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  “Nobody’s seen them in a month.”

  “What happened?!” I asked. “Isn’t there any backup? I mean, that’s nuts!”

  “I guess they’re on vacation.” The man passed along another bucket.

  I was flabbergasted. “Why didn’t anyone call a nearby town for help? Why hasn’t this been all over the news?”

  “They’re on vacation too,” he answered, and twitched a little bit. “Everybody deserves a vacation.”

  “So Number 5 brainwashed you too, huh?”

  “What?” asked the man, sweat dripping from his brow.

  “Never mind,” I said, shaking my head. And I put out what was left of the fire with one giant alien breath, like I was blowing out candles on a birthday cake. “Now go home and take a shower.”

  Chapter 35

  I’D LEFT LUCKY at the house with Mr. Gout—but one of the bigger problems with the telepathically adjusted is that, while they’ll do what you tell them to do, they generally won’t do what you’ve forgotten to tell them to do. Like taking the dog for a walk.

  By the time I got home, poor Lucky was practically putting on a Number 5–style disco dance.

  Since Mr. Gout had been diligently alienproofing the house for the past twenty-two hours, following the blueprints Dad had given him, I told him to go take a nap. Then I materialized a collar and leash and took Lucky for a much-needed stroll.

  I don’t know if you have a dog, but it’s a real responsibility. I mean, they need to be fed, and they need to be walked, and if they make a mess on the sidewalk, you need to take care of that too.

  Lucky seemed great and all, but I quickly decided that—after holding him back from chasing his third squirrel, and two neighbors’ cats before that—until I had completely crossed every alien off The List, I couldn’t possibly let myself be a dog owner.

  Emma was going to kill me, but she and everybody knew that my responsibility here—to safeguard the Earth from a deadly alien scourge—was more important than providing a happy home for one dog. How did Mr. Spock put it? The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.

  Especially when “the one” is a squirrel-chasing, cat-hating, car-barking, sidewalk-dookying dynamo of energy incapable of walking in a straight line.

  And nearly incapable of being coaxed into a two-seater Ferrari—which is what I had to do… to make the four-mile drive to the local SPCA.

  Chapter 36

  I PARKED MR. GOUT’S Ferrari in front of a stenciled, rust-streaked OFFICE sign on the side of the first building we came to at the SPCA, not more than a mile from the TV transmission station we’d visited last night.

  Lucky cowered on the passenger-side floor as I got out of the car and went around to open his door.

  “Come on,” I said, patting my legs in encouragement. “Come on, boy!”

  He was having none of it. I conjured a tennis ball, then a doggy biscuit, then, finally, a piece of freshly cooked bacon, which did the trick. Lucky bounded out of the car just as a long-boned, white-haired woman in work boots, dark green pants, and a khaki shirt emerged from behind one of the sheds.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  She looked like Jane Goodall, that woman who studied apes in Africa, and she reminded me of somebody else I knew too, though I couldn’t quite remember who.

  “Um, we found a stray. No collar or anything, so —”

  “Don’t want him yourself?”

  “I, um… my family is away a lot, and I have a full-time job, and —”

  “Must be some job,” she said, glancing disapprovingly at the Ferrari. “Bring him inside, and you can fill in some paperwork.”

  “Come on, Lucky,” I said, materializing two more bacon bribes as the caretaker turned her back.

  “You’ll just need to fill in where you found him, and anything you’ve noticed about his health. I take it his hair was already singed before he made your acquaintance?”

  “If you’re thinking I—I mean, there’s no way I —”

  “A half dozen pups have come in these past few weeks with burns worse than that. I’ve called the police, but they say they haven’t been able to find anything. I’ll tell you, there’s something very strange going on in this town. The way the dogs here bay all night, always in the direction of Old Man Wiggers’ farm —”

  “Old Man Wiggers’ farm?”

  “Right over that ridge,” she said, pointing back into the woods. “I thought the crazy old coot had retired from farming, but, given the amount of noise he’s been making, I guess he’s reconsidered. Been driving the dogs and me crazy. Bulldozers, loudspeakers—I’d swear he’s even been blasting with dynamite back there,” she said, rubbing her eyes.

