Grayson’s moustache twitched. “Well ... we’ll burn that Einstein-Rosen Bridge when we get to it.”
My gut went slack.
That’s exactly what I was afraid of...
I CAME OUT OF THE BATHROOM to discover Grayson duct-taping one of his stupid mystery gadgets to the back of Earl’s camo hunting vest.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Getting ready for tonight.” Grayson ripped a piece of duct tape with his teeth. “We’re sending Earl in as first contact.”
“What?” I gasped.
Confusion, fear, paranoia and envy played Twister in my head. “Wait a minute. Did you choose Earl because he did better than me on your stupid EEG machine?”
I knew I was arguing against my own best interests, but I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t want the job of Martian Greeter. Far from it. But Earl and I had been rivals for thirty years. The force of habit was so strong in me that I didn’t want my cousin to best me at anything—not even death by alien probe.
I scowled at Grayson. “You think Earl’s better than me. Admit it!”
Grayson shrugged. “In some ways, yes. He’s more—”
“Cool under pressure?” I grumbled.
“Well, Drex, I have noted you’ve shown a remarkable ability to defy conventional scientific theories.”
I softened, feeling flattered. “Really?”
“Yes.” Grayson smirked. “For every action you have an unequal and opposite overreaction.”
I scowled. “Ha. Ha.”
“But regarding Earl,” Grayson continued, his voice fading to a whisper, “I was thinking more along the lines of him being more expendable than you.”
“Oh.” I winced with guilt, and glanced over at the banquette. Earl was snarfing down Reese’s Pieces from a Mason jar—with a fork.
Maybe it really is for the best...
“What’d he say?” Earl asked, looking up at me. “I couldn’t hear him over the crunching.”
“Uh ... Grayson said you’re indispensable,” I lied.
Earl grinned, revealing teeth stained in every color no one ever wants their teeth to be. “Is that true, Mr. G.?”
Grayson glanced at Earl, then back to me. “As far as you know.”
“Ha ha!” Earl giggled excitedly. “Grayson thinks I’m better’n you, Bobbie! Na-na-na na-na!”
Resentment bitch-slapped my guilty conscience into submission. “Yes, Earl. You won this one, fair and square.”
But this victory rang as hollow as my poor cousin’s head.
If Earl really did end up becoming Earth’s intergalactic ambassador, it could quite possibly spell the end of the world as we knew it.
And I didn’t feel fine.
Chapter Twenty-Five
It was 6:15 p.m.
T-minus forty-five minutes and counting.
At seven o’clock, we would all be heading out to prank call a mixed race of alien creatures that were probably billions of years older than us and trillions of times smarter.
What could possibly go wrong?
For our last supper, I’d ordered Hungry Howie’s Crazy Bread and six bottles of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill. I’d figured, what the hell. If I was going to die, I wanted to go out with as many regrets as possible.
“I thought I told you to clean those up,” Grayson said, reaching into a bag of Crazy bread on the kitchen counter.
He nodded toward the windowsill. I glanced at the rack of test tubes I was supposed to have washed yesterday. I’d stashed them up there to do later. Perhaps this time, procrastination really would pay. With any luck I’d be dead by dawn, and it wouldn’t matter.
Score.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve been a little busy given the—you know—alien invasion and stuff.”
Grayson’s green eyes studied me like I was a new species of algae. “Never mind. I’ll do it myself tomorrow.”
I poured another pink glass of wine and muttered under my breath, “If there is a tomorrow.”
Grayson’s eyebrow arched. “You don’t think we’re going to be able to pull this off?”
I sighed and glanced over at Earl, who was dutifully completing his TV “assignment.”
“No offense, Grayson. But in what universe does watching reruns of ALF qualify as an in-depth course on communicating with aliens? We have no real strategy!”
Grayson grabbed me by the shoulders. “Listen to me, Drex. Historic moments can’t be orchestrated—merely experienced.”
“Really?” I said, a tinge of hope returning to my soul. “Who said that?”
