“Cara,” I whispered. “Is that you?”
There was a frantic scraping sound and a thud from the other end, and then a familiar voice said, “Who’s there?”
“It’s me, Luke Parker.”
“Kid!” It was Cara, all right. “They got you too, huh?”
It made perfect sense that she’d be imprisoned here. The sue-dunham couldn’t have the real Cara Lee getting in the way while their robot copy went about her evil mission.
“What happened to you?” she asked. “I was walking through the park, listening to the new Billy Dark album, and the next thing I knew—”
“There was a green flash and you woke up craving grilled cheese.”
“Yeah. And the weirdest thing is, I don’t even like grilled cheese.”
“It’s good that you’re a prisoner here too,” I said.
“It is?” said Cara, puzzled. “Good for who?”
“For all humankind,” I said. I had an idea that taking Cara Lee prisoner might prove to be the sue-dunham’s undoing. Zack didn’t want to hear from me, but she was someone he’d always take a call from. “Cara, you have to contact Star Guy telepathically.”
“I do? Why would he listen to me?”
“He’ll listen, trust me. You have to tell him everything. Reach out with your mind. Are you reaching?”
“OK, OK. Here I go.” There was a delay that seemed to last forever, and then Cara said excitedly, “It’s him! I can hear his voice.”
We were saved! Now the aliens would get what was coming to them. My superhero brother would be here in a flash. Oh yeah, the sue-dunham were about to—
“No, wait,” said Cara. “It’s a recorded message.” In a halting voice she repeated it for me. “‘Hello, it’s Star Guy. I appreciate your call. However, due to the excessive number of mind-to-mind requests I receive, I’ve had to limit access to my telepathic communication. If you have a PIN, please enter it now. If your request is urgent, or you believe you should be on the approved caller list, then contact the District Council, extension eight six two.’ Or it might have been eight six four. It went a bit crackly at the end.” Cara sighed. “He’s not coming for us, is he?”
“Nope,” I said. I didn’t have a PIN. I didn’t even know there was an approved caller list. “If we’re getting out of here, we’re going to have to do it all by ourselves.”
“OK, Houdini,” she said. “So how exactly do we do that?”
I paced the classroom, deep in thought. Harry Houdini, the famous escapologist, would have freed himself from this place in seconds, with only a smile and a hairpin hidden in his silk underpants. But did I have skills like Houdini? I was about to find out.
“OK, let’s review,” I said. “All we have to do is escape from detention, evade the hordes of deadly sue-dunham prowling the corridors, make our way back to the transporter in the gym, figure out how to work the controls, and beam ourselves home.”
“Right. Simple then,” said Cara.
I was glad she agreed. I continued my search for equipment to aid our escape. One of those TV remotes would have been useful. It seemed to be the sue-dunham’s version of the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver in Doctor Who, capable of unlocking doors—and who knew what else. Unfortunately, all I could lay my hands on were a pack of three-ring binders in pastel shades, a handful of thumbtacks, a metal protractor, a triangle, and a dozen plastic rulers. I informed Cara.
“Useful, kid,” she said. “If you want to give the aliens a particularly tricky geometry problem.”
I twirled the triangle around my finger. “Y’know what, that’s not a bad idea.”
Five minutes later, everything was in place. Now, for my plan to have any chance of success, I had to attract the attention of the guard outside the door. I could see her outline through the frosted glass.
“Ooooh,” I moaned, loud enough for her to hear. “I don’t feel well. I think it was the grilled cheese. The room is spinning. I’m going to blow space chunks. Bleurgh.”
I kept up my pretend retching until the door swung open and the guard poked her head inside to check on me.
That was her first mistake.
