Invasion

  “With a law requiring all Americans to be armed at all times, no mass murders will ever again occur in our wonderful country,” declared Congressman Matt Petershot (R. Indiana).

  “I firmly believe that this law will essentially eliminate crime,” said Senator Orin Bash of Wyoming. “With a fully armed citizenry, which was clearly what the writers of our great Constitution had in mind, no criminal will dare undertake any violent crime. Mass murderers will be gunned down as soon as they open fire. Our movie theaters and restaurants and high schools will be safe again.”

  A spokesman reported that the President, although in general supporting such legislation, felt that the law should limit weapons to citizens who had reached the age of fourteen.

  However children’s rights advocate Jill Fortress immediately indicated that her organization would fight this limitation. “Children are at even more risk of gun violence than adults,” she declared. “Allowing them to have guns would let them protect themselves against physically stronger adults. Think how many child abductions would have been avoided had those poor children been packing.”

  TWENTY

  (From Billy Morton’s MY FRIEND LOUIE, pp. 145–149)

  The flight to the Cayman Islands was uneventful. What I remember of it. Flying first class, I was offered all the free drinks I wanted. Though I usually don’t have more than a couple of drinks on any given day, some pretty lady convinced me otherwise. She was wearing a uniform that had shrunk so badly the skirt barely covered her upper thighs, and on two occasions her breasts spilled out of her blouse and I had to help her put them back in. Well, not exactly, but she did keep smilingly offering me one drink after another, and I never like to disappoint a pretty lady.

  I don’t remember a thing after being served my fourth bourbon, but I’m told they needed a wheelchair to get me off the plane. I’m not the man I used to be.

  I guess a hotel driver met me at the airport and drove me to my hotel, but my next memory after smiling at the pretty stewardess handing me my fourth drink was waking up in bed with Louie poking me in my belly with one of his limbs. Let’s call it an arm although it emerged suspiciously low on his body. In any case he woke me up, insisted on my having a drink with him, which I did. When I saw it, I hoped it was vodka, but all the evidence is that it was a hundred percent water.

  Then he got me going on my assignment of being a major financial criminal.

  * * *

  Unfortunately, being a major financial criminal isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s a lot of work and no play. James Bond seems to save the world from super-masterminds, who have thousands of hit men, by winning money at casinos, sleeping with a lot of beautiful women, and drinking especially dry martinis. In four days in the Caymans I achieved only the last. And only one.

  First of all, I missed Lita, Jimmy, and Lucas. Because we were now famous from the TV show and the YouTube reruns, Louie had told us that we could never be seen in public as a foursome. Even in our disguises, a wizened old man with two young kids and a wife with a memorable ass might grab people’s attention.

  Most of that first day Lita and I were busy opening bank accounts. Separately. Only after eight of the most boring hours I’ve ever lived through did we manage to have a drink together and go up to her room where I could see the kids. When we got to her room, the two boys paid not the slightest attention to our entrance. They were too busy on the floor playing with… Louie! He broke away from the kids and came up and bounced off my chest and then off Lita’s hip, his new way of greeting us I guess. When he settled back on the rug I saw that the bump on his side had gotten even bigger and was attached by only a short inch-long, inch-wide sort of tube.

  Jimmy announced that Louie was about to give birth to a new FF. I turned to Louie, who blushed modestly and gave me an “ah shucks” grin. Of course, he didn’t literally do this, but I’d begun to notice over the weeks that he was somehow communicating his feelings to me in some non-physical way.

  “I’m afraid we’re in a bit of trouble,” Louie said, bouncing up onto the big double bed, the boys bouncing up there too.

  “What’s up?” says I.

  “I flew here inside a suitcase. Unfortunately, when the owner opened the suitcase in his room at the Cayman Hilton he began suspiciously fingering the wooly silver-gray sweater he didn’t remember owning. So I formed my sphere, bounced away to his patio, took a swan dive into the hotel pool, and escaped. Since he reported the incident first to the hotel management and then to the local authorities, I’m sure the American government spy agencies know there’s an FF in the Caymans. And they know this is one of the places we might try to move our money. We’ve now learned that they’re sending three more agents here from the States to look at all recent arrivals to the Caymans. Pretty soon they’ll look at Robert Walton and Leah Klein and her two sons. We’re in trouble.”

