by Robert West
“Uh, I think so . . . yeah, right. But that’s soon!”
“That’s probably all the time we’ve got left!”
A few minutes later Beamer and Ghoulie were cutting through the attic en route to the tree ship. Beamer had to practically drag Ghoulie past the web. Actually, Beamer wasn’t too keen on it himself, the way it glowed eerie silver in the moonbeam.
Climbing through the tall windows, they crept across the shingled roof to the big tree branch which overhung the house.
Ghoulie stopped just before he was ready to step from the roof to the tree. “Did you hear what your sister said at dinner?” he said, eyeing the tree curiously.
“No, listening to her has been known to cause brain damage,” said Beamer with a smirk.
“Well, she was just repeating what that scientist guy she follows around said.”
“Oh man, not him!”
“He’s found an energy field around the tree — bigger than the one around the web! But get this: they’re connected, passing energy back and forth between them.”
“My sister said that? She doesn’t know a field from a hair brush.”
“Well, she didn’t say it quite that way. I had to do a little translation.”
“Do you think that’s why we go off to other galaxies in our heads?”
“I don’t know. I’m thinking about it.”
It was warm, like Indian summer, and the music of night life was all around them as they climbed through the tangle of branches. The night was bright, even though the sky was mostly clouded over. A circular opening around the full moon made it look like a giant eye in the sky.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Beamer said, catching a glint from something in the tree. He looked closer, then slowly reached inside his old friend the squirrel’s home toward whatever it was. What he came out with was that shiny dark object Beamer had seen the squirrel carrying around months ago. Beamer held it up in the moonlight and turned it around and around.
“The meteor!” he suddenly blurted.
“What are you talking about?” Ghoulie asked, scrunching up close to peer over his shoulder.
“This is the missing chip from the meteor in the museum.”
“Come on, Beamer, it’s just a rock,” Ghoulie muttered, as he moved on up the tree.
“That’s what you said to Ms. Parker. Ghoulie, this is it. I’m sure of it!”
“Okay, okay, so you’ve got a piece of a meteor for your very own,” Ghoulie said, still uninterested.
“No, it’s more than that. It’s a piece of a falling star, a star that hit my tree, Ghoulie — my tree!”
“Sure, Beamer. Now would you hurry and get up here,” Ghoulie ordered impatiently.
“D’ya know what I think? The energy field came from the meteor. It had some kind of radiation so that when it blasted the tree, it gave it some kind of . . . something. The squirrel . . . or maybe its ancestor all those years ago,” Beamer went on talking to the air, “must have mistaken it for an acorn and taken it up to its nest.”
Beamer pocketed his new treasure and reached back in the hollow to pick up a handful of acorns. “We’re gonna need all the help we can get. I’ll pay ya’ back later,” he said to the invisible squirrel, and then he began to throw the nuts, one by one, at Scilla’s window. Finally it opened and Scilla’s irritated face poked out.
“Hey, what’s it take for a girl to get a little sleep around here?” she asked with a gigantic yawn.
“Meet us in the ship,” Beamer whispered loudly. “We’ve got work to do.”
“Now? Are you crazy?” she exclaimed.
“It’s now or never, and I mean never.”
She gave him a long look. “I’ll be right over.”
* * * * *
A little after five o’clock on Saturday afternoon, Jared and four other boys were on their bicycles, weaving in and out of traffic. Anyone within ten blocks would have known where they were from the sound of horns blaring. Usually only Jeffries and Slocum went with Jared to the Saturday movie. Today, though, was special. Today, there was going to be a war.
The movie — Mean Streets Aflame — couldn’t have been better chosen to pump them up for the massacre ahead. Yes, “Operation Demolition” was underway. You see, bad guys make plans too. Before Beamer even had a glimmer of an idea, Jared had already laid out his hit plan. Like a teen Mafia kingpin, he’d gathered all the facts; he’d analyzed his enemies — their abilities and limitations, who would be where, when — and predicted their means of retaliation.
In one swift attack, Jared was going to bring them to their knees . . . forever.
* * * * *
Beamer and Ghoulie were waiting at the far end of the park where the largest of the forest paths opened up into a broad playing field.
