The EngiNerds Strike Back

by Jarrett Lerner

  For River

  Preface

  I’VE GOT GINGER ALE UP my nose, applesauce in my eye, and a smear of ketchup across my forehead.

  My best friend, Dan, looks like he got his head dunked in a vat of strawberry jam.

  And the rest of our friends?

  Well, they don’t look much better.

  Jerry’s covered in juice.

  John Henry Knox is smothered in mustard.

  And if you wrung out Edsley’s hair, you’d have enough chocolate syrup to make every one of us a milkshake.

  Out of all of us, Mikaela fared the best—but even she could use a fresh pair of clothes.

  It feels strange to be thinking of her, Mikaela, as a friend. Twenty minutes ago, I thought of her as more of an enemy.

  But that’s not even close to the strangest part of the moment, as we all stand there together on Feldman’s Field, surrounded by the metal pieces of a broken-down robot, the dozens of pounds of meat he’d been stuffing himself with for the past several days, and an assortment of now-empty bottles and cans and boxes and jars of beverages and condiments that we just battled him with.

  No, the strangest part by far is the spaceship that just touched down on the field’s patchy grass, and the alien who emerged from it in order to inform us that our planet is in grave danger and will be reduced to dust within a week.

  Oh, wait.

  My bad.

  He said TWO weeks.

  If we’re lucky…

  Confused?

  Well, yeah—so am I.

  There are a couple books you can read to clear up any confusion you have about the bot. All I’ll say here is that he was one of eighteen such machines designed, built, and programmed by Dan to eat and compress and store food for humans, and that, after malfunctioning in a rather spectacular fashion (that is, farting that compressed food out at humans), we had to battle sixteen of them in the alleyway behind our town’s grocery store, the Shop & Save. That should’ve been the end of that. But then Mike Edsley—the stupidest smart kid in the galaxy—built and loosed his robot, Number 17, on our town. It took several days to find and deal with that bot, named Klaus—who’s now, thankfully, lying in pieces at our feet.

  And Robot Number 18?

  That bot was never built. Dan, Jerry, John Henry Knox, and I split its parts up into four piles and each took one. I packed my pile into a box, cinched it shut with about thirty yards of duct tape, and shoved it under my bed—way under my bed—where the collection of metal can never cause trouble again.

  But back to more pressing matters.

  Like the alien.

  And our apparently doomed planet.

  Though I’m afraid I can’t clear up any of your confusion about all of that. Because about those matters, I’m as in the dark as anyone. And speaking of the dark—even though I kind of just want to run home, crawl into the cozy dimness beneath my bed, cuddle up with that box of robot parts, and hide for the next couple weeks… even though, after having only just finished solving one huge problem (Klaus), I don’t think I have it in me to deal with another, even huger problem.… I also don’t really want to be reduced to dust along with the entire planet.

  So I take a deep breath.

  Rub the applesauce out of my eye.

  And take a step closer to the alien…

  1.

  THE ALIEN, I SHOULD SAY, doesn’t look like an alien.

  Like a movie alien, I mean.

  The kind you see in old TV shows and on the covers of certain science fiction books.

  If you walked past this alien on the street, you probably wouldn’t bat an eye. I bet you could even have a quick conversation with him—about the weather, maybe, about the big, somewhat strange-looking cloud you’ve seen floating around in the sky lately—and you wouldn’t think twice of it.

  Sure, his eyes are a bit big.

  His nose is a tad narrow.

  His skin has an odd green-blue tinge to it.

  And his voice carries a slight squeak.

  But otherwise, he looks and sounds and moves just like a normal kid.

  And farts like one too.

  A fact that I managed to entirely forget, even though only moments ago he let a particularly foul one loose with a long, loud FFFffpffweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-PARP!

  I guess learning that your planet is a week or two away from being utterly destroyed can do some damage to your short-term memory.

  But that bold step I just took toward the alien landed me right in the fetid heart of his otherworldly fart cloud.

