???
I was walking with Stephanie through the peach groves. It's one of her favorite places.
"It's valuable?" She asked me.
"Yep, that Blue Box is going to make me a lot of money. We can go away together and leave this fucking place." All of the sudden we were in the construction site in New Jersey. Stephanie gave me that mock-shocked look whenever I used language she didn't approve of.
"Hey David!" Jason said as he showed up suddenly. "Need my help?"
"Sure, man! You game, right?"
"I don't know Man. You named your cat Megadeth?" All of the sudden, Jason was Marco and he was holding Megadeth by his tail.
"He doesn't like that! Don't do that!"
But Megadeth started to change. Became orange with black stripes. And got big. I turned around suddenly and got pushed by a grizzly bear.
Where do you think you're going? The Bear said. I turned around and a giant Cobra came up out of the ground where Marco used to be. I turned around again and there was the Dule Fansa with a gaggle of Wild Things. Two had my parents. One had Steph.
"Let them go!"
You weak, pathetic fool! said the Dule Fansa. Give me the Blue Box or they will die!
I had the blue box in my hands all of the sudden. I stepped forward to give him the box when the giant snake coiled around me.
Oh, no you don't, human!
The small blue Motaro-looking alien suddenly showed up. He had a tiger-skinned back. He also had four arms for some reason. Go ahead and kill the humans. You're not getting the box!
And as the Giant Snake dragged me away, I saw the Wild Things slit the throats of my parents. And Steph.
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
I was on the ground outside. I had woken up. I was dreaming. It was still Tuesday. I realized I couldn't have been asleep for more than half an hour. My head hurt like a motherfucker. I opened my eyes and I saw five kids. One of them was Marco. Aside from him, there were two boys and two girls. Of the two girls, there was a short black girl and a very tall blonde white girl. Of the two boys, one was shorter than the other, but not as short as Marco. The shorter boy was definitely some kind of black, white, hispanic mix. A kind of pretty boy. The other boy was definitely white. He was also tall, taller than me. Very broad shouldered. Light brown hair. The big guy looked like he was in charge.
"Who are you?"
The big guy spoke. "We're the people who are going to totally change your world, David."
I thought that over for a minute. "Is this some sort of gay thing?"
The big guy was taken aback by that. Marco and the girls stifled a laugh.
"Uh, no." The big guy said suddenly. He looked at the sky. There was some bird circling over us. Probably a vulture.
I turned to Marco. "Listen Marco, whatever you and your little friends have planned, forget it. Okay, the blue box thing went straight to fucking hell, and I was thrown out a wall, not a window mind you, a fucking wall, by some big-ass bear. Now you're probably wondering what the fuck I'm talking about, but you know what? None of your goddamn business. I'm just going to go home and find out what those freaks wanted." I started to walk away.
"They wanted your box." said the blonde.
I turned around slowly. "How'd you know that?"
"Let's take a walk, David." the big guy said.
"Who are you people?" I asked as I started to walk with them. Marco and the black girl were on either side of me. The big guy was up front. The blonde and the pretty boy were behind me. Fucking surrounded.
"I'm Jake." said the big guy.
"Rachel." Said the blonde.
"Cassie." Said the black girl. She smiled at me. It was the same smile Steph had.
"And I am Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill." said the pretty boy. I raised a curious eyebrow.
"What the hell kinda name is that?"
He looked as if he wasn't sure how to answer. "You can call me Ax. It is my nickname. Nick. Name. Ick. A-a-a-m-m-m-m-MA"
"I'll call you Crazy! Marco, who the fuck are you guys?"
"We're the guys that saved your hide." Marco said very strongly. The look in his eyes was definite. I had total misjudged him. He was not the idiot I had marked him for. I also got the impression that he did not like me very much.
"We're at the bus stop." Jake said. "When you get on David, don't talk."
"Fuck you. Who are you to tell me what to do?"
"David, it would be best if you didn't talk about what happened where others can hear." Cassie said, putting a reassuring hand on me. I shrugged it off. She looked at me with eyes that, unlike the others, showed genuine care and worry. Those eyes. Goddamn.
I kept my mouth shut while I rode the bus to Cassie's house. Cassie was with me. The others did not get on. Cassie made attempts to make small talk, but I remained silent and stonefaced. When Cassie and I got off, she led me to her barn. The others were already waiting for me.
"How, the fuck, . . . . did you . . . ?" I stammered. I mean they fucking quantum leaped or something.
