The spell was broken when Amy reached her shoe and tried to grab it. As she bent down to pick it up, she lost her balance and fell to one knee, dislodging a rock that had been embedded in the mud. The football-sized stone tumbled over the side of the dam and fell in the dry creek bed with a heavy thud.
“You okay?” I yelled. I ran around the pool and down into the creek bed, stopping at the base of the dam, where I could look straight up at Amy. I wanted to be in place to try to catch her in case she fell off the top.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” She stood up and wiped mud from her leg. “Just scraped up my knee, is all. It’s a little bloody, but not too bad.” She balanced on one leg while she pulled the shoe on to her other foot. “I should probably wash it off in the river when we—aaaah!”
Amy lost her one-legged balance, and the shoe she had just put on came down heavily on top of the dam. The log underneath her rolled and she fell backward. She thumped down heavily in a sitting position with a startled guh! sound.
Three more stones dislodged from the top of the dam and tumbled down the side—I quickly sidestepped out of the way before they hit the ground. Then a huge clump of logs shifted crazily, and a rush of water streamed out of the side of the dam, hard, like someone had turned on a fire hose. The next second, more hoses spurted from three different spots.
Then the entire structure started moving.
It was all going to come crashing down.
There was a chance that I could have dived out of the way, saved myself. But Amy froze me to the spot with her eyes. They were looking right at me, stretched wide, filled with pure, animal terror.
Even worse, they were silently pleading with me, begging me to do something.
But what could I do? My mind’s eye showed me, in terrible detail, what would happen in the next few seconds. The tremendous pent-up force of the water would be unleashed. The dam would collapse. And the power behind thousands of gallons of rushing water would grind those massive logs and rocks together like they were in a blender.
And Amy would be caught in the middle of it all.
So would I, if I stayed here. But how could I possibly leave her?
I was still frozen to the spot, still staring up at Amy and her haunted eyes, when the dam burst. The whole thing suddenly moved forward as if pushed by a giant hand. Just a second or two until impact.
I acted on pure reflex. I whipped Scratchull’s black device out from behind my back, tapped open the top of the case, and jammed it into the tumbling wreck of a dam.
My thumb found a button, and I pushed it.
Nothing happened.
The logs didn’t melt into wood puddles. The rocks stayed as hard as…rocks.
I cringed. That meant that in less than a second—
Wait. Nothing happened. Amy still sat safely on top of the dam, a very confused look on her face. Even though the dam was tilting at an impossible angle, it stayed in place, completely motionless.
“What happened?” Amy said. It came out in a whisper that was swallowed by the vastness of the forest. “I thought the dam was going…that I was about to…” She trailed off, leaving the unthinkable unsaid. She leaned forward slowly, gripping a log with both hands, and looked down to where I stood with one hand still jammed into the middle of the dam. “David…did you do something?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I mean, I tried to do something, but…I don’t know.”
She stood up carefully. “I’m going to swim back to the other side. I don’t want to try to climb down this dam.”
“Good idea. Looks like it could fall at anytime.”
“It looks half-fallen already. But that doesn’t make any sense.” She scanned the face of the dam and shook her head. “You should get away from there, too. Right now.”
“Another good idea.” But when I turned to step away, my hand remained stuck in the dam. I pulled, but it wouldn’t budge. And as the panic partially wore off, I realized that my hand was very, very cold.
“What in the…?” Amy said from atop the dam. She was turned away from me, facing the water. “The pool,” she said. “It’s…it’s frozen.”
“What?” I called. I couldn’t see the water at all from the base of the dam.
“It’s frozen,” Amy said. “And not just a little crust on the top, either. It looks like it’s frozen solid all the way through to—oh, no!”
“What?”
“It’s not just the pool—it’s the entire creek!”
I tried to pull away again, but my hand didn’t move at all. And it was going numb now. Freezing.
Using my free hand, I gripped a smallish rock from the side of the dam and pulled. It stuck firm for a minute but finally popped free. The place where it had just been was solid ice, now with a concave rock-sized indentation in it.
Suddenly Amy was standing by my side. “David, do you know why this is happening?”
“Maybe. Just help me get free first, okay?”
Together we dislodged the dam debris surrounding my forearm. My hand was encased in a wall of ice up to my wrist.
Amy and I used sharp rocks to chip away at the ice, until finally I could pull my hand free. My fingers were so red with cold they were almost purple. But they were still clutching at Scratchull’s little black device.
“What’s that thing?” said Amy.
I switched it to my other hand and stuck my frozen one into my pocket, trying to warm it up. “This is what I need to talk to you about,” I said. How to start? “About Scratchull. Look, I know you’re going to be disappointed, but he’s not what he seems to be. At all. In fact, he’s—”
“I know that,” Amy said. “He’s just pretending to be some transporter repairman, but he’s actually here to report on Earth for the Collective and tell them—”
“No. Listen. The Collective sent him here for a punishment. Earth is, like, his prison.”
