He collapsed on his brittle back. I heard a snapping crackle and then the muffled sound of squishy splats. I figured the giant’s internal organs were turning into mush. For a moment, its spindly legs kicked helplessly at the air as it writhed in horrendous pain.
Because Number 1 had just taken on itself all the pain and hurt it had meant to send my way.
It’s why the reflecting shield was a better idea than any weapon I could have possibly conjured up.
I knew that The Prayer, cruelest monster to ever set crooked foot on planet Earth, would crank up the pain resonator in that godforsaken weapon all the way to its Level 11: Eternal Damnation.
That’s why the monster was now dying the worst death its own twisted mind could ever have imagined.
Chapter 55
NUMBER 1 WAS dead.
I don’t know what I expected.
Fireworks. Marching bands. Maybe a ticker tape parade down New York’s canyon of heroes.
I had just completed my life’s mission. I had avenged my parents’ deaths. I had done what I had come to this planet to do.
I swiped my fingers across one of the pentagram panels on my dad’s old Tusk computer and initiated a video call to Special Agent Judge at FBI headquarters in D.C.
“Number 1 has been zeroed out, sir,” I reported.
“It’s gone?” asked Agent Judge, overjoyed. “You’re positive?”
I rotated the Tusk sideways so he could see the petrified and still smoldering husk of what had once been the most ferocious alien outlaw to ever land on Terra Firma.
“Behold his earthly remains,” I said sarcastically. “He doesn’t look so fierce lying on his back with his legs splayed out, does he? Kind of reminds me of an ‘after’ pic in a bug spray commercial.”
“Thank you, Daniel,” said Mr. Judge, emotion choking his voice.
And it was emotion he was definitely entitled to. The Prayer had killed his wife right after the putrid thing murdered my parents.
“You have no idea how long I have waited for this day, Daniel.”
I could’ve answered, “Yes, sir. I do.” Instead I just nodded and let him have a moment to savor the sweet sensation of justice finally been served.
There was one more thing I had to tell him.
“Sir,” I said, “rest assured, I will find Mel, no matter where Number 1 hid her.”
Mr. Judge looked confused. “What do you mean, Daniel?”
“Now that Number 1 is no longer a threat to humanity, my sole focus will be locating and extracting your daughter from her current hostage situation. The Prayer may have a few henchbeasts guarding her, but…”
“Daniel?”
“Sir?”
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Like I said when you came to visit me in D.C., Mel’s safe. She’s at the horse ranch. In Kentucky. Hang on. I’ll patch her in.” Agent Judge clacked his keyboard.
A second pentagram panel flickered to life on my Tusk computer.
“Hey, Daniel.”
It was Mel—looking more beautifully radiant than ever (and not just because she wasn’t clamping electrodes to my ankles anymore, either). Relief flooded through me. Apparently, the whole kidnapping and torture thing had been a sick and twisted mental movie planted in my head by the late Number 1. He had even made me question Mel’s loyalty and goodness. No doubt about it, IT was good.
Was being the key word.
“Are you okay?” Mel asked from her tiny screen.
“Never better,” I said with a smile.
Because it was true. My work on Terra Firma was finally done.
Except…
“Sir?” I said to Agent Judge’s image. “Any word on that black hole?”
“No news.”
“Is it still growing?”
“Hang on.” He clacked more computer keys. “Interesting.”
“What?”
“When did you terminate Number 1?”
“Five, maybe ten, minutes ago.”
Mr. Judge grinned. “That’s what I figured. According to our friends at NASA, that’s exactly when the anomaly slowed its rate of expansion.”
“Way to go, Daniel!” said Mel, my personal cheerleader. “You just saved Earth’s bacon.”
“Thanks,” I said through half a laugh. “But, sir?”
“Yes, Daniel?”
“Is it still growing?”
“Slightly. Guess Number 1 put his anomaly on autopilot.”
