The Predator

by K. A. Applegate

  K. A. Applegate The Predator (Animorphs Series, #5) Converted from RTF

  The Predator (Animorphs Series, #5)

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  Begin Content

  AN APPLE

  PAPERBACK

  SCHOLASTIC INC. New York 000 Toronto London Auckland Sydney

  1 Quote from pg. 59 of JOURNEY TO THE ANTS by Bert Holldobler and Edward 0. Wilson. Copyright © 1994 by Bert Holldobler and Edward 0. Wilson. Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press.

  Cover illustration by David B. Mattingly.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any pay ment for this "stripped book."

  No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permis sion of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., 555 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  ISBN 0-590-62981-6

  Copyright © 1996 by Katherine Applegate. All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. APPLE PAPERBACKS and the APPLE PAPERBACKS logo are registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc. ANIMORPHS is a trademark of Scholastic Inc.

  12 11 10 9 8 7 6 789/901/0 Printed in the U.S.A. 40 First Scholastic printing, December 1996

  2 For Michael

  My name is Marco.

  I can't tell you my last name or where I live. Believe me, I wish I could. I would like nothing more than to be able to tell you my name is Marco Jones or Williams or Vasquez or Brown or Anderson or McCain.

  Marco McCain. Has kind of a nice sound, doesn't it?

  But McCain's not my last name. I'm not even going to swear to you that Marco is my first name. See, I'm hoping to live awhile longer. I'm not go ing to make it any easier for the Yeerks to find me.

  I live in a paranoid world. But just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean I don't have enemies.

  3 I have real enemies. Enemies that would freeze your blood if you only knew.

  So, see, I'd like to tell you my name, and address, and phone number, too, because if I could do that, it would mean I no longer had any enemies. It would mean m
y life was normal again. It would mean I could go back to minding my own business.

  I believe in minding my own business.

  Which is why what happened on my way home from the 7-Eleven was so dumb.

  I was walking down the street with some low- fat milk, a loaf of bread, and a bag of peanut M&M's. Since my mom died, I've gotten stuck with a lot of the shopping and stuff for my dad and me.

  This 7-Eleven isn't in the greatest neighborhood, so I was walking kind of fast, minding my own business, trying not to think about the fact that it was after ten at night.

  Then I heard it.

  "Just don't hurt me, just don't hurt me."

  It was a man's voice. An old man, from the sound of it. It was coming from a dark alley.

  I hesitated. I stopped. I pressed myself back against the cold brick wall of the building and listened.

  "Just gimme the money, old man, don't make

  4 me hurt you," a second voice said. A younger voice. A tough voice.

  "I gave you all of it!" the old man cried.

  Then the punk said something I can't repeat. Basically, he was getting ready to pound the old man. I heard other voices. Three punks total. It didn't look good for the old man.

  "This is totally not your problem, Marco," I told myself. "Stay out of it. Don't be an idiot."

  Three punks. Each of them probably twice as big as I was. I'm not exactly Arnold Schwarze- negger. I'm not even average height for my age, although I make up for it by being incredibly cute.

  And charming. And witty. And modest.

  But I was pretty sure the three big gang members in that alley were not going to be very impressed by my cuteness.

  Fortunately, I have other abilities.

  It had been a while since I had done this par ticular morph, but as I concentrated, I could feel it coming back. I slipped into the opening of the alley and hid in the shadow of a very smelly Dumpster.

  The first thing that happened was the fur. It sprouted quickly from my arms and legs and all down my body. Thick, rough, ragged, black fur. It grew long on my arms and back and head. It was shorter everywhere else.

  5 My jaw bulged forward. I could hear the bones in my jaw grind as they stretched and the nonhu- man DNA changed my body.

  Morphing doesn't hurt. It creeps you out some times, but it doesn't hurt. And as morphs go, this one wasn't bad. I mean, I still got to keep all my usual arms and legs and stuff. Not like when I morphed into an osprey. Or a dolphin. I mean, when I was a dolphin, I was breathing through a hole in the back of my neck.

  With this morph I had arms, as usual. Only they were a lot bigger. A lot bigger. My legs bent forward. My shoulders grew so massive it was like having a couple of pigs sitting on my back. I also had an enormous round belly and a leathery chest.

  My face was a black, bulging, rubbery mask, and my eyes were practically invisible beneath my heavy brow.

  I had become a gorilla.

  Now, here's the thing about gorillas. They are the sweetest animals around. If you leave them alone they will mostly just sit and eat leaves all day.

  And that's all the gorilla mind really wanted to do right then - eat some leaves, maybe a nice piece of fruit.

  But I was in that head, too, along with the gorilla's instincts. And I had decided to teach those

  6 it

  punks a little lesson. See, now that I was in that gorilla body, I weighed four hundred pounds. And I was mighty strong.

  How strong? Let me put it this way. Compared to a gorilla, a human being is made out of tooth picks. I wasn't just twice as strong as a man, I was maybe four, five, six times stronger.

  Further down the alley, the punks had lost pa tience with the old man.

  "Let's just kick his butt," one of the geniuses said.

  That's when I decided to say hello. To get their attention, I picked up the Dumpster and threw it against the far wall of the alley.

  Yes, a full-sized Dumpster.

  CRASH! BOOM!

  "What was that?"

  "Look! What is that thing?"

  "Whoa! That's some kind of a ... of a mon key!"

  Monkey! I thought. Excuse me? Monkey? I'll show you monkey.

