James Patterson - Watch the Skies

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.”

“Yeah, maybe we just freed him up so he can call the shots from cyberspace,” I said.

“That would be bad,” said Dana, and I did the only thing there was left to do.

I continued to bang my forehead on the steering wheel.

TURNS OUT RACING along the highway with your buddies isn’t nearly as fun in stinky old municipal dump trucks with grease-smeared windows as it is on high-performance motorcycles.

Still, we were pretty happy to be doing it. We had finally managed to confiscate every single electronic device in town and had loaded them into these garbage haulers.

How, you may ask? Sometimes, alien powers can’t solve problems in an instant. Occasionally, there’s absolutely no replacement for good old-fashioned elbow grease and determination. And in this case, a little high-tech hypnosis.

When we got to the Wiggers’ farm, we took the garbage haulers out across the abandoned fields until we reached the alien breeding ponds.

Then we turned and dumped every Macintosh, Think-Pad, Dell, Gateway, Toshiba, Sony, LG, Motorola, Samsung, NEC, JVC, Magnavox, Westinghouse, GE, RCA, Sylvania, Nextel, Nintendo, Microsoft, AT &T, IBM, Lenovo, and a dozen other branded electronic devices-from walkietalkies to microwave ovens to TiVos to Wiis to network routers-into the water.

It was pretty impressive-the sound of tons of twisting metal, breaking glass, and snapping plastic cascading down the hillside into a pond.

But the best part was when Number 5-who’d been silent till now, no doubt trying to figure out yet another escape plan-screamed like the Wicked Witch of the West when the stuff started splashing into the water.

The moment the first of those batteries, silicon chips, and transformers began sizzling and fizzling and shorting out, everything with a screen or a speaker began broadcasting his shrill, urgent-sounding plea:

“Stop! Please stop it! I’ll make you famous. You can have a credit on my next show-I’ll put your name right up there with mine-I’ll even move the pilot episode to another planet if these stupid humans mean so much to you. St-oooo-op! Puh-uh-lease. My my-ind… I fe-eeel… di-zzzzzzzzz-eeee… D-d-d-ah-nnnn… yu-uhl?”

“Yes, Number 5?”

“I’m… gu… guh… gunna get you… for this.”

“Oh, no, you’re not,” I said. And I opened up The List computer-on which I’d just run a very thorough virus scan-and deleted Number 5’s entry.

The pond was soon bubbling and steaming with all the battery chemicals and electronic waste, and we watched as literally tons of stinky, finless, alien catfish began to float, belly-up, dead, to the surface of the pond.

Then I turned to the video camera that Joe was using to record the proceedings and did my best Ryan Seacrest impersonation: “We here at American Alien Hunter hope you’ve enjoyed Season Two. Please stay tuned for previews of our next adventure-right after this brief word from our sponsors.”

THEY SAY EVERYONE loves a parade, and I guess that’s one more way I’m different. I guess I just think there’s something unsettling about people putting on uniforms, walking together in a line, and having everybody come out to stare at them. Still, if only out of being gracious, I let the people of Holliswood put me atop their homecoming day float and rode along with the mayor through the middle of town and out to the civic auditorium where all of the children of Holliswood had assembled to stage their own version of High School Musical.

It wasn’t really my cup of tea, but I will say one thing for Number 5’s legacy-he left those kids with some darn good dance moves.

And then, since the whole town-minus those who were melted by Number 5 and his goons-was there, I used some of what I’d learned of Number 5’s mind-control broadcasting techniques and erased all memory of myself and the aliens from every single person… except Judy.

I DROVE JUDY home on my motorcycle while everybody else was getting their bearings and wondering what the heck they were all doing at the civic auditorium in the middle of the day.

“You study hard with your folks, okay, Judy?”

We were standing on her porch exchanging goodbyes. It was a beautiful June day. The birds were chirping, the clouds were scudding, the flowers were doing their fragrance-emitting thing.

“I just can’t believe you’re leaving. Can’t you take me with you? I’m losing my mind here with my parents and this homeschooling business.”

“I know it seems like a drag, but they’re good people. I can tell. And there will be life after Holliswood, I promise.”