I glanced over my shoulder.
Nurse O’Hara.
She was smiling at me and holding up a shimmering syringe. Her smile wasn’t the friendly sort, either; it was more like a “we’ll see who’s in charge here, young man” kind of smirk.
As the sedative swam through my bloodstream and my brain began to fog, all I could hear was my father’s voice calling out to me from somewhere far, far away:
Go look for your backup, son! Find your backup!
Chapter 44
BUT WHAT WAS my backup?
Where was my backup?
I became totally obsessed with trying to decipher my father’s cryptic message.
Is there some weapon I’m supposed to find? Some ally? Maybe another warrior to help me take down The Prayer?
I was so fixated on figuring out what it was my father wanted me to do that I started muttering my internal monologue out loud.
“Who’s my backup? Where’s my backup?”
Was I going crazy?
The so-called doctors and nurses sure seemed to think so. They tied my arms and legs to the hospital bed with thick leather straps buckled tight.
“Find my backup? What’s my backup? Should I back up the Tusk computer?”
When I started asking the scoop of mashed potatoes on my cafeteria tray these questions (over and over) the doctors decided to transfer me to the psychiatric wing of the hospital.
This time, when they rolled me down the halls, they were really halls and not just canvas flats from a Hollywood movie set. It was a real hospital. It even smelled like chicken broth mixed with antiseptic.
I realized: I might truly be insane. This whole Daniel X thing could be a figment of my imagination. All the running around in New York City, Kentucky, and Kansas could’ve taken place right here in a hospital bed—in my head!
Could this be my real reality? Was Daniel X just a fevered dream?
Every day, usually after a snack of pills in tiny paper cups, I had to go to group therapy.
“The last time we spoke, Daniel,” said Dr. Loesser, the psychiatrist in the tweed coat who liked to stroke his goatee, “you exhibited a great deal of hostility.” He formed another fingertip tent under his nose and waited patiently for me to respond.
“Well,” I said, “maybe I am slightly hostile because, like I told you yesterday, The Prayer got my girlfriend, Mel, who is really Dana, to give me electroshock therapy with jumper cables hooked up to some kind of high voltage spaceship battery.”
I was sitting on a plastic chair in a circle that included the psychiatrist and seven other patients. Half of them looked numbed out on drugs. The other half was drooling in anticipation, wondering what kind of kooky stuff I’d say next.
I did not disappoint.
“Maybe I should’ve stayed a cockroach,” I said.
My fans in the group circle giggled.
“Pardon?” said the doctor, arching a single eyebrow.
“After I teleported to New York City to get away from all those giant Mack trucks that had turned into humongous bulldogs, I turned myself into a cockroach so I could escape the lightning bolts being hurled at me in the middle of Times Square.”
Dr. Loesser stroked his beard some more. “I see. And how did that make you feel, Daniel?”
“Pretty small and insignificant at first. But then I found this puddle of spilled Coke. No bubbles, just sticky syrup. Yum.”
“Daniel,” the shrink started, “it seems…”
I held up my hand to stop him. “I know. You’re going to tell me that when I had my motorcycle accident I ran over a cockroach and it had a lightning-bolt marking on its thorax.”
“No,” said Dr. Loesser. “I was going to say that, given your high level of anger and bitterness, it seems you have reached the alienation phase of coping with your trauma.”
I nodded. “Makes sense. After all, I’m an alien here in your nation.”
The whole group cracked up at that one. Even the zonked out zombies.
When I joined in and started laughing like a maniac, too, Dr. Loesser raised a single finger to summon an orderly.
Another linebacker in white came at me with another syringe filled with bye-bye juice.
The instant he jammed the needle into my arm, my head slumped forward. I drifted down into the spiraling black hole of unconsciousness again.
The last thing I heard was the group laughing at me.
And I may be wrong, but I think Dr. Loesser was laughing at me, too.
Chapter 45
WHEN I WOKE UP, I was back in my hospital bed.
“There he is!” said a supercheery voice that sounded like my mom, if my mom was being played by a cheesy sitcom actress. “I knew this would snap him out of it.”
“We had to smuggle these in,” she chirped, fanning her hand over an open foil container filled with a stack of piping hot pancakes. “But there’s nothing like a hearty breakfast to cure whatever ails you, I’ve always said.”
“And I’ve always said, ‘Never argue with a boy’s mother about what’s best for him,’ ” joked a man who looked like my dad would’ve looked if my dad were ever on display in a wax museum. “So eat up, Daniel, those may be the last pancakes your mom ever makes.”
“Huh?”
“Our pancake maker was stolen, syruptitiously. What a waffle experience.”
Okay. Robo-Dad even cracked corny puns like my real dad sometimes did. I had to applaud The Prayer’s script-writing skills.
Either that, or I had gone completely bonkers.
“You’re not insane, Daniel,” said another mother who had materialized in my room. “These two are not who they claim to be.”
“My puns aren’t that lame,” said a second father standing beside my mirror image mother. “Are they, Altrelda?”
“Sometimes, Graff,” said Mom #2.
