“I can’t believe we’re being forced to leave so early,” one of them snarled as he struggled to get to his feet. “I’m never coming back here again.”
“My apologies, sir.” It came out flat, with none of her usual warmth or concern. The alien glared at her, but she already had her back turned to him as she walked away to help some others carry their suitcases into one of the rooms.
I stood in the middle of it all, feeling numb, the Tourists knocking into me as they rushed past. No one was worried about disguises this morning, so the hallway looked like happy hour at that saloon in Star Wars. Grandma emerged from one of the bedrooms and our eyes met. She looked exhausted, and it was the only time I had ever seen her without a smile in her eyes.
“How bad?” I asked.
She pointed at a copy of The Forest Grove Gazette lying on a chair. “Read that,” she said in that same flat, tired tone. “Then meet me downstairs.” She rushed past me and hurried down the steps. I stepped back into my room and looked at the big headline splashed across the front page:
ALIEN SIGHTING IN FOREST GROVE: FACT OR FICTION
My stomach knotted up and I thought I was going to puke. Oh, man, this was so much worse than the thing at the park with Mr. Harnox and the teenagers. This was…this was the worst thing I could ever have let happen.
Underneath the headline: a picture of one of the Jungle Boys, the glow from his body lighting up the forest behind him. It was like those famous pictures of the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot. Grainy. Out of focus. Obviously amateurish, or in this case, taken by a cheap cell phone.
But also like with those famous photographs, your imagination became the camera. It smoothed out the blurry edges. Added depth to a flat image. Found features and details in confused shadows. And then, because some part of your mind wanted to believe, it would let you see a clear picture of a mythical beast.
Or, in this case, you saw exactly what was there: a picture of a glowing alien, obscured by some leafy maple branches, throwing pinecones in the forest.
I scanned the article:
FOREST GROVE—Robert Tate, Forest Grove’s sheriff for nearly two decades, claims he encountered extraterrestrial life forms in the forest north of town late last night.
Tate, also the leader of Cub Scout Troop #17, was camping with a dozen Scouts near the Nooksack River when the mysterious event allegedly occurred just before midnight. As proof, he offers a picture taken by one of the Scouts (see photo above).
“There was a pack of them, maybe ten in all. Their bodies were all lit up and they had the ability to fly,” Tate said. “They were extremely hostile and launched an attack on our campsite. My first priority, as always, was protecting my Scouts.”
The sheriff said he plans to rally community support against The Intergalactic Bed and Breakfast, a local establishment that caters to (story continued on page A7)
I tossed the newspaper aside and rush-limped down the staircase, the hallways empty now. Mr. Harnox was alone in the sitting room, crouching at one of the windows and peeking outside from behind the edge of a curtain. All of the windows were covered.
I pushed aside a corner of the curtain on the next window and looked out. The sight knocked the wind out of me.
Hundreds of people were gathered out front, pressed up against the white picket fence and lining the sidewalks. Some looked through binoculars, and others fiddled with video cameras, apparently preparing for a mob of hostile aliens to run out the front door at any moment.
And there, off to the side of the front porch, a dozen or so men circled Sheriff Tate as he spoke into a walkie-talkie. Most of them were holding shotguns or hunting rifles.
I heard a creak on the stairs. I dropped the curtain and saw Grandma making her way down, holding the railing for support.
“I managed to get the rest of the Tourists out safely,” she said. There were dark circles under her eyes, and for the first time since I’d met her, she looked old. She also looked miserable, but nowhere close to as bad as I felt for causing her to look that way.
“What about the three alien boys?” I asked.
“Their parents got here at the crack of dawn and picked them up. They’re safe.”
“Grandma, I’m so sorry. I didn’t—”
Grandma stepped close and put a finger on my lips. “Shhh. First things first. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, but—”
“You’re well and truly all right, then. You promise?” she asked. She felt my forehead, then studied me. “You were so feverish when they brought you home last night. Delirious. Oh, was I worried. Thank the Creator you’re okay.” She let out a long, shaky breath. “I stayed with you all night, but before you awoke, they showed up outside, and then…then…” She trailed off, too upset to continue.
