by Gary Urey
“Who cares who found it,” I said. “The question is what are we going to do about it?”
“We have another one,” TJ said.
“Another what?” Dr.Wackjöb asked.
“Last night’s video of Schnoz sleeping.”
“Then let’s see if our vast-nosed friend had another alien abduction.”
When Dr. Wackjöb said the words “alien abduction,” a cold shiver went up my nose. I had never thought of my experience in those terms before. But that was my reality. I was the unconscious victim of a human nose experiment conducted by aliens from outer space.
The first six hours of the video were all the same—me sleeping—so Dr. Wackjöb fast-forwarded until we saw the first wisps of a shadow form above my bed. It took all of my courage to keep watching. I mean, who knew what the aliens were going to shove up nose next?
“This is the same thing that happened the night before,” Vivian said.
Dr. Wackjöb pressed a finger to his lips, indicating for everyone to be quiet. This time, the shadow formed into two aliens. They were identical with tiny slits for noses and mouths and huge eyes.The hoses they used for my nose were twice as large as they’d been the first night.When the aliens shoved them inside my nostrils, I flailed so much that a third alien materialized from the dark cloud and held me down.
Then the snoring happened: loud, rumbling snorts that shook the room and made my dresser topple over. A small crack fissured its way up my wall. The aliens turned and looked at each other. Their once dark, soulless eyes now beamed with a fluorescent green light.
I heard a loud thump directly behind me. Mumps had passed out again.
“They’re communicating with each other,” Jimmy said.
“I bet they’re talking about how big Schnoz’s nose is,” TJ said. “Or about all his boogers.”
“They’re Apneans,” Dr.Wackjöb muttered.
“That’s exactly what I thought too,” Vivian said. “Schnoz has a horrible case of sleep apnea.”
Dr. Wackjöb shook his head. “I said Apneans, not apnea. Follow me to the Cosmoscope.”
Dr. Wackjöb turned on a switch, played with some knobs, and the farthest corners of the universe, looking as if they were only inches away from our faces, popped up on a giant screen.The celestial sky twinkled like someone had spilled a jar of silver glitter onto black construction paper.
A series of oohs and ahhs went up from Vivian and the Not-Right Brothers. Dr. Wackjöb positioned the mouse on his computer and a flash of light in the middle of deep space appeared on the screen.
“Is that a star?” TJ asked.
“No,” Dr.Wackjöb replied. “It’s a planet, proof that other life-forms exist in the universe. I have named it Apnea.”
“Why Apnea?” I wondered out loud.
“Apnea comes from the Greek, meaning to breathe,” Dr. Wackjöb explained. “The study of this planet is my living breath. It is all I live for. That is why I have named the planet Apnea.Watch as I zoom in closer.”
The screen grew fuzzy for a moment and then became as clear as a green booger on a white tissue. Mountain ranges, lakes, rivers, buildings, and UFOs flying through the planet’s airspace came into view.
“Wow,” Vivian said. “This is just like looking at Google Maps, but instead of a neighborhood you can see a whole planet.”
“Gríöarstór Nef,” Dr. Wackjöb said to me, “this is the planet Apnea, four billion light-years from Earth. Home of the aliens that are snatching your snores.”
CHAPTER 13
SNORE DESTRUCTION
We have to let the world know!” TJ shouted. “This is the greatest discovery in the history of mankind!”
Dr. Wackjöb looked at TJ with a frown. “Young man, I have informed NASA, the British Interplanetary Society, the Russian Space Federation, and even a Wal-Mart security guard,” he said bitterly. “I sent them the exact galactic coordinates of my planetary discovery. No one believes me enough to bother looking.”
“Can you zoom in closer?” I asked.
With a press of a button, the Cosmoscope focused in on the planet Apnea.We saw thousands of aliens that looked just like the ones who shoved hoses up my nose. The extraterrestrial beings seemed to be hovering around a large, metallic-looking object.
“What’s that thing they’re working so hard on?” Vivian asked.
“Not sure,” Dr. Wackjöb answered. “It is partially obscured by a reflective light shield. Do you see the planet’s two suns in the distance?”
We nodded our heads.
