The Dangerous Days of Daniel X (15 page)

Chapter 92

THERE WERE COWS in the field, a herd of black-and-white Holsteins. Joe’s mouth went wide as the moo-cows stood on their hind legs with their hooves at their waists.

With a little help from me, of course. My last trick of this story, I swear.

“Give me a
J!
” I yelled.

“Moooo,” the cows bawled, and made a
J
with their front hooves.

“Give me an
O!
”

The hooves made an
O.

“Moooo!”

“Give me an
E!
”

Thirty Holsteins bent sideways, their front hooves and one rear hoof extended.
Very cool to watch.

“Mooooo!”

Even Emma, who rarely approved of doing anything with animals except setting them free, looked like she was about to wet her pants with the excitement.

The grand finale of the routine came as they assembled in a four-base cheerleading pyramid. The two Holsteins at the top had extended their hooves skyward.

“What does it spell?” we all yelled out.

“MOOOOO!
” the cows bawled as they did these totally impossible cheerleader jumps and basket catches and back handsprings.

My sides were aching from laughing so hard. It was good to be on Terra Firma. And to have my powers again.

“Be afraid, aliens,” Dana said, hopping up on my back, pumping her fist at the sky. The sun was dipping over the rise of the country road in front of us. I began to run faster and faster and faster. You wouldn’t believe how fast.

“Be very, very afraid!” I screamed to this blurring, wonderful world of ours.

A look ahead to further adventures (if you want to peek)

One

IT WAS A PRETTY regular early summer night at 72 Little Lane. The crickets and katydids were making that soothing trill they make on warm, still, small-town evenings. The back porch light was on, but otherwise the tidy brown house was happily, sleepily dark.

At least it was until 11:35, when the local news came to an end and a few TV sets in homes down the street began to play the opening theme of a popular comedy show. At that point all the insects fell silent, silent as the grave—and not because it was their bedtime or because they’d gone off to watch TV.

They had succumbed to a silent command. It’s hard to translate the command exactly—it couldn’t be heard by human ears, and the language of insects isn’t one that easily can be put into words anyhow—but every six-legged creature in the area instantly decided it was a very good time to hide under a rock, wedge into some tree bark, or even dig a little way down in the dirt . . . and to be very,
very
quiet.

And then, inside the small brown house, it became very,
very
loud. Every speaker—on the computers, on the television sets (the one in the den was a brand-new flat-screen with THX surround sound), on the cell phones, on the iPods, on the radios, on the telephones, even on the “intelligent” microwave—began to blast a dance song from a popular old movie, a dance that was a favorite of a very slimy, very fat, very fishy-smelling, and very
powerful
alien.

Two

THE BOY FUMBLED for his clock radio. It was blaring some superlame old ’70s song by one of those awful disco bands his mom sometimes played in the car. His sister must have changed the station as a prank. He’d get her back—later, after a bit more shut-eye.

He punched the snooze button, but the radio didn’t shut off. He flicked the switch on the side, but it didn’t shut off. He picked the clock up off his bedside table and saw that it was just past 11:30
at night
.

She was going to pay for this. He reached down and pulled the cord out of the socket . . . but it still didn’t shut off.

“What the—?!” he said, and rubbed his eyes with his free hand. The clock was no longer telling the time; the glowing display now read
DANCE.

And then a new disco song began, and a voice loud and screechy enough to cut through all the noise said: “DO THE DANCE!”

“Now
that’s
freaky,” said the boy, and he started to get scared. Only he wasn’t scared for long, because a blue spark leaped out of the alarm clock and up his arm, and suddenly all he cared about was getting downstairs to dance.

He ran out of his room and collided with his father in the hallway. And now his mom and sister were pushing at him from behind, and the entire family almost killed themselves tumbling down the stairs to the living room.

It was weird, thought the boy, because he was pretty sure he hated dancing. Just last weekend he’d refused to join his mom and a bunch of girl cousins when the dancing started at a wedding.

But now he couldn’t stop himself. He pushed to the center of the living room and somehow he knew exactly what moves to make, and—except for the look of terror in his eyes—he boogied his heart out like a pimply, pajama-wearing John Travolta.

His mom, dad, and sister didn’t look like they were having much fun either.

In fact the only fun in the house was being had by the five monsters watching the family from behind the weird vein-and-slime-covered lights, microphones, and multilensed video cameras in the adjoining dining room.

They
were laughing their heads off—some of them literally rolling on the floor in amusement.

The boy had a vague urge to stop and stare at these uninvited guests, but it was like there was some new part of his brain that wouldn’t let him think about them, even though they were right there—
filming his family
.

He didn’t even wonder what it meant when one of the monsters, slapping one of its six scaly knees, said, “By Antares, they’re good. It’s just like
Saturday Night Fever
!”

