“Hey, watch what you’re doing, pal,” snapped a New Yorker. “I’m standin’ here.”
As the Mack truck rattled down Seventh Avenue, the truck driver yanked on his air horn to give me a serious blast of big city ’tude.
“Get out of the road, nut job!” he shouted as he flipped me a New York City–style single-digit salute.
I smiled and waved back—relieved to discover that sometimes a Mack truck is just a Mack truck.
As I stood huddled with the mob of pedestrians crowded onto the traffic island—all of us antsy for the light to change so we could charge across Forty-Second Street—my cell phone began to vibrate. It also emitted a very odd, very peculiar ringtone.
A ringtone I had never downloaded or heard before.
Chapter 14
THE TRAFFIC STOPPED.
The pedestrians froze.
The WALK sign never lit up.
All the giant billboards surrounding Times Square quit flickering, some with bulbs stuck in midblink.
Number 1, the all-powerful alien, the one my father warned me was a “godlike” creature, had somehow made time stand still in Times Square so he could send me a text message.
I glanced down at the screen on my Extremely Smart Phone (Apple will probably sell something similar in the year 2525). A glowing green message was waiting for me.
As I went to open the text, I noticed my hand was bathed in an eerie green glow.
I looked up.
I wouldn’t need my phone.
The Prayer’s message was boldly scrolled in bright green script on every conceivable electronic receptor in Times Square. The jumbo-screen TVs. The flashing billboards. The chaser lights zipping electronic headlines around massive buildings. Even the illuminated advertisements on top of the stalled taxicabs proclaimed Number 1’s message to me:
CONGRATULATIONS, DANNY BOY!
YOU HAVE MOVED UP TO THE TOP OF MY LIST.
YOU ARE MY NEW NUMBER 1.
I spent a few time-suspended seconds soaking it in.
I guess turnabout is fair play, as they say.
I’ve had The Prayer at the top of my list my whole life. Now it was his turn to make me his number-one draft pick, the prime target of his anger and wrath.
For a moment, I wondered who used to be The Prayer’s Number 1. Why hadn’t he focused on me in the past? Had he counted on some of his outlaw cronies in the Top Ten to take me down?
If he had, it didn’t work out so well. I’d already erased numbers 2 through 9 before any of them could erase me.
So now it was just us.
Two number ones. Two Alien Hunters locked in what would be, for one of us, our final battle.
I was in for the fight of my life and I knew it.
And if I had any doubts about The Prayer’s powers, they quickly evaporated when a pair of white-hot lightning bolts slammed into Times Square, blasting new potholes into Seventh Avenue and jolting time back into play.
The cratered asphalt steamed and sizzled. Sparks crackled like fireworks and spewed out of every sign and TV screen hanging over the crossroads of the world.
But the seen-everything New Yorkers around me just shrugged as the shower of electrical embers rained down on their heads. Some popped open umbrellas. Most probably figured a fuse must’ve blown somewhere. They just kept going to wherever it was they needed to be.
I stared at the smoldering holes in the street and shook my head.
Lightning bolts.
Apparently The Prayer had a serious Zeus complex.
Chapter 15
ALL THE RESIDUAL static electricity zizzing through the New York night air after the lightning strike gave me another power surge.
I could feel my nerves tingling, my senses sharpening.
I hoped it was the final energy boost my body needed to make my transformation powers fully operational. Because I really needed to turn myself into something other than a human teenager.
I didn’t want to be a sitting duck. If the gangly alien known as The Prayer wanted to hunt an Alien Hunter, fine. Bring it on. But he was going to have to do some serious predator work before he could stick my taxidermied head on the wall of his twisted trophy room.
As you might remember, the first time I escaped from Number 1 back in Kansas, I turned myself into a tick. This time, I decided to become a creature that could survive anything the overgrown grasshopper dished out, including lightning bolts or a nuclear blast. An insect that can survive three months without food, one month without water.
