Read The Dangerous Days of Daniel X Online
Authors: James Patterson,Michael Ledwidge
Tags: #FIC002000
The Dangerous Days of Daniel X (13 page)
ALL MY RELATIVES had started to hum. I was about to ask what was up when a flicker of light appeared on the wall.
Then a scene formed.
It was a mom and dad and a little boy in a powder blue rowboat. Hey, wait! That wasn’t just any little boy. That was me!
My relatives were projecting some kind of memory home movies on the wall for me! How crazy was that? And how cool.
For the next hour, I rested my chin in my palms and watched memory after memory in total awe! My mom and dad in what looked like navy officers’ uniforms, getting married. Taking me home from the hospital, playing with me in a swimming pool, playing with me at the beach. I smiled as I spotted myself petting Chordata’s trunk.
After a while, the scene on the wall changed to me as a small child playing with four friends.
Suddenly it felt like the top of my head blew off! I tapped my grandmother’s hand as I realized who this was.
Joe, Willy, Dana, Emma, and me in a sandbox!
My buds! My dudes! No way! We were good friends even as little kids?
“Wait a second! That’s Joe, Willy, Emma, and Dana. My friends,” I said excitedly.
“Yes, they were your friends from preschool. My, how you used to get on,” my grandmother said. “You formed a friendship bond, called a
drang,
that is rarely seen among our people. Very powerful, Daniel. Very special.”
“But where are they now? I have to see them immediately.”
She touched my face.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “They were together at the Academy when it was bombed on FirstStrike. Their bodies were never recovered. They’re presumed dead, Daniel.”
Tears sprang to my eyes as I felt the strength suddenly leave my body. My head hit the tabletop as a bolt of despair shot into my brain stem. It felt like I was being torn in two.
With all the destruction that I had seen, the ruin of an entire world, it wasn’t until this moment that I was truly overcome. I hadn’t felt such sadness since I was three.
Dana, Joe, Emma, and Willy—my best friends had all been murdered by Ergent Seth and his villains.
I don’t know exactly who I was when I finally lifted my head and dried my eyes. Just that I wasn’t the same person I had been minutes before.
“Seth,” I whispered. “I’m coming for you. I swear I am. I promise you, Dana, Joe, Emma, Willy, my dear dead friends! My
drang.
”
MY HEAD WAS STILL SPINNING when I woke up the morning after the party. Meeting my real family for the first time would have been overwhelming in itself. But at the same time trying to get up to speed on my people
and
the history of my planet and—hello!—my destiny had been like drinking from a fire hose.
I was hoping to catch a few stragglers from the night before. I still had about a thousand questions bouncing around in my skull. But there was no one. In fact even my grandmother seemed to be gone.
I found a handwritten note taped to the inside of the front door.
Dear Daniel,
You are still recuperating, so I couldn’t bear to wake you, but there is grave news! Terrible, woeful news!
The Outer Ones’ World Harvesters have reached the outskirts of Undertown, our last sanctuary in the city. A cave-in at one of the lower tunnels has left hundreds of casualties, and I must leave to help. It is utter chaos and desolation for thousands more who have lost their dwelling places. Mothers and children are weeping and bleeding in the streets.
You have come at a miserable, desperate time for our planet. Who knows, maybe this is no accident. The horse-faced beasts are everywhere, so I must go.
I hope to see you again, and if not—
Love, great love, for all of eternity, my brave, handsome Daniel.
Grandma Blaleen
THE SUN WAS GETTING LOW as I finally made it back out of the confusing maze of tunnels under Alpar Nok’s shattered surface. I turned into the nearest abandoned office tower and hit its stairwell at a gallop. Grandma Blaleen was right—the horse-faced beasts were everywhere!
A short time later, I stood on the roof, watching the sun set. The Alparian sun was almost twice as large as Earth’s. Or was Alpar Nok just closer to it? Anyway, it had a yellowish-green tinge that turned into a blue and gold as it sank. It was heart-stoppingly beautiful, as I was sure this city had once been. I imagined this same fate for New York and Paris and London back on Earth, and it chilled me to the bone.
Then I stared at Seth’s spaceship hovering ominously in the distance. And his sickening machines eating through this planet, like worms through a smashed apple.
I thought about all the dreams and beauty Seth had taken away. And lives—like Joe’s, Willy’s, Emma’s, Dana’s. My dear friends murdered long ago at their school, of all places.
How long would it be before this same kind of senseless destruction would be replayed on Earth?
I closed my eyes, concentrated fiercely, and brought my friends back. With my mind, of course.
