Read Daniel X: Game Over Online

Authors: James Patterson,Ned Rust

Tags: #JUV037000

Daniel X: Game Over (17 page)

BOOK: Daniel X: Game Over
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Ueno Park is an old-style city park—cobblestone carriage paths, huge trees, stone parapets—in the center of Tokyo. It’s got more than a half dozen world-class museums in and around it, a zoo, playing fields, and some truly awe-inspiring Buddhist shrines.

We soon discovered that it’s also got to be Japan’s premiere cherry-blossom-viewing venue. There have to be more than a thousand cherry trees in the park. I mean, I’m not a huge flower freak or anything, but all those millions of blossoms—and how the petals rained down like a snowstorm when the wind blew—it’s just one of those things you have to see to believe.

What was
not
so cool to see, however, was that on that particular spring afternoon, for every one of the thousands of blossoms on each of the trees, there had to be at least one tourist crammed into the park.

Plus, one alien safari hunter.

And believe me, one was enough. As luck would have it, it was the tall one whose hat I’d ridden on in the GC Tower elevator and whose tracking device I’d stolen. He was attempting to blend in as a forty-something man who happened to stand six feet eight inches tall and looked like he had broken glass under his skin.

We were just walking past the life-size model of a blue whale in front of the natural history museum when I spotted him. I grabbed Kildare’s arm. I didn’t need to offer a word of explanation as I steered him quickly away from the crowds toward the safety of a nearby shrine that had been roped off for the blossom festival.

As is customary, we washed our hands in the ablution pool outside the shrine.

“Should we stop the charade, Daniel?” he whispered as he filled his ladle with the cold water streaming from a spigot in the mouth of an ornately cast copper dragon.

“Of course, Kildare,” I said.

“You aren’t here to kill me; I can tell that much.”

“That’s true—and I’m sorry we haven’t talked openly before. I just, well—”

“It’s my fault too. Things are just so messed up. My parents—”

I nodded. It was definitely a delicate situation. Which was of course why we hadn’t talked about it, even though obviously we’d both known each others’ true identities all along.

“I hope it’s okay. I feel bad—”

“They killed the Pleionid already, didn’t they?”

I nodded.

“I felt it.”

“Look,” I said. “Is there anything you can tell me that will, um—”

“I know they have to be stopped, Daniel. But just give me a day. I think I may know a way to do it without resorting to, you know—”

“Okay. But what are you thinking?”

“I can sabotage my parents’ plans.”

“You mean like when you set the Murkami family free?” I asked, giving voice to a hunch.

He nodded.

“Steps like that aren’t enough, Kildare. They have too much in motion now for us to be doing guerrilla stuff. They’re too strong. We have to step it up. How many others will they hunt to extinction?”

“Well,” said Kildare. “I’ll give you one thing you may find useful if, you know, my plan doesn’t work.”

“Please. Anything.”

He nodded as he ladled some more water over his hands. “Do you like the ocean?”

“What?”

“Oh, crap!”

He was staring across the pool. I followed his horror-stricken gaze and saw Ellie and Colin Gygax—his parents, Number 7 and Number 8 on The List of Alien Outlaws on Terra Firma—coming up the stone path toward us. They did not look happy.

Chapter
46

 
 

“DANIEL, THEY’RE GOING to try to demoralize you. Don’t let them, okay? No matter what they say.”

“I don’t demoralize easily,” I replied. Still, I had to admit I was more than a little freaked out that they somehow knew we were here and were approaching us in broad daylight!

“Good,” Kildare said. “Now just stick with me.”

My mind was exploding with questions, but I nodded at him as his parents came up to us, looking like some snooty, well-dressed professional couple.

“We can do this right here, right now, in the middle of Tokyo, Alien Hunter,” said Number 7, striding up and attempting to grab Kildare’s hand. Kildare was having none of it and backed up next to me.

“Of course, given the crowds today, a few hundred humans would doubtless be killed or injured in the melee,” chimed in Number 8. “Minimum.”

“Like that’s a big concern for you guys,” I muttered.

They ignored me, and Number 7 went on. “And we’d doubtless end up wrecking some of this park’s lovely cultural treasures—”

“We mean,
if
you still want to
hunt
us, that is.”

“You’re calling
him
a hunter?” demanded Kildare.

“Why else would he have been conducting surveillance on us?”

“Shopping in our store—”

“Watching us from window-washing platforms—”

“Turning himself into a fly—”

My mind was reeling. How did they know all this? How had they been spying on me even as I was trying to spy on them?

“Even,” said Number 8, “going as far as pretending to care about our son.”

“He
does
care about me,” protested Kildare. “Way more than either of you do.”


Sure
he does, son,” said Number 7. “That must be why they call him the
Alien Hunter.

“It’s not very nice pretending to be somebody’s friend like that,” said Number 8, casting a reproachful glance my way. “But what would you expect from an Alpar Nokian?”

“Yes, cold-blooded killers, all of them. He was just using you so he could find out more about us—so he could more easily hunt our family,” said Number 7.

