The Rise and Fall of El Solo Libre Read online

  Running behind the cart was a short little G’Dalien named EL-ROY, who’d clearly missed his ride. His tentacles flapped against the shiny white floor as he scurried to catch up with his friends.

  “RUNNIN’ LATE AND COMIN’ THROUGH!”

  CA-ROL quickly herded the little ones to the side as Chicago and his orange-jumpsuited buddies zoomed past. They glided to a halt in front of a diorama. A group of fake cavemen sat beside a fake fire alongside a stuffed woolly mammoth, and a G’Dalien spaceship hung overhead. The driver of the cart leaped out, jumped the railing, and turned back to smile at the confused tour group.

  “Sorry, kids! This part of the exhibit is temporarily closed!” He pointed to the name tag on his orange jumpsuit. It read, “Hello! My name is: CHICAGO ILLINOIS: EXHIBIT TECHNICIAN, MERWINSVILLE MUSEUM OF HUMAN HISTORY.”

  Sausalito jumped out and put up a large curtain, pulling it across the diorama. Printed on the curtain in huge block letters were the words: “PLEASE PARDON OUR MESS! EXHIBIT UNDER CONSTRUCTION.” In front of that, Dallas quickly erected a large fencelike blockade with even huger block letters printed on it: “CAUTION! STAY BACK 300 FEET AT ALL TIMES.” Finally, EL-ROY came flip-flopping up, squeaking to a stop. He crossed his arms and scowled at the confused children.

  The youngsters looked up at CA-ROL, who looked just as befuddled as they were.

  “Right!” she blurted out cheerfully. “Who’s ready for a snickety-snack at the cafeteria, then? Let’s move along now!” She shot back a look as she shuffled the kids down the hall.

  Inside the caveman diorama, Chicago glanced at his watch, which looked remarkably similar to the one Herbert was bragging about. His eyes widened as a sparkling blue ripple began to appear in the center of a black-painted fake cave entrance.

  POP! POP! POP! Herbert, Alex, and Sammi came flying out of the wormhole. Herbert flew past Chicago and stumbled a bit, barely keeping his balance as he slid to a stop—only to be knocked down by Alex, who popped out fanny-first and slammed into him. Sammi popped out last, somersaulting like a ninja and sliding into Chicago’s arms. Chicago smiled at her.

  Chicago left Dallas, Sausalito, and EL-ROY to reopen the caveman diorama as he taxied the AlienSlayers in the AirCart through the Merwinsville Museum of Human History. They passed exhibits and artifacts showing how the wise and friendly G’Daliens had come to Earth decades ago and saved the human race from near-extinction. In return for cleaning up a very messy planet and sharing their advanced alien technology, the G’Daliens were allowed to take over and run everything. Proof of a happy partnership wasn’t just in the glass cases, behind the railings, and on the walls of the museum. It was also evident in the hallways, snack bars, and gift shops, where Humans and G’Daliens co-mingled like one big, happy, slightly weird-looking family.

  As the AlienSlayers made their way toward the lobby, many members of this weird-looking family recognized them. Some smiled and pointed, others took pictures. Some followed at a respectful distance, and still more ran ahead of them excitedly.

  “Okay, Chi-Town,” Alex asked his driver. “Whaddya got lined up for us today?”

  Chicago pressed a button on his wristwatch. A holographic checklist beamed out of it and hovered above his arm.

  “You guys are gonna love this!” Chicago said, swerving to miss a G’Dalien woman trying to take their picture. “I’ve got a call in for you to do interviews with Total Universal Inside Access: Merwinsville! Cool, right?”

  “No alien threats?” Alex asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Any cosmic disturbances?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Did a suspicious meteorite crash-land in the city and maybe sprout slimy vine-pods that drool acid when they come in contact with human flesh?”

  “Sorry, Alex,” Chicago said. “It’s been pretty quiet since yesterday.”

  Alex slumped back in his seat. Sammi glanced at Herbert. Then she threw her arms around the two of them.

  Chicago pulled up to the towering museum entrance doors. “We sure are! Along with a few friends!”

  As the great museum doors began to open, a deafening ROAR broke out on the other side. Alex, Herbert, and Sammi stepped out to greet their fans. Gathered all the way down the long stone steps of the museum were thousands of Merwinsvillians—humans and G’Daliens alike—jumping, screaming, and holding giant banners for their hometown AlienSlayers.

