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  “You mean besides the fact that nothing’s too weird for TV these days, and people probably think it’s an ad for car insurance or something?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, I’ve been running some scans and comparing broadcasts from nearby towns, and it looks like that by this point he had totally cut off Holliswood from the rest of the world. All the phone lines to the outside seem to be cut. The satellite dishes have been jammed. Even the power grid seems to have been interrupted.”

  “But how do the people on the outside not notice that the town’s fallen off the map?”

  “Number 5’s a smart guy. Maybe he hacked into some nationwide communications network and figured out a way to jam the wider world’s alarm bells or something. I don’t know. Maybe he’ll explain it in this speech he’s about to give.”

  Chapter 44

  JOE AND I turned up the volume and watched as our increasingly unpredictable foe addressed the town on live television.

  “As the most important and powerful entity ever to set foot on your pathetic soil, I accept your town’s obvious and unavoidable compliance with my delegation’s mission. We could call it unconditional surrender, but, of course, you didn’t put up enough of a fight for there to be a surrender.

  “The point is that you will do whatever I say. I say ‘jump’? You start jumping and wait for me to say how high in case I care to specify. I say ‘sing,’ you sing. I say ‘check your mail,’ you check your mail. Actually, ladies, you’ll find a special gift in your mailboxes tomorrow that I want you to open right away.

  “And if I say ‘dance,’ you dance. And let’s try to do a little better job of it than Weatherman Ron. Wasn’t he just atrocious? Here, let’s practice—Gina, would you care to lead the town in our first-ever municipality-wide showcase? How about a little Justin Timberlake to get our toes tapping?”

  The camera pulled back, and he began to clap his tentacles as “Rock Your Body” began to blast through the studio speakers. And then Gina and her producers climbed onto the horseshoe-shaped anchor desk and began a synchronized routine straight out of a Super Bowl halftime show.

  I could faintly hear Number 5 laughing through the dance music.

  “Joe, can you isolate Number 5’s voice in the audio track, and filter out the music? Sounds like he doesn’t realize he’s getting picked up by the microphones.”

  “Easy-peasy,” said Joe, patching in some algorithms. “It sounds like Fishy’s conducting a separate broadcast back there.”

  “— true that the average human isn’t worthy of being a slave on our home planets, but oh, how they can make us laugh! Welcome, viewers from Alpha Centauri to Zebulon Nexi. You are at this moment witnessing the very first minutes of the very first episode of the funniest live entertainment show in cosmic history!”

  Just then the image on our monitor flickered and went blank.

  “What’s going on, Joe? Did we lose the signal?”

  “I don’t think so. It seems to be some kind of interference or —”

  My heart nearly leaped into my mouth—the monitor winked back on, and there was Number 5, doing his old trick of looking right at me through a television screen.

  “You do think I have a good chance at winning a Pulsar’s Choice award, don’t you, young Alien Hunter?”

  How did he do it? How was he always a step ahead of me? How many other unguessed powers of his was I going to stumble upon? How many times was I going to have the feeling that not only was he toying with me, he was having me act from a script?

  I fought an urge to put my frustrated fist through the monitor; I didn’t want to completely lose my cool just yet. It was time to throw some attitude back his way.

  “The only award you’re going to win is when I drag your stinky, blubbery carcass down to the tackle shop and earn a trophy for the largest mutant catfish ever caught in North America.”

  “Are you calling me stinky, Stinkyboy?”

  “How —” I started to say but stopped and punched the flat-screen display so hard my hand went straight through, and when I pulled it back, daylight was streaming in the hole. I’d put my fist right through the side of the van.

  How did he know my childhood nickname? The nickname I’d had on my home planet?! How did he always seem to have everything figured out?

  I grabbed the computer console and heaved it the length of the van at the back doors, where it exploded into a jillion fragments and set the van rocking like we’d run into a tree.

  So much for not losing my cool.

