Armageddon - By James Patterson Page 0,23

or five hours till we reach Kentucky.”

“Really?” Mel leaned over to check out the speedometer. “Even though you’re doing, like, ninety in a fifty-five zone?”

“Don’t worry. The highway patrol has other things to worry about tonight besides writing me a speeding ticket.” It was true that the roads were completely empty—no cops, cars, even truckers.

“That’s not what I’m worried about, Daniel.” Mel’s brow furrowed with concern. “I’m worried about you.”

She reached over and placed a very warm, very comforting hand on my knee.

“It seems like this Number 2 is dead-set on destroying you,” she continued. “For whatever twisted reason, he seems to be doing all… this… just to get at you.”

“Not gonna happen,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure.

“Promise?” said Mel.

It was only one word, but I hadn’t heard that much care and concern in a voice since the time I was two years old and my mother thought I had vanished from my crib. (That was the day I accidentally discovered I could turn myself into inanimate objects and had become a stuffed monkey so I could chat with Schnozzy, my stuffed elephant.)

I raised my right hand to make a pledge: “Cross my heart and hope to have a water buffalo squat on my face.”

“Huh?”

“It’s something people used to say up on Alpar Nok. It’s like a solemn vow.”

“Well, I’m going to hold you to it.”

“Hey, other aliens have tried to take me down before. They didn’t have much luck. Neither will Number 2.”

“Good,” Mel said, settling back into her seat, resting her head against the pillow she’d made out of her jean jacket. “Because if that thing destroys you, well, that would totally destroy me.”

Wow.

If I may be allowed to paraphrase a famous Oscar winner: She liked me. She really, really liked me.

I guess that’s why, in the middle of the night, on a winding mountain road, I was loving this planet more than I had ever loved it.

Mel had her own amazing superpower: the uncanny ability to stir up emotions that had never been stirred before. For years, no living creature (except the ones I had cooked up in my imagination) had cared so much about me. Daniel X. The alien orphan kid with no last name, no real friends, no one to lose sleep worrying about him.

Until I met Mel.

Then again, I’d also have no future if Number 2 and his army of alien thugs had their way.

So, as much as I wished I could morph into a typical teenager and have my biggest burden be how to ask Mel to go horseback riding with me again, saving the planet was what I needed to focus on.

And with good reason.

Chapter 32

IT WAS 7 AM in New York City and 7 PM in Beijing when Abbadon struck next.

Amazingly, he was in both cities at the same time.

Astonishingly, he was also simultaneously in London (where it was noon) and Moscow (where it was 3 PM).

“I hope you are near a television, Daniel,” Abbadon whispered to the winds whipping around him on his elevated posts in all four locations. “This is going to be delicious.”

In New York Abbadon stood atop the Empire State Building; in Beijing he was out on the observation deck of a super-tall skyscraper called China World Trade Center III; in London he stood in an office window on the seventy-second floor of the unfinished London Bridge Tower; and in Moscow he chose the Naberezhnaya Building, which, at 881 feet, afforded him an excellent view of the chaos and destruction below.

“Witness my powers, Daniel! Fear me and bow down to me!”

In all four locations, buildings seemed to topple at his whim. Glass and steel and concrete slid down the sides of structures and crumbled to the ground as if the edifices were mammoth lizards losing several thick layers of skin.

In all four cities, Abbadon made the same bargain with the millions of panicked survivors filling the streets: “Serve me and live. Refuse me and die.”

“What would you have us do?” pleaded the terrified leaders of the four metropolitan centers.

“Leave your families. Destroy your halls of justice. Burn all your books and abandon your churches. Take whatever you want from whomever you want to take it and join me in the underworld. And bring me the boy called Daniel!”

“Yes, Master!” a million voices cried out in reply.

“This is my planet now!” said Abbadon. “Only those who descend into the abyss to be my slaves shall escape the coming cataclysm.”

“Yes, Master!”

Abbadon had never felt so close to