by Nate Ball
But both our bikes were still locked up! What?!
Just then the crowd seemed to stop. They all froze and looked up. The air filled with Amp’s high-pitched voice. It seemed to come from every direction at once. It filled the air like squeaky thunder.
“ATTENTION, ERDIAN COUNCIL! CALL OFF THE INVASION OF EARTH BY THE ERDIAN FORWARD GUARD. THIS IS ADVANCED SCOUT AMP OF THE SPACE CRUISER DINGLE. I REPEAT, CALL OFF THE INVASION OF EARTH. RECALL THE FIRST-WAVE INVASION STRIKE FORCE IMMEDIATELY! PLEASE CONFIRM RECEIPT. OVER.”
The world around me was plunged into silence. Nobody moved.
I stared, open-mouthed into the air like I was in a trance.
“What did you do to my walkie-talkie?” I whispered.
As soon as I said it, I heard the crowd gasp. Someone even shrieked. I realized I had never heard a real-life shriek before.
“Hey, kid!” someone shouted from behind me.
I whipped around, thinking Principal Luntz was about to grab me by the back of my T-shirt.
It was a police officer. I instantly imagined he had been looking for me and would now handcuff me for all the trouble Amp and I were causing.
Amp’s broadcast must have stopped him in his tracks like everyone else on the street. He looked from me to the radio and back to me. “Kid, you better get yourself home. I don’t know what’s going on, but we may be attacked by aliens at any moment.”
I couldn’t speak. Technically, he was right, but I couldn’t dip my toe into the truth now. So without another word, I turned and ran off.
“Is this really happening?” I gasped, as I became just another panicky citizen running around like a headless chicken.
Strangely, the only other thought that bounced around in my head as I chugged up the slope of Main Street was that Amp was clearly the worst roommate in history.
13
The Road Home
I was in terrible condition.
My lungs felt like they were the size of grapes. Squished grapes. That had dried out in the sun for a week. So I guess they felt like raisins.
What seemed like just minutes when Olivia and I were on our bikes now seemed like three half marathons strung together.
It seemed like the entire town was outside, looking up. I saw all manner of people out on their lawns watching the skies. They had telescopes, binoculars, fancy cameras with long lenses, and smartphones with built-in video cameras. Some families were quickly packing up their cars, like they were leaving town in a hurry to escape the incoming Erdian space invaders.
This was nuts!
As I huffed and chuffed down the middle of the street, people called out the strangest warnings to me.
“Go the other way. You’re headed right into their trap, boy!” a man hollered at me.
“Stop running so fast!” a woman yelled. “Aliens are attracted to movement.”
“Kid, put some goggles on to hide your eyes. Aliens always eat the eyes first! They taste like chicken!”
Huh?
I also overheard two nervous women speaking quietly as I ran by. “Sure, he looks like a regular kid, but he could be one of them in disguise, one of those body-snatching aliens.”
To which the other woman replied, “If he tries to eat our eyes, I will sock him in the face. No alien is gonna mess with my street.”
What? This was getting downright dangerous!
Amp was right: humans were unpredictable.
Police cars, fire trucks, ambulances, news vans, and then the city dogcatcher zipped past me at unsafe speeds. Weirdly, these were soon followed by an ice-cream truck, which thundered by at about eighty miles an hour. That couldn’t be good for business. As it rumbled past, I heard its jingling tune get interrupted by Amp’s urgent voice. This time it wasn’t in English, it was in Erdian, which sounded like a frog being stepped on repeatedly. Because I knew him, I could tell that Amp sounded desperate. Or frustrated. No, he sounded really annoyed. I even heard him say “floofy” at some point. I’m sure he was starting to realize that his lame walkie-talkie plan was failing miserably. The question was, would he shut up before anyone got hurt or run over to death by a nervous ice-cream truck driver?
I was slick with sweat and incredibly thirsty when I finally rounded the corner of my street. The growing heat of the day was cooking me slowly, like a tiny boy in a giant crockpot.
