James Patterson: Dangerous Days of Daniel X

“Oh, Danny,” he said in Phoebe Cook’s voice as he drew me to him. “I love it when we hug.”

Let me walk you through the being-squeezed-to-death-by-an-alien process. First it feels like a dump truck is sitting on your chest. Then it feels like an aircraft carrier landed directly on you. Black stars begin to cloud your vision. I had never seen or even heard of black stars before. Maybe they were the last thing you got to see on your way to the other side.

“I am more,” Seth roared through gritted teeth as he continued to crush me into fine particles. “I am more.”

I could feel my bones about to pulverize, my eyeballs ready to pop from their sockets.

I held on as long as I could.

Then I forced a final smile.

“I told you I was smarter than you, Dumb-Dumb. Didn’t I tell you?”

Seth looked at me curiously, and in the next instant, everything-Seth, the improvised coliseum, the immovable crushing pressure- all of it was gone.

I was on a white sheet.

I’m not talking a regular hospital sheet or something, but an incredibly enormous, billowing white sheet, a virtual desert of a white sheet going off and out of sight in every direction.

I was clinging to it desperately. With my arms and legs and teeth.

My eight, long, segmented, covered-in-an-exoskeleton arms and legs, by the way.

I’d turned myself into a tick.

I was now too small for Seth to squeeze to death. Let’s face it. I was so small I doubted Seth could even see me.

I STARTED to turbo-climb the cloth cliff of Seth’s white shirt. I was actually on his shoulder blade when I turned and saw his enormous eye staring down at me.

Far off, I watched a claw the size of a two-family house rise toward me. Uh-oh.

Then I jumped! The claw actually brushed my back. It came so close, I almost went flying off Seth altogether.

Almost.

I landed on the side of Seth’s head, next to his ear.

And then I held my breath… and crawled inside.

YUCK!

It was like the most disgusting cave ever discovered. Right in my path was what looked like a tractor trailer’s worth of melted Limburger cheese.

My tick torso doubled over and I started to dry heave. I realized I was standing in Seth’s earwax.

Finally, though, I rose up tall-and shouted!

“On Terra Firma, they have a product called Q-tips. You should look into it, Seth,” I yelled.

“WHO SAID THAT? ” he bellowed as I scampered down the curving corridor of his ear canal.

I didn’t stop until I came to a bulging red nodule. It was plugging up the tunnel. Now what?

I shut my eyes and pictured the anatomy of the Verm-gypian head from the diagram on my laptop. Having a photographic memory comes in really handy sometimes.

I realized I was staring at his tympanic membrane, or eardrum. Hmmm. It parted like a curtain as I cut into it with my fang.

Seth howled, so I must have been doing something right.

Next, I wriggled my way into a chamber called the tympanic cavity. Above me was a repulsive bulging, hanging thing that looked like a giant squid. It was Seth’s cochlea, the organ that turns sound into brain signals.

There was a little window in it where a funny-looking bone called the stirrup flickered in and out.

I climbed up and crawled over the stirrup and through the window, into Seth’s inner ear.

“I’m still here!” I reassured him. “This is still a fight to the death!”

THE INSIDE of Seth’s cochlea was even grosser than his earwax situation. It was filled with this fluid that was… ugh, I don’t even want to get into it.

I swam through the gook until I reached another opening filled with what looked like yellow spaghetti.

Aha! Just what I was looking for, a gaggle of Seth’s nerves. Auditory or vestibular, I wasn’t sure, and it didn’t matter.

I just needed a way to travel so far into his skull that there’d be no chance for him to get me out. I wriggled into a ductlike nerve, headfirst, and continued on my merry way, spelunking through Seth’s head.

For some reason, I don’t think Seth was having as much fun as I was. Periodically I would hear him moan things like NO and PLEASE and my personal favorite, MOMMY .

“I’m right here, honey!” I called back. “But you know what they say about letting an opponent get inside your head?”

After about five minutes of wriggling, I arrived at more yellowish spaghetti, and clumps of unidentifiable organs that looked important, and rather delicate. By my calculations, I was now in Seth’s brain stem, halfway between his medulla oblongata and his pons.

This was the Grand Central Station of Seth’s brain, the part that controlled his respiration, his blood pressure, his heart rate.

“Are all the brains of your species this small, Chunk Bucket? Or are you like an exception?” I yelled.

“GET OUT OF MY HEAD! ” Seth screamed.

His voice was truly thunderous in the chamber of his skull. The voice of an angry god in an evil temple.

“GET OUT OF MY HEAD NOW OR I’LL BOARD MY SHIP AND BLOW THIS PLANET TO DUST! ” he screamed.

And that was different from what he had intended to do in what way?

“You want me out of your head?” I said.

“YES! ”

“You sure?”

“YES! ”

“Say please.”

“PLEASE! ”

“Okay,” I said. “If you insist. But you won’t like it. Ready or not, I’m coming out!”

I LET OUT a thunderous trumpeting roar, and I mean that literally. My tick legs thickened as my body bulged, expanding at an amazing rate.

Seth had begun to shriek for his MOMMY again.

Then my head hit the ceiling of something spongy, and I slid through tissue and membrane with a wet pop.

I blinked in the suddenly bright sunlight, raised my glorious trunk to the sky, and trumpeted again.

Yes, trumpeted!

I’d transformed myself into a glorious elephant! One the size of Chordata.

I towered there for a moment, feeling my elephantness, feeling the power and might and wisdom of everything that was hopeful and alive about Alpar Nok.

Seth was lying on the stone beneath me, and well… wow. Seth wasn’t doing too well. Euphemism.Look it up. Where his head used to be was basically a pool of pale-colored slime.

This piece of garbage who had nearly destroyed my planet had had a large head for sure. But even his head couldn’t contain a full-grown elephant.

I trumpeted again, and the kids from Earth and Alpar Nok leaped to their feet, cheering.

The remaining alien commandos stood there in shock as I morphed back into myself.

“You there,” I said to the largest and nastiest-looking of them all.

“Me?” The creature cringed, fearfully pointing a claw at himself.

“Yes, you,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Krothgark.”

“Krothgark, I haven’t decided if I’m going to let you live or not. Would you like to influence my decision?”

“Yes,” Krothgark said. “Very much.”

“Then do yourself a big favor and unchain those kids,” I said. “And those kids. And those.All of them.”

“You got it, sir. Right away, right away. You heard the man,” Krothgark said, smacking one of the horse-head soldiers next to him. “Unchain the children.”

When I looked up I saw that people were streaming toward me. I gave Bem and his sister, Kulay, high fives as my uncle pinched both of my cheeks.

“ Woooh, ” I heard Joe yell from somewhere in the happy crush. “Yeah, baby! We’re going to Disney World.” Leave it to Joe.