  I leap back, gagging, before the gas can utterly destroy my lungs.

  “Sorry,” the alien says. “Those Food-Plus veggie burgers are really not sitting well.”

  “So that was you.”

  It’s Mikaela. And though I’ve got my eyes squeezed shut, worried as I am that the intergalactic nastiness that recently leaked out of the alien’s backside might melt my corneas, I can tell that Mikaela’s brain is spinning fast as it finally, at long last, puts together the pieces of this puzzle that we’ve all been driving ourselves crazy over for the past few days.

  “You took all that food from the Food-Plus,” she says. “And—”

  “Yes,” the alien interrupts.

  And I crack open my eyes just in time to see him say:

  “I caused the blackout. And I made that satellite fall out of the sky, too.”

  He’s talking about the out-of-the-blue blackout that left our town without power for two whole hours, and the satellite—you know, those big contraptions that spin around in outer space—that came plummeting out of the sky and crashing in, again, our town. A pair of crazy, inexplicable events that I’d been so sure were caused by Edsley’s rogue robot.

  “But those were both accidents,” the alien continues. “The other stuff wasn’t.”

  John Henry Knox steps forward, now that the creature’s fart has cleared.

  “What other stuff?” he asks.

  “The precipitation,” the alien says. “All that snow. And the rain behind that other food store the other day.”

  He means the “freak blizzard” that caused our town to cancel school yesterday—in the middle of May—and the sudden, super-intense downpour that drenched me, Dan, Jerry, John Henry Knox, and the last of the butt-blasting bots in back of the Shop & Save.

  “You…,” I say, remembering that day, recalling the fear I felt thinking that my life as I knew it was about to come to a screeching halt as those bottomlessly hungry, dangerously flatulent robots overtook us and then took over our town, our country, and maybe even the whole entire world. “You saved us,” I finally finish.

  The alien nods.

  Then says:

  “And I came down here to try to help do it again.”

  2.

  “BUT…”

  The alien pauses and peers around at the neglected expanse of Feldman’s Field.

  “This may not be the best place to explain the situation,” he says.

  I think I get what he means. While the field, overgrown and out of the way as it is, isn’t exactly one of our town’s most popular destinations, if anything’s going to get people flocking to it, it’s an enormous cloud-draped spaceship.

  “My ship can’t stay on the ground for too long,” the alien adds. “It’s against protocol. And I really can’t be caught breaking protocol.”

  I wonder if his ship has some sort of autopilot feature, so the alien can send it back up into the sky and stay here on the ground with us. Or maybe it’s got a cloaking device, a button he can press that’ll make the ship completely invisible.

  The alien doesn’t tell us. Instead he takes a step directly toward Dan.

  “Dan…,” he says, swi
nging an arm out toward his ship. “Would you care to join me?”

  As soon as I understand what the alien is suggesting—that Dan board the ship with him and head up into the sky—sirens start going off in my brain, bright red lights flash, and I think, No. No, no, no, no, no, no, NO.

  I turn to Dan.

  His eyes are as wide as waffles.

  “Um,” he says. “Ahhh…”

  “I’ll explain everything,” the alien says. “And you can report back to your friends as soon as we’re through. Though it may take several hours. There’s a lot to explain. But the future of your planet depends upon it.”

  “Bahhh…,” Dan responds.

  My tired brain—remember, we just finished hunting down and battling a super hangry robot—kicks into overdrive, trying to find a different option, one that doesn’t involve my best friend traveling tens of thousands of feet up into the air with an alien we only just met.

  But before I can think of a thing, Dan steps forward and says, “Yeah. Okay. I’ll do it.”

  “Dan—” I say. “You don’t—”

  “It’s cool, Ken,” he interrupts. Then he tips his head toward the alien. “He’s already helped us so much. We can trust him.”