  “So what can we do about it?” asks Lita.

  “Well, as soon as I can split off junior here,” says Louie, growing a limb to point to his tennis-ball growth, “I’m going to join Molière playing games on the beach—like the FFs in California. Maybe get the government to think we are harmless FFs rather than the thieving kind.”

  “But it sounds like it’s already too late,” says Lita.

  “It probably is, because something else happened that has upset the government. Molière monkeyed with their list of known terrorist organizations and added the Red Cross, both Republican and Democratic national committees, and the National Rifle Association. For the last several days all members of these organizations have been on the no-fly list and gotten stuck at airports.”

  I laughed.

  “That’s neat,” says Lucas.

  “So what do we do now?” says I, always coming up with a question when answers were what were needed.

  “You and Lita have to change identities again. Tomorrow morning I want you to check out of your hotels and become Jose Rodriguez and Maria Gomez, successful dope smugglers. We’ll get you the documents and appropriate clothing. The Feds aren’t interested in dope smugglers laundering money in the Caymans, they want FFs and the humans that are helping us.”

  “I get to be Latino!” says I. “Lita always wanted me to be a Latino.”

  “What about us!?” says Jimmy.

  “We’ll sneak you and Lucas into a safe house we have here. I’m afraid two boys about eight and eleven in the Caymans is now a red flag.”

  “Is the safe house on a beach?” says Lucas.

  From outside there was suddenly a thunderous BOOM! and an incredible flash of light filled the room then disappeared. Lita and the boys rushed to the window to look out, and I wobbled over to join them. Nothing. Everything calm as could be.

  “Was it thunder?” says Jimmy.

  “Here he is,” says Louie.

  We all turned and saw that the small soft ball attached to Louie’s side had split away and was plopped down on the bedspread beside him.

  “Wow!” says Jimmy.

  “About time,” says Louie, and reaches out with a limb and lightly touches the new FF.

  Which rolls up the limb and presses itself against Louie’s midsection.

  “Louie had a baby!” says Lucas.

  “Is he a boy or girl?” asks Jimmy.

  “Both!” says Lucas. “Remember, FFs are always both.”

  The furry softball then leaps off Louie and rolls up into Lucas’s arms. Lucas has the biggest grin I’ve ever seen on him and gently pets the little fella’s head.

  “What’s his name?” Lita asks Louie.

  “It’s about two hundred words long in our Ickie language. You people will have to name him the same way you did me.”

  “It’s Louie Junior,” says Lucas.

  “Or Louie the Second,” says I.

  Neither seemed quite right, and neither Louie nor the little fella moved an inch. There was a silence.

  “He’s Louie-Twoie!” says Jimmy, and the newborn rolls off Lucas and goes immediately to J
immy, bounces up to tap his face and settles into his lap.

  “Louie-Twoie,” says I. “What do you think, Louie?”

  “I’m honored,” says Louie, “and you should know that every FF born is ninety percent the same as his parent, so your name, Jimmy, is quite appropriate. Although since Louie-Twoie is actually my fourteenth split-off, technically he’s Louie the Fourteenth, or ‘Louie Quatorze’ as Molière has been referring to him.”

  A silence. Lita looked at me and then the two boys.

  “It’s Louie-Twoie, I think,” she says. “Names don’t have to stick to the facts.”

  “Hooray for Louie-Twoie!” says Lucas.

  TWENTY-ONE

  (From LUKE’S TRUE UNBELIEVABLE REPORT OF THE INVASION OF THE FFS, pp. 108–111)

  The United States defense establishment had decided that any alien not spending all its time cavorting in the water or on a beach or otherwise entertaining the public was probably a terrorist. They knew too that the aliens were using humans to help them, especially setting up bank accounts to launder their stolen billions. They had sent a special task force to the Caymans to monitor bank transactions and all alien activity. Their goal was simple: capture an alien terrorist.

