Speaking of J.Lo, I barely noticed when he said, “Truck.”
“What?” I mumbled.
“The bluey truck,” he said. “From beforeto.”
“Hey, yeah! We saw a turquoise truck earlier, driving through the streets. Which one of you was that?”
There was silence. Only Trey was smiling, which I was beginning to understand didn’t mean anything good. I’m not saying I believed all, or any, of the things these people had been saying about the Massive Alien Conspiracy, but I thought Trey could maybe disagree without being a jerk about it.
“Are you going to tell her?” asked Trey. “I’ll happily do it if you won’t—”
“You saw Chief Shouting Bear,” said Beardo. “He’s a…he’s just an eccentric old junkman that lives around these parts. He’s kind of a town legend.”
“Ha—yeah. The Legend of the Crazy Indian,” said Vicki. Then she looked sideways at J.Lo and me and added, “No offense.”
“For what?” I asked. “We’re not Indians. Or crazy.”
“I am one-sixteenth Habadoo,” said J.Lo.
“Tell them the best part,” said Trey. “Tell them Chief Shouting Bear’s the guy who found the flying saucer that crashed in 1947. Tell them he has it in his basement.”
Beardo sighed. “The Chief…claims he has the spacecraft. He really was here in Roswell back then—he was in the air force or something during World War Two.”
“There was no air force in World War Two,” said Trey. “The air force was founded in 1947, and he got kicked out of the military for believing in UFOs!”
“So have any of you seen it?” I asked. “The spaceship?”
“All of us,” said Kat. “It’s sort of a rite of passage. You come to Roswell, eventually you end up in Shouting Bear’s basement looking at that piece of crap.”
“I want to see the ship,” said J.Lo.
“Don’t bother, kid.”
“We’d recognize the ’47 saucer if we saw it,” said Vicki, and everyone but Trey started nodding. “The ufology community knows what that ship looked like. We’ve known for years.”
“Decades.”
If anyone spoke next, it was drowned out by loud, dry booms like dud fireworks that seemed to turn the whole night inside out. We raced to the window to see the Gorg and the Boov fighting again—maybe fighting over some small white object in the plum sky.
That night I told Vicki that we planned to sleep in the UFO museum. “Y’know, because the other kids are there.” Even though at this point I would sooner have slept next to seasick howler monkeys than Beardo’s two boys.
“I thought you two could bunk in the living room,” Vicki said, holding pillows and looking hurt.
“Maybe tomorrow night? Come on, JayJay,” I said, finding J.Lo’s hand under the sheet and pulling him out of the apartment.
“I am not feeling so well,” said J.Lo as we went downstairs. “I think those littles soaps were not the eating kind.”
“You have more food in the car. We have to be quick now, in case she looks out the window.”
We walked toward the museum until the last possible moment. Then I checked Vicki’s windows behind us, and we rushed down an alley and wound our way back out to the main road a few blocks away.
“I want to visit the shouty bear man,” said J.Lo. “He sounds nice. Also I want to see his ship.”
“Me too,” I said. “Right after we get Slushious fixed. You know, a few weeks ago I would have said that spaceships couldn’t look like big meatballs. A year ago I wouldn’t have thought they’d be all glass and hoses. Maybe the Chief’s ship just doesn’t look like people expect. Maybe you’ll recognize where it came from.”
“The peoples do not think it is authentical.”
“Yeah, well, they’re nice people, but those guys could get licked on the lips by a Lhasa apso and they’d still claim it was the Abominable Snowman.”
“Yes. I do not know what this means.”
We neared the arroyo. I was out of breath but happy to be doing something constructive after sitting around all day. As we grew close, I could see Pig meowing silently to us through the passenger window. I let her out and gave her a scratch behind the ears.
“Sorry, Pig. We’re here for the rest of the night now.”
J.Lo tossed off his ghost costume and got immediately to work. He squirted some liquid over his hands, quickly congealed into gloves, then poured me a pair, too. Together we wrenched the road sign out of the hood.
