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.

“That’s so disgusting,” said Joe. “I mean people say they could eat a horse when they’re hungry, but that’s just an expression. What kind of monster would actually eat a poor little kitty?”

“Stay here, Lucky,” said Emma, and before the rest of us could stop her, she’d jumped out of the van and was sprinting toward the aliens.

Chapter 18

I’VE GOT TO hand it to Emma-for a peacenik, she really knows how to lay down some hurt. That first alien she decked must have thought it had been teleported back up into space for all the stars and blackness it was suddenly seeing.

Still, this was a case of seven versus one, and, though she managed to knock down a henchbeast and had delivered some serious facial rearrangement to another, she was soon at the uncomfortable center of an alien pileup.

Willy was the first to reach her side. He grabbed the nearest henchbeast and threw him a dozen yards straight into a tree. The young maple shook and dropped a lot of sticks and leaves but fared better than the alien-which shook and dropped most of its legs.

Joe, Emma, and I managed to take out another two, but the other aliens had remembered their guns by this point and were laying down some heavy fire that kept us playing far more defense than offense.

That is, until it occurred to me that I could turn their high-powered plasma guns into Super Soakers.

Willy was quick to notice the change, and he jumped forward, taking a shot right in the chest.

“Oh no!” he screamed, “I’m me-eh-eh-elting!!!” And then he collapsed to the ground.

“Or… not!” he said, leaping back up and adopting an intimidating martial arts stance.

Alien henchbeasts tend not to be as deep or as sensitive as human beings, but they do have faces, so it’s pretty easy to tell what emotions they’re feeling. In this case, the look on their ugly mugs is what you could safely call terror.

For a few seconds, they continued to halfheartedly squirt lame streams of water at Willy and my friends… and then dropped their plastic toys and scattered into the woods.

“You okay, Emma?” asked Dana, as our friend got back to her feet.

“It was a cat,” she said, pointing to a pile of torn flea collars on the pavement.

We nodded sympathetically. I spotted a satchel one of the aliens had been carrying and began to rummage through it.

“Promise me, Daniel,” said Emma. “We’re going to get every last one of these monsters.”

“That’s job one,” I reassured her. But I was preoccupied with something I’d found in the satchel. Something very strange, and distressing.

Chapter 19

IT WAS A small piece of jewelry from my home planet.

My people are incredible and distinctive craftsmen, and I instantly identified the small silver pendant of an elephant as genuine Alparian handiwork, not some dime-store knockoff.

In fact, elephant pendants like this were commonly worn by adults who leave the planet, emblems of home-world solidarity. My mother and father had both received them when they had graduated from the Academy and accepted jobs in the Protectorship. As far as I knew, they’d never taken them off.

So what on earth-or any other planet, for that matter-were a bunch of Number 5’s henchbeasts doing walking around with an Alpar Nokian elephant necklace?

It had to be one of my first memories, that little silver elephant hanging from my mother’s neck. I’d play with it endlessly, watching it twirl and catch the light whenever she held me in her arms… though I hadn’t thought about it in years.

I wiped away some moisture from my eye before it technically became a tear. One more mystery for me to solve, I thought with a sigh, putting the pendant in my pocket.

Just then I had this really weird sensation that I was being watched, and I spun around. But there was nothing-just cricket-infested woods.

“Joe,” I yelled into the van, “are you picking up any alien life-forms on the scanners?”

“Nothing but regular wildlife. Those cat eaters we scared off are miles away by now.”

Great, I thought. Now Number 5’s made me paranoid, on top of everything else.

Chapter 20

AFTER A MILE or so, the county road crossed over the freeway, and we pulled into a small Exxon minimart at the end of the off-ramp to regroup about where the night’s mission was headed. We got some waters and sodas, and Joe bought a couple dozen bags of chips, a fistful of jerky sticks, and at least a dozen Hostess bakery products.

That was normal, but here’s the weird part: Joe actually stopped eating in the back of the van before he’d finished inhaling his third bag of nacho cheese chips. Even weirder, he paused to place a crumb inside what looked like a miniature microwave oven.

“Fifty-three percent Benton, Iowa; thirty-two percent Edison, New Jersey; eleven percent Las Piedras, Mexico; three percent Ankang, China. And trace quantities from, oh, a planet that’s about twenty-five thousand light years away from Earth.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Dana.

“That corn chip. This machine can pinpoint the origins of any sample you put inside it. In this case, a corn chip.”

“Your corn chip has extraterrestrial ingredients?” asked Dana, wrinkling her cute little nose.

“Well, it’s mostly from Iowa -probably the corn part,” said Joe.

“It’s no surprise, really,” I said. “The List tells us there are how many thousand aliens living here on Earth?”

“Probably one of them works at the snack factory and sneezed on the production line,” said Dana.

“Yeah,” said Emma, “or they’re trying to poison the population or something.”

“It’s possible,” said Joe, sticking another handful of chips in his mouth. “Aw I cun… sayfersher is… day… tayse… perrygood.”

“Think you can fit some caviar in there?” I asked, handing Joe a can from my backpack. It was the tin that mom had found in the mailbox.

He put the whole can inside and slammed the door shut. The machine hummed while Joe swallowed the last of the chips.

“Yeah, this one’s not going to earn ‘organic’ certification, either. The paper looks like it might have come from Oregon trees, but the metal and stuff inside is definitely from a galaxy far, far away.”

“Let me guess,” I said, “Number 5’s home planet.”

“On the button,” said Joe.

“Guys,” said Dana, hunkering over her console. “I’m seeing signs of alien activity a few hundred yards from here. And there’s some sort of freaky transmission coming from a TV relay station just up that hill over there.”