My Gym Teacher Is an Alien Overlord (7 page)

“You want a what?” asked Christopher Talbot.

It was nine thirty the following morning, and I was standing on the doorstep of Crystal Comics. I'd been hammering to get in since nine, which, according to the sign, was when it was supposed to open.

“A job,” I repeated.

He peered down at me with a wary expression. “If this was Victorian England and I had a blocked chimney, well then, a short, wiry boy like yourself? I'd hire you in a flash. But you're what—six? Seven?”

“Eleven,” I said through gritted teeth.

“Eleven. Really? Makes no difference. There are things called employment laws. Good-bye.” He pushed the door shut.

I shoved a foot in the narrowing gap. “Uh, you launched a rocket-powered super suit from a volcano in the middle of town and used a superpower-sucking machine on my brother, so don't tell me you care about laws.”

Christopher Talbot pursed his thin lips in displeasure. I sensed he was wavering. “And what's more, according to that”—I pointed to the sign—“this place should have been open long before now. Your nephew quit. You don't have anyone else. You need me.”

His face was a mask. Not a supervillain mask—the other kind, that doesn't give anything away. But I knew he was thinking seriously about what I'd said. I decided to sweeten the deal. “You wouldn't even have to pay me,” I added. “So technically I wouldn't be employed, which means you wouldn't be breaking any laws.”

I had to get this job. I needed it more than I'd ever thought possible.

“I know that look,” said Christopher Talbot, fixing me with his TARDIS-blue eyes. “Seen it in the mirror a hundred times. You're plotting something.”

“You've found me out,” I said, holding up my hands in mock surrender. I leaned toward him and whispered, “I want to take over the world.”

He was suitably startled. Taking advantage of his surprise, I pushed past him into the store. He stood in the open doorway, tracking me like an automatic sentry gun. “This is some kind of trick, isn't it?” He stabbed a finger at my Deadpool backpack. “You've got some sort of surveillance device in there, don't you? This is entrapment, that's what it is. Not that I'm planning anything villainous.
Whatsoever
. Got that, whoever's listening to this?” He glanced out onto busy Main Street, scanning the passersby. “That annoying brother of yours sent you, didn't he?”

“My annoying brother has nothing to do with me being here,” I said. “Well, he does, but not in the way you mean.” I'd found what I came for. Dumped on a shelf behind the counter was the chunky, oh-so-touchable shape of a video game console.

I gazed into the black depths of the precision-molded plastic and saw my own face staring back. At least it looked like me, but I could swear there was something about the face gazing back that was different. Something fluttered behind my reflection's head. It seemed to be . . . a cape. Had to be some trick of the light. Before I could look again, another face swam out of the gloom. Christopher Talbot stood at my shoulder, enveloping me in a cloud of minty toothpaste and salami sandwich breath.

“Can't stand these things,” he said, gesturing to the console. “Wouldn't even have one in the store, except your generation can't get enough of them. Video games.” He shook his head with displeasure. “Whatever happened to a good old-fashioned game of Red Rover?” He had a misty look in his eye. “Two dozen taunting schoolkids trying to drag down a small child on a concrete playground.” He sighed. “All right then.”

“All right what?” I asked uncertainly.

“You've got the job,” he said. “No overtime, no 401(k), and you have to provide your own sandwiches.”

“I already brought them,” I said, indicating my backpack.

“Course you did. Right. I'm off for a nap.” He threw a salute. “Commander, the bridge is yours.” With that he leaned on his cane and hobbled off toward the back of the store.

As soon as I heard the soft thud of his door shutting, I locked the front door and turned the sign to Closed. I didn't want to be disturbed (and it wasn't as if people were lining up to get in). I hurried over to the counter, removed the Xbox from its shelf, set it up in front of the screen, and reached for the game disc. The overhead lights shone through its layers to reveal a gorgeous spiderweb of circuitry under the surface. I'd never seen anything like it. Lab Rat Games must have spent a fortune on the design. I slotted the disc into the machine, and as I waited for the game to load, I unzipped my backpack. In addition to my sandwiches, I'd brought a pair of headphones. The console whirred to life, and I felt myself relax. I slipped on the headphones, and the outside world faded away. This was what I needed. The sure touch of the controller, the instant feedback, the pinpoint control I had over my alien fleet. This is what I could rely on—not Serge, not Lara, not Mom or Dad, and especially not my big brother. As I played I sensed I was not alone. All across town, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people were doing the same thing, focused on blasting the dratted Star Guy and his annoying sidekick out of the sky.

