Watch the Skies

Chapter 45

I WAS SITTING with Mom at the kitchen table, pushing a spoon back and forth through my SpaghettiOs.

Usually I love SpaghettiOs for breakfast-they were almost the only thing I’d eat as a kid, back before I’d grokked the concept of gourmet cooking-but I didn’t have much of an appetite right then.

“So, it sounds like Number 5’s exploiting the population of this town for cheap entertainment,” said Mom.

How many times did she have to go over the facts? I half considered dematerializing her, and I three-quarters considered saying something sarcastic about her keen powers of observation, but some instinct told me to bite my tongue and show some respect.

She was just trying to help, after all.

“Yeah, he’s exploiting,” I muttered. “And liquefying. And incubating.”

Mom perked up. “ ‘Liquefying’ I understand-but what do you mean by ‘incubating,’ Daniel?”

“He’s gotten the women in the town to carry his eggs inside them.”

“He what?!”

“Yeah,” I said. “As near as the gang and I’ve figured out, it’s not quite like they’re pregnant, because his larvae are growing inside their stomachs. But it looks like he’s determined that the expandability of the human female abdomen, combined with the human stomach’s acidity, regular supply of food, and temperature, make for an ideal incubation chamber for his species’ young.”

“That’s the most sickening thing I’ve ever heard!” said Mom.

“You remember that tin of caviar you found in the mailbox? We ran tests on it in the van. Total DNA-match to Number 5. And hundreds of women around town are getting huge. And-get this-they’ve been ‘pregnant,’ they say, for just about four weeks.

“Which one hundred percent corresponds with when this ‘caviar’ appeared all over town. So Number 5 brainwashed them to eat it, and, voilà, he’s got a couple jillion eggs getting nourished by the kind women of Holliswood.”

Mom’s jaw dropped. But she didn’t even realize the full horror of it yet.

“Of course, we don’t know what the end result’s going to be,” I continued. “Whether it’ll kill the women or not.”

Chapter 46

“DANIEL!” MOM RECOILED. “You’ve got to get to the bottom of this!”

“I know it, Mom,” I told her. “It’s just not turning out to be that simple. Every time we think we’ve set Number 5 back, it’s like he’s been expecting it. It’s like we’re acting a part in a play he scripted for us.”

“So do something unpredictable. Improvise.”

“We’ve tried that,” I said, mushing a SpaghettiO flat with my spoon. “We’ve tried everything.”

“Don’t lie to your mother, Daniel. You haven’t tried everything.”

“Well, I mean everything I can think of.”

“You haven’t done that, either. You could try listening to your mother for once. Eat your soup. Little-known fact-SpaghettiOs aren’t just comfort food, they’re brain food.”

“They are not.”

“They are when I make them. And didn’t I just tell you to start listening to your mother?”

I took a spoonful, and it was the weirdest thing-the fog instantly lifted from my brain. I began to see what clearly wasn’t going to work, and where we might actually have a good chance against Number 5. Suddenly, where everything had been impossible, this entire mission seemed completely doable.

“Wow, Mom,” I said, quickly polishing off the rest of the bowl. “What did you do to this stuff? I feel like an entirely new and improved Alien Hunter.”

“Glad to hear it. I’ve always said there’s nothing like a good meal to get a body back on track.”

“Now, if only I could figure out how to get some more time to prepare our plans.”

“Well, why don’t you skip school, for starters?”

I don’t care what planet you’re from-you’ve got to love a mom who tells you it’s okay to play hooky now and then.

Chapter 47

MOM HAD ME materialize an iPhone and promptly used it to call the administrative office at school.

“Hello,” she said. “This is -” She put the phone on mute and asked me what surname I had used when I’d invented my school record.

“This is Daniel Exley’s mother calling. I’m keeping him home today… What? You want to know why? Because I’m his mother and I say so, that’s why… But that’s ridiculous. Why would a parent not put their child’s interest first and foremost? If I didn’t have a darn good reason for keeping him home, I wouldn’t be keeping him home… Sick? No, he’s not sick, we just have something we need to solve here…

“Well, that’s just plain silly. Honestly, I have never heard of anything so unreasonable. Let me ask you one more time, why would I-his mother-want to keep him home if not because I thought it best for him?… ‘Against policy’ my ashtray!

“You know what? You sound like the sort of person who would do really well as a midlevel bureaucrat in a totalitarian regime-then you could tell me straight out, ‘Hey, lady, I don’t make up the rules, I just blindly enforce them.’…

“Personal? You accuse me of getting personal, and you’re telling me how to raise my son? Fine. You want acceptable reasons why Daniel’s not coming to school? Well, stick these in your fascist helmet:

“Number ten: Daniel is attending an intergalactic symposium on ichthyological embryology today.

“Number nine: Daniel described your school as being a holding pen for the ‘criminally underinspired.’

“Number eight: Daniel has developed allergies to fluorescent lights, number two pencils, and linoleum.

“Number seven: Daniel is locked in mortal combat with an electromagnetically gifted, levitating catfish from a planet eleven thousand four hundred light-years away.

“Number six: Daniel wrote an essay for his social studies class yesterday that was so good his teacher fainted, and we don’t want to put any other educators in harm’s way.

“Number five: We’ve looked over the terms of the No Child Left Behind Act and determined that if your school is doing the driving, we’re okay with Daniel being left behind.

“Number four: Daniel’s eyes glazed over so badly during yesterday’s trigonometry class that he needs to go to the ophthalmologist today for a cleaning.

“Number three: Aliens have landed in Holliswood, and I think maybe we should reconsider our daily routine.

“Number two: Daniel’s doctor fears that if Daniel has to hear one more nonsensical, bureaucracy-inspired edict come out of your office, he may decide to flee the country.

“Number one: If Daniel came in to school today, I would instruct him to find you and turn you into something more fitting for your personality… like a potted plant.”

There was a dramatic pause.

“Would you believe it?!” she said, turning to me. “That nasty little person hung up on me!”

“It’s okay, Mom. I think she probably grokked that I won’t be showing up today.”

“That’s right. You’ve got more important things to do,” she said, taking away my bowl and shooing me and Lucky out of the kitchen. “Now get going.”

Chapter 48

I SPENT MOST of the rest of the day on The List, studying the reproductive habits of alien fish species and boning up on electromagnetic theory while my friends and family worked at their own parts of the puzzle.

Dad had the biggest breakthrough of the day by far.

“Daniel,” he said, “I figured out how Number 5’s been getting into the wiring. He’s been broadcasting himself from nearby cell phone towers into any accessible electronic components, including the van and The List computer itself.”

“So that’s how he knew my childhood nickname, huh?”

“And that’s how he’s known where you’ve been almost every moment since you got here. He’s essentially been hacking himself into any electronic device he pleases.”

“That’s just great. So if I ever want to get the jump on him, I have to give up the van, The List, and keep away from anyplace wired for electricity? I guess I’ll just go wait in the woods and hope he happens to walk by.”

“Sure, that’s one way. Or you could just upload this decoy computer program I wrote into The List computer and leave it right here on the kitchen table. The program’s designed to simulate your presence. So, when he checks in, he’ll think you’re right there in the room with the computer. Eating, surfing the Web, texting your buddies, doing your homework -”

“Homework? Don’t you think that’s a little unrealistic?”

“Well, you look like a geek,” said Pork Chop.

“Hey, I’m your brother.”

“Only in your imagination.”

I shook my head and sent Dad off to upload the program. Maybe it would fool Number 5 for a little while and give me a chance to surprise him for once.

Dad came back at dinnertime to say all was ready and that the program would also show me sleeping when night came. After that, I dematerialized the rest of the gang, took Lucky for a quick walk, came back, cranked the new Green Day album, and spent some time in front of the bathroom mirror with a pair of scissors and a tube of superstrength hair gel. Mom had told me I needed a haircut, and I figured a talented guy like me shouldn’t have much trouble doing something as simple as a haircut.

Once I’d perfected my new ’do, I drove my motorcycle to a small, blue-shuttered house on the north end of town. The crickets were chirping like it was their last day on Earth, but otherwise everything seemed totally normal. Almost too normal.

I nervously pulled the silver elephant necklace from my pocket and hung it around my neck. Maybe it would bring me some luck. Then I cautiously approached the front door and rang the bell.

I heard footsteps and swallowed hard as the curtain on a window parted, revealing a brilliant blue eye.

I stood back, wondering if this was all a big mistake. The lock turned, and the door started to creak open. I threw out my right hand, firmly grasping the strange item I’d just materialized.

“What beautiful daisies!”

“You must be Judy’s mom,” I said, handing the woman the bouquet. “She has your eyes.”

“Judy said you were sweet. Come on in. She’ll be right down.”

Chapter 49

JUDY’S PARENTS INVITED me to sit on the couch, and it was just like what you see in all the sitcoms and movies when the parents are meeting their daughter’s date for the first time.

They seemed to be very nice, and I made sure to be polite and honest-well, without going into too much detail about my background-so I think I managed to make a pretty good impression. Judy’s dad was an electrical engineer, so we definitely hit it off on that score.

We discussed computer chips, the latest developments in carbon-matrix superconductors, and a bunch of other supergeek stuff until Judy came downstairs. At that point-when I saw her in her summer dress with her hair down-I confess, I lost some of the thread of what Mr. McG was talking about.

“Look what Daniel brought you,” said Mrs. McG, coming out of the kitchen with my flowers in a vase. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

“And he’s quite the budding electrical engineer, I can tell you,” Mr. McG spoke up. “Really knows his stuff. I keep telling you, Judy, it’s a real growth field.”

“Such a well-mannered young man,” chimed in Mrs. McG.

“Look, guys, he’s my date, not yours. Come on, Daniel, let’s go.”

“I’ll put your flowers in your room, dear.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“And I’ll find that copy of Popular Wiring I was talking about-the issue about lightning-proofing.”

“That’d be great, sir.”

“Okay, Mom and Dad. I’ll be back by midnight.”

“Have a good time,” they said in one voice, holding hands as they beamed at us.

“Creepy, huh?” remarked Judy as we stepped out the door.

“They seem nice. And, um, healthy. Say, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you and your mom didn’t get any caviar in the mail the other week.”

“Oh, no, we got it all right. Can you believe it? Russian sturgeon are on the endangered species list, and our local news station decides it’s a good idea to send the entire town tins filled with eggs that they ripped out of the bellies of pregnant fish. I totally e-mailed Al Gore about it.”

“Actually, they weren’t Russian sturgeon.”

“Really? That’s what it said on the label, didn’t it?”

“Yeah, but you can’t believe everything you read.”

“Well, anyhow, I think fish eggs are a gross concept. I’m still glad I threw them away before Mom saw them. They can’t be good for you anyhow.”

“That’s a safe assumption,” I said, taking her hand.

Chapter 50

I MATERIALIZED AN extra helmet and helped Judy onto the back of my motorcycle.

“Where’s a good place to eat in this town?” I asked through the intercom as we sped down her street. “Besides the diner, I mean.”

“There’s not a lot. There’s one of those all-you-can-eat Lobster Hut places that my parents like, but I’m not really into seafood.”

“That’s understandable,” I said, quickly logging onto the Internet. Another little perk of being an Alien Hunter is that I have wireless broadband connectivity… in my head.

