Alien in My Pocket #4 (9 page)

My Secret Roommate

W
hen a pint-size alien from outer space crash-lands his spaceship on your bed during the middle of the night, your life can get pretty messed up.

You can never go back to the way it was.

My little blue alien and I argued constantly for two straight months as we tried to repair his junky ship. We fought like two crabs in a bucket.

Then we ran out of steam.

And we learned to get along.

I guess you can get used to most things that at first seem to be the absolute ruin of your life, like summer school, tuna fish, and spelling quizzes.

I had grown comfortable with Amp, and he had gotten used to me.

The fact that Amp wasn't much bigger than a stick of butter helped me keep him a secret from my parents and little brother. He also had an invisibility trick that had come in handy more than once and the ability to erase people's short-term memory.

The only other person on Earth who knew about Amp was my best friend and next-door neighbor, Olivia. And she had gotten so used to Amp that it was a minor miracle she hadn't blurted out some funny story about him to my parents.

As the ambassador of the human race, I think I had done a pretty spectacular job. My cat hadn't eaten Amp, I hadn't stepped on him, and most important of all, I'd convinced him that attacking our planet was a bad idea.

See, Amp is the lead scout for the planet Erde. The Erdians are planning on taking over Earth, but because of me, Amp understood that attacking this planet was a major mistake. Compared to the average Erdian, we were simply too big to be defeated.

So as we made slow progress in repairing his ship, the
Dingle
, we became friends—if it's possible for a human to be friends with a hairless, three-fingered, Smurf-colored alien no bigger than a ham sandwich.

But now the time was fast approaching to get Amp back home to cancel the Erdian invasion. The future of Earth and Erde depended on us. We both knew it, but we didn't talk about it much.

Mostly, we spent our time eating junk food and watching scary movies on my mom's laptop.

Amp was crazy for horror movies, the old black-and-white kind.
Dracula. Frankenstein. The Wolf Man. Creature from the Black Lagoon
. We were working our way through a deluxe set of twenty-four classic horror movies on DVD that I had borrowed from Olivia's grandpa.

One night, Amp and I were up late—as usual—enjoying SweeTarts and Ritz Crackers while watching
The Mummy
(starring Boris Karloff), when our cozy little situation got crazy.

As is often the case, it all started with alarm bells.

Sound the Alarm

“H
ey, what's that noise?”

“Eh?” Amp grunted absent-mindedly. He was lying on his side next to the track pad on my mom's laptop, rubbing his stuffed belly, totally absorbed in the movie.

I was sitting cross-legged on my bed with the computer in front of me.

“Hey,” I said, gently poking the back of his head with my pinky finger. “Can you hear that?”

“I can hear you interrupting the movie,” he said. “Now shush.”

“Seriously,” I said, poking his shoulder now.

“Knock it off, Zack,” he said, shrugging his poked shoulder.

“C'mon, Amp, listen.”

“Quiet!” he said, waving his hand at me. “The mummy is coming. I love this part!”

I slapped the space bar and paused the movie.

“What are you—?”

“Can you hear it now?”

We both listened in the silence. It was a faraway tinkling, buzzing sound. Or beeping. It wasn't the kind of sound I had ever heard before.

“That sounds pretty dang alien to me,” I whispered.

He jumped to his feet and held up his hands to silence me as he strained to hear the noise.

“Oh, that's not good,” he said in his strange, high-pitched voice.

“What exactly do you mean by ‘not good'?”

“Does it mean more than one thing?” he asked.

“Amp, what's happening?”

He began looking around in a panic. His face turned a paler shade of blue.

“Is that sound coming from you? Are you going to explode or something?”

He shot me a look. “Don't be ridiculous. I don't beep. Or explode.”

“At first I thought you were farting,” I half-joked, but it wasn't funny. The far-off beeping alarm grew louder.

“It's an Erdian alarm.”

“Seriously?” I yelped, jumping off my bed. I dropped down to the floor and looked under the bed. I looked in my laundry basket. I opened all the drawers of my desk as fast as I could, but I seemed to get no closer to the sound. I noticed he was still standing on the laptop. “Are you just going to stand there?” I snapped.

“You can search faster than me,” he said.

“Is the thing I'm looking for going to blow up in my face when I find it?!”