"You should sit down." Rachel said as she pushed me down on a bale of hay. Rachel and Marco stayed at either side. Jake, Cassie, and the boy named Ax were in front of me.
"Do you guys know about what happened to me?" I asked.
"Yeah. We do." Jake said. "You and your family have become casualties of the invasion."
"What invasion?"
"An Alien invasion."
Aliens, huh? Like the Motaros and the Wild Things. "Who were they?"
"They are called Yeerks. They are a parasitic race from another planet. They are not much more than gray slugs, really. But they enter your brain and reduce you to slavery. Those big, seven-foot-tall creatures that were in you house?" The Wild Things. "Those are Hork-Bajir. They have a Yeerk in their brains. An entire species already enslaved by the Yeerks."
"And now they're after the human race." Cassie said. "There are thousands of humans who've been made into Controllers. That's what you call a creature who's controlled by a Yeerk."
"My brother is one." Jake said.
"And by now, David, so are your mother and your father." Marco said suddenly. What, the fuck, was he talking about? I glanced at the others. Jake and Cassie weren't too happy about what Marco said, either. Rachel and Axem-whatever looked indifferent.
"He needs to know what's happening. He needs to know this isn't just some game?"
I turned toward him. "What about my mom and dad?"
"Look, it's all about that blue box you found. The Yeerks want it. The guy who turned into the big purple pile driver?" The Motaro/Dule Fansa. "That's Visser Three. He's the leader for the Yeerks her on Earth. He's running the invasion, okay? As you may have noticed, he wants the box. And he allowed your father, and your mom, too, I guess, to see the truth. To see him. And that's a no-no. The Yeerks don't want people knowing what's happening, not yet. So he's going to keep your mom and dad quiet. Plus, he's going to find out what they know about the box."
"Are you saying he'll torture them or something?"
"Man, listen to me. By now your parents have been taken to a secret, underground facility called a Yeerk pool. It's not a nice place. Picture a sludgy cesspool of a pond the color of molten lead. There are two steel piers leading out over the pond. Hork-Bajir warriors will drag your parents out to end of one of those piers. They will-"
"Marco!" Cassie said angrily. Apparently she wasn't the only one opposed to Marco's method of laying it on so fucking thick I can't fucking breathe.
"They will drag them out to the end of that pier and they will kick their legs out from under them and force their heads down into the sludge. And while they are kicking and screaming and calling for help, a Yeerk slug will swim over and it will squeeze into one ear. And it will flatten itself out and squeeze and burrow and dig its way into their brains. And the Hork-Bajir will yank them up out of the sludge, and they will start to feel that they cannot control their own arms or legs. Cannot open their own mouths or move their own eyes. The Yeerk will open their memories like a person opening a book. They will be slaves. The most total slaves in all of history because even their own minds won't be theirs anymore. Are you getting the picture?"
Yeah, I got the fucking picture! I felt like crying, but hell if I was going to do that. The big speech seemed to wear Marco out.
"My mom is one." He said flatly. "She's a controller."
"There's a lot to tell you, David, but Marco's right." Jake said. "You need to know this isn't a game. This is life and death. This is the future of the whole human race. It's too late to help your parents. And as of now, you have no home and you can't go back to school. You do, they'll find you. And it'll be you taking that long walk down the steel pier."
No life? Not like I had much of a life to begin with. It was destroyed last February when Dad announced we had to move. Still the few pieces I had left had now been snatched away from me. My parents, aliens in their heads. My pets? Who knows? I'll never see any of them again. My parents, my aunts and uncles. My cousins.
Oh shit.
I'll never see Stephanie again either.
FUCK!!
"This is stupid!" I decided to say. Taking me away from school is nothing. My parents is another thing. And Steph? To never see her again? I don't think I could handle that. God, I was so stupid! Why hadn't I called her??!!!! E-mailed??!! Something??!! She'll think I fucking forgot her!!! "I mean . . . it's not right. Can't be. This is all some kind of trick."
"You saw what went down at your house." Rachel said.
"That could have been guys dressed up in costumes." Yeah, like I fucking believed that.
"You saw Visser Three morph." Cassie said.
"What's a Kisser Three?"
"Visser Three. With a 'v'" Jake corrected. "The one who looked like a deer with a scorpion tail." The Motaro. "You saw him morph into that purple pile-driver monster." The Dule Fansa, he called it.
Still. "It's all a trick." I said stubbornly.
"Ax." Jake said to the pretty boy with the ridiculous name. "Demorph."