  I take a deep breath—and a rush of pins-and-needles nervousness fills my body up along with the air. I consider arguing with Dan. But I know him. Better than anyone. I know that look in his eyes. He’s made up his mind. And once Dan has made up his mind about something? Look out. If single-handedly building a fleet of walking, talking—and, yes, farting—robots doesn’t prove as much, then I don’t know what does.

  “Come over as soon as you’re done,” I tell him.

  “Of course,” Dan says.

  Giving my shoulder a squeeze, he turns toward the alien. He nods, gulps… and strides toward the spaceship. We all watch him climb the ramp that leads up to the ship’s doorway, keeping just a couple steps behind the alien. He stops at the very top of the ramp and turns to give us a quick wave.

  I think Dan must be the bravest kid—no, the bravest person—in the world. Brave enough to board an alien’s spaceship and briefly—at least, I hope it’s brief—leave this world.

  I think this—and then watch Dan step through the doorway and disappear into the ship. A beat later, the door closes and is then quickly covered up by a swirl of cloud. And it’s only a couple seconds after that that the ship, as noiselessly as the beating of a butterfly’s wings, lifts off the ground and sails up into the sky.

  3.

  I STARE, SQUINTING, UP AT the cloud-covered spaceship as it rises, rises, and rises some more. It takes less than a minute for it to reach the lowest of the real clouds in the sky. And then it’s gone, blended seamlessly with the rest of the white and gray puffs looming above us.

  I’m about to lift my fingers to my mouth so I can gnaw on my nails—a nervous habit that I actually thought I’d kicked years ago—when Mikaela’s voice stops me.

  “Well…”

  She lowers her own gaze from the sky.

  It takes a minute for me to do the same, and another for all the other EngiNerds to do so too. No doubt everyone’s mind is turning over the same series of questions mine is.

  Is Dan going to be okay?

  Can we really trust this alien?

  Why is he here?

  What the heck is threatening our planet?

  Mikaela plants her hands on her hips and scans the field around her.

  “I guess,” she says, “we should clean this place up.”

  No one moves.

  And it doesn’t take a genius to know what everyone’s thinking now.

  Why bother cleaning up Feldman’s Field if the junky stretch of patchy grass might just be reduced to dust in a week or two?

  “Suit yourselves,” Mikaela says. “But I’m not about to start acting like a jerk.”

  She scoops up an empty juice box off the ground and chucks it toward the nearest trash can. It hits the rim with a THUNK and bounces in.

  Edsley joins her a second later, grabbing the bottle of chocolate syrup he battled Klaus with.

  It takes only a few more seconds before all the rest of us join in. We clean up our mess and then some, leaving that old, overgrown field that no one even goes to anymore looking even better than we found it.

  4.

  ONCE WE’VE CLEANED UP THE water bottles and juice boxes and soda cans and milk cartons, once we’ve tossed out the meatball subs and double-stacked burgers and strips of bacon and links of sausages that the endlessly hungry Klaus has been feasting on and compressing in his stomach for the past few days, the only thing that’s left to deal with is the robot himself.

  One by one, we gather around him.

  The pieces of him, that is.

  Because thanks to some quick tool work by Max, Amir, Alan, and Simon, plus some expert directing by Mikaela, the robot is now broken down into a harmless heap of parts. A head. A torso. A pair of arms. A couple of legs. And two feet. So long, Mr. Where’s the Beef.

  “What,” asks Jerry, “are we supposed to do with him?”

  It’s a good question.

  An important question.

  And so even though my thoughts keep getting tugged up toward the clouds and how Dan’s faring among them, I try to properly consider the question.

  My first idea is to bring the broken-down bot to a foundry and have him liquified into an even more harmless puddle of molecules.

  Unfortunately, I’ve got no clue where the nearest foundry is. And even if there just so happens to be one around the corner, I doubt whoever is running the place would let a bunch of kids waltz in and access their two-thousand-something-degree fire.

