Watch the Skies

“Right,” he said. “So shall we do the climactic battle scene now, or do you want to go see Hair and Makeup first?”

“Very fu

Number 5 deflected the blast with a lightning bolt of his own, but at least I’d temporarily wiped the smile off his face. He even looked a little apprehensive as he glanced at my friends, who were now charging into his alien hordes like a bunch of berserk ninjas. Everybody but Emma, that is, who still hadn’t returned.

But I couldn’t worry about her now.

The battle was on.

Chapter 84

AT FIRST WE held our own. The others were laying down every martial arts trick in the book and pushing the alien scum back away from the crumpled van while I managed to keep Number 5 on the defensive-forcing him to concentrate his attention on me.

But the tide quickly began to turn. Three thousand to seven aren’t good odds, no matter how you look at it.

Especially when one of the three thousand is number five on The List of Alien Outlaws on Terra Firma, and you’ve quickly come to discover that you have once again underestimated his powers.

Like not realizing he has the ability to adjust the electromagnetic properties of the zipper on your motorcycle jacket so that he can zip it up over your head and you can’t see until you forcibly rip the thing off-just in time to see him shoot a couple thousand volts of electricity at you…

Good thing I know how to duck. Fast.

“Had enough, Alien Hunter?” he asked, smiling once again. “Want to stretch out your last seconds on Earth? I tell you what-if you do a little dance for us, maybe I’ll grant you a brief respite to put on some new shoes. I can’t say I’ve ever sensed much rhythm in you, but I bet our alien audience would love to see you do some clog dancing.”

Just then a random blaster shot caught Joe in the shoulder and spun him around like a rag doll. Dana quickly dragged him to cover and got to work bandaging him up while Pork Chop and Mom gave me looks of pleading desperation.

I knew we couldn’t last much longer-there were just too many of them, and I was having too much trouble with Number 5 to be able to help the others.

“You win,” I said, lowering my arm.

“Surrender?” he said.

“We surrender,” I said, lowering my head in shame and signaling to my friends and family to step back.

Maybe I’ll still figure something out, I thought, trying to console myself.

“Ah-ah-ah!” he laughed and signaled to his troops to let up.

“Don’t worry,” he said, as the noise of the battle abated. “Under the circumstances, you’ve made the best decision you possibly could have, and I promise that your final minutes will be appreciated by trillions and trillions of aliens around the universe.

“Really,” he went on, “when you think about it, what’s a little humiliation and pain on your part when you’ll be bringing laughter to at least half the known universe? Surely you know that old expression: ‘The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few’… or…”

His voice trailed off. Now that the melee had stopped, he and the rest of us could hear something very strange-a sort of howling, baying noise, like an enormous fox hunt, and then an unearthly roar.

We both looked over, and there to our west, cresting the hill, was an enormous, barking, snarling pack of mutts-big ones, small ones, brown ones, black ones, white ones, gray ones-racing toward the farm.

And that ant-lion that I’d rebrainwashed to hate aliens was at the head of the pack!

I also spotted, bringing up the rear-and ru

And then, like something out of a movie, there was a huge thunderclap and a rush of wind and rain.

The storm was picking up again.

Chapter 85

I QUICKLY DETERMINED that I wasn’t going to get a better chance than this, so I secretly signaled to my friends to be ready to rejoin the battle and cleared my throat.

“Um, Number 5?” I asked as he waved at his troops to go meet the intruders and then turned his mildly perplexed fish face back to me.

“Before that dance you want me to do,” I said, “can I just see that necklace of my dad’s? It means a lot to me, and I just want to touch it.”

Number 5 rolled his eyes. “You do have some sense for good drama, you bad-haired little twerp,” he said. “Sure, that sounds cinematic enough. The orphan communes with his dead father’s keepsake. Come on over and have a look. Maybe we can even have a little good-bye hug, you and I,” he said, stretching his tentacles wide.

I walked up to him, knowing full well that if I tried any tricks, he was summoning enough electricity to crisp me up worse than a chicken nugget left in a microwave for twenty-five minutes. At full power.

He offered me the necklace, and I took off the one I was wearing-my mother’s, he’d have us believe-and twined them together as the camera crews circled for close-up shots of the bittersweet symbolism.

And then, as the tears started to course down my cheeks, I accepted Number 5’s embrace.

I realized it was entirely possible he was going to fry me right then and there, but I suspected his love of drama was going to give me at least a few more moments.

There was a growing electrical charge in the clouds overhead, and when I sensed it had reached the critical level, I freed my arm from his smothering hug and hoisted the necklaces high up into the air.

Alien Hunter science-geek fact number 45: silver is one of the best conductors of electricity in the known universe. And there’s almost nothing lightning loves better.

The bolt that coursed down into my arm and met Number 5’s own electrical reserves must have been more than a gigavolt, and it did just what I’d been hoping it would-it overloaded and totally fried his circuits.

You see, while his alien wiring had been designed to handle vast quantities of electricity, it was meant to handle it coming from the inside, not the outside.

The scream he let out almost made me feel bad for him, and the smell made me feel bad, period. All that raw electricity lit up his internal circuits like toaster wire and basically cooked him up like a three-hundred-pound platter of Cajun-style catfish.

“Disgusting!” I could hear Dana saying in the distance. I stared at Number 5’s remains-just a mess of overdone fish and melted wiring-and, dazed as I was, aimed a sheepish smile in her direction.

Then I looked down-the necklaces had melted into a silver puddle of slag in the palm of my hand. Now I would never be able to prove they hadn’t been my parents’.

“Ew!!” Dana exclaimed. She wasn’t reacting to Number 5’s remains after all. She was staring off at the alien army, which was suddenly exploding in geysers of gore. Through the storm, we could see bodies of aliens literally getting mowed down as the ant-lion and his new dog friends made short work of their terrified prey. Remember what I told you about dogs who smell bad aliens?

Needless to say, even as numerous as the aliens were, with the help of our animal friends-and with Number 5 safely out of the picture-the tide quickly turned back in our favor.