Chapter 15

The actual Yeerk pool was not a pool at all.

We were in a large open space, at least a hundred feet wide, well beyond my visual acuity. As they wheeled Chapman through, I took mental notes of the smooth polished concrete floor, with the lime green hazard tape lines. Across the length of the floor, bisecting the room, were lines of of colored safety tape. Orange, purple, blue, and yellow, each with black chevrons indicating a direction, all vanishing into obscurity beyond the limits of my lizard eyes. As the Controller staff pushed the stretcher along the width of the floor, I could make out more details. The concrete walls were lined with an elaborate network of pipes, ducts, and braided cables of various thicknesses. The walls and ceiling were again segmented by steel trusses and concrete buttresses. The whole floor had something of a particle accelerator vibe to it. Pale green lights were set into steel rigging that bridged the space from wall to wall, supported by the type of giant columns you see in parking garages, and the soft green glow made the room even more eerie than I already found it.

But the part that really got my attention were the tanks.

Along both walls in rows were huge clear acrylic tubes, each centered in the space between buttresses. They looked like massive cylindrical aquarium tanks. Each tube had to be twelve feet in diameter, with about twenty feet of clear plastic above a ten-foot tall steel base. The tubes were full of a milky grey liquid obviously not normal water, tinted by blue lights embedded within the tubes. I could just barely make out a dark center tube. Like a black pole running the vertical axis of the tube.

Running from the walls down to the metal bases were heavy industrial electrical cables, color-coded pipes, and various hoses. Some were routed to massive canisters, like oversized scuba tanks or milk cans, before then being fed into the bases. And set into those steel bases were workstations with computer monitors, display screens, and various blinking lights. Here and there, I saw technicians in green jumpsuits making adjustments to the panels.

They were definitely alien, or at the very least, they conformed to some alien stereotypes. I felt like I'd walked into a video game.

And each tube was a perfectly maintained habitat for Yeerks.

I could see thousands of tiny black shapes swimming within the nearest tank, and I felt a surge of terror and dread. I couldn't make out any real details through the murky liquid, but they couldn't have been larger than goldfish or tadpoles, maybe the size of my thumb.

It felt weird to think something I'd probably squish underfoot on the sidewalk could be so dangerous. They needed human bodies to do this, and who knows how many machines or whatever technology they had used to excavate this facility, but all of it was for the benefit and agendas of these slugs.

And it got worse.

In the wide space between the rows of tanks were what had to be hundreds of transport gurneys and the floor was lined with smaller diameter acrylic tubes leading to odd little medical stations. This was a facility that could take at least a hundred people an hour without overflow.

The gurney was wheeled into one of the docking stations and I scurried to the foot of the stretcher. I didn't think I'd necessarily be noticed at Chapman's feet and I wanted to see what they were doing to him. I wanted to know how they operated.

I was surprised by what I saw.

For as much as I'd just been blown away by the Yeerk containment vats, the docking stations were almost ludicrous. They looked like hairdressing sinks. I mean, obviously they were custom-designed and still had a weird medical-alien aesthetic, but the Controllers gently lifted Chapman, put something like a simple rain poncho over his head and shoulders, and fitted him with a type of full-face oxygen mask. They then opened the other end of the stretcher so that it now resembled a massage table, with the padded donut headrest, laid Chapman back down, and pressed a button. The stretcher then reclined so that Chapman's head was resting in the basin, and then it filled steadily with liquid from the Yeerk vat.

I didn't see the Yeerk leave Chapman's head - I couldn't see through the nearly opaque liquid - but the basin drained, and the stretcher raised. One of the Controllers took a quick second to wash Chapman's face with a cloth, set a fresh towel under his head, and pressed a button that triggered a slow pulsing blue light on the docking station. The two Controllers just left him there, no concern, as they went to another incoming stretcher.

