Alien in My Pocket #7

by Nate Ball

  “No, Zack, I’m finished. Thank you for being my host, for being my friend, but a good Erdian scout knows when his mission has failed. I just don’t care anymore. This is Erdian Scout Amp, over and out.”

  “Wait! Amp? Get your blue butt back here this instant.”

  There was no response. Just eerie silence.

  My eyes watered, and I blinked away the moisture. I looked out my window and knew our conversation had a silver lining: He was nearby. Our ability to speak with our minds had a limited range, maybe fifty yards max. So he was somewhere within half a football field of me. There was still hope. I might not be able to find him, but at least I knew he was close enough that when he was ready to stop acting crazy, he would come home.

  I sighed and collapsed back onto my bed. I could feel my brain easing into sleep out of exhaustion or confusion or just plain old frustration.

  He’d come around. He’d get the munchies and come crawling back for his SweeTarts, Ritz Crackers, and sunflower seeds. He’d apologize. We’d watch one of his favorite old-time horror movies, like The Wolf Man or The Mummy.

  Everything would be all right.

  As I drifted off to sleep, I had no idea how wrong I was.

  The Cat Gets Out

  My first thought when I woke up wasn’t about Amp or his meltdown or his disappearance.

  It was about pancakes.

  I was starving. And Saturday morning meant blueberry pancakes, crisp bacon, buttery biscuits, and sweet pineapple juice. Mom pulled out all the stops on Saturday mornings.

  To be honest, I had forgotten about Amp and simply let my grumbling stomach lead the way. I rumbled down the stairs, my hair bouncing like a rooster tail, and I still had on the clothes I had been wearing last night.

  I didn’t realize anything was amiss till I plopped down in my regular chair. The air wasn’t filled with the familiar smells of freshly brewed coffee and steamy pancakes; instead the kitchen was deserted, except for Mr. Jinxy, our family cat, who sat on the kitchen counter and stared at me suspiciously with squinty eyes.

  No juice pouring. No biscuits baking. No bacon sizzling.

  My fantasies of a full stomach came to a screeching halt.

  I glanced around. “Now what?”

  My parents and Aunt Joni looked over when I poked my head into the living room. They all seemed deeply concerned and highly irritated.

  “Hi, Aunt Joni. What are you doing here? Are you taking us out for breakfast?” I asked hopefully.

  “See? That’s what I’m talking about!” Aunt Joni exclaimed to my parents, jabbing her pointing finger in my direction.

  “What do you know about this?” Dad asked, waving around a piece of binder paper.

  “About what?” I asked, confused.

  “It’s about your brother running off,” Mom said. “And his crazy talk.”

  “Oh, he always talks crazy,” I said with a shrug. “Why did he run off this time?”

  The three of them gave me disapproving looks. I stuffed my hands into my pockets, not exactly sure of the situation I had walked into.

  My mother powered up her cell phone to call the neighbors to see if they’d seen Taylor. My father was looking for his car keys. He was going to see if he could find Taylor himself. And my aunt just sat there and stared daggers at me. I was never so glad to hear the kitchen phone ring in my whole life.

  I backed out of the living room and lifted the phone off its wall-mounted cradle before it could ring a second time.

  “Uh . . . hello?” I said. My stomach growled painfully at the same time.

  “Is this Taylor McGee?” a strange man asked in a pushy voice.

  “No, it’s not. I’m his brother, Zack. Zack McGee. Who is this?”

  “Is he there? He’s late for our meeting.”

  “Meeting? What meeting? He’s only in the second grade. Second-graders don’t have meetings.”

  “I was promised an exclusive.”

  “I’m not even sure what that means.”

  “We had a deal,” he said, sounding irritated. “There’s already a crowd here. Does he have a cell phone? Can you give me his mobile number?”

  “No, I can’t. Because he doesn’t have a cell phone. I don’t have one either, and I’m older than he is.” I paused. “I’m sorry, you never said who you are.”