There really wasn’t much in the way of five-star restaurants in Holliswood. I took a few seconds to scroll through the customer comments on cityguide.aol.com and found that the At-Least-It’s-Not-Monday franchise across from OfficeMax had the best reviews.

It wasn’t exactly the sort of place in which you’d expect to bump into a New York Times food critic, but the HELP WANTED sign in the window gave me an idea, and I quickly summoned two characters from my imagination-Wolfgang, a chef trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and Jean-Luc, a headwaiter with the skill set of an employee of Le Cirque in New York.

They rushed in ahead of us, and the stunned manager hired them on the spot. Jean-Luc complimented a wide-eyed Judy on how much she resembled young Greta Garbo as he led us to a secluded table in the corner that was already set with starched white table linens and a floral arrangement that Judy said was the most beautiful she’d ever seen.

“I knew Thursday was ‘Chicken Finger Night,’ ” she said as our third course, Canard à l’Orange, arrived at the table. “So I guess tonight must be ‘Haute Cuisine Night.’ ”

“You should tell your friends.”

“Are you sure you didn’t have anything to do with this, Daniel?”

“Hey, if I had the kind of money to make something like this happen, would I be in Holliswood?”

“I guess not,” she said, and laughed. “But I’m glad you are.”

Whereupon I once again blushed as only an alien can.

Chapter 51

WE’D BEEN LOOKING forward to dessert but had eaten so much we couldn’t possibly squeeze in another bite. So I gave Jean-Luc a handsome tip, and I took Judy for a ride in the country.

Judy wrapped her arms around my waist as we sped down back roads, losing ourselves in the confident drone of the engine and the buffeting, summer-perfect air. We drove for miles and miles, eventually stopping to look at some constellations from a distant field-I helpfully illuminated the lines between the stars so Judy could see the shapes more easily-and then, at her suggestion, we looped our way back to the King Kone drive-through near the high school.

“It’s weird,” said Judy, as she dismounted and took off her helmet. “This place is usually mobbed with kids. It’s like the hangout. Jocks, stoners, goths, skate kids, sometimes even the World of Warcraft shut-ins.”

“Maybe they heard homeschooled kids were starting to show up and decided it wasn’t cool anymore,” I said, earning myself a jab to the ribs I could have easily dodged but didn’t.

The ice-cream stand itself was a tiny affair, more awning than building. It was basically just a counter area where the employees served the ice cream; a walk-in freezer; and the men’s and women’s rooms, which were accessible from outside.

We ordered a couple of soft-serve cups from the bored-looking counter boy and claimed a picnic table in the back, as far from the noisy road as we could get.

“Oh, darn,” said Judy as we sat down. We’d failed to notice some chocolate sauce on the side of the table, and her dress brushed against it. “I’m going to get some soap and water on it so the stain doesn’t set. Don’t eat my ice cream while I’m gone.”

I was pretty close to being done with my own already and shrugged.

She wagged her finger at me and headed inside, leaving me to find a cleaner table where I could contemplate my empty dish-and why her ice cream looked so much better than mine had.

I was just lifting a tiny spoonful to my mouth-pretty sure she’d never notice-when a blue flash lit up the ice-cream stand, and I heard the telltale blast of an alien firearm.

So I never did find out if her ice cream was any better than mine.

Chapter 52

I RAN SO fast I could hear napkins, empty Styrofoam cups, plastic spoons, and other litter getting sucked along in a vortex behind me.

I flattened myself against the outside wall of the ice-cream stand and took a quick peek inside the EMPLOYEES ONLY door. Two aliens were filming a couple of their friends lapping up some blaster sludge from the floor.

The counter boy’s paper hat smoldered off to one side.

One of the aliens on the ground looked up at the cameras, human sludge dripping from his chin, and quipped, “I just love King Kone soft serve!”

The others laughed appreciatively. I slid back and, with my hand cupped over my eyes, stepped into the ladies’ room.

“Judy,” I whispered, putting my finger to my lips to quiet her.

“Daniel!” she screamed.

“I was kind of hoping you wouldn’t do that,” I said and threw her over my shoulder.

“What are you doing?!” she howled as we burst out into the night. I sprinted around the corner of the ice-cream stand and leaped the white plastic fence that separated the shop from the gas station next door.

I rounded the building and carefully lowered Judy to the ground. I forced myself to turn away as she smoothed down her dress, which had hiked up dangerously high on her legs as I carried her.

“What the heck was that all about?” she demanded.

I peered around the corner of the cinderblock wall and saw the aliens ransacking the ladies’ room at the ice-cream stand, searching high and low for whomever had just screamed.

“Um, yeah. Sorry about that,” I said. “I guess I like, um, memorable first dates.”

Chapter 53

“DID YOU HEAR anything when you were in the restroom?” I asked Judy.

“You mean besides you barging in? Hmm. Actually, I did hear a loud noise. Like a car backfiring or something. Totally startled me. What was it? Was the ice-cream stand on fire?”

“Um, back at the diner the other day, you know, when you made me the grilled cheese and pickle-and then out in the parking lot-do you remember seeing anything strange?”

“Strange, like…”

“Monsters? Aliens?”

“What?! Did you eat my ice cream? What’s going on, Daniel?”

“Okay, look. Can we agree that there’s a lot of weird stuff going on lately?”

She nodded vigorously.

“I mean, this isn’t the first time something freaky’s happened in recent weeks, right?”

She shook her head no.

“And there not being any kids here at the King Kone tonight? And the caviar in the mail? Or how people are watching even more TV than usual? And the fact that the firemen have all disappeared, but nobody talks about it?”

“Yeah, I guess that’s all weird enough.”

“Well, remember that story I told you about how I was an alien?”

“Yeah, that was a little bizarre… but cute. I feel like an alien in this town myself.”

“Well, what if I told you it’s true?” I began, and then I couldn’t stop. “And that the stuff I was telling you about there being other aliens around here is on the level too? And that I’ve figured out the evil alien that I’m tracking right now has learned how to get into everybody’s heads and keep them from realizing, or at least remembering, that anything’s wrong-even when they’ve seen it with their own eyes?”

I took a deep breath, half expecting Judy to turn and run away from me as fast as she could. But she still had her incredible eyes fixed right on me.

“I guess I’d say you could probably tone it down with the stories. I mean you did get me out on a date-I’m a homeschooled kid, remember, so I’m just a little desperate-so you really don’t need to try so hard. Say, cool elephant necklace. Is that Indian?”

She put her hand on my shoulder and leaned in close as if to look at it, but she seemed to be aiming her gaze more at my lips than at my neck. My heart jumped up in my chest-was she about to-I mean, were we about to -?

I never found out because, right then, there were a bunch more bright blue flashes and a huge explosion.

Chapter 54

WE CAREFULLY PEERED around the wall again and saw that the aliens-frustrated by not being able to find their potential victim-had decided to destroy the ice-cream stand. Not to mention my motorcycle. There was nothing left but a smoking hole in the ground, and the fiends were now staggering around the lot, firing into the air like a bunch of drunk banditos in a bad spaghetti Western.

“Daniel-those are -”

“Yeah, I know. Aliens. Bad aliens. And you know what? As soon as you turn away, you’re going to forget you ever saw them.”

“Nuh-uh,” she said, on the verge of tears. “I’ll never forget seeing this for as long as I live.”

“Oh yeah?” I asked, pulling her back to look at me.

“Huh, what?” she said. “Did we just kiss? ’Cause it must have been pretty good. Seriously, Daniel, I feel like I must have blacked out or something. Wow. Here, let’s do it again -”

She leaned toward me, but, instead of kissing her, I put my hands up to her face and did a little scan on her brain.

Sure enough, right there in the middle was this weird little electrical imbalance-a sort of hovering charge within the nerves of the short-term memory area.

So that’s how Number 5 had done it. He’d implanted some sort of semi-intelligent electrical impulse-like a computer program-in her head that apparently kept her from retaining any memories that involved experiences with aliens.

“Hey,” she said, “that feels nice, but do you want to kiss me or not?”

“Um, yeah,” I said, and we kissed. And though it took all my strength to stay focused, I managed to blast a carefully formed countercharge directly into her mind.

“Ow!” she yelled, pulling back from me and putting her hand to her lips.

“I’ll say,” I said. “Sweater shock, I guess.”

“Yeah, but you’re wearing a T-shirt. And we’re not standing on a rug. And it’s June.”

I shrugged.

“Daniel, this is all so weird.”

“You want weird?” I said. “Look around the corner at what’s going on over at King Kone.”

“What? Here, let me see -”

She saw at least three of the aliens piling into their stolen KHAW-TV news van.

“Oh my gosh! Aliens!”

“Yeah, aliens-in other words, let’s get the heck out of here ASAP!”

Chapter 55

AFTER I FIXED Judy’s memory, I was hoping she’d be a little scared of Number 5’s blaster-toting thugs-at least enough to want to step out of the way and let aliens fight aliens.

But she wasn’t afraid in the least. She was angry. And she was determined to convince me to let her help.

“What do you mean, let’s get out of here? We can’t let these monsters take over the town!”

“Okay,” I finally relented after ten minutes of arguing with her, “but we’re just watching for now. And you need to listen to everything I say, okay? I say ‘get down,’ and you hit the deck, right? I say ‘run,’ you run like there’s a flesh-eating monster right behind you, okay? And if we get separated for any reason, you go right back to your house and take care of your parents, okay? And no touching TVs or cell phones or computers or anything electronic, okay? I’m positive that’s how Number 5 got into your head in the first place.”

“Aye-aye, Captain Daniel!”

“I mean it.”

“I know you do. But isn’t it kind of a moot point? I mean, didn’t they just drive off?”

“Oh, that,” I said, snapping my fingers and rematerializing my motorcycle. I also made us two new helmets-one blue and one pink, just like her dress.

“Awesome,” said Judy, grabbing the blue one. “It goes with my eyes.”

Chapter 56

WE FOLLOWED THE KHAW van at a safe distance into downtown Holliswood and back to the television station.

We parked at the top of the four-story public garage across the street.

“Here,” I said to Judy, “stand back a bit. We need something a little better at eavesdropping than our own eyes.”

“Like, ears, maybe?” Judy quipped.

“Better,” I replied, and turned my bike into Dad’s minivan.

“Wow,” said Judy. “Can you make anything?”

“Anything I can grok,” I said.

“Huh?”

“It means ‘understand,’ roughly. I guess you haven’t been reading any Robert A. Heinlein.”

“If he wrote after 1920 and was fun in any way, the answer’s no. I just got done with Silas Marner. Talk about Snoozeville.”

“Yeah,” I said as we climbed inside the minivan. “They use that book to punish criminals on my home planet. They make the worst offenders read it out loud and then write reports about the author’s use of symbolism and metaphor.”

“Ouch. Say, is that a gun?” asked Judy, pointing at an RJ-57 over-the-shoulder tritium-charge bazooka that was latched in the munitions cabinet at the back of the van.

“Yeah, and it’s powerful enough to punch a hole right through Mount Rushmore,” I cautioned. “So stay away from it, okay?”

I noticed Judy didn’t make any promises.

“Here, let’s fire up the van’s eavesdropping equipment,” I suggested, “and figure out what those space bullies are doing.”

