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 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.
Willy 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 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.