  Part Two

  TWINKLE, TWINKLE, THEN YOU DIE

  Chapter 45

  I WAS SITTING with Mom at the kitchen table, pushing a spoon back and forth through my SpaghettiOs.

  Usually I love SpaghettiOs for breakfast—they were almost the only thing I’d eat as a kid, back before I’d grokked the concept of gourmet cooking—but I didn’t have much of an appetite right then.

  “So, it sounds like Number 5’s exploiting the population of this town for cheap entertainment,” said Mom.

  How many times did she have to go over the facts? I half considered dematerializing her, and I three-quarters considered saying something sarcastic about her keen powers of observation, but some instinct told me to bite my tongue and show some respect.

  She was just trying to help, after all.

  “Yeah, he’s exploiting,” I muttered. “And liquefying. And incubating.”

  Mom perked up. “ ‘Liquefying’ I understand—but what do you mean by ‘incubating,’ Daniel?”

  “He’s gotten the women in the town to carry his eggs inside them.”

  “He what?!”

  “Yeah,” I said. “As near as the gang and I’ve figured out, it’s not quite like they’re pregnant, because his larvae are growing inside their stomachs. But it looks like he’s determined that the expandability of the human female abdomen, combined with the human stomach’s acidity, regular supply of food, and temperature, make for an ideal incubation chamber for his species’ young.”

  “That’s the most sickening thing I’ve ever heard!” said Mom.

  “You remember that tin of caviar you found in the mailbox? We ran tests on it in the van. Total DNA-match to Number 5. And hundreds of women around town are getting huge. And—get this—they’ve been ‘pregnant,’ they say, for just about four weeks.

  “Which one hundred percent corresponds with when this ‘caviar’ appeared all over town. So Number 5 brainwashed them to eat it, and, voilà, he’s got a couple jillion eggs getting nourished by the kind women of Holliswood.”

  Mom’s jaw dropped. But she didn’t even realize the full horror of it yet.

  “Of course, we don’t know what the end result’s going to be,” I continued. “Whether it’ll kill the women or not.”

  Chapter 46

  “DANIEL!” MOM RECOILED. “You’ve got to get to the bottom of this!”

  “I know it, Mom,” I told her. “It’s just not turning out to be that simple. Every time we think we’ve set Number 5 back, it’s like he’s been expecting it. It’s like we’re acting a part in a play he scripted for us.”

  “So do something unpredictable. Improvise.”

  “We’ve tried that,” I said, mushing a SpaghettiO flat with my spoon. “We’ve tried everything.”

  “Don’t lie to your mother, Daniel. You haven’t tried everything.”

  “Well, I mean everything I can think of.”

  “You haven’t done that, either. You could try listening to your mother for once. Eat your soup. Little-known fact—SpaghettiOs aren’t just comfort food, they’re brain food.”

  “They are not.”

  “They are when I make them. And didn’t I just tell you to start listening to your mother?”

  I took a spoonful, and it was the weirdest thing—the fog instantly lifted from my brain. I began to see what clearly wasn’t going to work, and where we might actually have a good chance against Number 5. Suddenly, where everything had been i
mpossible, this entire mission seemed completely doable.

  “Wow, Mom,” I said, quickly polishing off the rest of the bowl. “What did you do to this stuff? I feel like an entirely new and improved Alien Hunter.”

  “Glad to hear it. I’ve always said there’s nothing like a good meal to get a body back on track.”

  “Now, if only I could figure out how to get some more time to prepare our plans.”

  “Well, why don’t you skip school, for starters?”

  I don’t care what planet you’re from—you’ve got to love a mom who tells you it’s okay to play hooky now and then.

  Chapter 47

  MOM HAD ME materialize an iPhone and promptly used it to call the administrative office at school.

  “Hello,” she said. “This is —” She put the phone on mute and asked me what surname I had used when I’d invented my school record.

