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.”
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“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 de
vices. 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.