Into the Dorkness

by John Kloepfer

  Bjorn reached into an open desk drawer and took out a strange-looking object. It was about the size of a billiard ball and had seven different metal rods with rounded bulbous tips sprouting out of it.

  “This thing was all that was left behind after Max was abducted,” he said. “Every time one of Max’s manuscripts appears, this thing lights up like the Fourth of July.”

  “Have you gotten the latest edition?” Warner asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “It’s one of the best in years. Two of the biggest, baddest aliens land on Earth and start brainwashing the entire human race. They’ve got it all. Brain-wiping capability. Impulse-control technology. Total neural override. They even have these crazy nanobugs that fly around and inject people in their brain stems with microscopic mind control.”

  The freshly transmitted proofs for the latest edition of Brainstorm were spread out on the desktop.

  “Zouric and Nuzz . . . ,” Kevin said under his breath.

  “That’s correct,” Bjorn replied, looking at him quizzically. “But how did you know that?”

  “Those bad guys aren’t make-believe,” Warner said. “They’re the real deal, and they’ve just taken over Oregon and pretty soon the entire planet!”

  “Dang,” Bjorn said, scratching his head. “That’s pretty heavy, man.” He gathered the transmitted proofs of the comic and handed them over for Klyk and the kids to examine. “This one just came back for review from the publisher. It’ll hit stores in the next couple of days.”

  “Not if Zouric and Nuzz have anything to do with it,” Kevin said.

  “Have a look. Take your time,” Bjorn said. “See what you can find.”

  The kids poured over the latest edition of Max Greyson’s Brainstorm.

  The first page illustrated Zouric and Nuzz experimenting with the blue alien nanojuice to work as a mind-control serum. But they needed a delivery system, so Nuzz developed the robotic insects to unleash their diabolical plague. The panels on the third page depicted their secret weapon in action as they released the swarm on the Kamilions, and showed Nuzz controlling the insects and the brainwash victims with a high-tech computer system aboard their ship. The reptilian warrior race didn’t even know what hit them. Before they knew it they were a mindless slave army for Zouric and Nuzz.

  “So the only reason Zouric and Nuzz have an army at all is because of these mind-control robot bugs, right?” said Kevin.

  “They must be receiving the signal from Zouric and Nuzz’s mother ship,” TJ added.

  “Then all we have to do is get onto the ship and jam up the signal,” Tara said.

  “Wait . . . that actually sounds kind of hard,” TJ said.

  “Hey, check this out.” Warner said, flipping to the final page. “It’s a blueprint of Zouric and Nuzz’s mother ship!”

  Kevin examined the map of the spacecraft. “It looks like they can operate the wireless mind-control mechanism from here. . . .” He pointed to a room next to the mainframe at the center of the mother ship.

  “Then that’s what we have to do,” Warner said. “Go back to camp and figure out a way to jam their network.”

  “It’s the only way,” Klyk agreed. “We have to go back and stop them once and for all.”

  “You guys leaving so soon?” Bjorn asked. “But you only just got here!”

  Warner shrugged. “Time flies when you’re saving the world from alien psychopaths.”

  “Oh, but please, at least let me get you something to eat,” he insisted. “I—I don’t get visitors too often.”

  Kevin’s stomach grumbled a little at the mention of food. “I am kind of hungry,” he said. “We did miss breakfast.”

  “Then it’s settled.” Bjorn clapped his hands in excitement. “You can’t save the world on an empty stomach, now can you?”

  “Whatcha got?” Warner asked.

  “Couple boxes of Pop-Tarts, box of granola bars, pomegranate juice,” Bjorn said, listing the menu. “That’s about it.”

  “Sounds good to us,” Kevin said. “We’re not too picky.”

  Bjorn jogged off to the kitchen to prepare the breakfast, even though it was after lunchtime by now. “Coming right up!”

  “Nice guy,” said TJ. “Kinda weird though. . . .”

  DING! Bjorn’s toaster sprang up two piping-hot Pop-Tarts.

