Read The Dangerous Days of Daniel X Online
Authors: James Patterson,Michael Ledwidge
Tags: #FIC002000
I LET HIM keep coming until the last possible second, when I dropped low and tumbled directly under his legs. I even managed to hook my right foot around his leg and trip him.
The home and away crowd cheered as he landed hard enough to crack the stone ground.
Okay,
I thought.
So far, so alive.
Seth grunted as he got up and shook his mammoth shoulders. He jogged toward me, then stopped and grinned. He curled his claws, crouching in a kind of kung fu stance.
I put up my fists beside my head and crouched, waiting for the next, furious attack.
But instead of the roundhouse kick I was expecting, a forked bolt of red lightning erupted out of Seth’s mouth. It struck me point-blank in the forehead.
Not fair,
I thought, as sizzling force and blinding light hit me between the eyes like a burning sledgehammer.
Nobody said anything about lightning.
I stumbled back, my hair singed, my clothes black and smoking. So much for my
Iliad
strategy, and my being Achilles the Second, and probably my living until tomorrow morning.
“Nice try, Seth,” I said, grinning. Which was a pretty gutsy statement considering that I was about to die.
I even managed to stay on my feet. Alien Hunter rule of thumb:
In the event of near electrocution, stay upright.
And then Seth changed strategies. He ran over me like a runaway freight train.
Maybe might does make right?
HE ACTUALLY DROVE ME down
into
the stone ground a few inches. Then he wrapped me in his arms and lifted me above his head. Up close, he smelled like death, and yes, unfortunately, I have experience with that particular odor. Far too much for my tender years.
“Oh, Danny,” he said in Phoebe Cook’s voice as he drew me to him. “I love it when we hug.”
Let me walk you through the being-squeezed-to-death-by-an-alien process. First it feels like a dump truck is sitting on your chest. Then it feels like an aircraft carrier landed directly on you. Black stars begin to cloud your vision. I had never seen or even heard of black stars before. Maybe they were the last thing you got to see on your way to the other side.
“I am more,”
Seth roared through gritted teeth as he continued to crush me into fine particles.
“I am more.”
I could feel my bones about to pulverize, my eyeballs ready to pop from their sockets.
I held on as long as I could.
Then I forced a final smile.
“I told you I was smarter than you, Dumb-Dumb. Didn’t I tell you?”
Seth looked at me curiously, and in the next instant, everything—Seth, the improvised coliseum, the immovable crushing pressure—
all of it was gone.
I was on a white sheet.
I’m not talking a regular hospital sheet or something, but an incredibly enormous, billowing white sheet, a virtual desert of a white sheet going off and out of sight in every direction.
I was clinging to it desperately. With my arms and legs and teeth.
My eight, long, segmented, covered-in-an-exoskeleton arms and legs, by the way.
I’d turned myself into a tick.
I was now too small for Seth to squeeze to death. Let’s face it. I was so small I doubted Seth could even
see
me.
I STARTED to turbo-climb the cloth cliff of Seth’s white shirt. I was actually on his shoulder blade when I turned and saw his enormous eye staring down at me.
Far off, I watched a claw the size of a two-family house rise toward me. Uh-oh.
Then I jumped! The claw actually brushed my back. It came so close, I almost went flying off Seth altogether.
Almost.
I landed on the side of Seth’s head, next to his ear.
And then I held my breath . . . and crawled inside.
YUCK!
It was like the most disgusting cave ever discovered. Right in my path was what looked like a tractor trailer’s worth of melted Limburger cheese.
My tick torso doubled over and I started to dry heave. I realized I was standing in Seth’s earwax.
Finally, though, I rose up tall—and shouted!
“On Terra Firma, they have a product called Q-tips. You should look into it, Seth,” I yelled.
“WHO SAID THAT?
” he bellowed as I scampered down the curving corridor of his ear canal.
I didn’t stop until I came to a bulging red nodule. It was plugging up the tunnel. Now what?
I shut my eyes and pictured the anatomy of the Verm-gypian head from the diagram on my laptop. Having a photographic memory comes in really handy sometimes.
I realized I was staring at his tympanic membrane, or eardrum.
