Chapter 14
*Shit,* Marco said again.
*Is he going where I think he's going?* Rachel asked.
*Looks that way,* I said, deflated.
*I am confused,* Elfangor said. *What about this route is so ominous?*
*This road goes to a much larger city,* Cassie answered.
*I see,* Elfangor said.
I don't know why we hadn't considered this. I mean Santa Cruz isn't exactly the first city on the anyone's list of alien invasion locations. Come to think of it, I had to wonder how dumb we were not to think of that earlier.
Santa Cruz and the other cities that line the Monterey Bay are more or less all exurbs of the Greater San Francisco Bay Area. That statement may or may not be debatable, depending on who you ask. We live less than an hour south of the 49ers' Levi's Stadium and it may come to a surprise to some that San Jose is actually the more populous of the major cities in the Bay metro, about thirty percent more populous than San Francisco and more than twice the population of Oakland. As the property values and development have reached limits in the San Francisco peninsula, the city of San Jose has absorbed a lot of that overflow. Actually, that is precisely how the 49ers ended up moving forty miles southwest to their new home in Santa Clara County a few years ago. Not that rent is any cheaper, though.
We're talking about living south of the sixth largest metropolis in the country (after New York, LA, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Dallas) and still somehow expecting the alien invasion to be a local affair. Putting it like that, I felt really stupid.
We kept pace with Chapman's car fairly easily. Ravens can hit fifty miles per hour in level flight, and since we had the bird vision at our disposal and weren't bound by the curvature of the road, keeping him in sight was easy.
In fact, floating on the thermals, the rising warm air currents, sustained flight was pretty easy. It's like riding a bike downhill, just relax and let the air currents do their thing. We still had to flap here and there as we made course corrections, and as we moved through various wind conditions, but as experiences go, flying free on the wing isn't anything you can equate to as a human - unless you happen to have experience hang-gliding. I mean, the closest I could describe it is like the weightless feeling you get on a rollercoaster, but when you're a bird, you are the rollercoaster.
At first, when Chapman had stopped in Scotts Valley, we thought maybe he wasn't going all the way to the Bay. But all he had done was stop for gas, and get back on the road. We were past Bethany Park before we knew it, and from there on, the highway was mostly through forest and sparse rural areas until we made the San Jose outskirts. As the raven flies, the distance is fairly traversable.
For the better part of half an hour, we were just flying, making idle conservation. Okay, yes, we had turned into birds using alien technology and we were still stalking our high school principal, but all in all, it felt like a normal road trip.
That's probably actually weirder, huh?
*You guys realize we could use the morphing tech to watch football games?* Marco said conversationally.
*Yeah, birds don't need tickets, demorph at halftime, pick any spot you want, sounds like a plan,* Tobias said. *Only problem is the Steelers don't play the 49ers this year.*
*Ugh, Pittsburgh has corrupted you. Jake, wanna catch a game?*
*Yeah, Marco. If we survive the Yeerk pool, I'll go to a game with you.*
*What about concerts?* Rachel asked. *Same principle, right?*
*I don't know,* Cassie said. *Is it wrong for us to abuse the morphing technology?*
*Cassie,* Elfangor said. *The technology comes with some responsibility, which all of you have exercised admirably. But the technology is also permanent, and should we destroy the Yeerk pool, how you use the technology is up to you.*
I hadn't really given much thought to morphing for fun. I hadn't even actually morphed my own dog yet, and while flying had obvious advantages, I had no real desire to go back to raccoon mode and I was actively resisting any thoughts about the lizard.
As we passed the Lexington Reservoir and the exit for the Lexington Zoological Gardens where Cassie's mom worked, we flew lower. It wasn't much further from here to the city outskirts, and the neighborhood of Los Gatos came up quickly enough.
Ironically, for all our efforts to keep up with Chapman's car, we soon realized we had a tremendous advantage when it came to residential streets. Birds don't have to wait on things like traffic or red lights, so as he got backed up, I began to realize how much the human thought processes were in some ways a handicap when it came to morphing. The things that were easy for a human, like using a cell phone or opening a door, were hard for a bird. But obviously birds were much better at getting around from Point A to Point B.
I mean, it sounds obvious. But it's really not. Everything I knew about getting around was counterintuitive for the bird mind. We think about the time it takes to drive places based on the distance of preset paths. Streets are an obvious example, but even walking from one room to another, walking down the hall at school, going around a puddle, all this path shit was just wasted effort to the raven. The bird saw the world in straight line distances, because when you can fly, you go through life with cheat codes enabled.
