I nodded, but I didn’t buy any of that. No way did this place dry out in one night. And no way was it natural for the ground to bubble like that, ever. This whole clearing had been as eerie and unnatural as—
Scratchull. Of course! His eyes had glowed red when he heard I was coming back from a swamp up in the woods. And then he had been so firm about the fact that they shouldn’t go check it out last night. I’d been too tired and shaken up by my near-death experience to think about it then, but why would Scratchull care if they drove the Jeep in the dark? Why would he automatically argue that the whole thing was perfectly normal?
Because he was trying to cover something up.
I looked at my watch. Since Scratchull didn’t sleep, he had had almost ten hours to get up here. Had he fixed it somehow? I had no idea how he could do that, but I was sure he was behind all of this.
And suddenly I knew what I had to do.
I didn’t say anything to Tate or Amy. Just marched to the Jeep.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“Are you sure?” said Amy. “You don’t want to look around, see if maybe the marshy ground shifted into the surrounding woods or something?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Tate walked out of the clearing and back to the Jeep, shaking his head and muttering, “Crazy kid. Wasting my time…”
“Sorry, Mr. Tate,” I said. “I guess it wasn’t as bad as I thought. What do you need to get done today?”
“Lots of odd jobs, this and that,” Tate said. “First I need to take Scratchull into town for a supply run at the hardware store. He says there’s lots of stuff he needs to finish up our projects.”
Perfect. Scratchull’s room would be empty. That would give me the opportunity I needed.
“Do you want to hang out today, David?” Amy said, interrupting my plotting. “I can probably postpone a few of my jobs until tomorrow.” She looked at me hopefully. “We could make up for our lost outing last night. Besides, it might be good to have a chance to talk about…things.”
Part of me wanted to say yes. Most of me, actually. Amy would be the perfect ally.
But she had all of her hopes for the future of the planet pinned on Scratchull. As much as I hated to admit it to myself, Amy might not be entirely on my side right now.
This was something I was going to have to do alone. “Sorry, I’m going to be busy today.” It didn’t sound nearly as nice as I wanted it to. “Maybe later,” I offered.
“Yeah,” she said, her eyes cold now. “We’ll have to check our schedules.”
The rest of the ride back down to Grandma’s house was quiet.
I watched from behind a spaceship sculpture as Tate and Scratchull walked through the gate in the picket fence to Tate’s Jeep. Scratchull refused to wear makeup, but he did put on a hat, sunglasses, and gloves to cover up most of his glaring white skin. As soon as they headed toward town, I raced to the back of the house, pulling Snarffle along behind me.
Scratchull kept his room locked; I had already tested that out this morning. Snarffle and I climbed Tate’s watchtower to the platform that was level with the top floor of Grandma’s place.
I dropped to one knee and looped Snarffle’s leash around a railing, then placed my hands on either side of his purple head. The little alien gazed up at me with those wide green eyes. “I need you to stay here, okay? And if that creepy old Skull-Face comes back, you need to let me know. You got me?”
Snarffle panted and bobbed up and down. Now, I wasn’t one of those people who really believed that pets could understand what I was saying. But Snarffle made the same whistling-growling noise every time he saw Scratchull, so I figured that would be as good an alarm system as I was going to get. If Snarffle tipped me off to the white alien’s arrival, I could dash out the front door of his room. Besides, I should only need a minute or two in there, tops.
I tightened the straps on my backpack. Scratchull’s room was three windows down. I moved quickly, knowing if I stopped to think, I would chicken out.
I braced myself against one of the watchtower pillars and slowly slid my foot off the platform. It dangled out in the open air, above the terrifying drop-off, before I managed to place the tip of my shoe on the nearest window ledge. I jounced my foot up and down to test how securely it was attached—sometimes the wood on old houses gets pretty soft, especially in a climate like this. But the windowsill held firm.
