Well, almost nobody. They’d left behind a waitress.
She was in no shape to play, though. The poor girl was collapsed like a rag doll on the floor next to the counter. Her burnt-out face reminded me of a kid’s toy you might have tried to run on a car battery rather than AAAs.
The name stitched on the pocket of her calico uniform was Judy Blue Eyes, and, you guessed it, her eyes were the kind of clear blue a guy could look into and see the promise of the whole world.
A human guy, I mean. For me, the promise of the whole world was usually a great deal darker.
“Hey, Judy. You okay?”
“Nnnn,” she said, consciousness slowly percolating back.
I helped her into a booth and gave her a glass of water.
“Wh-wh’appen?” she stuttered.
“Food fight,” I said, only it was far worse than that. Smashed china plates, syrup and salt caked on the walls, soda dripping from the tabletops, empty jelly packets stuck to the seats, ketchup and mayo on the jukeboxes, Promise spread splattered on the ceiling, slicks of alien slime pooled everywhere like a sticky mix of spilled honey and coffee.
“Oh gosh,” she said, struggling to sit up and take it all in. “I’m so-o fired.”
“Nah,” I said. “I can give you a hand.” And then, like somebody had pressed the ×8 button on my remote, I zipped around with a broom, a mop, a couple bottles of Windex, and a dozen dishrags and had the place spick-and-span in no time, literally.
“Man, I’m really out of it,” said Judy as I returned to her now-gleaming booth. “I mean, did you just clean all that up in, like, ten seconds?”
Man, was she cute. I was trying to think of something clever to say back, but I had this weird—though not totally unpleasant—tightness in my chest, and all I could manage was this really lame giggle.
Must be an alien thing.
Chapter 3
I DON’T KNOW what got into me because it’s totally against policy to give the straight scoop to civilians, but Judy insisted on making me a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of chili—the aliens hadn’t quite eaten every scrap of food in the place—and before I knew it I’d told her just about the whole story.
How I was an Alien Hunter and my parents, Graff and Atrelda (bless their weird-named souls), had been Alien Hunters and how their mission was to protect nice folks from the thousands of aliens who wanted to take advantage of, plunder, pillage, and sometimes plain-out destroy places like this.
“Places like this?” Judy smiled wryly, not taking me seriously. “You can hardly blame them for wanting to plain-out destroy Holliswood. I mean, this place is nothing but a prefab smear of parking lots, giant superstores, drive-through banks, twenty-garage automotive franchises, and chain restaurants. And mean girls, dumb jocks, and people who get their news from those scrolly things running across the bottom of their favorite stupid TV show—while running on the treadmill at the gym.”
I couldn’t help but admire her astute observational skills. Not to mention her honesty, directness… and, okay, cuteness.
“Well, people can’t be all that bad here. You’re a girl… and you’re not mean.”
Good one, Daniel. Wish I had Joe’s gift of gab. In lieu of that, I kept rambling.
I told her how one of the alien baddies, the worst of the worst, had killed my parents when I was just three, and how I’d barely escaped with my life and—almost as important—The List.
Judy stopped smiling. “Don’t joke about your parents being murdered,” she said.
“I wouldn’t joke about that,” I said, wondering if I’d gone too far.
Her eyes were penetrating mine. “And… The List is… ?”
There was no stopping the power of Judy’s blue eyes, so I spilled all the rest: how The List was, in full, called The List of Alien Outlaws on Terra Firma, and how it was an interactive, constantly self-updating summary of all the ill-intended Outer Ones now residing on the planet, ranked from number one to somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, from most dangerous to those that are barely stronger than a human.
And how my parents’ evil murderer—known as The Prayer—was number one on that list… and that it was my life’s goal to hunt him down and kill him.
Sorry, I get a little hung up on that sometimes.
When I finished, Judy was looking at me like I was C-RA-Z-Y nuts, so I slapped on my best damage-control smile and said, “Psych! Just messing with you! I love making up stories.”
