Animorphs: 2010 - Chapter 2
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Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Nine (18+){Not like me. They have come to destroy you.}
“Destroy?” Marco had come up behind me, though I noticed he stayed behind me. “Seriously?”
{I don’t have much time.} The alien stumbled again, and finally dropped down onto all four knees.
I knelt with him to stay at eye level, not sure why. It just seemed respectful. “We can get you out of here,” I pointed out. “Protect you. Get you somewhere safe.”
He shook his head before I’d even finished speaking. {They know I’ve come here. They must find me, or else they’ll look for me. We don’t have much time.}
I was stunned to silence. This alien was going to use himself as bait to protect us, to keep whoever was following him from looking too hard at what was going on in this parking lot. Possibly to keep them from taking their search across the street into the mall, as well.
Cassie looked about to argue, but I put my hand on her arm to stop her. “Who are ‘they’?” I asked.
The alien’s queer way of talking changed again. Where before I had heard words and speech in my mind, now I experienced something completely different. I somehow just knew the word ‘Yeerk,’ but along with the word came images, ideas, vague knowledge. It was as if he’d somehow passed along a complete concept, mind-to-mind, instead of words. I saw the slug-like body and knew that it lived in a pool of sludge, that the antenna on the end were how they saw and communicated.
That they infested others and used their bodies.
Another concept followed shortly after. War. This alien, his race, they’d been at war with the Yeerks for a long time. Across decades and galaxies. Fighting for two generations. Fighting with a sense of shame that wasn’t fully explained in this strange form of communication. Someone gasped at the crushing weight of the alien’s sense of duty to his war, a desire to stop his enemy not matter what the cost.
{They come here,} he continued in his previous speech. {They come to enslave you, not to fight you.}
Again I felt the brush of unstated thoughts behind what he told us. ‘Enslave’ became a complete, specific idea without him needing to explain it. They would harvest earth for bodies, for hosts. Use humans like so many tools in their war against this alien’s people. To do that, they would need us healthy and whole, not decimated by a war of our own.
The strange way of communicating, of receiving ideas that were so detailed and yet so vague at once, made my head hurt. It was like talking in a language where everything was so painfully specific that explanations would never be needed. I pressed the heel of my hand against my forehead, trying to process it all at once, but the alien didn’t give me a chance.
{We tried to stop them. We failed.}
I saw a great battle in space, with Mars spinning in the background. He didn’t think of the red planet as Mars, but somehow I knew that’s what it was. A confusing jumble of strange ships. Small ones firing green lasers. Two larger ships on the sidelines of it all. I didn’t get a coherent picture of the battle, just a general sense of combat and loss. A sense of betrayal when it was realized that the Yeerks far outnumbered their foes.
My side ached suddenly, right where the alien’s wounds would have been on my own body. The others must have felt the same thing. Tobias grimaced and clutched his gut while behind me, Rachel cried out softly. We were feeling the alien’s race away from the battlefield. Not his retreat, but his desperate desire to get to Earth and find some last-ditch solution that he knew, with absolute conviction, would be here.
The pain passed as quickly as it had come.
{Hide now. Hurry. They’re coming.}
I didn’t get a clear sense of ‘them’ from the alien. Just a feeling of dread. A knowledge of death. Perhaps the alien didn’t know himself just who was after him.
What he did give us was enough to make us all head for the building, though. I pushed Marco ahead of me and pulled Cassie behind me when those two walked too slow, while Rachel raced ahead and tried to find an unlocked door or window to the offices.
“Wait.” Tobias stopped after a few feet. “Can you tell us your name?”
{War-Prince Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul.} Pride came along with his name. No arrogance. Just pride.
Rachel found an open window and we all ran for it, though Tobias hesitated a few more moments before he joined us. We clambered in the window one at a time, landing in an empty, dusty office. The interior door was ajar and Rachel ran for it, but she stopped with on hand on the knob, looking back at the window with her mouth hanging open.
I turned to look as well. Another ship was approaching, perfectly silent, also invisible except for a few lights on various points. The lights drew a vague outline of a craft about the size of a large bus, the front end in a wedge shape and the back end curved upward.
Tobias, the closest to the window stood frozen, framed by the sill and a perfect target for anyone who looked over. I motioned for everyone to get down on the floor, but Tobias stood frozen until Marco, who was closest, dragged him down.
{Visser Three.}
I was startled to hear Prince Elfangor’s words, even from this distance. I felt his distaste for the name, knew instinctively that ‘Visser’ was a rank, a high one, and that the bearer of the name was despised beyond description.
