Terror from Outer Space

by Robert Vernon

  And in that regard, Ambrosia didn’t disappoint.

  A Wig-Wam Motor Lodge (where tourists could sleep in concrete teepees), several American Indian trading posts, the “world’s largest” snow cone, and even a giant meteor crater tour were just a few of the many attractions in Ambrosia. These were small, mom-and-pop businesses that were in stiff competition with each other. Neon signs and brightly colored billboards with preposterous claims tried to entice the passing motorist. The more outlandish and eclectic the appeal the better.

  It was this line of thinking that had inspired the owner and namesake of Big Al’s Tire City. A freshly painted sign boasted, “The Tallest Tower of Tires!” And on this day, a crane was creating an impossibly tall stack of retreads—with every tire painted in the brightest, most fluorescent colors imaginable.

  Big Al looked on, excitedly rolling a toothpick back and forth in his mouth.

  With one last belch of smoke, the crane set the last tire safely in place at the top of the tower, just like the crowning star on a Christmas tree.

  The crane operator leaned out of his cab. “Well, that just about does it, Big Al. Just gotta secure it all with a cable. Like it?”

  Big Al hooked his thumbs behind his suspenders as he admired his technicolor monstrosity. He struggled to even find the words. “Why it’s so tall! So colorful! So . . . DANDY!”

  Had Big Al not been so focused on his latest marketing masterpiece, he might’ve heard the roar and squealing tires of two approaching vehicles.

  Mike Fowler cautiously took his hands off the steering wheel of the speeding Buick. “You got it, Ben?”

  Looking a little more relaxed, Ben nodded and slowly smiled—a mixture of nerves and growing confidence. “This isn’t so bad. I’m doing it! I’m actually driving a car!”

  From where she sat in the backseat, Winnie could see Buchanan’s truck starting to catch up. “Well, you better start driving it faster. Here they come!”

  “What? Where?” Panicked, Ben couldn’t help but turn around and see for himself.

  “Ben!” Winnie yelled. “Don’t take your eyes off the road!”

  The warning came too late. The Buick missed a turn, hit a curb, and launched into the air. It arced slowly up before leveling off and crashing directly through Big Al’s Technicolor Tower of Tires.

  Brightly colored tires exploded in all directions like bowling pins. Some seemed to rain down from the sky.

  Somehow, Ben regained control of the Buick and steered it back onto the road, leaving most of the chaos in his wake.

  A split second later, Buchanan’s truck dodged right and then left in a sea of rolling, spinning, bouncing tires, not slowing down for a moment!

  Several blocks away, on the porch of the Hi-Desert Hardware store, two old gents were partaking in a daily afternoon ritual—drinking sweet tea while playing a friendly game of checkers.

  “Gotten pretty quiet around here since the heat wave,” said one, wearing thick coke-bottle glasses and studying the board.

  The other just grunted and pushed his John Deere hat a bit farther back on his bald, sweaty head.

  The approaching sound of roaring engines and squealing tires caught both men’s attention. Widow Stevens’ Buick raced by, accompanied by the sound of screaming kids. The Buick was immediately followed by a beat-up pickup and the sound of angry shouting. Finally, bringing up the rear was a herd of brightly colored tires, bouncing this way and that.

  The old gents stoically took it all in for several moments until the last tire had rolled by.

  “That’s somethin’ you don’t see every day,” one of them pointed out.

  The other simply grunted as they returned to their game.

  The Buick continued to pick up speed as it merged onto Main Street in the center of town. Ben barely missed a parked car, causing Winnie to let out a short, frightened scream from the backseat.

  “No screaming! I can’t concentrate with you screaming!” Ben demanded. Somehow, he’d inadvertently turned the windshield wipers on.

  “Ben, you better slow down!” Mike warned. “There’s a turn up ahead!”

  Ben tried to pump the brakes, but the pedal went to the floor with no resistance. He looked in horror over to Mike. “There are no brakes!”

  “What?!” Winnie screamed.

  “No screaming!” Ben screamed back.