“Now I know what it feels like to be a guppy,” groaned Ghoulie, propping his head on top of his bicycle handlebars. He fingered nervously the strap to a small video camera that was slung around his neck.
“How else are we going to get him into the backyard?” Beamer explained for the seventeenth time.
“Being bait for a shark is not what I had in mind!”
“All we gotta do is make sure we don’t let him get too close.”
They sat quietly on their bikes, anxiously looking up the trail. The wind rippled their clothes, tugging at the hood of Ghoulie’s sweatjacket. A sky full of big, puffy clouds made the park a patchwork of green and shadow.
“What’s taking them so long?” Ghoulie finally broke the silence.
“I don’t know,” Beamer shrugged. “Maybe the movie went long.”
“But we got the time for the next showing, remember?”
“Yeah, okay . . . well, then . . . could be they stopped for a Coke or a video game or something. I don’t know.”
Ghoulie turned to wipe his nose on his sleeve, then lost his breath in a world-class gasp! Beamer turned around to see what the matter was, and saw Ghoulie’s eyes growing to roughly the size of poached eggs. He followed the direction of Ghoulie’s shaking finger.
19
Invasion!
There they were — the bad news troop — in full force, coming from the wrong direction and going the wrong way. The Star-Fighters had been outflanked, outfoxed, out-maneuvered, and were definitely out-manned. Just like that, Beamer’s plan was blown to pieces.
“Well, we’ll just have to try again next Saturday,” Beamer said, trying to shrug it off.
Then the full extent of the disaster blew over them like a nuclear shock wave. Just when Jared’s goon squad should have zigged left for home, they zigged right!
“I don’t like the looks of this,” Beamer murmured, a lump forming in his throat. “They’re headed for Murphy Street.” Then he saw it — the crooked fan tail of a crowbar sticking out of Jared’s saddle bag.
“Oh no!” Beamer gasped as he watched them round a turn onto Murphy Street. “They’re headed for the house!” he cried.
Beamer and Ghoulie peeled out at near light speed, but there was a major pit where Beamer’s stomach should have been. Not even warp drive was going to get them home ahead of Jared. And Scilla was there alone!
Yep, Jared couldn’t have timed it better if he’d been able to read their minds. Erin was at cheerleader tryouts and Michael was with Dad and Mom, who were working at the school rummage sale.
Beamer pedaled like his life depended upon it, shaking his head in dismay. Right now, the battle for the tree ship had all the earmarks of a middle-school Armageddon.
* * * * *
One thing was in Scilla’s favor: She didn’t have time to worry about it. Perched in her treetop lookout position, she was watching for Beamer and Ghoulie to come tearing around the corner into Murphy Street, with Jared and gang in hot pursuit. The only trouble she’d had so far was from birds. A whole flock of tiny, noisy black birds heading south had settled in their tree for a rest stop. Her grandma called them starlings. In fact, it took her a minute to realize that the new noise at th
e bottom of the tree wasn’t coming from them.
“All right,” she suddenly heard a voice snarl from below. “Looks like we caught ’em with their pants down. Let’s make this quick and messy.”
Scilla nearly fell out of her perch. Where are Beamer and Ghoulie?
“Do we have to carry up the sledgehammer?” Slocum whined.
“Holy tamole!” Scilla mouthed silently. In desperation, she quietly slipped and tripped and sometimes fell, branch by branch, down toward the tree ship.
Jared and his gang hadn’t spotted her yet.
“Yeah, take it,” Jared growled. “We don’t want anything left of their precious tree house but splinters.” Slocum groaned and tucked the sledgehammer in his belt.
As Jared vaulted onto the slanted trunk, Scilla landed, rump first, on the ramp. “Just like a bunch of boys to leave a girl to do their dirty work,” she muttered as she pushed painfully to her feet. This isn’t even my fight. Maybe I could just hide in the leaves until they leave.
When Jared got where the slanted trunk turned and climbed more straight up, he stopped, suddenly uneasy. “You guys go first,” he called behind. “I’ll take . . . uh . . . an anchor position . . . in case the dorks show up and are stupid enough to follow us up the tree.”
