Alien in My Pocket #5: Ohm vs. Amp

My Secret Roommate

W
hen a pint-size alien from outer space crash-lands his spaceship on your bed during the middle of the night, your life can get pretty messed up.

You can never go back to the way it was.

My little blue alien and I argued constantly for two straight months as we tried to repair his junky ship. We fought like two crabs in a bucket.

Then we ran out of steam.

And we learned to get along.

I guess you can get used to most things that at first seem to be the absolute ruin of your life, like summer school, tuna fish, and spelling quizzes.

I had grown comfortable with Amp, and he had gotten used to me.

The fact that Amp wasn't much bigger than
a stick of butter helped me keep him a secret from my parents and little brother. He also had an invisibility trick that came in handy more than once and the ability to erase people's short-term memory.

The only other person on Earth who knew about Amp was my best friend and next-door neighbor, Olivia. And she had gotten so used to Amp that it was a minor miracle she hadn't blurted out some funny story about him to my parents.

As the ambassador of the human race, I think I had done a pretty spectacular job. My cat hadn't eaten Amp, I hadn't stepped on him, and most important of all, I'd convinced him that attacking our planet was a bad idea.

See, Amp is the lead scout for the planet Erde. The Erdians are planning on taking over Earth, but because of me, Amp understood that attacking this planet was a major mistake. Compared to the average Erdian, we were simply too big to be defeated.

So, as we made slow progress in repairing his ship, the
Dingle
, we became friends—if it's
possible for a human to be friends with a hairless, three-fingered, Smurf-colored alien.

But now the time was fast approaching to get Amp back home to cancel the Erdian invasion. The future of Earth and Erde depended on us. We both knew it, but we didn't talk about it much.

Mostly, we spent our time eating junk food and watching scary movies on my mom's laptop.

Amp was crazy for horror movies, the old black-and-white kind.
Dracula. Frankenstein. The Wolf Man. Creature from the Black Lagoon
. We were working our way through a deluxe set of twenty-four classic horror movies on DVD that I had borrowed from Olivia's grandpa.

One night, Amp and I were up late—as usual—enjoying SweeTarts and Ritz Crackers while watching
The Mummy
(starring Boris Karloff), when our cozy little situation got crazy.

As is often the case, it all started with alarm bells.

Sound the Alarm

“H
ey, what's that noise?”

“Eh?” Amp grunted absent-mindedly. He was lying on his side next to the track pad on my mom's laptop, rubbing his stuffed belly, totally absorbed in the movie.

I was sitting cross-legged on my bed with the computer in front of me.

“Hey,” I said, gently poking the back of his head with my pinky finger. “Can you hear that?”

“I can hear you interrupting the movie,” he said. “Now shush.”

“Seriously,” I said, poking his shoulder now.

“Knock it off, Zack,” he said, shrugging his poked shoulder.

“C'mon, Amp, listen.”

“Quiet!” he said, waving his hand at me. “The
mummy is coming. I love this part!”

I slapped the space bar and paused the movie.

“What are you—?”

“Can you hear it now?”

We both listened in the silence. It was a faraway tinkling, buzzing sound. Or beeping. It wasn't the kind of sound I had ever heard before.

“That sounds pretty dang alien to me,” I whispered.

He jumped to his feet and held up his hands to silence me as he strained to hear the noise.

“Oh, that's not good,” he said in his strange, high-pitched voice.

“What exactly do you mean by ‘not good'?”

“Does it mean more than one thing?” he asked.

“Amp, what's happening?”

He began looking around in a panic. His face turned a paler shade of blue.

“Is that sound coming from you? Are you going to explode or something?”

He shot me a look. “Don't be ridiculous. I don't beep. Or explode.”

“At first I thought you were farting,” I half-joked, but it wasn't funny. The far-off beeping alarm grew louder.

“It's an Erdian alarm.”

“Seriously?” I yelped, jumping off my bed. I dropped down to the floor and looked under the bed. I looked in my laundry basket. I opened all the drawers of my desk as fast as I could, but I seemed to get no closer to the sound. I noticed he was still standing on the laptop. “Are you just going to stand there?” I snapped.

“You can search faster than me,” he said.

“Is the thing I'm looking for going to blow up in my face when I find it?!”

“Why do you always assume things are going to blow up?”

“That's the kind of noise things that blow up make!”

“Try the window,” he said, pointing urgently.

I pulled up my window and looked out to the dark backyard. “Crickets,” I said. “Only crickets outside. No alarm.”

When I turned back around Amp was staring at the closet with a horrified expression on his face. We kept his spaceship in my closet!

Amp and I exchanged a glance.

I tiptoed over to my closet door, opened it
slowly, and gently pulled the wool blanket off his football-size spaceship. The alarm become louder as it fell away, and I noticed two small blinking purple lights.

My mind spun. “Do you need to change the oil or something?”

Amp appeared next to my foot. He grabbed the ample skin of his belly and began to nervously knead it like bread dough. “That is a proximity alarm,” Amp said in a trembly, tight voice.

“That's terrible,” I whispered, staring at the blinking light. “What exactly does
proximity
mean?”

“It means someone is coming,” he said.