“Wait a second,” said the first father. “Who the heck are Graff and Altrelda?”
“Those are Danny’s made-up names for his space parents,” said Mom #1. “But did space mom bring you your favorite food? Of course not. How could she? She’s not real, Daniel.”
The parents who called themselves Graff and Altrelda were both wearing silver elephant pendants, emblems of Alpar Nokian home-world solidarity. My real parental units received their pendants when they graduated from the Academy and accepted their first jobs in the Protectorship.
Or maybe I made all that up.
Maybe it was just another part of my imaginary, alternate reality.
“Eat these before they get cold, Daniel,” said Mom #1. “I made them with chocolate chips and then sprinkled on powdered sugar.”
“Hang on a sec,” I said, turning to the other side of the bed and my other set of parents. “How can you guys even be here?”
“Easy,” said my dad with the cocky grin I remember from our many hard-core training sessions. “Some part of your brain must have known you needed parental advice.…”
“But, wait—you can’t come back. I cast your souls to the wind. Remember, Mom? After Dad’s spirit passed over, you said, ‘None of us is immortal.’ And then your spirit moved on, too.”
My mother (or the one who seemed more like my mother than the other mother in the room) smiled. “It is true, Daniel. But those who lived their life in the light never truly die.”
I looked to my dad; the one I felt had to be my dad.
He winked. “We love you, Daniel. Always.”
Okay. That nearly clinched it.
“We love you, Daniel. Always,” had been my father’s final words to me, right before he died.
But wait a second: The Prayer killed my father. The giant praying mantis monstrosity would’ve heard those words, too. This new set of parents could be another pair of pre-programmed imposters sent by Number 1 to mess with my head.
“Zeboul does not like this planet,” said Dad #2. “Humanity, with its abundant reservoirs of goodness and light, is a constant irritant to the forces of darkness.”
br /> “Whoa,” said Dad #1, “sounds like somebody in this room watches way too many Star Wars movies.”
The other father didn’t even react to that. “The next time Number 1 catches you, Daniel,” he said with steely determination, “the thing will most certainly destroy you.”
“And,” added my other mother, “it will attempt to crush your soul to prevent it from moving on to the next realm. It will deny you access to the light and take you with it into the darkness.”
I dropped my head into my pillow and closed my eyes tight.
Either I was an ordinary teenager named Daniel Manashil with a hyperactive imagination who had been in a bad motorcycle accident, or I was Daniel X, the earth’s final protector.
If I was Daniel the Alien Hunter, then the fate of an entire solar system (not to mention the cosmic balance between good and evil) had come crashing down on my head.
If I was Daniel Manashil, I would have to erase all of this alternate universe crap from my mind once and for all, so I could go home, fix my motorcycle, and ask the Dana I knew from school to go with me to the homecoming dance.
Either way, I was definitely going to need some backup.
Too bad neither one of my dads had mentioned where I might find some.
Chapter 46
WHEN I OPENED my eyes, both sets of parents were still in the room.
Just then, a swath of violet-tinged light crept across the floor. I looked over to the door. The crack under it was a glowing strip of ultraviolet light.
“Mom!” I hollered. “Get down!”
The door burst open.
The Prayer had kicked it in with a quick blast from his muscular leg.
One set of parents—the mom and dad who had arrived first—quickly leaped back from the bed rails and huddled up against the wall, taking themselves out of harm’s way.
The other set stood their ground.
(Quick footnote—if you’re ever in a similar jam, here’s how you can tell who your real parents are: they’re the ones who don’t abandon you in the face of danger.)
“YOU!” roared The Prayer in its deep, strangled voice. “I already killed you both!”
“You can’t kill love,” replied my mother extremely calmly, especially considering the fact that The Prayer was toting his sizzling Opus 24/24.
“Lower the gun, my friend,” said my father.
“I am not your FRIEND! Die again, Alien Hunter!”
Once more, I heard a string of deafening explosions as Number 1 blasted my parents (or their spiritual essences or their ghosts or whatever had drifted back into my life) off to oblivion. It was like that night back in Kansas all over again. Only worse, because I didn’t have any idea what happened to a blasted spiritual essence.
“Good shooting,” said Fake Dad from the corner.
“I’ll say,” added Fake Mom.
“Ha! I am just getting started. That was nothing. Now it’s time for the blood and guts and gore.” I heard the whine of the Opus 24/24 recharging its pain resonator. “Game over, you pathetic little pukemeister!”
And he swung his weapon up and aimed it right at me.
Chapter 47
THIS COULD NOT be happening again!
But it was.
I quickly tucked, rolled, and hit the floor—putting the steel frame of the hospital bed between The Prayer and me.
I heard the crunch of the killing machine’s triple-jointed feet as it tiptoed around the foot of the bed. “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” it taunted.
Like that was going to happen.
I crawled underneath the bed to contemplate my options.
“He’s under the bed, sir,” said Fake Dad.
“Do you need a flashlight?” added ever-helpful Fake Mom. “I have one in my purse.”
