Patrick Griffin's Last Breakfast on Earth (4 page)

Something was nuzzling Patrick—some thing
s
, rather: things with whiskers, moist snouts, and malty breath. He opened his eyes and saw three collared sheep standing against a low gray sky. A donkey and a big brown cow, also wearing collars of blue seat belt–like fabric, stood a few paces behind. There was nothing the least bit threatening about any of them, but these were no ordinary barnyard animals. It took Patrick a moment to think it through, and then it came to him: the sheep, the donkey, the cow—their eyes were all too big, like manga characters brought to life.

Otherwise, he supposed, everything was normal enough. The wind was gusting, tousling his hair and the grass around him. But how, he asked himself, was the grass dry if it had just been raining?

And then it hit him—he was dreaming. He wasn't
really
outside with a bunch of freaky big-eyed animals. He clenched his eyes shut, hoping to move to the next dream or even to wake back up, but the sheep's nuzzlings were really starting to tickle. Giggling and lazily swiping at them, he rolled over to protect his belly.

“Hey you!” said a piercing, hooting voice.

Patrick opened his eyes and lifted his head from the grass. Standing just beyond the donkey, a big-eyed boy regarded him with rank disapproval.

“Who on Ith are you?”

Patrick considered whether the boy might have some sort of accent to be pronouncing the word
Earth
as
Ith
—like it rhymed with, well,
with
.

“And why are you in our yard, and why were you laughing—and why are your
ears so big
!?”

Patrick still didn't know quite how to respond. First, he really wasn't in the mood to speak. Second, he didn't have big ears. And, third, it struck him that if anybody should be asking questions about this entire situation, it should be him.

He pushed up on an elbow and looked around. He'd assumed he was dreaming of a farm, or maybe a petting zoo. But this was somebody's front lawn, and not a somebody he ever remembered having visited. For one thing, most people he knew had houses with windows and didn't have plants growing on their roofs. It wasn't an ugly building, exactly. But Patrick had definitely never seen it, or any structure quite like it, in his entire life.

Similar slope-sided houses lined both sides of the street, some also with blue-collared farm animals standing in their well-kept yards … and even upon their gardened roofs.

He turned his attention back to the boy with the tiny ears and the ridiculously, impossibly big eyes. The kid was now aiming a fancy-looking cell phone at Patrick—presumably filming him.

“Well?” prompted the boy. “Do you intend to answer?”

The boy looked to be Carly's age—fifth grade or so—a pale, understuffed dumpling of a boy wearing brown corduroy pants and a too-big sweater vest squeezed up over his collarbones by his too-tight backpack.

Patrick also couldn't fail to observe that the boy was wearing makeup.

Dream or not, Patrick couldn't contain his surprise at that: “Are you wearing
lipstick
?” he blurted.

“I could have begun by asking why you
aren't
wearing any,” said the kid, still aiming his smartphone at Patrick. “But frankly your
ears
are what demand the greatest explanation. I mean anybody, in theory, could have forgotten to apply cosmetics in the morning; but most people don't wake up with fantastically large
ears
! Wait, is that a costume!? Are you an
Anarchist
!??”

“A what?”

“Don't play games with me!! I've just escalated my feed for review by the cops!”

“Wait. What?” said Patrick, trying to think things through. Was he trespassing on the kid's lawn or something? “Where am I?”

“You're at 96 Eveningside Drive,” said the boy. “Right in
my
front yard.”

“96 Eveningside Drive?” asked Patrick. “That's funny. I live at 96 Morningside Drive.”

“Yeah, hardy-har-har,” said the boy, his pubescent voice dripping with sarcasm. “Great joke. Now, explain yourself and don't try any—”

The boy broke off. Clearly he'd just thought of something and—judging from how he clasped his hands and did a little jump—it was a pleasing notion.

“Wait, are you an
Earth
ling?!”

“Umm,” said Patrick. Wondering again if the boy had said
Earth
or
Ith
before, and also if maybe the boy was like Stephen Westrum, Jeff Hookey, or one of the other crazy Doctor Who–Heads from school, always obsessing about aliens and robots and mutant plagues.

“Holy flipping sight!” yelled the boy, looking down at his smartphone. He was bouncing up and down like he had to go to the bathroom. “I found one! I found one! I'm going to
mega-index
!”

“Found one
what
?” asked Patrick, standing up. Despite his now very concerted attempts to shoo them away, the sheep weren't budging, and he was becoming increasingly worried one might step upon his shoeless toes.

“An Earthling, stoop!” said the boy, looking intently into his phone. He glanced up suddenly, embarrassed. “Oops, sorry, I mean an Earthling, sir.”

“O-kay,” said Patrick.

“Wait—Rex—they say he didn't even know where he was at first. Am I the first person you've seen?”

“Seen? You mean in this yard?” asked Patrick. He wanted to ask who Rex was but the boy cut him off.

“Here on
Ith
, am I the first
Ith
ling you've seen?”

“I'm going to guess you like science fiction,” said Patrick.

“Where were you before you got here?!” demanded the boy.

“Umm,” said Patrick. “I was at the kitchen sink and then—”

“And then suddenly you just found yourself here—here, in front of me?”

“Something like that,” admitted Patrick.

“That's why your ears are so freakishly big!” shouted the boy, smacking his palm against his cheek and spinning around. “I can be so
blind
sometimes. Of course!”

He observed the skeptical look on Patrick's face and broke into a nursery rhyme of sorts:

“Ears are for Earth

Eyes are for Ith

And both in their way

Help the true become Truth!”