The Pretty boy nodded his head. "I would be glad to. It is very disturbing being without my tail. Diss-ter-BING." Tail?
"David," Jake said to me, "watch Ax. Watch him closely."
I looked and the pretty boy started to change. His bare feet started to turn more like hooves. His arms started to thin. His hands grew more fingers. His lips disappeared. Hoofed legs appeared out of his torso.
I admit it. I freaked. I believe my exact words were: "Aaaaaahhh! Aaaaaahhh!". I screamed and tried to run out the door, but the blonde, Rachel, grabbed me.
"It's okay, you'll get used to it." She said. Get used to what? Dudes turning into monsters?? Was he one of those shape-shifting aliens? One of the aliens was pretending to be Spawn. The tiger and the bear were probably aliens too. Are Marco and his friends actually shape-shifting aliens?
That's when I finally got a hold of my senses long enough to notice something. The boy named Ax was turning into something resembling a centaur with a scorpion tail. Blue and tan fur. No mouth. Stalk eyes.
The smaller Motaro! Fucking Shit!
"See?" Jake said. "No trick. This is Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill. We call him 'Ax' for short. He's an Andalite. The Andalites are the good guys of the galaxy."
"Mostly, anyway." Marco interjected.
"Visser Three, who you saw in your room, has an Andalite body, but he's a Yeerk underneath it all. He has stolen and enslaved an Andalite."
I'm pretty sure I was shaking. I mean, this was too much. Shape-shifters called Andalites. Brain-stealing slugs called Yeerks. How were Marco and the others involved? Jake and Marco didn't talk as if they were Andalites. Especially not after Marco's snide comment about Andalites being the good guys. They were humans, at least the Jake and Marco were. Cassie, also. That was definitely human emotion I saw through those eyes. Rachel's probably human too, but I wasn't too sure about her.
"There is one nice thing about all this." Cassie said. "There is a nice compensation for all the danger and all the fear."
What? What could possibly be a "nice compensation" to this Sci-fi/Horror flick I've landed in?
"You know the wild animals who were fighting the Yeerks today? You know the birds who tried to steal the blue box before that? Us. That was us." Marco said. THEM??? Marco the Babbling Idiot and his three psycho friends are the shape-shifters???? It occurs to me then that he was probably the one who was pretending to be Spawn. Fucking Yes, way!-idiot. Marco continued. "See, Visser Three and Ax aren't the only one ones who can morph. So can we, and now that we have this, so can you." He was referring to my blue box. That's what it does? Turns people into shape-shifters?
"Any animal you can touch, you can become," Cassie said. "A dolphin, a skunk, a wolf."
"An elephant or a grizzly bear." Rachel added.
"A gorilla. A shark." Marco added.
"A tiger, a fly, a cockroach." Jake said. "Any animal. Any size. But only for two hours at a time. You can never stay in morph for more than two hours."
I couldn't help but ask. "Why?"
"Meet the final member of the Animorphs." Marco said. Animorphs? Is that what they called themselves? "David, my man, meet Tobias."
Tobias was a bird. "He's a bird." I muttered intelligently. Kind of like the hawk that came through my window, (which I now know was one of these Animorphs. Probably Marco.), but different. Brown feathers, not gray, and a red tail. Duh, a red-tailed hawk. I had to do a paper on them in my last school, but why did they give a bird the power to morph? Wait, weren't they saying about a warning? I could practically feel the wheels in my head turning. "He was trapped in this form."
Bright Boy said the hawk. But I have the power to morph again. A gift from our buddy the Ellimist.
"Ellimist?"
"That's another long story." Marco said to me.
I ended up staying the night at Marco's house. He gave me the use of his bed for the night. He slept on an air mattress. He fell asleep quickly. I couldn't sleep even if I wanted too. I knew that this was not going to last. That this was probably my last night in a real bed. God knows what they were going to do with me. They way they were talking it was as if they were debriefing me for some fucking war. I was no fucking soldier. When I was twelve, my father put me in a summer boot camp. After the second week of having Sergeant Bad-Breath telling me to do shitty exercises and yelling in my "insubordinate" face, I lost my temper and kneed him in the balls.
I was sent home.
That was when I decided I could never be military like my Dad. I stopped playing soldier after that. Now here I was. Getting ready to "play soldier" in a real war, unlike any war I had heard or read about. It was fucking nuts.
It couldn't be real. My father was fucking military. Intelligence, for Christ's sake. He would never let a slug into his brain! I had to call him. I got up and found the phone.
