Armageddon (3 page)

“Hey, Daniel,” teased Dana, who, full disclosure, I have a mad crush on. “Part of the park is called ‘Gotham City.’ You wanna head over there and check out this cool coaster called Batman: The Ride?”

“More bats?” I said. “No thanks.”

“Let’s do the Dare Devil Dive!” said Willy. “Get this: you climb ten stories up a vertical lift, then plummet down a ninety-five-degree first drop!”

“Um,” said Dana, “not to barf all over your idea, Willy, but I detect one slight problem.”

“What?”

Dana gestured at the dark rides towering all around us. “Like I said, it’s after three
AM
.”

“So?” said Willy, who can be as stubborn as he is brave.

“The park is closed, Willy,” said Emma, who was Willy’s little sister and knew him better than anybody. “You can’t ride the rides, because, well, Six Flags very wisely shuts off all its electricity after hours in an attempt to conserve energy.”

I smiled. “Well, you know what they say: it’s a whole ’nother park after dark. Start ’em up!”

And, by the power of sheer imagination, I made every single ride in Six Flags whir back to life!

YOU KNOW HOW when you go to an amusement park in the middle of the summer and you want to ride the really cool rides, but you have to wait like two hours in a line that keeps switching back on itself, so all you can do is keep staring at the hundreds of people ahead of you?

Well, this was absolutely
nothing
like that.

When we came to the end of any ride, we didn’t have to unload and run around to the entrance to ride it again. I just imagined the thing starting up and—
ZAP!
—it did.

We defied gravity, flew through loop-the-loops, felt g-forces similar to those encountered during the reentry phase of interplanetary space travel, and, basically, got to retaste what we had for lunch that day when it flew back up into our mouths.

“C’mon, you guys,” said Willy. “Time to take the ultimate plunge: the Dare Devil Dive coaster.”

Yes, nausea fans, we’d been saving Six Flags’ most incredible thrill ride for last.

We hurried over to the base of the bright yellow-and-red roller coaster. The logo emblazoned on its glowing two-story marquee sort of reminded me of Number 2 and his minions: a helmeted, goggled head with wings sprouting out on both sides and flames blazing up in the background.

“You okay, Daniel?” Emma asked when she caught me staring up at the wicked imagery.

“Yeah. Come on. Let’s give this devil his due.”

Our six-seater roller-coaster car was shaped like a fighter jet.

“Buckle up,” said Emma. “Keep your feet and hands inside the car at all times.”

“Your funnel cakes, too,” Dana added, elbowing Joe.

“Blast us off, Daniel!” said Willy.

Of course roller coasters don’t actually
blast
off. They kind of creep to a start and haul you up a hill. Coaster cars don’t have engines, so the ride is totally powered by the energy stored up when the car climbs the track’s first hill. After that, gravity and some other principles of physics are all you need.

A hidden chain hauled us straight up toward the starlit sky. When we were perched at the peak of the ten-story tower with our fighter plane’s nose hanging over the edge, the ride seemed to stall.

“Is it busted?” asked Willy.

“Nope,” said Joe, our technical wizard. “Teetering on the edge like this is just part of the coaster engineer’s grand desiii…”

Joe didn’t get to finish that thought.

We plummeted downward into a ninety-five-degree drop, which, check your protractors, is beyond straight down. We were actually angling
inward
as we dove straight for the ground.

With all sorts of kinetic energy rocketing us along, we careened up through three inversions, caught air on a zero-gravity hill, and swooped through an Immelmann U-turn—a half loop, half twist with a curving exit in the opposite direction from which we entered. (Quick fact: the whole move is based on a maneuver first employed by a German fighter pilot named Immelmann in World War I.) We raced into another nose-down dive, then shot up into a heartline roll (a total 360 where the pivot point is your heart, not your feet) before the car was slowed by magnetic brakes.

“Whahoobi!” shouted Willy.

“Un-
be
-lievable,” added Joe, with a burp.

“I’m glad it’s over,” said Emma.

“Me, too,” said Dana.

“I need liquid refreshment,” said Joe.

Which gave me a wild idea. “Coming right up!”

Hey, if this ride was powered by my imagination, there were no limits, no magnetic brakes to slow me down. Defying gravity and tapping into my personal reserves of energy, I made the fighter jet car fly off the rails and soar across the amusement park.

