The Escape
Page 10
I had lost my mother once. Now I'd lost her again. Unless . . .
I pictured the Leeran swimming toward her. Had she made it? No. It wasn't possible.
We swam away. We swam toward shore, where we would be human once again and go back to our lives. Back to home and homework. Back to saying good night to a picture of my mother.
But nothing would ever be the same now. How could it be? They would all know.
I felt the energy drain out of me. I was exhausted. Exhausted and defeated. I waited for someone to say something nice. Something sweet and comforting. Something that they would never have said to the old Marco.
«Hey. I just heard something,» Rachel said. «Mechanical. Like . . . hey! It's the same sound the sub made. That transparent sub. I heard its engines.»
«l don't hear anything,» Tobias argued.
«lt's coming from over in this direction^ Rachel said. «0ver closer to me.»
I didn't hear anything, either. Maybe Rachel was just making it up. Maybe she was trying to give me some tiny hope to cling to. It didn't sound like something Rachel would do. But there
162 are hidden depths to Rachel. There are times she'll surprise you.
«Thanks, Xena,» I said.
You know, if she'd said, «You're welcome,» I'd have known it was a lie. That she hadn't heard a sub. That she was just trying to be nice.
«Thanks for what? For hearing that sub? For paying more attention than you, Marco?» Rachel sneered in her usual Rachel sneer. «You know, possibly the reason I notice more than you do, Marco, is that I don't use half my brain making dumb jokes and the other half of my brain laughing at them.»
It was a pretty good shot. It made me laugh a little. I don't mind when the jokes are at my own expense. As long as they're funny.
Was it true? Had my mother made it to the sub and escaped? I don't know, and I guess I wasn't totally sure what I wanted the truth to be.
If she was gone . . . really, really gone, then I could be a normal person again. I could be sad and then put it behind me. I could be free.
If she was still alive, still trapped, then I was still trapped, too. I still had to try and save her. I would still be a prisoner of hope.
«l'll ask you this just once more, and then never again, because I know how you are about people feeling sorry for you,» Jake said privately
163 so no one else could hear. «Are you okay, Marco?»
Like I always say, you have to decide whether you think life is tragedy or comedy. I long ago decided to look for the joke in life.
And now I had to decide whether, in my own mind, she was dead or still alive. Suddenly I had this flash. This picture in my head. Me and her. Me and my mom. My real mom, free, no longer a Controller. It would be far in the future. Years from now, maybe. Me and her and my dad would sit down together and talk about how it had been. About all the stuff that had happened. All the secrets and despair. All the fear. All the anger and hopelessness. We'd remember it all.
And then, slowly but surely, we'd talk less about how horrible it had all been. We'd start talking about the strange stuff. The weird stuff. The stuff that we could laugh at, now that it was all over.
See, it was my mom who taught me that the world was funny.
And if she was alive, we'd maybe still get that day in the future to sit down and laugh together.
«l'm fine, Jake,» I said. «And I'll be better. When she's free again.»
165 Don't miss
TM
ANIMORPHS
# 16 THE WARNING
L'm sure it was a beautiful house. But I didn't really see it. All I saw with my dim rhino-vision were walls and doorways. But at least we'd been right to guess that there were wide hallways. Wide enough for me to barrel down like a ... well, like a rhinoceros.
And the ceilings were high enough that Tobias, Cassie, and Marco could fly down them, searching madly from room to room. Searching with vision greater than human vision and hearing that could pick up the sound of a gopher belching from a distance the length of a football field.
They used me to open doors.
«Jake, open this door,» Marco would say. I'd turn where he showed me, shove my massive bony face forward, and the door would explode in splinters.
CRRR-UNCH-BANG!
«We are trashing this man's home,» Cassie
166 said. «l sure hope he is a Controller after all this.»
«He can afford to have his doors fixed,» Marco said.
«That's not the point,» Cassie said. Then, «Jake, open this door, please.»
CRRRR-UNCH-BANG!
«Nothing,» Tobias complained. «Nothing, nothing, nothing! Nothing in any of these rooms, and there may be a hundred rooms in this place.»
«Tobias is right. We are out of time,» Cassie said.
«This isn't the way to do it,» I said. «We can't just search room to room. It could take hours. We need to figure this out. How do we find Ax and Rachel? Where would they be?»