  I glanced down at Lucky, who had finished his treat and was looking back up at me, tail wagging like crazy. “So, I, um, can just leave him with you?”

  “This is the pound, and he’s a stray, right?” Her penetrating blue-eyed stare was making me really nervous, like she was grokking my thoughts.

  “You want to know what our euthanasia policy is, don’t you?”

  I nearly swallowed my Adam’s apple. I was going to have enough trouble explaining this scenario to Emma and the gang without having to confront the fact that Lucky might get put down.

  “The only thing we do to animals here is vaccinate, spay, or neuter. We hope they get adopted—because any dog will have a happier life with a loving forever home all its own—but we don’t kill here.”

  “You ship them off someplace for that?” I said, tears welling. Forget “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one”—what kind of an alien monster was I?

  “Any animal that comes here gets food, shelter, and veterinary care for the course of its natural life.”

  I nearly leaped across the counter and kissed her. I suddenly realized who she reminded me of: my alien grandmother, Blaleen. Another great lover of animals, although Blaleen was more into elephants than dogs.

  This woman had also just reminded me that you humans can be about the best, most compassionate beings that have ever inhabited this particular dimension.

  Chapter 37

  OF COURSE, THE first thing Emma asked when I returned to the house was where Lucky was.

  “Um,” I said.

  “Where is he?” she repeated.

  Now my family and the rest of the gang were giving me subzero stares too.

  “Well,” I said, materializing a piece of bacon on top of Emma’s left shoulder and telekinetically pushing open the kitchen door behind them.

  Next thing we knew, Emma was pinned to the floor, giggling underneath a tail-wagging tornado of singed fur.

  “Lucky! Stop!” she laughed as I mentally placed some bacon in her pockets. “You’re tickling me!”

  In the end, of course, I hadn’t been able to go through with it. I mean, I’m sure Lucky would have had a good enough life there at the SPCA, but I also knew what my grandmother would have thought of it, to say nothing of my friends and family.

  “So I learned some interesting things today,” I said.

  “For starters, Dana, I need you to check out current and historical satellite maps of the area. There’s a farmstead belonging to a Jarrod B. Wiggers a couple clicks east of where we were last night. I want you to scan recent images of the property to see what’s changed there over the past few weeks.

  “Emma and Willy, I need you to check Mr. Gout’s handiwork here at the house and assess any weak points. We need the defenses to be tighter than a Tinkertoy in case any aliens decide to pay us a visit. Oh, and speaking of Mr. Gout, I sent him home.”

  “So you just let him go back to being a scumbag landlord?” asked Dana.

  “Well, I did give him one slight adjustment—I implanted a firm rule in his head that from this day forward he must be kind to his tenants and never charge them a penny more than what’s fair.

  “Mom, Dad, and Brenda,” I continued, “please walk the neighborhood with Lucky and keep an eye out for
anything strange, okay? I don’t think Number 5’s going to try anything just yet, but we know he’s capable of surprises.

  “And Joe, I need you to come with me to the van. We’ve got some theoretical physics equations to work through.”

  “Does it involve Avogadro’s theory of spontaneous taco creation?” he asked hopefully.

  “I think there are some Cool Ranch Doritos left in the back,” I said.

  “That’ll do,” he said.

  Chapter 38

  I SET JOE to work while I quickly dialed 411 for a McGillicutty residence on Mulberry Avenue. I didn’t have the nerve to call just yet, but I was half thinking about asking Judy on a date… after I’d figured out a little more precisely what kind of trouble Number 5 had been cooking up in Holliswood and environs.

  What Joe and I were doing is a little complicated to explain in much detail, but I’ll give you the basic idea: You know how light travels really, really fast?

  Well, in outer space, where stars and planets are so far apart that the distance between them is measured by how far light travels in a year, you start to see that light isn’t quite the greased lightning it’s cracked up to be. In fact, being unable to travel faster than light through space would be kind of like cruising the interstate in a mule-driven cart.

