“Is the telecloner!” J.Lo hissed.
Just then I heard the dirt crunch behind us, and turned to see the Chief.
“Your brother’s a smart kid,” he said. “Could tell this thing doesn’t belong here.”
“Yeah…” I said. “What, uh, what is it?”
“Not sure. Have some theories. Suppose I can tell ya it belonged to the aliens, though. The new ones. Heard some explosions last night, drove out there, stole this thing while the aliens were fightin’ each other.”
J.Lo was hopping all around the telecloner, inspecting it from every angle. Each time he stopped looking at a spot, Lincoln would approach and lick it for good measure.
“So,” I said. “Do you usually drive toward explosions?”
“I’m a junkman,” the Chief answered. “Explosions are like dinner bells to us.”
“And you just picked this thing up yourself?”
“It’s lighter than it looks.”
I nodded. So far, every alien thing I’d held was lighter than it looked.
“So…” I said, “what do you want for it?”
“Want for it?”
“Sure. You sell and trade junk, right? How much for it?”
“It’s not for sale, kid.”
I couldn’t accept that. Here we’d found something the Boov had been trying to get their hands on for decades. The Chief didn’t even know what it was. But J.Lo could probably figure out how it worked and make more.
“There must be something you want,” I said.
“Nope.”
Should I just tell him? I thought. Should I tell him my brother’s a Boov and he can figure out how to use it? Or would that make things worse?
J.Lo pantomimed a steering wheel under his sheet. I sighed when I realized what he meant, and that he was right.
“Our car,” I said. “I’ll give you our car. A Boov helped us build it. It floats.”
The Chief eyed me suspiciously.
“Your car has Boov parts? For real?”
Suddenly the air was cut by what sounded like a huge, shrill bird.
“Grace! JayJay! Grace! Are you in there?”
Vicki Lightbody was stalking the outside of the junkyard fence, looking for the way in.
The Chief groaned. “Friend of yours?”
I shrugged. “She’s been feeding us.”
Vicki stuck her round, moony face through the gate, and Kat followed behind.
“There you two are!” she called out. “I just knew I needed to check up on you. Here, take these water bottles.”
I resented anyone suggesting we needed to be “checked up on.” On the other hand, I noticed for the first time that it was getting dark, and that my throat was cracked from thirst. I drank, and J.Lo poured half of his bottle over his head and slipped the rest under his sheet to drink.
“Mm. Um, this is Vicki and Kat,” I said. “I guess you both know the Chief?”
“DON’T STEAL MY LAND, JERKS!” shouted the Chief, and I must have jumped three feet. “YOU PALEFACED DEVILS!”
I looked at him, wide-eyed. Where had that come from?
“Well, I just think everyone in our little community knows Chief Shouting Bear by now,” Vicki said. Her voice had changed from birdsong to something more like the sound of windshield wipers on dry glass. Otherwise, neither she nor Kat seemed too surprised.
“Ma’am,” the Chief replied.
“We should all be heading home,” said Vicki. “Doncha think?”
“Why don’t you bring that car of yours back tomorrow,” the Chief said to me. “I’d like to have a look at it.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s kind of broken. But we could push it. Yeah. We’ll come.”
“Actually, I think you kids were going to stay with me all day tomorrow,” said Vicki.
“We were? Since when?”
“LET ’EM COME, INDIAN GIVER! I WON’T KEEP ’EM ALL DAY.”
“It’s dangerous for young children to be playing around all this rusty junk,” chirped Vicki. “They’ll get lockjaw.”
“It’ll do ’em good,” said Chief. “Rusty junk is all that’s gonna be left of this planet soon. HAWOOOO WOO WOO WOO!”
Lincoln sat down at the Chief’s feet and howled with him.
“JERKS.”
Vicki Lightbody clucked her tongue.
“You could do with a more positive outlook,” she said with an angelic smile. “When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade is what I say.”
Chief Shouting Bear told Mrs. Lightbody what he thought life had given him. There was a tiny break in her otherwise shining face, like a crack in an Easter egg.
