Take Me To Your Reader: An Otherworld Anthology (14 page)

"
Let the teachers go!" I screamed. I fumbled with the salt in my arms, peeling back the spout on one canister. I flung it in her direction.

She screamed, a high-pitched, foreign, tritone of a sound. The human skin façade burned right off, and beneath it she oozed green over what appeared to be black and purple insides. Fructoids descended upon me, but I went crazy, throwing salt all around. More screams and burns and sizzle and smoke and green and ooze. It was pandemonium.

And just like that, I was out of ammunition. Because I was an idiot. And I thought this was a movie, apparently.

"
Restrain him!" Clarice called, and two of the burlier dudes strung me up against a wall. I began to struggle, but my resistance was futile.

Which I would normally laugh to myself about but . . .

The house filled quickly with them, wall-to-wall, shoulder to shoulder. And then a loud, reverberating sound came from underneath us, and the house shook. The lights in the house went off, and outlines of green came on. People stumbled down basement steps, cramming into what I was sure was a small space. But it was like a friggin' Mary Poppins bag.

Then I realized: the ship was underground. The house was merely on top of it.

They started talking to each other in another language. Weird sounds of hissing and electrical whines and that obnoxious high-pitched noise that a TV on mute makes.

Clarice, oozing and smoking and disgusting, made some clicking hissing noise that made people scatter to specific places. As if she
'd called for places before a curtain rise.

Just then, Travis appeared in the doorway.
"Fenton!" he called. He spoke to the burly men in a native tongue, but they ignored him. Finally, he just started beating their arms. "Let him go! Let him go!"

"
There's more salt in the car," I said to Travis, not having the faintest clue whether he'd help me. He looked at me and then he looked all around the room, and then he bolted back out the front door. The house shook and groaned, and it felt like we were lifting. Travis tumbled into the doorway with more salt than I could have carried in ten trips, and flung it at the burly dudes first. They dropped to the ground, and so did I.

"
You're helping me," I said to Travis in disbelief.

"
We're friends," he said, like it was the most natural thing in the world that he was helping me rebel against his own kind. "We have to get you out of here."

"
The teachers!"

Travis hesitated, and then said,
"Come on." He bolted down the basement steps into the green room I'd presumably broken into earlier. There were eight tubes lining the room, each about three feet wide, spanning floor to ceiling, and filled with a green liquid. And inside them, each of the six missing teachers were floating, unconscious. Their names were inscribed on the bottom of the tubes. I looked back at the empty tubes next to me. At the bottom of the one closest to me read the words, Fenton Marsh: Sustenance.

Travis looked back at me.
"There's no way. I don't know how to get them out. We can only save you."

"
But . . ."

Travis grabbed me, dragging me away.
"We can still save you."

We were fighting our way through Fructoids once we got back to the living room. They didn
't care that I'd gone deeper into the ship. They cared that I wanted out.

Salt canisters littered the floor, and I grabbed them, threw them so they
'd break open, spewed it everywhere. I made it to the front door, opened it, and hung out over the edge when Clarice grabbed me by the throat, pinning me against the floor, my body half in and half out of the doorframe. The burn on her body was spreading quickly, and I could see pearlescent white jawbone in her face. "Fenton Marsh!" she screamed angrily. The air around me burned cold on my face. We had climbed faster than I'd realized, the house literally moving on top of the ship. We were up in the clouds. There was no way out.

She saw the peril on my face.
"Comply, and you will survive."

"
Fenton, don't!" Travis cried. He barreled toward Clarice and me at full speed, and he threw us both onto the front stoop of the house, which was unbelievably still attached. I rolled down it, hanging off the edge. Clarice did the same, but she quickly flung herself back up on the steps. She made another terrible noise, and more Fructoids came out of the house, lunging at me. Only, as if uncoordinated little lemmings, many of them went falling onto the ground. The most injured went first, as if on a kamikaze mission.

Travis made it to me, and he said,
"You must trust me, friend." Then he ripped back the hands of the Fructoids grabbing me, and he peeled my own hands off the steps I had barely been clinging to.

And then? I was falling through the air. Falling and falling.

Travis's body sailed by me, and then I hit it, full force, in mid-air, and we were tumbling together. Screaming. I was probably crying. Dizzy, with the damn sounds of salt-burned Fructoids ringing in my ears.

Clarice
's voice carried, "Fenton Marsh! Noncompliant!"

And many more seconds than you
'd expect later, we hit the ground. And I was alive.

Travis maneuvered his body under mine, and took the force of the impact. Like Wyle E. Coyote, there was a Travis-shaped hole in the ground, and I had landed on top of him and hardly felt a thing, save for the wind being knocked out of me.

Who knows how long I lay there awkwardly on top of Travis's body, unable to process what had happened.

Beneath me, Travis laughed.
"It worked," he said.

"
You thought it might not?" I asked, getting to my feet. He hopped to his feet and then out of the cartoon hole. He reached down for me and hoisted me up.

"
I hoped," he said. He looked up at the sky, a weird green and white blinking light rose higher and higher into the clouds before it straight up disappeared.

"
Where did it go?" I asked.

"
They reached the county line," he said. "Their Jedi only worked that far. Anyone else would be able to see what just happened, so they had to use the invisibility by the time they hit the county limits."

"
Travis, does this mean . . . Can you not go home now?" I asked, realizing what he'd offered me.

