Chapter II
"The Revelation"

Xan

My friends call me Xan for short, but my real name is Alexander Parkman, and up until recently, I thought science fiction was just that: fiction. When I learned the truth, it was a rude awakening for me.

I was just chilling on my bed and watching TV that night, thinking about football during the commercials. Spring practice for the school team was going to start again soon, and as its starting wide receiver I couldn't stop running plays in my mind. It was still weird to me; I'd never intended to try out for football, and yet here I was totally immersed in it. One moment the Coach was resorting to all but begging me to try out – he thought that my small stature, light build, and success with the school's track team might make me perfect for the position – and the next I'm one of the team's key players. Back then, I thought that was the weirdest turn of events life could throw at me.

Anyway, so I'm flipping through the channels when I get this really weird phone call. Some guy speaking all funny on the other end tells me that something called a 'sub-fisher wants to speak with me. I told this weirdo to shove it up his ass and went back to channel surfing for a few more minutes before I get to Channel 3 – you know, the community access channel – right when they're replaying the public announcement that labeled my best friend as a dangerous fugitive. This wasn't the first time I'd seen it; it'd been broadcast on all the TVs earlier today in school. Nevertheless, I watched it one more time, my mind still struggling to comprehend these allegations. According to the Trenton PD, Josh Hammond, the guy I'd grown up with, played little league with, partied and chased girls with, was a felon. Even worse, he was charged with first degree murder. The cop making the address called him armed and dangerous, and warned people who saw him to report the sighting and keep their distance, a recommendation I knew I was going to ignore. If I ever saw him, I was going to do everything I could to get some answers, because none of this was making any sense to me.

As if to compound my confusion just then, a voice called out from my window and nearly scared the living daylights out of me. "I didn't do it," Josh Hammond stated solemnly as he climbed into my room. My eyes nearly bugged out of my head when I saw my slightly disheveled fugitive best friend standing right in front of me.

"Wha- What are you talkin' about?" I asked.

"It's kinda hard to explain," he told me. "Is your dad home?"

"Uh, no, but…"

"Good." He finished pulling himself through the window and into my room. "Look, something did happen, but it's not what you're seeing there. The thing is, I still need to get out of town. And, I, uh, was hoping you could help me."

"Help you? You're wanted for murder, and you want…"

"You know that's not true," Josh cut me off. "You've known me a long time, you know that I'd never do anything like that." I thought about that for a moment. Josh had always had more rage in him than most people gave him credit for; most of the time he kept it cool, but if someone had the misfortune to push him too far, things could get very ugly, very fast. But even when he totally blew a gasket, I never saw him completely loose control. But if that happened, he'd be accused of manslaughter; the cops were charging him with first-degree murder.

"Maybe," was what I eventually replied. "But, bro, come on, this ain't like me backin' you up in front of the principal. If I do this, I'm an accessory. I could go to jail, man. I…"

"I know," Josh interrupted. "Believe me, I know what could happen to you if you help me." A haunted look came over his eyes as he said that, which only further aroused my suspicions that there was more going on here than he was willing to say. "Look, all I want is some supplies. Food and water mostly, I haven't had anything in over a day. Then I'll be gone. No one has to know you gave it to me." After a few moments of silence as I considered his request, he added, "Please," in the most desperate tone of voice I'd ever heard from him. My heart just broke right then; guilty or not, this guy was my bro, my best friend since we were in diapers. I couldn't just throw him out on his ass.

"Ok, look, you need to be quiet. My mom's sleepin', and if we wake her she'll definitely report you. Now c'mon."

Josh thanked me as I lead him out of my room and down to the kitchen, grabbing an old backpack of mine along the way. Once we were there, we stuffed a buttload of crap into it: water bottles, snack packs, canned veggies, even an old piece of steak my mom had wrapped up in fridge, just to name a few things. When it was all done, Josh thanked me one more time and I showed him to the door.

"Bro, when you get outa here, you better move fast," I told him as he unlocked my front door, "cuz I'm gonna give you fifteen minutes before I call the cops." The moment I said that he spun around, a look of surprise and horror on his face.

"What? Why?"

"Look, they might track you here, and I'm sorry but I ain't goin' downtown for you. If I call 'em myself, I have a better chance of convincin' 'em that I had nothin' to do with you."

"So… you're going to tell the police that you've seen me?" Josh looked absolutely horrified at that prospect. In my opinion, he was making a big deal out of nothing. I'd given him what help I could, now I was going to cover my own ass.

Before I could call him out on it, however, the front door was suddenly kicked open… by my father? I could hardly believe my own eyes when I saw him standing there, flanked by three other big, burly guys. Josh was even more freaked out by their being here than I was; he quickly moved back away from them, and I could see that he was tenser than I'd ever seen him before.

"Dad? What the…"

"Alex, keep quiet!" he snapped at me before turning his attention back to Josh. "You must really be stupid to think that we weren't monitoring the phone lines. The moment the phrase 'Sub-Visser' entered that call, we were all over your ass." It took me a moment to realize what he was talking about.

"Wait, the 'sub-fisher' guy? That was you?" I asked Josh. He nodded.

