by Nate Ball
Contents
Chapter 01: My Secret Roommate
Chapter 02: Sound the Alarm
Chapter 03: Party Crasher
Chapter 04: My Second Erdian
Chapter 05: Marshmallow Bullets
Chapter 06: Retreat and Rethink
Chapter 07: Sugar Bust
Chapter 08: Bedspread Rumble
Chapter 09: The Inspection
Chapter 10: Chatty Bang-Bang
Chapter 11: Healthful to a Fault
Chapter 12: Beard Boy
Chapter 13: Atlatl or Bust
Chapter 14: Losing the Room
Chapter 15: Don’t Move
Chapter 16: Good-bye Forever
Chapter 17: Grounded for Good?
Try it Yourself: Atlatl
Excerpt from Alien in My Pocket #6: Forces of Nature Chapter 01: What a Trip
Chapter 02: The Ol’ Switcheroo
Back Ad
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
My Secret Roommate
When a pint-size alien from outer space crash-lands his spaceship on your bed during the middle of the night, your life can get pretty messed up.
You can never go back to the way it was.
My little blue alien and I argued constantly for two straight months as we tried to repair his junky ship. We fought like two crabs in a bucket.
Then we ran out of steam.
And we learned to get along.
I guess you can get used to most things that at first seem to be the absolute ruin of your life, like summer school, tuna fish, and spelling quizzes.
I had grown comfortable with Amp, and he had gotten used to me.
The fact that Amp wasn’t much bigger than a stick of butter helped me keep him a secret from my parents and little brother. He also had an invisibility trick that came in handy more than once and the ability to erase people’s short-term memory.
The only other person on Earth who knew about Amp was my best friend and next-door neighbor, Olivia. And she had gotten so used to Amp that it was a minor miracle she hadn’t blurted out some funny story about him to my parents.
As the ambassador of the human race, I think I had done a pretty spectacular job. My cat hadn’t eaten Amp, I hadn’t stepped on him, and most important of all, I’d convinced him that attacking our planet was a bad idea.
See, Amp is the lead scout for the planet Erde. The Erdians are planning on taking over Earth, but because of me, Amp understood that attacking this planet was a major mistake. Compared to the average Erdian, we were simply too big to be defeated.
So, as we made slow progress in repairing his ship, the Dingle, we became friends—if it’s possible for a human to be friends with a hairless, three-fingered, Smurf-colored alien.
But now the time was fast approaching to get Amp back home to cancel the Erdian invasion. The future of Earth and Erde depended on us. We both knew it, but we didn’t talk about it much.
Mostly, we spent our time eating junk food and watching scary movies on my mom’s laptop.
Amp was crazy for horror movies, the old black-and-white kind. Dracula. Frankenstein. The Wolf Man. Creature from the Black Lagoon. We were working our way through a deluxe set of twenty-four classic horror movies on DVD that I had borrowed from Olivia’s grandpa.
One night, Amp and I were up late—as usual—enjoying SweeTarts and Ritz Crackers while watching The Mummy (starring Boris Karloff), when our cozy little situation got crazy.
As is often the case, it all started with alarm bells.
Sound the Alarm
“Hey, what’s that noise?”
“Eh?” Amp grunted absent-mindedly. He was lying on his side next to the track pad on my mom’s laptop, rubbing his stuffed belly, totally absorbed in the movie.
I was sitting cross-legged on my bed with the computer in front of me.
“Hey,” I said, gently poking the back of his head with my pinky finger. “Can you hear that?”
“I can hear you interrupting the movie,” he said. “Now shush.”
“Seriously,” I said, poking his shoulder now.
“Knock it off, Zack,” he said, shrugging his poked shoulder.
“C’mon, Amp, listen.”
“Quiet!” he said, waving his hand at me. “The mummy is coming. I love this part!”
I slapped the space bar and paused the movie.
“What are you—?”
“Can you hear it now?”
We both listened in the silence. It was a faraway tinkling, buzzing sound. Or beeping. It wasn’t the kind of sound I had ever heard before.
“That sounds pretty dang alien to me,” I whispered.
He jumped to his feet and held up his hands to silence me as he strained to hear the noise.
“Oh, that’s not good,” he said in his strange, high-pitched voice.
“What exactly do you mean by ‘not good’?”
“Does it mean more than one thing?” he asked.
“Amp, what’s happening?”
He began looking around in a panic. His face turned a paler shade of blue.
“Is that sound coming from you? Are you going to explode or something?”
He shot me a look. “Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t beep. Or explode.”
“At first I thought you were farting,” I half-joked, but it wasn’t funny. The far-off beeping alarm grew louder.
“It’s an Erdian alarm.”
“Seriously?” I yelped, jumping off my bed. I dropped down to the floor and looked under the bed. I looked in my laundry basket. I opened all the drawers of my desk as fast as I could, but I seemed to get no closer to the sound. I noticed he was still standing on the laptop. “Are you just going to stand there?” I snapped.
“You can search faster than me,” he said.
“Is the thing I’m looking for going to blow up in my face when I find it?!”
“Why do you always assume things are going to blow up?”
