Read The Dangerous Days of Daniel X Online
Authors: James Patterson,Michael Ledwidge
Tags: #FIC002000
MY PANIC STATE had pretty much quadrupled by the time I burst through Glendale High’s front doors a few minutes later. I raced up and down the halls, ripping open doors and sticking my head into empty classrooms like a lunatic escaped from an alien asylum.
There goes her dad’s theory,
I thought, sprinting through the deserted cafeteria.
Phoebe isn’t here at school.
Not even in the corner of the library where she’d first told me about her sister’s being missing.
Phoebe’s words from the night before burned in my ears as I passed her locker.
You’re like my guardian angel.
Yeah,
I thought, sick with worry.
Or maybe I’m the one who led Seth to you.
“There you are,” Mr. Marshman said as he practically clotheslined me in front of his office. “We’ve been trying to call your house. There was a mix-up, and we forgot to give you your placement exam. I’m glad you’re here early. You can take the test now. This is perfect.”
Was this guy kidding me? Like I needed a test now? Like I didn’t have enough on my mind already?
I let out a deep breath as I glanced over his shoulder at the nearest exit. Should I just bolt? Phoebe obviously wasn’t here. Maybe she’d headed to Malibu on her own. Or maybe Seth had taken her to keep her sister company?
“Mr. Marshman, with all due respect, I really can’t do this now,” I said.
“I think you can, Mr. Hopper.” He handed me a booklet and pencil. “I
know
you can, Mr. Hopper.”
“All right, fine.” I practically ripped the test out of his hands. I leaned it against the nearest wall, speed-read my way through it, marking off answer after answer with machine-gun rapidity.
Maybe thirty seconds later, forty tops, I broke the pencil in half on the last of the one hundred multiple-choice fill-ins. I shoved the test into Marshman’s face.
“Don’t bother to grade it. I aced it,” I said, taking a step for the exit. “Now, I have to go! Every once in a while something is actually more important than school! Hard to believe, I know!”
Marshman suddenly made a grunting sound and shifted like a linebacker to his left, blocking my path.
“I knew you were trouble the first time I laid eyes on you,” he said, red-faced. “My instincts are never wrong, Hopper.”
That’s it. Enough of this nonsense,
I thought.
Up and down the school hallway, I levitated all the student lockers. Then I levitated Mr. Marshman until his bullet head touched the ceiling and he yelped with surprise and disbelief.
“How—how did you do that?”
“You don’t want to know,” I said, gazing into his astounded eyes. “Now you stay right there—for thirty minutes. Let’s call it a time-out!”
Then I left school—in a
blur.
I BURST OUT the back exit into the parking lot.
First I scanned all the cars.
Then the athletic fields. Beyond the wrecked equipment shed, a team was starting early soccer practice.
Maybe Phoebe had joined the soccer team, I thought. No, that didn’t make sense.
You’re losing it, Daniel. This isn’t like you.
I picked up my pace when I saw that one of the girls near the far goal had long black hair. Phoebe? The soccer coach blew her whistle as I ran past.
I was about midfield when the dark-haired girl finally turned around. My heart sank. Unless Phoebe had suddenly turned Asian American, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the coach yelled, charging toward me.
I wish I knew.
Then I heard a girl scream, and I recognized the voice immediately.
“Phoebe!” I yelled, my eyes burning as I half-ran, half-clawed my way up a steep slope beyond the athletic fields. “I’m coming . . . Hold on!”
I finally broke the top of the rise a second later. Thank the heavens, Phoebe was there. She was in a clearing, down on her knees, crying. I wasn’t too late! I’d found her. I ran up and wrapped her in my arms, feeling the familiar warmth of her body.
“Oh Daniel, something really horrible,” she whispered, trembling, “something unspeakable, is about to happen. I just know it. I’m sure of it.”
“IT’S OKAY, PHOEBE,” I said as I rocked her gently back and forth. “I’m here now. Everything is okay. It’s my fault. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“You can say that again,” Phoebe said, suddenly stiffening in my arms.
What the —?
She squirmed away. Then Phoebe gave me a funny smile. Not funny ha-ha. Funny
weird.
Funny
contemptuous.
Funny
sickening.
“What?” I said. “Phoebe? Are you okay? What’s going on here?”
“You are so dumb, it’s amazing,” she said, shaking her head. “You still haven’t figured it out.”
“Figured what out?” I said warily.
Suddenly I fell back, blinded, as a silver-tinged explosion flashed before my eyes. Where Phoebe’s sneakers had been, there was now a huge pair of men’s black shoes. I slowly panned up—long black trousers, a black silk shirt, kinky chin whiskers.
