It was the kind of hot that makes you wonder if the universe is just a giant, cosmic microwave and someone accidentally hit the “popcorn” button twice.
Up here in Cascade Springs – which is basically a collection of trailers, gas stations, and pine trees in the Pacific Northwest – we aren’t built for a hundred and five degrees. By Tuesday, the asphalt on Main Street was turning back into a liquid state, threatening to swallow a Honda Civic whole. By Thursday, things got weird.
My buddy, Dave – not his real name, but he looks like a Dave if Dave’s were made entirely of bad posture, thrift-store flannels, and a profound misunderstanding of basic physics – was sitting on my porch, trying to see if a slice of processed cheese would sentiently crawl off a cracker to find shade.
“Mac,” Dave said, wiping a mixture of sweat and cheap energy drink from his forehead. “The mountain is melting.”
“Mountains do that, Dave. It’s called summer. You might remember it from last year, or literally every year before that.”
“No, man. Look at Mt. Rainier. It looks like a scoop of vanilla ice cream left on a car dashboard. It’s slouching.”
I looked; he wasn’t entirely wrong. The snowcap wasn’t just receding; it looked like it was actively trying to slide down the rock face to get away from the sun. But that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was what the ice cream had been keeping in the freezer.
Around 3:00 PM, a guy walked into the yard. Except he didn’t really walk. He sort of… sloshed. Like a heavy-duty trash bag filled with lukewarm clam chowder trying to navigate a brisk walk.
He was wearing a heavy winter parka. In a hundred-and-five-degree weather.
“Hey,” the guy said. His voice sounded like someone wet vacuuming a carpet. “Is this the municipal zone governed by the… human persons?”
Dave blinked, slowly lowering his cheese cracker. “Uh, yeah. Mostly. Except for the raccoons. They run the school board.”
The parka guy nodded, a movement that cause his entire head to briefly deform and then snap back into a roughly spherical shape. “Excellent. I am looking for the Regional Supervisor or Agricultural Yields. My collective requires an immediate supply of sodium chloride. And perhaps some frozen pizza. The pepperoni kind, not the weird white-sauce ones.”
I stared at him. Up close, his skin didn’t look like skin. It looked like a translucent silicone that had been left in a puddle. You could vaguely see things moving around inside his chest – not organs, more like a collection of very confused, glowing jellyfish trying to escape a laundry hamper.
“Dude,” I said. “Are you… thawing?”
“The correct term is liquefying,” the parka guy corrected politely. “The cryo-stasis field on Sector 4 failed approximately three solar rotations ago. We have been under your glacier since the Cenozoic era. It was quite cozy until your atmosphere started behaving like an angry toaster.”
A BRIEF NOTE ON PREHISTORIC SUB-GLACIAL ENTITIES:
As it turns out, if you leave a hyper-advanced, semi-crystalline, gelatinous alien civilization under a mile of solid ice for a few millennia, they don’t die. They just hit the snooze button. But when you crank the global thermostat up to “crispy,” they melt out of the permafrost looking for a snack and some air conditioning.
His name was something that sounded like a wet sponge hitting a tile floor, so we just called him Barnaby. Barnaby was technically a vanguard scout for a subterranean collective currently oozing out of the foothills by the thousands.
We took him into my living room, mostly because I have a portable AC unit that sounds like a jet engine but keeps the room at a crisp sixty-two degrees. The moment Barnaby stepped into the stream of cold air, he let out a sound like a deflating pool floaty and structurally solidified into something resembling a very pale, very doughy human male.
“Oh, sweet mother of the Great Void,” Barnaby sighed, collapsing onto my couch. He immediately left a massive damp spot that I knew would never smell right again. “That is the stuff.”
“Alright, Barnaby,” Dave said, leaning forward with intense gravity. “Let’s talk logistics. You said your people want salt?”
“Yes. Our cellular membranes require high salinity to maintain structural integrity in high-temperature environments. Without it, we become… a puddle. A very sad, conscious puddle that gets sucked into the local water table.”
