They all demorphed in the shadow of an empty building, in a parking lot across the street from their ultimate destination. Seeing the building in front of her, so normal looking but somehow eerie in spite of that, Rachel resisted the urge to shudder. There was something decidedly wrong about that building; nothing anyone would really be able to see, but after all her time as an Animorph, she knew better than most that what you saw wasn't always the only thing there.
"So that's the nuthouse," Marco said, and there was a definite note of satisfaction in his voice; Rachel suspected that she knew why. "I always figured I'd end up here, sooner or later."
"I don't think you're the only one," Shara responded, even as Marco winked at her.
Looking over at the other girl, Rachel found that she looked just slightly morose, staring at the building in front of her as if it held some kind of great, deep secret. Or just like she was thinking deeply about something. Rachel didn't really know which, but she figured that Shara could look after herself.
Cassie's sigh drew Rachel out of her thoughts. "I don't think the patients really like to be called nuts."
"Of course not," Rachel agreed. "They'd have to be nuts to want to be called nuts." Macro gave her a discreet low-five where none of the others were likely to be able to see it.
(Cassie's right,) Tobias put in. (It's not politically correct to call nuts nuts.)
"You know, you're right," Shara said, with a mock-considering look on her face. "We should probably be calling them the 'differently sane' or something."
"You know," Cassie said, wearing the same expression. "I could swear you were talking to that hawk just now. I must be differently sane."
All of them, with the obvious exception of Slade, laughed at that one. even Jake, who was trying, with his typical lack of success, to get the group to calm down and take what they were doing seriously.
They were standing across the street from the Rupert J. Kirk State Mental Heath Facility. It was a fairly nice-looking place: made of red brick, with an ornamental fountain and several lawn chairs sitting out in the neatly manicured front yard, along with several shade trees scattered about. It would have looked like a completely normal, even pleasant, place to be, save for the chain-link fence that surrounded it; the chain-link fence topped with coils of barbed wire. That, combined with the heavy, wire mesh in the windows, told the Animorphs that this was not a place where anyone was staying voluntarily.
Still, the building looked nice enough; for the most part.
"Who else has the willies?" Cassie wondered aloud.
Beside her, Rachel saw Shara raising her hand, as well. So that made two of them.
"What are willies?" Ax asked, a look of confusion on his human-morph's face.
(A vague, creepy feeling,) Tobias elucidated. (The subtle, unsettling sense that something you can't quite see is desperately wrong.)
"Pretty much the feeling I got when we walked over the top of the Radam's concealed base," Shara said, her tone flat and her eyes fixed on the building they were all observing; though Rachel would have been willing to bet good money that she wasn't actually seeing it.
Marco, who looked like he'd been about to say something, turned to look over at Shara instead. Before anyone else could say anything, though, Jake jerked his head to indicate that they should all be moving along. Rachel shook Shara's shoulder briefly, catching the other girl's attention and getting a brief, grateful smile in return. Together, the eight of them made their way closer to the facility that they had all been observing.
Rachel could have sworn that the sky briefly darkened, almost as if the sun had passed behind a cloud, the moment they all made it there. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted Tobias flitting from tree to tree as he paced them, and Rachel felt a bit better about the situation.
"It looks easy enough to bust in," Jake observed, after a moment spent taking in the meager security measures that had been pun in place to guard the mental facility. "A fence, a door, no big deal. Not like the Fenestre mansion or the Yeerk Pool. Easy."
"So, there's no chance of you needing my brother in full armor to ride you in rhino morph this time?" Shara asked, a slight smirk on her face as she turned a sidelong look on Jake.
"No, I don't think there is," Jake said, echoing Shara's semi-amused tone.
"Yeah," she said, drawing all of their attention back to the mission at hand. "So, we get in, we find this George Edelman guy and try to figure out what he knows about the Yeerks. Then we leave Marco behind and get out."
Slade gave her a weird look for that one, well, him and Ax, but since neither of them had really seemed to get humor most of the time, Rachel didn't pay them much attention. Jake's raised eyebrow, on the other hand, did catch her eye.
"Okay, I think we just might have to put a limit on the number of nut jokes. This is serious."
Marco made a dismissive noise. "Nah. This isn't serious."
"You're right, Sirius is somewhere over that way," Shara said, pointing up to the sky. "This is probably Bernard's star, or something." No one laughed, so Shara folded her arms and gave a subdued sort of chuckle. "I guess no one gets the astronomy jokes."
"That was a joke?" Jake asked, raising both eyebrows this time.
"Wordplay, I guess you'd call it," she said, shrugging. "Anyway, it's not really important."
"Right," Rachel said, nodding. "We need to find an open window, or something."
Easier said than done, it seemed: there were a lot of windows on the building, probably to make the place seem less confining than it otherwise would be, but they were all made of thick glass with heavy, wire mesh covering them. Likely on both sides, but they weren't quite close enough to make out those kinds of details. They weren't going to get that close, either; it was enough of a risk just having seven of the eight of them visible like this, without making it obvious just what they were all so focused on.
