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  For a few seconds, they continued to halfheartedly squirt lame streams of water at Willy and my friends… and then dropped their plastic toys and scattered into the woods.

  “You okay, Emma?” asked Dana, as our friend got back to her feet.

  “It was a cat,” she said, pointing to a pile of torn flea collars on the pavement.

  We nodded sympathetically. I spotted a satchel one of the aliens had been carrying and began to rummage through it.

  “Promise me, Daniel,” said Emma. “We’re going to get every last one of these monsters.”

  “That’s job one,” I reassured her. But I was preoccupied with something I’d found in the satchel. Something very strange, and distressing.

  Chapter 19

  IT WAS A small piece of jewelry from my home planet.

  My people are incredible and distinctive craftsmen, and I instantly identified the small silver pendant of an elephant as genuine Alparian handiwork, not some dime-store knockoff.

  In fact, elephant pendants like this were commonly worn by adults who leave the planet, emblems of home-world solidarity. My mother and father had both received them when they had graduated from the Academy and accepted jobs in the Protectorship. As far as I knew, they’d never taken them off.

  So what on earth—or any other planet, for that matter—were a bunch of Number 5’s henchbeasts doing walking around with an Alpar Nokian elephant necklace?

  It had to be one of my first memories, that little silver elephant hanging from my mother’s neck. I’d play with it endlessly, watching it twirl and catch the light whenever she held me in her arms… though I hadn’t thought about it in years.

  I wiped away some moisture from my eye before it technically became a tear. One more mystery for me to solve, I thought with a sigh, putting the pendant in my pocket.

  Just then I had this really weird sensation that I was being watched, and I spun around. But there was nothing—just cricket-infested woods.

  “Joe,” I yelled into the van, “are you picking up any alien life-forms on the scanners?”

  “Nothing but regular wildlife. Those cat eaters we scared off are miles away by now.”

  Great, I thought. Now Number 5’s made me paranoid, on top of everything else.

  Chapter 20

  AFTER A MILE or so, the county road crossed over the freeway, and we pulled into a small Exxon minimart at the end of the off-ramp to regroup about where the night’s mission was headed. We got some waters and sodas, and Joe bought a couple dozen bags of chips, a fistful of jerky sticks, and at least a dozen Hostess bakery products.

  That was normal, but here’s the weird part: Joe actually stopped eating in the back of the van before he’d finished inhaling his third bag of nacho cheese chips. Even weirder, he paused to place a crumb inside what looked like a miniature microwave oven.

  “Fifty-three percent Benton, Iowa; thirty-two percent Edison, New Jersey; eleven percent Las Piedras, Mexico; three percent Ankang, China. And trace quantities from, oh, a planet that’s about twenty-five thousand light years away from Earth.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Dana.

  “That corn chip. This machine can pinpoint the origins of any sample you put inside it. In this case, a corn chip.”

  “Your corn chip has extraterrestrial ingredients?” asked Dana, wrinkling her cute little nose.

  “Well, it’s mostly from Iowa—probably the corn part,” said Joe.

  “It’s no surprise, really,” I said. “The List tells us there are how many thousand aliens living here on Earth?”

  “Probably one of them works at the snack factory and sneezed on the production line,” said Dana.

  “Yeah,” said Emma, “or they’re trying to poison the population or something.”

  “It’s possible,” said Joe, sticking another handful of chips in his mouth. “Aw I cun… sayfersher is… day… tayse… perrygood.”

  “Think you can fit some caviar in there?” I asked, handing Joe a can from my backpack. It was the tin that mom had found in the mailbox.

  He put the whole can inside and slammed the door shut. The machine hummed while Joe swallowed the last of the chips.

  “Yeah, this one’s not going to earn ‘organic’ certification, either. The paper looks like it might have come from Oregon trees, but the metal and stuff inside is definitely from a galaxy far, far away.”

  “Let me guess,” I said, “Number 5’s home planet.”

  “On the button,” said Joe.

  “Guys,” said Dana, hunkering over her console. “I’m seeing signs of alien activity a few hundred yards from here. And there’s some sort of freaky transmission coming from a TV relay station just up that hill over there.”

  Against the starry sky, we could see a sinister red light blinking atop a steel-framed communications tower.

  “Listen to this.”

  The minivan’s speaker system began to play a decidedly unearthly series of clicks, moans, and static.

  Lucky bared his teeth and made a low growl.

  “Atta boy,” said Emma, stroking his neck reassuringly. “Let’s go rid Earth of some aliens.”

  Chapter 21

  THE RELAY STATION’S access road was barricaded by a chain-link gate.

  “Want me to make it go away?” asked Willy, already aiming his plasma cannon at it.

  “It’s easier to spy on aliens when they don’t hear you coming,” I said.

  So we left Lucky to guard the van, and, as stealthily as an Alien Hunter and his four imagined friends can manage, we jumped the fence. It was fifteen feet high, but we can do tall buildings in a single bound, so it really wasn’t an issue.

