War Games

by SoloMoon

The yeerk-human war may be over, but Tom and Jake's struggle to deal with a late-night intruder into the Berenson household proves that adjusting to normal life after its end is not easy. Sequel to Day the Earth Stood Still. Eleutherophobia pt. 3

A/N: Written to the sounds of "Enter Sandman" by Metallica.

The yeerk opened my eyes and sat me up in bed.

I didn't realize what was happening, why this was wrong, why it should never happen again and couldn't possibly be happening now, until it had already forced me to swing my legs over the side and stand up.

No! I screamed at it. No, stop-

{Sorry.} It sounded more gleeful than apologetic. {Orders are orders.}

How had this happened? They must have grabbed me while I was unaware, asleep-It couldn't have-it wasn't- The war was over!

Apparently this particular yeerk hadn't gotten that memo, because it was using my body to yank open the top drawer of my dresser and pull out the dracon beam I had hidden underneath a pile of socks.

I fought at the motion with everything I had, even knowing that the struggle was pathetic and useless. Of course it did no good. The yeerk pocketed the dracon beam and walked out my body into the hallway.

Please, just leave, I begged it. Please. I'll go quietly if you just leave without-

{Without doing this?} it asked, and then it spun around and shot Homer in the head.

He never had time to make a noise, just crumpled to the floor in a heap of fur. I screamed at the top of my mental voice, throwing myself against the walls of my mind so hard that I felt the hand that held the dracon beam twitch open. The weapon fell to the floor, where it rolled and landed at the edge of the pool of blood where Homer-

I would have thrown up if my gag reflex had been my own. Since nothing belonged to me, what my body did instead was bend over and pick up the dracon beam, rolling its eyes.

{Just for that, human, I'm killing the others.}

Jesus, no, I'm sorry, I won't do it again, I promise, please, just leave them alone, please, I'll do anything-

{What exactly do you have the power to do, anyway?} It used my hand to ease open the door to Mom and Dad's room.

Jake had to have seen the flash, had to have heard the sound of the dracon beam going off and know what it meant. He had to know. He had to stop me. I knew he could do it. He could kill me to keep them safe. If he could just get here in time...

{Yeah, that's not going to happen,} the yeerk said.

Mom was lying with her face half-squashed into the pillow, mouth slightly open. Dad was bundled up in most of the covers from the bed, lying stiffly on his back as if he was already dead. It took two seconds, less time than I had to draw a breath to try and make a sound, before the yeerk tightened my hand around the trigger and fired a shot into each of their chests, leaving bloody ragged holes behind.

It wasn't even within my power to look away as they bled out, bodies still twitching, organs exposed to the air.

No, no, no, please, God, no, no... I don't know if I was even tracking anymore, I was fighting so hard to leave my body, to be anywhere else, to be gone from here and the bodies in the bed and the hallway. After everything we'd been through, fought for, after everything Rachel had died for, they were gone, and now...

The yeerk slid the dracon beam back into my pocket, ducking out of the room-at last, at last my eyes looked away from the bodies-and stepping around the puddle of blood still on the floor. It walked down the hall to Jake's room, and, sending a burst of smugness my way, knocked on his door.

Jake, still too trusting after everything that had happened, opened it immediately. He was running one hand through his sleep-mussed hair, looking me over with the innocence of being too exhausted to be on his guard. He looked like a kid, sixteen years old and barely used to shaving. Too young to fight a war.

"Tom?" he asked sleepily. "What is it?"

My mouth moved into a faint smile. The only answer he got was when I pulled the trigger again.

This time, whether from a mistake or a deliberate attempt to be cruel, the yeerk hit him in the stomach instead of the chest. He slammed onto the floor, choking on the blood that filled his throat, writhing while I screamed.

Morph! I was yelling at him, even knowing I could never make myself heard. Morph now! Come on, just morph anything! NOW, Jake! MORPH-

And then I woke up.

