“Number seven: He’s receiving aromatherapy from Mindy Fresh, MD, for his acute aversion to extraterrestrial halitosis.
“Number six: His localized academic malaise is being reviewed by Dr. Inogono Takit.
“Number five: S. Hugh Striker, MD, is counseling him about his obsession with lists.
“Number four: Dr. Wei-Goh Holmes is treating him for an especially nasty strain of domestic nostalgiasitis.
“Number three: Dr. I. M. Trubbell is assessing the state of his bureaucratic mumbo jumbo allergy.
“Number two: Dr. Slobodan Sonne is seeing him about his accelerated bipedal locomotion.
“Number one: Hello? Are you still there?… Daniel, I think she hung up on me.”
“She probably just needed one excuse, Mom, but thanks.”
“No worries, Daniel. I just figure the best way to teach people like that a lesson is to overload them with whatever it is they think they want.”
“Interesting thought, Mom,” I said, sending her home with a blink of my eye and summoning Dana. We pulled back onto the road and headed off to meet Number 5.
Chapter 65
I BEGAN BY doing what any highly disciplined military commander would do on the eve of battle—I ate a four-course meal.
Dana and I had climbed a hill above a cornfield opposite the Wiggers’ property. I’d made us a picnic including wasabi-crusted salmon fritters, chanterelle-and-pork-medallion panini, watercress salad, vichyssoise, and a carafe of Gatorade.
“So what were you doing last night, Daniel, off on your own like that?”
“I was just confirming some theories I’ve been working on. Some light reconnaissance, you know, stuff like that.”
“By yourself?”
“Um, pretty much, yeah.”
“Pretty much?” she asked. “And that black hair I found earlier probably just happened to land on your collar? Just had been blowing around in the wind?”
I guess dematerializing her hadn’t made her forget. “Hair?” I said incredulously. “What hair?”
“The one that looked just like this other one that I found in your blue motorcycle helmet and which isn’t mine or Emma’s.”
“Wow,” I said turning the hair into a butterfly that flew from her grasp. “Is that a tiger swallowtail?”
“You aren’t going to distract me so easily. Whose hair was that?”
“Just a kid I met at the diner,” I said, thinking quickly. “Number 5’s goons had given her a rough time, so I just checked in on her.”
“Sure you did.”
“And she gave me some good information too. Turns out Number 5’s programmed everybody in this town with some sort of standing electronic charge that lives inside their heads. Makes them conveniently forget things they’ve seen; makes them responsive to his orders—stuff like that.”
“And she told you this?”
“Well, no, but I did figure out how to remove the charge from her head, so that now—provided she stays away from TVs, computers, and cell phones—she’s once again in control of her own mind.”
“Sounds like it must have been a pretty intimate procedure.”
“Sure, I mean, I had to basically go inside her brain and.… Wait, I know what you’re thinking. But you know I’d never get emotionally involved with any humans. I mean, it’s just not fair —”
“So you were just using that poor girl? She was nothing but an experiment?”
I shook my head. This clearly was not something to get into with Dana.
“Let’s just eat our lunch and relax, okay, Dana? It’s a gorgeous day, and we’ve got a big afternoon ahead of us.”
She bit into her sandwich with a little more force than was necessary.
I sighed and looked around at the rolling hills, the brilliant blue sky, the butterflies and birds flitting around the field below.
“This really is a beautiful planet, isn’t it?” I said. “So much diversity, so much that’s lovely and good. You know, that’s what really gets me about the Outer Ones. I mean, if I had to come up with a definition of evil, I’d say it’s not just not appreciating beauty but wanting to mess with it, control it, own it.
“I mean, this whole show Number 5’s aiming to make—it’s all about taking this fantastic human species and bending it to his will for nothing more than cheap entertainment. A true artist would document them. Would present humans and their planet in all its glory—the plays they’ve written, the beautiful art they’ve made, the cities, the fields…”
“Put a sock in it, Daniel; (a) I’m not forgetting that you went on a date last night, and (b) you have a crumb on your lip, and it’s driving me crazy. Here, let me take it off.”
