything went black...