The sound of the ambulance sirens was the first thing I was aware of. They sounded impossibly loud, and getting louder by the moment. As if the ambulance's intent was to come and run me over. Just when it couldn't get any louder, the sound stopped, replaced by the sound of doors opening and slamming. Feet moving.
"How long has he been unconscious?" an adult male voice asked, concern evident in his voice.
"About twenty minutes," a youthful reply assured him, trying to sound more confident than he was.
There was a touch on my leg, and although I didn't feel much pain, I involuntarily gasped. "Definitely broken," a third voice, female, contributed. "And it looks like he has a mild concussion, too." I felt my body being lifted off the ground and moved to one side.
"Do you want to ride with him?" the female asked kindly. I didn't hear a verbal reply as I was again treated to the sensation of rising from the ground, though this time no one was grabbing onto me. I must have been placed on a platform of some kind. Some dim part of my mind started to realize that it was probably a stretcher, and that I was probably being placed into the back of the ambulance.
The siren started up again, though this time it didn't seem so bad, and I felt the sensations that I instantly recognized as being in a moving vehicle. With this realization, I started to wonder: had the youth decided to go with me? Was his voice… familiar, somehow?
My eyes opened. The ceiling of the ambulance greeted me, a horrible puke-green color with a dangling IV tube on one side. I tried to move my eyes left, to see if anyone was with me, but they wouldn't respond. I tried to move my fingers and toes, but they wouldn't respond either. For a blissful moment, I entertained the thought that whatever accident I'd been in had paralyzed me. But then I felt the youth's hand clutch mine, and I felt my own hand squeeze back, and I remembered exactly where my paralysis had come from. And how long I had lived with it.
"Eric," my mouth weakly murmured.
A patch of Eric's dirty blonde hair drifted into my vision as he leaned inward, whispering into my ear. "Just relax, Chris," he stated, his tone firm but gentle. "We're on our way to a hospital now. They'll be able to do something... about your leg, /and/ about the Yeerk in your head."
My head shook back and forth. "It's out," my voice declared. "I think it died when I hit the ground."
Eric pulled his face back to make eye contact with me, and rolled his eyes. "If you seriously expect me to believe that, Yeerk, then it's amazing you were ever able to fool anyone."
Orkath, my Yeerk, turned my head to look at the ambulance driver. He was watching the road, of course, and chatting with his colleague, but I could make out the name on his license, which hung prominently to one side of the dash. James Loper. Somehow, that name seemed familiar to me.
Glancing back at Eric, I felt a wave of cocky arrogance from my Yeerk. «He /is/ a stubborn fellow, isn't he?»
«He's smart,» I replied, uneasy that my Yeerk didn't feel beaten, but feeling confident about the situation anyway. Just the thought that a few hours from now, I could be free! «And he's not going to believe he's saved me... or stop trying... until he sees you crawl out of my head. Looks like your days are numbered.»
Orkath didn't bother replying to me, instead focusing on Eric. "I fooled you for awhile," he goaded.
Eric only shrugged. He was trying to stay tough, but he looked a little hurt. "So what was the plan, exactly? Get me to fall for you, then convince me to join the Sharing and put one of your friends in my head?"
I felt my mouth curve into a grim smile. "That's about the gist of it," Orkath admitted. "You'll get used to it. Chris has been my host for a year now." I was shocked. Had it been a year? Had I really been out of control of my life for a whole year?
Eric seemed to think about that for a minute. "So then... I never met Chris. Not /really/."
«Oh no!» I cried. «Please, you have to tell him I love him! Don't let him think he doesn't know me!» I pleaded with my Yeerk, begged. But something serious had changed in him, after the Governor's announcement. He merely took my anguish as a badge of pride.
"I've acted mostly like him," the Yeerk replied. "I've needed to, to keep from arousing suspicion amongst his family and friends. So in a way, you've met him."
At this point, I could see Eric's curiosity overriding his nervousness, his hurt, even his anger. I couldn't blame him. There was a time when I would have given anything to talk to a real alien. But I could feel nervous for him, and worry about him letting his guard down. Those things, I definitely did do. Especially when it occurred to me - the Yeerk must have been in some real pain, with my broken leg. Why hadn't he morphed and repaired it yet?
"Can he see and hear me?" Eric asked. "The real Chris, I mean?"
My head nodded slightly. "Yes," he replied, a sneer on his face. "In fact, even now he's wondering why I haven't used my morphing powers to fix my leg."
Eric missed the impact of that statement. "Morphing..." he repeated. "That's when you turned into that monster, right?"
"Hork-Bajir," Orkath corrected. "They come from a different planet, one we took over before we came to this one."
"Is that some ability Yeerks have?"
My smile grew. "It is now," Orkath noted pridefully.
Eric was about to say something else, but suddenly the inside of the ambulance became dark. Apparently it had entered a tunnel of some kind, and light was no longer coming in through the back windows. As soon as the darkness enveloped us, I could feel my body beginning to shrink. I couldn't see the changes, but I could feel the feather impressions and sharp talons I had come to associate with my golden eagle morph.
"There's no tunnel on the way to the hospital," Eric complained, and it was then that I remembered very clearly where I'd heard the name James Loper before. At an awards ceremony held by the Sharing.
James Loper was a human-Controller.
«Don't worry,» Orkath said to Eric, now using thought-speech as we finished the change to hawk. «It won't hurt. Much. You'll rather enjoy it, I think. And I'll make sure you get to spend all the time with Chris that you want. In the cages.» Injury healed, he began the return trip towards my natural, human form.
Eric started to ram his body up against the back of the ambulance, but the doors had been locked and the handles on the inside were secured. He looked panicked, but still managed to retain some composure until the ambulance emerged into the Yeerk Pool complex and he could see out the windows; then, panic gave way to sheer hysteria.
"Nooo! You're not taking me! You're not taking me!" Eric cried, but his protests were useless. The ambulance came to a halt, and Martin, along with a Hork-Bajir-Controller, was there to receive the Yeerks' new prisoner.
My own screams echoed Eric's. «You can't do this to him! What about the partnership! What about being in the closet! What about liking it all in secret!»
Orkath's feelings were still very clear to me. He was upset about something. Hurt. But in his best sarcastic tone, he replied, «I was... how do you humans put it? Ah yes. 'Going through a phase.'»
Orkath stepped out of the ambulance, moving forward to the infestation pier. He kept my eyes riveted on the spot, and enjoyed my torment as I watched Eric's head jammed into the pool's sludgy water, and saw the tip of the Yeerk slug as it crawled it's way into his ear.
Eric was a Controller now. Just like me.
Just like me.