It’s a weapon of some kind.”
“It looks like a cowbell.”
And yeah, you know it, Jack. You can already picture it in your mind. You and John Luke on the battlefield, fighting off aliens, and you’ve run out of ammo. You call to John Luke, telling him you need more cowbell.
Yep. That’s right. A lot of good it will do you then.
John Luke opens the shredded door. He wasn’t kidding about the armory.
“There’s lots of different kinds of weapons in here,” he says. “We were going through the list in our class.”
You pull him to the side.
“Hey, you know what we’re dealin’ with, right?” You decide to speak only in a whisper for the next part. “These people are planning to invade the US.”
“Not if they can’t get off this ship.”
“You have a plan?”
“Yeah. The big question is this: do we take out their ships or their leaders?”
Well, look at John Luke, all grown-up and acting like Alexander the Great. Or General Patton.
You think for a minute.
These are good questions from a man holding a magical cowbell in his hand.
Do you take out their ships? Go here .
Do you take out their leaders? Go here .
BRAIN DAMAGE
YOU CHOOSE CYBERSLEEP. How do you know if you can trust that professor guy anyway? Hopefully everything will be better in the morning, like it usually is.
When you first enter cybersleep, you experience a wonderful, familiar sense of security. But a short time later, it feels like you’re bouncing around, and you wonder if you’re imagining the screams.
Then you wake up and realize you’re not.
As soon as you shake off your post-cybersleep confusion, you notice that John Luke is missing. The ship is violently jerking up and down, and you can hear voices down the hallway. After detaching yourself from your seat, you open the door and get a firsthand glimpse of the chaos that awaits you.
The professor or whoever it was —a TV critic, Jack? —happened to be right.
You see an awful, terrible, unspeakable thing —it’s John Luke. He’s been infected.
Antlers are coming out of his head.
When he sees you, he attacks. And just like that, it’s over.
You should’ve known better.
You should’ve realized that when you’re in space and an alien jackalope gets involved, you don’t go on acting like everything’s fine and dandy.
Before your transformation, you experience your last thought as Silas Robertson: I wonder what antlers will look like on my head.
You bet they’ll look pretty cool.
THE END
Start over.
Read “Look at the Stars: A Note from John Luke Robertson.”
BRASS MONKEY
“WELL, WE’VE HEARD REPORTS that some of these are not working,” you tell the woman.
“Are you sure?” she asks. “You’ve heard that those bombs in particular don’t work?”
You nod.
“That’s strange.” She touches her wrist, which appears to have some kind of device on it.
Maybe it’s one of those smartwatches. Like having an iPhone as a watch. It’s the latest technology, and you’re really hoping to get one when you’re back on Earth.
“Yeah. Strange, Jack,” you say, letting Jack accidentally slip out of your mouth.
“Want to know the strangest thing about that?” she asks.
You notice her eyes have become dark. Like all black.
That can’t be good.
“Maybe the fact that they look like cans of diet soda but are actually bombs?”
She only shakes her head. “No. It’s strange because we just got those in. They’re brand-new. Never been used. Never been tested out. But I have an idea.”
This definitely can’t be a good idea.
Soon the door opens, and some pirates from the seven spaced-out seas come and put handcuffs on John Luke and you.
“I think it’s finally time to see how these bombs work,” she says. “In person.”
Then she starts to laugh, but the laugh becomes something awful and horrific —a squealing, wailing scream.
She sounds like a monkey.
And she just keeps laughin’ and laughin’.
They take both
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