«ln the last place we look,» Marco grumbled. «0r at least . . . wait a minute! Wherever they are, they'll be guarded.»
«Yes!» I said. «0f course. We just rampage till we see something well guarded.»
«l'll head upstairs,» Tobias said.
He zoomed away and up a large staircase. I lumbered along into a vast open living room area. I stomped on through. I tried not to crush too much furniture, but I was big and half-blind, so I kept hearing the crunch of wood and the shatter of glass and pottery in my wake.
167 «L)p here!» Tobias yelled.
Then, not as loud as before, but still loud enough . . . BLAM! BLAM!
«Tobias!»
«l'm okay! But I found an area with two big guys with big guns. It's upstairs.»
I tried to turn around and head back to the stairs, but then Marco yelled.
«Uh-oh! Guys coming up behind us. Man, how many gunmen does this lunatic hire? Jake, we have to go through these guys to get back to the stairs!»
«l got guys on my tail!» Tobias yelled down from upstairs.
I spun around and wiped out a couch in the process. «This way?!»
«No, a little left!»
I turned and annihilated a coffee table. Then I charged. I couldn't tell the difference between the men and various pole lamps and bookcases, except when they moved. The blur drew my eye, and I smelled humans.
I lowered my head and charged.
BLAM! BLAM!
Shotgun pellets stung but didn't penetrate beneath my outer skin.
POP! POP! POP! POP!
I was hit. I staggered. I felt the bullet from the handgun tear into my right shoulder. A second slug lodged in the bone of my face.
168 I hit the guy with the gun. I was mad. I lowered my horn and I tossed my head back. He went flying back over my shoulder.
"Ya-ah-AHHHHHH!"
The other man jumped aside. I think he was fumbling to reload his shotgun. I sideswiped him and knocked him into the wall. Then I was out of the room, back into the hallway, tearing along back to the staircase.
I was bleeding. And I was weakening on my right side. My right front leg was moving slower. The bullet in my face must have ricocheted off. I felt pain there, but not the heaviness I felt in my shoulder.
I came to the stairs and tried to charge straight up. But rhinos were never meant for climbing stairs. My legs wouldn't lift high enough. My weight and momentum were too much. The wooden stairs splintered.
BLAM! BLAM!
«Tobias! What's going on up there?»
«l'm leading these guys around in circles and they're blowing the crap out of the walls and ceiling trying to shoot me.»
«l can't make the stairs. We need more fire-power. Marco, Cassie, morph! Tobias, keep it up. Keep leading 'em on.»
A bird trapped in a house, being chased by
169 two guys with shotguns. Had I just sentenced Tobias to death?
I started to demorph as fast as I could. But while my thought-speak was still functionin
g, something occurred to me. «Rachel! Ax! Can you guys hear me? Rachel! Ax!»
« . . . unh . . . what?»
«Who is that?»
« . . . unh ... it is me, Aximili,» Ax said.
He sounded dazed. I wasn't surprised. «Ax! Demorph! Time's up!»
«But there are humans here watching me, Prince Jake.»
Another decision. «Just do it, Ax, we're coming for you! Do you - » My thought-speak went dead as I became more human than rhinoceros.
«Yes, Prince J - » Ax fell silent.
I was shrinking. My armored flesh became tender human skin. My face was flat and delicate. But my legs could handle stairs. I still heard the sounds of gunfire from upstairs. And the sad thing was, I was glad. As long as they were still shooting, it meant Tobias wasn't dead yet.
Marco and Cassie were just becoming human again. They were three foot tall lumps of feathers and shrinking beaks and emerging skin.
One wrong move and Tobias was gone. Ax
170 might be demorphing in front of people who might be Controllers. Rachel ... no one knew whether Rachel was even conscious and capable of demorphing. Or alive at all. And now the three of us were utterly vulnerable, weak, pathetic.
I just kept thinking: This wasn't even supposed to be a very dangerous mission. And now, we were as close to being wiped out as we'd ever been.
"Cshom on!" I said, slurring my words with a mouth that was not human yet. "No chime kleft!"
I started up the stairs, staggering on my shifting, changing legs. The joints weren't right. The toes weren't toes, and my ankles seemed to have no flexibility. But time was up. I dragged myself up those stairs, hoping desperately that I had not killed us all. . . .