My Cousin, the Alien (6 page)

I just grunted. He went on.

“Maybe if I made a big model of all the bumps on the pendant, I’d see a pattern easier. If we do it outside, I could try punching different combinations of bumps on the real pendant and not risk blowing up the hotel if I get it to work.”

I didn’t even grunt.

We were passing through the woods beside the golf course. Suddenly, Ethan jogged off into a pine grove and started brushing away pine needles with his feet. Reluctantly I helped. I figured I was building ammunition to make him go horseback riding later.

The pine needles gave off a sweet, spicy smell, and dust caught in the shafts of sunlight like flecks of gold. Ethan’s pendant glinted fiercely as he set it in the center of the clearing and began arranging rocks and pine cones on the ground, copying its pattern.

I kind of let the angry springs inside me loosen. Sitting back against a pine, I listened to the afternoon woods—a mourning dove calling, insects buzzing, the distant voices of golfers. The air felt warm and drowsy.

With a sudden thump, a white golf ball bounced into our clearing, knocking aside one of Ethan’s pine cones.

He stomped over to replace it, then spun around at the sound of crashing.

Two men stepped out of the bushes. Fat, bald men.

Agent Sorn crouched behind a flowering bush, talking hurriedly into her sender.

“I tapped into meetings and communications, going to great lengths to get our Agent and his family to a new location. To no avail. The Gnairt are here and seem to have identified him.”

“Under no circumstances are the Gnairt to capture or injure the boy,” Zythis’s gargly voice ordered. “His mission is too important to that planet and the Galactic Union.”

“Understood. I will attempt to keep him in sight at all times, but these young ones have more energy than Arcturian jiggle bugs. They’re hard to keep track of.”

“Do whatever is necessary, Agent Sorn.”

The connection ended. Still crouching behind the bush, she returned the sender to her satchel, then reluctantly pulled out her silvery laser gun.

“Looking for something, ma’am?”

“Yeek!” The gun arched out of her startled hands, landing deeper in the bushes. She looked up at the gardener, her mind racing though its language implants. “I’m just looking for my . . . my . . . my hair dryer.”

“Whatever. Just don’t you hurt the rhododendrons.”

“I wouldn’t dream of hurting anything, sir.”

Maybe I’d been playing too much of this alien stuff, but suddenly our sunny little woods felt a lot colder.

One of the bald men pointed at the golf ball and gave a burbly little laugh. “Sorry to disturb your game, kids, but our game isn’t going well either.”

I guess that was a joke. The other man laughed. I just stared at the two. They were more than just fat. Their pink skin seemed stretched too tightly over its contents, like over-blown-up balloons. And they were
totally
bald. No eyebrows, no eyelashes, not even a little fringe of hair at the base of their shiny skulls. And even weirder, they were completely identical. Really creepy-looking twins. For a sickening moment, I remembered that the fat, bald guys at the mall had looked like twins too.

So what? The world’s full of twins.

Ethan stared at them for a moment too, then hurriedly scooped up his pendant.

“You know, kids,” one said in a booming, trying-to-be-jolly voice, “we should join forces. We’ve lost lots of balls in these woods. If you two pick up all you can find, we’ll pay 25 cents a ball. What do you say, kids? You can bring them by our hotel room tonight.”

Easy money, all right. There were probably dozens of lost balls in these woods. But, aliens or not, I didn’t like these guys. A glance at Ethan’s deathly white face cinched it.

“Sorry,” I said. “We’ve got to go.”

“Oh, but it’s such a lovely afternoon,” one balloon-faced man argued, making a practice swing with his golf club. “Tomorrow it may rain.”

“In fact, Clyde,” the other said, rubbing a bloated hand over his glistening scalp, “let’s walk around with them. The woods are cooler than the fairway. They can go after all the balls that old guys like us can’t reach.”

“Great idea, Bill. What do you say, kids?”

“No,” was all Ethan said. I agreed. These guys could be child molesters or something. And the Clyde guy gripped his golf club like he was wielding a weapon.

As we both backed away, I said, “Sorry, no. We’ve got to get back. Been gone too long already.”

We turned and ran down the road, only slowing as we passed someone striding briskly up the path, the white-haired lady from the Vulcan Wasser Pavilion. At the sight of that perfectly normal, smiling person, I suddenly felt foolish. There I was, letting Ethan’s crazy game get to me—looking for bad guys everywhere, even in a couple of fat, too-friendly golfers.

