About Appletree Court:
Bernie’s latest raid takes him to the subdivision of Shady Groves. But things quickly go wrong. First, the house Bernie is robbing turns out to be not as deserted as he thought. And then, a flying saucer from outer space appears in the sky above Shady Groves…
This is a short story of 3600 words or approx. 14 print pages in the The Day the Saucers Came… series, but may be read as a standalone.
Excerpt:
June 9th, 1956. The day the saucers came. And coincidentally, also the day I went straight for good. Not that I would ever in a million years have guessed what would happen when I got up that morning and went to work.
At the time, I was… — well, let’s not shilly-shally about it, shall we? I was a thief, a burglar. I made my living by breaking into other people’s homes, stealing their stuff and selling it.
I’d been in the business for twenty years at that point. Got started as a kid during the Great Depression, when life was hard and honest jobs were scarce. During the war, I went straight for a while and joined the army like a good patriotic all American boy. Got sent to Europe and promptly relapsed. There were simply too many homes, shops and museums to loot and no one to stop me. Hell, my commanders even encouraged me, as long as they got their cut.
Back home, I’d continued where I left off before the war. I broke into homes and shops, stole whatever caught my fancy and sold it. In ‘47, I got caught and did time in Sing Sing. Stetson, Bernie, prisoner number 26072 — that’s me.
By the time I got out, things had changed… a lot. The postwar economic boom was in full swing. People had a lot more money than before and a lot more stuff, which meant there was a lot more to steal.
And then there was that most glorious of all American inventions, the suburb. While I was doing time, they’d sprung up like weeds where they’d been only empty fields before. Street upon street and row upon row of nigh identical houses on large lots. A car in every driveway, a TV in every living room.
Best of all, those suburbs were largely deserted during the day. The husbands were at work, the kids were at school, the wives… — well, sometimes they were home, so you had to be careful. But much of the time, they were out shopping or playing bridge and tennis at the local country club with the other bored suburban wives. Or they were screwing the mailman or a vacuum cleaner salesman, while their husbands were at work.
Suburbs were pure opportunity, not just for the upwardly mobile middle classes, but also for notorious criminal elements (that’s what the judge said at my sentencing, at any rate) like me.
By the summer of ‘56, I had my raids down to an art. I’d invested some of my ill-gotten gains into a cherry red Chevrolet pick-up. I parked the pick-up on the street in broad daylight and walked right up to the house I was planning to rob as if I belonged there. I always dressed in non-descript workman’s clothes, a cap or hat pulled deep into my face, so no one would look twice at me, let alone remember me. If anybody challenged me, which happened very rarely, I was a gardener, plumber, pest control, air conditioning technician hired by the owners of the house to mow the lawn, unclog the toilet, kill off the roaches or install a new air conditioning unit. Fabulous invention that, air conditioning. Homes kept cool at the height of summer. Truly, we were living in the future, we were.
Those new suburban homes might have all sorts of fancy furnishings, but the locks on the doors were a joke. Two minutes and I was in. And then I would grab whatever I fancied, carry it out to my cherry red pick-up and drive off after I was done.
I didn’t just stick to one suburb, but I switched around, hitting Leafy Gardens one day, Magnolia Orchard the next and Placid Acres the day after. That way, I remained unpredictable enough that the coppers had a hard time tracking me. And if the ground got too hot for me in one town, I simply moved on to the next. As for the marks, their insurance paid for everything anyway.
It was a good life and an easy, but lucrative job. So of course, it couldn’t last.
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About Cora Buhlert:
Cora has been writing, since she was a teenager, and has published stories, articles and poetry in various international magazines. She is the author of the Silencer series of pulp style thrillers, the Shattered Empire space opera series, the In Love and War science fiction romance series, the Helen Shepherd Mysteries and plenty of standalone stories in multiple genres.
When Cora is not writing, she works as a translator and teacher. She also runs the Speculative Fiction Showcase and the Indie Crime Scene and contributes to the Hugo-nominated fanzine Galactic Journey. Cora is a finalist for the 2020 Hugo Award.
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