The Dangerous Days of Daniel X

by James Patterson

  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.

  And here’s the start of another adventure, coming soon

  One

  I BET I can see London from here, I thought.

  I was, oh, maybe 150 feet in the air, above a grassy field outside a small village called Whaddon. I’d only been in England a couple of weeks, and I still had a little of that excitement that hits you when you go to a new place.

  Before I had time to take a good look around from this
high place, though, I started to fall.

  Fast.

  The first of the evening stars became a blur, and the ground seemed to rush up at me faster and faster.

  I could hear shouting voices, but it was impossible to tell what they were saying over the blistering wind surrounding me.

  Maybe I should have been worried, but I’ll admit it— I was enjoying myself. That is, until Willy kicked me hard in the face.

  Willy, Joe, Dana, Emma, and I were playing soccer. Our own version, where I was the ball. That is correct, I had transformed myself into the soccer ball itself.

  Luckily, soccer balls don’t have a lot of nerve endings, I thought as I flew forward into the air.

  “And Willy controls the centered ball beautifully, shooting a pass to Joe. He takes it up the line. But—no! Dana sweeps in with a well-executed slide tackle and steals it!” Joe always liked to deliver the play-by-play, although talking about himself in the third person usually distracted him from, well, playing.

  “Pay attention, Joe,” said Willy, grimacing. “We’re getting creamed by girls.”

  Even Dana, in the middle of passing me to the other end of the field, cracked up at this.

  Then she kicked me pretty hard, and I once again briefly enjoyed the feeling of flying through the evening sky—until I saw Emma’s face rushing toward me. She caught me easily on her forehead and juggled me there for a moment as she turned to the “goalposts”—two trees at the end of the field.

  Then Emma bent her body back and headed me straight up in the air. Way up. I relaxed, enjoying the sensation of free fall; it’s not something I get to do that often.

  Below me, Dana and Willy were racing toward the goalposts.

  Dana got there first, and as I came down she jumped into the air, fell backward, spun, and sent a scorching scissor kick through the goal.

  “GOOOOOAAAAAAL!” screamed Joe from the other end of the field in his best international announcer voice.

  I’d known Dana’s team would win (her team always did), but her powerful kick took me by surprise. I had already overshot the goalposts by at least a hundred feet. Suddenly I realized I was headed straight for the tree-lined gorge that bordered the field.

  I concentrated for a second, and then I was back to being myself again, no longer a soccer ball. I grabbed an overhanging tree branch as I flew past. Dangling one-handed over the gorge, I frowned at Dana, who was trotting over, and gave a dramatic sigh.

  “You did that on purpose, didn’t you?” I called to her. “Tried to kick me into the briar patch.”

  She laughed. “Daniel, you look like a depressed orangutan. Get down from that branch.”

  Before I could come up with a snappy reply, Joe’s voice rang across the field. “Okay, you two, now can we get going? London’s not going to walk to us! We have monsters to catch.”

  Two

  I DROPPED DOWN from the tree and dusted myself off. You think playing soccer is dirty?

  Try being the ball.

  A few minutes later, the five of us were walking along an English country road. Very picturesque, I must say.

  Our pickup soccer match had been a good distraction, but now it was almost eight and night was starting to fall.

  “Well, let’s hoof it, guys,” I said. “In a couple of hours we can find somewhere safe to camp out.”

  We hadn’t gone far when a light from behind made us turn around.

  A large vehicle was approaching. I stuck my thumb out while my friends moved back toward the shadows, ready to disappear if need be.

  Fortunately they didn’t have to. As it pulled up alongside me, I saw that the vehicle was a beat-up van, and probably large enough to hold ten or eleven. A tiny woman with short gray hair was behind the wheel, wearing a tweed suit that was three sizes too big for her.

  She rolled down her window and peered into the darkness behind me. “Are you lost, dearies”

  Her face looked careworn, but she had smile lines around her mouth. I liked the way she looked, and I liked her spacious van even more.

  I put on my best harmless-backpacking-tourist face. “I’m afraid we’re stranded, ma’am. We’re trying to get to London.” To catch some aliens—Number 3 to be exact.

  “Oh . . . Americans!” She smiled. “Well, I’m heading that way. Hop aboard.”

  Three

  IT DIDN’T TAKE MUCH to convince us. We gratefully piled in, Willy and Emma in back, Dana and me in the middle row, and Joe sprawled out in the passenger seat.

  We drove in silence for about ten minutes. Joe had nodded off, and Will and Emma were chatting in hushed, lazy voices behind me.

  I normally end up talking with the people who pick me up, but it had been a long day. My eyes were about to close when Dana’s lips brushed against my ear. Yeah, that woke me up.

  “Have you noticed?” she whispered.

  “What?” I whispered back.

  “The driver’s seat—it’s on the left side.”

  “So? That’s where it’s supposed to be.”

  “Not really, Daniel. We’re in England, remember? They drive on the other side.”

  That’s a little unusual, I thought to myself. Why would the van be American?

  And there was something else, something that had been gnawing at me since we got in. Something about what the driver was wearing. Tweed is a rough woolen fabric. It’s often used for the jackets of college professors, pipe-smoking stamp collectors, and—now I remembered— outdoorsmen, such as hunters.

  I tried to lean forward to get a better view. That’s when I realized I couldn’t move a muscle, couldn’t even blink.

  “So you’ve noticed, dearie.” The driver’s voice seemed to catch in her throat, then something harsh came out, not a human sound. Not even close. “I’m a hunter. Just. Like. You. And I do believe I’ve just caught dinner!”

  Stay tuned.

  Watch the skies.

  And everywhere else.

  —Daniel

  About the Authors

  JAMES PATTERSON is the author of the highly praised Maximum Ride novels and of bestselling detective series featuring Alex Cross and the Women’s Murder Club. His novels have sold more than 140 million copies worldwide. He lives in Florida.

  MICHAEL LEDWIDGE is a novelist who has coauthored two #1 bestsellers with James Patterson. He lives in New York City.