“Well, I don’t know what to make with that,” she said.
“Look, it’s no problem. We’ll come back for a few hours in the morning,” I told the Chief. “See you.”
Chief Shouting Bear nodded.
Once we were outside the gate, Kat let out a whistle.
“Man, I don’t know how you kids can stand him. Doesn’t all the yelling get on your nerves after a while?”
“He’s a poor man,” said Vicki. “A poor, sick man.”
“Actually,” I said, “he didn’t yell at all until you guys showed up. Not really. Maybe he only yells at grown-ups.”
Vicki sniffed.
“Well, you are not going back there tomorrow. We cannot have two children spending time alone with a crazy man, and Trey never should have told you the way.”
I looked at J.Lo. He leaned over and whispered an escape plan that ended with Vicki Lightbody inside a ball of superyarn and cold foam. I hoped it wouldn’t have to come to that, but it was a good plan.
We went home with Vicki that evening and ate her food, and slept in her living room, and politely declined her invitation to build a fort out of the sofa cushions. Actually, to be totally accurate, J.Lo was all over the sofa cushion–fort idea and was drawing up plans and talking about this kind of insulation versus that kind of insulation and asking if New Mexico had a history of earthquakes before I shot him the look that’d come to mean I can’t explain right now, but you need to stop discussing central heating and start talking about Power Ninjas or something before everyone realizes there couldn’t possibly be a ten-year-old kid under that sheet, you dumb alien.
Luckily, it was just us plus Vicki and Andromeda in the apartment, and Vicki was way too excited about finally getting what she wanted, to notice what she actually had: not two grateful and happy children, but a space alien and a suffocating eleven-year-old girl who was beginning to feel she could run the rest of the way to Arizona if she had a good breakfast first.
“Wakey wakey!” sang Vicki the next morning. “Eggs and bakey!” She giggled at her rhyme, then frowned.
“What is that noise? Is that the smoke detector?” she asked, and hustled off to check. J.Lo leaned toward me and listened.
“Hm. It is you,” he said.
I took a breath and the sound stopped.
“Sorry,” I said, and rubbed my palms against my eyes. “I guess I was accidentally screaming a little bit with my mouth closed. I just want to get on the road again. And I’m worried about Pig.”
Then I told J.Lo about the big group of Boov the previous day, and the Gorg’s cat fancy. J.Lo gasped and clapped his hands over his mouth, then looked thoughtful.
“I have never hearded of the Gorg liking animals which are not superlarge and dangerful with teeth or kicking strong feet or sitting upon you BAM! with heavy bottoms.”
“Maybe they like how cats taste. Maybe they just think they’re cute, I dunno.”
“Maybies. It is often spoken that the Gorg are fussy eaters.”
By the end of breakfast I thought I had Vicki figured, so I told her I had to go feed my cat and play with her and change her litter, because having a pet was a Big Responsibility and I wanted to be a Good Cat Owner.
If Vicki had smiled any wider, the top of her head would have fallen off. She said what good kids we were, and promised we’d leave as so
on as she changed clothes and fixed her hair. I gotta admit, I ate up the praise as much as the breakfast. I hadn’t been anybody’s good kid in a while.
I followed her into the bedroom.
“Great,” I said. “And afterward, we’re going to visit Chief Shouting Bear, because I promised him I would and I think it’s important to keep promises, because…because a person who doesn’t…”
Vicki’s sunny expression clouded over and turned dark. Eyebrows swooped like vultures.
“After we check up on your cat,” she thundered, “you two will come with me for an educational tour of Historic Roswell. We’re going to see the old courthouse.”
Italics can only do so much, so I’ll clarify that she said “old courthouse” like it was the number one scariest thing in the world.
“Come on, J—JayJay,” I said, nearly botching the name for the hundredth time.
“You two march right back in…get back here!” Vicki shouted. “I don’t have my shoes on!”
She followed us to the top of the stairs.
“What about keeping your promise to go sightseeing with Andromeda and me?!”
“What are you talking about?” I said on my way down the stairs. “We never agreed to anything like that.”