“Oh, okay, sure,” I said, leaning forward so she could remove it. I just didn’t expect she was going to do it with her lips.
Chapter 66
A GUY’S GOT to give his imagination some credit when a girl he’s dreamed up manages to make him dizzy with a kiss.
“Wow,” I said. “That must have been some crumb —”
We began kissing again. The blue sky and green fields were twirling around like I was in a music video.
“I’m not exactly complaining,” I said, “but what was that for?”
“Must be that hot new hairdo of yours, spike. Or that new bling,” she said, fingering my necklace.
“Hey,” I said, “you’re supposed to be my dream girl.”
“So?”
“So dream girls just say no to unnecessary sarcasm.”
“Having dreams is one thing,” said Dana. “Controlling them is something else.”
“I guess they’re kind of like reality that way,” I said, and, as if on cue, seven henchbeasts, who must have been crawling on their bellies toward us through the tall grass, sprung up, grabbed Dana, and rushed off toward the woods, depositing her in the arms of a big sweaty space monkey.
Chapter 67
“HOLD IT, SHE’S not even real!” I yelled. “I just make her up. With my imagination!”
I leaped to my feet and scanned the area for whatever sort of booby trap Number 21 had laid for me.
“You make her up, huh?” he said, snorting through his ugly snout, and passing Dana to his henchbeasts. “In that case, I guess let’s make believe my soldiers are breaking her arm.”
The henchbeasts looked back at him like confused children.
“Break. Her. Arm,” he said, and now they all nodded and positioned themselves to snap her left arm.
In a flash I gave Dana a wink and turned her into a thirty-five-foot anaconda, which promptly wrapped itself around their necks and squeezed. Hard.
“Didn’t believe me, did you?” I asked Number 21 as his henchbeasts fell to the ground, their heads swelling like balloons.
“Oh, I believed you. I just wanted to keep you distracted while I got this ready.”
He was suddenly aiming the same shockwave cannon he’d used to knock me unconscious in S-Mart.
“Oh,” I said, as he pulled the trigger.
Chapter 68
LIGHTNING QUICK, I reached down, tossed up a handful of dirt, and mentally forced the particles into a shield.
Number 21 started to laugh, but the blast completely deflected around me. I took some pleasure watching that obnoxious ape lower his gun and scratch his head.
“What else you got?” I yelled across the field at him.
He dropped his weapon, and one of his cronies passed him a gun so large I was kind of surprised he was able to hold it. I wasn’t familiar with the type, but it was so big it looked like it could have blown apart a modest-sized asteroid.
“And what do you have, my little Stinkyboy?” he asked, his voice dripping with condescension.
“Better a stinky boy than a stinky space ape,” I said, reaching dramatically to my side and unholstering my weapon of choice—my hand with my index and middle finger extended, my thumb cocked like a pistol’s hammer. “Nanny-nanny boo-boo!”
He laughed like a hyena.
“You’re too kind,” I said. “Shall we draw on the count of three?”
“It’s your funeral!”
I materialized one of those big, digital, drag-racer countdown clocks in the field between us. It pinged down: 0:03:00… 0:02:00… 0:01:00 —
And then I was leaping in the air, avoiding his blinding, hypersonic blast and, simultaneously, launching the exact same sort of blast back at him out of my “hand gun.”
When I landed, his discharge had scorched its way across the field behind me, setting afire some cornstalks and taking a nick out of the crown of a hill before it ripped its way into outer space.
My blast, on the other hand, had punched a ten-foot-wide, mile-deep, smoking hole in the ground right where he’d been standing.
“Anybody smell pork chops?” I asked the gawking henchbeasts in my best John Wayne impersonation. “Or is that charbroiled monkey?”
They scattered back into the forest like terrified bunny rabbits.
