Chapter 24

I noticed my friends were all demorphing as I started my own morph. They were getting close to the time limit, and now that the Yeerk was in Erek's capable hands, they must have felt the danger was past.

As I shrank, I felt my feathers blend together. I felt my bones go soft. I fell to the ground, limp, probably looking like a nightmarish, short-necked version of a rubber chicken.

My senses seemed to shut off, one by one. My eyesight went dim before it disappeared altogether. My sense of smell, which is keen but usually unnecessary because of my awesome eyesight, went next. Something like smell replaced it, but it's impossible to describe how that worked. My hearing didn't so much disappear as change – I automatically started translating the vibrations against my moistening skin much the way an animal with ears does with an eardrum. The last thing I clearly heard as an Earth animal was Rachel and Marco going back and forth.

"Don't do it, Marco. I can see that look on your face. If you make one single joke, I swear to God I'll punch you straight in the nose. Try me."

"Jeez, I wasn't gonna," Marco protested, using the indignant voice he used when somebody called him out on something he definitely was about to do.

I would have laughed, but there was nothing funny about the helpless feeling that was settling over me as I finished the changes. There were a few muted instincts – one of them was wanting to get somewhere wet – but other than that, nothing. Being a Yeerk was like being knocked out, or in a deep sleep. I saw images in my mind, but they were all made of memories – my memories. The Yeerk I'd morphed was just a body created from DNA, and it had no memories of its own.

I felt pressure, then movement. (It is only I, Tobias,) Ax said. (I am transferring you to our captive. Do you…will your current body know what to do?)

I could hear that he was trying with all of his control not to sound disgusted by what I was. By my "current body." (I don't know – I guess so. I'm not getting much in the way of instincts, here.)

Just when I said that, I started to feel something. Vibrations, maybe. No, that wasn't quite right…popping? Crackling? That was it – it felt like the crackling of static electricity against your skin right before a really bad thunderstorm. An extension I hadn't known was a part of me extended away from my body, toward the buzzing, popping sensation. I realized with a shock that I was sensing the actual electricity from our prisoner's brain activity. I had always wondered how the Yeerks found their way into their hosts – now I guess I knew.

Almost unconsciously, I started contracting and squirming, heading toward the electricity. Things got in my way, but little tiny extrusions from my body pushed and tugged and secreted something. Before I knew it, I was a part of the electricity.

As I merged with the buzzing thing beneath me, previously unused parts of my Yeerk brain began to…I don't know, fill up. It's like when you turn on an old fluorescent light bulb, and parts of it light up in sequence. Parts of the Yeerk's consciousness, previously unused, were lighting up.

Sight! Pow! Even though I'd only been without it for maybe two minutes, its return was glorious.

Smell – real smell! I could taste the very air! Slowly, even though the sudden return of senses threatened to disarm me, I remembered what I was doing. And, tentatively, I tried to open communication with the brain I currently controlled.

I was shocked at what I found. The mind I touched was cold, so very cold. It watched me with no emotion whatsoever. Well, almost no emotion – I felt disappointment, but also an apathy behind it. Instinctively, I followed the course of that emotion to get to the root of it, and what I saw made me sick – metaphorically, of course.

The jig was up, and this guy knew it. He knew that I knew what he was, and that he wouldn't be allowed to continue what he thought of as "playtime." Don't let that childish word fool you – that's just what he called it.

The man – Arnold Underwood, I noted his name with little interest – was an animal. Actually, he wasn't – I just couldn't think of another word for what he was at the time. What had the Yeerk called him? 'A beast – a loveless beast.' Yeah, that description was extremely accurate.

He was a lawyer – a defense attorney, ironically. He was smart and good at his job. He made a lot of money and had a lot of powerful friends, which was what drew the Yeerks to him in the first place. All of that – his career and social life, what would be the central point of any normal person's life - was so dim in comparison to what this man called playtime. He lived for his playtime, which was simply murder.

He spent every single bit of his free time planning and carrying out his horrible crimes. He was smart, like I said, which was how he hadn't been caught yet. And he had never been so bold as to stab girls and leave them where they would be found – he took care of his victims in other ways.

I flipped through his memories the way a person watches a car accident – horrified, but also unable to stop myself from looking. I watched as he put a drop of pure nicotine into the coffee of his coworker's secretary. I hadn't known that concentrated nicotine was fatal, but Arnold Underwood knew it, so I knew it. I watched as he watched through a vent as she fell out of her desk and seized uncontrollably. I heard him saying little, blasphemous prayers to himself that no one would discover her until it was too late.

I watched as he pushed a little boy in front of a city bus.

I saw him lean over the partition of a bathroom stall, where a man was doing his business, and watched him hit the poor, unsuspecting guy in the head with a hammer.

I saw him strangle a cab driver on a dark, deserted street, and then step out of the cab and walk calmly away like nothing had happened.

I finally slammed the book of his memory shut when I saw him drop a few pellets of rat poison into a baby bottle in the refrigerator of an acquaintance's house. Young, old, male, female, black, white – when it came to "playtime," Arnold Underwood did not discriminate.

'What is wrong with you!' I screamed at the man, unable to stop myself. 'What in God's name is your malfunction!'

His only reply, the only thing he said to me the entire time I controlled him, was this: 'God's name? There is no God.'

I almost believed him. I detached from his brain, yelling wordlessly in pure outrage and horror. Yelling to no one in particular and everyone at once. How, how, how? If there was a God, how could this…thing…exist?

I needed to get out, and I needed out now.

I barely even realized it when my eyesight returned. I didn't even care. I just wanted wings – at that moment, I would have given absolutely anything for my wings. Absolutely anything to get away from the monster whom I had just been inside.

Like any other sane human, I had just experienced something beyond horrible, and I just wanted out of there.