The Rise and Fall of El Solo Libre Read online

  “Well, here goes nothing,” Sammi said.

  “You mean everything,” Herbert corrected her.

  “All righty,” Alex said as he flicked on the suit in his hands. “AlienSlayers, start your engines!”

  A tiny blue swirl inside the slide began to pulse and come to life. Herbert flipped his on. The tiny blue swirl got bigger and stronger. Sammi smiled and flipped hers on, too.

  WUBBA-WUBBA-WUBBA-WUBBA-WUBBA-WUBBA!!

  The wormhole surged. The empty N.E.D. suits jerked in their arms, lurching toward the wide mouth of the slide. The three neighbors looked at one another.

  “ONE! TWO! THREE! GO!” They let go of their suits.

  FOOMPF! FOOMPF! FOOMPF!

  In the blink of an eye, the three silver N.E.D. suits, the keys to Sammi’s, Alex’s, and Herbert’s wormhole, disappeared. And a half a blink later, so did the wormhole itself.

  The three of them sat there for a moment in silence.

  Herbert got up first. He slowly climbed down the ladder without saying a word. Sammi followed.

  “Yeeeehaaawww!”

  They turned to the bottom of the tube slide and watched as Alex tumbled out onto the grass.

  “Y’know, this is actually a pretty cool jungle gym.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll see you guys at school,” Herbert said.

  “I hear sixth grade is pretty challenging,” Sammi added.

  “Hope we can handle it,” Alex said, doing his best SarcasmaTron imitation.

  Alex, Sammi, and Herbert burst out laughing. The three ex-AlienSlayers walked off in three separate directions toward their three separate houses, giggling to themselves.

  Chicago Illinois sat cradled in the tusks of the large, stuffed woolly mammoth, tossing pebbles at the black-painted cave entrance. The last pebble bounced off the fake rock, and the entrance began to glow and swirl a deep blue. He sat up.

  POP! POP! POP!

  Three silver objects suddenly shot out of the cave hole and smacked him in the head. Chicago fell out of his mammoth hammock. He pulled the empty N.E.D. suits off his head, looked down at them, and smiled proudly as he realized exactly what his friends had entrusted him to do.

  At the opposite end of the Hallway of Human History, Chicago approached a large-handled bin in the wall. Above it was a sign:

  TRASH DISINTEGRATOR CHUTE. Chicago pulled open the bin door and looked down the dark shaft.

  He held the three N.E.D. suits and took just a second to contemplate what he was about to do. He made a silent little wish that Alex, Sammi, and Herbert would live a long and happy life, so that someday he could see them again.

  Then he quickly stuffed the suits into the bin.

  He didn’t watch them fall down the chute but rather quickly slammed the bin lid closed. He knew himself too well—if he thought about it too much, he might change his mind and dive after them, keeping just one for himself so he could visit the friends he would miss very much.

  Chicago Illinois wiped away a tear with his sleeve and walked out of the Merwinsville Museum of Human History.

  GOR-DON thanked LO-PEZ for the lift home, promised to call him sometime, then wiped the mud and makeup off his face as soon as the confused and chubby G’Dalien sped away in the mayor’s sleek SkyLimo.

  “Idiot,” he seethed. He slogged into the museum and approached the door to his toxic waste closet home.

  CLANG!

  The sound echoed from above, through the disintegration chute, which emptied into the trash pit outside his front door. GOR-DON leaned over the pit and looked up the dark chute.

  FLOOMPH!

  A large clump of silver material dropped out of the chute, covering his face. Freaking out, he fell over the railing to the pit but shot a tentacle out to keep himself from falling into the laser-disintegration unit below. The silver heap slipped off his head. His other tentacle shot down and grabbed it.

  GOR-DON heaved his blobby butt over the railing and he looked at the N.E.D. suits in his tiny, clawlike hands.

  “They get all the glory, while I get their dirty laundry.” He wobbled over to his toxic closet door and shuffled inside.

  “You’ve got issues,” the pleasant computer voice announced.

  “Tell me about it,” he replied as he dropped the suits on his desk. A new headline beamed onto his wall of holo-clippings.

  “Oh, Marion,” the heartbroken G’Dalien moaned. “How did things go so horribly, horribly wrong?”

  “That’s easy. You let your feelings get in the way of your duty…”

  The croaky old voice startled GOR-DON. He stood up and looked around the room.

  “Y-Your Mightiness?!” GOR-DON stuttered as he tried to act pleasantly surprised. “It’s been years! How have you been?”

  “You failed me, janitor. Again.”

  “No, no! I did everything you asked all those years ago! I delivered your package to the cave on the dark side of the moon, I trained the MoonBats to keep watch over his cave, everything! Do you know how hard it is to train a MoonBat in the dark?!”

  “And yet…he came back.”

  “Well, if I may make a small suggestion, in all your wisdom and evil ingeniousness, I think perhaps you may have underestimated his friends…”

  “His friends?! You dare question my authority on his friends?! I’m quite aware of what his friends are capable of…”

  GOR-DON flinched as the shadowy figure approached from the darkness and stepped into the green glow of the holo-clippings on the wall.

  “After all, I used to be one of them.”

  The old woman had long, silver-and-black streaked hair and wore a dark bodysuit with a flowing black cape.

  She sneered at him and turned to the newest holo-clipping. Then she noticed the clump of N.E.D. suits lying on the desk, and picked them up.

  “Where did you get these?”

  “Oh, I caught them in the disintegration chute. I suppose the AlienSlayers have retired. So that’s good, right?”

  She looked back at GOR-DON and began to laugh. GOR-DON laughed with her, nervously. She aimed a fist at the holo-clipping wall. Her large silver bracelet began to glow a brilliant blue.

  “You’ve done well, janitor. I think you’ve earned a little getaway.”

  “Oh. Where am I going?”

  “Not ‘where,’ but ‘when.’”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re—”

  “You don’t need to know anything right now, janitor. Except how to sew.”

  “What? I can’t sew—”

  WHUMPH! The silver clump of N.E.D. suits hit GOR-DON in the head.

  “Learn.”

  KABLAM!!

  Her bracelet emitted a powerful ball of blue light, which blew a massive hole in the thick wall of GOR-DON’s room. He pulled the N.E.D. suits from his face to see smoke and debris swirl and scatter all around him. When it settled, he looked up.

  Old Lady Sammi Clementine had left the building.

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  Copyright

  HERBET’S WORMHOLE: THE RISE AND FALL OF EL SOLO LIBRE. Copyright © 2012 by Peter Nelson and Rohitash Rao. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  www.harpercollinschildrens.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Nelson, Peter.

  The rise and fall of El Solo Libre / Peter Nelson & Rohitash Rao.—1st ed.

  p. cm.— (Herbert’s wormhole)

  Summary: Pretending to be alien slayers when they travel via a wormhole to their hometown 100 years
in the future, ten-year-olds Alex, Herbert, and Sammi must pull together when an actual alien invasion occurs.

  ISBN 978-0-06-201218-0

  [1. Time travel—Fiction. 2. Extraterrestrial beings—Fiction. 3. Friendship—Fiction.] I. Rao, Rohitash.

  II. Title.

  PZ7.N43583Ri 2012 2011022936

  [Fic]—dc23

  12 13 14 15 16 CG/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FIRST EDITION

  EPub Edition © MARCH 2012 ISBN: 978-0-06-209930-3

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  * Which, technically, they weren’t.

  * Which, technically, it wasn’t.

  * Which, technically, they were.

  * Which, technically, he was.