“Whu-what?” Joe said, coming up beside me. “No! You gotta be messing with my head. I mean, the alien spaceship was a trip, but now we’re actually on another
planet?
A wrecked planet, I see, but still. Tell me they have light sabers, Daniel. I want my own light saber!”
“Don’t listen to him, Daniel,” Willy said, punching Joe in the arm. “He’s just taken one small step for idiots, one giant step for idiotkind.”
“I know things look bad now, Daniel,” Emma said, scanning the jagged horizon. “But this planet has an incredible life force, one that is even greater than Earth’s. I can practically taste it. Given time and isolation, it’ll come back.”
I felt something hopeful in my chest. I’d almost forgotten how good it felt to be among my friends again.
My murdered friends,
I couldn’t help thinking.
I stepped over to where Dana stood, off by herself, looking very sad.
“What is it, Dana? Why won’t you talk? Did I do something wrong?”
Her eyes teared. Suddenly she hugged me hard.
“Okay, Daniel, I know what you have to do here. I’m just so afraid, afraid of losing you. And myself. But let’s get to work anyway. Let’s try to stop Seth if we possibly can.”
For the next several hours, we just sat there and thought about how to save our homeland. We turned over the options and possibilities, thousands of them, actually. Unfortunately, they all pretty much stank.
“What do we do now?” Dana finally asked. “We still don’t have a plan—and my brain is getting numb.”
“Sleep,” I said. “Dream about The Prayer, I suppose. But tomorrow we fight to live!”
THE NEXT MORNING it took us hours of tricky and difficult hiking through the landfill of the destroyed city to get anywhere near Seth’s ship.
If the disaster area looked bad from far away, close up it was much worse. There were thousands of horse-heads everywhere I could see.
We staggered around shattered baby cribs, computer screens, old newspapers and books, broken appliances, skeletons, all of it covered thickly with ash and mud.
When we got closer to Seth’s gigantic spacecraft, I saw that another landing chute was down.
“I guess he’s not afraid of an attack,” I said.
“What are we going to do?”
Willy said nervously. “I don’t like the look in your eyes.”
“Get it over with,” I said. “Tussle, rumble, duel to the death. Something awful, something final.”
I pulled a metal pole out from the rubble. Then I hurled it about the length of three football fields. About four seconds later, the pole clanged against the ship’s hull.
“What
are
you doing?!” said Emma as a deafening alarm sounded in the ship.
“Do you see a doorbell anywhere?” I said, and walked forward.
“Knock, knock!” I yelled up at the belly of the ship. “Come out, come out, wherever you are, Seth! It’s me. Daniel.”
ABOUT TWENTY SECONDS LATER, there was a metallic groaning sound, and the door opened.
Seth came out in a bathrobe, holding a travel mug of coffee in one hand and a folded-over
Wall Street Journal
in the other. The dozen or so commando soldiers who filed out the doorway behind him swung their 24/24 Opus Magnums in my direction.
“Well, if it isn’t Daniel X himself,” Seth said with a yawn. “Become tired of living in this dump of a city already, eh? What can I do for you today? Death? Eternal enslavement? What’s it going to be?”
“I had something a little more sempiternal and epic in mind,” I said as I put my fingers to my mouth and whistled. “You saw
Lord of the Rings I
,
II,
and
III
, right?”
At first, nothing happened. Then, slowly, there was movement at the rim of the valley wall. Actually, it seemed as if the rim itself was moving, which couldn’t be.
Spikes of light glittered off thousands upon thousands of mirrored visors, and titanium battle helmets, and rifle barrels.
Around the edge of the valley walls stood a massive army of futuristic-looking starship troopers. Each soldier was sheathed head to toe in high-tech silver battle armor, and each one aimed a blocky, snub-nosed submachine gun down at Seth and his fellow aliens.
Suddenly their voices roared as one!
I smiled, trying to mask the fact that each and every cyborg space marine had been created by yours truly.
With my mind.
I turned back to Seth as his newspaper fluttered down from his claw. I thought his eyeballs were going to pop out of his butt-ugly face.
“You thought we were all gone, didn’t you?” I yelled theatrically. “Thought you had us beaten into submission? Think again. Prepare to feel the terrible wrath of Alpar Nok!”
Dana leaned in from behind me and whispered against my cheek.
“Daniel, will they actually be able to fight?”
“I honestly don’t know,” I said out the side of my mouth.
“Great,” she said. “One more question. Will it hurt when I die?”
“PREPARE TO FIRE on my order!” Seth screamed to his soldiers. “And summon more backup. I want a full squadron of battle tanks and missile drones! Get me a
million
squadrons!”
