Read The Dangerous Days of Daniel X Online
Authors: James Patterson,Michael Ledwidge
Tags: #FIC002000
WHEN I WOKE AGAIN, I don’t know how much later, I noticed that I wasn’t bleeding anymore. I wasn’t up for a footrace with a pickup truck or anything, but I felt like maybe in another hour or so, I could do something incredible. Like, say, sit up.
I was about to give it a shot when the cell door clanged open, and Seth waltzed in. In his claw was an iron bowl of some slop that smelled like rotting fish and looked like macaroni and eye cheese.
“Here, boy,” he said, clucking his tongue as he dropped the bowl next to my head. “Oh, what’s wrong? Does the little doggie have a tum-tum ache? Don’t want to play epic hero anymore? No more a-hunting-aliens-we-will-go? I came down here just to watch your suffering and humiliation. The thing about moments of triumph, you want to make them last!”
“Please don’t hurt me,” I said, shivering. “Please.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Seth said as he squatted down to get a better look at my misery. “I will.”
That’s precisely when I manifested Willy, Joe, Dana, and Emma into the open doorway behind the big horse-headed creep.
That’s right.
Never give up, never say die, live in complete denial.
I even remembered to dress them in the filthy gray jumpsuits that were all the rage with the abducted tween-age slave set this season.
I told you I was feeling a little, teensy bit better. It’s hard to keep a good Alien Hunter down. I think it was the sleep that had done it. I’d recharged enough to work at least a little of my power. Maybe five percent.
I watched my gang hoof it out of my cell and down the corridor of the ship.
“You are pathetic, do you know that?” Seth continued. “You actually thought you could come after me? And win? I even warned you. But losers such as yourself never learn, I suppose. Losers like you are never satisfied until someone actually hands them their head.”
“I should have listened to you,” I moaned, crying. Shia LaBeouf couldn’t have done a better acting job, not even with Steven Spielberg directing. “Please, please,” I said, writhing for effect. “I’ll do anything you want.”
Seth merely smiled. “Of course you will.”
FOR THE NEXT couple of hours, I lay flat on my back in my cell with my eyes closed. What with all I’d been through, I was putting up my feet and taking a major breather.
Yeah, right!
Actually, I was busy communicating telepathically with my friends as they searched the ship for a way out, or at least a way to strike back at Seth and his goons.
First off I watched as Willy searched level upon level for any sign of a lifeboat or an escape pod, but unfortunately there was nothing. It was a Hail Mary, I knew, because even if he found one, there was no way of knowing how to operate it or even which was the direction back to Earth. Willy tried to get near what he thought might be the bridge, but it was crawling with heavily armed mutant horse-faces.
On the main slave factory floor, Joe and Emma discovered that there were chains and pallets underneath all the worktables. The kid slaves worked and slept in the same five square feet.
But Joe and Emma did manage to do something positive. They sat with about twenty or so abducted girls gathered around them. Emma had snagged some yarn from one of the sweatshop shelves, and she was showing them how to make friendship bracelets. Leave it to Emma to find a silver lining just about anywhere.
The most heart-shredding of the psychic podcasts came from Dana. She had spoken to one of the prisoners, a pale Asian American boy who had more than a passing resemblance to the ghost kid from
The Grudge.
“How long have you been here?” Dana asked. “Can you tell me that?”
The kid looked right through her.
“Dunno.”
“Months? Years?”
“Dunno.”
“Where are the older kids?” Dana said.
A look of horror invaded the kid’s face.
“Taken away,” he whispered. He began sobbing as Dana picked him up and put him in her lap. “Sold.”
Of course,
I thought. As if breaking their spirits wasn’t enough, Seth had put the kids on the auction block and sold them to whoever—or
whatever
—could come up with the highest price.
Maybe that was why I was being kept alive—to be sold at auction.
How much for an Alien Hunter, slightly used? With five percent of his former powers?
“You’re going to be okay,” Dana said, hugging the boy as tears rolled down her cheeks. “We’re going to get you out of here and back home. Hey, you want to play I spy? I’ll go first. I spy with my little eye something cute.
You.
”
The kid actually giggled. How do you like that? Leave it to her. Even in hell, Dana could make people laugh.
Okay, then, what had I learned? Fact one: there was no resistance against the impossibly cruel alien creeps. Fact two: there was no possibility for escape.
