The Bark & Bite

The elderly man rode his scooter through town. Even though the bright-blue electric scooter barely outpaced any walking pedestrian, Harris still prefered the exhilarating feeling of the wind on his weathered face.

Every day Harris pulled his prized scooter out of his shack of a garage and took it on a ride through the neighborhood. Sometimes Harris rides in town to get groceries. Other days he rides to retrieve the mail. Most of the time, however, Harris rides his scooter to provide him with time to think about his life.

On one of these particular days Harris was thinking about his adult children when he saw something strange in the sky. At first he could barely see the speck with his debilitating vision. With a few strained squints Harris saw the strangest thing he had ever seen in all his eighty-three years of life. A large, luminescent disc hovered over the town and eclipsed anything below it. The omniscient form saw the old man then, and he knew he was in big trouble. Before the UFO could vaporize the elder, something even stranger happened.
With a quick press of a button on his scooter’s console, Harris’s vehicle began to transform. Two legs the size of semi trucks sprouted from the bottom of the craft and Harris was propelled fifty feet in the air along with his scooter. A large blue shell formed around the old man and various dials and joysticks appeared in front of him. A trio of nuclear weapons emerged from beneath the panels on the side of the scooter. Harris was ready.
The UFO fired its weapon.
The scooter shuddered as the beam of concentrated plasma hit the cockpit. Luckily the shields were strong enough; Harris did not want a single scratch on his scooter’s paint job. Now it was time to counterattack. With a quick alignment of his crosshairs, Harris opened fire on the alien threat. The disc exploded in a purple inferno and shrapnel fell upon the small town. Harris had to act quickly or the lives of hundreds would be toasted. The scooter used its arsenal of weapons to shoot the alien fragments out of the sky. The alien threat was gone, and Harris’s thumbs were sore.

With the quick flip of a switch the old man’s scooter transformed back to its original, scooter-like state. Harris rode through town, oblivious to the awe-stricken military who just arrived to the scene.
“Where did? What? Who?” the confused soldiers grunted in unison.
The army reluctantly drove their tanks and flew their helicopters back to base, the discombobulated marines shortly behind them.
False alarm.