Grayson locked eyes with me. “I did. Just now. Are you having trouble hearing?”
I closed my eyes and let the breath drain out of me.
It’s official. We’re doomed.
I CHECKED THE PROVISIONS in my purse again.
One Glock. Thirty extra rounds of ammo. Fourteen Tootsie Pops.
I closed my eyes, hoping against hope that this whole alien invasion thing was some kind of stupid misunderstanding. But if I was indeed going to be abducted and whisked off to planet Krull, well, by God, I was going out in style—and with a ready supply of high-fructose corn syrup.
“You ready?” I heard Grayson ask.
I opened my eyes. He was standing in the hallway of the RV, talking to Earl.
“Yes sir, Mr. G.,” Earl said, and saluted.
My lip snarled. “What are you two doing?”
Grayson reached into his potion cabinet. “I’m giving our trooper here something to make him feel invincible.”
My eyebrows inched closer. “Jack Daniels?”
“No.” Grayson pulled out the Windex bottle and spritzed Earl from head to toe with Alien Parasite Remover. “Now you’ll be untouchable, my good man.”
“In my book, he already was,” I muttered.
Earl grinned and studied his arms as if he’d never laid eyes on them before. “Cool!”
I shook my head. “You really think that’s gonna work?”
Grayson shrugged. “It can’t hurt. I give it a thirty percent chance.”
“How do you figure that?” I asked, watching Earl flap his arms like a water turkey, trying to dry himself.
“I extrapolated from placebo research,” Grayson said. “Like any sugar pill, if you think it will work, it works.”
A twinge of pain shot through my head like a stray bottle rocket. I closed my eyes. Either the Boone’s Farm was beginning to talk, or the little twin inside my brain was trying its best to kick me in the ass.
For once, I had to agree with it. This whole situation was a disaster looking for a place to happen.
I opened my mouth to voice my objection one more time, but was drowned out by an unearthly wail only slightly worse than one of Grayson’s shower soliloquies.
“Okay, troops,” Grayson said, lowering the bugle from his lips. “Let’s move out.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
I was surprised by the number of cars in the parking lot of the former 7-11 that was now Juanita’s Casa del Tacos.
Then I remembered it was Tuesday night.
Straddling Bessie’s gearshift, I shifted my weight to the right and glanced over at my typically taco-crazed commander in chief. His eyes were fixated on the road ahead. He hadn’t even given the neon sombrero a passing glance.
I nearly choked on my Tootsie Pop. I’d never seen Grayson so ... focused. Either that or the green-eyed taco fiend had finally gone mad.
I sat in silent contemplation and listened to the monster truck’s tires whine as we passed the restaurant and turned onto the dark, rural road leading to Edward Medard Park—the Hi-Ho.
Earl began humming an unrecognizable tune. I turned toward him and my jaw clamped like a vice grip. I was caught between a madman in black and a redneck in camo spritzed with alien parasite remover.
By any rational measure of sanity, all three of us were stark-raving nuts.
“Do you see anything?” Grayson asked, staring out the passenger window through a pa
ir of binoculars.
Only my future skittering away like a three-legged dog in ice-skates.
“Nope,” I said, even though I’d spotted the glow coming from the woods about five seconds earlier. I guess my will to live was stronger than I’d planned on.
“Hey! There it is!” Earl said, pointing a beefy finger at the windshield.
“Excellent,” Grayson said. “Pull over here.”
LIKE A LOW-BUDGET VERSION of Survivorman with an all-idiot cast, the three of us tromped through the swamp, filling our galoshes and feeding the mosquitos.
Silently, I prayed the ominous glow we’d spotted on the roadside would skip making an encore tonight. But against all odds—and forsaking all my hopes and dreams—that damned luminous ring and its glowing portal of doom had reappeared at the ridgetop, right on schedule.
I couldn’t make out the spaceship in the center, and there was no sign of either the Conehead or Medusa alien life forms. I wondered if Earl’s ALF training had been all in vain...
“You know the drill,” Grayson said.
“Yep,” Earl replied. “I’m ready, Chief.”