  We snuck up the hardscrabble road on foot. At the top of the hill and inside another fence—this one topped with concertina wire—we found a pretty typical broadcast substation: a small forest of towers, satellite dishes, antennas, and transformers. The small control shack also looked to have been built by human hands.

  Everything, in fact, seemed pretty normal—except that the door to the shack had been blown off its hinges, and there was an eerie blue glow emanating from within… and, of course, the air was filled with the disgusting stink of aliens.

  We broke out some night-vision binoculars and long-range microphones and crept closer. There were a half dozen henchbeasts inside the shack, guzzling motor oil and laughing their ugly butts off as one of them edited video footage.

  The transmissions were surreal scenes of townspeople doing dances, singing a capella, and, always at the end, getting vaporized. That especially sent the aliens into hysterics.

  Next they uploaded a scene of pregnant women converging on a country farmhouse.

  “That Number 5’s a stallion,” said one of them, guffawing conspiratorially.

  “Yeah, especially for a fish,” replied another, causing the rest to roll on the floor with laughter.

  Just then the picture on the monitors changed to the glowering image of their boss, and they quickly stood at nervous attention.

  “Are you no-talent alien clowns having a good time?” asked Number 5.

  “Yes, sir!—I mean no, sir!—We mean —”

  “Spare me the stupidity,” said Number 5. “And see if you can’t spare yourselves and me yet another production delay. Our friend the Alien Hunter is forty-five meters away, and he’s armed to the teeth.”

  “Well, so much for the element of surprise,” said Joe.

  Willy cracked his knuckles and then, in his best Bruce Willis impersonation, said, “Lock and load.”

  We didn’t like using guns ourselves, but I had to agree with the sentiment.

  Chapter 22

  NOTE TO SELF: when fighting hand-to-hand with rubber-skeletoned aliens—which some of these evidently were—remember that thing Sir Isaac Newton said about every action being met with an equal and opposite reaction.

  Because no sooner had I landed a devastating roundhouse kick to the head of one of the henchbeasts than I was sailing th
rough the night like I’d just jumped off a ten-story building onto a trampoline.

  I somehow managed to land on my feet on the far side of the control shack and was ready to spring back into action, but my friends had already figured out how to deal with these overly flexible aliens. You simply tie one of their limbs to a fixed object, such as the steel girders of the broadcast tower, and then you run with their bodies in the opposite direction.

  Then, when you can’t run any farther, you let go and—bang!—the creatures snap back into themselves with such force that they explode like dropped water balloons. Only they’re filled with some sort of sticky greenish syrup rather than water.

  Gross but effective.

  The other type of henchbeast we encountered wasn’t quite so stretchy but had its own surprise—some sort of gland on the abdomen that could spray a jet of foul black acid more than thirty feet.

  We found they weren’t very good at aiming up, however. The secret was to jump into the air and then crush them from above—splat!—just like a foot squashing a bug.

  But since they each weighed about a hundred fifty pounds, they left your sneakers a whole lot messier.

  Chapter 23

  ONCE WE’D SAFELY dispatched the last of them, we ducked into the control shack, hoping to find some clues. It was worrisome that Number 5 often seemed to know my whereabouts.

  There was no sign of him, however.

  “So what were they up to in here?” asked Joe.

  “I think Number 5’s getting ready for a new show,” I said. “Our friends were probably uploading the footage to an extraterrestrial receiver for postproduction. Joe, can you figure out anything useful about this setup?”

  He was already poring over the equipment, following wires and examining switches and displays.

  “Yeah, it looks like most of the data is getting broadcast straight up into space. There’s a small signal coming back, though. Probably a guidance beacon, but it might be something else. Here, let me see if I can get it on this set here.”

  He moved some wires to different jacks and threw a couple of switches. And then we saw what might have been the most sickening thing I’d ever seen.

  And, yes, I’ve been on the Internet before.

  Chapter 24

  IMAGINE THE THEATER for American Idol during the season finale. Now make it bigger—like Madison Square Garden in New York or the Staples Center in Los Angeles. And now quadruple its seating capacity. And now replace the mostly polite, family-oriented audience of American Idol with the loud, obnoxious fans of, say, Jerry Springer or Howard Stern. And have them not be human.

  Have some be three headed; have some be lobster clawed; have some wearing space suits; have some glowing with orange radiation; have some be nothing more than dense clouds of blue vapor; have some that look like huge unblinking eyeballs on mushroom stalks; have some with hammer heads, some with needle noses, some with feathers, some with frog legs, some with turtle backs, and some that look like Chinese dumplings with sea-urchin spines and metal helmets… well, that at least starts to paint the scene.

  But that wasn’t the sickening part.

  What made us gasp in horror was the stage, where the scenes we’d watched on the monitor were now being played for the alien horde’s viewing pleasure.

  A father and his daughter getting terrified by a microphone-wielding Number 5… and then liquefied by blaster rays.

  A family—and even their dog—dancing to seventies disco hits… and then melted by blaster rays.

  A TV news anchor break dancing on her desk… and then, in a flash of light, getting transformed into a steaming pool of swampy liquid.

  And then me, getting knocked senseless by Number 21 in S-Mart.

