CHAPTER SIX
The Electric D.R. Fritz
I.
Until Monday morning came, I pretty much stayed in my room. I didn’t want to talk to or see anyone. My mind was blown; did I just watch Mandy Lee die before my eyes at the hands of a alien robot from the Crab Nebula?
I sat on the bus and watched the rain stream across the windows. It was a dark day. The storm clouds had moved in late Sunday afternoon and brought with them some heavy downpours that hadn’t really let up. It was kind of fitting.
I questioned the Professor about Mandy not being in school, and what her parents would say. He simply told me that he’d take care of it. I don’t know how he could, but I had to trust him. He was the only person I could confide in about this stuff now.
Nog told me there was normally a group of five or six Intergalactic Ambassadors. Besides him and myself, there was only Farrow that I knew of – Nog’s old partner who was reported missing. I wanted to know who the other’s were. Maybe we all needed to get together to figure this thing out.
When I got to school, I immediately went to the cafeteria where they served a cold breakfast of stale bagels and orange juice. I didn’t eat anything the day before so I was starving. I paid for my food and took a seat at one of the tables.
“Hey jerk face!” a voice called out from behind me. I turned and looked in mid-bagel bite. It was Radar and his goons. Radar approached with a freshly cut mohawk. I knew I should keep my mouth shut this time because of the trouble that ensued before. Or maybe I should just make peace? That might solve everything.
“Look, Matt, I…”
“Everyone calls me Radar, cause that’s my name. I expect you to call me that too, ya butt,” Radar said with a malicious grin. His pals cracked up.
“Radar,” I continued, “I’m sorry about last time. I think we got off on the wrong foot.”
“How’d you like to get off on no foot? Cause I’m gonna break yours right off if you ever call me a jerk again. Got it, nerd?” Radar said.
This guy was ridiculous. “Whatever.”
Radar then knelt down next to me. “You’ll never be cool, Scout. Not like me. You wanna know how cool I am? I mean, besides my mohawk?” Radar stood up and crossed his arms. “I wear sunglasses when I take craps.”
Instantly, his goons laughed hard. Even Radar got a chuckle out if it. Did he really just say that? That wasn’t even funny. I actually didn’t even get it.
“Come on, guys,” Radar shouted to his friends, “Let’s go find Chuckles and mess with him!” They turned and laughed as they disappeared into the cafeteria.
As quickly as they left, Phil arrived and sat next to me. I watched as he pulled out a tuna sandwich from his lunch bag and started to eat it.
“Is that your breakfast?” I asked.
“No,” Phil said with a full mouth. “Where’s Chuck?”
“I don’t know. But wherever he is, he’s doomed. Radar and his gang are going to mess with him.”
“Poor Chuck.”
“Poor all of us. Why does it feel like were the only ones who ever get picked on?”
“I don’t know,” Phil said, licking his fingers clean of some rogue tuna salad. “I wouldn’t let it bother you though.”
“How can you say that? That guy annoys me so much.”
“He’ll get what’s coming to him,” Phil said, pulling out a second tuna sandwich from his lunch bag.
“How can you be sure?”
“Scout, when my parents were in high school, my mom was bullied all the time about the way she looked. She was fat like me and wore ridiculous clothes like me. She even had a ponytail like me. When she grew up, she started her own company, and now works at home making bags of money each year. I call her Money-Bags Mom. She’s very well respected.
“My dad on the other hand was a bully. He’d pick on kids until there was literally nothing left to do. He got in fights, got detention each week – he amounted to nothing, ended up cheating on my mom, got kicked out of the house and now eats dinners at soup kitchens. So you see, when I get picked on, I just imagine how different our lives will be ten years from now.”
Phil had a point. I kind of admired it. I always wondered why the fact that people picked on him never bothered him. Phil broke my thought concentration:
“Did Chuck give you a turtle mustache shirt? Those things are awesome.”
II.
I sat in astronomy class studying Mandy’s empty seat. What was Nog going to do about it all? What about Mandy’s parents? This could get complicated very quick.
Nog stood up in front of the class as the period was down to only a minute or so left. He was surprisingly upbeat.
“Alright guys, lets see if we can crank out a pop quiz real fast. Everyone pull out a sheet of paper and a number two!”
A class-wide moan lead to kids slowly pulling out their papers and pencils. They thought if they took their time getting the stuff out, maybe the bell would ring before Nog had a chance to quiz us. And it did. The bell rang and everyone stood up.
“Ah, rats! Next time you guys, next time,” Nog said, pointing at a random student when he said that. I waited a moment so I’d be the last one out of the room. Nog was gathering up his things and putting them in his briefcase. I walked to the doorway rather slowly and saw him flip a switch near the chalkboard turning off some of the lights in the room. This was weird. He normally had another class come in right after us.
