The Dangerous Days of Daniel X by James Patterson, Michael Ledwidge Page B

seemed like quarts of blood, and my intestines and vital organs must have been ripped apart by the gun blast.
    Gut-shot down in the salt mine,
I thought, starting to shake a little with the agony. Gee, my life had become the title of a country-and-western song.
    A short time later, a door banged open and a couple of guards charged in. They were carrying electric stun guns.
    “For me? You shouldn’t have.”
    “Get moving, you filthy mammals,” one of the aliens yelled as he herded together the Earth kids I was sharing the chamber with. The little girl who’d helped me started to sob.
    “Hey, guys, look! This one’s sprung a leak.” The alien laughed as he waved the cattle prod next to her tear-filled face. “I can’t believe we actually get paid to have this much fun.”
    “You too,
worm,
” Seth said, tapping a couple of thousand volts near my face. “Get up! Get moving. Hold your intestines in.”
    I probably should have been in an ICU, but I shot to my feet and stumbled out of the cage. No way I’d let them know how badly I was hurt.
    “Nice acting job!” Seth said, and roared with laughter. “You could have been in one of my films. As an extra.”
    It was pitch-black outside in the desert. And freezing cold. At two, maybe three o’clock in the morning.
    Why did I have the feeling that we weren’t going on a nature walk?
    Chapter 55
    AS I TURNED to my right, I saw that the desert sky was filled with stars in every direction. Except one. Above the eastern mountains, there was a . . . hole in the sky. A hole that was moving closer and getting larger and larger by the second.
    The hairs on the back of my neck stood at full, parade-ground attention.
    The object hovering about fifty feet above me was black as the night itself, and about the size of a football stadium. I don’t know who started that UFO saucer nonsense, but they must have been nearsighted. This ship was undoubtedly rectangular, like a Dumpster. Or a giant coffin.
    It just hung there above us, ominously floating. There was a disturbance in the air as some kind of energy field pulsated loudly across its massive length.
    Then a telescopic column, possibly an elevator, dropped from its belly into the ground.
    Some of the kids started crying, and I called out, “Don’t worry, it’s nothing. It’s probably just E.T.”
    The elevator thingy landed less than thirty feet from where I stood. A hydraulic hum followed. Then a doorway opened.
    Inside, a particularly huge and ugly horse-head in a black uniform was smiling, showing cobralike teeth.
    “Hey there, kiddies. Want to go for a ride, huh-huh-huh?” he said in a pretty good imitation of SpongeBob SquarePants.
    All of us abductees stared at the alien in the doorway. Then we stared at each other. And then, as if we’d finally reached a silent consensus, we started to scream at the top of our lungs.
    Chapter 56
    THE RIDE UP in the crowded alien elevator made all of the smaller kids scream again. It was like an
upward
free fall, or bungee jumping in reverse. I can tell you this—the open wound that was my stomach really appreciated the ride.
    The back of the elevator opened, and we were hauled out into the mother ship.
    Somehow the hot, cramped inside managed to be more horrible and despair-inducing than the grim exterior had promised. Those
Star Trek
writers were bugging when they dreamed up the dentist’s office–like
Enterprise,
I thought, as I looked around. Water and steam dripped from tangles of overhead ducts. The floors were slick with what appeared to be oil and discarded garbage. The place looked like a boiler room and a landfill combined.
    A blast of hot air from somewhere swept across my face, and I caught the stink. Think the world’s hugest bus station bathroom.
    We were pushed through a metal detector–like apparatus. Seth came over to me as it beeped. He ripped my List computer out of my backpack.
    “You won’t be needing this,” he said, tucking it under his arm,