Back inside the turtle, everyone was silent. Trish had pulled Bucciarati aside to talk to him, and that was when the mood had started to dampen.
"We should be in Venezia either tomorrow or the day after," Abbacchio said.
"What's with the tension?" Narancia asked.
Bucciarati and Trish were discussing stands, Tobias answered in private thought-speak. Apparently, she's showing signs of being a stand user herself.
"She's been really strong through all of this. But it's new to her. It's only natural that she'd have to take time to process everything," Giorno said.
"Unlike us, she's not used to weird stuff," Marco commented.
Trish glanced over at him, a frown on her face, but didn't say anything.
"I wonder if the Yeerks are still following us, or if they went back to get their Kadrona rays," Cassie wondered.
None of the animorphs had time to answer because Mista suddenly gasped. "One of the bullets took the hamburger from the truck driver," he said. The truck driver, noticing this, saw the turtle underneath the passenger seat, picking it up to examine it. In a panic, Mista shot at him. A sudden crash from outside the turtle got everyone's attention.
"What's going on?" Bucciarati demanded, jumping to his feet.
It appears the vehicle has crashed, Ax supplied.
"You guys were supposed to be watching the ceiling!" Fugo scolded.
"Sorry, kind of had to parent the bullets," Mista replied.
"Guys," Jake said, turning his head toward Cassie and Marco, "you should have been watching the ceiling too."
"Oops," Marco shrugged.
"'Oops?' Are you serious?" Abbacchio asked, narrowing his eyes at Marco. Upon seeing Bucciarati's warning glance, he looked at his map. "There's a rest stop only a few miles from here. We'll walk there and steal a car."
"Tobias, why don't you take to the sky and fly ahead for surveillance?" asked Jake.
On it, answered Tobias.
Once they reached the rest stop, it was pretty dark outside.
"Can we hurry up and pick a car to steal?" Narancia asked.
"Are you stupid?!" Fugo snapped. "Sure, why don't we just announce ourselves to the enemy?"
"We have firepower," Rachel replied, sticking up for Narancia. "C'mon, let's do it!"
"Look, you two might be the reckless and impulsive types, but use your heads," Fugo sighed, exasperated.
"Fugo's got a point," Abbacchio said.
"A really good one," Jake said, eyeing Rachel. "Last thing we need is to be ambushed."
"Why don't we see what Bucciarati wants us to do?" Narancia suggested.
"Ahem," Jake said. "I say we-"
Giorno was already in the parking lot, punching a car with Golden Experience.
"What are you doing, Giorno?" asked Fugo.
"Driving off with one of these would be too obvious. If we were to take a hundred of them, however- What if the car parts were scattered across the area? That would give us time to make our escape," he replied. He turned the cars in the parking lot into frogs, which began to hop around the parking lot. Cassie caught one and held it in her hand.
"Just as I thought. I can't acquire it as a morph," she mused. "Just like you can't acquire the DNA of someone while they're in morph. Because these are originally car parts and not actual animals, it makes sense."
"It's settled, then," Abbacchio said, ignoring Cassie. "Here, tell Bucciarati what's going on." He handed Giorno the turtle. "We're going to get a car."
"Bucciarati," Giorno told the turtle, "We're stealing a car. The others are just getting it ready."
"Good," Bucciarati's voice echoed from inside the turtle.
Cassie followed Giorno toward the other side of the rest stop. They hopped over the guard rail made of bricks and saw a motorcycle just sitting there.
"That's weird," Cassie said quietly.
"Giorno, Cassie, is something wrong?" Bruno called up. But he was distracted by Ax calling his name.
Something's happened to Trish, Tobias said urgently.
Bruno hurried toward them, where Trish's body was being dragged into the cabinet. Bruno grabbed her hand, trying to pull her out, when he noticed something- she had transformed into cubes! It was happening to Bucciarati, as well.
"Stay back," Bucciarati ordered as he felt himself being attacked by the stand as well. "Get help!" But it was too late. Tobias and Ax were followed by him, also attacked by the stand.
"Guys?" Giorno asked, frowning. Peering into the key, he saw that no one was there.
"What happened?" Cassie asked.
"I don't know. I'll send my stand to investigate," he told her.
"I can help," she offered, but Giorno shook his head.
"No. I don't want anything to happen to you, too," he replied.
Golden Experience went into the turtle and looked around for the missing people.
Across the street in the parking lot, where the others were working on getting the car, they heard a thought-speak voice.