  Alex, Herbert, and Sammi waved to their fans as their AirCart glided slowly through the cheering crowd along the perfectly clean, shiny, plastic walk streets of downtown Future Merwinsville. They inched past the TransPort Station, a massive clump of clear sucker-tubes, which served as the quickest, easiest, hair-messingest mode of transportation around the city. They saw the gleaming G’Dalien buildings towering over their heads and countless G’Dalien technological wonders floating, flying, and skittering all around them as they approached the tallest building in all of Future Merwinsville—City Hall, home of the SlayerLair.

  The AlienSlayers’ homebase was located at the very tippity-top of City Hall—a lookout perched at the highest point in Merwinsville. The entrance was on the ground level and guarded by LO-PEZ, a heavyset G’Dalien who loved his job almost as much as he loved pizza, cupcakes, hot dogs, chips, and doughnuts. Which is what he had for a snack between most meals.

  “All right, everybody,” LO-PEZ belched through a mouthful of biscuits to the mob of people crowding the entrance. “Let ’em through. Let ’em through!”

  Chicago helped LO-PEZ clear a path through the excited crowd of onlookers as Herbert, Alex, and Sammi pushed their way to the door. They boarded the all-glass, see-through SlayerVator that would shoot them up to their headquarters, hundreds of stories above the streets of Future Merwinsville.

  Alex stepped back out for one last wave to the crowd.

  “Thank you! We love you! See you soon!”

  Herbert grabbed Alex by his collar and yanked him back inside the SlayerVator.

  The doors whooshed shut and the SlayerVator shot upward, allowing two full seconds of quiet before reaching the 3,000th floor, high above the city.

  Inside, the room was the perfect lookout spot for protecting an entire city from alien attack: floor-to-ceiling windows, plenty of comfortable seating, and a supercomputer who could tell them anything they needed to know, while making any kind of smoothie they could think of.

  Alex burst into the room, rushed to the wall-sized supercomputer, and called out to it by name.

  “SarcasmaTron, report! Any impending alien attacks?”

  The highly advanced technological brain whirred and clicked. Its lights blinked and flashed as it computed its final answer.

  “Oh, yeah…tons of ’em,” it said in a very smart-alecky voice. “The odds are a tetraquadzillion-to-one, so do the math.”

  “You’re being sarcastic again, aren’t you.”

  “SarcasmaTron computing answer…computing…computing…uh, yeah, kinda.”

  Alex flopped himself down in a jelly-filled squishy chair. He really didn’t like SarcasmaTron very much.

  Sammi pulled up a barstool at SarcasmaTron’s built-in smoothie bar. “Black raspberry, orange sherbet, bananas, and kiwi, please.” A whirring was heard somewhere below the bar, followed by a soft ding! A panel slid open and a purplish-orange-yellowy-green frosty drink popped out.

  “Oops. Whipped cream, please.”

  The drink dropped into the bar again and popped back out half a second later. Ding! It was topped with a poofy head of whipped cream. Sammi smiled and took a big slurp of her smoothie.

  Herbert crossed to an old man in an antigravity floating wheelchair, working on a complicated invention laid out on a table.

  “Hey, good to see me!”

  The AirChair spun around. Sitting in it was Herbert. Or, to be more exact, 110-year-old Herbert. His future self. Future Herbert wore glasses and had a similar expression to his younger self, just with a lot more wrinkles and a lot less hair.

  “Gree
tings, boy genius!” the old man said. “How’s the smartest person in Merwinsville today?”

  “I was about to ask you the same question!”

  As they both laughed together, Alex looked on. “I liked you two better when you hated each other.”

  “The odds of that dynamic remaining unchanged were highly unlikely,” Old Man Herbert said.

  “Predictably,” Herbert added. “We have so much in common!”

  “Precisely!”

  The two Herberts high-fived. Alex turned his attention over to the smoothie bar. Chicago had arrived, and he had a straw in Sammi’s smoothie. The two were slurping happily.

  “Delicious!” He grinned.

  As Sammi smiled back at Chicago, Alex stood up. “It’s getting a bit too buddy-buddy in here. I’m gonna go downstairs and sign a few hundred autographs. Let me know if anything exciting happens—”

  SLAM! SLAM! SLAM! SLAM!