“What?” Amy’s face scrunched up in confusion. “Why would they do that?”
“Because he invented this.” I held up the device. “It has enough power to destroy the entire planet.”
“What?” She took a couple of steps backward, away from the device. Away from me. “Wait—how do you know all of this?”
“I was hiding in his closet, and this little green dude popped out of the transporter, and he was all ‘Master, this’ and ‘Master, that’ and ‘I brought you the device you requested,’ and then he—”
I stopped. Amy was giving me a strange look. “What were you doing in Scratchull’s closet?”
I took a deep breath. This was going to be a long story, and I could tell it was one that part of her didn’t want to believe.
I looked past her, at the dam, where the wall of logs and rocks tilted crazily but stayed suspended in midair, held motionless by the grip of the ice. All of a sudden I felt intensely uneasy. We were so exposed out here. Even though it was a secluded area, it seemed like any minute someone could come hiking through the woods and see that frozen creek.
What would we say then? What if someone called the forest ranger, or the police? And then we got linked to this craziness? Oh, man, what if it was a repeat of last summer, with the town storming the B&B and me the cause of it all?
“Look, Amy, I can explain everything later, when we have more time. I promise. But right now we have to figure out what we’re going to do about this.” I gestured at the dam. “We need to make a plan.”
“But I don’t understand anything that’s going on.”
“I know, I know,” I said, as we jogged around the side of the dam. “I don’t either, really.” It felt like the whole world was closing in on us, and I was running out of time to stop it.
Back up at the pool, we looked down the length of the creek. The entire surface was a sheet of ice.
“I saw Scratchull use this machine to melt the bed in his room. It turned into mush. I was trying to do the same thing with the dam,” I said.
Amy looked bewildered and horrified at the same time.
Amy shuddered. “But you didn’t know what it could do…” Her eyes kept going from my face to the black device in my hand and back again. “You risked the potential destruction of the Earth…”
“Well, I didn’t think it…” She was making me realize how stupid I had been in that split-second of panic. “It was on the lowest setting,” I said lamely.
Amy stared at me. “Are you telling me you actually gambled on the welfare of the entire planet just to save me?”
It sounded so reckless when she said it like that. But I guess there was no other way to put it. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m really sorry if—”
“David, that’s the sweetest thing ever!” Amy threw her arms around me and hugged me fiercely. I almost dropped the device, but managed to hold on, and even had the presence of mind to put my arms around her, too.
Then Amy broke off the hug and immediately reverted to her scientific self, pointing to the watering hole, now a frozen pond. “The device must’ve touched the water instead of the dam,” she said. “And instead of converting a solid to a liquid—”
“—it was the other way around,” I finished the sentence for her. “But look.” I bent down and ran my hand over the icy surface. I held my fingers up to show her that they were wet. “It’s melting already. Maybe—hopefully—it will just go back to normal. To the way it was before.”
“Yeah, but it’s going to take a long time for all of this to melt. Even if it stays sunny.” She frowned as her eyes scanned the length of the creek. “A couple of days, at least. Maybe a week?”
I nodded. “At least. I hope no one comes out here before then. What would someone do if they saw this in the middle of summer?”
Neither one of us had an answer to that question. We just stood there in silence, studying the long stretch of solid ice.
And then I noticed something about the silence. It was complete, and not just because we weren’t talking. It felt eerie, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I cocked my head and listened to…nothing.
I suddenly realized what was missing. There was no roar of the—
“Oh, no. No, no, no.”
“What now?” Amy said.
“Follow me.”
I grabbed her hand and we walked straight across the pool, something that felt very strange since we had been swimming in there just a few minutes ago. I walked slowly—the surface was slick with that thin layer of melted ice on top—but when we hit the sandbar on the other side, we ran, half stumbling through the thick clumps of wild grass, then stopping short when we reached the riverbank.
The Nooksack River was frozen. The whole thing. It must have happened as quickly as it had with the creek, because it looked like a photograph of a raging river: completely still, with the white water surf frozen exactly in place.
I looked upriver, and the Nooksack was sheer ice as far as the eye could see until it went around the bend toward Mount Baker.
Then I looked downriver. Worse—much worse—was the fact that the river was frozen as it made its way toward Forest Grove.
“Oh, David.” Amy’s face had gone nearly as pale as Scratchull’s. “What have you done?”
It’s hard to have a conversation while you’re sprinting through the forest, exposed tree roots tripping you up, and thorny brambles ripping at your skin, but Amy and I were trying.
“What are we”—huff, huff—“going to do?”
“How can we possibly”—pant, wheeze—“explain something like this?”
Snap! Crunch! “What are we going to tell your grandma?”
Crash! “Ouch! Or your dad?”
I guess it wasn’t really a conversation. Just a series of questions without any good answers.
When we finally burst through the forest at the edge of Riverside Park, I felt like all of the wind had been knocked out of me. Then I saw what was going on at the park, and I almost threw up.