“Anybody moves, they’re dead. Same goes for you, Seth,” I said.
Our eyes locked and held. This was the crucial part of my plan. The next ten seconds or so meant everything, the future of this planet, and probably of Earth. Hey, you can never be too dramatic when you’re psyching yourself up before a battle to the death.
“On Earth, this is what they call a Mexican standoff,” I said. “You move, you die. I move, I die. So how about instead we actually see who is more powerful: Alien? Or Alien Hunter?”
“What are you saying, Daniel?” Seth said.
“You and I fight man-to-man. Man to
whatever
you are. Winner take all. You win, my warriors disarm and become your slaves. I win, you and your hideous cretins slime back into your flying Dumpster and never come back.”
After all my thinking and searching through annals of every strategy and warfare book ever written, I’d actually gotten the ploy from
The Iliad,
by Homer. Achilles gets Hector outside Troy’s walled gates to fight him one-on-one while both their armies watch. Check it out in
The Iliad.
Great story!
Seth suddenly laughed at me.
“Sounds exciting, except I really don’t care how many of my drones die. How about I just give the fire order and go back and watch the end of
24,
the fifth season, on my DVD?”
“Oh, I get it now,” I said, shrugging. “Seth is afraid of a fifteen-year-old. I’m not surprised.”
“What did you just say?” Seth said, putting a claw to his ear.
“You heard me.
Gutless. Ugly. Slime-bucket. Horse-headed beast.
How can I put it any clearer? Let’s see. You’re totally petrified of me? You’re quaking in your bedroom slippers? You just soiled your undies with the little hearts on them? Isn’t that right,
Dumb-Dumb?
Seth, already halfway inside the door of the ship’s elevator, stopped suddenly. “
Dumb-Dumb,
” he muttered.
“Hold this,” he said, handing his coffee, paper, and robe to one of his hench-creeps.
“Bring down the Earth slaves!” Seth roared. “Watching the death of this fledgling
nothing
will be a once-in-a-lifetime learning experience for them.”
I resisted the urge to wipe sweat from my forehead, and just about everywhere else on my body.
My plan was working so far, I guessed. I’d used what I’d learned from Seth’s dream to manipulate him. In the dream, he was a little mutant horse-head, and all the other horse-heads were chanting “Dumb-Dumb” at him while he was being humiliated by a horse-head teacher.
Being thought dumb was Seth’s greatest fear.
Join the crowd.
And mine? Maybe being torn limb from limb by one of the strongest and most evil creatures in the known or
unknown
universes.
TEN MINUTES LATER, the sun was blazing directly over our heads, and all the Earth kids were watching with google eyes. The scene reminded me of the Roman Colosseum, or at least the way it looked in
Gladiator.
Seth’s clawed feet made nails-on-a-blackboard scratching sounds as he approached across the courtyard of our makeshift arena.
Me and my big yap, I thought. Defeat Number 6? I doubted I could last thirty seconds with the beast.
That’s when Joe started his ridiculous ringside announcement.
“Ladies and gentlemen. And all of Seth’s creeps,” Joe shouted. “In this corner, wearing Eagle Outfitter jeans and a powder blue Gap T-shirt, weighing in at one hundred and forty pounds—Daniel, the Wailin’ Alien.”
By this time, along with the Earth kids, what seemed like everyone surviving on Alpar Nok, including my aunts and uncles and my grandmother, had arrived on the scene. They’d held back at first—probably as frightened as I was—but now they were cheering like a home crowd at Dodger Stadium.
“And in the nether corner, standing seven and a half feet tall and weighing in at a whopping six hundred ninety pounds, and maybe more—Ergent ‘The Planet Eater’ Seth.”
I turned and stared at Joe.
“Would you shut up already?” I said. “You’re making him angry.”
“Angrier,”
Seth corrected. “Just wait till you see
angriest.
”
“Sorry,” Joe said sheepishly. “I always wanted to do that. It was
great!
”
“Fair warning, sir,” I babbled as Seth got closer and closer. “Did I tell you? My powers came back. In full. And maybe some extra since I’m now well rested.”
Bluish light crackled from my fingertips as I spun to my left. Then an enormous wall of energy flew up, protecting the Earth children from any kind of harm.
Seth threw up one hand—the energy wall I’d created buckled and disintegrated with a loud sucking sound. The Earth kids were left unprotected again.
“You were saying something,” Seth said, holding a claw over his mouth as he yawned.
“Oh, I get it,” I said. “I’m the one who creates, you’re the one who destroys. Interesting concept.”
“Isn’t it, though?” Seth said as he rushed forward to end my life.