Game Over

Chapter 50





“MOM, DAD! DON’T!” screamed Kildare. “He’s not going to hurt you!”

If this was all part of Kildare’s plan, he sure was a good actor. I leaped over a console of driving simulators and tried to find some cover, which wasn’t easy since their weapons were making short work of the video-game consoles. If they kept this up, their entire store would soon be reduced to a circuit-board scrap heap.

I know I’d told Kildare I’d give him a day before I went after his parents; but I didn’t recall making a similar pledge about their security goons. I grabbed the turret-mounted gun off the first-person-shooter console next to me and quickly transformed the thing’s guts into those of an Embulsorator 2300—a weapon my father favored and whose popular nickname was the Fly Daddy, so called because it turned your opponent into a harmless species of insect.

I leaped back over a bank of consoles with my seemingly plastic gun. No doubt assuming it was a harmless video-game accessory, the security goons promptly burst into laughter.

“Anybody know how to turn this thing on?” I asked, taking advantage of their overconfident amusement and gradually leveling the gun at them. They laughed even harder until I depressed the trigger, and, voilà, their suddenly not-smiling selves turned into tiny little flies that—unlike when I turned myself into an insect—didn’t include their brains. They were, for all intents and purposes, plain-old flies forevermore.

“He’s harmless, is he, Kildare?” asked Number 7. A sharp smell was wafting through the room. I immediately realized it was the same odor I’d detected in the crawl spaces upstairs in the Tower when I’d found Kildare’s secret room.

“He won’t hurt you,” repeated Kildare, with little spirit. My friend had become very pale and was shaking. He looked like he was getting sick, but not with the common cold.

“I promised him I wouldn’t harm you,” I told his parents. “Now let us out of here.”

“Won’t hurt us, huh?” asked Number 7. “The great Alien Hunter is taking an early retirement?”

“Or,” suggested Number 8, “perhaps the reason you’re not going to harm us is that you’ve discovered you couldn’t if you tried?”

“At any rate,” said Number 7, “the relevant fact here is that we haven’t made any such promises about not harming you.”

And, with that, he shot out his arms and sprayed a stream of white liquid at me, which I’m glad I didn’t assume to be nondairy creamer. I did a backward flip and landed ten yards away as the liquid hit the tile floor and melted through to the level below us.

Next time I had a chance, I guess I’d have to add that to their entry on the List computer: can shoot ultraconcentrated acid.

Now Number 8 had joined the action, easily mimicking my flip—despite the fact that she was wearing a woman’s business suit and heels—and landing right next to me. I smiled sheepishly as she looked down at my surprised expression.

“My home world has stronger gravity than yours,” she explained. And then her arms turned gray and became wicked-sharp-looking swords that she swung together toward my neck like a giant pair of scissors.

I ducked and sprang to Kildare’s side in the middle of the showroom floor.

“You okay?” I asked. Number 7 was looking at Kildare intently, and for some weird reason his cheeks were puffed out and he was blowing.

“He’s… making… pheromo—”

“Pheromones!” I blurted. Of course! That was the sharp odor I’d been smelling. And that must be why Kildare looked so sick. If the “cells” of his body and his parents’ bodies worked the same way those of the ants in his terrarium did, Number 7 was disrupting the very function of Kildare’s bodily systems.

“Here you go,” I said, materializing a gas mask and quickly putting it over Kildare’s face.

He nodded and put his hand on my shoulder as he breathed deeply through the mask. Already he was straightening back up, and color was returning to his skin. But we couldn’t exactly savor the moment because Ellie Scissor-Arms was sprinting toward us, her razor arms whistling through the air as she came. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Number 7 had produced a shoulder-firing microwave cannon from someplace and was in the process of drawing a bead on us. Before I could grab Kildare and drag him to safety, he pulled off his mask and did one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.

He pulled in his feet and hands and for a moment hovered there off the floor in a curled-up ball. Then Kildare flickered gray and—BLAM!—exploded into a dim gray cloud that entirely filled the room.

A new sharp smell assaulted my nostrils and stung my eyes, then both his parents flickered gray and dispersed into indistinct gray clouds.

The demolished store was now filled with an angry buzzing sound, and Kildare rematerialized.

“It won’t last too long,” he said. “And I won’t be able to surprise them that easily again,” he said.

“Another pheromone?”

“Yeah, panic signal,” he said. “I’d never tried it before, but I just set off an alarm that sends all their cells scrambling. Kind of like when you stir up a hornet’s nest or an ant hill.”

We bolted out into the lobby. The steel security shutters had now dropped around the perimeter of the building, and there was no obvious way out. I sized up one of the shutters and got ready to magnify my strength and peel it from its frame.

“So that panic signal you used on them is kind of a self-preservation thing?” I asked, stooping down to grab the shutter.

“Exactly,” said a voice behind me. But it wasn’t Kildare’s.