But how to conquer Earth's last line of defense?

I ran through precisely what I was up against. Star Guy could fly, breathe in outer space; he had the powers of telekinesis and telepathy, a Star Screen radar, and a force field. He needed starlight to power up, but he could go for days without needing to recharge. And Dark Flutter had . . . pigeons. She wasn't a threat. No,
he
was the obstacle.

My mother ship went down in flames. Star Guy's victory theme blared in my headphones. No matter. I had time. All day, in fact. Mom was at work, and Dad thought I was at Serge's house. Dad had barely noticed when I slipped out that morning, and he hadn't questioned my cover story. He was too busy watching endless YouTube clips of old TV shows from his childhood. He does this when he's feeling old and sad. When Dad got like this he was not easily distracted.

I restarted the game from the last checkpoint.

Not easily distracted
. An idea tickled the back of my brain. Perhaps Zack's greatest power was not one that Zorbon had given him. I thought it through. Zack could sit in the library and study for hours and hours. Not only could he leap tall buildings in a single bound, he could also read a math textbook from cover to cover without moving a muscle. Forget about telekinesis and Star Screens; his greatest powers were his powers of concentration. The tickle became an itch. I felt the stirrings of an actual plan. I'd studied him in the heat of battle; I knew that he had to concentrate in order to use his powers. The solution to my problem rose up like a fin in the water.

Break his concentration and you break Star Guy.

Unable to focus, he would drop his force field, and without it he'd be vulnerable to a blast directed from my mother ship's weapon systems. I did a quick calculation. My alien-targeting computers were lightning fast, so it would take just two seconds to lock on and fire. Two seconds without his protective shield, and victory would be mine.

One part of the puzzle remained. How to distract him? What I needed was a tactical shepherd's pie. Not an actual shepherd's pie, but something that would work the same way on Zack.

I was so close. I could feel the answer just beyond my fingertips. But just as I reached for it, there was a dull knocking in my headphones. I slipped them off and the knocking grew louder. Someone was at the front door. Grumbling, I paused the game. I opened the door to a motorbike courier delivering a package for Christopher Talbot.

“Ine ear id,” said the courier.

“Pardon me?”

The courier removed her helmet. Long hair spilled over leather-jacketed shoulders. She peeled off a glove, and as she thrust the handheld signing device at me and tapped a stylus against the screen, I noticed her fingernails were painted blue. “Sign here, kid,” she repeated.

I was frozen to the spot.

“You OK?” asked the courier.

The answer to the puzzle was standing in front of me (in a manner of speaking). I signed for the package and rushed back to the game. I didn't have to distract Star Guy; I had to distract
Zack
. Swiftly, I navigated to the Overlord menu, accessed the R & D laboratory, selected the nanomachine replicator, and set to work designing the device that I knew would stop him in his tracks. I labored for minutes. And then it was done. The very last part of the process was to give the weapon a suitably awesome name. I thought for a moment and then began to enter my choice, using the controller. I meant to call it the “Doomsday Machine,” but I made a typo, and seeing as it took ages to select the letters, I didn't bother to go back to fix it. So it ended up being called the “Doofsday Machine.”

I restarted the game. My device primed, I launched another invasion of Earth. I swept aside the tanks and planes as usual, and waited. Two streaks appeared on the horizon: Star Guy and Dark Flutter were coming. But this time I was ready for them.

I gently pressed the
FIRE
button and unleashed my secret weapon. It worked just as I'd planned. The force field flickered and dropped. Two seconds later my weapon systems boomed, and I was rewarded with the glorious sight of Star Guy and Dark Flutter tumbling out of the sky to their doom.

I leaped to my feet and punched the air. I'd done it—crushed them both! My victory cry lodged in my throat. A high-pitched whine was rising from the console. I barely had time to turn my head toward it before a flash of green light exploded from the machine, and my world went dark.

