Chapter 28
There was an infinitesimal moment that seemed to last forever. The godawful silence when you realize you're alone. I remember that night at Cassie's, watching the falling star that turned out to be his ship. There had been such a rush of awe and wonder then. Time had seemed to stop then, too. So much of our lives the last few days had revolved entirely around him. And just as suddenly as he had come into our lives, he was taken from it.
I could hear Tobias scream in thought-speak, no words, just a black wave of raw emotion.
*He's… he's gone…* Rachel stammered.
I didn't know what to do, what to say. Of all things, Visser Three helped us. From behind us came the monstrous bellow and the lumbering thunder of some kind of footfall. I didn't even know if that thing had feet, but it definitely sounded like it was moving.
And it was heading for us.
But we were already in the corridor to the Taxxon feeding area. And the monstrous form of Visser Three couldn't maneuver around the corner from the concourse. The giant mass of writhing tentacles I saw in the dim glow will probably haunt me for the rest of my days. Nothing but barbed tendrils and teeth, and I knew if not for his size and our head start, he'd have killed us already.
And then Elfangor gave us one final surprise. See, as it turns out, Elfangor hadn't planted all the bombs in the tank room.
The flash was blinding, overloading the squirrel's overly sensitive retinas. But the light was brief. The noise was tremendous. Almost equally loud was the sound Visser Three made. Huge chunks of concrete exploded from the wall, severed tentacles splattered everywhere. We were only a dozen yards at most, and wet globs of monster shot past us. The dust cloud filled the hallway, and I saw the cracks creeping out into the rock wall.
It didn't kill him outright. I guess that was just asking too much of the universe. But if the ethereal howls of pain and rage were any indication, he was seriously injured.
*Move!* I yelled.
The Taxxon feeding area was only a little further ahead, and when we came in, the orange jumpsuit crew stopped in their tracks.
Six human-Controllers armed with hoses and floor squeegees were nothing to the gorilla and grizzly. A one-armed gorilla is still more dangerous than you could imagine. Marco grabbed the nearest human, pulled him close, and roared. It was enough to send Tobias gliding off his shoulder and up to the rigging. The gorilla teeth, each the larger than a man's thumb, shined in the bright lights of the feeding area. Marco threw the Controller like a discus, pivoting on his feet and making an almost hundred-eighty degree turn. The Controller slid across the length of the room and into the wall. The message was clear. He knew Marco could have killed him effortlessly. Hell, Marco could have thrown a goddamned engine block if he wanted to.
*Get out.* It was all I could do not to scream. My mind was boiling. I felt like I was on fire. Nothing made sense, and I knew I was panicking. I made no effort whatsoever to calm myself. There was nothing in the world that would salve the loss of Elfangor, Visser Three was probably right behind us, and Rachel and Marco needed to demorph and fast-track to their own squirrel morphs to get out. Panicking was really the only sane choice, and I needed the adrenaline rush if I was to have any chance.
*Rachel,* I said, groping for ideas in the noise that was my brain, *see if you can break that panel by the door.*
There isn't much that a grizzly can't break. She shoved her claws through the panel like a toddler tearing into graham crackers. Sparks shot out from the hole where the panel used to be.
*I don't know if that's going to work or not, so let's go. Morph as fast as you can.*
Cassie had apparently noticed the meat chute while I was focused on Marco and Rachel demorphing below.
*This is our way out, huh?* She said it like we were about to swim through broken glass.
*It's either this or the tentacle monster,* Tobias said.
Marco and Rachel finished their squirrel morphs right when the first impact hit the door. Cracks appeared in the concrete around the door frame. Either Visser Three had demorphed and remorphed, or the son of a bitch hadn't been as injured in the bomb blast as I'd hoped. Marco and Rachel caught up to the rest of us in a heartbeat.
Another impact and dust puffed out around the door frame. A loud thud and suddenly a mass of tentacles punched through the ruined mess of the control panel.
*Andalites!* the Visser thundered at us.
*Quick,* I said, *Go, up and out.*
I was the last to go. I watched the four squirrels ahead of me bolt through the metal ductwork in the ceiling. The chute was smeared with blood and slime, and the smell of rotten meat was beyond my vocabulary. But the jet-black mass of tentacles was methodically ripping into the concrete. The third squirrel, I think it was Rachel, had just gone through the shaft when the Visser ripped the massive sliding door from the concrete wall. Tentacles by the hundred slithered into the gap like a plague of snakes. It wasn't enough for the rest of him to get in, but that was clearly irrelevant.
