Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast (11 page)

But now Brandon knew that he would have to go it alone, without any grown-up help.

“Me, too,” Kathy pleaded.

“You're only eight,” Brandon answered. “I'm eleven.”

“Not till Thursday,” Kathy said.

That settled it, of course. There's nothing like a kid sister to make a boy do something he has hoped to be talked out of.

“By then the aliens will be long gone,” Brandon promised her. And he meant it. Or at least he hoped he meant it.

“At least tell me where the aliens are going to be,” Kathy begged.

“On the bike path,” Brandon said at last. He had to tell someone, and Freddy was still in Miami.

“Why the bike path?” Kathy asked.

“Because it's the only place in town they've been spotted three separate times.”

“So?” Little sisters can be a hard sell.

“Maybe that's where the Mother Ship is.”

“What's a Mother Ship?”

He sighed. “The place where all those mothers come from,” he said in a grumbling voice.

“How do you know they're mothers? Maybe one of them is a father Or a baby.”

He turned away. “I'm going to kill Freddy for leaving,” he muttered as he pulled on his goalie's gear. As usual, the shin pads gave him a moment's worth of trouble. Then he straightened up and got into the rest. If any aliens tried to eat him, they'd need some pretty strong teeth. He tapped the face mask with his gloves. Riding his bike was going to be hard, especially wearing a cup and skates. And it was hard seeing to the side with the mask. But his gear was almost as good as a suit of armor—and about as expensive! He'd taken many a blade to the shin in practice and in games and hardly felt a thing. Just a bit of bruising. He doubted any alien could eat him through all that leather and plastic. After all, they had not eaten the muzzle, the dogs' tags, the horses' halters, or the reins.

“Shouldn't you ask Dad if you can go out? Especially in your gear?” Kathy asked.

“Don't...” Brandon said, going over to her and thumping the top of her head with his glove, “even think about telling anyone what I am doing.”

“Not even Mom?”

“Especially not Mom,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because ... well, because she'll faint.”

“I've never seen her faint. Not even when I cut my finger and there was blood everywhere and Dad had to sit down.”

“Well, you'll see her faint if you tell her about this. It's a secret. Between you and me.”

“Like the secrets you have with Freddy?” she asked.

"Only better.”

She smiled. “Only better,” she said.

By this he knew she would never tell. She had always been jealous of his secrets with Freddy, which was just as it should be. She was three years younger than he was, after all. He and Freddy were eleven. Almost.

 

Actually, riding the bike wasn't as difficult as Brandon had feared. The hockey stick across the handlebars was awkward, but he could manage it. He couldn't go very fast, but he wasn't in that much of a hurry. In fact, the farther along he got, the slower he went, and that had nothing to do with either the hockey stick or the skates. To be honest—and though he wasn't always truthful with his parents or his sister or his teacher, he was always honest with himself—he was scared.

Not a little scared.

A lot scared.

After all, these aliens were eating horses! And cows! And they had polished off Colonel Brighton's awful pit bull without so much as a burp. Of course, it had been muzzled. But still...

With each street, Brandon's stomach shrank with terror, until by the time he got to the bike path that led to Freddy's house, there was nothing left in his belly but a small hard rock. Still he pedaled on. He was afraid of the aliens but he was even more afraid that if he turned back now Kathy would tell all her friends at Hawley Elementary that he was scared. So even if he were alive at the end of this, he might as well be dead, with eight-year-old girls laughing at him.

He was debating this with himself when he turned onto the bike path, and there, squatting over the remains of a rabbit, as if it had just been snacking or having dessert, was one of the aliens.

The gray one.

This time Brandon didn't look at it from the corner of his eye or through a rhododendron bush. He looked at it full on.

It really was gross.

Well, gross didn't half explain it. The alien had shiny, slick dark gray skin, as if it were constantly wet. Its head—if that was a head—was bulbous, like a giant onion, and it bulged in funny, awkward places. Its eyes were twin black shrouds without pupils. It had slimy tentacles that flopped about. In fact, Brandon suddenly knew exactly what the alien looked like.