I reminded myself for the millionth time to never underestimate an opponent again. Oh, wait. What was I thinking? There wasn’t going to be an again.
I WAS EATING an imaginary cherry sno-cone—which helped my spirits more than you might think. I was planning on an imaginary lemon-and-lime one next.
“Bet’s to you, Daniel,” Pork Chop said, peering at me over her massive pile of chips. “Quit stalling and lose the hand already.”
If you think regular solitary confinement is boring, you should try it on an alien spaceship. That’s why I decided to host a family World Series of Poker tournament in my cell.
I guess I was feeling a little better. In the special power sense, at least. I was able to manifest my parents and sister, the poker table, cards, some chips, sno-cones.
“And on our left, the Danster continues to hold up the game,” my sister complained. “And to slurp in the most disgusting way imaginable.”
“I call,” I said, turning over my aces.
All six of them.
“What the —?” Pork Chop said in outrage. She picked up two of my aces and shook them in my face. “This is outrageous. I don’t care if you are delirious.”
“That’s the ace of crosses and the ace of cats,” I said proudly.
“Those cards don’t exist,” Pork Chop said. “Those
suits
don’t even exist.”
“Daniel, c’mon. That’s not like you,” my mom said.
“Gee, Mom,” I said, clutching my aching stomach. “I guess I haven’t been in the best of moods since Seth gave me this new belly button here.”
An overwhelming sense of sadness and anger had finally enveloped me. Here I was about to be executed or maybe something worse—and what was I doing? Sitting here and taking it.
“Who am I kidding with this garbage?” I yelled. “Pork Chop, listen to me! You think cheating at cards is a shocker? I know something that’ll blow your mind. . . .
You’re not real!
I invent you, create you, bring you into being. I daydream you like the alien that I am. Mom and Dad aren’t real either!”
“What are you? Crazy?” Brenda said, making a face. “Who died and made you God? Explain that one to me.”
A chilling realization came to me then.
I knew who Brenda really was.
And why I could manifest her so easily.
“Okay, here’s your explanation. Ready? You used to be real, but you were killed.”
My sister’s face was drained of its color.
“What do you mean? I feel perfectly fine. When did this happen?”
“When I was three a killer came to our house. His name is The Prayer. Mom must have been pregnant with you. When she died, you died.”
Pork Chop turned to my mom and dad. Tears beaded in her eyes. “He’s lying,” she said. “I don’t want to be dead. I don’t want you both to be dead.”
I looked across the room, where my mother and father were hugging Pork Chop. Both of them were crying too.
And then they were gone.
I WAS SLUMPED over in my cell, feeling awful about what I’d said to Pork Chop, when I sensed wraithlike movement on the other side of my cell door. Then Seth entered with a contingent of formal-looking, uniformed alien guards. Now I felt even worse. If I was murdered, I’d never be able to tell Pork Chop how sorry I was.
I was herded into a large, high-ceilinged chamber crowded with a couple dozen horse-heads in black smocks, working at computer consoles.
Was this the execution chamber?
My mind reeled, coming up with a couple dozen horrendous ways in which I would now be put to death. I gritted my teeth and erased all the bad images. I wasn’t going to give Seth the satisfaction of seeing me afraid.
“Get it over with, Seth,” I said. “Do your worst. I can take it.”
“You think so? Put his home up on the big screen,” Seth commanded.
I turned as a soccer field–sized wall seemed to vaporize and a star-sprawled view of space appeared.
Oh,
I thought. This wasn’t the execution chamber. It was the bridge of the spaceship. Whoops, I’d jumped to the wrong conclusion. I liked this one a whole lot better.
The view on the screen seemed to pan to the left. I gasped! Filling the screen was Earth in all its massive, beautiful glory.
“Why have we come back?” I asked. “And why is Terra Firma greenish at the edges? What have you done now, Seth?”
“Come back? Did you hear this fool?” Seth called out to the other aliens. “Of course, we just went for a seventeen-light-year spin around the block. That’s not Earth, idiot. I said
you
were home. Welcome to Alpar Nok, your home world, jackass.”
Alpar Nok?
I thought, staring at the green-tinged planet.
My home?
The screen tilted suddenly, and the shining green planet on it got larger and larger as we approached in a hurry.
My poker face crumbled as we blasted through clouds and an ocean appeared. An ocean, calm and limitless and filled with the purest, bluest water I’d ever seen.
I felt it then, a kind of warming of my soul. I could hardly breathe. I couldn’t take my eyes away from this miracle.
