My Gym Teacher Is an Alien Overlord (4 page)

It was the last hour of the last day before the fumigation break. The corridors swarmed with students heading to their final classes before one precious and unexpected week off. I hadn't seen Serge all day. I finally caught up with him and we were carried along in the noisy surge. Serge had geography and I had art, so we were going our separate ways. I was about to learn that that was true in more ways than one.

“What do you mean, you can't come over?” I said. “We have important S.C.A.R.F. business to discuss.”

Serge gave me an awkward look. “It is my
maman
. After the business with Miss Dunham, she says that you are a bad influence and I must avoid you.”

“Avoid
me
?” I was outraged.

“
Oui
. I have been wanting to tell you all day, but it is difficult for me. You are my best friend, and you are a sensitive soul.”

“I'm not sensitive,” I snapped. “Or a bad influence. I'm harmless. Well,
mostly
harmless.”

“I know. That is what
I
said. Luke Parker may appear to be full of confidence and
le
smart aleck, but scratch the surface and beneath you will encounter an anxious boy who simply wants to be accepted.”

“I wouldn't have put it quite like that,” I mumbled.

We were approaching the geography classroom. “There was talk at the dinner table that I should move to another school,” said Serge quietly. “I would not even mention it, but it was over the cheese course.”

This was awful. Serge was not only my best friend; he was currently my only friend. I'd gone to meet Lara at lunchtime in order to tell her my theory about what had brought down the airplanes, but she hadn't showed, no doubt off saving some old people from a burning retirement home. What with her bailing on me to go and be Dark Flutter, if Serge left, then I'd be that kid at the back of the school cafeteria eating his sandwiches alone.

Serge couldn't look me in the eye. “I am sorry,” he said. “Truly.”

I could still rescue the situation. After all, he and I had faced the end of the world together and come out the other side. Nothing could separate us, not even his
maman
. All I had to do was find the right words.

“Fine,” I said sharply. “I don't need you either.” With that I marched off along the corridor and didn't look back.

Lara sent a vole with an apology. I opened the note in the tree house, where I had retreated as soon as I got home from my bruising day at school. I was alone, apart from a heaped plate of crustless peanut butter sandwiches and a double-chocolate milkshake. And the vole.

The note confirmed my earlier suspicions. Lara had missed our lunch meeting because of superhero commitments. She'd written that she would try to pop by later, but her mom was taking her to buy new shoes. That said it all. I came a distant second to a pair of ballet flats. First Serge, now Lara. And forget about Zack; he'd been far too important to pay me any attention for ages.

The vole sat on the floor, gazing up. I could swear it looked sorry for me.

“What are you waiting for?” I asked. “A tip?”

The vole said nothing.

“Well, I'll give you a tip,” I said, taking a bite of sandwich. “Stay away from owls. Got it?”

The vole looked at me blankly.

“Because they're your natural predators,” I explained as I chewed.

I sighed. Not even voles were interested in what I had to say. I waved my half-eaten sandwich. “Know what I don't get?”

The vole did not.

“Zorbon the Decider, that's what. First time he rolls up, he hands out superpowers and a warning.
Nemesis is coming
. Oooh. Big scary end-of-the-world riddle. But the next time he shows his shiny, interdimensional head in here, what does he do? Turns Lara into a superpowered rodent-whisperer—no offense
—
and that's it. No warning. No strange prediction. Nothing.” I paused to suck a mouthful of milkshake through twin straws. When I lowered the drink, the vole had gone. I poked my head out of the tree house to see it scurrying off into the garden.

“Zorbon doesn't hand out powers for nothing,” I called after it. “So the question is, what kind of threat is so terrible it's going to take not one but
two
superheroes to deal with it? I'm telling you, something wicked is heading into town. Mark my words.”

But no one did. Only the wind answered. Swirling in the oak tree, it shook the turning leaves, making them rattle like bones.

The break began with a bang—and a zap and an atomic
whump
. I threw off my comforter and went downstairs to investigate the pounding that was coming from the living room, to find Dad slumped on the sofa in front of the TV, playing on my video game console. Mom had already left for work, and Zack was at the library studying for exams he didn't have to take for another two years. I assumed that “going to the library” was code for “foiling a bank robbery” or “freeing the hostages,” but with my super-nerd of a brother, you could never be sure.