Chapter 69
I TURNED DANA back into herself, materialized the rest of the gang, and then—with Dad’s electronic countermeasures installed in the van so that Number 5 couldn’t, as far as we knew, spy on us—we proceeded to put the finishing touches on a 3-D battle map of the Wiggers’ farm.
Judging from our satellite photos, the property had changed a lot over the past month.
The farmhouse and barns had been joined together by a number of alien-constructed domes, generating plants, and oblong outbuildings. And dozens of new ponds pockmarked the former corn and sorghum fields.
“Nursery ponds,” said Dana.
“Looks that way,” I said. “It’d be hard to raise a million little Number 5s without a habitat similar to that of his home planet.”
“Check out this footage,” said Joe, hitting a button that superimposed video images onto the map.
Hundreds upon hundreds of human forms were staggering through the fields, zombie-like in every way, except that every single one was a pregnant woman, and all were watching cell phones, iPods, or PDAs—transfixed as if engrossed in the last few minutes of an episode of 24.
With the sort of seamless choreography you’d see in an automated factory, they split into groups and moved toward the ponds. One by one, and turn by turn, they wandered into the water, deposited the wriggling contents of their stomachs, waded back out, took another can of “caviar,” and headed back to town.
And then an alarm went off. Somebody was approaching the van.
Chapter 70
“HUMANS,” SAID WILLY, examining the monitor. “Lots of them.”
We looked out the front and saw masses of Holliswood residents streaming toward the Wiggers’ farm. They were parting around the van and staggering, barely alert, intent only on moving forward, their faces inches away from the cell phones, BlackBerries, and portable game platforms they carried.
“Holy Close Encounters of the Weird Kind,” said Joe. “But these ones aren’t pregnant. So what gives?”
“Well, I doubt the aliens dug all those ponds themselves. So maybe these ones are coming to do some free manual labor. That, or maybe they’re coming to get filmed,” said Dana.
“And then melted,” added Emma.
“All right,” I said. “I think it’s about time we went and had a talk with Number 5.”
Chapter 71
WE DROVE THE van up the poplar-lined, heavily rutted driveway and parked on the gravel by the main barn, just opposite the house.
“Lock and load, guys,” Willy said as we leaped out of the van.
We closed in on the farmhouse, tree by tree, bush by bush, moving so stealthily that nobody would have heard us over the gentle breeze and chirping birds.
“Where’s the welcoming committee?” signaled Joe in American Sign Language—one of thirty human languages we’re fluent in—as we reached the front porch. “I mean, do we have to go up and ring the doorbell?!”
Just then, the birds stopped singing and, in unison, chirped the three tones from those NBC Peacock station-identification interludes. And then the massive barn doors swung open to reveal a JumboTron-sized video screen.
“Greetings and salutations to you and your imaginary friends, young Alien Hunter,” said Number 5 from the screen. He was carrying a pitchfork and wearing a straw hat and oversized overalls—if you can imagine a creature with no legs in overalls—standing in front of a backdrop curtain patterned with a Milky Way Hillbillies logo.
“We’ll see who’s so imaginary,” said Willy, attempting to storm forward as Emma and Dana held him back, “when my boot comes down on your slimy head!”
Number 5 ignored the outburst. “In fact, I’m honored you’ve come. I knew your mom and your dad—back before they got turned into crispy critters, I mean—so I have a good idea of what an upstanding young Alien Hunter you must be. You know, I may even have some footage of them around here someplace.”
That was weird. I mean, obviously he hadn’t arrived on Earth till long after my parents were dead, but maybe there was some chance he’d crossed paths with them when they’d been on assignment in the Andromeda galaxy, or someplace before they’d come to protect Earth…
How cool would it be to see them on film? Of course, I have my memories, and my memories—even from back when I was three, when The Prayer took their lives—are pretty good. But what if he really did have some footage of them? Maybe after I killed him, I’d go looking through his archives, just in case.
