Watch the Skies

Chapter 1

YOU KNOW THE second-coolest of all my superpowers? It’s the one that lets me hear any song I’ve ever heard as loud as I want, as often as I want, and anytime I want. It’s like I have an iPod implanted in my head. Only it holds, like, terabytes more songs, and the sound quality’s better. And it never needs to be docked or recharged.

The song I was playing over and over again right then, as I motorcycled down I-80, was “Don’t Fear the Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult. I know it kinda puts the K in Klassic Rock, but it’s a good one. And it was going along real well with my thoughts and plans-wherein I am the Grim Reaper… of very, very bad aliens.

I leave the good ones alone, of course. But, honestly-not to bum you out-I’ve only bumped into a couple other “good” aliens here on your Big Blue Marble.

So what’s the coolest of my superpowers, you ask? The way I can smell alien sweat from ten miles away even while speeding along a highway with my helmet on? The way I’ve recently learned to make high-performance, hybrid-engine racing bikes that can travel three thousand miles at seventy-five miles per hour on a tank of gas? The way I can pop a wheelie… on my front tire?

Well, that’s almost untopable, but, no, the coolest of my superpowers is the one with which I can create my best friends-Willy, Joe, Emma, and Dana-out of my imagination.

It takes some concentration, and I have to be rested and not taking any allergy medicine, but, really, being able to shoot fireballs or outrace locomotives is nothing next to being able to make friends out of thin air.

And they’re not bottom-of-the-barrel specimens, either. Joe is great with video games and computers, and otherwise is basically a life-support device for the world’s fastest-moving mouth. He’s either chewing his way through some mountain of food that weighs twice as much as his skinny butt, or he’s talking a blue-and totally hilarious-streak.

Emma is our moral compass. The part that gets her worked up about Alien Outlaws is that they’re on Terra Firma and doing harm not just to people but to Nature. Mother Earth has no better advocate than her Birkenstock-wearing self.

Emma’s older brother is Willy. He’s the ultimate wing man, built like a brick and slightly harder to scare than one too. He’s our go-to guy when it comes to weapons and engines and stuff like that. Plus, he’s more loyal than, like, Batman’s butler Alfred, Sam in The Lord of the Rings, Wesley in The Princess Bride, and King Arthur’s horse combined.

Finally, Dana is, well… I guess you could say she’s my dream girl. She manages to be both the most attractive and the most grounded person I’ve ever encountered. In the universe. Remember, I haven’t exactly been operating out of a Montana shack all these years.

Oh, and all four of them happen to be outstanding at don’t-try-this-at-home motorcycle stunts. Which we were thoroughly enjoying on this particular night, chasing after an eighteen-wheeler. Keep in mind that aliens don’t necessarily abide by the same rules humans do when it comes to minimum driving age.

“Slalom!” Willy, who was in the lead, called out. One of our favorite tricks.

We leaned the bikes almost on their sides and-get this-zipped under the trailer… behind wheels seven, eight, nine, and ten, and in front of wheels eleven through eighteen… and came out safely on the other side.

Finally we pulled up to a small-town diner.

“Sorry about this,” I said to my friends, climbing off my bike. I was about to face off with the most powerful alien I’d ever engaged in mortal combat.

“Sorry for what?” asked Joe.

“Number 5,” I told them, furrowing my brow. “You smell that?”

There was a terrible smell in the air, like somebody had left a herring-salad sandwich in a hot car… for a week.

“Ugh!” Emma wrinkled her nose. “I’m catching it too. Seriously bad news.”

“Yeah, Daniel,” Willy echoed. “This guy must be more evil than the stink in your sneakers. We better get ready to rumble.”

“My sneakers don’t smell, Willy,” I said. “And I can’t put you guys at risk. This is between me… and Number 5.”

“You’re such a boy,” said Dana, hand on her hip, a look of concerned disapproval on her face. “Are you sure you’re ready to go that high up The List? No offense, Daniel, but you got pretty lucky with Number 6.”

“Always with the pep talks, Dana. Thanks a lot.”

Then I clapped my hands, and she and the rest of them flickered out of existence. (I actually don’t need to clap, but it looks cool.)

And then I cleared my head for battle.

Chapter 2

HIS STENCH WAS bad outside, but that was nothing compared to how it was in the diner. This guy made low tide smell like Obsession for Men.

I must have missed him by just a matter of minutes-the scraps of moist membrane rotting in the booth where he’d been sitting hadn’t even skinned over-but he and his henchbeasts had gotten away while the getting was still good.

Unfortunately, with these higher-up-The-List baddies, I was discovering a trend: they often seemed to know I was coming. I guess I should be flattered that they didn’t want to run into me, but it was more than a little frustrating to keep bringing my A-game only to find nobody to play with.

Well, almost nobody. They’d left behind a waitress.

She was in no shape to play, though. The poor girl was collapsed like a rag doll on the floor next to the counter. Her burnt-out face reminded me of a kid’s toy you might have tried to run on a car battery rather than AAAs.

The name stitched on the pocket of her calico uniform was Judy Blue Eyes, and, you guessed it, her eyes were the kind of clear blue a guy could look into and see the promise of the whole world.

A human guy, I mean. For me, the promise of the whole world was usually a great deal darker.

“Hey, Judy. You okay?”

“Nnnn,” she said, consciousness slowly percolating back.

I helped her into a booth and gave her a glass of water.

“Wh-wh’appen?” she stuttered.

“Food fight,” I said, only it was far worse than that. Smashed china plates, syrup and salt caked on the walls, soda dripping from the tabletops, empty jelly packets stuck to the seats, ketchup and mayo on the jukeboxes, Promise spread splattered on the ceiling, slicks of alien slime pooled everywhere like a sticky mix of spilled honey and coffee.

“Oh gosh,” she said, struggling to sit up and take it all in. “I’m so-o fired.”

“Nah,” I said. “I can give you a hand.” And then, like somebody had pressed the ×8 button on my remote, I zipped around with a broom, a mop, a couple bottles of Windex, and a dozen dishrags and had the place spick-and-span in no time, literally.

“Man, I’m really out of it,” said Judy as I returned to her now-gleaming booth. “I mean, did you just clean all that up in, like, ten seconds?”

Man, was she cute. I was trying to think of something clever to say back, but I had this weird-though not totally unpleasant-tightness in my chest, and all I could manage was this really lame giggle.

Must be an alien thing.

Chapter 3

I DON’T KNOW what got into me because it’s totally against policy to give the straight scoop to civilians, but Judy insisted on making me a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of chili-the aliens hadn’t quite eaten every scrap of food in the place-and before I knew it I’d told her just about the whole story.

How I was an Alien Hunter and my parents, Graff and Atrelda (bless their weird-named souls), had been Alien Hunters and how their mission was to protect nice folks from the thousands of aliens who wanted to take advantage of, plunder, pillage, and sometimes plain-out destroy places like this.

“Places like this?” Judy smiled wryly, not taking me seriously. “You can hardly blame them for wanting to plain-out destroy Holliswood. I mean, this place is nothing but a prefab smear of parking lots, giant superstores, drive-through banks, twenty-garage automotive franchises, and chain restaurants. And mean girls, dumb jocks, and people who get their news from those scrolly things running across the bottom of their favorite stupid TV show-while running on the treadmill at the gym.”

I couldn’t help but admire her astute observational skills. Not to mention her honesty, directness… and, okay, cuteness.

“Well, people can’t be all that bad here. You’re a girl… and you’re not mean.”

Good one, Daniel. Wish I had Joe’s gift of gab. In lieu of that, I kept rambling.

I told her how one of the alien baddies, the worst of the worst, had killed my parents when I was just three, and how I’d barely escaped with my life and-almost as important-The List.

Judy stopped smiling. “Don’t joke about your parents being murdered,” she said.

“I wouldn’t joke about that,” I said, wondering if I’d gone too far.

Her eyes were penetrating mine. “And… The List is…?”

There was no stopping the power of Judy’s blue eyes, so I spilled all the rest: how The List was, in full, called The List of Alien Outlaws on Terra Firma, and how it was an interactive, constantly self-updating summary of all the ill-intended Outer Ones now residing on the planet, ranked from number one to somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, from most dangerous to those that are barely stronger than a human.

And how my parents’ evil murderer-known as The Prayer-was number one on that list… and that it was my life’s goal to hunt him down and kill him.

Sorry, I get a little hung up on that sometimes.

When I finished, Judy was looking at me like I was C-RA-Z-Y nuts, so I slapped on my best damage-control smile and said, “Psych! Just messing with you! I love making up stories.”

“Oh, sure,” she said, blinking her gorgeous peepers and looking more than a little confused-and creeped out.

Sometimes I’m more extrastupid than extraterrestrial.

“Okay, gotta go!” I said, flashing damage-control smile variation number two.

“Sure…” Judy said. “Come back and see us real soon, um-what did you say your name was again?”

“Daniel,” I said, and flew out the door before she asked me my last name.

That part of getting to know someone is always a little awkward… when you don’t have a last name.

Chapter 4

YOU KNOW HOW dogs go wild over mailmen? Well, you haven’t seen a dog go postal till you’ve seen one detect the scent of the bad sort of alien. It’s hilarious.

Right now, I was the one about to go postal because I couldn’t detect anything at all. My alien-tracking nose could rival a bloodhound’s, but unfortunately, I wasn’t getting any directional indications on Number 5. I sensed he was still in town someplace, but he must have started taking some new kind of precautions against me.

I was upset, but not so much that I couldn’t recognize it was a beautiful night, and since I needed some rest anyhow, I decided to make camp. I took a minute or two to gaze at the twinkling stars and run through the names of all that were visible. Even on the clearest of Earth nights, you can only see about two thousand stars from the planet’s surface… but get me up past the murky atmosphere, and I’ll name you a couple million that would be distinguishable even to your human eyes.

Then I turned on my laptop. Not just any laptop, this one-it’s one some creatures would, literally, kill for… because it alone contains the complete and perpetually updated List of Alien Outlaws on Terra Firma.

I can shape The List as anything from an interactive scroll to a heads-up display visor, but I usually access it as a laptop, since I like to practice not standing out. Plus, that way-when I’m not researching-I can download movies from Netflix.

So I logged in and did a little research on the stinking outlaw I’d just missed at the diner. Number 5 hailed from a remote swamp planet with an unpronounceable name that makes the Siberian tundra seem cosmopolitan.

