Clones vs. Aliens (14 page)

In Alex’s backpack was the portable scanner entrusted to him by Dr. X. If they could attach it to the hull of the
Gemini shuttle for just thirty seconds, it would reveal and store details of the shuttlecraft’s interior
and
exterior. With this knowledge, they could finish repairing the big ship and even unlock its main hatch.

Fisher raised a hand to his ear and tapped the nearly invisible earbud he was wearing.

“Amanda, are you and Veronica in place? Over.”

“Copy, in position on the condiments float. Feeling ridiculous.”

“You’re supposed to say ‘over.’ Over.”

“Are you serious? Fine,
over.
”

Fisher could feel Amanda’s annoyance through the earbud. He held up a pair of binoculars and shaded the lens from the bright California sun. The binoculars autofocused until the girls were in sight.

Amanda and Veronica were across the parking lot on one of the very first floats. Their suits were bright red and bumpy to help them blend into the huge bowl of foam cranberry sauce they were hiding in. Amanda and Veronica would create a diversion by using the condiments float’s famous Cran-Cannons. At the end of the parade route there were several targets set up, and a part of the big finale was a marksmanship contest wherein several lucky volunteers would try to launch massive globs of cranberry sauce with great accuracy. If Amanda and Veronica could get to those cannons, that might distract
the Gemini long enough for Fisher and Alex to approach and scan the shuttle.

“Now we just have to wait for the aliens to show,” Alex sighed.

No sooner had he said it than a low hum filled the lot, making their ears buzz and sending flurries of dust and pebbles skittering along the vibrating asphalt.

“Here we go,” Fisher said, tapping his earpiece. “Stay hidden until we’re ready to launch the diversion. Over.”

“Got it,” Amanda responded.
“Over,”
she added in an annoyed voice before Fisher could remind her.

Cheers from the onlookers pealed across the lot as the disguised Gemini shuttle appeared. Fisher had to admit it looked amazing. It floated gracefully out into the open, seeming to glide on the air—which, Fisher knew, was exactly what it was doing, though it was draped with a cloth to conceal the fact that it didn’t have wheels. It was covered in balloons and swirls of fabric painted in browns, reds, and golds, and the back sprouted a turkey tail-like crest of construction paper feathers. And as it rotated slightly from left to right, the gleam of thousands of tiny sparkles dazzled the crowd.

Eight of the Gemini, including Anna and Bee, were standing on a platform built on top of the craft. They waved and smiled.
Lulling the population into blissful unawareness
, Fisher thought to himself.

Principal Teed wiggled out of the sunroof of his car, holding a bullhorn.

“Welcome one and all, particularly our new friends”—cheers broke out again—“to the forty-eighth annual
Wompalog Middle School Thanksgiving Parade!” Thunderous applause echoed throughout the parking lot.

Principal Teed disappeared once again into his car and honked the horn, signaling the parade could begin.

The first float was a display of a field of maize accented by squash and pumpkins on sticks, complete with waving scarecrows. The maize looked like it had been sitting in the sun for a few too many years without being harvested, but the float was neatly put together and did a good job setting the tone. The second float was a reasonably authentic miniature version of a Native American longhouse, upon which stood eighth grader Grace Beaumont, who was half Iroquois. After that was the float full of side dishes where Veronica and Amanda were hunkered down.

The parade slowly unspooled from a clump in the parking lot to its full length along the street. Hundreds of people were clustered behind the sidewalk barricades shouting and waving. Teed had been right. The crowd was even bigger than usual. Fisher swallowed hard. Nothing bad would happen. Nothing bad
could
happen.

Ahead of the Gemini shuttle was a marching band from a nearby high school. The trombones were a little warbly, but the sound was solid overall.

Fisher looked down to check the radar and it was right on target, the dots and clumps moving just as they should be.

“Hey, Fisher,” Alex said, “how many snare drummers are in that band?”

“I didn’t count,” Fisher said. “Four, maybe?”

