Read The Dangerous Days of Daniel X Online
Authors: James Patterson,Michael Ledwidge
Tags: #FIC002000
“YOU’VE BEEN A WOEFUL, pitiful dupe all along,” said Seth. “I guess it’s to be expected, given what dullards your parents were. What were their names—Graff and Atrelda? Who can even remember? Who cares? The way I hear it, those two were actually too stupid to let live. They practically murdered themselves.”
If I’d been in fighting shape, I would have ripped a hole through the steel mesh to get at Seth’s lopsided face. My parents had been selfless protectors and friends of humanity, horrifically murdered by a misshapen monster without a conscience.
“I’ll admit it. You got me,” I said. “For the most part, you really did keep your thoughts consistent with a normal girl like Phoebe Cook. It was a pretty brilliant operation.”
“Please. Pulling the wool over your eyes was as easy as beating you at chess,” Seth said. “But what’s with the ‘for the most part’ rubbish?”
I looked at him as if I were suddenly bored . . . which I definitely was not.
“At Phoebe’s house that night, remember our sleepover? You let down your guard. You blew it, Seth.
You had a dream.
I scanned it. At first I thought it was a really odd nightmare coming from Phoebe, but now I realize that it was
your
dream. It all makes perfect sense. I know what your greatest fears are, Seth. Your deepest vulnerabilities, even what you’re going to do next. You’ll never get away with it. Won’t happen.”
Seth stared at me even more dead-faced than usual, seemingly confused for the moment.
His cronies were staring at him now, waiting for their leader to strike back.
“What dream?” Seth said. “What was in my dream?”
“That’s for me to know and you to agonize about, you donkey-faced freak,” I said. “I’ll give you a hint.
Dumb-Dumb,
” I whispered.
It sounded like a couple of grenades going off in the cage as Seth kicked it again and again. I stifled laughter, then decided the heck with it, and let myself crack up.
“Dumb-Dumb,”
I repeated.
“YOU READ MY DREAM, did you? I’m truly impressed.”
Suddenly Seth had a smile on his face. An awful, pinched smile, matched with an even more heartless gleam in his dark, demonic eyes.
“Wait! Maybe
you’ll
be impressed with something I have in the back room,” he said, clapping a claw to his head as if he’d been forgetting something. “Hold on, I’ll be right back. Don’t you dare go anywhere. You’ll love this.”
I didn’t like the sound of that one bit. Even his disgusting followers looked worried when he shouldered his way past them and disappeared down a long, dingy hallway.
They actually dove out of the way when he returned a moment later. He was holding something above his head. My eyes locked on it. Oh boy! An Opus 24/24 assault rifle.
“Say hello to my little friend,” Seth said. “Nothing like the cool steel of an Opus 24/24. And what a coincidence. I could be wrong, but isn’t this the same sort of weapon that did in your dear departed mother and father? I believe it is.”
The door of my cage screeched like a banshee as Seth flung it open. A chill raced down the ridge of my spine. Everyone was deathly quiet—the kids, Seth’s thugs, even Seth.
Slowly he raised the deadly rifle to his shoulder.
“What are you going to do now? Shoot me?” I asked with a fake smile.
A bloom of fire burst from the gun’s barrel. What felt like dynamite exploded inside my stomach.
“Good guess,” Seth said with a smile as I flew backward about fifteen feet and landed spread-eagled on the floor.
What can I tell you about getting gut-shot? It’s bad. About as bad as it gets. Excruciating is the tip of the iceberg. I could actually feel the bullet deep in my stomach, feel its heat, feel it burning into the torn tissue that surrounded it.
I slapped my hand to the wound as blood—red blood, not green or anything—started pouring out from between my ring finger and pinkie.
The most sickening sadness laced the pain as my vision started to blur, then flicker. I wondered if this was how my mother and father felt just before they died.
Talk about having a sucky last day,
I thought, as I fell away into darkness.
And I had kind of liked Terra Firma too.
I would miss night baseball, sno-cones, Spider-Man, the Winter Olympics . . .
White Castle sliders, Bart Simpson, did I mention sno-cones? . . .
I DON’T KNOW how long it was before I came to—I wasn’t even sure if coming to was what I was doing. All I knew for sure was that there was a worried face floating maybe a foot above me. The innocent face of a seven or eight-year-old girl.
I would have believed she was an angel—except for the terrible waves of pain throbbing in my stomach.