But since leaving his provincial home and finding his way to the bright lights and big megalopolises of the central star clusters, he’d been working his way through the ranks, and now he was an up-and-coming entertainment mogul. Kind of an alien version of Aaron Spelling, if Aaron Spelling were a few degrees more bloodthirsty than Attila the Hun.

His MO was to find technologically evolving but still largely defenseless cultures-such as Earth’s-where he could easily move in, steal some of their better entertainment ideas, enslave their unwary populations, and then walk away with a treasure trove of exploitive, derivative programs that he’d then proceed to syndicate to networks across the cosmos.

So what made this swamp creature worthy of the number five spot on The List? His signature cinematic flourish: to kill his cast as the last act of their skits. In fact, because they always died at the end, he was considered the founder of a new style of alien program that they called-in typically lame alien fashion-endertainment.

Nobody’s ever accused the Outer Ones of having over-developed senses of humor, that’s for sure.

Chapter 5

NOT SURPRISINGLY, AFTER refreshing my knowledge about Number 5, I had some trouble sleeping. Kidnap, brainwashing, wanton murder, callous exploitation of sentient creatures on at least three dozen underdeveloped worlds…

I was going to enjoy removing him from Earth, permanently.

As soon as the sun was up, I headed back to town. Guided by a sort of eighth sense-I have seven legitimate senses, at least that I’ve so far discovered-that told me there was something funky going on in the immediate vicinity, I pulled into the S-Mart twenty-four-hour superstore and found a parking space next to a minivan that was being loaded by a pregnant woman. She was lifting a flat of motor oil… and sweating like crazy.

“Need a hand with that, ma’am?” I offered. She gave me a blank stare and made a weird bubbling sound with her mouth.

“Okay, sorry to bother you,” I said, noticing one of her grocery bags seemed to have at least twenty cans of fish food in it. That struck me as a little weird, but maybe she ran a pet store or something.

I turned to go into the store, but as I stepped out from behind the minivan, I almost got decked by a green plastic S-Mart grocery cart-pushed by another pregnant woman.

I did a double take-to make sure I hadn’t accidentally wandered toward a Mommies “R” Us or something-and nearly got flattened by another pregnant woman, who was seemingly in a race with three other pregnant women, all making a beeline for the store’s entrance.

“Weird,” I said, and headed inside, where things got weirder still.

Chapter 6

I WALKED INTO the store and heard this strange, gurgling voice on the piped-in infotainment shopper channel, and I’m like, huh, that sure is a strange person to pick as your announcer. I was relieved to be approached by a very normal-looking, young fresh-faced store clerk as I walked in.

“Can I help you find something, sir?” He looked like a good candidate for Employee of the Month.

“Yeah…” I said, operating on my eighth sense again, “fish food.”

As the clerk led me through hardware and housewares and electronics, I found myself gagging. And when I spotted a video display, I understood why.

Scowling on-screen was none other than the unfortunate fish head of Number 5.

And even more unfortunate, he saw me.

Number 5 scowled, and his image disappeared, leaving a prerecorded Rosie O’Donnell to talk about some titanium-plated sandwich maker. Maybe he’d spotted me from one of the overhead security cameras. Did that mean he was in the store someplace?

“Sir? Are you all right?” the clerk called back to me.

“Couldn’t be better,” I told him with a weak smile. “Are we there yet?”

“Almost,” he replied, as we passed an empty motor-oil section… and then his voice transformed into a hideously twisted gurgle, just like the infotainment announcer’s voice: “We’re going to Number 5.”

I stopped dead in my tracks.

Until I realized that smiley Mr. Employee-of-the-Month was heading toward a sign for aisle five-Pet Food. And he was soon surrounded by an enormous throng of pregnant women who stood slack mouthed, staring at some empty shelves where all the fish food had been.

I was just about to tell everyone to take their fish-food orders to a certain minivan in the parking lot, when World War III broke out in aisle four.

Chapter 7

GUIDED BY THE sound of explosions, falling shelves, and screams, I made a mad dash to the source of the chaos, leaping over people, dodging carts, somersaulting over cardboard display stands.

The cause of the commotion was a makeshift film set “manned” by ten henchbeasts that were melting terrorized shoppers with their weapons. And heading the group was an alien that made my jaw hit the floor-a big-nosed ape that was none other than number twenty-one on The List.

In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have taken even a nanosecond to think about it. Because as soon as he saw me-and clearly he’d been waiting in ambush-he fired this rifle kind of thing with a round dish on its front end.

At me.

I’ve got some pretty good reflexes, if I do say so myself, and I managed to leap up into the air before he got the shot off-like high enough so that I could grab one of the exposed I beams in the thirty-foot ceiling-but I wasn’t fast enough.

A massive shockwave slammed into me, compressing all the air in the warehouse-sized store and smacking me down like I was a fly and it was a rolled-up newspaper. I crunched onto the floor, my ears ringing, my vision blurry, the room spinning.

“This is gold,” Number 21 cackled.

It would’ve been a great time to conjure up my friends or some weapons to help me kick some alien butt, but right now I could barely remember the word for ouch. I was on my own.

“We’ve found a lot of talented extras here in S-Mart,” Number 21 said darkly. “But you’re our best talent of the day, Daniel.”

My legs were like rubber as I staggered to my feet and forced myself into a jujitsu stance, instinctively realizing that since I couldn’t think clearly enough to create a peashooter, I was going to have to resort to old-fashioned hand-to-hand combat.

Unfortunately, I was still so unsteady, I think I ended up looking more like a drunk clown than a highly trained martial artist.

Number 21 was busting a gut. He mopped his sweaty brow and slung his shockwave cannon over his shoulder. “Are you guys getting this?” he asked the henchbeasts that were filming the shopping nightmare.

One of the crew asked, “Should we melt him too?”

“Nah,” Number 21 replied. “This was just his screen test. Boss says he’s still got some real important parts to play.”

And then everything went black as I fell back against a tower of mac-and-cheese boxes.

Chapter 8

AS I CAME to, I could feel the henchbeasts’ high-tech restraint device squeezing me from my chest down, holding me to the floor.

“Can we make a deal?” I pleaded to the two shadowy figures standing over me-and then, um, I became about as embarrassed as I’ve ever been in my fifteen adventure-filled Earth years.

What was holding me to the floor was not some alien-tech, carbon-fiber straitjacket, but a whole mountain of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese boxes that I’d knocked on top of myself when I passed out.

And the two figures standing above me weren’t alien henchbeasts, but two twelve-year-old skate kids.

“You mean you want us to join your crew?!” asked the shorter chubby one.

“Dude, that’s so stoner!” said the taller skinny one.

“Yeah, when you jumped up and the monkey dude with the big space-gun blasted you and you fell! Whomp, dude! Stomped like a narc! And those guys in the weird bug suits with the cameras? Totally awesome FX.”

“You,” I said, looking down the aisle at the brown stains on the floor that had been some of their fellow humans not long ago, “are insane.”

“And you, dude, are a magnate! When’s the show going to be on? Are you guys on YouTube?”

“You guys own both Jackass movies, don’t you?”

“Dude. And T-shirts,” he said, lifting up his buddy’s sweatshirt to show an “I Jackass” decal.

I like humans; I truly do. But, sometimes it amazes me their civilization ever got off the ground.

Chapter 9

MY FRIED HEAD and body were starting to feel better as I crossed the parking lot back to my motorcycle. Pregnant women were still streaming into the store to look at the empty fish-food and motor-oil displays, but at the moment I was too bummed about losing my first battle against Number 5’s crew to continue my investigation alone.

So I decided to summon Mom and Dad. I was so aching for my family right then, I even whipped up Brenda, aka Pork Chop-my annoying little sister-out of thin air.

“Um, Daniel, I don’t think we’re all going to fit,” said Pork Chop, nodding at my bike.

“You are not still riding motorcycles,” said Mom. “You know how I feel about them, Daniel. Not safe.”

Dad smiled knowingly at me. It wasn’t an argument worth having with Mom, although-for the record-he and I knew that unless I had an accident on my bike that involved falling into the sun or possibly a direct hit from an Opus 24/24, chances were I would escape permanent injury. And so-presto change-o-I willed some additional matter into existence and transformed my motorcycle into an awesome late-eighties vintage, wood-panel, retrofitted Dodge minivan.

“Air bags?” asked Mom.

“Side-impact air bags and ABS,” I assured her and gave her the keys.

“Well, let’s get going,” said Dad. “Time’s a wasting, and we need to convene a strategy session for dealing with Number 5 and Number 21.”

The man never took a breath without having a six-point plan for it.

“And then, dear, sweet, wonderful, multitalented brother, we can all go out in the yard and polish the giant golden statue we’ve made of you because we love and adore you and, basically, worship your fantastic self… or not,” said my sister, making the L-is-for-Loser sign against her forehead.

I was too tired to retaliate, so I just rolled my eyes.

“So where’s home, anyway?” I asked.

“Why, right here,” said Mom, pulling the minivan over in front of a huge Victorian house with a wraparound porch and a FOR RENT sign in the front yard.

Even without a golden statue of me in the backyard, the house was beautiful. The landlord, however, was not so easy on the eyes. We’d called the number on the sign saying we were interested in the property, and he showed up about fifteen minutes later in a gleaming, new, top-of-the-line Ferrari. Right off the bat, he was grouchy and impatient with us.

“Can we have a look around?” Dad asked.

“Let’s not beat around the bush here.” He’d spotted our dilapidated minivan and peered at us through his amber sunglasses. His shifty eyes darted around, sizing us up like we were so many head of cattle and he was a rancher. Or a butcher.

Chapter 10

SO, AS YOU can see, I have trust issues.

But it wouldn’t have taken a ninth sense-let alone a sixth sense-to know the guy definitely wasn’t cool. The next thing you know, his eyes fixed on Mom’s modest engagement ring.

“Three thousand,” he said, and spat some tobacco juice into the lawn.

“Dollars? A month?!” my mom asked.

“Plus a month’s rent in advance. Security deposit. And heat and electricity are not included,” he said, already turning back toward his luxury sports car.

“We’ll take it,” said Dad.

The man spun around. “Now, don’t waste my time here, buddy. I have twenty properties to manage and can’t waste time on deadbeats.”

“Are you calling us deadbeats?” asked Mom.

Pork Chop blew a bubble and stared at him menacingly.

“All right then-a cashier’s check. Six thousand dollars made payable to Ernesto Gout. And I need it today. I have a lot of other people looking at this place.”

The guy tensed up a little as Dad stepped toward him, but Dad was all smiles.