“Daniel?” said Emma. “This wasn’t in the brochure.”

“It should be!” Willy shouted as we zipped underneath
the Sky Bucket gondola ride and landed on the tracks of the giant steel coaster called Goliath, a ride so humongous it wouldn’t completely fit on the park grounds, so Six Flags had to run the track outside and back again. We rode up its two-hundred-foot ascent, zoomed through a couple of zero-gravity drops, slid into a giant spiral, and, since this was Daniel X’s version of Goliath, flew off the tracks again so we could soar up into the sky.

“Hey, I can see Atlanta!” Joe said as I made the car climb higher than Goliath’s highest hill.
Much
higher.

“I can see Miami,” said Dana.

We did a couple of barrel rolls over the Mind Bender, buzzed the Dodge City Bumper Cars, and, for my big finish, made a smooth water landing in a turquoise blue river at Splash Water Falls just as the rapids sluiced around a bend to slide us down a five-story waterfall.

“You want liquid refreshment?” I joked to Joe. “Here it comes!”

“Woo-hoo!” shouted Willy. “Hang on!”

Our roller-coaster car plunged over the falls, hit the waiting water below, and sent up a ten-foot wall of foam and spray that drenched us all.

Totally soaked and laughing hysterically, we drifted along until our fighter plane bumped into some rubber dock guards and sloshed to a full stop.

“Let’s do it again,” said Willy. “Let’s do it again.” He sounded exactly like everybody’s annoying little brother and/or sister.

Only we couldn’t ride any more rides.

We weren’t the only ones in the park anymore.

A squad of goons in bright white space suits leaped out of the surrounding pines and came charging up the exit ramp at us.

They were all carrying weapons.

Alien
weapons.

I COUNTED AT least a dozen storm troopers decked out in full-encapsulation bunny suits.

Their bodies were wrapped in loose-fitting, crinkly white fabric; their hands and feet were sealed inside black rubber gloves and boots; and their faces were hidden behind hoods and respirator masks.

They were carrying some pretty heavy artillery, too, none of it forged on planet Earth. We’re talking RJ-57 over-the-shoulder, tritium-charge bazookas; high-intensity microwave guns; shock-wave cannons; blasters; and a pair of Opus 24/24s, which contain an illegal molecular resonator that fires a pulse vibrating at the precise frequency of its victim’s neurotransmissions, causing the target to expire from sheer, unadulterated pain.

It’s no wonder the Opus 24/24 is banned across most of the civilized universe.

“We can take these marshmallow people,” Willy said, crouching into an arms-raised attack stance.

“No weapons, Daniel,” urged Emma.

“We’ve got your back, bro,” said Joe, moving to my right.

I eased into a neutral Aikido position, a nonaggressive martial arts style my father once taught me, and sized up the intruders. Aikido is all about redirecting the attackers’ force into throws, locks, and restraints. I wasn’t really sure how good it would be going up against an Opus 24/24, but I’d give it a whirl.

“Down on your knees, all of you,” said the alien team leader, his reedy voice blaring out of a speaker embedded in his helmet. “Hands behind your heads. Do it! Now!”

“You guys?” I said to my friends. “You need to go.”

“Let’s lay down some hurt on these dudes,” said Willy, wound up and ready to swing into full
Kung Fu Panda
mode. “And fast. I want to ride that X coaster again!”

“Not gonna happen,” I said. “Not today.”

“Wait one minute,” protested Dana. “These…
things
have weapons.”

Which was exactly why I needed to send my four friends away. Yes, I created them from memories stored in my mind, but they were extremely real. Therefore, an Opus 24/24 blast to any one of them would be extremely painful. I couldn’t stand to see my friends get hurt like that.

“Later, you guys,” I said.

“No,” Dana said, actually stomping her feet. “You’re in trouble. You need us. You can’t just snap your fingers and send us away.”

Well, yes, I could.

And I didn’t need to snap my fingers, although I guess I could’ve. It might’ve looked more magical, might’ve fooled the heavy-breathing, space-suited cretins into thinking they were dealing with a witch or a wizard.

Instead, I just imagined my friends gone. To someplace safe. Someplace fun. I picked Six Flags Magic Mountain, outside of Los Angeles.