“Oh, sure,” she said, blinking her gorgeous peepers and looking more than a little confused—and creeped out.
Sometimes I’m more extrastupid than extraterrestrial.
“Okay, gotta go!” I said, flashing damage-control smile variation number two.
“Sure…” Judy said. “Come back and see us real soon, um—what did you say your name was again?”
“Daniel,” I said, and flew out the door before she asked me my last name.
That part of getting to know someone is always a little awkward… when you don’t have a last name.
Chapter 4
YOU KNOW HOW dogs go wild over mailmen? Well, you haven’t seen a dog go postal till you’ve seen one detect the scent of the bad sort of alien. It’s hilarious.
Right now, I was the one about to go postal because I couldn’t detect anything at all. My alien-tracking nose could rival a bloodhound’s, but unfortunately, I wasn’t getting any directional indications on Number 5. I sensed he was still in town someplace, but he must have started taking some new kind of precautions against me.
I was upset, but not so much that I couldn’t recognize it was a beautiful night, and since I needed some rest anyhow, I decided to make camp. I took a minute or two to gaze at the twinkling stars and run through the names of all that were visible. Even on the clearest of Earth nights, you can only see about two thousand stars from the planet’s surface… but get me up past the murky atmosphere, and I’ll name you a couple million that would be distinguishable even to your human eyes.
Then I turned on my laptop. Not just any laptop, this one—it’s one some creatures would, literally, kill for… because it alone contains the complete and perpetually updated List of Alien Outlaws on Terra Firma.
I can shape The List as anything from an interactive scroll to a heads-up display visor, but I usually access it as a laptop, since I like to practice not standing out. Plus, that way—when I’m not researching—I can download movies from Netflix.
So I logged in and did a little research on the stinking outlaw I’d just missed at the diner. Number 5 hailed from a remote swamp planet with an unpronounceable name that makes the Siberian tundra seem cosmopolitan.
But since leaving his provincial home and finding his way to the bright lights and big megalopolises of the central star clusters, he’d been working his way through the ranks, and now he was an up-and-coming entertainment mogul. Kind of an alien version of Aaron Spelling, if Aaron Spelling were a few degrees more bloodthirsty than Attila the Hun.
His MO was to find technologically evolving but still largely defenseless cultures—such as Earth’s—where he could easily move in, steal some of their better entertainment ideas, enslave their unwary populations, and then walk away with a treasure trove of exploitive, derivative programs that he’d then proceed to syndicate to networks across the cosmos.
So what made this swamp creature worthy of the number five spot on The List? His signature cinematic flourish: to kill his cast as the last act of their skits. In fact, because they always died at the end, he was considered the founder of a new style of alien program that they called—in typically lame alien fashion—endertainment.
Nobody’s ever accused the Outer Ones of having over-developed senses of humor, that’s for sure.
Chapter 5
NOT SURPRISINGLY, AFTER refreshing my knowledge about Number 5, I had some trouble sleeping. Kidnap, brainwashing, wanton murder, callous exploitation of sentient creatures on at least three dozen underdeveloped worlds…
I was going to enjoy removing him from Earth, permanently.
As soon as the sun was up, I headed back to town. Guided by a sort of eighth sense—I have seven legitimate senses, at least that I’ve so far discovered—that told me there was something funky going on in the immediate vicinity, I pulled into the S-Mart twenty-four-hour superstore and found a parking space next to a minivan that was being loaded by a pregnant woman. She was lifting a flat of motor oil… and sweating like crazy.
“Need a hand with that, ma’am?” I offered. She gave me a blank stare and made a weird bubbling sound with her mouth.
“Okay, sorry to bother you,” I said, noticing one of her grocery bags seemed to have at least twenty cans of fish food in it. That struck me as a little weird, but maybe she ran a pet store or something.
I turned to go into the store, but as I stepped out from behind the minivan, I almost got decked by a green plastic S-Mart grocery cart—pushed by another pregnant woman.
