Daniel X: Game Over (15 page)

THE PLEIONID!

The creature had been waiting for Kildare cleverly disguised as a layer of moss and lichen on the surface of the ancient lantern.

Despite its being maybe the cutest creature I’d ever seen—those big puppy eyes, those adorable little hands and feet—it tore into Kildare’s bag of Mister Donut donuts with ravenous savagery. Then it collapsed to the ground in a fit of satisfied groans and bubbly giggles.

But Kildare wasn’t smiling as I landed on a nearby stalk of bamboo.

“You can’t stay here,” said Kildare. “They’re coming for you in less than an hour. You need to leave this planet.
Now.
”

“I need to talk to the boy,” it replied.

The
boy?
Did it mean me?

“He was at my school today,” replied Kildare.

My little butterfly mind was racing at a thousand miles an hour. Did Kildare know who I was? I guessed that would make sense given that his parents had mug shots of me floating around their information network.

“Take me to him,” said the Pleionid.

“There’s no time,” Kildare told him. “And I don’t think you can help him anyhow.”

“Faith,” the Pleionid responded simply.

“I have faith,” said Kildare, glancing at his not-yet-activated hunting tracking unit. “I have faith their gamers will hunt you down, and then my parents will probably eat your carcass if you don’t get very, very far away from here
right now.
”

Should I have revealed myself then and there? It seemed an obvious thing to do. But was it
too
obvious? How was I supposed to be certain this wasn’t a trap?

The answer, of course, was that I couldn’t be certain of anything. I bit my butterfly tongue and stayed right there, looking to all the world just like one of its billions of innocuous insects.

HOW MUCH TIME was I losing just resting there and debating everything I saw through my thousand-lensed butterfly eyes?

There was no way Kildare could be the enemy,
I thought. I mean, what kind of evil space alien
practically bawls his eyes out
saying good-bye to a creature of an entirely different species, one that his parents want to kill and eat?

I could only imagine what my father would say if he knew I was forty miles outside Tokyo developing sympathies for the son of Number 7 and Number 8 on The List of Alien Outlaws on Terra Firma: I was just too darn gullible. When you think about it, wasn’t that precisely why I’d failed to notice that the little girl in the test had really been an alien? I saw her, and, like some just-landed-on-Earth simpleton, I assumed she was a poor, sweet little innocent whose life it
was my mission to save from demon motorcyclists. Now, here I was out in the real world stalking my
real
enemies, and yet this time I didn’t think it could be a trap?

Still, the way the creature had simply replied, “Faith,” to Kildare, kept echoing in my head. Why shouldn’t I have faith in my own instincts? Hadn’t I gotten this far relying on them?

The second I made up my mind to begin to turn back into my regular self, the creature raced up, belched a cloud of donut-scented gas in my face, and, with a distinct note of mischief, said, “Catch me if you can,
Alien Hunter!
”

Startled, I tumbled to the ground, the stalk of bamboo crushed by my sudden human weight.

“Wha—
Daniel?
” Kildare said, as shocked as I was. “How did you find us?”

I ignored him and kept my eyes on the Pleionid. “You said you wanted to find
me!
” I blurted as I struggled to my feet.

“If you are who I think you are, you won’t have too much trouble,” the Pleionid replied, winking a puppy eye at me and breaking into bubbly giggles again. “Can’t be too cautious!”

And, with that, it was gone. Or, rather, it would have seemed gone if I hadn’t been aware of some of its abilities and known what to look for. A nearly-impossible-to-detect flicker of motion, like the faintest breath of wind in the grass, was racing across the field.

“Where’s it going?” I yelled back at Kildare, already sprinting after the Pleionid.

“You’ll have to catch him to find out!” Kildare shouted, fading away behind me as I hit—thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty miles per hour—trying desperately to catch up.

It was racing right for the train tracks, which, I quickly realized, were about to be occupied by a Tokyo-bound
shinkansen,
hurtling our way at more than a hundred miles per hour.

I put on an additional burst of speed, sending up a rooster-tail of mud and rice plants behind me. I felt a little bad—some farmer was going to be upset at the furrow I was making through his paddy—but there wasn’t time to apologize or to fix things right then.

I was just a dozen or so yards behind the Pleionid when I realized it was aiming to cross the tracks a split second ahead of the approaching bullet train, thereby trapping me on the other side of it or, perhaps, leaving me smeared across its pointed nose.

Fortunately, I happen to be able to leap higher than a speeding locomotive.
Un
fortunately, as I cleared the hurtling train, I didn’t see any sign of the Pleionid.

