“And math?” said Willy, the group’s natural-born leader. “It got ugly this year, Daniel. It turned into calculus!”
I was confused again.
“Willy, what are you talking about? I need to take care of Number 1.”
“Okay, where’s your bedpan?” asked Joe.
“Great, you guys,” said Dana, rolling her eyes. “I so want to witness Daniel’s bodily functions at work.”
“Don’t worry about the homework,” said Emma. “You’ll catch up, Daniel. You’ve always been the smartest kid in class.”
“Except riding your motorcycle in the rain,” said Joe. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to bust your chops, buddy, but that was just dumb.”
I shook my head. Tried to clear out the cobwebs left over from whatever drug Dr. Oz had needled into me.
I noticed a bunch of GET WELL SOON! balloons tied with ribbons to the foot of my bed.
“All right, kids,” said Nurse O’Hara as she marched into the room. “We don’t want to wear Daniel out. He’s had a rough night.…”
“Aw,” moaned Willy. “We just got here.…”
“Yeah,” said Emma. “And Daniel just woke up.”
“Out, the lot of you,” said Nurse O’Hara. I noticed she was smiling again. “Don’t you kids have homework to do?”
“Yeah,” groused Joe. “High school’s a beast.”
“High school?” I said. “Willy?” I motioned for him to move closer so Nurse O’Hara wouldn’t hear what I said next. “I don’t go to high school.”
“Well, duh.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. I wasn’t going nuts.
“You’ve been in a coma,” Willy went on. “But now that you’re awake, your butt’ll be back in homeroom before you know it.”
Chapter 4
MY STRANGE DAY kept getting stranger.
My next little surprise? An unexpected visit from my family—my mom, my dad, and my little sister, Brenda.
Quick recap, just so we’re all up to speed here: I don’t have a family anymore. I am, basically, the galaxy’s number one orphan. As you already know, The Prayer murdered my mother and father when I was just a kid. He also masterminded the near-genocide of my home planet, Alpar Nok.
Is it any wonder the repugnant insect freak is the top target on my List?
Anyway, in the past I’ve been able to summon my mother and father back into temporary, artificial existence, just like I do with my four friends. In fact, my mom and dad were even easier to conjure than Joe, Willy, Dana, and Emma. And sometimes, like whenever I needed them most, my mom and dad just appeared.
But during my battle with the demon Abbadon (Number 2 on The List), I cast the ashes of my father and mother’s immortal souls to the four winds. They can’t come back to help me anymore, no matter how much help I might need.
As for my little sister, Brenda?
She’s definitely not real. How could she be? She was never even born.
When Number 1 killed my mom, she was pregnant with the baby that would have become my little sister. That’s right—The Prayer snuffed out my mother’s life as well as the little life growing inside her.
Brenda, aka Pork Chop, never actually existed except in my imagination.
“Oh, Daniel,” said the woman who looked like my mother. She was tall, blond, and pretty. She was also weeping. “You came back to us! “
“We were so worried,” said the man who looked remarkably like my father. “We thought we’d lost you. Our house hasn’t been a home without you, son.”
“Actually, I thought our home was pretty awesome while you were gone,” said the girl who was supposedly my sister. “I had the upstairs bathroom all to myself.”
“Pork Chop!” said my mother, raising her eyebrows disapprovingly.
“Sorry,” said my annoying li’l sis. “I’m just joking, Daniel. I really, really missed you, too. Not!”
I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Who are you guys?” I said.
My father grinned. “That’s an odd question, Daniel. We’re your family.”
“Don’t you recognize us?” My mother’s voice was quavering.
“He’s still a little groggy,” explained Nurse O’Hara, who had come into the room to adjust my IV bags. “It’s to be expected. He’s been unconscious for over a year. Who knows what sort of wild dreams he might’ve had while he was under?” She tapped the side of her head.
Yeah, Nurse O’Hara thought I was nuts. I guess I should’ve felt insulted but I didn’t.