I was actually glad none of my friends or family were there to see me do what I was about to do. It would’ve been even more embarrassing. Because I was sinking to a new low. Literally.
That’s right. To lose myself in this crowd, I turned myself into one of New York City’s most populous creatures: a Periplaneta americana, better known as the American cockroach. At a length of one and a half inches, I was the largest of the roaches you’ll find in the Big Apple. My crispy shell was reddish brown with a yellow figure eight birthmark up front. I had wings tucked over my tail and a serious hankering for cheese, glue, flakes of dried skin, rodent corpses, and starchy bookbindings. I was also seriously disgusting.
I quickly clamped all six of my spindly legs onto the pants cuff of a guy climbing aboard a crosstown bus. I let him carry me up the steps, but as soon as he sat down I hopped off his pants, scampered down his socks, and scooted off his shoe right before he shook out his leg, feeling a creepy crawler.
I scurried across the sticky bus floor and, fighting the cockroachian urge to lap up a gooey brown pool of coagulated Coca-Cola, scampered between two very sensible shoes. I hid in the dark shadows underneath a row of scooped-out plastic bus seats.
I was safe.
For the time being, anyway. It was hard, even for a skilled predator like The Prayer, to hunt prey he couldn’t see, smell, or pick up on radar.
I twitched my antennae out my compound eyes and zeroed in on an advertisement displayed above the windows on the far side of the bus.
It was a poster for Roach Motels, those insect traps that use bait to lure cockroaches into a sticky-floored cardboard box. They squirm, starve, and eventually (after a couple of months) die. Since New York City is a multi-cultural town, the slogan was written in Spanish: “Las cucarachas entran… pero no salen.”
I didn’t need to activate my universal translator to know what the ad said: “Roaches check in, but they don’t check out.”
I just prayed the same wouldn’t be true for me.
Chapter 16
AS I WAS CHECKING out the Roach Motel poster, a lady sitting directly underneath it was checking out me. When she saw my twitching antennae, she gasped and put one hand to her chest like she was having a heart attack. Her other hand was pointing straight at me.
“Cockroach!” she screamed.
Actually, it was more like a shriek.
“COCKROACH!”
Squirming frantically (and totally freaking out), she grabbed hold of a pole and clambered up it so she could stand on her blue plastic seat. Apparently she didn’t want her feet anywhere near the floor of the bus in case I crawled on her.
“COCKROACH!”
My eye contact with the uptight, shrieking lady was broken when a man’s size thirteen shoe stomped down a few centimeters in front of my twitching bug face. The shock of the shoe quake sent my two cerci tingling. (Cerci are the little hairs sticking out of a cockroach’s butt that act like a motion detector.)
“Did you get him?” screeched the hyperventilating woman.
“Yeah,” said the macho-macho man attached to the wingtip shoe. “I think so.”
“Thank you,” gushed the woman. “Bless you.”
“No problem,” said the guy, sounding like he thought he was Sir Galahad rescuing a damsel in distress.
I didn’t want to break up their little mass-transit moment, but I also didn’t want to spend another second gagging on the cheesy fumes coming out of the guy’s socks and
shoes. Unfortunately, cockroaches smell with their antennae and their mouths. I was taking in a double dose of sweaty foot funk.
So I scampered across the dotted toe of his wing tip.
“Roach!”
“Eeeeeek!”
“Cucaracha!”
Now everybody on the bus was aware of my presence.
I scurried down the center aisle, dodging shoes, zigzagging around guillotining briefcases, barreling under swinging shopping bags, avoiding pointy-tipped umbrellas. These panicked people were using every weapon in their workday arsenal on me.
I raced through the gauntlet and made it to the front of the bus.
“Get outta here! Scram!”
Now the bus driver was getting in on the act. He was trying to stomp on me with both of his heavy black work boots. I juked and jived, scuttled and scooted. The driver kept coming at me with both his feet—feet that should have been busy on the gas and brake pedals.
I could feel the whole bus swerving as the driver concentrated on the floor instead of the road.
