Lenny Lemmon and the Alien Invasion, page 1
BOOOORED. Bored, bored, bored.
People say school holidays are the most fun part of the year, but this one? BLAH. The longest two weeks EVER! It doesn’t help that my two best friends, Sam and Jess, are both on holiday. Not together. Sam has gone to the seaside and Jess says she’s rock climbing in the GOBI DESERT, even though our parents are friends and Mum says they’re definitely in Tenerife.
I’m lying on the sofa trying to block out my brother Brandon’s BUM-ACHINGLY BAD music thumping from upstairs, but I can’t do it. I start poking at my wobbly tooth with my tongue. Maybe if it drops out, the tooth fairy can bring me something exciting.
The noise comes from the basement. Dad’s inventions lab is down there and we’ve had more explosions than a fireworks-testing factory just lately. Still, I’m so
that I’m going down to see what’s happening.
At the bottom of the basement stairs, the floor is covered in broken inventions. There are the legs from his LOLLIPOP-MAN ROBOT that fell apart outside my school and made a load of Year One kids cry.
There is the command console from his Chessmaster computer, which only knew how to play Hungry Hungry Hippos. And isn’t that the bumper from the HOVER CAR that didn’t hover?
As I pick my way through, I find Dad standing by his desk, writing something down. “Improve eye sockets,” he mumbles as he writes.
“Everything OK, Dad?” I ask.
“Stupendous,” he replies. “Just putting the finishing touches to my TRANSLATION HELMET.”
Dad picks a helmet up from his desk. It’s black and shiny with blinking red lights all over it.
“THIS IS GOING TO BE THE ONE, MY BOY,” he says. “IT’S GOING TO CHANGE THE WORLD!”
Dad says that about all his inventions. But one day he might be right! Maybe.
“This bad boy instantly translates anything into the language of your choice,” he says. “Watch this. I’m going to say, ‘Hello, I would like three eggs, please’ in French and the translation helmet will say it in English.”
Dad puts the helmet on his head and a weird robot voice crackles out. “OWOH! ME WOO LIKEYLIKE THREEZY EGGYWEGGIES PLAZAZAZA.”
Dad whips the helmet back off with a big grin. “Pretty cool, eh?”
I give him a thumbs up. “BRILLIANT!”
“And that’s not all!”
“Really?” I say.
Dad nods, a proud smile still on his face. “Let’s go upstairs.”
In the back garden, something is covered in a sheet. I’m a bit nervous because last time Dad kept something under a sheet it was his AUTOMATIC HAIRCUTTING MACHINE, which gave him a wonky mohawk.
“Lenny, do you like biking?” he asks.
I nod. “Sometimes.”
“And do you ever find yourself biking along and wishing you could go faster? And HIGHER?”
Now I’m interested. “Actually, yes!” I say. I don’t tell him I often have a daydream about soaring above school and dropping water bombs on Mr Greenford, the head teacher.
“Introducing, the FLYING BIKE!”
Dad whips off the sheet to reveal a bike that looks a lot like mine, but with some added bits. Hang on a second. That IS mine!
“Dad, why have you messed with my bike?” I moan.
“Messed with?” says Dad. “I think you’ll find the correct word is ‘IMPROVED MASSIVELY’.”
He grins at me and I stare back at him. “I think that might be TWO words.”
Dad laughs. “Take a look!” He points at the handlebars. On one side there’s a dial that has
written beside it. On the other side, there’s a big red button that says
“Come on, watch me take her for a test drive,” he says.
Two minutes later, Dad is sitting on my bike in the middle of our road, wearing a motorcycle helmet, and pads on his knees and elbows. Now, this could be EXCITING! Imagine if it works! Every shop in the world is going to want these: the Lemmon Flying Bike! We’ll be so rich, I won’t even have to go to school any more. Better yet, I could BUY the school. Imagine if I were the head teacher. First up, I’m banning maths.
Dad yells, snapping me out of my daydream. “I said are you ready to start filming? This could be a historic moment!”