And then I stopped dead in my tracks.
It was crawling with cops and news vans!
They were everywhere!
I saw several men wearing headphones attached to those inside-out umbrella thingies. They were walking around, scanning the street, and I knew just what they were doing: they were closing in on the signal of whoever was broadcasting the ridiculous alien invasion news that was panicking the entire town.
They were closing in on Amp and my dang walkie-talkie!
And when they found Amp . . . then you’d really see adults in a panic. They would think the invasion was already underway (which, I suppose, technically, it actually kinda was).
I shot up the nearest driveway and decided I’d secretly make my way up the street to my own backyard by way of my neighbors’ yards. Nobody would see me coming.
The bad news was my legs were rubbery with exhaustion, and the idea of hopping fences right now seemed impossible.
The good news was that I was in such a panic, I wasn’t feeling any pain, only desperation.
14
Get Up for It
You wouldn’t think getting to your house by running through six backyards would be all that difficult. I’ve done it a thousand times before. But today, it wasn’t just difficult, it was downright life-threatening.
The first few backyards weren’t bad. I was chased by a nasty poodle named Luna, I stomped through a strawberry garden, and I almost broke my foot on a cement tortoise lawn decoration thingy, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle.
But in the Swopes’ backyard, things got loopy. I was flying through some laundry that had been hung out to dry—who still did that?—and didn’t see the hot tub on the other side of the drying laundry.
I’ve never felt strongly that hot tubs should be covered when not in use, but falling into practically boiling water with a pillowcase wrapped around your head changes your view of things.
“AAAGH!” I screamed when I emerged like the Swamp Thing from the soup-hot water. I threw off the pillowcase and fell to the ground. I grabbed my throbbing right thigh, which had smashed into the seat ledge just under the water’s surface. I had received the worst charley horse in the history of legs and charley horses.
Sopping wet and steaming hot, I pushed forward like a half-cooked water buffalo, crawling over a patch of dirt to the fence. Of course, the dirt stuck to me. And in seconds I realized that the dirt was from a recently planted garden that must have been sprinkled with fertilizer, what a farmer might call manure—or what you and I would call poop.
I arrived in my backyard wild-eyed, huffing and puffing, limping, sopping wet, and smelling like a four-foot-tall cow patty.
Once my feet were firmly planted in my own backyard, I was instantly tackled from behind.
“Get down!” Olivia grunted in my ear. “They’re everywhere.”
“You almost broke my back,” I wheezed through gritted teeth.
“Why are you so wet? Is that sweat?!”
“No, it’s hot tub.”
“Oh my gosh, you smell like poop! Did you have an accident?”
I rolled onto my knees and caught my breath. “That’s not important,” I growled.
“Says you!” she hissed, covering her mouth and nose. “Your stink is makin’ me blink.”
“Forget that! We need to shut Amp up,” I growled.
“I’ve been calling up to your bedroom window, but that pipsqueak can’t hear me.”
“Because he’s set up in my closet,” I said, getting into a limp crouch. “Let’s go through the back door.”
“No, the cops are downstairs. Your dad is talking t
o them now.”
“What?! They’ll find Amp!”
“I know,” Olivia said, throwing her arms in the air. She looked up at the window and shook her head. She shrugged again. “Now what?”
“Let’s get your grandpa’s big ladder!” I said. Keeping low, I slipped through the hole in the fence that stood between our two houses.
“Nice thinking,” Olivia whispered from behind me.
We grabbed the ladder from the garage, tossed it over the fence, slid back through, and, like a trained team of firefighters, we had the ladder up to my window within thirty seconds flat. I started up first, but Olivia pushed past.
“Outta the way,” she said, scrambling past me like a circus chimp.
She dove in through my open window, which was still missing its screen from the day Amp first crash-landed into my life. I heard her fall onto my desk and send my stuff crashing to the floor.