I had no choice.
I had to lose the disguise or the driver would stomp me to death two seconds before his bus drifted into a head-on collision and killed all the passengers.
So I quickly transformed back into a teenage boy.
The driver’s eyes nearly popped out of his head.
“Watch it!” I hollered.
He gripped his steering wheel just in time, saw the other bus we were about to smack into, and slammed on the brakes.
“Open the door, please,” I said as politely as I could. “This is my stop.”
When I heard the whoosh-thunk of the door swinging open behind me, I looked at the terrified passengers who had just witnessed a filthy cockroach turning into a normal kid.
“You’re all safe,” I said as reassuringly as I could.
But I couldn’t help shaking my head and adding, “Seriously, people. It was only a bug. Grow up.”
Chapter 17
I STUMBLED OFF the bus, totally wiped.
The passengers still on board looked dazed and confused. Most of them were probably wondering why they couldn’t remember what had happened during the last five minutes of their lives.
The answer was simple: I had used my remaining creative energy to scrub their short-term memories clean. They would have no recollection of seeing a scuzzy cockroach turning into a kid who they probably thought looked pretty scuzzy, too. Hey, I’d been kind of busy. Grooming and hair gel hadn’t been high priorities.
Anyway, I was exhausted from the mental exertion of mopping all those memories clean. And I was starving.
My crosstown bus had only crawled one block west so I was standing at the corner of Forty-Second Street and Eighth Avenue, right across the street from the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
Hundreds—maybe thousands—of people were scurrying in and out of the building. Commuters eager to head home to New Jersey and upstate New York. Friends meeting friends who had just climbed off suburban buses for a big night in the city.
I realized that’s what I needed.
Not a big night in New York City; I needed my friends. Hey, the number one Alien Outlaw in the galaxy had just declared me to be his number one target. “Alone” was the last thing I wanted to be.
So once again, I tried to conjure up my four friends. And I didn’t want the imitation Joe, Willy, Dana, and Emma who had come to visit me in the Hunting Camp Hospital. I wanted the real deals, even if they were one-hundred-percent purely products of my imagination.
I stared at clusters of friends greeting each other with hugs or helping with suitcases across the street at the bus terminal. I remembered sharing simple moments like that with my friends. Lending a hand. Being happy to see each other. Sharing that special bond you only ever share with your best buds. I totally grokked that warm, overwhelming sensation. Let it wash over me, knowing that what some wise earthling said years ago was absolutely true: “Friends are the family we choose for ourselves.”
And then I heard a voice behind me.
“So, Daniel, where the heck is the original Original Ray’s Pizza?”
It was Joe.
“I mean there have to be five bazillion pizza parlors in New York City, all of them called Original Ray’s, or Original Famous Ray’s, or Real Ray’s.”
“The real one was just called ‘Ray’s Pizza,’ ” said Emma. “It was down in Little Italy on Prince Street.”
“Was?” said Dana. “As in ‘it’s not there anymore’?”
“Yeah. Unfortunately, they closed.”
“Bummer,” said Willy. “I could go for a slice of pepperoni.”
“Pepperoni?” groaned Emma, our resident vegan. “Do you even know what they put in that stuff?”
“Sure,” said Joe. “Peppers and chopped oni’s.”
Willy laughed. Emma sighed. Dana rolled her eyes.
Me? I just grinned.
My gang was back.
“Hey, you guys,” I said, “let’s do a picnic up in Central Park.”
“Um, Daniel,” said Dana, “in case you haven’t noticed, it’s late. Isn’t Central Park dangerous after dark?”
“Not if you have your friends to cover your back.”
And, fortunately, I did.
Chapter 18
CENTRAL PARK IS this huge man-made forest in the center of New York City’s island of Manhattan.
Approximately thirty-five million visitors tromp though its 843 acres every year. Very few venture in after midnight.
So my friends and I had Umpire Rock—a massive, mica-flecked outcropping just south of the park’s Heckscher Ballfields—all to ourselves.
