Daniel X: Game Over (8 page)

I placed my order as soon as I got to the room: “Yes, I’d like eight bowls of the Imperial consommé, two dozen orders of the assorted sashimi, seven gratin-of-shrimp with the sole Queen Elizabeth II, eight Chaliapin steaks—actually, better make that nine—and why don’t you throw in twenty orders of shrimp tempura. As for drinks, I’d like two pitchers of fresh-squeezed orange juice, four liters of Coke, two liters of Sprite, three liters of Pineapple Crush, and some of that fancy sparkling water—what’s it called—Pellegrino? Oh, and dessert. Do you have baked Alaska? Great, how many people does it serve? Yes, in that case, I’d like three of those too.
Domo arigato.
”

And then—so you don’t think I’m a glutton or anything—I placed another order, only this one happened entirely inside my own head. I materialized Dana, Willy, Joe, and Emma, as well as Mom, Dad, and Pork Chop (aka Brenda, my little sister).

There was a lot of hugging, high-fives, low-fives, jumping on the bed, and general jubilation. And when I told Joe what I’d ordered from room service, he just about went catatonic on me.

“This sure seems festive, Daniel,” said my mom. “What’s going on?”

“Attention, everybody,” I said, standing on the mahogany credenza and waving at Emma to turn down the sound on the Dance Dance Revolution game she and Pork Chop had begun to play on the room’s Wii console.

“As you know, we’re once again faced with what some might think is an insurmountable challenge. Not one, but
two
Listers are with us in Tokyo, and all signs suggest that they’re about to go critical. What you don’t know is that there may actually be
three
of them—they appear to have a son.”

“I’m really good with alien kids, you know,” said Joe. “Do you think they ever need a sitter?”

“And,” I continued, ignoring him, “if that weren’t enough, it appears that they might be getting some help from yet another Lister.”

“Another in the top ten?!” demanded Dana, putting down her iPhone and looking at me in disgust. “Which one?!”

“Umm,” I said, coughing out the answer. “Number 1.”

The expressions on their faces ran the emotional spectrum—from Willy’s steely defiance to Mom’s outright queasiness—but as I dropped that bombshell a uniform look of terror appeared.

“Let’s not lose our heads,” I said, forcing a smile. I had one more piece of news that I was quite certain none of them would see coming.

“Does anybody know the date?”

“April twenty-ninth,” said Joe.

“Not
that
date,” I said as the room began to shake and a noise like thunder filled our ears.

A PARADE OF trumpeting elephants sent us sprawling against the walls amid a confetti storm of flower petals. Never before had anything like this ever been experienced inside the Fujiya Hotel—or, really, anyplace on this side of the planet.

“Gathering Day!” screamed Pork Chop, jumping up and down on the credenza next to me. She was too young to have experienced the last one. To clarify, Alpar Nok, my home planet, circles its sun a little more slowly than Earth does. About twelve times more slowly. So a single Alpar Nokian year is about twelve Earth years long.

You might think maybe this would cause us to have more holidays, but, in fact, we have fewer. So when one happens—and Gathering Day is the biggest of them all—it’s a pretty massive thing. Think Christmas, Rosh
Hashanah, Eid ul-Adha, Fourth of July, Bastille Day, Boxing Day, Chinese New Year, Easter, Diwali, Mahavir Jayanti, and your birthday all rolled into one.

My mother dodged an elephant and climbed up next to me with tears in her eyes.

“You remembered, Daniel,” she said, so softly I could hardly hear her over the trumpeting pachyderms and, now, the polyphonic strains of the Bryn Spi Philharmonic Orchestra.

Bryn Spi is the capital city, the center of Alpar Nokian culture. It’s where the very best of our artists, musicians, and entertainers gather. And, considering that there’s never been a nonmusical, nonartistic, nontalented Alpar Nokian, that’s saying something.

To hear just one Bryn Spi musician is an amazing thing. To hear a gathering of the hundred best performing the most beautiful and touching piece that has ever been composed, the Departed Symphony, is completely soul lifting. It’s a celebration and a remembrance of lost Alpar Nokians—humans and elephants alike. Needless to say, the song got a lot longer after First Strike, the horrible attack on our planet by the Outer Ones that resulted in the decimation of our species.

Legend has it that the symphony is so affecting that it causes people to have visions. Seriously. I don’t remember much from my last Gathering Day (when I was a toddler and by then living in Kansas), but they say you can’t be exposed to the song and not have an out-of-body experience: seeing dead relatives, conversing with famous Alpar
Nokians from history, or some other grand and enlightening vision.