“And what do we get if we don’t just call the National Guard to come scrape you guys up with a snowplow?” I asked.
Barnaby reached into his parka pocket. His hand briefly turned into a collection of writhing tentacles before stabilizing into five fingers, and pulled out a small, metallic cylinder that thrummed with a low, vibrant purple light.
“This is a localized atmospheric stabilization matrix.” Barnaby said.
“Speak English. Bill Nye.” Dave muttered.
“It’s a remote control for the weather,” Barnaby explained. “We use it to keep our underground caverns at a comfortable sub-zero temperature. If you provide us with twenty tons of rock salt and a subscription to a streaming service – preferably one with all seasons of Workaholics – you can have this to fix your summer. It can turn your sky back into a reasonable, overcast, rain-drizzled paradise.”
Dave and I looked at each other.
On one hand, this was an undocumented alien lifeform demanding bulk condiments. On the other hand, my shirt was currently glued to my back by my own sweat, and sitting in a warehouse behind the local Walmart was a massive surplus of winter road salt because of the mild winter last year.
“Can it make it snow?” Dave asked.
“If you press the blue button, it will snow so hard your local meteorologist will cry.” Barnaby promised.
The actual exchange took place behind the Cascade Springs Tractor Supply Co.
Picture this: two guys in a beaten-up Chevy pickup filled to the brim with bags of industrial ice-melt, facing off against a crowd of about fifty entities that looked like a cross between a lava lamp and a pale, oversized marshmallow man. They were all wearing oversized hoodies and sunglasses they’d clearly stolen from gas station display racks to keep their eyes from melting out of their skulls.
It was tense. A raccoon knocked over a trash can in the alley, and three of the alien guys accidentally liquefied out of sheer panic, turning into a communal pool of glowing blue too before slowly slurping themselves back into their boots.
“Easy boys,” Dave shouted, throwing a 50-pound bag of salt at the lead entity. “We’re all friends here. Just take the sodium and give us the clicker.”
The lead alien – a particularly tall puddle wearing a ‘Seattle Seahawks’ snapback – caught the bag. His arm absorbed the plastic entirely, digested the salt in a sickening crunch-hiss sound, and then spat the empty bag back out of his chest.
He looked refreshed. His skin turned a healthy, opaque shade of skim milk.
“The deal is honored.” The Seahawks alien said. He tossed the metallic cylinder to me. It felt freezing cold to the touch, like a piece of dry ice. “We shall return to our subterranean slumber until your species inevitably burns this planet to a cinder. See you in a few decades.”
With that, the fifty marshmallow men turned around and marched back toward the mountain, their boots making a rhythmic squelch-pop, squelch-pop sound in the summer heat.
We sat on my porch that evening. The metallic cylinder was sitting nearby.
“Go ahead,” Dave said. “Hit the blue button. Make it rain. Make it freeze. I want to wear a hoodie again, Mac. I want it so bad.”
I pressed the blue button.
A beam of pure, violet light shot out of the cylinder, piercing straight through the smoggy sky. Within ten minutes, the temperature dropped forty degrees. Within twenty minutes, actual honest-to-god snowflakes started drifting down onto the evergreen trees. It was beautiful. It was a miracle.
Then the cylinder started vibrating. And smoking. And emitting a high-pitched shrieking sound like a cat caught in a blender.
“Uh,” Dave said, leaning away from it. “Is it supposed to do that?”
“I don’t know, Dave! I didn’t get the user manual!”
The blue button popped off. The device clicked, shifted internally, and a small digital display illuminated on the side. It was a countdown timer.
TIME REMAINING: 24:00:00
CURRENT MODE: ICE AGE 2.0 (Global Firmware Update)
I looked out at the street. The snow wasn’t stopping. In fact, it was starting to come down sideways. Somewhere in the distance, an avalanche siren started to wail.
“Well,” Dave said, zipping up his hoodie and reaching for another cheese cracker. “On the bright side, we don’t have to worry about the heatwave anymore.”
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