I looked down and saw that the girl had balled up my shirt and stuffed it into my wound. A tear rolled out of my eye onto the stone floor. Abducted, terrified, and most likely in shock, this little girl had probably saved my life.
Gestures like that were why humans were worth saving, I thought. Or even worth dying for.
“Thank you,” I whispered. “These ugly horse-heads better watch their step. They’re starting to get on my nerves.”
“Mine too,” said the girl.
“
Hey, you!
What do you think you’re doing in there?” came a voice. One of the aliens was crouching by the cell door. “Didn’t I tell everyone not to touch him?”
The little girl stared at him like a deer frozen in headlights, at least the way I’ve always imagined that cliché looks.
“Hey, give me back my wallet,” I croaked at her, loud enough for the thug to hear.
“Oh, why didn’t you say you were just robbing him?” the guard said, turning away. “In that case, go for it. You humans are lower than dirt. Tear each other apart. Go for it.”
I SPENT the better part of the next hour lying there on the cold stone floor, writhing in pain, probably close to death. I’d lost what seemed like quarts of blood, and my intestines and vital organs must have been ripped apart by the gun blast.
Gut-shot down in the salt mine,
I thought, starting to shake a little with the agony. Gee, my life had become the title of a country-and-western song.
A short time later, a door banged open and a couple of guards charged in. They were carrying electric stun guns.
“For me? You shouldn’t have.”
“Get moving, you filthy mammals,” one of the aliens yelled as he herded together the Earth kids I was sharing the chamber with. The little girl who’d helped me started to sob.
“Hey, guys, look! This one’s sprung a leak.” The alien laughed as he waved the cattle prod next to her tear-filled face. “I can’t believe we actually get paid to have this much fun.”
“You too,
worm,
” Seth said, tapping a couple of thousand volts near my face. “Get up! Get moving. Hold your intestines in.”
I probably should have been in an ICU, but I shot to my feet and stumbled out of the cage. No way I’d let them know how badly I was hurt.
“Nice acting job!” Seth said, and roared with laughter. “You could have been in one of my films. As an extra.”
It was pitch-black outside in the desert. And freezing cold. At two, maybe three o’clock in the morning.
Why did I have the feeling that we weren’t going on a nature walk?
AS I TURNED to my right, I saw that the desert sky was filled with stars in every direction. Except one. Above the eastern mountains, there was a . . . hole in the sky. A hole that was moving closer and getting larger and larger by the second.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood at full, parade-ground attention.
The object hovering about fifty feet above me was black as the night itself, and about the size of a football stadium. I don’t know who started that UFO saucer nonsense, but they must have been nearsighted. This ship was undoubtedly rectangular, like a Dumpster. Or a giant coffin.
It just hung there above us, ominously floating. There was a disturbance in the air as some kind of energy field pulsated loudly across its massive length.
Then a telescopic column, possibly an elevator, dropped from its belly into the ground.
Some of the kids started crying, and I called out, “Don’t worry, it’s nothing. It’s probably just E.T.”
The elevator thingy landed less than thirty feet from where I stood. A hydraulic hum followed. Then a doorway opened.
Inside, a particularly huge and ugly horse-head in a black uniform was smiling, showing cobralike teeth.
“Hey there, kiddies. Want to go for a ride, huh-huh-huh?” he said in a pretty good imitation of SpongeBob SquarePants.
All of us abductees stared at the alien in the doorway. Then we stared at each other. And then, as if we’d finally reached a silent consensus, we started to scream at the top of our lungs.
THE RIDE UP in the crowded alien elevator made all of the smaller kids scream again. It was like an
upward
free fall, or bungee jumping in reverse. I can tell you this—the open wound that was my stomach really appreciated the ride.
The back of the elevator opened, and we were hauled out into the mother ship.
Somehow the hot, cramped inside managed to be more horrible and despair-inducing than the grim exterior had promised. Those
Star Trek
writers were bugging when they dreamed up the dentist’s office–like
Enterprise,
I thought, as I looked around. Water and steam dripped from tangles of overhead ducts. The floors were slick with what appeared to be oil and discarded garbage. The place looked like a boiler room and a landfill combined.
A blast of hot air from somewhere swept across my face, and I caught the stink. Think the world’s hugest bus station bathroom.
We were pushed through a metal detector–like apparatus. Seth came over to me as it beeped. He ripped my List computer out of my backpack.