“As the planet revolves around the suns, the Apneans will move the light shield. Perhaps then, we can get a glimpse of their laborious project.”
“I want to see it now,” Jimmy groaned.
“Have patience, my boy. Our planet revolves every twenty-four hours, but Apnea revolves every two hours.That’s how long we have to wait until they move the light shield.”
For the next one hundred and twenty minutes, we listened as Dr. Wackjöb explained his theory of UFOs, earthquakes, and alien abductions.With the video of the spacemen sucking snores from my booger maker, his work was no longer a theory, but a proven fact.
“Gríöarstór Nef,” Dr. Wackjöb said to me, “Apnea is in trouble.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Our world derives its power mostly from fossil fuels,” Dr.Wackjöb explained. “Apneans, on the other hand, have no such resource. They use solar power originating from their two suns.”
Vivian scratched her head. “I can’t wrap my brain around this,” she said. “What do solar power and Schnoz’s snoring have to do with each other?”
“Look at their two suns on the screen,” Dr. Wackjöb instructed. “Tell me what you see.”
“I see two big red suns that pulse every few minutes,” Mumps said, still looking a bit nauseous from his latest blackout.
“That is an excellent observation. Although our own sun looks yellow, it is actually white. Only when the sun’s light passes through Earth’s atmosphere does it change from white to the yellow color we see. That is the sign of healthy, relatively young sun.”
“Thanks for the science lesson,” I said impatiently. “What’s your point?”
Dr. Wackjöb turned to look at me. “The point is that a sun nearing the end of its life throbs like a giant heart. It runs out of hydrogen fuel at its core like a motorcycle engine runs out of gas. It also turns a brilliant bloody red, just like the two suns of Apnea.”
“So their two suns are dying,” Vivian reasoned. “Without a sun they have no solar power.Without solar power they…”
“They find another place to live,” Dr. Wackjöb interrupted. “When Apnea’s suns die, the planet will die. Its inhabitants are acutely aware of this. The Apneans need Gríöarstór Nef’s snores for destruction.” Dr. Wackjöb’s face grew gravely serious. He looked me in the eye and said, “The Apneans have been harvesting more and more of your snores to use against us. They will use your nose to cause earthquakes and destroy our civilization. Their master plan is to invade Earth and then build a new world in their own image.”
“Good-bye, Earth; hello, Apnea,” Mumps muttered.
Vivian pointed to the screen. “Look!” she yelled. “The Apneans are moving the light shield!”
Everyone stared at the screen. I watched in horror as the aliens pulled away the light shield and revealed the most disturbing, the most frightening thing I had ever seen in my life.
“It’s…it’s…” Jimmy stuttered, but the words got stuck in his throat.
Mumps collapsed in a fleshy lump at my feet. Vivian gaped in wide-eyed astonishment. Dr. Wackjöb just looked on with a serious expression on his face.
“It’s an enormous spaceship shaped like Schnoz’s honker!” TJ cried. “They created a giant Robo-Nose to destroy the world!”
CHAPTER 14
ROBO-NOSE
From the screen, Robo-Nose looked like a ten-story-high, five-school-bus-wide replica of my be
ak, right down to the shape of my bristly nose hairs. I watched as hundreds of Apneans climbed inside the mechanical muzzle. Moments later, a thrust of snore-fueled, boogery snot exploded from the metal nostrils like a thousand rocket blasts. Robo-Nose slowly rose off the ground, hovered in midair, and then shot through the atmosphere and out of sight.
“They are coming for us,” Dr. Wackjöb said. “They have powered their nasal ship with Gríöarstór Nef’s snores.They will then fly around to different parts of the earth and cause massive earthquakes to destroy our planet.This is just as I predicted but no one would believe me!”
“How long will it take for them to get here?” Vivian asked.
Dr. Wackjöb punched some numbers into a computer program. “Apnea is four billion light-years from Earth. If my calculations are correct and Robo-Nose is traveling at the speed of snores, it should take them two solar days to reach our planet.”
“A solar day is twenty-four hours,” TJ said. “They’ll be here on Saturday.”
“That stinks!” grumbled Mumps. “I was supposed to go to fishing on Lake Winnipesaukee this Saturday with my uncle. But now it looks like I’m going to have to help save the world from an alien invasion.”