  Fortunately, alien technology has figured out some ways—which I won’t attempt to explain right here—to surpass the speed of light.

  That’s not to say light’s slowness doesn’t have its uses. Like, for instance, when you want to see into the past.

  Think about it. If light takes one hundred years to travel from Earth to Planet X—which is one hundred light-years away—then if somebody on Planet X has a really, really good telescope and wants to see what’s happening on Earth right now, like you reading this book, for instance, then he’ll have to wait one hundred years for the light that makes that image come to him.

  And, if he were looking through his telescope right now, what he’d see instead of you reading this book is a picture of whatever was happening here one hundred years ago.

  That’s the core principle behind how my people—Protectors of the Universe that we once were—have been able to create a bunch of very good remote-control “telescopes” out in space. Some are ten minutes away, and some are ten million years away. By uplinking to them through the minivan’s console, Joe and I were figuring out how to pull up a video feed of whatever had been happening on Earth from moments ago to millions of years ago—kind of like real-life TiVo.

  My big idea was to get some clues about Number 5’s plans by going back to when Number 5 and his henchbeasts first arrived in Holliswood.

  “Um, Dan-o, what was that code you just read me? Zero-eight-five-three-five-six-F-zero-two-R-P, or zero-eight-five-three-five-six-F-zero-two-R-T?” asked Joe.

  “Let’s try whichever one you didn’t just type in,” I said as we received footage of a woolly mammoth playing with her baby in what looked like a prehistoric Holliswood Lake.

  “I think that’s a little too far back.”

  Chapter 39

  “THAT’S IT,” I said to Joe. “Play that scene right there.”

  He turned the dial and locked in the playback codes on our improvised deep-space historiscope. What we had before us was a pauseable, zoomable, playbackable recording of Number 5’s arrival in Holliswood.

  A pulse of light flashed in the sky over the pine forest next to a country road on the south side of town, and, in a microsecond, his fat, flabby, fishy self materialized, crackling with electricity among the burning pine trees.

  Number 21 came next, and then, in a series of slow-motion lightning bolts, a handful, then dozens, then hundreds upon hundreds of alien henchfiends streaked down from the sky.

  The fireworks ended with a dozen or so interstellar transport containers materializing in the midst of the horde.

  Number 5 opened one and removed what looked like a small, neatly folded mesh of wires and circuits.

  He unfolded it with his tentacles, carefully stretching it open to its full teardrop shape, and smiled.

  “What is that?” asked Joe. “An alien-style fishnet stocking?”

  I was in no mood to joke. “I think we have yet to witness the level of evil this creep is capable of,” I told him as the real horror show began.

  Chapter 40

  WE WATCHED ON-SCREEN as Number 5 barked some orders at his minions, who quickly dispersed into the still-burning forest. Then he borrowed what looked to be a cell phone from Number 21, placed a call, and proceeded to wait impatiently in the middle of the road.

  Four fire trucks soon arrived at the scene, squealing to a stop when they saw the big, levitating, tentacled catfish hovering in the middle of the road. Number 5 took advantage of the firefighters’ astonishment and calmly glided up on the roof of the ladder truck. He twined a tentacle around the flexible communications antenna on top of the cab, and blue sparks coursed down its length.

  A moment later, all the firefighters poured out of their trucks, in their black and yellow suits, and formed a Macarena line as a camera crew of a dozen aliens came forward to film the dance.

  The rest of the aliens returned, cheering and jeering from the edge of the burning forest as the mind-controlled firefighters slapped hands to the backs of their heads, then to their hips and gyrated.

  The scene quickly shifted from absurd to abhorrent as a team of aliens advanced with unholstered blasters and began obliterating the dancing firefighters, one by one, melting them into slicks of black sludge as their film-crew colleagues zoomed in for close-ups.

  The unabashed show of depravity made my insides burn. But Number 5 was clearly elated by the entire performance. He pumped his tentacle like he was Tiger Woods after making a tournament-winning putt.