I grabbed the gutter, then eased my other foot onto the sill, and finally let go of the watchtower altogether. The gutter was good for balance, but if my feet slipped, there was no way it would support my entire body weight. I wondered fleetingly whether the drop would be enough to kill me, or just break both of my legs. Then I decided I’d be better off not thinking about it at all.
I worked myself sideways, sliding feet and hands inches at a time. The boy who looked back at me from the reflection in the window appeared to be terrified.
I got to the very edge of the first windowsill, then had to lift my foot and seek out the next one with my sneakered toes. I extended my grip farther along the gutter until I was leaning far enough to be able to bring my other foot to the new ledge.
My legs were shaky and my head light from the exertion of maintaining perfect balance. I tightened my grip on the gutter and the plastic creaked and groaned. I froze in position and held my breath for a very long time.
A little alien stared up at me from inside the guest room. His tiny green hands grabbed the bottom of the window and yanked it up.
“What are you doing out there?” he said.
“Ummm…exercise,” I said. “House climbing. It’s very popular on this planet.”
The alien slammed the window shut and ran out of sight. “Mom!” I heard him call. “Earthlings are weird!”
I sidestepped as quickly as I dared, then lunged over so I was standing in front of Scratchull’s window. If I could just get one minute in there, I would be able to set the stage to reveal Scratchull to be the liar that he was. At least that’s what I was gambling on doing.
But how was I going to get the window open now? It’s not like I could let go of the gutter.
I slowly lifted one foot and placed the tip against the window. I pressed in, not hard enough to break it, but enough so the rubber gripped the glass. I pulled upward; my shoe squeaked along the surface, and the window budged a little. Maybe a quarter of an inch.
I repeated this until there was enough space to jam my foot in under the window. I lifted my knee with a grunt and the window slid most of the way open.
I dropped down and stepped inside the room. Ugh—what was that smell? I quickly found the source of the odor: a huge aquarium in the corner. There was no water, but it was filled with a writhing, squirming pile of something.
I crept closer. Gross! The aquarium was crawling with slugs. I have met life forms from all over the universe, and I have to say that regular old Earth slugs are the most disgusting.
If you’ve never seen one up close, a slug basically looks like a four-inch-long, squirming, pulsating booger. They come in classic booger colors: green, yellow, and brownish-black. They are sort of fascinating in their grossness. I mean, one of the cool parts about meeting all of the aliens was seeing how their bodies developed in an environment totally different from Earth’s. But how could you even start to explain the existence of slugs? In school they told us that the law of nature favors the survival of the fittest. So aren’t species supposed to get stronger, faster, and smarter over time? If so, it’s strange that billions of years of natural selection would come up with a defenseless snot creature that moves about as fast as continental drift.
The hallway floorboards creaked outside the door. Footsteps. I froze, but whoever it was tromped right on by. I realized I was studying the slugs to avoid the terror of being in Scratchull’s room. Time to put my plan into action.
I slipped off my backpack, unzipped it, and withdrew Amy’s enhanced baby monitor. Feeling the he
ft of its plastic case, I instantly felt guilty. She probably would have let me borrow it, but then she would have asked what I was going to do with it.
I would explain everything to her after I found some incriminating evidence. I mean, that creepy alien had to be responsible for the disturbing, bubbling, man-eating mud. I figured it shouldn’t take me too long to pin it on him if I could keep him under constant surveillance.
Still, sneaking into Amy’s room to find the baby monitor had not been my finest hour. She had hidden it in one of her drawers, and I’d had to dig through some of her…um, dainty things…to find it. Okay, enough about that.
I also felt guilty because I had sort of looked at some pictures she had on her dresser. I couldn’t help it—they were right there, out in the open. The one I couldn’t get out of my mind showed her with a big group in the snow, surrounded by sleds and inner tubes, probably up near the top of Mount Baker. Everyone had their arms thrown around one another’s shoulders as they posed for the camera, their breath fogging the air.