He shrugged his shoulders, naturally.
"There was not much for me to go home to," he said. "I have a friend here. Right?"

He reached for a fist bump, but I bear-hugged him.
"Right," I said.

We walked back to Maple Street slowly. Travis had some minor burns. I
'd fallen ten thousand feet. We were a little beat up.

When we got to the cul-de-sac, the house at the end of the street was now just a giant hole in the ground with a fence leading up to it. Abandoned cars still lined the streets.

"What are people going to think?" I asked him.

"
That they were invaded by aliens," he said, his face sober.

"
Really?" I asked, shock and surprise and a weird amount of relief overcoming me.

He laughed.
"Nope! But it was funny to see you think that's the case. You'll still be alone in what you know."

I shrugged this time.
"Not alone, man. I've got a friend."

And so, you can still hear the screams. It's weird, and who knows how long it will last, but these weird electronic alien noises mixed with people-screams still echo right when you get to the county line.

Am I traumatized? Yes. Sure. Can I believe it even happened? Pretty much no. Do I wake up every morning with the sinking feeling that it was only the beginning? You bet I do.

But do I have someone to sit with at lunch every day, who, using his Jedi mind powers, is sometimes pretty good at getting nice girls to sit with us?

Yeah, I do.

And all it took for that miracle to occur was the total alien invasion and eventual desolation of the house on Maple Street.

By Heather Hildenbrand

For information on other titles

Visit the author
's website:
http://heatherhildenbrand.blogspot.com/

My cheek slipped sideways from my arm to the bare mattress, jarring me awake. I looked down and grimaced at the pool of saliva that coated my skin. Did all humans drool in their sleep or was it exclusive to the male body I
'd been issued? Gross.

I pushed myself onto my elbows and surveyed my surroundings. My eyes closed and opened again slowly. Maybe if I blinked enough, it would look different. It didn
't. The suite we'd booked was trashed.

The bedroom floor was covered in a pile of sheets and blankets where I
'd thrown them aside in my unconscious state. From my view through the open door, the common area looked worse. The couch was overturned, the curtains ripped from the rod, and the sliding door that led onto the balcony hung open. Cartons of takeout littered the beige carpet. Several of them were tipped on their side, noodles and chopsticks spilling out. Discarded clothing—jeans and a T-shirt that I remembered seeing on Dieben last night—left a trail from the balcony door to the second bedroom at the other end of the suite. The door was closed. I assumed he must still be passed out. I looked around once more and found my room empty of any other occupants. Bone must be in with Dieben. 

I sat up, trying to piece together the previous night
's events or how I'd ended up in this bed wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, but the details were lost. My head pounded with every movement. I slowed, carefully positioning my legs while pressing my palm against the thudding in my skull. This body didn't handle hangovers very well. Hopefully Dieben and Bone were better off.

Time to wake them and find out.

I made it three steps when my communicator beeped. Why did mothers always have the worst timing? A sixth sense, definitely. I hit the button and an image of her face projected itself outward, hovering three inches above the handheld device. On her end, an image of my face did the same. 

"
Hi, Mother," I said, running a hand through my hair at the last second. I couldn't even remember what my features looked like. Hopefully everything seemed normal in my expression. It was hard to hold a poker face when the face didn't belong to me to begin with.

"
Hello, Axel." She gave me a tight smile, her smooth skin creasing at the edges of her mouth. It was strange to me how human-like our appearance seemed when our behavior was so different.

"
Is everything okay?" I asked.

"
Of course, I just wanted to say hello. How is your Rumschpringe experience?"

Rumschpringe. A one-week vacation where we could get away and not answer to anyone. A time to let loose before we went home and took up the life of a responsible adult of Panmera. During my time here, I
'd learned the humans had something similar, called spring break.

Panmerans could choose any planet we wanted for Rumschpringe, but my best friend, Bone, and I had chosen Earth as sort of a personal challenge. It was the planet with the largest number of deserters. Our kind came for Rumschpringe and never went home. In our world, they called it the Force. The invisible thing that sucked us in. Made us willingly give up a home filled with higher technology, fewer diseases, and longer life spans. For … this. Earth. Being human. And every imperfection that came with it. No one knew what the Force was. Anyone who truly experienced it never returned to explain.

Deserters were considered the lowest of the low. Worse than criminals, not that we had many of those. Deserters were traitors. Even if they ever did try to return, Panmeran society wouldn't have let them. Only in death … and even then, it'd been luck more than anything that had brought my older brother Colryn's body home to its final resting place last year.

I wanted to show them all I was strong enough to resist the Force. I
'd spent six days here, enjoying myself in the barbaric way only humans could, by over-indulging on food, drink, and whatever else this planet had to offer an eighteen year-old alien stuck in a human male's body, and soon I'd return home. Willingly. In one piece. With my friends. Nothing resembling a Force had shown itself thus far.

Even if it did, I would face it. I
'd planned for this all year. When my tutor had asked which planet I chose for Rumschpringe, I'd answered "Earth" without hesitation. Because more than anything, I wanted to understand and actively resist the invisible Force that took more and more of our people each year. For peace of mind. For my parents. For Colryn.

It would help if I could remember what had happened last night.

The hologram flickered. My mother awaited an answer. Humans were obviously prone to daydreaming. "I'm having a great time," I assured her. At least, I thought I was.