“That’s what I thought,” Alex said. “There are eight now.”

Fisher looked up from the radar screen, his heart ramping up to panic speed. Eight snare drummers marched in the band. Four of them were real. The other four had to be Gemini, using their powers of transformation to disrupt the parade. After a moment, Fisher saw which were the impostors: four of them abruptly changed tempo, speeding their beat up to double time. About half the band tried to follow their rhythm, marching at double the speed of the rest of the band. Ringing crashes rang out as trumpets smacked into tubas, tall hats were swiped off by trombone slides, and bass drums scooped up everything in their path.

Spectators stumbled backward as musicians lurched, tripped, and floundered, crashing into the barricades that kept the spectators from spilling into the street.

“Is there a techno remix happening back there, or did something go wrong? Over,” said Amanda over the radio.

“Wrong,” Fisher said.

“I’m wrong? You forgot to say
over.
”

“No, right. I mean, something went wrong,” Fisher responded, getting flustered. “The Gemini are disguising themselves as drummers and messing up the whole
parade rhythm. We’ll try to sort it out. Over.”

Floats were starting and then jerking to a stop. The band itself was a few measures away from being a brass heap. The crowd, at least, was amused. They laughed and pointed as people in costumes stopped abruptly and collided with one another, as the tempo changed frenetically every few bars.

It was chaos. The mission had changed.

“Come on!” Fisher said, jumping off of the float and hitting the ground hard. Alex followed him. They both tapped buttons on their suit collars, switching the ChameleoClothes from “auto” to “manual.” A few more taps later, Fisher’s disguise immediately puffed out and turned the golden brown of corn bread while Alex’s shifted to the many-hued cobble pattern of an ear of maize.

Fisher pulled two small boxes from his backpack, and tossed one to Alex. Moving as quickly as they could in the cumbersome costumes, they ran to opposite sides of the street, ducking around the colliding band members.

Fisher had brought the devices to help time and coordinate the group’s efforts more exactly—but they were going to have to serve a different purpose now. He pressed a switch on his device, a speaker he’d been working on to help develop his dancing skills before he’d perfected the technology in the iGotRhythm automated dancing shoe. The speakers pumped out an extremely powerful beat at
subsonic frequencies; a beat too low to hear, but powerful enough to
feel
all through the skeleton. Fisher adjusted the tempo to match that of the real drummers, and soon the rest of the band began to regain control, the inaudible
thud-thud
of the speakers too powerful to ignore.

By the time the band had resumed formation, the four impostor drummers were gone.

But Fisher couldn’t relax. There could be Gemini
anywhere.
If the Gemini wanted to make trouble, he had no doubt they would. His eyes moved to the crowd. Was that old man’s posture natural? Had he ever seen that girl around town before? Who would the Gemini most likely go after next?

Fisher jogged ahead to walk beside the colonial thatched-roof house float, hoping to get a better view.

“Hey, Fisher?” Amanda’s voice patched in through his earbud. “The parade’s supposed to go down Main Street this year, right?”

“Of course,” Fisher said. “The same as every year.”

“Well it isn’t,” Amanda said. “You’d better get up here. Um, over.”

Fisher motioned for Alex to follow him. They ran past the plastic colonial house, past the side-dish float with its piles of cardboard stuffing and a few real giant corn ears that had survived poor Fee’s fall in Mrs. Bas’s garden. Panting, they finally reached the condiment float where
Amanda and Veronica were hiding. Amanda and Veronica hopped to the ground. Their suits morphed to look like twin green apple bushels, sprouting various leafy branches laden with fruit.

“Look,” Veronica said, pointing. Up ahead, Main Street forked. A cop stood directing the parade along its intended route. His back was turned to an
identical
cop, who had moved the barricades and was directing the parade to bear left toward South Oak Street.