“Hm,” said J.Lo.
“What?”
“Nothings. To work! Pass to me the flocked bootpunch.”
“Can you describe it?”
“Pink. Fur. Twisty parts.”
“That’s like, three things in here.”
“It will be quivering a little.”
“Aha. Here.”
Two hours passed, and I had to admit I wasn’t good for anything except handing J.Lo tools that had been described really well beforehand. I’d been playing with Pig for a bit and was beginning to drift off when I realized that J.Lo was just sitting there, staring.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I cannot fix it. Slushious requires a new Snark’s. A new bipaa’ackular humbutt would not hurt anything, either.”
I nodded. “That’s it, then. We have to steal a car. It’s not our fault. Maybe we can hotwire a police car—you know, something that doesn’t belong to just one person.”
J.Lo packed up his tools.
“Anyway,” I went on, “we should do it and leave soon. I think Vicki wants to adopt us. And I don’t like the suspicious way Kat keeps looking at you.”
“Is Kat the one having the glasses and dark hairs?”
“No, Kat is a woman.”
“Hm.”
There was a rumble that I first thought was thunder, but then it came again, loud as anything, and the night sky lit up orange over the northern hills.
“That was close,” I said.
Boov ships passed overhead and shone through the trees like flashlights through cobwebs. I ducked without thinking, then watched them race toward the fire and noisy sky.
“Let’s go,” I said. “I want to find out what’s going on.”
“I already do know what it is going on,” said J.Lo.
“Tell me.”
“So the Boov ships always shoot off toward the booth,” I said.
“And destruct it beforeto it reaches ground,” said J.Lo. “Or shortly afterthen. And the Gorg ship destructs the Boov ship. Is all very efficient. Except, eventually the Gorg make success in setting up a telecloner, and then it is all over. Gorg spill out over planets like ants onto gum balls. With their angriness and barking guns they force the Boov to evacuate—then the Gorg ship eats the world.”
“Well,” I said, climbing into Slushious, “let’s just have a look. Maybe we can learn something.”
“Is not safe.”
“Because of the Gorg?”
“Becaused by the faulty Snark’s Manifold.”
“We won’t need brakes if I’m careful,” I said. “It’s not like there’ll be traffic. Get in.”
“Is not only the brakes—”
“Grab Pig, too,” I said. “C’mon.”
“We could explore!” said J.Lo with panicky eyes.
I looked at him for a moment, trying to read his face.
“Right,” I said. “We’ll just have a look around.”
A second passed, then J.Lo and Pig got in. J.Lo buckled himself and gripped the safety belt with tight blue fingers.
“I will stick on you,” he sighed.
As we drove, the sky grew lighter and brighter, and smelled like fried hair. The boom of galactic war was deafening. Up ahead, a bright but damaged Boov ship staggered through the air, keeping low as the Gorg ship drew hundred-mile lines of fire in the sky.
“Slushious is handling a little weird,” I said. The car shuddered and listed right and left like there was ice on the road, putting aside for the mo
ment that it was summer, and we weren’t near a road, and we wouldn’t have been touching it if we were.
“Yes,” J.Lo said through clenched teeth. “That is the danger of exploring.”
“I guess,” I said. I thought he was being awfully philosophical all of a sudden.
We crested a hill and looked down into a wide pit where once there had been some kind of mining operation. On the ground were the remains of a second Boov ship and, near that, the Gorg teleclone booth. And the scene around the booth was, frankly, just awfully gross. Gorg were streaming out of the booth and, just as quickly, being shot to pieces by the struggling Boov ship. It was my first look at the Gorg, but I wasn’t able to form much of an impression. They had the booth backed up against a steep cliff wall, and hordes of them clung to it in an attempt to protect it from the Boov’s weapon. In the darkness and sickening swaying light, they just looked like a knot of bodies, and parts of bodies, and I’m already thinking about it a lot harder than I ever wanted to. Meanwhile, from somewhere in Mexico, the Gorg’s huge, fiery blasts took aim at the glowing Boov ship, which used the ravine for cover and bobbed around in a way that must have been making a couple dozen Boov crewmen airsick.