  Mike tried to remain calm. “Okay. Emergency brake! Hit the emergency brake!”

  Ben grabbed for the lever. “You mean this?”

  With a loud, spring-like noise, the hood of the Buick suddenly popped up, caught the wind like a sail, and completely obscured their view.

  Now they were all screaming.

  Half a mile away, in the parking lot of Paco’s Auto Detailing, Sheriff Theodore Smitty paced around his newly detailed truck like a drill sergeant on inspection day. His eyes darted back and forth, looking for even the smallest water spot or wax streak.

  “So, what do you think, Sheriff?” Paco asked.

  The newly washed and waxed truck sparkled in the afternoon sun.

  “Pretty good, Paco. Pretty good.” Smitty dabbed his hanky on his tongue and then gently removed a speck of dust from the hood.

  Smitty had been Ambrosia’s duly elected peacekeeper for almost twenty years, and he wore the star on his chest proudly. At six feet tall, with a bulky frame, he was an imposing figure, and he carried himself with a commanding presence that had been developed from leading a U.S. Marine platoon through the jungles of Vietnam for four years.

  Smitty would never get rich on the modest sheriff salary, but one of the perks of his position was that every five years the city provided him with a brand-new truck. He didn’t actually own it, the city did; but he cared for each truck like it was his own. And this one was brand spanking new. The dealership had just dropped it off two days earlier after outfitting it with an emergency light bar, a siren, a police radio, and a sheriff’s decal on the door.

  Paco opened the driver’s door, and then he noticed Smitty’s freshly pressed uniform and spit-shined black boots. “Ooh-wee! Just look at you, dressed all spiffy like that. What’s the occasion, Sheriff?”

  “Well, not that it’s anyone else’s business . . .” Smitty began.

  “No,” Paco agreed. “I was only curious.”

  Smitty tossed his cowboy hat onto the truck’s bench seat before getting in. “It just so happens that I have a very important dinner date this evening, and I want to make a good impression.”

  “You sly dog!” Paco gingerly closed the door, careful not to leave any handprints in the truck’s freshly waxed finish. “Watch out for those potholes now!”

  Smitty glanced at himself in the rearview mirror, straightened his bolo tie, smoothed his mustache, and was just starting to ease out onto the highway when he noticed two fast-approaching vehicles going well over the speed limit. He hoped it was only a trick of the light, but at first glance it appeared that one of the speeding vehicles had its hood up.

  Ben couldn’t see a thing past the windshield. He was as good as blind. But luckily the last half mile of road had been fairly straight, and so far—knock on wood—they hadn’t hit anything.

  Mike leaned out his window and tried to peer around the open hood. “More to the right, Ben! More to the right!”

  “This way?” Ben squealed.

  “No, your other right!” Mike shouted.

  “Just worry about the emergency brake, Ben!” Winnie leaned over his shoulder and pointed toward the floor. “It’s somewhere down there!”

  Buchanan’s truck gave the Buick a threatening bump from behind, and then pulled to the right in an attempt to come alongside the car.

  Just as Buchanan pulled up alongside the Buick, Ben realized the emergency brake was not a lever he needed to pull. It was a small pedal on the left side, near the floor, that he needed to step on.

  “Found it!” Ben stomped on the brake as hard as he could.

  Immediately the Buick’s tires locked up
, and the sudden deceleration of the car caused the hood to slam back down into place. The three passengers looked up and were horrified to see that Sheriff Smitty’s truck was only thirty yards ahead—directly in their path.

  “Look out!” was all Mike could yell.

  Ben yanked the steering wheel hard to the left, and—not so much by skill as by sheer blind luck—he missed the sheriff’s truck by mere inches.

  Buchanan had not been so lucky. He’d been so focused on exacting his revenge that he didn’t see Smitty’s truck until it was too late. He hit the brakes hard with both feet and tried to veer away, but it wasn’t enough. His truck sideswiped Smitty’s vehicle from stem to stern. With a sickening metallic screech, Buchanan’s truck glanced off the truck and skidded a dozen more yards before crashing into a tamale stand.

