Aliens in Disguise by Clete Barrett Smith

Author:Clete Barrett Smith [Smith, Clete Barrett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781423180968
Publisher: Disney Hyperion
Published: 2013-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

I looked out the peephole.

Aliens.

The tall one had dusky yellow skin with an enormous round nose and spiky hair. The short one had the same nose, but more of an orange tint. She either had an antigravity beehive hairdo or else there was a traffic cone on her head. And they both had decided to go with the silvery one-piece-jumpsuit look.

The male continued to beat on the door while the little female peeked in the windows. Both of them cast nervous glances back down the road toward town, but the street was empty, as usual.

Leaning my shoulder against the door, I scanned a mental list of the Tourists I’d met so far this summer. It’s hard to keep track of all the aliens that come through here, but I was pretty sure I’d never seen these two. Although I might have met someone from their planet; there was something vaguely familiar about them.

More pounding. What was going on? Maybe they had checked in with someone else a few days ago and then had gone out and gotten lost? That didn’t seem right. Tate would have kept records of—

“Please! Help us!”

I looked through the peephole again. The female was calling through cupped hands pressed against the window.

I cracked the door open a few inches, careful to block the jamb with my shoe so they couldn’t burst in.

“Oh, thank the stars,” the female said. “Quick, open up and let us in.”

Not yet. “What’s going on?”

The male wedged his face into the narrow crack between door and frame, like a dog trying to nose open a door. “We heard this place was a safe haven.” He dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You know…for travelers.”

The female’s face appeared below his. “Travelers from far away.” She gave me a broad wink. “Very far away.”

My weirdo radar, which I thought had been broken by overuse after hanging out at the B&B, was definitely buzzing now. Something was off.

“So…what, are you saying that you’re not guests here?”

“Not as such.”

“But we’d like to be.”

“In fact, it’s urgent—”

“Most urgent.”

“—that we check in.”

“Today.”

“Right now.”

This was too strange. Why hadn’t they arrived in the transporters? I mean, I knew that spaceships existed, because I had seen a couple, but they didn’t visit often. And I’d never seen an alien just show up at the front door.

But wait—Grandma had been running this place for forty years—there were probably lots of things I’d never seen before. What to do?

“How did you get here?”

They glanced at each other, the male looking straight down, the female straight up. Finally they faced me again. The male cleared his throat. “We’re sorry, it’s just that—”

“We’re not in the habit of trusting, you know, humans. No offense intended, you understand.”

Whatever. “Look, you’re the ones who came here, remember? I can shut the door if you’d rather—”

“No!”

“Then how did you get here?” I repeated.

“Well…that’s kind of a long story,” the male said.

“Oh, it is not,” the female said. “Our, uh, vehicle crashed. There, that’s a pretty short story.

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