That night's patrol was uneventful - we scoped an area about three miles in all directions from the center of the Yeerk pool complex. Wherever the rebels were hiding, they were keeping their distance.
«Let's call it a night,» Tom's Yeerk finally declared after we were getting dangerously close to our two-hour time limit. «Tomorrow after school report to the cafeteria for sweeping duty.»
«I can't go tomorrow,» my Yeerk announced.
«He's got a daaaaaaaaaaaaaate,» Jason's Yeerk taunted, exactly the way Jason probably would have if he'd been able. His peregrine falcon did a couple of loops around my and Tom's golden eagles.
«Settle down,» Tom ordered. «Everybody dismissed.» The abnormal flock of birds-of-prey scattered, by incident, according to species. Rob and Jason's falcons flipped around and headed towards their homes on the south end of town. Ulie went off alone to the west, while Tom, Eileen and I banked east.
«See you at the pool tonight?» Tom asked me, flapping hard to get a little more altitude.
«Yup,» my Yeerk replied. «I'll be there as soon as my host family's convinced that I turned in for the night.»
Tom's Yeerk chuckled. «Some very unfond memories of having to go through that. Glad to be done with it.»
We flew on in silence for awhile. Being all the way on the west side of town, we had the longest trip to get back home. My Yeerk started doing what he always does when he's bored - rifling through my memories to see if there's some truly funny or insightful moment that he missed. Inevitably, he always stopped at the same one, and I was already cringing in my mind at the thought of having to relive it yet again...
The bear was coming for us. It was HUGE! Long, sharp black claws on the end of long, furry brown paws. Teeth roughly the size of my middle finger. A standing height of almost eight feet.
My cub scout uniform ripped against the side branch of a large oak tree. Ironically enough, my bear scout patch hung loosely from my now half-open shirt, then fell to the dirt and got trampled by my mud-caked Keds.
I didn't even slow down to feel the gash in my ribcage.
Next to me, just as out of breath as I was, was my fellow scout Craig. We were just innocently walking along on the edge of our campsite... oh, alright, might as well admit it, we were looking for a place to fool around without getting caught. We'd been making all those stupid eleven year old boy jokes about being in the "We-blows", one thing led to another... use your imagination.
It seemed almost certain at the time that God was punishing us for our indiscretion. First we'd gotten lost in the woods and then, after an hour of searching for the campsite, stumbled upon the bear's cave instead.
In my defense, Craig was the idiot who said it looked like a good place to get all touchy-feely together. I was just the idiot who followed him in.
"We're gonna die, we're gonna die, WE'RE GONNA DIE!!" Craig kept yelling, screaming in terror as he ran. As if to taunt him, the bear made sure to roar in response.
"Stop wasting breath!" I cried, picking up as much speed as my puny little boy legs would muster.
Know those chase scenes in the movies? How the hero and the villian are always engaged in those real high-endurance runs but it's only thirty seconds of clipped film, maybe focusing on one and then the other back and forth?
Well, real run-for-your-life chases aren't like that. Real chases can go on indefinitely. Ours probably only lasted about four minutes or so, but that was still four straight minutes of non-stop, sheer adrenaline. Finally, it was clear that we weren't going to get anywhere - this bear wanted us, and bad. I did the only thing I could think of to do.
I stopped running.
Craig kept going for a few seconds, but stopped and turned when he saw I wasn't next to him. "What're you doing?!" he screamed in frustration.
In truth, I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn't a brave person by any stretch of the imagination. I ran from bullies in school all the time. I had no idea why I was picking up an egg-sized rock from the ground and looking towards the bear, daring it to come closer.
"Just get out of here!" I yelled, waving a hand dismissively back in Craig's direction. "Go or we'll BOTH die!" After a moment's hesitation, he finally took off again.
The bear slowed as it loped into the area near me. It knew that one of it's prey had stopped, but it's weak eyesight couldn't pinpoint my exact location. So I threw the rock. Nailed it straight in the bear snout, which made it turn it's head straight at me.