I was home.
I WAS STILL DUMBFOUNDED as Seth and his security contingent of armed mutant killers escorted me through the bowels of the ship and toward the landing elevator.
A million questions and feelings rushed through me at once.
What would my people look like? Would anyone know me? Did they all have powers like mine? Did I have actual family still living here?
“You may wonder why I brought you home,” Seth prattled on with his fancy English accent. “I’m such a show-off. Love to rub it in. I wanted your race to see that their defeat was complete across the universe. All hail the returning conquered
loser!
That’s
you,
by the way.”
Unfortunately Seth was right. My hands were shackled behind me, then I was shoved roughly into the elevator car.
We plummeted, and almost instantly slammed to a sudden stop. The forward ramp automatically dropped down, kicking up dust. I squinted through it as I was pushed out and . . .
Felt panic. Huge
Perfect Storm
waves of horror and dread and shock.
No!
I thought.
This can’t be my home.
For mile upon mile, as far as my eye could see, corkscrewed metal girders and wrecked vehicles poked out from mountainous piles of scorched rubble. The few buildings that were still standing were warped, shattered, windowless. The prevailing sound was the whistle of wind over tumbled bricks. From horizon to horizon lay the demolished remains of a massive city, one that had been as big as New York or London.
Staring at the destruction, I stood frozen with despair. Grief for my people and my ruined world filled me. Seth had gotten me yet again, I realized.
Hey, look, Daniel. Here’s your home planet. Oh, I forgot to mention, it’s been leveled.
I CAUGHT HIM staring at me, a mirthful smile on his fetid alien face.
He’s fooled me twice,
I thought with a shake of my head.
Shame on me.
Twenty feet below the rim of the elevated landing ramp was what looked like a derailed bullet train. Someone had scrawled DEATH TO ERGENT SETH in its dust-covered side.
“
You
did this,” I said, turning to Seth. It wasn’t a question.
Seth took a long cigar out of his pocket and lit it with a gold Zippo as he winked at me.
“I know,” he said, blinking as he shook his head at the desolate vista. “Unreal, isn’t it? Sometimes even
I
can’t believe it. I mean, ever since I was little, I always dreamed of committing mass destruction. But on this kind of scale? It’s more than even I had a right to expect.”
Seth raised a claw and saluted his handiwork. Half a mile away, a massive pit was being carved out of the rubble. Insectlike machines of the same green-gray metal as the spacecraft were moving around and around in slow circles. There were more pits in the distance beyond it, and more busy insectile machines.
“They’re called World Harvesters, my race’s greatest invention,” Seth said proudly.
“They’ll chew through anything—rock, garbage, dead bodies, you name it—and remove every atom of valuable minerals and elements. It took half a million years for your people to build the city of Bryn Spi, the shining jewel of your planet. It took me one and a half hours to blow it into a billion shiny pieces. And by this time next year—and this is my favorite part—it will look like nothing ever stood here at all.”
My heart seemed to be unfastening inside my chest. “Where is everyone?” I asked.
“Your fellow Alparians? The few who are still alive scurry through the ruins like rats. They have no powers, no hope, no reason to live, really. But still they stumble on. Pathetic.”
Seth shook his head in disgust.
“Protectors of the Universe?” he said, tapping the ash from his cigar with one of his talons. “Guess they should have worried more about protecting themselves.”
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, Protectors of the Universe?” I asked.
“You
are
clueless, aren’t you?” Seth said. “I keep forgetting you had all this thrust on you at three years of age. Behold, Alpar Nok, the home of the Alien Hunters, the universe’s answer to injustice and evil! Your parents were sent to Earth to protect the oh-so-special humans from the Outer Ones, as they like to call us.
“Because a few pathetic Alparians were born with some ability to manipulate the universal force, it was thought you could protect the good from the evil. As if good and evil aren’t just fairy tales made up for small children. There are the
strong
and then there are the
weak.
”
I looked out at the ruined city again. Seth and his buddies had left just enough standing for me to see how amazing it must have been.
Fragments of exotic spires, pyramids, domes, pagodas, minarets, columns, and obelisks peeked out in every direction. Right next to us was a giant sculpted building that looked like a hundred-story violin made of glass and metal. Now it leaned precariously because a huge hole had been blown in its base.
Wait a second, I thought. It was leaning toward us.
Maybe that was a good thing.