Free Cosmic Boy Versus Mezmo Head! by Tony Abbott

1
    Sounds of Weirdness!
    Z whrrrr—rrrrr!
    Jeff Ryan walked slowly backward out his front door. The big white satellite dish on his roof was spinning like crazy.
    â€œSomething’s going on,” Jeff mumbled to himself. He shifted a brightly colored box that he was holding in his arms.
    Errrkk! An army truck screeched to a stop in his driveway and a bunch of men in army uniforms jumped out. They carried a small wooden crate to the house.
    â€œSomething big is going on!” Jeff whispered.
    Jeff’s mother, who was also dressed in an army uniform, and his father, who puffed on a pipe, met the soldiers in the doorway.
    Jeff heard only a few words of what they were saying. “… Last night … fell from the sky … top secret … global invasion … like a cabbage.”
    â€œCabbage?” Jeff repeated to himself. “The army delivers vegetables now?”
    A moment later, the soldiers climbed back into the truck and sped off. Jeff’s parents carried the small crate inside.
    â€œBye-bye, sweetheart!” Mrs. Ryan called from the doorway. She blew Jeff a kiss.
    For years, his parents had told him that the top-secret, high-security, fenced-in area north of Grover’s Mill where his mother worked was really a shoe store.
    But Jeff knew it wasn’t. It was an army base. His friends said the army captured alien junk and did things with it there. Jeff wasn’t sure if that was strange, or just normal everyday parent stuff.
    Except that normal everyday stuff didn’t seem to happen in Grover’s Mill. That’s why his friends called their town The Weird Zone.
    â€œThe center of intergalactic weirdness,” Jeff mumbled, stepping to the sidewalk. “The Zone. A place where all the grown-ups are Zoners.”
    Bong! The giant donut-shaped clock on top of the Double Dunk Donut Den chimed the hour.
    Sssss! The oversized pancake pan on Usher’s House of Pancakes hissed out a cloud of smoke.
    Jeff smiled. Those two restaurants had been bonging and hissing the hours for as long as he could remember.
    Bweeeep! A high-pitched sound screeched through the air.
    Jeff frowned. “That’s a new one.” He turned to see a man crouching in the bushes across the street. The man seemed to be holding a large leafy green thing in front of his face as a disguise. And he wore green shoes.
    The instant he saw Jeff, the man slipped back between the bushes and disappeared.
    â€œWell, okay. That’s a little strange.” Jeff shifted the box and walked to the center of Grover’s Mill. He stopped in front of the X-RaysUs Medical Clinic to wait for his best friend, Sean Vickers.
    They walked to school together almost every day.
    And today was special. The W. Reid Elementary School annual play tryouts were that morning. Jeff’s teacher, Mrs. Carbonese, was directing an outer-space version of The Wizard of Oz. Jeff and his friends were going to try out.
    The box Jeff was bringing had part of the Wizard’s costume in it.
    Jeff crouched and opened the box. It was his favorite toy a few years ago—a Cosmic Boy Space Helmet. It was based on the old TV show about a boy with incredible powers. Jeff was way beyond toys and shows like that now.
    He pulled out the gray plastic bowl-shaped helmet with knobs on it. It had a row of tiny lights across the front and two antennas sticking up behind the ears.
    â€œPretty old, but still cool.” Jeff put the helmet on his head. It was tight. The helmet was made for a much smaller head. He turned to look at himself in the window of X-RaysUs.
    Blink! Bzzz! Whrrr! The lights across the forehead blinked off and on, a little buzzer on top buzzed, and the antennas began to whirl slowly.
    â€œWhoa!” Jeff exclaimed. “It still works!”
    â€œSo, Cosmic Boy, we meet again!” came a deep and gravelly voice.
    Jeff whirled in fear. Then he laughed. “Sean!”
    Sean Vickers trotted up to him.