  “Who is that, Zack?” Dad barked from the living room.

  “Hold on a second!” I called out.

  “Listen, pal, my editor is all over me. Just tell me how I can reach Taylor McGee?”

  “Mister, are you sure you’re calling—”

  Just then the phone clicked twice, meaning we had another incoming call. “Uh, hold on,” I said. I quickly pressed the Talk button, switching over to the other line. “Hello?”

  “Is this Taylor?” another man’s voice asked immediately.

  “Seriously?” I said, pulling the phone away from my head to look at it briefly.

  “Zack?” the deep voice said.

  “Who in the heck is—”

  “This is Mr. Prentiss. Remember, we met when you won your school’s science fair with your magnificent battery-powered magnet? I was one of the judges. My company sponsored your school’s science fair.”

  “Oh, sure. How’s it going?” I grabbed my face and squeezed it in embarrassment.

  Mr. Prentiss was indeed a big shot in my town. He was a scientist and inventor with his own engineering company. He had wanted to give me a summer job after I won my school’s science fair, but I avoided his calls until he gave up. It was really Amp who had won that science fair. I had just gotten the credit for Amp’s work. Honestly, Taylor was the science genius in our family, but I had stolen a lot of his thunder with that magnet. And I hadn’t let him forget it.

  “Your brother’s started quite a kerfuffle.”

  “Kerfluff-what? Hold on a second, Mr. Prentiss. I have someone on the other line.”

  I pressed my hand to the phone. “Hey, you guys, there’s a phone call for Taylor. . . .”

  “What is wrong with you?” my aunt Joni asked.

  I made a painful smile. “I don’t know. I’m pretty hungry and slightly dizzy.”

  “Are you even paying attention to the events going on around you right now, Zack?” Dad growled at me as he grabbed the phone away.

  “Uh . . .” I replied. “Sort of . . .”

  “We’ve got a family emergency here,” Mom snapped. “Stop goofing around on the phone and help us sort this out. Gosh!”

  That was when I saw it. There was a sheet of binder paper on the coffee table. It was a note written in red colored pencil in Taylor’s unmistakable fat lettering.

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  Good morning. I have made the scientific discovery of the century. I have proof of alien life. In fact, I have an actual alien. He’s small, blue, and funny-looking. I named him Buddy. I have called a press conference and will announce my discovery to the world this morning. Make sure the TV is on and you can see me. I didn’t tell you because I knew you wouldn’t let me. Sorry. I will probably become superfamous, so just letting you know before things get out of hand. I’ll call later.

  Your son,

  Taylor Q. McGee

  P.S. Tell Zack I’ll let him hold the alien if he wants.

  I dropped the note, and it floated to the ground like a dry leaf.

  In an instant my world had collapsed around me, like I had just been sucked into a black hole.

  My worst nightmare—and the thing I had worked tirelessly to prevent for months—had just come true.

  Taylor had discovered Amp and was going to tell the world.

  Seeing the Light

  I stood in my room in such a state of shock, I couldn’t move.

  I was struck dumb—I had never really known what it meant until that moment.

  I had no plan. I had no ideas. I had no hope of stopping the events that were spiraling out of my control.

  Amp was right: All was lost.

  That was
when I heard the beeping.

  At first I thought I was hearing something inside my head, like alarm bells warning me that I was about to faint.

  But that wasn’t it.

  The sound was muffled, high-pitched, and urgent. And extremely annoying.

  I shook my head. I followed the noise past my bed and my desk and into my dark closet. I flipped on the light and listened.

  Without thinking, I slowly pulled the wool blanket off Amp’s broken spaceship.

  There, on the side of the spaceship, somehow glowing through the spaceship’s shiny metal, was a blinking purple light.

  I gasped. The noise was loud and annoying, and the light was unmistakably purple. And I knew what that meant.

  Amp had once explained that the appearance of a purple light on the side of his ship meant the Erdian invasion of Earth had begun.

  My messy closet seemed to spin.