“It’s a deal, sir,” he said, putting out his hand.

The landlord grudgingly accepted the handshake, whereupon I quickly stepped up behind him and put my hand on the back of his head, causing him to go rigid like somebody had dropped an ice cube down his shirt.

Cool Alien Hunter power number 141: Telepathic Attitude Adjustments.

“So, would cash be okay?” I asked.

“Yes, yes, of course. Cash would be fine,” he said, quickly coming around.

“And how about if you bring it to us by, oh, say, noon.”

For a moment it looked like he was going to lose his lunch, but he nodded.

“And we’ll need you to call the electric and gas companies and arrange to pay that yourself, okay?”

“Yeah-yeah, sure-sure.”

“And, here, why don’t we trade cars? You take the minivan, so you can have some more room for stuff when you run our errands. And we’ll keep the Ferrari.”

“Great idea.”

“All right then. If you can just give me the keys to the house and your car, I’ll let you go to the bank and get us our money.”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

It all goes to show that you can’t always believe first impressions.

Or, if you don’t like your first impression, then change it. I mean, if you’re an Alien Hunter.

Chapter 11

AFTER MR. GOUT returned with the money, we sent him off to get some lumber and other things to help alienproof the house. His attitude was much improved-he actually seemed happy about it.

“Your abilities are getting sharper,” remarked Dad, “but you’re going to need a bit more than that for Number 5. In fact, I’ve managed to update his profile, and I created a brief dossier I want you to digest before dinner.”

“And you aren’t going out till you’ve taken a shower and done your laundry,” added Mom. “You look like a ragamuffin. And tomorrow you’re getting a haircut.”

I guess it’s a little weird that I let myself get bossed around by people that are essentially products of my imagination; but what kind of parents would they be otherwise?

“Sure, Mom,” I humored her. Meantime, I went to check out some updates and relevant List computer information that Dad had helped me locate on Number 5 and Number 21.

You don’t make it into The List’s top ten without a pretty terrifying résumé to back it up, but the more I found out about Number 5, the more it was clear this was going to be my biggest test yet.

Like the electric eels on Earth, his species had evolved in murky swamp waters where electrical powers gave a creature a distinct advantage. Only, of course, his species had evolved a little more than any eel. Not only were Number 5 and his kin able to sense and stun with electricity, but they could also manipulate the electrical impulses in their prey’s brains and actually hypnotize them into doing whatever they wanted.

According to recent reports, it wasn’t uncommon to find Number 5’s species living with a handful of attending servants, who would do everything from cleaning to cooking themselves for dinner.

In the field of electromagnetics, Number 5 was described as something of an artist-you know, like in the way Genghis Khan was an artist with battlefield tactics and ruthless leadership. Oh, sorry… maybe you missed that part of world history class.

Also, he was a dynamo of energy. Literally. Where an electric eel could generate a few kilowatts-enough to kill the population of, say, a bathtub-Number 5 could generate enough electricity to fry an entire water park full of people… and even those out in the parking lot.

As to Number 21, the space ape that had gotten the jump on me in S-Mart, I discovered his show-biz name was Dougie Starshine and that he’d been credited as the production assistant and casting director on Number 5’s last dozen shows-and that he was no weakling, either.

That alien miscreant was wanted for murder in a half dozen galaxies, and it looked like he had some pretty serious psychic warfare talents. I mean, maybe a twenty-one ranking doesn’t quite compare to a top-ten baddie, but if you’re the type of reader who likes a little perspective, consider that Joe and I had figured out that if Superman were evil and real (in fact, he is loosely based on a real alien from the Crab Nebula), he’d come in at about number thirty-seven.

Real aliens seldom have weaknesses as obvious as kryptonite.

Chapter 12

DAD AND I went out back and did some jujitsu training-and savate, tae kwon do, taekkyon, aikido, judo, and glima for good measure-and held a brief tactical planning session afterward.

He’d decided that when you boiled it right down, all that Number 21 had done to me was seize the advantage by using the element of surprise.

If there is a kryptonite for me, then there you have it: because my powers are directly linked to my imagination, I have to be thinking clearly in order to make the best use of them.

By hitting me with that concussion-inducing shockwave, Number 21 had been able to keep me disoriented and unable, for instance, to visualize any weapons-or summon my alien-butt-kicking friends.

“Hey, Mom,” I yelled. She was sitting on the back porch reading a book, The Elephant-Keeper’s Secret Kite, that I’d picked up for her. Have I mentioned that I love elephants and that it’s a little-known fact that they originated on my home planet?

“What’s for dinner?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” she replied. “All we have here is a tin of caviar I found in the mailbox along with a lot of other old junk mail.”

“Caviar?” I asked. “As in fish eggs?”

“A lot of people consider it a delicacy, Daniel,” she reminded me, holding out the package. It was still in its clear plastic mailer, addressed to “Female Resident.”

I tore open the bag and read the note that came with the can:

A gift to the women of Holliswood from the KHAW news team, in gratitude for your kindness to visiting film producers. Bon appétit!

Caviar from the local news station? Well go ahead and chalk up mystery number 112 for me to solve already. And, while you’re at the board, why don’t you put me down for what is really only my second bad pun ever-although in this case I think you’ll agree it’s completely unavoidable-because there was something very fishy going on in this town.

Chapter 13

SINCE I REALLY did not want caviar for dinner-or ever-I sent Mr. Gout out for some KFC original recipe. I knew my friends, especially Joe, would never forgive me if I didn’t summon them for the Colonel Sanders gorge fest. Joe nearly cried with happiness when he saw Mr. Gout come in the door with the big red-and-white buckets.

Then Dana, Willy, Joe, and Emma and I said good night to my parents and hopped into the Ferrari. The only problem was the five of us couldn’t fit in a two-seater sports car.

“Leave Dana here,” said Joe.

“No way,” said Dana, “You’re the one who smells like Colonel Sanders’s gym shorts.”

“I’ll stay behind if you guys want,” said the ever-sacrificing Emma. “Even though all I smell like is coleslaw because nobody ever asks what I want to eat for dinner.”

Emma always serves us a generous helping of grief for eating meat.

“Hey, you kids,” said Dad, who was standing on the front lawn, laughing at us along with Pork Chop. “Take the minivan,” he suggested. “I made some modifications that will help quite a bit with your, um, errands tonight.”

Willy had already clambered out of the overstuffed Ferrari and was sliding open the minivan’s side-panel door.

“Dudes. You gotta come check this out!”

Chapter 14

DAD HAD CONVERTED the minivan into a cross between Scooby Doo’s Mystery Machine and a NASA command center.

The spacious, now shag-carpeted interior was blinking, pulsing, and humming with sensor displays, joysticks, trackballs, touchpads, data visors, relay panels, heads-up displays, sampling hoods, and holographic imagers.

“This is great, Dad,” I said. “So how’s everything work?”

“I’m sure a genius like you can figure it out in no time,” said Pork Chop, snapping her bubblegum.

“It’s all very user-friendly,” said Dad. “I don’t think any of you will have any trouble getting the hang of it.”

“Actually, it’s my four copilots who’ll be getting the hang of it,” I said. “I’m driving.”

They groaned but settled into the back of the van without another note of complaint as I drove toward the outskirts of town. They’re good friends like that.

As we made our way down the quaint residential streets, you couldn’t help noticing the windows of nearly every house glowing with the eerie blue flicker of TV and computer screens. This thing called Contemporary America-and its obsession with televisions, game systems, and computers-has gone a little far if you ask me. Some call it the Information Age, but I’d tend to say it’s more the Sitting-on-one’s-butt-and-letting-other-people-do-the-thinking-for-you Age.

“You guys find anything useful back there?” I asked, turning onto Mulberry from Larch.

“Yes, I think I have our first target!” said Joe. “There’s a whole mess of ’em in a building about a half mile from us. Hang a left here and then a right at the next stoplight.”

“How many are there?” asked Willy, practicing some jujitsu moves in the middle of the van.

“Can’t tell yet. Hang on, okay?” Joe remained intent on his data feed. I turned at the light onto a commercial street lined with stores and shopping plazas.

“Okay, it’s up there on the right,” said Joe. “Should say ‘ White Castle ’ on it… and it’s absolutely infested with… hamburgers!”

We pelted him with food wrappers, empty soda cans, a couple of dirty sneakers. I should’ve remembered that no mission is more important to Joe than filling his supersize-me stomach.

Chapter 15

JOE PRACTICALLY HAD to be held down to be kept from leaping out of the van as we passed the White Castle.

I steered back to our original route, but we didn’t get very far. A man, covered from head to toe in mud, staggered out of the bushes and into the middle of the road.

I swerved and hit the brakes.

“Hey,” I yelled out the window. “You need some help?”

He ignored me and staggered up the lawn of a house whose windows-like all the others we’d seen-were flickering blue from TV and computer displays.

“Yo,” yelled Willy, climbing out of the van after him. “You okay?”

The man must have heard him-unless he was deaf or had mud in his ears-but he just walked up to the house and right smack into the closed front door. After a minute or two, the door opened, and we caught a glimpse of a pregnant woman as he pushed his way through and disappeared inside.

“Rough day at work, I guess,” said Dana.

“Maybe he’s an alligator wrestler,” suggested Joe.

“Alligators don’t live this far north, stupid,” said Emma. “But clearly he was coming from someplace muddy.”

“The closest body of water is two point one miles south-southeast of here,” said Dana, clicking away on a computer in the back of the minivan. “That roughly lines up with the direction he was coming from.”

“Step on it, driver!” said Willy.

“Hey, I’m in charge around here,” I said and added, “as should be obvious to a bunch of people who depend on my imagination for their very existence.”

“Sorry, your highness,” said Joe, returning the flurry of food wrappers, soda cans, and sneakers that had nailed him earlier.

We’d just turned onto County Road 23 when Emma suddenly shrieked like a banshee.

A dog had run into the street just feet away from our car.

Chapter 16

I BRAKED SO hard that everybody in the backseats ended up in the front seats.

“What’s with all the jaywalking delays?” I grumbled. I had an investigation to conduct here.

“Aw,” said Emma, sitting up and looking at the poor animal shivering in the van’s headlights.

“Somebody tried to burn him,” she exclaimed as we got out of the van. She gathered the medium-sized brown dog in her arms.

“Are you sure you want to pick him up like that?” asked Joe. “He’s, like, really muddy.”

Emma shot him a reproachful glance.

“Judging from the shape of the burn marks,” said Willy, petting the dog’s head, “I’d say an alien firearm did this. He’s a lucky pup to have escaped with only some singed fur.”

