The Last Invention Page 12

  One time we were playing a really dangerous game of tag (Melanie called it “Got You Last”). I slammed against one of the turrets, causing a little bit of stone to crumble away. It revealed a small red button inside the stone block. We ran to the opposite side of the tower. We stared across at the button for awhile, and then we inched closer to it. Melanie finally got the courage to push it.

  A secret hatch opened in the floor.

  We stared at each other in shock.

  I peeked my head down into a dark room under the roof. It had a shower in it, and a stairway leading further down into the depths of the tower. We climbed down a ladder and examined every inch of that room. It was a new place to explore, a room where we hadn’t yet memorized every nook and cranny of stone. A fresh space. More square footage in which to hug my beautiful companion.

  It was the most excitement we had in a long time. We decided to follow the stairway as far down as it could go, to see if we could get to the bottom. We held hands and walked down, passing cobwebby rooms filled with crumbling stones and bits of plastic and metal junk, and dusty furniture. Every few levels, a half-collapsed, dangerous-looking balcony peered off into the thick green mist. Further down, some rooms had skeletons in them, lying on the ground in strange positions. Their bony hands still held small electronic devices, long ago crushed and broken. I wondered if those were characters from the previous stories that Oinkleberry and Ricky had written. Questions swam through my head—did every boy imagine a tall tower like this one? Did every romance end in this place? Were we in danger?

  We eventually made it down to a level of the tower that had a solid balcony. We stood on it and looked out at the only thing we had seen so far besides green fog. A swirling dark cave hovering in the mist. Close up, it seemed hundreds of miles tall, and it was impossible to look past its edges. The wormhole. It wanted to suck me into it when I stared too long, and Melanie had to pull me back to prevent me from falling off the balcony. I remembered the night that we came out of that cave as beautiful dragon and sick, helpless boy, but it already seemed like a year ago.

  Suddenly, we heard footsteps come from inside the tower, somewhere lower down in the stairwell. We scrambled off the balcony and ran back up the winding stairs. We leaped the stairs two at a time, gasping and shrieking and holding hands. Back to safety. Back to the top of the tower, where it was warm and cozy. When we were back on the roof, we pushed the mini-fridge and shelf over the hatch in the floor. Whatever was down there was sure to kill us—those decaying skeletons were proof of that. I wished that we had never found that red button. What good was the inside of the tower? It probably went down for hundreds of miles, and we’d starve before we ever made it to the bottom.

  The mysterious intruder never came up to the top of the tower. Our lives continued, but we didn’t dare explore the depths of the tower again. We took turns taking warm showers. We ate those sesame chicken morsels and drank water. At night (or what we thought was night) I narrated quietly in her arms, my back resting against her soft tunic, fantasizing about what it would be like if she didn’t think of me as just her little brother. I’m probably the only boy in history that could be lonely in the arms of Miss Infinity.

  One time when Melanie and I were throwing bits of rocks off the edge of the tower, a strange thing happened. The sun broke through the green mist. It was a warm, circular green sun just like the one I had seen back in the domed meadow near the cemetery. My insides tickled when I stared at it for too long. I closed my eyes and leaned my face up to the sky. It felt so good to have its hot rays on my face. Around us, the fog began sizzling away.

  Melanie and I didn’t really need an excuse to hug each other. We had been doing that more and more each day. So we embraced right there under the green sun. And that’s the moment that all my shattered hopes got glued back together. All the frustrated, lonely nights I had spent thinking about my beautiful goddess just faded into a distant memory. Our lips came together right there under the warm sun. The kiss that I had dreamed about since I was nine. Her lips were softer than the most delicate substance in the universe, and I sank into them and got lost forever in there. My first real kiss. It was all warmth, sweet smells, quiet breathing, heart pounding, my hands around her back squeezing her ribs (wasn’t sure where else to put them), plus a little coughing. I was somehow able to continue narrating while kissing my goddess. One thing they don’t teach you in health class about kissing goddesses is that a special surge of energy will flow through your body. The goddess’s power. It was spreading into me and healing every sick, lonely, sad, emotionally disturbed cell in my body. All those parts of me that were billions of years old suddenly felt reborn, like I was brand-new and not some ancient being. If I wasn’t already immortal before being brought to this tower top, then our kiss sealed the deal.

