Game Over

Chapter 51





THE VOICE DIDN’T belong to Number 7 or Number 8, either; it belonged to both of them. Kildare’s trick had scattered them into their billions of parts, but they had now regathered. Well, sort of. Together they’d formed a dense, swirling gray cloud, with four black eyes and a single cavernous mouth the corners of which rose in a bone-chilling smile as I turned around.

“Yesss,” they hissed to me. “We have many talents that single-body creatures like you can’t begin to guess.”

Kildare was standing frozen next to me. He’d gone completely white except for his widened eyes, which were now completely black like those of his parents.

“Kildare?!” I yelled at him, but he didn’t react. It was like his mind had slipped away, and then, to my horror, his body started to disappear too.

He was being swallowed. Number 7 and Number 8’s mouth had grown to the size of a whale’s, and their body was expanding like a bellows, drawing in air—and drawing in their son. He came apart like a pillar of sand in a tornado. They were devouring him!

It was so terrifying an image that my emotions were getting in the way of my powers. My head was reeling, and I couldn’t figure out a thing to do about it. How was I supposed to hurt a cloud? And how was I supposed to defeat the enemy and not hurt Kildare?

“That’s right, Alien Hunter. Another of our unique defense mechanisms involves eating our young. At least the ones that are weak or unfit.”

“Give him back,” I commanded. “He’s not like you.”

“You’re right—he’s not like us. He’s part of us.”

“Give him back,” I repeated, this time with as much authority and ire as I could muster. But they sensed my weakness here. Had it all been a trap? Did they somehow lead me to Kildare, to lure me back to them? Had he intentionally fooled me?

“Here’s the deal, Alien Hunter,” they announced vaingloriously. “You have thirty seconds, and it’s your choice how you spend them. If it’s any comfort, we can assure you that you’ll soon get to see Kildare—or, at least, parts of him.”

Rage boiled up inside me, but I couldn’t just blindly attack them. I didn’t want to hurt my friend. I had to play along. “What do you mean by that?”

“You can either stay here and chat with us, as you’re doing now,” they continued, “or you can have a head start.”

“A head start? What are we playing, tag?”

“You can call it whatever you like, but we tend to refer to it as ‘hunting.’ And then once we’ve caught you, we’ll devour you, just as we did Kildare. Only in your case, it will be a lot more painful and permanent.”

“Oh, look at that,” taunted the black-eyed cloud, morphing part of itself into a wrist with a watch wrapped around it, at which it glanced dramatically. “Time’s up!”

My ears filled with an awful buzzing sound as the cloud began to envelop me.