  Heavy titanium sheets suddenly dropped down over the windows of the SlayerLair, plunging the room into complete darkness.

  “EVERYONE STAY EXACTLY WHERE THEY ARE. NOBODY MOVE!”

  The voice boomed from over by the SlayerVator door. A bright green laser scanner cut through the darkness, sweeping the SlayerLair with its precise light, covering every nook and cranny of the room before retracting back to its source near the SlayerVator.

  The lights came up and the window plates retracted. Standing there in a trench coat and old-timey hat was Chicago’s dad, Mr. Illinois. He slipped his laser-pen into his coat pocket, lifted his wrist to his bushy mustache, and spoke into his sleeve.

  “Room secure,” he barked. “All clear. Send in M.O.M.”

  Sammi looked at Chicago. “Mom?”

  “M.O.M.—Mayor of Merwinsville. It’s a code-name Dad came up with,” Chicago whispered. “He’s been working on it ever since he was made Special Agent Head of Mayoral Security last month.”

  Special Agent Illinois stepped away from the door while keeping a suspicious eye on everyone in the room. A short, chubby, smiling G’Dalien burst in. “Greetings, AlienSlayers!”

  Mayor CROM-WELL wasn’t very big for a full-grown G’Dalien and might have been mistaken for a plump, overgrown G’Dalien baby if not for his sharp suit with vest, big bow tie, and shiny sash.

  “How fabulous to find you hard at work, vigilantly watching over the good citizens of our fine city and protecting us from any and all uninvited intruders!”

  The mayor smiled at everyone in the SlayerLair. His grin revealed a wall of perfectly straight, perfectly white, squared-off teeth. They were not at all like the rows of tiny pointed daggers common to his species, but rather like two rows of dice, without the dots.

  “Actually, sir, there are no signs of alien invasion,” Chicago said. “So I was going to line up an interview on Total Universal Inside Access: Merwinsville!”

  “Fantastic! But first you must join me for our groundbreaking ceremony! We’re building a state-of-the-art coliseum for the Great G’Dalien Flee-Festival this weekend, and I need my AlienSlayers to help me kick it off and fire up the crowd!”

  Sammi, Alex, and Herbert looked at one another. Besides Mayor CROM-WELL, only one other person in the room seemed excited about the day’s schedule.

  Chicago fist-pumped the air. “Awesome!”

  Sammi set down her smoothie and approached Mayor CROM-WELL. “Sorry, sir, but what exactly is a Great G’Dalien Fly Festival?”

  Mayor CROM-WELL’s jaw dropped open. For the first time ever, he was speechless. But he quickly recovered.

  “Flee-Festival! It’s only the most important historical event in G’Dalien history!”

  Old Man Herbert knew what was coming. He turned and addressed the wall-sized computer. “SarcasmaTron, commence flashback simulation.”

  “Of course,” the sassy-voiced supercomputer spat back. “Because he couldn’t just tell them the story.”

  The lights inside the SlayerLair dimmed. SarcasmaTron’s HoloScreen beamed a 3-D image into the center of the room. Herbert, Alex, and Sammi looked up at a peaceful-looking planet they didn’t recognize. The G’Dalien mayor began narrating in his most dramatic voice.

  “This was once our planet. Like your Earth, it was not without its problems. But it was home.”

  WHOOSH! In an instant, the holographic planet was suddenly surrounded by holographic spaceships. Not doughnut-shaped, friendly looking, little UFO-type spaceships, but pointy, menacing-looking battle cruiser–type spaceships.

  “Then came…the Klapthorians. The bullies of our galaxy.”

  “Oh, no!” Sammi gasped. “What did they want?”

  “They wanted…our LUNN-CHMUNNY.”

  “Your lunch money?” Herbert blurted.

  “You’re kidding us, right?” Alex asked.

  “I know, I know, it sounds similar.” The mayor rolled his eyes as if he’d explained this thousands of times before. “But it’s pronounced LUNN-CHMUNNY, not ‘lunch money.’ Totally different. It’s one of the most rare and valuable substances in the known universe. Now, may I finish?”

  “Please,” SarcasmaTron spat. “The suspense is killing us.”

  “Thank you. So the Klapthorians attacked our defenseless planet with their massive Death Cruisers, stealing each and every G’Dalien’s LUNN-CHMUNNY.”