  The rest of the fog burned away above us, revealing a sparkly black sky filled with stars and colossal multicolored clouds of dust—a daytime view of outer space. The green sun shined like a billion watt lamp. When my nose brushed Melanie’s it tickled so much that my eyes watered. Somehow this alien sun made our human skin super-sensitive. I held Melanie’s hand, brushed my leg against hers, did anything to make contact with her soft skin. When our tongues met, it created a spark that sent a jolt of electricity through my body. I was blown backwards against one of the stone turrets, and my body fell through the gap in the turreted wall, teetering over the edge of the tower by my legs. Melanie ran over and pulled me up by my tunic. Gasping for air, panting, we ran over to our pillow and rested for awhile. Melanie held me tightly while my back pressed against her. I always thought I would be the one holding her, but it’s really hard making a fantasy come true down to every last detail, so I’m not going to nitpick. We were in love, and that was good enough for me.

  “Why did you do that,” Melanie said.

  “What.”

  “Make me fall in love with you.”

  “It just happened.”

  “It’s wrong. I told you.”

  “Not here, we’re not on Earth.”

  After the green sun set, we rolled over onto our backs and stared up at the starry night sky with our arms around each other. It was like being in the largest planetarium in the universe. Distant black holes created jets of red dust that stretched to a far corner of the sky. Galaxies exploded like fireworks, sending particles crashing against our tower. Thousand of suns lived out their strange lives—some distant ones exploded, some spiraled around each other in a gravitational dance, some were being swallowed by the black holes through a tornado-like funnel; space dust swirled and created new stars, spaceships soared by. Planets of all colors and sizes orbited all of the above. A comet zoomed by leaving a trail of ice that sprinkled down onto us. I reached over and made a little snowball and tossed it at Melanie. She made her own and slapped it onto my mouth. Nobody was happier anywhere in the universe, and that made me feel relaxed and special.

  “You’re so romantic, the things you narrate. I didn’t know.”

  “I’m shy about it.”

  Melanie giggled and wiped away the snowball juice from my lips. We could’ve gone down below into one of the tower rooms for warmth, but we stayed up there under our blanket and cuddled the whole night. With each passing second, our relationship became less like a doomed childish fantasy and more like the love story that everybody wanted. Two Earth creatures madly in love. Of course, Melanie would never let me go further than a kiss in a million years, but a kiss is all I ever wanted in the first place. The rest was just a feverish dream brought on by loneliness in my prison cell and my memory of being Logan. I had seen what other boys wanted to do, deep down in their black hearts. I was going to protect Melanie’s purity, and nobody was ever going to make her less than perfect. For the first time, a girl loved me back. Too bad those creatures on Asekz 13 can’t ever experience true happiness. I don’t even know why they even go on living.

  I thought I heard groaning in the distance. Melanie and I drifted off
to sleep as galaxies collided above us like an infinite nightlight.

  When we woke up the next morning, the green sun beamed on our skin. The fog had completely cleared, and after Melanie and I wiped the dew from each other’s faces, giggling and tickling from our ultra-sensitive skin, we stood up and looked out beyond the turrets.

  What we saw completely shocked us.

  A rolling green meadow stretched as far as the eye could see. Asekz 13. The tower was right next to the planet! Flat rings circled the planet, made up of thousands of different colorful strips of dust and floating rocks. There was a horizontal band of rings and a vertical one, making the planet look like one of those textbook drawings of an atom. Our floating tower hovered between the horizontal band and the planet’s green surface. There was no sky or atmosphere, just space stretching far into the distance. Above the planet, beyond the vertical band of rings, sat an asteroid belt filled with dozens of brown, rocky lumps. Dark caves were cut into many of the asteroids. I wondered if they were wormholes to every corner of spacetime—the Grand Central Station of our universe.