“Something you and your marvelous imagination should be able to take care of,” said Mel. “Right, Daniel?”
“No doubt. But, since there’s no imminent threat or danger, I have a more important operation to plan.”
“What’s that?” asked Mr. Judge, sounding slightly concerned.
“Organizing a little party, sir. We need to celebrate. It’s not every day you get to wipe out your worst enemy and save the planet at the same time. Mel?”
“Yes, Daniel?”
“I’ll pick you up at seven.”
“You have a car?”
I shrugged. “I could, I guess. Any make or model you like.”
“Um, Daniel—you don’t have a driver’s license.”
“True. Besides, it’ll be more fun if we teleport together.”
Chapter 56
AS PROMISED, I picked Mel up at 7 PM.
Literally.
I teleported to Kentucky, wrapped both my arms around her waist, hoisted her off the ground, and two blinks later we were back in Kansas.
I had, of course, totally rebuilt the farmhouse, putting it back into mint condition. I had even planted a couple of rose bushes in the front yard and a whole field of Kansas wildflowers in the back.
Number 1’s carcass? Long gone.
After a quick laser-based cremation, I whipped together a mini-funnel cloud and scattered his ashes up beyond the stratosphere, in that layer where the molecules and atoms have a hard time reconnecting.
“Where’s the grub?” said Joe, who—of course—I had summoned to Kansas for the party.
“Inside,” said Emma. “And Joe? There are organic carrot sticks, celery stalks, and cherry tomatoes.”
Joe cocked an eyebrow. “And your point is?”
“You don’t have to stuff yourself on corn dog cupcakes, moo-oink balls, deep-fried cookie dough, or red velvet funnel cakes, which—if you don’t mind me saying, Daniel—look a lot like congealed intestines.”
(For my little party, I had recreated several of the crazier foods from last year’s Kansas State Fair, including moo-oink balls, which are juicy meatballs wrapped in greasy bacon.)
“That’s why I made the veggie platter,” I said.
“Waste of time, bro,” said Joe, heading into the house. “Waste. Of. Time.”
Emma’s big brother, Willy, came over, nibbling a row of potato chips on a wooden skewer, another food-tent treat from the state fair.
“I like this,” he said. “When you’re done snacking, you have a weapon.”
“Right,” said Mel, with a laugh. “You could poke out somebody’s eye with that thing.”
“I could.” Willy munched another chip. “But I’d wait till all the potato chips were gone.”
Dana was at the party, too, of course, only she wasn’t physically there because Mel already was.
I know. The whole soul mate thing confuses me, too. Xanthos, who was in the backyard nibbling on some of the tastier wildflowers, promised he’d walk me through the conceptual overview later.
“Later works for me,” I had said. “Because tonight is all about having fun.”
I felt like the munchkins must’ve felt in that movie about The Wizard of Oz. Ding-dong, The Prayer was dead! It was time to party.
We had music blasting (I had cooked up a couple of awesome DJs for the night). There was a ton of food and drink in the house. Most importantly, all my amazing friends and comrades in arms were there. We laughed and joked and shared war stories about all the aliens we had hunted down togethe
r. And then we danced.
Well, everybody except Joe.
Nothing could tear him away from the state fair–style food after he had sampled his first Krispy Kreme burger à la mode: a hamburger sandwiched between two glazed Krispy Kremes with a scoop of vanilla ice cream plopped in the top doughnut hole.
You have done well, little brudda, said Xanthos (in my head, of course) when things started winding down around midnight. Remember—never give sway to the negative way, mon.
Thanks, I said.
I escorted Mel home to Kentucky (her dad had given her a pretty lenient curfew of 1 AM because he knew we had a lot to celebrate) and then I returned to Kansas.
“I want to spend one last night in that house,” I told Mel. “One night knowing all the horrible things that happened there can never happen again.”
“Go for it,” she said. Then she gave me a quick kiss on the lips. It tasted sweeter than the deep-fried Kool-Aid they serve at the Kansas State Fair.