A huge mass of people was gathered along the edge of the river.
The crowd stretched throughout the whole park. Every person in Forest Grove must have been out there.
Parents herded small children away from the ice while teenagers heaved rocks that bounced and skidded across the surface of the river. People pointed and shook their heads. Cameras clicked all over the place. Some folks lingered by the playground equipment, fifty yards away from the edge of the river, expressions of undisguised fear on their faces.
Amy and I were doubled over, hands on our knees, as we watched the crowd and tried to catch our breath.
“This is not good. Not good at all.” Amy wiped a clump of sweaty hair out of her eyes. “This is terrible. This is the worst thing that—”
“I get it.”
“Oh, David. What are we going to do?”
“We have to get to the B-and-B. Right away.” I knew what we had to do, even though it was the very last thing in the world I wanted to do. “We need to talk to Grandma.”
Neither of us moved.
“I’m really worried,” Amy whispered. “And scared.”
“Me too.” I wasn’t ashamed to admit it, either. The alien brothers who got loose in the forest last summer were seen only by a few people, almost all of them kids. And the picture that had made the front page of the newspaper was grainy and barely in focus, easily explained away.
But this—everyone in town was seeing this. A crystal-clear, high-definition, 3-D image.
“Come on,” I said. We could have walked through the park to get back to Grandma’s. It would have been easier, and it’s not like anyone would connect us with what had happened to the river. At least not yet. But a deep sense of shame caused me to turn and sneak back through the forest, hiding behind the screen of trees from all of those people.
There was nobody out front at the B&B. We made our way around the side of the house to the backyard and then stopped short. A group of aliens—maybe two dozen or so—was huddled together at the base of the porch steps. They were all different shapes and sizes, but they shared the same facial expression: confusion mixed with fear. They looked a lot like the group of humans we had just seen at the park.
Grandma worked her way through the crowd, offering a comforting hug here and a reassuring pat on the back there. “No need to worry. We’ll get this all figured out in no time.” She spoke slowly, in soothing tones. “No reason to be distressed.”
A tall alien took off the thrift store fedora he had gotten from Grandma’s trunk of disguise clothing, and scratched at a ridge of bumps covered in green scales. “Then why do the natives seem so upset? They’ve formed a mob very close to here, you know. Those of us enjoying the park were quite anxious when they all converged.”
“Well, that’s not a mob, exactly,” Grandma said. “More of a…peaceable assembly. Average folks banding together in a time of uncertainty. Temporary uncertainty. Nothing to be worried about.” She managed to plaster a big smile on her face. No one returned it.
An elderly alien clutched her traveling partner. “I don’t like mobs when I’m traveling off-world,” she muttered. “I don’t like them at all.”
“The humans are just a little nervous right now,” Grandma said. “Here on Earth we don’t see water freeze like that so suddenly. Especially in such a large quantity. Humans don’t know how to—”
“We never see anything like that, either! Especially when it’s so warm out,” another alien chimed in. “I realize this is a primitive planet, but shouldn’t the basic laws of physics still apply?”
This set off a rumbling of muttered side conversations. Grandma kept trying to calm everyone down, but the aliens formed a rough semicircle around her, firing so many questions that she couldn’t possibly keep up.
“All right, simmer down now. That means everyone!” Tate’s shout cut through the crowd noise. The screen door banged behind him as he strode out onto the porch. Grandma looke
d up at him, and her face softened, clearly relieved.
Tate held up his meaty arms for silence and then addressed the crowd. “I appreciate everyone hustling to return and grouping up back here. Good work.” He paced back and forth on the porch, a general addressing the troops. “Now this here situation calls for a Code…um, a Code…well, I don’t think we have a code color set up for this exact set of circumstances. But that doesn’t mean we need to—”
“Can you explain what’s going on?” the alien with the bumpy head called out.
Tate stopped pacing and fixed him with a stare. “I don’t rightly know, yet. But I aim to find out mighty soon.”
A bundle of nerves, cold as that frozen river, bunched up in my stomach when he said that.
Tate paced across the wooden boards again. “Now, as I was saying, there’s no need to panic. We simply ask that you return to your rooms for the time being. Sit tight for a bit. If you hear the alarm, then double-time it into your transporter and go home. If we—”
“In which case we would give you a full refund for your vacation, of course,” Grandma interjected. “And offer you a free weekend stay anytime you’d like to return.”
“Now we can all do this in a nice, orderly fashion,” Tate said. “Folks staying on the third floor should—”
He stopped and scrunched his eyebrows together. He cocked his head, one ear turned toward the sky.
And then I heard it too. The unmistakable chukka-chukka-chukka of a helicopter propeller. Closing in fast.
“Move!” Tate shouted. “Move, move, move! Everyone into the house!” He bolted down off the porch and herded the aliens up the steps. The crowd squished together. A few aliens lost their footing and tripped up the stairs, getting smooshed in the rush of frenzied movement.
Alien on a Rampage Page 14