“Hey, take it easy in there,” I hissed up the ladder. “There’s homework on my desk that I really don’t want to have to redo.”
Seconds later her fist appeared at the top of the ladder. “Here, catch,” she called out and released her fingers. A screaming Amp fell at me like a tiny blue bomb. I caught him as gently as I could and stuffed him in my pocket.
“Nice,” Olivia said from somewhere in my room. “You should play baseball.”
I growled but didn’t have the energy to argue.
“Why is it so wet in here?” Amp croaked from my pocket.
Before I could answer, my walkie-talkie came flying out the window and soared over my head. I watched it crash-land in the grass. By the time I looked up again, Olivia was coming back down the ladder almost as fast as Amp had fallen.
I heard my dad’s voice through my open window calling up the stairs for my brother. “Taylor, are you making some kind of broadcast? Get down here right now, please. The police are here!”
I didn’t wait to hear Taylor’s answer. Like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, I limped across the backyard and through the fence.
“You do know you smell like dead animals, right?” Amp asked from my pocket.
I didn’t answer. My head was spinning, my thigh was throbbing, and the cops were everywhere.
The relief finally washed over me as we opened the side door of Olivia’s garage and closed it behind us with a quiet click.
Olivia and I exchanged a look and shook our heads. This was insane, but we were safe. Amp was safe. And we had the radio—well, at least what was left of it.
My only regret? I wished I could have seen Taylor’s face when the cops accused him of causing a major citywide panic.
15
Post-disaster Review
“Perhaps I made the signal too strong,” Amp said, puzzled.
“You think?” Olivia said, rolling her eyes.
“Amp, your voice was everywhere,” I said.
We were sitting on the old couch in Olivia’s garage. Amp stood in front of us on a cardboard box labeled GIVEAWAY CLOTHES. With the garage door closed and the light off, it was calm and peaceful in there after the insanity of just a few minutes earlier. But it smelled really bad, which was apparently my fault.
“Something went wrong,” he said, staring up at the fishing poles.
“Oh, you have an amazing grasp of the obvious,” I said. “And I heard you speaking Erdian, which is kinda gross-sounding. No offense.”
He looked at me, but didn’t say anything.
“It was a rather surprising turn of events,” he said after a pause, pressing his three-fingered hands on the top of his head. “I’m not sure what went wrong.”
“Epic fail, Short Pants,” Olivia said, tapping the cardboard box with her foot.
“Don’t call me that,” Amp said, like a second grader. “I don’t wear pants.”
“Yeah, what’s up with that, No Pants?” I said, and laughed quietly.
Amp suddenly looked like he remembered something. He turned his back to us and moved his wrist recorder to his face.
“Note to Erdian Council: Perhaps the broad-spectrum frequency repeater from the Dingle was too powerful. My experiment seems to have interrupted and overridden almost every frequency in use here. But the strength seems to have been focused terrestrially, on the surface, and not through a quantum connection. Total mission fail.”
“Is there any way we can get you to stop doing that?” I asked.
“Sadly, no,” he sighed, distracted.
Olivia nudged his box again with her foot. “Hey, we’re all friends here, why do you have to turn your back to us? It’s kinda creepy.”
Amp blinked at us. “I don’t know. Your faces are distracting.”
“Distracting?” Olivia said, pretending to be offended. “Thanks for the compliment. Yours isn’t exactly comforting either.”
“Listen,” Amp said, “the important thing is our secret is safe. As Zack would say, no harm, no foul.”
I sat up. “You forgot about the part where you destroyed my walkie-talkie. And I got a charley horse so bad my grandchildren will feel it. That’s a big foul.”
“I could’ve put that walkie-talkie back together again, if Olivia hadn’t flung it from your second-story window.”
Olivia shook her head at him. “Maybe I should have flung you. And maybe you’d like to explain to Principal Luntz what happened.”
Amp rubbed his tiny hands together. “That will be my pleasure. I can make him think he broke it.”