The dozen rulers I’d tacked to the door frame bent back under the action of the opening door and, with a volley of boings, pinged against her face. Wincing at the slaps, she stumbled into the room—and the next part of my trap. I had set the binders in a tight pattern across the floor, their stiff metallic rings pried apart like bear traps, ready to clamp onto unwary feet. The guard lurched into the minefield, letting out whistles of pain as dozens of metal pincers nipped at her toes. In an attempt to avoid further injury, she performed a desperate hopping dance that brought her within range of the storage cupboard where I’d secreted myself. From my hiding place I watched as she teetered on one leg, weakened and off balance. I wouldn’t get a better chance.
I sprang from the cupboard. “Hypotenuse this,” I quipped, bringing the curved metal edge of the protractor down like a pirate cutlass, severing the holster from her belt and spilling the remote control held inside. Catching the falling device, I leaped nimbly over the snapping binders. Once on the other side of the door, I quickly aimed and fired the remote. The door slammed shut, sealing the guard inside.
Seconds later I freed Cara from the classroom next door. She looked down at me. “Hypotenuse this?”
I shrugged. “Best I could come up with.”
She glanced both ways along the empty corridor. “Come on,” she said. “We’re not out of this yet.”
Bamf!
We headed out of the math block, passing a bulletin board plastered with announcements about guard-duty rosters, the forthcoming invasion, and a bake sale. Next to the board was a long window that overlooked the staff parking lot. A glimpse out revealed the scale of the aliens’ invasion preparations. Cara gasped. The parking lot was crowded not with the usual Nissans and Fords, but with sleek atmospheric strike fighters and bombers. If they were anything like the ones in the video game, Earth’s military forces would be swept aside.
“How are we going to stop all that?” said Cara.
“We’re not,” I said. My brother was the only thing that stood between the aliens and Earth’s destruction—and only if he stopped being in a huff with me.
We paused at the next junction, pressing our backs to the wall and holding our breath as a patrol marched past. Once they turned the corner, I started to move off. Cara held me back.
“Uh, wasn’t that Miss Dunham? And Miss Dunham?”
Cara didn’t know about the sue-dunham. It turned out she hadn’t seen a soul since being beamed aboard the ship. She only knew that she was in an alien vessel at all because of the glossy magazine slipped under her door, titled What’s On Board! And the accompanying article, “This Month, Invasion Earth: Ten Things You Never Knew About the Destruction of the Human Race.”
As we plotted our way through the maze of corridors, I filled her in on what I’d learned about the aliens—their gym teacher disguise, the reality TV show, the video game trap—and then I got to the part about her robot impostor. That was kind of awkward.
“Wait, why did you make her look like me?”
Uh-oh. I felt a slipping sensation, as if this conversation was about to get away from me.
“You could have picked any girl in the world.”
“Uh, no, I couldn’t,” I said quickly. “The game only has people from our town.”
“OK, but you could have chosen any of them.”
The truth, of course, was that I’d had to pick Cara because Zack had a crush on her. But I couldn’t exactly tell her that without revealing Star Guy’s identity. The possible conversation flashed through my mind:
“I made the robot look like you because Star Guy has a huge crush on you.”
“He does? How do you know?”
“Because he’s my big b
rother.”
She was studying me with a curious expression, waiting for a response.
There was a whistle from back down the corridor—an alien patrol had spotted us. I’d never been happier in my life to be ambushed. An alarm that sounded like the school bell blared across the deck. Now the whole crew would be looking for us.
“This way!” I shouted, taking Cara’s hand and leading her into a stairwell. We bounded downstairs, taking the steps four at a time. Behind us I could hear the beat of alien sneakers as the sue-dunham pursued us as relentlessly as Miss Dunham during cross-country season.
We crashed through the stairwell door, our feet sliding on the polished floor as we came to a halt in the school’s entrance foyer. Over the main door hung the school flag, with its Viking ship emblem and Latin motto, Sit Vis Vobiscum. But the alien foyer was far bigger than the real one. It had to be in order to house so many trophy cabinets. Instead of the handful of dusty glass cases that lined the corridor outside the main office on Earth, here there were dozens and dozens arranged in tight rows.
“Quick, over here,” whispered Cara.