“What is that glowing gas, anyway?” I said. “The stuff inside the Boov ships.”
“Is the brains,” said J.Lo. “The main computer.”
“The computer is gas?”
“It is tiny molecules. Human computers are electric switches—off on, off on. Many switches. How these turn off and on tells the computer whats to do. Boov computers are the same, but are electric gas. Each tiny molecule is the switch. Billionses of switches. Trillionses.”
Suddenly the Gorg ship lowered its aim and began punching huge holes in the landscape, opening a line of fire toward the Boov. Slushious, which was already shaking enough, rocked from waves of force and sprays of rock and earth. Pig let out a deep whine like a slow fire engine.
“Um, I think we’d better move,” I said, and coasted down the hill to a safer distance.
A string of Gorg suddenly appeared above the lip of the pit like huge lightning bugs, with their green jetpacks. They shot at the Boov, and the Gorg ship shot at the Boov, but the Boov dove toward the booth down below.
“Brave Boovish boys,” said J.Lo in hushed tones. “And girls and boygirls and girlboys and boyboys and boyboygirls and boyboyboyboys. They are soon to lose, but they will make one last try.”
Just then the Boov ship rocketed out of the gorge, followed by cannon fire, and ten or twelve Gorg jetpackers in hot pursuit.
It was almost quiet, except for the rumbling of the car.
“I am wondering,” said J.Lo. “Did we do it? Did the Boov steal away the teleclone booth?”
“Steal?” I asked. “Not destroy?”
“We shouldto go look. Hurry! There would not be much time!”
I urged Slushious forward, toward the ravine, though the shuddering and knocking of the engine only grew worse.
“The greatest hope of the Boov has been to one day capture a Gorg telecloner,” said J.Lo. “This way the Boov could discover howfor they made teleporting and cloning work on persons and complexicated things. The Boov could have then their own endless armies.”
“Why do you think your guys captured one this time?”
“I do not think, not really, but there was no loud noise from the ground hole. Usuallies, when the Gorg realize they cannot set up their booth, they explore it into a millions pieces!”
“They…explode it?” I asked.
“Ah yes. Explode. I am always doing that.”
We pulled up to the ravine.
“Waitaminute. Have you meant ‘explode’every time you said ‘explore’ tonight?”
“Lookit!” said J.Lo. “Down in the hole!”
“Slushious might explode?”
“At any moments, yes. But look!”
Despite myself, I looked where J.Lo was pointing. First I saw the piles of Gorg parts all around. But then I realized what wasn’t there—the booth.
“The Boov got the booth,” I said.
“No,” said J.Lo. “Up there!”
Driving up the steep road on the other side of the mine was the turquoise truck. And in the truck bed was the booth.
“Hey. Hey!” I shouted. “He doesn’t get that; we get that!”
“I am not thinking he can hear—”
I floored it and drove around the edge of the pit.
“J.Lo, are we going to explode?”
“Maybies. The Snark’s Adjustable Manifold is very instable. But Tip said she wanted to drive anyways.”
“Well, I got this crazy idea we were going to be exploring, not exploding,” I said. Then I glanced at J.Lo’s face.
“You came with me. Even though you thought the car might explode.”
A flash appeared to the northeast. The Gorg had finally brought down the second Boovish ship. J.Lo pressed his face against the passenger window.
“He’s out of the ravine,” I said. “Chief Shouting Bear. I bet Slushious can catch him if we don’t blow up first. What are you looking for?”
“They are coming back. Gorg jetpackers. I see sevens.”
“Oboy. What…what can we do?”
J.Lo had a real hopeful sort of look on his face. Like he needed to borrow money.
“The Boov have never before captured a Gorg teleclone booth. It is the most important thing,” he said. “The most important thing is to not give it back.”
I sighed and shut my eyes and nodded my head. My mind raced, searching for a good idea.
