The Alien Pet Expedition

Chapter 12: Sterling’s Awakening

Sterling didn't wake up in a hospital bed, though he probably should have. He woke up on the cool concrete of his garage floor, surrounded by the smell of burnt plastic and the lingering static of a failed intergalactic uplink.

His head felt like it had been used as a practice target for a particle beam. He groaned, pushing himself up, his eyes immediately darting to his monitors. They were black. Dead. The beautiful, glowing green light of his "discovery" was gone.

"The signal..." he rasped, his voice sounding like sandpaper. "I had it. I had the frequency."

He crawled toward his primary workstation, his hands trembling. He found his digital recorder, the one he’d been using to capture the "anomaly." He hit the playback button, hoping, praying, that it had recorded something more than just his own shouting.

The audio crackled. Through the static, he heard: "...reverse it, you incompetent canine!" followed by a voice that sounded unmistakably like a cat’s, but with the cadence of an angry professor: "We have to collapse the portal before it goes supernova!"

Sterling froze. He played it again. And again.

"Cats," he whispered, a manic light returning to his eyes. "Talking, space-faring, cat-and-dog, anomaly-controlling... geniuses."

He began pinning photos to his corkboard—photos he’d snapped from a distance of Leo’s backyard. He circled the cat and the dog. He looked at the data he’d pulled from the crash site, realizing now that the "energy" he’d been chasing wasn't a meteor—it was a signature of advanced, non-Earth technology.

"They aren't just pets," Sterling muttered, grabbing his coat. "They’re stowaways. And they’re hiding right under my nose."

Meanwhile, back at Leo’s house, Zax and Pip were huddled under the dining room table, trying to make sense of their next move.

"The Collective is clearly struggling with our file," Pip said, staring at a blank, blinking light on their communication device. "The sanitation unit was an insult. A gross, metallic insult."

"We are staying another day," Zax decided, his ears twitching as he heard a car pull into the driveway. "And we are doing it quietly. If that Hunter comes back, we do not engage. We stay strictly 'animal'."

Leo looked at them, his heart sinking. "Another day? You mean you might actually be leaving tomorrow?"

Zax looked at the boy. He felt a weird tug in his chest—a strange, un-feline sensation. "Leo, this planet is primitive. The food is subpar. The gravity is oppressive. But..." He looked at his own reflection in the table’s edge, where he saw himself not as a high-ranking officer, but as a cat who liked how Leo scratched behind his ears. "But, I suppose your 'homework help' is not entirely without merit."

Pip barked a soft, agreeable sound. "We aren't going to let that Hunter catch us, Leo. Not when we’re so close to going home."

Leo nodded, but as he glanced out the window, he saw a familiar van parked at the end of the block. Sterling was back, and this time, he wasn't carrying a tracker—he was carrying a high-end, custom-built animal containment crate.