  Before they could decide what to do, I charged. Knuckles scraping the dirty ground, small hind legs propelling me forward, I charged.

  If the punks had had any sense, they would have run.

  They didn't.

  "Get it! "one yelled.

  7 I grabbed him around his arm with one mas sive fist. I lifted him straight off the ground and threw him over my shoulder.

  "Aaaaaaahhhhh!"

  BOOMPH!

  He landed on the ground behind me. The other two rushed at me, one on the left, one on the right. I saw a knife glittering. The knife slashed my arm. It almost hurt.

  "Hoo hoo hrrraaawwwrr!" I yelled, in pure go rilla.

  With my injured arm, I landed a backhand blow to the knife guy's chest. He flew back. I mean, flew. He hit the wall and dropped.

  I just grabbed the third guy by the shirt collar and threw him into the Dumpster.

  "Don't kill meeeee!" he cried as he sailed through the air.

  I had no intention of killing anyone. I hoisted the knife guy into the Dumpster with his friend. He wasn't breathing real well, but I figured he'd survive.

  Hah, I thought. Who needs Spiderman, when Marco is on the case?

  While I was telling myself just how cool I was, I heard the sound.

  It was a click. Two clicks, actually. The sound of an automatic pistol being cocked.

  8 I spun around.

  BLAM!BLAM!

  It was the first guy. The one I'd thrown over my shoulder. He was up on his feet, gun pointed.

  I was big. I was powerful. But a gun was a whole different story. And loud! Man, are those things loud.

  "Hah! Come and get some, monkey man!"

  I barreled behind the Dumpster. I leaned my massive shoulders into it and sent it rolling and spinning and sliding at the guy with the gun.

  "Ahhhhh!"

  BLAMPH!

  So much for the guy with the gun.

  I checked. He was alive. He wasn't happy, but he was alive. The gun was nowhere to be seen.

  Well, Marco, I thought, that went okay. Now, find someplace private, demorph, call 911 to come arrest these guys, and you can still get home in time to watch Letterman.

  Unfortunately, I had forgotten one thing.

  "G-g-get out of here you . . . you monsterl"

  The old man. The one I had risked my life to save. He was standing, facing me. He was shaking with fear and red in the face.

  Oh, I thought. So that's where the gun went.

  The old man was pointing the gun at me.

  "Back, you demon! Don't come any closer."

  9 BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

  I tore out of the alley with bullets whizzing through the air.

  Which just goes to show you why you should never get involved in other people's problems.

  8

  Yeah , so then I do the gorilla thing, right? I save the old man. I'm the hero. I am Spiderman. I am Wolverine. I am Batman - "

  "Or at least Gorilla Boy," Rachel interrupted.

  She did a forward flip as we walked across the springy grass. Rachel's into gymnastics. It's very distracting when someone flips while they're talk ing to you.

  It was the day after my big hero act. We were all out in a far meadow of Cassie's farm - me, Jake, Cassie, and Rachel, strolling through little bunches of wildflowers. Tobias was flying overhead, about a hundred feet up, in a sky dotted with bright, white clouds.

  "And what happens as I am playing Captain

  10 America?" I ask. "The old man unloads the gun at me. I totally lost the milk and my bag of M&M's."

  Jake gave me a disgruntled look. "Marco? It was good of you to rescue the old man. But you really shouldn't be turning into a gorilla."

  Now, as you're reading this, you're probably thinking, Urn, Marco? Time out. You've left o
ut a few things. Like, how can you turn into a gorilla?

  Good question.

  It happened on a dark night when we were all heading home from the mall. There were five of us.

  Me, you already know.

  Jake is my best friend, even though, unfortu nately, he is kind of a pain sometimes. He's one of those serious-type guys. You say the word "re sponsibility" and he snaps to attention. He's the kind of guy who always seems like he's bigger than he actually is. That's because he has that whole "I'm in charge, and you can trust me" thing going on. He has sensible brown hair, and trustworthy brown eyes, and one of those confi dent chins.

  He also has a great sense of humor and is very smart, and I would trust him with my life any day, any time. Not that I would ever tell him that.

  Then there's Cassie. I didn't really know her very well back then. But I think she's kind of

  11 Jake's girlfriend now. Of course, no one is sup posed to know this. Ssshhh! Big secret!

  Cassie is the one who is least like me. If I'm comedy, she's poetry. She's a natural peacemaker. She's the one who knows when you're feeling bad and will find something nice to say that makes you feel better. And it's not like she's manipulating. She really cares about things. She's like sincere or something.

  Cassie is our animal expert. Her parents are both vets and she spends most of her free time helping her dad run the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic. It's in the barn at their farm. They save in jured woodchucks and deer and eagles and so on. Cassie actually knows how to get an injured, angry wolf to take its pills. (Not an easy thing. Believe me. I was a wolf once.)

  You go out to her barn and you'll see this lit tle, short, black girl in overalls and boots with her arm halfway down the throat of a wolf that could just bite it right off. And she'll be smiling and acting like it's no big deal. And the wolf will be just standing there, looking like he's trying to earn a gold star for being the best little boy in school.

  Then there's Rachel. Very beautiful. Very leggy-blond-supermodel type. Ms. Fashion. Ms. Properly-Applied-Makeup. Ms. Has-lt-AII - Looks- and -Brains.

  12 Rachel is Jake's cousin, and a total babe who, unfortunately, is also totally insane. See, somehow, underneath all that perfect hair and perfect teeth, there's this lunatic Amazon warrior-queen, just fighting to get out.