The flat screens winked to life-I’d replaced the one I’d punched my hand through the other day-and scanned around to see what was going on inside the station’s walls.

I didn’t detect Number 5’s massive electromagnetic signature anyplace, but there were at least forty of his regular, low-level henchbeasts in there, including the handful that had just returned from the ice-cream stand.

I also discovered that they were already transmitting the raw footage of the ice-cream stand incident to their network in outer space.

We watched as the counter boy put down the phone and began juggling ice-cream scoops and chanting, “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!” And then got melted. And eaten.

Judy gasped in disbelief. “So this is the kind of inhumanity we’re dealing with here…”

“Judy, you don’t have to do this,” I warned her. “I’m telling you, that’s only a fraction of what these guys are capable of.”

And it was nothing compared to what came next.

Chapter 57

A LOCAL WOMAN was slogging slowly back to shore from the middle of a shallow farm pond in her soaking-wet nightgown.

The camera panned right, and an alien carrying a long-handled net went splashing out into the pond behind her. He sprinkled a can of fish food, waited a moment, and scooped the net through the water, hoisting it up in the air, waving his fist triumphantly as he did so.

The camera zoomed in on the wriggling net, revealing a mass of two-inch-long, fat-bellied baby fish that promptly emitted a series of bright blue sparks, which caused the alien to jerk and jolt… and fall back, quite dead, into the water.

Now the camera zoomed back and panned left, bringing into focus the pond’s shoreline, which was crammed with spectator aliens. In the center, Number 21 and Number 5 were standing on some sort of viewing platform.

The former was passing the latter a cigar and then offering to light it as the aliens around cheered and stomped their feet.

“What were those things in the net?” asked Judy. “Electric eels?”

“More like electric alien catfish,” I said, “and the direct descendants-if not clones-of the fifth most powerful alien on Earth.”

We watched as the woman crawled out of the pond and onto the shore. One of the aliens gave her a new tin of caviar and a can opener. A half dozen others slapped her back in mock congratulation. The camera zoomed in on her face, and I realized I’d seen her zombie-like mug before-she was the pregnant woman who’d refused my help at S-Mart.

She vacantly nodded at the aliens and trudged up the hill toward town, eating the contents of the can as she walked.

Judy gasped in horror.

Truth be told, I did too.

Chapter 58

I SHOOK MY head. “How many women do you figure there are in Holliswood, Judy? A couple thousand?”

“Easy,” said Judy.

“And how many eggs do you figure there are in a tin of caviar? A thousand or so?”

“Sounds right.”

“So a thousand times two thousand is, um, a couple million. And if they do this every month or so -”

“You can’t possibly mean -?!”

I nodded sadly.

“That’s so disgusting, so sick, so wrong!”

“So evil,” I added. “Yeah, the world may just be on the verge of the biggest alien invasion in history. And it’s going to be homegrown.”

Just then the equipment picked up a new audio signal. It was coming from the station’s control room and an operator someplace up in space.

“Boy, did you see the jolt that thing gave that poor goon?” said the voice from the control room. “They really look like they’re going to be chips off the old block.”

I aimed the wall-penetrating camera at the control room and-just as I’d suspected-confirmed that it was Number 21, in all his sweaty, white-haired monkeyosity.

“So tell me, are you guys bulking up enough on crew?” asked the voice from space. “It’ll be one thing to have a few thousand Number 5s around, but who’s going to do the heavy lifting?”

“No worries,” said Number 21. “We’ve had the troops on a strict breeding diet since we arrived. Here, just watch the rest of this feed, and you’ll stop worrying about that end of things.”

Judy and I watched too-at least as much as we could without getting sick.

A hunch-shouldered henchbeast sitting in a stiff-backed chair was sipping at a can of motor oil. An off-camera voice told it to remove its shirt.

The camera moved around behind it so that we could see a bulge containing no fewer than two dozen baby henchbeasts-they were growing right out of the creature’s back! And, right then and there, several of the offspring took advantage of the lifted shirt to separate from their parent’s flesh and leap to the floor.

The next scene was from a chicken coop filled with hundreds upon hundreds of the henchbeast offspring, leaping and clinging to the arms and legs of an overburdened alien parent who was attempting to refill a trough with motor oil.

“If they can breed that quickly…” Judy started to say. “Yeah,” I continued, “this planet’s toast.”

Chapter 59

SO THAT WAS Number 5’s plan. And a darn good one too… I mean, if your objective is to generate close to two billion hours of exploitative entertainment and destroy an entire species in the process.

Well, at least I could cross four more items off the mystery board:

1) Why had Number 5 picked relatively weak, unintelligent henchbeasts as his primary helpers? Because this particular species happened to replicate and grow to adulthood faster than any other in the cosmos, meaning Number 5 would be able to breed a big enough goon squad in time to get his show on the air for the next intergalactic network season.

2) What was the deal with all the motor oil I’d seen the aliens stealing and guzzling? Nothing has more easily digestible raw calories for this species-useful for rapidly growing babies, and their parents-than motor oil.

3) Why were the aliens always lapping up the sludge left behind by their melted human victims? Because, while it’s high in calories, a diet of motor oil is lacking in certain essential vitamins and minerals, whereas a melted human body has lots of essential nutritive ingredients needed for raising healthy aliens.

4) What was the deal with the fish food the women had been purchasing at S-Mart that day? They’d been taking it to feed the baby Number 5s they were raising in the fish ponds at Wiggers’ farm.

So now I just had a few dozen remaining questions to answer. Questions, you know, like, was there a weakness in his plan?

Personally, I was starting to have doubts.

“Judy,” I said, “let’s get you home now, okay?”

She didn’t say anything, which I thought was strange. But not as strange as what I saw when I turned to speak to her-because there was nobody there.

Chapter 60

“WHERE THE -?!” I started to say, but then I spotted her-on one of the van’s monitors. She had taken the bazooka and was running across the road between the parking garage and the TV station.

No time to waste chasing to her, so I decided to teleport myself instead. It’s a skill Dad had me practicing lately. I really had to grok where it was I needed to go, and it required way more focus than I could usually pull off near the clutches of an alien… but right now, Judy was running straight into a death trap, and there was only one thing I cared about.

I materialized on the sidewalk in front of her and-as gently as possible, of course-tackled her and shoved her into the hedges in front of the station.

“Are you crazy?!”

“Let go of me, Daniel.”

“You think you can run over here with a gun and take on the twenty-first-most-powerful alien on the planet-and who knows how many of his goons-just like that?”

“You said yourself it was a pretty powerful gun.”

“Yeah, well, if you can get them to agree to stand in a straight line and not move while you squeeze the trigger, sure, you might have a chance. But there’s a bigger chance they’d turn that thing against you.”

“But you were just sitting there watching and listening, and every single passing minute these monsters are getting a little closer to taking over not just Holliswood but the whole planet! You said so yourself!”

She was like a tiger trying to wrench herself out of my grasp to keep running. Then, all at once, she went limp under my weight and looked at me sadly. “I know you don’t have any family left to save… but I have mine.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.

“I mean, if you could go back in time and have another chance to save your parents, wouldn’t you?”

“Look, Judy, you can have all the powerful weapons in the world, but if you don’t have a plan-and if you don’t know what you’re getting into-you won’t have a snowball’s chance in Atlanta.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in fighting evil aliens, it’s that it’s very important to do some serious homework. You see, with tests like this, there are no makeup exams. You fail, and that’s the end.”

“But with your powers…”

“My powers are only as good as my imagination. And my imagination is only as good as what I’ve learned. That’s why I have to study things really hard. If we bide our time, we’ll have a better chance.”

“Prove it, Daniel,” Judy demanded, but her steely blue eyes softened a little now.

“Okay,” I went on, secretly admiring her negotiating skills. “Since I have the sense that you aren’t going to go home quietly unless I prove what I mean, let’s at least leave the gun here and sneak inside so I can show you something that will change your mind, okay?”

“And if you’re not right, you give me back the bazooka-plus a platoon of Navy SEALs-to help me bust in through the front door.”

She looked me in the eye, and we both started to smile.

“But if you are right,” she went on, “what do you get from me?”

“Then I get to take you home and, um, you have to go about your life like normal till I give the sign, okay?”

“That’s it?” she asked, leaning in close. “You can’t think of anything else you might like?”

And so we made out right there in the bushes in front of the alien-infested TV station.

And while I’m not an Alien Hunter who’s in the habit of kissing and telling, I made up my mind-next time I saw her in her diner uniform-to change her name tag from “Judy Blue Eyes” to “Judy Mind Blower.”

Chapter 61

WE SNUCK INTO the station through the freight entrance at the back of the building.

The first thing we noticed was that the place smelled like a zoo-a zoo at which the cage cleaners had been on strike for a week. It’s a well-documented fact that personal hygiene is a really low-priority item for the Outer Ones, but it never fails to take my breath away when I go somewhere they’ve been-especially if the windows haven’t been left open.

I had to make us invisible twice as patrolling henchbeasts scuttled past, but we found our way to the alien-built central server core on the second floor without too much trouble.

I quickly sat down at the administrator’s terminal and brought up a blinking holographic map of the world, which spun slowly in the center of the room. Every village, town, and city on Earth was labeled in successively wider rings of color radiating from the tiny red bull’s-eye that was Holliswood, ending in a big blue circle that covered the backside of the planet.

Each color zone had a countdown clock on it. Holliswood’s was counting down below 73 hours now, while the next ring was counting down from 273 hours, the one after that 473 hours, the one after that 673 hours… all the way to the last at 4,473 hours, which corresponded to about six months from now, the equivalent of an intergalactic broadcast season.

“I knew it,” I said. “This town is just the pilot episode.”

“So this is just the beginning…” Judy echoed.

“And in a matter of months, they will have filmed the demise of every single human settlement on the planet, from New York City to the smallest fishing village on the Indian Ocean.”

“Okay, but there’s something you haven’t thought about,” Judy challenged. “If these goons are, like, doubling their population every few days, how’s the chief alien going to control them all? You said he’s the director-and directors are the ones who make the shows work, right? All those aliens are going to need somebody to tell them how to run each location, and he can’t very well get to over a thousand cities in a single day… can he? I mean he sure doesn’t look like Santa Claus.”

“Well, Sherlock, that’s the reason he has the women of Holliswood coughing up his babies in that pond.”

“So I guess his kids must grow pretty fast too. But can they become smart enough to run a filmed invasion that quickly?”

“I don’t know exactly how it’s possible, but I bet he’s figured that out too. I think I may have seen some training equipment that will let him manage that end of things.”

“Okay, Mr. Alien Smarty Pants, so is that what you wanted to show me?” Judy asked, sounding skeptical. “I mean, still, won’t it be harder to put these guys out of business when there are millions of them, rather than just hundreds, like right now? Shouldn’t we go ahead and attack before they’ve bred?”

“Well, there’s one more thing,” I said, typing in a code. The display in front of us briefly flashed “Emergency Abort Test 2,” and then a crowd of shoppers dancing the Electric Slide in some grocery store checkout lines appeared on-screen.

After about fifteen seconds, the music was interrupted by Number 5’s voice. “Very nice! Now stop dancing,” he said, and began to laugh. “And, now… stop breathing.”