During dinner, we could see Clyde and Bill eating at the far end of the dining room, two tables away from the white-haired lady and half hidden by the family we’d seen at the stables. I wondered if we should tell our parents about the two golfers. But tell them what? They hadn’t done or even said anything creepy. Well, not very creepy. I sighed. It’d be good when this vacation ended and Ethan wasn’t around all the time making me weird.

After dinner, the adults sat on the veranda, and we headed to a spot under the hotel’s west tower. The sun had smeared crimson behind a dark wooded ridge. That’s where the star guide said Orion could be seen in this time of year.

Ethan babbled on about what his home planet was probably like: his pet flying cats, his mountain palace, his personal rocket scooter. I swung on a bar of the scaffolding that covered that end of the building, and thought about horses.

“Look, you can see stars now,” Ethan said excitedly. “I wonder if that’s Orion. The pattern looks sort of right.”

Glancing at the faint stars near the horizon, I couldn’t see any pattern at all.

“There, just above that pointy tree. That could be home!”

I looked, but it was just a star. Why get excited about a cold distant star when he had an OK home right here? True, I’d rather have my parents than his. But Uncle Paul and Aunt Marsha weren’t mean or anything. They were just busy and probably knew more about making money than making kids happy. Besides, who knew what life might be like on that tiny, faraway light? It could be a whole lot worse.

Ethan babbled on. “Sure, that’s got to be . . . ”

A grating noise came from above. Then a loud crack. I looked up, then dove for Ethan, throwing myself on top of him and a prickly bush. The air sizzled and filled with blue-white light. Then came a crashing thud. For a moment, I was too stunned to move. Ethan squirmed under me. Untangling ourselves, we peered through the fading twilight.

A large building stone had buried itself in the ground a few feet away.

Fearfully, I looked up. Scaffolding was silhouetted against the violet sky. I thought I saw something else, a head maybe, but then it was gone. “Guess this building does need fixing,” I said in a quavery voice. “It’s got some major loose stones.”

“Loose stones? You’ve got loose marbles! Someone’s trying to kill me.”

I didn’t feel like arguing. I didn’t feel like anything but being safe with our parents on the veranda. At a nervous trot, we headed back but agreed not to tell them about the stone. Otherwise they wouldn’t let us out of their sight again. Yet even with them, I didn’t quite feel safe. Someone with a rifle could pick us off easily.

This was so dumb! My cousin’s not an alien. And nobody’s trying to kill him! The fat, bald guys are just creepy humans, and the stone fell by accident. I didn’t understand the bit with the light, though. Ethan hadn’t seen it because I’d been on top of him. Maybe I’d been hit by a small chunk of rock and “saw stars.” Yeah, that was probably it. An accident and a blow to the head.

Once in bed, I kept telling myself the same things over and over. Creepy but human twin golfers. An accident with a building stone. A slight bump on the head—even though I didn’t actually feel one. But just the same, I didn’t sleep very soon or very well.

Covered with mud, leaf mold, and stone dust, Agent Sorn paced angrily under the concealing branches of a weeping willow. She jabbed in the sender code of Chief Agent Zythis’s message machine, not wanting to explain in real
time what had happened.

“Agent Sorn, reporting. The Gnairt have gone too far, attempting to drop a large stone on our Agent. I managed to deflect it with my laser, causing a minor flash. But still, it was a close call. The obvious answer would be to eliminate the Gnairt, but the laws and customs on this planet would call unwanted attention to the killing of two supposed humans, compromising our mission. My only course is to stay close to our Agent and be prepared to act as needed. Out.”

She tried to brush the muck off her new, brightly colored native outfit, then gave up. She’d just have to traipse back to the veranda and settle into a rocking chair like a normal, if slightly untidy, resort guest.

This mission was proving to be a lot more trouble than expected. But she admired the young Agent’s pluck, even if he had no idea who he really was. She just hoped she could keep him alive.

The next morning I woke to the sound of rain against the window. No hope for horseback riding today even if I could talk Ethan into it. My dad was pleased, though. Ever since the brochure had appeared under our door, he’d been keen on that underground river trip. He loved that sort of thing and spent most of the short drive to the cave jabbering about blind fish, white crayfish, and other “rare cave fauna.”