Mostly because I was starting to think the same thing.
My father sighed. “We’ve spoken to your doctors, Daniel.”
“Did you really tell them you were from another planet?” my little sister said with a laugh. “I guess that would explain why you dress like such a dork.”
“Pork Chop!”
“Sorry, Dad.”
“Okay,” I said. “You guys tell me. Who am I?”
“You’re our one and only son, Daniel,” said my mother, taking my hand in hers. “You are Daniel Manashil. You go to high school. You have four amazing friends.…”
“One of them’s your girlfriend, Dayyy-na!” said Brenda in a singsong voice. “Well, she was your girlfriend before you were stupid enough to ride your motorcycle in the rain. Now I think Dana might be dating Willy.”
“What?” I said.
“Well, you can’t expect her to wait forever.…”
“No. What are you people talking about? I don’t go to high school.…”
“Let’s take it easy,” said my father soothingly. “You just came out of a coma, after all. You had a terrible accident, son.”
“Really?” I stammered, not knowing who or what to believe. “What happened?”
“You were riding your motorbike home from school. A rainstorm hit. The surface of the road became slippery. You lost control and spun out, Daniel. Your bike skidded across the highway and slammed into a tractor-trailer truck. You almost died!”
“Actually,” said Nurse O’Hara, “he did die.”
Chapter 5
NURSE O’HARA KEPT fiddling with the tubes and wires attached to the equipment beeping all around my bed.
“You flatlined, Daniel,” she said, tapping the monitor tracking the peaks and valleys of my heartbeat. “You had no pulse for two or three minutes.”
“That means you could have had serious brain damage!” blurted my baby sister. “So now you’ll probably dress even worse!”
“Brenda!” said my mom. “Honestly.”
“What? It explains why Daniel thinks he’s some kind of superhero from outer space. There was no oxygen in his brain for…”
“All right, everybody,” said Nurse O’Hara. “Visiting hours are over. Young Mr. Manashil needs his rest.”
For a second or two, I wondered who she was talking about.
Then I remembered: Everybody in the room kept insisting that I was Daniel Manashil, ordinary high school kid. If that was true, then Daniel X was the biggest figment of my imagination (or anyone else’s) ever!
What about all the incredible stuff I’ve done during my time on Earth? All the aliens I’ve battled, the human lives I’ve saved? I could remember enough nonstop action to fill four, maybe five books. Was all of that just a complex dream created by my poor, oxygen-deprived brain in the two or three minutes I was dead?
My family, the Manashils, promised to come back tomorrow and left.
I sunk my head back into the foamy hospital pillow and closed my eyes.
I didn’t know who I was any more.
Daniel X, the Alien Hunter? Or Daniel Manashil, the high school kid who dresses funny and stupidly drove his motorcycle on a rain-slick highway? Somehow, I drifted off to a fitful sleep. I think they were still pumping sedatives into my blood system.
“Daniel?”
I opened my eyes.
A bearded man in a tweed jacket was sitting in a chair he had pulled up beside my bed. His fingertips formed a tent underneath his no
se.
“Hello, Daniel. I am Dr. Loesser. One of this hospital’s many licensed psychiatrists.”
I nodded. I felt like I was teetering on the brink of insanity. Maybe a shrink was what I needed.
The psychiatrist stroked his goatee. “You are, most likely, feeling quite confused. You have experienced a terrible traumatic shock.”
He was right. Waking up in this hospital bed had probably been the most traumatic experience of my life—almost worse than seeing my parents slain by a giant purple bug with dreadlocks.
If, you know, any of that ever really happened.
I swallowed hard. “Am I crazy, doc? Because I kind of feel like I’m going nuts here.”
He grinned. “No. Of course not, Daniel. You have simply spent your comatose time constructing a complex coping mechanism to ease the emotional pain of your poor judgment.”
I must’ve frowned or looked confused.
“Allow me to explain,” said the psychiatrist. “Nurse O’Hara has told me about your outburst with the doctors who came to visit you several days ago.”