Surrender humans! Or be annihilated! Bow before us!
"Who said that?" Abbacchio demanded.
"If that's who I think it is-" Rachel began.
We are the Helmacrons! Rulers of the galaxy!
"Man, those guys are annoying," Marco muttered.
"Mista, can you hurry up with the car?" asked Jake anxiously. "I don't want the Helmacrons shrinking us again."
"I'm working on- wait, what? Shrink us?" Mista asked.
"Like Formaggio's stand shrunk me?" Narancia asked.
"Unfortunately, yes," Rachel sighed. "The Helmacrons are a small alien race who do everything backwards. They kill their own leaders and have the corpse make decisions. They shrunk Cassie, Marco, and Tobias before."
"They took Cassie and I on their ship," Marco added. "And we don't have time for-"
"Oh no," Narancia groaned. "Not again."
The Helmacrons had shrunk Narancia, Fugo, Mista, Abbacchio, Marco, Rachel, and Jake. They were the one sixteenth of an inch tall, the same height as a Helmacron.
"What do we do now? You've dealt with them before; you should know what do!" Mista cried, grabbing Marco's shoulders.
"Maybe Jake has a plan," Fugo suggested in a patronizing tone. "He is a leader, after all."
Jake ignored the jab. "The Helmacrons have Dracon beams," he said. "And when they die, their brain is absorbed by another Helmacron."
The Helmacron ship, which looked like a toy spaceship, landed near the group. Out came the four-legged aliens, with heads shaped like upside down cones, two googly eyes on top of the heads, and vertical mouths. The insectoid aliens had blue skin, and even though they communicated in thought-speak, their mouths still made sounds that sounded like "neep! Neep!"
"Fugo," Jake said. "Use your stand to take down some of the Helmacrons. Don't kill them all, we'll need a couple to unshrink us."
"No," Fugo said harshly. "Use your morphs. They're your enemies, not ours."
"Right now, they're both of our enemies," Rachel snapped. "Don't be stubborn."
"You asked if I had a plan," Jake told him. "Well, that's my plan."
"Don't tell me what do!" Fugo shouted.
"If you people won't do anything, I will. Aerosmith, go!" Narancia said, seeing that the Helmacrons had their Dracon beams aimed at them.
Surrender, pathetic humans! Be our slaves! The Helmacrons said.
Aerosmith's bullets shot at the Helmacrons, filling them full of holes.
"Neep! Neep!" They cried out in pain. Mista loaded his gun and shot at them as well.
"Fugo," Abbacchio said quietly, watching as the Helmacrons' bodies dropped to the ground and more poured out of the ship, "I think Jake is right. You should use your stand. Even with the animorphs' morphs and the others' stands, it looks like it'll take a while to defeat them. We're pressed for time. I wouldn't be saying this if it wasn't an emergency."
Jake blinked, surprised that Abbacchio of all people was agreeing with him.
Fugo turned to Jake. "Bucciarati told you about my stand, didn't he?"
"Not exactly," Jake replied. "He and I were talking about leader stuff, and he mentioned you had a useful stand. He didn't say what it does."
"Mista, Narancia, stop!" Fugo shouted. "I'm going to use my stand!"
Narancia and Mista looked up in surprise. "Did he just say what I thought he said?" asked Mista.
"He's going to use his stand?" Narancia asked in surprise.
"I hope it works on aliens," Mista muttered.
"What's Fugo's stand?" asked Rachel, watching as Fugo strode up to the Helmacrons, whose weapons had been disabled due to Aerosmith and Sex Pistol's bullets.
"He can create a virus that kills an opponent within a few minutes," Abbacchio answered. "We have to make sure we stay out of the way so we don't get caught in its range. Fugo never uses his stand unless he needs to."
"Well, no one wants to be used as a walking bioweapon," Marco commented.
Jake glanced away from Fugo. How ironic was it that just this morning Bucciarati had used Fugo as an example of using your teammates, and now Jake was using Fugo in that exact same way? What would he say when he found out that not only had Jake used Rachel, but now Fugo, who wasn't even his own teammate?
Giorno coughed as the stand he was battling took a chunk of his throat out in the form of a cube. Cassie stared in horror. For once she could see a stand, and this one was really weird. It had silver-blue skin and was an odd sort of humanoid. It had a mouth and could talk. And now, it turned its eyes toward her.
