The Kelbrid Chronicles

REDUX

And should we fall down by the wayside in this ever-changing world,

we can look back to these heroes of our past.

With their staunch determination and ferocious iron will,

no tyranny would quell them in their task.

I. Ramble and Roll

Marco

My name is Marco.

God, it feels like forever since I've said that, and at the same time... Man, at the same time I feel like I've been saying it all my life. Sometimes I find myself wishing that I'll never have to say it again, never have to start a new chapter of this ridiculous, insane, brutal "adventure." I want this adventure to end, I want a break.

I want a vacation.

Right now, however, I don't have a single second to spare longing for the day I can finally hang up my uniform and tell someone else to go save the world. My best friend, the closest thing I have to a brother, just issued an order that will certainly, definitely, without a shadow of a doubt get us all killed. And for what? To spit in the eye of The One and his Yeerk lackeys? Excuse me if I'm not chomping at the bit for a chance to make a gesture. If I'm going to die while engaging the enemy, I want to be damn sure my final attack leaves a mark, hurts them like they've hurt me. But this? This is the equivalent of a fly declaring war on a windshield.

"Ram the Blade Ship," he says, and it may be the third or fourth time he's said it. No one is reacting, no one is responding. They're all just staring at him, like he's sprouted a second head, and Christ, I think the French woman is crying.

I take a deep breath, clear my throat, and then promptly tell Jake to shut his fat mouth.

Maybe I should insert a preface here before things really get out of hand. In it, I should probably explain to you who "we" are, why we're special, what we're doing in a remote corner of the galaxy in a standoff against a potentially omniscient alien entity that seems hell-bent on destroying everything, everywhere. I might give you a summary of all the seemingly insane events that have led up to this very moment.

You'll listen and nod and then you'll laugh and say, "Oh Marco, no one lives a life that exciting! Surely you've embellished somewhere…" At which point I'll give you the finger and carry on saving your oblivious civilian ass, like I have a thousand times before.

Only now, unlike back then, you should know who we are. We've been all over the news, talk shows, documentaries, movies, books, the Internet… We're not fighting a secret war anymore. You should be as familiar with the name The Animorphs as you are with The Marines. We're kind of a big deal.

So yes; aliens, shape-shifting, and intergalactic warfare are all very real. A bunch of teenagers saved the world; also real. We sacrificed our childhoods, our innocence, our families, and even each other when necessary. We bled, fought, and killed almost nonstop as our peers struggled through junior high school. While most people my age were intimately familiar with what popping pimples felt like, I was intimately familiar with what it felt like to have .55 caliber bullets blow giant holes in my body, what burnt flesh smelled like, the precise sound bones made when they snapped in two. I knew what the blood of several sentient species tasted like years before I lost my virginity. I—we--had to grow up fast or not grow up at all.

So after finally emerging victorious (though not altogether whole), and having praise, rewards, and fame heaped on us like plastic beads around the necks of inebriated co-eds during Mardi Gras, you may be wondering why we didn't just bask in our much deserved glory and hero-worship before quietly sneaking off to live out the rest of our lives in relative peace and satisfaction with a job well done.

Why? Because friendship.

Friendship dragged me out here. Along with the possibility of blowing stuff up in space, which must always be taken into consideration. But mostly friendship.

You see, our friend Ax is dead, allegedly consumed by The One, and that's kind of an issue for the surviving members of The Animorphs. There aren't a whole lot of us left, and those of us that are… Well, I've managed to obtain copies of the government's workups in our dossiers, and "suffers from severe psychological and emotional damage" doesn't even begin to accurately reflect our collective state of being. We're banged up and bloody from years of hidden suffering and stress. We're barely holding ourselves together and no one is going to hurt one of our own without having to pay the butcher's bill. The trick is figuring out how to make them pony up more than we did, and ideally put them out of business forever.

"I'm not asking, Marco. That was an order."

Jake doesn't even bother to turn his head to look at me. He only has eyes for The One, who insists on wearing a perversion of our dead friend's face, adding a grotesque horizontal slash for a mouth. If you've never seen an Andalite, you won't be able to appreciate how wrong a mouth looks on their heads. What a creepy bastard.

"And I'm not a soldier. I don't take orders, especially not the fucking stupid variety," I snap back and now he's looking at me.