The tentacles groped in the space below us, and Cassie bolted up the shaft right ahead of me. No sooner had I entered the duct than tentacles swarmed over the lighting array below me. I heard the sound of crushing metal and exploding glass as they squeezed the lighting fixtures, ripping the steel cables that suspended them.
Visser Three bellowed below in frustrated rage.
Our only possible course was to climb, and what is better at running up a vertical surface than a squirrel?
We had only been in the chute for a minute, maybe two, when the section of duct below us was ripped down. But that was it. I kept expecting a tentacle to follow us up the shaft, but thankfully that didn't happen. For the moment, we were safe. But who knew for how long?
We climbed like the devil was behind us.
It was impossible to judge distances with any certainty in the total black of the meat duct. The stench was worse than you can imagine. Every so often - and again, I can't really guess how far apart they were spaced - was a series of wheels set into the duct. The duct was apparently mechanized, and when the system was on, the wheels would presumably keep meat from getting jammed in the chute. I prayed it didn't come on with us in it.
I kept time by counting how many wheeled sections we passed. Fifteen, sixteen. After twenty, I couldn't scurry any more. I felt like that scene in the original Ghostbusters movie when they have to take the stairs all the way up. But even slowing down, we kept going.
We climbed in silence.
No one wanted to talk, not yet.
I occasionally looked down, though I couldn't tell you why. I wasn't worried about tentacles anymore, and I really couldn't see anything at all. Maybe, on some level, I was looking back for Elfangor.
I wasn't delusional. I knew he was gone. I had felt it when it happened. And I wasn't looking back because I thought he'd be there behind us, somehow miraculously catching up to us unscathed. I was looking back, I think, because it was the only way I had to say goodbye.
The darkness below was all I had left of him. We were leaving, we were alive, because of him. He'd made the sacrifice play to make sure the rest of us reached the room below. And this place… he deserved better. He deserved better than us. Better than five kids that didn't know what they were doing. He deserved better than me. I had fucked up. If I had thought about this…
Tobias had stolen a car… because of me. I hadn't planned for the trip here. And Elfangor was dead because I made the call to backtrack. Because I hadn't thought of our exit like I should have.
I stared into the abyss below me because I couldn't bear to look up. Up above was our freedom, our survival. The way out was right here, and we were going to make it.
And he wasn't. Didn't.
He wasn't my friend, Elfangor. Not really. I had known him less than a week. Six days, I'd known him. Just six days, and he'd torn our whole world down to ribbons and we had made this our new reality. I didn't know him on a personal level. I didn't know his likes, dislikes. We never watched a football game, never talked about comics or hung out in any person-to-person kind of way. He wasn't my buddy or anything.
But somehow he was so much more than that.
I turned back up to my friends, up to the endless climb above, and I said my silent goodbye to the one of us that wasn't coming.
After awhile, I started to get nervous about how long we had been in the chute. Without Elfangor, there was no way of telling for sure how long we had been in morph, and I had lost count of the wheeled sections somewhere in the forties.
The only vague clue we had about how long this shaft might be was the duration of the elevator ride down. I knew we were probably hundreds of feet below ground level, trapped in a metal tube, and I wasn't sure how fast we were climbing.
We were about a foot long, including the tail, and that put us at hundreds of body lengths to go. And my squirrel body was tired all the way through. We just weren't built for stamina.
*We can't do this,* I said. It was the first any of us had spoken since we evaded Visser Three.
*Jake?* Cassie asked.
*What's up?* Marco added.
*Anyone have a guess how long we've been in morph?* I needed something. Problems can be useful for stress. Finding a solution is a good distraction to shit you don't want to think about.
*I don't know,* Rachel said. *Me and Marco maybe twenty minutes. You guys… what, like half an hour? Forty minutes, maybe?*
Twenty minutes.
From the time I switched from tiger to squirrel till we had made it to this fucking meat chute, had only been twenty minutes, give or take. It felt like days.
But that gave us a little more than an hour before we had to demorph and there weren't any other branching points in this shaft. I began to feel very claustrophobic in the confined dark.
*We got an hour twenty at most before three of us are stuck as squirrels. We need to haul ass.*
*There's gotta be some way out of here,* Rachel said, finally. *Any ideas?*
*If there're wheels, there has to be some kind of drive chain or belt system, right?* Marco asked.
*I thought of that,* I said. *But any housings for cables or belts wouldn't be big enough for a demorph.*
*Yeah,* Marco said, *if it only needed to be big enough for cables, sure. But if any section breaks, someone has to be able to access it for repairs, right? I mean, belts and chains wear out. And they have to get bone fragments jammed in this shit every now and again, right?*
That made sense. And even for as horrific as the shaft smelled, they did have to clean it periodically or else the buildup of meat slime, bacteria, and fungus would be astronomical. Marco was right. They had to be able to get in here to some extent.
