Daniel X: Game Over (19 page)

A new sharp smell assaulted my nostrils and stung my eyes, then both his parents flickered gray and dispersed into indistinct gray clouds.

The demolished store was now filled with an angry buzzing sound, and Kildare rematerialized.

“It won’t last too long,” he said. “And I won’t be able to surprise them that easily again,” he said.

“Another pheromone?”

“Yeah, panic signal,” he said. “I’d never tried it before,
but I just set off an alarm that sends all their cells scrambling. Kind of like when you stir up a hornet’s nest or an ant hill.”

We bolted out into the lobby. The steel security shutters had now dropped around the perimeter of the building, and there was no obvious way out. I sized up one of the shutters and got ready to magnify my strength and peel it from its frame.

“So that panic signal you used on them is kind of a self-preservation thing?” I asked, stooping down to grab the shutter.

“Exactly,” said a voice behind me. But it wasn’t Kildare’s.

THE VOICE DIDN’T belong to Number 7 or Number 8, either; it belonged to
both
of them. Kildare’s trick had scattered them into their billions of parts, but they had now regathered. Well, sort of. Together they’d formed a dense, swirling gray cloud, with four black eyes and a single cavernous mouth the corners of which rose in a bone-chilling smile as I turned around.

“Yesss,”
they
hissed to me. “We have many talents that single-body creatures like you can’t begin to guess.”

Kildare was standing frozen next to me. He’d gone completely white except for his widened eyes, which were now completely black like those of his parents.

“Kildare?!” I yelled at him, but he didn’t react. It was like his mind had slipped away, and then, to my horror,
his body started to disappear too.

He was being swallowed. Number 7 and Number 8’s mouth had grown to the size of a whale’s, and their body was expanding like a bellows, drawing in air—and drawing in their son. He came apart like a pillar of sand in a tornado. They were devouring him!

It was so terrifying an image that my emotions were getting in the way of my powers. My head was reeling, and I couldn’t figure out a thing to do about it. How was I supposed to hurt a cloud? And how was I supposed to defeat the enemy and
not
hurt Kildare?

“That’s right, Alien Hunter. Another of our unique defense mechanisms involves eating our young. At least the ones that are weak or unfit.”

“Give him back,” I commanded. “He’s not like you.”

“You’re right—he’s not
like
us. He’s
part
of us.”

“Give him back,” I repeated, this time with as much authority and ire as I could muster. But they sensed my weakness here. Had it all been a trap? Did they somehow lead me to Kildare, to lure me back to them? Had he intentionally fooled me?

“Here’s the deal, Alien Hunter,” they announced vaingloriously. “You have thirty seconds, and it’s your choice how you spend them. If it’s any comfort, we can assure you that you’ll soon get to see Kildare—or, at least,
parts
of him.”

Rage boiled up inside me, but I couldn’t just blindly attack them. I didn’t want to hurt my friend. I had to play along. “What do you mean by that?”

“You can either stay here and chat with us, as you’re doing now,” they continued, “or you can have a head start.”

“A head start? What are we playing, tag?”

“You can call it whatever you like, but we tend to refer to it as ‘hunting.’ And then once we’ve caught you, we’ll devour you, just as we did Kildare. Only in your case, it will be a lot more painful and
permanent
.”

“Oh, look at that,” taunted the black-eyed cloud, morphing part of itself into a wrist with a watch wrapped around it, at which it glanced dramatically. “Time’s up!”

My ears filled with an awful buzzing sound as the cloud began to envelop me.

EVER GET STUNG by a bee or a yellow jacket or a fire ant? Try all three at once, and then multiply the feeling by a thousand if you want some sense of the intense pain I experienced when Number 7 and Number 8 first grazed my left arm. If a doctor had shown up and offered to amputate my afflicted limb, I would have said yes on the spot.

But almost worse than the pain was the frustration. I couldn’t figure out how to fight back. It was a textbook case: often the greatest challenge of my powers isn’t actually using them; it’s deciding
how
to use them. And while I believe there are elegant solutions to every problem under the sun, finding the right one usually takes more than a few seconds, or minutes, or hours, or…

I dodged another dark blow from my amorphous
four-eyed enemy as I gave up on the latest of several half-baked ideas, including:

• Sucking them up with a giant vacuum cleaner. Problem was, did I really expect they’d stay sealed in the bag and I could just toss them into a Dumpster?
  

