Watch the Skies Read online

“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.