Clones vs. Aliens (4 page)

The M3 finished its first full circle and tore into the second with blinding speed as Fisher’s vision blurred into a continuous, full-spectrum blob. It was like someone had dropped a kaleidoscopic fishbowl over his head. The rushing of the wind, the screeching of the tracks, and the screams of the other kids all blended into a smoothie of terror.

The M3 barreled into its second loop. The Vikings must have seen the coaster moving by now. Would they think to try and stop it? Probably not, since it would require
that they think, period. Fisher didn’t like the idea of having his life saved by the Vikings, but having his life
not
be saved would definitely be worse.

Fisher tried to reach out and put his hand on Veronica’s, but his arm was pinned in place by the velocity of M3. He felt like his joints were about to pop out of place.

Fisher’s cheeks flared out like a bulldog caught in a high-speed car chase from the wind. He managed to turn and see if Veronica was all right. Veronica’s brilliant golden hair looked like it was being blown dry by a helicopter, but she looked unharmed. He couldn’t see the rest of his friends, but their intermittent yelps and shouts reassured Fisher that they were at least still pinned to their seats.

An abrupt shift pushed Fisher forward against his harness—they were slowing down! As the trees zipped by, Fisher realized that they were descending.

Mercifully, the ride finally came to an end, new brakes shrieking, an elephant sitting on Fisher’s chest as the last of the coaster’s momentum was used up. It took Fisher a few seconds to recover his senses and realize the cars had stopped moving. With shaking hands he unlatched his harness and pushed it up away from him. He’d barely shrugged it off when Veronica plunged into his arms, and his already erratic pulse shot right back up into the red.

“I thought we were going to crash,” she said, leaning into him. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” he said, “I think … I hope I’m still alive.”

She pulled away slightly, and suddenly her face was four inches from his. A newly activated part of Fisher’s mind started tap-dancing around like its socks had been stuffed with gravel and ghost peppers.

You’ve seen this moment in movies a million billion times
, it said.
You know what happens now!

Fisher wasn’t sure whether to trust this part of his brain.

What do you mean you’re not sure?? I thought you’d learned not to run and hide from human contact by now! Come on, Fisher. You know what to do.

Fisher started to lean toward Veronica. A little wisp of a smile flickered across her face.

He was going to do it.… He was going to kiss her.…

“WAHHHH!” Alex shouted at the top of his lungs, rattling them both out of the moment. Alex was pointing up at the sky. A massive fiery object was plunging directly toward them.

Amanda screamed, “GO!”

Then the top of the Mega Mars Madness coaster exploded. Fisher’s hearing was instantly blown out. A dull ringing echoed in his ears as he scrambled out of the car and away from the coaster. He escaped not a
moment too soon—his hand tight around Veronica’s as he pulled her away from the fiery mass barreling toward their heads. Alex, Amanda, and the others ran alongside them. The Earth shook like a struck bell, and Fisher was thrown from his feet and swallowed by a cloud of dust.

Everything went black.

For a moment, Fisher thought he must be dead. Then he realized if he were dead he wouldn’t have the capacity to reflect on it. He sat up, groaning a little, trying to blink the grit from his eyes. His hearing was just starting to come back and he heard an alarm begin to blare.

They had been encircled by a wall of tangled, shredded steel and tortured, burning plastic. Half the remains of the M3 formed a barrier encircling the coaster park. The other half had been reduced to a heap the size of an office building that the kids had barely avoided being buried under. Trevor and Erin were lying on the ground, petrified but miraculously uninjured. Alex was helping Amanda to her feet. She winced as though she’d sprained her ankle. From the sound of commotion outside the wall of debris, a crowd was running in their direction, hopefully with plenty of emergency equipment.

Only then did Fisher realize that Veronica’s hand was no longer in his.

“Alex!” he shouted. Panic burned through his veins
like fire. “Veronica!” It was the only thing he could say. Luckily, Alex understood.

Fisher dashed back into the debris in a panic, hurling everything he could lift out of the way. Amanda nodded to Alex that she was okay, and he ran to help, along with Erin. The guards were setting up barriers, forming a perimeter around the wreck and talking hurriedly into their radios.

“Did you see what happened to her?” yelled Alex. To Fisher, whose hearing was still scrambled, it sounded as if Alex was whispering through four layers of Styrofoam.

“No,” Fisher said desperately. “I had her hand as we were running away, but I lost her when we got knocked over.”

“We can’t find Warren, either,” Alex said as he started hefting and heaving through the rubble alongside Fisher.

With every lifted-away piece that didn’t reveal Veronica, Fisher’s frantic pace increased. He almost tossed a piece of scrapped plastic right into Alex’s head, forcing his clone to duck. Fisher yelled an apology and kept digging.

He turned at the muffled sound of a familiar squeal-snort.

FP bounded out of the wreckage, looking heroic—winged hooves prancing. He darted past Fisher and Alex and hopped from one piece of debris to another, putting
his snout to each. Then he stopped and let out a piercing squeal, shaking his curly tail like a maraca.

“Veronica!?” Fisher’s heart was in his chest. If anything had happened to her, he would never forgive himself.

Fisher and Alex shoved until Fisher’s arms burned with overstrain, and they just managed to shift a massive support strut out of the way. Underneath it was Veronica. The huge C-shaped beam that landed over her had actually shielded her from other debris. She squirmed free, her hair and clothing matted in dust. She wrapped her arms around Fisher until his lungs barely worked, ashes from the explosion puffing off of her like a coating of flour.