First one fell, then another, then dozens of victims collapsed to the floor. I fast-forwarded so we didn’t have to watch the whole horrible thing but stopped where a henchbeast walked out, kicked a couple of the bodies, and gave a thumbs-up.

“Ex-cellent,” Number 5 chortled.

I stopped the playback. How could any intelligent being be so twisted? I mean, I guess I’d seen evil before, but the fact that he was doing this just for laughs…

“So you mean -?” asked Judy.

“Yeah, he can make people die at his command.”

“Including my parents?” she asked, drawing a deep breath and wiping her eyes.

I nodded.

“Promise me you’re going to stop him, Daniel.”

“I promise we’ll stop him,” I said. “Now let’s get out of this place and get you home.”

Chapter 62

“LOOKS LIKE WE made it with three minutes to spare,” I said as we pulled up in front of her house.

“What? My curfew, you mean? Now there’s a joke. Here, let’s go for a walk,” she said.

“I’d like nothing better, Ms. Blue Eyes, but this is our first date, and I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot with your parents, and, anyhow, there’s kind of this alien invasion going on that I’ve been entrusted with shutting down and -”

The front door opened, and Mr. and Mrs. McGillicutty rushed out onto the porch.

“Did everything go okay?” asked Judy’s mom, clutching her husband’s arm nervously and looking accusingly at her daughter. Mr. McG seemed pretty agitated himself.

“We had a great time,” said Judy, annoyance starting to cloud her concern for her parents.

“Are you sure?” asked Mr. McG.

“What’s the matter with you two?” asked Judy. “I’m back before curfew, aren’t I?”

“Well, that’s just it, dear. How good a date could you have been if he got you home before curfew?! Daniel, was she rude? Did she remember to say please and thank-you?”

“Your daughter is the loveliest, smartest, bravest girl I’ve ever had the privilege of taking on a date, Mrs. McG.”

It was Judy’s turn to blush.

“Well,” said Judy’s mom, and she and her husband immediately brightened. “Well, in that case-I mean we’re not trying to rush you or anything-but we want to let you know we’re really laid back, and you don’t need to come to Mr. McGillicutty and formally ask for her hand. Whatever you two are comfortable w-”

“MOM!!!”

“What, dear? I just want to lay things out there for Daniel’s benefit -”

“You guys homeschooling me in academics is one thing, but telling me how to conduct my social life, and talking to me about marriage -!”

“Don’t yell at your mother, Judy. We just happen to have some experience with these things, and when the right person comes along, well, you can just tell.”

“That’s right, Dad, I can tell. You don’t need to tell me in front of a date and embarrass me beyond all reason.”

“But Daniel here’s such a terrif-”

“Actually, I’m not as perfect as you guys might think,” I said, backing slowly down the stairs. “I mean, I really have my share of issues. I’ve had trouble maintaining a fixed residence -”

“I could clear out the rooms above the garage for you,” suggested Mrs. McG. “There’s even a working shower over there -”

“And I regularly find myself cavorting with disreputable types. Really disreputable types -”

“Look, he’s even self-effacing!” said Judy’s mom.

“They’re right, honey,” Mr. McG relented, winking at his wife. “Let’s stay out of this. Why don’t we go to the kitchen and rewash some dishes so that we’re out of their hair and they can have their space?”

“Oh, okay. Right,” said Judy’s mom, giving her own subtlety-free wink back at her husband.

“I’m so sorry about them,” whispered Judy as they went back into the house. “Actually, I’m mortified.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I whispered back. “I expect Number 5’s recent mind games have affected their social boundaries a little is all. The brain’s a delicate organ, you know. Probably when he zapped them, he caused some unintentional side effects. Like making them desperate for you to get married to an alien,” I explained, thinking that he probably didn’t intend for them to pick this particular alien.

“Gosh, I hope you’re right. My life is over if they’re going to treat my dates like this. Not that I can imagine dating anybody but you, of course. Daniel, I really did have a wonderful evening, even if it did mostly revolve around those nightmarish aliens.”

I probably would have blushed even if she hadn’t given me a kiss right then, but she did, and my head nearly burst with happiness.

“I can’t believe those aliens want to make a comedy of us,” she said.

“The Divine Comedy, maybe,” I babbled.

“Aw, you’re so sweet,” she said, and gave me a kiss I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

Chapter 63

“YOU OKAY BACK there?” I asked through the helmet’s intercom.

“You’re going a little fast, aren’t you?” she asked.

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” I said, briefly popping a wheelie, and bringing the speedometer up to 110 miles per hour.

I was elated. It was a beautiful day, and I finally had a solid theory about how I might possibly stop Number 5.

Also, I was alone with one of my favorite people in the whole universe.

“Stop squeezing so hard, Dana,” I said. Taking Judy along this morning to check out Number 5’s farm had been out of the question, of course-because of my vow never to imperil any humans, and my need to concentrate.

“Well, slow down! You’re making me wish we’d gone to school instead.”

“School-I totally forgot!” I said. “This could be a problem.”

I pulled the bike over, and we took off our helmets.

“What’s the big deal?” asked Dana. “We’ve only been once. You think they’re going to miss us?”

“The problem is that we’re on the books now. And if they don’t get a call, and I don’t show up, they may have a truant officer stop by the house. And if a truant officer goes out to the house and finds nobody there, he may call it in on a radio or a cell phone. If he does that, Number 5 may just pick up the signal and wonder what’s going on. Because, you see, Dad’s program, if it’s working, has been fooling him into thinking I’m there. And this could blow that cover.”

“I guess you’re pretty smart anticipating a problem like that,” said Dana, one hand on her hip and the other extended toward me, her finger and thumb pinched together. “But clearly you’re not so smart about other things.”

“What’s that?” I asked, and swallowed nervously as I saw that she was holding a long black hair.

“Been riding around with somebody with wavy black hair, Daniel? This was on the collar of your motorcycle jacket.”

“Oh, um, that, well… you know I really better get Mom here to deal with that truant officer situation, so, sorry if this seems sudden -”

I dematerialized Dana and took a deep breath before summoning Mom.

In some ways, this girl business was way more complicated than hunting aliens.

Chapter 64

“MOM,” I SAID. “Here’s your iPhone. Do you think you could call your friend at the principal’s office and tell her I’m sick?”

“Of course, honey,” she said, and happily dialed the school’s attendance line.

“Yes, this is Mrs. Exley calling again-Daniel’s mother?… Fine. How are you today?… That’s wonderful. And your policies? How are they?… What do I mean? I mean if you were a normal person, I might ask about your family, but it seems clear to me that school district policies are what’s closest to your heart…

“Well, that’s all very interesting, but actually this isn’t a social call. I’m just following up to say that Daniel’s staying home today… No, it’s for none of the reasons he stayed home yesterday.

“Today, you see, he’s quite sick… You need his doctor’s name, you say? No problemo. You have a pen? I’m going to warn you, he has more than one disease, and we’re seeing a bunch of different specialists today.

“Number ten: He is being treated by Doctor Yuri Fishman for voltaic catfish fever.

“Number nine: He’s seeing Doctor Yvonne Yurmunni for interstellar impecuniosity.

“Number eight: He has an appointment with Doctor Darth Crater for his space pox vaccination.

“Number seven: He’s receiving aromatherapy from Mindy Fresh, MD, for his acute aversion to extraterrestrial halitosis.

“Number six: His localized academic malaise is being reviewed by Dr. Inogono Takit.

“Number five: S. Hugh Striker, MD, is counseling him about his obsession with lists.

“Number four: Dr. Wei-Goh Holmes is treating him for an especially nasty strain of domestic nostalgiasitis.

“Number three: Dr. I. M. Trubbell is assessing the state of his bureaucratic mumbo jumbo allergy.

“Number two: Dr. Slobodan Sonne is seeing him about his accelerated bipedal locomotion.

“Number one: Hello? Are you still there?… Daniel, I think she hung up on me.”

“She probably just needed one excuse, Mom, but thanks.”

“No worries, Daniel. I just figure the best way to teach people like that a lesson is to overload them with whatever it is they think they want.”

“Interesting thought, Mom,” I said, sending her home with a blink of my eye and summoning Dana. We pulled back onto the road and headed off to meet Number 5.

Chapter 65

I BEGAN BY doing what any highly disciplined military commander would do on the eve of battle-I ate a four-course meal.

Dana and I had climbed a hill above a cornfield opposite the Wiggers’ property. I’d made us a picnic including wasabi-crusted salmon fritters, chanterelle-and-pork-medallion panini, watercress salad, vichyssoise, and a carafe of Gatorade.

“So what were you doing last night, Daniel, off on your own like that?”

“I was just confirming some theories I’ve been working on. Some light reconnaissance, you know, stuff like that.”

“By yourself?”

“Um, pretty much, yeah.”

“Pretty much?” she asked. “And that black hair I found earlier probably just happened to land on your collar? Just had been blowing around in the wind?”

I guess dematerializing her hadn’t made her forget. “Hair?” I said incredulously. “What hair?”

“The one that looked just like this other one that I found in your blue motorcycle helmet and which isn’t mine or Emma’s.”

“Wow,” I said turning the hair into a butterfly that flew from her grasp. “Is that a tiger swallowtail?”

“You aren’t going to distract me so easily. Whose hair was that?”

“Just a kid I met at the diner,” I said, thinking quickly. “Number 5’s goons had given her a rough time, so I just checked in on her.”

“Sure you did.”

“And she gave me some good information too. Turns out Number 5’s programmed everybody in this town with some sort of standing electronic charge that lives inside their heads. Makes them conveniently forget things they’ve seen; makes them responsive to his orders-stuff like that.”

“And she told you this?”

“Well, no, but I did figure out how to remove the charge from her head, so that now-provided she stays away from TVs, computers, and cell phones-she’s once again in control of her own mind.”

“Sounds like it must have been a pretty intimate procedure.”

“Sure, I mean, I had to basically go inside her brain and… Wait, I know what you’re thinking. But you know I’d never get emotionally involved with any humans. I mean, it’s just not fair -”

“So you were just using that poor girl? She was nothing but an experiment?”

I shook my head. This clearly was not something to get into with Dana.

“Let’s just eat our lunch and relax, okay, Dana? It’s a gorgeous day, and we’ve got a big afternoon ahead of us.”

She bit into her sandwich with a little more force than was necessary.

I sighed and looked around at the rolling hills, the brilliant blue sky, the butterflies and birds flitting around the field below.

“This really is a beautiful planet, isn’t it?” I said. “So much diversity, so much that’s lovely and good. You know, that’s what really gets me about the Outer Ones. I mean, if I had to come up with a definition of evil, I’d say it’s not just not appreciating beauty but wanting to mess with it, control it, own it.

“I mean, this whole show Number 5’s aiming to make-it’s all about taking this fantastic human species and bending it to his will for nothing more than cheap entertainment. A true artist would document them. Would present humans and their planet in all its glory-the plays they’ve written, the beautiful art they’ve made, the cities, the fields…”

“Put a sock in it, Daniel; (a) I’m not forgetting that you went on a date last night, and (b) you have a crumb on your lip, and it’s driving me crazy. Here, let me take it off.”