“That’s the kind of noise things that blow up make!”
“Try the window,” he said, pointing urgently.
I pulled up my window and looked out to the dark backyard. “Crickets,” I said. “Only crickets outside. No alarm.”
When I turned back around Amp was staring at the closet with a horrified expression on his face. We kept his spaceship in my closet!
Amp and I exchanged a glance.
I tiptoed over to my closet door, opened it slowly, and gently pulled the wool blanket off his football-size spaceship. The alarm become louder as it fell away, and I noticed two small blinking purple lights.
My mind spun. “Do you need to change the oil or something?”
Amp appeared next to my foot. He grabbed the ample skin of his belly and began to nervously knead it like bread dough. “That is a proximity alarm,” Amp said in a trembly, tight voice.
“That’s terrible,” I whispered, staring at the blinking light. “What exactly does proximity mean?”
“It means someone is coming,” he said.
Party Crasher
“What do you mean, somebody is coming?” I asked.
Amp pulled on his antennas. “What do you think I mean? I mean what it sounds like I mean!”
I picked him up and held him just inches from my nose. “Don’t get tricky, Short Pants.”
“I don’t wear pants! You know that.”
“Don’t get snarky, either. Just tell me what’s happening.”
He released his antennas, closed his eyes, and pulled down his lower lip. “I don’t know.”
“They’re attacking Earth, aren’t they?” I yelped, shaking him.
> “Who is?”
“Your creepy Erdian friends! They’re arriving on Earth right now. The invasion is beginning, and I never warned anybody!”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” he wheezed, struggling in my grip. “Not so fast.”
“Was this whole thing a trick? Were you just stalling? Faking me out about your broken ship until your army of blue buddies arrived?”
He pushed on my fingers. “You’re squeezing me too tight,” he gasped. “My head is going to pop!”
“Sorry,” I said and opened up my hand. He took several deep breaths and began to pace in circles on my palm, just inches from my face.
“That, Zack, is not an invasion alarm,” he said, pointing at his ship. “Invasion alarms are yellow.”
“Why yellow?”
“It would take too long to explain,” he said, waving off my question. “The point is that alarm just means that someone is coming.”
“Someone? Or a million Erdian someones?”
He stared at the buzzing, flashing light and it stopped suddenly. He looked back at me. “They’re probably trying to find me. Like a rescue mission of some kind. But because my ship is damaged, they’ll never actually find me. The odds are a million to one.”
I looked at him skeptically. “Who would they send? Your mom?”
“Why on Erde would they send my mother? That would make no sense. Let’s just hope it’s not my—”
Amp was interrupted by a thunderous whooshing sound coming from my window.
“The attack is beginning!” I squealed.
I dropped Amp like a hot potato, jumped out of the closet, scrambled to my desk, and pressed my face to the window screen. I squinted as a fiery light lit up the backyard.
“Uh-oh,” Amp gasped from somewhere behind me.
A spaceship just like Amp’s was flying in circles twenty feet off the ground in our backyard. A shower of orange and white sparks were spraying out of it, making it look like the Fourth of July had come to my backyard.
Without warning, it turned sharply, like it had bounced off an invisible wall.
“Ooohhhhh nooooooo . . .”
I dove to the carpet just as the thing exploded through my window screen.
Just like Amp’s ship had done, the fizzing ball of metal crashed into the wall over my bed with a dull thud, just two feet from the dent Amp’s ship had made, which I had cleverly hidden from my family by covering it with a baseball poster.
I was definitely going to need another poster now.
I blinked as thick, stinging smoke filled my room. A burning rubber taste made my tongue tingle. And an eerie, glowing light pulsed from under my bed.
“A million to one, he says,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. Despite Amp’s claim that the invasion wasn’t starting, I wasn’t convinced. He had been wrong before. About practically everything.
That’s when I saw Amp crouching on my bedspread. He had put on his helmet and was holding his tiny weapon out in front of him. Like a truly good friend, he was trying to protect me.
Then he turned.
But then I realized that wasn’t Amp on my bed.
It was another Erdian. And he looked ready for a fight.
My Second Erdian
“Report to Erdian Council,” the strange Erdian barked into a little wristband recorder thingy.
“Here we go again,” I sighed, rising to my feet. I’d seen Amp do this a million times. This was like getting the same headache twice.
“Atmosphere on this planet is exactly as we predicted,” he continued breathlessly into his tiny bracelet. “Readings indicate seventy-eight percent nitrogen, twenty-one percent oxygen, and trace amounts of argon and carbon dioxide. It is, however, having a strange effect on my voice, which sounds very high. No sign yet of Scout First Class Amp. Stand by for more. Situation here is fluid and unpredictable.”
Now that I had a better look at him, I did notice that this Erdian had slightly longer antennas than Amp and a big space in his teeth. Other than that, they were practically identical.
I cleared my throat. “Uh . . . hi, I’m Zack,” I announced.
He spun and faced me. “Do not move, Earth person,” the tiny creature commanded, his eyes growing wide with fear. He stumbled backward on my bedspread.
I knew he was surprised by my size.