Dad was wearing his bathrobe and the Hulk slippers I'd bought him for his last birthday (he looked less “Hulk smash” and more “Hulk shuffle with a cup of cocoa”).

“Morning, son. And how are you this fine—oh, hang on.” He broke off to repeatedly stab the
FIRE
button on the game controller. On-screen, a familiar building exploded in a cloud of radioactive dust.

“Isn't that the Walgreens on Main Street?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.” Dad nodded, concentrating furiously on the game.

A video game set in our town?
Strange,
I thought. Then again, no stranger than a superhero living here. The empty box lay discarded on the floor.
LAB RAT GAMES
, read the logo on the side. I'd never heard of them. Rising out of the cover art—a colorful illustration of the suburbs in flames—was the title in big letters:
Puny Earthlings!
Dad must have bought it in town—the same town he was now gleefully turning to rubble. This was great. But then I remembered that Mom had imposed a thirty-foot exclusion zone around my Xbox. I took a step back.

“Where're you going?” asked Dad. “We can play together.” He tossed me the second controller.

Well, OK then. If it was fine with Dad, then it was fine with me too. I slid onto the sofa beside him and jumped right into the game.

From what I could pick up playing through the Main Street level, it was a twist on the alien invasion story. Instead of fighting off hordes of attackers from outer space,
you
were the aliens. You could jump from the cockpit of a fighter-bomber to the bridge of the mile-long mother ship to the strategic brain of the Alien Overlord itself. Lab Rat Games had gone to town on the design. The graphics gleamed. Our town had never looked better—apart from the craters and mass devastation, obviously.

The designers had not only lovingly re-created the town; they'd also reproduced its inhabitants. Individual faces were recognizable. There was the mayor, there the lady from the post office, over there the man who drove the ice-cream truck that was always parked outside our school in the afternoon.

“Don't you think this is all a bit . . . odd?” I said.

Dad didn't look up from the screen. “Attention to detail, son—that's what it is. Y'know, the thing almost entirely absent from your homework.”

I ignored the insult. “Is that Mitali from down the block?” I leaned in. A small human figure zigzagged her way through the park, trying to shake off a squad of alien shock troops. “They've even got her Avengers backpack.”
If Mitali is in this game
, I wondered,
could
I
be in it too?
Immediately I flew my assault craft down Moore Street and parked outside our house. I guided my alien warrior from the cockpit and lumbered up our driveway, disintegrated the front door, and barged inside.

My mom and dad stood in the hallway.

I burst out laughing. They looked just like the real thing, right down to the frowny expression Dad gets when he's reading an instruction manual.

“I don't remember giving permission for this,” said Dad, on seeing his virtual self.

“No,” I said, “but you have to admire the attention to detail.”

He shot me a sideways look, and then his expression returned to one of puzzlement. “How did they get our images?”

I shrugged. “Maybe they took it from your library card?” I didn't care. It was so cool. I searched the house, but there was no sign of a virtual me. Zack, however, was in his bedroom reading a book. Typical. Dad stopped me from blasting him to ashes.

I brought up an on-screen menu and, with a couple of button pushes, jumped out of the soldier and into the Alien Overlord's character in the command ship. I returned to the important business of invading the planet.

The earthlings sent in their military. Battle tanks, attack helicopters, and strike fighters all fell before our superior alien weaponry. But just when I thought we couldn't lose came the next twist in the game.

Earth's greatest defenders showed up.

Star Guy and Dark Flutter swooped in, and before I knew it, they had kicked our alien bottoms back to Centaurus A.

The defeat triggered the final cut-scene animation showing what was left of the invasion fleet turning their green tails and fleeing the earth.

Dad turned to me, arched one eyebrow, and gurgled, “So, Admiral Flibol, Terror of the Ninth Quadrant, Vanquisher of the Lorbofloz Horde, Holder of the Order of the Shining Custard for Valor, shall we play again?”

We did. We played through the morning, four bowls of Cocoa Puffs, most of two large pizzas, a liter of Coke, a carton of Extremely Chocolaty Temptation ice cream, the entire box of Girl Scout cookies at the back of the cupboard that Mom thought we didn't know about (they were Tagalongs), a box of after-dinner mints individually wrapped in green foil that were a present, a can and a half of Pringles, and an apple (for nutritional balance).