I closed my eyes when we kissed a second time.
When I opened them, I was back in Kansas. In my bedroom. And, for the first time since I was three years old, I felt totally safe.
I drifted off to sleep; the best sleep I’d had in over a decade.
Or, at least it was—until I started to dream.
Chapter 57
IN MY DREAM, I was standing in the backyard of my Kansas home with Mikaela. Only this time, she wasn’t costumed as a college girl or a karate expert.
She was dressed in a flowing white robe that shimmered and sparkled like an angel on top of a Christmas tree. Four gossamer wings glowed warmly as they fluttered on her back.
“It is not done,” she whispered in my ear. “It is never over.”
She reached out her hand. I took it. Together, we shot up into the sky like streaking comets. In the dream, my own body began to glow and I joined Mikaela as one of several stars twinkling in a sprawling constellation.
“Look,” I heard her voice cry out. “See!”
Dozens of light years away from Earth and its solar system, I had a pretty good view of what was going on in the Milky Way.
I could see the black hole sucking nearby planets, meteoroid, and stars into a swirling wormhole of nothingness.
The hole was tinged deep purple around its rim.
“It is gathering new strength,” whispered Mikaela’s voice. “It is not finished with you.”
“Number 1?” I asked.
“Number 1 is insignificant.”
“How can you say that?” I demanded. “Number 1 killed my parents. Number 1 killed Mel’s mom. Number 1 incited all the other alien outlaws to bring their evil to Earth. Number 1 tortured me and hunted me and tortured me again. How can that, in any way, be called insignificant?”
“That wasn’t Number 1.”
“Um, yes it was.” Yeah, I was getting a little snarky with the glittery angel because she was making me mad. “Trust me. I know what I’m talking about because I’m the guy the big bug was torturing.”
“Number 1, the alien creature you knew as The Prayer, was but a vessel, Daniel. The most recent host for the spirit of eternal evil.”
Now my dream flashed back to my father’s Tusk computer. I was holding it in my palm near the salt marsh. My dream was giving me an instant replay—so that I’d pay closer attention to what my dad’s backup computer had been trying to tell me the first time, I guess:
“The creature known as The Prayer, currently operating on Terra Firma in the guise of an overgrown praying mantis, is the most evil alien outlaw of the current millennium.”
In the guise of an overgrown praying mantis.
In other words, The Prayer was a costume that the force we call Evil or whatever had decided to wear for a while.
Xanthos had said basically the same thing. He had called The Prayer a “highly refined manifestation of eternal, omnipresent, and omnipotent evil.”
My dream was making something extremely clear: I had not eliminated the threat of evil when I destroyed The Prayer. I had simply shattered its most recent body.
IT, the real Number 1, was still out there.
Mikaela’s voice washed over me again: “It is not through with you, Daniel. It may never be through with you.”
In a flash, the dream shifted scenes again.
I was back inside the farmhouse in Kansas.
But I wasn’t in my bedroom. I was down in the basement molding the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World with Play-Doh.
I was three years old again.
And I knew the cellar door was just about to be kicked open.
Chapter 58
EVEN THOUGH I knew it was a dream, the terror felt extremely real.
I guess nightmares always do.
“Focus here,” whispered Mikaela’s gentle voice in my head.
Watch with your soul, my yute, added Xanthos in his lilting island tones. See what is truly before your eyes.
I’ll try, I thought back.
I let the memory unspool. Let it play out precisely as I had chronicled it in my memory banks:
I’m trembling and pressing my small, vulnerable body up against an old water heater, petrified about what just happened to my mom and dad. A beam of violet-tinged light shines down the stairs into the basement.
Freeze frame!
Was that the answer?
That before I saw The Prayer, I saw a beam of violet-tinged light?
That’s what had been extra vivid in my most recent recollections of that horrible day all those years ago. The violet-tinged light.