"Maybe I'll cubeify your girlfriend," it laughed. It lunged at her, but Golden Experience planted itself in front of her, blocking the blow.
Giorno gasped as Golden Experience absorbed the blow to the chest, his own wound appearing.
"Cassie…...get the others," Giorno rasped. "I'll keep the turtle safe."
"I'll get help," Cassie said. She hopped over the guard rail and stopped in her tracks. The car was there, but the others were gone. Slowly, cautiously, she walked forward. Giorno's cry of pain distracted her. She spun around to see him with his hand over his eye. Had that stand taken his eye out? Cassie began to speed walk toward the car. "Guys, where are you? Giorno is in trouble!"
A few feet away from the car, she spotted something. It looked like a toy spaceship. She recognized it instantly. The Helmacrons' ship! The Helmacrons must be back! She ran back toward Giorno.
Surrender humans! You're pitiful beings! The Helmacrons' thought-speak echoed in her head.
"Giorno! The others are preoccupied at the moment, tell me what to do and I'll-"
"Go! I've figured it out, I know how to beat this thing. I'm not letting it hurt you," Giorno said determinedly. Cassie noticed that his eye and throat was back in place. But how?
"Okay. I trust you," Cassie said. She turned and ran back toward the Helmacron ship, but the lights in the rest stop caught her attention. It looked like someone was getting up to leave. That couldn't happen. Not yet.
Cassie began to morph horse. She had to distract everyone there.
The Helmacrons' dead bodies piled up on the pavement. Fugo's Purple Haze virus was working on them, quicker than it did on humans. When no more Helmacrons came out of the ship, Fugo called back Purple Haze and the group boarded the spaceship.
"This is so awesome!" Narancia exclaimed.
"Those Helmacrons are really stupid," Mista commented. "You'd think when they saw their comrades dying, they'd try to stay away, not blindly rush out into the battle."
"They are pretty stupid for a species that thinks so highly of themselves," Marco agreed. "Last time I was on one of their ships I asked one of them what his name was, and he didn't even know what a name is. I decided to call him Wuss."
Mista and Narancia snickered.
"Quiet," Fugo snapped. "I think these are the control panels-"
He stopped talking when he saw the withered corpse of a Helmacron sitting in the captain's chair.
"That's their captain," Rachel explained. "No need to worry about her, she's deader than a doornail."
"This gives me the heebie jeebies," Mista muttered, glancing at the alien corpse.
"Keep it moving," Jake said. "There's got to be some live Helmacrons on the ship somewhere."
At that moment, three Helmacrons arrived in the room, holding Dracon beams.
Surrender now! Be our slaves for eternity! One of them shouted in thought-speak.
"Thanks for the offer, but I'm afraid we'll have to pass," Marco said dryly.
"Unshrink us right now, or we'll kill all of you," Abbacchio snarled at the aliens.
Kill us? That's absurd! One of the Helmacrons laughed.
Narancia summoned Aerosmith and blasted holes through one of them. It collapsed, dead.
"I suggest you do as we say now," Jake said coldly.
We are not taking orders from lowly humans.
Narancia blasted another one dead.
"Unshrink us or we'll kill you," Abbacchio told it.
You won't kill me. I'm your only chance of getting back to your normal size, it said.
Mista aimed his gun and fired three shots into it.
"Neep! Neep!" It cried out in pain.
"Unless you want to bleed out, do as we say!" Fugo shouted at it.
Alright, I'll unshrink you pathetic humans! But I'm telling you, we'll be back to conquer this planet! You will not escape the wrath of the Helmacrons!
Cassie had caused chaos in the rest stop with her horse morph. Everyone fled to the back of the building as she blocked the front of it, neighing and rising up on her back legs. Hearing Giorno's voice coming closer along with the sound of an engine running, Cassie raced out the door and saw Giorno and the others standing there, turtle in hand.
"Get in the turtle and demorph in there," Giorno said, knowing instantly it was Cassie. "We have to get moving."
Alright, she said. Once inside the turtle with the others she demorphed. Giorno was driving with Fugo in the front seat and Mista in the back seat. Tobias and Ax were telling everyone about the stand user who had attacked them and turned them into furniture while Jake and Abbacchio were telling Trish and Bucciarati about the Helmacrons shrinking them. Cassie sat down in a seat in between Rachel and Trish. Well, today sure has been crazy so far, she thought to herself. At least for now we're safe from any attacks.
But everyone knew that wouldn't last long.