Hmmm.
It parted like a curtain as I cut into it with my fang.
Seth howled, so I must have been doing something right.
Next, I wriggled my way into a chamber called the tympanic cavity. Above me was a repulsive bulging, hanging thing that looked like a giant squid. It was Seth’s cochlea, the organ that turns sound into brain signals.
There was a little window in it where a funny-looking bone called the stirrup flickered in and out.
I climbed up and crawled over the stirrup and through the window, into Seth’s inner ear.
“I’m still here!” I reassured him. “This is still a fight to the death!”
THE INSIDE of Seth’s cochlea was even grosser than his earwax situation. It was filled with this fluid that was . . . ugh, I don’t even want to get into it.
I swam through the gook until I reached another opening filled with what looked like yellow spaghetti.
Aha! Just what I was looking for, a gaggle of Seth’s nerves. Auditory or vestibular, I wasn’t sure, and it didn’t matter.
I just needed a way to travel so far into his skull that there’d be no chance for him to get me out. I wriggled into a ductlike nerve, headfirst, and continued on my merry way, spelunking through Seth’s head.
For some reason, I don’t think Seth was having as much fun as I was. Periodically I would hear him moan things like
NO
and
PLEASE
and my personal favorite,
MOMMY
.
“I’m right here, honey!” I called back. “But you know what they say about letting an opponent get inside your head?”
After about five minutes of wriggling, I arrived at more yellowish spaghetti, and clumps of unidentifiable organs that looked important, and rather delicate. By my calculations, I was now in Seth’s brain stem, halfway between his medulla oblongata and his pons.
This was the Grand Central Station of Seth’s brain, the part that controlled his respiration, his blood pressure, his heart rate.
“Are all the brains of your species this small, Chunk Bucket? Or are you like an exception?” I yelled.
“GET OUT OF MY HEAD!
” Seth screamed.
His voice was truly thunderous in the chamber of his skull. The voice of an angry god in an evil temple.
“GET OUT OF MY HEAD NOW OR I’LL BOARD MY SHIP AND BLOW THIS PLANET TO DUST!
” he screamed.
And that was different from what he had intended to do in what way?
“You want me out of your head?” I said.
“YES!
”
“You sure?”
“YES!
”
“Say please.”
“PLEASE!
”
“Okay,” I said. “If you insist. But you won’t like it. Ready or not, I’m coming out!”
I LET OUT a thunderous trumpeting roar, and I mean that literally. My tick legs thickened as my body bulged, expanding at an amazing rate.
Seth had begun to shriek for his
MOMMY
again.
Then my head hit the ceiling of something spongy, and I slid through tissue and membrane with a wet
pop.
I blinked in the suddenly bright sunlight, raised my glorious trunk to the sky, and trumpeted again.
Yes, trumpeted!
I’d transformed myself into a glorious elephant! One the size of Chordata.
I towered there for a moment, feeling my elephantness, feeling the power and might and wisdom of everything that was hopeful and alive about Alpar Nok.
Seth was lying on the stone beneath me, and well . . . wow. Seth wasn’t doing too well.
Euphemism. Look it up.
Where his head used to be was basically a pool of pale-colored slime.
This piece of garbage who had nearly destroyed my planet had had a large head for sure. But even his head couldn’t contain a full-grown elephant.
I trumpeted again, and the kids from Earth and Alpar Nok leaped to their feet, cheering.
The remaining alien commandos stood there in shock as I morphed back into myself.
“You there,” I said to the largest and nastiest-looking of them all.
“Me?” The creature cringed, fearfully pointing a claw at himself.
“Yes, you,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Krothgark.”
“Krothgark, I haven’t decided if I’m going to let you live or not. Would you like to influence my decision?”
“Yes,” Krothgark said. “Very much.”
“Then do yourself a big favor and unchain those kids,” I said. “And
those
kids. And
those. All
of them.”
“You got it, sir. Right away, right away. You heard the man,” Krothgark said, smacking one of the horse-head soldiers next to him. “Unchain the children.”
When I looked up I saw that people were streaming toward me. I gave Bem and his sister, Kulay, high fives as my uncle pinched both of my cheeks.
