“They have butts on their heads!” I shouted.
After that, Lloyd took over. He told Mr. Mudd the whole story. How the aliens showed up at Chop Socky, how they played my video games, and how seventy billion more of them were on their way here right now. I kept waiting for Mr. Mudd to fall off his chair or spit out his drink in shock and horror, but he didn’t seem surprised at all. He just nodded along, as if it was exactly what he expected to hear.
“And you didn’t say anything,” Mr. Mudd said, “because you wanted to protect them. Because you believed they came in peace. And because no one would believe twelve-year-old boys talking about aliens with butts on their heads, who spoke in farts. Is that right?”
“Whoa!” I replied. “How do you know so much?”
“I know because those are the same reasons I kept quiet . . . when the aliens visited me!”
“What?”
Now it was Mr. Mudd’s turn to tell his story. “I was your age,” he said, “when they flew in my window one night. Two of them. IAmAWeenieBurger and Doodoofartmama.”
“Those are our aliens!” Lloyd said.
“I figured. They said they needed somewhere to stay while they scoped out the Earth and figured out if it’d be worth invading. I’d just gotten my first Atari 2600 home video game system, so I distracted them by teaching them to play Pac-Man. I was hoping they’d lose interest in destroying our planet, but it only made them want to take it over even more. When they caught me taking a Polaroid picture of them, they flipped out and called their friends from home. Just that one small provocation was enough to make them want to invade. I begged them to spare us. I burned my picture in hopes they would just leave, and finally, they did. But as they left, they vowed to return in seven butthead years. I never got to ask them how long that was in Earth years, so I’ve dedicated my life since then to studying them and preparing for their invasion, knowing it could come any day.”
“Well, it’s coming tomorrow,” Lloyd said. “So what do we do?”
“Don’t worry, boys,” Mr. Mudd replied confidently. “This is the moment I’ve been waiting for. And planning for. By day, I’m an ordinary teacher.”
Lloyd and I shared a look. Mr. Mudd was anything but ordinary.
“By night, I am a pro-Earth crusader, scouring the Internet for information and planning for their arrival! Over the course of my life, I’ve developed and committed to memory a speech so persuasive that once the buttheads hear it, they will never return to our planet. All I need is a chance to deliver it before they take over.”
“Well, we’re taking them to Quentin’s house after school.”
“Quentin?” Mr. Mudd said. “Not him! He’ll mess everything up!”
My jaw dropped. “You don’t like him either?”
“Teachers can’t stand weenies like him,” Mr. Mudd explained. “Nobody can!”
I loved hearing that Mr. Mudd was no fan of Quentin’s either, but unfortunately, I couldn’t see any way of getting out of our meeting with him.
“Well, he’ll really mess everything up if we don’t let him meet the buttheads,” I said.
“Why don’t you come to his house with us?” Lloyd asked. “You can give your speech and make sure Quentin doesn’t embarrass all of humankind.”
“Boys, out of duty to our planet, I’ll do it!”
I looked at Lloyd and smiled, starting to feel hopeful again that we could save Earth.
As we walked back to my house after school, Lloyd did the math and figured out that we had three hours and twenty-two minutes before my parents got home from work. “That’s plenty of time to take the buttheads to Quentin’s!” he cheered. “We could even see a movie on the way home and still make it back in time!”
“Right,” I said, “except that it’s actually one hour and thirty-nine minutes before they get home.”
“Oh.”
Math was Lloyd’s worst subject.
“So we’ll just have to save the world a little bit faster,” he said. He took off his digital watch. “I’ll tell you what. It takes ten minutes to walk to Quentin’s house. So that means we have to leave to come back here in one hour and twenty-three minutes.”
“One hour and twenty-nine minutes,” I corrected.
“Yes.” He set his watch to count down from 01:29:00 and hit START. “Now we’ll know how long we have.”
Given that we had almost an hour and a half, I figured we could probably do it, but it wouldn’t be easy. First, we had to explain to the buttheads why we wanted them to go.