What I did see was an alien I recognized from the GC Tower boardroom.

A
hunter
.

THE OWL-FACED GOON was squatting in the rice paddy and had some serious alien-tech camouflage going on. But since I was coming down from thirty feet in the air, it wasn’t hard to see him or his wicked-looking weapons.

Of course, I was brilliantly disguised as a teenager taking a superhuman leap over a bullet train, so it wasn’t too hard for him to see me either. His wicked-looking weapons were soon blasting away in my general direction.

I hit the ground and leaped sideways, then—faster than any bullet train—I charged. Getting in low under his spray of weapon fire, I tackled him, then I applied that
kansetsu waza
joint-locking move that Miyu had used on me. In a moment, I was standing on his armored neck and looking down into his panic-stricken, silver-eyed, noseless face.

“You’re—you’re—” he gasped.

“Yeah,” I said, “your friendly neighborhood Alien Hunter. Now tell me, what are you doing here?”

“The Puh-puh-puh-plee—”

“Pleionid?” I asked.

He nodded and started sputtering again: “Puh-puh-puh-please don’t hurt me. I’ll leave Earth, I promise!”

“Tell me how you tracked it here. The hunt codes weren’t supposed to go out till the hunt started, and that’s not for another half hour.”

“I ha-ha-ha—hacked the system.”

“How does it work?”

“It tracks pleiochromatech emissions. N-n-n-now, will you puh-puh-please let me go?”

“Why would I do that?”

“So you can
die,
Alien Hunter!”

And, with that, I came to realize that owl-headed goons like that one have certain defense mechanisms I’d failed to anticipate. I won’t give you the blow-by-blow on what happened next, because it gets a little gross, and your parents or teachers might take this book away from you if I spelled it out in too much detail. But let’s just say this particular breed of alien—the Dookian—when under duress, is apt to spray the highly caustic contents of its intestines at its attacker.

The long and the short of it is that this one did it
to me,
and it was easily the single-most-disgusting experience of my life. Fortunately, however, it wasn’t fatal and didn’t prevent me from karate-chopping him into the next prefecture.

When I was done cleaning his repulsive goo off me—I had to materialize a full case and a half of Handi Wipes to get the job done—I found the tracking unit he’d hacked and quickly determined that the Pleionid had already gotten thirty miles ahead of me, heading east toward Narita Airport.

I took off running at a comfortable two hundred miles per hour (any faster and I usually get a bit of a headache from the concentration it takes not to trip). Soon, I was closing in on my quarry.

But it wasn’t headed quite all the way to Narita Airport. Instead, it stopped in the middle of a beautiful garden in the town of Ushiku. But it wasn’t the plantings that were the most noteworthy feature of the place. That distinction went to a bronze man who happened to be taller than Godzilla.

DEPENDING ON THE movie, Godzilla is seldom depicted as much bigger than two hundred and fifty feet tall. The Amitabha Buddha statue at Ushiku is almost
four hundred
feet
tall,
and that’s not counting the base he stands on.

To give you some perspective, that means that it’s more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty; it also has a place in the Guinness World Records. Yeah, it’s
that
ginormous.

Also suffice it to say the Pleionid wasn’t content to meet me someplace convenient like a snack bar, ticket booth, or even in the viewing room located in the chest of the statue. No, my ultracamouflage little quarry went straight to the top—crawling like the world’s fastest and most purposeful oil slick up the exterior of the colossus, all the way to the head, where it proceeded to lodge itself in the statue’s
left ear. I watched and watched (and kept checking the hacked tracking device) until it appeared that the Pleionid had finally stopped running.

Now I just needed to figure out how to get up into the Buddha’s left ear without making the local news and the Facebook pages of every camera-wielding tourist on the grounds. Which basically ruled out sprouting wings like Maximum Ride, leaping like Superman, scaling the statue like Spiderman, or laying the statue down on its side like the Hulk.

So I ended up doing the tourist thing and rode as high as the attendant-driven elevator would take me: up into the statue’s slit-windowed chest. From there, it was only modestly difficult to duck behind a display and do my tried-and-true butterfly trick. I flitted under the door marked
WORKERS ONLY
and soon found myself inside the cavernous, girder-spanned interior of the statue.

The statue’s ears were open to the outside, although chicken wire had been put across them to keep birds and bats from roosting inside. That didn’t stop the Pleionid, though. Without breaking the screen, it had somehow crossed through. Another trick I’d love to figure out.