It wobbled almost through me, ramming me forward with such force that I felt my body fly backwards into the tree behind me. The pain was throbbing all up and down my right side, but it felt more numb than sharp. I could tell I'd hit my head. I could feel my consciousness ebbing away at me, but as I passed into what I thought would be my final sleep, the fear had finally left me, because I knew that I had saved Craig, and that made my sacrifice worth it.
Suddenly I was awake and in the hospital. My older brother, about thirteen at the time, explaining to me that the bear had been tranquilized just as it was about to lunge at me again. That the scout leader had called a search party to look for me and Craig after we hadn't returned to camp. And that the search party was still out there, looking for Craig. He hadn't made it back.
End of memory. Back to the reality of the wind flapping beneath the wings of my morphed bird body. And the proverbial cold, whispered chills at remembering the terror I'd felt and the pain at knowing that my sacrifice had been in vain.
The Yeerk knew how I felt about the memory, but with his usual indifference he brushed aside my discomfort for the sake of his own sick impulses. I was never quite sure what it was - curiosity, perhaps? Pleasure at seeing me squirm? Something he was trying to understand?
He knew that I wondered, but he chose not to share his thoughts. He had that luxury. He could keep secrets while I could not. All I was privy to were his emotions, and those seemed almost completely alien to me. He wasn't feeling pleasure, but he didn't seem confused either. Just... thoughtful. Somber.
I returned my focus to what was visible from the golden eagle's acute eyes. It was aware of my house, below and to the left of us, maybe a few blocks away. The Yeerk brought the eagle into a dive and swooped down low, perching on my bedroom windowsill. "I" always kept it open partway, the fresh air particularly appealing to me. The Yeerk had no trouble ducking under the crack and getting into the room. We demorphed and he pulled out another set of my clothes and dressed me.
Just in time, too - he was just pulling the T-shirt over my head when my Mom entered from the hall with a basket of my laundry.
"Oh!" she yelped, startled. "When did you get home? I didn't even hear you come in."
My Yeerk made my mouth chuckle. "Geez, Mom, I've been here for awhile. Even did my homework."
My mother patted me on the head. "Such a good boy," she muttered, half to herself. I felt a surge of pride come from the Yeerk at her praise, and it made me angry. Her compliment was meant for me, not him. He had no right to take any joy in it.
«Nonsense,» the Yeerk said, detecting my thoughts as always. «She compliments me on the way I keep your room and the way I do your work in school. She approves of me. I bet she'd approve of me even if she knew I wasn't you.»
«You're dreaming, Yeerk. She would kill you for what you've done to me.»
I deliberately ran through one of my old fantasies, a dream I'd had when I was first caught. My Yeerk sitting at the dinner table, thinking everything is okay, when suddenly my family grabs him and tells him that they figured it out. They hold my head down on the table and, with the hose of a vacuum cleaner, vacuum the Yeerk straight out of my brain and then hug the heck out of me.
It was a stupid fantasy. It wasn't likely to come to pass. But the Yeerk always felt just the slightest twinge of discomfort when I imagined it, and I could enjoy that, at least.
To spite me, I heard the Yeerk say "I love you, Mom. I'm so glad you approve of me. I'd never want to do anything that didn't make you proud."
"Oh, honey," my Mom cooed, giving my body a long, affectionate squeeze whilst my Yeerk laughed smugly at me. "You know I'll always love you. No matter what."
Another fantasy popped into my head, this one having nothing to do with the Yeerk. It was me, sitting with my mother on one side of me and Eric on the other. I was holding his hand in mine and telling my mother that we were boyfriends, that we planned on spending the rest of our young lives together. And my mom, filled with tears of joy that I could feel that way about another human being, repeating the words I'd just heard.
«I could tell her now,» my Yeerk said to me privately.
I exploded.
«You'd like that, wouldn't you, Yeerk! You'd like to see my mother turn against me, maybe even kick me out of the house! Would SERVE YOU RIGHT! Then, at least, they wouldn't have to deal with YOU and your SICK, TWISTED KIND anymore!»