“
Woooh,
” I heard Joe yell from somewhere in the happy crush. “Yeah, baby! We’re going to Disney World.” Leave it to Joe.
“You’ve saved us,” Grandma Blaleen said as she hugged me tightly.
Then Dana had her arm around me too, and nothing had felt so good to me in a long, long time.
“You’re . . .” she sobbed. “You’re . . .”
“Still alive?” I said. “Of course. How could I let
us
die?”
Just then, a human girl came running up to us. She had flaming red hair, lots of freckles—very pretty. “I was held captive on that terrible spaceship,” she said. “Thank you for saving me. I’m Phoebe Cook, the real one.”
She had something tucked under her arm. “I found this on the ship. I thought it might be important.”
My laptop!
I reached for the computer containing The List of all the other alien scum I had to destroy, but before I could say a word to Phoebe, Dana did.
“It’s very nice to meet you, Phoebe. I’m glad you’re all right. Now you should go back and celebrate with your friends. Daniel is with me. Bye-bye, Phoebe. Scoot along.”
IF I THOUGHT the first feast at my grandma’s was something, I hadn’t seen anything yet. There were twelve straight days of dancing and music, celebrating, eating, storytelling, you name it. Except that you couldn’t possibly imagine a blowout party on Alpar Nok, could you?
For hours and hours, total strangers came up and embraced me. My arms were sore from shaking hands. And my cheeks, from being pinched. I was told that I met every single inhabitant of Alpar Nok.
Twice.
At one point during the final fireworks show—
really, this was the final
—I found my grandma and sat her down for a heart-to-heart.
“Let me help you rebuild the city,” I said. “Where do we start? When?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “You’ve done enough here, Daniel. You have to go back to Earth. Finish the work your parents started. And I’d go
now,
if I were you. Make the Outer Ones take you and the rest of the abducted kids back. Before those blackguards can think about it, and do something deceitful and treacherous.”
“But when will I see you again?” I said. “
Will
I see you again?”
“Of course you will, Daniel,” she said. “In your dreams, in your mind’s eye, and always in your heart.”
“One question,” I finally said. “Seriously now. Are you a doctor?”
She shrugged. “Gardener,” she said.
KISSING THE EARTH WITH MY DRANG AND ALL THAT GOOD STUFF
THE SUN WAS JUST STARTING to set as we crossed a cornfield near Huxley, Iowa, where I had the Outer Ones drop us off after we’d delivered the last of the abducted Earth children safely home. I was watching the departing spaceship when I almost tripped over a football lying in the grass.
You wouldn’t think that a scuffed-up, oblong ball with
NFL
written in jazzy script under its laces could actually fill a person with unbridled joy, but I almost started crying.
Something good had just happened. I was back on Terra Firma, and I’d missed it like crazy, more than I ever could have imagined.
This is my home,
I realized.
I love it here. It’s a great, great planet.
I bent and lifted the football.
“Joe,” I said, hefting it. “Go long, my man.”
Willy, Dana, Emma, and I cracked up as we watched Joe run. Fewer things in life are funnier than watching Joe-Joe put the pedal to the metal. When he got about eighty yards away, he yelled back.
“I’m open, Daniel! Throw it! Chuck it! Montana to Jerry Rice, Brady to Randy Moss, Brett Favre to anybody!”
“You call that
long?
” I yelled at him.
Joe kept running, and talking. About four minutes later, when he was basically a blip on the horizon, my cell phone rang.
“This long enough for you, wise guy?” Joe said, breathing heavily into the phone.
“That’ll do it,” I said, and let the football fly. It made a hissing sound through the golden, early evening sky as it spiraled toward Joe and the sun. I was glad there weren’t any passing aircraft, because I had to put some arc on that sucker.
Joe was standing about half a mile away. We burst into loud applause as he caught it and then got knocked onto his butt.
“Now that’s what I call a catch, Joe,” I said as I ran up and saw my bud sitting smack-dab in the middle of a cow pie. Willy was punching his thighs, he was laughing so hard.
“And check it out,” I said, pointing toward the field behind Joe.
“We’re not the only ones impressed.”