“O-kay,” said Patrick, crossing his arms and noticing the raised skin of his burn. He'd forgotten all about it—strangely, it didn't hurt at all.

“You're on Ith!
Ith!
You're on a whole 'nother world!”

Patrick looked at his arm. The letters,
YA-WAY
, were very clear—raised and bright red upon his light brown skin—but the thing was more like a healed scar than a fresh wound.

“What's that on your arm? A cut?”

“No. A burn, I guess.”

“A burn?”

“Yeah, there was a hot pipe in the kitchen this morning.”

“Why were you near a hot pipe?” asked the boy. “Are you an HVAC tech or something?”

“Um, no,” said Patrick as a sheep came up and pressed the surprisingly hard top of its head against his leg. “So what's the deal with all the farm animals?”

“Farm animals?”

“The sheep and cow and—” Patrick broke off, noticing a llama on the roof of the house next door.

“What do you mean what's the deal with them? They control plant growth, and provide milk, wool, and fertilizer for the municipality.”

“What's going on, Kempton?!” demanded a woman's voice from behind Patrick. “With whom are you speaking?!”

“Mother! I found an Earthling! Didn't you see my feed?!”

Patrick looked up as a blond woman, hands on her wide hips, came down the path from the house. She was wearing a neatly ironed flower-patterned dress and had on even more makeup than the boy. Her ears were similarly tiny and her eyes enormous—and they got even larger as she looked up from her own fancy smartphone, regarded Patrick, and began to scream.

 

CHAPTER 9

Sorry, Wrong House

Ichabod Coffin was not happy. Ultravivid dreams—including one in which some very strange people had moved next door and taken to throwing loud parties—had kept him tossing and turning all night long, causing his back to seize up and forcing him to seek relief in the massage chair down in the den.

He was still in the motorized chair—his reading glasses perched at the tip of his parrot-beak nose, his MacBook Pro centered in his flannel-robed lap—as the sun cleared the pine trees in the backyard and cast an annoying glare upon his newsfeed.

Watching people on Facebook had become one of his favorite pastimes of late. The idea of actively joining—commenting, sharing, telling people about his own life, etc.—seemed crazy to him, but he did occasionally feel pressure to be a part of the community and would sometimes press the Like button to show his approval of, or at least his amusement at, other people's posts. He somehow was fascinated to see other people show off their kids, their puppies, their cats, their cars, their gardens, their meals, their deluded impressions of what was politically important … They were all so alarmingly stupid and spoiled—and this whole braggy social-media thing was to his mind another sign of civilization's demise—but, at the same time, it was utterly riveting.

And he would have watched longer this particular morning despite the sun's glare, but at 9:33 a.m. a flash of green issued from the hallway, together with an enormous, floor-shaking thud that caused dishes to chime and tinkle in the kitchen, and he broke off.

His mind flailed for explanations. It couldn't be Consuela. His Ecuadoran live-in housekeeper had left last night to visit her daughter in North Carolina. Had an appliance or a lightbulb exploded? Maybe those new high-efficiency LED bulbs he'd installed weren't stable? But an exploding bulb couldn't possibly have made
that
much noise. And why would there have been
green
light? It had definitely been green.

He could call 911 but the police would take minutes to get here, and to talk right now might be to alert a home invader to his presence. He could run—flee through the front door in his bathrobe and bare feet—go to a neighbor's house. But what if there was an innocent explanation?

Clearly he should first figure out what was going on, and
then
decide what to do about it.

It had to be a burglar. Ichabod's great-grandfather had been a banking tycoon and, though no Coffin since had much grown the family fortune, the old man's inheritance had been managed well, and the eight-bedroom, timber-framed house still reeked of wealth.

But if anybody thought it was going to be an easy job to rob the Coffin estate, the low-life scumbag had another think coming.

Despite Hedgerow Heights' nearly nonexistent crime rate, Ichabod had installed tens of thousands of dollars' worth of silent alarms, motion detectors, panic buttons, and security cameras throughout the estate. And he'd taken other measures, too, including stockpiling self-defense items. In the coffee table right in front of him, for instance, was a Taser X3—the most advanced nonlethal self-defense item one could legally purchase over the Internet.

He pulled open the drawer and removed the black-and-yellow, pistol-like device. Holding the weapon out with both hands like a TV-show policeman, he crab-stepped his way out into the narrow hallway.

A faint but sickly sweet, smoky smell greeted his nose, and he could hear a low, regular rasping noise like somebody breathing, somebody with asthma. He quietly stalked to the end of the hallway and peered around the mahogany doorjamb. There on the floor next to the marble-topped counter, an
animal
was sprawled, apparently asleep, its furry gray-brown, puffy-tailed butt pointed right at him—there was a
bear
in his house!

But the creature appeared to be asleep. He immediately thought to retrieve one of the six cans of bear spray he'd ordered after the Peekskill sighting a few months back. One was stashed by the seldom-used front door. But he probably shouldn't be setting off bear spray inside a house and anyhow it wasn't a very large bear—probably just a cub, not much bigger than a large dog—and certainly a good deal smaller than a full-grown criminal.

He considered the weapon in his hand, leveled his arm, and placed the red laser-sight dot right in the middle of the animal's fluffy rump. There was a terrific
pop!
and a series of clicks, and the next thing he knew the animal was flopping on the floor, its claws clacking noisily on the polished hardwood.

It was a disturbing sight, not that he spent much time watching. He dropped the still-discharging weapon and ran—or at least tottered—back down the hall as fast as his knob-kneed old legs would take him.