I lay there, eyes closed, remembering how to breathe, remembering that I could breathe on my own. Trying to remember that I remembered. After fifty-six inhales and fifty-seven exhales I could hear beyond the pulse pounding in my ears and had all but convinced myself it was only a dream. I had to make a few tries to get the motion right, but eventually I succeeded at opening my eyes. After just three more breaths, I could stare at the dull white ceiling instead of blank darkness.

Yay.

Getting out of bed was actually somewhat easier than that first small victory had been. The trick was just to will myself to be standing up. Usually my body had enough muscle memory that it could get me through the individual motions without me having to think about each one-

Of course this time, I fell over halfway through standing up and had to catch myself on the covers to avoid ending up on the floor. I stopped moving for a few seconds, pissed off at myself. Why the hell could I perform complex motions like typing or dribbling a basketball in the middle of the day with my mind away from aliens, but utterly fail at simple ones like standing up while coming off a nightmare? It shouldn't have been possible for my stupid brain to sabotage me this much, and yet it did. Repeatedly.

Fine. Left knee, pressed against the carpet. Left hand, pulling my body slowly up. Just had to get my legs under me, a rush of dizziness, and... I was standing up. Under my own volition. Quick, tell the news stations.

Standing made me feel calmer, though, more in control. I inhaled as much as I could, held the breath, and then let it out. Maybe the worst thing about being infested-no, not the worst thing, but one of the things your mind never seems to adjust to-is the inability to control your own breathing. You ever have the feeling of waking up and feeling like you're being held down, like you can't move no matter what you do and even though your brain keeps frantically trying to get your limbs to do something, your lungs to draw in another breath, you can't do it, until you're certain that you're going to suffocate? Yeah, imagine that happening for years.

All the right steps came to me eventually, though. I breathed all on my own, whenever I felt like it, until my mind finally started to believe I could.

And then I walked over to my dresser, opened the top drawer, and pulled out the dracon beam I had hidden underneath a pile of socks.

I just-stood there, for a while, hugging the weapon to my chest like it was a teddy bear. When I was sure that my fingers wouldn't slip out of my control I turned it over in my hands, sliding the safety off and then back on, checking the power cell, clicking the gauge on the side to the first and most powerful setting, making sure that the particle separator still had enough fuel so that I could use it to fire a single shot through my own head and kill myself instantly.

Fucked-up though it was, it always made me feel better to know that I had a way out. That if the yeerks ever came back to earth, they'd never get the chance to infest me.

I wasn't going to kill myself, not really. It was free or dead (or so the tattoos I'd seen on a dozen ex-controllers said), not all of the above. Anything else would be a waste. And if the yeerks never came back-no, since the yeerks were never coming back-I could keep on doing whatever the hell I felt like doing until I got cancer or a bus ran me over. Going where I wanted to go. Saying what I wanted to say.

Breathing. Whenever I felt like doing so.

As if I'd summoned it by thinking too loud, there was a noise from downstairs.

I froze. Stopped breathing. My hand tightened painfully on the dracon beam as I listened. I wasn't sure that it hadn't been my imagination. But then it came again. A quiet but drawn-out squeal that was too high-pitched to be anything human. This time it was accompanied by a rustling noise, and a thump.

There was something downstairs. Something not human.

My heart rate skyrocketed. I was holding the dracon beam so tightly that the knobs were pressing into the fingers of both hands. I could still breathe, but I was breathing a lot faster now without having decided to do so.

It could be anything. Controllers. Taxxons. More of the crazy terrorists who wanted Jake dead. It didn't have to be yeerks. Maybe it wasn't. There was a tiny part of my brain that just wanted to hide under the bed and pray that they didn't get in. There was a much bigger part that was pissed off. After everything that had happened, like hell was I going to go down quietly.

Terror was tunneling the edges of my vision and causing my pulse to beat so strongly it actually hurt. I nonetheless opened the door to my room as quietly as possible and started to walk toward the stairs.

There was a sound behind me, and I whipped around, thumbing off the safety on the dracon beam as I turned. I relaxed, lowering the weapon, when the door to Jake's room swung open and a Bengal tiger slipped out into the hallway.

