Cassie had seen that the lines for all the rides were very short, and that made sense to her since the only people inside the park at this time were the high-ranking officers from Area 51, some of the children of those same officers, employees of The Gardens itself, and of course the Animorphs. As the officers walked into the entrance of the log ride, the Animorphs fell into step just behind them.
Of course, Cassie had suspected that the staff at a top-secret Air Force base wouldn't actually list Area 51 as their workplace, and she had been right. They had listed their workplace as Gondor Industries, something that any J.R.R. Tolkien fan would probably find very funny. Gondor Industries was a completely fabricated company, thought up by one of the junior officers as a joke.
When it came time for the Animorphs to get into one of the log boats, all four of them climbed into the same one. Cassie and Jake sat together in the front row, while Marco and Slade took the second. A man and a woman who were seemingly unfamiliar to any of the Animorphs sat behind them in the back row.
As the log boat started moving, Marco could practically feel the tension radiating off of Jake, who was sitting directly in front of him. Marco, being Marco, naturally decided to do something about it.
"You know, this whole thing would be a whole lot more fun if there wasn't the usual risk of dying associated with it. We've done so many things like that already that it's starting to lose its thrill. I personally love the log ride, it's not as great as the coasters of course, but the big drop at the end is really cool."
Behind Marco and Slade, someone else had also heard Marco's joke. But Lance Torrelli didn't find it very funny.
"That voice," Lance muttered just loud enough for Slade and Marco to hear him. "I know that voice!"
Cassie, Slade and Marco all turned around to find out who the speaker was, forgetting in their haste that Slade had been advised not to look anyone in the eye. Fortunately for the Animorphs, Torrelli was too preoccupied to notice Slade's strange eyes, unfortunately for them, he was preoccupied with the Animorphs themselves. Or at least the three he had seen before.
"You!" Torrelli shouted, glaring more at Cassie than at the other two, even as the log boat they were all in started to clank its way up the chain-lift that would take it to the top of the artificial hill.
"Oh, that's not good!" Marco exclaimed, looking at the decidedly unhappy face of the man who had been their interrogator when they had taken their first, unintentional, trip into Area 51.
"What, what is it?" Jake asked, turning in his seat to try and see who was behind them. Slade and Marco were in his way, though.
Cassie, Slade, Marco, Torrelli and Jake were all pushed back into their seats when the log boat started to gain speed up the steep incline. Torrelli's girlfriend, Celia Henderson, had already been leaning back in her seat and so was spared from most of this.
"You three are under arrest!" Torrelli shouted, glad to finally have a bead on his new least favorite people on earth.
"What's going on?" Celia asked, not understanding what would make Lance react this way; they were just a bunch of kids, after all.
"Yeah, what is going on?" Jake asked, careful not to use any of his friends' names, since there was an obviously unfriendly guy sitting two rows behind him.
"It's the guy from Area 51," Cassie leaned sideways to whisper in Jake's ear. "He just recognized Slade, Marco and me."
"Great, do you think anything else is going to go wrong tonight? Because I'd just like to plan ahead," Jake whispered back.
"None of you kids had better move!" Torrelli commanded, hoping somehow that those teenagers would listen to him this time.
Unfortunately, that was not to be. At that moment, the log boat reached the top of the chain lift. For a minute or so it hung there at the top, seemingly in defiance of the laws of physics, but then gravity reasserted itself. The boat started to tip forward slightly, then fell with frightening speed down the sharp incline of the hill.
"Aaaahhhhh!" Celia yelled, flinging her arms back and enjoying the feel of wind through her hair.
"Aaaaahhhhh!" Cassie screamed, because she hated thrill rides more than almost anything else in the world.
"You three are mine!" Torrelli shouted, leaning forward to try to catch hold of at least one of the kids sitting in front of him. He managed to grab onto Vincent Valentine's left shoulder, but the tall black-haired boy turned more quickly than he was prepared to deal with, delivering a vicious palm-heel strike to Torrelli's face.
Slade felt the bones in the Captain's nose break under the impact of his hand, then the sudden whoosh of air rushing past as the boat they were all in slid down the fake hill. The large and abrupt splash of water came as somewhat of a surprise, but it really shouldn't have considering how fast their boat had been going. Slade took a moment to reorient himself; looking around at where their boat had taken them.
They were now in what looked like a very good replica of a logging camp, complete with mannequins made up to look like lumberjacks. Slade saw Jake lean back and turn to look at Cassie. He didn't mean to eavesdrop, but in the confined space of the boat and with Slade's own enhanced hearing, it wasn't as if he could help it.
"If the Yeerks are going to strike here, they'll do it in the tunnel up ahead," Jake informed her. "It's like the Tunnel of Love, very dark inside."
The perfect place to conceal an ambush, Slade thought to himself. Cassie, meanwhile, was wondering just how Jake knew what the inside of the Tunnel of Love ride looked like. But she wasn't going to ask, now was not the time for anyone to get distracted, least of all Jake.
"Either way we're all going to have to bail out of here quickly, or we'll never be able to lose the Captain," Cassie said practically.
Slade said nothing, but he agreed completely with her. Marco, having a sudden idea, turned to face Captain Torrelli, ignoring the thin trickle of blood still coming from the man's nose, Marco spoke. "You know, I don't really think you can arrest us. I mean, you're with the military police, right? and, the last time I checked, this place did not count as a military base."
