“Simple,” she repeated, pale brows arched. “They’re an alien species that’s more advanced than us. Stronger than us, and can clone three warriors for every one we kill. Sure, let’s bonk them over the head.”
Irving pursed his lips. “Theoretically, if they had a brain stem, blunt force trauma could be effective.”
Alvarez threw his arms up, yelling at the room in Spanish. Blake didn’t speak Spanish, but he got the gist of what he was saying well enough.
Gabriel tried to get the room to settle. “Back to basics!” he shouted, slamming his fist on the whiteboard. His fingers smudged the writing. “What do we have that they don’t?”
Everyone stilled as they considered what Gabriel had asked. Ideas burned through Blake’s head. They didn’t seem to like fire? But short of stumbling upon a hidden cache of Napalm, he didn’t think they could burn the city before being killed. Besides, Russia had tried bombing the city, and that hadn’t worked.
Judd’s snort broke the silence. “Meth.” He looked around at their unimpressed faces. “What? You asked what we had that an advanced alien species wouldn’t!”
Victoria threw a pen at his head, and Irving’s sigh sounded like it had been carved from his very soul, but Blake was stuck on something.
Flesh and blood.
“If it bleeds, we can kill it…” he trailed off, looking up in time to see Phin grabbing Judd by the neck, dragging him down so he could try and kick him in the nuts. Gabriel looked like he was ready to tear his hair out.
“That could work,” he said, a little louder, drawing attention. Irving made a face, but Gabriel was listening. “Gabriel, you said they were flesh and blood. A methamphetamine overdose would kill anything alive.”
Irving was staring at him, eyes narrowed. It wasn’t his usual look of complete disdain. This one was incredulous, bordering on irritation. But he was listening.
Blake turned to him. “They’re not designed to survive for long, which leads me to believe they probably don’t have a waste management system. But they almost certainly have an organ topump blood and oxygen throughout their body. A brain. Both of those things would be affected by meth.”
He could see the wheels turning in Irving’s mind. “Without a proper necropsy, we can’t be sure of any of that.”
“It’s common sense,” Blake snapped. “A stimulant overdose would fry the Queen’s whole system.”
Tommy nodded, eyes on the table as he considered it. “I mean…if anything could kill an alien system, it would be meth.”
Gabriel rocked back on his heels. “They don’t have protection from an internal attack.” He glanced back at the board, his brows furrowing. “They’re designed to protect against armament. Not a small needle that could slip between the plates.”
“It wouldn’t even have to penetrate that deep.”
The room was quiet, but this time there was an undercurrent of excitement. Hands clenched on the table as people glanced at one another, looking for a better idea. No one had any.
As far as Hail Mary’s went, it wasn’t the most glamorous. He didn’t know how they were going to inject a lethal dose of methamphetamine into a Queen alien clone machine attached to a spaceship hovering in their atmosphere. Or evenwhata lethal dose of methamphetamine was to a Monkey Cat.
But Blake’s paramedic teacher once told him that paramedics make precise decisions based on guesswork and unreliable data. And he’d spent too long doubting himself. Blake was a paramedic, and it was time to save some lives.
To the complete shock of everyone present, Irving addressed Judd directly. “I presume you know how to make methamphetamine?”
Judd knocked Phin off of him with a vicious elbow. Standing up to his full height, he grinned down at Irving. “Oh, I see how it is. Everyone always makes fun of the redneck until it’s time to do some redneck shit.”
CHAPTER
TWELVE
Gabriel frowned at the boxes of cold medicine, bottles of bleach, drain cleaner, brake cleaner, iodine, salt, soap, antifreeze, and pool cleaning tablets. They looked like a list of household products that could kill you. It reminded him of the cabinet under his sister’s sink, the one with the child locks, even though her kids were well beyond their accidental ingesting years. He poked at a dented corner of a box of cold medicine.
Judd called it a One-Pot shop. What he meant by that, Gabriel didn’t ask. What itwas,was a few tables shoved together under a pinned-up tarp in the parking lot. They’d dragged the grill and bonfire closer so he could boil pots of the most garish colored liquids, the smell of melting microplastics thick in the air as they bubbled.
What was more concerning—which wassucha low bar—was the gusto with which Judd began cooking illegal drugs. He had Sara standing on an overturned bucket picking apart cold pills, using an old driver’s license to cut the powder on a scale. The ethics of letting a six-year-old help them cook methamphetamine was a question no one except Victoria was willing to broach, and she was off hunting this afternoon.
Blake had raised some alarm, but shrugged once Judd produced ‘sufficient’ safety measures.
Namely, a pair of giant, douchebag sunglasses that served as safety eyewear and an old bike helmet that kept falling into the kids' eyes.
Blake came over to the pile Gabriel was standing over, pushing his own sunglasses up, so he could begin perusing the household goods. His nose was red from where the sunglasses had bit into it, and his cheeks sooty from stirring the pots on the open flames.