{You heard it too, then?} he asked, tilting his head at me.

I nodded.

He bared four-inch fangs in a grimace. {Crap. I was hoping I imagined it.}

You and me both, squirt.

{Stay here, I'll check it out,} Jake said.

I crossed my arms. Like hell, I mouthed.

He tried to brush past me, and I stepped in front of him. {It's probably nothing, right? So stay here-}

"Make me," I hissed.

That drew him up short, so abruptly that for half a second I almost felt guilty through the ratcheting anxiety. We both knew perfectly well that he would be more than capable of physically stopping me from following him in this morph-if he broke my legs. Or chewed my arm off.

{Fine,} he said tightly.

Before we went any further I pushed past him, walking to the door of our parents' room. Just like in the dream I turned the knob silently and guided it inward a few inches. They were even sleeping just like I'd imagined them, Mom holding onto her pillow while Dad lay on his back wrapped in blankets like a mummified pharaoh.

When I shut the door, Jake was watching me. I gave him a thumbs up.

Homer? I mouthed.

{Still asleep on my bed,} he said, shrugging. The motion looked very odd on a cat. {Some guard dog.}

There were some ways that our parents had become ridiculously strict after the war-almost never letting us go anywhere they didn't know about, setting curfews that they actually kept-and some ways that they'd become more lenient. Mom still insisted that she didn't want the dog on the furniture, but she'd stopped bothering to enforce that rule. Like me, she probably appreciated the frequency with which Homer would curl up half on top of Jake at night-and the infrequency with which Jake woke the whole house with screaming nightmares on the nights when he had the golden retriever there as a heating blanket and guardian.

I nodded. Despite the sarcasm, I could hear how tense Jake was.

{Better turn that thing down,} Jake suggested, looking at the dracon beam. {Best case scenario it's the world's stupidest burglars down there, and worst case scenario...}

The worst case scenario was one in which nothing either of us did would matter, but I knew what he meant: if there were controllers attacking the house, there would be no point in killing innocent hosts as well as the yeerks. Not when we had other options.

I hated to do it-it felt too much like leaving myself disarmed and vulnerable-but I thumbed the setting on the side of the dracon beam until the tiny readout informed me that it was at level 10, low enough to stun but not kill.

Then, before I could tell Jake that I should go first just in case, he jumped up onto the railing of the stairs. He balanced there for an impossible second, seven hundred pounds of muscle and orange fur standing delicately on a strip of wood three inches wide, and then jumped the fifteen feet into the lobby below and landed with a sound no louder than a pillow hitting the floor. I'm almost certain I made more noise following him down the normal way.

He stalked into the kitchen with all the liquid grace of a housecat, every muscle in his enormous body stiff with tension as he wound around the counter and peered into the shadows of the breakfast nook. I followed him, still scanning the room for any sign of the threat, trying to breathe more quietly than my pounding heart wanted to demand that I did. It was almost impossible for me to see anything in lighting this low, but I knew better than to risk turning on any lights. The shadows shifted, and I tensed, taking aim, but the sweep of motion continued past as a car drove around the corner and its headlights briefly illuminated the room as it went by on the road outside.

The sound came again! We both flinched. It was a faint but painfully high-pitched squeak, surrounded on either side by rustling noises. Jake glanced back at me. I jerked my head toward the living room. It had come from in there. He nodded.

The living room had two doors, one to the kitchen and one to the foyer. I waved my hand to get Jake's attention and, when he looked over, pointed to myself and then around the side of the room.

{Okay. Be careful,} he said.

I made sure he could see I rolled my eyes at him before I turned and walked back through the shadows of the kitchen, listening hard for any other sounds. If there was something in the living room, it was either pretty small-or incredibly stealthy. Jake and I had already made more noise between the two of us just getting down here.

