The True Meaning of Smekday (26 page)

There was a poster in Chinese on the side of the pipe next to a signed picture of Betty Grable, and a kind of embarrassing pinup painting of a girl getting her skirt lifted up by a pelican.

J.Lo kneeled by the teleclone cage and started loosening connections.

“I can make it into pieces,” he said. “Then will it be more easier to move.”

“Okay, good,” I said. “Why do you think the Chief lit this half of the tunnel, all the way down? He’s got all his stuff piled right here.”

J.Lo was muttering to himself in Boovish. “Five minutes!” he told me, never looking up from the booth.

I walked down the length of the tunnel away from him, until I came to an elbow and a ladder leading back up. I suddenly had a weird feeling I’d never left Florida, and the ladder would open onto the Broadway of Happy Mouse Kingdom all over again.

I started up the ladder, and the pipe soon got narrower and darker around me. But above me, way high above me, there was a little square of moonlight.

“Someday soon,” I told myself, “Mom’s gonna ask what I did all this time on my own, and I’m gonna say, ‘Climbed ladders.’”

I had that feeling of déjà vu again when I realized I’d been climbing too long—that I’d passed the ground and kept going. I must be in the water tower, I thought. I must be getting close to the tank. The pipe brightened, and I looked up at wire mesh stretched over a hatch above me. Moonlight filtered in, I supposed from the big hole in the side of the tank where the Chief claimed his papier-mâché saucer had crashed. I pushed up the hatch and poked my head through to get a look at things.

“Oh,” I said. “You have
got
to be kidding me.”

“No pushing!” said J.Lo. “I am no so good with ladders.”

“Really? You think?”

“You could have just to told me what. Instead of all this climbing.”

“Almost there,” I said.

J.Lo popped up his helmet and used it to push against the mesh hatch in the floor of the water tank as he climbed. The helmet snapped back.

“Koobish!”

He scrambled up into the big cylindrical room and rushed over to the larger of the two animals.

“Naaaa-aa-aa-a-a-aa-aaah!”
said the koobish.

“Maa’apla nah!”
said J.Lo.

“I thought they might be koobish,” I said. “They look just like one of your drawings.”

They were four-legged, with wiry hair in tight little curls. Their feet were round and made
pock-pock
noises when they walked. The smaller koobish came up to J.Lo, and he took a bite out of its ear.

“Hey!” I said. “What was that?”

“Is okay,” said J.Lo, beaming. “They do not feel pain. They are fine so long as you do not eats the head.”

“Huh.”

“Try a littles bite of tail. Is crunchy.”

“No.”

Instead I petted the small one as it whinnied happily. The Chief had made it nice for them. The tower was lined with water troughs and filled with hay, and there was even a little potted tree under the big hole in the tank where the UFO had come in.

Oh, yeah, I thought.

“J.Lo?”

“Yes?”

“What if a spaceship really did crash into this thing in 1947? A Boovish ship.”

“YES! Of coursenow! The ship that crashed onto Roswell must have to been the Haanie Mission!”

“But…” I said, “that means…that the Chief really does have a spaceship.”

We held each other’s gaze for a second.

I was already heading down the ladder again when J.Lo ran to the hatch. Then he ran back a moment, took another bite of koobish, and started down the ladder above me.

“Will the koobish be okay?” I asked, my voice echoing. “We can’t bring them with us to Arizona.”

“They shoulds be fine. They have plenty water to make an hundred babies, and the Chief put out enough chlorine for to last them a year. An Earth year.”

I’m faster on ladders, so by the time I got outside I was way ahead of J.Lo. The entrance to the Chief’s basement was just a gaping hole now, with the splintered remains of doors barely attached by crumpled hinges. I hurried down the steps and groped around for the light switch.

Only about half the lights came on. No “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” The Gorg had trashed everything. He’d even thrown the UFO against a wall, and it lay there on its end, papier-mâché crunched against the rough concrete.

“I don’t get it,” I whispered. The saucer looked just as bad as it had two days ago. Worse. “There’s no way that thing’s real.”

