My last words faded away, and there was nothing but the hum of the car and the flapping of hoses. And under that, the bubbling sound of J.Lo’s humid breath in the backseat. I looked out my window, but it was too dark to see anything. I would have liked to have seen the landscape, maybe to think about my visits here with Mom. Going to the beach, going to Happy Mouse Kingdom. I realized I might see Happy Mouse Kingdom again, if we made it to Orlando without being stopped. Without being stopped by any Boov, that is.
“Hey,” I said as it hit me, “where are all the people?”
“Hm?”
“There’s supposed to be, like, three hundred million people here. I thought there would be tents and shelters and people walking around everywhere.”
J.Lo pressed his face against the glass. “Yes. Many humans. No Boov. Humans everywhere.”
I had a terrible thought. I thought about the people in concentration camps in World War II, told by Nazi soldiers to take showers, and the showerheads that didn’t work, and the poison gas that tumbled slowly through vents until every last one was dead. And then I thought about everyone two days ago, rushing to line up for those rocketpods.
“What…what did you do with them?” I said. My voice fluttered. I was almost too afraid to speak. “What did you do with them really?”
J.Lo crawled out from under his blanket. “I? I did not do nothing with the people. I am Chief Maintenance Officer Boov, not Humans Transport—”
“J.LO!” I shouted, my voice louder but raw. The car slowed and drifted onto the shoulder. I wasn’t paying attention anymore. “Tell me the truth, J.Lo! Tell me the truth. Tell me.”
J.Lo looked down at his hands and nodded, biting his lip. My stomach fell and my face went hot, but I was not going to cry, no matter what.
“I…” said J.Lo. “I…am not really chief maintenance officer. I am—”
“No! Nono…” I said. “I don’t care about that now. What really happened to all the humans?”
J.Lo looked stunned. “Oh…oh. I do not know.”
I searched his face. He really didn’t know. He was a terrible liar.
“You thought they’d be here?” I asked.
“I thought this thing, yes.”
We sat for a while in the still car, wondering where everyone was. I thought about what the Boovcop had said: So you do not to know? What has happened?
J.Lo edged up into the front seat again. Pig purred and actually curled up in my lap, if you can believe it.
“They are all right,” J.Lo said. “They were probably taken unto some other place instead. You should not to expect such bad things of the Boov.”
They’ve done such bad things already, I thought. But I didn’t say it, because he wouldn’t understand. History is written by the winners, so they say.
I noticed we were hovering in a ditch on the side of the highway. I gripped the wheel again.
“We’re staying off the main roads until I know what’s going on,” I said. “I could be walking into some kind of trap. And you don’t want to run into Carl again, I’m guessing.”
J.Lo winced. “Her name is not Carl. I did not to know her at all.”
I almost said I know, and then I almost nodded, but in the end I just sat there. I guided Slushious up an embankment, dropped her onto an access road, then began snaking my way through the city streets of what used to be Jacksonville.
Then I said, “So you’re not the chief maintenance officer, huh?”
J.Lo waggled his head. “No. I was more what you would to call…ah…fixing person….”
“Handyman?”
“A HandyBoov, yes,” he said sadly. “I was at to the antenna farm to change the antennas for using by the Boov.”
“You said that before,” I reminded him.
“Yes…but I was not telling then that I made very big mistake with the antennas. I did not to do my job correctly. Now I must stay away fromto the Boov. Hide with the humans.”
I might have told J.Lo that the humans probably wouldn’t be any happier to have him than the Boov were, what with him stealing their planet and all, but the subject was driven from my mind by a building ahead of us.
Had it been a moonless night, I might not have seen it at all. It lay just beyond the pool of my headlights. I swiveled the car clockwise and aimed for the blue scrawled letters on the side of a Potato Potentate restaurant:
UMANS-HAY—
O-GAY OO-TAY THE INGDOM-KAY—
EET-MAY UNDER-WAY THE ASTLE-CAY
—BOOB
Boob?
“What does that to say?” asked J.Lo, leaning against the dash.
I stared at him for a moment, frowning.
J.Lo glanced at me, then cast his head quickly back to the wall.
“Is it…is it the English? So many little lines.”
It was a secret message of some kind, of course, but from whom? It was hard to believe anyone would be so naive to think Pig Latin might fool a Boov. And it was even harder to believe that it did. Then I finally put it together.
“You can’t read, can you?” I asked. “You can’t read English.”
J.Lo puckered his fingertips together, over and over.
“Mmmmm…no.”
“You were never taught? You never”—I grimaced at what I was about to say—“learned from my mom?”
“Almost no one of us can read the humans words. Is very difficult. Nothing like the Boovwords.”
“Why not?”
“Hm…most humans have…little flat pictures, and each of this little picture is meaning a part of a word. Liketo…building the word from different bricks.”
It took a second before I understood what he was talking about.
“Letters,” I said. “You’re talking about letters. They build a word.”
“Yes! Yes. We are not having these things. All Boov words are made of bubbles.”
“Bubbles.”
“Yes. They are bubbles in the air. How big are this bubbles, or how thick, or how joined unto each other; this is how we know which word is what.”
I recalled the odd bubble formations I’d seen floating here and there. They were only writing. They were signs.
“So most of the Boov cannot to read the humans words. Is supposing to be a big secret.”
Of course it is, I thought. If we knew, we could leave each other messages in Pig Latin, right out in the open.
“So why are you telling me,” I asked, “if it’s such a big secret?”