So we spent a decent amount of time waiting for Chapman to negotiate traffic and lights. And as we waited for Chapman, I had thoughts.
*Elfangor?*
*Yes, Jake.*
*Exactly what are we looking for here?*
*Honestly, Jake, you have as good a guess as I do.*
*What, seriously?* Marco asked.
*I told you, I have little experience with surface tactics, and none applicable for your planet.*
*What does that mean?* Rachel asked as we took off from a rampart and flew down to the next intersection to wait for the green light.
*On most other planets taken by the Yeerks, I could morph the native species, such as the Hork-Bajir and Taxxons, and infiltrate the Yeerk facilities. I cannot do that here.*
*Why not?* Rachel asked.
*You humans are too complex.*
*You can't morph humans?* Tobias asked.
*I can,* Elfangor said. *But your culture is too complex. In the three days we have spent following this Controller, could you have taught me to pass for human?*
*I see your point,* Cassie said, taking wing again.
*But back to Jake's question,* Marco said. *You mean to say you have no idea roughly where he's headed? Like what kind of building he would be headed to or anything?*
Elfangor seemed to take a long moment to think. *The Yeerk pool is generally a massive facility. And yet our scans from orbit found Kandrona radiation signatures with no apparent surface pools.*
Well, I guess that made sense. I didn't know what Kandrona meant, but I'd heard Elfangor mention it before in relation to the pool. But the idea of having a large vat of alien slugs and a line of people going to and from, that had to be hard to hide.
*Surface pools,* Marco said. *You mean you think the Yeerk pool might be underground?* There was a level of heat to his tone. *You didn't think to mention that?*
Elfangor didn't seem bothered that Marco was upset. *It could be as likely that the Yeerks have constructed multiple smaller pools, more easily concealed among the buildings of your cities.*
*I'm not sure that's any better,* Cassie said. *What, would we have to do this over and over again, mapping pool after pool?*
That thought was outright terrifying. Not only did I never want to do this again, even I knew that the Yeerks would eventually catch on. Each pool we destroyed, assuming we had any success at all in that category, would obligate new security measures at every other facility.
We kept leapfrogging intersections, keeping Chapman's car in view as he made his way through the city. Tobias was the first to notice it.
*Isn't the airport this way?*
*Shit,* Marco said again.
*I've gotta agree with Marco on that one. If Chapman gets on a plane, we're porked,* Rachel said.
I remembered just a little earlier, when Rachel had mentioned Melissa babysitting and yet both of us missing how that would impact Chapman. I had thought then just how unprepared for this we were, how much else we could have forgotten. It had been an unpleasant thought, to say the least, but Rachel's comment raised an odd point.
*Um, guys? I really hate to bring this up, but if Chapman gets out of his car and goes into the airport, exactly how are we going to follow him as birds?*
Silence.
*Fuck,* Tobias said. *I can only morph two birds or a raccoon.*
*And it's not like any of us can go in as a human,* Cassie said. *Aside from the fact none of us would be dressed, Chapman would recognize any of us.*
*Well,* Marco said, *What could follow Chapman into a building and not be noticed? I'm thinking a raven would be introduced to a broom pretty damn quick. And the raccoon would get San Jose Animal Control here in a heartbeat.*
*We'd need something smaller,* Cassie said. *Like a fly or a spider.*
I hated my life. *Or a lizard.*
*Yeah, that'd work,* Rachel said. She hadn't been there; she didn't know.
*You sure?* Cassie asked. *After last time…*
*What happened last time?* Rachel asked.
*I ate a spider.*
*Oh. Yuck. But seriously, that's it?*
*Rachel, if I'd taken a bite of a sandwich and accidentally swallowed a spider, that would be gross, but not a big deal. But when you shove something in your mouth the size of your own head and feel it trying to fight its way back out as you're swallowing it, it's a bit more than just the ick factor.*
*Oh. Sorry. So lizard's out?*
I mean I really hated my life. We flew down again, keeping the red car in sight. *No, lizard mode is all we have.*
As we approached the exit loop to turn off from Highway 17 to Airport Boulevard - one of the most spectacularly unoriginal, blatantly overt street names - we thought this was it. But Chapman didn't take Airport Boulevard. He took the right ramp onto Coleman Avenue as expected, but rather than take the next right onto Airport Boulevard, he stayed on Coleman.