J.Lo arrived, panting. “Did you to…is it…Tip should to…have waited…so much…running…”

“You don’t think he would’ve…” I said, and trailed off. There was something funny about the whole scene.

“Yes?…What.”

I stepped over and tore some of the cracked papier-mâché off the fake spaceship. Inside was a real one.

“How’s it coming?” I asked. We needed to leave while it was still dark, and I was feeling tired and antsy.

“Superfine,” said J.Lo. “This Chief Shouty Bear, he is some smart fellow. Do you know he drained out and cleaned the Snark’s Adjustable Manifold his self? And fixed the humbutt, I do not know how he did that, let me tell you. These things would have taken hours for doing. Howfor is the BullShake?”

The big can of BullShake Energy Drink was strapped to the back of Slushious, and the disassembled Gorg teleclone booth was inside. And J.Lo was completing the repairs. He made Slushious a new fin from the hatch of the three-hundred-year-old rocketpod and smoothed out the roof. He swapped out some parts, including the Snark’s Adjustable Manifold. It was a bit bigger than our old one, and an antique, but apparently the Chief had taken good care of it. I hoped the BOOBs were taking good care of the Chief.

J.Lo put down his tools and raised his oil-stained face.

“Alls done!” he cheered.

J.Lo had to drive. I was dead tired. I put out a bunch of food and water for Lincoln and left a note for BOOB and the Chief on the windshield of the Party Patrol car and we tore away from Roswell, trying to cover as much ground as possible before any Gorg noticed. I drifted in and out of sleep in the backseat, my body a question mark with Pig dotting my feet. It was nice in the backseat, feeling like a little kid again, so that when I awoke an hour later and the car was stopped, I half expected my mom to lift me up and carry me to my bed.

There was a soft glow of lights in the back windshield. I propped myself up and stared out. Then I stumbled through the car door and joined J.Lo, standing by the rear bumper.

We were higher up, looking down and about eighty miles southeast at where Roswell used to be. Maybe you future people have rebuilt it—that would be nice. The big Gorg sphere was closer than before, and was the color of a fresh bruise in the moonlight. And Roswell was glowing in the dark.

“What are they…why are they doing it?” I asked.

J.Lo glanced at the big metal can on our car, then back at the town. It was all the answer I needed. The Gorg hadn’t found their teleclone booth; they were burning everything for a hundred miles so nobody else would have it, either.

“They got out, don’t you think? Chief and David and everybody? Lincoln?”

Cannon fire set the horizon ablaze, and impossibly huge Gorg giants stamped it out again. I would have thought I’d dreamed it all, if not for the pictures.

“We betters get going,” said J.Lo.

We drove in shifts, caught some sleep, and steered north more than ever, because it looked like the Gorg were on the move. It was hard to tell with a ship that large and that far away, but it seemed like they were aiming right for us. We could have made it to the Arizona border in a few more hours if we hadn’t been distracting each other with stupid little arguments. Don’t get me wrong; I like J.Lo fine. I’ve made that bed. But I’m not sure there’s a person in the world I could be with twenty-four hours a day for three weeks without getting a little snippy. If I ever meet such a person, I’m marrying them. We were probably somewhere around Four Corners when we actually had a fight over whether water was wet. I guess I knew I was wrong, but there was no stopping me when I got going.

It was weird country. Really barren, with these loops and piles of rock that looked like poured frosting. But I knew we were nearing the Arizona border when I started seeing little threads of smoke in the air. They were from campfires, I thought. They were from people.

“You better put on your costume,” I said. “And I don’t think you’re going to be able to talk to people with that voice of yours. That Kat woman was on to you.”

J.Lo cleared his throats. “WHAT IF I TALK LIKE THIS.”

I jumped. He sounded just like someone on TV.

“OUR PARTING CONTESTANTS WILL RECEIVE THE FOLLOWING CONSOLATION PRIZES.”

“That’s amazing,” I said. “Now do a little kid voice.”

“THIS IS THE ONLY VOICE I CAN DO.”

“Oh. I don’t think that’s gonna help, then.”

“Just as well,” said J.Lo. “It makes my teeths hurt.”

He pulled the sheet back on. We’d made him some arms now as well, with white sleeves and mittens.