“He doesn’t have a collar,” Dana observed.

“Which is just one more reason why we’re taking him with us,” said Emma. “We’ll check with the animal shelter to see if anybody’s missing a dog, and, if not, we’ll adopt him. And, for now, his name will be Lucky, just like Willy said.”

I thought about this for a moment. Unlike the rest of them, Lucky wouldn’t just disappear when I needed to be alone. So if Emma adopted him and then Emma wasn’t around for a bit, the dog would be my responsibility. I felt like a parent having an awkward moment at PetSmart.

“Um, I think we better leave him here. I mean, he was probably going someplace -” I broke off. Emma looked like she was deciding exactly how to conduct my public execution.

“Right,” I said. “Bring him into the van already.” I’d figure this out later. He was a pretty sweet-looking dog, at least under the burned fur and inch-thick mud.

Hey, I may be an alien, but I still have a heart.

Chapter 17

WE TRAVELED ABOUT a quarter mile down an unpainted, heavily potholed strip of asphalt that saw more traffic from combines and livestock trailers than passenger vehicles. I knew we’d hit the boondocks when we saw something far stranger than a farm animal emerge about twenty feet in front of the van.

It was an alien picnic. Right there in the middle of the road was a cluster of Number 5’s henchbeasts.

“Um…” wondered Joe. “Why aren’t they attacking us?”

“It worked!” said Dana. “See, I put us in stealth mode. We can see them, but they can’t see us. Or hear us, for that matter. A mile or so back I turned on a cloaking device that renders the van invisible.”

“Go ahead,” she continued, “test it out. Drive up closer.”

As we slowly approached, we could see some of them were munching on chicken wings. Not buffalo- or BBQ-style, though… they were the kind with feathers still on them and blood still in them. They guzzled cans of motor oil to wash them down and tossed the empties to the ground and stomped on them like they were at a fraternity party.

And then we noticed one henchbeast had something that looked suspiciously like a cat’s tail hanging out of its mouth.

“That’s so disgusting,” said Joe. “I mean people say they could eat a horse when they’re hungry, but that’s just an expression. What kind of monster would actually eat a poor little kitty?”

“Stay here, Lucky,” said Emma, and before the rest of us could stop her, she’d jumped out of the van and was sprinting toward the aliens.

Chapter 18

I’VE GOT TO hand it to Emma-for a peacenik, she really knows how to lay down some hurt. That first alien she decked must have thought it had been teleported back up into space for all the stars and blackness it was suddenly seeing.

Still, this was a case of seven versus one, and, though she managed to knock down a henchbeast and had delivered some serious facial rearrangement to another, she was soon at the uncomfortable center of an alien pileup.

Willy was the first to reach her side. He grabbed the nearest henchbeast and threw him a dozen yards straight into a tree. The young maple shook and dropped a lot of sticks and leaves but fared better than the alien-which shook and dropped most of its legs.

Joe, Emma, and I managed to take out another two, but the other aliens had remembered their guns by this point and were laying down some heavy fire that kept us playing far more defense than offense.

That is, until it occurred to me that I could turn their high-powered plasma guns into Super Soakers.

Willy was quick to notice the change, and he jumped forward, taking a shot right in the chest.

“Oh no!” he screamed, “I’m me-eh-eh-elting!!!” And then he collapsed to the ground.

“Or… not!” he said, leaping back up and adopting an intimidating martial arts stance.

Alien henchbeasts tend not to be as deep or as sensitive as human beings, but they do have faces, so it’s pretty easy to tell what emotions they’re feeling. In this case, the look on their ugly mugs is what you could safely call terror.

For a few seconds, they continued to halfheartedly squirt lame streams of water at Willy and my friends… and then dropped their plastic toys and scattered into the woods.

“You okay, Emma?” asked Dana, as our friend got back to her feet.

“It was a cat,” she said, pointing to a pile of torn flea collars on the pavement.

We nodded sympathetically. I spotted a satchel one of the aliens had been carrying and began to rummage through it.

“Promise me, Daniel,” said Emma. “We’re going to get every last one of these monsters.”

“That’s job one,” I reassured her. But I was preoccupied with something I’d found in the satchel. Something very strange, and distressing.

Chapter 19

IT WAS A small piece of jewelry from my home planet.

My people are incredible and distinctive craftsmen, and I instantly identified the small silver pendant of an elephant as genuine Alparian handiwork, not some dime-store knockoff.

In fact, elephant pendants like this were commonly worn by adults who leave the planet, emblems of home-world solidarity. My mother and father had both received them when they had graduated from the Academy and accepted jobs in the Protectorship. As far as I knew, they’d never taken them off.

So what on earth-or any other planet, for that matter-were a bunch of Number 5’s henchbeasts doing walking around with an Alpar Nokian elephant necklace?

It had to be one of my first memories, that little silver elephant hanging from my mother’s neck. I’d play with it endlessly, watching it twirl and catch the light whenever she held me in her arms… though I hadn’t thought about it in years.

I wiped away some moisture from my eye before it technically became a tear. One more mystery for me to solve, I thought with a sigh, putting the pendant in my pocket.

Just then I had this really weird sensation that I was being watched, and I spun around. But there was nothing-just cricket-infested woods.

“Joe,” I yelled into the van, “are you picking up any alien life-forms on the scanners?”

“Nothing but regular wildlife. Those cat eaters we scared off are miles away by now.”

Great, I thought. Now Number 5’s made me paranoid, on top of everything else.

Chapter 20

AFTER A MILE or so, the county road crossed over the freeway, and we pulled into a small Exxon minimart at the end of the off-ramp to regroup about where the night’s mission was headed. We got some waters and sodas, and Joe bought a couple dozen bags of chips, a fistful of jerky sticks, and at least a dozen Hostess bakery products.

That was normal, but here’s the weird part: Joe actually stopped eating in the back of the van before he’d finished inhaling his third bag of nacho cheese chips. Even weirder, he paused to place a crumb inside what looked like a miniature microwave oven.

“Fifty-three percent Benton, Iowa; thirty-two percent Edison, New Jersey; eleven percent Las Piedras, Mexico; three percent Ankang, China. And trace quantities from, oh, a planet that’s about twenty-five thousand light years away from Earth.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Dana.

“That corn chip. This machine can pinpoint the origins of any sample you put inside it. In this case, a corn chip.”

“Your corn chip has extraterrestrial ingredients?” asked Dana, wrinkling her cute little nose.

“Well, it’s mostly from Iowa -probably the corn part,” said Joe.

“It’s no surprise, really,” I said. “The List tells us there are how many thousand aliens living here on Earth?”

“Probably one of them works at the snack factory and sneezed on the production line,” said Dana.

“Yeah,” said Emma, “or they’re trying to poison the population or something.”

“It’s possible,” said Joe, sticking another handful of chips in his mouth. “Aw I cun… sayfersher is… day… tayse… perrygood.”

“Think you can fit some caviar in there?” I asked, handing Joe a can from my backpack. It was the tin that mom had found in the mailbox.

He put the whole can inside and slammed the door shut. The machine hummed while Joe swallowed the last of the chips.

“Yeah, this one’s not going to earn ‘organic’ certification, either. The paper looks like it might have come from Oregon trees, but the metal and stuff inside is definitely from a galaxy far, far away.”

“Let me guess,” I said, “Number 5’s home planet.”

“On the button,” said Joe.

“Guys,” said Dana, hunkering over her console. “I’m seeing signs of alien activity a few hundred yards from here. And there’s some sort of freaky transmission coming from a TV relay station just up that hill over there.”

Against the starry sky, we could see a sinister red light blinking atop a steel-framed communications tower.

“Listen to this.”

The minivan’s speaker system began to play a decidedly unearthly series of clicks, moans, and static.

Lucky bared his teeth and made a low growl.

“Atta boy,” said Emma, stroking his neck reassuringly. “Let’s go rid Earth of some aliens.”

Chapter 21

THE RELAY STATION’S access road was barricaded by a chain-link gate.

“Want me to make it go away?” asked Willy, already aiming his plasma cannon at it.

“It’s easier to spy on aliens when they don’t hear you coming,” I said.

So we left Lucky to guard the van, and, as stealthily as an Alien Hunter and his four imagined friends can manage, we jumped the fence. It was fifteen feet high, but we can do tall buildings in a single bound, so it really wasn’t an issue.

We snuck up the hardscrabble road on foot. At the top of the hill and inside another fence-this one topped with concertina wire-we found a pretty typical broadcast substation: a small forest of towers, satellite dishes, antennas, and transformers. The small control shack also looked to have been built by human hands.

Everything, in fact, seemed pretty normal-except that the door to the shack had been blown off its hinges, and there was an eerie blue glow emanating from within… and, of course, the air was filled with the disgusting stink of aliens.

We broke out some night-vision binoculars and long-range microphones and crept closer. There were a half dozen henchbeasts inside the shack, guzzling motor oil and laughing their ugly butts off as one of them edited video footage.

The transmissions were surreal scenes of townspeople doing dances, singing a capella, and, always at the end, getting vaporized. That especially sent the aliens into hysterics.

Next they uploaded a scene of pregnant women converging on a country farmhouse.

“That Number 5’s a stallion,” said one of them, guffawing conspiratorially.

“Yeah, especially for a fish,” replied another, causing the rest to roll on the floor with laughter.

Just then the picture on the monitors changed to the glowering image of their boss, and they quickly stood at nervous attention.

“Are you no-talent alien clowns having a good time?” asked Number 5.

“Yes, sir!-I mean no, sir!-We mean -”

“Spare me the stupidity,” said Number 5. “And see if you can’t spare yourselves and me yet another production delay. Our friend the Alien Hunter is forty-five meters away, and he’s armed to the teeth.”

“Well, so much for the element of surprise,” said Joe.

Willy cracked his knuckles and then, in his best Bruce Willis impersonation, said, “Lock and load.”

We didn’t like using guns ourselves, but I had to agree with the sentiment.

Chapter 22

NOTE TO SELF: when fighting hand-to-hand with rubber-skeletoned aliens-which some of these evidently were-remember that thing Sir Isaac Newton said about every action being met with an equal and opposite reaction.

Because no sooner had I landed a devastating roundhouse kick to the head of one of the henchbeasts than I was sailing through the night like I’d just jumped off a ten-story building onto a trampoline.