*Okay,* Rachel said, *Now where's he going?*
To the left was a parking lot, with a Starbucks and an In-N-Out Burger. But to the immediate right was the southernmost tip of the airport runways. Then we passed Avaya Stadium, home of the San Jose Earthquakes. After that it seemed to be just a few nondescript buildings, which I quickly realized to be small aircraft hangars. We heard jets taking off and landing as he continued on.
Chapman made a right turn on Brockway, passed a collision repair shop, and then past a small building with a sign for Richmar Associates, which I took to be a small legal office, and onto Martin Avenue. There was a large parking lot, then four long pale-grey buildings, each maybe five hundred feet long and a hundred feet wide.
These were larger hangars, for larger aircraft, the passenger jets rather than the smaller commuter flights or courier lines. The last of the hangars wasn't as long and was built a little wider with no parking lot. Chapman turned in between the third and fourth buildings, and while he was parking, all of us sat down on the roof. We weren't sure which building he was heading into at first, and I couldn't demorph till I was sure this was the right roof.
Sure enough, a minute later, Chapman walked over to the fourth building and I flew across the gap to land on the other roof and hurriedly demorphed. It felt good to be human again, even if crouching on a hangar roof was awkward. But I didn't have time to linger and I had barely regained my human fingertips before I felt them turn into reptilian claws.
As I shrunk, I concentrated harder on the reptile instincts. Run, dark, food. No. No food, I thought. No more spiders. Chapman.
I skittered over the edge of the building at breakneck speed. Lizards may like to conserve energy but they can haul ass when they want to, or in the case of a pissed off human brain forcing them to.
And I was pissed. I hated going lizard again, which I realize isn't really the lizard's fault so much as me just not wanting another night of fucked up spider dreams. But that anger was useful for keeping the lizard brain on task, so I tried to hold on to it.
*We'll try to come in behind you,* I heard Cassie call after me.
I was ten feet down the side of the building when I saw Chapman turn a corner toward a door and I powered my little lizard body after him. I missed the open door but was small enough to squeeze under it, though the lizard brain hated it.
I saw the black leather of Chapman's shoes and booked it to him. Part of it was that I didn't want to lose him, and part of it was the closer I stayed to Chapman, the less likely was to be stepped on.
Chapman showed a badge or some kind of ID card to a stern-looking middle-aged woman sitting at a desk and she buzzed him into a door behind her. I followed as he stepped in and was surprised to find nothing more than simply a small hallway and a normal elevator door. Chapman pushed his ID card into a reader - the kind they use on hotel doors - and when the light came on, punched a code into what looked like an ATM keypad.
Okay, so maybe not a normal elevator.
Right then, I knew I was on my own. Even if they found something they could morph, like a small swarm of flies suddenly blowing in the front door, they would have no way of knowing where I had gone.
The elevator doors opened, and I stayed close to Chapman as much as I could without risking an errant foot. I skittered up the wall and up to the edge of the ceiling. The elevator was moving down, and it was harder for the lizard to experience the kind of acceleration-induced weightlessness you feel in elevators. I mean, the acceleration on a human body would be measured in pounds. For the lizard body, it was measured in fractions of an ounce. All the same, I still had the impression this was faster than your average elevator.
We were in the elevator for an unsettling length of time. Marco had taken Elfangor's statement as evidence the pool was subterranean, and I knew even before the elevator doors opened that we were definitely underground. The elevator took way too long for that to not be certain.
Chapman started walking as soon as the elevator doors opened and I instinctively crawled across the ceiling and out of the elevator. I probably should have been more cautious but I really didn't want to lose Chapman. Or get stuck in the elevator.
But now that I was out, I wasn't sure I really wanted to follow Chapman in here. I was scared. The lizard had a visual range of maybe twenty or thirty feet before things got blurry and technically I had already completed the mission. I knew the entrance to the Yeerk pool was an aircraft hangar on Martin Avenue by the San Jose international airport. That was all I strictly needed to know.
But where I was scared, the lizard brain just straight up didn't care. And as much as I was scared I was equally curious.
As I scurried down the wall, I realized I was crawling over rough-cut stone, and the wall felt almost like the wall of a cave or something. But then I reached the smooth concrete floor and it felt like I was in a Sam's Club or a CostCo more than an alien underground lair.