“Hold on,” Vicki shouted. “You just…hold on…I…”
Vicki turned abruptly and rushed back into her apartment. I watched her leave.
“Wow. What crawled up her butt?”
J.Lo looked.
“It could be any manner of things, judging by the size.”
We stepped out into the oven-baked air and walked a couple blocks.
“You know,” I said, “I think Mrs. Lightbody might be a little nuts.”
“Little nuts?”
“Yeah. You know—crazy.”
“Ah. Yes. I thought this also whento she tried to feed me the pasta with noodles. Do you know she covered it with a tomato sauce? That cannot be right.”
I saw a huge pear out of the corner of my eye and recognized it as Vicki Lightbody, dressed in a green blouse and matching stirrup pants that made a zippering sound as she walked.
“Oh, jeez. Here she comes. Walk faster.”
She had her shoes on now, and a diaper bag slung over one shoulder. In the opposite arm she cradled Andromeda, who was wearing both her Legolas Onesie and her Keebler booties. Which seemed wrong, you know—mixing two different kinds of elves like that. So now I knew Vicki was crazy.
“Wait for us!” she sang. “Our first stop is a very powerful magnetic convergence point where two ley lines cross under an Arby’s. This is where the Agarthan race makes—”
“We’re going to the car,” I said. “We’re going to see my cat, remember? You were okay with that part.”
“I can not throw the cold foam pellet,” whispered J.Lo to me. “You are not supposed to get babies in it.”
“That’s okay.”
Vicki followed us to the car wash, explaining all the way that dogs make better pets than cats, and how when she was a little girl she listened to her parents, and that using ginger ale instead of cold water when making Jell-O gives it a little kick, and did we think they tried to pack too much into the fourth season of Babylon 5? She didn’t.
I used to live in a city, so I had a lot of practice ignoring people, but Vicki Lightbody was pushing me to my limit. J.Lo and I greeted Pig and let her out for a bit while we pushed Slushious through the wipers at the exit of the car wash. We pushed right into Vicki.
“We won’t be needing your little car, you sillies.”
Andromeda wasn’t in Vicki’s arms anymore. It wasn’t hard to follow the crying to the spot near a hedge where the baby lay on her back. Pig was sniffing at her head.
“I think you kids don’t understand what’s happening,” said Vicki. “We can’t all go around doing our own thing and…and changing everything! Children do not drive cars. They do not visit old Indians in junkyards. How can things go back to normal when everyone keeps changing everything?”
I decided that was one of those rhetorical questions. I scooped Pig up again and put her safely back in the car. I had a feeling we might have to make a break for it at any moment.
“All my life…all my life I’ve waited for the aliens to come, and now they’re here!” she said. “Now they’re here!”
She was more right than she knew. As she spoke, two crablike monsters the size of gas grills scuttled down a distant avenue. Then one of them turned away and headed straight for us.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Vicki creaked. “My aliens don’t push people around and cause families to break up, make people move and desert their wives and daughters! My aliens are nicer.”
The creature paused right behind her. It was some awful mixture of meat and machine, and I wasn’t at all surprised when J.Lo whispered that it was a robot sent by the Gorg. It was green and purple all over, with a back end that formed a round cage. And in the cage were two stray cats, shivering in the heat.
It was a small yowl from one of these cats that made Vicki Lightbody turn around, and when she saw the crab robot, she gave a squeak and rushed over to clutch Andromeda to her chest.
A scooped-out section at the front of the robot crackled to life and projected a moving image of what I guessed was the head of a Gorg. The reception was terrible.
“A MESSAGE FROM THE ASSISTANT REGIONAL DEVASTATOR GORG THREE-GORGS!” the head said in a tinny roar. “A MESSAGE FROM THE ASSISTANT REGIONAL DEVASTATOR GORG THREE-GORGS! A MESSAGE FROM THE ASSIS—MESSAGE BEGINS. HUMANS! YOU ARE HEARING THIS MESSAGE BECAUSE A CAT OR CATS WAS RECENTLY DETECTED IN YOUR AREA! ARE YOU IN POSSESSION OF A CAT OR CATS, OR KNOW WHERE A CAT OR CATS CAN BE FOUND?”