  “This is Daniel Exley’s mother calling. I’m keeping him home today.… What? You want to know why? Because I’m his mother and I say so, that’s why.… But that’s ridiculous. Why would a parent not put their child’s interest first and foremost? If I didn’t have a darn good reason for keeping him home, I wouldn’t be keeping him home.… Sick? No, he’s not sick, we just have something we need to solve here.…

  “Well, that’s just plain silly. Honestly, I have never heard of anything so unreasonable. Let me ask you one more time, why would I—his mother—want to keep him home if not because I thought it best for him?… ‘Against policy’ my ashtray!

  “You know what? You sound like the sort of person who would do really well as a midlevel bureaucrat in a totalitarian regime—then you could tell me straight out, ‘Hey, lady, I don’t make up the rules, I just blindly enforce them.’…

  “Personal? You accuse me of getting personal, and you’re telling me how to raise my son? Fine. You want acceptable reasons why Daniel’s not coming to school? Well, stick these in your fascist helmet:

  “Number ten: Daniel is attending an intergalactic symposium on ichthyological embryology today.

  “Number nine: Daniel described your school as being a holding pen for the ‘criminally underinspired.’

  “Number eight: Daniel has developed allergies to fluorescent lights, number two pencils, and linoleum.

  “Number seven: Daniel is locked in mortal combat with an electromagnetically gifted, levitating catfish from a planet eleven thousand four hundred light-years away.

  “Number six: Daniel wrote an essay for his social studies class yesterday that was so good his teacher fainted, and we don’t want to put any other educators in harm’s way.

  “Number five: We’ve looked over the terms of the No Child Left Behind Act and determined that if your school is doing the driving, we’re okay with Daniel being left behind.

  “Number four: Daniel’s eyes glazed over so badly during yesterday’s trigonometry class that he needs to go to the ophthalmologist today for a cleaning.

  “Number three: Aliens have landed in Holliswood, and I think maybe we should reconsider our daily routine.

  “Number two: Daniel’s doctor fears that if Daniel has to hear one more nonsensical, bureaucracy-inspired edict come out of your office, he may decide to flee the country.

  “Number one: If Daniel came in to school today, I would instruct him to find you and turn you into something more fitting for your personality… like a potted plant.”

  There was a dramatic pause.

  “Would you believe it?!” she said, turning to me. “That nasty little person hung up on me!”

  “It’s okay, Mom. I think she probably grokked that I won’t be showing up today.”

  “That’s right. You’ve got more important things to do,” she said, taking away my bowl and shooing me and Lucky out of the kitchen. “Now get going.”

  Chapter 48

  I SPENT MOST of the rest of the day on The List, studying the reproductive habits of alien fish species and boning up on electromagnetic theory while my friends and family worked at their own parts of the puzzle.

  Dad had the biggest breakthrough of the day by far.

  “Daniel,” he said, “I figured out how Number 5’s been getting into the wiring. He’s been broadcasting himself from nearby cell phone towers into any accessible electronic components, including the van and The List computer itself.”

  “So that’s how he knew my childhood nickname, huh?”

  “And that’s how he’s known where you’ve been almost every moment since you got here. He’s essentially been hacking himself into any electronic device he pleases.”

  “That’s just great. So if I ever want to get the jump on him, I have to give up the van, The List, and keep away from anyplace wired for electricity? I guess I’ll just go wait in the woods and hope he happens to walk by.”

  “Sure, that’s one way. Or you could just upload this decoy computer program I wrote into The List computer and leave it right here on the kitchen table. The program’s designed to simulate your presence. So, when he checks in, he’ll think you’re right there in the room with the computer. Eating, surfing the Web, texting your buddies, doing your homework —”

  “Homework? Don’t you think that’s a little unrealistic?”

  “Well, you look like a geek,” said Pork Chop.

  “Hey, I’m your brother.”

  “Only in your imagination.”

