The Rise and Fall of El Solo Libre Read online

  “Or else what? You gonna use your megamittens on me? I KNOW ABOUT THE VIDEO GAME PRANK! You two are about as good at fighting aliens as I am at baking cupcakes! It’s over, losers, and I have won! Soon everyone who laughed and made fun of me will see that I was always right—the world-famous AlienSlayers are superzeroes! BWAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH!!”

  Sammi thought for a second. “And by ‘everyone,’ you mean everyone you’re letting the Klapthorians wipe out?”

  GOR-DON stopped laughing.

  “Yes. About that,” Herbert said. “You may want to rethink your evil plot. It has some intrinsic logic flaws.”

  “Please. Do you honestly believe I didn’t plan exactly how to use the destruction of this pit of a planet to make myself Supreme Ruler of Gor-Donia?”

  Herbert smirked. “Gor-Donia?”

  “It’s just a working title. I haven’t made a final decision on the name yet. Although anything would be better than Earth. Why didn’t you just name it ‘Planet Dirt.’ Oh, wait. Now I remember. Because humans are idiots.”

  Sammi stared up at the AlienSlayer news projections on the wall. Her eyes drifted down to a framed photograph standing on the desk beside the computer. She recognized the woman in the picture, and read the inscription.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’d just hate for you to go to all this trouble and end up with nothing.”

  “This room is designed to hold toxic waste!” GOR-DON snapped. “These walls are six feet thick! Whatever those psychotic shrimpazoids do aboveground, I’ll barely feel a rumble down here. Once the Klapthorians have put their killer snail back on its leash, realized there’s no LUNN-CHMUNNY to be found on this rock, then pack up and fly off to wherever they came from, I shall emerge from my bunker, rule all survivors of my species, and enslave all survivors of yours! Questions? Comments? HA! Didn’t think so!”

  Sammi picked up the photograph of Marion. “Just one.”

  GOR-DON froze. His beady eyes darted from Sammi to the picture and back again.

  “Her? Pff. She knows how to reach me,” he said, trying to play it cool.

  “Yeah, we know.” Herbert held up GOR-DON’s business card. “She gave us your info. Funny, I don’t remember her asking for it back, either.”

  GOR-DON looked at Sammi. His chin quivered.

  “No, I don’t think she did,” Sammi answered. “Guess she’s not interested in dating someone who’s planning to destroy her planet.”

  GOR-DON suddenly snapped.

  “I told her I’d protect her! All I asked is for her to come crawling back and help me reign over my kingdom of human slaves! So what’s she do? She runs off—like I’m the bad guy.”

  “Women,” Herbert offered.

  “I know, right? Can’t live with ’em, can’t eat ’em without getting a bunch of hair stuck in your teeth.”

  “Of course, there is one sure thing we girls can’t resist,” Sammi said. She let the words hang out there for a while. GOR-DON stared at her, waiting. Herbert seemed genuinely interested too.

  “…A hero.”

  “Yes! Which is precisely why my plan to heroically crawl out of my basement bunker and rule the Rubble Kingdom of Gor-Donia is guaranteed to make me irresistible! How could it not? She’d have to have a heart of stone.”

  Herbert and Sammi traded looks.

  “Let me toss this idea out,” Sammi said. “What if, instead of destroying Merwinsville, you were responsible for, I dunno, saving it?”

  “You lost me. No idea where you’re going with this.”

  She continued. “Let’s say my colleague and I admit publicly, to everyone, that we aren’t AlienSlayers.”

  “Well, duh. I’d be instantly proven right, everyone would worship me, and Marion would think I was the hero instead of you—” GOR-DON gasped. “Okay. You just officially blew my mind. I order you to continue.”

  “Let’s think this through,” Herbert said. “Not only will you save face when we tell everyone we’re phonies, you get to call off the Klapthorian attack and actually do what we fake AlienSlayers never really could!”

  “You mean I’d—save the world…”

  GOR-DON gazed up at the wall of holo-clippings and imagined all the headlines declaring him a hero. He could hear the adoring crowd echoing in his earholes. He could see Marion running into his tentacles. He shut his eyes. He could feel her soft, puddinglike lips kissing his.

  Sammi and Herbert stood watching GOR-DON smooch his tentacle for an awkwardly long period of time.

  “Ahem.”

  GOR-DON opened his eyes.

