The Warning

by K. A. Applegate

  16

  got all these new friends

  suddenly and

  YrkHSer: Kill all Yeerks ! CKDsweet: the sharing, and I think

  they are all Yeerks.

  I looked at Marco. He nodded.

  "The Sharing," he muttered. "Interesting. See if anyone stomps on that."

  Sure enough, someone did. The supposedly enthusiastic Yeerk hater.

  YrkHSer: The sharing is okay. I checked them out.

  Chazz: Wrong. The sharing is a Yeerk front organization.

  YrkHSer: No way. They're like Boy Scouts.

  "Whoa," Rachel said.

  "This Chazz guy seems fairly serious," Tobias offered.

  "YrkHSer may be a Controller himself," I said.

  "Or he may just be mistaken," Cassie pointed out.

  Gump8293: he's with them all the time. The other day I

  18

  Carlito: Gump8293: Carlito: MegMom:

  GoVikes: MegMom: GoVikes:

  I've discovered that Yeerks need to go someplace secret and heard my dad and these new friends whispering about

  feed or replenish. Every three days. I think they someone called "Visher" or "Vister" or something, get out of their host body to do this. Gump, I think it's "Visser." I think a Visser is like a they're like snails, only without a shell, general or something. I think Visser is a rank. Rank. LOL. Totally rank.

  "GoVikes is just your standard chat room moron," Marco said. "But Chazz and Meg and Carlito seem like they may know something."

  "Gump is sad," Cassie said. "Worried about his dad."

  "Yeah, well, it's a sad world all around," Marco said harshly.

  I had known for a while that Marco's mother

  19 is a Controller. In fact, she's Visser One, a very high-ranking member of the Yeerk hierarchy. But the others had only learned recently. And Marco is allergic to pity so he has to act extra tough.

  Gump8293: Isn't there any way for me to get my dad to stop being

  YrkHSer: Kill all Yeerks!

  Gump8293: a Yeerk?

  YrkHSer: Talk to your dad. Tell him what you think.

  Chazz: NO Gump. Say NOTHING to your father. If you say anything you'll be next.

  MegMom: Gump, listen to Chazz. He's right. You can't do

  FiteyVVV: Hi everyone.

  MegMom: anything to save your father. All you can do is get hurt.

  Fitey777: I have a name to add to the list of known Yeerks.

  Gump8293: I have to DO something.

  FiteyVVV: Charles J. Sofor. He's the deputy police chief in

  YrkHSer: Kill all Yeerks!

  Chazz: Hello Fite y.

  20 MegMom: Good, Fitey's here. FiteyVVV: the capital. I am close

  to getting the location GoVikes: chop him up in little

  pieces. Fitey777: of a Yeerk feeding area.

  "So, what do we think?" I asked the group.

  Rachel sighed. "Who can tell? Maybe some of these guys are for real. But maybe it's all a Yeerk scam to lure people in."

  "Like Gump," Cassie said. "They may be trying to get his name and address so they can warn his father, the Controller."

  "I suspect a Yeerk scam," Tobias said.

  "I'd go that way, too," Rachel said.

  Cassie shook her head. "I'm not so sure. There's something real and genuine about some of these people. Not all. YrkHSer is probably a Controller. But Gump is real. I'd bet on it."

  I learned to trust Cassie's instincts about people long ago. "I get the same feeling," I said. "Ax?"

  "Who can tell? This primitive means of communication makes it impossible to judge. Now that humans have the telephone, why do they still use this primitive system?"

  "Actually, the phone was invented first," I said. "This is more modern."

  21 Ax laughed. "Humans. You invent the book first, then the computer. Puter. Telephone before computer. Very backward."

  "Marco? What do you think?"

  Marco tilted his head back and forth in a "who knows?" gesture. "If I had to guess, I'd say a little of both. Maybe this Web page was created by Yeerks to help them locate any humans who know about them. But at the same time, maybe it got a little out of their control. I mean, maybe Chazz, Carlito, Fitey, and Meg are all for real."

  I nodded. "We need to try and find out who these people are. Ax? Can you hack in and penetrate the protected screen name files?"

  I stood up and Ax sat stiffly in the chair. He placed his unfamiliar human fingers on the keys. "What is 'Caps Lock'?"