Maybe Willy
would
get to ride that ride again.

THE SHRINK-WRAPPED SQUADRON leaped back a half step when Joe, Willy, Dana, and Emma vanished.

“Take a hint, guys,” I said to the small army circled around me. “Do like my friends just did. Disappear.”

“I said
on your knees
, son,” grunted the lead goon through his helmet radio.

Interesting. He called me “son,” but I knew he wasn’t my dad, because when my father pops in for a surprise training seminar, he seldom travels with a posse of weapon-toting thugs.

And just to get you up to speed: my father, my mother, and my little sister, Pork Chop, have something in common with my four best friends—they exist only as living, breathing creations of my very vivid imagination.

“Son, let’s not make this any more difficult than it has to be,” said the robot-voiced squad commander.

Okay, he did that “son” thing again. I knew that none
of Number 2’s battling barbarians would bother politely addressing me like family.

Who are these guys?
I wondered.

Fortunately, a storm trooper to my left made a seriously stupid move with his weapon that sent my personal danger alert plummeting to DEFCON Zero.

The doofus was carrying his double-barreled benzene-powered vaporizer
backward
! If he squeezed the trigger, he’d fry himself to a crispy, crackly crunch. These guys weren’t aliens. They were amateurs.

“Who are you people?” I asked.

“FBI. On your knees. Now.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m not big on bowing down before people, especially when they’re dressed up like oversized FedEx envelopes.”

“I repeat: We are with the FBI.”

“Really? I guess that makes sense, if FBI stands for Freak Boy Institute.”

“You want me to cuff the smart mouth?” barked another one of the guys in what I now recognized to be hazmat suits, those Tyvek outfits people wear to clean up nuclear meltdowns, biological waste, chemical spills—that sort of thing. Tough Guy slung his weapon over his shoulder and brandished a pair of FlexiCuffs so he could hog-tie my hands behind my back.

I focused on the plastic straps.

And turned them into strawberry Twizzlers.

“WHAT THE…”

Tough Guy dropped the Twizzlers like they were glowing strands of red-hot plutonium.

“Okay, son,” said the leader, making a big show of lowering his weapon. “We’re impressed. We know what you’re capable of. We’re special agents with the FBI’s IOU.”

“IOU?” I laughed. “You’re making that up, right? Like
I owe you
?”

“I assure you, son, this is not a joke. The Interplanetary Outlaw Unit functions under the radar as a liaison between the United States federal government and visitors from planets unknown.”

“Like me, you mean?”

“No, son. We’re on the same team.”

Impossible
, I thought. In all my battles with alien outlaws, never once had the United States cavalry come riding over the ridge to my rescue.

“We’re your friends,” he continued.

“No. My friends just left so you wouldn’t hurt them with that Opus 24/24—if you even know how to fire it.”

“We’re not here to hurt anyone.”

“Then tell me: Why are you carrying a weapon known to be the galaxy’s most heinous, most hurtful, not to mention most outlawed, instrument of pain?”

“We thought carrying the alien weaponry would prove that we are who and what we claim to be. We confiscated these weapons in firefights.”

“Right. The IOU. A super-secret branch of the FBI that deals with alien outlaws, just like Mulder and Scully used to on
The X-Files
. ‘The truth is out there’ and all that. Sorry, Agent, I want to
believe
, but, frankly, I don’t.”

“You should, Daniel. I promise you, I’m telling you the truth.”

“Okay. That was good, calling me Daniel. I only have one question: How did you know my name?”

“Easy,” said a tall man who stepped out of the shadows. “I told them.”

THIS NEW ARRIVAL wasn’t wearing a hazmat suit or a sealed helmet.

In fact, he was wearing a two-piece suit so rumpled it looked like he had slept in it for maybe a month.

“Come on, guys,” the tall man said to the others. “Put away those weapons before you hurt somebody. You act like you’ve never met an alien before.”

All around me, weapons clattered as they were lowered. Clearly, the guy without a helmet, mask, or respirator was the man in charge.

“Daniel, I’m Special Agent Martin Judge. I head up the FBI’s IOU, which, yes, is a lame name, but we’re stuck with it. It’s already printed on all our top secret business cards.”