When Amp had arrived so many weeks ago, he was surprised when he saw how big I was. And when he saw the size of my parents, he practically fainted.
I sighed as I stepped over to my bed. “Okay, just take it easy, squirt,” I said. “I come in peace.”
“You come in peace?” he said. “But I’m the one who just got here!”
Do all Erdians love to argue? “Listen, I am on your side. Let’s be friends.”
“Oh, please, earthling, your weak mind tricks will not work on me.”
“Mind tricks? Hey, I’m just being friendly.”
“That won’t work either,” he said, pointing his little weapon at me, which looked like a tiny TV remote control.
“Whoa there, half-pint,” I said. “Relax with the ol’ remote-controller-zapper thingy. Look, I know the whole Erdian invasion backstory. So take it easy and tell me what you’re doing here.”
“You know about the invasion!” he cried. “You must have tortured our scout!”
“Tortured? Amp? C’mon, Blue Face, it’s not like that.”
He grunted at me. “He would have never revealed his name unless you forced him to. What have you done with his body? I am here to recover it.”
“Body? He’s not dead. Gosh, what do you think I am?”
“Then where is he? Huh? Tell me that, giant human!”
“Actually, I’m not sure. He’s probably hiding somewhere. He can be like that.”
“Oh, please, you expect me to believe that? You are a horrible liar!”
“Ease back on the throttle, space dude,” I said soothingly. I tried to calm him down by flashing him with my friendliest, welcoming smile.
“Showing me your teeth will not scare me.”
“That was a smi—! Oh, forget it! Look, we need to quiet down and clean up this mess before my parents come barging in here.”
He crept closer to me. I’m sure he was trying to get me in range of his weapon. “Show me where you’re keeping him prisoner this instant.” His eyes nervously scanned the smoke-filled room. “Amp! Amp! I am here to rescue you!”
He then spoke in a strange language that I couldn’t follow. It was Erdian. Amp had taught me a few words, but they were mostly curse words.
“Could you be quiet, please?” I hissed. “If my mom and dad hear you they’ll flatten you with a spatula. You want to get pancaked?”
“AMP! AMP! IDENTIFY YOUR LOCATION!”
This guy had listening issues. “Stop with the floofy shouting.”
I thought using an Erdian word like floofy would make him feel at ease, but it only seemed to freak him out more.
“NOTHING IS AS IT SHOULD BE!” he yelped.
Without any other ideas, I half-fell, half-dove onto my bed in front of him.
That took my tiny visitor by complete surprise.
The resulting mattress bounce sent him flying high into the air, at least three feet. I counted four somersaults, one spin, and two and a half twists. I caught him gently in the palm of my hand.
Amp and I did this trick all the time. It was hilarious. But my new guest didn’t seem to see the humor in it.
Shaking his head, he jumped to his feet and zapped my chin with his weapon. It felt like cold static electricity. It tickled. He snarled and shot me repeatedly in the lips, ears, eyes, forehead, cheeks, and nostrils. He seemed to be looking for a weak spot.
I rolled my eyes at him. Then I plucked his helmet off his head and put it on the tip of my nose. His stunned look made me laugh.
“Let’s get one thing straight,” I began.
Before I could finish, he was knocked from my hand by a flying marshmallow.
Marshmallow
Bullets
“NO! WAIT!” I yelped.
One minute you’re making intergalactic peace with an alien, and in the next second he’s picked off by a flying marshmallow!
Another marshmallow came flying. This one bounced off the back of my head. It stung more than I’d care to admit.
Olivia!
One of Olivia’s many charming hobbies is building marshmallow launchers. Or, in this case, marshmallow cannons.
I looked back over my shoulder just as a spinning marshmallow rocketed through the ragged hole in my screen. It hit me square in the eye.
“Agh!” I said, falling back on my bed. “Olivia, knock it off,” I said in the loudest whisper I could muster.
When I spun back around the strange Erdian was gone.
“This can’t be happening,” I said.
Marshmallows continued to fly past my head. One hit me square in the ear. My best friend and next-door neighbor could be annoying, but there was no denying she had great aim.
I stepped to the window. “Olivia, what are you—”
Three marshmallows bounced off my face in less than two seconds. “OUCH!”
“Sorry,” I heard her call out.
I could see Olivia’s shadowy figure standing barefoot in the grass in my backyard. She was in a nightgown and carrying her largest marshmallow launcher. It was slung over her shoulder by a guitar strap.
“That thing is dangerous, Olivia.” I sniffed, trying to clear my watery eye.
“Oh my gosh, Zack, are you crying?”
I growled. “You almost blinded me! What are you doing?” I hissed, poking my head all the way out of my screen’s new basketball-size hole.
“I’m running outta ammo, that’s what I’m doing!” she said. “Duh, Zack. I’m laying down a steady suppressing fire so you can safely retreat.”
“Retreat? Where am I going to retreat to? I’m already in my room!”
“You can’t argue with basic military tactics, Zack.”
“Did you see the—”
“Of course,” she interrupted. “I think the whole neighborhood did. It sounded like World War III out here. What’s going on?!”