I sat with Chapman for a minute. I just… He was a human being, stuck in this horrible place, and I just didn't want to leave him. I don't know why, really. It's not like he knew I was there, and not like he'd take a small lizard as any kind of comfort. He was no longer infested, he should've been free right now, but he wasn't. He didn't even have this brief time to scream at them, curse them, to cry piteously or anything. Even while the slug was gone to its precious home, Chapman still belonged to it.

There were people living in this place because it needed round-the-clock staff. I tried to wrap my head around that, the implications. I looked at the other gurneys, at how many I could see and how many more I just couldn't see in lizard morph. Thousands of people were here, probably.

In retrospect, I don't know what exactly I was thinking this would be. I had an image of a concentration camp combined with a public pool. Like Controllers would march down a pier, dip their heads in the water, and then armed guards would drag the now uninfested host to a cell to wait and cry.

But that was a human view of captivity. I was thinking in terms of a prison, but that was stupid. They weren't keeping humans as prisoners, they were keeping them as livestock. This wasn't a prison; it was a stockyard.

I didn't know what to do here.

I'd probably been in lizard morph less than half an hour, maybe twenty minutes guessing from the crawl from the roof, the elevator, the outside corridors, to here. I wasn't sure exactly how long Chapman's Yeerk would be in the tank, but I was worried that the hour and a half I had left might not be well-spent waiting around. Then again, leaving had risks too. I'd gone through at least two card-controlled security doors to get here, so I wasn't sure I could get back out on my own anyway. But waiting here in the blue glow of the Yeerk vat was seriously damaging my calm, and I just couldn't sit on Chapman for an hour without going crazy. I couldn't sit in a roomful of human livestock and do nothing but watch. I just didn't have the ability to turn that off.

Elfangor had told me before, waiting for those Bug Fighter ships, that patience could be difficult. He had said fear could lead to poor decisions, and I knew full well that running out of the barn that night would have ended in disaster. But he wasn't there to tell me to chill this time. And the lizard brain didn't really care one way or the other, but the lizard also had a much stronger scatter instinct.

I followed the stripes deeper into the room. I could have gone back the way I'd come in. I probably should have. But I wanted to know more about this place, I wanted to know what we were up against. Plus, when I had skittered off Chapman's stretcher, a Controller had nearly stepped on me, so I was already twenty feet down before I got back in control of the lizard mind.

I passed three sets of tanks before I came to an intersection I hadn't been able to make out from the other end of the infestation room. The orange and yellow lines turned to the left, the blue line turned to the right, and the purple line came in and kept going straight down the hall. I couldn't see Chapman from here, and I really wasn't sure how long before they put the Yeerk back in his head. Then again, if the Yeerks went seventy-two hours between tank appointments I'd be shocked if this didn't take awhile.

I wondered if somewhere was a giant map on the wall with a "You Are Here* marker. I hadn't paid enough attention to the color lines on the way down here. I chose to go left just because I thought I remembered passing a yellow line earlier, but I couldn't be sure.

The lizard body was tiring, and it wasn't pleased with this constant scurry mode. The body was built for quick bursts and I'd essentially been making it keep a human pace, which was doable but very taxing. I took a slower approach as I came to the door.

Lacking a security card, the only way through the door that I could see was a vent above the air-lock style sliding door. And even knowing the vent couldn't be more than than the thickness of the concrete wall, I still wasn't happy about vents.

But I did it, and that's the important thing. Being this small, fitting through the spaces as I did, I got some perspective of how powerful this technology could be. I mean, Ant Man did fine, right?

The other side of the door was the bottom landing of a staircase, the stripes running up the steps. There was a new line here, green, with the chevrons running opposite to the orange and yellow. I slithered down the door and up the yellow safety railing. At the top of the stairs, I was at another large intersection, and it looked similar to the crossways where I had seen the forklift earlier. Actually, taking a longer look now that I wasn't pressed to keep pace with a walking Chapman, I realized this was the same corridor. The curvature was almost imperceptible to the lizard eyes, but this concourse was definitely not a straight line. The yellow line turned to the left and the orange stripe went straight, across the main concourse to another air-lock door set right into the massive concrete wall.