“Oh, okay, sure,” I said, leaning forward so she could remove it. I just didn’t expect she was going to do it with her lips.

Chapter 66

A GUY’S GOT to give his imagination some credit when a girl he’s dreamed up manages to make him dizzy with a kiss.

“Wow,” I said. “That must have been some crumb -”

We began kissing again. The blue sky and green fields were twirling around like I was in a music video.

“I’m not exactly complaining,” I said, “but what was that for?”

“Must be that hot new hairdo of yours, spike. Or that new bling,” she said, fingering my necklace.

“Hey,” I said, “you’re supposed to be my dream girl.”

“So?”

“So dream girls just say no to unnecessary sarcasm.”

“Having dreams is one thing,” said Dana. “Controlling them is something else.”

“I guess they’re kind of like reality that way,” I said, and, as if on cue, seven henchbeasts, who must have been crawling on their bellies toward us through the tall grass, sprung up, grabbed Dana, and rushed off toward the woods, depositing her in the arms of a big sweaty space monkey.

Chapter 67

“HOLD IT, SHE’S not even real!” I yelled. “I just make her up. With my imagination!”

I leaped to my feet and scanned the area for whatever sort of booby trap Number 21 had laid for me.

“You make her up, huh?” he said, snorting through his ugly snout, and passing Dana to his henchbeasts. “In that case, I guess let’s make believe my soldiers are breaking her arm.”

The henchbeasts looked back at him like confused children.

“Break. Her. Arm,” he said, and now they all nodded and positioned themselves to snap her left arm.

In a flash I gave Dana a wink and turned her into a thirty-five-foot anaconda, which promptly wrapped itself around their necks and squeezed. Hard.

“Didn’t believe me, did you?” I asked Number 21 as his henchbeasts fell to the ground, their heads swelling like balloons.

“Oh, I believed you. I just wanted to keep you distracted while I got this ready.”

He was suddenly aiming the same shockwave cannon he’d used to knock me unconscious in S-Mart.

“Oh,” I said, as he pulled the trigger.

Chapter 68

LIGHTNING QUICK, I reached down, tossed up a handful of dirt, and mentally forced the particles into a shield.

Number 21 started to laugh, but the blast completely deflected around me. I took some pleasure watching that obnoxious ape lower his gun and scratch his head.

“What else you got?” I yelled across the field at him.

He dropped his weapon, and one of his cronies passed him a gun so large I was kind of surprised he was able to hold it. I wasn’t familiar with the type, but it was so big it looked like it could have blown apart a modest-sized asteroid.

“And what do you have, my little Stinkyboy?” he asked, his voice dripping with condescension.

“Better a stinky boy than a stinky space ape,” I said, reaching dramatically to my side and unholstering my weapon of choice-my hand with my index and middle finger extended, my thumb cocked like a pistol’s hammer. “Nanny-nanny boo-boo!”

He laughed like a hyena.

“They said you were a character, but it’s truly a shame that your curtain call is coming so soon.”

“You’re too kind,” I said. “Shall we draw on the count of three?”

“It’s your funeral!”

I materialized one of those big, digital, drag-racer countdown clocks in the field between us. It pinged down: 0:03:00… 0:02:00… 0:01:00 -

And then I was leaping in the air, avoiding his blinding, hypersonic blast and, simultaneously, launching the exact same sort of blast back at him out of my “hand gun.”

When I landed, his discharge had scorched its way across the field behind me, setting afire some cornstalks and taking a nick out of the crown of a hill before it ripped its way into outer space.

My blast, on the other hand, had punched a ten-foot-wide, mile-deep, smoking hole in the ground right where he’d been standing.

“Anybody smell pork chops?” I asked the gawking henchbeasts in my best John Wayne impersonation. “Or is that charbroiled monkey?”

They scattered back into the forest like terrified bunny rabbits.

Chapter 69

I TURNED DANA back into herself, materialized the rest of the gang, and then-with Dad’s electronic countermeasures installed in the van so that Number 5 couldn’t, as far as we knew, spy on us-we proceeded to put the finishing touches on a 3-D battle map of the Wiggers’ farm.

Judging from our satellite photos, the property had changed a lot over the past month.

The farmhouse and barns had been joined together by a number of alien-constructed domes, generating plants, and oblong outbuildings. And dozens of new ponds pockmarked the former corn and sorghum fields.

“Nursery ponds,” said Dana.

“Looks that way,” I said. “It’d be hard to raise a million little Number 5s without a habitat similar to that of his home planet.”

“Check out this footage,” said Joe, hitting a button that superimposed video images onto the map.

Hundreds upon hundreds of human forms were staggering through the fields, zombie-like in every way, except that every single one was a pregnant woman, and all were watching cell phones, iPods, or PDAs-transfixed as if engrossed in the last few minutes of an episode of 24.

With the sort of seamless choreography you’d see in an automated factory, they split into groups and moved toward the ponds. One by one, and turn by turn, they wandered into the water, deposited the wriggling contents of their stomachs, waded back out, took another can of “caviar,” and headed back to town.

And then an alarm went off. Somebody was approaching the van.

Chapter 70

“HUMANS,” SAID WILLY, examining the monitor. “Lots of them.”

We looked out the front and saw masses of Holliswood residents streaming toward the Wiggers’ farm. They were parting around the van and staggering, barely alert, intent only on moving forward, their faces inches away from the cell phones, BlackBerries, and portable game platforms they carried.

“Holy Close Encounters of the Weird Kind,” said Joe. “But these ones aren’t pregnant. So what gives?”

“Well, I doubt the aliens dug all those ponds themselves. So maybe these ones are coming to do some free manual labor. That, or maybe they’re coming to get filmed,” said Dana.

“And then melted,” added Emma.

“All right,” I said. “I think it’s about time we went and had a talk with Number 5.”

Chapter 71

WE DROVE THE van up the poplar-lined, heavily rutted driveway and parked on the gravel by the main barn, just opposite the house.

“Lock and load, guys,” Willy said as we leaped out of the van.

We closed in on the farmhouse, tree by tree, bush by bush, moving so stealthily that nobody would have heard us over the gentle breeze and chirping birds.

“Where’s the welcoming committee?” signaled Joe in American Sign Language-one of thirty human languages we’re fluent in-as we reached the front porch. “I mean, do we have to go up and ring the doorbell?!”

Just then, the birds stopped singing and, in unison, chirped the three tones from those NBC Peacock station-identification interludes. And then the massive barn doors swung open to reveal a JumboTron-sized video screen.

“Greetings and salutations to you and your imaginary friends, young Alien Hunter,” said Number 5 from the screen. He was carrying a pitchfork and wearing a straw hat and oversized overalls-if you can imagine a creature with no legs in overalls-standing in front of a backdrop curtain patterned with a Milky Way Hillbillies logo.

“We’ll see who’s so imaginary,” said Willy, attempting to storm forward as Emma and Dana held him back, “when my boot comes down on your slimy head!”

Number 5 ignored the outburst. “In fact, I’m honored you’ve come. I knew your mom and your dad-back before they got turned into crispy critters, I mean-so I have a good idea of what an upstanding young Alien Hunter you must be. You know, I may even have some footage of them around here someplace.”

That was weird. I mean, obviously he hadn’t arrived on Earth till long after my parents were dead, but maybe there was some chance he’d crossed paths with them when they’d been on assignment in the Andromeda galaxy, or someplace before they’d come to protect Earth…

How cool would it be to see them on film? Of course, I have my memories, and my memories-even from back when I was three, when The Prayer took their lives-are pretty good. But what if he really did have some footage of them? Maybe after I killed him, I’d go looking through his archives, just in case.

“Daniel,” said Dana, “you’re gaping like you’re a fish. Snap out of it.”

I shook my head and forced my mind through a focusing exercise Dad had taught me during my aikido training. She was right-Number 5 was obviously messing with my head.

“Sure,” he went on, “I think I may have even posted them online. Here, I’ll text you the YouTube link.”

“I didn’t bring my cell phone. It’s not like I haven’t figured out your infiltration techniques, Fivey.”

“Well, where can I send an e-mail?”

“Try I-H-eight-F-I-S-H-at-gmail-dot-com.”

He held up his Sidekick, showing me the screen and the “message sent” dialog box.

“So you’ve really never seen it?” he asked.

I raised an eyebrow at him.

“The scene where Number 1 killed your parents? You didn’t know I was there, filming the whole thing?”

Chapter 72

“NOW I KNOW you’re lying,” I said. “I was there when my parents were killed.”

“Sure. But were you upstairs with me and Number 1? Or were you down in the basement, playing with your toys?”

How could he have known that?

“You had no idea I was up there filming, did you? That surprises me. You know, out on the Extranet-the Outer World’s version of the Internet-that clip has had more than thirty-five trillion downloads.”

It simply wasn’t possible. I’d relived that moment a thousand times. There had only been Number 1’s and my parents’ voices.

And in the end, there’d been nobody upstairs with my parents’ bodies. I mean, I hadn’t actually seen them killed, but…

“It’s very moving,” he said. “The part where your mom cries like a little girl is pure emotion, but my personal favorite scene is where your dad begs Number 1 for his life. ‘Oh, Mr. Prayer, please, I can get you money, I can help you, just don’t hurt my fa-fa-family, oh puh-lease!’ ”

“Dude, that’s low,” said Willy, cracking his knuckles.

“Yes, perhaps that necklace of your mom’s you’re wearing will dispel any lingering doubts you may have. You do know it was hers, don’t you? That footage where you recognized it and started crying is priceless. Just priceless!”

Had the necklace really been a plant, a setup? Had he even filmed my reaction to it… was that even possible?

“So,” he went on, “it’s starting to dawn on you, isn’t it?”

It was no secret that Alparians wore elephant pendants. It was probably just an elaborate hoax meant to distract me, get under my skin, cause me to make mistakes -

“And, look!” he said, pulling out a necklace from behind the bib of his overalls… “We’re twins! Do you recognize it? It was your father’s, of course. Number 1 usually collects them for his trophy case, but this time he knew they’d make great props and let me borrow them. Once he was done spitting on their corpses, that is.”

My mind was reeling, and I winced as I resisted throwing everything I had at the flat-screen display-but I knew that was exactly what Number 5 wanted. He was just trying to keep me from thinking rationally. There was no way he’d been in that farmhouse twelve years ago. The necklaces had to have been manufactured. And any film he showed me of my parents would turn out to be a computer-generated fake.

“Look, Daniel-may I call you Daniel? I’m first and foremost a business creature, so let’s do ourselves a favor and adhere to the negotiating process here. Remember how it works? First we state our goals, and then we start working toward a deal, a compromise. So, you see, for my part, I want to create the most popular reality show of all time. Which conflicts, wouldn’t you say, with your stated purpose of wanting to exterminate me and my crew.”

“Actually,” I said, somehow keeping my game face on, “you have it wrong. All I’m looking for is some information.”

He nodded his fat, slimy head and gestured for me to elaborate.

“All I want to know is exactly what you want with all the people of Holliswood.”