I hadn't been paying attention to his emotions - if I had been I'd have realized that he wasn't taunting me, but instead sincerely offering to help me with something I was afraid to do. Worse, my words had stung him. I could feel that what I'd said had genuinely hurt the Yeerk.
But by the time I'd started to feel remorseful, he'd already started to be angry. «If they /did/ kick us out, it would be because YOU were the one that was disgusting to them, not me! It'd be no sweat to me. I'd be taken in by my brother Yeerks. /They/ don't abandon their own, unlike you drivelling humans. I'd be fine. Better than fine, because I wouldn't have to keep up this pathetic pretense of humanity anymore!»
His words had an effect on me, but I refused to let them sink in. If I didn't acknowledge it, I rationalized, he wouldn't be aware of it. I guess part of me believed it. But the truth is, I was just being prideful. I couldn't just let him slur my people like that, not after what I'd seen of Yeerk society. «"Brother" Yeerks?! HAH! You've got to be kidding me. Visser One practically incinerated every Yeerk in the pool last time Jake and the others had been there!»
«Did you humans not have "friendly fire" in your last war? The human rebels are a menace, a threat to the peaceful coexistence of Yeerk and human. People like them are the reason that we're going to have to take this planet forcefully.»
«Riiiight,» I sneered, «Because your /original/ plan was to go door to door and just /ask/ the humans, right?»
«We're /saintly/ compared to you humans. Do you know what it's like for me? When you - we - eat cows and lamb and fish, I feel the pain of knowing that they were once living, breathing creatures. That they had hearts, minds. Hopes and desires and fears. I feel all that, but I know that the creature had to be killed so that my host, /you, could live. And you want to talk to me about wrongdoing?»
"Honey, did you hear me?" my mom asked, looking at me with concern.
We both realized that we'd been staring blankly out at the world whilst we were arguing. By the time I saw my chance to grab for control of the body, though, the Yeerk was already using my mouth to say "Sorry, mom, I was just thinking about something. When's dinner?"
"Soon as you're ready to come down, honey. I'm about to take it out of the oven now." She still gave me that momentary look of worry before turning around and walking down the stairs.
My mom always worries when she thinks my life is going less than perfectly. I think it's just because she wants me to be happy. There was a time when she'd push, wanting to know what I was thinking and feeling. Wanting to help solve every problem, right every wrong in my life. It was a source of tension between us for a long time.
My Yeerk put a stop to that. He explained to her exactly what I'd been thinking and feeling - that much as I knew she loved me, she couldn't solve everything for me, and I had to deal with some of my problems on my own so that I could feel the pride of getting /past/ them on my own. He explained it exactly the way I would have, had my voice still been my own - or had I had the courage to do it before he came along. And he assured her that he'd always come to her if he felt like he couldn't hash it out on his own, and that he always valued her opinion.
I told myself that he'd only done it so that she wouldn't question his trips to the Yeerk pool or his activities at the Sharing or elsewhere. But it still made it all so incredibly clear - he was better at living my life than I was. He'd said what needed to be said to make my mom back off a little bit while still letting her know she was useful. When and if I'd ever gotten around to it, I'd probably have started a fight.
And tommorow night, he was going to take Eric out on "my" first date ever. And he was going to do /that/ better than I would have done it, too. I was useless.
Useless.
I could feel the Yeerk listening to my thoughts, absorbing my new beliefs about myself. Strangely, my feelings bothered him. He offered no words of comfort, though. He merely joked with my family over dinner, and put up with my big brother's abuse, and asked my mom how her day at work was, and helped her clear the dishes and wipe down the counters afterwards. And as he put the last plate away and said he was going to turn in for the night, and kissed my mom on the cheek and told her that my dad would be proud of her if he were alive, and she cried those tears of joy and gratitude at his pretentious affections, I watched and studied. Perhaps he lived my life better now. But someday, if by some chance I became a free person again, I was going to remember the things he said that made my family proud and happy. Someday, if I was lucky, I might get the chance to say them myself.
And I was going to mean them.
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Short part, I know. I was going to wait until the next one was done and post both, but this was posted by popular request. Thanks for those reviews so far, good to know I'm doing good!