  “We should probably head out if we’re going to do this,” Sammi suggested.

  GOR-DON nodded. “Yeah. Okay. Right! Just let me slip on my dress and put on my makeup.”

  Young Alex helped his older self pull the beanbag-shaped boulder out of the hole in the wall. They swung it over to a wedge that held it in place. Alex stepped aside and gestured toward the cave exit.

  “Age before beauty.” He smiled. They were both wearing their blue and silver Mexican wrestling masks that their Uncle Davey had brought back for them from Guadalupe.

  Old Man Alex took a step toward the hole, then pulled back. “I—I can’t.”

  Young Alex looked at his older self’s pear-shaped belly. “C’mon, you didn’t eat that many SuperCheezyFranksOnnaStick,” he said. “Suck in that gut. You’ll fit through.”

  “No, I mean, I can’t. I can’t slay aliens, I can’t go back to Earth, I can’t step outside the dark side of the moon, I can’t leave my cave. I can’t.”

  “Of course you can! And besides that, you have to. I’m not gonna save the world all by myself!”

  “I’m sorry,” the old man said. “There was a time, years ago, when I probably should’ve put down the Virtua-Goggles, stopped eating SuperCheezyFranksOnnaStick, and rejoined the world. But now it’s too late. I’m just fat. And lazy. And I can’t do it.”

  “Okay. I understand. I guess I’ll just—whoopsie!” The younger Alex suddenly stumbled backward, tripped on a moon rock, and fell through the hole into the darkness outside.

  “Alex!”

  The older El Solo Libre rushed to the hole and leaned out. Two small, silver-sleeved arms reached up and grabbed him.

  “HUMMMPH!”

  Alex yanked his older self out through the hole with all his might. As the old man somersaulted in the moon dust, the younger Alex reached inside the cave and pulled the peg. The boulder corked the entrance hole with a CRUNCH!

  “What are you doing?!”

  Older Alex scrambled to his feet and rushed to the boulder. He pushed at it, but it wouldn’t budge.

  “Well,” Alex said. “Looks like we’re locked out. And—oh, no! I forgot my spare keystone.” He burst out laughing. “Get it?! ‘Keystone?!’ C’mon. That’s funny stuff. You need to chillax.”

  Old Man Alex wasn’t laughing. Or chillaxing. He was freaking out.

  “Why did you do that? Everything I own is in there!”

  “Everything you own is made of rocks, dude,” Alex said. “Except two things. You said you’ve gotten fat and lazy. Well, I think someone sent you the SuperCheezyFrankOnnaStick 3000 to keep you fat and the AlienSlayer:43 game to keep you lazy.”

  “Why would anyone want to do that?”

  “To make sure you stayed in your cave and never came out. Because I may be a boring, normal kid, and you may be a fat, old, freaky, dim-witted hermit dude—”

  “Hey—”

  “—but I have a hunch that together we can do anything. Together, we can defeat any alien that dares poke their ugly snouts in our neck of the galaxy. Together, we are EL SOLO LIBRE!”

  Old Man Alex smiled at Alex as he jumped up on a boulder and began cheering and waving his arms.

  “LEE-BRAY! LEE-BRAY! LEE-BR—”

  FLOOOMPH!

  A black shadow swooped down and snatched Alex off the boulder and disappeared into the darkness.

  “Alex? ALEX!!!”

  Old Man Alex leaped
into action, jumping from boulder to boulder as he chased the flicker of silver sailing away in the cold, dark sky.

  “NOOO! ALEX! COME BACK!!”

  “AHHHHHHH!!!”

  Alex screamed at the top of his lungs as the giant MoonBat carried him over the craggy gray craters and valleys. Looking down, he spotted a tiny, pear-shaped figure taking giant steps in the low lunar gravity, trying to keep up.

  “I’ll save you, Alex! Just hold on!”

  Old Man Alex suddenly skidded through the moon dust and stopped short at the edge of a very steep cliff. He looked up. He could only watch helplessly as the MoonBat carried his younger self away from him.

  Soaring high above the canyon, Alex looked back at his older self stranded at the edge of the cliff, getting smaller and smaller in the darkness. He noticed the tiny figure lifting a large white object over his head. He was yelling something to Alex, but it was hard to understand. It sounded like…

  “Alex! Clock its gears!”

  “What?!”

  “Flock its beers!”

