I shut my eyes and pictured the anatomy of the Verm-gypian head from the diagram on my laptop. Having a photographic memory comes in really handy sometimes.
I realized I was staring at his tympanic membrane, or eardrum. Hmmm. It parted like a curtain as I cut into it with my fang.
Seth howled, so I must have been doing something right.
Next, I wriggled my way into a chamber called the tympanic cavity. Above me was a repulsive bulging, hanging thing that looked like a giant squid. It was Seth’s cochlea, the organ that turns sound into brain signals.
There was a little window in it where a funny-looking bone called the stirrup flickered in and out.
I climbed up and crawled over the stirrup and through the window, into Seth’s inner ear.
“I’m still here!” I reassured him. “This is still a fight to the death!”
Chapter 88
THE INSIDE of Seth’s cochlea was even grosser than his earwax situation. It was filled with this fluid that was . . . ugh, I don’t even want to get into it.
I swam through the gook until I reached another opening filled with what looked like yellow spaghetti.
Aha! Just what I was looking for, a gaggle of Seth’s nerves. Auditory or vestibular, I wasn’t sure, and it didn’t matter.
I just needed a way to travel so far into his skull that there’d be no chance for him to get me out. I wriggled into a ductlike nerve, headfirst, and continued on my merry way, spelunking through Seth’s head.
For some reason, I don’t think Seth was having as much fun as I was. Periodically I would hear him moan things like NO and PLEASE and my personal favorite, MOMMY.
“I’m right here, honey!” I called back. “But you know what they say about letting an opponent get inside your head?”
After about five minutes of wriggling, I arrived at more yellowish spaghetti, and clumps of unidentifiable organs that looked important, and rather delicate. By my calculations, I was now in Seth’s brain stem, halfway between his medulla oblongata and his pons.
This was the Grand Central Station of Seth’s brain, the part that controlled his respiration, his blood pressure, his heart rate.
“Are all the brains of your species this small, Chunk Bucket? Or are you like an exception?” I yelled.
“GET OUT OF MY HEAD!” Seth screamed.
His voice was truly thunderous in the chamber of his skull. The voice of an angry god in an evil temple.
“GET OUT OF MY HEAD NOW OR I’LL BOARD MY SHIP AND BLOW THIS PLANET TO DUST!” he screamed.
And that was different from what he had intended to do in what way?
“You want me out of your head?” I said.
“YES!”
“You sure?”
“YES!”
“Say please.”
“PLEASE!”
“Okay,” I said. “If you insist. But you won’t like it. Ready or not, I’m coming out!”
Chapter 89
I LET OUT a thunderous trumpeting roar, and I mean that literally. My tick legs thickened as my body bulged, expanding at an amazing rate.
Seth had begun to shriek for his MOMMY again.
Then my head hit the ceiling of something spongy, and I slid through tissue and membrane with a wet pop.
I blinked in the suddenly bright sunlight, raised my glorious trunk to the sky, and trumpeted again.
Yes, trumpeted!
I’d transformed myself into a glorious elephant! One the size of Chordata.
I towered there for a moment, feeling my elephantness, feeling the power and might and wisdom of everything that was hopeful and alive about Alpar Nok.
Seth was lying on the stone beneath me, and well . . . wow. Seth wasn’t doing too well. Euphemism. Look it up. Where his head used to be was basically a pool of pale-colored slime.
This piece of garbage who had nearly destroyed my planet had had a large head for sure. But even his head couldn’t contain a full-grown elephant.
I trumpeted again, and the kids from Earth and Alpar Nok leaped to their feet, cheering.
The remaining alien commandos stood there in shock as I morphed back into myself.
“You there,” I said to the largest and nastiest-looking of them all.
“Me?” The creature cringed, fearfully pointing a claw at himself.
“Yes, you,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Krothgark.”
“Krothgark, I haven’t decided if I’m going to let you live or not. Would you like to influence my decision?”
“Yes,” Krothgark said. “Very much.”
“Then do yourself a big favor and unchain those kids,” I said. “And those kids. And those. All of them.”
“You got it, sir. Right away, right away. You heard the man,” Krothgark said, smacking one of the horse-head soldiers next to him. “Unchain the children.”