I looked quickly at J.Lo, then at Mrs. Lightbody. She was staring back at me and…smiling? I held my breath.
“YOUR REPLY WAS NOT UNDERSTOOD. TO CONTINUE IN ENGLISH SAY ENGLISH! GU POZGIZLU IZ NIMROG, FEL—”
“Uh, English!” I said.
“ARE YOU IN POSSESSION OF A CAT OR CATS, OR KNOW WHERE A CAT OR CATS—”
“No!” I said, and hoped Pig had the sense to stay low. The robot apparently couldn’t detect her inside the car.
J.Lo said no, too. Vicki didn’t say anything.
“ALL MUST ANSWER!” said the robot, and turned its flickering Gorg face toward Vicki. “ARE YOU IN POSSESSION OF A CAT OR CATS, OR KNOW WHERE A CAT OR CATS CAN BE FOUND?”
“Well, now, let me think…” said Vicki, smirking like she was eating cake in front of orphans.
“ALL MUST ANSWER!” said the robot, charging up to Vicki and Andromeda. It craned up to its full height and pressed near the baby. Vicki gave a sharp cry and tried to hold her out of its reach.
“POSSIBLE CAT!” screeched the robot. “INVESTIGATING!”
“It’s not a cat!” I said. “It’s a human! A human infant!”
The cat hunter eased away and relaxed its posture again.
“CORRECT. MESSAGE CONTINUES. ALL CATS MUST BE SURRENDERED TO A GORG OR GORG REPRESENTATIVE BY SUNDOWN TONIGHT! ANY HUMAN FOUND TO BE HARBORING A CAT AFTER THIS TIME WILL BE DISASSEMBLED! HIS CLOSEST NEIGHBORS WILL BE SEVERELY PUNCHED! MESSAGE STOPS.”
With that, the crab scurried away, its joints and feet making chewing and ticking noises across the pavement. I felt like I had an all-over sunburn.
“Thanks,” I told Vicki. “For not…”
She didn’t really look at me when she answered. She would have been looking at my hat if I had been wearing one.
“You’d better let your cat go,” she said flatly, “or turn it over before tonight. You can’t fight things.”
She turned to leave.
“Maybe I’ll pop in and check up on you later,” she added, and zipped off home.
“Let’s go,” I said.
We jogged alongside Slushious for a while, pushing it as fast as we could manage. Then we jumped in and rode until it ran out of momentum, and we had to jog again.
“What does she keep having to ‘
check’?” I said. “You’d think we needed watering or something.”
We coasted along in silence for a minute. A big ball of burgundy ponytails and black braids rolled across the road ahead of us.
“Look,” I said halfheartedly. “Another one of those tumbleweeds made out of old hair weaves.”
“Tumbleweave,” said J.Lo.
I frowned at the rearview mirror as we slowed. “Were people this crazy before you guys invaded?”
“I was not around beforeto us guys invaded.”
“It was a rhetorical question.”
“Ah. Then the answer is yes.”
We opened our doors and propelled the car forward again. More cat hunters moved through the town, down at the ends of streets where the air shimmered.
“J.Lo?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not trying to be bossy all the time. It just comes out that way. You know?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe that’s what makes me crazy. Always having to have it my way. Maybe that’s what makes both me and Vicki crazy.”
“Chief Shouty Bear is perhaps crazy,” said J.Lo after we’d hopped inside again.
“Yeah,” I said. “Or he wants people to think so.”
The tall fence appeared in our windshield, and Lincoln the Great Dane sprang from it and turned circles around the car as we pulled up. The Chief’s place was on a small hill, just a bump, really, but it made it difficult to keep Slushious in one place.
“Here,” said the Chief as he emerged from the yard and propped open big double doors. Then he grabbed our front bumper and helped us move the car inside.
J.Lo and I were panting, and we sat down against Slushious in a thin slip of shade. The Chief disappeared into the house and came back with water.
“Thanks,” I said.