“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.
&nbs
p; 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. r />
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.