I felt a tug on my collar as she pulled me down behind one of the cabinets. There was the athletic bounce of footsteps as the sue-dunham patrol swept into the entrance foyer from the stairwell. From our hiding place we watched with relief as they jogged past us, into the cafeteria across the corridor.
As they filed inside, my eyes switched focus to the glass cabinet in front of me. Instead of a football trophy or a medal for being the runner-up in volleyball, there sat an unexpected but familiar object.
“It’s a TV remote,” I said.
“And there’s another one in here,” said Cara, peering into the next case.
An inspection of more cases revealed remote controls in all of them. Each had a different design. Some appeared to have been fashioned for use with one hand, two, or even three. Others were meant to be held in suckered tentacles or claws, or operated by fingers made of water or pure energy.
Set into the plinth beneath each case was a plaque engraved with alien writing and a pattern of circles and intersecting lines. I ran a finger over the raised design.
“It’s a star chart,” I said, suddenly realizing what I was looking at. “They’re coordinates for different planets.” I came to a horrible conclusion. “Each of these remote controls must belong to a race that the aliens have conquered.”
We looked slowly around the entrance foyer. There were hundreds of remote control trophies. The sue-dunham had rampaged across galaxies, destroying everything before them, all in the name of a reality TV show.
“And we’re next,” said Cara quietly.
The full horror of our situation sank in. If the aliens succeeded, then we’d soon be just another TV remote in a glass case.
“What are you doing?!” said Cara, as I lifted off one of the glass tops and removed the remote from inside.
“If it’s anything like the sue-dunham’s, then maybe we can use it.” I pointed it at the main entrance door and tapped the ON button. Nothing. “Batteries must be dead.”
I abandoned the remote and headed off with Cara for the gym. I was sure that at any moment a sue-dunham patrol would pounce on us, but we reached the end of the corridor unscathed. We peeked around the corner.
The entrance to the gym lay before us. Unfortunately, so did a solid line of guards. My heart sank. There was no way we were getting past them.
Cara turned to me. “Look, kid, one of us has to get off this ship and warn Star Guy,” she said. “But not both of us. I’ll create a diversion while you get to the beaming thingy and head back to Earth.”
“But—”
Cara suddenly looked furious. “The aliens took my phone,” she said. “And no one takes my phone.” She said it the way the Thing says, “It’s clobbering time.” Part of me felt scared for the alien invaders.
“Kid, if I don’t make it, tell Matthias . . . I really, really liked him.”
I winced. Do I have to? Under the circumstances I felt I ought to agree. I nodded.
She took a deep breath and stepped into the corridor. Waving her arms and yelling at the top of her lungs, she charged at the guards. Taken by surprise, they turned and ran, whistling their dismay as the fearless Cara chased them off down the corridor. Soon they would realize they were being hounded not by the Howling Commandos, but by an unarmed teenage girl looking for her cell phone. Dangerous as that was, it wouldn’t stop them for long. I had to go. Now.
A low hum of power filled the near-empty gym. One side of the pommel horse had been removed, exposing a bank of intricate alien machinery. It had to be the controls for the matter transporter. A lone sue-dunham performed what I guessed to be a series of diagnostic tests on the equipment. Focused on her work, she failed to spot me lurking at the door. She adjusted several dials, tapped a sequence of keys, and studied a readout on a display. She noted something on a handheld device before disappearing through another door into the sports equipment storage room. Now was my chance.
I stood before the baffling control panel. To my dismay it looked nothing like the one in the transporter room on the starship Enterprise. I felt like a monkey put in charge of the Large Hadron Collider. This was bad. I could take a guess and start hitting random controls, but in comics, teleportation was notoriously dangerous. I’d be meddling with the fabric of space-time; one wrong input and I could end up beaming myself into the side of a mountain, or a dimension populated by bloodsucking giraffes. Or worse.