I press record on Mum’s phone and give him the thumbs up. Dad nods and gives me a thumbs up back. He turns the dial and starts pootling down the street. When he gets to the end, he spins round and comes back. I hear him scream, “TURBO THREE!”
The bike heads back towards me faster. I see him crank the dial. “FOUR!”
My heart pounds so loud it almost drowns out the roar of the bike.
“TURBO FIVE!” Dad yells.
“FLY, FLY, FLY!”
Dad smashes the big red button and the bike jumps up. I whoop with delight. IT’S WORKING! We’re going to change the world!
Then the bike clunks back down and smacks into the kerb. Dad goes flying over the handlebars and lands in Mrs Patel’s flowerbed. I run over to him, scared that he’s hurt himself, but he climbs to his feet with daffodils sticking out of his motorcycle helmet.
“It’s fine,” he says. “Just needs a little tweaking, that’s all.”
I look down at my bike, lying in a twisted heap in the road.
“Or maybe a BIG tweaking.”
After Dad’s failed experiment I was still BORED, so he gave me a whisk to take back to Grandma’s shop. He had used it to make a Whiskatron robot the other day, but it refused to whisk. Then it escaped the kitchen and went FACE-FIRST into a pond.
I had to go the long way round because the bridge over Duggler’s Ditch, which is a huge dry stream, has been demolished before they start work on a new one.
Linda Lemmon’s Ice Cream Parlour has been in town since forever. I bet
used to go there for knickerbocker glories. It’s my favourite place, and not just because I get free ice creams.
I walk in and it’s the same as always: Grandma’s favourite olden-days music playing, all the chairs and tables squeaky clean, and the counter cabinet piled high with EVERY KIND OF ICE CREAM you can think of. My favourite thing to do is to grab a cone and stack it with FOUR different scoops: chocolate, chocolate chip, white chocolate and chocolate crunch. All the varieties. I call it the Patented Trademark Lenny Lemmon Quadruple Super Scooper.
“HI, GRANDMA!” I yell, making her jump as she leans on the counter reading a book. “I brought your whisk back!”
Grandma takes a look at the whisk, all caked in mud, and drops it into the bin. “Thank you, Lenny,” she sighs.
It isn’t like Grandma to be sad. She’s the happiest person I know, normally. “What’s the matter, Grandma? Is it the dirty whisk?”
Grandma shakes her head and waves her hand around the shop. “It’s this place, my love. Look at it.”
I take a look around and shrug. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Don’t you think there’s something MISSING?” she says.
“Now you mention it,” I say, “I’ve always thought you should do burgers and chips.”
“Not burgers and chips, Lenny. People!”
I gasp. “You can’t eat people!”
Grandma sighs again. “I mean NO ONE is here. You know, I haven’t even sold one ice cream today? Not a single solitary scoop.”
“Why?” I ask. “Your ice cream is DELICIOUS.”
Grandma snatches up a cloth and starts cleaning the counter, even though I can already see my face in it.
“It’s that EnormoMall they opened outside town last year,” she says. “They have ice cream from all around the world there.” She stops scrubbing and squeezes my hand. “If this carries on, I’m afraid I’m going to have to close the shop.”
NO! That is unthinkable. Grandma has worked there her entire life. It holds so many family memories. I’M GOING TO HAVE TO
I’m SO sad, I even forget to take a Patented Trademark Lenny Lemmon Quadruple Super Scooper for the journey home.
Sam’s family own a bookshop just around the corner from Grandma’s place, and when I walk past I’m surprised to see his dad putting books on shelves. HUH. I go inside.
“HI, SAM’S DAD!” I say.
He smiles when he sees me. “Ah, Lenny! Come to take him out playing, have you?”
I frown. “But he’s on holiday!”
“I can assure you he isn’t. I—”
Sam’s dad is interrupted by a weird noise coming from the children’s section round the corner.
“Sam’s dad,” I say nervously. “Is there a snake in the kids’ books?”