Within a minute, even tough-as-nails Willy had tears streaming down his face. And I was just starting to go off into la-la land myself. I was beginning to smell the gunjun flowers of my home planet’s high mountain plains and was even starting to see a herd of elephants coming toward me—when there was a knock on the door.

I quickly muted the orchestra, hid the parade, and leaped across the room, pressing myself along the wall next to the door.

Everybody was looking to me for some sign. I waved them into defensive positions. It was unlikely to be a noise complaint—I’d of course soundproofed the room so that the noise of this holographic parade wouldn’t send hotel management into conniptions—but, then, who could it be? The only certain thing was that the visitor was uninvited.

And, quite possibly, most unwelcome.

“WHO IS IT?” I asked as innocently as I could.

“It’s the Murkamis, Daniel-san,” said a voice that sure sounded like Eigi’s.

Willy peeked through the keyhole and nodded. I also did a little radar sweep through the door to confirm that there were just four people and that their sizes and shapes matched the Murkamis.

I opened the door and they stepped in, all wearing gleaming Gathering Day robes (made of woven vanadium) and traditional Alpar Nokian headdresses.

“Eigi,” I yelled with alarm. “You guys were supposed to have left from Narita Airport by now! It’s in the complete opposite direction from here!”

“We’re sorry, Daniel-san,” he said, bowing contritely.
“But we couldn’t leave a fellow Alpar Nokian all alone against those two monsters.”

“Besides,” said the daughter, Miyu, “you can’t exactly show up at the airport in clothes like these and expect to get right on the airplane.”

“Yeah,” agreed the boy, Kenshin. “Or really go anyplace and expect anybody to think you’re not a freak.”

“But how did you know we were here?” I asked.

“Dana invited us last night,” said Miyu.

“It was kind of obvious they didn’t want to leave Tokyo, Daniel,” said Dana. “And it seemed wrong not to include them if they were going to be in town. Here, come outside with me.”

I waved the Gathering Day parade back into existence for the others and followed Dana outside onto the terrace.

I turned to her in the late-afternoon sunlight. “So how did
you
know I was going to have a Gathering Day party?”

“Well, sometimes, umm, I can kind of read your thoughts.”

I looked at her in horror. Could it be true? Because if she could read my thoughts, then she might know when I thought embarrassing things about her, like how I thought she looked really beautiful right then and—

“I mean, not
most
of the time. Just sometimes, when you bring me in and out of existence. Maybe it’s because I kind of come out of your mind. It makes sense that sometimes I bump into your thoughts then, you know?” I chuckled self-consciously, and then she continued to torture me by probing my innermost emotions.

“Yesterday when you brought us here to check out the GC Headquarters, you were filled with thoughts about Gathering Day. About how you last celebrated it with your parents in Kansas when you were a little boy and how incredible it was. It was really very touching,” she said, taking my hand. I turned as red as a lobster in a pot of boiling water.

“I mean,” she went on, “you’re always thoughtful, Daniel, but thinking of this, remembering this—the loss of your civilization, your family, and the care you give to the others around you, even strangers—”

“Can Willy and the others also see my thoughts sometimes?”

“I don’t think so,” she guessed.

“That’s so weird…” I started to wonder.

“Not as weird as what’s about to happen,” said a sinister voice just above us.

A massive head peered out over the curving eave of the hotel. The head of a very large insect. A praying mantis, to be precise. A praying mantis with dreadlocks.

“Number 1!!!!” screamed Dana.

Too late. Way too late.

BEFORE I COULD even flinch, Number 1 had hopped over the edge of the hotel roof and flattened us to the floor of the balcony. And when I say flattened, I don’t mean knocked down—I mean
flattened.
Crushed to a thickness of less than an inch.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. I’d been waiting my whole life to be face-to-face with Number 1, but here it was and there was nothing I could do. I was a pancake… a pancake that was about to become toast. He bent down in my face and mocked me. “Poor little Daniel. Have you been eating enough? You seem so…
thin.
”

He laughed and peeled Dana’s crushed body from the balcony floor. She was like a big disk of Play-Doh, all stretched out and wretchedly, helplessly flat. Utter dread seized me.
Was it possible that—

I couldn’t even think it. He’d taken my parents. He couldn’t take Dana too.

“Do they play much Frisbee in this country?” Number 1 asked, like I was in any shape to talk. I couldn’t even tell where my mouth was except that something tasted gritty and soapy like floor cleaner. Which probably meant at least part of it was against the floor.

He took Dana’s flat, motionless body and flung her off the balcony, spinning her out over the trees. How could this be happening? A body couldn’t possibly survive in this shape. If he’d crushed us, he’d crushed us, right? Dana must be dead. I must be dead. I must be—