“Well, Daniel, it’s just that they’re as entertaining as heck.” He laughed. “Of course, it doesn’t hurt that they’re good little workers-dumb, loyal, coachable… Did you know they created nearly thirty acres of new ponds here at the farm in just under a month? Unfortunately, there were a couple of accidents along the way. They aren’t the most resilient species in the world. If I had a nickel for every bulldozer-related fatality this week…”

He chuckled to himself. “Anyhow, it’s a shame we had to lose any, but I assure you we were able to recycle their remains-just as we will with the rest of them after each episode. It turns out that on top of everything else they make wonderful fertilizer. And did I mention the women are perfect incubators?”

Dana didn’t let that one go without a response. I just wish she’d tried using words first.

Chapter 73

WITH AN ARM that would have turned Roger Clemens green with envy, Dana fired a rock straight between Number 5’s eyes on the display. Sparks flew everywhere, and the screen quickly went dark.

“I think you just voided his Best Buy warranty,” said Joe.

“There are too many televisions on this planet anyhow,” said Emma, patting Dana on the shoulder.

There was a laugh behind us that sounded like Jell-O being liquefied in a Cuisinart. We turned to see Number 5 hovering at the end of the wraparound porch.

Absolutely live and in the flesh for the first time.

“Woo-hoo! You’re a hot-tempered little product of Daniel’s imagination, aren’t you? Can I interest you in some caviar?”

That got the rest of the gang charging at him, but to little effect. He’d thrown some sort of crackling field of electricity around himself, and he laughed as if he were getting tickled as they bumped into the invisible barrier and fell back flat on their butts.

It shouldn’t have come as any great surprise that number five on The List of Alien Outlaws on Terra Firma was not going to be taken down in hand-to-hand combat, but my friends continued to take out their frustrations on his force field-leaping, charging, punching, kicking… and always ending up flat on their backs as they failed to find a gap in his electromagnetic defenses.

Meanwhile, I watched my fish-faced foe as closely as I could-and I can watch things pretty closely.

I monitored his sweat, the rhythm of his breathing, his pulse, the slime oozing from the pores on his belly, the contractions of the suckers on his tentacles, the shape of his slimy nostrils… and, other than almost getting sick at how truly disgusting he was, almost right away I noticed something significant-a “tell,” as a poker player might say of his opponent-his eyes never blinked.

I zoomed in my vision to about 128:1 and quickly understood why. His eyes were held open by very thin, transparent data screens that would be entirely invisible to the human eye, but I could see they were feeding him images, text, and data. It was kind of like one of those heads-up displays in a fighter pilot’s helmet; only, of course, in Number 5’s case, the wiring was inside his body.

But I didn’t have time to think about it much right then.

“Thanks for keeping him distracted, guys,” I said to my friends and hoped they would forgive me as I dematerialized their trigger-happy selves.

“You should have let them keep it up,” Number 5 said, still laughing. “I could have gone all day.”

“I was starting to get that impression,” I said, gloomily.

“Oh, don’t take it so hard,” he said. “Can I help it if I’m bee-oo-tee-ful and completely invincible too?”

Chapter 74

BECAUSE IT HAS been scientifically determined that smiling aliens are much less likely than scowling ones to attack violently, I decided to try a charm offensive.

“Boy,” I said, still playing up my disappointment, “you really are powerful, aren’t you?”

“Let’s just say I could provide power to all of New York City for, oh, a couple of decades. But let’s not get technical. The important thing is that we’re candid with each other.”

“Candid?”

“Yes, young Alien Hunter. You may have had some occasional luck with my fellow List members, but don’t bother trying out for any of my interstellar casting calls. Your acting skills are atrocious. You meant to distract me with flattery? Do you think this is my first planetary invasion?”

He laughed mockingly and went on. “I can practically hear the gears grinding under that haircut of yours. Which is truly awful, I must say. Who was your inspiration for it anyhow-Cookie Monster?”

“That really hurts coming from a bloated swamp creature like you.”

He chuckled. “Yes, I long ago realized my place is behind-not in front of-the camera. But I’m curious to see what else you have on your mind. I suspect you were looking for some sort of weakness in me, a chink in my proverbial force field. And judging from that smug look that keeps crossing your face, I expect you think you found something. So, tell me, what do you think it is? What’s my Achilles’ heel?”

“A weakness in you, the galvanic director of such intergalactic hits as Desert Planet Booty Call and Shocking Alien Crime Scenes? Not a chance. We’re obviously no match for each other, so… I guess I’ll be going now.”

“Not so fast, you deluded little creep. You think I’d actually let you leave? Just like that? I wasn’t planning on doing this just yet, but it’s nothing we can’t work around in postproduction. Roll cameras!” he yelled at the alien film crews that had been assembling in the yard.

“No, really,” I said, “I’ll see you later.” And, with that, I transformed myself into a common house mosquito.

Chapter 75

NUMBER 5 BLINKED despite the hardware in his eyes. He must have thought I’d teleported myself away.

“How’d he do that?!” he screamed in frustration at the film crew. He yanked the railing off the side of the porch and sent it sailing through the air at them, causing them to briefly scatter.

“Gu-uh!!” he said in frustration and put his tentacles up over his head. “And where’s Number 21? He was supposed to be back by now. Somebody find him!”

As Number 5 spoke, I carefully flew up to his face, landed on his nose, and jabbed my itchy, needle-like snout into it.

“Gah! Bugs!” he shouted, and as he swatted his tentacle down to crush me, I somehow overcame the nauseating taste of his putrid fish blood, grabbed onto his face with all my strength, and transformed myself into a hedgehog.

“Ahhh!” he yelled as my spines penetrated his tender flesh.

I turned myself back into human form and laughed in his face, briefly, as he got over his surprise.

“I know where Number 21 is, by the way,” I revealed. “He’s, um, excuse me”-I turned to spit the taste of Number 5 out of my mouth-“the latest addition to crossed-out entries on The List.”

Number 5 gaped at me as only a fish can, and then his eyes got really dark, and he began to summon an electrical charge big enough to fry me and every life-form within a hundred yards.

Focus, Daniel, focus… the house, the house, the house…

And all at once, I was gone.

Dad would be proud of me. I’d teleported myself back to the safety of the house, two and a half miles away.

Chapter 76

THE WOODEN LAUNDRY table was covered with holographic maps, spreadsheets, weather reports, weapon data, and, um, Gatorade and White Castle burgers.

Mom, Dad, Pork Chop, Emma, Joe, Willy, Dana, and I were going over our final plans down in the basement. Lucky was there too, but he was more interested in intercepting a hamburger than how we were going to confront Number 5 and his minions.

“So what did you learn from your face-to-face interaction with him?” Dad asked.

“The most important thing,” I said, wiping ketchup from my chin, “was that he never blinks.”

“So?” asked Joe. “He never smells good, either.”

“Electrical implants,” I explained. “He has data screens on his eyes.”

“Ahh,” said Dad. “Very, very good, Daniel. You do show some promise as an Alien Hunter… Not much, but some,” he added with a twinkle in his eye.

“No, he doesn’t,” said Pork Chop. “The only thing he shows promise at is in his quest to become certified as the most annoying brother in the universe.”

“That may be,” said Dad, “but Daniel’s discovered that Number 5 has wet wiring.”

“Wet wiring? What are you boys talking about?” asked Mom.

“Number 5’s powers-his ability to broadcast himself to electronic devices, to snoop around in remote wiring, to see out of television screens, etcetera, is doubtless being augmented-if not entirely enabled-by a surgically implanted computer system in his body.”

“So, he’s, like, bionic?” asked Willy.

“Like the Six Million Dollar Alien,” said Joe around a mouthful of fries.

“Sort of, only what he’s got would cost more like six trillion dollars. Not to mention that he’s implanting this same kind of wiring in the hordes of alien progeny he’s breeding on Earth,” I commented, remembering the “alien fishnet stocking” Joe and I had observed earlier.

“So now that you’ve figured all that out, what good does it do us?” asked Mom.

“Well, er -,” Dad fumbled for the right way to say it.

“Probably none at all,” I finished for him, dropping my head.

Just then we heard a roar and rumble overhead, and we ran upstairs to see what had happened. Through the driving rain, we could see that the streetlights were out and that the neighborhood had gone completely dark.

Chapter 77

DO YOU EVER roll down the window and stick your head out when you’re on the highway doing, like, sixty-five miles per hour in a downpour? You absolutely shouldn’t-I mean, it’s not safe-but that’s what it felt like the second we stepped outside the house.

We could barely see a dozen feet in front of us, even with the lightning going off every fifteen seconds. And the thunder made it seem like we had wandered into the middle of a battlefield. The power was out all over Holliswood.

“Why are you carrying that?!” Dana yelled to me over the noise of the storm.

I was clutching a sixteen-foot copper chain and waving it around in the air above me.

“Science experiment!” I yelled, and promptly got hit by a lightning bolt so powerful it must have flipped me thirty feet into the air and dropped me on my back.

At least that’s what it felt like when I regained consciousness. My friends had dragged me into the van, and we were evidently driving on a highway.

“Are you crazy?!” asked Dana as my eyes fluttered open.

“Um, maybe,” I said, sitting up. My mouth tasted like I’d been eating match heads. “Are we almost there?” I asked over the noise of the struggling windshield wipers and the hail pelting the metal roof of the van.

“Almost, dear,” said Mom. “Don’t tell me you need a bathroom break already?”

“Maybe if there’s a doctor in the bathroom, sure,” I said. Boy, did I feel terrible. But I had to let myself get struck. Just to make sure I could handle it.

“Hey,” I said, suddenly realizing somebody was missing. “Where’s Emma?”

“She just made us drop her off a little ways back. She wouldn’t tell us why, but we figure she was going to check in on the animals at the SPCA. Anyhow, she said you’d understand.”

I didn’t know exactly what she was up to, but I had a hunch.

Chapter 78

THE STORM WAS weakening by the time we got to the farm, which was shrouded in darkness.

“Maybe they’re gone,” said Dana, as we peered out the windshield at the farmhouse.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “The power’s out here just like it is in the rest of Holliswood. And that’s precisely why I wanted to come here while the storm was still raging,” I said. “With the electricity out, that should mean Number 5 won’t be able to tap into the cell phone towers and other circuits to figure out where we are. And that means maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to surprise him.”

“Um,” said Willy, staring at the abandoned-looking farmhouse. “I mean, it’s great that he might not be able to find us, but exactly how are we going to find him?”

“Joe’s going to take care of that end of things. There’s no way an alien that big and stinky can hide from the van’s sensors. Any luck back there, Joe?”

“There’s no sign of him-or any of the aliens-anywhere. Maybe they did go off someplace.”

“It’s not possible. I mean, they weren’t ready to start the film yet. And their entire breeding operation’s based here. They couldn’t have picked up and left just like that…”

“The equipment’s not picking anything up is all I know,” said Joe.

“Maybe it’s busted,” said Willy, looking over Joe’s shoulder with the rest of us. Everything seemed to be working, but maybe he’d forgotten to do something. It certainly was surprising that we weren’t detecting any aliens whatsoever.

“Um, Daniel?” asked Dana.

“What, Dana?”

“Why are we hovering?”

“What?”

“Why is the van hovering fifty feet in the air?”

“What?!” I said, spinning around and spotting the wet upper branches of a maple tree through the windshield.

“Yeah, and why is there that blue glow all around us?” asked Joe.