Sam’s dad chuckles. “Why don’t you go and have a look?”
“NO!” a little voice bleats from the same place.
I slowly walk round the corner and find nothing but a load of books and a cardboard cut-out of a dragon. To begin with, I think the dragon is speaking and I’m worried it’s going to shoot fire at me, but then I see a shoe sticking out from behind it. Sure enough, there he is.
“SAM!”
Sam comes out from his hiding place and slumps on to a purple beanbag. “Fine. You caught me.”
“But I don’t understand. You told me you were going on HOLIDAY.”
Sam’s bottom lip droops. “We were supposed to be, but then we didn’t.”
“So I’ve been bored on my own all week when we could have been PLAYING?!” I say. “Don’t you like me any more, Sam?”
Sam fiddles with the collar of his shirt, like he always does when he’s worried.
I sit on a little plastic stool next to him. It makes a farting sound and I can’t help but giggle a bit. “You don’t need to be EMBARRASSED in front of me, Sam. We’re best friends, remember?
Sam nods and his eyes go all wet. “Sorry, Lenny.”
“You don’t need to be SORRY either.” I pull a crocodile puppet off a toy rack and put it on my hand, making it talk in a growly voice. “Now, let’s go out and play. AND MAKE IT SNAPPY!”
Sam smiles a little bit at my brilliant joke. “I’m just scared, Lenny.”
“Of the crocodile?” I say. “I can put it away if you want.”
“No, not the crocodile.” Sam leans in close and whispers even softer. “I heard Mum and Dad talking about the shop. They said that no one comes into town any more and they’re not selling any books. They’re worried they’ll have to close.”
“It’s the EnormoMall!” I say, shaking my crocodiley fist.
Sam nods. “Dad says all the shops will close soon and the whole place will be a GHOST TOWN.”
My eyes go fuzzy as I imagine it: ghost cafés, ghost hairdressers. I wonder what it would be like to have a ghost cut your hair? HAIR-RAISING, I bet! Haha!
“LENNY!” Sam clicks in my face, interrupting my daydream. “He doesn’t mean an actual town full of ghosts. He means no one will be here.”
I think about it for a second. That sounds horrible. I can’t imagine the town without Grandma’s ice cream shop and Sam’s dad’s bookshop and the toy shop and the market where scary people shout weird stuff about vegetables.
“Sam,” I say, putting my arm round his shoulder. “WE ARE NOT GOING TO LET THAT HAPPEN.”
Sam shakes his head. “Come on, Lenny, we’re just kids. What are we going to do?”
I jump to my feet and throw my hands in the air. “We are going to SAVE THE TOWN!”
Sam sighs. “I’d take you more seriously if one of your hands wasn’t a crocodile.”
I throw the puppet off and sit back down next to Sam. “Listen, we saved the school, didn’t we?”
“Well, not real—”
“WE DID,” I say. “AND we won the Olden Days competition for class 5B.”
“Again, it was a little more complicated than that.”
“BABABABA!” I hold up my hand, not wanting to hear about complicated stuff. “Anything is possible, Samuel. ANYTHING.” I lean forwards and shout into the main part of the shop.
“Sam’s dad! Sam is having a SLEEPOVER at my house tonight!”
“Um, OK?” he replies.
“Excellent,” I say, pumping my fist. “Now, come on, Sam. Grab your toothbrush and your THINKING CAP, because we’ve got some planning to do.”
Sam yawns and rubs his eyes while I stare at a sheet of paper that says
and nothing else. Well, except a doodle of me as a big muscleman.
Normally, sleepovers with me and Sam are MASSIVE FUN. We eat pizza, we play games, we watch movies, then fall asleep in our sleeping bags on the living-room floor covered in popcorn. But tonight is different. We have been so busy THINKING, we haven’t had time for fun stuff.
“Come on, Sam,” I say. “You’re the one with the good school-report cards. Surely you can think of something?”
Sam yawns again. “We could give people money to go into town?”
I rub my chin. “And where would we get this money?”