"We can't hurt anyone," Jake said, drawing the attention of everyone in the group again. "No fighting. Those are all innocent people in there. We can't take the risk that they might be injured in a battle. It's too far to travel in fly or cockroach morph and still have any real time to search," he continued, seeming to just be thinking out loud now. "Hmm... Maybe it's not so easy, after all."
Just then, as Jake was trying to think up a method to get them all safely inside the mental institution so that they could speak to Edelman, a delivery truck drove up the long, curving driveway, heading toward the far side of the building.
"Was that a food truck?" Jake wondered aloud, as it passed out of their line-of-sight. "Tobias? Can you go take a look?"
The hawk flapped away without a word, returning in under a minute. (It's delivering some kind of food. The truck itself looks pretty big, and it's dark in the back.)
Jake nodded with a certain degree of finality. "Okay, I don't think more than three of us should go. There's probably not that much room in the truck, anyway. We morph to bird, fly into the truck, demorph, and then morph to cockroach. We'll hide in some of the food, so they can carry us right in. Rachel, Shara, since you were the most involved with this guy, you're in. I'll go with you, for backup in case either of you need it," he gave a mildly sardonic look at Shara. "I mean, if you don't need to blow up a building, or kill a bunch of sharks, or something." Jake sobered quickly, continuing to outline the plan. "Tobias doesn't have a useful morph for these kinds of situations, and Ax is way too obvious when he demorphs to be of any help right now."
She wanted to ask just how it was that she and Shara had ended up being volunteered for this mission, though it wasn't like she wouldn't have volunteered if she'd been given then chance, but the three of them were moving out before she had a chance to. It took them maybe about twenty minutes to find a good place to morph into their seagull shapes. But, when they did, she and Jake found that place, they were confronted with a new problem.
"You mean, you couldn't find even one injured seagull in Cassie's barn?" she asked, raising an eyebrow at the other girl.
"Well, I didn't really know I was supposed to be looking," Shara said, with a wry sort of smile. "But, if I'd seen a seagull in the barn, I definitely would have noticed it. It's not very common to find them so far away from the water."
"All right," Jake said, decisive again though he didn't sound particularly enthusiastic about it. "We'll try to get you a seagull morph as soon as we can. You and Slade," he amended, after a slight pause. "For now, though, you need to find something to morph that's not as conspicuous as your usual flying morph." Jake fell silent again, clearly thinking about what they could do next. "Could you call Tobias? Ask him to get you a pigeon?"
"I could do that," Shara said, then closed her eyes. The weird, rosy-pink glow that Rachel had only seen in the other girl's eyes when it was dark shined right through the other girl's eyelids for a moment, then it was gone and Shara opened them again. "He says he'll be right here, though he didn't sound too happy about being sent out for a pigeon."
"Yeah," she said, with a chuckle. "He's not really fond of pigeons. Or most other birds, for that matter. Sounds like they're a bunch of jerks, anyway."
Shara chuckled, just as Tobias himself swept in low over their heads.
(Here, catch this,) he said, dropping the pigeon he'd been holding right into Shara's hands.
Said hands clamped around the body of the pigeon like a vise, pinning its wings to its sides in a way that Rachel couldn't help but think that Cassie wouldn't approve of if she'd been there to see it. The pigeon kicked and struggled a bit, but quickly went limp as Shara began to acquire it. Releasing the bird once she had taken care of that crucial part, the three of them morphed into their various secondary bird forms.
The Dumpster just a bit behind and to the side of them, empty though it was, provided a bit of a distraction to the minds of the seagull that she and Jake had morphed, but for some reason Shara didn't seem to be affected by it. Come to think of it, she and Slade never seem to be affected by any of their morphs. Not even when they first use them, like Shara's doing right now.
She wondered for a few seconds just why that was, then quickly decided that she would ask Shara herself when all of them had finished with this mission. Now wasn't really the time for those kinds of questions. Flapping her way into the air, pacing Jake and Shara as they all spiraled higher into the air so they would have the maximum speed for the dive they were going to make into the back of the delivery truck, Rachel noticed Cassie and Marco gathering up the clothes that the three of them had left behind. She was glad to see it, since she hadn't been particularly eager to have her and Shara's outfits laying out where anyone could just grab them up.
She knew it was probably a silly thing to think of, especially at a time like this, but that was the way she felt; she'd spent good money on those outfits, after all.
(We need to time this right,) Jake said, drawing her attention back to what they'd all came here for in the first place. (I don't want to be a seagull trapped inside a truck.)
(Yes, that would be bad for security, as Marco might say,) Shara said, sounding like she was trying to lighten the mood a bit; Rachel smiled inwardly. (One... two... three...)
(How about right now?) she said, folding her wings in for a dive.