  Kevin, Warner, Tara, and TJ sat around the kitchen table while Bjorn kept the Pop-Tarts coming. The never-ending junk pile wasn’t quite as bad in the kitchen, although Kevin was pretty sure he saw at least three dead cockroaches by the wastebasket next to the fridge, information he thought best to keep to himself before chow time. At the center of the table, Klyk paced back and forth with his arms clasped behind his back. “The nanobots must be tapped into the ship’s mainframe wirelessly.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” TJ said, chewing a mouthful of granola bar.

  “Excuse me, everybody,” Bjorn said, flopping two more Pop-Tarts onto a half-clean serving plate. “I’ll be right back. I think I have some more Pop-Tarts in the pantry.”

  Kevin glanced at the clock. “Okay, you guys,” he said. “Bjorn’s cool and all, but we gotta finish up and get out of here.”

  “Yo, Bjorn,” Tara yelled across the kitchen. “Never mind, we’re good on the Pop-Tarts.”

  Bjorn did not respond.

  Kevin stood up from his seat at the breakfast table. “Bjorn?” he called. Kevin snatched Klyk off the middle of the table and propped the little cyborg on his shoulder. He then walked into the pantry, his friends following quickly behind them.

  “What is it, Kev?” Warner asked.

  A warm summer breeze drifted inside the pantry through a cracked-open window. At their feet, a box of Pop-Tarts lay on the black-and-white-checkered floor, spewing out two aluminum foil packages of the breakfast pastry. Stacks of smelly old pizza boxes covered the rest of the floor.

  “He’s not here,” Kevin said. “Where the heck did he go?”

  A familiar mechanical whir buzzed overhead. The kids looked up to see one of the fluttering alien nanowasps about to attack.

  The robo-bug circled the air near the ceiling and swooped down in a spiral.

  “Watch out!” TJ yelled, flailing his arm and trying to backhand the mechanical pest.

  In a flash, Klyk aimed his mini photon blaster at the flying robot insect and fired, zapping both its wings off and sending it crashing to the floor.

  Kevin closed the pantry window and peered out through the smudged, dirt-caked pane of glass. A dark cloud of alien mind-control insects swept across the Colorado mountainside.

  “Where the heck is Bjorn?” Warner shouted.

  “I don’t know!” Kevin yelled over the ambient buzzing growing louder and louder every second they hesitated.

  Quickly, the kids bolted out of the pantry. “Bjo-orn!” they all called as they ran around the house, wading through heaps of trash, trying to shut all the doors and close every window.

  Kevin hustled out of the living room and into the entrance hall. His three friends halted next to him near the front of the house. Bjorn stood by the front door with his hand on the knob, ready to fling the thing open wide and let in the swarm.

  Kevin gasped as Bjorn craned his neck back at them. It looked like someone had stuffed two lumps of coal in his eye sockets, and Kevin could see the signature mind-control puncture wound on the back of Bjorn’s neck.

  “One of those stingamabob things already got him!” Tara cried.

  Bjorn’s mouth opened and closed as if he were talking, but the voice coming from his vocal cords was surely not his. “Now the time has come—Kevin Brewer, Warner Reed, Tara Swift, and TJ Boyd—to pay for your transgressions against the grand conqueror!”

  Bjorn flung the main door wide open with a flourish, and a swarm of nanowasps surged into the house, swirling in a corkscrew.

  “Retreat!” Kevin shouted. They all doubled back down the scrap-cluttered hallway toward Max’s office.

  The swarm of
nanowasps pecked at the air behind them. Kevin ran helter-skelter to the opposite side of the house behind his three friends.

  Klyk rode on Kevin’s clavicle, clutching his earlobe for balance. The mini alien pulled out his tiny ray gun and started blasting the airborne alien buggers.

  ZAP! Klyk nailed one of the nanowasps getting a little too close and the mechanical bug dropped to the ground. ZAP! ZAP! Two more alien robo-wasps bit the dust. ZAP! A fourth one caught the full complement of Klyk’s ray gun’s blast.

  The four of them hit the brakes in front of the door to the home office. They all ran in and slammed the door shut behind them as the cloud of alien insects bombarded the office door from the hallway.

