A few moments later I saw a vast eyeball, stuck on the end of a long stalk, come shooting up toward us where we hung upside down. One of Ax’s extra, stalk-mounted eyes. The eye turned to look at us.
Then, a violent vibration in the air. The eye disappeared from sight.
And a second vibration, like something heavy falling.
We demorphed as quickly as we could. When my human eyesight returned, I saw Ax, standing calmly in his Andalite form. Against the far wall was a man in a white coat, holding a clipboard.
He was crumpled and unconscious, but alive.
“No. It’s not. But that’s a good instinct, Ax. Whoever this guy is, he’s someone’s brother or son or even father.”
I took a look first at my own body. I was barefoot, like I always was when I came out of a morph. And wearing only my silly-looking bike shorts and tight T-shirt. (Even Ax can’t figure out how to morph anything more than the most minimal clothing.) But I seemed to have all my usual legs and arms.
“You okay, Cassie?” I asked.
“I’m fine.” She pointed at what had looked like a shiny Superdome to us as flies. It was a stainless steel vat about eight feet across.
I laughed. “You know what this is? This is a whirlpool. A Jacuzzi. Someone just put a lid over it. Why would they have this in a hospital?”
“For therapy,” Cassie said. “You know, for people with muscle strains or back problems.”
I stepped to the side of the whirlpool. I grabbed the handles on the lid and lifted. It opened easily on hydraulic hinges. I looked inside. I recoiled.
The water was sludgy, brown, and viscous.
And roiling with slugs.
Yeerks. In their natural state.
“Well, well, well,” I said.
Yeerks must leave their host bodies every three days to return to a Yeerk pool. In the Yeerk pool they feed by soaking up various nutrients, but especially Kandrona rays, which are like the rays of their home sun. Kandronas are artificial sources of Kandrona rays.
“Can they see us? Now, I mean?”
I walked slowly around the whirlpool. My foot hit something solid. The pump for the whirlpool action. It was disconnected, with a wire pulled out of the wall socket. The control panel had been ripped away, exposing bare wires.
“Ax? What do you think would happen to all those Yeerks in there if the temperature of the liquid suddenly went up to say, one hundred twenty degrees? And the liquid was all agitated?”
Ax looked puzzled.
“Well. That would be a pity.” I made a quick decision. “Ax? Watch the door to the hallway. Cassie? We may need you in some more dangerous morph. What have you got?”
“Wolf?”
“Perfect. But no howling.”
“What are you going to do?” Cassie asked.
“We came here to stop this sick operation, right? Well, wiping out a hundred or so Yeerks might be a good way to start. I’m going to hook this thing back together, and Jacuzzi these filthy creeps to death.”
There were no tools in the room. But I did find some tape and a pair of tweezers. That was all I needed. I began reconnecting wires, red to red, blue to blue, green to green. Without the switches, the settings would all automatically be at maximum. Maximum heat, maximum jets.
But all the while, in the back of my head, was this nagging feeling.
It couldn’t be this easy.
I connected the last wire.
Cassie had finished the transformation into her wolf body. She stood by patiently, like a very big, very tough-looking dog.
“Okay. Time to boil some Yeerks.”
I reached down and stuck the plug in the outlet. It took a few seconds, then the boiling sound began. The familiar Jacuzzi bubbling.
The door opened. A man and a woman, both wearing white lab coats. For a split second they just froze and stared.
“Andalite!” the woman yelped.
Cassie was on her in a flash. She leapt, hit the woman hard, and knocked her to the floor.
Ax moved toward the man, but the man was fast. He dodged, staying out of range of Ax’s tail.
I was still behind the whirlpool, out of sight. I was trying to focus on morphing into tiger form for a fight.
But then, two more men, dressed in uniform as guards, came plowing into the room. The first one leveled a gun.
“Ax!” I shouted. “A gun!”
Ax’s tail flashed.
“Aaaargghh!” the Controller screamed.
The hand that had been holding the gun was no longer attached to the man’s arm.
“Get backup to the pool area! Andalites!” the second guard screamed into a walkie-talkie. Then he drew his gun.
BLAM! BLAM!
They told me later there was a third shot. But I didn’t hear it.
A sledgehammer blow struck the side of my head. A ricochet. For a brief second I clung to consciousness. But then, I swooned. I fell.
Facedown in the whirlpool.
Facedown in the bubbling, boiling mass of dying Yeerks.
Facedown, unconscious, in the superheating Yeerk pool.
I don’t know for how long.
When I woke I had two terrifying, overwhelming feelings. One was suffocation. I had breathed in a lungful of the liquid from the pool.
I came to, gasping and hacking and gagging. I was alive, but I could hardly breathe. Each breath was a struggle. I coughed, and I think at one point I threw up.
The second feeling was of pain in my head. Pain like nothing I had ever even imagined before. It was like someone was drilling a hole in my ear, drilling straight into my brain.
I wanted to scream, but I was still choking. I was on my knees on the floor of the hospital room, wanting to cry from the pain and gasping for every half breath of air.
All the while, a battle raged. They were trying to get in the doorway. But it was too narrow for more than one or two Human-Controllers at a time to attack. Ax’s tail and Cassie’s long wolf teeth were enough to hold them off.
BLAM! Another gunshot!
“Stop firing, you fool!” someone shouted. “The pool is in there! Visser Three will eat your guts!”
Even in my condition I could see that Ax and Cassie couldn’t last. I needed to morph, to join the battle. But I could not seem to do it. The pain … or maybe the lack of oxygen … I couldn’t concentrate. My brain was fuzzy, drifting….
I heard a rumbling, pounding noise from the hallway outside. There were cries and screams of rage. Suddenly, into the room burst a huge black gorilla and a second wolf.
