Alien Fight Club

At a little after four on a Monday afternoon in December, Eddie Kowalski stood in the middle of Sam Whitmore’s garage with an alien weapon duct-taped to his left wrist, about to be proven right about everything.

The band had been built for a wrist the width of a breadstick. Eddie had solved the difference with half a roll of silver tape and no plan for getting it off. Above it the flaming-skull tank top did what it had done every day since August, which was insist to the whole of Ohio that it was not cold. Above that, exactly seven blond spikes stood at attention, with a finger-width of brown coming in at the roots.

At the back of the garage, on the battered couch, Kevin Marsh ate Cheddar Saturns with his eyes half shut and his fingers orange to the second knuckle.

On the ship’s left wing, where the blue tarp had been folded back to make room, Zog was asleep inside a small, soft purple dome of his own. Since Thanksgiving he had discovered naps, and he took them with the zeal of a convert: after lunch, after television, once after a sneeze. Nobody had thought to put a dome over the workbench.

“Kev,” Eddie said. “Watch this.”

“No.”

“I said WATCH THIS.” Eddie said it louder, which was the only other way he said things.

Kevin selected a Saturn. “Those are the last words spoken before every trip to the emergency room.”

“I already tested it. On the gnome.” Eddie pointed. The garage gnome, eighteen inches of red hat and concrete beard, stood on the arm of the couch, where Eddie had put it after borrowing it from inside Zog’s nap dome. “It’s the CONTROL. That’s science. Safety.”

Kevin looked at the gnome. The gnome looked at the far wall, as it had since the day Kevin bought it.

The dial on the band had four settings, and Eddie had learned what all four were called and forgotten what three of them did. He turned it to three, because three was a good number. The Possums had once scored three points in a quarter, and nobody in town had ever forgotten it.

Purple came out of the band the way tissue paper comes out of a gift bag, one translucent sheet over another, faster than paper has ever done anything. The sheets settled into a dome fifteen feet across. It swallowed the couch, Kevin, the gnome and the whole back half of the garage, and stopped a foot short of the fridge. The sound it made was the low, wet raspberry of a containment field, pitched down so far that the fridge hummed back.

The couch rose one inch off the concrete and stayed there.

Something rose with it. From behind the couch, where Kevin kept a spare bag of Saturns for reasons nobody had ever asked about, a second purple bag drifted up into view, turned over once, and hung above the backrest like a small, cheerful moon.

“Huh,” Kevin said.

“It’s a FUCKING FORCE FIELD, bro! Nothing gets hurt in there! TRY something!”

Kevin flicked a Saturn at the curved purple wall. It struck, slowed, thought about it, and drifted back across the dome into his open palm. He looked at it. He ate it.

“The Saturn came back,” Kevin said. “This is the best technology I’ve ever encountered.”

“Is the gnome okay?”

Kevin turned his head a quarter-inch. The gnome hung an inch above the arm of the couch, still staring at the wall. “She seems fine.”

Kevin considered the band on Eddie’s wrist, which on its first setting had kept a federal agent alive in the woods for twenty-eight days on his own recycled air. “Does it do the fart thing.”

“It’s the FIGHTING setting, bro, not the FARTING setting.” Eddie was already knocking on the dome and watching the purple ring out from his knuckles. “Kev. KEV. You could punch this. You could body-slam it. You could get KICKED into it by a HORSE. It’s a bouncy castle made of ALIEN SCIENCE.”

“Okay.”

“And what does Bakerfield have? Jack SHIT. No parties. No events. The Possums lost their last game by exactly enough, AGAIN, and now we don’t even have THAT. The best day at school this year was the FIRE DRILL. People CLAPPED, Kev. For a DRILL.” He spread his arms, and the dome shivered. “And I am standing here WEARING a thing that makes a fighting arena where NOBODY CAN GET HURT.”

Kevin chewed.

“You want to start a fight club,” he said.

“I want to start THE fight club. Alien Fight Club. Five bucks a match.”

Kevin chewed through three more Saturns. The spare bag turned slowly above his head. Inside his own quiet dome, Zog made the small, high whistle he made when he was dreaming about paperwork.

“I want to commentate,” Kevin said.

“DONE.”

The door at the top of the half-flight of stairs from the kitchen opened, and Sam Whitmore came down three steps in socks and the red hoodie with a toaster pastry in one hand, and stopped. He looked at the dome, the floating couch, the floating gnome and the extra bag of Saturns orbiting all of it. He looked at Eddie’s wrist. Then he looked at Eddie’s face, which was the part that worried him.

“No,” Sam said. “Whatever this is—no.”

“It’s a fight club, Sam!”

“Dude. You’re wearing an alien weapon? On your wrist? With DUCT TAPE?”

Eddie held up the arm, and the band hummed, and the whole back half of the garage pulsed with it, like a very small nightclub that had let in a couch.

“WEAPON? It’s a SPORTING VENUE!”