Lloyd came up with a great lie to get them to Quentin’s house. “Quentin’s going to make a big announcement at a press conference,” he said. “He’ll let everyone know that your planet-mates are coming, so they don’t get all freaked out when the sky fills up with UFOs and try to shoot them down.”
“But I thought Quentin was a donkey-butt jerk,” IAmAWeenieBurger said.
“He is,” Lloyd said. “But he’s a donkey-butt jerk people listen to.”
They farted it over privately for a minute and then agreed it would be good to have someone spread their message.
Next, we needed to find a container we could use to transport the aliens. We had to search my whole house before we came across my parents’ old cooler in the basement. We got the buttheads to go number four, but even still, we weren’t sure we’d be able to get the lid closed.
“Ow! Ow! Ow!” IAmAWeenieBurger protested as Lloyd and I shoved him down on top of Doodoofart-mama so we could get the latch to lock into place. With a final push, we got the cooler lid closed, and Lloyd and I bumped fists, confident about how our plan was proceeding.
“Let’s go,” he said, but when I got a look at the time on Lloyd’s watch, I stopped short.
“An hour and four minutes,” I said. I shook my head. “I can’t go. We’ll never make it in time.”
“You have to come!” Lloyd said.
“Why? You can do it without me.”
“No, I can’t.”
I couldn’t believe how upset Lloyd was. “Sure you can,” I told him. “I never really help with these plans anyway. We both know you get all the ideas and you do all the talking. I’m not important.”
“Not important? Josh dude, you’re essential.” Lloyd grabbed me by the shoulders. I’d never seen him speak with such conviction before. This wasn’t just a smooth-talking act like he sometimes pulled with grown-ups. This was for real. “You’re the one who tried out for the Smart-Off, who pushed a stroller full of aliens across a parking lot, who let two creatures with butts on their heads sleep in his bedroom. You know why you did it and not me? Because I don’t have the guts. I wouldn’t even have the guts to talk to grown-ups if I didn’t have you with me. You’re my best friend, man. We’re a team.”
There were times when I wondered why I let Lloyd talk me into doing so many crazy things. Sometimes I even wondered why I was friends with him at all. But at that moment, I knew exactly why. At that moment, I would’ve done anything for him.
“OK,” I smiled. “Let’s go. But when that watch alarm goes off, we come back here, no matter what.”
Lloyd nodded. “OK,” he said. “Now come on. Let’s go save the world.”
Lloyd and I underestimated how heavy the cooler would be. Even with one of us on each side, we had to stop and take a break about every five seconds all the way to Quentin’s house. By the time we got there, there were only forty-nine minutes left until my parents got home. I was already nervous about how fast time was ticking away. We rang the doorbell and waited. I was getting really impatient. “It’s been eighteen seconds! What’s taking him so long? If aliens were at my house, I’d answer the door in four or five seconds, tops.”
The door swung open, and Quentin scowled at us. “Where are they?” he demanded, craning his neck to see behind us.
“In here,” Lloyd said, pointing to the cooler.
Quentin looked at the cooler, skeptical. “I knew this was another trick!” He tried to slam the door
on us, but Lloyd shoved the cooler inside to keep the door propped open.
“Guys, come on out,” Lloyd said, flipping open the lid.
Quentin eased up on the door, staring at the cooler. “How dumb do you think I—” Before he could say “am,” the two aliens rose up from the goo and took shape before Quentin’s eyes. His jaw dropped, and he stood still, speechless, until finally Doodoofartmama broke the silence.
“FRRT!” he said, smiling and extending his hand.
The next sound I heard was a thud, as Quentin collapsed onto the floor, eyes closed.
“I think he fainted,” Lloyd said. Lloyd and I bent down over Quentin to see if he was OK.
“Uhh-SHOOZ!”
“Bless you, Doodoofartmama,” I said, looking over my shoulder.
Doodoofartmama shrugged, confused. “FRRT?”
I looked back at him, and to my shock, there was no snot at his feet. Instead, there was a sick puddle pooled up at IAmAWeenieBurger’s feet. He was the one who sneezed this time.
“What just happened?” IAmAWeenieBurger said, confused.
“Uh-oh,” I replied.