  Smitty sat momentarily stunned in his truck. He wondered if perhaps it could all be just a bad dream he would wake up from at any moment. The squawk of his police radio told him it wasn’t.

  “Sheriff Smitty, come in.” It was Arlene—Ambrosia’s highly excitable police dispatcher. “Be on the lookout for two cars racing down the west side of Main Street. Over.”

  Smitty took a deep breath and rubbed his temples with his index fingers. After a moment, he decided he’d better get out and lay down some safety road flares. But the door wouldn’t budge. Smitty put his shoulder into it and the door finally gave, falling out of his hand and crashing to the pavement.

  Spence arrived on a bike just as Ben, Mike, and Winnie were piling out of the Buick.

  “Are you guys okay?” Spence asked.

  Winnie looked down, checking to make sure all her limbs were still attached. “I think so.”

  “Way to go, Ben!” Mike laughed and gave his friend a high five.

  A few moments later, Smitty was in the process of handcuffing Buchanan and his pals when Ben ran up to him.

  “We did it, Smitty! The Last Chance Detectives solved another one! And we brought the culprits right to you! Can you believe it?”

  “That was you driving, Ben?”

  “Yeah! That was me all right!” Ben puffed out his chest proudly.

  “Did you put the car into park?” Smitty asked.

  Ben’s face went blank. “Huh?”

  “That’s what I thought.” Smitty pushed his way past Ben and began to run.

  Ben turned to see the Buick slowly rolling toward some storefronts. Smitty caught up to the car just as it sheared off a fire hydrant, sending up a thirty-foot fountain of water.

  Smitty now had a demolished truck and a splitting headache, and was thoroughly drenched to the skin. He could only watch as a lone bright orange tire rolled past him and continued down Main Street.

  Chapter 3

  THE LAST CHANCE GAS AND DINER had been built on old Route 66 in the early 1930s. It earned its name because it was located on the outskirts of Ambrosia and was literally the last chance motorists had to fuel up their car and get a bite to eat before traveling over 150 miles of unforgiving, barren desert to the next small town.

  Mike’s grandparents, Pop and Kate Fowler, owned the establishment. Pop Fowler ran the gas station and garage. Grandma Fowler oversaw the attached diner. Mike and his mom chipped in to help the family business whenever they could. The entire operation had earned the Fowler family a decent living for well over fifty years—ever since Pop had returned from the Second World War.

  During the war, Pop Fowler had been the pilot of a B-17 Flying Fortress called the Lady Liberty. The old warbird had faithfully seen him and his crew through many dangerous missions. Somehow, she always delivered them safely back home.

  After the war, in the 1950s, the Air Force found itself with thousands of aircraft on its hands that it no longer had any use for. The Lady Liberty was among them. Her fate? Either to be sold for civilian use, or to be chopped up as scrap, smelted, and turned into aluminum ingots.

  Pop couldn’t bear the thought of the Lady Liberty being destroyed, so he purchased her for what the government was asking at the time—five thousand dollars. Then he gave the plane a permanent home outside the diner, where he could keep an eye on her every day.

  In return, the Lady Liberty became a legitimate roadside attraction, drawing customers to the Last Chance Gas and Diner. But to Mike and his fellow detectives, the B-17 served another function that was even more important.

  The Lady Liberty was the official clubhouse of the Last Chance Detectives. The four kids met inside regularly to go over the latest local mysteries they were working on.

  Most of the cases they took on were small jobs, ranging from finding lost cats to exposing things like Buchanan’s stolen-goods operation. But some cases grew into much bigger affairs. In just the last year, they had begun to earn quite a reputation, having solved mysteries having to do with museum-artifact smuggling, UFO sightings, and a desert Bigfoot monster.

  But this morning, Mike was too busy helping out at the Last Chance Gas and Diner to be able to give the detective business much of his attention. He was cleaning the front window of the diner with a squeegee when Ben rode up on his bicycle.

  “Mike!” Ben called.

  “What’s up, Ben?”