I somehow managed to land on my feet on the far side of the control shack and was ready to spring back into action, but my friends had already figured out how to deal with these overly flexible aliens. You simply tie one of their limbs to a fixed object, such as the steel girders of the broadcast tower, and then you run with their bodies in the opposite direction.

Then, when you can’t run any farther, you let go and-bang!-the creatures snap back into themselves with such force that they explode like dropped water balloons. Only they’re filled with some sort of sticky greenish syrup rather than water.

Gross but effective.

The other type of henchbeast we encountered wasn’t quite so stretchy but had its own surprise-some sort of gland on the abdomen that could spray a jet of foul black acid more than thirty feet.

We found they weren’t very good at aiming up, however. The secret was to jump into the air and then crush them from above-splat!-just like a foot squashing a bug.

But since they each weighed about a hundred fifty pounds, they left your sneakers a whole lot messier.

Chapter 23

ONCE WE’D SAFELY dispatched the last of them, we ducked into the control shack, hoping to find some clues. It was worrisome that Number 5 often seemed to know my whereabouts.

There was no sign of him, however.

“So what were they up to in here?” asked Joe.

“I think Number 5’s getting ready for a new show,” I said. “Our friends were probably uploading the footage to an extraterrestrial receiver for postproduction. Joe, can you figure out anything useful about this setup?”

He was already poring over the equipment, following wires and examining switches and displays.

“Yeah, it looks like most of the data is getting broadcast straight up into space. There’s a small signal coming back, though. Probably a guidance beacon, but it might be something else. Here, let me see if I can get it on this set here.”

He moved some wires to different jacks and threw a couple of switches. And then we saw what might have been the most sickening thing I’d ever seen.

And, yes, I’ve been on the Internet before.

Chapter 24

IMAGINE THE THEATER for American Idol during the season finale. Now make it bigger-like Madison Square Garden in New York or the Staples Center in Los Angeles. And now quadruple its seating capacity. And now replace the mostly polite, family-oriented audience of American Idol with the loud, obnoxious fans of, say, Jerry Springer or Howard Stern. And have them not be human.

Have some be three headed; have some be lobster clawed; have some wearing space suits; have some glowing with orange radiation; have some be nothing more than dense clouds of blue vapor; have some that look like huge unblinking eyeballs on mushroom stalks; have some with hammer heads, some with needle noses, some with feathers, some with frog legs, some with turtle backs, and some that look like Chinese dumplings with sea-urchin spines and metal helmets… well, that at least starts to paint the scene.

But that wasn’t the sickening part.

What made us gasp in horror was the stage, where the scenes we’d watched on the monitor were now being played for the alien horde’s viewing pleasure.

A father and his daughter getting terrified by a microphone-wielding Number 5… and then liquefied by blaster rays.

A family-and even their dog-dancing to seventies disco hits… and then melted by blaster rays.

A TV news anchor break dancing on her desk… and then, in a flash of light, getting transformed into a steaming pool of swampy liquid.

And then me, getting knocked senseless by Number 21 in S-Mart.

The audience loved every second of it. Even through all of the bits of static and fuzz, you could see the jeers, the sneers, the laughter, the pumping fists, claws, and tentacles of those assembled interplanetary creeps.

Then, I heard Number 5’s voice boom through the arena. “And that, my fellow producers, is just the trailer for the hottest new entertainment phenomenon we’re calling endertainment. Watch the skies for more episodes-and a sizzling premiere that’ll leave you dying for more.”

Without saying a word, the five of us started smashing everything in the shack.

Sparks flew, and the air filled with the scent of shorted fuses and ozone as we hurled mixing boards, editing decks, holoform display units, and a bunch of other things we didn’t bother to identify before we trashed them.

And then, as I reached to pull one of the monitors off its wall-mounted bracket, Number 5’s image flickered to life on the screen.

“I thought you were the Alien Hunter, not the Alien Vandal,” he laughed.

I was speechless. How did he do that TV trick? It looked like a regular old set.

“You’ll be happy to know the broadcast was completed before you destroyed any of this equipment.”

“I don’t care,” I managed to say.

“Don’t you?” he said. “I’m not sure I believe you. Not that I suppose it matters. The only thing that would be a help is if you stuck around town till we’re ready for the final episode. You have a starring role in it, you know.”

“You’re not even going to make it to episode two, you fishy freak.”

“Ah-ah-ah-ah!” he laughed at me. “Very good, young Alien Hunter. That’s just the kind of bravado the audience loves to see. And it will make it all the funnier when I kill you in a live broadcast.”

Chapter 25

“DUDE,” SAID JOE as I hurled the monitor through the window. “He’s totally toying with you.”

“Let him keep thinking that,” I said-although, truth be told, I was getting pretty freaked at this point.

“How can he possibly keep seeing me through TV screens like that, Joe?”

“Maybe he’s got them reverse-wired somehow, has them working as cameras.”

“Is that possible?”

“Almost anything’s possible if you have alien technology on your side.”

“Can you take a look and find out for us?”

“Sure,” said Joe. “Of course, it would’ve been easier if you hadn’t thrown it out the window and smashed it into a thousand pieces… but I’ll see what I can do.”

He stepped out of the shack to gather up the remains.

“Okay,” I said to the rest of them. “You guys have any big ideas here? Personally, I’m starting to wonder if going after Number 5 wasn’t a big mistake.”

“But he’ll keep killing animals if you don’t stop him,” said Emma.

“And humans,” said Willy.

“And probably you,” said Dana. “You guys are a great help,” I said.

Chapter 26

JOE DIDN’T FIND anything strange in the wrecked TV. No nanocameras, no light-sensitive data films, no reverse-broadcast microtransceivers. Which left me one conclusion-Number 5’s electromagnetic powers were greater than I’d even begun to imagine.

I mean, the only thing I could figure was that he was actually able to inhabit electronic devices. And, in a world as wired as this one was becoming… well, there wasn’t much to keep this soulless creep from turning the entire human race into an unpaid variety show and then committing the worst extinction event the planet had ever seen.

Just to be safe, I had the gang run a complete analysis on the van’s equipment, and, when we made it back to the house, we shut off the main circuit breaker in the basement and cut the phone lines.

Clearly, if I was going to find a way to surprise Number 5-and I’d been miserably failing at it so far-I couldn’t have him watching me through the electrical sockets.

I turned to my family and friends. “If you were Number 5, what would be the last thing you’d expect of a young Alien Hunter bent on wiping your foul-smelling stain off the face of the planet?”

“Acting normal for once in your life?” offered Pork Chop.

I was about to give her the L-is-for-Loser sign, but that’s when it hit me. Tomorrow morning I was going to do exactly what any normal kid my age would do. I’d get up, get dressed, drink some orange juice, eat a frosted strawberry Pop-Tart, and go to high school.

Number 5 wouldn’t expect that in a million years.

Chapter 27

DANA AND I had English class first period, although maybe class isn’t quite the right word for it. It was more like a holding pen in which the substitute teacher and the students had collectively agreed to spend fifty-five minutes doing as little productive activity as was humanly possible.

The sub clearly just wanted to keep things quiet enough to avoid the attention of any hallway-roving administrators. And the kids, for their part, were taking full advantage of the situation. Some were texting friends; some were chatting idly; some were staring off into space; and two boys were actually sleeping at their desks. The closest thing to learning taking place in the room was a single dark-haired girl reading some manga.

“And, in this great country’s quest to create a democratic, self-governing citizenry,” Dana declaimed to whomever was listening-namely, me-“it was determined that the most important function of its free and public schools was to help its children become motivated, engaged, and eager-to-learn participants in the democratic process; that although the downward-sloping road to lowest-common denominators might have seemed the easiest to travel, the job of teachers, parents, and the larger community was to provide an education that showcased the highway to mathematics, reading, writing, problem solving, and critical thinking as the more compelling and rewarding route.”

“You are so weird,” I told her.

“Aren’t you always reminding me that I’m a product of your imagination?”

“You have a point there.”

“You mean about the failures of this country’s educational system or that stuff about how if I’m weird, you have only yourself to blame?”

“Both, really,” I said.

It was frustrating to see these kids wasting this opportunity. I know I’m not the oldest or wisest entity in the cosmos, but life is short no matter what planet you’re from-way too short to waste chances to learn.

Plus-as has been proved only a couple million times-List aliens have a much better time taking advantage of undereducated people than well-educated ones. Trust me, in my alien world, the ranks of abductees, hosts, slaves, and murder victims include a lot more TV and video-game addicts than they do book readers.

I saw a group of girls gather around an iPhone to watch a little red-carpet footage from some second-rate award show.

And then I had an idea.

Because this was supposed to be an English class, I decided to make up for some of the time they’d lost and uploaded into every student’s brain a couple of my favorite human books-which I’ve of course memorized word-for-word in both text and audio formats-The Catcher in the Rye and Stranger in a Strange Land. And then, as a bonus, I gave them the entire contents of Wikipedia.

The poor sub must have thought he was getting punked. All the kids-having suddenly discovered the joy of a good book for the first time-were lining up and asking him for more things to read.

It felt good to put things somewhat back on track here, but I sensed there was a lot more fixing to do in this school, so Dana and I gathered up our books and went out into the hallway.

Chapter 28

ONE OF THE many cool things about Robert A. Heinlein’s classic Stranger in a Strange Land, which is about a guy with alien superpowers living among humans here on Earth, is this thing called “grokking.” Grok is a Martian word that literally means “to drink,” but it’s one of those words-in both the book and real life-that often means a whole lot more. When you grok something, you’re saying you get it.

Like when Dana and I stepped into the linoleum-floored corridor, I instantly grokked the fear, confusion, and hopelessness of about a hundred freshman filing, zombie-like, down the hall toward the back of the building.

“Number 5,” I whispered, and Dana nodded in agreement. I quickly made us look a little younger-I’d make an excellent plastic surgeon if I were into that kind of stuff-and we joined the end of the line.

“Where are we going?” I asked the little messy-haired kid in front of me.

“We’ve got another practice for the big musical, stupid,” he replied.

“Ah, the big musical,” said Dana. “When’s that happening again?”

“Saturday, you moron. What are you guys, foreign-exchange students?”

“Something like that,” I said, putting my hand on his neck and quickly erasing his memory of this conversation, just in case.

We exited the building and came to a silent stop on the sidewalk next to the school parking lot where, a moment later, two yellow buses, each driven by a henchbeast, screeched to a halt.

The kids wordlessly broke into two groups and climbed aboard.

“You want to do something about this?” Dana asked me.