Fisher peered through his binoculars. The cops were
almost
identical. But the second cop’s badge had no detail; it was solid and featureless. Also, his eyebrows looked like they’d been drawn on with Magic Marker. The cop was a Gemini decoy—badly made, hastily drawn.

The longhouse float had already turned left. The condiments float came to an abrupt halt at the fork, swaying, its driver apparently unsure which way to go.

“You go take that cop down,” Fisher said to Amanda and Alex. “We’ll run ahead and try to reroute the longhouse.”

Fisher and Veronica bolted down the street, sending halfhearted waves to the parade watchers so that no one would be alarmed. Fisher fought down a surge of frustration. If the Gemini kept making trouble, Fisher and Alex would have to spend all their time preventing disaster and they wouldn’t ever get close to the shuttle. He
couldn’t help wondering if the Gemini knew somehow, if they’d anticipated Fisher and Alex might use the parade to regain a strategic advantage and were taking steps to prevent it.

They bolted past the fake cop. Fisher had full confidence that Alex and Amanda would be able to take him down. The longhouse float was cruising down South Oak Street, a route that hadn’t been cleared of traffic for the parade. Fisher’s heart flapped in his throat like a dying fish.

Coming directly toward the float was a flatbed truck loaded up with antique clocks and fine porcelain dishes.

“You have to be kidding me,” Fisher gasped out, picking up his pace, his lungs and legs burning with the effort.

The truck swerved toward the sidewalk. But even with the float hauling to the right, they looked certain to clip each other. The float may only have been going fifteen miles an hour, but given its size and the truck’s load of breakable cargo, it was more than enough for a heavy crash.

“Veronica!” Fisher rooted in his backpack with one hand and tossed her a slingshot and a small black pellet. “Hit the truck!”

Without asking any questions, Veronica stopped to take aim. The black projectile sailed over Fisher’s head, landing in the truck’s bed and bursting into a purple foam, a buoyant material that would protect and buffer the cargo from any shocks.

Fisher kept running and at last pulled up alongside the float. The truck was almost on top of them. He had only seconds to act. He took a magnetic clamp from his belt and slapped it to the steel undercarriage. Spooling an almost invisible thread from the clamp, he hooked it to a dart, and threw it at a lamppost as they glided past an intersection.

Fisher’s wire wrapped around the base of the lamppost and caught. The nylon thread—actually made of an incredibly durable steel fiber patented by Fisher’s mother—halted the float in its tracks and, slowly, guided it to the right.

The truck and the float just brushed each other as the truck blew by, pounding its horn. The cargo jostled heavily, but the extra padding kept it safe. Fisher pulled a special blade from his belt and severed the wire as the float completed its turn, rounding the corner and heading back toward Main Street. At the speed it was going, it should merge with the rest of the parade at just the right spot to slot back into its space.

Alex and Amanda caught up to Fisher and Veronica.

“We took down the cop drone,” said Amanda.

“How?” Veronica asked.

“Made fun of its eyebrows,” Amanda said. “Until it went
kaboom.
”

Screams broke out from the parade route.

“Sounds like the party’s not over,” said Alex, who tore off along the side street that connected with the parade. Fisher, Amanda, and Veronica sprinted behind him.

Principal Teed had commandeered the condiments float, and was deploying the Cran-Cannons. Tart ammunition went in every direction, dousing the crowd. The principal’s grin was a little bit
too
wide—and in the very back of the parade, the
real
Principal Teed was still sitting behind the wheel of his Volvo.

Fisher groaned.

“Okay,” Amanda said. “Suggestions?”

“I have one,” said Veronica, raising an eyebrow.

The condiment float kept up its berry bombardment, gallons of sauce flying every which way, as spectators screamed and scattered, coated in the thick, purple goo.

Fisher, Alex, Veronica, and Amanda came running at the float from four different directions. The condiment float was decorated with many food items, including a number of massive squash stuck on the sides. The kids each grabbed one. Together, they stuffed the barrels with the squashes—then ran, rolled, or leapt out of the way.