There were dozens of people walking in either direction, some in jumpsuits, some in normal businesswear, others in more casual clothing. It wasn't a constant stream of people, though. Some went to the left, some went to the right, and a small group went past me down the steps to the infestation area. It wasn't five minutes sitting on this railing that I noticed the concourse was clear.

If I had my bearings, I was pretty sure if I followed the yellow line left again I would loop back to the hallway to the main elevator. Then again, I could've gotten turned around where Chapman had gone past that office area. I wondered why he'd gone that way if this concourse would have brought him to the infestation area. I know he didn't stop anywhere but now I wondered more about the people he had passed as he'd gone through, making all those twists and turns through the office area. I wondered if maybe he'd needed to see someone specifically.

I chose to follow the orange line. I knew how to get back to Chapman, and I was reasonably sure how to make it back to the other hallway to the elevator at this point. So might as well look around. Maybe there'd be a place I could demorph or something. Also, the lizard didn't want to do too much more of the running, so I took the shorter distance.

And so once again I went through the vent above the airlock door. I should've followed the purple line instead.

My flickering lizard tongue and it's bizarre form of olfactory reception was overwhelmed by the stench. The smell hit like a freight train and it took a minute before I could get my bearings.

I had compared the infestation room behind me to a stockyard, but this, this was a slaughterhouse. I'm not being metaphorical, either, it was an actual slaughterhouse.

It was like a factory assembly line for dead animals, with skinned racks of ribs hanging on hooks. The hooks were part of some kind of hanging rail system, suspended from more of that steel stage rigging and offset steel support beams. Set into the floor was a more standard railing system, with what looked like mine cars, full of offal and meat scraps. The door I'd come through came out to an elbow section of the tracks. Both rail systems ran to my left, back into the far wall, to the giant metal doors of a freight elevator, before coming to an open space and then running away from me. If I'd kept my bearings, then these railings ran parallel to the long hallway space of the infestation area.

There was hissing as jets sprayed intermittent clouds over the incoming meat. I wasn't sure if it was coolant or water or some kind of chemical additive, but by the smell, they didn't care if this meat was rotting. There were workers down there in bright orange jumpsuits, wearing black rubber boots and gloves, and firefighter-type oxygen packs. Yeerks or not, I couldn't blame them; I couldn't stand the smell even as a lizard. Actually the lizard didn't hate the smell, but seemed confused that the smell of rotting meat didn't correlate to swarms of flies or maggots.

No, thanks, lizard. I'm good. Thanks for that mental image, though.

I noticed at least two people with hoses spraying the floors and each was followed by others with oversized floor squeegees, pushing the water toward drains set into the floor. I wasn't about to try to get through the wet floor, so I crawled up above the vent and managed to find my way onto the overhead rigging. This was a pretty decent vantage point, actually, and I figured I'd probably be able to go anywhere I wanted through the overhead lighting rigs and vents.

Disgusting as this was, I wondered what in the hell brain slugs would need with this much raw meat. I seriously doubted this slough was fit for human consumption. So I followed the rail system down further, trying to figure out what the holy fuck was going on here. There had to be tons of cow and pork and I wouldn't have been surprised if there was outright roadkill in some of those carts. And how were they transporting this much meat into this facility? We had to be hundreds of feet underground, and a major airport above.

I wondered if there was a slaughterhouse or meat packing plant near the airport. It'd make sense, I guess. Much like the hangar above had enough floor space for a security elevator, I could see a slaughterhouse with a secret elevator. That part was easy enough to imagine, though I tried not to dwell on it. Aliens in the police or military, that made sense. I knew that stuff from movies and comics. But I was paranoid enough about people being Controllers without trying to think of how connected they were in the infrastructure and somehow the thought of Yeerks in the cattle industry just seemed extra wrong.

