The Halloween Rebel

"Die you vile creature of the night!!!" The black coat swirled around as the vampire hunter spun quickly upon his victim. The vampire turned; his eyes blood red and his teeth dripping crimson from his morning kill. He hissed at the hunter as he tried to leap away, but the hunter was quicker. He grabbed the vampire by his cloak and pulled him back. The vampire turned to fight but it was too late, the hunter thrust forward with a stake and pinned the vampire to the wall.

"How dare you hunt in my presence? I'll enjoy watching you..."

"Billy Jenkins you stop that this instant!!! Take that stake out of Fred right now and get back to your desk! Fred, you need to wait for lunch time to start hunting, you know it is not fair to the other kids."

"Sorry Mrs. Bullfinch." Billy pulled the stake out of Fred who groaned a bit. Bloodshot out of the hole in his chest as the stake came out and got all over Sally's desk. She was a princess and did not appreciate the blood, she screamed and then fainted and Mrs. Bullfinch had to send her to the nurse.

"Sorry Mrs. Bullfinch." Fred mumbled when he could talk again."You children are all just lucky I don't turn you into frogs! Or stick you in my oven!!! Honestly, sometimes you are all more trouble than you are worth!!! Now back to our spelling words!" Mrs. Bullfinch turned and her long crooked nose almost hit the blackboard as she began to write our spelling list.

Class had been a little weird for the last week, ever since Halloween when the whole world changed. You see Halloween had been a little different this year. Sure, everyone still dressed up, we go all out for Halloween in my town, and everyone dresses up, even the adults. The kids all went out trick-or-treating, the teenagers and adults went to parties, all of that was the same, what was different was the meteor.

At first, the whole sky had gotten bright, everyone looked up to see the pretty colors dancing across the sky, and then there was a bright flash, a loud BOOM, and then a huge falling star streaked across the sky! It got bigger and bigger until it looked like it was going to smash our whole town! People started to panic. Then, just as quickly as it appeared the meteor seemed to explode! Sparkling dust fell all around and everyone watched as it rained a fine powder, almost like snow across our whole town.

We really don't know the extent of things. We haven't been able to make contact with anyone outside our town. And at first it was okay, we were all alive and unharmed. It wasn't until the next morning that things became odd. People were running around, still in their costumes, and then people began to act like they really thought they were what they were dressed up as.

That was a strange Sunday. In my Sunday school class, I had three spidermen, two werewolves, who by the way kept scratching flees off onto everyone, and a whole host of other ghouls and goblins you would never expect to see in church. You may be asking yourself, what about me, what was I dressed up as? Nothing. I was just plain old me, Alex Bowman, the ten-year-old Halloween rebel!

Like I said before Halloween was a big thing in our town, there are huge costume contests and everyone tries to outdo everyone else with their costumes. It starts early in the year, people start planning out their costume, and how they are going to have a better one than everyone else, I just couldn't take it any longer! This year when my mom asked me what I wanted to be I told her nothing, I refused to dress up this year! She tried to talk me out of it, and tried everything she could think of to get me into the spirit of things, but I stuck to my guns. The Friday before Halloween, which was on a Saturday this year, everyone at school was dressed up, and I just sat there, getting funny looks. My best friend Jason, who was dressed up as Jack Sparrow from "The Pirates of the Caribbean" came and sat with me at lunch.

"So you're really not going to dress up this year?" Jason looked shocked at the idea of someone not participating in the town tradition. "I figured your mom would get you to cave."

"Nope, not me, she says I've got a head harder than titanium." I smiled at him and knocked on my head.

"What are you going to do about trick-or-treating? No one will give you candy if you're not dressed up!" The look on Jason's face said that not getting candy on Halloween would be the end of the world. Jason really liked candy. I had tried telling him he was a bit to round to be Jack Sparrow, but he wouldn't listen.

"I'm not going. I'm going to hang out in the tree house and read. I'll just steal some of my sister's candy."

That is exactly what I did too. I boycotted everything Halloween. I stayed home and I saw the meteor from my tree house window. Now I kind of wish I would have dressed up, at least then I would have cool powers like everyone else. Of course, not everyone was happy being who they had dressed up as, some people had it a lot worse than me, like my parents.

My whole town has turned upside down in the last week. People running around thinking their costumes are real. Superheroes could suddenly use the powers of the people they were dressed up as, monsters and ghouls were running amok, and it seemed as if people couldn't really get hurt either. I had seen vampires staked, like in class, werewolves shot, I even saw a Spiderman get hit by a car and walk away without a scratch. If someone did get wounded, they were perfectly fine by the next day. It was really strange.