They were all bundled up, but I could tell from the flashes of multicolored and scaly skin underneath hoods and scarves that this was no middle-school ski trip—Amy had taken a group of aliens up to go sledding. She was standing between two tall Tourists and had that lopsided grin on her face. Was one of those her teen alien friend, the one who set her up with the translator? The one who had visited three or four times (or more?) since I had been here last time? The one who she probably wanted to see again because he was so—
The transporter in the corner started humming. The circular light in the middle glowed blue, and a thin layer of steam floated out from underneath the door.
Not good.
The light pulsated in rhythm with the humming, getting faster and faster and louder and louder until finally it stopped altogether with a Whoosh!
The door would open any second. No time to get back out the window or even fiddle with the lock on the front door. Crap! What was I going to do?
The transporter door swung open. I lunged into Scratchull’s closet and pulled the door closed behind me, leaving a small slit to peek through.
The alien that came out of the transporter stood about four feet tall, and his coloring was bright greenish-yellow. His face sort of melted into his torso without any neck. There were three black ovals near the top of his head that I figured were his eyes, and below these a fat, round, snoutish-looking thing stuck out. I couldn’t decide whether it was a nose or a mouth.
And his legs. He didn’t have any. The bottom half of his body was…it’s kind of hard to describe, but from the waist region down he looked like a jellyfish. Sort of a mushy blob that shook when he moved.
There was no way that Grandma would be able to disguise something like that enough for him to mingle, undetected, with the citizens of Earth. But I had a feeling this alien was not here for a vacation.
Even without legs, he moved really fast. He shot out of the transporter and zipped around the room as if he were looking for something—glancing out the window, peeking under the bed—and then he was moving straight toward the closet, reaching for the doorknob. He had too many fingers to count, the tips hollow circles that opened and closed with a squelching sound.
It was all happening so fast, I hardly had time to be terrified. I searched for an excuse that would explain why I might be crouching in Scratchull’s closet and came up empty. The green alien’s fingers closed around the doorknob and every muscle in my body tensed up. I was so nervous I even closed my eyes, like a little kid does when he wants to disappear. Great move on my part. I could hear the closet door start to creak, but just then the door to the bedroom burst inward and slammed against the wall.
My eyes snapped open. Scratchull stormed into the room. When he saw Mr. Green Jellyfish-Legs, he pulled himself up to his full height, nearly scraping his gleaming white skull head against the ceiling.
Then Scratchull started talking and the most hideous noise came out. It was scratchy and hissy, with an undercurrent of unbearable screeching, like when your dad is cutting his steak, but then something monumental happens in the football game he’s watching on TV, and he gets so agitated that he doesn’t realize he has cut right through his steak, and now he’s scraping his knife against the bare plate—like fingernails on a chalkboard, only way worse—and the TV keeps showing the slow-motion replay over and over, and your dad keeps getting madder and madder and just keeps scraping that blade against the china in frustration. His voice sounded just like that.
Greenie cowered before Scratchull, covering his head with his arms. He opened his mouth and strange sounds came out, but these were softer and rounder, like the blub-blub-blub of bubbles in a water cooler. I finally figured out they were talking to each other in their native languages.
Moving as slowly as I could to avoid making any sound, I flipped on the baby monitor, keeping the volume low. I pressed the listening end against my ear.
“…have you been? Do you suppose I am enjoying my forced exile on this desolate rock?” Scratchull hissed.
“I am sorry, Master, so, so sorry. I have spent every moment trying to find what you requested, never thinking to stop for food or rest. You must believe me, Master.”
Scratchull loomed over Greenie, those gray spiderweb lines creeping out of his collar and spreading across his neck as if his skin was about to crack into a thousand pieces. Greenie shrank before the white alien, putting his hands out before him and scrunching his head down into his rounded shoulders.
