“Hey!” I said. “What was that?”
“Is okay,” said J.Lo, beaming. “They do not feel pain. They are fine so long as you do not eats the head.”
“Huh.”
“Try a littles bite of tail. Is crunchy.”
“No.”
Instead I petted the small one as it whinnied happily. The Chief had made it nice for them. The tower was lined with water troughs and filled with hay, and there was even a little potted tree under the big hole in the tank where the UFO had come in.
Oh, yeah, I thought.
“J.Lo?”
“Yes?”
“What if a spaceship really did crash into this thing in 1947? A Boovish ship.”
“YES! Of coursenow! The ship that crashed onto Roswell must have to been the Haanie Mission!”
“But…” I said, “that means…that the Chief really does have a spaceship.”
We held each other’s gaze for a second.
I was already heading down the ladder again when J.Lo ran to the hatch. Then he ran back a moment, took another bite of koobish, and started down the ladder above me.
“Will the koobish be okay?” I asked, my voice echoing. “We can’t bring them with us to Arizona.”
“They shoulds be fine. They have plenty water to make an hundred babies, and the Chief put out enough chlorine for to last them a year. An Earth year.”
I’m faster on ladders, so by the time I got outside I was way ahead of J.Lo. The entrance to the Chief’s basement was just a gaping hole now, with the splintered remains of doors barely attached by crumpled hinges. I hurried down the steps and groped around for the light switch.
Only about half the lights came on. No “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” The Gorg had trashed everything. He’d even thrown the UFO against a wall, and it lay there on its end, papier-mâché crunched against the rough concrete.
“I don’t get it,” I whispered. The saucer looked just as bad as it had two days ago. Worse. “There’s no way that thing’s real.”
J.Lo arrived, panting. “Did you to…is it…Tip should to…have waited…so much…running…”
“You don’t think he would’ve…” I said, and trailed off. There was something funny about the whole scene.
“Yes?…What.”
I stepped over and tore some of the cracked papier-mâché off the fake spaceship. Inside was a real one.
“How’s it coming?” I asked. We needed to leave while it was still dark, and I was feeling tired and antsy.
“Superfine,” said J.Lo. “This Chief Shouty Bear, he is some smart fellow. Do you know he drained out and cleaned the Snark’s Adjustable Manifold his self? And fixed the humbutt, I do not know how he did that, let me tell you. These things would have taken hours for doing. Howfor is the BullShake?”
The big can of BullShake Energy Drink was strapped to the back of Slushious, and the disassembled Gorg teleclone booth was inside. And J.Lo was completing the repairs. He made Slushious a new fin from the hatch of the three-hundred-year-old rocketpod and smoothed out the roof. He swapped out some parts, including the Snark’s Adjustable Manifold. It was a bit bigger than our old one, and an antique, but apparently the Chief had taken good care of it. I hoped the BOOBs were taking good care of the Chief.
J.Lo put down his tools and raised his oil-stained face.
“Alls done!” he cheered.
J.Lo had to drive. I was dead tired. I put out a bunch of food and water for Lincoln and left a note for BOOB and the Chief on the windshield of the Party Patrol car and we tore away from Roswell, trying to cover as much ground as possible before any Gorg noticed. I drifted in and out of sleep in the backseat, my body a question mark with Pig dotting my feet. It was nice in the backseat, feeling like a little kid again, so that when I awoke an hour later and the car was stopped, I half expected my mom to lift me up and carry me to my bed.
There was a soft glow of lights in the back windshield. I propped myself up and stared out. Then I stumbled through the car door and joined J.Lo, standing by the rear bumper.
We were higher up, looking down and about eighty miles southeast at where Roswell used to be. Maybe you future people have rebuilt it—that would be nice. The big Gorg sphere was closer than before, and was the color of a fresh bruise in the moonlight. And Roswell was glowing in the dark.
“What are they…why are they doing it?” I asked.
J.Lo glanced at the big metal can on our car, then back at the town. It was all the answer I needed. The Gorg hadn’t found their teleclone booth; they were burning everything for a hundred miles so nobody else would have it, either.
“They got out, don’t you think? Chief and David and everybody? Lincoln?”
Cannon fire set the horizon ablaze, and impossibly huge Gorg giants stamped it out again. I would have thought I’d dreamed it all, if not for the pictures.
“We betters get going,” said J.Lo.
We drove in shifts, caught some sleep, and steered north more than ever, because it looked like the Gorg were on the move. It was hard to tell with a ship that large and that far away, but it seemed like they were aiming right for us. We could have made it to the Arizona border in a few more hours if we hadn’t been distracting each other with stupid little arguments. Don’t get me wrong; I like J.Lo fine. I’ve made that bed. But I’m not sure there’s a person in the world I could be with twenty-four hours a day for three weeks without getting a little snippy. If I ever meet such a person, I’m marrying them. We were probably somewhere around Four Corners when we actually had a fight over whether water was wet. I guess I knew I was wrong, but there was no stopping me when I got going.
It was weird country. Really barren, with these loops and piles of rock that looked like poured frosting. But I knew we were nearing the Arizona border when I started seeing little threads of smoke in the air. They were from campfires, I thought. They were from people.
“You better put on your costume,” I said. “And I don’t think you’re going to be able to talk to people with that voice of yours. That Kat woman was on to you.”
J.Lo cleared his throats. “WHAT IF I TALK LIKE THIS.”
I jumped. He sounded just like someone on TV.
“OUR PARTING CONTESTANTS WILL RECEIVE THE FOLLOWING CONSOLATION PRIZES.”
“That’s amazing,” I said. “Now do a little kid voice.”
“THIS IS THE ONLY VOICE I CAN DO.”