“A big gray jellyfish!” he said aloud. Right—a jellyfish with a shark's skin.

The alien didn't seem to notice him. It kept slurping up the rabbit.

Until, that is, Brandon dropped his hockey stick and the stick kind of shimmied on the pavement, making a lot of noise.

Then the gray alien noticed him big-time!

It seemed to hunch down on itself, then lifted up with a kind of long sucking sound—a sort of sssssssssssluuuumirppppp. It landed on the hockey stick and stayed there for a moment before deciding that the stick was inedible. Then it turned its black-shroud eyes on Brandon.

Brandon was so frightened he couldn't move. Which probably saved him for the moment. Clearly the alien only ate living things. And living things moved. Brandon wasn't moving. He was too scared to.

Suddenly there was a sound behind him and a little voice called out, “Brandon, where are you?”

He turned his head slowly, cautiously, and looked through the mask's slit.

That was when Kathy's bike came into view.

The alien turned its head, too. Then it turned its body and, as if swimming through both air and time, it focused on her.

“Oh,” Kathy said in a voice that was little and frightened. “Oh.”

“Don't move!” Brandon cried out. “Don't move a muscle, Kathy.” But his voice was straining through the mask and Kathy was clearly too far gone with fright to hear him anyway. She braked the bike and tried to turn to go back the way she had come. But the bike wobbled left, then right, then fell over with Kathy still on it. At that, the alien hunched down on itself and then began to lift up.

That's when Brandon lost it. No one—alien or not—messed with his little sister. He got off the bike, reached down, picked up the hockey stick, straightened up, and charged.

Of course it was a bit awkward, because he was wearing skates and there wasn't any ice around, it being the middle of August. He was sweating like stink from fear and from the heat. Perspiration ran down his face, making him almost blind behind the mask. And he was still holding his bike. Whatever heroics he had planned turned at that moment into pure disaster. He tripped over something in the bike path and fell onto the alien, hockey stick flailing.

“Oof,” he said. And “Jeeze.” And “Unh-unh.” His hockey coach would have benched him for that kind of move.

The alien completely forgot about Kathy, though. It raised up a bit, made its slurping noise, which—dose up—sounded like the whirring of a giant Mixmaster, only worse. There was a sudden sharp spray, like soapy water, that further obscured Brandon's vision, and then the alien landed on him, sliding down him like a kid on a banister, from his head to his feet, totally encasing him in a wet dark that smelled a little like second-day underwear, more like the boys' locker room after a game, and a lot like a whole pot of burnt eggs.

For a moment Brandon was totally without feeling or thought. And then he realized that he was about to die. About to die—and there was nothing he could do to change things. Or to say good-bye. It was going to be messy, ugly, and embarrassing. He was dosed up inside the alien—an alien that had already devoured birds, squirrels, raccoons, dogs, cats, even horses and cows.

Then the alien's entire body shuddered, convulsed, and ... lifted off, flopping away from him. Brandon realized that he was alive and out in the summer sun again, smelling like throw-up and feeling worse.

He couldn't see much, for the mask had slipped a bit sideways and he was covered with a variety of substances, none of which he wanted to put a name to. But someone—Kathy?—was shouting his name.

He turned. He tried to listen. Then he remembered.

"Kathy!” he cried. “Get away. Go home. The alien...”

He heard a lot of other sounds then. Someone took his mask off. Someone wiped his face. When he opened his eyes to the summer sun, there were his mom and his dad and the fire chief and Captain Covey and Brandon's science teacher. And the CNN reporter was standing on the side, his microphone at the ready, looking happy.

On the ground was the gray alien, covered with a soapy foam and looking very very dead.

“I don't ... get it..." Brandon started to say, when the reporter moved in.

“What does it feel like, being the brother of a hero?” the reporter asked, shoving the mike under his nose.

The two words didn't connect: brother... hero.

“He feels fine,” his mom said.

“We all feel fine,” his dad said.