For a moment there was only silence outside. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears and Rachel’s ragged breathing behind me, but nothing from outside our office. Then the hiss of an automatic door opening and the scrape of something sharp against metal, sounding vaguely like tap shoes.
{Hork-Bajir.}
I saw in my mind the creature that made the tap-shoes sound. Seven-foot tall, covered in blades, the claws on its feet clinking against metal. Claws made for climbing trees but easily adapted to ripping apart foes. I knew to be afraid of these creatures, but because they were enslaved, not because they were naturally aggressive. I pitied them.
Elfangor’s thoughts did not tell me why he pitied them so much, nor what kind of ‘peaceful’ life a being covered in blades could have led. Apparently even this abbreviated form of communication could leave things out.
Then a new sound, the sound of hooves again. These were steady, not the footsteps of an injured alien. I crept closer to the window and risked looking out again. Another alien like Elfangor faced the fallen Prince, with half a dozen Hork-Bajir and a dozen men and women in a semi-circle around them.
I reached to my thigh automatically, but my M9 wasn’t strapped there. I felt a moment of panic before I realized that I wasn’t supposed to have a weapon today. Crouched behind poor cover, watching an enemy converge on a friend, I felt naked without my firearm. But this wasn’t Fallujah; I didn’t walk around armed every moment of the day expecting an attack from all directions. Or rather, I wasn’t supposed to need to.
{Tisk, tisk, Elfangor. Running from a battle? What will your people say when they find out?} The ‘voice’ came from the new blue alien, from Visser Three. His words were clear and crisp, without any of subtly and concepts behind them that Elfangor’s had. They sounded hollow and inadequate after hearing the thoughts of the Prince.
Elfangor turned one stalk eye on our window, but quickly looked away. No need to foolishly give away our position. {This is your enemy,} he told us. Somehow I was reassured that the Visser couldn’t hear these thoughts. And I knew that Visser Three was in charge of the entire invasion force. Elfangor must have been very important, to warrant such a high-ranking pursuit. {He is the only Yeerk to take an Andalite host.}
I saw other Andalites like Elfangor, running in a field of pale green grass, or sitting together in a small, carved out hollow in the side of a hill. Laughing without mouths. Touching hands together. Peaceful. I felt a wave of affection for them, Elfangor’s love for his people, tinged with kind of horror that anyone had violated a member of his species. I understood. It was the worst fate imaginable for this free-running species, to be a captive.
{No comment?} Visser Three asked. Elfangor’s exchange with us had only taken a split second. {No heroic last words, no declaration of defiance? Honestly, Elfangor, I expected more from you than this. Quite disappointing.}
I sat back down with my back against the wall. I didn’t want to see Elfangor executed on my behalf. Across the room, Rachel was inching the door open, slowly enough that the movement wouldn’t attract attention.
{No matter,} Visser Three continued. {We can always add your begging for your life into the record later, I suppose.}
Rachel had the door opened enough to slip through it. I tapped Marco and Tobias on the shoulders to get their attention and pointed toward the door. Slowly, we all crept across the floor to the exit.
Elfangor’s words stopped us. {Don’t make a sound. But watch.}
I’d never known before that ‘watch’ could have so much emotion behind it. Could mean at once a desperate plea for us observe his death, to preserve the truth of his final moments against whatever lies Visser Three would spread later, and also a firm instruction that we see what the Visser was capable of. We would need to know later, need to understand if we were to survive.
Still, I didn’t dare stand up. I couldn’t imagine a way to tangle with one of those Hork-Bajir and come out alive at the end. Not without some weapon more powerful than whatever I could find on the ground.
I didn’t have to stand up, though. Visser Three began to change. I heard it before I saw it, heard the sickening crunch and slither before I saw his body grow up past the windowsill, saw his skin twist and melt. His face grew to the size of monster truck wheel and then split across the bottom, showing large, sharp teeth in three rows. His four legs merged into two, each the size of a tree trunk. His arms thickened as well, the fingers melting together into three digits that looked like clumsy crab claws.
There was a short scuffle beside me, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the massive creature long enough to figure out which two of my friends were fighting. I clenched my hands into fists at my sides, desperately wanting to leap out the window and do something, anything, to help. But it wasn’t possible. A tank probably couldn’t fight whatever he had turned into.
