Wade Travers cursed under his breath and pressed one hand against the raging hard-on in his jeans.

His other hand clutched a pair of binoculars.

Across the lake, one of the big dumb aliens was cradling Nikki Fortune in his arms. He had just tied her up and gone down on her for like a hundred years.

Wade couldn’t hear anything, but from Nikki’s expression he could tell she was probably screaming the dude’s name by the time he let her come.

Wade wasn’t into eating pussy, himself. The taste always reminded him of the sour note he got in his mouth when one of his metal fillings went bad. And besides, he could never figure out what was what down there, it all seemed to be made of the same fleshy, slimy stuff and he couldn’t make heads or tails of whatever it was he was supposed to be looking for.

The whole thing made him think of the snipe hunts his uncle used to send him on as a little kid. Turned out there was no snipe. And Wade figured it was probably the same with the magic lady part.

But he’d been looking forward to seeing Nikki return the favor to her beefy boyfriend.

Instead the big dope was holding her like she was a baby or something and kissing her on top of the head.

“Lame,” Wade observed to himself. But he didn’t drop his binoculars just yet. Maybe the alien was the smooth type and he was going to turn the whole thing around on her.

It was pretty boring on the island.

No TV, no friends, no partying.

He did have a phone but he had to charge it with solar power, which meant he didn’t get a full charge half the time so he couldn’t use it for porn or online poker as much as he wanted.

If his dad hadn’t promised him the convertible he would have been out of here long ago.

On the other hand, the only place he wanted to go was Maxwell’s.

But his dad had been forced to agree that Wade would stay one hundred yards from Maxwell’s at all times in order to get him out on bail. And the last place Wade wanted to go was back to jail. He hadn’t made it past the processing room last time, but that was close enough for him.

So now Wade stood vigil in the old cottage on the island, watching Maxwell’s for anything that might help him exact his revenge. His dad had offered him his BMW convertible if Wade could produce info that exonerated himself.

Which might be difficult, since there was no such information. Wade had sworn to his dad that he hadn’t been stalking Honey, hadn’t thrown the rock or tried to set fire to her cabin.

But of course he had.

So he wasn’t going to find another stalker to pin the blame on.

Besides, she was with Kitt all the time anyway. So she couldn’t pick up a new stalker.

But he knew eventually his dad would let him off the island, and as long as he refused to come home without the car, he would get it, even without the proof.

The first thing he’d done when the plan was made was to go to the mall and get a bunch of spy gear. Some of it was meant for kids, but it worked anyway. And he’d gotten the binoculars from a hunting store online.

He ordered tons of stuff from his phone. One of his buddies from the resort brought it over on a canoe in the middle of the night once a week.

Meanwhile, everyone else at the resort thought he was still in jail, so he was perfectly free to spy and relax.

And to plot his revenge on Honey and her weirdo friends, of course.

He’d been shocked when he saw Remington go underwater and stay there for ten minutes at a time.

When he’d gone on his phone to search Andorra and see if the people there had freaking super powers, it auto-filled to:

Superpowers people from A — erie

Wade had just stared down at his phone, thunderstruck.

Was it possible that the guys were from another planet, not just another country?

He’d tried to work out the problem sensibly.

Honey had said that Kitt and his brothers were her cousins from Andorra.

Clearly the first part of that was a lie, he couldn’t be her cousin.

Or maybe he was, and she was banging her cousin…

No, Honey wouldn’t boink her cousin. And it followed that if the first part was a lie, then Honey was a liar and the whole thing was a lie.

And therefore, Kitt could not be from Andorra.

And if he wasn’t from Andorra, then his brothers weren’t from Andorra either.

But did that mean they were from Aerie?

He’d looked up Aerie on his phone.

There were endless pictures of three big guys - Bond, Rocky and Magnum. They looked as different from Kitt, Remington and Indiana as those three looked from each other. But they were the same type of guy. Without exception they looked like a bunch of UFC fighters doing a commercial for adopting homeless kittens or something. Big scary muscles and big shit-eating smiles.

Freaking women loved them though. There were about a million web sites dedicated to their “masculine beauty”, whatever that was.

Yes, it was true. Kitt, Remington and Indiana were definitely aliens.

Wade had hardly been able to contain his news. He’d called his dad and made him come out to the island so he could tell him in person.

“What are you talking about, boy?” Sam Travers demanded sternly. “Did you make me row across this lake in the middle of the damned night to tell me this fairy tale? Please tell me you have something real.”

Nothing that Wade could say convinced his father that he had uncovered the truth. And the meeting ended with his dad tromping back to the canoe in the darkness and telling Wade he’d better stop ordering gadgets on his credit card and spend his time looking for real evidence.

After that, Wade had come up with a really smart plan to rat them all out.

He’d paid that idiot to snag his anchor on the gas line, knowing that Remington wouldn’t be able to help playing the hero, and that he would out himself for everyone to see.

Of course he hadn’t counted on Addy using her staff training to get everyone off the grounds before anyone could see Remington showing off.

It was sheer brilliance on Wade’s part to take the video and upload it to YouTube.

He’d thought he was in the clear and had exacted his vengeance on the lot of them.

But even though it started off promising, most of the newer comments on his video said viewers thought it was faked. It had garnered thousands of “dislikes” in the span of a few days. And in the deluge of real video of real aliens over in Stargazer, his was all but forgotten.

Even his dad figured Remington probably came up for air outside the frame a couple of times.

He’d expected reporters and government-types to come flooding in as soon as he’d posted the video. But apparently, they didn’t know how to do their jobs.

It was a minor setback. He would just have to move on.

Wade had considered leaving the island, car or no car.

But in his mom’s daily email she let him know that her sister, Aunt Teresa, was coming out. Teresa was nice enough, but her visit always meant a week or two of cleaning and cooking in preparation and Wade detested being around people who were cleaning.

So he decided to stay until he could take them all down.

It was fine during the day. There was plenty going on at the resort, and the place was laid out along the shore of the lake, so he could see practically everything that went on.

At night though, it could get a little creepy.

Not that Wade believed that dumb ghost story. Only a baby would be afraid of that.

But still, there were a lot of weird noises in the house at night.

Over in the staff commons cabin, the alien was blowing out the candles. One moment the screened box glowed warmly across the lake.

The next, it disappeared into darkness.

Wade suddenly became aware of the sound of the tree branches scraping the roof of the cottage and the creak of the floorboards downstairs in the empty living room.

He shivered and turned on his phone again.

His dad had said he shouldn’t use any light at all in the cabin at night, even the phone, since someone on the mainland might see it. And his battery was running low.

But he needed a little comfort.

He pulled up his favorite video “58 Epic fails” and smiled at the compilation of baseballs to the groin, boating accidents, cats being frightened by toasters and other signs that the universe was a magical place, and that Wade still held a dignified position within it.