Although I watched carefully where I was going, I almost tripped over a kitchen chair on my way back into the living room. The house felt as it always had, familiar and not, like I'd sleepwalked through these rooms dozens of times but never stopped to examine anything. I'd heard other people say they felt violated, as though a safe space had been invaded and changed, when someone broke in. I wasn't sure whether I'd be feeling the same way right now if there hadn't been a yeerk living in this house for so long without anyone apparently noticing.

I heard the door from the living room to the kitchen slide open-Jake had decided not to wait for me.

"Fuck," I hissed, giving up on caution and sprinting around to the living room door. I shoved it open and spotted the attacker right away-a small, dark shape that was diving straight toward Jake's head.

Jake dropped to the floor before I even had time to think about calling out a warning. When it flew directly overhead he suddenly popped back up, swiping at it. It dodged out of the way, and his paw caught in the fabric of the sofa, claws tearing four huge slices through the fabric before he yanked free.

It spun in midair and swooped at me instead. I jerked my hand up and squeezed the trigger on reflex.

The energy weapon went off with its usual screeching hiss, the brilliant green light hitting the shape in midair. I scored a direct hit more through muscle memory than actual skill, but the end result was the same. It dropped to the floor and I spun around to see if there were any more opponents.

Jake was also scanning the room; we both relaxed a few degrees when we realized that the little flying thing had been the only attacker.

{What is it?} Jake asked.

I kept the dracon beam aimed at the small shape on the floor as I walked forward. I crouched down, only several minutes too late registering the brown fur and delicate wings.

"It's... a bat," I said, and promptly sat down on the floor and started laughing.

Jake snorted. It came out sounding faintly terrifying. {Seriously?} He jumped lightly over the couch and landed on the other side of our fallen foe.

"Yep." I was giggling like an idiot now, high from the sudden release of tension. I pushed to my feet, trying to relax the death grip I still had on the dracon beam and start breathing normally again.

Jake leaned forward to sniff at the little bat, which now looked kind of pitiful lying on the floor.

"You sure that's not Marco or someone?" I asked.

{Pretty sure anyone in morph would have said something while I was trying to eviscerate them,} Jake pointed out.

"Careful," I said, when he started to nudge it curiously with a huge paw.

He glanced up at me, perking his ears out. {You think it's endangered?}

"Or rabid," I said darkly. "Either way, we should-"

The lights snapped on, flooding the room with blinding fluorescence.

Mom was standing in the doorway, looking as angry as I had ever seen her, glaring at the dracon beam in my hand.

"Thomas Isaiah Berenson! Is that what I think it is?"

"A flashlight?" I suggested, voice small. She hadn't used my full name before since she'd stopped despairing of me never bothering to do my homework or go to class on days when there wasn't basketball practice and instead began telling the neighbors what a nice young man I'd turned out to be once I'd joined the Sharing. Right now it made me feel like a six-year-old who had just been caught sneaking ice cream before dinner.

"That's not funny," she snapped.

{Mom-}

She turned, saw Jake, and let out a noise somewhere between a gasp and a shriek. "What the hell is going on here?"

"There was a bat-"

She rounded on me again, pale-faced with anger. "Excuse me?"

"A bat." I gestured to where it was still lying on the floor. "Probably got in through the flue."

"So you decided to shoot it? With a dracon beam?" Her voice was actually shaking.

{We thought it might be...} Jake trailed off, looking like a chagrined kitten, when Mom turned the full force of her glare on him.

"It's not dead," I said helpfully. "It'll be fine in a few hours."

"Well, that's a relief," Mom said, voice rising in pitch. "It's good to know that you showed some restraint, otherwise I'd think that you completely overreacted!"

Since there was no really good answer to that, I crouched down next to the bat. "I'll just take it outside-"

"Stay where you are!" Mom was back to yelling.

I looked up at her, white faced and pressing her shaking hands together around a handful of her nightgown, and it hit me like a really late brick to the head. She wasn't angry; she was afraid. Of course she knew exactly what a dracon beam sounded like, and she'd woken up in the middle of the night to that sound, had probably already checked and found both of her kids missing from their beds, and then had come down here and seen me holding a deadly, alien weapon in the same room where Jake was in battle morph...