  "Forget 'Caps Lock.'"

  "Yes, Prince Jake."

  I sighed. "I'm not a prince," I said for probably the millionth time.

  Ax entered the computer's software and began to write furiously. But after a few minutes he was obviously frustrated.

  "What?" Marco mocked. "A superior Andalite can't hack into the Web Access America computer?"

  "Can you?" Ax asked him.

  "No."

  22 "Ah." He went back to typing furiously. Then he pushed the keyboard away, almost angrily. "The most basic systems are not usable."

  "In other words, you can't do it?" I said.

  "No. This machine and the central computer are both too primitive. I tried to reconfigure the software, but it is not enough." He brightened. "However, I fixed it so Marco will now be able to win any online computer game he plays."

  "I already win every game," Marco lied.

  "Your win and lose ratio is stored in the cornputer, Marco," Ax pointed out. "You do not win every game. You win forty-two percent of the time. Ratio. Horatio. Ray. Shee. Oh."

  "It would be nice to know if these guys are for real," Cassie said. "We may have allies out there. And there may be people like Gump who we could help."

  I held out my hands. "So? How do we get the real names behind the screen names?"

  "If we busted into WAA's main office ..." Marco began.

  "Invade Web Access America?" Rachel said, grinning.

  "Yeah," Marco said. "Invade Web Access America. Bust into their main computers. Get the screen names. And while we're at it, turn off that stupid program that keeps offering you a Web Access America Visa card."

  23 UJ.

  le Animorphs are like the world's greatest burglars. I mean, we don't steal stuff, of course. But when you can become any kind of animal, it's usually fairly easy to get into places.

  Just one problem. Web Access America was not in our town. The headquarters of Web Access America was a couple of hundred miles away. Too far for us to get to. Even if we morphed into birds, we couldn't cover that much distance in the two-hour morph time. And if we stopped and demorphed and remorphed, we'd still never make it there and back in a day.

  So we needed some other means of transportation. And that's why we were at the airport in the terminal that Saturday morning, watching

  24 through the floor-to-ceiling windows as flights took off.

  "It's a one-hour-and-thirty-minute flight," Marco said. "Plenty of time."

  "Right."

  "All we have to do is morph, fly aboard the plane, try not to get swatted, and demorph when we get there," he said. "We can take United or Northwest."

  It was just me and Marco at the window. The others were spread around the terminal. We try not to congregate together. We don't want to look like a group. Yeerk eyes are everywhere. They think we're a bunch of Andalites, not humans, but we have to be careful all the time.

  "United or Northwest?" Marco asked.

  I shrugged. "Flip a coin. Who cares? The problem I have is with the idea of being a fly on a plane. Lots of people looking to swat. And if anything goes wrong, how do we demorph on a plane?"

  "You want to cancel out?"

  I thought about it for a minute. Out on the runway, a 747 was rumbling down the tarmac, picking up speed for a takeoff. "Nan. I guess it'll be okay. It's a risk, but it's worth it."

  Marco smiled. An actual, nonmocking smile, which is rare for him. "I remember back when

  25 you didn't want
to have to make all the big decisions."

  "I still don't want to make them," I said. "But someone has to, right?"

  "Yep." He nodded.

  "I just want to get back to a life someday where I don't have to make decisions that might get people killed."

  "Do you?" Now Marco's smile was definitely of the mocking variety. "You really think someday we can all go back to being regular kids? You think after being the leader of the Ani-morphs you can go back to being Joe Average Student?"

  "Yes, I do." I said it forcefully. I meant it.

  "Uh-huh," Marco said dryly. "Come on, let's round up the others." He squinted to see the board announcing flight departures. "Let's catch the United flight. It leaves soonest. We have fifteen minutes. Gate nineteen."

  "Is there a movie on the flight?" I asked, trying to catch Marco's casual tone.

  "On a one-hour-and-thirty-minute flight? More like an in-flight cartoon."

  We found the others, drifting from Cassie and Rachel to Tobias and Ax. We explained the plan. It was Tobias who asked the question I had overlooked.

  26 "How are we going to find gate nineteen when we're in fly morph? How good are fly eyes?"