Marco had found me and stopped me before I could dial.
"Ever heard of Caller ID?" He said to me.
"I'm calling my mom and dad." I said strongly.
Marco nodded finally. "Okay, but not from here." He told me to get dressed. Once we were ready, Marco snuck us out.
"Come on." He said.
"Where, the hell, are we going?"
"You want to call home, fine. We'll call. But from a pay phone. And then you'll see what happens."
We walked to a pay-phone at a 7-eleven.
"Okay, now listen up." Marco said, obviously trying to mimic Jake's authoritativeness, and failing miserably. "We do this my way. You can call. Tell your parents you're all right. Don't tell them who you're with. Don't tell them where you are. Got it?"
Fuck you. I thought to myself, but I nodded anyway. Marco leaned against the wall and slung his arm over the top of the phone. Getting ready to kill the call probably.
I started to dial when he grabbed me again. "Before you do that, let me tell you exactly what's going to happen. Your mom and dad will sound totally normal. They'll tell you to come home. If you refuse, they'll ask where you are. Ask them what happened today at the house. Just that."
I finished dialing. After the second ring, someone picked up. "Hello?" My dad.
"Hello? Dad? It's me. It's me."
"David?!! Jesus, where are you, son?? Your mother and I are worried sick. Are you okay?"
"No, I'm not okay, I'm scared."
"Okay, okay. Just calm down, son. Tell us where you are and we'll come get you."
Marco silently mouthed the words "ask him."
"Dad, what happened? I mean, those were aliens and all."
My father gave a slight chuckle. "David, don't worry about that. It was all some hoax played by my new colleagues. A sort of hazing." I echoed it back for Marco's sake. Hoax, my ass! I looked at Marco and he seemed to mirror my sentiment.
"Dad, I saw that one alien turn into something else. That was real."
"Son, I told you not to worry about it. Now, if this is about me grounding you, I'm sure we can discuss that. I bet you probably had a good reason to cut class. Now come home, son. It isn't safe out there." Good reason?? Was he fucking kidding me???
"I'm okay." I began to say. "I'm--" Click! Marco cut the call.
"What the fuck, you think you're doing??" I yelled. I was talking to my father God damnit!
He grabbed my sleeve. "Come on. That's time enough."
I shook him off. "Step off, Marco, you don't tell me what to do."
"Listen, you idiot, in about two minutes a couple carloads of Yeerks are going to come screaming up looking for you. They'll trace the call."
"My dad wouldn't do that."
"No? Come with me. We can watch. We can see what happens." Marco said as he dragged me across the street into a dark alleyway. We slunk back in the shadows. About a minute and a half later. Two jeeps came with about four or five normal looking people.
"See?" Marco said self-righteously
"That doesn't prove anything." I shot back.
Then came a car I recognized. Dad's Ford Tauros. Quality American Machinery. My mother and father came out. My father had a bandage over his right hand. Ax did that. Bastard alien. Dad started to hand out some photographs.
"Your picture." Marco so-necessarily-explained to me.
"They're guys from my dad's work." I said firmly, even though I myself was half-speculating half-hoping. "Other spies, like him."
"What exactly does your dad do for a living?"
"He works for the National Security Agency. So, see, he would be able to trace the call, and he'd have his work buds with him. He's just looking for me, that's all."
My father came across the street with a few of his work buds.
"If we don't find that kid," my father started. "Visser Three will make us wish we were dead."
I felt like I had been hit with a fucking truck. It was true. It was all fucking true!! My father, my mother. They were each one of them! For the second time today I felt like throwing up, and it's been a while since I last ate.
My father started to come toward us.
"He's coming this way. He'll see us." I was able to sputter.
No, he won't said Marco. That's when I heard the sound of something large running. I looked out to see and it was a rhinoceros. The Rhino started to rough up my dad and his friends.
That would be Jake. Marco said. I turned and realized I was talking to a gorilla. He and the others have been taking turns watching my house in case there was any trouble. They followed us. So Marco could turn into a gorilla and Jake could turn into rhinoceros. So who were the bear and tiger?
I had decided I had seen enough. I sulked back into the shadows. I heard some shuffling, yelling, but I stayed behind the shadows.
My life was over.
No school, which is not such a bad thing.
No mall, no movies, no TV.
No home. No family.
No Steph.
I was a soldier now. A warrior. But what was I fighting for?
I felt the shadow of a gorilla loom over me. Seen enough?
No family.
No Steph.