11. Jody

Chapter 11

Jody

I winced every time I saw Evil Santa hit Aldyn. It was barbaric. Horrible. And a little hot. Not Evil Santa hitting Aldyn. But when Aldyn hit back.

Were his eyes glowing red?

I couldn’t look away, but I had to. Wendy and I needed to find the devices that were the key to our freedom. Aldyn was distracting Evil Santa. It was our job to get us out of there. Jeff couldn’t do much but stay on the floor and try not to groan. I felt bad for the guy. He looked kind of gray, and he clearly needed a doctor. But with the force field around the building, there was no way we could get a doctor in here. We had to stop Evil Santa.

The portal device fell first. Wendy was way faster than me and managed to scramble inside, right near the fighting aliens, and grab it. Then she ran right back to me and we took a look at it. There were a bunch of buttons and some flashing lights. No instructions. Definitely nothing in English.

“Should we smash it?” I asked.

“What if that makes things even worse?” She grimaced as she asked.

Yeah, that was a risk. One I didn’t want to take. I took the device from her and stared at it for a while. No ideas came to me.

And while all that was going on, Evil Santa and Aldyn kept fighting. I heard something else fall to the ground, something small, maybe plastic.

The force field device.

But before either Wendy or I could make a move, Aldyn was being flung down.

I didn’t realize what happened first. How could I have known? But then a shockwave rocked through the store, sending both me and Wendy stepping back a few feet, and then a horrible buzzing sounded. I looked down at the device in my hand and then up to just behind where Evil Santa was standing.

It started as a little pinprick of light, something that might have been an optical illusion. But after just three seconds, it was clear that whatever it was, it was real and growing. The portal.

After less than thirty seconds, it was big enough for a person to crawl through, but it wasn’t a person that was coming out of there. Huge tentacles flopped out and flailed around, one wrapping itself around Evil Santa. At first he seemed confident, but as it tugged on him, his expression shifted. “What’s going on? What’s this?” he demanded.

“It’s your portal thing!” I was afraid to press any buttons, afraid to make anything worse. And I wasn’t about to hand this thing over Evil Santa. Even if he was the only one who knew how to use it.

“You fool! You shifted the settings. Who knows what you have unleashed.” He might’ve had more to say. He might have had more insults or ideas. But the tentacle thing pulled him back through the portal, and for a moment, it disappeared.

I thought maybe we were safe. I took a breath and looked at the device. There had to be a way to turn it off. Or make it bigger. Once it got to two meters wide by two meters tall, it seemed to stop growing. That was good, at least. But I didn’t know what was going to come out of it. We couldn’t just leave a huge portal open in the middle of the store. It was a danger to everyone.

“Figure out how to turn it off!” Aldyn yelled as he scrambled to his feet. He looked like he was about to come my way, but then another tentacle flopped out of the portal and he let out a curse. He took off toward it, those claws in his hands out and ready to do damage.

He had protected us enough. I had to figure this out.

There weren’t many options. Two big buttons and one dial. There seemed to be a few other settings on the side, but I ignored them.

Aldyn let out something like a war cry as he threw himself at the tentacle, slashing at it without any mercy. It retreated, but a second later a second one joined it, and then a third, and then a fourth. Too many for one man to fight. Even a man with claws.

I had to hit something. I punched down on one of the buttons and squeezed my eyes shut, afraid of what it would do. I didn’t hear anything happen, so I had to open my eyes.

Shit.

The portal had definitely grown.

I wasn’t hitting that button again.

Wendy had run up to Aldyn carrying a giant pole that she must have found somewhere. It looked like it was something used to arrange products that were too high up for a person to reach. She jabbed it in towards the tentacles and it seemed to help for a moment. Then one of the tentacles grabbed onto it and tore it out of her hands. There was only one more button.

Either it worked or I screwed us all over.

“Close it, Jody. Do it now.” The tentacles were wrapped all around Aldyn, and they seemed like they were about to pull him through the portal. If they pulled him through there was no getting him back. I didn’t want to think about what was happening to Evil Santa right now. Sure, he had kidnapped us and that definitely wasn’t cool, but being tortured by tentacles was not a fate that anyone deserved.

Okay, well from what I’d seen on the Internet, some people did really want that fate. But this was not the time to think about that.

I pressed the button.

There wasn’t a shockwave this time. Instead, it was like a gust of wind as a door slammed shut. My ears popped, and when I was brave enough to open my eyes, I looked over and saw that Aldyn was standing there with two tentacles wrapped around his arms. But those tentacles didn’t go anywhere. They had been chopped off by the portal closing.

I set the device carefully on the counter. I didn’t want to accidentally open up another portal. But Aldyn looked ready to drop. I rushed over to him and helped pull the tentacles off.

His face was bruised and green blood was splattered over his split lip. His? He was an alien, after all. Maybe his blood wasn’t red.

“Good job,” he told me with a smile, and I didn’t think it was even sarcastic.

“You’re the one who did all the work,” I said.

“I think I need to sit down.” And before he could step towards a chair, he crumpled down to the floor.