"Had to be sure you weren't one of them, Xan," he told me without ever taking his eyes off of my dad.

"We didn't make infesting him a priority… yet," my dad announced as his companions moved further into the house, closing in on Josh with every step. Suddenly, my dad reached into his suit jacket and whipped out something that looked like a bastardized, angular flashlight. "Try and pull that Dracon Beam on me and I will cut you down before you even have the chance to point it at me." I didn't know what he was talking about, but I had noticed that Josh's right hand had been inching closer and closer to his back pocket. "The Sub-Visser would prefer his old body back, but he's more than willing to make do with another one. After all, there are so many choices on this planet of yours."

Ok, now I really thought that I was loosing it. "What the hell are you talking about?" I demanded.

"Shut up, Alex!" my dad snapped at me again. That was the second time that my soft spoken father had raised his voice to me in the past few minutes. That was more than he'd done that in the last year. I think that it was that more than anything else that placed my suspicions squarely on my father.

Something in my expression must've let Josh know what I was thinking, because right then he said, "Your dad's an alien." My eyes did the little cartoon pop-out thing just then as I struggled to wrap my head around that statement. "Or rather, he's an alien's slave. The little bastard is in his head right now, controlling everything he does." Before I could even decry all of that as ridiculous in my own head, my father responded to Josh's accusation in the last way I expected him to.

"Well, Josh, I thought you were noble. Now there's no way to get out of…" My dad froze for a moment, and a blank expression briefly came over his face. He snapped out of it quickly, though. "Now I really have no other choice but to take my son in and get him infested too. Karl." One of the brutes who accompanied my dad moved away from Josh and towards me.

I need an Advil, I thought to myself as my head started to throb from the insanity of what was happening. It just couldn't be real. This was fantasy, it was scifi crap, this stuff didn't really exist. Then, that guy Karl laid his hands on me, and all the thousands of thoughts in my head faded away, replaced by a single, powerful instinct. I wrenched free of the big man's grip with speed and effectiveness gained from the hundreds of tackles I'd broken on the field and took a few steps back. Josh did the same, slipping away from the brutes My dad sighed in frustration.

"Alex, trust me, it's not worth fighting us. Josh here has done a better job of it than anyone I've ever seen, and he's only gotten a single day of freedom out of it. You can't fight us, you can't beat us, the only choice left is to join us. That's what your dad did, and he's got a very comfortable arrangement right now. You can have the same thing. Just don't mess with us right now."

"Xan, if you listen to them, you'll spend the rest of your life as a slave," Josh spoke up. "These things, they don't care about you, they just want your body. They…"

What happened just then, I'm still not completely sure of. It happened too fast, and I was still too shocked from everything that was going on to truly comprehend what exactly I was seeing. I remember one of the thugs reaching for Josh, then there was a flurry of motion, a flash of green light, and a strange high-pitched sound. When it was all over, the thug was dead on the ground and Josh had ducked into the bathroom, the same funny-looking object that my father was holding clutched in his hand as well.

The guy that had moved in on me before charged me again, and I yet again evaded his attempts to restrain me. Meanwhile, back in the foyer, Josh and my dad had turned the place into a scifi battleground. Those things they were holding – which I now concluded had to be some kind of weapon – were firing green bolts of energy at each other. Two bodies now lay on the floor between them. Tssseeewwww! Tssseeewwww! Tssseeewwww! The sound of it was only slightly more pleasant than the sound of nails on a chalkboard, but the sight of it was entrancing. Fortunately, my mind wasn't so frozen by the shock of all of this to allow myself to become absorbed in the firefight. After all, I had my own problem to deal with.

The thug, Karl, came at me again, and I dodged him again, but I knew that it couldn't keep going like this. My gut told me that this fight needed to end now, so when the SOB came at me again I dropped low and charged right back at him. It was just like on the football field; I tripped the guy up into the air, and he landed hard on his back. The difference between this and the game is that this guy had no pads on, and he wasn't landing on soft grass but rather a hardwood floor. The wind knocked out of him, he struggled to get back up, but I finished him off with a strong kick to the head. He was out cold.

It was only when I turned back around to face the entranceway that I realized that I hadn't heard that infernal noise in some time now. A chill ran down my spine as I looked around to see who was still standing.

"We need to get out of here," Josh told me, but I barely heard him. My whole focus was on the man lying on the ground.

"Dad," I whispered, a tear rolling down my cheek. Josh stormed over to me.

"I'm sorry about your dad, but if we don't leave now you're going to wish you were lying there with him. Now come on!" He grabbed my arm and pulled me out the door. Once we were outside, however, I regained enough of my senses to follow him on my own. I barely saw where we were going, though; the image of my dad, lying dead on my floor, was burned in front of my eyes, and it wasn't going anywhere anytime soon.

End of Chapter II

A/N: Ok, well, things heated up a little bit in this one. That's just a taste of what's to come. Once my team has been assembled, you'll witness them embarking on a much darker, more desperate war against the Yeerks than the one waged by the Animorphs. Until then, expect another Josh chapter next, a short one to fill in a crucial piece of the storyline before I move on to another character.