“What’s going on, Professor? Where are you going?” I asked.
“Oh, Scout. How’d you like my lecture on Uranus?” he said.
“It was okay. Where are you going? What about your next class?”
“Oh, I have Mr. Hatcher over in the Physics room taking them in for an extra study hall. I have a meeting.”
“With who?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Tell me.”
“Why do you have to know everything?”
“Does it have to do with aliens?”
“Yes.”
“Then I should know.”
Nog sighed and sat his briefcase down. “I don’t think Mandy is dead. If you want to know more, come by the classroom after school tomorrow. That’s all I can say for now.”
I smiled with hopeful relief. “Sounds good.”
Nog picked up his briefcase and shoved me out of the room. He closed his door and locked it, double-checking it a few times. He was quick to vanish down the hall and out of sight.
Someone tapped my shoulder and I turned around to see Phil. He looked flustered.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Chuck,” he said, out of breath.
What about Chuck?
Phil and I stood outside in the courtyard where Chuck was literally hung from the flagpole in nothing but a very tight – and revealing – pair of patriotic underwear. Students who caught wind of the situation were outside laughing. Poor Chuck; this was the doing of Radar and his squad of boogers. I hated them.
I turned to Phil. “Is this something that you can just ignore?”
Phil looked angry. This actually started to bother him. “Radar’s a dead man. Scout, we need to get revenge. This is Chuck were talking about here.”
I nodded and looked back up at Chuck soaring in the wind above the courtyard. It was wrong, but Phil was right. We needed to plot some revenge.
III.
After the bus dropped me off at home, I walked the couple miles to Chuck’s house. I wanted to make sure he was okay. I could only imagine how humiliated being strung up on the flagpole must have been. He probably had a lot to get off his chest.
I knocked on the front door and Chuck’s mom answered and said that he had left just a few minutes ago. I wondered for a moment where he might have gone, but then I realized it was obvious.
Jakon’s Comics and Collectables was open for business, and I’m sure some of that business was coming from Chuck. I walked in, and the place was empty as usual.
Jakon stood behind the counter reading the latest issue of what appeared to be called Jack Hammer and the Underwater Rebellion. Hm. He looked up at me.
“Oh, hey there. Are you looking for Chuck?” he asked.
“Yeah, is he here?”
Jakon pointed to the back of the store where I noticed Chuck was sitting against the wall. I thanked Jakon for pointing me in the right direction, and then I noticed the once empty shirt rack next to the checkout counter had dozens of Chuck’s mustache turtle t-shirts hanging on it.
“Have his shirts been selling?” I asked Jakon.
“I can’t keep them in stock. This is a fresh order. I think I’m going to have him create a new design,” Jakon responded.
I smiled for Chuck, and then went to see him in the back of the store. He was sitting on the floor reading a comic book.
“Hey, Chuck. You okay, boss-man?” I asked.
He didn’t look up from his book.
“That could’ve happened to anyone,” I said.
He looked up. “Really? Cause I doubt it. It was bound to happen, and it was bound to happen to me. This is what high school is going to be like for the next four years, Scout. One month in and I hate it already.”
I didn’t really know what to say, except, “Was it Radar?”
“Yeah, that jerk. If my mom didn’t show up the other day, I would have beat him up, that’s for sure,” Chuck said, confident in the heat of anger. I knew he wouldn’t have, for dozens of reasons, but I let him vent.
I noticed he was blinking heavily again, similar to the way he was on the first day of school. It must have been nerves or stress or something. He checked his Batman watch and then reached into his pocket and pulled out a pill bottle. He popped a pill and put the bottle away.
“You doing drugs?” I asked, wondering what it was he was taking.
“It’s prescribed.”
“For what?”
Chuck hesitated for a moment, and then caved. “I have some Tourettes.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, but just a smidge. Don’t tell anyone, please. I’m like five shades of embarrassed by this.”
“You shouldn’t be.”
“It’s lead to more nicknames and wet willies than I can even begin to mention.”
“You have a lot going for you, Chuck. I don’t see Radar selling shirts off the shelves at any store. I’m sure your making some money off of it.”
“A little. Like fifty percent.”
“That’s fifty percent more than Radar. You have a lot to be proud of. He doesn’t. You’ll go somewhere in life, and he won’t. Phil explained it to me.”
Chuck thought about it for a minute and then smiled. He stood up. “Thanks, Scout.”
“You’re welcome. Plus, Phil and I are already starting some revenge.”
“I like it!” Chuck said excited. He put the comic back on the shelf. “Hey, I heard Mandy moved to Europe. Is that true?”
Europe? That’s what Nog came up with?
