Todd Save The Queen
A Short Story by Jonathan Brett
Copyright 2012 Jonathan Brett
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Todd’s back lawn was dark and empty on the warm June night that he decided to call his mother and give her the bad news. He sat on a creaking chair and looked at the empty table and the folded up umbrella. His cell phone sat on the glass table and he, not for the fiftieth time, rehearsed what he would say. The glass of ice tea sweated for him as he went through his speech one more time.
“Mom, I have bad news: I’m going to stop treatments,” he said. He rubbed his head and felt the smoothness of the scalp. He was sure that he was so pale that he glowed in the dark. The ache in his body curled around his bones and settled in like a lazy cat.
Todd reached for the phone and ended up grabbing the glass of iced tea. He took a sip and stood up.
“Maybe I’m crazy,” he said to the empty lawn. “Maybe give it another couple of months. Who knows?”
He knew, though. It was only a matter of time.
Suddenly, the dark lawn was illuminated by a bright light. The grass was thrown into relief and Todd’s eyes hurt to look at the brightness in the sky.
Todd dropped the glass and it shattered on the concrete of the patio. He stepped over the glass and it crunched under his sneakers. He picked up his cell phone and looked at it, but he couldn’t read the face, so he put it down.
“God?” Todd asked the light.
A loud, kind-of nasally voice filled the air: “Hello? Is this thing on?” There was a tapping sound. “Wait there, human! You’re needed for an important mission.”
“I’m on a mission…from God?” Todd asked. He blinked at the light. “And why do you sound like you’re talking through your nose?”
“Because my nose is flat,” the voice said. “Hold on, we have your coordinates.”
“Coordinates? Scotty’s in heaven?” Todd blinked. “And he got a job. Man, I suffer through cancer to get a job in heaven? What happened to eternal rest?”
Suddenly, the light got brighter and Todd had the not-all-that-uncommon feeling of his body being torn apart.
* * *
Todd woke up with another bright light in his face. Some indistinct shapes moved around outside his vision. He felt like he had just come out of another MRI.
“The human’s waking up!” said a voice.
“Should we make sure he came through the beam with his brain intact?”
“I think you conking him on the head when he materialized might have done more damage!”
“Well, I couldn’t figure out the stun setting on my gun and I didn’t want to vaporize him.”
Todd asked: “Is this heaven?”
“No, it’s a spaceship,” said the same nasally voice he had heard earlier.
The light shifted away and Todd still only saw a bright light in the middle of his vision. He sat up and touched his tee shirt and jeans. Somehow, he expected heaven to have more heavenly raiment.
“A spaceship?” Todd asked. He blinked away the light and it was now spots.
“Yes.”
Todd looked over and saw three little gray men with triangular heads and black eyes that blinked from the sides. One of them waved a three-fingered hand. He had a couple of extra stripes on his jumpsuit. He said, “I’m Tom. This is Dick and this is Harry.”
“Tom, Dick, and Harry,” Todd said. He rubbed his eyes. “Is this some kind of joke? If this is the support group’s idea, I don’t find it very supporting.”
“We need your help, human,” Dick said. He moved a holographic display with his small hands and came closer to the bed where Todd sat. “Do you confirm that you have a shaved head?”
“Uh, yeah,” Todd said.
“And you are an American?”
“Uh-huh,” Todd said.
“Great!” Dick said. “Hold still while I run a scan on you. The last human we abducted using the transference beam was materialized with his head on backwards. We fixed that, but it was an awkward couple of hours.”
“Human, exactly how many office buildings have you freed from terrorists?” Harry asked.
“What? None!”
“Can you accurately shoot two guns while flying through the air?” Harry asked.
“I’ve shot guns, but not while flying through the air.”
“What about causing not-flammable items to explode while shooting them and saying a witty one-liner?” Harry asked. He seemed to be reading off some sort of holographic list.
“Um, I think you meant to abduct Bruce Willis,” Todd said.
“So, you’ve never fought off terrorists while barefoot?” Tom asked.
