Devin Booker knew he wasn’t really supposed to be near the visitors’ locker room.
He also knew that this was perhaps his last chance to meet his idol, Kobe Bryant. Given the circumstances, Devin thought he should be allowed a little leeway in terms of where he was and wasn’t supposed to be.
He had never been to this part of the arena and was a little lost; he wandered around for a little while when an unexpected, yet completely familiar, voice spoke from behind him. “Looking for me?”
Devin turned around to see Kobe standing in the corridor, smiling in his usual Kobe way. Now that Devin was face-to-face with the man himself, he found himself starstruck. He swallowed. “Yeah.”
“It’s better that we chat here. Fewer people,” Kobe said.
Devin nodded. He hadn’t seen another person for several minutes until Kobe had appeared. The locker room he had been trying to locate was probably a long ways off. “Yeah,” he repeated. “Man, it’s crazy to think that you were playing in the NBA when I wasn’t even born.”
Kobe chuckled. “Yeah, a little crazy.”
“How do you do it? How did you stay so good for so long?” Devin asked. “And don’t tell me about hard work, I know all about that.”
Glancing around to reassure himself that nobody was around, Kobe leaned in a little closer. “I can tell you, but it can’t be out here.”
There was a door to Devin’s left. He was so eager to hear Kobe’s words of wisdom that he didn’t at all care what might be behind it; it turned out to be a mostly-empty janitorial closet. “We could go in here,” he suggested.
“That works,” Kobe said, shrugging. The two basketball players walked through the door and closed it behind them. A light switch was found and flipped on, illuminating the bare fluorescent bulb on the ceiling. “Now, I’m only sharing my secrets because I think you’re something special. Really special. Maybe the next Kobe.” Kobe chuckled again as he referred to himself in the third person.
“I don’t know about that,” Devin replied bashfully.
“Maybe you don’t know now. But you will,” Kobe said, adopting a serious tone of voice. “Now listen up. The secret to my success is…”
Devin was so focused on listening to Kobe’s words that when Kobe’s torso exploded outward, showering Devin with flecks of blood and bone, Devin could think of nothing except how he hadn’t even gotten to hear the secret. He was soon brought back to reality by the sight of some sort of alien creature crawling out of the hole that had been created in Kobe’s chest. Kobe, meanwhile, had fallen against the wall and lay slumped there, all life absent from his eyes.
Devin backed as far away as he could. Somehow, in his surprise, it never occurred to him to simply open the door and leave. “What are you?” he asked, staring in repulsion at the three-foot-tall being who possessed four clawed legs and purple glasslike scales all across its body.
“I am Kobe,” answered the creature in a voice that seemed not to be transmitted through the air but instead inserted directly into Devin’s auditory cortex. “And if you want to be the next Kobe, you will allow me to use your body as a host.”
“A…host?”
“Kobe’s body was failing. It could no longer support me,” explained the alien, who did not seem to have eyes or a head to speak of. “Your body is young and fresh.”
“What if I don’t want to host an alien in my body?” Devin asked defiantly.
There was the briefest of pauses before the alien replied, “that’s not really an option.” With frightening quickness, it leaped off the floor with two of its legs extended outward, obviously intending to pin Devin against the wall. Devin instinctively ducked, rolled, and ran to the opposite corner, near where Kobe’s sundered body lay motionless.
As the alien recovered its footing, Devin looked desperately around him for anything that might help him. Spotting a jug of bleach, he removed the cap and splashed some of the strong-smelling liquid on the creature. The effect was immediate, and the closet was filled with the sound of glass shattering as the creature’s scales turned a violet red color before breaking and falling off.
“You will die for your resistance!” announced the creature, who again launched itself at Devin, this time connecting with the human’s chest. Devin cried out in pain as he felt his lung punctured by a needle-pointed alien claw, but he overcame the pain to toss some more bleach on the exposed, scaleless areas of the alien’s skin.
“No! Fool! Do you not want to be the next Kobe?” screamed the alien as it fell to the ground and shuddered, clearly mortally wounded.
Devin stood over his vanquished foe and looked down at it with derision. “I think I’d rather be the first Devin Booker.” He stomped his foot through the squishy exposed flesh and felt the being’s connection with his brain disappear.
—
“Yo, you learn a lot from Kobe?” asked a teammate as Devin walked back into the locker room.
Devin wiped a spot of blood off his face. “Yeah. Kinda.”