James Patterson - Watch the Skies

So now I just had a few dozen remaining questions to answer. Questions, you know, like, was there a weakness in his plan?

Personally, I was starting to have doubts.

“Judy,” I said, “let’s get you home now, okay?”

She didn’t say anything, which I thought was strange. But not as strange as what I saw when I turned to speak to her-because there was nobody there.

“WHERE THE -?!” I started to say, but then I spotted her-on one of the van’s monitors. She had taken the bazooka and was running across the road between the parking garage and the TV station.

No time to waste chasing to her, so I decided to teleport myself instead. It’s a skill Dad had me practicing lately. I really had to grok where it was I needed to go, and it required way more focus than I could usually pull off near the clutches of an alien… but right now, Judy was running straight into a death trap, and there was only one thing I cared about.

I materialized on the sidewalk in front of her and-as gently as possible, of course-tackled her and shoved her into the hedges in front of the station.

“Are you crazy?!”

“Let go of me, Daniel.”

“You think you can run over here with a gun and take on the twenty-first-most-powerful alien on the planet-and who knows how many of his goons-just like that?”

“You said yourself it was a pretty powerful gun.”

“Yeah, well, if you can get them to agree to stand in a straight line and not move while you squeeze the trigger, sure, you might have a chance. But there’s a bigger chance they’d turn that thing against you.”

“But you were just sitting there watching and listening, and every single passing minute these monsters are getting a little closer to taking over not just Holliswood but the whole planet! You said so yourself!”

She was like a tiger trying to wrench herself out of my grasp to keep running. Then, all at once, she went limp under my weight and looked at me sadly. “I know you don’t have any family left to save… but I have mine.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.

“I mean, if you could go back in time and have another chance to save your parents, wouldn’t you?”

“Look, Judy, you can have all the powerful weapons in the world, but if you don’t have a plan-and if you don’t know what you’re getting into-you won’t have a snowball’s chance in Atlanta.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in fighting evil aliens, it’s that it’s very important to do some serious homework. You see, with tests like this, there are no makeup exams. You fail, and that’s the end.”

“But with your powers…”

“My powers are only as good as my imagination. And my imagination is only as good as what I’ve learned. That’s why I have to study things really hard. If we bide our time, we’ll have a better chance.”

“Prove it, Daniel,” Judy demanded, but her steely blue eyes softened a little now.

“Okay,” I went on, secretly admiring her negotiating skills. “Since I have the sense that you aren’t going to go home quietly unless I prove what I mean, let’s at least leave the gun here and sneak inside so I can show you something that will change your mind, okay?”

“And if you’re not right, you give me back the bazooka-plus a platoon of Navy SEALs-to help me bust in through the front door.”

She looked me in the eye, and we both started to smile.

“But if you are right,” she went on, “what do you get from me?”

“Then I get to take you home and, um, you have to go about your life like normal till I give the sign, okay?”

“That’s it?” she asked, leaning in close. “You can’t think of anything else you might like?”

And so we made out right there in the bushes in front of the alien-infested TV station.

And while I’m not an Alien Hunter who’s in the habit of kissing and telling, I made up my mind-next time I saw her in her diner uniform-to change her name tag from “Judy Blue Eyes” to “Judy Mind Blower.”

WE SNUCK INTO the station through the freight entrance at the back of the building.

The first thing we noticed was that the place smelled like a zoo-a zoo at which the cage cleaners had been on strike for a week. It’s a well-documented fact that personal hygiene is a really low-priority item for the Outer Ones, but it never fails to take my breath away when I go somewhere they’ve been-especially if the windows haven’t been left open.

I had to make us invisible twice as patrolling henchbeasts scuttled past, but we found our way to the alien-built central server core on the second floor without too much trouble.

I quickly sat down at the administrator’s terminal and brought up a blinking holographic map of the world, which spun slowly in the center of the room. Every village, town, and city on Earth was labeled in successively wider rings of color radiating from the tiny red bull’s-eye that was Holliswood, ending in a big blue circle that covered the backside of the planet.

Each color zone had a countdown clock on it. Holliswood’s was counting down below 73 hours now, while the next ring was counting down from 273 hours, the one after that 473 hours, the one after that 673 hours… all the way to the last at 4,473 hours, which corresponded to about six months from now, the equivalent of an intergalactic broadcast season.

“I knew it,” I said. “This town is just the pilot episode.”

“So this is just the beginning…” Judy echoed.

“And in a matter of months, they will have filmed the demise of every single human settlement on the planet, from New York City to the smallest fishing village on the Indian Ocean.”

“Okay, but there’s something you haven’t thought about,” Judy challenged. “If these goons are, like, doubling their population every few days, how’s the chief alien going to control them all? You said he’s the director-and directors are the ones who make the shows work, right? All those aliens are going to need somebody to tell them how to run each location, and he can’t very well get to over a thousand cities in a single day… can he? I mean he sure doesn’t look like Santa Claus.”

“Well, Sherlock, that’s the reason he has the women of Holliswood coughing up his babies in that pond.”

“So I guess his kids must grow pretty fast too. But can they become smart enough to run a filmed invasion that quickly?”

“I don’t know exactly how it’s possible, but I bet he’s figured that out too. I think I may have seen some training equipment that will let him manage that end of things.”

“Okay, Mr. Alien Smarty Pants, so is that what you wanted to show me?” Judy asked, sounding skeptical. “I mean, still, won’t it be harder to put these guys out of business when there are millions of them, rather than just hundreds, like right now? Shouldn’t we go ahead and attack before they’ve bred?”

“Well, there’s one more thing,” I said, typing in a code. The display in front of us briefly flashed “Emergency Abort Test 2,” and then a crowd of shoppers dancing the Electric Slide in some grocery store checkout lines appeared on-screen.

After about fifteen seconds, the music was interrupted by Number 5’s voice. “Very nice! Now stop dancing,” he said, and began to laugh. “And, now… stop breathing.”

First one fell, then another, then dozens of victims collapsed to the floor. I fast-forwarded so we didn’t have to watch the whole horrible thing but stopped where a henchbeast walked out, kicked a couple of the bodies, and gave a thumbs-up.

“Ex-cellent,” Number 5 chortled.

I stopped the playback. How could any intelligent being be so twisted? I mean, I guess I’d seen evil before, but the fact that he was doing this just for laughs…