God only knew whether she'd thought that I had been infested, again, or that Jake had, again, or that the house was under attack from some other source. Maybe all three thoughts had gone through her mind.

"I'll take the bat outside," she said stiffly. "Jake, demorph and go to your room. Tom, give me that." She held out her hand.

"But I need it." My voice came out sounding more desperate than I meant it to. I realized I was clutching the dracon beam to my chest again and lowered my hand.

"Why?" Mom crossed her arms. "In case a spider shows up?"

Jake made a noise like he'd started to laugh, realized he shouldn't, and cut himself off. Either that or he was about to hack up the world's biggest hairball. It was hard to tell.

"Where did you even get that thing?" Mom asked me.

I didn't bother to answer; she knew perfectly well where I'd gotten it from.

Mom must have realized that too, because she grimaced and held out her hand again. "It doesn't matter. That is a lethal weapon, alien technology, and it is illegal to own. Give it to me."

"I..."

"Now, Tom."

I shut my mouth, realizing I had no reasons for needing to keep it that I could speak out loud. My fingers didn't want to cooperate as I clumsily slid the safety back on and thrust it awkwardly at her.

Mom took it like it was a half-rotted dead rat, grimacing as she only touched it with the tips of three fingers.

{Mom,} Jake said. {I'm sorry. We were just-}

"Just... Go to your rooms," she said. Now she sounded more exhausted than anything.

The truth hung in the air, dangerously close to the surface, seconds away from open exposure. If any one of us had spoken it out loud I think all of us would have broken right there, shattered until nothing could tape us back together no matter what we did. All three of us were awake at three in the morning, all of us struggling desperately to shore up the facades of health and glue the pasteboard smiles back into place.

We had to keep faking it until we made it through. We had to. And if Jake and I couldn't pretend to be fine for Mom, if Mom couldn't keep pretending to be fine for us...

I didn't know. The thought made me lightheaded with fear.

"Go," Mom said. "Now."

The moment broke, or rather she released us from it. Jake slunk out of the room, bounding up the stairs in two quick jumps that left more claw marks on the carpet, and disappeared down the hallway.

I gave Mom one more glance-she was still breathing hard, and she had dropped the dracon beam in favor of slowly picking up the unconscious bat. There didn't seem to be anything else I could say, so I turned away and followed Jake.

I shut the door to my own room, flopped onto my bed, and started morphing immediately.

If dolphins are wise, at least according to Cassie, then snakes are zen. They're sort of like those sun-worshipping tourists you see spending all day on the beach: lazy with contentment as long as they're soaking up warmth, happy with just finding a comfortable way to lie down and staying there for hours, not moving except to roll over occasionally and adjust their towels.

Whoever it was that gave snakes their bad reputation had clearly only ever encountered rattlers, because although king cobras can kill humans with a single bite, they almost never bother to do so. Most of the time they flee humans instead of confronting them; the venom is there for hunting and as a deterrent, not because they ever go looking for a fight.

The larger snakes especially have neither a predator's driving hunger nor a prey animal's constant fear; all they ever want is to work on their tans somewhere warm and soft, able to go for weeks on end without even bothering to eat. Like beach bums they conserve energy by just existing and letting the world worry about itself, not driven by any instinct more urgent than lazy annoyance if someone blocks their sunlight, only ever breaking from their slow-moving meditative states to- Okay, so maybe most tourists don't move faster than the human eye can follow and unhinge their own jaws to swallow an entire live mongoose whole and then fall back asleep in the middle of the days-long process of digesting their still-struggling prey, but have you seen how many french fries some of them can put away in a single sitting?

It let me breathe easier, allowing the snake's deep-seated peacefulness to settle over me and wash away the human instincts that were still twitching with leftover adrenaline. I arranged my pile of coils into a comfortable position in the middle of the bed, flicking my tongue to be sure the air tasted as it should.

