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“No, he doesn’t,” said Pork Chop. “The only thing he shows promise at is in his quest to become certified as the most annoying brother in the universe.”

“That may be,” said Dad, “but Daniel’s discovered that Number 5 has wet wiring.”

“Wet wiring? What are you boys talking about?” asked Mom.

“Number 5’s powers-his ability to broadcast himself to electronic devices, to snoop around in remote wiring, to see out of television screens, etcetera, is doubtless being augmented-if not entirely enabled-by a surgically implanted computer system in his body.”

“So, he’s, like, bionic?” asked Willy.

“Like the Six Million Dollar Alien,” said Joe around a mouthful of fries.

“Sort of, only what he’s got would cost more like six trillion dollars. Not to mention that he’s implanting this same kind of wiring in the hordes of alien progeny he’s breeding on Earth,” I commented, remembering the “alien fishnet stocking” Joe and I had observed earlier.

“So now that you’ve figured all that out, what good does it do us?” asked Mom.

“Well, er -,” Dad fumbled for the right way to say it.

“Probably none at all,” I finished for him, dropping my head.

Just then we heard a roar and rumble overhead, and we ran upstairs to see what had happened. Through the driving rain, we could see that the streetlights were out and that the neighborhood had gone completely dark.

Chapter 77

DO YOU EVER roll down the window and stick your head out when you’re on the highway doing, like, sixty-five miles per hour in a downpour? You absolutely shouldn’t-I mean, it’s not safe-but that’s what it felt like the second we stepped outside the house.

We could barely see a dozen feet in front of us, even with the lightning going off every fifteen seconds. And the thunder made it seem like we had wandered into the middle of a battlefield. The power was out all over Holliswood.

“Why are you carrying that?!” Dana yelled to me over the noise of the storm.

I was clutching a sixteen-foot copper chain and waving it around in the air above me.

“Science experiment!” I yelled, and promptly got hit by a lightning bolt so powerful it must have flipped me thirty feet into the air and dropped me on my back.

At least that’s what it felt like when I regained consciousness. My friends had dragged me into the van, and we were evidently driving on a highway.

“Are you crazy?!” asked Dana as my eyes fluttered open.

“Um, maybe,” I said, sitting up. My mouth tasted like I’d been eating match heads. “Are we almost there?” I asked over the noise of the struggling windshield wipers and the hail pelting the metal roof of the van.

“Almost, dear,” said Mom. “Don’t tell me you need a bathroom break already?”

“Maybe if there’s a doctor in the bathroom, sure,” I said. Boy, did I feel terrible. But I had to let myself get struck. Just to make sure I could handle it.

“Hey,” I said, suddenly realizing somebody was missing. “Where’s Emma?”

“She just made us drop her off a little ways back. She wouldn’t tell us why, but we figure she was going to check in on the animals at the SPCA. Anyhow, she said you’d understand.”

I didn’t know exactly what she was up to, but I had a hunch.

Chapter 78

THE STORM WAS weakening by the time we got to the farm, which was shrouded in darkness.

“Maybe they’re gone,” said Dana, as we peered out the windshield at the farmhouse.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “The power’s out here just like it is in the rest of Holliswood. And that’s precisely why I wanted to come here while the storm was still raging,” I said. “With the electricity out, that should mean Number 5 won’t be able to tap into the cell phone towers and other circuits to figure out where we are. And that means maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to surprise him.”

“Um,” said Willy, staring at the abandoned-looking farmhouse. “I mean, it’s great that he might not be able to find us, but exactly how are we going to find him?”

“Joe’s going to take care of that end of things. There’s no way an alien that big and stinky can hide from the van’s sensors. Any luck back there, Joe?”

“There’s no sign of him-or any of the aliens-anywhere. Maybe they did go off someplace.”

“It’s not possible. I mean, they weren’t ready to start the film yet. And their entire breeding operation’s based here. They couldn’t have picked up and left just like that…”

“The equipment’s not picking anything up is all I know,” said Joe.

“Maybe it’s busted,” said Willy, looking over Joe’s shoulder with the rest of us. Everything seemed to be working, but maybe he’d forgotten to do something. It certainly was surprising that we weren’t detecting any aliens whatsoever.

“Um, Daniel?” asked Dana.

“What, Dana?”

“Why are we hovering?”

“What?”

“Why is the van hovering fifty feet in the air?”

“What?!” I said, spinning around and spotting the wet upper branches of a maple tree through the windshield.

“Yeah, and why is there that blue glow all around us?” asked Joe.

I slid open the side door and looked down. And there, his tentacles extended toward us and pulsing blue with crackling electricity, was Number 5.

“Hello, young Alien Hunter,” he said. He was no jolly Santa this time around. “Want to come down?”

I nodded wordlessly and instantly wished I hadn’t. “Hang on tight, everybody!” I yelled, as we plunged toward the earth.

Chapter 79

THE VAN SMASHED into the ground like a badly made toy-but, fortunately, one with state-of-the-art air bags, and a couple of pretty tough alien-fighters inside.

Still, we were pretty dazed as we crawled from the wreckage.

“Yeah, I think your sensors weren’t working quite right, Joe,” said Dana as she picked windshield glass from her hair and looked warily over toward Number 5. He was floating toward us, surrounded by a buzzing sphere of blue electricity.

“Um, right,” I said as the hairs on my head-wet as they were-stood up under the force of his static charge.

“You killed him,” he said, stopping about a dozen yards away.

“Number 21, you mean?” I said. “Well, he was trying to kill me, you know.”

“We’d worked together for nearly three decades,” Number 5 told me, scowling at me like I was an unwanted bug. “He was my right hand. And you destroyed that.”

As if to echo the point, he raised his left tentacle straight in the air. A dozen stadium-style floodlights lit up the farm, and we could see that hundreds of aliens, each holding an alien weapon, had formed an enormous circle around us.

Their ranks were tight and unbroken, except for a few rain-soaked, muddy humans pushing through here and there, staggering, zombie-like, back in the general direction of town. I guessed that with Number 5 off the air during the thunderstorm, they had been returning to their homes.

“Oh, no, you don’t!” yelled Number 5 in their general direction. “Back to work!”

Their cell phones and other handhelds began to ring and vibrate, and they predictably answered the devices and turned back to the fields from which they had come.

“I’m not done with any of you yet!” ranted Number 5. “And when I am, you’ll know it! I’m not the universe’s premiere producer of endertainment for letting my actors just fade away!”

Chapter 80

“PRETTY IMPRESSIVE, NUMBER 5,” I admitted, “but check this out.”

I proceeded to make a cell phone ringtone all my own, consisting of the first few bars of Blondie’s “Hanging on the Telephone.”