Despite all of this, life still seemed to go on close to normal, we still had school, and adults still went to work, it was as if everything had changed, but at the same time, nothing had. I was seriously missing out. Since I hadn't dressed up, I had no powers or anything, I was still just plain old me.

Another thing that worried me was my parents. They had gone out on Halloween, my dad was dressed as bacon, and my mom was dressed as eggs. And now that's exactly what they were, it hadn't happened instantly, but on Monday morning, I went to find them and all I found in their bed was breakfast. I put them up in a safe place, where my little sister wouldn't eat them, but I had to take care of everything since they weren't here. It had been a week now and I was really starting to hope things would go back to normal. At least my little sister hadn't been dressed as anything to weird on Halloween. She had gone out dressed as a carebear, so other than being constantly on the chipper side, she wasn't too much trouble.

Thank goodness it was Friday. We had been having this odd school for a week and I was ready for a break. As soon as I got home I was planning on getting on my computer and trying to find out any news I could get from the outside world. Besides that, we had some new neighbors move into the creepy Jones house at the end of the street on Monday, and I was wondering if they were normal like me, or weird like everyone else.

The bell rang and I jumped up and grabbed my stuff and then I ran for the door. I grabbed my skateboard from the rack outside and took off, eager to get away from that place. As I coasted down the sidewalk Jason walked past, obviously drunk and waving a bottle of rum about while singing the dead man's chest song. I really hoped things would get back to normal quick; it was hard to have a drunken pirate as a best friend.

I rolled on down to my street and was headed for my house when a bright flash of light from the Jones house distracted me. I let my board roll to a stop and stood there looking at the house. A few seconds later there was another bright flash and a small explosion from inside the house. I sat down on my board and watched to see if anything else would happen. There were several more clatters and clangs and a few more flashes and bangs. After a while, I got bored and decided to coast on home. I was going to go up to the Jones place later anyways and introduce myself, I could find out then what was going on.

I rolled up our driveway and went into the house through the garage. I stopped by the fridge to say hi to Mom and Dad, who were staying pretty fresh for week old breakfast food. I grabbed a snack, not Mom or Dad (I also avoided the fuzzy sandwich in the corner and the moldy pie), and went out to my treehouse to watch the afternoon madness in my neighborhood. Mr. Thompson next door had dressed as a zombie and so now from time to time, he chased people about the neighborhood trying to eat their brains. He stumbled towards my tree house, but I dropped a brick on his head and that made him decide to go chase the mailman, who for some reason was dressed in a ballerina outfit complete with pink tutu. I watched as he danced away, and then I turned my attention over to the Jones house. All of the noise and light seemed to have stopped. There was still a bit of time before my sister got home, so I decided now was as good a time as any to go introduce myself.

I climbed down from my tree house, after making sure Mr. Thompson was nowhere around, and went into the house. I grabbed my board and went out the front door. I rolled down the sidewalk and right up to the old Johnson house. I had been afraid of this place until a week ago, but now that there were real monsters and ghosts everywhere else, it seemed silly to be afraid of a house.

I was just about to knock on the door, when another bang from inside the house made me jump off of the porch and duck behind the hedges. I peeked over the top and saw more flashes of light. They looked like they were coming from the kitchen so I decided to do a little recon before knocking on the door. If these people were normal like me then everything would be okay, but if they weren't then they could be any kind of monster. I snuck back to the back of the house, nearly tripping over a water hose and slowly peaked into the kitchen window.

At first, it was dark inside, and I couldn't see anything. Then a light built up in the middle of the room. The whole kitchen had been torn apart. It looked like the floor was ripped out too. In the middle of the room, going down into the basement was a huge machine. I didn't know what it was, but it looked massive. The light kept getting brighter and suddenly I saw something float up from the basement. It had purple skin, and about ten long tentacles. Each tentacle looked like it had sharp barbs on the end. The creatures head was large and had a beak for a mouth, with a sharp pointy tip. It was bigger than a human, at least ten feet tall and appeared to be able to fly, or at least hover. The flashes of light were coming from something in its hand. It looked like a tool of some kind. The creature was building the massive machine. The creature reached the tool forward and it made a bright flash. I covered my eyes and stepped back, blinded by the flash and bumped into something. It felt like a person and I turned around quickly to see who I had bumped.