I thought about Xanthos and Mikaela, how the two of them were always bathed in the orange-red warmth of the sun, even on cloudy days.
“This is the color of the Legions of the Light,” my father’s computer had informed me. “The color of confidence and creative power. This is your color.”
On the other hand, the purple light that had preceded Number 1 into my childhood basement was the polar opposite; it lurked down at the dark, ultraviolet end of the spectrum.
Then I thought about the swath of violet-tinged light that crept across the hospital floor a half instant before The Prayer burst in to blast my parents and Pork Chop. Okay. The bad guys’ team color was purple.
Still dreaming, my memory scrubbed forward a few frames:
And then I saw it—a six-and-a-half-foot-tall praying mantis. That terrible form…
That last thought echoed in my ears.
Even as a three-year-old, I had suspected what I now knew to be true: Zeboul, the force of ultimate evil that exists in the universe, had taken on the “terrible form” of The Prayer that night in Kansas—and all through my dangerous days as the alien hunter—because it knew the shape would terrify me.
But that didn’t mean it couldn’t take on other forms even more menacing.
Mikaela was right: It wasn’t done doing evil on this planet.
It wasn’t done with me, either.
Chapter 59
WHEN I WOKE up, my bed sheets were soaked with sweat.
The real Number 1 was still out there; it would always be out there. It was a force of nature as old as the universe itself, fueling all sorts of wickedness and worse. Also, it still wanted to destroy the planet.
Why?
I had a theory: It was ticked off because too many earthlings fought against evil by doing good. Every time you collect cans of food for hungry people at your school, Evil has a bad day. When you stand up to a bully picking on a kid half his size, Evil sits in a corner and sulks. Even when you toss a bottle into a recycling bin instead of an ordinary trash can, Evil gets steamed.
It just can’t stand the fact that good people on this planet are always standing up for what’s right. Not everybody, of course. But enough to tip Terra Firma’s scales toward being a “good world” instead of an “evil playground.”
I had a hunch that the eternal and all-powerful evil some called Zeboul seriously wanted to tip the galactic balance in its favor: it wanted to s
uck Terra Firma’s entire solar system into an endless black hole. That meant I had to do everything in my considerable power to patch up that galaxy-busting sinkhole before it grew wide enough to wolf down my adopted home.
But how on Earth (or any other planet) was I going to take on an elemental force of the universe? How could one teenager possibly wipe out evil?
My dad was right. I was definitely going to need major backup.
It was time to summon the gang and put together a plan.
I remembered something else the Tusk computer had said in its mini-lecture: “Wherever you find negative energy you will also find its positive opposite.” Somehow, we’d have to tap into the plus side of the eternal energy equation. And fast.
I focused on my friends.
But they didn’t come. Instead, I felt a strange sensation, like some sort of invisible but extremely powerful force closing in around me.
And whatever the strange force was, I could tell that it definitely wasn’t playing for the good guys.
And that’s when the torture started.
Chapter 60
I FELT SUCH intense pressure in my head that I thought my skull might implode. A powerful, throbbing fist was squeezing my whole body, crushing the air out of my lungs.
I tried one more time to call for backup, to summon my friends. But my brain pulsed with excruciating waves of big-time hurt whenever I tried to ignite my imagination.
As you know, I have felt extraordinary pain during my years as an Alien Hunter.
I have been beaten, battered, and bruised.
I have faced unrelenting torture and the brutalizing burn of alien weaponry blasts.
But, trust me on this—I have never, ever felt pain this intense.
My overwhelming agony cut through my body and went straight for my soul. I wondered if I had wasted my entire life chasing after a shadow monster. I had not avenged my parents’ deaths by destroying The Prayer because the big bug was only a small pawn in an eternal struggle that had gone on since the dawn of time.
The pain was paralyzing. Once again, I wanted to die, if only to escape this profound and unimaginably intense torment.