Daniel X: Game Over (3 page)

Dana’s face was still ashen. “He’s serious, you two. It was bad. Let me tell you.”

“First things first,” I said. “It’s getting dark, and we have to go find ourselves a secure place to spend the night. Then we’ll grab some grub and get these two caught up.”

I walked over to a nearby glass-and-chrome bus shelter and scanned the route map. The GC building is located in the Nishi-Shinjuku district of Tokyo. It’s a gleaming, bustling, ultradense corporate neighborhood with fancy retail and restaurants around the edges. We needed someplace a little quieter, a little less crowded, a little less likely to be frequented by Number 7 and Number 8’s minions.

“Keihin,” I said, spotting a sprawling, industrial-looking area on the map down along Tokyo Harbor. It seemed like the kind of place that would have plenty of good spots to hide, and not too many people—or aliens.

“Get on,” I said, quickly materializing Pasmo fare cards and handing them out as a bus pulled up. “We’ve got a bit of a ride ahead of us.”

“If I lose my mind from hunger,” said Joe, “I’m blaming you.”

“You lost your mind a long time ago,” Dana quipped.

“I hope it’s a scenic route,” said Emma. “Apart from Number 7 and Number 8 being here, I’m loving what I’ve seen of this country so far. It’s so…
foreign.
”

I knew just what she meant, I thought, settling down by a window near the back of the mostly empty bus. Although, technically speaking,
everything
is foreign to me. I am, after all, quite possibly the universe’s most displaced orphan. I clutched my arm to my chest as a wave of homesickness washed over me. I call it homesickness; yet I barely have any memory of what my home was like.

I turned and looked behind us out the bus window, hoping to hide my stupid emotions from my friends. The sinister GC Tower still loomed above us, and I again wondered if Number 7 and Number 8 were in there. Probably, I figured. The only things that have been constants in my life are the monsters I’m fated to kill—or die trying.

That and
feeling sorry for myself,
apparently. I needed to get a grip. What was that lesson I had I learned in my last martial arts training session? Something about how if your emotions are getting in the way, you need to tie them to what’s going on around you. You need to link them to something practical and immediate.

Like the problem of six aliens masquerading as tattooed young thugs who got on the bus at the next stop.

IT MUST HAVE been Bad Human Disguise Day here in Tokyo, because those dirtbags wouldn’t even have passed for human in a Halloween parade for blind space rangers.

Never mind forked tongues. These guys apparently didn’t know that human knees bend
forward,
not
backward
—and that most folks don’t have long, hairy tails. Most of them had tucked their tails up their shirts, but the biggest one left his hanging out the top of his leather pants. They clambered aboard like so many overgrown insect-Labrador hybrids and gathered around a tired-looking family of four seated at the front of the bus.

I turned up my hearing (it’s a shame you earthlings can’t do that), so I could listen in on what they were saying. They were joking among themselves in a horrible attempt at Japanese.

“Nice haul tonight,” said one of the shorter ones.

“Not bad,” said the tallest and strongest looking of the thugs, the one with the tail hanging out. He also seemed to be the one with the most tattoos—dragons and shogun swords were all up and down his arms and neck. I suddenly realized what they were going for with their gangster exercise clothes and slicked-back hair: they were pretending to be Yakuza, the ruthless Japanese version of America’s mafia.

“But remember, we’re not just supposed to be collecting revenue; we’re supposed to be
acquiring targets for the next hunt.
”

“You mean like
these
guys?” said the one wearing the gold-brimmed New York Yankees cap, elbowing the father of the unfortunate family next to him.

The big one leaned over and snuffled at the side of the father’s head as the rest of the family sank into their seats in terror.

“Ah, what luck!” he shouted, suddenly wide-eyed and excited. “These are the ones that got away!”

The five of us watched in shock as one of the aliens proceeded to knock out the bus driver with a blow to the back of the head, while another removed what looked like a high-tech staple gun and fired it into the father’s shoulder. The poor man screamed in pain and fell to the floor.

I didn’t need to say a word to Dana, Emma, Willy, and Joe—we all stormed to the front of the rapidly decelerating bus.

The man wasn’t dead—he wasn’t even bleeding—but whatever they had just done to him sure didn’t tickle.

“All right, tough guys,” said Willy, standing up to his full five foot two inches and throwing out his not-exactly-intimidating chest. “Get off this bus, or I’m going to pour a fifty-five-gallon drum of hurt all over your heads.”

The big goon turned and for a moment looked at Willy like he’d lost his mind. Then he joined his friends in raucous laughter.

“Maybe we can paralyze them with humor?” suggested Joe as the thugs jumped up on the seats around us and simultaneously drew out the biggest Ginsu knives I’d ever seen.

I leaped ahead of my friends.

“Drop. The. Knives,” I said in a voice that, for a second or two, actually made them stop grinning like jackals.

“Kill them,” the leader commanded.