As I got down a length of scaffolding, I saw that the meat was being divided and dropped down shafts in the wall. They were feeding something. That's what this was. The meat came in from somewhere above and came through this receiving area to be processed, divided, and portioned before dropping into feeding troughs below.

I don't know why I wanted to look. Even as I scurried across the scaffolding and down the steel support beam, I knew whatever was down there was going to be terrifying. I knew it was going to give me nightmares. But I wanted to know what we were up against.

I wasn't crazy enough to try to go through the drop shafts, though. Along the walls in this section on either side of the corridor, were thick acrylic observation windows, the kind I knew from the zoo. The windows were smeared clear slime, and splattered with what looked to be blood and shit, and for as fastidiously clean they were keeping this room despite the dripping meat, no one was making any attempt to clean the room below us.

I saw a fresh splash of red and slime hit the acrylic and I made my way across the wet floor to try to get a look.

It's kinda hard to go into things without pre-conceived notions and assumptions. Like I assumed aliens didn't actually exist until a few days ago, but even still, we all have the general idea of what they're supposed to look like: mostly humanoid body shape, huge black eyes, grey skin, giant bulbous heads. Where that image comes from, I don't know. I could ask Marco later, I supposed. But Elfangor didn't look anything like that. The reality didn't mesh with the expectation.

And that was true here as well. I was expecting to see space werewolves or giant reptiles or something. But the aliens in the feeding pen below were unlike anything I could have imagined.

They were monstrous, carnivorous worms.

They had to be twelve feet long, easily, and as thick as a sewer pipe. Like it would take two or three people to wrap their arms around it, though a garbage bag full of old diapers and used heroin needles would be a hundred times more huggable. The bulk of their weight seemed to be supported on five pairs of strong but stubby legs ending in massive spike-like claws, like the limbs of an armadillo or something. Claws that probably would make more sense on rock and dirt than they did on smooth cement. They had the type of segmented exoskeleton you'd expect on a potato bug, but out of their back grew segmented spines covered in bristles. Their underside looked soft and rubbery, translucent like the skin of some kind of giant morbidly obese subterranean salamander. They had a pale yellow color to the skin, with the exoskeleton the color and texture of a toenail fungus. Here and there were odd knobs embedded in the skin. Cassie told me later it sounded like osteoderms, but they looked like warts or giant zits.

The front third or so was bent upward, with three pairs of lobster-like appendages. One pair was larger than the other two, over-developed and seemed to be more to help support their front parts off the ground. The other two seemed vaguely more dexterous, grabbing parts of meat and pushing them back up to their terrifying mouth. They had a head that reminded me of the graboids from the old Tremors movie, though they had four globular red eyes. But they had the same weird kind of bifurcated lower jaw that opened to reveal a squid-like conglomerate of barbed tongues, pulling into a massive lamprey-like mouth.

There were dozens of them. They were pushing and shoving each other, like elephant seals in a nature documentary. Even through the inches of plastic, I could hear the squishing noises, the odd bellowing belching sounds they made, like a language of nothing but intestinal distress noises.

Their feeding area was a good floor below this one, and however the monster worms were getting into the feeding pens - this was one of six that I could see - the entrances and exits had to be below me.

To say I was done would have been an understatement.

As much as I hated some aspects of lizard mode after that spider, the reptile's mind was very apathetic to a lot of things. I wasn't cold and nothing was trying to eat me, so other than a good cricket, the lizard brain was fine. It wasn't impacted by the writhing horrors behind the safety glass. Honestly, lizard mode didn't recognize things visually the way I was used to as a human. The way a dog can't recognize a photograph, the lizard didn't really understand the idea of things beyond the glass. I couldn't hear it that well, couldn't smell it, and it wasn't a bird or a rat or something the lizard brain could understand. So it dialed the meh to eleven.

I wasn't exactly thrilled by the apathy, but I was glad the reptile mind was there so I didn't have to deal with that right now. Honestly, had I been human, I think I would've screamed loud enough for Elfangor and the others to hear me on the surface.