“The drill?” I asked. “I don’t know the drill!”
Before my eyes, my big, bear of a cousin saluted, drew himself up six inches taller, and flexed his muscles like King Kong.
“Step aside, Bobbie,” he said. “I’m going in. If anything happens, save yourselves!”
“Wait!” I called after him.
But it was too late. Before I could stop him, Earl ran past me and headlong into the portal.
He disappeared with a metallic, gong-like sound.
“Earl!” I screamed, and took a step toward the glowing ring.
“Ouch!” Earl hollered. “Well, would you look at that!”
“What is it?” I yelled, running toward the intergalactic portal. “Are you hurt? Are you trapped in some kind of other dimension?”
“You might could call it that,” Earl said. “Don’t rightly know what to make of it.”
“God help me,” I screamed as I closed in on the portal. “Hold on, Earl! I’m coming after you!”
I took a step back, preparing to make a giant leap.
“Wait,” Grayson said, grabbing my arm from behind.
“Let me go!” I screeched. “I’ve got to save Earl!”
“Shh!” Grayson said, putting his hand over my mouth. “Look over there.”
He turned me around.
I gasped.
Then I couldn’t breathe.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Grayson and I stood side by side, stunned to silence, staring out from behind the thin strip of forest that hid us from an army of pointy-headed aliens.
I held my breath and watched helplessly as my camo-clad cousin stumbled down the ridge where the portal hovered, then barreled directly into a circular clearing at the bottom.
The tamped-down clearing was eerily similar to the one we’d discovered yesterday in the woods right off Whirlwind Trail. Except instead of a dark circle in the center of it, a bonfire blazed.
And it was occupied with an army of otherworldly beings.
All around the fire, Conehead-like aliens in white robes stood motionless, staring into the blaze like pawns in an intergalactic game of chess. They would’ve appeared harmless—perhaps even friendly—except for the fact that each of them was wielding a shiny, sabre-like weapon.
“Uh ... howdy,” Earl said, standing up and dusting himself off. He waved a meaty paw and approached the alien toga party. “I come in peace.”
Wordlessly, in perfect synchronicity every alien’s head turned toward my cousin and raised their light-sabers high.
I cringed and whispered to Grayson, “What are they going to do to him?”
He didn’t answer, and I didn’t look over to read his expression. My eyes were glued to my cousin and the creatures from Krull.
One of the pointy-headed beings broke away from the uniform circle and approached Earl, seeming to glide rather than walk as he moved.
“Are you here to join us, brother?” it said in a deep, almost mechanical baritone.
“Uh, sure,” Earl said.
“Excellent. Follow me.”
“All-righty then,” Earl said. Then he did something that stunned me. He looked back in our direction and winked.
My jaw fell open. I stood and stared, momentarily paralyzed with fear, as my brave, sweet, stupid, idiotic cousin followed the creature away from us and toward the other side of the bonfire.
“I have to keep an eye on him,” I whispered, edging by Grayson, who was peeking out from behind a small cypress tree.
“Right. But stay out of view,” he said, following behind me.
“What are we going to do if this goes south?” I asked, crouched over, pushing my way around a palmetto bush.
“I’m working on it,” Grayson said. “I hadn’t expected so many aliens to come out of that little ship. We’re going to have to see how this plays out.”
“There he is!” I gasped, freezing in my tracks.
Earl was by the fire, kneeling in front of an alien in a golden robe.
“That must be their leader,” Grayson whispered.
We watched from the bushes as the white-robed alien that had made first contact with Earl nudged my cousin with its saber and said something I couldn’t hear.
Earl stuck out his tongue.
My heart sunk.
Oh, God, Earl! This is no time to be a smartass!
I pulled out my Glock. Grayson grabbed my arm.
“Wait, Drex,” he whispered in my ear. “We don’t have a chance against this many of them.”