“Daniel,” said Dana, “you’re gaping like you’re a fish. Snap out of it.”
I shook my head and forced my mind through a focusing exercise Dad had taught me during my aikido training. She was right—Number 5 was obviously messing with my head.
“Sure,” he went on, “I think I may have even posted them online. Here, I’ll text you the YouTube link.”
“I didn’t bring my cell phone. It’s not like I haven’t figured out your infiltration techniques, Fivey.”
“Well, where can I send an e-mail?”
“Try I-H-eight-F-I-S-H-at-gmail-dot-com.”
He held up his Sidekick, showing me the screen and the “message sent” dialog box.
“So you’ve really never seen it?” he asked.
I raised an eyebrow at him.
“The scene where Number 1 killed your parents? You didn’t know I was there, filming the whole thing?”
Chapter 72
“NOW I KNOW you’re lying,” I said. “I was there when my parents were killed.”
“Sure. But were you upstairs with me and Number 1? Or were you down in the basement, playing with your toys?”
How could he have known that?
“You had no idea I was up there filming, did you? That surprises me. You know, out on the Extranet—the Outer World’s version of the Internet—that clip has had more than thirty-five trillion downloads.”
It simply wasn’t possible. I’d relived that moment a thousand times. There had only been Number 1’s and my parents’ voices.
And in the end, there’d been nobody upstairs with my parents’ bodies. I mean, I hadn’t actually seen them killed, but…
“It’s very moving,” he said. “The part where your mom cries like a little girl is pure emotion, but my personal favorite scene is where your dad begs Number 1 for his life. ‘Oh, Mr. Prayer, please, I can get you money, I can help you, just don’t hurt my fa-fa-family, oh puh-lease!’ ”
“Dude, that’s low,” said Willy, cracking his knuckles.
“Yes, perhaps that necklace of your mom’s you’re wearing will dispel any lingering doubts you may have. You do know it was hers, don’t you? That footage where you recognized it and started crying is priceless. Just priceless!”
Had the necklace really been a plant, a setup? Had he even filmed my reaction to it… was that even possible?
“So,” he went on, “it’s starting to dawn on y
ou, isn’t it?”
It was no secret that Alparians wore elephant pendants. It was probably just an elaborate hoax meant to distract me, get under my skin, cause me to make mistakes —
“And, look!” he said, pulling out a necklace from behind the bib of his overalls… “We’re twins! Do you recognize it? It was your father’s, of course. Number 1 usually collects them for his trophy case, but this time he knew they’d make great props and let me borrow them. Once he was done spitting on their corpses, that is.”
My mind was reeling, and I winced as I resisted throwing everything I had at the flat-screen display—but I knew that was exactly what Number 5 wanted. He was just trying to keep me from thinking rationally. There was no way he’d been in that farmhouse twelve years ago. The necklaces had to have been manufactured. And any film he showed me of my parents would turn out to be a computer-generated fake.
“Look, Daniel—may I call you Daniel? I’m first and foremost a business creature, so let’s do ourselves a favor and adhere to the negotiating process here. Remember how it works? First we state our goals, and then we start working toward a deal, a compromise. So, you see, for my part, I want to create the most popular reality show of all time. Which conflicts, wouldn’t you say, with your stated purpose of wanting to exterminate me and my crew.”
“Actually,” I said, somehow keeping my game face on, “you have it wrong. All I’m looking for is some information.”
He nodded his fat, slimy head and gestured for me to elaborate.
“All I want to know is exactly what you want with all the people of Holliswood.”
“Well, Daniel, it’s just that they’re as entertaining as heck.” He laughed. “Of course, it doesn’t hurt that they’re good little workers—dumb, loyal, coachable.… Did you know they created nearly thirty acres of new ponds here at the farm in just under a month? Unfortunately, there were a couple of accidents along the way. They aren’t the most resilient species in the world. If I had a nickel for every bulldozer-related fatality this week…”
Watch the Skies Page 10