“Oh, please, Master. Please. I have had to smuggle bits and pieces past transporter security on a dozen different planets.” Scratchull took another step forward. Greenie shivered all over, his gelatinous body quivering. “And these things you ask for…they are highly illegal. I am at great risk everywhere I go, and it takes me longer to—”
Fwap! Scratchull backhanded Greenie, and it sounded like he had slapped a bowlful of Jell-O. Splorsh! The effect was about the same, too, as little greenish-yellow blobs of the alien’s body broke off and splattered around the room.
“Enough excuses!” roared Scratchull, the fissures in his skin growing darker, spreading above the jawline and across his face. “Tell me you have brought the new device.”
“Yes, yes indeed,” Greenie said. He zipped along the wooden floor, scooping up the scattered bits of himself and pressing them back into his body. “Of course, Master. You know I never leave you wanting for anything.” Greenie slithered closer to the closet, and I did another full-body cringe. But instead of opening the door, he scraped a few more mushy blobs from where they were stuck to the wood and patted them back onto his head, smoothing them over like a sculptor working with clay. He slipped away again, and I let out a long, shaky breath.
“Well? Where is it?” Scratchull said.
“Right here, tucked away. Safely hidden from those who would do harm to Master.” Greenie jammed both hands inside the lower half of his body, the jellyfish part, and pulled them out again with a suction-y slurping sound. He held a sleek black device about the size of a deck of playing cards. “Do you see? I have assembled the whole thing from a smuggled piece here and a borrowed bit there, always according to your instructions. And I brought it for you, just as I promised. Do you see how—aaahhhh!”
A thin stream of white lightning shot out of the device and sizzled as it struck the bed. Instantly the big four-poster dissolved into a…well, into a puddle of bed. A viscous fluid seeped across the floor, the bright colors of the bedspread swirling around on the surface, mixed in with the darker wood tones of the headboard.
“Fool!” The lines on Scratchull’s face were pitch black now and extended all the way to the top of his head. He wrenched the device out of Greenie’s hands and then delivered another backhanded blow.
Greenie slipped around the room, collecting bits of himself and mashing them back into his body.
“This is not a toy!”
“I know, Master, I know. Of course not. It was an accide
nt, Great One. A slip of my clumsy fingers. Please forgive me.” Greenie smoothed his head back into shape, looking up at Scratchull as the tall, white alien delicately turned the device this way and that, studying it from all angles. “But at least this way you can see that it works, yes? Master is pleased, correct?”
The spiderweb lines covering Scratchull’s face slowly faded. “Perhaps. The bed, of course, was merely for the sake of appearance.” Scratchull sneered and made a dismissive gesture at the bed puddle with a long-fingered white hand. “But what kind of assurance do I have that this will work any better than the last one you brought me?”
“Ah, yes, assure you I can and assure you I will, Exalted Being. I took the power cells from the research facility on Balderbahn.” Greenie sidled closer to Scratchull, gazing up at his skull face. “The work they are doing with the storage of regenerative energy is the best in the—”
“I know it’s the best. It’s mine. They poached the formula from me without any regard for proper compensation when the Collective mandated the sharing of knowledge within the scientific community.” The dark-purple circles under Scratchull’s eyes smoldered. “Shortsighted cretins.”
The thick gel of the bed puddle oozed across the floor, and Greenie slithered out of its path. He studied the melted mess for a few moments. “What do you call your invention, Master?”
Scratchull held up the little black device, admiring it. “It’s a Molecular Destabilizer. It breaks down matter at the cellular level, reconfigures it into a different state. Leaves it vulnerable to further manipulation and enhancement….” When Scratchull smiled it looked like a facial expression that he had read about but never tried. “Or, if left unattended, complete entropy.”
“Manipulation and enhancement?”
Scratchull sneered. “Destruction and devastation, mostly. But some enhancement, yes.”
“And for this they banish Master? Coerce him into exile on a primitive planet? Force him to do menial jobs for the humans and not return home?” Greenie glanced at the bed sludge on the floor again. “Surely they are not worried that Master will launch an attack on all of the furniture in the universe?”
Alien on a Rampage Page 11