“Well, get over it!” Jimmy barked in Mumps’s face. “If Apneans take over Earth you’ll never go fishing again—because you’ll be DEAD!
“Knock it off, you two,” Vivian ordered. “We have to come up with a plan or we’re all goners.”
“Vivian is right,” I said. “It’s up to us to save the world.” I turned to Dr. Wackjöb. “And how exactly will we accomplish that?”
“We fight fire with fire,” Dr. Wackjöb said. “Or, in your case, we fight nostril with nostril. Is it true that you blew up army tanks and large trucks with just your nose?”
“Absolutely!” I announced proudly. “Well, with the help of a snoot full of cayenne pepper. Do you want to see what it can do?”
Dr. Wackjöb nodded and we walked outside. Luckily, Vivian had reminded me to bring a bottle of pepper. At the back of the compound were six massive boulders. I knew from school that retreating glaciers from ten thousand years ago had left them behind. I took a huge sniff of cayenne, aimed, and sneezed with all my snot. The boulders shot off the ground like golf balls smacked from a tee and then exploded into a million pebbles.
“Astonishing!” Dr. Wackjöb gushed. “That nose of yours is as a lethal weapon!”
“Now we know exactly why the Apneans picked Schnoz,” Jimmy said.
“Without a doubt, young man. I think we just may have a fighting chance against these invaders. Your proboscis is one of the most powerful forces on Earth.”
We filed back into the observatory and planned our next move. While Dr. Wackjöb crunched numbers into his computer, trying to determine the exact coordinates of the alien landing, Vivian, the Not-Right Brothers, and I talked things over. The first thing we addressed was my nightly visits by little gray space men. The more snores they harnessed, the more power they had.
“Let’s ambush them when they materialize from that dark shadow,” Vivian suggested.
“What do you mean?” TJ asked.
“You guys have a sleepover at Schnoz’s house. When the aliens appear to do their hose-up-the-nose ritual, you grab them and tie them up as prisoners.”
“That’s stupid,” Jimmy said. “What are we supposed to do with them after we tie them up? Hold them for ransom until they agree to leave our planet alone?”
“We should just conk them over the head,” Mumps said, flailing around like a ninja ready for battle. “One quick karate chop to the skull and they’d be history.”
“Mumps, you pass out just seeing them on video,” I said. “If you saw an alien in real life, you’d probably spontaneously combust. As far as I’m concerned, Vivian’s on the right track.”
“How so?” Jimmy asked.
“You guys saw the aliens on tape.They’re about our size. Jimmy, do you think you can sew up a couple alien costumes?”
“Schnoz, that’s a brilliant idea!” Vivian beamed. “We should tie up the real aliens and then dress up like them. That way we can go on board Robo-Nose and sabotage it from the inside.”
I slapped Vivian a high-five. “Exactly right. Wrap them up in duct tape.That stuff is good for practically everything.”
“The dark shadow is some kind of passageway that transports them to our world and then back to Robo-Nose, their main booger ship,” TJ said. “We just have to enter the shadow in place of the real aliens.”
Jimmy paced around the room, thinking. “It sounds like a good plan to me, but who is going to take the trip from the shadow to Robo-Nose? This is a lot riskier than just sneaking into our school to battle ECU.”
“There’s no way I’m doing it,” Mumps said. “I’ll stay down here on solid ground and work with Dr. Wackjöb.”
Vivian looked at Jimmy and TJ. “Then it’s up to us, partners. It can’t be Schnoz because he has to battle them nostril to nostril from the outside.” She looked at her watch. “Schnoz, you better fly us home so Jimmy can stitch up some alien costumes. It looks like we’re going to have a busy night ahead of us.”
Just as we had done when we first formed our crime-fighting superhero team, we all bent over until our noses were touching.
“On the count of three,” I said. “One, two, three…”
“Gríöarstór Nef!” we all screamed.