And then the one in charge—the fat one in the folding canvas chair, cradling the bullhorn in his left tentacle— replied, with a sigh, “Yes, it’s almost a shame we have to
terminate
them.”

Three

THE FIVE ALIENS scuttled and hovered (yes, hovered) out of the TV news van and stared in through the big plate-glass windows of the Holliswood Diner.

They were ugly buggers—three were basically overgrown cockroaches with blue, bald, little-old-man heads; one was like a big, white, angora-furred gorilla (except that he had excellent posture, was really sweaty, and had a rather unfortunate big pink hog’s nose); and then there was the one in charge—basically a legless, levitating, thousand-pound sumo wrestler with tentacles for arms, no neck, the head of a catfish, and a thick coating of slime.

“Business is about to pick up
a lot,
” said the boss alien, observing the young blond waitress reading a Sherman Alexie paperback at the counter. He grabbed the pig-nosed ape’s cell phone, held it to the side of his wide, earless head, and watched as the girl reached across the counter to pick up the diner’s phone.

A little spark flashed where his tentacle gripped the cell phone and another leaped out of the phone the girl was holding, arcing straight into her ear. She put down the phone and opened the door for them—her eyes glassy, her face expressionless.

“What did the Zen Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?” asked Catfish Head as she showed them to their booths, already chuckling to himself at the coming punch line.

“Make me one with everything!” said the waitress, robotically.

The monsters burst into laughter.

“Actually, on second thought, sweetie,” said Catfish Head, “why don’t you go and make us
everything
with everything. Chop-chop!”

“Good one, boss!” said the pig-nosed ape, stealthily snatching his cell phone back from where his employer had rested it on the table. He carefully wiped it down with a napkin before returning it to his purple belt-clip.

The girl, meantime, had flown into motion as if somebody had hit the X2 button on her remote control. She prepared and delivered to the aliens heaping stacks of pancakes, eggs, bacon, sausages, Belgian waffles, sundaes, gyros, coffee, bagels, turkey platters, Cokes, muffins, burgers, cheese steaks, cheesecakes, clam chowder, oatmeal, root-beer floats, gravy fries, banana cream pies, meat loaf slices, onion rings, mashed potatoes, orange sodas, chicken-fried steaks, oyster crackers, saltines, and basically everything the diner had.

“Careful or you’ll burn her out, boss,” said the pig-nosed ape.

“Plenty more where that came from. What’d our orbital sensors say the count was now at? Six
billion
of them?”

He laughed a laugh that sounded like somebody blowing bubbles in turkey gravy.

Four

YOU KNOW THE SECOND-COOLEST of all my superpowers? It’s the one that lets me hear
any
song I’ve
ever
heard as loud as I want, as often as I want, and anytime I want. It’s like I have an iPod implanted in my head. Only, of course, the sound quality’s better. And it holds more songs.
Way
more songs. Like
terabytes
more. And, of course, it never needs to be docked or recharged.

The song I was playing over and over again right then, as I motorcycled down I-80, was “Don’t Fear the Reaper” by Blue Öyster Cult. I know it’s ancient and kinda puts the K in Klassic Rock, but it’s a good one. And it was going along real well with my thoughts and plans—thoughts and plans wherein I am the Grim Reaper of bad aliens, the Grim Reaper of very,
very
bad aliens.

I leave the good ones alone, of course. There are a few of them around too, though not so much on Earth. I mean, there’s me and then there’s . . . well, honestly—and not to bum you out—I’ve only bumped into a couple other good aliens here on your Big Blue Marble.

But what’s the coolest of my superpowers, you ask? The way I can smell alien sweat from ten miles away, even speeding along a highway with my helmet on? The way I’ve recently learned to make high-performance, hybrid-engine racing cycles that can drive 3,000 miles at 75 miles per hour on a tank of gas? The way I can pop a wheelie on . . . my
front
wheel?

Well, that’s almost untoppable, it’s true. But no, the coolest of my superpowers is the one with which I can cause my best friends—Willy, Joe, Emma, and Dana—to show up
out of my imagination
.

Pretty sweet, no? I mean, name a movie or comic-book superhero who can do that—create
real people.

Five

OF COURSE it takes some concentration, and I have to be rested and not taking any allergy medicine, but really, being able to shoot fireballs or outrace locomotives is nothing next to being able to make friends . . .
out of thin air
.

And they’re not bottom-of-the-barrel specimens, either. Joe is basically a life-support device for the world’s fastest-moving mouth. He’s either chewing his way through some mountain of food that looks to weigh half as much as his skinny butt, or he’s talking a blue—and totally hilarious—streak. Oh, and he’s good with video games and computers and things like that.