When I looked up I saw that people were streaming toward me. I gave Bem and his sister, Kulay, high fives as my uncle pinched both of my cheeks.
“Woooh,” I heard Joe yell from somewhere in the happy crush. “Yeah, baby! We’re going to Disney World.” Leave it to Joe.
“You’ve saved us,” Grandma Blaleen said as she hugged me tightly.
Then Dana had her arm around me too, and nothing had felt so good to me in a long, long time.
“You’re . . .” she sobbed. “You’re . . .”
“Still alive?” I said. “Of course. How could I let us die?”
Just then, a human girl came running up to us. She had flaming red hair, lots of freckles—very pretty. “I was held captive on that terrible spaceship,” she said. “Thank you for saving me. I’m Phoebe Cook, the real one.”
She had something tucked under her arm. “I found this on the ship. I thought it might be important.”
My laptop! I reached for the computer containing The List of all the other alien scum I had to destroy, but before I could say a word to Phoebe, Dana did.
“It’s very nice to meet you, Phoebe. I’m glad you’re all right. Now you should go back and celebrate with your friends. Daniel is with me. Bye-bye, Phoebe. Scoot along.”
Chapter 90
IF I THOUGHT the first feast at my grandma’s was something, I hadn’t seen anything yet. There were twelve straight days of dancing and music, celebrating, eating, storytelling, you name it. Except that you couldn’t possibly imagine a blowout party on Alpar Nok, could you?
For hours and hours, total strangers came up and embraced me. My arms were sore from shaking hands. And my cheeks, from being pinched. I was told that I met every single inhabitant of Alpar Nok. Twice.
At one point during the final fireworks show—really, this was the final—I found my grandma and sat her down for a heart-to-heart.
“Let me help you rebuild the city,” I said. “Where do we start? When?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “You’ve done enough here, Daniel. You have to go back to Earth. Finish the work your parents started. And I’d go now, if I were you. Make the Outer Ones take you and the rest of the abducted kids back. Before those blackguards can think about it, and do something deceitful and treacherous.”
“But when will I see you again?” I said. “Will I see you again?”
“Of course you will, Daniel,” she said. “In your dreams, in your mind’s eye, and always in your heart.”
“One question,” I finally said. “Seriously now. Are you a doctor?”
She shrugged. “Gardener,” she said.
Epilogue
KISSING THE EARTH WITH MY DRANG AND ALL THAT GOOD STUFF
Chapter 91
THE SUN WAS JUST STARTING to set as we crossed a cornfield near Huxley, Iowa, where I had the Outer Ones drop us off after we’d delivered the last of the abducted Earth children safely home. I was watching the departing spaceship when I almost tripped over a football lying in the grass.
You wouldn’t think that a scuffed-up, oblong ball with NFL written in jazzy script under its laces could actually fill a pe
rson with unbridled joy, but I almost started crying.
Something good had just happened. I was back on Terra Firma, and I’d missed it like crazy, more than I ever could have imagined.
This is my home, I realized. I love it here. It’s a great, great planet.
I bent and lifted the football.
“Joe,” I said, hefting it. “Go long, my man.”
Willy, Dana, Emma, and I cracked up as we watched Joe run. Fewer things in life are funnier than watching Joe-Joe put the pedal to the metal. When he got about eighty yards away, he yelled back.
“I’m open, Daniel! Throw it! Chuck it! Montana to Jerry Rice, Brady to Randy Moss, Brett Favre to anybody!”
“You call that long?” I yelled at him.
Joe kept running, and talking. About four minutes later, when he was basically a blip on the horizon, my cell phone rang.
“This long enough for you, wise guy?” Joe said, breathing heavily into the phone.
“That’ll do it,” I said, and let the football fly. It made a hissing sound through the golden, early evening sky as it spiraled toward Joe and the sun. I was glad there weren’t any passing aircraft, because I had to put some arc on that sucker.
Joe was standing about half a mile away. We burst into loud applause as he caught it and then got knocked onto his butt.
“Now that’s what I call a catch, Joe,” I said as I ran up and saw my bud sitting smack-dab in the middle of a cow pie. Willy was punching his thighs, he was laughing so hard.
“And check it out,” I said, pointing toward the field behind Joe. “We’re not the only ones impressed.”
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 abou
t 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
The Dangerous Days of Daniel X Page 12