At the next section of wheels, we spent a few minutes feeling around for seams, hatches, screws, anything. In total darkness, it was a challenge. But we had sensitive paws, and we managed to find some kind of access panel. Getting it open was nothing short of a fucking miracle. I have no idea what we did to move it, but the important thing is that we did.
Five squirrels tumbled into a larger space. There were drive belts, I could smell engine grease, and I'm pretty sure I fell into a series of gears along the way down. It was just as dark, but there was at least some room. The smell was a little better, but not by much.
*Not sure this will work for morphing,* Cassie said. *But I count it as a positive move.*
A few minutes of blind groping later, we came out into an engineering platform. Finally, we had a break from the god awful smell of rotten meat, but the real break was that we finally had some light. It wasn't a bright light, but our night vision didn't need much.
The room was tight, and in a lot of ways, it reminded me of a submarine. Everything was metal grating, iron railings, dials, gears, et cetera. It was tight, and I actually felt a little bad for whatever schmuck Controller was responsible for this kind of bullshit maintenance. For as high-tech as the Yeerks seemed to be, there was a staggering amount of low-skilled labor involved. I actually felt a lot better that my worst obligation in life had hitherto been cleaning the bathrooms at the movie theater.
Even going one at a time, it was cramped, but the important thing is that we all got a morph clock reset. It was easiest for Cassie. Cassie's not short, really, but she was the shortest of our group. She was the one to check what we thought was the entrance to the maintenance crawlspace, or in our case, the exit from it, but no such luck. It was probably for the best, anyway. Who knows what would've been out there, right? Last thing any of us wanted was to get drawn into another conflict. At the very least, we found out that the maintenance shaft had a ladder, and that was good enough for me. I was impatient to be done with squirrel mode, but it was more efficient to climb, even as small as we were.
We finally reached the top of the shaft some time later and came out in a meatpacking plant, just like I had suspected. It was thankfully deserted. I'd spent the last part of our ascent wondering if Visser Three had figured out where we had gone. Maybe the seventeen thousand Yeerks we cooked, the more than half dozen tanks we'd fried, and the untold number of Taxxons, Hork-Bajir, and humans we'd killed or injured warranted more of his focus.
Once we were out in the night air of the parking lot, I felt a rush of relief. We found a spot to demorph a little further out, in a stand of trees behind a Jiffy Lube. Minutes later, we were all in our owl morphs, flying south.
*What now?* Cassie asked.
I had been dreading that question. We had one loose end to take care of before we went home. But the car Tobias had stolen was gone by the time we made it to the hangar buildings. I wasn't sure what to make of that. *Controllers?*
*Maybe,* Tobias said. *Or the cops found it. It was a stolen vehicle after all.*
There wasn't much else to do without the car except continue on home. We passed a bank, the kind with the big digital clock and temperature display. It was a little before two in the morning. If the wind was with us, we would be back in Santa Cruz by three.
Level flight was easy and all of us new the way home from here. We were quiet again; for better or worse, we were each alone with our own thoughts. My mind raced with everything that had happened. Not just losing Elfangor, but all of it. I thought of Snow White, the unnamed dark-haired Controller Elfangor had shot, the Controllers I had mauled as a tiger, some of which were later eaten alive by Taxxons. I thought about the fact that I was complicit in the death of seventeen thousand slugs, that we had done damage to the enemy.
But I already knew that meant nothing. The tank facility we had hit was in all likelihood only one of several throughout the complex. It was designed exclusively for humans, so right off the bat I knew there were other facilities for Hork-Bajir and Taxxons.
I wondered what would happen to the people on those gurneys, the unconscious hosts that slept through the whole melee. Probably they'd all just be infested again by new Yeerks. We probably accomplished nothing. That was a sobering thought as we soared silently through the night.
Elfangor died doing what he could, and I'm not sure how much impact we had on anything.
*I'm going to Elfangor's,* Tobias said suddenly, shattering the silence.
*Tonight?* Rachel asked. *You sure?*
*I… I have to,* he said. *He… the other day, he showed me how the comm array works. I…*
*We have to call Aximili.* Cassie said. Just like that, she had turned it into a group thing. All of us needed to be there. Only Tobias had actually ever seen or spoken to Aximili, a fact the rest of us had only just then learned, but all of us were part of it.