“So where’s the grub?” said Joe, whose stomach needed to be sufficiently stuffed with food before it would let Joe take in the spectacular view of the skyscrapers ringing the park.
Feeling rejuvenated just by having my friends around, I felt confident I could whip up a feast. Maybe the entire menu from the original Ray’s Pizza—everything from garlic knots to spaghetti to pizza pies.
“One midnight snack comin’ right up,” I said and materialized a heaping pile of steaming food on a red-checkered tablecloth.
Well, that was what I had intended to do.
Instead, what my imagination cooked up was a steaming pile. As in a trash heap.
“Um, Daniel,” said Dana, “none of this looks very appetizing.”
She was right. Instead of a smorgasbord of fine Italian dining, I had inadvertently conjured up a mound of chunky pig slop giving off gas vapors. It looked like that soupy stuff you see in the big rubber barrel in the cafeteria where all the leftover food scraps are collected.
“I think I’m going to hurl,” said Willy.
“Good,” said Joe. “It’ll probably smell better than this mess.”
Obviously, my matter-manipulation powers were still a little sketchy. They hadn’t fully recovered from my quick-change cockroach transformation. However, I was able to evaporate the muck mound before it dribbled any farther across Umpire Rock.
“Don’t worry, you guys,” said Emma. “I have a whole bunch of vegan no-bake peanut butter protein bars in my backpack.”
“Oh, joy,” said Joe.
But he was hungry enough to eat whatever Emma dished up. So was I. And we both considered ourselves lucky that she wasn’t hitting us with one of her famous raw power bars.
After everybody wolfed down about three bars each, Dana and I ended up sitting together on a patch of grass filling one of the crevices on Umpire Rock. The rest of the gang ran down to the nearby playground to check out the swing sets.
Like I said earlier, Dana is my dream girl—she is literally the girl of my dreams. Her long blond hair and beautiful sky-blue eyes, her ability to make my heart skip a few beats, even her incredible scent—all of it comes straight out of my emotional memories of the real Dana, the girl I knew back on Alpar Nok.
Dana was the prettiest and most grounded person I had ever met.
Until I met Melody Judge, the daughter of an FBI agent. Her dad heads up a secret government task force that deals with extraterrestrial outlaws. Melody reminds me so much of Dana, right down to the pale scar on both their cheeks, that I truly believe my soul mate from the planet Alpar Nok somehow found me again here on Earth.
Or maybe I just made that last bit up because I don’t want ever to have to choose between the two.
Yes, when it comes to girls, I’m just like most guys: totally confused.
“So how’s Mel?” said Dana, as if she had just been reading my mind, which she probably could since she more or less came out of it.
“She’s fine. Safe at home in Kentucky.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“You do? How?”
“The same way I know you and Mel split an order of KFC’s honey-barbecue wings two minutes before you idiotically decided to go for a ‘stroll under the stars.’ Along a deserted highway, in the middle of the night. Hello? What were you thinking?”
“Hey, I asked you to come with me.” I quickly realized what I had just said. “I mean, I asked Mel to come with me. But she was wiped out. We’d taken the horses out for a really long ride.”
Dana grinned. “Yeah. All the way down to McGimsey’s farm. “
Okay. That was a stunner. How could Dana know what Mel and I had done back in Kentucky? Unless, of course, my imaginary friends have total access to all my memory tapes while they’re hanging out inside my mind, waiting for me to summon them into action.
“Daniel?” said Dana. “Do you remember how I died?”
I nodded. Man, I hated talking or even thinking about this. “Yeah.”
“And do you remember when that was?”
“Sure. Like it was yesterday.”
“So you remember the date?”
“Definitely.” It’s still marked with a black circle on my calendar.
“Good. Then do the math.”
“Huh?”
“Take the date of my death and factor in the time differential between Earth and Alpar Nok. Time moves much more quickly down here than it did back home, because of the shorter length of the solar orbit here.”