“Oof … youf ofkay?” Fisher’s voice was muffled by her shoulder.

“I’m okay,” she said. “I’m okay. Is everyone else all right?”

“FP found Warren!” Alex shouted. “He’s fine! Asleep, actually.”

Fisher kicked something with his heel as he stepped back from Veronica. He looked down to see a twisted, bent steel tube. It took a moment for him to realize it was a safety harness. He felt nauseous. They could have
died.
They almost
had
died.

Fisher led Veronica back to the group. The others were still picking themselves up and brushing themselves off.
Erin, who always kept a small first-aid kit on her, had just finished taping up Amanda’s ankle. Amanda tested it and grimaced, but nodded.

“It’s not bad,” she said. “I can walk okay.”

It wasn’t until that moment that Fisher remembered Brody, Willard, and Leroy.

“Hang on,” he said with what little breath he could draw. “What about the Vikings? They were near the coaster when it started. Are we sure they got away in time?”

“I saw them walking away as we got going,” Erin said. “Unless they doubled back they are probably fine.”

Fisher could hear dozens of voices outside the barrier of wreckage the explosion had ringed them with. Underneath them was a grumbling engine and heavy metallic clangs. It sounded like a bulldozer or a backhoe was clearing a path.

“Sounds like we’ll be out of here soon,” Alex said, putting his arm around Amanda’s shoulders.

“So … Did all of you see that?” Veronica said, tilting her head upward.

“Of course we saw it,” grumbled Amanda. “How do you not see a fifty-foot meteor pointed right at your head?”

“It wasn’t a meteor,” Veronica said. “It was a ship.”

Everyone stared at her like she’d sprouted a parrot beak.

“Veronica,” Amanda said, moving toward her and speaking very slowly, “are you sure you weren’t hurt?
Did you bump your head? Maybe someone should take a look.” She lifted a hand toward her head. Veronica brushed it away.

“I’m not hallucinating,” she said impatiently. “I’m fine. I know what I saw.” She turned to Fisher. “You believe me, don’t you?”

Fisher opened his mouth and closed it again, feeling a little bit like a fish trying to swallow an apple.

Alex yanked Fisher aside and spoke quietly. “Fisher, an object that size falling from space should’ve turned this whole park into talcum powder. You know that.”

“Yeah,” Fisher muttered back, pretending he hadn’t noticed that Veronica was now glaring at him. “It would have to have been moving pretty slowly to just wreck the coaster. But a
ship
?”

“Uh, everybody?” said Erin, pointing to the wreckage. “What is
that
?”

Seeping from between the shattered remains of the M3 coaster was a viscous green fluid that glowed faintly. It flowed over obstacles and even
up
them, defying gravity—almost as if it were alive. More and more of it pooled in the grass as Fisher and the others backed away.

Soon, it had formed a circular pool the size of the Wompalog basketball court. The faint green glow seemed to pulse calmly, like a very slow heartbeat. Then it started to move again.

Nobody could speak. Not even Alex could think of anything clever to say.

A narrow tendril rose out of the pool and slowly extended toward the kids, who were rooted to the spot like a row of flowers. Very confused, scared flowers. The tendril paused when it reached Amanda and Veronica, and its end widened into something like a satellite dish. It stayed in place for a few seconds before the whole extrusion zipped back into the puddle.

The fluid then divided into thirteen forms that rose and stretched upward. As the forms solidified, they took on oddly familiar shapes; torsos, arms, legs, then heads. Colors and textures appeared next, becoming skin, hair, even clothing. Fisher was too flabbergasted to even have a sense of how long the whole process took, but it couldn’t have been more than a minute.

Where there had once been a small pond of luminescent green gloop, there were now thirteen very attractive and fashionable-looking teenage girls.

Veronica crossed her arms and shot Fisher a dirty look.

“See? I
told
you it was a ship.”

Here it was. Extraterrestrial life.
Aliens.
Fisher had spent every single day of his life trying to imagine what this exact moment might be like for humanity.

He hadn’t, however, imagined that he, Fisher Bas, would be the first human to
meet
the alien race—especially not at twelve years old.

Nor had he anticipated their appearance. These beings were obviously not human. Or even carbon-based. But they looked exactly like teenage girls.
Gorgeous
ones. Veronica was still the most beautiful girl Fisher had ever seen, but staring at a thirteen-way tie for second place was dizzying. The aliens looked like a team of superheroines selected from all over the planet. They were all ethnicities, different heights and appearances, but all looked the same age, and all radiated beauty.

“Uh …” Fisher said. He realized Alex was making the same sound. It was the same noise that rattles out of an
old laptop when it’s trying to analyze particle accelerator data. Fisher’s brain was in overdrive.

The “girls” turned to look at the humans. Their eyes clicked to Fisher’s, and then to Alex’s, and then back. Then, with a signal that was invisible to Fisher, the girls began to glow. Each one became … blurry. Almost as if they were vibrating at extremely high frequency. The blurriness increased, making them look like doubles.

After a moment it became clear that doubling was
exactly
what they were doing. Twin forms grew farther apart until, with a final snap into clarity, each girl became a pair of identical twins, right down to their clothing and the way their hair fell.