  “WHAT?!”

  “BLOCK ITS EARS!”

  This made only slightly more sense than flocking its beers, but Alex obeyed. He swung his body back and forth, gaining momentum until—

  CLAMP! Like a real Mexican wrestler, Alex leg-locked the MoonBat’s head. Then, like a kung fu master, he side-kicked his heels into the bat’s huge ears. Alex squeezed his legs as tight as he could, plugging the creature’s earholes.

  SHRIIIEEEEEEK!!

  The giant bat dove and spun, trying to shake Alex’s feet out of its ears. It let go of Alex as it cut back toward the ridge where Old Man Alex stood. Alex hung upside-down, holding on by his heels. He spotted Old Man Alex spinning around with the large white object.

  The next second, Alex noticed an enormous moon boulder soaring directly toward him. At the last moment, he popped his feet out of the MoonBat’s ears. The animal’s sensitive hearing picked up the ripples in the air as the boulder approached—but it was too late.

  POOOOMPH!

  The boulder slammed into the MoonBat and carried it over the far ridge of the canyon, leaving Alex to drop straight down toward the lunar surface.

  “AAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaahhhh…?” Surprised that he hadn’t hit the ground yet, Alex opened his eyes. Thanks to the low gravity of the moon, he was still falling—just veeerrrrrrrrrry sloooowwwly.

  As Alex gently floated toward the bottom of the valley, Old Man Alex calmly walked up and waited beneath him.

  Alex drifted into his arms like a feather, and the Older El Solo Libre set him down on his feet.

  Alex stepped out of the darkness and onto the shiny-stoned, pickety-fenced, flower-lined path that led off toward LunaPark.

  He looked back. Old Man Alex stood in the darkness. He dipped his toe in the light. Then his foot. He lifted his leg in preparation and took a big breath.

  “This is one small step for me, one gia—whoopsies!”

  He lost his balance and fell into the light side of the moon. Alex looked down at him.

  Herbert and Sammi weren’t sure if Main Street was deserted because it was just before dawn and everyone was still in bed or because it was the 50th Anniversary of the Great G’Dalien Flee-Festival and everyone was already gathered in the Flee-a-seum.

  Either way, as they clanged and banged through downtown Merwinsville in GOR-DON’s junky jalopy, they were grateful to find the streets empty. Not only were they in a hurry to get back to the SlayerLair, but they would’ve hated for anyone to see them riding in a hunk of scrap with an evil G’Dalien wearing a wig, a dress, and way too much makeup.

  LO-PEZ was napping outside the ground-level entrance to the SlayerVator. He woke with a start and nodded to Herbert and Sammi as he crammed the last of an entire coffee cake into his mouth.

  Then he spotted GOR-DONNA.

  His eyebrows immediately started fluttering up and down on his puffy face like two caterpillars doing pushups.

  “Mornflub, M’amflor,” he cooed to her through a mouthful of coffee cake. He swallowed the mushy pastry with some difficulty. “So nice to see you again, m’lady.”

  “Out of my way, you moron,” the gussied-up G’Dalien spat.

  LO-PEZ watched as they zoomed up the SlayerVator. “Good looks with a dash of spice,” he purred. “LO-PEZ likey.”

  From his hiding spot behind a potted plant, Herbert stared at the Klapthorian’s scabby brown face being holo-projected in the center of the SlayerLair.

  “Y’ello?”

  GOR-DON stood in front of the SarcasmaTron and addressed the alien receptionist in his best GOR-DONNA voice.

  “Hello!” she said. “Could you connect me with the Klapthorian captain, please?”

  “Ooh, I’m afraid he’s out in the field today, with back-to-back annihilations. He’s not to be reached, except in case of emergency.”

  GOR-DONNA looked over at Herbert and Sammi. They nodded “yes” frantically.

  “It is,” she said.

  “Hold on. I’ll try to connect you.”

  The HoloScreen image sputtered and went to static. Muzak played. GOR-DONNA gave a thumbs-up to Sammi, who was peeking out from behind the smoothie bar. He patted his yellow wig and turned to face the HoloScreen image.

  The Klapthorian captain appeared, surrounded by knobs, lights, and various cockpit instruments.

  “This had better be important.”

  “It is, oh huge one,” GOR-DONNA said in an urgent-but-sweet tone. “It’s about my son, El Solo Libre.”