  Amp’s planet hadn’t come to some terrible, sudden end. It hadn’t exploded. The light he saw was probably the launch of the attack, one million tiny football-size spaceships shooting through a hole in space and time, taking the Erdian shortcut to Earth.

  I stumbled out of my closet, clutching at the pain in my empty stomach.

  If the attack was on, that meant something had happened to Amp’s boss, Ohm. Ohm had blasted off back to Erde right from my own backyard to cancel the invasion. He knew that humans were too big for the Erdians to defeat. So what happened? Did he take a wrong turn at Saturn? Did he get lost traveling through time and end up a million years from now? A hundred questions swirled through the space between my ears.

  All I could think then was that I had to tell Olivia. She was the only person who would understand. She would figure out what we had to do, who to tell, how to get the warning out about the Erdians who would soon arrive to attack our planet. She was good in an emergency. I was not.

  I looked out my window to see if Olivia was in her backyard, but movement in my own backyard caught my eye.

  Behind the side door of our garage, the one a few feet from the gate in our backyard fence, I saw a bike wheel peeking out. The wheel rocked back and forth a bit, as if someone were struggling with it. I leaned forward and focused.

  It looked like my mom’s bike. Had I just caught a bike thief with truly terrible timing?

  With an invisible shove, the whole front wheel and handlebars emerged from behind the door. My eyes nearly popped out of my face. There, strapped to the handlebars was an old birdcage, and sitting on the little swinging bird perch inside the cage was a slumped and defeated-looking Amp.

  “Amp!” I screamed. “Wait!”

  That was when Taylor emerged with the rest of the bike. He looked back over his shoulder, and his mouth dropped open in surprise. “He’s mine, Zack!” he shrieked. He pushed the big bike toward the gate and fumbled at the rope that would open the gate.

  “Oh, no you don’t!” I bellowed.

  In one smooth movement, I leaped onto my desk and slid out of my second-story window, realizing just as my body went over my windowsill and gravity grabbed ahold of me that the ladder Olivia had leaned up against my house last night was gone.

  Gone!

  Using that deep part of my brain we must share with monkeys, orangutans, and chimps, my hands shot out and I managed to grab the windowsill edge.

  My body’s entire weight transferred to my fingertips. “Aaaaaagh!” I garbled in surprise and pain.

  Behind me, I heard the gate scrape open.

  There I was, dangling on the side of my house, twenty feet in the air, my feet desperately searching for a ladder that wasn’t there and my fingertips begging for me to let go. All the while my brother was slipping away, kidnapping my alien roommate.

  My life was so not normal.

  Gasping hot breaths, I steadied myself and dared to look down. I could see the bushes far below. It looked like a mile. I heard the gate close behind me, and I grunted in desperation.

  I squeezed my eyes shut. I took a deep breath. I had no choice. I let go.

  Giving Chase

  I fell like a bag of bricks.

  It felt like I was falling for a full minute, but it couldn’t have been more than a second or two.

  My whole body tensed up before I crashed down into the bushes.

  I heard a tearing sound, which I thought came from my body, but it was just my shirt. The cracking sounds, which I thought were my bones snapping on impact, were just the bush’s branches splintering from my impact.

  I wasn’t sure how it happened, but I came to a stop upside down.

  After a second I started to squirm and flop around to free myself from the shaking bush.

  I could feel my ankle burning with pain, either from a sprain or a cut—I couldn’t tell which. I must have had scrapes everywhere because the skin on my neck, face, arms, and feet stung. My shirt ripped even more as it snagged on the splintered branches.

  With a final groan, I flopped from the broken bush onto the wet grass, checking to be sure all my limbs were still attached. With an amazed glance up at my second-story window, I turned and limped off after my brother and my alien, tiny leaves and blades of grass dropping from my hair and body as I ran.

  “Did someone steal your stairs?” Olivia asked with a whistle, suddenly appearing on her side of the fence.

  I made a noise similar to the sound a monster would make.

  “I need to talk to you,” she said.