  Kevin locked the office from the inside as the barrage of robo-bugs slammed against the door like a hailstorm pelting a tin rooftop.

  A loud thud pounded outside in the hallway as Bjorn threw his weight against the door. “Open up, earthling scum, and pay for your crimes against the grand conqueror!”

  “No way, dude,” Warner shouted. “Tell the grand conqueror we don’t want to be a part of his psycho club.”

  Bam! Bam! The door shuddered as Bjorn continued to bang and shout, jiggling the lock vigorously, and the alien insects burrowed and squirmed under the crack at the base of the door. One of the little alien buggers wormed its way through the keyhole and launched itself triumphantly in the air.

  ZAP! Klyk blasted the nanobug and watched it fall to the floorboards.

  Tara quickly shoved a piece of bubble gum in her mouth and chewed it up and stuck it in the keyhole.

  Kevin broke off from the group and ran over to the window. A black iron security grate made it impossible to escape. “You guys!” he shouted over Bjorn’s pounding outside the office. “There’s no way out of here.”

  Crunch-splat, crunch-splat! TJ stomped desperately at the alien robo-bugs crawling under the door. The neon blue nanofluid oozed out in a thick puddle beneath the soles of TJ’s sneakers.

  “We have to seal them out!” Warner said, dashing from the closet to the door. He carried over a box of winter clothing filled with hats, mittens, and scarves. Placing the box on the floor, Warner dropped to his knees and started stuffing the wool garments under the door until no more nanobugs were able to squeeze through.

  Oddly, Bjorn had stopped trying to bust the door down. All Kevin could hear now was the buzzing of the alien insects, flapping their metal wings.

  He turned around to see TJ crushing the last of the alien insects still in the room. “Maybe we shouldn’t be smashing them like that, TJ,” Tara said.

  “Why not?” he asked. “They’re trying to sting us and turn us into Nuzz’s mind slaves.”

  “That’s why,” she said, pointing at TJ’s feet.

  The blue nanovenom was crawling up TJ’s sneakers, curling around his ankles, and beginning to coil around his calf muscles.

  “Yuck!” TJ screamed. “Get it off me!” He kicked off his shoes and socks, but the blue alien goo was stuck fast to his skin.

  Kevin quickly grabbed a pair of mittens from the box and put them on. He kneeled down and wiped the stuff off his friend’s legs before cramming the mittens under the crack at the base of the door. The blue puddle on the floor spread out across the hardwood, inching toward them, and they all backed away.

  “We’ve got serious problems,” Kevin said. “The only way out of here is through that door.”

  “But, Kev,” said TJ, raising a worried eyebrow. “Those nanobugs are out there!”

  “I know that, TJ,” Kevin said. “Let me know if you have another idea.”

  “I have an idea,” said Tara, scanning the cluttered interior of the office. “Those alien robot bugs are made of metal, right?”

  “So?” Warner said. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Well, if we had a big magnet, we could catch them, you know, like with flypaper.”

  “Where are we supposed to get a big magnet when we’re stuck in here?” Warner asked.

  “I don’t know.” Tara shrugged. “I didn’t say it was a good idea.”

  “Wait a second,” Kevin said. “Maybe we don’t have a big magnet, but what if we had a lot of little magnets?”

  “Okay.” Warner rolled his eyes. “I’ll just go down to the magnet store and pick some up.”

  “Quit being such a party pooper,” TJ said, rummaging through the hoard of random stuff piled around the office. “We can make our own magnets. All we need is some wire and something metal, a battery, and some tape to make an electromagnet.”

  “That just might work.”

  “There’s bound to be something we can use in this trash heap!”

  A sharp crack like breaking wood sounded from the doorjamb. They all jerked their heads to look at the door. Bjorn was back, this time working at the lock with a crowbar.

  Without another word, the five of them sprang into action and began sifting through Bjorn’s junk piles, looking for the necessary supplies. A few minutes later, they had found everything they needed: a large spool of copper wire, a new pack of extra-long nails, a box of screws, a roll of duct tape, and a whole bunch of batteries.

  “All right, guys,” Kevin said, cracking his knuckles and sitting on the floor. “Let’s get to work.”