• Using a flamethrower might be effective, but I’d run the risk of burning Kildare’s cells too, assuming he was somehow still alive in there…
  

• Preserving them cryogenically with a freeze ray and then spending the next few years figuring out how to extract Kildare’s billions of cells from the mix once they weren’t moving around. Problem was that although I’d heard of them, I hadn’t yet learned the physics of freeze rays and couldn’t very easily just invent one on the spot.
  

• Using a giant can of alien bug spray was a great idea,
  if
  I had any understanding of Number 7 and Number 8’s physiology and what toxins might actually be effective. And, again, how could I simultaneously
  not
  kill the Kildare parts of the cloud?
  

• Going back in time and hoping things would work out differently. But I’d been told that Number 1 had somehow put a block on time travel for me, and since I had no idea how he’d done it, I couldn’t possibly figure out how to work around it.
  

• Summoning a billion carnivorous dragonflies and instructing them to eat only those bits that looked like Number 7 and Number 8’s cells. I had no idea, though, if there actually were a way to tell Kildare’s
  bits apart from his parents’ bits… or if a billion dragonflies would fit inside the lobby… or if dragonflies were even trainable.
  

In short, maybe if I’d had a month and access to the intergalactic equivalent of Wikipedia, I could have come up with something. But I didn’t have a month. And I didn’t have a computer. And I
did
have a big black cloud of malevolent alien cells trying to sting me to death.

Again and again, they came after me. At first I was dodging pretty well—biding some time, hoping against hope I’d find a weakness, a chink in their amorphous armor—but with every leap, spin, duck, and parry, I grew a little less confident, and a little slower, and a little more scared.

And then blackness exploded across my vision, and searing white light seemed to be pouring into my skull.

They’d hit me. They’d gotten me in the face.

How could I have been so stupid? How could I have let them do this to me? How could I have thought—after losing Kildare, after my friends’ and father’s warnings—that I’d ever stand a chance against them?

I leaped blindly, as high and as fast as I could, wanting only to get away, wanting only to make the pain stop.

I smashed into the wall on the far side of the room with a bone-jarring thud, but I was almost grateful for it. The stinging wasn’t as bad as before, and my vision had partially come back. Apparently, they’d only grazed me.

And then, finally—as if the impact had knocked some sense into me—I had a halfway decent idea.

I’D NOTICED THAT every time Number 7 and Number 8’s cloud attacked me, it first had oriented its four eyes at me. Its
eyes!
In other words, it was finding me by
sight.
If the cloud
couldn’t
find me by sight, I might just gain some sort of advantage or, at least, a chance to live.

The next step was effortless. I filled the entire GC Tower lobby with something relatively easy to understand and create: mirrored glass. With a quick sweep of my arms, I converted the sleek obsidian ground floor of the building into a giant carnival fun house.

The fun part was that Number 7 and Number 8 didn’t see just me; they saw
thousands
of me.

The not-so-fun part was that, judging from the angry, droning roar that went up, they weren’t very happy about it.

“You think you’re
clever?!
” the cloud’s polyphonic voice
challenged me, spinning its gray mass around and around as it—or they?—tried to figure which image was the real Daniel X.

This was no time for chitchat. I had to take advantage of their momentary confusion to strike back or get away.

The cloud’s eyes were up against one of the mirrors now, examining the surface closely, very closely. Then it lifted a glossy black appendage—an arm? a leg? a tentacle? a pseudopod?—and carefully tapped the glass.

There was a small
ping
and then the pane shattered into gravel-sized bits and collapsed on the hard floor.

“
Not
so clever,” the droning voices yelled triumphantly. The cloud flickered and launched a swarm of tiny, glossy black spheres. In a moment, they had all fanned out and had shattered every single mirror in the room, resulting in a sound like, well, a Niagara-sized waterfall of breaking glass.