I did a double take—to make sure I hadn’t accidentally wandered toward a Mommies “R” Us or something—and nearly got flattened by another pregnant woman, who was seemingly in a race with three other pregnant women, all making a beeline for the store’s entrance.
“Weird,” I said, and headed inside, where things got weirder still.
Chapter 6
I WALKED INTO the store and heard this strange, gurgling voice on the piped-in infotainment shopper channel, and I’m like, huh, that sure is a strange person to pick as your announcer. I was relieved to be approached by a very normal-looking, young fresh-faced store clerk as I walked in.
“Can I help you find something, sir?” He looked like a good candidate for Employee of the Month.
“Yeah…” I said, operating on my eighth sense again, “fish food.”
As the clerk led me through hardware and housewares and electronics, I found myself gagging. And when I spotted a video display, I understood why.
Scowling on-screen was none other than the unfortunate fish head of Number 5.
And even more unfortunate, he saw me.
Number 5 scowled, and his image disappeared, leaving a prerecorded Rosie O’Donnell to talk about some titanium-plated sandwich maker. Maybe he’d spotted me from one of the overhead security cameras. Did that mean he was in the store someplace?
“Sir? Are you all right?” the clerk called back to me.
“Couldn’t be better,” I told him with a weak smile. “Are we there yet?”
“Almost,” he replied, as we passed an empty motor-oil section… and then his voice transformed into a hideously twisted gurgle, just like the infotainment announcer’s voice: “We’re going to Number 5.”
I stopped dead in my tracks.
Until I realized that smiley Mr. Employee-of-the-Month was heading toward a sign for aisle five—Pet Food. And he was soon surrounded by an enormous throng of pregnant women who stood slack mouthed, staring at some empty shelves where all the fish food had been.
I was just about to tell everyone to take their fish-food orders to a certain minivan in the parking lot, when World War III broke out in aisle four.
Chapter 7
GUIDED BY THE sound of explosions, falling shelves, and screams, I made a mad dash to the source of the chaos, leaping over people, dodging carts, somersaulting over cardboard display stands.
The cause of the commotion was a makeshift film set “manned” by ten henchbeasts that were melting terrorized shoppers with their weapons. And heading the group was an alien that made my jaw hit the floor—a big-nosed ape that was none other than number twenty-one on The List.
In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have taken even a nanosecond to think about it. Because as soon as he saw me—and clearly he’d been waiting in ambush—he fired this rifle kind of thing with a round dish on its front end.
At me.
I’ve got some pretty good reflexes, if I do say so myself, and I managed to leap up into the air before he got the shot off—like high enough so that I could grab one of the exposed I beams in the thirty-foot ceiling—but I wasn’t fast enough.
A massive shockwave slammed into me, compressing all the air in the warehouse-sized store and smacking me down like I was a fly and it was a rolled-up newspaper. I crunched onto the floor, my ears ringing, my vision blurry, the room spinning.
“This is gold,” Number 21 cackled.
It would’ve been a great time to conjure up my friends or some weapons to help me kick some alien butt, but right now I could barely remember the word for ouch. I was on my own.
“We’ve found a lot of talented extras here in S-Mart,” Number 21 said darkly. “But you’re our best talent of the day, Daniel.”
My legs were like rubber as I staggered to my feet and forced myself into a jujitsu stance, instinctively realizing that since I couldn’t think clearly enough to create a peashooter, I was going to have to resort to old-fashioned hand-to-hand combat.
Unfortunately, I was still so unsteady, I think I ended up looking more like a drunk clown than a highly trained martial artist.
Number 21 was busting a gut. He mopped his sweaty brow and slung his shockwave cannon over his shoulder. “Are you guys getting this?” he asked the henchbeasts that were filming the shopping nightmare.
One of the crew asked, “Should we melt him too?”
“Nah,” Number 21 replied. “This was just his screen test. Boss says he’s still got some real important parts to play.”
