James Patterson - Watch the Skies

“Like, ears, maybe?” Judy quipped.

“Better,” I replied, and turned my bike into Dad’s minivan.

“Wow,” said Judy. “Can you make anything?”

“Anything I can grok,” I said.

“Huh?”

“It means ‘understand,’ roughly. I guess you haven’t been reading any Robert A. Heinlein.”

“If he wrote after 1920 and was fun in any way, the answer’s no. I just got done with Silas Marner. Talk about Snoozeville.”

“Yeah,” I said as we climbed inside the minivan. “They use that book to punish criminals on my home planet. They make the worst offenders read it out loud and then write reports about the author’s use of symbolism and metaphor.”

“Ouch. Say, is that a gun?” asked Judy, pointing at an RJ-57 over-the-shoulder tritium-charge bazooka that was latched in the munitions cabinet at the back of the van.

“Yeah, and it’s powerful enough to punch a hole right through Mount Rushmore,” I cautioned. “So stay away from it, okay?”

I noticed Judy didn’t make any promises.

“Here, let’s fire up the van’s eavesdropping equipment,” I suggested, “and figure out what those space bullies are doing.”

The flat screens winked to life-I’d replaced the one I’d punched my hand through the other day-and scanned around to see what was going on inside the station’s walls.

I didn’t detect Number 5’s massive electromagnetic signature anyplace, but there were at least forty of his regular, low-level henchbeasts in there, including the handful that had just returned from the ice-cream stand.

I also discovered that they were already transmitting the raw footage of the ice-cream stand incident to their network in outer space.

We watched as the counter boy put down the phone and began juggling ice-cream scoops and chanting, “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!” And then got melted. And eaten.

Judy gasped in disbelief. “So this is the kind of inhumanity we’re dealing with here…”

“Judy, you don’t have to do this,” I warned her. “I’m telling you, that’s only a fraction of what these guys are capable of.”

And it was nothing compared to what came next.

A LOCAL WOMAN was slogging slowly back to shore from the middle of a shallow farm pond in her soaking-wet nightgown.

The camera panned right, and an alien carrying a long-handled net went splashing out into the pond behind her. He sprinkled a can of fish food, waited a moment, and scooped the net through the water, hoisting it up in the air, waving his fist triumphantly as he did so.

The camera zoomed in on the wriggling net, revealing a mass of two-inch-long, fat-bellied baby fish that promptly emitted a series of bright blue sparks, which caused the alien to jerk and jolt… and fall back, quite dead, into the water.

Now the camera zoomed back and panned left, bringing into focus the pond’s shoreline, which was crammed with spectator aliens. In the center, Number 21 and Number 5 were standing on some sort of viewing platform.

The former was passing the latter a cigar and then offering to light it as the aliens around cheered and stomped their feet.

“What were those things in the net?” asked Judy. “Electric eels?”

“More like electric alien catfish,” I said, “and the direct descendants-if not clones-of the fifth most powerful alien on Earth.”

We watched as the woman crawled out of the pond and onto the shore. One of the aliens gave her a new tin of caviar and a can opener. A half dozen others slapped her back in mock congratulation. The camera zoomed in on her face, and I realized I’d seen her zombie-like mug before-she was the pregnant woman who’d refused my help at S-Mart.

She vacantly nodded at the aliens and trudged up the hill toward town, eating the contents of the can as she walked.

Judy gasped in horror.

Truth be told, I did too.

I SHOOK MY head. “How many women do you figure there are in Holliswood, Judy? A couple thousand?”

“Easy,” said Judy.

“And how many eggs do you figure there are in a tin of caviar? A thousand or so?”

“Sounds right.”

“So a thousand times two thousand is, um, a couple million. And if they do this every month or so -”

“You can’t possibly mean -?!”

I nodded sadly.

“That’s so disgusting, so sick, so wrong!”

“So evil,” I added. “Yeah, the world may just be on the verge of the biggest alien invasion in history. And it’s going to be homegrown.”

Just then the equipment picked up a new audio signal. It was coming from the station’s control room and an operator someplace up in space.

“Boy, did you see the jolt that thing gave that poor goon?” said the voice from the control room. “They really look like they’re going to be chips off the old block.”

I aimed the wall-penetrating camera at the control room and-just as I’d suspected-confirmed that it was Number 21, in all his sweaty, white-haired monkeyosity.

“So tell me, are you guys bulking up enough on crew?” asked the voice from space. “It’ll be one thing to have a few thousand Number 5s around, but who’s going to do the heavy lifting?”

“No worries,” said Number 21. “We’ve had the troops on a strict breeding diet since we arrived. Here, just watch the rest of this feed, and you’ll stop worrying about that end of things.”

Judy and I watched too-at least as much as we could without getting sick.

A hunch-shouldered henchbeast sitting in a stiff-backed chair was sipping at a can of motor oil. An off-camera voice told it to remove its shirt.

The camera moved around behind it so that we could see a bulge containing no fewer than two dozen baby henchbeasts-they were growing right out of the creature’s back! And, right then and there, several of the offspring took advantage of the lifted shirt to separate from their parent’s flesh and leap to the floor.

The next scene was from a chicken coop filled with hundreds upon hundreds of the henchbeast offspring, leaping and clinging to the arms and legs of an overburdened alien parent who was attempting to refill a trough with motor oil.

“If they can breed that quickly…” Judy started to say. “Yeah,” I continued, “this planet’s toast.”

SO THAT WAS Number 5’s plan. And a darn good one too… I mean, if your objective is to generate close to two billion hours of exploitative entertainment and destroy an entire species in the process.

Well, at least I could cross four more items off the mystery board:

1) Why had Number 5 picked relatively weak, unintelligent henchbeasts as his primary helpers? Because this particular species happened to replicate and grow to adulthood faster than any other in the cosmos, meaning Number 5 would be able to breed a big enough goon squad in time to get his show on the air for the next intergalactic network season.

2) What was the deal with all the motor oil I’d seen the aliens stealing and guzzling? Nothing has more easily digestible raw calories for this species-useful for rapidly growing babies, and their parents-than motor oil.

3) Why were the aliens always lapping up the sludge left behind by their melted human victims? Because, while it’s high in calories, a diet of motor oil is lacking in certain essential vitamins and minerals, whereas a melted human body has lots of essential nutritive ingredients needed for raising healthy aliens.

4) What was the deal with the fish food the women had been purchasing at S-Mart that day? They’d been taking it to feed the baby Number 5s they were raising in the fish ponds at Wiggers’ farm.