  Tobias had never morphed a fly before. He'd just acquired the DNA earlier that morning.

  "Pretty bad, actually," I admitted. "Compound eyes."

  "The sense of smell is good, though," Marco said. "I mean, flies can sense poop or garbage from a long way off."

  I looked at Marco. He looked at me.

  "Oh, puh-leeze," Marco said. "Where would we find it? And what would we do with it? Hand it to the flight attendant at the gate? Tell him, 'Hang onto this for us. We'll be right back as flies'?"

  A plane was disgorging passengers from a nearby gate. The people all looked tired and annoyed. Some smiled for the relatives and friends who were picking them up. But I guess it must have been a long flight, because some of the people had pressure marks on the sides of their faces. You know, like they'd been sleeping with their heads leaned against the windows of the plane.

  Then there was the mother and father with their baby. The baby was squalling and squirming in its mother's arms.

  They stopped just a few feet away.

  "He needs to be changed," the mother said.

  29 "Whose turn is it?" the father asked.

  The mother handed the baby to him and he groaned. "Please let it just be number one."

  "I don't think so," the mother said. "I think you're getting a full load."

  I turned to Marco, Tobias, and Ax. "Okay, we need a volunteer for a very hazardous and disgusting mission. Someone has to get that diaper."

  It turned out the volunteer was me. Ax couldn't even understand the basic concept. Which left three of us. We did rock, paper, scissors. Whoever didn't match the others was the volunteer.

  Tobias and Marco took paper. I did rock.

  I swear somehow or other they cheated.

  Two minutes later I had an absolutely vile Huggies wrapped in a couple of paper towels.

  "I don't suppose you want this," I said, offering it to Marco.

  "What is it?" Ax wondered.

  "A diaper," I said. "Baby poop."

  "Diaper gravy," Marco said. "We're going to use the diaper gravy to guide our flight as flies."

  "I don't understand."

  I sighed. "This would be one of those things I really don't want to explain, Ax," I said. I carried the diaper toward gate nineteen. I stuffed it into a large, standing ashtray and returned to the oth-

  27

  ers. "That should do it. Let's get back with Cassie and Rachel."

  "See, now this is why we aren't Batman or Spiderman," Marco complained. "Spiderman never has to follow the trail of baby poop."

  "Who is this spider man?" Ax asked.

  28

  We went to a men's room to morph. Cassie and Rachel went to a ladies' room. I guess there are times when we Animorphs just can't work as a team.

  "We could all fit together in the handicapped stall," Marco suggested.

  "You're not supposed to do that," I said. "Let's just each get our own stall."

  But that was easier said than done. There were a lot of flights coming and going. The men's room was busy. The best we could do was get two stalls.

  "Oh, this doesn't look too weird," Tobias muttered as he and I entered a stall together.

  30 "Wait 3 few seconds. Things will be quite a bit weirder," I told him.

  We closed and latched the door. We stripped off our outer clothing and shoes and stuffed it all into a backpack we'd brought along. We set the bag behind the toilet. You can't morph street clothes or shoes, just something form-fitting. Like the bike shorts and T-shirt I was wearing. If we were lucky we'd get our clothes back later at the lost and found. If not ... well, w e lose a lot of clothing.

  "Fly morph, huh?" Tobias whispered.

  "Yep."

  "Is it as gross as I think it will be?"

  "No. It's much, much grosser."

  Tobias made a face. Then he started morph-ing. But not into a fly. See, when you morph you can only do it from your natural shape. Strange as it may seem, Tobias's natural shape is now that of a red-tailed hawk.

  So as I waited nervously, Tobias grew feathers and wings and talons and a beak. And in the next stall Ax grew a scorpion tail, two stalk eyes, and four hooved legs.

  "Ready?" I whispered to Marco.

  "Yeah. Let's do it. It's crowded in here."

  I looked at Tobias. Funny how even I was used to the idea that the real Tobias was the Tobias

  31 with the fierce gold-and-brown eyes and the beak designed to tear apart flesh.

  "Ready?"

  «Yeah. I'm as ready as I'll ever be.»

  "You might like it," I said. "You should see how well flies fly."

  «l fly better than anything else with wings already^ he said. «0kay. Let's get this over with.»