And then everything went black as I fell back against a tower of mac-and-cheese boxes.
Chapter 8
AS I CAME to, I could feel the henchbeasts’ high-tech restraint device squeezing me from my chest down, holding me to the floor.
“Can we make a deal?” I pleaded to the two shadowy figures standing over me—and then, um, I became about as embarrassed as I’ve ever been in my fifteen adventure-filled Earth years.
What was holding me to the floor was not some alien-tech, carbon-fiber straitjacket, but a whole mountain of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese boxes that I’d knocked on top of myself when I passed out.
And the two figures standing above me weren’t alien henchbeasts, but two twelve-year-old skate kids.
“You mean you want us to join your crew?!” asked the shorter chubby one.
“Dude, that’s so stoner!” said the taller skinny one.
“Yeah, when you jumped up and the monkey dude with the big space-gun blasted you and you fell! Whomp, dude! Stomped like a narc! And those guys in the weird bug suits with the cameras? Totally awesome FX.”
“You,” I said, looking down the aisle at the brown stains on the floor that had been some of their fellow humans not long ago, “are insane.”
“And you, dude, are a magnate! When’s the show going to be on? Are you guys on YouTube?”
“You guys own both Jackass movies, don’t you?”
“Dude. And T-shirts,” he said, lifting up his buddy’s sweatshirt to show an “I Jackass” decal.
I like humans; I truly do. But, sometimes it amazes me their civilization ever got off the ground.
Chapter 9
MY FRIED HEAD and body were starting to feel better as I crossed the parking lot back to my motorcycle. Pregnant women were still streaming into the store to look at the empty fish-food and motor-oil displays, but at the moment I was too bummed about losing my first battle against Number 5’s crew to continue my investigation alone.
So I decided to summon Mom and Dad. I was so aching for my family right then, I even whipped up Brenda, aka Pork Chop—my annoying little sister—out of thin air.
“Um, Daniel, I don’t think we’re all going to fit,” said Pork Chop, nodding at my bike.
“You are not still riding motorcycles,” said Mom. “You know how I feel about them, Daniel. Not safe.”
Dad smiled knowingly at me. It wasn’t an argument worth having with Mom, although—for the record—he and I knew that unless I had an accident on my bike that involved falling into
the sun or possibly a direct hit from an Opus 24/24, chances were I would escape permanent injury. And so—presto change-o—I willed some additional matter into existence and transformed my motorcycle into an awesome late-eighties vintage, wood-panel, retrofitted Dodge minivan.
“Air bags?” asked Mom.
“Side-impact air bags and ABS,” I assured her and gave her the keys.
“Well, let’s get going,” said Dad. “Time’s a wasting, and we need to convene a strategy session for dealing with Number 5 and Number 21.”
The man never took a breath without having a six-point plan for it.
“And then, dear, sweet, wonderful, multitalented brother, we can all go out in the yard and polish the giant golden statue we’ve made of you because we love and adore you and, basically, worship your fantastic self… or not,” said my sister, making the L-is-for-Loser sign against her forehead.
I was too tired to retaliate, so I just rolled my eyes.
“So where’s home, anyway?” I asked.
“Why, right here,” said Mom, pulling the minivan over in front of a huge Victorian house with a wraparound porch and a FOR RENT sign in the front yard.
Even without a golden statue of me in the backyard, the house was beautiful. The landlord, however, was not so easy on the eyes. We’d called the number on the sign saying we were interested in the property, and he showed up about fifteen minutes later in a gleaming, new, top-of-the-line Ferrari. Right off the bat, he was grouchy and impatient with us.
“Can we have a look around?” Dad asked.
“Let’s not beat around the bush here.” He’d spotted our dilapidated minivan and peered at us through his amber sunglasses. His shifty eyes darted around, sizing us up like we were so many head of cattle and he was a rancher. Or a butcher.
Watch the Skies Page 2