  In the lush meadow below, thousands of beings sat staring at our floating stone tower. Their faces were expressionless. Were they all teenagers? I scanned the horizon for Ricky and the Pig, but there were too many creatures down there—like a crowd at a rock concert. I ducked down below the turrets, just to be out of sight. When the tower had been enveloped in fog, I had often forgotten about why were here. To entertain. Melanie and I were slaves to an alien species—stars of our very own sci-fi romance.

  Melanie and I peeked out of the turrets to try to make sense of the planet. We soon figured out that the most common creatures in the audience were teenage demons, beings that looked like young humanoids, but their eyes glowed red and one small horn grew on their perfectly bald heads. They wore no clothes, but there was nothing to be embarrassed about—they had the anatomy of Barbie and Ken dolls. Those demons never blinked as they stared up at our tower top. Real evil kids. I became mesmerized by one particular demon, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old. Its glowing red stare burned the back of my eyes, and my vision turned into nightmarish hallucinations. Wild flames danced in front of me. Creatures with red skin morphed in and out of the fire. Voices whispered in my ear. My body started sweating, and my insides twisted around in a knot. My blood felt hot.

  “Look away,” Melanie said. She turned my head.

  I found a small crowd of teen angels. They were also humanoids, but they had white wings and wore blue togas wrapped around them. Halos hovered above their bald heads. When I stared into their deep blue eyes my insides felt normal again—that feeling of demonic dread disappeared. One angel smiled at me when I stared at it for a long time. The creature waved, and my insides tickled a little.

  “The angels and demons don’t sit near each other,” I said.

  We stared at the crowd for a long time, trying to figure out as much as we could about the different species on the planet. The animals just confused us—what does a teenage bird or rabbit or pig look like, anyway? But the mutants were another story. Things were terribly different about those humanoids—multicolored veins covered the outside of their bodies, twisting and piling up in complicated knots. Each color took turns glowing brightly, showing off its entire path around the outside of the poor kid—green, blue, red, yellow, brown—like a fancy display in a Christmas window. Mutant teenagers never smiled, and some grimaced in pain. One of them stared at me with black eyes, until it eventually opened its mouth to reveal a dark tongue inside.

  The teen gods looked like muscular supermodels with no particular gender. They held silver staffs and wore gold crowns on their heads. They sat on floating clouds above the rest of the crowd and occasionally gave orders to some kids below them. When one angel disobeyed, the god waved its arms, and a large rock fell out of the asteroid belt and hurtled down towards the crowd. Everybody began screaming, until the god waved its staff again and sent the rock away. The angel ran into the distance and disappeared over a grassy hill.

  There were many other types of humanoids down there—beings with no skin, some with monstrous heads, others with no faces at all. There were creatures with two heads, or three legs, or four arms, or a random combination of body parts. The simple, grassy meadow looked like an experimental testing ground for every type of humanoid that exists in the universe. I counted 37 species in all—19 humanoid, 12 recognizable animal types in variety of new colors, and 6 species of animals that I had never seen before—odd things that are only found deep inside feverish nightmares.

  And all I could think to do was wave my hand in greeting.

  The entire field of creatures hissed at us.

  We ducked down below the tower turrets and leaned against the stone bricks. My heart pounding, I held Melanie’s hand tightly. We had no privacy. With their gadgets, those aliens could track our every move—whether we hid behind this castle wall or not. But we stayed perfectly still in that one spot, trying to figure out what to do next. We thumb wrestled, tickled each other’s wrists, experimented with how long we could touch our super-sensitive skin together before passing out—anything to pass the time. Hours went by, until our tired minds once again believed that we were alone.

  And then we heard a noise.

  Something was scratching at the trap door in the floor!

  The shelf and mini-fridge jiggled a little. My heart pounded. It was the first time our little private tower top was disturbed by an outsider. We ran over and stood on the hatch, preventing it from being opened. We pushed together all the snow that had fallen off that comet. In a few seconds we made what looked like a primitive snowman on top of the trap door.