“Am I sick, too?” IAmAWeenieBurger whimpered. “Uhh-SHOOZ!” He let out a second, bigger sneeze, and this time, the snot sprayed all over Quentin’s face as he lay passed out on the floor.
“Maybe you guys shouldn’t have done your business in the same container,” I said. “All your germs must’ve mixed together.”
“Germs are nasty little things!” IAmAWeenieBurger complained.
On the bright side, the blast of alien snot snapped Quentin back to consciousness. He began sputtering and rolled over. “What happened?”
“I snotted on you,” IAmAWeenieBurger confessed. “Sorry, dude.”
Quentin wiped the snot off his face and staggered to his feet, backing away in shock. “You’re real!” he said. “I don’t believe it. I have so many questions. Do you breathe oxygen? Can subatomic particles escape a black hole? Did Star Trek really happen?”
“Well, sit down,” IAmAWeenieBurger said. “We have a lot to talk about, yo.”
“Um, Lloyd . . .” I said. I pointed at the watch, as our time ticked quickly away.
“Right,” Lloyd said. “Just take us to your room, Quentin. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to dork out on these guys after they take over tomorrow.”
“Hold on,” Quentin said, leaning down over the cooler. He took a very close look at the gunk that was left behind after the buttheads took shape. “What is this?”
“Just some molten remnants from one of our many excretory processes.” IAmAWeenieBurger shrugged. “No biggie.”
Quentin reached into his pocket and whipped out a plastic baggie, then used it to scoop up some of the goo. “Fascinating,” he said. He held it up to the light for a better look, then pressed it to his nose and took a good, long sniff.
As he backed away with his specimen, I pushed the cooler onto the front porch. Before I even closed the door, squirrels began to appear in the yard, sniffing their way toward it. I knew that by the time we were ready to go back, they would’ve licked it clean.
I had never been to Quentin’s basement laboratory before. It was dimly lit, and everywhere you looked, there were beakers bubbling with green and blue gunk, storage freezers marked “active culture” and “control culture,” and vials hooked up to machines that were beeping constantly. On the wall were detailed diagrams of the anatomy of a cat and a pig.
“Pardon the mess,” he said. “I’ve been working on a vaccine for feline swine flu.”
We heard a creak, and a bright sliver of light spread down the stairway. “Hello!” Quentin’s mom called from above. “There’s a strange middle-aged man here to see you!” She led Mr. Mudd downstairs, with a tray of snacks in her hands. “And I have some goodies!”
I panicked, shoving the aliens toward a closet. “Guys! Hide!” I said. It was too late, though. She had already seen them—and they had seen Mr. Mudd.
“FRRT, Earl!” IAmAWeenieBurger said.
Mr. Mudd squeezed his face tight to respond in their language. “FRRT!” he replied, nodding to each of the buttheads as he popped off a nasty dook wave. “IAmAWeenieBurger, Doodoofartmama.”
Doodoofartmama giggled.
“What’s he laughing at?” Mr. Mudd asked.
“You fart with a funny accent,” IAmAWeenieBurger admitted. “Nice try, though.”
“Well, I see we all know each other here,” Mrs. Fairchild said. “No need for introductions, eh?” She set her snack tray down, but nobody took anything. I didn’t recognize a single item. All of the food was strangely colored and textured. None of what she was serving looked edible, let alone the kind of food you’d call “goodies.” If I’d seen these objects in another context, I might’ve guessed they were car parts or structures used for shelter by small sea creatures. I would never have guessed any of these supposed foods she was serving us were even fit for human consumption.
Lloyd was far less tactful than me. “What is that stuff?” he asked.
Quentin’s mom smiled and pointed to the items on the plate. “These are dried kiwi flakes. Coconut leather. Dairy-free flaxseed brownies. A few cups of rose petal tea to wash it down. And for a little guilty pleasure, I threw in some carob chips.”
Even with everything I’d been through the last few days, this was the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen.
“What about Oreos?” IAmAWeenieBurger asked.
Quentin’s mom giggled, “Well, we eat healthy around here!” she said. “But I’ll see what I can whip up.”
“Thank you!” IAmAWeenieBurger called out, as she bobbed back up the stairs. “Nice lady.”