“Booo,” said J.Lo the ghost. “Boowoooooo!”

“Okay,”
I replied, smiling. “Thank you.”

WELCOME
TO THE UNITED STATES
OF ARIZONA

said a big sign, and I let out a sigh. According to the sign, Arizona is known for cotton and copper. The state bird is the cactus wren, and the state canyon is the Grand Canyon. Way to go, Arizona.

A few minutes more and I could see tents and little houses dotting the land. And people—more humans than I’d seen in one place for three weeks. Hundreds of people, and they were all staring at us.

“Why is everyone staring?” I said. Then I answered myself in my head: Why
wouldn’t
they be staring?

I tried to look sixteen, which is really hard to do if you’re not concentrating, and lowered Slushious closer to the ground, the back tires just skimming over the asphalt. But there were still the extra fins and the hoses and BullShake can and the ghost in the passenger seat to contend with, so people stared. J.Lo stared right back.

“Ah! Looksee? The Boov are helping.”

It was obvious where he was pointing. There was something like a transparent soccer ball filled with shampoo near the main road. People with buckets and coolers crowded around it, but they’d stopped whatever they were doing to watch us pass.

“It is a telecloner,” said J.Lo. “The peoples can use it to make water, and to make food.”

“Food? I thought the telecloners couldn’t do that. The Boov ones, I mean.”

I wished I hadn’t added that bit about the Boov. I hadn’t meant anything by it, but I thought I heard an edge in J.Lo’s voice afterward.

“Is not
complicated
,” he said. “The telecloners can make a healthy milk shake. Has everything you need.”

“That’s nice of them,” I said. “Nice of the Boov.” And the crazy thing was, I really meant it. The Boov had invaded our planet, erased our monuments, taken our homes, and dumped us in a state they didn’t want, and I was already so used to the whole idea that it seemed like a sweet gesture that they hadn’t left us to starve in the dark.

I coasted Slushious down a hill past what used to be a Buy-Mor but now seemed to be home to a bunch of people. They gawked and pointed at our floating car, so I started shouting “Magic trick!” out the window as we passed. It didn’t mean anything, but it got about half of them to nod and go back to what they’d been doing.

It wasn’t ten minutes before we were stopped. I saw blue and red lights flashing behind me, and heard a siren, but you couldn’t imagine a sweeter sound. It was just a siren—nothing weird about it, nothing new. It was an ordinary cop car, carrying two ordinary probably-scared-half-out-of-their-minds cops.

I pulled over. The squad car slowed and parked some distance behind me. A man cop got out and crouched behind the open door, training his gun on Slushious. A woman cop got out the driver’s side and crept slowly up on us like she expected the car to change into a robot. After a minute of this she leaned over and looked in my window.

I thought the police officer was supposed to take the lead in these kinds of situations, but this woman just stared at us. I smiled back sweetly.

“Hi.”

The policewoman frowned at my “hi.” I think her instincts kicked in.

“Do you know why I stopped you today, ma’am?” she said.

“Because I’m only eleven and my car is floating?”

The officer stared for another moment, and coughed.

“Yes,” she said.

“Sounds like you’d better take me down to the station, then,” I replied.

I figured I wasn’t going to find Mom by driving all over Arizona shouting her name out the window, so I knew I’d end up going to the authorities anyway, if there were any. At the station I explained about my mom’s abduction, and the mysterious Boov who rebuilt our car, and how my brother JayJay would throw up for ten minutes if anyone tried to touch or talk to him. I got a lot of practice telling this story, as I had to repeat it to no less than fifty people over the next few days. Soon I had a police escort down to Flagstaff, where a lot of former government types were trying to collect information and help people reunite with friends and family. It was funny that there were so many people trying to find one another when we were all crowded into one state like this. But I guess unless you were all on the same rocketpod, you had no way of knowing if your loved ones were living in Mohawk or Happy Jack or Tuba City. I swear I’m not making these names up.

The Bureau of Missing Persons of the United State of America was in a university building. I was introduced to a thin man in a little suit named Mitch. Two more men in identical suits stood behind him with their hands behind their backs.