Those prematurely old eyes of his zero-in on my own and it's like he doesn't even know who I am. There's nothing but a shadow of the guy I once knew in there, and this shade is both desperate and dangerous. He's like a starving, wounded predator backed into a corner and facing something bigger and meaner than himself. To Jake, a fly declaring war on a windshield not only seems rational, but inevitable. It's the only move he has left to make.

Screw that. There's always more than one gambit to choose from. Jake's forgotten that; forgotten how many impossible scrapes we managed to survive, how many improbable and unlikely schemes we cooked up at the last minute that somehow managed to work.

"Don't you get it?" He asks, gesturing behind him toward the display screen showing the amorphous, changeable image of The One. "This is it. This is the enemy we don't win against. It killed Ax," he says, voice rising with each word. He looks at Tobias, jabbing a finger at the breast of the red-tailed hawk. "No, it erased Ax! And it's going to do the same thing to everything else. Everyone we know and care about. So what would you suggest we do? Nothing?!"

"Run now and live to fight again some other day, Jake," I retort. "A day when we have some intel on this thing, on what it did to Ax, on… anything related to it. That sounds a hell of a lot better to me than a kamikaze run which—"

SILENCE.

The command reverberates inside of my head like a clap of thunder, ushering in a wave of nausea so intense I feel as though I may pass out. Vision swimming, I manage to catch a glimpse of Jake as he stumbles into the control panel of The Rachel, clutching his head, blood streaming from his eyes, ears, and nose. Judging by the warm dampness I feel slicking my own face, I rightly assume I'm in a similar state.

YOU ARE MINE. YOU BELONG NOT UNTO YOURSELVES.

This time, I do throw up. I feel my legs give out as immense pressure exerts itself somewhere over my head, behind my shoulders, directly on top of my heart. It's unbearable. A few seconds and all I can do is pray that I die soon. At least then I'll be rid of this indescribable pain.

YOU.

WILL.

SUBMIT.

And I do. I submit. There may have been an infinite number of paths we might have walked, choices we might have made before this moment. But now, within reach of The One, all illusion of choice is stripped away. I can see, finally and irrefutably, that every moment of my life has inevitably led to this. It was all for nothing. It was all for The One.

I AM THE END OF ALL THINGS.

Please, please. Oh God, please just let it stop.

Now, don't ask me how or why, but for some reason, I feel myself yanked back from the razor's edge of infinite agony offered by The One, feel a shock of cold pulse through my consciousness, and I swear on my life I hear someone calling my name.

Marco. Marco! Pull it together!

Somehow, I push back against the creeping, cold nothingness infiltrating my mind; push back against the pressure threatening to crush my soul down to its smallest atomic components. My instincts-and the primitive instincts of the bestiary co-opting my genetic code-roar to life, and The One roars back.

SUBMIT.

"Fuck… You," I manage.

"Go to Hell," Jake grinds out.

"We. Are going. To destroy you," gasps Tobias, curled up on the deck in his human form. I don't know how or when he did it, but he managed to morph before The One shattered his fragile avian spine against the deck.

YOU WILL NOT.

This time I feel bones break, this time I can see The Rachel's electronics sparking and denting, crumpling from the invisible force grinding us into dust. All of the air is forced out of my lungs as my ribcage is smashed against the floor and I swear my eyeballs are going to burst in their sockets.

Just a little longer. They're coming for you.

But I can't, we can't. No one can survive this. The ship is on fire, water is streaming from the cooling system as it fractures and tears apart. Every single cell of my body is compressed and I can feel myself breaking down into the most basic elements.

My vision goes dark and all I can do is wait for it to be over.

And then… and then!

Then a voice filters down from somewhere out among the stars, and shared thought-speak trickles into our brains like melting snow.

[Prince Jake and crew, hold fast. We are preparing to intercept.]

Somehow I know that the owner of this voice and the others following it are packing some serious heat, and that somehow they are aware of what The One is capable of. These unknown saviors are not afraid. Quite the opposite. They are eager. I can feel their enthusiasm, their yearning for a good fight, leap above the waves of pain threatening to drown my consciousness. These are hunters coming to rescue us, and they reckon that even The One should be fearful of them.

And though I've never met one, never even seen a picture of one, nor heard more than an anecdotal, sketchy tale from the memory of a reluctant Andalite or Cree, I know who's rocketing across the cosmos to our aid, though for the life of me I can't figure out why.

It's the Kelbrids. Hallelujah.

Lyrics: "Heroes From Our Past" Dropkick Murphys