  Just then our little technological devices sprang to life, one by one, beeping and flashing—the Interrogatrix, the Sol Enhancer, the Body Builder, the Voxinator, and the Roleplaying Ring.

  The creature under the trap door banged louder.

  Part 4

  The Last Invention

  We’re leaving the planet.

  Our story is coming to an end.

  All the teenagers on the planet’s surface are cheering, screeching, uttering demonic cries, singing beautiful songs, and wishing us off. They don’t need us anymore. Melanie and I are holding each other tight, our bodies shaking. I never thought it would end this way.

  I’m going to try to tell you everything. There isn’t much time. The day that the green fog lifted, when we saw the planet’s surface and its alien residents, was only the beginning of the end. Things got much scarier after that…

  The scratching at the hatch in the floor eventually stopped, and whatever was down there left us alone. We didn’t want to look, though. We just left everything piled on top of it. Our hi-tech devices all worked again, but we didn’t use them because there was another problem. I got really sick. A disease spread through my body like one of those fast-moving viruses in a zombie movie. In only a few minutes I barely had the strength to move or talk. My narration stopped, and I collapsed into Melanie’s arms.

  It was some kind of alien fever. My eyes were burning up. Melanie told me they were bright red and bloodshot. I lay shivering in her arms on our tiny blanket as she whispered comforting things into my ear. We made a pact to never again look through the stone turrets at the crowd below, to never again stand up and show ourselves to those creatures. There were dangers down there—secret things about the universe that we didn’t know. When you’re growing up nobody warns you not to stare into the eyes of a demon for too long.

  When I closed my eyes I could still see the demon’s face, so coldhearted and evil, peering into my soul. Its little brown horn grew slightly, as if infecting me with its sickness, practicing its evil ways, gave it some kind of bodily reward. A pain clawed at the insides of my stomach. With all my effort I turned around and stared at Melanie’s face just to have something beautiful to look at. Her image drove away the terror—just like the angel’s face. I stared at her for a long time without blinking. If I shut my
eyes for an instant the horror would return.

  Melanie fed me cool water. I was burning up, so all I wanted was cold water. I eventually fell asleep with my head on the pillow, water dripping down my chin. It was a sleep filled with nightmares and horror—Melanie falling off the edge of the tower, an angry Melanie telling me that she hated me over and over again, demons climbing over the tower turrets and devouring us, and many more. I woke up drenched in sweat and shaking uncontrollably. Melanie had to hold me down just to stop me from vibrating.

  “Ni..ni..night…mares,” I said, shaking and gasping for breath.

  “They weren’t real. Sleep.”

  I finally calmed down in the warmth of her arms.

  “Melanie, I can’t ever lose you.” I squeezed her weakly and rested my sweaty head on her shoulder.

  “You won’t.”

  “You sure?”

  “When you’re better we’re going to use the devices to go home.”

  “But will it be the same there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even though we’re both wanted for first-degree murder?”

  “Don’t think about that now. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yes. Sleep.”

  I wasn’t convinced. The dread of losing Melanie suddenly ate away at my brain. Before I was in pain because I wanted her to love me so badly. Now that we were in love, the thought of losing her seemed so much worse. I had never felt pain like those nightmares. That utter, total loss. I never wanted to feel anything like that again. The green sun showered us in glowing light, and the stars twinkled in the blackness of space. I suddenly felt alone in the universe.

  “Adrian, sleep.”

  She put her hand under my sweaty tunic and rubbed my bare stomach. A ticklish sensation spread across my chest and stopped my heart for a moment. I almost passed out. The green sun’s alien power was making my skin more sensitive each day, and ripples of ticklish, energized warmth spread from her fingers to different corners of my chest. I hoped that she would never stop. When she kissed my cheek, a jagged bolt of green lightning came off my skin and destroyed one of the tower turrets. It made me faint in her arms.