“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 impossible, this entire mission seemed completely doable.