  Louie and Molière knew all this because they’d had Louie-Twoie sneak into the main suite rented by the agents, first disguised as a large mouse, then as a dirty gray sock lying under a bed. LT did a good job considering he’d been born only a day earlier.

  Billy and Lita were doing their morning chores of opening more bank accounts as Jose Rodriguez and Maria Gomez. At the same time two FFs took turns on the beach entertaining the crowd with acrobatic tricks, playing gentle games with the children, and generally trying to pretend they were the harmless kind of FFs rather than the terrorist money-laundering sort. A young woman had joined the FF out in the water, and together they began to do amazing tricks, some even better than the two FFs working by themselves. It helped that the woman had real breasts, whereas FFs didn’t.

  Billy and Lita celebrated their becoming the proud owners of millions of dollars by late in the afternoon retreating to their hotel room for some marital bliss, or as much bliss as the elderly Billy could manage. Billy maintains that he hadn’t needed any Viagra—that Lita’s lovemaking could erect an Eiffel Tower on a corpse.

  But when Billy and Lita were making love, and Lucas, Jimmy, and LT—back from his first surveillance assignment—were playing baseball at the safe house Louie had set up for them, there was more important action taking place on the beach.

  Late that afternoon, while Molière and his female partner were fifty feet off the beach doing acrobatics, Louie was entertaining the tourists too—playing games with some of the children. A vendor pushing a large ice-cream cart through the sand approached. Louie paused in his play when the cart first arrived, but when children began leaving it with ice-cream cones, he resumed, entering immediately into a triple cartwheel somersault flying fish into a sandcastle. The kids shrieked with joy and a half-dozen people applauded.

  Then a spray of sticky, hot, glue-like tar began hitting Louie and the sandcastle. The ice-cream cart had sprouted a thick hose, and a white-uniformed man was blasting away at Louie, who rolled away, the splotch of sticky glue-tar that had already hit him picking up gobs of sand that slowed him. When he expanded himself to protect a child who happened to be in the path of the flow, he was hit again. When he tried to roll himself into the water, he was hit again.

  Suddenly Molière burst out of the shallow water and rolled like lightning to the man with the hose and knocked him down, the hose spraying the goo up into the air like an eruption of “Old Faithful.” Almost immediately another man appeared and began shooting at Molière, who rolled at warp speed back into the water. A small drone flew up carrying a giant mesh net—ten times as big as a butterfly net—hovered over the struggling Louie covered with goo, and dropped it down over him.

  Some of the onlookers began applauding again, assuming this was part of the show, but then some of them saw that a small boy at the sandcastle had been hit in both legs with the hot goo and was crying. His mother began to scream. Then several women discovered goo in their hair and began to scream. Another child began to yell and cry. Another mommy screamed, although whether for her hair or her child has never been determined.

  The onlookers stopped applauding. As another big man appeared and began dragging Louie away from the beach, some people began to move angrily after them. The hose man aimed the hose at anyone who threatened to get too close. Another man waved his semi-automatic pistol threateningly. It wasn’t a dignified retreat—three men with a tar cannon and a gun holding off five or six people armed only with bathing suits, a rubber duck, and two badminton rackets. But it was a successful retreat. When they got to the road, two other men appeared in a pickup truck, hoisted Louie and the ice-cream cart and hose into the back of it, and sped away.

  The American government had captured an FF.

  TWENTY-TWO

  (From THE OFFICIAL HISTORY OF THE ALIEN INVASION, Volume 1, pp. 434–446. Being the report of Agent Michael Johnson on the interrogation of the alien terrorist and the subsequent response to the raid on the safe house.)

  When agents of the CIA captured a Protean on a beach in the Caymans they had no idea which Protean they had snared. It could have been just another harmless, playful Protean like the SuperSurfers in California, or it could be Alien 6, Louie, one of the masterminds behind the attacks on networks, bank accounts, and social media. As soon as the Protean was in custody I was notified, I being considered one of the primary “experts” on Proteans.