I put my arm around her shoulders and led her away from the window. I tried to set her down on the couch but she shook me off. “Scrub, there’s something we need to talk about.”
I nodded a little, too nervous to speak.
“When those giant Tourists came to collect their children…we asked the boys for their version of what had happened.…”
I swallowed. I felt like running from the room, hiding somewhere. I knew Grandma wanted me to say something, but I wasn’t strong enough.
“They told us…” She took a deep breath. “Scrub, they told us that you left them alone in the forest. In the middle of the night. All three of them said they went out looking for you, and that’s when they ran into Tate and the Scouts.” She studied my face, waiting for a reaction. I could feel the hot pinpricks of tears behind my eyes, but I refused to let them fall.
Grandma kept her gaze fixed on my face. “I stood up for you. Told the parents that simply couldn’t be true, that you would never do something like that.”
I wanted so badly to deny everything. The perfect lie even popped into my head: I had stepped out around midnight to go to the bathroom behind some nearby trees when the Jungle Boys popped out of the tent and ran away…they had been so mischievous all day…they were probably just waiting for me to drop my guard for a split second so they could escape and cause trouble…I could see it all so clearly that I even started to believe it for a minute.
Grandma was watching me carefully, a glimmer of hope in her eyes. I could tell she would believe anything I said right then.
I opened my mouth, but the story refused to come out. Grandma had trusted me so much since I got here, the only adult who had ever really trusted me with anything, and I couldn’t pay that back with a lie.
I stared at the floor. “It’s true,” I said. I heard Grandma let out a little gasp. I kept looking at the floor for a minute, but then forced myself to look up, into her eyes. “They were sleeping so hard. I figured I could sneak away, just for a few minutes. I thought everything would be fine.”
If Grandma had yelled at me, I think I could have handled it. But it was so much worse when tears leaked out from behind her pink lenses and she looked right through me. “Oh, Scrub. How could you?” She turned to fix her glazed-over stare at the curtains. “And now Tate has won. The whole town’s out there. I’m ruined.” She slumped down on the couch, any traces of her normal energy gone. She looked like a puppet with all of the strings cut.
I knelt beside her. “Grandma, I am so sorry, I can—”
She held up a hand to cut me off. “No. No. It’s mostly my fault,” she said, not even looking at me, her voice barely audible. “I never should have asked you to go. It was just too much responsibility to burden you with. I realize that now.”
“No! That’s not true, Grandma. I can handle it, I promise. I like the responsibility.” She stared at her hands, which were lying palms up on her lap. “If you give me a second chance, I swear I’ll never let you down again.”
“I wish I could give you that chance, Scrub, and never were words more true.” Grandma sighed. “But those people outside have invited fear into their hearts, and now fear has made its home there.” She da
bbed at the corners of her eyes behind her glasses, then gestured toward the window with one skinny arm. “Just look at them. The fear twists their faces so badly that they need some of our disguises just to look like themselves again. I’m afraid they won’t allow me the opportunity to offer you a second chance.”
The stark reality of that fact was impossible to ignore. My body felt like shutting down. I was tired, sore, furious with myself for getting into this mess and—I could admit it—afraid of the mob outside. But I had to fight against all of that; I had to keep a window of hope open, or I’d never be able to forgive myself.
“I can fix this,” I told Grandma. “I can get rid of that mob and save your business.”
She looked up from her hands and gazed steadily at me. “How?”
I took a deep breath. “I don’t know yet.”
Bam! Bam bam bam! Bam!
Grandma’s head jerked up. Mr. Harnox dropped the edge of the curtain and scrambled backward. “Some of them, out there,” he said, gesturing to the window. “They are throwing—”
Crash! A rock smashed through the window and lay on the carpet, surrounded by shards of glass.
