The True Meaning of Smekday (21 page)

“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 every 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.

“What,”
I shrieked,
“in GOD’S name are you—”

J.Lo ripped the sparking Snark’s from its place in the hood and threw it over the back of the car, trailing blue lightning in its wake. I watched it catch in a tangle of thorny branches right in front of the swarm of Gorg, then
Flash! Bam!
and the cabin of the car went bright with blue-white light, and the big clap of force somersaulted Slushious over and again on its fat pink Safetypillows.

We shuddered to a stop.

“Wroooo,”
said Pig.

“Yeah. Me too,” I answered. “J.Lo?”

I could see one of his hands wiggling.

“I am fine.”

He was fine, pressed firmly between two cushions on the hood.

“That was a good plan, J.Lo.”

“I am quietly proud,” he said through the high whine of the shrinking pillows.

Slushious couldn’t be driven after we lost the Snark’s Adjustable Manifold, but it still floated, so it wasn’t too difficult to push once the Safetypillows disappeared again. We moved it as far as we could from the arroyo, in case any Gorg came poking around. We pushed around the edge of the city until about five or six in the morning, when the air was waking and opening its big blue eyes. The birds were singing, and I felt weirdly happy, considering we were talking about all the things that didn’t exist anymore, now that the Boov and Gorg had arrived. We hid Slushious in a car wash, between the part with the huge spinning brushes and the part like a big pasta maker.

“There used to be a ton of TV channels, maybe hundreds. Now there’s just the Emergency Broadcast System.”

“Hm.”

“And there’s no World Series this year. Probably no baseball teams at all, because there are no states. And…no countries anymore, either. Not really.”

“Mm,” said J.Lo. “I am not knowing if these countries were evers such a good idea in the first place.”

He frowned. “Which place is this first place, anyways?” he asked, looking at the atlas. “Is it Delaware?”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “About countries, I mean.”

“Yes. And I am thinking, if the baseball was being played before, it is still being to.”

“Maybe.”

“And televisions will return. Earthland never had so much to beginto.”

“Are you kidding? There were so many channels that they had one just for old cartoons. And about five just for new cartoons. And a music video channel that didn’t even play music videos.”

“Fhf. Boovworld had once five million channels beforeto the Purging.”

“The what?”

“The Purging.”

“Purging.”

“Yes. In the Purging, all channels but one were eliminatited, to prevents the death of society.”

“Oh. Yeah. People are always going on about how TV is going to ruin Earth, too.”

“Is well proven. Let us say, after televisions are invented, that there is only then a few channels. Three or four. We will call them A, G, Semicolon, and Pointy.”

“How about we call them A, B, C…and ABC.”

“Whatevers. Let us now think of these channels as like four cups filled with eggs. Cup A holds inside News eggs, and Sport eggs, and Variety Show eggs. Cup B has News and Animated Story eggs and Situationally Comedic eggs. So on. More big cups are added because peoples want More Choices.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Soon it is noticed that between the cups there is room for
smaller
cups.

“These cannot hold much. Maybies there is one with only News eggs all the time. Maybies one with only Funny. But maybies Funny is your favorite sort of egg, so you like this cup.

“Then even smaller cups are made for inbetween the small cups and even smaller between those. The more cups, the more new gaps to fill. Every kind of show is invented. Shows like
Pillowbusters!
And
What Are People Willing to Put in Their Mouths?
Or
The Week in Balancing
, or
Watch Out, Baby Animals! Cavalcade
,
Big Celebrity Poomps
,
Guy on a Table
…lots of shows.”

“So what was the problem?” I asked.

“It went out of the control,” said J.Lo. “Shows had to be recorded whilst even more shows were watched. Not enough time for seeing everything a Boov wanted to see, so some had to quit their jobs, or hires someone to watch for them.”

“Um…”

“Televisional scientists theorized a point into the future when each and everys Boov has his own show, and this show only shows him watching shows. So HighBoov decree: no more television but what the HighBoov say. And the HighBoov mostly say cooking shows.”

“Uh-huh. I’m really tired, J.Lo.”

“Yes. I also.”

I curled up next to Pig in the back of Slushious.

I awoke in the afternoon to find a note from J.Lo saying he’d gone ahead to Vicki’s to eat soap. Actually, it just said “JLO(BiKi5OP,” but I thought that was pretty good. I fed Pig and walked back through town.

I entered Vicki’s apartment, ready to launch immediately into explaining where we’d been all night. But no one was there. Not even J.Lo. I went downstairs and squinted down the hot street. Trey appeared on a corner.

“Hey! Grace, right?” he said. “We’ve all been looking for you.”

“Sorry,” I answered. “We realized we had to go check on our cat, and then we were tired so we just slept in the car, and have you seen J.Lo?”

“Who—the actress?”

“I mean JayJay.”

“Not today.”

I sighed and shaded my eyes from the hot July sun that made everything look flat and washed-out.

“Maybe he was abducted by aliens.” Trey laughed.

I didn’t think it was a very funny joke, all things considered, but I let it go.

“You don’t believe in any of the stuff they do,” I said, meaning the other Roswellians. “Do you?”

“No reason to. There are perfectly rational explanations for everything.”

“Like weather balloons?”

“Scientific balloons,” he said. “Sure. You know that NASA has a ballooning facility just a couple hours from here? They send up these enormous silver balloons all the time. I’ve seen them launch one. But the UFO nuts never tell you about that, do they?”

I was reminded of something else they probably wouldn’t tell me.

“Do you know where Chief Shouting Bear lives?” I asked.

“Gonna go see the flying saucer, huh?”

“Just for fun.”

He told me how to get to the right road, and how to follow it out of town to the big scrap yard that surrounded the Chief’s house.

“Go,” said Trey. “Look for yourself, that’s what I say. Don’t take these jokers’ word for anything. You’re not one of them, I can tell. You’re like a young me.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but I’m working on it.”

“What?”

“Thanks. If you see JayJay, send him back to Vicki’s, okay? Oh, wait—look.”

I almost said, “There he is,” but stopped myself when I realized I was not looking at a Boov in a ghost suit—I was looking at a Boov.

“Whoa,” said Trey.

This Boov wasn’t even wearing the right color uniform. It was white with green and pink trim. He, it, looked back and forth, right and left. It saw us, but barely paid us any mind. Then there were more Boov following behind, wearing all kinds of colors. Many were armed, especially the ones in green, and Trey stepped backward toward a shop window. I approached the group.

“What’s going on?” I said. “Why are you here?”

“Whyfor are
you
here?” shouted a Boov in green, and he raised his weapon. But the one in white told him something in Boovish, and he put it away again.

“You are supposed to have gone to the Human Preserve,” said the Boov in white.

“I know. I’m trying. What’s going on?”

I saw now that there were more than a hundred Boov, all moving quickly through Roswell on foot. None of them looked happy.

“The Gorg, they established a…an outpost south of here,” said the Boov. Then it looked at me for the first time. “The Gorg are the newcomers, in the big rounded ship.”

“I know. I mean, I heard.”

“Some of our number were onto a warship, fighting forwith the Gorg. Some of we were just living in New Smeksico. We are moving away fromto the Gorg. So should you, also.”

“Are they coming?”

“They might do. And they will not show unto humans the same respect you were shown by the Boov.”