  I flew into the Caymans within four hours and was driven immediately to the estate the CIA used as a safe house. The estate covered seven acres on the water, a huge stucco mansion and two guest cottages.

  Inside I was greeted by CIA Agent Adolf Agua who was in charge of the team. He knew Unit A was at the top of the chain of command in relation to the Protean terrorists and he seemed to welcome my appearance. We both knew that a decision would have to be made as to what to do with this alien, and I think Agent Agua was happy that it would be me or my Unit A that would have to make it.

  I was led to a wing off to one side of the mansion and dug partly down into the earth. Cellars are not feasible on most of the Caymans because of high water tables, but the CIA had dug down as far as they dared to create a windowless room twenty feet wide and forty feet long: in effect a giant cell. We entered through the only door to the room, a steel monstrosity more than three inches thick.

  Inside there was only one agent, who greeted us nervously. The door was locked behind us. The alien was in the middle of the room, locked in a cubical glass cage about four by four by four. A hatch on top seemed to provide the only access. Otherwise the room was totally empty.

  “He hasn’t said a word so far,” Agent Agua said as we approached. “As you can see, we’ve removed most but not all of the polymacatine that we sprayed on him during the capture.”

  I walked to within a few feet of the cage and stopped and stared at the hairy sphere, splotched on one side with some sort of black coating.

  “I don’t see how anyone can identify one Protean from another,” Agent Agua continued. “They all look the same even when they look different—I mean even when they change shapes.”

  “Hi, Louie,” I said.

  “Hi,” the alien replied. “How they hanging?”

  Agent Agua looked stunned.

  “You’re able to recognize this one!?” he said.

  “I think so,” I answered. “Although I’m smart enough to know that a Protean not Louie might find it to his advantage to pretend to be Louie, so there’s a possibility I’m being tricked.”

  “Jesus,” said Agent Agua.

  “What do you think, Louie?” I said to the Protean. “Are you a fake Louie or a real Louie?”

  “I’m not sure,” said the Protean. “This goo that they covered me with has affected the fine receptors of my computer syste
m. I may be this entity you call ‘Louie’ but quite honestly, I’m not sure.”

  “Bullshit,” I said neutrally. “One alien or another, you know precisely who you are.”

  “In any case I don’t intend to say anything more until I’m out of this cage, in a bath, and have had the rest of this black goo cleaned off me.”

  “Get someone in here with a tub of water and any solvent you need to get rid of the rest of the polymacatine,” I said to Agua. “And the key to unlock this cage.”

  Agent Agua went into action and within a half hour Louie had been released from his cage, had the polymacatine cleaned off, and was enjoying a soak in the large metal tub.

  “Well, Louie, shall we have a chat?” I asked.

  “Who’s this Louie you keep talking to?” it answered. “Am I supposed to be named Louie?”

  Now, on one level I was certain that this alien was Louie, but on another I knew that Proteans might have the ability to give off false signals about who they are, that they could convince humans that they were some other Protean that the humans thought they knew. On the one hand, I knew this was Louie. On the other hand, I knew I’d be a fool to trust a word of what this alien said to me, whether it was Louie or not. And even worse, I knew that if this was another Protean he probably had communicated with Louie, might even this very moment be communicating with Louie, and thus could quite easily fool me.

  “So, Mr. X,” I said to the alien lolling in the bathtub. “Can you please tell me what you’re doing in the Caymans?”

  Agent Agua and I were standing side by side three feet from the tub.

  “Enjoying the waters, Mike,” it replied.

  “There are plenty of waters around Long Island,” I said. “Why come here?”

  “To see one of my old buddies.”

  “And when were you planning to return to Long Island?”

  “Who says I come from Long Island?”

  I should note that the voice of this alien was not the same as the voice of the Louie on Billy Morton’s boat, and it was different too from the voice that Louie had used during his television performance. But all three voices were definitely similar.