Torrelli glared, though that Fox Mulder kid did have a point, Torrelli wasn't about to give the kid anymore satisfaction than he was probably already getting from the fact that his good buddy Vincent had just broken Torrelli's nose. Pulling his cellphone out of his jacket pocket, Torrelli punched in a number that he had come to know very well. "Gardens security? This is Captain Lance Torrelli, security code number eight-seven-two-niner-niner. I need-"
The rest of Torrelli's sentence was drowned out to everyone but himself and the person he was speaking to, by Slade giving Marco a stiff swat upside the head.
"Thanks a lot for making things that much harder for us, Fox," Slade hissed, making sure to use the name Marco had given when they had all met up with the Captain, to avoid further suspicion on his part.
"Well, how was I supposed to know that he had a direct line to the security in this place, Vinny?" Marco shot back. "And how about hitting me a little harder next time? I think my skull is still intact."
"Make me angry enough and I just might," Slade growled.
"Knock it off, you two," Jake ordered. "This really isn't the time or the place to start a fight."
Slade nodded once, acknowledging Jake's authority. Marco was about to make another one of his cutting remarks, but Jake glared at him and he shut up.
"This is going to make things a lot harder for us to get anything done," Cassie whispered.
"I know," Jake said in a voice low enough not to carry beyond the second row of seats. "Stay on guard, the tunnel's coming up now."
The rest of the Animorphs tensed, as the log boat banged through a door and entered a room that was completely dark. There was no light at all to be seen, save for the feeble amount put out by Slade's eyes. Slade himself could make out the walls and ceiling of the room they were in, but even his enhanced vision had its limits, and Slade couldn't make out much beyond that.
Cassie looked around too, but with her dimmer human vision Cassie might as well have been blind. Standing up, Cassie started to step out of the right side of the boat. Slade, by sheer luck, happened to glance in that direction just before Cassie would have fallen out.
(Cassie, wait! Don't!) Slade lunged forward, clamping his hands around Cassie's wrists and hauling her back into the boat through sheer muscle-power. "Are you all right?" he asked quietly.
"I'm fine," Cassie reassured him, just as quietly as Slade himself had spoken.
But in the same row next to Slade, Marco was not so fine. Captain Torrelli had gotten the idea to use the darkness – where he figured that those kids wouldn't be able to evade him nearly as well as they had been doing so far, and no snot-nosed punk was going to punch him in the face again – to cover his movements. Grabbing blind, Torrelli squeezed someone's shoulder harshly.
Marco felt the tips of someone's fingers digging into the bony part of his shoulder. Trying to pull out of the offending grip, Marco found that the owner of the hand was reaching forward from behind the seat instead of sideways. So it couldn't be Slade then, and that only left one other person.
"Let go of me, you overstuffed army jerk!" Marco shouted.
"You and your little buddies are all coming with me!" Torrelli grunted. "Who's the other guy up there? One of your other accomplices that I didn't have the 'pleasure' of meeting?"
"As if I'm going to tell you," Marco scoffed. "What business do you think it is of yours, anyway?"
"It comes with being an 'overstuffed army jerk', I believe those were your exact words," Torrelli smirked in a distinctly unpleasant manner.
"Call me overoptimistic, but I don't think Vincent's going to go along with your plan without some heavy-duty 'persuasion'."
Torrelli gritted his teeth, remembering the painful little 'lesson' that he had gotten in Why Not To Mess With Vincent Valentine. When the boat came out of the tunnel at last, Torrelli was still fuming. "You kids are going to do some serious hard time for this, I swear," Torrelli growled. "If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to make you kids pay for this."
This is really not good, Marco berated himself silently. There are times I think it would just be better to keep my big mouth shut. Not that Marco would admit something like that out loud. Ever. The boat turned suddenly, and Marco braced himself to avoid being slammed into Slade. His efforts were mostly successful, and he only ended up bumping into the larger boy's shoulder.
Cassie was watching the walls, now that she could see again, looking for any sign of a Yeerk ambush in the making. But neither she nor Jake were able to spot anything of the kind. Looking ahead, Cassie saw the log boat that had been in front of them disappear suddenly. Squeezing Jake's arm convulsively, Cassie leaned over to him.
"Jake, what's going on?" Cassie whispered, afraid of what was going to happen.
"Ohh, the waterfall's coming up!" but that happy squeal did not come from the boy sitting next to her, it had come from the woman sitting in the back row. For Celia, the best part of any thrill ride were the high drops.
"There's a waterfall coming up?" Cassie demanded desperately but quietly, tightening her grip.
"Yeah, a big one," Jake whispered back, internally debating the merits of asking Cassie to let go of his arm against the fact that she was obviously calmer than she might have otherwise been. Jake had asked her to go on a roller-coaster with him once, and only once, and when they had gotten to the end she had told him that it wasn't something she ever wanted to do again.
In the end, Jake decided to let Cassie hold on to his arm for as long as she felt she needed to. As the boat edged ever closer to the waterfall at the end of the ride, Cassie's grip tightened to the point where Jake was sure he was going to have fingernail marks in his arm until the next time he morphed.