“Not yet,” I said. “Sounds like this is another rehearsal, so I’m pretty sure they’re not in immediate peril. Number 5’s too much of a perfectionist to kill prematurely. He’s going to want the best, biggest bang he can get on Saturday.”

We broke away from the group and hid behind the rear bus. Dana slapped a small magnetic device under the bumper.

“Homing beacon,” she said, as the bus doors closed and the buses squealed away from the curb, “so we can track where they’re taking them for the practice session and hopefully see where Number 5’s intending to film Holliswood’s grand finale this weekend.”

We returned to the building, and I noticed two pregnant teachers standing silently in the courtyard, staring up at the sky. I’d never seen so many pregnant women in one town. Time to get to the bottom of this.

“How long have you been pregnant?” I asked the closer one.

“Four weeks,” she replied.

“Four weeks?” said Dana, her eyes nearly bugging out of her head. “You’re a little big for four weeks, don’t you think? Aren’t you worried?”

“No, I’m just happy,” she said like a very, very bad actress reading a very, very lame script.

Then I did something I don’t normally like to do because it makes me feel queasy on the best of days. I used my X-ray vision… and looked inside her belly.

I’d describe to you in detail what I saw, except you’d never forgive me if I did.

Chapter 29

“ALIEN SPAWN,” I explained to Dana as diplomatically as I could. “Number 5’s, by the look of them.”

“Nasty,” said Dana. “So all these pregnant women in town are actually filled with little Number 5s?”

“That’s my theory,” I said.

“That’s horrible!” said Dana, gasping.

“And I’m guessing the ‘caviar’ mailing from the television station is how it happened.”

“Which means the station is probably one of the first, if not the first, place Number 5 attacked. Let’s go have a look!”

“You may be right, Dana, but I want to check out a few things before going over there.”

“Like what? Gym class?”

“No. I have to go see somebody.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. I’ll see you back at the house, okay?”

“Who are you going to see, Daniel?” she asked, tapping her foot impatiently.

“Well…” I started to explain, but then I clapped her out of existence. It was an awkward thing to explain to anybody, let alone Dana.

Chapter 30

I PULLED THE van into the diner lot and spotted Judy Blue Eyes through the plate-glass window, shuttling a brown-rimmed coffee pot back and forth to customers along the counter.

I made my way inside, pulled my “Relax” cap down over my eyes, and took a stool across from the rotating pie display.

She had recovered well from the other night, and it would be an understatement to say she was looking pretty cute.

“Hey, you!” she said, spotting me and causing my alien heart to flop around in my chest like a fish in the bottom of a rowboat.

“Hey, J-J-,” I started to say but, fortunately, she cut off my nervous stutter with a glass of water and a menu.

“So, um, how’s it going?” I finally managed to ask.

“Good. How’s it going with you?” she asked.

“Good.”

“Want another of those grilled cheese sandwiches you liked so much-with a slice of pickle in it?”

“Sure. Great. Thanks.” I was doing well with the one-word sentences. “Look, um, Judy -”

“Yes?” she asked, batting her eyes and causing me to forget what I had meant to ask her.

“So, has anything… unusual happened since the other night?”

“Unusual? Like what?”

“Like, um, anything weird?”

“Where? Here, at the diner?”

“Yeah, or in your neighborhood, or at school.”

“My school is always weird-my parents have been homeschooling me since eighth grade. It totally stinks.”

“I’m sure they’re doing what’s best for you.”

“Yeah, completely destroying my social life is just what the doctor ordered.”

“Seriously, you never go to school?”

“Pretty much just for standardized tests. Like twice a year.”

“So when do you get out to see your friends?”

“Friends? I’m lucky to get out for piano lessons. I took this job pretty much just so I could talk to other human beings.” How ironic that she had found herself talking to a nonhuman instead, I thought. “Only problem is it’s usually old truckers, municipal employees, and police. My parents figure it’s good experience for me and a chance for me to earn some money for college.”

“I’m impressed.”

“Yeah, they seem to think I’ll get into a better school this way. And who knows? Maybe they’re right. Maybe Mulberry Avenue Academy is better than Holliswood High.”

“What’s Mulberry Avenue Academy?”

“ Mulberry Avenue is the street my house is on. I was trying to make a joke, stu.”

“Stu? Um, my name’s Daniel.”

“Stu’s not just short for Stuart, stupid.”

I was unprepared for that, but I was pretty sure she was flirting.

“So you feel like it’s a good idea to tease me even with a name like you’ve got?” I said pointing at her name tag. “I mean, it seems to me if you want to go that way -”

“My real last name’s McGillicutty. My boss couldn’t spell it over the phone to the uniform supplier, so he put the order through as Judy Blue Eyes.”

“McGillicutty, huh?” I was tempted to tell her name sounded just like a substance, magillakedi, that’s excreted by a three-hundred-pound centipede-like creature from Frizia Nine and is one of the three worst-smelling compounds ever discovered… but then I thought better of it.

“So, remind me… Did you say you wanted that sandwich, stu?”

We were staring pretty hard into each other’s eyes at this point, and I was feeling a little giddy. “Sure, a sandwich would be great.”

Chapter 31

ONE MINUTE JUDY was herself-smiling, bouncing down the length of the counter to pass my order through the kitchen window-and the next minute, the diner was almost as surreal as an alien picnic.

All at once the volume on the TV set above the cash register went from mute to ear busting. A number from that High School Musical show started to crescendo, and suddenly Judy was juggling coleslaw cups and then twirling the two-foot-long pepper mill like she was a majorette.

Then the volume went back down, and, without missing a beat, she was back leaning across the counter looking at me.

“That’s funny,” she said, putting down the mill. “You asked for pepper, right?”

“Um, yeah, sure. Listen,” I said, getting out my wallet. “I just remembered I have to walk the dog.” Even weirder than Judy’s juggling routine was the fact that Zac Efron from High School Musical was starting to look a little like Number 5 to me. Sure sign it was time to split.

“Oh, okay,” she said, looking a little surprised.

“Just promise me you’ll keep your eyes open for anything strange, okay?”

“You betcha, cutie.”

Did I mention Alien Hunter superability number 415? Yeah, I can blush so hard that Santa could probably give Rudolph a season off and have me guide his sleigh at night.

So my big giant red head and I stuttered “Th-th-thanks,” and left a nice tip on the counter.

I scanned the room for danger on my way out and noticed a few shady dudes in one of the corner booths. Their overcoat collars were turned up, their rain hats pulled down, and, though they were taking pains to hide their faces behind their menus, I got a definite glimpse of blue skin.

I quickly looked away, continued on as if nothing was wrong, and, as I passed the coffee machine, grabbed two full pots and threw the boiling-hot liquid right into their laps.

I knew it wasn’t going to do any real damage, but there’s nothing like a good old-fashioned, lawsuit-worthy, scorching-hot coffee spill to really tick someone off.

It worked like a charm.

Chapter 32

I WAS OUT the door and into the parking lot in a flash, four coffee-scalded aliens hot on my tail.

“I hate when that happens,” I said pointing at the damp, yellow stains on their poorly fitting pants. “So-o embarrassing!”

“You. Are. So. Dead,” said the biggest one. He pressed a button on a small electronic device he was holding, and the back door on a tractor-trailer parked at the rear of the lot rolled open, revealing an interstellar transport container. That could only mean one thing: something very big, very bad, and very foreign was about to appear on the scene.

An unnerving roar emanated from within, and, a moment later, an enormous space creature leaped out into the parking lot.

With the body of a six-hundred-pound lion, a giant ant’s head with wicked-sharp mouthparts, and a stinger on its tail the size of a baseball bat, the creature gave the impression that it wasn’t here to march in the annual firemen’s parade.

It let out another roar and pawed at the pavement like an angry bull, its antennae pointing at me like twin rifle barrels.

“Um, why’s it looking at me?” I asked the aliens. One of them responded with a grizzly voice.

“Every day since it was a kitten, its trainers have punished it with a stick that was coated in the scent of your pathetic Alparian species. It may have never met you personally, but, trust us, it hates your guts.”

“Um,” I said, trying to decide whether giant lions or giant ants scared me more, “you wouldn’t have any spare deodorant I could borrow, would you?”

The henchbeasts thought that was hilarious.

Chapter 33

I DON’T KNOW if you’re a fan of nature documentaries or otherwise familiar with the African savanna’s ecosystem, but the truth is that even if the lion is King of the Jungle, he’s not quite an all-powerful ruler.

The only truly supreme creature on that continent-the one creature that no other animal will go against-is the African elephant.

Weighing in at seven tons, more than twenty times the size of the largest lion, five times the size of a rhino, and with ivory-hardened tusks capable of tearing open a Jeep, there isn’t much that’s going to risk challenging the will of a full-grown bull elephant.

So I changed myself into one.

Although, in deference to my adversary’s mutant alien status, I included some special bonus features that I’ll explain shortly.

Unfortunately, my sudden shape change didn’t have the immediate effect I intended. Instead of leaping back into his cage, scared out of his wits, the beast charged me at an alarming rate of speed, leaping almost straight up into the air so that he could land on my back and dig his claws, jaws, and poison stinger into my unprotected flesh.

I quickly jumped sideways-setting off a few car alarms as I landed-turned around, dropped to my front knees, and raised my big elephant butt at the pouncing alien beast.

Now, before you interpret this move as a sign of submission, think again: What trumps an ant… besides a giant sneaker?

A spider. Ant-lion versus elephant-spider!

I raised my tail, exposing a massive set of spinnerets, and fired a tangle of web that would have impressed even Peter Parker.

The ant-lion fell to the pavement with a thud, bound up like a mummy. It growled at me in rage, wriggling helplessly in its silken straitjacket.

I knew I didn’t have much time before the aliens regained their wits and decided to attack me themselves, so I quickly charged up to the ant-lion, knelt down, and probed through the sticky threads with my trunk to find the back of his armored head.

Then I undertook one of the more challenging telepathic adjustments I’d ever undertaken.

“I hope this works,” I said, ripping the threads from its struggling body.

Fortunately, it did-the reprogrammed ant-lion quickly leaped to its feet, gave me a startled stare through his bulging bug eyes, and charged after the henchbeasts.

“Yeah,” I yelled in booming elephant voice as they ran away into the woods. “You know that memory he had of my scent on his trainer’s stick? Well, I kind of changed it to a memory of your scent, you ugly bugglies!”

But they were already too far gone to hear me. I could hear trees falling and their screams fading in the distance.