I slid open the side door and looked down. And there, his tentacles extended toward us and pulsing blue with crackling electricity, was Number 5.

“Hello, young Alien Hunter,” he said. He was no jolly Santa this time around. “Want to come down?”

I nodded wordlessly and instantly wished I hadn’t. “Hang on tight, everybody!” I yelled, as we plunged toward the earth.

Chapter 79

THE VAN SMASHED into the ground like a badly made toy-but, fortunately, one with state-of-the-art air bags, and a couple of pretty tough alien-fighters inside.

Still, we were pretty dazed as we crawled from the wreckage.

“Yeah, I think your sensors weren’t working quite right, Joe,” said Dana as she picked windshield glass from her hair and looked warily over toward Number 5. He was floating toward us, surrounded by a buzzing sphere of blue electricity.

“Um, right,” I said as the hairs on my head-wet as they were-stood up under the force of his static charge.

“You killed him,” he said, stopping about a dozen yards away.

“Number 21, you mean?” I said. “Well, he was trying to kill me, you know.”

“We’d worked together for nearly three decades,” Number 5 told me, scowling at me like I was an unwanted bug. “He was my right hand. And you destroyed that.”

As if to echo the point, he raised his left tentacle straight in the air. A dozen stadium-style floodlights lit up the farm, and we could see that hundreds of aliens, each holding an alien weapon, had formed an enormous circle around us.

Their ranks were tight and unbroken, except for a few rain-soaked, muddy humans pushing through here and there, staggering, zombie-like, back in the general direction of town. I guessed that with Number 5 off the air during the thunderstorm, they had been returning to their homes.

“Oh, no, you don’t!” yelled Number 5 in their general direction. “Back to work!”

Their cell phones and other handhelds began to ring and vibrate, and they predictably answered the devices and turned back to the fields from which they had come.

“I’m not done with any of you yet!” ranted Number 5. “And when I am, you’ll know it! I’m not the universe’s premiere producer of endertainment for letting my actors just fade away!”

Chapter 80

“PRETTY IMPRESSIVE, NUMBER 5,” I admitted, “but check this out.”

I proceeded to make a cell phone ringtone all my own, consisting of the first few bars of Blondie’s “Hanging on the Telephone.”

“Wow, I’m so impressed,” scoffed Number 5. “You have imaginary friends and you’re a mimic. I should take you to a party sometime.”

But then the humans’ cell phones began ringing all over the farm with the same tone.

And guess who was on the line?

“People of Holliswood,” I announced. “You have fallen victim to an alien invader who has been controlling your thoughts and actions through electronic devices. This is why some of you are at a farm digging ponds in the middle of a rainstorm.

“This is why the fire department is missing. This is why your children have been rehearsing a massive, alien-inspired version of High School Musical. And this is why you periodically find yourself doing very silly dances and musical routines for no apparent reason.”

I glanced over at Number 5. He looked like he was about to explode with rage-which, I reminded myself, was just what I wanted.

Chapter 81

“I AM NOW going to ask you all to return to your homes and your normal lives,” I told the citizens of Holliswood authoritatively. “But, first, I’d like you to do one last dance to show our appreciation for our alien VIP. I call it ‘The Number 5,’ and it goes like this -”

And then, to the jangly beats of Sissy Bar’s “Space Klown,” everybody in broadcast range began puffing out their cheeks, wiggling their fingers at the sides of their mouths like catfish whiskers, and swishing their butts back and forth, just like Number 5 did when he hovered around.

My gang all thought it was hilarious, and I even saw a couple aliens snickering.

Number 5, meantime, was gathering so much anger-filled energy that every hair on my body was standing on end.

“You see,” I said to him in as confident a tone as I could muster, “although I never had any doubt you’d come into this universe as an electronically gifted fish, I was totally stumped about how it was you were able to so easily broadcast yourself into electronic devices.

“I mean, I knew you’d taken over the television studio, and the broadcast substation, and the cell phone towers… but that didn’t explain it. It was clear you were actually living inside the network, but how you were able to do that, well, that was the real mystery. At least until I noticed that you never blinked.

“Which led to me notice your impressive eye implants and all that crazy wiring that you must have had surgically placed inside you. I mean, that’s some high-tech stuff!”

The scowl on Number 5’s face was getting even uglier, if that’s possible.

“And then I remembered seeing all those junior-sized neural nets in your transport containers, and I already knew you were reproducing yourself at an alarming rate-with your ‘caviar’ project and the ponds and all-and that must have been so you could run this program on a truly massive, planetwide scale. I mean, you don’t strike me as the kind of guy who’d be into fatherhood for the pure joy of parenting.”

“Well, that’s all very clever,” he said, smiling suddenly. “But you’re still only seeing a small part of the puzzle. And the bigger piece contains the part that’s about to fry your skinny little butt.”

Chapter 82

TIME WAS DRAWING short, so I did another minibroadcast to the townspeople to stop their “Number 5” dance: “Thank you for that fine performance! Now, people of Holliswood, please return to your homes. A brand-new episode of The Simpsons is on tonight!”

“Shoot to kill any human attempting to leave the premises!” yelled Number 5 to his troops.

The humans within earshot all turned and looked at me apprehensively as hundreds of alien rifles aimed at their heads and chests.

“And bring me the McGillicutties!” their evil director commanded. “Now!”

I couldn’t help but gasp. How could he have known about Judy? I’d taken every precaution…

The circle of aliens parted on one side, and Judy and her parents were ushered through as Soul Hooligan’s “Stoop Kid” began playing on speakers all over the farm.

“Do the dance!” he yelled at them, and, sure enough, Judy and her parents began doing a Soul Train-style showcase. My stomach, heart, and every other organ in my body dropped like they’d just fallen off a bridge.

“Not only will they dance at a word from me,” said Number 5, laughing, “but they will die, too. So just give me a single reason, you little punk, and the next time you two want to go out for ice cream, this young woman will be numbered among your other imaginary friends.”

Chapter 83

IT PROBABLY WASN’T my brightest move ever, but what choice did I have?

“Let them go, Number 5,” I said, aiming my hand like a gun at Number 5’s flabby, slime-covered belly, just as I had with Number 21. “And I mean right now, or my friends and I will spend the next ten minutes wiping you and your minions off the face of the Earth.”

“Oh, sure,” he said, snorting even harder. “Are you guys getting all this?” he asked the circling film crews, rhetorically. “I just knew you were going to rise to the occasion, Alien Hunter. You’ve got a lot of substandard qualities I’m not going to miss, but nobody can fault your comic timing. I mean, here I am completely in control of the situation and you-what, are you going to shoot your fingernail at me?”

“Drop your cell phones, go home, and wait for us,” I said to the McGillicutties.

“Ah-ah-ah,” snickered Number 5, so amused that he didn’t even try to stop Judy and her parents as they nervously threaded their way through the alien hordes toward town. He dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief and turned to regard me, my friends, and my family.

“Right,” he said. “So shall we do the climactic battle scene now, or do you want to go see Hair and Makeup first?”

“Very funny,” I said, signaling to my friends to attack-and simultaneously unleashing a thunderous blast from my hand of the exact sort that killed Number 21.

Number 5 deflected the blast with a lightning bolt of his own, but at least I’d temporarily wiped the smile off his face. He even looked a little apprehensive as he glanced at my friends, who were now charging into his alien hordes like a bunch of berserk ninjas. Everybody but Emma, that is, who still hadn’t returned.

But I couldn’t worry about her now.

The battle was on.

Chapter 84

AT FIRST WE held our own. The others were laying down every martial arts trick in the book and pushing the alien scum back away from the crumpled van while I managed to keep Number 5 on the defensive-forcing him to concentrate his attention on me.

But the tide quickly began to turn. Three thousand to seven aren’t good odds, no matter how you look at it.

Especially when one of the three thousand is number five on The List of Alien Outlaws on Terra Firma, and you’ve quickly come to discover that you have once again underestimated his powers.

Like not realizing he has the ability to adjust the electromagnetic properties of the zipper on your motorcycle jacket so that he can zip it up over your head and you can’t see until you forcibly rip the thing off-just in time to see him shoot a couple thousand volts of electricity at you…

Good thing I know how to duck. Fast.

“Had enough, Alien Hunter?” he asked, smiling once again. “Want to stretch out your last seconds on Earth? I tell you what-if you do a little dance for us, maybe I’ll grant you a brief respite to put on some new shoes. I can’t say I’ve ever sensed much rhythm in you, but I bet our alien audience would love to see you do some clog dancing.”

Just then a random blaster shot caught Joe in the shoulder and spun him around like a rag doll. Dana quickly dragged him to cover and got to work bandaging him up while Pork Chop and Mom gave me looks of pleading desperation.

I knew we couldn’t last much longer-there were just too many of them, and I was having too much trouble with Number 5 to be able to help the others.

“You win,” I said, lowering my arm.

“Surrender?” he said.

“We surrender,” I said, lowering my head in shame and signaling to my friends and family to step back.

Maybe I’ll still figure something out, I thought, trying to console myself.

“Ah-ah-ah!” he laughed and signaled to his troops to let up.

“Don’t worry,” he said, as the noise of the battle abated. “Under the circumstances, you’ve made the best decision you possibly could have, and I promise that your final minutes will be appreciated by trillions and trillions of aliens around the universe.

“Really,” he went on, “when you think about it, what’s a little humiliation and pain on your part when you’ll be bringing laughter to at least half the known universe? Surely you know that old expression: ‘The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few’… or…”

His voice trailed off. Now that the melee had stopped, he and the rest of us could hear something very strange-a sort of howling, baying noise, like an enormous fox hunt, and then an unearthly roar.

We both looked over, and there to our west, cresting the hill, was an enormous, barking, snarling pack of mutts-big ones, small ones, brown ones, black ones, white ones, gray ones-racing toward the farm.

And that ant-lion that I’d rebrainwashed to hate aliens was at the head of the pack!

I also spotted, bringing up the rear-and running pretty hard to keep up-two human figures: Emma and a slightly taller one with gray hair whom I quickly recognized as the woman from the pound, the one who reminded me of my grandmother.

And then, like something out of a movie, there was a huge thunderclap and a rush of wind and rain.

The storm was picking up again.

Chapter 85

I QUICKLY DETERMINED that I wasn’t going to get a better chance than this, so I secretly signaled to my friends to be ready to rejoin the battle and cleared my throat.

“Um, Number 5?” I asked as he waved at his troops to go meet the intruders and then turned his mildly perplexed fish face back to me.

“Before that dance you want me to do,” I said, “can I just see that necklace of my dad’s? It means a lot to me, and I just want to touch it.”

Number 5 rolled his eyes. “You do have some sense for good drama, you bad-haired little twerp,” he said. “Sure, that sounds cinematic enough. The orphan communes with his dead father’s keepsake. Come on over and have a look. Maybe we can even have a little good-bye hug, you and I,” he said, stretching his tentacles wide.

I walked up to him, knowing full well that if I tried any tricks, he was summoning enough electricity to crisp me up worse than a chicken nugget left in a microwave for twenty-five minutes. At full power.

He offered me the necklace, and I took off the one I was wearing-my mother’s, he’d have us believe-and twined them together as the camera crews circled for close-up shots of the bittersweet symbolism.