  My next best idea is to split the bot up, just like we did with the one that was never built. Jerry can take the arms and legs. Mikaela can have the torso. John Henry Knox can have the head. And I guess I’ll take the feet. Maybe I’ll give them to my dog, Kitty. The pooch’s all-time favorite toy is a dirty sock that he found under a super disgusting Dumpster. His favorite pastime is licking our kitchen’s a-little-less-disgusting-than-a-Dumpster-but-not-exactly-immaculate linoleum floor. I’m sure he’d find something to love about a pair of robot feet.

  I’m about to share this plan with everyone else, but Edsley jumps in before I can get a word out.

  “I’ll take him.”

  I look over at Edsley and find him staring down at the broken-down bot with a glint in his eye.

  It makes me nervous.

  Really nervous.

  He must feel my eyes on him, because he looks up and says, “He is mine.”

  If I hadn’t just helped battle the bot, if I hadn’t just seen a spaceship sink down from out of the sky and land a few dozen feet away from me, if I hadn’t just met an alien and found out that our planet was in danger of being reduced to dust in a week or two, if my body didn’t feel like a bunch of stapled-together noodles and my brain didn’t feel like a scoop of cold mashed potatoes, if I weren’t severely scared and distracted due to the fact that my best friend is currently floating around somewhere in the sky with an alien we only just met, I might put up more of a fight.

  But instead I choose to go with the simplest plan, the easiest option, the one that doesn’t involve me doing any work or taking on any responsibility. I tell Mike, “Fine. Whatever.”

  “Noice,” Edsley says, grinning down at the bot.

  A wave of panic whips through my body.

  And before Edsley can gather up all the pieces of the bot, I nudge him aside and grab a few for myself. One arm. One leg. A random assortment of screws, nuts, and bolts.

  “Dude,” says Edsley. “You just said I could have it.”

  “You can,” I say, lifting up the bot’s arm. “This is just a little insurance.”

  “Insurance?”

  “Against your idiocy.”

  Now it’s Edsley’s turn to say, “Whatever.” He mutters it moodily as he gathers up the last pieces of Klaus.

  5.

/>   AS SOON AS HE’S GOT the rest of Klaus bundled up in his arms, Edsley heads off in the direction of his house, not even bothering to say bye to any of us.

  “Mike!” I call after him. “THINK before you ACT! DON’T do anything STUPID! PLEASE!”

  He flicks a hand up into the air to acknowledge that he heard me.

  Or maybe it’s more of a leave-me-alone gesture.

  I heave a sigh and turn back to the others.

  I find Mikaela staring up at the sky again. Maybe trying to see if she can spot the cloud that isn’t a cloud at all but is, in fact, a spaceship. Maybe hoping that the cloud is already on its way back down to us, to return our friend and clue us in as to just what is going on.

  But the alien said that it might take several hours to explain the situation to Dan, and it’s only been, like, twenty-five minutes.

  All of which makes me want to gnaw my fingernails down to nubs again.

  Mikaela lowers her eyes and looks at me.

  “This is gonna be the longest wait in history,” she says with the tiniest hint of a smile. A smile that I can tell is forced.

  “Tell me about it,” I say. I try to push my lips into a little smile too but totally fail.

  Mikaela checks the sky again.

  “But I guess that’s all we can do,” I say. “Wait.”

  “Wait,” Mikaela says, “and rest.”

  She turns to me again. This time, though, her smirk is gone. There isn’t the slightest trace of it.

  “We’re gonna need it,” she says seriously. “I don’t know what this threat to the planet is. But as soon as we find out, we’re going to have to work our butts off to do away with it.”

  She’s right, of course. Though as long as Dan is still up there in the sky, I doubt I’ll be getting any rest.

  6.

  WE ALL SPLIT UP AND head home.

  I take it slow.

  Reee-e-e-ee-eee-eeeeally slow.

  I’ve got so much stuff banging around in my head, and I’m pretty sure the longer I’m cooped up in my house, the crazier I’ll go and the more terrified I’ll be.