  The audience loved every second of it. Even through all of the bits of static and fuzz, you could see the jeers, the sneers, the laughter, the pumping fists, claws, and tentacles of those assembled interplanetary creeps.

  Then, I heard Number 5’s voice boom through the arena. “And that, my fellow producers, is just the trailer for the hottest new entertainment phenomenon we’re calling endertainment. Watch the skies for more episodes—and a sizzling premiere that’ll leave you dying for more.”

  Without saying a word, the five of us started smashing everything in the shack.

  Sparks flew, and the air filled with the scent of shorted fuses and ozone as we hurled mixing boards, editing decks, holoform display units, and a bunch of other things we didn’t bother to identify before we trashed them.

  And then, as I reached to pull one of the monitors off its wall-mounted bracket, Number 5’s image flickered to life on the screen.

  “I thought you were the Alien Hunter, not the Alien Vandal,” he laughed.

  I was speechless. How did he do that TV trick? It looked like a regular old set.

  “You’ll be happy to know the broadcast was completed before you destroyed any of this equipment.”

  “I don’t care,” I managed to say.

  “Don’t you?” he said. “I’m not sure I believe you. Not that I suppose it matters. The only thing that would be a help is if you stuck around town till we’re ready for the final episode. You have a starring role in it, you know.”

  “You’re not even going to make it to episode two, you fishy freak.”

  “Ah-ah-ah-ah!” he laughed at me. “Very good, young Alien Hunter. That’s just the kind of bravado the audience loves to see. And it will make it all the funnier when I kill you in a live broadcast.”

  Chapter 25

  “DUDE,” SAID JOE as I hurled the monitor through the window. “He’s totally toying with you.”

  “Let him keep thinking that,” I said—although, truth be told, I was getting pretty freaked at this point.

  “How can he possibly keep seeing me through TV screens like that, Joe?”

  “Maybe he’s got them reverse-wired somehow, has them working as cameras.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Almost anything’s possible if you have alien technology on your side.”

  “Can you take a look and find out for us?”

  “Sure,” said Joe. “Of course, it would’ve been easier if you hadn’t thrown it out the window and smashed it into a thousand pieces… but I’ll see what I can do.”

  He stepped out of the shack to gather up the remains.

  “Okay,” I said to the rest of them. “You guys have any big ideas here? Personally, I’m starting to wonder if going after Number 5 wasn’t a big mistake.”

  “But he’ll keep killing animals if you don’t stop him,” said Emma.

  “And humans,” said Willy.

  “And probably you,” said Dana. “You guys are a great help,” I said.

  Chapter 26

  JOE DIDN’T FIND anything strange in the wrecked TV. No nanocameras, no light-sensitive data films, no reverse-broadcast microtransceivers. Which left me one conclusion—Number 5’s electromagnetic powers were greater than I’d even begun to imagine.

  I mean, the only thing I could figure was that he was actually able to inhabit electronic devices. And, in a world as wired as this one was becoming… well, there wasn’t much to keep this soulless creep from turning the entire human race into an unpaid variety show and then committing the worst extinction event the planet had ever seen.

  Just to be safe, I had the gang run a complete analysis on the van’s equipment, and, when we made it back to the house, we shut off the main circuit breaker in the basement and cut the phone lines.

  Clearly, if I was going to find a way to surprise Number 5—and I’d been miserably failing at it so far—I couldn’t have him watching me through the electrical sockets.

  I turned to my family and friends. “If you were Number 5, what would be the last thing you’d expect of a young Alien Hunter bent on wiping your foul-smelling stain off the face of the planet?”

  “Acting normal for once in your life?” offered Pork Chop.

  I was about to give her the L-is-for-Loser
sign, but that’s when it hit me. Tomorrow morning I was going to do exactly what any normal kid my age would do. I’d get up, get dressed, drink some orange juice, eat a frosted strawberry Pop-Tart, and go to high school.

  Number 5 wouldn’t expect that in a million years.

  Chapter 27

  DANA AND I had English class first period, although maybe class isn’t quite the right word for it. It was more like a holding pen in which the substitute teacher and the students had collectively agreed to spend fifty-five minutes doing as little productive activity as was humanly possible.

  The sub clearly just wanted to keep things quiet enough to avoid the attention of any hallway-roving administrators. And the kids, for their part, were taking full advantage of the situation. Some were texting friends; some were chatting idly; some were staring off into space; and two boys were actually sleeping at their desks. The closest thing to learning taking place in the room was a single dark-haired girl reading some manga.

  “And, in this great country’s quest to create a democratic, self-governing citizenry,” Dana declaimed to whomever was listening—namely, me—“it was determined that the most important function of its free and public schools was to help its children become motivated, engaged, and eager-to-learn participants in the democratic process; that although the downward-sloping road to lowest-common denominators might have seemed the easiest to travel, the job of teachers, parents, and the larger community was to provide an education that showcased the highway to mathematics, reading, writing, problem solving, and critical thinking as the more compelling and rewarding route.”

  “You are so weird,” I told her.