My body went limp. Grayson was right. There was nothing I could do but watch in horror as the strange figure Grayson called the leader reached a spindly arm toward my cousin. Unlike the others, the leader was thin and bronze-colored—almost as shiny as the golden robe it wore. The being placed something on Earl’s tongue, then tilted its head skyward and let out an unearthly wail—like a yodeler being stuck with a cattle prod.
Suddenly, all the other aliens echoed the leader’s strange call—including Earl! Their haunting shrieks set every hair on my body on end.
I held my breath, expecting to see a light sabre come down on Earl’s neck, and his head go rolling off into the fire.
But that didn’t happen.
Instead, Earl was given a white robe. Then he jauntily joined a group of aliens who were forming a line at the end of a strip of glowing-hot coals.
“Yugan duit, yugan duit!” the creatures began to chant.
One stripped off its robe and made a mad dash across the glowing coals.
My gut fell four inches. Beneath its robe, the alien was wearing overalls. The only thing “out of this world” had been my imagination.
“Yugan duit,” morphed into “You can do it!” as more and more of them stripped off their robes and ran through the hot coals.
I blew out a sigh. These were no alien creatures—not unless Krull was inhabited entirely by middle-aged, flabby white guys.
“What the—?” I muttered to Grayson. But then I spotted Earl in the coal-trotting conga-line and clammed up.
It was his turn to run the gauntlet.
I held my breath, anticipating disaster.
But, to my surprise, like a trooper, Earl high-tailed it through the path of red embers, hooting and hollering the whole way. At the end of his brief, hot-footed journey, he was given back his robe, along with a few hearty claps on the back by his fellow compadres.
As the next guy in line stumbled across the hot coals, Earl put his robe back on and meandered to the edge of the clearing. By some miracle, he managed to choose a spot within earshot of where Grayson and I were hunched over, hiding in the palmetto bushes.
“Psst! Over here,” Grayson said.
Earl’s head turned sideways. “Where you at?”
“Over here,” I said.
“Oh!” Earl fumbled into the woods beside us, a goofy
smile on his face, like he’d just come from a spa that offered happy endings or something.
“Boy, howdy,” he said. “I gotta tell ya, that was outta this world!” He stuck his arms out like Frankenstein and smiled admiringly at the robe’s sleeves, as if they were magic. “Bobbie, look at what them nice ol’ aliens done give me!”
Grayson shone a small penlight on Earl, then zeroed in on the robe’s chest pocket.
“Hmm,” Grayson said. “This is worse than I thought.”
I shook my head, finding that hard to believe. “Worse than your lamebrain idea this was an alien invasion from Krull?” I hissed. “Gimme a break!”
“See for yourself,” Grayson said, turning Earl around to face me.
“See what?” I grumbled.
Grayson shone the penlight past Earl’s shoulder and lit up the robe’s pocket. In dark-green embroidery, a three-letter insignia stood out from the white terrycloth.
I blanched. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
“Unfortunately not,” Grayson said. “It appears these men have fallen victim to their own innate fears, egged on by a charismatic leader feeding them false hopes of an unobtainable utopia.”
I stared at the three letters stitched on Earl’s robe pocket.
KFC
“Dear lord,” I said. “Is this some kind of freaky fried-chicken cult?”
“No,” Grayson said. “Something even more unappetizing.”
I grimaced. “More unappetizing than grown people licking their fingers?”
“Yes. By a factor of at least ten.”
I gasped. I glanced back through the bushes at the robed men dancing around the bonfire, then turned back to Grayson. “What do you mean?”
Grayson grabbed my shoulders and stared into my eyes.
“Drex, I believe what we’ve stumbled on here is the genesis of a newly emerging network marketing scheme.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Network marketing?” Garth asked, his mouth hanging open like a bucktoothed Venus flytrap.
Still in his ratty flannel bathrobe, he’d waited up for us by the entry gate to his compound, sprawled out in a lawn chair with a Coleman lantern and his wimpy hound-dog Tooth for company. As soon as he’d spotted us, Garth had hit the remote to open the barbed-wire topped gate, and Earl had driven Bessie on through.
Scatman Dues (Freaky Florida Mystery Adventures Book 6) Page 12