  “Oh! I know your son,” the captain said pleasantly. “In fact, I’m on my way right now to destroy his planet and every living thing on it. How is he?”

  “Not well, Your Immensity. That’s why I’m calling.”

  “How can I help you, Mrs. Libre?”

  “I know my son can be mouthy at times, but he’s a good boy. He didn’t mean to call you a shr—whatever he called you.”

  “I hate that name,” the Klapthorian Warrior huffed.

  “Yes, well, had he known that, I assure you he never would’ve said it. Especially to someone as massive and gargantuanly mighty as you.”

  The captain smiled a bit, but quickly shook it off. “I’m running behind, Mrs. Libre. What is it you want?”

  “Only this, Your Largeness. Please, don’t destroy Earth. I will see that the boy is severely punished, but please, spare our tiny planet. It would be…so very big of you.”

  The Klapthorian captain was quiet for a moment. His beady yellow bug-eyes got a little more glassy than they already were.

  “Y’know,” he said, “I never knew my mother. She was eaten alive by me and my forty-seven thousand brothers and sisters, shortly after giving birth to us.”

  “Oh my, I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be. She was…delicious.” The bug-eyed commander wiped a small teardrop from his enormous glaring eyeball. “Mrs. Libre, your situation has touched me deeply. I have an offer for you.”

  “Thank you, thank you, oh giant one! Anything!”

  “Let me take your mouthy, disrespectful son so that I can make an example of him by watching him slowly die in a horrible method of my choosing, and I’ll happily turn our ship around and spare your planet total annihilation. Deal?”

  GOR-DONNA thought for a second. But only a second.

  “Deal!”

  “What?!” Sammi popped up and charged across the lair. “You can’t let him do that! What about our deal?!”

  “Excuse me, but who is this?” the captain asked.

  “Just my daughter, sir. She has her brother’s mouth.”

  “Such unworthy brats. You really do have your hands full, Mrs. Libre. A mother’s job is thankless and never ending. Well, I’ll be more than happy to help you by feeding your other burden to my pet Death Slug. Now where is the little scamp?”

  “Ha!” Sammi said. “We don’t know where he is, so there!”

  “Hm. That does complicate things. I’m afraid if you can’t produce
El Solo Libre, we’ll have to stay the course and destroy all of you.”

  “No. Here I am.”

  They all looked over to the potted plant in the corner. Herbert stepped out from behind it and approached.

  “Herbert, what are you doing?!” Sammi whispered.

  Herbert looked terrified but determined. He turned to Sammi.

  “None of this would’ve happened if I’d told Alex the truth like you wanted to. I was so concerned with losing the trappings of being a superhero, I didn’t realize I was losing what it means to be a good person. It’s my fault he’s gone. I have to do this.”

  “You sound different,” the alien captain noted. “Did you get a haircut?”

  “What’s it to you, dendrobranchiatus?” Herbert snapped, his voice cracking slightly.

  The room fell silent. Herbert sighed. “SarcasmaTron?”

  “Dendrobranchiatus: nerd-speak for the suborder classification containing such decapod crustaceans as the prawn, more commonly known as the whiteleg shrimp.”

  The Klapthorian captain’s bug eyes twitched. He slammed a switch on the console in front of him.

  KA-ZZZZZZZT!!

  A blinding flash of yellow sparks suddenly engulfed Herbert. His body shook for a second as the light grew brighter and brighter. It sparked and fizzled, leaving a scorched circle on the shag carpet and the slight smell of burned raisin toast.

  Herbert was gone.

  “Nooooo!!!”

  Sammi dropped to the ashy-black burned spot where Herbert had been standing seconds before.

  “Well, that should do it,” the captain said cheerily. “Mrs. Libre, you have yourself a wonderful day. You’re a terrific mom, and your two children—oops, make that your one child—neither appreciates nor deserves you.”

  The HoloScreen went to static, and the Klapthorian captain disappeared.

  The lair was filled with smoke. Sammi was crying on the floor.

  GOR-DON was grinning.

  The Klapthorian Death Cruiser silently rounded the sun and pointed straight for Earth like a slow-motion arrowhead. It had no lasers, no missiles, no blaster cannons. It didn’t need any of those things. Its real planet-destroying weapon, the Klapthorian Death Slug, was sleeping peacefully in its cage in the back of the vessel, like a family dog on a road trip.