w.i.l.l.y 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!!! me-eh-eh-elting!!!" And then he collapsed to the ground.

"Or... not! 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 terror.

For a few seconds, they continued to halfheartedly squirt lame streams of water at w.i.l.l.y 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 was a cat," she said, pointing to a pile of torn flea collars on the pavement. 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 rea.s.sured 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 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 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 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. 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 quant.i.ties from, oh, a planet that's about twenty-five thousand light years away from Earth."

"What are you talking about?" asked Dana. 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 how many thousand aliens living here on Earth?" 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 b.u.t.ton," 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."

Against the starry sky, we could see a sinister red light blinking atop a steel-framed communications tower.

"Listen to this."

The minivan's speaker system began to play a decidedly unearthly series of clicks, moans, and static.

Lucky bared his teeth and made a low growl.

"Atta boy," said Emma, stroking his neck rea.s.suringly. "Let's go rid Earth of some aliens."

Chapter 21.

THE RELAY STATION'S access road was barricaded by a chain-link gate.

"Want me to make it go away?" asked w.i.l.l.y, already aiming his plasma cannon at it.

"It's easier to spy on aliens when they don't hear you coming," I said.

So we left Lucky to guard the van, and, as stealthily as an Alien Hunter and his four imagined friends can manage, we jumped the fence. It was fifteen feet high, but we can do tall buildings in a single bound, so it really wasn't an issue.

We snuck up the hardscrabble road on foot. At the top of the hill and inside another fence-this one topped with concertina wire-we found a pretty typical broadcast substation: a small forest of towers, satellite dishes, antennas, and transformers. The small control shack also looked to have been built by human hands.

Everything, in fact, seemed pretty normal-except that the door to the shack had been blown off its hinges, and there was an eerie blue glow emanating from within... and, of course, the air was filled with the disgusting stink of aliens.

We broke out some night-vision binoculars and long-range microphones and crept closer. There were a half dozen henchbeasts inside the shack, guzzling motor oil and laughing their ugly b.u.t.ts off as one of them edited video footage.

The transmissions were surreal scenes of townspeople doing dances, singing a capella, and, always at the end, getting vaporized. That especially sent the aliens into hysterics.

Next they uploaded a scene of pregnant women converging on a country farmhouse.

"That Number 5's a stallion," said one of them, guffawing conspiratorially.

"Yeah, especially for a fish," replied another, causing the rest to roll on the floor with laughter.

Just then the picture on the monitors changed to the glowering image of their boss, and they quickly stood at nervous attention.

"Are you no-talent alien clowns having a good time?" asked Number 5.

"Yes, sir!-I mean no, sir!-We mean -"

"Spare me the stupidity," said Number 5. "And see if you can't spare yourselves and me yet another another production delay. Our friend the Alien Hunter is forty-five meters away, and he's armed to the teeth." production delay. Our friend the Alien Hunter is forty-five meters away, and he's armed to the teeth."

"Well, so much for the element of surprise," said Joe.

w.i.l.l.y cracked his knuckles and then, in his best Bruce Willis impersonation, said, "Lock and load."

We didn't like using guns ourselves, but I had to agree with the sentiment.

Chapter 22.

NOTE TO SELF: when fighting hand-to-hand with rubber-skeletoned aliens-which some of these evidently were-remember that thing Sir Isaac Newton said about every action being met with an equal and opposite re reaction.

Because no sooner had I landed a devastating roundhouse kick to the head of one of the henchbeasts than I was sailing through the night like I'd just jumped off a ten-story building onto a trampoline.

I somehow managed to land on my feet on the far side of the control shack and was ready to spring back into action, but my friends had already figured out how to deal with these overly flexible aliens. You simply tie one of their limbs to a fixed object, such as the steel girders of the broadcast tower, and then you run with their bodies in the opposite direction.

Then, when you can't run any farther, you let go and-bang!-the creatures snap back into themselves with such force that they explode like dropped water balloons. Only they're filled with some sort of sticky greenish syrup rather than water.

Gross but effective.

The other type of henchbeast we encountered wasn't quite so stretchy but had its own surprise-some sort of gland on the abdomen that could spray a jet of foul black acid more than thirty feet.

We found they weren't very good at aiming up, however. The secret was to jump into the air and then crush them from above-splat!-just like a foot squashing a bug.

But since they each weighed about a hundred fifty pounds, they left your sneakers a whole lot messier.

Chapter 23.

ONCE WE'D SAFELY dispatched the last of them, we ducked into the control shack, hoping to find some clues. It was worrisome that Number 5 often seemed to know my whereabouts.

There was no sign of him, however.

"So what were they up to in here?" asked Joe.

"I think Number 5's getting ready for a new show," I said. "Our friends were probably uploading the footage to an extraterrestrial receiver for postproduction. Joe, can you figure out anything useful about this setup?"

He was already poring over the equipment, following wires and examining switches and displays.

"Yeah, it looks like most of the data is getting broadcast straight up into s.p.a.ce. There's a small signal coming back, though. Probably a guidance beacon, but it might be something else. Here, let me see if I can get it on this set here."

He moved some wires to different jacks and threw a couple of switches. And then we saw what might have been the most sickening thing I'd ever seen.

And, yes, I've been on the Internet before.

Chapter 24.