And then, as the tears started to course down my cheeks, I accepted Number 5’s embrace.

I realized it was entirely possible he was going to fry me right then and there, but I suspected his love of drama was going to give me at least a few more moments.

There was a growing electrical charge in the clouds overhead, and when I sensed it had reached the critical level, I freed my arm from his smothering hug and hoisted the necklaces high up into the air.

Alien Hunter science-geek fact number 45: silver is one of the best conductors of electricity in the known universe. And there’s almost nothing lightning loves better.

The bolt that coursed down into my arm and met Number 5’s own electrical reserves must have been more than a gigavolt, and it did just what I’d been hoping it would-it overloaded and totally fried his circuits.

You see, while his alien wiring had been designed to handle vast quantities of electricity, it was meant to handle it coming from the inside, not the outside.

The scream he let out almost made me feel bad for him, and the smell made me feel bad, period. All that raw electricity lit up his internal circuits like toaster wire and basically cooked him up like a three-hundred-pound platter of Cajun-style catfish.

“Disgusting!” I could hear Dana saying in the distance. I stared at Number 5’s remains-just a mess of overdone fish and melted wiring-and, dazed as I was, aimed a sheepish smile in her direction.

Then I looked down-the necklaces had melted into a silver puddle of slag in the palm of my hand. Now I would never be able to prove they hadn’t been my parents’.

“Ew!!” Dana exclaimed. She wasn’t reacting to Number 5’s remains after all. She was staring off at the alien army, which was suddenly exploding in geysers of gore. Through the storm, we could see bodies of aliens literally getting mowed down as the ant-lion and his new dog friends made short work of their terrified prey. Remember what I told you about dogs who smell bad aliens?

Needless to say, even as numerous as the aliens were, with the help of our animal friends-and with Number 5 safely out of the picture-the tide quickly turned back in our favor.

Chapter 86

DOGS AREN’T JUST a man’s best friend. As it turns out, they’re an Alien Hunter’s best friend too. They really made all the difference when it came to wiping out Number 5’s army. It even crossed my mind to adopt that ant-lion as a pet-and as a plan B for my next alien confrontation.

Dana and I were driving back into town to get Lucky from the house, and I was noticing that despite all that had happened recently, every single home was alight with the flickering blue glow of TVs and computer monitors.

“You’d think so soon after discovering the worst possible perils of electronic media, these people would chill out with all their TVs and computers and whatnot,” I commented.

“Yeah,” said Dana from her console in the back of the van. “And they all seem to be watching the exact same thing. Here, I’m patching it in -”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Um. We have a small problem.”

“What sort of problem?”

“Well, you know how you killed Number 5?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, you didn’t quite get all of him.”

I slammed on the brakes. “Are you kidding? You mean his charbroiled skeleton came back to life?” No way was I ready for another fish fry. I was totally wiped.

“No, it’s more like his virtual self came back to life. It’s like he’s turned himself into a bunch of little computer programs on every device he ever touched… like they’re all infected with a little piece of his um, personality.”

I groaned. And just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, Dana continued.

“Right now he’s rejoining all these little pieces and making himself into one very big, powerful dude. And, in fact, it looks like right now he’s busy trying to hack his way through to a satellite uplink station.”

This was bad. This was very bad. “Which means,” I began as it dawned on me, “he’s either trying to reconnect with the wider world here on Earth, so he can infect it too… or maybe he’s going to broadcast into space to summon reinforcements.”

“So this must have been his contingency plan. He probably didn’t mean for you to fry him up like a catfish po’ boy, but he had a backup plan in case you did…”

I banged my forehead against the steering wheel. Again. And again.

“What?!” asked Dana.

I sat up and turned to her. “I’d been thinking all along that he’d had that computer hardware put inside him as a sort of implant, you know, to enhance his powers. But maybe I had it backwards. Maybe Number 5 isn’t an alien electric catfish at all but a computer program that took over an alien electric catfish.”

“In other words, he was a computer program first and a catfish second, not a catfish first and a computer program second.” I nodded, and Dana continued along the same lines of what I was thinking. “So maybe this isn’t really much of a setback for him at all, in that case. Maybe he just needs to find another host, and he’s back in business. Maybe he even wanted you to do this to him.”

“Yeah, maybe we just freed him up so he can call the shots from cyberspace,” I said.

“That would be bad,” said Dana, and I did the only thing there was left to do.

I continued to bang my forehead on the steering wheel.

Chapter 87

TURNS OUT RACING along the highway with your buddies isn’t nearly as fun in stinky old municipal dump trucks with grease-smeared windows as it is on high-performance motorcycles.

Still, we were pretty happy to be doing it. We had finally managed to confiscate every single electronic device in town and had loaded them into these garbage haulers.

How, you may ask? Sometimes, alien powers can’t solve problems in an instant. Occasionally, there’s absolutely no replacement for good old-fashioned elbow grease and determination. And in this case, a little high-tech hypnosis.

When we got to the Wiggers’ farm, we took the garbage haulers out across the abandoned fields until we reached the alien breeding ponds.

Then we turned and dumped every Macintosh, Think-Pad, Dell, Gateway, Toshiba, Sony, LG, Motorola, Samsung, NEC, JVC, Magnavox, Westinghouse, GE, RCA, Sylvania, Nextel, Nintendo, Microsoft, AT &T, IBM, Lenovo, and a dozen other branded electronic devices-from walkietalkies to microwave ovens to TiVos to Wiis to network routers-into the water.

It was pretty impressive-the sound of tons of twisting metal, breaking glass, and snapping plastic cascading down the hillside into a pond.

But the best part was when Number 5-who’d been silent till now, no doubt trying to figure out yet another escape plan-screamed like the Wicked Witch of the West when the stuff started splashing into the water.

The moment the first of those batteries, silicon chips, and transformers began sizzling and fizzling and shorting out, everything with a screen or a speaker began broadcasting his shrill, urgent-sounding plea:

“Stop! Please stop it! I’ll make you famous. You can have a credit on my next show-I’ll put your name right up there with mine-I’ll even move the pilot episode to another planet if these stupid humans mean so much to you. St-oooo-op! Puh-uh-lease. My my-ind… I fe-eeel… di-zzzzzzzzz-eeee… D-d-d-ah-nnnn… yu-uhl?”

“Yes, Number 5?”

“I’m… gu… guh… gunna get you… for this.”

“Oh, no, you’re not,” I said. And I opened up The List computer-on which I’d just run a very thorough virus scan-and deleted Number 5’s entry.

The pond was soon bubbling and steaming with all the battery chemicals and electronic waste, and we watched as literally tons of stinky, finless, alien catfish began to float, belly-up, dead, to the surface of the pond.

Then I turned to the video camera that Joe was using to record the proceedings and did my best Ryan Seacrest impersonation: “We here at American Alien Hunter hope you’ve enjoyed Season Two. Please stay tuned for previews of our next adventure-right after this brief word from our sponsors.”

Chapter 88

THEY SAY EVERYONE loves a parade, and I guess that’s one more way I’m different. I guess I just think there’s something unsettling about people putting on uniforms, walking together in a line, and having everybody come out to stare at them. Still, if only out of being gracious, I let the people of Holliswood put me atop their homecoming day float and rode along with the mayor through the middle of town and out to the civic auditorium where all of the children of Holliswood had assembled to stage their own version of High School Musical.

It wasn’t really my cup of tea, but I will say one thing for Number 5’s legacy-he left those kids with some darn good dance moves.

And then, since the whole town-minus those who were melted by Number 5 and his goons-was there, I used some of what I’d learned of Number 5’s mind-control broadcasting techniques and erased all memory of myself and the aliens from every single person… except Judy.

Chapter 89

I DROVE JUDY home on my motorcycle while everybody else was getting their bearings and wondering what the heck they were all doing at the civic auditorium in the middle of the day.

“You study hard with your folks, okay, Judy?”

We were standing on her porch exchanging goodbyes. It was a beautiful June day. The birds were chirping, the clouds were scudding, the flowers were doing their fragrance-emitting thing.

“I just can’t believe you’re leaving. Can’t you take me with you? I’m losing my mind here with my parents and this homeschooling business.”

“I know it seems like a drag, but they’re good people. I can tell. And there will be life after Holliswood, I promise.”

“Easy for you to say,” she said.

“Well, I have been around the block a few times -”

She interrupted me with a kiss. And, as the world spun and I saw the brilliant promise of summer in her eyes, I erased her memory of me.

Chapter 90

THE GANG AND the family and I had our final council meeting at the KHAW transmission station that we had trashed in that early skirmish with Number 5’s goons.

“Checklist,” I said.

Emma began. “Caviar: one hundred percent confiscated and all female residents checked to ensure no alien inhabitation. Also, all dogs from the Holliswood pound safely adopted.”

“Good. Willy?”

“All incubation ponds drained and all larval Number 5s converted to crop fertilizer. All battery chemicals removed from groundwater, and all electronics fully rehabilitated. Wiggers’ farm restored to its pre-Number 5 condition.”

“Dana?”

“All aliens imported or bred by Number 5 have been exterminated… except for the ant-lion, which is on an interstellar freighter on its way back to its home planet.”

“Mom?”

“All essential civic functions restored. Remainder of town police currently investigating multiple missing-person claims, including loss of entire fire department.”

“Pork Chop?”

“Holliswood area schools back in session. New curriculum featuring effective math and science courses. English classes now including such pillars of modern literature as Stranger in a Strange Land.”

“Excellent. Dad?”

Dad threw a circuit breaker on the recently repaired broadcast shack’s wall. “Holliswood is now officially reconnected to the wider world, and the government authorities will doubtless be showing up to assist in putting the town back on its feet.”

“Joe?”

“Video scrapbook has just undergone postproduction. Screening ready to commence.”

I nodded, and he fired up the projector.

We watched Number 5’s landing party. The attack on the fire department. The takeover of the TV station and the Wiggers’ farm. Screen tests of human families being forced to dance. The High School Musical practice sessions at the civic auditorium, the caviar distribution, the alien nurseries, the incubation ponds… and then the scene at S-Mart where Number 21 kicked my butt, which once again got a good laugh out of everybody.

“That’s why we watch these things,” I tried to explain. “It’s like a football team reviewing the highlight reels at practice.”

“Yeah, but that scene’s hilarious!” said Willy.

“That’s nothing,” said Joe, and that’s when the real laughter began. Because somehow Joe had gotten the grainy black-and-white feed of me cutting my own hair in the bathroom.

“I was trying to look like Billy Joe Armstrong!” I protested as they all rolled with laughter. “You know, the lead singer of Green Day?”

“Yeah, there’s plenty to learn there,” said Dana, winking at me.

“Okay, gang,” I said after we sat through the final battle scenes and paused a couple of times to comment on things we could have done better. “Is that everything?”

“Oh, one last report,” said Joe, somberly.

I nodded for him to go on, though I couldn’t think what we hadn’t covered, and what would be making him look so glum.

“I’m still not certain that operational efficiencies have recovered one hundred percent at White Castle, Taco Bell, KFC, Burger King, Wendy’s, McDonald’s…”

“Well, I guess we can stop by and check a couple on our way out of town,” I conceded.

The strength of Joe’s embrace rivaled Number 5’s final squeeze.