  I didn’t look over, and just hobbled past her toward the gate.

  “Uh . . . sorry about the ladder,” she said, observing me with a puzzled look as I passed her. “I should have told you I took it back.”

  “Gotta catch them,” I said to her over my shoulder, gasping.

  “Who? Your neck is bleeding a bit. And your pants are torn. I can see your boxer shorts.”

  I stopped at the gate and looked back at her. “I found Amp! Taylor has him!” I cried. “And he’s gonna tell everyone!”

  “What? How? Wait!”

  I left the gate open, then limped down the driveway and out onto the street. I looked both ways. Twice. Nothing!

  Then I saw them.

  Taylor was at least ten houses away. My mom’s bike wobbled unsteadily onto the street from the sidewalk. Its frame was way too big for Taylor, who wasn’t very good at riding a bike in the first place.

  I knew why he was on my mom’s bike. He was embarrassed by his. It used to have training wheels on it, and it was painted bright orange and covered with images of a cartoon show he used to watch. He called it a “baby bike.” But his inability to handle Mom’s bike gave me a chance to catch him.

  “Taylor, stop! You don’t know what you’re doing!”

  I took off after them. My ankle throbbed in protest. My neck tickled. My arms and face stung. The rough street tore at the soft skin on the bottoms of my feet. In frustration, my eyes teared up. I couldn’t stop it.

  Down the street a car turned the corner and slowed down as it passed me, going in the opposite direction. The two adults in the car stared at me like they were witnessing a scene from a very sad zombie movie. The man behind the wheel rolled up his window as they passed by.

  With a groan of horror, I saw the face of a girl from my class in the backseat. Jade glared at me with shocked recognition, her eyes going wide as the car drove around me. I managed a pained smile and a halfhearted wave, but there was no way everyone at school wasn’t going to hear about this.

  But what did that matter?

  An attack on Earth by an alien army would certainly drown out any gossip about a blubbering, bloody Zack McGee running down the middle of the street in his pajamas on an otherwise peaceful Saturday morning.

  I stopped. It was useless. Taylor was gone.

  He was meeting with people who would blow the cover off the best-kept secret in history.

  “You didn’t have a chance,” Olivia said suddenly from somewhere behind me. She must have been running after me.

  “I know.” I sig
hed, not turning around so she couldn’t see my watery eyes.

  “Do you know where he was going?” she asked.

  I shook my head and still didn’t turn around.

  She was silent for a moment. “Did you see Jade?” she asked softly. “She’s nice.”

  “I did,” I said with a sniff. I threw my arms up and let them fall back to my sides. “What a disaster,” I said.

  “Yup,” she said. “A disaster of global proportions.”

  “I never thought it would end like this.”

  “Come back to my garage. You’re bleeding. You look really weird. And I have something to tell you.”

  Too exhausted to argue, I turned and followed Olivia back down the street, wondering what she could possibly have to tell me that even mattered at this point.

  First Aid

  “I’d feel better if I went over and told your folks,” Olivia’s grandfather said, pressing a big bandage onto my neck. “Let them know you’re over here and okay.”

  “At this point that would make things a lot worse,” I said. “Trust me.”

  “Grandpa was a doctor in the army,” Olivia said proudly.

  “Not a doctor,” he said, smiling at me. “A medic. But still, I’ve seen a lot worse.”

  “What’s the difference between a doctor and a medic?” I asked.

  “Pay grade,” he mumbled, dabbing a cotton ball onto my forehead.

  We were in their dusty, dim, and crowded garage. We were surrounded by boxes, crates, fishing poles, canoes, hunting gear, folded-up canvas tents, unused bikes, pots and pans, and every possible thing someone might collect over a long and adventurous lifetime.

  I was sitting slumped at the end of an old lumpy couch, a frosty blue ice pack from their freezer wrapped lightly around my ankle. Olivia’s grandfather had cleaned some of the bigger scrapes on my arms and face with a smelly liquid that stung more than I cared to show.