That was several days ago?
“She also told me the details of the fantasies you have discussed with your friends and family.”
“Fantasies?”
“These stories about being an alien; how you were sent to Earth to protect all mankind.”
“I’m the Alien Hunter.”
The psychiatrist’s grin grew wider. “Yes. So I have heard. Imagination and hallucination can be wonderful survival tools when one is unconscious.”
“So I made all this stuff up? Just to kill time while I was in a coma?”
“That is one way to put it, I suppose. But let us look at some of the specific details of your ‘story’ more closely. For instance, this business with the…” He looked at a clipboard in his lap. “Ah, yes. ‘The six-and-a-half-foot-tall praying mantis with the dreadlocks.’ ”
“They call him The Prayer.”
“They?”
“It’s his alias. On The List of Alien Outlaws on Terra Firma.”
The shrink nodded. “Again, Mr. Manashil, I applaud your imaginative mind on the intricate layers of detail you have constructed to support your grand delusion. You say this creature from another planet—The Prayer, as you call him—killed your parents at your farmhouse in, let me see, Kansas?”
“Right. Back when I was three years old.”
“Ah, yes. You were a mere toddler. A weakling. There was absolutely nothing you could do to stop the hurt and pain inflicted upon your poor mother and father by this horrible ‘monster.’ Don’t you see what this dream is really all about, Daniel?”
I shook my head.
“Your own compensatory feelings of guilt and remorse.”
“Really? I don’t get it. What do I feel so guilty about?”
“Disobeying your parents, of course. Riding your motorcycle in the rain after they had repeatedly warned you not to do so. Your accident and near death inflicted tremendous hurt and pain on them, Daniel. Therefore, in your fantasy, to absolve your own guilt you created this horrible, alien beast. You didn’t hurt your parents. ‘The Prayer’ did.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Daniel?”
“Yes?”
“Do you remember the helmet you were wearing when you had your motorcycle accident?”
“No, sir.”
The psychiatrist glanced down at his notes. “According to the police report, it was a Nitro Mantis Touring Helmet.”
I swallowed. “Is that where I got the idea to make my monster a Praying Mantis?”
“Perhaps. What do you think, Daniel?”
I didn’t answer.
I was too devastated, too confused.
Was my life as I remembered it nothing more than a grand illusion I’d concocted because I felt bad about breaking my parents’ bike-riding rules?
How could that be?
It had all seemed so real.
So unbelievably, painfully real.
Chapter 6
LATER THAT NIGHT as I lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling tiles, wondering what kind of toppings Daniel Manashil liked on his Papa John’s pizza or Coldstone sundae, it dawned on me.
Something was seriously wrong.
And it had nothing to do with pizza or ice cream.
It was this place.
I kept replaying Dr. Loesser’s psychobabble in my mind.
Back when I was Daniel X (instead of some ordinary high school schmo named Daniel Manashil) I had the equivalent of a four-channel, XLR-balanced, +48V phantom-power digital recorder scrolling in my head at all times. I could, as they say when you call a tech-serve line, monitor my memories for quality assurance purposes.
I couldn’t do it when I first woke up, but now that ability had returned.
Because I was still Daniel X!
Hey, how else could I have a Dolby Digital memory track of every word ever spoken to me?
I quickly scrubbed backward and replayed a chunk of the shrink’s opening remarks:
Nurse O’Hara has told me about your outburst with the doctors who came to visit you several days ago. She also told me the details of the fantasies you have discussed with your friends and family… this business with the… Ah, yes. ‘The six-and-a-half-foot-tall praying mantis with the dreadlocks.’… You say this creature from another planet—The Prayer, as you call him—killed your parents at your farmhouse in, let me see, Kansas?
I stopped the playback.
I didn’t need to hear any more.
“Busted, Dr. Loesser,” I whispered to myself.
I definitely couldn’t shout it out loud. My hospital room was, undoubtedly, bugged.