I opened my eyes and winced as a sliver of light poked me like a bony finger.

“The Thucwex Gsuphlon has arrived,” boomed a voice that seemed to come from everywhere. There was a sound like someone clapping wet hands. “Bring the nourishment.”

As my vision adjusted, I began to make out my surroundings. I was lying on some kind of raised platform in the center of a large, rectangular room with two doors. A single column of light shone down on me from the ceiling far above. Markings crisscrossed the floor, multicolored straight lines and curves I felt sure I'd seen somewhere before. A movement caught my eye. High up one wall was a viewing window, behind which huddled shadowy figures, observing me. I felt like a specimen on a microscope slide. I sat up. My head throbbed, and I had an overwhelming desire for—

“Grilled cheese, oh great and terrible Thucwex?”

There was a faint buzzing next to my ear. I turned to find some kind of hovering drone with a bulbous electronic eye that swiveled at the end of a stalk. The weird thing was that the drone looked familiar. It held out a silver plate on which lay a slice of toast with a slab of melted white cheese.

“Halloumi,” said the voice. “Not only the squeakiest cheese in the universe, but one of the saltiest. Your biology requires such replenishment after your journey.”

Journey? What was the voice talking about? I examined the grilled cheese greedily. It might have been poisoned, but I didn't care. I wolfed it down, and slipped off the podium. “Where am I? Who are you?” I addressed the figures behind the high window.

“One question at a time,” said the voice. “Lower the blast shields,” it commanded.

With a rumble, a section of wall parted, leaving an unobstructed view out. I'd seen this view a hundred times, but only in photos with a NASA logo in one corner.

Before me lay the spinning green and blue marble of planet Earth.

“We are in geostationary orbit above the oblate ellipsoid known to you as Earth,” explained the voice calmly. “In your standard measure, twenty-three thousand miles above coordinates fifty-one degrees, twenty-two minutes, thirty-nine-point-nine seconds latitude; zero degrees, two minutes, thirty-six-point-five-one seconds longitude. Or, as I am sure you have already calculated, directly above Route 95 at the corner of Brewery Road.”

Suddenly, I remembered where I had seen the drone before. “I'm on the mother ship from
Puny Earthlings!
” I breathed.

“Such insight, such reckoning,” said the voice, impressed. “Truly he is the Thucwex Gsuphlon.”

“A new season brings a new Thucwex,” chanted more voices.

I reeled about the room in shock, legs wobbling beneath me. I stumbled and threw out a hand to steady myself. It brushed against a rope hanging from the ceiling. Curious. The jumble of thoughts in my head arranged themselves in some sort of order. The green flash from the Xbox just after I'd defeated Star Guy in the game must have been a teleportation beam. I'd been
beamed up
. And yet this place didn't look like any transporter room I'd seen in comics or on TV. Where were the beaming bays? The control panels with dozens of sliders? I pushed the questions from my mind—I had other things to worry about. If this was the mother ship, then the shadowy figures in the viewing window were aliens. Actual extraterrestrials. And if they were anything like the ones in the video game, they didn't come in peace.

“I know you're planning to take over the world,” I said. “But you won't succeed.”

“Yes, we thought so too,” said the voice smugly. “Until you came along, oh dreadful Thucwex.”

“What are you talking about? And why do you keep calling me that? What's a Thucwex?”

“How shall I explain?” There was a sound I can only describe as a polite cough into a clenched tentacle. “Who knows the earthlings better than themselves? Who better to plot their downfall than one of their own? That video game you are so obsessed with? The key to our plan. It was the maze and you the laboratory rats. In your language, we ‘crowdsourced' our invasion plan.”

The game. The game was a trick.

The voice let out a laugh at its own cleverness, one that sounded like a mouthful of slapping tongues.

“The only obstacle to our inevitable conquest has been the one known as Star Guy,” the smug alien went on. “For some time now we have been testing his abilities, probing him for a weakness. For example, unnoticed by your planet's laughable military forces, we used our mighty electromagnetic pulse weapon to bring down three of your atmospheric craft.”

The airplanes. I knew it!

“Star Guy proved to be up to the challenge. As he did with the threat from our genetically modified grocery clerk and the evil artificial intelligence we planted in JCPenney.”