I morphed back into my usual handsome self just as Judy tentatively popped up her head from behind our Dodge minivan. Instead of Judy Blue Eyes, though, it was more like Judy Wide Eyes.

“Bet you didn’t know I could do that, huh?” I said, kind of embarrassed.

“Yeah… No…” stammered Judy. “What was…? Who were…? Hey, why are we outside? Are you leaving?”

Watching her face was like seeing lights get shut off inside a building. I had no idea how, but Number 5 had clearly done something to her short-term memory. And if that was the case… well, this guy was getting more worrisome by the minute.

“Yeah, I better run, Judy,” I said. “Stay out of trouble, okay?”

“Um, yeah,” she said, waving like a Disney theme-park character as she walked, oblivious, back toward the restaurant. “Come back and see us real soon.”

Chapter 34

I HOPPED BACK in the van but didn’t get very far. Main Street was basically a two-mile-long parking lot. People were just sitting in their cars, staring into the bumper of the automobile in front of theirs, not the least bit worried about the plume of black smoke that was billowing farther up the road.

I turned the van into a levitating skateboard-like the one in that Back to the Future movie-and offered the young man in the Ford Focus behind me the sort of nod I imagined Danny Way would give before undertaking one of his record-setting jumps. Then I put my helmet on, jumped on the board, and zipped down the sidewalk to see what was going on.

A house was on fire-and in the most stunning show of community cooperation I’d ever seen in the U.S. of A.-neighbors and passersby had formed a bucket brigade to the house, filling and passing buckets, hand over hand, to douse the flames. The place was a total loss, but it looked like their efforts would at least keep the inferno from spreading to any other properties.

“Where’s the fire department?” I asked a businessman standing in the line, sweating in his charcoal suit.

“Nobody’s seen them in a month.”

“What happened?!” I asked. “Isn’t there any backup? I mean, that’s nuts!”

“I guess they’re on vacation.” The man passed along another bucket.

I was flabbergasted. “Why didn’t anyone call a nearby town for help? Why hasn’t this been all over the news?”

“They’re on vacation too,” he answered, and twitched a little bit. “Everybody deserves a vacation.”

“So Number 5 brainwashed you too, huh?”

“What?” asked the man, sweat dripping from his brow.

“Never mind,” I said, shaking my head. And I put out what was left of the fire with one giant alien breath, like I was blowing out candles on a birthday cake. “Now go home and take a shower.”

Chapter 35

I’D LEFT LUCKY at the house with Mr. Gout-but one of the bigger problems with the telepathically adjusted is that, while they’ll do what you tell them to do, they generally won’t do what you’ve forgotten to tell them to do. Like taking the dog for a walk.

By the time I got home, poor Lucky was practically putting on a Number 5-style disco dance.

Since Mr. Gout had been diligently alienproofing the house for the past twenty-two hours, following the blueprints Dad had given him, I told him to go take a nap. Then I materialized a collar and leash and took Lucky for a much-needed stroll.

I don’t know if you have a dog, but it’s a real responsibility. I mean, they need to be fed, and they need to be walked, and if they make a mess on the sidewalk, you need to take care of that too.

Lucky seemed great and all, but I quickly decided that-after holding him back from chasing his third squirrel, and two neighbors’ cats before that-until I had completely crossed every alien off The List, I couldn’t possibly let myself be a dog owner.

Emma was going to kill me, but she and everybody knew that my responsibility here-to safeguard the Earth from a deadly alien scourge-was more important than providing a happy home for one dog. How did Mr. Spock put it? The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.

Especially when “the one” is a squirrel-chasing, cat-hating, car-barking, sidewalk-dookying dynamo of energy incapable of walking in a straight line.

And nearly incapable of being coaxed into a two-seater Ferrari-which is what I had to do… to make the four-mile drive to the local SPCA.

Chapter 36

I PARKED MR. GOUT’S Ferrari in front of a stenciled, rust-streaked OFFICE sign on the side of the first building we came to at the SPCA, not more than a mile from the TV transmission station we’d visited last night.

Lucky cowered on the passenger-side floor as I got out of the car and went around to open his door.

“Come on,” I said, patting my legs in encouragement. “Come on, boy!”

He was having none of it. I conjured a tennis ball, then a doggy biscuit, then, finally, a piece of freshly cooked bacon, which did the trick. Lucky bounded out of the car just as a long-boned, white-haired woman in work boots, dark green pants, and a khaki shirt emerged from behind one of the sheds.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

She looked like Jane Goodall, that woman who studied apes in Africa, and she reminded me of somebody else I knew too, though I couldn’t quite remember who.

“Um, we found a stray. No collar or anything, so -”

“Don’t want him yourself?”

“I, um… my family is away a lot, and I have a full-time job, and -”

“Must be some job,” she said, glancing disapprovingly at the Ferrari. “Bring him inside, and you can fill in some paperwork.”

“Come on, Lucky,” I said, materializing two more bacon bribes as the caretaker turned her back.

“You’ll just need to fill in where you found him, and anything you’ve noticed about his health. I take it his hair was already singed before he made your acquaintance?”

“If you’re thinking I-I mean, there’s no way I -”

“A half dozen pups have come in these past few weeks with burns worse than that. I’ve called the police, but they say they haven’t been able to find anything. I’ll tell you, there’s something very strange going on in this town. The way the dogs here bay all night, always in the direction of Old Man Wiggers’ farm -”

“Old Man Wiggers’ farm?”

“Right over that ridge,” she said, pointing back into the woods. “I thought the crazy old coot had retired from farming, but, given the amount of noise he’s been making, I guess he’s reconsidered. Been driving the dogs and me crazy. Bulldozers, loudspeakers-I’d swear he’s even been blasting with dynamite back there,” she said, rubbing her eyes.

I glanced down at Lucky, who had finished his treat and was looking back up at me, tail wagging like crazy. “So, I, um, can just leave him with you?”

“This is the pound, and he’s a stray, right?” Her penetrating blue-eyed stare was making me really nervous, like she was grokking my thoughts.

“You want to know what our euthanasia policy is, don’t you?”

I nearly swallowed my Adam’s apple. I was going to have enough trouble explaining this scenario to Emma and the gang without having to confront the fact that Lucky might get put down.

“The only thing we do to animals here is vaccinate, spay, or neuter. We hope they get adopted-because any dog will have a happier life with a loving forever home all its own-but we don’t kill here.”

“You ship them off someplace for that?” I said, tears welling. Forget “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one”-what kind of an alien monster was I?

“Any animal that comes here gets food, shelter, and veterinary care for the course of its natural life.”

I nearly leaped across the counter and kissed her. I suddenly realized who she reminded me of: my alien grandmother, Blaleen. Another great lover of animals, although Blaleen was more into elephants than dogs.

This woman had also just reminded me that you humans can be about the best, most compassionate beings that have ever inhabited this particular dimension.

Chapter 37

OF COURSE, THE first thing Emma asked when I returned to the house was where Lucky was.

“Um,” I said.

“Where is he?” she repeated.

Now my family and the rest of the gang were giving me subzero stares too.

“Well,” I said, materializing a piece of bacon on top of Emma’s left shoulder and telekinetically pushing open the kitchen door behind them.

Next thing we knew, Emma was pinned to the floor, giggling underneath a tail-wagging tornado of singed fur.

“Lucky! Stop!” she laughed as I mentally placed some bacon in her pockets. “You’re tickling me!”

In the end, of course, I hadn’t been able to go through with it. I mean, I’m sure Lucky would have had a good enough life there at the SPCA, but I also knew what my grandmother would have thought of it, to say nothing of my friends and family.

“So I learned some interesting things today,” I said.

“For starters, Dana, I need you to check out current and historical satellite maps of the area. There’s a farmstead belonging to a Jarrod B. Wiggers a couple clicks east of where we were last night. I want you to scan recent images of the property to see what’s changed there over the past few weeks.

“Emma and Willy, I need you to check Mr. Gout’s handiwork here at the house and assess any weak points. We need the defenses to be tighter than a Tinkertoy in case any aliens decide to pay us a visit. Oh, and speaking of Mr. Gout, I sent him home.”

“So you just let him go back to being a scumbag landlord?” asked Dana.

“Well, I did give him one slight adjustment-I implanted a firm rule in his head that from this day forward he must be kind to his tenants and never charge them a penny more than what’s fair.

“Mom, Dad, and Brenda,” I continued, “please walk the neighborhood with Lucky and keep an eye out for anything strange, okay? I don’t think Number 5’s going to try anything just yet, but we know he’s capable of surprises.

“And Joe, I need you to come with me to the van. We’ve got some theoretical physics equations to work through.”

“Does it involve Avogadro’s theory of spontaneous taco creation?” he asked hopefully.

“I think there are some Cool Ranch Doritos left in the back,” I said.

“That’ll do,” he said.

Chapter 38

I SET JOE to work while I quickly dialed 411 for a McGillicutty residence on Mulberry Avenue. I didn’t have the nerve to call just yet, but I was half thinking about asking Judy on a date… after I’d figured out a little more precisely what kind of trouble Number 5 had been cooking up in Holliswood and environs.

What Joe and I were doing is a little complicated to explain in much detail, but I’ll give you the basic idea: You know how light travels really, really fast?

Well, in outer space, where stars and planets are so far apart that the distance between them is measured by how far light travels in a year, you start to see that light isn’t quite the greased lightning it’s cracked up to be. In fact, being unable to travel faster than light through space would be kind of like cruising the interstate in a mule-driven cart.

Fortunately, alien technology has figured out some ways-which I won’t attempt to explain right here-to surpass the speed of light.

That’s not to say light’s slowness doesn’t have its uses. Like, for instance, when you want to see into the past.

Think about it. If light takes one hundred years to travel from Earth to Planet X-which is one hundred light-years away-then if somebody on Planet X has a really, really good telescope and wants to see what’s happening on Earth right now, like you reading this book, for instance, then he’ll have to wait one hundred years for the light that makes that image come to him.

And, if he were looking through his telescope right now, what he’d see instead of you reading this book is a picture of whatever was happening here one hundred years ago.

That’s the core principle behind how my people-Protectors of the Universe that we once were-have been able to create a bunch of very good remote-control “telescopes” out in space. Some are ten minutes away, and some are ten million years away. By uplinking to them through the minivan’s console, Joe and I were figuring out how to pull up a video feed of whatever had been happening on Earth from moments ago to millions of years ago-kind of like real-life TiVo.

My big idea was to get some clues about Number 5’s plans by going back to when Number 5 and his henchbeasts first arrived in Holliswood.