“You won’t be needing this,” he said, tucking it under his arm, “ever,
ever
again.”
We were sprayed with some type of stinging gas, stuffed into gray jumpsuits, and shackled together with leg chains. Very neighborly.
I turned toward one of the portholes when I heard a low rumble coming from somewhere inside the ship. Down below, the desert mountains were getting smaller and smaller at a mind-blowing speed. What was crazy was that, unlike in the elevator, there wasn’t the slightest sense of motion.
About three seconds later, there was Terra Firma, my beloved planet Earth. Even under the circumstances, its grandeur took my breath away.
The astronauts had never communicated how completely lonely it looks, though. Sad, blue, and sort of helpless against the endless void of space. I watched it get smaller and smaller, and then—with what felt like a pinch in my heart—Earth was gone.
A COUPLE MORE black uniforms smacked and kicked us down a corridor toward a scary grinding sound that made me think of a transformer eating scrap metal. The hall opened into a tremendous chamber, and I had to wipe my eyes to make sure I wasn’t imagining things.
Down here were tiers upon tiers of cages and machines. At the machines, humans—mostly kids—were hard at work. They were hand rolling cigarettes, putting what looked like torture devices together, sewing animal skins into coats.
There were a few older humans too.
The floor managers of hell,
I thought. One of them was shaking a tiny Chinese kid back and forth against an industrial sewing machine. The kid was so dead-eyed, he wasn’t even crying.
The ship was some kind of flying child slavery sweatshop, I understood. A prison, a slave ship, and a sweatshop all rolled into one.
It really was hell, I thought. We’d actually arrived.
“Home sweet home,” one of the aliens said as he doled out the manacled kids to floor managers waiting by escalators. “No iPods or PlayStation 3’s here, you spoiled, hairless monkeys. Prepare to learn the true meaning of the expression ‘working your fingers to the bone.’ You’ve heard of tough love?
Welcome to tough hate.
”
“We have different accommodations for you, Daniel,” Seth said in my ear as he personally dragged me over another catwalk and down a filthy gray corridor. “You actually get your own room. Just in case you’re more
dangerous
than you seem to be.”
A door zipped open in a wall, and I flew through the air into a pitch-black cell. “Anything you need,
scream.
”
FOR A WHILE, I did my best to stay upbeat.
The night is darkest before the dawn,
I reminded myself.
Every cloud has a silver lining. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I will live to fight another day.
Yeah, right,
I thought as the bullet in my abdomen continued to send out unrelenting pulses of agony.
Makes you stronger; cripples you forever.
Flip a coin.
I couldn’t believe how overly confident I’d been. I’d actually thought I could defeat Ergent Seth. But I was a loser, complete and utter. I guess it was a family tradition.
“You are not a loser!” said a voice. “Not always, anyway.”
It must have been my fever. I was hearing voices now. Was it Glenda, the good witch? Or maybe Pinocchio’s friend the Blue Fairy?
“I’ve been brave, truthful, and unselfish,” I slurred. “Now make me a real boy.”
I guess several hours held captive by Seth was my mental limit.
E.T. ready for funny farm.
I opened my eyes and saw that it was Dana. Well, sort of.
She was coming in hazily, kind of two-dimensional. I could actually see
through
her. How weird was that? She seemed like a ghost. Or an angel. Maybe I was dead and had gone to heaven?
“You are not a loser, Daniel,” Dana insisted again, her matchless blue eyes on the verge of tears. Then a second later, she was past the verge.
“Oh, Daniel,” she sobbed. “You can’t die.”
“Don’t,” I said. “You can’t cry, Dana. My heart can stand pretty much anything except seeing you cry.”
“But
look
at you. I’ve never seen you like this. What happened to you? Besides that . . . Phoebe Cook flirtation. What was
that
about?
God,
Daniel.”
The last thing I was going to do was tell her that I was gut-shot.
“Seth,” I said. That about summed it up.
“What about your powers? Don’t tell me they’re gone. Please don’t tell me that.”
“Dana, c’mon,” I said. “Of course I still have my powers.”
“Maybe you’d feel better if you got up off that cold floor and moved around,” Dana said, offering me her hand.
Maybe she was right. Maybe all this agony was in my head. With super effort, I climbed up on my knees. Then I dropped facedown, cracked my head on the hard cell floor, and passed out cold.