There's a Spaceship in My Tree! (13 page)

“Releasing atmospheric distortion field!” Officer Bruzelski said with the ease of a practiced defender. Immediately the ship ejected a cloud of hydrogen oxide — water, that is — from a line of lawn sprinklers they had strung in the branches.

“Eeowww! Hey
!” four voices shrieked at once.

“Aiiiieeeee
!” cried the fifth. It was Jeffries, who had stared, point-blank, into a sprinkler head just as it went off. He took a free fall backward into a wide web of branches below him.

“They're up there!” Slocum yelled.

“All right, spread out.” Jared ordered. “Nobody ever got sprinkled to death.” He laughed and they joined in with him, all except for Jeffries, that is, who was nursing a hundred scrapes and scratches.

Now Bruzelski could see what should have been Jared. His ears were huge, like big fans sticking straight out from either side of his head. Instead of a mouth, he had mandibles, so that he seemed to be talking sideways. On top of his head was a huge plume like a rooster's.

Calmly, with a precision born of strict training at Sector Four Space Academy, Lieutenant Bruzelski moved to her next line of defense. “Activating stickeyon emission controls,” she said as she ran from panel to bleeping panel.

Nothing happened . . . or so it seemed.

Then Slocum, who was now in the lead, reached up for a higher branch and felt something strange.

20
Nightmare on Murphy Street

“Hey!” Slocum grunted as he looked at the black, gooey mess on his hand. He sniffed, then licked it. It was sweet. “J-a-a-a-r-eh-eh-d?” he yelled down to his boss, then took another lick.

“What?” Jared shouted back impatiently.

At the same time, Jeffries reached up for a grip. Both hands, instead, grabbed a handful of slimy gook and slipped. “
Aiiiiiiii
!” he screamed as he fell for the second time back into the prickly cradle of branches.

The gooey mess poured down the trunk like a heavy coat of paint, engulfing hands and feet, dribbling into mouths and over eyes.

“Hey! Eeeeeee! Yecchh! Whoaaah! Jaaar-ed!” came a chorus of yelps and screeches.

The slippery gook was, in fact, molasses from those old barrels in the garage — the ones Dr. Mac had been trying to cook back into lip-smacking goodness.

“Spread out away from the trunk,” Jared shouted to his henchmen, backing away as the gook glided down toward him. “Climb up one branch at a time.”

Muttering unmentionables, his troops shuffled out on their respective limbs and began hoisting themselves up, branch by branch.

Almost immediately, though, Phillips reached up for a handhold and tipped over something. A wide curtain of molasses rained down on him. “
Eeeeiii
,” he yowled like a cat who had fallen into a puddle, and fell backward, ending up hanging upside down with his legs wrapped around a branch. “J-a-a-r-eh-eh-d!” he cried bitterly.

Jared looked up just in time to get a face-full of the splashdown.

Seeing Jared's face, Slocum, on the other side of the trunk, couldn't hold back a snicker.

Jared glared murderously at him as he wiped the glop from his eyes.

Sobering quickly, Slocum reached up . . . and tipped over a long tray-full of his own.

The Star-Fighters had set up gutter sections, left over from Dr. Mac's home improvement project, all over the tree, and had filled them with molasses.

Jared's gloppidy-glop crew was livid, uttering words nobody nice ever used in the English language.

“Come on, you cowards!” Jared roared, grabbing Jeffries as he slid by. “You back down because of some pancake syrup and you'll be the joke of the school!”

It was then that Beamer and Ghoulie finally skidded into the yard, dismounting even before they stopped.

Ghoulie took off for the tree, only to have his feet slip out from under him in mid-run. “Yeooow!” he howled as he skidded into a dark, sticky puddle.

Beamer held a finger-full of the dark gook to his nose. “They're up there, all right, and Scilla's on the counterattack.”

“Hey — !” Ghoulie started to shout up to Scilla when Beamer suddenly clapped his hand tightly over Ghoulie's mouth.

“Sshhh,” he whispered urgently. “You don't want them to come down, do you?
We
don't have any defenses.
She
does.”

Ghoulie shuddered just thinking about it.

“I've got an idea,” Beamer whispered as he ran to the door of the house. “Come on.”

They streaked inside, Beamer reaching to catch the screen door a moment before it slammed closed.

In spite of Lieutenant Bruzelski's valiant efforts, the syrupy slime bags were still coming.

“Firing Veton Depth charges!” she announced, pulling down hard on a lever.

This time a line of popguns shot what looked like Ping Pong balls into the air. As they struck the surrounding branches they broke open, making a sound like popcorn popping and making it rain, not molasses, but birdseed — barrage after barrage of birdseed — a dust storm of little grains that found a nice, sticky home aboard the hapless, molasses-drenched crew below.

“Hey! What is — ? Who — Man! I'll get him!” five angry voices cried out, suddenly finding themselves coated with tiny yellow and white particles.

But the worst was yet to come, though it was totally unplanned. All those gaggling birds that had been driving Scilla crazy before caught one whiff of that molasses and birdseed and, well, suddenly discovered five giant, yummy bird feeders ready for the pecking. There was the racket of dozens of flapping wings on the move.

The boys yelled, swatting furiously at the hungry birds while trying to hang on to the tree at the same time.

One boy, Johnson,
did
fall — all the way down into Dr. Mac's safety net. Completely panicked, he scrambled across the net and fell to the ground. The seed-coated boy scurried and crunched off, gasping for breath, with a flock of tiny birds twisting and turning on his tail.

