The Call of the Others

Chapter 26

“So now we save my friends?” Preston asked.

“Yeah, eventually. But first, let’s fix this.”

“Fix what?”

“THIS.” Mr. Woodward gestured to the whole city. The streets were almost empty now, and all the lights in the buildings had gone out. Not to mention the water wasn’t working, as Preston recalled. Papers and other litter blew around the street. Preston was expecting a tumbleweed to fly by any second now.

Suddenly, Mr. Woodward approached a sewer in the middle of the road and lifted the cover. He started climbing down, until only his eyes were left peering at Preston over the asphalt.

“You coming?” he asked.

Preston wasn’t a big fan of sewers, but he followed Mr. Woodward anyways. He decided that after this, he was done with aliens. So, of course, the first thing he saw in the sewer was an alien’s dead body.

“EEEEEEWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!! WWWWAAAAHHHH!!! THAT’S SO DISGUSTING!! THIS IS SO NOT MINT, THIS IS NOT MINT AT ALL,” Preston whimpered.

“So this is why they shut off the water supply,” Mr. Woodward said, mainly to himself. “It’s not because of foreign pathogens, it’s because some of them drowned.”

“Foreign pathogens?”

“Yep. You know how we had the black plague?” Mr. Woodward asked. “And how it killed all those people? Well, what if on another planet, they had a…purple plague?”

“Purple plague? That’s preposterous,” Preston scoffed. “Hmm… Preposterous purple plague, try saying that ten times fast.”

“That’s not the point. We’ve never had that plague, so we don’t have the medicine. So people,” he replied slowly, “would die.”

“Oh. That would be bad. That would not be good. That wouldn’t be good at all.”

“So we have to clean this up, okay?”

Preston looked at the alien—it was a fat, rotund creature, covered in wrinkles and holes that were oozing some sort of goop.

“Do I have to touch it?” he asked tentatively.

When Scott fully recovered his senses, the boys were finally quiet. It kind of worried him.

“Okay. Let’s get another one.”

“I—I thought I saw one over there!” Charles blurted out, pointing in the direction of the hotel they were staying at. He hoped Scott wouldn’t know that. Luckily, he was still slightly out of it, so he didn’t.

“What did it look like?”

Charles blanked. What did aliens look like again? He lowered his voice and whispered, “Pure evil!”

Scott supposed that was his usual stupidity and charged in the direction of the hotel. Charles sighed, partly from relief and some from, well, a different kind of relief. Keeping up this stupid act was hard. The boys hadn’t agreed on it, but when Cary had started, they all played along. They followed him, exchanging nervous glances.

“Pure evil?” Cary hissed. “That’s how you describe an alien?”

“It was an on-the-spot kind of thing! Calm down. It worked, didn’t it?”

Martin interrupted them. “You do realize that there’s actually an alien there, right?”

“RUN, SCOTT, RUN!” Charles yelled, catching up to him. Lightning flashed across the sky, and rain poured down over their heads. The sky was illuminated for a single second, a silhouette of a strictly non-human creature appearing. Scott and Charles picked up the pace. Alice is in there, Charles thought, which kind of surprised him. Thunder struck. He’d worry about feelings later.

Scott raced up ahead. He took out a crossbow and shot the alien—Charles didn’t know how, because the sky was almost pitch black. It shrieked and fell against the window.

“Shit,” Scott muttered. The arrow landed in its shoulder, he figured out upon further investigation. He couldn’t shoot his gun, or else the hotel residents would hear it. He took out his crossbow and shot it again in what he assumed was a mortal shot. It was, luckily, and with one last struggle, it died. Another one popped up out of the bushes. Beautiful. Scott shot it in the chest, but it didn’t die. Oh, poop. Once again, Scott got one of those annoying reminders that his job was never as easy as he thought it was.

“Where do I shoot the damn thing?” he shouted, more in frustration than in actual questioning.

“Shoot him in the place where the sun doesn’t shine!” Martin suggested.

Scott shrugged and shot it there. Sure enough, it collapsed and fell, dead. Scott looked at Martin in shock. His arms were crossed, and he was smiling smugly. Scott was shocked that this kid was so good with aliens. It wasn’t that he was smart—hell no—it was that he just knew these things.

“Have you ever considered this as a career option?” he asked.