  Kevin and his friends gathered around the supplies while the nanobugs buzzed behind the door and Bjorn scraped away at the lock. Tara sat on the other side of the room working with a screwdriver to take apart the old microwaves stacked in the corner.

  “What are you doing over there, Tara?” Kevin asked

  “I’m making a stronger magnet is what I’m doing. . . . Argh!” Tara pulled the plastic panel off one of the microwave ovens and unscrewed the transformer from the old kitchen appliance. “These microwave transformers can generate a higher magnetic field than those nails.” Kevin never would’ve thought of that but he could see where she was going. While Tara took apart the other microwaves, the boys finished their smaller electromagnets, using up every last bit of the supplies.

  In just a few minutes the boys had made about two dozen electromagnets. “Good job, fellas!” Kevin said. “Now let’s figure out some way to hang them in front of the doorway.”

  The door creaked dangerously close to popping open as Bjorn pried away with the crowbar, trying to crack the lock.

  “Tara, are you almost done?” Kevin asked.

  “Just a couple more minutes,” she said, clipping three sets of jumper cables to a battery pack that was connected to the microwave transformer.

  “We don’t have a couple minutes!” Warner shouted. “Bjorn’s going berserk out there.”

  “I’m going as fast as I can,” she said.

  As Tara finished making three super-strong electromagnets, Kevin and the guys knotted their own homemade magnets with string and hung them in front of the doorway like birthday party streamers.

  “Okay, all finished!” Tara shouted. “Now let’s test these puppies out!” She lifted one of the flat metal transformers and aimed it at a metal screwdriver. The screwdriver levitated off the ground and latched onto the supercharged electromagnet. She picked up one and ordered Kevin and TJ to pick up the other two. “We’ll use them like shields.” Over by the door, a few of the robo-bugs squeezed through the cracked wood and flew into the office.

  The nanobugs whizzed through the booby-trapped doorway. Thwack-thwack-thwack! The first wave of nanobugs clanked into the homemade electromagnets dangling in their flight path and stuck, unable to break free of the magnetic field.

  “It’s working!” Kevin shouted, and then he remembered. At the last second, he doubled back and ran over to Max’s desk.

  “Kevin, what are you doing?” TJ hollered.

  “The transmitter!” Kevin yelled. He snatched the transmitter Bjorn had shown them off the desktop and tossed it in his backpack along with the comic book blueprint of the mother ship.

  Crack! Bjorn’s crowbar shot through the wooden doorjamb and the lock
popped clean off. The door swung open with a bang and the swarm of robotic insects flew into the electromagnetic booby-traps.

  “Now!” Tara yelled.

  Warner dropped his shoulder into Bjorn’s belly and the big brainwashed lug fell back into a pile of his own rubbish.

  Kevin took off running after his friends, holding the microwave electromagnet in front of his face to shield him from the swarm. The flying metal nanobugs clinked and clanked as the supermagnets pulled them out of the air.

  As he booked down the hallway, Kevin felt one of the nanowasps land on the side of his neck. Its pointy metal feet clung to the skin beneath his earlobe. Kevin was about to scream and try to shake the bug off, but then two zaps from Klyk’s mini ray gun struck the robotic insect.

  “Thanks, man!” Kevin said to his alien pal as the nanobug crashed to the floor.

  “Don’t worry, Kevin. I got your back,” said Klyk, shooting down another nanobug. “Or at least the back of your neck.”

  Kevin raced through the swarm of nanowasps toward his three human friends, who were shooting out the front door of the house. The kids hightailed it across the lawn and quickly boarded Klyk’s spaceship. Kevin closed the hatch behind them before the mechanical swarm of alien mind-control insects could reach their craft.

  As they cruised back to Northwest Horizons, Kevin sat quietly trying to gather his thoughts. They knew what they had to do now, but he was getting nervous about how they’d do it and whether or not they even could.

  “Hey, guys, check this out,” Tara said from one of the copilot seats. She pointed to the camera screen and zoomed in. Kevin crossed the deck of the ship and looked over Tara’s shoulder along with TJ.