Touched by an Alien

need to relax. It was fun. And your expressions were priceless.”
    “Jeff wouldn’t find it funny.”
    “No, he’d find it hilarious. And if he’d been in the cab with me, he’d have let me ‘hide.’ ”
    “I’m not Jeff.”
    I patted his cheek. “I know. But I like you anyway.”
    We got inside, and I took a look around. “Someone’s been in here.”
    “How can you tell? It was a mess when I was here before, it’s a mess now.”
    “It’s my mess, and it’s been moved.” Only a bit, but everything was moved a bit. I took his hand. “In case we have to leave quickly,” I explained as he gave me a panicked look.
    We walked through. All my fish were dead. “Overfeeding?”
    “Maybe. Maybe they think I love my fish.”
    “Who could love fish?”
    “Someone, I’m sure, just not me.” I moved us through the apartment, opening everything carefully. We got into the bedroom. No one there. I pulled out a suitcase, shook it out, and then started to toss clothes into it. I moved all my pictures into another bag. There wasn’t that much more I needed, though I grabbed my spare hairspray and put it in my purse.
    Christopher checked under the bed. “Nothing. You sure stuff’s been moved?”
    “Yeah. You sure you didn’t see anything foreign on anything I packed?”
    “No, all your concert T-shirts are devoid of suspicious powders.”
    “I packed other things.”
    “But nothing else carefully.”
    I looked at my bed. “Christopher? I think there’s something in my bed.”
    “Bomb?”
    “Could be.” No sooner had I said that than whatever it was moved under the covers. I managed not to scream.
    Christopher looked at it closely. “Are you afraid of snakes?”
    “Pathologically.”
    “That popular knowledge?”
    “I’m a girl, the bet is always good for snake fear.”
    “It’s a snake, then.”
    “Rattler?”
    “Most likely.”
    I was taking this extremely well. “We have to kill it. By we, of course, I mean you. I’ll stand here and scream.”
    “No screaming. Screaming tells the people watching your apartment you’ve found their gift.”
    “Oh, great.”
    “I don’t want to let go of you. You’re right, we’re going to have to move fast. But I need something to use to cut the snake’s head off.”
    “You think you can do that?”
    “Um, yeah. Hyperspeed and all.”
    Duh. “Right. I have knives in the kitchen.”
    “No, needs to be in this room. I think if we go back into the kitchen, we’ll be dead.”
    “Why?”
    “I can hear ticking.”
    The Nareemas were not only the landlords but the owners of the entire building. Since they’d come from that very war-torn country and were total paranoids, they were well trained in hasty exits. They routinely made the tenants practice emergency escapes—a small price to pay for great apartments in a great location at a very reasonable rate.
    In addition to the drills, all the apartments had an emergency alarm installed, always in the kitchen and bedroom areas, high enough up that most kiddies couldn’t reach the pull levers but most adults could.
    The emergency alarm sounded vastly different from the fire alarm, and the Nareemas literally made each tenant sign a contract that if they heard the emergency alarm, they would grab all living creatures, only, and run like hell out of the building. They kept a roster of all the living things. I hadn’t included my fish on the list, but if you considered a cockroach a pet, the Nareemas had it marked on your lease.
    If the building was going to go, I was going to clear out my neighbors if at all possible, and the snake could fend for itself.
    I looked around quickly. Anything else I had to have before it blew to smithereens? I grabbed my laptop bag after a quick examination that showed no bombs or slitheries. Because I traveled a lot for work, it contained my passport and all my personal information, and it was also where I stored checkbooks and other important things. I cleared out some more clothes and shoes, filling my five-piece luggage set to the brim.
    “How do you expect us to carry all this?” Christopher asked as I continued to pack like mad one-handed.
    “You sling this one over your neck,” I put my garment bag over him, “and you hold the really big rolling one.” I slung my purse over my neck to one side and the laptop bag over my neck to the other. Cosmetics bag that actually contained my personal care items hooked through the smaller bag that hooked to the medium