Because here’s the deal: I never mentioned anything about my family massacre in Kansas to anybody in this so-called health care facility.
How can I be so sure?
Easy. I was so emotionally scarred on that horrible day I rarely (if ever) talk about it to anyone. I certainly don’t give up juicy details like the thing’s dreadlocks to total strangers wearing white lab coats.
Yeah, yeah. I know. I should probably open up more. Let it all out. If I keep my emotions bottled up inside too long, I’ll eventually explode in some kind of socially unacceptable manner.
Fine. Point taken. But I could work on that little personality quirk with a real psychiatrist once I busted out of this prison.
Because that’s what this phony hospital had to be: the Alien Outlaws’ prisoner of war camp.
And I had a pretty good idea who my warden was: Number 1.
Chapter 7
I DECIDED IT was time to die again.
Or at least to make it look that way.
Encouraged by the return of my mental recording mechanism, I was pretty confident that more of my internal powers would eventually come back. I might be able to rearrange the matter inside my own body because it was in such close proximity to my brain.
I wouldn’t have to strain myself too much. I just needed to do enough organ manipulation to pull off a quick (and convincing) heart rate reduction.
On planets across the cosmos, the bigger the creature, the slower its resting heart rate. Great whales, the largest animals on Earth, operate on about seven beats per minute. The average heart rate for a sixteen-year-old earthling boy? Between 143 and 173 beats per minute. This is probably why those guys can’t sit still for very long.
Anyway, on Sreym, a planet I visited once, I met this HUGE under-ice dweller called a freejinn. It’s the size of Rhode Island and lives in the darkness six miles beneath the glaciers that coat Sreym’s polar ice caps. Its heart rate? Two beats every hour, like clockwork.
And the freejinn taught me how to do it.
I took a deep breath and concentrated hard. In my mind, I became a freejinn at the bottom of the Sreym sea.
I could still see and hear everything in the room, including the long, piercing screech of the EKG machine as my pulse dropped off the charts.
“Code Blue
!” I heard a robotic voice call out from a ceiling speaker. “Code Blue!”
The two burly orderlies bustled into the room. Nurse O’Hara stormed in right behind them.
“What’s going on?” she demanded.
“He’s flatlining!” grunted one of the orderlies. When he spoke, a long, rubbery lizard tongue spooled out of his mouth. As I suspected, my orderlies were actually undercover aliens in cheap human suits.
Nurse O’Hara grabbed my wrist as the EKG machine continued screaming its annoying beeeeeeeeeeep.
“No pulse,” she reported.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. My heart had already done its freejinnian ba-boom-boom for the hour. It’d be back with another drum solo in about sixty minutes.
“The Prayer must have his prey! We must resuscitate the boy!”
Note to self: it’s pretty impossible to say all the “s” sounds in the word “resuscitate” when you’re wearing a rubbery mask to make you look like a sweet Irish nurse.
My alien caregivers were so busy—frantically hauling me out of the hospital bed, sliding me onto a gurney—that they didn’t seem to notice that their lip, nose, and eyeholes were sliding around to reveal blotchy patches of their true snot-yellow and puke-green skin.
“The Alien Hunter must not die!” cried Nurse O’Hara as the orderlies rolled me up the hall.
“Yes, Mistress,” grunted the two orderlies. Slobbery gobs of gelatinous fish-gut goop dribbled out of their nose holes.
“Take him to the resuscitation chamber.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
In my self-induced state of suspended animation, I could still see and hear everything as they rolled me out the door.
The hospital corridors looked like the backstage of a movie set. The walls of my room had been made out of painted canvas stretched across wooden frames.
Without moving my eyeballs (dead guys don’t do eye rolls), I activated my zoom vision and peered over my toes.
To the double door we were about to bang through.
When the foot of my gurney hit the exit bar, I smelled something decidedly delicious: fresh air.
The resuscitation chamber must be in some other building.
For the next couple of minutes, I’d be outside the prison walls.