School Nathaniel Hardman (the best ebook reader for android txt) 📖

the spells the alien had cast, the clearest of the car-for-spider switches. He was trying to figure out this software; he had never done film editing, and it wasn’t as easy as he wanted it to be. Lori was sitting next to him, working on something on her tablet, and he vented to her.

“In the movies, the guy in charge would just say, ‘Zoom in on his mouth. Enhance! Again! Enhance!’ and his savvy little computer monkeys would,” Jeremiah twiddled his fingers expressively, “And then TA-DA! They’d have a nice, sharp image of whatever little piece of the picture they want. Am I just doing this wrong, or is that not actually possible?”

“Sorry Dear – what’s not…?” Lori trailed off, still watching her screen.

“I want to zoom in on the alien’s mouth. If we can figure out the words of the spell he used, then we just need the wand, and we can switch the castle back for the school.”

She was still staring at her tablet. “I keep watching these videos and thinking of the kids out there in this world of monsters and wizards… At least they’re with the rest of the school, but…”

Jeremiah looked up and saw his wife, really saw her. “I know,” he said, scooting over to wrap his arm around her shoulder. “But the kids will be fine. They have their teachers, the principal. They’re probably just sitting around bored. Jeff’s probably trying to impress everyone with the fly we pinned. And Suzy…”

“Is handing out ‘Vote for Suzy’ buttons to all the aliens,” Lori finished with a reluctant smile. Jeremiah held her tight and hoped it was true.

On her tablet, Jeremiah finally noticed, she had been watching the thunderbird scene that followed the six-legged dinosaur’s appearance. His eyes narrowed. “Does this one show the alien’s mouth any better?”

Lori sighed and restarted it.

A jostling camera was following the aliens as they left the blockade of soldiers surrounding the castle, crossed a street, and went through a stand of trees into a neighborhood. Several companies of human soldiers trailed them, apparently still without orders to engage.

Above them, a news helicopter moved in.

The helicopter was a couple of hundred feet in the air, but it was loud, and it was almost directly above the aliens. The warriors stopped walking and huddled. Then one of them nodded abruptly, raised his black wand, and said a long sentence.

“No,” Jeremiah said, “You can’t see it there. If they just had a slightly higher angle...” He trailed off as the scene played out. A distortion rippled through the air from the alien’s wand up, up, until it connected with the helicopter.

And then the helicopter was gone, and the largest bird anyone had ever seen was there in its place.

The bird looked a lot like a hawk, but it was huge, with a wingspan of at least twenty-five feet. It floundered when it appeared, flapping around squawking, disoriented.

As when the dinosaur had appeared, the aliens ran for cover, heading for the nearest building – a house. They reached the door and tried to force it open, fumbling with the knob.

With this, at last, they had crossed a line. Finally, the army reacted.

First there were a couple of warning shots, and a megaphone-amplified voice yelled, “Stop! Step away from the house.”

The aliens ignored it.

One alien pointed his wand at the doorknob and blasted it until it gave way, exploding inward into the house and leaving a basketball-sized hole in the door. It still didn’t open; the deadbolt was locked. The lead alien threw his shoulder against the door, then pointed his wand again.

The next shots were not warnings.

The lead alien was knocked forward into the door by the force of the bullets. He spun around and jerked up his wand, but another of the aliens forced his arm down. Then he directed his own wand at the door and began to say something but was shot several times from behind.

Incredibly, after bouncing off the door, the alien raised his wand again and shouted out his spell. The distortion leapt from wand to door, and suddenly, the house flickered and was replaced by a wooden structure with a steep roof and jade ornamentation around the shuttered windows.

The aliens charged through the door and slammed it shut behind them. None of them needed to be carried in. None of them were even bleeding.

“Wait, go back,” Jeremiah said. Lori skipped back 20 seconds, and they watched the alien cast his spell again. “Do you have the volume all the way up?”

Lori blared the scene a third time. Jeremiah could just hear the alien say something, but the other sounds drowned it out. He wondered if sound-editing software could filter out the noises...

On the tablet, the rest of the scene was playing out. The aliens had barely gotten through the door when the bird got over its disorientation and vented its rage on the humans below. It dove toward the group of soldiers, and opening its enormous beak, it SCREAMED.

Lori nearly dropped the tablet as she hurried to turn down the volume. The sound the bird made was more than loud; it was deafening, and Jeremiah felt it must have been more than just sound because mere volume couldn’t mow down a squad of soldiers like this bird did as it passed over them.

Jeremiah had heard that the soldiers had all recovered without any lasting damage. But watching them in the clip, it was hard to believe. It looked like they had been flattened by a wall.

The YouTube clip ended when the bird made a second pass, this time diving at the news crew that had been filming.

They shared a long moment of silence before Jeremiah said, “They’re inside the school. They’ll be okay.”

A door closed downstairs, and Jeremiah wondered dully if the swing shift of scientists