As I launched yet another fiery invasion upon the panicking humans, I took a moment to admire another aspect of the game: the R & D laboratory (which Dad explained stood for “research and development” and not “railguns and Death Stars,” though he did agree that in this case it could just as easily mean that). Here, deep in the heart of the Alien Overlord's mother ship, you used nanomachine replicators to design and build all kinds of weapons—from the obvious, like sonic blasters and thermal detonators, to the unusual, like a tank that you grew in a tank, and genetically mutated attack penguins. You could create almost anything you could imagine. It was like evil Minecraft.

Remembering how Zack had been weakened when he was cut off from starlight, I cobbled together a weather weapon with the capability to turn the skies cloudy. But the game versions of Star Guy and Dark Flutter simply flew up through the clouds to recharge. (In real life, after what had happened with Christopher Talbot, Zack never went out unless he was at least half-charged, and always filled up at the end of each day. He was as careful about recharging as he was about handing in his homework on time.)

When Dad and I finally lowered our game controllers and lifted our bloodshot eyes from the screen, we saw that the devastation we'd brought to our virtual town was mirrored in our living room. A landfill's worth of cardboard packaging and scraps of food littered the carpet. On the wall, where the painting that Mom did at art school had hung, was a dusty outline and a nail. I vaguely remembered a crash behind me during the final ground assault on the mall, but had assumed it was due to the excellent surround sound.

Dad retrieved the painting from behind the sofa.

“Why didn't Mom do art instead of getting a job in insurance?”

Dad thought for a moment. “It's good to follow your dreams, but it doesn't always work out, and then you have to know when to stop. And that's tough.” He traced a finger lightly over the painting before hanging it once again in its place on the wall.

“Dad, did you stop dreaming?”

He nodded slowly. “But it was much easier for me.”

“Why? What did you want to be?”

He straightened the painting. “A Jedi knight.”

That figured. Dad surveyed the wreckage of the living room. “We should probably get out the vacuum cleaner.”

“Yeah, we probably should,” I said.

“Or . . .” Dad's eyes swiveled to the TV. The game menu filled the screen, the
START
button pulsing like a neutron star.
“Puny earthlings!”
boomed a synthesized alien voice through the speakers.

“No. We can't,” he said.

“No,” I agreed.

“Ready, player one?” said Dad.

Amazingly, by the time Mom came home from work, there was no sign of our marathon gaming session. The carpet, which at one point had disappeared beneath a mountain of debris, was now entirely visible, and the bottle of I Can't Believe It Was Butter stain remover had proved remarkably effective with the Extremely Chocolaty Temptation spills. I caught her briefly inspecting her painting on the wall, but if she had any suspicions, they didn't last long. Dad had prepared dinner as a distraction. When I'd asked him earlier what he was making, he replied, “Tactical shepherd's pie.”

Zack called to say we shouldn't wait for him, because he was—and I quote—“staying late at the library.” Your guess is as good as mine.

I'd enjoyed playing
Puny Earthlings!
with Dad. There was just one problem. Despite spending the whole day devising more and more outrageous strategies, we had failed to overcome the combined forces of Star Guy and Dark Flutter. The game was simple. You couldn't win until you'd neutralized Earth's superheroes.

All through dinner I could think of nothing else. I knew it wasn't merely the challenge of the game that made me burn to brush Star Guy and Dark Flutter aside. Defeated by them in the virtual world, I had also been rejected by them in the real world. And it stung worse than my unfortunate wasp presentation. As I brushed my teeth, I made a decision. While I couldn't get one over on them in real life, I resolved to crush them in the game.

As I slipped into bed, I suddenly remembered the airplanes and my suspicions about an electromagnetic super-weapon. I turned off the light and watched the tree shadows moving on my ceiling. Maybe Zack was right and there was no weapon. And even if some supervillain
was
lurking behind the incident, what could I do? Zack and Lara weren't interested, S.C.A.R.F. hadn't made it past the logo stage, and even Serge wasn't talking to me. I was on my own.

No one else cared, so why should I? I decided to forget all about it. Instead, I planned to enjoy my week off school by taking over the world.