I ran to another window and peeked out from behind the drapes. Sheriff Tate and a few of his men were herding a group of teenagers—Eddie and Brian among them, clutching rocks—away from the house.
“You kids get outta here!” he shouted. “This could get dangerous. It’s a man’s job.” The teenagers took a couple of reluctant steps backward, and Tate kept shooing them. “Go on, now.” He raised his voice to address the rest of the crowd. “The women, children, and elderly should clear out too. No telling what might transpire here today. Leave this to the men.” A few people backed up a little bit, but most of the mob remained just as it was. Some of them shouted out at Tate, things like: “We have a right to be here!” and “We care about the safety of this town just as much as you do!”
I dropped the curtain and crossed to Grandma, who was looking more alert now. Mr. Harnox approached us. “Excuse and pardon…but have you thought the idea…to be making some contact with the Intergalactic Police Force?”
“We can’t do that!” Grandma came all the way to life again. She jumped off the couch and paced around the sitting room. “They’ll shut down the transporters. Maybe forever. Even if we do somehow manage to get rid of Tate and the rest of those human fools, I’d still be out of business.” She did a few more laps around the sitting room, shaking her head and muttering to herself.
She looked a little crazed. Mr. Harnox moved to put a hand on her shoulder. “But, please, it is the only way that—” he started to say, but Grandma shook him off and marched toward the front door.
“That’s it. I’m going out there to give that horrible man something’s he’s needed for too many years.”
“No!” I said. I had a vision of her on a rampage, wild-eyed, taking a swing at the sheriff in front of a crowd of angry witnesses. I didn’t think it would help our cause.
I rushed to cut her off. The doorknob was in her hand, and she had pulled the door halfway open when I reached her and grabbed her in a bear hug. Mr. Harnox followed, shutting the door and helping me sit Grandma down on the couch again.
“Let’s try to think this through for a minute. Okay?” I said. Grandma relaxed a bit, nodded at me. “What’s the Intergalactic Police Force?”
“Oh, just what it sounds like.” Grandma sighed, her face draining from an angry red to a defeated pale gray. “Made up of law enforcement types from planets across the Interplanetary Collective. They respond to situations all over the cosmos. But you’re only supposed to call them in a dire emergency.”
The sounds of the assembled crowd were louder now, coming in through the shattered window. “Well, Grandma…I think this is an emergency,” I said.
“But I’ve never had to call them. Not once, in over forty years.”
I winced. I didn’t think I could possibly feel any worse, but the knife of guilt twisted even deeper into my belly.
A long moment passed before Grandma spoke again. “Oh, I suppose you’re right, Mr. Harnox. It’s our only option at this point.”
Mr. Harnox nodded slowly. Grandma looked up at me then, and she seemed a little more like her old self. “According to the official protocol, I’m supposed to get in touch if there is any breach in security. But I just dread calling them. Who knows what they’ll do when they see that crowd of hostile humans outside?”
“Let’s worry about one thing at a time,” I said. I tried to stay focused on the task at hand to keep the fear and the guilt from clouding up my mind. “How do we contact the Intergalactic Police?”
“We need to get to a transporter,” she said. I pulled Grandma out of her seat and escorted her down the hall. Mr. Harnox followed.
“Then we’d better do it pretty quick,” I said.
We hurried up the stairs and entered the first guest room that we came to. I tapped on the transporter door. “Now, how do we do this?”
“We need to punch in our code—it contains the ID number for the inn, along with our planetary longitude and latitude coordinates.”
I gestured to the transporter input console. “Okay, go ahead and type it in.”
“It’s a really long number.” Grandma made a face. “I can never remember it.”
“Then how—”
“Wait, I know just where to find it.” Grandma stepped out and opened up a storage closet. Mr. Harnox helped her drag a bunch of rumpled cardboard boxes into the hall. Finally she found the right one and started lifting out papers. Dust clouds billowed up from the boxes and hung in the air above her.