This was all part of the aliens' master plan. Such cunning.

“Star Guy is a formidable foe,” declared the voice.

Typical. Even the aliens were impressed by my annoying brother.

“Indeed, for a time we considered him too formidable. But then we found you. We computed that the citizens of the realm where Star Guy resides would know him better than anyone else on the planet. They would understand his failings, help us target his vulnerabilities. And here you are. Thanks to your highly inventive solution, now we know how to crush him. You are the Thucwex Gsuphlon,” rasped the voice. “The Bringer of Ruin.”

“A new season brings a new Thucwex,” chanted the others.

Horrified, I leaned back against the wall and slid to the floor. For years I'd dreamed of being the Chosen One, but not like this. I'd shown the aliens how to defeat Star Guy. I was the villain. I was the end of the world.

“And now we shall reveal ourselves,” intoned the voice.

Head in my hands, I was vaguely aware of the relentless march of approaching feet.

“We have scanned your brain. Based on the image search of your tiny mind, we shall present ourselves in a form designed to strike fear into your meager cardiovascular system.
One
heart? Pathetic weakling race.”

I was less concerned with the insult than with the idea of facing my worst fear. “
What?
Why would you do that?”

“One must give the audience what they want,” said the voice.

What did that mean? I cringed at the thought of what slimy, multiheaded, slavering nastiness they'd dredged up from my vivid imagination.

A high-pitched shriek rose above the beat of marching feet, and another and another, until the jangling sound drove out every thought from my spinning head. Whatever horrifying form the aliens had taken, they were about to come through the door.

The first shadow fell across the threshold; then quickly one, two, three figures jogged through the doorway, all wearing light-blue tracksuits and blowing Acme Thunderer silver-plated whistles.

A seemingly endless line of Miss Dunhams trotted into the room.

By the time all of them had arrived, I was ringed by hundreds of duplicate gym teachers, whistles screeching, jogging on the spot. Only then, looking around me, did I see that the podium I had woken up on was a pommel horse, the rope I'd brushed against was a massive climbing rope, and the crisscross markings on the floor outlined a variety of sports courts.

The aliens' transporter room was a near-perfect replica of the school gym.

One Miss Dunham emerged from the pack and, placing her hands on her hips, addressed me over the terrible clamor. Though she looked like all the rest, I was sure this was the alien I'd been talking to. That familiar cruel smile spread across her lips.

“Luke Parker. Well, well, well.” She sounded just like the real Miss Dunham. “Our name is unpronounceable in your whiny, ridiculous language.” She turned to the others. “Only
one
tongue.” The others whistled their amusement. The leader took a step toward me, and I shrank back. “So you may call us . . . the
sue-dunham
. Know then that I am the Supreme Intergalactic Overlord and, thanks to you, soon-to-be ruler of Earth.”

Not if I could help it. If I could discover the aliens' reasons for invading, I might be able to figure out a way to defeat them. Aliens always had ridiculous reasons for invading Earth. And usually they hadn't done enough advance planning about the bugs in our atmosphere, or they hadn't updated the virus software on their mother ship. In comics and films they were always being thwarted.

“Have you run out of water?” I asked.

“What?” snapped the Overlord.

“Is that why you're invading us? To steal Earth's water?”

“Our oceans are vast, our weather cycle in perfect harmony. We have no need of your pitiful H
2
O.”

“Then you're here for food.”

“Food?”

“Yes, some natural disaster on your planet means you can no longer feed your own people, so you're going to harvest us and turn us into human-being burgers.”

“That's . . . disgusting. And highly caloric. No.”

“OK, OK. Then you're afraid of us and this is an early strike to make sure we never become a threat.”

“No.” She sounded bored now.

“You want our gold?”

“Nope.”

“DNA?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Millions of years ago you visited Earth and seeded the human race, and now you've come back in order to—”

She raised a hand. “I'm going to stop you there.” She took a step toward me. “I know what you're up to—I've met individuals like you before. And let me assure you, we have prepared for
every
eventuality. We do this
a lot
. And if you think I'm going to stand here and divulge our plans, then”—she smiled thinly—“you're quite right.”