“No,” I said. “No more messing with minds. As soon as the street clears, we have to go back to the race. I’ll think of something. Amp is right. The important thing is he didn’t get discovered and dragged away.”
Olivia shrugged. “Yeah, but as far as we know the invasion is still on.”
I blew out a big breath and ran my fingers through my still-damp hair. “Let’s just deal with Luntz and the walkie-talkie today. Tomorrow we’ll deal with the Erdian invasion of Earth.”
“At least you have your priorities in order,” Olivia said, and made a face.
“Now, Amp,” I said, “get off of that box. I need to borrow some clothes that won’t make me gag.”
16
No Jury, No Trial
“So you didn’t leave Olivia’s ladder on the side of the house?” my dad asked, watching my face like a hawk.
As you might imagine, dinner at my house that night was tense. Everyone was squinting at me with suspicion. I tried my best to stay cool and casual.
I pretended to think about it for a second. “I don’t remember using a ladder.”
“But wouldn’t you remember if you did?” Mom asked pointedly.
“I would think so,” I said, trying my best not to be specific. I could feel my parents’ eyeballs watching me as I pushed string beans around my plate with my fork.
“Well, I know it wasn’t me the cops were after,” Taylor said, quietly. “And the ladder didn’t go up to my window. It went up to yours.”
I looked at each one of them. “Hey, I was at the race. You can ask Max Myers. I don’t know what else to say to you guys.”
“And why are you dressed like that again?” Dad asked. “You look like a rodeo clown.”
I looked down. I was wearing a giant pair of shorts with about thirty pockets and a huge shirt with GONE FISHING written across the chest. I had pulled the clothes out of the cardboard box in Olivia’s garage. They were way too big, but they didn’t smell half as bad as mine, which were now in the garbage can in Olivia’s garage.
“Oh, I borrowed these,” I said, skimming off the truth for the first time. “My other clothes got stuff all over them. The situation was pretty hectic. Some guy hacked into all the radios and stuff. Wacky.”
“And Mr. Luntz says that’s how your walkie-talkie got broken,” Mom said.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, not realizing my mom had talked to Luntz. “It got knocked out of my hands and trampled on. It was crazy. You guys have no idea.”
My parents looked at each other. I wasn’t
sure if my story was holding together. I took no pleasure in fibbing like this, but I figured it was the only way I could keep Amp a secret.
“I told Mr. Luntz you’d do another year in Young Volunteers,” Mom announced.
“You did what?!”
“Ha, ha . . . ,” Taylor sang.
“It only seemed fair,” Dad said firmly, putting down his fork and fixing me with his dinner look. “Especially with what you’ve put your brother through with this spider business. Consider it a punishment if you want.”
“Bummer,” Taylor said gleefully.
I was too shocked to speak.
“Your father had to spray for bugs three times,” Mom said, looking at Taylor with a sad smile. “Poor baby.”
I gripped the edge of the table. “Him? Him poor baby? What about me? You just sent me to prison for another year! I was so close to escaping from that lousy club.”
“It only seemed fair, dear,” Mom cooed. “Principal Luntz seemed quite flustered about his walkie-talkie getting destroyed. He actually said all the parts were ripped out of it, like someone was mad at it or something.”
“That’s odd,” Dad said, staring at me.
I shrugged. I wasn’t going to say anything else. I really was a terrible liar. And the web I was weaving was getting a little too complex to keep track of. Plus, we had avoided disaster and that’s what counted. I’d just have to do my time in the Young Volunteers with quiet determination.
At least Amp was safe, and we still had time to call off the invasion. I had to keep my eye on the prize. Focus on the big picture. Saving all of humanity from an extraterrestrial invasion was more important than working for Luntz for another twelve months. It was close, but . . .
I shuddered at the thought of it.
I jerked a bit when I heard Amp’s voice inside my head. It was one of his favorite Erdian Jedi mind tricks, but I never got used to it. “Thank you, Zack. I’m sorry I made a mess of things. I’ll make it up to you.”
