Must be an alien thing.

I DON’T KNOW what got into me because it’s totally against policy to give the straight scoop to civilians, but Judy insisted on making me a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of chili-the aliens hadn’t quite eaten every scrap of food in the place-and before I knew it I’d told her just about the whole story.

How I was an Alien Hunter and my parents, Graff and Atrelda (bless their weird-named souls), had been Alien Hunters and how their mission was to protect nice folks from the thousands of aliens who wanted to take advantage of, plunder, pillage, and sometimes plain-out destroy places like this.

“Places like this?” Judy smiled wryly, not taking me seriously. “You can hardly blame them for wanting to plain-out destroy Holliswood. I mean, this place is nothing but a prefab smear of parking lots, giant superstores, drive-through banks, twenty-garage automotive franchises, and chain restaurants. And mean girls, dumb jocks, and people who get their news from those scrolly things running across the bottom of their favorite stupid TV show-while running on the treadmill at the gym.”

I couldn’t help but admire her astute observational skills. Not to mention her honesty, directness… and, okay, cuteness.

“Well, people can’t be all that bad here. You’re a girl… and you’re not mean.”

Good one, Daniel. Wish I had Joe’s gift of gab. In lieu of that, I kept rambling.

I told her how one of the alien baddies, the worst of the worst, had killed my parents when I was just three, and how I’d barely escaped with my life and-almost as important-The List.

Judy stopped smiling. “Don’t joke about your parents being murdered,” she said.

“I wouldn’t joke about that,” I said, wondering if I’d gone too far.

Her eyes were penetrating mine. “And… The List is…?”

There was no stopping the power of Judy’s blue eyes, so I spilled all the rest: how The List was, in full, called The List of Alien Outlaws on Terra Firma, and how it was an interactive, constantly self-updating summary of all the ill-intended Outer Ones now residing on the planet, ranked from number one to somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, from most dangerous to those that are barely stronger than a human.

And how my parents’ evil murderer-known as The Prayer-was number one on that list… and that it was my life’s goal to hunt him down and kill him.

Sorry, I get a little hung up on that sometimes.

When I finished, Judy was looking at me like I was C-RA-Z-Y nuts, so I slapped on my best damage-control smile and said, “Psych! Just messing with you! I love making up stories.”

“Oh, sure,” she said, blinking her gorgeous peepers and looking more than a little confused-and creeped out.

Sometimes I’m more extrastupid than extraterrestrial.

“Okay, gotta go!” I said, flashing damage-control smile variation number two.

“Sure…” Judy said. “Come back and see us real soon, um-what did you say your name was again?”

“Daniel,” I said, and flew out the door before she asked me my last name.

That part of getting to know someone is always a little awkward… when you don’t have a last name.

YOU KNOW HOW dogs go wild over mailmen? Well, you haven’t seen a dog go postal till you’ve seen one detect the scent of the bad sort of alien. It’s hilarious.

Right now, I was the one about to go postal because I couldn’t detect anything at all. My alien-tracking nose could rival a bloodhound’s, but unfortunately, I wasn’t getting any directional indications on Number 5. I sensed he was still in town someplace, but he must have started taking some new kind of precautions against me.

I was upset, but not so much that I couldn’t recognize it was a beautiful night, and since I needed some rest anyhow, I decided to make camp. I took a minute or two to gaze at the twinkling stars and run through the names of all that were visible. Even on the clearest of Earth nights, you can only see about two thousand stars from the planet’s surface… but get me up past the murky atmosphere, and I’ll name you a couple million that would be distinguishable even to your human eyes.

Then I turned on my laptop. Not just any laptop, this one-it’s one some creatures would, literally, kill for… because it alone contains the complete and perpetually updated List of Alien Outlaws on Terra Firma.

I can shape The List as anything from an interactive scroll to a heads-up display visor, but I usually access it as a laptop, since I like to practice not standing out. Plus, that way-when I’m not researching-I can download movies from Netflix.

So I logged in and did a little research on the stinking outlaw I’d just missed at the diner. Number 5 hailed from a remote swamp planet with an unpronounceable name that makes the Siberian tundra seem cosmopolitan.

But since leaving his provincial home and finding his way to the bright lights and big megalopolises of the central star clusters, he’d been working his way through the ranks, and now he was an up-and-coming entertainment mogul. Kind of an alien version of Aaron Spelling, if Aaron Spelling were a few degrees more bloodthirsty than Attila the Hun.

His MO was to find technologically evolving but still largely defenseless cultures-such as Earth’s-where he could easily move in, steal some of their better entertainment ideas, enslave their unwary populations, and then walk away with a treasure trove of exploitive, derivative programs that he’d then proceed to syndicate to networks across the cosmos.

So what made this swamp creature worthy of the number five spot on The List? His signature cinematic flourish: to kill his cast as the last act of their skits. In fact, because they always died at the end, he was considered the founder of a new style of alien program that they called-in typically lame alien fashion-endertainment.

Nobody’s ever accused the Outer Ones of having over-developed senses of humor, that’s for sure.

NOT SURPRISINGLY, AFTER refreshing my knowledge about Number 5, I had some trouble sleeping. Kidnap, brainwashing, wanton murder, callous exploitation of sentient creatures on at least three dozen underdeveloped worlds…

I was going to enjoy removing him from Earth, permanently.

As soon as the sun was up, I headed back to town. Guided by a sort of eighth sense-I have seven legitimate senses, at least that I’ve so far discovered-that told me there was something funky going on in the immediate vicinity, I pulled into the S-Mart twenty-four-hour superstore and found a parking space next to a minivan that was being loaded by a pregnant woman. She was lifting a flat of motor oil… and sweating like crazy.

“Need a hand with that, ma’am?” I offered. She gave me a blank stare and made a weird bubbling sound with her mouth.

“Okay, sorry to bother you,” I said, noticing one of her grocery bags seemed to have at least twenty cans of fish food in it. That struck me as a little weird, but maybe she ran a pet store or something.

I turned to go into the store, but as I stepped out from behind the minivan, I almost got decked by a green plastic S-Mart grocery cart-pushed by another pregnant woman.

I did a double take-to make sure I hadn’t accidentally wandered toward a Mommies “R” Us or something-and nearly got flattened by another pregnant woman, who was seemingly in a race with three other pregnant women, all making a beeline for the store’s entrance.

“Weird,” I said, and headed inside, where things got weirder still.