I felt a little bad that we had insulted her food, but then I realized I could use it to our advantage. “Guys,” I said, “Earth isn’t all video games and Oreos, you know. There’s lots of food like this, too.”
“Hey, I love coconut leather!” Quentin said, stuffing his face.
As the aliens sniffed the snack platter with their feet, I leaned in to whisper to Quentin. “Remember, we’re trying to get them not to take over the Earth, right?”
Quentin nodded. “Right.”
“How have you been, Muddy?” IAmAWeenieBurger said. “Still trying to beat our high score on Space Invaders?” He laughed mockingly.
“That third hand is an unfair advantage on shooters!” Mr. Mudd retorted, clearly stung by the jab.
“Whoa, calm down,” Lloyd said, pulling him aside. “Remember, we need to get them to call off their invasion, even if we have to kiss their buttheads.”
“Right,” Mr. Mudd agreed. “Then I should give my speech!”
“Not yet,” Lloyd replied. “First, Quentin should tell them he’s taking down the picture and saying it was a hoax. Then, they won’t feel threatened by Earthlings anymore.”
“Aha. Good idea,” Mr. Mudd agreed.
“Buttheads,” Lloyd said to the aliens. “Quentin has something he wants to talk to you about.” He winked at me, and we both winked at Mr. Mudd. This was going perfectly according to plan.
“Sure,” Quentin said. “But first, can I see your money?”
“What?” Lloyd said, caught off guard.
“You want to see woofbas?” IAmAWeenieBurger asked. “But Josh says they are worthless on your planet.”
“I just want to see the picture,” Quentin said, grinning.
I turned to Lloyd, panicked. I had totally forgotten that Lloyd told Quentin he was on their money. Clearly, though, it had been on Quentin’s mind.
IAmAWeenieBurger reached inside his butt. “Well, I wouldn’t have guessed you were such a fan of Queen Turdmuncher, but here you go.” He pulled out a piece of money, much like our own but with a drawing of a butt where one of our presidents would be.
“Queen who?” Quentin said, looking at the bill. “That’s not me!”
“No, that’s how they pictured you,” Lloyd insisted. “And Queen Turdmuncher is your name on their planet. It’s
a pretty good name for you.” Even he could tell at this point he wasn’t being very convincing.
“You lied!” Quentin said. “I’m not on their money! They probably don’t even have more than three or four statues of me on their entire planet!”
IAmAWeenieBurger laughed. “Just the one, actually. The Snertflings love to pee on it.”
“What?” Quentin shouted. “Is this a joke?”
“Quentin, let me explain,” Lloyd said.
Quentin cut him off. He was furious. “I want to talk to the aliens,” he demanded. “Without you guys!”
He opened the door to the basement bathroom. “Ooh, you’re busted,” IAmAWeenieBurger said to me as the aliens filed in.
“Mr. Mudd, you have to go with them,” I said. “Make sure Quentin gets them to agree not to invade.”
“Of course,” Mr. Mudd replied. “Don’t worry, boys. I’ve been preparing for this my whole life!”
Mr. Mudd followed Quentin and the buttheads into the bathroom and closed the door behind them, leaving Lloyd and me alone in his lab. “Do you think this’ll work?” Lloyd asked.
“It has to,” I said. “Those two don’t want to pick toe jam any more than we do.”
At the top of the stairs, the door opened, and Quentin’s mom returned with a new tray of snacks. “Hi-ho, boys!” she said. “I made some organic Oreos!”
She showed us what she’d made, but they looked nothing like Oreos. They were square and green, and the middle was much wetter and mushier.
“Well, you’ll have to give me the recipe,” Lloyd said, trying to be polite.
“It’s easy!” she said. “It’s just raw tofu between two strips of dehydrated seaweed. Try it!”
“I wish I could,” Lloyd said. “But I’m seaweed intolerant.”
“Well, just give it to the buttheads when they come out.”
It was a little strange how friendly she was to the two freakish monsters her son brought into her basement, and once she called them buttheads, I knew something was up.
Buttheads from Outer Space Page 12