“But the boss said no taking humans yet.”

“These aren’t humans,” he replied. “They’re gnats.”

“They’re what?” asked his thickheaded henchman, apparently not knowing what a gnat was and taking him at his word.

“Just
get
them!” ordered the boss.

They sprang toward us, knives flashing. But they didn’t realize who they were dealing with. While they were arguing about bugs, I had already decided exactly how I wanted to handle these guys. Having recently played one of the GC’s rated-M-for-mature games, Extreme Cage Fighter VI, I morphed myself into one of the most legendary thugs in all video-game lore—Vito the Home Wrecker. Have I mentioned my ability to transform myself into any person or creature that my mind can adequately visualize?

My arms and legs grew long, muscles I didn’t normally have rippled all over my body, my neck became massive, my jaw as square as a cinder block, and the next thing I knew I was nearly seven feet tall and over two hundred pounds. The alien thugs instantly recognized me—and my weapon of choice, an oversized baseball bat wrapped in razor wire.

“Vito?!”
asked one of them, standing stock-still with the rest of his friends.

“Get off this bus,” I growled, smashing my club against the floor and causing the bus to rock like we’d just driven over a land mine. “And go tell your superiors that the
Alien Hunter
is here.”

“Only if I got your severed head in my hands to prove it!” one of the more dimwitted henchmen yelled. He sprang for me, but I was too quick. The bat smashed into him in midair, and he dropped like a stone.

“Who’s next?” I roared. “I’ve been dying for some batting practice.”

The jaws of their pathetic human-costume faces all fell open as I flexed my biceps, covered—as was most of my body—in tattoo portraits of Roman Catholic saints.

“GET OFF!!!” I yelled, and, even before I could cock my club for a second swing, they were clambering over each other to exit the narrow bus door, tails tucked firmly between their legs.

“CHECK THE DRIVER, Em,” I said, assuming my regular form. Emma’s got the best medical training of any of us. A few days ago I’d downloaded the entire medical school curricula from Johns Hopkins and Vanderbilt Universities into her consciousness.

Meantime, the rest of us checked on the family. I helped the weary-looking father to his feet and instantly recognized something about him, something about his touch, his energy.

“Wait a second,” I said. “You’re—”

“Alpar Nokian,” he said back to me. “All four of us are. Just like you.” In an interesting twist of fate, Alpar Nokians like me are physically identical to you human folks.

“What on earth?”

“Precisely. We were abducted by Number 7 and Number 8’s minions two months ago and brought here.”

“But why?”

“Best I can figure is we were supposed to be target practice. A training exercise before they went after
you.
”

“You know who I am?”

“Didn’t you just tell us? You’re the Alien Hunter,” he said, bowing respectfully.

I had just announced that to the entire bus, hadn’t I? My friends had been nagging me to get more rest—it felt like it had been a month since I’d had a full night’s sleep—and maybe it was time I started listening to them. I was losing track of what I’d said only minutes ago.

“But if you were captured by Number 7 and Number 8, then why are you on this bus, and why did those fake Yakuza just
re
find you?”

“We were held in isolation for weeks, but then one day our cell door was just, well, it was open. Somebody must have let us out for some reason.”

He shrugged and helped his wife and then his kids to their feet. “As to how they found us again just now, I have no idea. Maybe bad luck?”

I nodded. I was getting pretty familiar with what bad luck looked like.

“Thank you for saving us, but we should get going,” he said.

“Where will you go?” asked Dana.

“We don’t know, but we’ll rely on alien ingenuity, yes? We just need to keep moving.”

“That’s fine, except for one thing,” I said, and turned and yelled to Emma. “How’s the driver?”

“He’ll be fine. Going to have a nice goose egg on the back of his head, but he’ll be okay.”

“Good. Come here and take a look at this man’s shoulder. Those thugs were talking about ‘acquiring targets,’ right? And something about a hunt? Something makes me think they may have put a transponder in this man, and that we should take it out so they can be on their way without getting tracked down in, like, the next ten minutes.”

Emma came back to us, asked the man to remove his button-down shirt, and examined his shoulder.

“I see where it must have gone in, but it’s a tiny wound. Maybe a microfiber transmitter?”

“Can we get it out of him?”

“Sure. Why don’t you just dematerialize it, Daniel?”

“Well, because I need to know what it is in order to do that. It’s not like wishing it away, you know.” That was true. I have to know exactly what it is I’m dealing with—and where it is—or it could be, um, a little dangerous. I mean, I didn’t want to put an unnecessary hole in the man, or sever an artery.

“I trust you,” said the man.

“I’m an alien hunter, not a surgeon, sir.”

“You’re the Alien Hunter—you can do
anything.
”

“Don’t believe the hype,” I replied. “My so-called powers only work when I have enough time to think something through, and when I truly
understand
what it is I’m trying to do.”

Seriously—it’s not as easy as you might think.