Things are about to change here on Earth.

YOU are the hunted. You are Gua.

You don't know me. But I am here. We're all here. You think we're not ready. You think you're smarter. Quicker. Harder. You think yourself superior. Wrong again. We are strong. Stronger than you can possibly know.

And you created us. The force that will stop you. The force that will rise up to destroy, not to be destroyed.

And we don't just want to send you home. We want you to die.

And we want it to HURT.

Afraid yet? You should be.

There was another who opposed you. Another you created. You know his name. These are his journals. I don't write this for his supporters, I don't write it for those who follow his memory now. Because he will always be one of us. He will always be the man who exposed your evil plans.

You called him 117. But he has a name. It's Cade Foster. And his death only strengthens our resolve.

I address you here only because I know you will read this. It's what you do. Putting us under a microsc

Quatrain 73, Century 6: ""A daughter of war meets the gallows when darkness' spirit takes flight. In the land of the Eye of the Stag, savior and devil come together as one.""

Even though I'm flying the Airstream solo these days I promised to keep up Foster's fight. So I'm doing the usual, scanning the quatrains and looking for matches in the real world. Thought the ""Eye of the Stag"" sounded like Ohio, the Buckeye State. So I checked for odd stories in the place that's ""round on the ends and hi in the middle.""

Came up with a girl named Lindsay Tilden, a cheerleader facing the death penalty for murdering her dad, Alistaire. Death penalty. Gallows. The clues were adding up.

Spicing up the pot was the fact that Lindsay's late Dad worked for Rocom Industries, a high tech weapons design firm and prime target for the Gua. Could Lindsay be the ""daughter of war"" the Big N had mentioned?

All signs pointed that way. So it was Eddie to the rescue. Solo.

Or so I thought.

Posing as Jack Reynolds from

Quatrain 72, Century 5. ""Hallowed eyes burn through the line to the fifth in colonies of old. Malevolence awaits a perfect division, as four makes five for apocalypse.""

A killer struck twice in New England recently, a place Eddie and I took for Nostradamus' ""colonies of old."" The police did their best to keep details confidential but reports leaked. The victims were said to have their eyes burned out of their skulls. Malevolence could be a reference to Mabus. Suspected the killer could have been Gua. Could the murders have something to do with the coming apocalypse?

Cops had turned up short on leads. Couldn't stop me from starting my own investigation.

Posing as Lafayette County, Field Evidence Tech ""Fozen"" I checked out the second crime scene, claimed the detectives on the case needed some new angles on the clues. Up on the ceiling near the pipes I found a strange symbol É could've been written in blood.

Wasn't the only one working the case for our side. Eddie was at the local police

A faction of Gua generals, working with Joshua, seek Foster's help in a plot to assasinate Mabus.

----- The prophet Nostradamus has foretold the arrival of an alien antichrist who will bring about the apocalypse. He calls himself Mabus, and he's out there right now ... somewhere. The prophecies of Nostradamus guide us and help us fight the Gua, but we have yet to get close to Mabus, we have yet to strike a blow that will stop the impending invasion. Until then, we prepare.

Call it a crisis of faith. Eddie was desperately searching the quatrains, trying to get us closer to Mabus but we were running out of angles. Jordan tried to bolster my spirits - told me our plan was working. We would continue to take the Gua down one by one, each step bringing us closer to finding the Guahead. Jordan believed we were gonna get him and win the war.

While sifting through quatrains, Eddie received an encrypted message from Joshua requesting a meeting to discuss Mabus. He wanted me to come alone. Eddi

Quatrain 15, Century 5. ""The message precedes the messenger, a sudden link to darkness. Betwixt the glare and the chasm, the child is freed with shadows behind.""

The Paranoid Times gets thousands of hits a week, all from the growing contingent of believers who know that aliens threaten our world. Most of these e-mails voice support, but when one tipped us to a Gua bomb set outside a United States Federal Office, we had to check it out. That e-mail saved hundreds of human lives, but who sent it? A disgruntled alien, a human with knowledge of Gua plans?

The e-mail was traced to a residential address. With backup courtesy of Jordan's Raven Nation, I set out to see if our mysterious cyber-tipper was truly a friend ... or possibly a foe.

Posing as Timothy Murray, a Compustar Internet Service employee I met Anne Berman, Aunt and guardian to Emily ­ the intense little girl who lived at the house and the only one to ever use the computer. Made no headway, Anne said Emily was sick and she wasn'

Quatrain 17, Century 4. ""Through the ancient north it shall pass, ship to ship the power of powers. All strength to those who unearth it, joined together will earth itself be consumed.""

A Gua intelligence communiquè intercepted by the Raven Nation mentioned an all-powerful weapon the Gua have spent years searching for, and now we were close to finding it. A search of archeological dig sites turned up an excavation of a Viking settlement in Nova Scotia. Crossing the border into Canada was a risk, but one I was willing to take.

The dig was stationed out of a bus graveyard. Yesterday's settlement was today's dump. I had to go in low profile - this time posing as Clyde the tow truck driver who wandered into the wrong place. But that's why I have Eddie and Jordan. Eddie posed as a big-shot archeologist named Dr. Charles Channing. His partner in the dig would be a man who made searching for ""The Hammer of Thor"" his life's ambition ­ an uptight, hefty guy named Dr. Samuel Spiedel. Jordan was

Quatrain 41, Century 4. ""At the inception of the millennium / machines of the new age deliver devastation in war. / From a throne under 13 faceless warriors / the invader king wields power.""

""Inception OS"" is an operating system used by almost every computer in the country — ""the machines of the new age."" Max Stareman is president of the software empire who planned to release the program to a massive media and consumer blitz. If Inception software was the weapon that ""delivered devastation"" then we had to stop it.

And first we had to get to Max Stareman.

Eddie figured tapping into Stareman's home base computer qualified him as nuts and who was I to argue — Eddie'd always called himself ""crazy,"" my plan helped validate the name. Way I saw it, the world's top computer programmers worked for Stareman, and any one of them could've been Gua — even the billionaire himself.

Wondered what the Gua wanted with an operating system anyway? Eddie figured the answer was easy: control. Most of the wo