Part 6 – Contact!

Marco

My name is Marco.

And right now, I was in serious trouble. Ms. Gomez walked up and down the class rows, collecting the essays we wrote the night before. Or were supposed to have written. Or might have written or might not have. Or really intended to write but never got around to it. Or wrote only to have the computer crash.

Or, like me, were supposed to have written but spent the night punching out Controllers during a raid on a Yeerk-controlled Burger King. Hey, it's kind of hard to write an essay and save the world at the same time, all right? I could see it now: "Hold on Mr. Hork-bajir, you can finish ripping out my intestines after I finish this paragraph on 19th-century British poets." Yeah, sure.

She stood over my desk. "Marco? Where's your essay?" She gave me a Look over the top of her glasses. I gulped. Here goes. "Um, um, I did write the essay," I gibbered. "I thought that, uh, Thomas Jefferson…" Her eyes narrowed. I plunged on into unknown waters. "…had some really great insights on Robert Frost's allegoral interpretation of Aristotle's metaphorical emancipation…" Whew, what a mouthful. The main problem overcome, I wrapped up my BS. "…and uh, furthermore, his courage and dedication were an example to us all…" What a great nonsense line, no wonder politicians use it so much. "…but, uh, I can't turn in the essay because I submitted it to an English major for literary review," I gabbled. "Only the best for you, Ms. Gomez."

I gave her my patented Sheepish Cute Marco Smile and held my breath. The seconds stretched on while she glared at me like some deranged tiger. I sweated.

A shadow of a smirk appeared at the edge of her mouth. Crap, busted. "Nice try, Marco," she said, going on to the next desk. "But—"

BRRRRRRRRRRINNG! The bell shrieked, and I bolted. I was SO out of there. Slipping into the stream of kids in the hall, her final damning words were lost in the cacophony. I hooked up with Jake at the lockers. I grinned at him, still caught in the rush of my narrow escape. "So, Big Jake, get that essay in for Gomez?"

Jake rolled his eyes, chucking some books in. "Yeah, like you're such a paragon of virtue in the area of turning work in."

"Since when do you use words like 'paragon'?" I mocked. "My explanation was very well-thought out, and in this man's humble opinion would have talked a Taxxon from its lunch."

Jake just grunted. "She didn't buy it." Not a question.

I gave him an innocent look. "Hey, is it really official if class ended before she passed down the sentence anyway?" I pointed out. "Besides, I can just write it later, hand it in, and it would all work out fine."

The guy just eyeballed me. "Marco, since when have you ever done makeup work voluntarily?"

"Ooh." I smirked. "Low blow." Jake punched my arm affectionately, and we fell into step through the throng heading outside.

"So, what's up?" I asked.

Jake looked around and lowered his voice. "We have a situation."

I groaned. "No! Please! Just no! Just ONE DAY after school, I'd like to go home and play some nice relaxing Nintendo. One day! Is it really too much to ask to be stomping Goombas with a deranged plumber instead of playing jump-rope with my intestines? Do we ever get to hit the Pause button? Do we ever get to play some peaceful Myst or Riven?"

Jake ignored my ranting. I kept going. "I mean, what is this? If I'm fated to kill endless waves of bad guys, at least there should be little floating score points over their head when I deck them! Hey, do you think that would work? Make it so we get points per slug squished or alien antagonized! Yeah!"

"Marco?"

"Yeah?"

"Shut up."

"Aww…"

We kept going, now slouching along sidewalks towards Jake's place. "All right, fine," I sulked. "What's the scoop?"

Jake kept his eyes front. "We've got a new guy in the neighborhood. Crashed here two nights ago. Tobias saw it and told us. Turns out he saw the newbie himself, too. Weird guy, not quite anything we've seen before. According to Tobias, he looks like some weird Andalite shoot-off."

Now it was my turn to eyeball Jake. "Remember our buddy the Inspector?"

Jake shook his head. "Nah, Tobias said the guy's not Garatron, either. Something new."

I stared at the sky pensively. "People would notice if he popped his head into the mall," I pointed out. "Where'd he crash? More importantly, where's he at?"

"A, the woods, and B, no clue," Jake answered tersely. "We're looking for him, but the Yeerks probably noticed it too. Tobias says the crash site's crawling with Controllers, no way in hell we can get near it. Here's hoping this guy's got enough sense to stay away. Turns out Tobias talked with him."

I stopped and stared at Jake. "And? Don't leave me hanging, here."

He shrugged. "Turns out the guy's a nothlit. Thought he was going crazy, so he talked to the Magic Bird, though the way Tobias tells it he probably was a bit nuts at that point. No idea how long he's been stuck."

I frowned. "Huh. Told the others yet?"