“I have some coins in my piggy bank?” he says.
“How many?” I say. “A million?”
Sam narrows his eyes and counts on his fingers. “Nine, I think.”
This is no good. We need to think of something that will drag people away from the EnormoMall and back to the fun books at Sam’s place and the delicious ice cream at Grandma’s.
Maybe TV will give us some inspiration. I turn it on and it automatically goes to the SCI-FI CHANNEL. Dad must have been the last one in here. He’s forever watching boring shows about space, where people with ridgey heads are always firing lasers at a bald man’s ship. That’s not on now though. It’s showing a stretch of desert with some metal stuff strewn across it.
“What’s this?” says Sam sleepily.
I press the button. “Alien Encounters.”
The screen changes to a small American town in the middle of nowhere. A man with crazy hair and a WILD look in his eyes comes on.
“No one had ever heard of Roswell before the flying saucer crashed here,” he says. “Then all of a sudden the whole world shows up.”
We watch for a little longer and it’s true. Ages and ages ago, people reckoned an ALIEN SPACESHIP crashed in this tiny town called Roswell and it’s still famous to this day. All the shops sell alien stuff and people come from all over to see it.
Sam chuckles. “That’s what we need. Some ALIENS to crash their ship here.”
I laugh too, and put on an alien voice. “Yes, please, Mr or Miss Alien. COME CRASH HERE! It’s way nicer than Neptune!”
“Or Pluto,” Sam laughs.
“OR URANUS!”
We laugh and laugh until tears are rolling down our cheeks, but then I suddenly stop. An idea has hit me like a bad pie flying across the school canteen.
Sam’s laugh comes to a stuttering stop and he looks at me. “Lenny?” he says, sounding worried.
“But what if…”
“Lenny, you’re pulling that face…”
“What if we didn’t NEED the aliens to actually come here?”
“You’re pulling that face you always pull when you’re hatching one of your schemes.”
“What if people just THOUGHT aliens had come?”
“Lenny, NO. NO!”
“LENNY, I’M SCARED,” Sam whispers as we step out of my house into the dark, cold night.
I give him one of my trademark reassuring shoulder slaps, but softly, so it doesn’t wake anyone. “RELAX,” I say. “There’s no way this could possibly go wrong.”
“You say that so often it’s lost all meaning,” Sam moans.
As soon as the idea hatched in my brain, like a TINY DUCKLING OF PURE GENIUS, the rest of it followed quickly. You see, for most people, faking a UFO crash would be tricky, but me? With Dad’s basement full of failed invention parts just lying around? So many of them that he won’t even notice if a few go missing? It would be crazy not to!
The woods opposite Grandma’s shop are only a few minutes’ walk away. The tricky part will be avoiding being seen with our two wheelbarrows full of clanking metal parts. Best to take it slowly. Even over the sound of the barrows I can still hear Sam’s teeth CHATTERING.
“It’s going to be fine,” I say, as we turn the corner at the end of my road and head towards town. “Just think about how well your dad’s shop’s going to do once this all goes off. You’ll be able to have the FANCIEST HOLIDAYS EVER! I’m talking tropical safari hotels, with gorilla waiters … and sloth maids … and pool lifeguards that are … sharks?
No, that wouldn’t work—”
Oh no. I was too busy thinking about the tropical safari hotel and I’ve clunked my wheelbarrow into a kerb and tipped it over and now some of the stuff has SPILLED on to someone’s garden.
“LENNY!” Sam gasps.
I put my wheelbarrow right and start loading the stuff back in.
The front door of the house opens and a man leans out.
“GO, GO, GO!” I whisper-shout at Sam.
We run with our wheelbarrows as fast as we can away from him.
“HE’S CHASING US, LENNY!” Sam pants at me.
I take a quick look over my shoulder and, sure enough, here he comes FLAPPING after us in his slippers. This was not part of the plan at all. If he sees what we have in our wheelbarrows it might ruin the whole thing. I have to think of a way out of this.