I should've tapped into that apathy more back at the stretcher. I wondered how much time I had been in lizard morph. It had probably been about another half an hour from the time I had left Chapman, and that point me at probably an hour of morph, probably a little more. I looked around, wondering where and if I could find a place to demorph.

There was nowhere I could pull that off in the meat room. It was too open, too many people, and if I'm being honest, you couldn't pay me enough to breathe that smell as a human if I didn't have to.

I knew the green stripe would take me back to Chapman, and there looked to be enough recesses and blind spots among the stretchers that I could probably demorph if I had to. I'd have to stay crouched behind one of the stretchers, hopefully hidden from the sparse staff in that section. Then again, I could just follow the yellow line and see if that didn't take me back to the hallway like I thought it would.

I had at least thirty minutes left in this morph. I didn't have a watch or anything, but I knew roughly how long it had taken to come down from the hangar above, and roughly how long it had taken to get to the meat room. Even if I was underestimating the time, I felt I should be good on time. But waiting for Chapman in the infestation room just wasn't an option.

I either had to get out, or I had to find a place to demorph. I was sure all my friends above had demorphed and remorphed by now. Somehow the thought of a furry blue alien on the roof of an aircraft hangar made me feel a little better.

I came back out into the concourse easily enough, but following the yellow line was not going to be as easy as I thought just then.

There were two more forklifts carrying more oxygen tanks, and some kind of miniature truck moving three giant spools of cable and tubing. But it wasn't the minor traffic on the path that caused me to stop.

There were other aliens in the concourse now.

Three of them were the worm things. They seemed less frenzied, and maybe a little less slimy and messy now that they weren't actively fighting over the meat trough, but their calm, determined demeanor didn't really detract from their horrific, nightmarish appearance. If anything, it made it worse. I'd already seen them as rampaging flesh monsters, and the Yeerks were able to reign them in.

The worms were wearing some kind of apparatus on their backs, something a cross between a scuba tank and a Ghostbuster proton pack, with hoses running into openings in the worm's upper portion. It occurred to me it was unrealistic to expect disparate alien races to be able to breathe our atmosphere. I wondered what kind of gas mixture they had to pump into those worms.

But behind the worms were something new.

There were six of them, and one of them would have been enough to make me shit myself if I'd not been in lizard mode. They were huge, hulking creatures. Whereas the worms had fat rolls and jiggled as they moved, these things were definitely muscle. They had a body type that's hard to put into words. It was like somebody broke into Jurassic Park, put all the dinosaur DNA in a blender, and then mixed that with Bigfoot.

They really did look like a mix of various dinosaurs, and they had the skin of a snapping turtle, mottled brown and green. From hips to shoulders, they had the general body of a gorilla or an orangutan, with wide shoulders and collar bones. The chest muscles looked similar to human weightlifters. Their arms themselves were overly long, built heavier than a human, like a bear on steroids. They the legs of a T-rex or giant bird, three toes forward, one toe backward. They had the long, muscular tail you'd expect to see on a dinosaur. Their necks were elongated, snake-like, and a head like someone had stapled a falcon's beak on a velociraptor's face.

But that was nothing to the blades.

At the forearms, elbows, shoulders, and the ankle were sharp blades of bone or horn. They had curved spikes at their tail, blades running down their neck, and forward-raked horns at their jaws and forehead. Even their fingers were bladed, with claws growing out of each knuckle almost as long as my entire lizard body.

All in all, they had to stand seven to nine feet tall, and factoring in the length of their necks and tails, I had to wonder how these things managed to fit in the various sections of the facility. I had to assume each alien species had to have its own section that was designed around their anatomy. It seemed unrealistic for the worms to be able to operate human technology.

The reptile monsters walked at the worm's pace, carrying what looked to be some kind of alien bazooka. The idea that giant lizard beasts would need firepower was just so weird, but I was too scared to appreciate the irony then.

And walking among them, the unmistakable sound of hooves on concrete echoing in the empty concourse, was an Andalite.