“Wh-wh-wh-what?” I said. Something very articulate and meaningful like that.
Above the collar of the black shirt was an impossibly narrow, horselike head, a
dead
horse’s head, covered in slack, bone-white, bloodless skin. The skin was decorated with pea-sized, pus-oozing bumps, like a diseased chicken’s.
I stared into the monster’s eyes. Shiny, bulging, blood-red orbs embedded in the loose skin like larvae.
“Ironic, isn’t it? Here you were, knocking yourself out to find me.” A voice came from a rattling flap and a hole below the demonic eyes. A British voice.
Seth’s
voice.
He switched back into Phoebe—and batted those startling blue eyes at me.
“And here I was the whole time,” came Seth’s voice—
out of Phoebe’s mouth.
“WAIT A SECOND,” I said, trying to stop the sudden, awful spinning in my head. “That means . . . all along you were . . . Right from the start you were . . .”
Seth changed himself from Phoebe back into the horse-headed monster—that is,
himself.
“Phoebe? Oh yes,” he said, winking an orb as the corners of his mouth pulled up in a horsey smile. “You’re quite a snuggler, Danny. I’ll always cherish the time we had.”
I closed my eyes and slowly shook my head. Talk about something sucking big-time. I’d been getting all googly-eyed and fog-brained over an alien slime pustule. Wow. I’d wanted to die before, but never so badly. I probably would in a second anyway. Cardiac arrest by embarrassment.
“Quite a convincing performance, wasn’t it?” Seth said, taking a little bow. “And I just loved playing Phoebe.”
“Wait a second. Aren’t you supposed to be a
gas
or something?” I asked.
“PR story,” he said. “This is Tinseltown, dear boy. Image is everything. Don’t believe anything you read or hear in LA. Wasn’t I fabulous as Phoebe, though?
I
think I was. I needed to get close to you, Daniel. To see if you posed any danger. You don’t, by the way.
“Now, where were we? Oh yes. Your imminent death.
Imminent
means you’re going to die
soon.
”
He slid his hand—which was more of a seashell-like talon—along my temple. All of a sudden, I felt seasick. Then came a black, despairing nausea. A centrifugal sucking sensation started deep at my core, as if a plug had been pulled at the bottom of my soul.
“My powers,” I whimpered. “They’re . . .”
“Being disconnected? Indeed,” Seth said. “Good thing too. Your misguided thoughts matched with your kind of powers are a combination that is much too potentially dangerous to allow. Not to mention that you ruined my magnificent graveyard creation. That clinched it, I’m afraid. It was a masterwork, don’t you agree? I was particularly fond of the odor of rotting flesh I was able to achieve. That’s why I’m logging you off, son. Good-bye.”
After another minute, the seashell claw withdrew. I lay motionless, hollowed out. I was surprised I could still breathe. I felt feverish, drugged, as Seth lifted me effortlessly in his arms.
“Night, Daniel,” he said.
In Phoebe’s voice, of course.
AS IF FROM FAR AWAY, I heard the sound of traffic.
Traffic?
As my head lolled back, I made out an upside-down Honda Odyssey with tinted black windows. It was the same minivan that I’d spotted in downtown LA, carting around the drug-dealing children.
It’s all coming together horribly,
I thought as the van’s door slid open. Then I was flying through the air before slamming painfully into the far wall.
Bang-up job, Dannyboy,
I thought as my wrists and ankles were duct-taped.
Way to go get ’em. You are your father’s son! You’re definitely ready to battle Number 6 to the death. Yours!
More ugly horse-heads—half a dozen—wearing muscle shirts and tracksuits and gold chains stared down at me with yellowish, cue-ball eyes.
“Meow,” one of them said.
The rest burst into howling laughter. Hey, these were the same losers who’d trashed my house, the ones who’d done the cat attack.
“That’s incredibly funny,” I said as the van’s tires squealed. “I know a good one too. This horse walks into a bar. Bartender says, ‘Hey, buddy. Why the long face?’ ”
I was barely able to cover my head as a dozen shell talons clawed at my eyes.
“Slime ’im! Slime ’im! Slime ’im!” came an eerie chant. Whatever it meant, I didn’t want it.
A particularly ugly, freak-show horse-face appeared a foot above mine. Something was oozing from the inside corners of its mouth hole.
I slammed my eyes shut as something warm and thick dripped onto my forehead and began to pool. The contents of my stomach rioted as I caught the spoiled clam-chowderish whiff of it.
I almost managed to close my mouth before the rancid, vomitizing ooze dripped off my nose, and onto my lips, and right down my throat.