{And thus ends our merry little chase, Elfangor. A shame we couldn’t arrange a larger audience for your demise.} Visser Three reached toward the ground and came up with Prince Elfangor in one hand, his crabby fingers digging cruelly into his wounded side. Elfangor struck out with his tail, impossibly fast with each strike, but the Visser ignored him. Elfangor couldn’t do anything besides scratch his skin. {And now you die.}
Still the Prince wasn’t paying him any attention. He lashed out with his tail, but his eyes were on us. {Tell them. Tell everyone.} For once, I had no idea what he meant. About the Yeerks or about his death? Did he even know himself?
The Visser held Elfangor over his mouth, dangling him in the air for a moment, before he dropped him into those rows of razor-sharp teeth. Elfangor finally screamed then, but like nothing I’d experienced heard before. It wasn’t a sound, it was a gut-wrenching, heart-stopping wave of terror and pain and loss. It was the blood rushing through my ears like a tidal wave and lights exploding in front of my eyes and vertigo and sorrow and desperation all in one.
It was over in a second. When I could see straight again, Visser Three was still chomping on Elfangor’s body, blue-black blood running from the corners of his mouth while bits of flesh spewed out like crumbs. The Hork-bajir around him sent up an odd cackling sound, while the humans cheered in the more usual fashion.
Beside me, Marco began to vomit noisily. I grabbed him by the shoulder, but there was nothing I could do to quiet him until he finished. The sounds of cheering outside the window stopped abruptly.
{Search the building!} Visser Three cried. {Hurry! Fools! I don’t care, just do it!}
Rachel tore the door open the rest of the way and bolted through it. Cassie was right after her, then Tobias, then me, pulling Marco. We raced down the pitch-black hallway and I prayed that there was nothing in our way to trip over.
Around a corner, we saw the glow of an exit sign, but before we could reach it someone from the outside started banging on it, trying to kick it in. The others ducked into another hallway; I pulled Marco and myself into a stairwell.
We stepped on a bum who had set up shop on the first floor landing. “Hey!” he yelled. “This is my spot! Get your own.”
The exit door burst open and I shoved Marco further up the stairs. I tried to pull up the homeless man as well, but he kicked me for my troubles. I left him. Not my problem.
We turned the corner at the top of the stairs just in time to hear the man start to shout again, only to be cut off by the sharp fire of a handgun. A large caliber from the sound of it.
Marco’s eyes were wide, the whites reflecting what little light came in through a window. “What do we do?” he hissed, panicking.
I clamped my hand against his mouth and pulled him off to the side of the hallway, against the wall.
“See anyone up there?” came a voice from downstairs.
“No, just the bum.”
I stiffened, making Marco protest my too-tight hold on him. I knew that second voice.
“Check it anyway. Don’t want anyone getting away.”
As we listened to the sound of boots coming up the stairs, I tugged Marco backward into a shadowed corner next to the stairs, behind a stack of broken office chairs. It was scant cover, but the shadows would make up for it.
Just as we settled in between the trash and the wall, I saw Corporal Cleever arrive at the top of the stairs. The owner of the second voice. One of the soldiers in my company. Young, brash, and too loud for his own good, but a decent-hearted kid. He always offered to pick up lunch for me when I had to work through our break.
Now Cleever held a gun in one hand, idly point it this way and that as he poked his head into all the offices that led off the hallway. Sloppy work. Sloppy and dangerous. Not at all like Cleever, who was good at his job despite all else. He never once checked our corner, or any of the other stacks of abandoned equipment in the hall.
Marco touched my arm to get my attention and nodded toward the stairs, but I shook my head. Cleever was at the other end of the hall, but movement would draw his attention. And we still didn’t know what was down there. Stupid, stupid, stupid of me to get us stuck on the second floor, but now we had no choice but to wait it out.
Eventually, Cleever finished his check of the offices and headed back down the stairs. “All’s clear up here,” he called as he descended.
Carefully, Marco and I left our spot and walked down to the other end of the hall, to the other exit sign and the other stairway. I led the way down the stairs, checking carefully for any signs that someone was just around the next corner, waiting to shoot us as well.
The emergency exit door was right next to the bottom of the stairs, providing us with an easy escape. I eased the door open slowly, careful not to show my body in the crack between the door and the wall in case there was someone outside waiting for me. All clear. The door opened into an ally on the side of the building.
“All clear, sub-Visser,” someone said in the hallway behind is. “We found a few transients; it was probably one of them that saw us.”
“I don’t like probablies.” Principle Chapman. I hadn’t heard his voice in ages, but there was no way I’d ever forget it. “Search the entire building and the surrounding area.”
I ushered Marco through the door and then closed it behind us as quietly as possible. Once free, we both ran for our lives out of that ally and into the night.
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