Seemingly satisfied with this thin explanation, Jared’s clones scrambled past him and on up into the branches, thickly cloaked with dark red leaves. Jared could see snatches of the bullet-shaped structure, newly painted and gleaming. What bothered him was the not-quite-blocked-out memory of the last time he had climbed this tree. But that time he had been alone. Now he was here in force. He took a deep breath, tucked his crowbar into his belt, and again started to climb.
Scilla quickly shut and barred the tree ship’s door behind her. She looked at the plywood control panels, her eyes again flaring in panic. There were supposed to be three pair of hands working the controls, not just one. She paced back and forth like an anxious penguin trying to decide what to do first.
Then, just as if someone had flipped a switch, she was Lieutenant Bruzelski again and everything popped into focus. Why she was alone on the scout vessel, she couldn’t say, but she knew her duty. “Screen on — mark zero, zero, zero!” she announced authoritatively, her hands playing across the dials. Immediately the view screen flickered on and, with it, the camera. “Yes!” she exclaimed, seeing the view angle shift to focus directly on the area below the ship.
There they were, Jeffries and Slocum, along with two others, Phillips and Johnson. At least that’s who she thought they were. She blinked to clear her eyes, then took another look. To her Lieutenant Bruzelski eyes, these were entirely different creatures — creatures from a world alien to her own. The one Scilla had thought was Slocum now had gills that flared every time he took a breath and a large floppy fin at the top of his head which kept falling into his eyes. Jeffries got stuck with the bug eyes and antennae and what may or may not have been a mustache. The other two had pig heads with big slavering lips, floppy ears, and pimples.
“Releasing atmospheric distortion field!” Officer Bruzelski said with the ease of a practiced defender. Immediately the ship ejected a cloud of hydrogen oxide — water, that is — from a line of lawn sprinklers they had strung in the branches.
“Eeowww! Hey!” four voices shrieked at once.
“Aiiiieeeee!” cried the fifth. It was Jeffries, who had stared, point-blank, into a sprinkler head just as it went off. He took a free fall backward into a wide web of branches below him.
“They’re up there!” Slocum yelled.
“All right, spread out.” Jared ordered. “Nobody ever got sprinkled to death.” He laughed and they joined in with him, all except for Jeffries, that is, who was nursing a hundred scrapes and scratches.
Now Bruzelski could see what should have been Jared. His ears were huge, like big fans sticking straight out from either side of his head. Instead of a mouth, he had mandibles, so that he seemed to be talking sideways. On top of his head was a huge plume like a rooster’s.
Calmly, with a precision born of strict training at Sector Four Space Academy, Lieutenant Bruzelski moved to her next line of defense. “Activating stickeyon emission controls,” she said as she ran from panel to bleeping panel.
Nothing happened . . . or so it seemed.
Then Slocum, who was now in the lead, reached up for a higher branch and felt something strange.
20
Nightmare on Murphy Street
“Hey!” Slocum grunted as he looked at the black, gooey mess on his hand. He sniffed, then licked it. It was sweet. “J-a-a-a-r-eh-eh-d?” he yelled down to his boss, then took another lick.
“What?” Jared shouted back impatiently.
At the same time, Jeffries reached up for a grip. Both hands, instead, grabbed a handful of slimy gook and slipped. “Aiiiiiiii!” he screamed as he fell for the second time back into the prickly cradle of branches.
The gooey mess poured down the trunk like a heavy coat of paint, engulfing hands and feet, dribbling into mouths and over eyes.
“Hey! Eeeeeee! Yecchh! Whoaaah! Jaaar-ed!” came a chorus of yelps and screeches.
The slippery gook was, in fact, molasses from those old barrels in the garage — the ones Dr. Mac had been trying to cook back into lip-smacking goodness.
“Spread out away from the trunk,” Jared shouted to his henchmen, backing away as the gook glided down toward him. “Climb up one branch at a time.”
Muttering unmentionables, his troops shuffled out on their respective limbs and began hoisting themselves up, branch by branch.