I nudged the edge of a curtain and peeked out the window. The crowd looked bigger from up here, and it was growing by the minute. People had spilled over the fence and were filling up the lawn. The front lines were swelling dangerously close to the porch.
Mr. Harnox came and stood over my shoulder, studying the crowd. He gave me a very worried look, and I put a finger to my lips and shook my head.
“Grandma.” I tried to block out the panic, keep my voice neutral. “I think we need to hurry up a little because—”
“Got it,” Grandma said, hurrying back into the room. “We just enter these numbers here”—she stepped up to the console, punching buttons while she looked at the paper—“and then enter the number code for the IGPF, kind of an Outer Space nine-one-one. There.” She stepped back but kept looking at the console for a moment. “They should get the message instantaneously.”
Grandma shut the transporter door. The blue circle appeared briefly, then flared out. She turned and faced me and Mr. Harnox. “It’s done,” she said in a small voice.
“You said something about them shutting down the transporters?”
Grandma nodded. “I’ve heard some variation of the same story from many Tourists. Apparently the IGPF took control of the transporter system hundreds of years ago, after a mass escape from a prison planet in a remote galaxy. Once the inmates stormed through the transporters, they were impossible to find. Now the police can shut down any and all transporters remotely with the touch of a button. As soon as they get an emergency call, they turn off the transporters for that location until everything has been resolved.” She put her hand on Mr. Harnox’s arm. “And you’ve been waiting so long to go home, you poor thing. Who knows how long it will be now?”
Mr. Harnox put one of his gray hands on top of Grandma’s and patted her. “It is not the problem,” he said. “I would not leave while the danger was all around, in any case.”
I admit, it stung a little to realize I had a lot to learn about bravery and treating others humanely from someone who lived millions of light-years from Earth.
“So what do we do now?” I said.
Grandma sighed. “We wait for them to show up.”
I thought of the growing crowd outside. “When will that be?”
“Hopefully, soon.” She leaned in and whispered to me. “At the very least they can protec
t Mr. Harnox. There’s no telling what Tate and that crowd would do if they got their hands on him in the middle of their frenzy.”
I shuddered at the thought. “What can I do to help?” I asked. “There must be something.”
Grandma chewed her bottom lip for a minute. “We need to keep Tate and that crowd out of this house until they get here.”
A booming knock on the front door. We all jumped. “I’ll get it,” I said. I was terrified about what I would find on the other side of that door, but it felt good to be doing something, to at least work some of the adrenaline out of my body.
We trotted down the stairs and opened the door, and there was Tate in his sheriff’s uniform. Standing behind him on the porch was Deputy Tisdall, along with a few of those men with guns. Tate wore the sunglasses that obscured his eyes and chomped on another one of his toothpicks. Most horribly, he was smiling.
“Pardon me, ma’am,” he said. “But the citizens of this town will no longer stand for your shenanigans, especially when they put others in danger.” Here he gestured to the mob behind him.
Grandma just stared at him, speechless. It was disturbing to see her look helpless in front of him.
“I have a petition signed by several good people from town,” Tate said, waving a clipboard in Grandma’s face. “It calls for an immediate shutdown of this facility and a thorough investigation of the premises. If you’ll stand aside, ma’am, I would like to start that investigation right now.”
I put my arm around Grandma. Her shoulders trembled.
I let Grandma go and stepped in front of her and faced Tate, my heart beating wildly.
“Do you have a search warrant?” I asked.
His smile disappeared. “You’re in no position to ask me questions, boy.”
“Do you have a search warrant?”
“Well, no. But as this petition clearly states—”
“You and I both know that petition wouldn’t stand up in a court of law,” I said. At least I hoped it wouldn’t. I was just saying what I’d heard in police movies. This was no time to show weakness or uncertainty, though. “If you come back with a warrant, then we’ll have to let you in. But if you don’t have one, you can sit out on the lawn with everyone else.” I hoped my voice didn’t sound as shaky as it felt.
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