Fishing out the TV remote I’d snatched from the guard, I studied the symbols on its buttons. Every remote control in our house had a button that brought up a help menu. I pushed the likeliest candidate.
A 3-D holographic image of a book appeared above the pommel horse, accompanied by a jumble of noises that I quickly realized were lots of different languages. The system seemed to be searching through them. Finally, it stopped and a woman’s voice said in perfect English, “Congratulations on choosing the UniBeamer 500, the latest in interpersonal matter transportation. With the proper care and maintenance, the UniBeamer 500 will provide you with years of trouble-free teleporting pleasure. This beamer is sold with a five-year guarantee—valid only if repairs are made at an authorized spaceport using genuine parts. Guarantee not valid in the Horsehead Nebula.”
The holographic manual opened to the contents page. I scanned the list for the quick-start section.
As I searched for the instructions I racked my brains. What did I know about teleportation? I knew that when Nightcrawler did it in comics, it made a sound like bamf and left behind a whiff of brimstone. Most teleportation devices that I’d read about needed a target. Something to lock on to. So how had they targeted me? When the sue-dunham had beamed me up, I’d been in Crystal Comics playing Puny Earthlings!
The game disc.
Of course. The spiderweb of circuitry beneath the surface wasn’t some kind of graphic design; it was actual circuitry. The disc had to be part of the teleporter. That way the aliens could beam up whoever was playing the game.
There had to be something in the manual about targeting. I combed through it until I found the right section. I had to read it twice—it was even more complicated than the instructions for my LEGO Star Wars AT-AT Walker. Crossing my fingers, I tapped a control on the main pommel horse panel. A map appeared before me like a genie from a lamp. I recognized my town immediately.
A second later the map was overlaid with hundreds of disc-shaped symbols that speckled the area like measles, one for every household where the sue-dunham had planted a copy of their fiendish video game.
If I understood the manual correctly, I could teleport anywhere on the map with a disc symbol just by touching it.
I hesitated. The sue-dunham would be able to track me using the teleporter’s equivalent of the last number dialed. They’d be sure to follow me to Earth. Once the
re I’d need help to keep them off my back while I tracked down Zack and convinced him of the imminent invasion. This was exactly the kind of mission S.C.A.R.F. was designed to handle. But S.C.A.R.F. was no more than a rejected logo in a portfolio case.
I zoomed in on the map. I needed someone with experience. Someone familiar with evil, world-dominating plans. There was only one man for the job.
I prodded the glowing disc symbol on Main Street.
A whine rose from the pommel horse as the teleporter charged up, and then a shaft of green light shone down from the roof, bathing the top panel of the horse. It was the transporter beam—my bus home.
From the other end of the gym came a screech of outrage. The transporter’s start-up sequence had alerted the sue-dunham operator. She sprinted from the equipment storeroom, brandishing a lacrosse net, whistle clenched between her teeth. I had seconds to get to the beam.
I swung a leg up onto the pommel horse, but only succeeded in banging my knee against the side. It was too high. If I was going to get off this ship and save Earth, then I had to do something I’d never accomplished: a perfect vault. I took a few steps back, closed my eyes, drew a deep breath, and remembered Miss Dunham’s words from gym class: “Knees high and spring.”
I felt my feet pound against the floor, my hands set firmly against the suede top, and then I lifted off like the Millennium Falcon blasting out of Mos Eisley Spaceport. The whine reached a terrible crescendo, like the school orchestra rehearsing. There was a bright green flash.
And I was no longer in the room.
I hurtled through darkness at incomprehensible speeds, but at the same time I felt as if I was moving through water. Stars blurred, galaxies swirled, space folded. Who knew what dimensions I was traveling through or where I was headed? In the murk of space-time I glimpsed a shape. Quickly it became a figure. It was me, but not me. He stood with hands on hips, chin thrust outward, a cape fluttering from his back, a set of stars glowing on his chest. I didn’t understand. Who? How? Where?
My Gym Teacher Is an Alien Overlord Page 8