Almost immediately, though, Phillips reached up for a handhold and tipped over something. A wide curtain of molasses rained down on him. “Eeeeiii,” he yowled like a cat who had fallen into a puddle, and fell backward, ending up hanging upside down with his legs wrapped around a branch. “J-a-a-r-eh-eh-d!” he cried bitterly.
Jared looked up just in time to get a face-full of the splashdown.
Seeing Jared’s face, Slocum, on the other side of the trunk, couldn’t hold back a snicker.
Jared glared murderously at him as he wiped the glop from his eyes.
Sobering quickly, Slocum reached up . . . and tipped over a long tray-full of his own.
The Star-Fighters had set up gutter sections, left over from Dr. Mac’s home improvement project, all over the tree, and had filled them with molasses.
Jared’s gloppidy-glop crew was livid, uttering words nobody nice ever used in the English language.
“Come on, you cowards!” Jared roared, grabbing Jeffries as he slid by. “You back down because of some pancake syrup and you’ll be the joke of the school!”
It was then that Beamer and Ghoulie finally skidded into the yard, dismounting even before they stopped.
Ghoulie took off for the tree, only to have his feet slip out from under him in mid-run. “Yeooow!” he howled as he skidded into a dark, sticky puddle.
Beamer held a finger-full of the dark gook to his nose. “They’re up there, all right, and Scilla’s on the counterattack.”
“Hey — !” Ghoulie started to shout up to Scilla when Beamer suddenly clapped his hand tightly over Ghoulie’s mouth.
“Sshhh,” he whispered urgently. “You don’t want them to come down, do you? We don’t have any defenses. She does.”
Ghoulie shuddered just thinking about it.
“I’ve got an idea,” Beamer whispered as he ran to the door of the house. “Come on.”
They streaked inside, Beamer reaching to catch the screen door a moment before it slammed closed.
In spite of Lieutenant Bruzelski’s valiant efforts, the syrupy slime bags were still coming.
“Firing Veton Depth charges!” she announced, pulling down hard on a lever.
This time a line of popguns shot what looked like Ping Pong balls into the air. As they struck the surrounding branches they broke open, making a sound like popcorn popping and making it rain, not molasses, but birdseed — barr
age after barrage of birdseed — a dust storm of little grains that found a nice, sticky home aboard the hapless, molasses-drenched crew below.
“Hey! What is — ? Who — Man! I’ll get him!” five angry voices cried out, suddenly finding themselves coated with tiny yellow and white particles.
But the worst was yet to come, though it was totally unplanned. All those gaggling birds that had been driving Scilla crazy before caught one whiff of that molasses and birdseed and, well, suddenly discovered five giant, yummy bird feeders ready for the pecking. There was the racket of dozens of flapping wings on the move.
The boys yelled, swatting furiously at the hungry birds while trying to hang on to the tree at the same time.
One boy, Johnson, did fall — all the way down into Dr. Mac’s safety net. Completely panicked, he scrambled across the net and fell to the ground. The seed-coated boy scurried and crunched off, gasping for breath, with a flock of tiny birds twisting and turning on his tail.
Back in the tree, the frantic cries and swatting hands of the Skullcross Gang finally succeeded in sending the hungry birds away in a black cloud that swirled up and around the tree then away southward. Breathing hard, soaked with water, coated with molasses and peppered with birdseed, Jared was beyond cussing. He pulled himself along a branch to beneath the tree ship’s entry ramp and hoisted himself up. There he was, staring across the ramp toward the tree ship’s door, his chest heaving with anger.
With the noise of the birds gone, Jared now began to feel and hear what sounded like the wind. For a moment, he looked anxious, uncertain.
Up in the attic, Beamer and Ghoulie were feeling pretty uncertain themselves.
“Oh, man, look at that,” Beamer said in a hushed voice, as they stared at the web. It was a brilliant yellow-white, almost too bright to look at. The instruments surrounding the web were all registering readings at the limit of their range.
“I think your attic is about to take off!” Ghoulie exclaimed. “The web must be picking up energy from the tree.”
“How can it do that?” Beamer asked. “Spiders don’t have electro — whatever, do they?” Just what the world needs — a high-tech spider invasion!
