Wordlessly, in perfect synchronicity every alien’s head turned toward my cousin and raised their light-sabers high.
I cringed and whispered to Grayson, “What are they going to do to him?”
He didn’t answer, and I didn’t look over to read his expression. My eyes were glued to my cousin and the creatures from Krull.
One of the pointy-headed beings broke away from the uniform circle and approached Earl, seeming to glide rather than walk as he moved.
“Are you here to join us, brother?” it said in a deep, almost mechanical baritone.
“Uh, sure,” Earl said.
“Excellent. Follow me.”
“All-righty then,” Earl said. Then he did something that stunned me. He looked back in our direction and winked.
My jaw fell open. I stood and stared, momentarily paralyzed with fear, as my brave, sweet, stupid, idiotic cousin followed the creature away from us and toward the other side of the bonfire.
“I have to keep an eye on him,” I whispered, edging by Grayson, who was peeking out from behind a small cypress tree.
“Right. But stay out of view,” he said, following behind me.
“What are we going to do if this goes south?” I asked, crouched over, pushing my way around a palmetto bush.
“I’m working on it,” Grayson said. “I hadn’t expected so many aliens to come out of that little ship. We’re going to have to see how this plays out.”
“There he is!” I gasped, freezing in my tracks.
Earl was by the fire, kneeling in front of an alien in a golden robe.
“That must be their leader,” Grayson whispered.
We watched from the bushes as the white-robed alien that had made first contact with Earl nudged my cousin with its saber and said something I couldn’t hear.
Earl stuck out his tongue.
My heart sunk.
Oh, God, Earl! This is no time to be a smartass!
I pulled out my Glock. Grayson grabbed my arm.
“Wait, Drex,” he whispered in my ear. “We don’t have a chance against this many of them.”
My body went limp. Grayson was right. There was nothing I could do but watch in horror as the strange figure Grayson called the leader reached a spindly arm toward my cousin. Unlike the others, the leader was thin and bronze-colored—almost as shiny as the golden robe it wore. The being placed something on Earl’s tongue, then tilted its head skyward and let out an unearthly wail—like a yodeler being stuck with a cattle prod.
Suddenly, all the other aliens echoed the leader’s strange call—including Earl! Their haunting shrieks set every hair on my body on end.
I held my breath, expecting to see a light sabre come down on Earl’s neck, and his head go rolling off into the fire.
But that didn’t happen.
Instead, Earl was given a white robe. Then he jauntily joined a group of aliens who were forming a line at the end of a strip of glowing-hot coals.
“Yugan duit, yugan duit!” the creatures began to chant.
One stripped off its robe and made a mad dash across the glowing coals.
My gut fell four inches. Beneath its robe, the alien was wearing overalls. The only thing “out of this world” had been my imagination.
“Yugan duit,” morphed into “You can do it!” as more and more of them stripped off their robes and ran through the hot coals.
I blew out a sigh. These were no alien creatures—not unless Krull was inhabited entirely by middle-aged, flabby white guys.
“What the—?” I muttered to Grayson. But then I spotted Earl in the coal-trotting conga-line and clammed up.
It was his turn to run the gauntlet.
I held my breath, anticipating disaster.
But, to my surprise, like a trooper, Earl high-tailed it through the path of red embers, hooting and hollering the whole way. At the end of his brief, hot-footed journey, he was given back his robe, along with a few hearty claps on the back by his fellow compadres.
As the next guy in line stumbled across the hot coals, Earl put his robe back on and meandered to the edge of the clearing. By some miracle, he managed to choose a spot within earshot of where Grayson and I were hunched over, hiding in the palmetto bushes.
“Psst! Over here,” Grayson said.
Earl’s head turned sideways. “Where you at?”
“Over here,” I said.
“Oh!” Earl fumbled into the woods beside us, a goofy smile on his face, like he’d just come from a spa that offered happy endings or something.
“Boy, howdy,” he said. “I gotta tell ya, that was outta this world!” He stuck his arms out like Frankenstein and smiled admiringly at the robe’s sleeves, as if they were magic. “Bobbie, look at what them nice ol’ aliens done give me!”
Grayson shone a small penlight on Earl, then zeroed in on the robe’s chest pocket.
“Hmm,” Grayson said. “This is worse than I thought.”
I shook my head, finding that hard to believe. “Worse than your lamebrain idea this was an alien invasion from Krull?” I hissed. “Gimme a break!”
“See for yourself,” Grayson said, turning Earl around to face me.
“See what?” I grumbled.
Grayson shone the penlight past Earl’s shoulder and lit up the robe’s pocket. In dark-green embroidery, a three-letter insignia stood out from the white terrycloth.
I blanched. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
“Unfortunately not,” Grayson said. “It appears these men have fallen victim to their own innate fears, egged on by a charismatic leader feeding them false hopes of an unobtainable utopia.”
I stared at the three letters stitched on Earl’s robe pocket.
KFC
“Dear lord,” I said. “Is this some kind of freaky fried-chicken cult?”
“No,” Grayson said. “Something even more unappetizing.”
I grimaced. “More unappetizing than grown people licking their fingers?”
“Yes. By a factor of at least ten.”
I gasped. I glanced back through the bushes at the robed men dancing around the bonfire, then turned back to Grayson. “What do you mean?”
Grayson grabbed my shoulders and stared into my eyes.
“Drex, I believe what we’ve stumbled on here is the genesis of a newly emerging network marketing scheme.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Network marketing?” Garth asked, his mouth hanging open like a bucktoothed Venus