“Yes, isn’t that one of the first things they teach you as an Alien Hunter—to
know your prey?

“At least his version of hunting involves saving lives; not killing for
sport,
” Kildare shouted.

“So he wants to
kill
us to
save
lives?” replied Number 7. “Perhaps he should consider taking a course in logic?”

“Or,” continued Number 8, “perhaps now that he knows more about us, he should just throw in the towel?”

“Yes, perhaps,” said Number 7, “he’s beginning to realize we’re a bit more trouble than we’re worth.”

“Unless,” continued Number 8, suddenly turning to me, “you need some more convincing?”

“Like,” said Number 7, “maybe it would help you to know that we’re not who we appear to be?”

“That we’re colonial beings,” said Number 8, “composed of billions of intelligent particles—”

“Which can combine,” continued Number 7 as he took his wife’s hand, “and take on any shape we wish—”

His voice suddenly sounded not so much like a single voice but a whole crowd of people talking at once. And then the two of them suddenly flickered gray and began to merge, effectively doubling in size and taking on a massive cloudlike swarm. It was kind of like somebody had just kicked over the world’s biggest hornet nest, and the hornets were on steroids and under the control of an evil supergenius. The cloud descended on a nearby pine tree and, with a stomach-turning buzzing noise, consumed every single branch and needle, leaving behind a burnt-looking stump.

At the top of the shrine’s stairs, out of earshot but still within view of us, the attending monk let out a small yelp and fled into the park.

Number 7 and Number 8 morphed back into their usual separate forms as I tried to lift my jaw from the ground and not look quite as surprised as I was. The implications of their being colonial creatures were past alarming to consider. Shape-shifting, immunity to projectiles, immunity to blunt trauma, able to disperse and reassemble at any time—

“So, tell us, have you ever fought a cloud that can take any form it wants and has a collective intelligence higher than any army the universe has ever known?” asked Number 7.

“It has its challenges, we assure you,” said Number 8.

They didn’t need to tell me. What was I going to do? Drop a bomb on them in the middle of a Tokyo park?

“Yes, why don’t you be a smart little Alien Hunter and leave us alone?”

“He’s
not
going to leave you alone,” yelled Kildare. “And I’m going to help him!”

“But surely not right now—not in this crowded park, not where so many innocents might be hurt?”

I nodded at them coolly.

Just then Number 7’s cell phone began to ring, and he pulled it out of his pocket.

“Is it him?” asked Number 8.

“It is,” said Number 7 looking down at the readout of his smartphone.

“We’ll continue this later,” said Number 8 as Number 7 put the phone to his ear. And, just like that, the two of them turned and walked back down the path, out of the now quiet sanctuary and into the crowded, blossom-filled park.

Chapter
47

 
 

“CAN YOU DO that?” I asked Kildare as we hurried to the train station. Number 7 and Number 8 were gone, but something told me we weren’t exactly being left alone. My plan was to return to the Fujiya Hotel and then summon my friends and family to meet Kildare.

“Am I a colony too? Is that what you’re asking?”

“I saw you turn gray like that once, at school. When Ichi stuck you in the garbage can.”

“We call it ‘dispersing’ if you want to know the technical term. Yeah, I’m
really
their son. But personality’s a different thing, you know. Just because you have a brain like your parents’ doesn’t mean you’re going to think the same thoughts or believe the same things.”

“I wasn’t saying—” I started.

“I know. And I don’t mean to be defensive. It’s just that
my parents are a little harder to relate to than those of most kids. I mean, some kids complain about having moms and dads that are lawyers or insurance agents. They should try coming home to a couple of vicious genocidal maniacs—”

“—with a small army of henchmen,” I added, gesturing at two aliens shambling down the path toward us in too-tight warm-up suits. We might have mistaken them for sumo wrestlers, except that, once again, their knees bent the wrong way.

“Yeah,” he agreed as we broke into a run toward the Ueno Station on the JR Yamanote line. But even as we made it down the park steps to the sidewalk, we spied three more badly dressed alien henchmen waiting beneath the overpass just outside the station. One of them waved while the other two reached inside their hoodies and pulled out weapons like the ones I had seen in the box back at the Game Consortium.

This was
not
good.

“Taxi!” I yelled, stepping out to the curb and flagging down a boxy little Tokyo cab. It’s no easier finding an empty cab in Tokyo than it is in New York, Paris, or London, but one just happened to be there right then.

We quickly hopped into the backseat. “Omiya, please,” I said, identifying a major train station a good distance out of downtown where we could easily find a train.

“Anywhere you like, bosss,” hissed the driver.

“Oh, crap!” said Kildare with alarm. “It’s one of my parents’ Silurians!”

Silurians are a species of monkey-like reptile frequently hired as contract assassins, because they’re clever, patient, and obedient, and happen to enjoy killing so much that you don’t even need to pay them to do it.

BOOK: Daniel X: Game Over
2.62Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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