  I shook my head and sent Dad off to upload the program. Maybe it would fool Number 5 for a little while and give me a chance to surprise him for once.

  Dad came back at dinnertime to say all was ready and that the program would also show me sleeping when night came. After that, I dematerialized the rest of the gang, took Lucky for a quick walk, came back, cranked the new Green Day album, and spent some time in front of the bathroom mirror with a pair of scissors and a tube of superstrength hair gel. Mom had told me I needed a haircut, and I figured a talented guy like me shouldn’t have much trouble doing something as simple as a haircut.

  Once I’d perfected my new ’do, I drove my motorcycle to a small, blue-shuttered house on the north end of town. The crickets were chirping like it was their last day on Earth, but otherwise everything seemed totally normal. Almost too normal.

  I nervously pulled the silver elephant necklace from my pocket and hung it around my neck. Maybe it would bring me some luck. Then I cautiously approached the front door and rang the bell.

  I heard footsteps and swallowed hard as the curtain on a window parted, revealing a brilliant blue eye.

  I stood back, wondering if this was all a big mistake. The lock turned, and the door started to creak open. I threw out my right hand, firmly grasping the strange item I’d just materialized.

  “What beautiful daisies!”

  “You must be Judy’s mom,” I said, handing the woman the bouquet. “She has your eyes.”

  “Judy said you were sweet. Come on in. She’ll be right down.”

  Chapter 49

  JUDY’S PARENTS INVITED me to sit on the couch, and it was just like what you see in all the sitcoms and movies when the parents are meeting their daughter’s date for the first time.

  They seemed to be very nice, and I made sure to be polite and honest—well, without going into too much detail about my background—so I think I managed to make a pretty good impression. Judy’s dad was an electrical engineer, so we definitely hit it off on that score.

  We discussed computer chips, the latest developments in carbon-matrix superconductors, and a bunch of other supergeek stuff until Judy came downstairs. At that point—when I saw her in her summer dress with her hair down—I confess, I lost some of the thread of what Mr. McG was talking about.

  “Look what Daniel brought you,” said Mrs. McG, coming out of the kitchen with my flowers in a vase. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

  “And he’s quite the budding electrical engineer, I can tell you,” Mr. McG spoke up. “Really knows his stuff. I keep telling you, Judy, it’s a real growth field.”

&
nbsp; “Such a well-mannered young man,” chimed in Mrs. McG.

  “Look, guys, he’s my date, not yours. Come on, Daniel, let’s go.”

  “I’ll put your flowers in your room, dear.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “And I’ll find that copy of Popular Wiring I was talking about—the issue about lightning-proofing.”

  “That’d be great, sir.”

  “Okay, Mom and Dad. I’ll be back by midnight.”

  “Have a good time,” they said in one voice, holding hands as they beamed at us.

  “Creepy, huh?” remarked Judy as we stepped out the door.

  “They seem nice. And, um, healthy. Say, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you and your mom didn’t get any caviar in the mail the other week.”

  “Oh, no, we got it all right. Can you believe it? Russian sturgeon are on the endangered species list, and our local news station decides it’s a good idea to send the entire town tins filled with eggs that they ripped out of the bellies of pregnant fish. I totally e-mailed Al Gore about it.”

  “Actually, they weren’t Russian sturgeon.”

  “Really? That’s what it said on the label, didn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but you can’t believe everything you read.”

  “Well, anyhow, I think fish eggs are a gross concept. I’m still glad I threw them away before Mom saw them. They can’t be good for you anyhow.”

  “That’s a safe assumption,” I said, taking her hand.

  Chapter 50

  I MATERIALIZED AN extra helmet and helped Judy onto the back of my motorcycle.

  “Where’s a good place to eat in this town?” I asked through the intercom as we sped down her street. “Besides the diner, I mean.”

  “There’s not a lot. There’s one of those all-you-can-eat Lobster Hut places that my parents like, but I’m not really into seafood.”