“Um, Dan-o, what was that code you just read me? Zero-eight-five-three-five-six-F-zero-two-R-P, or zero-eight-five-three-five-six-F-zero-two-R-T?” asked Joe.

“Let’s try whichever one you didn’t just type in,” I said as we received footage of a woolly mammoth playing with her baby in what looked like a prehistoric Holliswood Lake.

“I think that’s a little too far back.”

Chapter 39

“THAT’S IT,” I said to Joe. “Play that scene right there.”

He turned the dial and locked in the playback codes on our improvised deep-space historiscope. What we had before us was a pauseable, zoomable, playbackable recording of Number 5’s arrival in Holliswood.

A pulse of light flashed in the sky over the pine forest next to a country road on the south side of town, and, in a microsecond, his fat, flabby, fishy self materialized, crackling with electricity among the burning pine trees.

Number 21 came next, and then, in a series of slow-motion lightning bolts, a handful, then dozens, then hundreds upon hundreds of alien henchfiends streaked down from the sky.

The fireworks ended with a dozen or so interstellar transport containers materializing in the midst of the horde.

Number 5 opened one and removed what looked like a small, neatly folded mesh of wires and circuits.

He unfolded it with his tentacles, carefully stretching it open to its full teardrop shape, and smiled.

“What is that?” asked Joe. “An alien-style fishnet stocking?”

I was in no mood to joke. “I think we have yet to witness the level of evil this creep is capable of,” I told him as the real horror show began.

Chapter 40

WE WATCHED ON-SCREEN as Number 5 barked some orders at his minions, who quickly dispersed into the still-burning forest. Then he borrowed what looked to be a cell phone from Number 21, placed a call, and proceeded to wait impatiently in the middle of the road.

Four fire trucks soon arrived at the scene, squealing to a stop when they saw the big, levitating, tentacled catfish hovering in the middle of the road. Number 5 took advantage of the firefighters’ astonishment and calmly glided up on the roof of the ladder truck. He twined a tentacle around the flexible communications antenna on top of the cab, and blue sparks coursed down its length.

A moment later, all the firefighters poured out of their trucks, in their black and yellow suits, and formed a Macarena line as a camera crew of a dozen aliens came forward to film the dance.

The rest of the aliens returned, cheering and jeering from the edge of the burning forest as the mind-controlled firefighters slapped hands to the backs of their heads, then to their hips and gyrated.

The scene quickly shifted from absurd to abhorrent as a team of aliens advanced with unholstered blasters and began obliterating the dancing firefighters, one by one, melting them into slicks of black sludge as their film-crew colleagues zoomed in for close-ups.

The unabashed show of depravity made my insides burn. But Number 5 was clearly elated by the entire performance. He pumped his tentacle like he was Tiger Woods after making a tournament-winning putt.

When the last firefighter had been liquefied, Number 5 waved a “let’s roll” gesture, and the aliens activated the hover-drives on the containers, hitching them to the backs of the fire trucks. Then, lights flashing, they drove off down the country road toward the edge of town.

Chapter 41

JOE ZOOMED OUT the view, and we watched as all but one of the alien-driven fire trucks pulled up to a nearby farm-no doubt the Wiggers’ place.

Number 5’s ladder truck had broken off from the others and was now headed into downtown Holliswood. It finally stopped off the main drag in front of a squat building with a big red neon sign on top: KHAW: HOLLISWOOD COUNTY’S PREMIERE NEWS TEAM.

Number 5 hovered off the truck and followed a dozen gun- and camera-toting aliens inside the TV station.

“It makes sense, right?” said Joe. “A free press is tyranny’s greatest enemy. And Number 5’s all about tyranny, so the first thing he does is go after the press.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Although I’m beginning to think there’s more to it than that. Say, TV signals travel at the speed of light too, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, let’s pick up the signal the station was putting out at this same moment. Can you do that?”

Joe made some adjustments, and in seconds we had a split-screen with what we could see of the TV station from the outside, plus what was on air at the time-Weatherman Ron, wearing a shiny suit, a black silk shirt, and tropical-print tie, pointing to a wavy red line on the map behind him.

“And if you thought it was hot enough for ya already, well, this mass of low pressure coming in from the west is gonna change whatchya think hot is. But first, it’s going to bring us a whole mess of T-storms-YOWZA!”

He froze as a blue spark arced out of the remote control he used to toggle through his weather maps. And then LEN’s “Steal My Sunshine” began to play, and he started to dance a spastic, Blues Brothers sort of dance, distorted laughter gurgling in the background.

He kept it up for thirty seconds or so, then Weatherman Ron disappeared in a bright blue flash of light. The off-camera laughter got louder.

“Did they just vaporize Weatherman Ron on live TV?” asked Joe.

I nodded, sadly.

“I mean, he was annoying and all, but nobody deserves that.”

Chapter 42

THERE WAS SOMETHING very wrong with Gina Jensen, the news anchor. It looked like her hair had been nested in by squirrels, her makeup had been applied by chimpanzees, and her eyes had been replaced with giant marbles.

“HELLO, HOLLISWOOD,” she spoke loudly and robotically. “WE AT KHAW HAVE SOME BREAKING NEWS TO REPORT. SOME VERY, VERY WONDERFUL BREAKING NEWS. SOME MONTHS AGO, HOLLISWOOD WAS CHOSEN BY SOME IMPORTANT FILM PRODUCERS TO BE THE LOCATION OF A VERY SPECIAL MOVIE. NO OTHER TOWN IN THE COUNTY, IN THE STATE, IN THE COUNTRY, IN THE WORLD WAS SELECTED.

WE SHOULD BE VERY PROUD AND DO EVERYTHING WE CAN TO MAKE THE FILMMAKERS COMFORTABLE AND HAPPY. PLEASE BE SURE TO CHECK YOUR CELL PHONES, TELEVISIONS, E-MAIL, AND TEXT MESSAGES REGULARLY OVER THE COURSE OF THE NEXT FEW WEEKS. IN FACT, YOU SHOULD BE SURE TO LEAVE ON EVERY DEVICE YOU OWN AT ALL TIMES -”

She twitched suddenly, and the camera panned left to the anchorperson sitting next to her.

Only it wasn’t an anchorperson…

There, in all his lard-butted alien repulsiveness, was Number 5.

Chapter 43

WHAT WAS IT with this guy? In my experience, Outer Ones tended to keep low profiles as they hatched their evil schemes, but here Number 5 was going out on the airwaves, totally flaunting his presence. He was either being stupidly overconfident or scarily calculating. And all the evidence I was finding was pointing toward option two.

“Joe, this broadcast was thirty-three days ago, right?” I asked.

“Right.”

“So how did he manage to do this and not set off alarms all over town and even around the world? I mean, how does a big fat alien appear on TV in a modern American town and not have anybody even notice?”

“You mean besides the fact that nothing’s too weird for TV these days, and people probably think it’s an ad for car insurance or something?”

“Right.”

“Well, I’ve been running some scans and comparing broadcasts from nearby towns, and it looks like that by this point he had totally cut off Holliswood from the rest of the world. All the phone lines to the outside seem to be cut. The satellite dishes have been jammed. Even the power grid seems to have been interrupted.”

“But how do the people on the outside not notice that the town’s fallen off the map?”

“Number 5’s a smart guy. Maybe he hacked into some nationwide communications network and figured out a way to jam the wider world’s alarm bells or something. I don’t know. Maybe he’ll explain it in this speech he’s about to give.”

Chapter 44

JOE AND I turned up the volume and watched as our increasingly unpredictable foe addressed the town on live television.

“As the most important and powerful entity ever to set foot on your pathetic soil, I accept your town’s obvious and unavoidable compliance with my delegation’s mission. We could call it unconditional surrender, but, of course, you didn’t put up enough of a fight for there to be a surrender.

“The point is that you will do whatever I say. I say ‘jump’? You start jumping and wait for me to say how high in case I care to specify. I say ‘sing,’ you sing. I say ‘check your mail,’ you check your mail. Actually, ladies, you’ll find a special gift in your mailboxes tomorrow that I want you to open right away.

“And if I say ‘dance,’ you dance. And let’s try to do a little better job of it than Weatherman Ron. Wasn’t he just atrocious? Here, let’s practice-Gina, would you care to lead the town in our first-ever municipality-wide showcase? How about a little Justin Timberlake to get our toes tapping?”

The camera pulled back, and he began to clap his tentacles as “Rock Your Body” began to blast through the studio speakers. And then Gina and her producers climbed onto the horseshoe-shaped anchor desk and began a synchronized routine straight out of a Super Bowl halftime show.

I could faintly hear Number 5 laughing through the dance music.

“Joe, can you isolate Number 5’s voice in the audio track, and filter out the music? Sounds like he doesn’t realize he’s getting picked up by the microphones.”

“Easy-peasy,” said Joe, patching in some algorithms. “It sounds like Fishy’s conducting a separate broadcast back there.”

“- true that the average human isn’t worthy of being a slave on our home planets, but oh, how they can make us laugh! Welcome, viewers from Alpha Centauri to Zebulon Nexi. You are at this moment witnessing the very first minutes of the very first episode of the funniest live entertainment show in cosmic history!”

Just then the image on our monitor flickered and went blank.

“What’s going on, Joe? Did we lose the signal?”

“I don’t think so. It seems to be some kind of interference or -”

My heart nearly leaped into my mouth-the monitor winked back on, and there was Number 5, doing his old trick of looking right at me through a television screen.

“You do think I have a good chance at winning a Pulsar’s Choice award, don’t you, young Alien Hunter?”

How did he do it? How was he always a step ahead of me? How many other unguessed powers of his was I going to stumble upon? How many times was I going to have the feeling that not only was he toying with me, he was having me act from a script?

I fought an urge to put my frustrated fist through the monitor; I didn’t want to completely lose my cool just yet. It was time to throw some attitude back his way.

“The only award you’re going to win is when I drag your stinky, blubbery carcass down to the tackle shop and earn a trophy for the largest mutant catfish ever caught in North America.”

“Are you calling me stinky, Stinkyboy?”

“How -” I started to say but stopped and punched the flat-screen display so hard my hand went straight through, and when I pulled it back, daylight was streaming in the hole. I’d put my fist right through the side of the van.

How did he know my childhood nickname? The nickname I’d had on my home planet?! How did he always seem to have everything figured out?

I grabbed the computer console and heaved it the length of the van at the back doors, where it exploded into a jillion fragments and set the van rocking like we’d run into a tree.

So much for not losing my cool.