“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 running pretty hard to keep up-two human figures: Emma and a slightly taller one with gray hair whom I quickly recognized as the woman from the pound, the one who reminded me of my grandmother.
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.
Chapter 86
DOGS AREN’T JUST a man’s best friend. As it turns out, they’re an Alien Hunter’s best friend too. They really made all the difference when it came to wiping out Number 5’s army. It even crossed my mind to adopt that ant-lion as a pet-and as a plan B for my next alien confrontation.
Dana and I were driving back into town to get Lucky from the house, and I was noticing that despite all that had happened recently, every single home was alight with the flickering blue glow of TVs and computer monitors.
“You’d think so soon after discovering the worst possible perils of electronic media, these people would chill out with all their TVs and computers and whatnot,” I commented.
“Yeah,” said Dana from her console in the back of the van. “And they all seem to be watching the exact same thing. Here, I’m patching it in -”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Um. We have a small problem.”
“What sort of problem?”
“Well, you know how you killed Number 5?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, you didn’t quite get all of him.”
I slammed on the brakes. “Are you kidding? You mean his charbroiled skeleton came back to life?” No way was I ready for another fish fry. I was totally wiped.
“No, it’s more like his virtual self came back to life. It’s like he’s turned himself into a bunch of little computer programs on every device he ever touched… like they’re all infected with a little piece of his um, personality.”
I groaned. And just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, Dana continued.
“Right now he’s rejoining all these little pieces and making himself into one very big, powerful dude. And, in fact, it looks like right now he’s busy trying to hack his way through to a satellite uplink station.”
This was bad. This was very bad. “Which means,” I began as it dawned on me, “he’s either trying to reconnect with the wider world here on Earth, so he can infect it too… or maybe he’s going to broadcast into space to summon reinforcements.”
“So this must have been his contingency plan. He probably didn’t mean for you to fry him up like a catfish po’ boy, but he had a backup plan in case you did…”
I banged my forehead against the steering wheel. Again. And again.
“What?!” asked Dana.
I sat up and turned to her. “I’d been thinking all along that he’d had that computer hardware put inside him as a sort of implant, you know, to enhance his powers. But maybe I had it backwards. Maybe Number 5 isn’t an alien electric catfish at all but a computer program that took over an alien electric catfish.”
“In other words, he was a computer program first and a catfish second, not a catfish first and a computer program second.” I nodded, and Dana continued along the same lines of what I was thinking. “So maybe this isn’t really much of a setback for him at all, in that case. Maybe he just needs to find another host, and he’s back in business. Maybe he even wanted you to do this to him.”