I really couldn't see much as a lizard on the floor and following Chapman's shoes took a lot of mental effort. The lizard didn't really see a point to running.
Chapman's shoes were soon joined by other shoes, and then by more shoes. I'm honestly not sure where the other people were coming from, but it became increasingly crowded in the hallway. I moved to the left, narrowly avoiding a pair of red stiletto heels, and hugged the corner of the wall.
This wall wasn't like a cave wall. This one was cinder block, painted, and every so many feet I had to crawl through the triangular trusses of a steel support, the kind you see on stadium roofs. I wished I could see more of the structure, but the only way to get a better look around was to demorph, so lizard vision was the best I was going to have for now.
The wall I was following suddenly turned ninety degrees and I realized we had come to some kind of opening. About twenty feet wide of open concrete, lined with stripes of various colors, like the kinds of color-coded path systems you sometimes see in hospitals. The group of people I was following stopped to allow a forklift to pass, carrying what appeared to be a pallet of oxygen tanks or something.
On the other side of the wide gap, I could see a yellow safety railing set into a small concrete half-wall. This part was less sublevel mall garage corridor and more military missile base or something. I watched as the crowd moved again, some people turning left or right, and some going straight. I found Chapman amidst the other walking legs, recognizing his shoes once more, and skittered across the open space. This was a long concourse, set perpendicular to the corridor I'd just come through, and along the other wall I could see almost vault-like doors, wall-mounted cables and ductwork. The ceiling was too high for my lizard eyes to see, and I was starting to get a sense for how large this facility was. Definitely way too big to fit under the hangar upstairs. I did some mental math, which wasn't my strong suit. I knew where the door upstairs had been, and if I was at all confident with my directional orientation, I was pretty sure that I was deep beneath the runways.
I could only guess how deep we were, but blowing up the Yeerk pool would now necessarily involve smuggling explosives beneath a major US airport, and that idea was not something I could process right then. I didn't think Homeland Security would buy "saving the world" as a legit defense against our pending domestic terrorism charges.
I bolted down the wall and then across the floor, trying to keep those black leather shoes in sight. I reached the half wall, and went up and over, slithering across the yellow railing. I realized Chapman was heading down stairs, and I followed as best I could, clinging to the rail like my life depended on it because I was sure it actually did.
The steps were metal grating, and we got down about another twenty feet before I was once again on smooth concrete flooring. But offset from the landing of the steps, I realized we were now passing what could only be described as cubicles. There were steel support columns interspersed into the cubicles, and hanging wires stretched between them. There had to be at least a hundred people in those cubicles, and as I glanced left and right, I saw doors, offices, it seemed oddly sterile. I don't know what I had expected coming down here into the alien lair, but it hadn't been light clerical. I guess aliens need middle management, too, though.
Chapman went through a series of turns, other corridors, past an actual fucking McDonald's in the middle of a subterranean bunker, and past what looked like bunks or barracks or whatever the hell you want to call them. People were living here. These were body-snatching alien parasites, and I realized that whereas Chapman had a job, a wife, a daughter, coworkers, and generally people that would miss him, how many human bodies could these slugs take with no one to notice them missing.
The South Bay, despite - or probably more likely, because of - its high standard of living and level of affluence, boasted some of the highest rates of homelessness in the country. Thousands of people lived on the streets above, and I was sickened to think how many ended up down here for nothing more than a free cheeseburger.
Chapman stopped at another security door, slid his card through the reader, and stepped out into a brightly-lit space.
I didn't hear screaming. I didn't see a prison.
The room was almost like a floor at the emergency room, and Chapman waved to a handful of people in white uniforms and they led him to a stretcher. Chapman took off his suit jacket and undid his tie, laid down on the stretcher, and immediately fell asleep. They didn't need guards, I realized. If you can just drop your host body into a temporary coma, why would you need them?
I crawled under the stretcher, scurrying up and underneath so I wasn't seen. So far, no one had noticed me. But the sterility of this place was almost tangible. The humidity and temperature seemed perfectly maintained and my flicking lizard tongue hadn't even picked up the smell of any insects or spiders.
How much maintenance goes into keeping spiders out of an underground facility?
I felt the gurney or stretcher or whatever start moving as the medical Controllers pushed us through yet another set of doors, another elevator, and down to another slightly lower sublevel.
How deep did this place go?
When the door opened, I knew there could be no question. This was the Yeerk pool.