CHAPTER 15
SLEEPOVER
After an hour of begging, my mom and dad reluctantly agreed to allow Jimmy, Mumps, and TJ to sleep over. Of course, Vivian couldn’t spend the night because she’s a girl, but we had that all figured out. The two of us would be in constant walkie-talkie communication.When the Not-Right Brothers and I had subdued the aliens, I’d let Vivian know and she would sneak over to my house. She, Jimmy, and TJ would then slip on the alien suits and disappear into Robo-Nose.
“This is the fastest sewing job I’ve ever done in my life,” Jimmy said when he got to my house that night.
“Let me see your work,” I asked, anxious to see his creation.
“Don’t worry, Schnoz,” TJ said. “You’re going to be impressed by our fashion artist friend.”
Jimmy yanked out the three costumes from his gym bag. The outfits were awesome, right down to the silver-colored material to the slits for the mouth and nose.
“Where’d you get the material?” I asked.
Jimmy smiled. “I raided my older sister’s dresser drawer of all her spandex dance clothes. They were all black, so after I finished stitching the get-ups together, I found some silver spray paint in the garage and gave them a couple coats.”
“Let’s try them on,” Mumps suggested.
Jimmy, TJ, and Mumps slipped into the costumes.They looked exactly like the little aliens who had been snatching my snores. In fact, they looked so real I wanted to reach out and cuff them a good one upside the head.
“Mine fits like a sock,” Jimmy said.
“This one feels good too,” TJ added.
Mumps strutted around my room, making alien noises. “Since Vivian is about my size, it should fit her perfectly.While you guys are inside Robo-Nose, I’ll be working with Dr. Wackjöb. Schnoz can fly me there in the harness.”
A knock came at my bedroom door.
“I have some cookies and hot chocolate for you boys.”
It was my mom.
Jimmy, TJ, and Mumps quickly ripped off the alien costumes.
“Thanks, Mom,” I said, opening the door and taking the plate of goodies.
“Don’t you boys stay up too late,” she said. “Understand?”
“Okay,” we mumbled through a mouthful of cookies.
When my mom left the room, I looked at the clock sitting on my nightstand. “It’s nine thirty already,” I said. “I’m checking in with Vivian.”
I pressed the red button on the walkie-talkie. “Vivian. Can you read me?”
“Roger that,” Vivian replied, her voice full of
static.
“I saw the costumes Jimmy made. They look just like the real thing.”
“Good. I’ll be drinking soda full of caffeine to stay awake. Remember, when the cloud appears you have to let me know. Then I’ll sneak over to your house. Okay?”
“Sounds good,” I answered. “I’ll make sure the back door is unlocked so you can get inside. Over and out.”
“What do we do now?” Mumps asked when I turned off the walkie-talkie.
“Let’s play a few games of Electronic Battleship and then go to bed,” TJ suggested.
Jimmy slurped down the last drop of his hot chocolate. “I won’t be able to sleep,” he said.
“Me either,” I agreed. “But we have to turn out the lights. If the aliens don’t think I’m asleep, they may not come.”
The Not-Right Brothers and I played a few rounds of Electronic Battleship until around midnight.
“I guess it’s time,” TJ said.
“You got that right,” I said, crawling into bed and flicking off the light.
Jimmy, TJ, and Mumps unrolled their sleeping bags on the floor and slid inside.The only sounds were the occasional fart by Mumps, followed by a round of raucous laughter. My eyelids felt as heavy as bowling balls, but I fought the urge to sleep.The Not-Right Brothers, on the other hand, gave in to the sandman too easily. Soon, all three of them were crashed out, thin lines of drool dripping from their open mouths.
I tossed and turned in my bed, trying to stay awake. My discipline paid off. As the crimson-colored numbers of the alarm clock flashed 4:00 A.M., I felt a gust of warm, heavy air pass over my body. My eyes squinted in the semidarkness. I saw a dark shadow forming above my bed.
“Jimmy, Mumps, TJ!” I shout-whispered. “Something’s happening.”
“Huh…” Jimmy mumbled in his half-sleep.
“Whatta…?” TJ muttered, turning over in his sleeping bag.
A pungent electrical smell filled the room. I watched as the shadow slowly molded into the shape of two little gray aliens. The space invaders hovered at the foot of my bed, staring at me with large dark eyes, each holding a flexible hose the size of a sewer pipe.