Back in the tree, the frantic cries and swatting hands of the Skullcross Gang finally succeeded in sending the hungry birds away in a black cloud that swirled up and around the tree then away southward. Breathing hard, soaked with water, coated with molasses and peppered with birdseed, Jared was beyond cussing. He pulled himself along a branch to beneath the tree ship's entry ramp and hoisted himself up. There he was, staring across the ramp toward the tree ship's door, his chest heaving with anger.

With the noise of the birds gone, Jared now began to feel and hear what sounded like the wind. For a moment, he looked anxious, uncertain.

Up in the attic, Beamer and Ghoulie were feeling pretty uncertain themselves.

“Oh, man, look at that,” Beamer said in a hushed voice, as they stared at the web. It was a brilliant yellow-white, almost too bright to look at. The instruments surrounding the web were all registering readings at the limit of their range.

“I think your attic is about to take off!” Ghoulie exclaimed. “The web must be picking up energy from the tree.”

“How can it do that?” Beamer asked. “Spiders don't have electro — whatever, do they?”
Just what the world needs — a high-tech spider invasion!

“Good question,” said Ghoulie. “The last I heard, the stuff that mostly makes up spiderwebs isn't supposed to conduct electricity.”

But if a spider didn't make the web, who did — and why? Murphy Street definitely had way more mysteries than one little street had a right to.
Beamer shook his head to clear it.

“We don't have time to figure this out now!” yelled Beamer. He didn't know why he yelled, because the web made no sound. “We have to get to the tree ship!”

They made their way through an opening in the web and climbed out the window. They could hear the noise of battle.

Jeffries, Slocum, and Phillips crawled up to the ramp, tattered and bedraggled like refugees from chemical warfare.

“What's that?” Jeffries asked, nervously eyeing something hanging above the ramp. “Another booby trap?” It looked like a small hot air balloon made out of sheets crudely taped and sewn together.

“Maybe,” Jared grumbled. “Jeffries, jam something into that pulley over there.”

Jeffries jammed a stick tightly into the pulley.

Jared held up his crowbar. “All right, let's destroy this place!”

“Aaaiiiaahhh
!” they yelled as they leaped across the ramp and began tearing apart everything in sight.

Inside the tree ship, Bruzelski pushed frantically against a lever. Something was wrong with the ship's electro-trashmatic, goonjammer defense array. Unnerved by all the crashing and bashing outside the door, she rushed into the nose of the ship and adjusted the view screen. There they were — the hideous gang of monsters — making pulp out of the entry landing. What was worse, the Star-Fighters' last line of defense — the balloon — was just hanging there doing nothing while the invaders walked around the trip wire as easy as you please.

A crash at the door sent Bruzelski reeling to the floor. “Open up, meatheads!” Jared's voice shouted. The hull buckled beneath Jared's blows.

Bruzelski was trapped. “MacIntyre!” she screamed. Shields were down, ship's defenses were inoperative, and the enemy was boarding.

At that moment, Beamer and Ghoulie pushed through the branches right above the tree ship's nose.

“Hey, look what we got perched in our tree,” Ghoulie said, laughing. He pointed his camera at the four ooze-drenched boys. “Show time!”

“Somethin's wrong,” Beamer said anxiously. It was clear that, however silly they looked, Jared's demolition squad was making toothpicks out of the door. “Why hasn't she dropped the goonjammer array?”

“That's why!” Ghoulie said, taking his eye from the camera's viewfinder. “The pulley's jammed!”

Beamer's eyes alighted on his mom's electrical conduit. His overly careful mom had anchored it in enough places to hold an aircraft carrier. Maybe it was the strangely haunting buzzing and chirping sounds that seemed to be getting louder, or maybe he'd watched too many GI Joe cartoons, or maybe he'd just had too much spinach for supper last night. But something had definitely triggered his usually suppressed hero mechanism, for Beamer suddenly wrestled off his T-shirt, draped it around the conduit and, holding tightly to each end, jumped. The next thing he knew, he was sliding down the conduit straight toward the balloon . . . and Jared.

21
The Finger of God

Jared saw Beamer just as he slid by the balloon and kicked the stick off the pulley. Then Beamer slammed into the side of the ship and fell to the floor right in the middle of Jared's gang. Jared yanked Beamer up and slammed him against the tree ship door. The door, though, was already too far gone. It gave way, dumping Beamer to the floor inside with Jared smack on top of him.

“Beamer!” Scilla, no longer Lieutenant Bruzelski, yelled in surprise.

Jared's twisted features were close up in Beamer's face. “Where are those drawings?” he snarled.

“I don't have them,” Beamer stammered, his life passing before his eyes like a second-rate cartoon.

“You took them. I know you did!” Jared ranted as he snatched Beamer up from the floor. “And I want them back or this tree house is splinters!”

“I told you, I don't have them! Not anymore,” Beamer protested. Of course, Jared was about as likely to believe that Beamer had simply thrown them away as he was to launch a babysitting service.

“What does it matter?” Beamer stammered, trying a new tack. “They're good . . . better than any eighth grader's I've ever seen. You could — ”

“Yeah . . . right. I've been down that road,” Jared growled. “As soon as anybody sees you're different, you're gone, man. You're an outsider . . . an alien.”

He threw Beamer to the floor and picked up his crowbar. He swung it about wildly. Plywood instrument panels cracked into smithereens; wires snapped apart, sparking.