Watch the Skies

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 pa

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?”

“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 ru

“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 fu

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 wi

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.”