Jake shook his head again. "Not yet. Got work and chores tonight, but it's the weekend tomorrow. We'll hook up tomorrow morning and lay it out to Rachel and Cassie."

We reached Jake's house, and he went home. Me, I kept going, the beginning of a plan forming in my mind.

It wasn't until later that night, actually, that I met our mystery alien myself. I had been hanging out at the arcade, reveling in the temporary absence of life-threatening mayhem. Time Crisis was just as hard as always, and I always died at the part with the tank. Stupid tank. Of course, when you have a bright pink plastic zap-blaster, there's not much you can do. The last of my quarters gone and the change machine acting up again, I decided to call it a night.

Walking along the downtown sidewalk at about 1 in the morning, the streets were pretty deserted. I got near the edge, where shops and restaurants were beginning to thin out into suburbia, when I heard some voices coming from an alley. I listened in as I passed, out of sheer boredom.

"Don't move, Andalite," a voice sneered. "The Visser will pay handsomely for your head. Attachment to your body is optional."

THAT caught my attention. I doubled back, flattening against the wall, and snuck a look around the corner. Four faint spots of green light were the first thing I noticed, shining out of the gloomy alleyway. My eyes adjusted away from the neon signs, and I made out a homeless guy with an ugly-looking handgun threatening a tall alien that looked like a cross between an Andalite and a lobster. The alien's eyes, two main and two stalks, shone with an intense green glow, which was what I had first seen when I poked my head in. All of them were focused on the guy with the gun. His tail looked nasty, but he seemed to have forgotten about it, rooted to the spot by the gun. Definitely a human reaction.

I eased back around the corner and considered my options. I couldn't morph out here on the street. The hobo was facing away from the mouth of the alley, but if alien-boy noticed me and looked up, the Controller would notice. Damn. Well, if I did nothing, some scummy Sub-Visser would have the host body of his career. Not a terribly appealing future.

Fortunately, this Controller's hobo host was a drunken old wineo. I might have a chance. Most of it depended on surprise. Not for the first time, I wished I could just go ape on him, but finding somewhere safe to morph might waste time that the nothlit might not have. I took a deep breath. Here went nothing.

Not wasting breath on a war cry that would just get me noticed and shot, I sprinted into the alley, grimly silent. So focused on anticipating movement from the "Andalite's" deadly tail, the first inkling the Controller had of me was when I grabbed his wrist, shoving the gun away and down. He jerked in surprise, tightening instinctively upon the trigger, which set the gun off with a noise not unlike a bomb. You think guns make those cute little ptew ptew popping noises like in the Bond movies? Think again. It's this shockingly loud explosion, like dynamite, literally feet away from your head. Ears ringing, I hung doggedly onto his arm, vision swimming.

Then the nothlit got off his ass and joined the party with a powerful kick, revealing freaking massive triple-jointed legs and wicked talons that had been concealed by the gloom. He took a step forward and kicked straight-on like he was punting a football, the two giant front talons punching holes half the size of coke cans in the Controller's leg. The injured leg instantly buckled, and the Controller went down to one knee, still gamely wrestling with me for the gun.

The nothlit stepped back and kicked again, kung-fu style, this time at both of us locked together. The breath left my lungs in a pained whoosh as the Controller and I slammed against the brick wall of the alley. The back of his head cracked against the wall and he went limp.

I threw the gun into a Dumpster and turned around, ducking to dodge another front-on kick that would have taken my head off. "Woah!" I yelled. "Please don't remove my head, I use it sometimes!"

Alien-boy backed off and stared at me. Staring back, I drank in the details of his appearance. Not a guy you wanted to mess with, or encounter in a dark alley for that matter.

Speaking of which…

I stared at him. "Look, I don't have time to explain. If you come into town like this again, you'll get attacked again by more guys like him. Bottom line: get out of here, and stay the hell put until w…I figure out what to do about you."

The nothlit glared back at me with chilling reptilian eyes. (Bull,) he retorted. He shook a scaly finger at me. (Don't jerk me around, man. Guy tries to mug me, you just happen to walk along and Save The Day? And you see this bigass freakin' alien thing and you're cool with it? Psh, yeah right.)

Now I started to get mad. I mean, I can understand the stress of a fight and all, but just who did this guy think he was? …Aside from a 7-foot alien that could kick my head off, that is. "I'm telling you once more," I bit out. "Get out of here. You're in more danger than you know."

Alien-boy just glared. I sighed. "Look, I know you're pissed, but right here, right now, that's all I can tell you, all right?" I thought about telling him about Jake and the others, but decided against it. "Tell you what: there's some woods near here I know…"

I set up a meeting with him for 2 days from now. He left, and I finished walking home, mind racing. This was major. With the meeting in 2 days, I had time to give the rest of the group the lowdown. I just had to hope that Mr. Attitude had the sense to stay away from other Controllers…