  I closed my eyes and began to focus on the fly morph. The truth is, it made me feel better to have Tobias nervous. It distracted me from the fact that morphing a fly made me sick.

  There may be something more disgusting than a fly, but I sure haven't become it yet.

  The first change was that I began to shrink.

  The steel walls of the bathroom stall seemed to rise up and up and up. They grew to be the size of skyscrapers. Graffiti that had been in inch-high letters was now big enough to fill a billboard.

  When I looked down I got a real scare. It looked exactly as if I were falling into the toilet bowl. That toilet bowl got bigger and bigger and seemed to be sprouting up from the floor like it was a big mouth trying to swallow me whole.

  I saw the toilet paper dispenser go zipping by. One minute it was below waist level, the next minute it took off, straight up. It was an odd thing to see.

  32 The linoleum squares grew vast. The scraps of tissue on the floor became bedsheets. A piece of chewed gum became a big, pink boulder.

  But shrinking was the easy part. The other changes were infinitely worse. For one thing, there's the fact that your nose and mouth sort of melt together and grow into this insanely long, hairy, sticky, spit-dribbling thing the books call "mouth parts."

  «AAAAAHHHH! Jeez!» Tobias yelled in thought-speak.

  His own beak had just sprouted into the long, spring-loaded, utterly nasty-looking mouth parts. It was not a pretty thing to watch.

  Sprooot! Two big legs sort of burst out of my chest. You know how in the movie Alien the alien baby exploded out of that guy's chest? It was a little like that. Only instead of some fake-looking puppet, these were two long, black, jointed legs, each bristling with daggerlike hairs.

  Morphing is never totally logical. It isn't a smooth transition. It's not like each part of you gets gradually more flylike. Things happen suddenly, and in unexpected sequences. I was still about a foot tall when the legs pushed out through my ribs. I still had human eyes and a mostly human body. Aside from the monstrous mouth parts.

  "Hey, anyone in th
ere?"

  33 I heard the voice. And I heard the way the door of the stall rattled. But I couldn't answer. I didn't have a mouth.

  «Someone's trying to get in!» Tobias said.

  «l know!»

  «What do we do?»

  «Keep morphing. It's too late to back out now.»

  "Hey, is anyone in there? I gotta go bad."

  My hands had become the appendages of a fly. There were two hooked, talonlike claws and small, hairy pads that oozed a kind of glue. I could hear my internal organs going soft and squishy as entire things like a liver and spleen and kidneys were re-formed to make the infinitely more primitive guts of a fly.

  My bones were weakening so that my still-mostly-human legs were getting wobbly, turning to overcooked spaghetti.

  At this point I was about the size of a small dog. I had fly legs but no wings. I had human eyes and massive fly mouth parts. Tobias was a similar mess. And that's when the guy who had to go bad reached over the stall door and undid the lock.

  The door opened. There wasn't anything I could do.

  "Oh. Ohhh. OOHHH! Oh, No! NOOOO! NOOOOOO! AAAAAHHHH!"

  34 The man stood there and stared.

  I waved one dagger-haired, clawed leg at him.

  "AAAAHHHHH! Help! Help! Help!"

  The door slammed shut again.

  «Quick! We better be flies before he brings help!»

  "Help me! Police! Someone!"

  I continued shrinking, and now I noticed my gossamer fly wings coming in, attached to big springlike muscles in my back.

  "There are monsters in the toilets!"

  «What's going on over there?» Marco demanded from the next stall over.

  «We're busted,» I said. «Make it quick.»

  My human eyes dimmed, then went dark. Seconds passed in total blindness as my compound fly eyes grew. Then, all at once, I saw a world of shattered images, like a thousand tiny television sets all tuned to a slightly different picture.

  «By the way, Tobias, watch out for the fly instincts^ I warned.

  In my weird field of vision I saw something black and blurry go zipping by. Another fly. Tobias?

  «Tobias, is that you flying?»

  Rumble, rumble, rumble, rumble, RUMBLE, RUMBLE.

  35 Thunderous pounding vibrations distracted me. Many heavy feet were running toward me.

  WHAM! The door of the stall opened. I felt the wind whoosh past overhead. It excited the hairs on my back. My antennae quivered madly.