Marco and Rachel.
They had driven the attackers away, but only for a few seconds.
I felt myself lifted up off the floor. A white cloth was wrapped around my head. One of the lab coats from an injured Controller, I guessed. I was cradled in the huge arms of a gorilla.
I was still coughing and gasping, but my breathing was at least improving. Not enough to speak, but I could br
eathe enough to keep from passing out.
At the same time, something had happened to the pain in my head. It was diminishing. And yet, instead of feeling more clearheaded, I felt more confused.
“Get them!” a Controller was yelling outside the door. “Attack. Attack!”
I caught just a glimpse through the fabric that hid my face. A flash of something huge and gray.
Rachel’s elephant morph.
BOOOM! WHUMP! CRRRUUUUNNCH!
Wild screams! Panic! Cries of pain!
I was bounced and slammed against walls and even dropped at one point. I felt us go down a set of stairs. I felt hands grabbing at me and slipping away.
Finally, fresh air. We were running like mad for the shelter of a stand of trees that fronted the hospital.
I was tossed onto the dirt.
The gorilla peeled back the coat that was over my face.
“My … head …” I said.
“Something … wrong … I can’t … think.”
What was that voice? Where was it coming from?
Marco lifted me and slung me over a horse’s back. Cassie.
My hand tried to pull the coat away from my face.
What was happening? There was a voice inside my head.
We were running now, running and running at full gallop, through trees, across lawns, down suburban streets where Cassie’s hooves clattered loudly.
We jumped a fence. I flew through the air and landed hard on the dirt.
I felt pain, but it came from far away.
The coat was loose. I looked around. Trees, everywhere. A panting horse standing nearby.
I saw all this, but in a distant way, as if I were watching it all on TV. My eyes moved left, right. They moved all on their own. Like someone else was focusing them.
Cassie. I tried to say her name. Cassie.
But no sound came from my mouth.
What? Who was saying that? What was … ?
Then, a laugh only I could hear.
Then I knew.
I knew what the voice was.
A Yeerk!
A Yeerk in my own head.
I was a Controller.
Very good. You figured it out,> said the silent voice in my head, mocking me.
Tobias landed on a branch overhead.
I wanted to tell them both. To scream “They have me! They are inside me!” But I couldn’t make my mouth move. It was like there was a roadblock. Like I could form the thoughts, give the order to my lips and tongue to speak, but the order never got there.
Cassie had become human again. She knelt beside me and looked down into my eyes. “He’s alert. His eyes are tracking. Jake? Jake, can you talk to me?”
It was a nightmare. That’s what it was. Another nightmare. I would wake up soon. I would wake up and laugh and laugh.
the Yeerk said proudly.
That cut through my growing hysteria.
“We have to get him to a doctor,” Cassie told Tobias.
Just then, Marco arrived. He was fully human again. He was dressed in his morph clothes and walking gingerly without shoes. “Doctor? He needs a doctor? What’s the matter with him?”
“Nothing is the matter with me,” I said, quite suddenly. “I’m fine.”
Only I didn’t say it. My mouth spoke the words. But I didn’t say it.
The Yeerk had spoken through my mouth.
“No way,” Cassie said. “We’re taking you to a doctor. You didn’t answer me for, like, five minutes. Maybe you have a concussion.”
My body sat up. “Sorry I scared you, Cassie. But I’m fine. And where are you going to take me? Back to that hospital? What if some doctor does a blood test and he sees something that shows him I’m an Animorph?”
“Like what?” Marco asked, sounding skeptical.
“How do I know? Maybe some leftover roach DNA. Look, I’m fine, okay?”
“As soon as we know Rachel and Ax are safe, we need to break up and go our separate ways,” my mouth said.
The Yeerk was considering his next move. I could not “hear” his thoughts. But I could feel him using my brain. He was digging through my memory. Trying to learn quickly about the others.
He was using my brain. Using me.
I had to do something quick. Something to warn Cassie and Marco. Surely they would guess what was happening. They were the two people in the whole world who
were closest to me.
Surely they would realize that I was no longer myself.
Wouldn’t they?
“I don’t think there’s all that much the Yeerks can do right now,” Marco said to Cassie. “We’re deep in the national forest. It would take a while for them to organize a search. They’d need helicopters and lots of Human-Controllers. And they don’t even know what they’re looking for.” He laughed. “After all, they still think we’re Andalites.”
“Yeah, but it means we’re going to have to be very careful with Ax,” my mouth said. “We’ll need to hide him. I think we may have parboiled quite a few Yeerks in that whirlpool. They’re going to be very upset.”
It was incredible. It was shocking to listen to. The Yeerk was using my voice. My inflection. He was saying the words I would have said.
Marco and Cassie would never guess. As far as they could see or hear, the Yeerk in my brain was me.
I felt a dark wave of terror wash over me. He was telling the truth. I knew he was. No host had ever defeated a Yeerk.
Resistance was futile.
Futile.
I would never be free. Just like Tom. If this Yeerk moved on, they would give me to another. I was a slave.
Forever.
There was a noise behind me. Footsteps on the pine needles and leaves. At the same time, Tobias came swooping down to land on a nearby branch.
I turned around. Rachel.
“Hey, cousin,” I said. “I see you made it okay.”
Then, a touch on my shoulder.
I spun suddenly. I hadn’t heard anyone else arriving.
Ax! Just behind me. His Andalite face close to mine. His big eyes watching me.
And in that split second, hatred revealed itself. A hatred that had crossed light-years of space to play itself out on planet Earth.
Only I heard it. The Yeerk did not say a thing.
But surprised, unaware, unprepared, he did curl my lip in an instinctive expression of revulsion.
Animorphs #6: The Capture Page 6