"Sorry," I turned more blinking to get the flashes out of my eyes "I didn't know anyone was ..." I stopped talking as I realized I was staring at another creature, just like the one in the house, and it was looking at me. This one was a lot smaller than the other, only a little taller than me, but it looked just as menacing.

"It's okay, you didn't see me. You were too busy spying on my dad." The creature looked at me and smiled, at least I think he smiled it was hard to tell on a beak. "You should probably get out of here before he catches you. It is almost his snack time."

"You mean he eats people?" I had seen some weird stuff in the last week, so that wasn't much of a stretch.

"Ya, almost all of my kind does." The creature looked a bit sad, "I don't though, I'm a vegetarian, but don't tell anyone, Dad doesn't want the other generals to know. He says they would eat me for not wanting to eat meat."

"That sucks, hopefully, this whole costume thing will be over soon and you will go back to normal. Then you won't have to worry about it."

"Yeah... well, you had better run, but it was nice to meet you, where do you live?"

"Three houses down, in 1264. Hey, do you want to come see my tree house? You seem like a pretty nice monster." I grinned at him, but he still looked kind of sad.

"I can't go right now, Dad will be looking for me, but I might sneak away later, you seem different."

"Okay well, I'll see you later then, bye." I couldn't quite figure it out but something wasn't quite right with these guys, hopefully, he would come over later and I could figure it out. I grabbed my board from beside the house and ran back to the sidewalk and jumped on it to ride home.

A few hours later, with my sister home and fed, I went back out to my tree house to read. I was just about to climb up the ladder when something grabbed my ankle. I jumped and turned around to see the smaller creature from the Johnson house. He looked like he was smiling again.

"Hi! Sorry to scare you like that," He looked like he was grinning and not really sorry at all, "That's how we shake hands where I come from, well not really hands, but you get the idea." He made a weird noise in the back of his throat; it took me a second to figure out that he was laughing.

"Well," I said in my best I'm serious voice, "It's not polite to sneak up on people." I tried my best to look like my mom when she said it, and the creature made that noise again. I climbed up the ladder and opened the hatch and then hung upside down out of the opening. "Are you coming up? Or can't you do anything useful with those things?" I pointed at his tentacles and then pulled myself back into the tree house. In the blink of an eye, he had scaled the ladder and was in the tree house sticking his tongue out at me.

"Normally I don't eat people, but I'm thinking I'm going to have to make an exception for you." He grinned at me and made that strange laughing noise again.

We sat down, well I sat down, he kind of slunked, and I showed him my books and stuff. He seemed really interested in all of it, which is kind of weird because it is just normal stuff. I decided I would find out a little bit about them.

"So where did you guys move here from?" He looked at me a little funny, but then again all of his looks were funny.

"Were not from Earth, I'm not supposed to tell anyone that, but then again I'm not supposed to talk to you guys at all, Dad says your just the buffet. Yuck!" He stuck out his tongue and made a face. Okay, another person who thinks they are what they were dressed as, great!

"Well, as soon as this Halloween stuff is over and we all go back to normal you will probably remember where you're really from." I shrugged and started to flip through one of my boy's life magazines.

"No really, we are from the planet Grarnack. We came here to invade. It was our ship that caused everyone to change. It's a diversion so Dad can set up his dimensional gateway. In a few hours, an army will be here." The creature looked kind of sad. Okay, this was a bit extreme. Maybe things were getting worse. So far people had not forgotten who they were before, only started thinking they were something else as well.

"Okay space boy, what is your name then?" I turned and looked at him, expecting a normal name.

"It's hard to say in your language. It is Schellnork, sort of, that is as close as I can get." He really stressed the sch sound so it sounded really weird, definitely not a normal name. I sat and stared at him for a minute or so, trying to figure out what to do or say.

Okay, so now I have two options, I can believe that he is bonkers, and write it off to more craziness from the meteor, or I can believe him, in which case the world is about to end. The look on his face, alien as it was is what finally convinced me. He looked really sad, for some reason I couldn't believe he was just nuts. I swallowed a big lump in my throat before I spoke.

"I've got to pee." With that said I got up and walked to the balcony of my tree house. As I was peeing I heard that strange laugh again. I looked beside me and he was standing there watching me pee.

"Hey, you have a little tentacle too!" He reached a tentacle over to poke it and I slapped it away.

