The Dangerous Days of Daniel X Read Online Free

Greyhound bus. Truthfully, I prefer the train, but Amtrak clerks usually ask questions if you look like you’re a minor, which I do, which I
am.
    I tend to try to stay as paranoid as I can, and that’s because I’m always being followed. I don’t like the idea of my name, or even an alias, floating around in somebody’s database. In fact,
right now
I’m afraid I’m being followed. But I try not to think about it too much. Too depressing and disturbing.
    On the positive side, the bus was only half full—believe me, few things in life are worse than a lengthy ride on a crowded bus, except maybe confronting an alien with an appetite—but even so, I only took the Greyhound as far south as Grants Pass, a town thirty miles north of the California border.
    I could have gone all the way to LA, my next destination—Number 6’s home base—but fourteen hours riding the dog is my personal limit.
    I laid out my Rand McNally in the back of a McDonald’s across from the bus station. I wanted to see if there was a way to Southern California besides Interstate 5 so that I could be a little more off the beaten path. Right away I spotted another, skinnier road, 199, heading for the California coast. The fact that I’d never seen the Pacific before settled it for me.
    Oregon’s rain seemed to instantly turn to Northern California fog as I put the McDonald’s behind me and stuck out my thumb.
    I don’t recommend hitching, by the way.
Do not.
There are some pretty sick wack-a-doos out there. If I hadn’t had the means to protect myself and the urgent need to cover my tracks, I would have stayed on the bus.
    But you come across some good people on the road too. I actually caught my first lift from a couple of them, two nuns heading for a retreat house in Kerby. They were wearing habits, and I thought they would give me a sermon or something, but all we did was talk about the Mariners baseball team and its slim-to-none chances of making the AL wild card. Even better, they didn’t ask me where I was going, so I didn’t have to lie to them.
    “God bless you,” they said as they let me off. How nice was that? Maybe they had a sixth sense that I was about to need some extra blessings.
    Chapter 9
    IT WAS GETTING DARK an hour later when I came across a card-carrying, charter member of the wack-a-doo species. To put it mildly.
    I didn’t mind so much that the pickup truck I stuck out my thumb at didn’t stop. It was the can of Busch beer that sailed out of his passenger window that I found quite unnecessary. It probably would have shattered the bone structure of my face if I didn’t have pretty good reflexes. I ducked at the last second and watched as the full can exploded with a foamy hiss against the trunk of a pine tree.
    I decided I needed to teach that idiot truck driver a lesson about highway safety and etiquette.
    I stared at the can and
willed
the spilled beer back into it. Then I sealed the crack and pop-top, and holding it in my hand like a runner’s baton, I started after the truck.
    It took me a full ten seconds to catch up. I could have done it in less, but Busch boy was doing a hundred or so, and the roads were windy that day.
    I gave the surprised driver a big wink as I drew alongside his pickup’s open window. “What the . . . how the?” he yelled over the howl of the wind.
    “Hey, I think you dropped something,” I said, and I tossed the beer can into his lap. “Don’t drink and drive, you useless dink.”
    I was acting pretty smug—until I realized that my ability to sense danger was not nearly as advanced as my super speed and strength.
    Because suddenly it wasn’t a beer-guzzling fool who was driving the truck—it was a plug-ugly alien with a series of wide eyes that went all the way around his head, at least a couple of noses, and dueling mouths equipped with nothing but sharp fangs, dozens of them.
    Chapter 10
    “SO
WHO’S
CHASING
WHOM?
” he asked with one of the mouths. “And which of my mouths