“Uh, no,” Todd said. “I’m currently losing a battle against cancer and was about to quit my job, sell everything, and backpack across the United States until the cancer or some street bum with a switchblade finally gets me.”
The aliens said something in a rapid language. Tom rubbed his hands together and all of them occasionally glanced at Todd or the list in Harry’s hand. Finally, Tom said, “That’s it, we need to fire Doctor Gree’ka’la’balla’tola when we get back home.”
“Who’s Doctor Greek…uh…him? The guy you talked about a second ago?” Todd asked.
Tom sighed. “He’s our cultural advisor. He has a degree in human studies from the University of Bally-bally-Whoo-la. Our university system is woefully underfunded because we’re deciding that people are happier if they’re uneducated. The government finds them to be more easily distracted.”
“That’s what our government is up to, too,” Todd said.
“It’s the galactic recession,” Harry said with a shrug. “Bad fiscal policies. Our new president is an idiot, so he’s trying to make us all idiots, too, so he feels smarter. Doctor Gree’ka’la’balla’tola has so far been wrong on pretty much everything.”
“Like telling you that earth girls are easy,” Dick said.
“Yeah,” Todd said. “I really thought that they would go for a guy with cancer – at least a one-night stand because I could die tomorrow, you know? Nothing.”
“He managed to get a stalker,” Dick said, pointing a thumb at Tom.
“And then there was the whole thing about werewolves,” Harry said.
Tom rubbed his eyes. “Oh, that reminds me – Yama II has three moons. Any idea what that will do to Furball?”
The other two aliens shook their heads.
“Lock him in the bathroom again before we get there,” Tom said.
“What did this doctor say about me?” Todd asked.
“Just that any white American male with a shaved head is a one-man army,” Tom said. He shrugged and adjusted a dial on a holographic screen. It didn’t seem to do anything. “You were so white that we saw you from thirty thousand feet above your house. Once scans confirmed that you had a shaved head and we were in America, we thought we got lucky.”
“He must have watched a few Bruce Willis movies in his university days,” Todd said.
“We should take this human back and abduct this Bruce Willis guy,” Harry said.
“We’re already halfway to Yama II,” Tom said. “We can’t turn around now or they’ll execute her. You don’t want that – and you’re the one who got us into this mess in the first place!”
“Besides,” Dick interrupted, “you remember the last time we t
ried to abduct one of America’s movie stars?”
“Yeah, I got roundhouse kicked to the face,” Tom said. He rubbed his tiny chin. He glanced at Todd. “Never mind, you’re along for the ride, human.”
“Oh, and the scan’s complete!” Dick said. He pressed a couple of holographic buttons and they made important-sounding beeps. “It seems that the beam didn’t quite rematerialize you correctly. It left out a few odd growths that aren’t on the regular human template. It identified them as Cancer. Would you like that back, human?”
“No!” Todd shouted. He grabbed the holographic display and spun it around. Familiar with a million x-rays, Todd looked for the markers that he had been told over and over again was a curable kind of cancer if he just kept spending money and getting sicker and sicker. They were gone. He pointed to some readings. “Are these my vital signs?”
“Yes,” Dick said.
“Can you translate these to English?”
“Uh, yeah, here,” Dick said. He pressed a couple of buttons and the whole display switched from the alien language to English.
Todd read over the readings and compared them to the readings of the scan they took before they beamed him up. He typed in a couple of commands on the interface and the screen flashed: Cancer eradicated. No co-pay necessary.
“You cured my cancer!” Todd screamed. He pushed the screen away and grabbed Tom. He crushed him with a hug. “Thank you! Thank you! I’ll do anything to repay you.”
“The human’s hugging me! Help! What do we do?” Tom screamed.
“I can stun him!” Harry said, pulling out a pistol.
“That’s set to vaporize!” Dick said. “Hang on!”
The last thing Todd remembered was a blur of motion.
“I think blackjacks are more effective than stun rays anyway,” Dick said as Todd passed out.