“Allll right. Here we go.”
I cranked the steering knob way to the end of the a.m. dial and spurred Slushious on toward the approaching jetpackers. Their taillights traced alien symbols in the air as they drew closer. I liked thinking that they really were as small as they looked and would smack our windshield like the pests they were. But they kept getting closer and larger. They saw us and dropped lower in the sky, and I finally got a decent look at the things. It was just as well that I hadn’t before or I never would have let myself get so close to one, much less seven. When they were within a hundred feet they aimed rifles the size of streetlamps at us.
“Whatfor will you do?” asked J.Lo.
“They’re in our way,” I said. “I’m going to honk at them.”
I mashed my palm into the horn as hard as I could. Just like it had two weeks ago in Pennsylvania, the hood flew open and belched orange fire into the sky. The Gorg scattered, and I turned hard to the right and hit the gas.
“I don’t suppose that got rid of any of them,” I shouted, as our windshield was blindfolded by the clanking car hood and I had to drive with my head out the window.
“No. But they needed some seconds forto their eyes to readjust. And for this they did not see the boothtruck. They are following on us.”
I glanced up at the center of the hood. You could see the Snark’s Adjustable Manifold there, hissing and spitting blue fireworks against the window glass.
“That thing looks ready to pop,” I said. I could feel it buzzing through the steering wheel and in the seat of my pants.
“Yes. Drive unto the arroyo.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, my eyes snapping back and forth between the Gorg in my side mirror and the dark desert ahead. “I was thinking—”
“I have a idea.”
I pressed on toward the highway and checked the mirror just in time to be blinded by the flash of the Gorg rifles. They pockmarked the ground all around and sheared off our antennas, and I weaved Slushious right and left and behind flagpoles and fence posts.
“J.Lo, I really think we should—”
“Please onto the arroyo,” he said as he searched his toolbox and produced what looked like a pencil sharpener made of lemon Jell-O that, when cranked, would spit out super-strong yarn that smelled like ginger ale. “Trust on me.”
I retraced our path from the day before, through the hilly obstacle course that shook ever
y last thing out of J.Lo’s toolbox but made us a hard target. Gorg fire sheared the tops off of dunes and filled the night with pulverized dirt. In the meantime I chewed myself up inside trying to decide whether I should see J.Lo’s plan through or do what I really thought was best. I was furious that he’d put me in this position—we both knew I was the smart one.
“Almost to the arroyo,” he said. He’d tied one end of the superyarn around his middle, the other end around the passenger seat. “Turn into it.”
The Gorg were gaining. They were faster and more nimble. They’d love it if we went into the arroyo with all its rocks and low branches and high logs. Plus, I could barely see.
“I hope humans and Boov go to the same heaven,” I said as we skimmed down the hill. “I might want to say a few things to you later about this plan of yours.”
I gave us an extra cushion of air under the car and squinted into the rushing wind and stinging bugs. We barely missed boulders and fallen trees, and barely hit shrubs and thin branches that came from nowhere and whipped against the bumper, or hood, or my face. The Gorg were down in the trench, too, and blasting a red smoldering path through the brush.
“What are you doing?” I shouted to J.Lo, though it was pretty obvious he was climbing out the side window and onto the windshield. He shouted something back that was lost to the roaring wind.
Just then, a Gorg blast came awfully close to the car, and J.Lo lost his grip. He tumbled sideways and down the side of Slushious until his yarn lifeline went taut.
“Hwhoa,” I heard him say.
It was hard enough to navigate through the wash with a small army of flying death on your tail without worrying about J.Lo getting smacked against some tree trunk. I was beginning to take us up out of the arroyo when his face appeared in the window again.
“No!” he said. “Only oneother minute!”
He pulled himself hand over hand back up the yarn and onto the windshield again. The he peered backward over the roof of the car and reached for the Snark’s Manifold, which I was shocked to see was glowing hot pink.
The Gorg drew closer. J.Lo looked back over his shoulder at the Manifold, then squinted at the Gorg again.