“Leave Dana here,” said Joe.
“No way,” said Dana, “You’re the one who smells like Colonel Sanders’s gym shorts.”
“I’ll stay behind if you guys want,” said the ever-sacrificing Emma. “Even though all I smell like is coleslaw because nobody ever asks what I want to eat for dinner.”
Emma always serves us a generous helping of grief for eating meat.
“Hey, you kids,” said Dad, who was standing on the front lawn, laughing at us along with Pork Chop. “Take the minivan,” he suggested. “I made some modifications that will help quite a bit with your, um, errands tonight.”
Willy had already clambered out of the overstuffed Ferrari and was sliding open the minivan’s side-panel door.
“Dudes. You gotta come check this out!”
Chapter 14
DAD HAD CONVERTED the minivan into a cross between Scooby Doo’s Mystery Machine and a NASA command center.
The spacious, now shag-carpeted interior was blinking, pulsing, and humming with sensor displays, joysticks, trackballs, touchpads, data visors, relay panels, heads-up displays, sampling hoods, and holographic imagers.
“This is great, Dad,” I said. “So how’s everything work?”
“I’m sure a genius like you can figure it out in no time,” said Pork Chop, snapping her bubblegum.
“It’s all very user-friendly,” said Dad. “I don’t think any of you will have any trouble getting the hang of it.”
“Actually, it’s my four copilots who’ll be getting the hang of it,” I said. “I’m driving.”
They groaned but settled into the back of the van without another note of complaint as I drove toward the outskirts of town. They’re good friends like that.
As we made our way down the quaint residential streets, you couldn’t help noticing the windows of nearly every house glowing with the eerie blue flicker of TV and computer screens. This thing called Contemporary America-and its obsession with televisions, game systems, and computers-has gone a little far if you ask me. Some call it the Information Age, but I’d tend to say it’s more the Sitting-on-one’s-butt-and-letting-other-people-do-the-thinking-for-you Age.
“You guys find anything useful back there?” I asked, turning onto Mulberry from Larch.
“Yes, I think I have our first target!” said Joe. “There’s a whole mess of ’em in a building about a half mile from us. Hang a left here and then a right at the next stoplight.”
“How many are there?” asked Willy, practicing some jujitsu moves in the middle of the van.
“Can’t tell yet. Hang on, okay?” Joe remained intent on his data feed. I turned at the light onto a commercial street lined with stores and shopping plazas.
“Okay, it’s up there on the right,” said Joe. “Should say ‘ White Castle ’ on it… and it’s absolutely infested with… hamburgers!”
We pelted him with food wrappers, empty soda cans, a couple of dirty sneakers. I should’ve remembered that no mission is more important to Joe than filling his supersize-me stomach.
Chapter 15
JOE PRACTICALLY HAD to be held down to be kept from leaping out of the van as we passed the White Castle.
I steered back to our original route, but we didn’t get very far. A man, covered from head to toe in mud, staggered out of the bushes and into the middle of the road.
I swerved and hit the brakes.
“Hey,” I yelled out the window. “You need some help?”
He ignored me and staggered up the lawn of a house whose windows-like all the others we’d seen-were flickering blue from TV and computer displays.
“Yo,” yelled Willy, climbing out of the van after him. “You okay?”
The man must have heard him-unless he was deaf or had mud in his ears-but he just walked up to the house and right smack into the closed front door. After a minute or two, the door opened, and we caught a glimpse of a pregnant woman as he pushed his way through and disappeared inside.
“Rough day at work, I guess,” said Dana.
“Maybe he’s an alligator wrestler,” suggested Joe.
“Alligators don’t live this far north, stupid,” said Emma. “But clearly he was coming from someplace muddy.”
“The closest body of water is two point one miles south-southeast of here,” said Dana, clicking away on a computer in the back of the minivan. “That roughly lines up with the direction he was coming from.”
“Step on it, driver!” said Willy.
“Hey, I’m in charge around here,” I said and added, “as should be obvious to a bunch of people who depend on my imagination for their very existence.”
“Sorry, your highness,” said Joe, returning the flurry of food wrappers, soda cans, and sneakers that had nailed him earlier.
We’d just turned onto County Road 23 when Emma suddenly shrieked like a banshee.
A dog had run into the street just feet away from our car.
Chapter 16
I BRAKED SO hard that everybody in the backseats ended up in the front seats.
“What’s with all the jaywalking delays?” I grumbled. I had an investigation to conduct here.
“Aw,” said Emma, sitting up and looking at the poor animal shivering in the van’s headlights.
“Somebody tried to burn him,” she exclaimed as we got out of the van. She gathered the medium-sized brown dog in her arms.
“Are you sure you want to pick him up like that?” asked Joe. “He’s, like, really muddy.”
Emma shot him a reproachful glance.
“Judging from the shape of the burn marks,” said Willy, petting the dog’s head, “I’d say an alien firearm did this. He’s a lucky pup to have escaped with only some singed fur.”
“He doesn’t have a collar,” Dana observed.
“Which is just one more reason why we’re taking him with us,” said Emma. “We’ll check with the animal shelter to see if anybody’s missing a dog, and, if not, we’ll adopt him. And, for now, his name will be Lucky, just like Willy said.”
I thought about this for a moment. Unlike the rest of them, Lucky wouldn’t just disappear when I needed to be alone. So if Emma adopted him and then Emma wasn’t around for a bit, the dog would be my responsibility. I felt like a parent having an awkward moment at PetSmart.
“Um, I think we better leave him here. I mean, he was probably going someplace -” I broke off. Emma looked like she was deciding exactly how to conduct my public execution.
“Right,” I said. “Bring him into the van already.” I’d figure this out later. He was a pretty sweet-looking dog, at least under the burned fur and inch-thick mud.
Hey, I may be an alien, but I still have a heart.
Chapter 17
WE TRAVELED ABOUT a quarter mile down an unpainted, heavily potholed strip of asphalt that saw more traffic from combines and livestock trailers than passenger vehicles. I knew we’d hit the boondocks when we saw something far stranger than a farm animal emerge about twenty feet in front of the van.
It was an alien picnic. Right there in the middle of the road was a cluster of Number 5’s henchbeasts.
“Um…” wondered Joe. “Why aren’t they attacking us?”
“It worked!” said Dana. “See, I put us in stealth mode. We can see them, but they can’t see us. Or hear us, for that matter. A mile or so back I turned on a cloaking device that renders the van invisible.”
“Go ahead,” she continued, “test it out. Drive up closer.”
As we slowly approached, we could see some of them were munching on chicken wings. Not buffalo- or BBQ-style, though… they were the kind with feathers still on them and blood still in them. They guzzled cans of motor oil to wash them down and tossed the empties to the ground and stomped on them like they were at a fraternity party.
And then we noticed one henchbeast had something that looked suspiciously like a cat’s tail hanging out of its mouth.