Emma is our moral compass. While the rest of us are bent on destroying outlaw aliens because we just kind of hate them, the part that gets her worked up is that they’re on Terra Firma and doing harm not just to people, but to nature. Mother Earth has no better advocate than our Birkenstock-wearing bud.

Emma’s older brother is Willy. He’s about my age and is the ultimate wingman. He’s built like a brick and slightly harder to scare than one, too. When it comes to squaring off with the members of The List, you couldn’t ask for a better intergalactic crime-busting partner. Plus, he’s more loyal and steadfast than, like, Batman’s butler, Alfred, Sam in
The Lord of the Rings,
Westley in
The Princess Bride,
and King Arthur’s horse combined. And he’s kinda mechanically gifted, so when it comes to weapons and engines and stuff like that, he tends to be our go-to guy.

Finally, Dana is, well . . . I’m probably not going to be able to give you a very objective description, even if I am the one who created her. Let’s just say she’s got straight blond hair, is about my age, and somehow manages to be both the most attractive and the most grounded person I’ve ever encountered.

And I haven’t exactly been operating out of a Montana shack all these years.

Oh—and this goes for all four of them—they happen to be
outstanding
at don’t-try-this-at-home motorcycle stunts. Like leaning into each other in pairs so they make temporary “cars,” with four wheels between them. Or chasing up after an eighteen-wheeler and veering over suddenly, leaning the bikes almost onto their sides, and zipping
under
the trailer—behind wheels seven, eight, nine, and ten, and in front of wheels eleven through eighteen—and coming out safely on the other side.

We did a bit of that, and some other stuff you’d normally only see in high-budget movies, before finally pulling up to a small-town diner where I was about to face off with the most powerful alien I’d ever engaged in mortal combat. In fact, though I couldn’t yet see him, I could smell his fishy disgustingness all over the parking lot—like somebody had left a herring salad sandwich in a hot car for a week.

“Sorry about this,” I said to my friends.

“Sorry for what?” asked Joe.

“This is between me . . . and Number 5,” I said.

“You’re such a boy,” said Dana, hand on her hip, a look of concerned disapproval on her face. “Are you sure you’re ready to go that high up The List? No offense, Daniel, but you got awfully lucky with Number 6.”

“Always with the pep talks, Dana. Thanks a lot.”

Then I clapped my hands and she and the rest of them flickered out of existence. (I actually don’t need to clap, but it looks cool.) And then I cleared my head for battle.

Six

HIS STENCH WAS bad outside, but it was nothing compared to how it was inside the diner. This guy made low tide smell like Obsession for Men. And he wasn’t even
in
there any longer.

I must have missed him by just a matter of minutes—the gobs of slime in the booth where he’d been sitting hadn’t even skinned over—but he and his henchbeasts had gotten while the getting was still good.

With these higher-up-The-List baddies, I was discovering an unfortunate trend in which they often seemed to know I was coming. I guess I should take it as flattery that they didn’t want to run into me, but it was more than a little frustrating to keep bringing my A game and then find nobody to play it with.

Anyhow, I knew I’d have to pick up their trail as soon as I could, but for the time being the important thing was to give some attention to the waitress they’d left behind.

The poor girl was collapsed like a rag doll on the floor next to the counter. Something about her face reminded me of a burned-out lightbulb, or a kid’s toy you’d tried to run on a car battery rather than AAAs.

The name stitched on the pocket of her calico uniform was Judy Blue Eyes and, indeed, her eyes were blue—the kind of blue a guy could look into and see the promise of the whole world. A human guy, I mean.

“Hey, Judy, you okay?”

“Nnnn,” she said, consciousness slowly percolating back.

I helped her into a booth and gave her a glass of water.

“Wh-wh’appen?” she slurred.

“Umm. I think some bad characters came in and had a food fight,” I said, only it was worse than that. It looked like there’d been some sort of no-holds-barred riot. Smashed china plates, syrup and salt all over the walls, coffee and soda dripping from the tabletops, puddles of alien slime and pierced, empty jelly packets on the seats, ketchup and mayo on the jukeboxes, Promise spread splattered on the ceiling . . .

“Oh gosh,” she said, struggling to sit up and take it all in. “I’m
so-o
fired.”

“Nah,” I said. “I can give you a hand.” And then, like somebody had pressed the X8 button on
my
remote, I zipped around with a broom, a mop, a couple bottles of Windex, a dozen dishrags, and a quart of old-fashioned elbow grease, and had the place spick-and-span in no time, literally.

“Man, I’m really out of it,” said Judy as I returned to her now gleaming booth. “I mean, did you just clean all that up in, like, ten seconds?”

Boy was she cute. I was trying to think of something clever to say, but I was having a weird—though not totally unpleasant—tightness in my chest, and all I could manage was this really lame giggle.

Must be an alien thing.