  “Check this out!” Ben reached into the basket on the front of his bicycle and then handed Mike a copy of the local newspaper. “Yesterday’s case made the front page! They even printed our picture!”

  Mike couldn’t help but smile as he looked at the newspaper. Halfway down the front page, bold letters proclaimed: “Kid Detectives Solve Another Case.” Next to the story was a picture of all four kids proudly grinning as they stood next to a water-drenched Sheriff Smitty. Smitty wasn’t smiling.

  “Not a very good picture of Smitty, though,” Ben pointed out.

  “Looks like someone is trying to steal the top headlines,” a cheerful voice called from behind them. “But not from my husband you don’t!”

  Mike and Ben turned to see Rebekah Schaeffer—a pretty woman in her thirties—just getting out of her parked car with her two small daughters. Chloe was almost two years old and had curly blonde hair. Her older sister, Rachel, was going on six.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Schaeffer. Hey, girls!” Mike waved.

  “Now, I don’t mean to take anything away from you kids, but just take a look at the headline at the top of the page,” she teased, pointing at her own copy of the newspaper.

  Mike’s eyes scanned to the bold headline at the top of the front page: “Local Hero to Pilot Shuttle Home Today.” Below was a picture of a ruggedly handsome man who was cradling a space helmet. It was Rebekah’s husband, Ron Schaeffer.

  Mike’s dad, John Fowler, had gone to high school with Ron. Since they both shared a love of flying, they had quickly become best friends and agreed to join the Air Force together. But their careers eventually took them down different paths. Mike’s dad had become a fighter pilot, while Ron Schaeffer was recruited to be part of the NASA Astronaut Corps. He had now reached the rank of commander, and his current assignment was piloting the space shuttle Explorer. Its five-day mission was almost complete. All that remained was for the shuttle to reenter the earth’s atmosphere and execute a safe landing. If all continued according to plan, the Explorer would land within the next half hour.

  The prime landing site was usually the Shuttle Landing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a purpose-built landing strip. But bad weather routinely caused almost half the missions to be diverted to a dry lake bed within Edwards Air Force Base in California. Such was the case now. An unpredictable weather system in Florida meant the space shuttle Explorer would be diverted. Its new reentry flight path would bring it directly over Ambrosia. The craft would be flying at an altitude too high to be seen with the naked eye, but since it would be traveling at twice the speed of sound, it would make its presence known as it passed with two loud sonic booms.

  “We’ve got a front-row seat, eh, boys?” Rebekah said as she lifted Chloe out of the car seat in the backseat.

&nb
sp; “Sure do!” Mike called back.

  Mike’s mom came out of the diner, wiping her hands on her apron. She was tall with curly blonde hair and kind eyes. She rushed to help Mrs. Schaeffer unload the kids out of the car. “Rebekah, let me give you a hand!”

  “Thanks, Gail.” Rebekah handed her a bag. “I sure hope you know how much inviting us to listen in on Pop’s ham radio means to me and the girls. The TV networks don’t even air these landings anymore. Guess the general public got bored of watching them after a while.”

  “Nonsense! This is so exciting! Everybody thinks so.” Gail pointed to the girls’ matching dresses. “Why, you girls look so beautiful!”

  “Pretty,” Chloe added.

  “Wow!” Gail smiled. “Chloe’s already talking so well.”

  “Pretty is her newest word,” Rebekah said proudly.

  “C’mon, let’s get inside. We don’t want to miss anything.” Gail led them to the diner’s entry. “Pop has the radio all set up. And I just put out some freshly made cupcakes for the girls.”

  Ben’s eyes suddenly lit up. “The kind you make that have those chocolate pudding fillings?”

  “That’s right, Ben,” Gail said with a smile in her voice.

  “The ones with the colored sprinkles?”

  “Uh-huh!”

  Without another word, Ben dropped his bike and ran to follow the women into the diner. Mike turned back to finish the windows.

  His mom paused at the door. Rachel was still outside wandering toward Mike.

  “Rachel? Are you coming, sweetie?” Gail asked.