“QUIET!” screeched Number 1, sitting up on its rear and middle legs and wiggling its antennae to sniff the air the way a police dog sniffs suspicious suitcases. “I do not need your wretched illumination device. I can smell the boy. I can smell his FEAR.”
This was just like that first time when I was a little kid. Me, hiding; Number 1 tracking me like the master predator it was.
Of course, I thought.
I had a plan that I knew would work because it had worked the first time I was in this same dilemma.
The Prayer dropped into a multiple-knee-creaking squat and swung its hideous head under the bed.
And found absolutely nothing.
Because I had just done what I did back in Kansas all those years ago. I made myself a little less conspicuous to the murderous monster by transforming myself into an Arthropoda Arachnida Acari Metastigmata. I had become a tiny tick, smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. A baby male dog tick, to be precise.
And I was giving The Prayer mad mantis disease because it couldn’t find me.
“Not possible!” the frustrated freak gasped. “I smelled the boy under the bed a second ago!”
“He sort of disappeared,” said the dorky dad.
“Poof!” added his cheery spouse.
While The Prayer contemplated evaporating my one-hundred-percent fake mom and dad, I was hit with a second inspiration.
Everybody always says, “The best offense is a good defense.”
That meant the opposite must be true, too: “The best defense is a good offense.”
The best way to protect myself from Number 1 was to attack him.
But not here. More importantly, not now.
So I did a quick, full-body mitosis. For those of you who’ve already forgotten everything that was on your biology final, that means I split all of my cells in half and became two ticks.
I sent both my tick bodies scurrying across the cold hospital floor, dodged around The Prayer’s size fifty-nine feet, and scampered up the shoes and socks of Fake Mom and Fake Dad.
Then I threw open the palps at the sides of my mouthparts, pierced my phony parents’ skins with my double chelicerae, and sank my barbed, needlelike hypostome into them.
That’s right—I bit both their ankles and went vampire on them.
I started sucking their blood.
Chapter 48
LOCKED ON TO both my substitute parental units, I chose flight over fight once again—but only so I could stage the fight in my preferred arena.
I let my mind go limp and dove through the surface of time.
Since I had a solid grip on Fake Mom and Fake Dad—not to mention their blood mingling with mine—I was able to blast back to the past and drag the two of them with me.
My destination was Kansas, of course.
I was going back in time to that fateful day when The Prayer first entered my life. Back to when I was three years old, making the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World out of Play-Doh down in the basement.
At least, that’s the time I was going to make Number 1 think I had traveled to.
In truth, I was only time-scrubbing to that day when The Prayer caught me camping in the backyard. I set my time arrival parameters on early evening, just before dinner. I would art-direct the scene to make sure it looked exactly like it had on that cursed night right before The Prayer slaughtered my entire family.
That’s why I was bringing along a few props—specifically, body doubles for my mother and father. Physically, they had been good enough to almost fool me. Hopefully, they would be good enough to fool Number 1, too.
I assumed the “omnipotent” Prayer was time-diving right behind me. Any temporal jump I could make, I knew it could match.
I sensed, however, that the forces of darkness could be blinded by their single-minded devotion to cold and calculating logic. They weren’t big on emotions like love (I had a feeling this is why they wanted to destroy Terra Firma and all the emotional earthlings inhabiting it). Creatures without a conscience or intuition—those driven only by the logical choices presented to them—are often the easiest to fool. Especially if you do something totally wacking nuts.
The Prayer would
follow me down the time-warp rabbit hole because it would be a logical, predatory choice. It would not question where I was headed. The hunter would simply track its prey.
When Number 1 arrived in Kansas, I was pretty confident it would assume that I had gone back to that pivotal moment, right before both my parents were slain.
Something I’ve actually thought about doing at least a billion times since I mastered time travel.
Over and over, I’ve asked myself, What if I could go back and stop Number 1 from doing what it did?
What if I, the trained teenage Alien Hunter Daniel, could pop into our Kansas home two minutes before The Prayer showed up and, if nothing else, warn my parents that Number 1 was coming?
That would be so awesome, right?
Probably not.
Changing history has consequences. It’d be like chucking a cinder block into a calm lake. There’d be too many ripples rushing forward from that single impact point; enough turbulence to swamp the future and wash away tons of meaningful events.
For instance, all the good I had done during my dangerous days as the Alien Hunter might be undone. Several cities across the globe might be instantly wiped out by outlaw extraterrestrials because I wasn’t there to stop them if I hadn’t grown up an orphan, eager to take on my dead parents’ missions. Worse, I may have only delayed the inevitable, and the next time The Prayer struck in the past, the fiend would take greater pains to kill me when it killed my parents.
In fact, if I stopped The Prayer from killing my parents, bizarre as it sounds, there was a slim possibility that I would vanish half a nanosecond later because of whatever happened in the tsunami of history being rewritten. I might already be dead in that alternate timeline.
Seriously: you don’t want to mess with the past because it will totally scramble your future and muddle what you call the present.
On the other hand, I was more than willing to mess with Number 1’s mind, big-time.
Hey, he’d been doing it to me all along.
It was time to return the favor.