  Sammi giggled into her smoothie.

  Alex sat up and threw a few air punches. “Cool! And that’s when you fought back, right?!”

  Mayor CROM-WELL smiled at him. “Of course not! We did what G’Daliens do best. We fled! We fled proudly and with great speed, racing away nobly across the galaxy!”

  The HoloScreen showed tiny little spaceships pathetically popping off the overrun G’Dalien planet.

  Then the lights came up.

  “That’s it?!” Sammi blurted.

  “That’s what you celebrate?” Herbert asked in disbelief.

  “That is so lame,” Alex said.

  The mayor smiled at them. “We had to protect our youngsters, as well as our peaceful heritage. Fighting would have risked both, so we chose to flee. I suppose to three mighty warriors such as yourselves, that would seem…‘lame.’”

  “Yep, too bad you didn’t have us around back then,” Alex said, karate-kicking his defenseless jelly-filled squishy chair.

  “Precisely my point!” The mayor continued, “Had we not fled those fifty years ago, we would not have discovered such great friendships here on Earth. And to G’Daliens, that is what is most important. True friendship is worth more than all the LUNN-CHMUNNY in the universe.”

  The others looked at one another, and tried not to laugh.

  The large circular clearing at the far end of Main Street had been slowly filling up with Merwinsvillians for most of the morning. By the time Mayor CROM-WELL’s personal TransPodium appeared in the sky with Herbert, Alex, and Sammi aboard, the scene below had grown into an enormous pep rally.

  The mayor’s TransPodium was a small, antigravity stage that flew him from event to event. It was conveniently equipped with a voice-amplification unit so that thousands of citizens could hear his speeches, large MonitOrb screens so they could see him up close, and multiple firework cannons so they knew when to clap.

  The mayor pointed down at the vast site. “This is where we are building the Flee-a-seum, an enormous arena with stadium seating, overlooking a beautifully landscaped open field.”

  “What happens on the field?” Herbert asked.

  “The Great G’Dalien Flee-Festival!” The mayor gestured grandly. “On the fiftieth anniversary of the Great G’Dalien Fleeing, every citizen in Merwinsville will take part in a symbolic re-enactment!”

  “You mean, they’ll flee?” Sammi asked.

  “Precisely! G’Daliens will run in mock-terror down Main Street, mock-fleeing from a mock-Klapthorian Winged Death Slug. When the terrified G’Daliens enter the Flee-a-seum, all of Merwinsville’s human population will rise from their seats and chant, ‘Welcome, G’Dalien Friends! Please take control
of our planet in exchange for all your marvelously advanced gifts!’”

  They all stared at the grinning mayor, unimpressed.

  The TransPodium descended, hovering just above the crowded center of the circle. Merwinsvillians cheered so loudly Sammi had to cover her ears. Special Agent Illinois suspiciously scanned the audience for any sign of troublemakers. He gave the all-clear sign. The mayor stepped up and addressed his people.

  “Greetings G’Daliens, Humans, Merwinsvillians all!”

  The crowd roared back. Mayor CROM-WELL held up a tentacle.

  “Today we break ground on what will be the site of much jubilation—the first ever Great G’Dalien Flee-Festival! This weekend we invite all of you to take part in reenacting the hastily heroic retreat we G’Daliens made fifty years ago and the warmly tentative welcome we found once we arrived here on Earth!”

  Herbert and Sammi glanced at each other. This weekend? The stadium hadn’t even been built yet. It was just a big empty space.

  Alex was in awe of the audience. It was the biggest crowd of Merwinsvillians he’d ever seen gathered together for something that wasn’t about him.

  Mayor CROM-WELL gestured to the three of them to step forward. “Here to help kick off the commencement of our shrine to this great event are Merwinsville’s very own ALIENSLAYERS!”

  Chicago ushered them toward the front of the TransPodium, clearing the way. Herbert and Sammi were nearly trampled by Alex, who leaped in front of them. He threw his arms open as if trying to give the entire crowd a giant bear hug.

  “Thank you!” Alex bellowed so loudly his voice was cracking. “We love you, Merwinsville!” He blew kisses to the crowd.

  Herbert was seriously considering pushing him off the TransPodium into his beloved admirers, until a strange noise distracted him.