Game Over

Chapter 55





AS YOU MAY recall, I’m quite capable of running at over two hundred miles per hour. Limping at that rate of speed, however, is an entirely different sport and not one I’d recommend.

At that velocity, the forces that come into play are pretty extreme. But when your leg has recently been mauled by a couple of top-ten List aliens and feels like it was broken in three places and then sprayed with hot acid…

In other words, I wasn’t really too keen on the idea of going all the way back to Tokyo on foot. We ran as far as a highway overpass and stopped to look back at the alien vehicle now hovering above the giant Buddha’s head like an oversized mosquito.

I zoomed in my eyes and turned up the light levels, watching closely as the vehicle slowly circled the head. I gathered it was running some sort of scan to determine whether I was in there or not.

“Uh-oh,” said Dana, with good reason. The skycar had changed direction and was now pointed right at us. And it was accelerating toward us at one hundred, two hundred, three hundred miles per hour! I’d have trouble running that fast on a good day. Trying to materialize our own skycar now, or even a motorcycle, just wasn’t possible.

“Daniel, you teleported. That’s how you escaped Number 7 and Number 8 and ended up in the Buddha’s head. You’ve got to be able to do at least that much again.”

I could almost see the driver’s eyes through the windshield of the rocketing skycar.

“Gotcha,” I mumbled. I just needed to think of a place to send us. A place whose layout I knew, a place that would be the same as when I was last there, a place where a person—or a piece of furniture—wouldn’t be in our landing spot, inadvertently causing us to be dead on arrival.

And I needed to figure it out fast, before we got mowed down by the approaching alien vehicle that was now a mere one hundred… fifty… twenty-five… ten yards away.