"Hey now here we don't play with other people's "tentacles" without their permission and you never call them little!!! Dad told me it was regular sized!" With that, I zipped and turned around as he made that weird laughing sound again. "So you really are telling me the truth, aren't you?"

Schell looked sad again and nodded his head. This was just too much for me to process, here I was, the only normal person, in our area and possibly on the whole planet for all I knew, and Earth was about to be invaded. I had to do something, but what? I was just a kid, what could I do to stop an alien invasion? There had to be a way.

"Okay, first off, I'm going to call you Schell, cause your name is too long, second off, do you want them to invade, or can you help me stop them?"

"I don't want them to invade, but if I try to stop them, my dad would get really mad, I don't like it when he's mad. Last time I lost a tentacle."

"Okay, well what if we could think of a way to get your dad to go home and to leave you here?"

"Well, there could be a way, but it would be hard."

"Well, I figure anything we do is going to be hard. I don't know anything about your Dad's plan or technology. I can't stop him without you." I looked over at Schell, hoping he wanted to help.

"Well, the gate only works one way at a time. If we sneak in and flip the wires, it would open a gate from here to our planet instead of the other way. Dad would have to lean close to the gate to fix it, and if we were quick we could push him through and unplug the gate so they couldn't use it. Then I could turn everyone back to normal, but we would have to be really careful. If Dad doesn't go through the gate, you're a snack and I'm probably dessert."

"Hmm, it could work, but couldn't he just bring another ship?"

"Well he could, but it would take him another thousand years to get here. That's how long it took us."

"You're a thousand years old?" I couldn't believe it, I mean sure I didn't know much about aliens, but he seemed so much like me I had assumed we were the same age.

"Well, kind of. We were asleep for the trip so to us it only seemed like a couple of days."

"Oh, okay, still weird, but okay. So if this works we can buy the Earth another thousand years?"

"Yup!" He seemed to grin at this, "and I wouldn't have to worry about being a vegetarian! I could stay here where you are all vegetarians!"

"Well, that's not exactly true. We eat meat, just not meat that can talk to us." I grinned at him and he looked a little sad again. "But don't worry, we have no trouble with people that want to be vegetarians, there are lots of them out there," I told him that and he seemed happy again.

"Well, what are we waiting for? We have work to do! Come on follow me back to my house. I'll show you which wires to flip, and then you sneak in and flip them while I distract my Dad."

We climbed down from the tree house and ran back in my house. I checked on my sister who was busy shooting rainbows out of her belly button or some such nonsense. I grabbed my board and a toolkit out of my room and we headed off for the Johnson house. We went around by the fence, making sure to keep low. Now that I knew what Schell's dad was up to I didn't want him to find me and ruin our chances of saving Earth. We snuck up to the same window I had looked into before. Schell made a strange gasping sound and I looked at him.

"He's got it built, we don't have much time. He's probably calling home now!" Schell started to slide around to the basement access at the side of the house. I followed him.

He opened the door and started down the stairs, when he came into the main chamber of the basement I heard a loud snarl. Schell made a similar noise back and they went back and forth for a while. I'm guessing that it was Schell's native language. After a few minutes, Schell started to go further into the basement. He used one of his tentacles to point me in the direction he wanted me to go as he and his dad started to float up to the kitchen. Schell had told me what to look for on the way over, so as soon as I was hidden behind the machine, I quickly found the wires. One was a red wire and the other was a blue wire. Schell had told me to simply flip them and it would reverse the gate. I pulled the red and the blue and stuck them in the opposite places. Now, all we had to do was get his dad to go through the gate. I snuck out and looked around the basement. There wasn't much to work with, but when I got around to the other side of the garage I was in luck. Someone had hung a punching bag here at some point. I checked it out and it seemed sturdy. If I jumped on it from the other side I could make it swing just enough to catch Schell's dad and hopefully knock him through the gate. I found a place to hide over on that side of the room as Schell and his dad floated back down. They talked some more in that snarling language and then Schell's dad started messing with some controls. I got ready to go and Schell looked over and saw me. He nodded and then signaled for me to wait.

The door to the gateway made a loud whoosh when it opened, and it was amazingly bright. Schell's dad looked at it, and made a growling noise. He snarled at Schell for a bit and Schell snarled back some. Schell's dad reached a tentacle over and smacked Schell, knocking him down and then he bent forward close to the gate and began messing with the wires.