When we landed in the Moore Creek Preserve, it felt different. Without Elfangor, it was just a grove of trees in the dark. It seemed eerie how quickly I found it foreboding, how much the character of the place changed already. And when we demorphed and I lost the owl's night vision, it became darker still. Tobias went to the comm array, working the Andalite technology the way Elfangor had taught him. Marco and Rachel set themselves to starting a fire. Cassie got blankets out of the tent in the meantime.
I, however, was transfixed on the ground. Amid the blades of grass, in a small bare patch of bare earth, was a single impression. A hoofprint that hadn't been left by any deer. I was on my knees without even thinking. I remember lightly touching the cool, damp soil, feeling the impression he'd left behind. All that remained of Elfangor were the impressions he had left behind.
Whatever wall I had built in my mind to contain my emotions broke. I cried. Unabashed tears fell down my face. I felt the clenching pain in my throat as I sobbed like a child, the bitter tears stinging in my eyes. I don't know how long I sat there crying over a footprint in the dirt. But I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up to see Cassie crying too.
Somehow, I was holding Cassie. I don't remember moving, but she was in my arms and we were hold each other, crying on each other, for a long moment before we regained any composure. When I looked at the others, they too were caught in the moment. At some point, Rachel and Marco had gotten the fire going. Marco sat on the ground by a fallen log, hugging his knees and hiding his face. Rachel stared into the fire, tears steaming her face. Tobias leaned against a tree, wiping the tears from his eyes with the back of his wrist.
A few minutes later, we heard a noise from the communications array. The array apparently worked similarly to the memory storage thing Elfangor had shown us in Cassie's barn. When I saw Aximili for the first time, he was standing in the clearing with us. It wasn't like a hologram at all, I felt like I could reach out and touch him. God, he looked so much like Elfangor. Smaller in his proportions, he was clearly younger, but the green eyes had the same brightness. Curiosity etched across his features as he scanned the unfamiliar faces.
*Yes?* he said. *Where is Elfangor?*
Tobias couldn't keep it together. Rachel held him close as he began crying again. Marco had never found his feet. He sat, gently rocking himself as he stared into the fire. Cassie buried her face into my chest.
I swallowed the molten iron in my throat. "Ax… Aximili…" I choked. "We… we have some bad news about your brother…"
It went as well as it could have, I guess. Aximili had the same reaction I think anyone might have had.
*No. Not Elfangor…*
He was in denial for a few minutes, but as we explained what had happened, each of us adding little details, his expression blanked, and then darkened.
Aximili hung up on us.
He just gave us a foul look and then suddenly he vanished. I couldn't blame him. He needed to process, whatever that entailed, and if he wanted to be pissed at us, that was just going to be the nature of the beast. We'd deal with it later. I was too drained - physically, mentally, and emotionally - to take it personally. We were the only ones that could get him out of the ocean, so he couldn't ignore us forever.
Once she composed herself, Rachel started to morph back to owl. She had to get home. I know I did too. Tobias sat down next to Marco and I wondered if he wasn't going to stay in the tent tonight. I didn't think it my place to ask either of them their intentions. If it were up to me, I would probably have stayed too. But like Rachel, I had my own obligations.
I flew with Cassie to her bedroom window. We didn't chat, didn't flirt. Nothing. But after she demorphed, and I got ready to fly home, she called for me. "Jake?" I heard her whisper.
I turned, looking at her face. I remembered thinking earlier that night if I'd ever see her face again, and I was overwhelmed with too many emotions as I studied her expression. *Yes, Cassie?*
She shifted awkwardly, standing in her one-piece swimsuit. "Would you… stay? With me?"
*I…* I was already thinking how to get away with that. Spending the night with Cassie definitely trumped going home. And no, perverts, I wasn't thinking about that. But I couldn't not be home in the morning.
Cassie apparently knew what my hangup was. "Just till I fall asleep," she said. "I… I don't want to be alone."
I turned around as she changed out of the swimsuit and into a nightshirt. I sat on her nightstand, feeling the cool breeze. Cassie pulled up her blankets. *I love you, Cassie,* I said. It was the first time I'd said it to her.
"I love you, too," she said, quietly. "Thank you, Jake. I needed this."
She was asleep only a few minutes later. I felt creepy being in my girlfriend's bedroom at night while she slept. But I spent a long moment just watching her breathe. She was alive. I was alive. We lost Elfangor, and that was a wound that wasn't going away. But we were alive. That was the part I needed to focus on.
It was almost four when I got back to my room. I collapsed on my bed, thankful school was closed tomorrow for senior graduation. The ceremony wasn't till the evening, but the school was closed anyway.
I wanted to dissolve into oblivion, but sleep didn't come quickly. I'm not too proud to say I cried myself to sleep that night.