{Midget?} I called.

{What is it?}

As I'd suspected, Jake had stayed in morph for the moment. I wondered what Homer made of his favorite human walking around as a cat, much less one that was too large to be intimidated by barking. {I think we should talk to Mom,} I told him.

{Now?} he asked.

{No. Tomorrow, I guess.}

{Yeah, she seemed pretty angry.}

I breathed out a sigh. He hadn't noticed, then. Or if he had he wasn't saying anything. {You're just lucky she didn't see what you did to the couch.}

{Oh, crap. I forgot about that.}

I laughed, letting the sound echo down the connection. {Good luck explaining that one.}

{Thanks for the show of support,} he grumbled.

{Hey, what else am I here for?}

He was silent for such a long time that I wondered if he'd demorphed-and then started worrying that he'd fallen asleep without demorphing.

{Jake?} I said at last.

{Yeah? Sorry, I was just thinking.}

{Don't hurt yourself,} I shot back automatically.

{Ha-ha.}

When he didn't explain on his own I gave up and asked. {Thinking about what?}

{I just...} He hesitated. {Thanks. For having my back.} This time he wasn't sarcastic. {For a while there... I mean, it's good to know that you... Okay, never mind. But-thanks.}

I knew what he was struggling to articulate, circling around but not looking directly at. For years my infestation, and Jake's knowledge of it, had held the entire house in a siege state. Not only had Jake had to stop confiding in me, he'd had to start watching every single word he said around me. I remembered the thousand flimsy lies: he had to do homework, he was just at Marco's house, the blood on his leg was from a broken bicycle chain. He'd spent years knowing that the smallest moment of carelessness on his part could end with my arms dragging him to the end of the yeerk pool pier, my hands wrapped around his throat as I forced his head into the thick sludge and held on through all his struggles until at last he stopped struggling the moment he lost control of his body.

I knew consciously, but I couldn't imagine what it must have been like for him.

It was good to be back, either way.

{Good thing we responded in time,} I said at last. {Pretty sure that bat was starting to get ideas. It had a shifty look about it.}

{Oh my god, stop talking. And stop reading old science fiction.}

I laughed. Equilibrium restored. {Jake?}

{Uh-huh?}

{We didn't close the flue, did we?} If I'd had hands I would have buried my face in them.

{Shit.}

{Yeah.}

{Oh, well,} Jake concluded. {Nothing we can do about it now unless you want to risk The Wrath of Mom.}

Definitely not something I was looking to do. {We'll worry about it tomorrow. I mean, I don't think it's likely any more bats are going to come in before now and then.}

{Yep, I'm pretty sure we put the fear of god in the whole greater bat community.}

{You are such a dork,} I told him.

He ignored me. {Really, Mom should be thanking us for our heroic efforts against the bat menace.}

{You've already got your face on Mount Rushmore, what more do you want?} I teased.

{What? They actually went through with that?}

{Kidding.}

{I hate you.}

{I never liked you in the first place.}

{That's just because you're jealous of how awesome I am.}

{Unless 'awesome' is a synonym for 'miniscule' these days...}

{I'm not even going to dignify that with a response. Good night, asshole.}

{Good night, midget.}

Once I was sure he didn't have anything else to say I demorphed, slowly swinging myself over to sit on the side of the bed as my limbs reappeared and my spine shrank back down to human proportions. When I was completely human again I stood up, hooking both hands under the mattress and levering it up off the bed frame.

I found the slit in the fabric almost immediately, my fingers remembering where to feel along the seam even though I hadn't been the one to put it there. The weight of the handheld dracon beam was reassuring, fitting easily into my palm as it slid free from its hiding place.

I didn't bother trying to sleep. I just slid the mattress back into place and sat on it, clicking the dracon beam's safety on and then back off, setting the power level to one, checking the fuel gage and the particle separator indicator. And then going through the routine again. And again.

Eventually the motion faded into me slowly opening and closing my fingers around the weapon one by one, just to prove to myself that I could.