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “She certainly did.”
Chuck put his hand on my shoulder, “Sorry things didn’t work out. You must have been a lousy lover for the girl to want to leave the country.”
Oh, Chuck, if you only knew.
IV.
The next day, school ended and I killed some time by my locker. Once the halls cleared out enough, I headed up to Nog’s room. The door was open so I let myself in. Nog wasn’t there yet. I set my backpack down on the floor next to his desk and walked back to the large metal door.
My God! It was opened a crack. Nog would kill me if I opened it all the way, so I just peered through the crack, but all I could see was black. It was completely dark in there.
“What did you see?” Nog’s voice called from behind me. I swung around and saw him in the front of the room setting his briefcase down next to the wall.
“Nothing,” I said. “It was opened when I got here.”
“Opened?” Nog came jogging through the room and to the metal door. He looked the door over, up and down many times; I wasn’t really sure what he was looking at. He put his hands on it and pushed it shut, locking the door back into place.
“This isn’t good. This isn’t good at all,” Nog said, shaking his head and walking back to his desk. I followed him and sat down in the chair next to his desk.
“What’s going on?” I asked. Nog closed the classroom door, locked it, and walked over to his chalkboard. There was a small picture – a crudely drawn solar system, obviously by some kid – taped to the wall right next to it. He removed the picture to reveal a small white button. He pressed it once and his entire chalkboard turned into a video screen. There was snow on it, like a TV with bad reception, before the actual video feed kicked into full gear.
It was night vision surveillance footage that showed a room, similar to the size of the classroom, with something strange in the middle of it. It looked to me like some sort of…robot? A very humanoid looking robot.
As the rest of the information on screen appeared piece by piece, I saw the time – which was real-time – and a name at the bottom of the screen, which read: D.R. Fritz.
“Who’s Doctor Fritz?” I asked.
“It’s not, Doctor Fritz, Scout. It’s D.R. Fritz – Defense Robot Fritz,” Nog said, pointing to the back of the classroom. “This is video footage from that closet you’re so unhealthily obsessed with.”
I looked back at the bolted metal door. That’s what was in there? A robot? My first thoughts were dead on! Good job, me!
“What’s it for?” I asked.
“We created it as part of our defense against the aliens. It’s built to take heavy fire, and return that heavy fire. It has an artificial intelligence and is made out of space-age materials that will allow it to leave our atmosphere and return massive amounts of awesome space and alien information to us. It had tons of mechanical issues in its early form, so we named it Fritz.”
I studied the inactive robot on the screen – it wasn’t doing anything. Almost like it didn’t work, or was broke. “Is it on the fritz again or something?” I asked, “Cause it’s just sitting there.”
Nog looked at Fritz on the screen and noticed it too. “No, it usually sparks, or parts of it explode when it’s on the fritz. It looks to me like it’s been deactivated. That’s why I said ‘this isn’t good’. Someone has clearly seen it and messed with it.”
“But who?”
“No clue, Scout,” Nog said, pressing the white button again and turning off the video feed. “I’ll have to start an investigation – I don’t know how anyone but the E.I.A.’s know about D.R. Fritz.”
Nog sat down at his desk and sighed really loud; he was stressed.
“Um, so Professor, what was your meeting about today?”
“I’ll cut to the chase, man. We want to send you there,” Nog barely explained.
“Where?”
“Bethani.”
Was the Nogster joking around or was he dead serious? He wanted to send me, a high school freshman, to the Crab Nebula? “You’re joking, man,” I said, nervously laughing.
“Not even a little bit, my brotha. We’ve been working on sending someone to Bethani for years. We have reason to believe that your girlfriend, Mandy Lee, wasn’t in fact incinerated before our very eyes, but instead, teleported to their home planet. I also think that my partner, Farrow, met the same intergalactic fate.”
“Can’t you go, or someone else from the E.I.A. for that matter? Who else is part of this by the way?” I stumbled over all of my words.
“I can’t go because with my age, the chances of something going wrong are only increased. Same thing with Principal Smidgeon.”
“So the Smidge is part of this…” I said out loud, confirming my suspicions.
“Yeah, the Smidge is. I got him involved when I was transferred here. I can’t tell you the others just yet, just to protect them for the time being.”
I shook my head. There were too many secrets involved in this – too many ridiculous ones.
“Scout, on Saturday night, I need you to come to my farmhouse on Rhodes Road. It’s the one with the really long white fence. We’ve been working on a little something that can make the trip to Bethani, and I think we’ve perfected it. We need you to bring back Farrow and Mandy,” Nog said.
I just sat there, concerned, nervous and absolutely blown away by what I was hearing. Within the week, I could be in space fighting a species of dangerous aliens that we didn’t know much about.