Kathy was crying. “I had to come,” she was blubbing, “because I left Mom a note that I had seen the aliens on the bike path and was going there.” She snuffled loudly. “ 'Cause I promised I wouldn't say you were going, and besides, she'd never have believed you. And she must have told Dad. And he called the police and...”

And then Brandon noticed what Kathy was holding in her hand: a fire extinguisher. The one from behind the kitchen door. The yellow one that Dad had had them practice with. There was something still dribbling out of the nozzle. Foam. He looked down at his feet, where his skates were covered in the same foam. And covered with something else as well. He didn't want to know what the something else was.

The sheriff lured the CNN reporter away from Brandon by talking into his microphone. “Like when my mama used to wash my mouth out with soap for saying naughty words,” he told forty million viewers. “That alien didn't like it any more than I did all those years ago. Ptooie!” He laughed. He had his arm around the reporter, who was looking around for help. “We'll do the same with them other two. Wash their mouths out with soap.”

“More like an enema,” Brandon's mom said.

“Myrna!” his dad said, but he was laughing.

Which is how Brandon knew there was nothing more to worry about. Not even ruining his hockey gear, which cost $398 new. Nothing at all.

Except—he suddenly thought with growing horror as the TV cameras continued to roll—all the kids at school who would laugh and laugh at him because he'd been rescued by an eight-year-old. He knew then, with absolute certainty, that it would have been better if he had been eaten by an alien, the gray or the green or the red.

Much better. All things considered.

HE WAS NOT BORN a king but the child of wandering players, slipping out ice-blue in the deepest part of winter, when the wind howled outside the little green caravan. The midwife pronounced him dead, her voice smoothly hiding her satisfaction. She had not wanted to be called to a birth on such a night.

But the father, who sang for pennies and smiles from strangers, grabbed the child from her and plunged him into a basin of lukewarm water, all the while singing a strange fierce song in a tongue he did not really know.

Slowly the child turned pink in the water, as if breath were lent him by both the water and the song. He coughed once and spit up a bit of rosy blood, then wailed a note that was a minor third higher than his father's last surprised tone.

Without taking time to swaddle the child, the father laid him dripping wet and kicking next to bis wife on the caravan bed. As she lifted the babe to her breast, the woman smiled at her husband, a look that included both the man and the child but cut the midwife cold.

The old woman muttered something that was part curse, part fear, then more loudly said, ‘‘No good will come of this dead cold child. He shall thrive in winter but never in the warm and he shall think little of this world. I have heard of such before. They are called Winter's Kin.”

The mother sat up in bed, careful not to disturb the child at her side. ‘‘Then he shall be a Winter King, more than any of his kin or kind,” she said. “But worry not, old woman, you shall be paid for the live child, as well as the dead.” She nodded to her husband, who paid the midwife twice over from his meager pocket, six copper coins.

The midwife made the sign of horns over the money, but still she kept it and, wrapping her cloak tightly around her stout body and a scarf around her head, she walked out into the storm. Not twenty steps from the caravan, the wind tore the cloak from her and pulled tight the scarf about her neck. An icy branch broke from a tree and smashed in the side of her head. In the morning when she was found, she was frozen solid. The money she had dutched in her hand was gone.

The player was hanged for the murder and his wife left to mourn, even as she nursed the child. Then she married quickly, for the shelter and the food. Her new man never liked the winter babe.

“He is a cold one,” the husband said. “He hears voices in the wind,” though it was he who was cold and who, when filled with drink, heard the dark counsel of unnamed gods who told him to beat his wife and abuse her son. The woman never complained, for she feared for her child. Yet strangely the child did not seem to care. He paid more attention to the sounds of the wind than the shouts of his stepfather, lending his own voice to the cries he alone could hear, though always a minor third above.

As the midwife had prophesied, in winter he was an active child, his eyes bright and quick to laugh. But once spring came, the buds in his cheeks faded, even as the ones on the boughs grew big. In the summer and well into the fall, he was animated only when his mother told him tales of Winter's Kin, and though she made up the tales as only a player can, he knew the stories all to be true.