Now was my chance. I pushed off of the wall with everything I had. I jumped hitting the bag full force which knocked the wind out of me but the bag flew forward and hit its target. Schell's dad turned suddenly and caught the bag, but the force of the impact knocked him back into the gate. He would have gone through, but he was able to cling to the bag and hold himself here. Schell jumped over and grabbed his dad's hands, and he got them to come loose, but they grabbed Schell and started to pull him through the gate.

I jumped off of the bag and grabbed Schell's other tentacles. I tried to pull him free, but the pull of the gate was to strong. We started to slide towards the gate. I tried planting my feet, but there wasn't enough traction. This was it. The front part of Schell was almost to the gate. Suddenly all of the pull quit, and Schell and I fell backward into the basement. Schell jumped up and ran to the wall. He pulled the big power source out of the wall and the gate turned off with a loud crack.

I got up off of the floor and looked over at Schell. He looked surprised and somewhat happy. "What happened? I thought we were both going through that thing."

"Well, on the way through the gate I told my Dad I was sorry, but that I liked it here on Earth. He said if I liked it so much I could stay, at least that way, he said, I wouldn't bring disgrace to the family by being a vegetarian. Before he let go he smiled at me and told me good luck, then he just pushed me back. I never thought he cared about me, but he did!" Schell looked up at me and looked like he had been crying.

"That is awesome... Hey wait, we did it!!! We saved the Earth, just you and me stopped an alien invasion!"

"Ya... we did! Now I can turn everything back to normal." With that Schell walked over to another machine and turned it off. It quit making the hum it was making and the lights slowly turned off. "There that should do it, by tomorrow everyone should be back to normal, now just one more thing." Schell picked up something that looked like a gun, "I need to borrow your clothes and I need you to shoot me with this." Schell handed me the gun.

"I can't shoot you! Why do you want me to shoot you? And why do you need my clothes?"

Schell made that funny noise in the back of his throat again, laughing at me. "The gun is a conversion ray. It works kind of like the machine over here, only it only affects what or who you shoot, and it is permanent. I need your clothes so I can dress up like a human for Halloween." With that he began to help me undress. Soon He was wearing my clothes as best he could. I pointed the ray at him and told him good luck, and then I pulled the trigger. A couple seconds past and nothing happened, and then Schell began to change. He turned pink, then peach. His tentacles began to grow together. He grew hair on his head. His face changed. Suddenly, I stood facing another boy, one that looked a lot like me. There were a few changes, he gave himself green eyes, and his face was a bit different, but we could definitely have been brothers.

"Well, how do I look?" Schell turned around and showed off.

"That's amazing! You look a lot like me, but different!"

"Well we didn't want two of you running around, we were trying to save the world remember?"

"Five days on Earth and you are a comedian? Give me back my clothes!" Schell laughed a human laugh and looked at me.

"You'll be jealous." He winked at me and started taking off my clothes to give them back.

"Why would I be Jealous of you? I'm the real human here!" I jumped at him and snatched my shirt.

"Ya, but I've got a bigger tentacle!" He grinned and threw me my shorts, then ran for the door that led out of the basement.

We made our way back to my house, me in my clothes and him in my boxers. So far everything looked the same. We made it to the house just as Mr. Thompson came staggering towards us mumbling about brains. We shut the door and he went the other way. I ran to the kitchen to check on my parents. They were still breakfast, but the bacon had my dad's face. I took them and laid them back out on their bed. I didn't want them to be all cramped in the fridge. Then I went to check on my sister. She seemed to have developed care bear patterned baldness. She was shedding blue hair all over her room.

I made us some dinner, and my sister came out to eat. She seemed to be acting a lot more like herself. She even asked where mom and dad were. I told her they would be back tomorrow, but I was watching her tonight. She accepted that and went back to her room after dinner. She never even asked about Schell.

After that night things went back to normal in our town. Mom and Dad were back by the next morning, although dad still smelled like bacon for a few days and started talking about quitting his Job and joining the CHP. My sister had shed all her hair and was her usual annoying self. Monday rolled around and my parents went to the school to enroll my new brother. No one really knew what all had happened over that week, the only ones who knew everything were me and Schell, so people just kind of accepted things, like my parents accepting our story that Schell was an alien who helped me save the planet. Although I'm not sure they really believed it, but hey, they let him stay.

After his first day of school, we got him all set up in my room. We were getting to bed when I thought about the one thing about the last week that was still bothering me. I turned to Schell and looked him in the eyes.

"So do you really have a bigger "tentacle"?" I asked him as seriously as I could muster. He started laughing and then looked back at me.

"Want to see?"

The End