  When the last firefighter had been liquefied, Number 5 waved a “let’s roll” gesture, and the aliens activated the hover-drives on the containers, hitching them to the backs of the fire trucks. Then, lights flashing, they drove off down the country road toward the edge of town.

  Chapter 41

  JOE ZOOMED OUT the view, and we watched as all but one of the alien-driven fire trucks pulled up to a nearby farm—no doubt the Wiggers’ place.

  Number 5’s ladder truck had broken off from the others and was now headed into downtown Holliswood. It finally stopped off the main drag in front of a squat building with a big red neon sign on top: KHAW: HOLLISWOOD COUNTY’S PREMIERE NEWS TEAM.

  Number 5 hovered off the truck and followed a dozen gun- and camera-toting aliens inside the TV station.

  “It makes sense, right?” said Joe. “A free press is tyranny’s greatest enemy. And Number 5’s all about tyranny, so the first thing he does is go after the press.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Although I’m beginning to think there’s more to it than that. Say, TV signals travel at the speed of light too, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, let’s pick up the signal the station was putting out at this same moment. Can you do that?”

  Joe made some adjustments, and in seconds we had a split-screen with what we could see of the TV station from the outside, plus what was on air at the time—Weatherman Ron, wearing a shiny suit, a black silk shirt, and tropical-print tie, pointing to a wavy red line on the map behind him.

  “And if you thought it was hot enough for ya already, well, this mass of low pressure coming in from the west is gonna change whatchya think hot is. But first, it’s going to bring us a whole mess of T-storms—YOWZA!”

  He froze as a blue spark arced out of the remote control he used to toggle through his weather maps. And then LEN’s “Steal My Sunshine” began to play, and he started to dance a spastic, Blues Brothers sort of dance, distorted laughter gurgling in the background.

  He kept it up for thirty seconds or so, then Weatherman Ron disappeared in a bright blue flash of light. The off-camera laughter got louder.

  “Did they just vaporize Weatherman Ron on live TV?” asked Joe.<
br />
  I nodded, sadly.

  “I mean, he was annoying and all, but nobody deserves that.”

  Chapter 42

  THERE WAS SOMETHING very wrong with Gina Jensen, the news anchor. It looked like her hair had been nested in by squirrels, her makeup had been applied by chimpanzees, and her eyes had been replaced with giant marbles.

  “HELLO, HOLLISWOOD,” she spoke loudly and robotically. “WE AT KHAW HAVE SOME BREAKING NEWS TO REPORT. SOME VERY, VERY WONDERFUL BREAKING NEWS. SOME MONTHS AGO, HOLLISWOOD WAS CHOSEN BY SOME IMPORTANT FILM PRODUCERS TO BE THE LOCATION OF A VERY SPECIAL MOVIE. NO OTHER TOWN IN THE COUNTY, IN THE STATE, IN THE COUNTRY, IN THE WORLD WAS SELECTED.

  WE SHOULD BE VERY PROUD AND DO EVERYTHING WE CAN TO MAKE THE FILMMAKERS COMFORTABLE AND HAPPY. PLEASE BE SURE TO CHECK YOUR CELL PHONES, TELEVISIONS, E-MAIL, AND TEXT MESSAGES REGULARLY OVER THE COURSE OF THE NEXT FEW WEEKS. IN FACT, YOU SHOULD BE SURE TO LEAVE ON EVERY DEVICE YOU OWN AT ALL TIMES —”

  She twitched suddenly, and the camera panned left to the anchorperson sitting next to her.

  Only it wasn’t an anchorperson…

  There, in all his lard-butted alien repulsiveness, was Number 5.

  Chapter 43

  WHAT WAS IT with this guy? In my experience, Outer Ones tended to keep low profiles as they hatched their evil schemes, but here Number 5 was going out on the airwaves, totally flaunting his presence. He was either being stupidly overconfident or scarily calculating. And all the evidence I was finding was pointing toward option two.

  “Joe, this broadcast was thirty-three days ago, right?” I asked.

  “Right.”

  “So how did he manage to do this and not set off alarms all over town and even around the world? I mean, how does a big fat alien appear on TV in a modern American town and not have anybody even notice?”