By the way, don’t say I didn’t warn you back around page four that the story might get a little rough at times.
I DON’T KNOW about you, but whenever I’m slimed and hog-tied in the stow-and-go seat well of a minivan, I tend to do a little soul-searching.
First of all, I was pretty angry with myself. I’d let Seth play me like an iPod Shuffle. I’d been
sooo
sure about how ninjalike and under the radar I was being, but now I realized Seth must have felt me the moment I set foot in LA. He was Number 6, after all!
What else? Oh, yeah. I was in paralyzing fear of losing my life. Lots of kidnap victims can say they don’t know what their captors will do to them, but I really, really didn’t know. I mean, were these pus-headed aliens going to slime me again, or was it something worse? I figured . . .
worse.
Then they started playing their music, which was a sophisticated form of torture in itself. The List of Alien Outlaws never said these freaks were fanatics of early eighties bands. We’re talking Journey, Air Supply, Styx. And some group I’d never heard before called Yes that should have been called No. In my humble opinion, anyway.
The eardrum-walloping volume wouldn’t have been so bad if these intergalactic thugs didn’t have to sing along, like this was a karaoke van, banging their mallet-shaped heads back and forth and playing air guitar, air drums, air cymbals.
I just lay there in shock, gazing out the back window at the tops of telephone poles zipping by on our road trip to who-knew-where and who-knew-what.
I should have listened to my mother and father.
I should have listened to Dana.
I should have listened to Ergent Seth.
I’d been warned, hadn’t I?
IT WAS PITCH-BLACK when the silver van pulled off the highway to hell. I was barely able to catch the top of a DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK sign that flashed in the brake lights out the back window.
I was yanked up roughly as we came to a stop about a half hour later. Outside in the headlights stood half a dozen weathered wood factory buildings.
Welcome to the middle of the middle of nowhere,
I thought. So why did this scene seem extremely familiar to me?
“Hey, isn’t this where they shot
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
? The remake of the remake?” I said, thinking out loud.
“Very observant, Daniel,” Seth said proudly. “A true masterpiece of the chain saw–wielding cannibal genre. At least you have good taste in bad movies. I told you, I was in the industry, didn’t I? That remake was one of my finest awful films. Here, let me give you a tour of the shoot,” he said. “No cameras, please!”
He ripped the duct tape off my feet, then dragged me out of the van by my hair. A very painful way to go.
I was pulled past a huge, rust-pocked metal tank into one of the buildings. Dozens of kids were inside, some of them in large cells and some chained to the walls.
I winced as I took in the faces. These were the same missing kids I’d seen from the file “Phoebe” had shown me in LA.
“So that part of the story was true,” I said. “You really are off-loading kids from the earth. You’re nothing but a slave trader.”
“C’mon, that’s not
all
I am,” Seth said as he opened a cell door and kicked me inside. “Don’t forget all the stealing, murdering, and drug dealing I do. Not to mention the hit movies I’ve made about zombies, cannibals, vampires, and cutting instruments.”
I watched as Seth transformed himself into Phoebe Cook.
“Oh Danny. I need your help soooo much,” he/she taunted. The rest of Seth’s horse-head buddies slapped their thighs and broke up laughing.
Seth turned back into his vile and demonic self.
“Absurd logic on your part. Why would a girl as hot as Phoebe Cook need the help of a weak, stupid, substandard, inferior, about-to-be-extinct failure like you? Phoebe was a
test,
Daniel. You failed. Miserably.
Look
at you.”
Whatever Seth had done to sap my power, it had worked. I was having trouble staying on my feet, or even focusing on his hideous horse’s head.
“Now that we’ve come face-to-face, Seth,” I said, staring steadily into his reddish-brown eyes, “my only regret is that you’re not the insectlike lowlife who actually killed my folks.”
“Oh, I just might be their killer after all,” he roared.
“No, you’re not,” I said with a shake of my head. “I marked that miscreant on his skull after he murdered my mom and dad. The creature who took out my parents, the one who is going to pay with his life, is The Prayer. You’re only
sixth
on my List, Seth. Dream on!”
“Isn’t that interesting?” Seth said. “You learn something new and useful every day. Speaking of which, maybe I can tell you something that you didn’t know, Mr. Smart-ass.
You’re
Number 1 on the Hit Parade of every alien currently residing on this backworld of a planet. We were hunting for
you,
young Daniel X. And I just won the jackpot. That’s why you’re still alive. I want to show off my prize. I won, you lost. Maybe I’ll drag you from galaxy to galaxy—
in captivity.
”