“Why do you always assume things are going to blow up?”

“That's the kind of noise things that blow up make!”

“Try the window,” he said, pointing urgently.

I pulled up my window and looked out to the dark backyard. “Crickets,” I said. “Only crickets outside. No alarm.”

When I turned back around Amp was staring at the closet with a horrified expression on his face. We kept his spaceship in my closet!

Amp and I exchanged a glance, and I knew it was his ship.

I tiptoed over to my closet door, opened it slowly, and gently pulled the wool blanket off his spaceship. The alarm become louder as it fell away. I saw a small purple light blinking on the side of his football-size ship.

My mind spun. “Do you need to change the oil or something?”

Amp appeared next to my foot. He grabbed the ample skin of his belly and began to nervously knead it in his hands like bread dough. “That is a proximity alarm,” Amp said in a trembly, tight voice.

“That's terrible,” I whispered, staring at the blinking light. “What exactly does
proximity
mean?”

“It means someone is coming,” he said.

Party Crasher

“W
hat do you mean, somebody is coming?” I asked.

Amp pulled on his antennas. “What do you think I mean? I mean what it sounds like I mean!”

I picked him up and held him just inches from my nose. “Don't get tricky, Short Pants.”

“I don't wear pants! You know that.”

“Don't get snarky, either. Just tell me what's happening.”

He released his antennas, closed his eyes, and pulled down his lower lip. “I don't know.”

“They're attacking Earth, aren't they?” I yelped, shaking him.

“Who is?”

“Your creepy Erdian friends! They're arriving on Earth right now. The invasion is beginning, and I never warned anybody!”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” he wheezed, struggling in my grip. “Not so fast.”

“Was this whole thing a trick? Were you just stalling? Faking me out about your broken ship until your army of blue buddies arrived?”

He pushed on my fingers. “You're squeezing me too tight,” he gasped. “My head is going to pop!”

“Sorry,” I said and opened up my hand. He took several deep breaths and began to pace in circles on my palm, just inches from my face.

“That, Zack, is not an invasion alarm,” he said, pointing at his ship. “Invasion alarms are yellow.”

“Why yellow?”

“It would take too long to explain that,” he said, waving off my question. “The point is that alarm just means that someone is coming.”

“Someone? Or a million Erdian someones?”

He stared at the buzzing, flashing light and it stopped suddenly. He looked back at me. “They're probably trying to find me. Like a rescue mission of some kind. But because my ship is damaged, they'll never actually find me. The odds are a million to one.”

I looked at him skeptically. “Who would they send? Your mom?”

“Why on Erde would they send my mother? That would make no sense. Let's just hope it's not my—”

Amp was interrupted by a thunderous whooshing sound coming from my window.

“Maybe the attack really is beginning!” I squealed.

I dropped Amp like a hot potato, jumped out of the closet, scrambled to my desk, and pressed my face to the window screen. I squinted as a fiery light lit up the backyard.

“Uh-oh,” Amp gasped from somewhere behind me.

A spaceship just like Amp's was flying in circles twenty feet off the ground in our backyard. The shower of orange-and-white sparks spraying out of the spaceship made it look like the Fourth of July had come to my backyard.

Without warning, it turned sharply, like it had bounced off an invisible wall.

“Ooohhhhh nooooooo . . .”

I dove to the carpet just as the thing exploded through my window screen.

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About the Author

NATE BALL
is the host of the Emmy and Peabody award–winning PBS reality shows
Design Squad
and
Design Squad Nation.
An MIT graduate with a Master's Degree in mechanical engineering, Nate is also the cofounder of Atlas Devices, a two-time All-American pole-vaulter, and a competitive beatboxer. He lives with his wife in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 

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Credits

Cover art by Macky Pamintuan

Design by Sean Boggs

Copyright

Alien in My Pocket: On Impact!

Text by Nate Ball, copyright © 2014 by HarperCollins Publishers

Illustrations by Macky Pamintuan, copyright © 2014 by HarperCollins Publishers

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Library of Congress catalog card number: 2014935757

ISBN 978-0-06-231492-5 (trade bdg.) — ISBN 978-0-06-221629-8 (pbk.)

EPUB Edition JUNE 2014 ISBN 9780062216304

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