“Oh! Well, that’s very…very…wasn’t it the other aliens who wanted the cats?”
“Mmmmyes. The Boov are…doing little favors for them. So they will stop shooting us. Now move along! Everyones back to their homes!”
Mrs. Lightbody gave me a smug look and hustled off.
J.Lo got in the car and let the cat out of the bag, so to speak.
“Fun,” he said, looking at his sheet. “Covered in cat’s hair.”
J.Lo had really kept busy while I’d been in the UFO Museum. Apart from supplies and a new ghost costume, he’d found us a police car. Sort of.
“It’s not a police car,” I said.
“It is,” said J.Lo. “Looknow. Lights for flashing.”
“That’s true.”
“Writing on the sides.”
“Yeah, but the writing? It says ‘BullShake Party Patrol.’”
“Yes. Whatnow?”
BullShake was one of those energy drinks. Do you still have them in the future? They came in these tall, thin cans and were supposed to make you feel vital and hyper so you’d have the drive and focus to save lives, or run that extra mile, or solve that unsolvable math problem or whatever.
“Looks just alike a police car,” said J.Lo.
“Except it’s smaller. And police cars aren’t usually red. And don’t normally have six-foot-long cans of energy shake on their roofs.”
“Can we not take it?” asked J.Lo.
We took it. We towed Slushious back up to the junkyard, which looked sad and flat, apart from the big busted water tower standing a couple hundred feet away. J.Lo got right to modifying the Party Patrol car so it would be easier to drive and see over the dashboard.
“Waitaminute,” I said. “Let’s just get the teleclone booth and make sure it’ll fit in this car before we waste too much time on it.”
We untied Lincoln and let him run around, and J.Lo took me to the center of the naked wooden floor that used to be the Chief’s house. He hunched over, searching all around his and my feet.
“You know,” I said, “after that Gorg sneezed, he was all looking around my feet, too.”
“The Gorg did not sneeze.”
“He did. And then he shouted ‘Where is it?’ and looked at my feet. Is there something I don’t know about teleclone booths, like how they shrink real small when they’re not being used or something?”
“I am not looking forto the booth. I am looking to the hole. Ahanow!”
He put his fingers to a spot on one of the floorboards and pried it up. A large square door lifted clean out of the floor.
“Oh, cool,” I said. I defy you to say anything less stupid when you discover a secret trapdoor for the first time.
J.Lo found a switch on the wall. Bare lightbulbs winked on, giving a dull glow to the space below.
“This is where you hid?” I asked as we toed our way down a metal ladder bolted to the side of…well, to the side of an enormous pipe. A huge concrete water pipe that bottomed out about thirty feet below.
“Yes. And to where we hids the teleclone booth. Arounding the corner.”
We reached bottom and I saw we were standing at the intersection of two huge pipes that made an upside-down T. One direction, leading toward town, was invisibly dark. But in the opposite direction the lights stretched out a long way. The pipe was all dry and full of stuff. The teleclone booth was here, and a stack of metal lock boxes, and a bunch of regular cardboard boxes filled with antiques. There were big round army helmets and old newspapers. There was a Bible in German and a pewter plaque with the Declaration of Independence on it.
“And look,” said J.Lo. “Talkie-walkies.” They must have been Chief’s from the war. They were the Incredible Hulk of walkie-talkies: really big and green, about the size and weight of a half gallon of milk, with a long antenna and a mouthpiece like a telephone.
There was a poster in Chinese on the side of the pipe next to a signed picture of Betty Grable, and a kind of embarrassing pinup painting of a girl getting her skirt lifted up by a pelican.
J.Lo kneeled by the teleclone cage and started loosening connections.
“I can make it into pieces,” he said. “Then will it be more easier to move.”
“Okay, good,” I said. “Why do you think the Chief lit this half of the tunnel, all the way down? He’s got all his stuff piled right here.”
J.Lo was muttering to himself in Boovish. “Five minutes!” he told me, never looking up from the booth.
I walked down the length of the tunnel away from him, until I came to an elbow and a ladder leading back up. I suddenly had a weird feeling I’d never left Florida, and the ladder would open onto the Broadway of Happy Mouse Kingdom all over again.
I started up the ladder, and the pipe soon got narrower and darker around me. But above me, way high above me, there was a little square of moonlight.
“Someday soon,” I told myself, “Mom’s gonna ask what I did all this time on my own, and I’m gonna say, ‘Climbed ladders.’”
I had that feeling of déjà vu again when I realized I’d been climbing too long—that I’d passed the ground and kept going. I must be in the water tower, I thought. I must be getting close to the tank. The pipe brightened, and I looked up at wire mesh stretched over a hatch above me. Moonlight filtered in, I supposed from the big hole in the side of the tank where the Chief claimed his papier-mâché saucer had crashed. I pushed up the hatch and poked my head through to get a look at things.
“Oh,” I said. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“No pushing!” said J.Lo. “I am no so good with ladders.”
“Really? You think?”
“You could have just to told me what. Instead of all this climbing.”
“Almost there,” I said.
J.Lo popped up his helmet and used it to push against the mesh hatch in the floor of the water tank as he climbed. The helmet snapped back.
“Koobish!”
He scrambled up into the big cylindrical room and rushed over to the larger of the two animals.
“Naaaa-aa-aa-a-a-aa-aaah!” said the koobish.
“Maa’apla nah!” said J.Lo.
“I thought they might be koobish,” I said. “They look just like one of your drawings.”
They were four-legged, with wiry hair in tight little curls. Their feet were round and made pock-pock noises when they walked. The smaller koobish came up to J.Lo, and he took a bite out of its ear.