The Capture Read online

  “Cassie, I was just —”

  “Uh-uh. No. Don’t tell me what you were just. Don’t ever do that again.”

  Tobias said, in the thought-speak that comes with being in a morph.

  I hung my head. “Okay, Cassie. Sorry.”

  Rachel whistled appreciatively. “It’s a new, tougher Cassie. I approve.”

  “I remember when she used to be so sweet,” Marco said. “I didn’t know her voice could even sound like that. Plus, look! She now comes with a kung fu grip.”

  Cassie ignored them. Instead she gave me a private look, just between the two of us. I knew what the look meant. It meant I care about you. Don’t be dumb.

  And the look I sent her meant I know; I care about you, too.

  Okay, I realize it sounds corny. But give me a break. We’d been through a lot, Cassie and I. And all of us. We’d grown pretty close.

  To me, Cassie is an amazing person. For one thing, she handles all kinds of responsibility. Her barn is actually the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic. Her parents are both veterinarians and her dad runs the clinic as a way to help injured wild animals. Everything from seagulls to skunks. And Cassie helps with all the work, except for doing surgery. But I’ll bet she could do that, too.

  As for how she looks, well, she’s very pretty. Kind of short. She only comes up to my chin, but then, I’m fairly tall. But she’s not one of those wimpy-looking short girls, you know? Not all prissy. She’s strong looking. Mostly, when I picture Cassie, I think of her wearing overalls and boots because of her working in the barn so much.

  I guess most guys would say Rachel is prettier. Personally, I don’t think of her that way because she’s my cousin. But Rachel does look like some kind of blond supermodel.

  Not that Rachel acts like Ms. Fashion. Just the opposite. If there’s danger, Rachel is right there. Usually a few steps ahead of anyone else.

  Marco says Rachel’s enjoying it all. That she’s actually glad about all that’s happened in our lives since that night when we saw the Andalites’ damaged spaceship land in the construction site. Marco refers to Rachel as Xena, Warrior Princess.

  But that’s Marco. For him, everything is a joke. Except for his family. Or what’s left of it.

  Marco is small, with dark eyes and dark, long brown hair. Cassie says a lot of the girls at school think he’s cute. I wouldn’t know.

  Most of the time Marco and I totally do not get along. He says I’m too serious. Personally, I think he’s just a little too immature sometimes.

  We disagree about everything. He actually tries to tell me that college hoops are better than the NBA. Yeah, right! Please. What are you going to do with a guy like that?

  We get on each other’s nerves a lot of the time.

  We’re also best friends and have been since we were babies. I would do almost anything for Marco, and he would do the same for me. Of course, he’d complain the whole time. Oh, man, can that guy complain when he wants to.

  The last member of our original group is Tobias. Tobias used to be this kind of sweet guy with wild blond hair. A dreamy sort of person with a really terrible home life.

  Used to be.

  I glanced up at him. He was perched on a rafter overhead. He was preening his wing feathers, carefully combing them out with his beak.

  It’s an amazing beak. It has a wicked, cruel-looking hook at the end — the better to tear open the mice and rats and other small animals he eats.

  Tobias is a red-tailed hawk. I guess maybe he will always be a red-tailed hawk.

  See, there’s one problem with morphing. A time limit of two hours. If you stay in morph more than two hours, you stay forever.

  Which is why Rachel asked me, “So? What’s the rest of the story? How did you get out of the Roach Motel before the time was up? I notice you are human again.”

  “More or less,” Marco added.

  I shrugged. “Well, I sat there for a while, trying to squirm out, but it didn’t work. I was stuck good. But it was okay, because as I sat there I realized I could start to make sense of some of the vibrations I was hearing. Some of it was sound. People speaking.”

  “What people?” Marco asked.

  “My parents. My dad twisted his ankle playing tennis, which is why they’d come home early. They were the ones who’d gone into my room, looking for the ACE bandage I have in my drawer. They were the ones who’d turned on the light. Anyway, what could I do? I wasn’t about to get stuck in roach morph. And I could tell my parents were up in their bedroom. So I demorphed.”

  Tobias asked in thought-speak.

  “Yeah. And it was very tight. But as I grew, I could push the refrigerator out an inch at a time. Still, I thought I was going to suffocate back there. And then, just as I was getting human again, my mom walks in.”

  That made them all lean forward.

  “What?” Cassie demanded. “Your mom? What did she see? What did she say?”

  “Well, all she could see was my head. It was normal, fortunately. And what she asked me was, ‘Jake? Why are you back there? And while we’re at it, why do you have the top of a Roach Motel stuck in your hair?’”

  Everyone got a good laugh out of that image.

  Marco was the first to stop laughing. He was looking at me kind of sideways. The way he does when he thinks I’m hiding something.

  “Very funny and all, Jake,” Marco said. “But you haven’t told us why you were morphing a roach. And don’t give me that ‘I was just trying it out’ routine.”

  I stopped laughing. Sooner or later I would have to tell them. I would have to tell them everything.

  “Okay. Look, I’ve learned something. For one thing, Tom is getting more important to the Yeerks. I think now he’s just below Chapman as a Controller.”

  Rachel gave a low whistle.

  Chapman is our assistant principal at school. He is also the most important Controller we know about in our town.

  “Tom is careful about not letting my parents or me overhear anything suspicious,” I said. “But he does make calls using our phone sometimes. I’ve been checking the calls when he’s done. So I know some of the people he’s calling.”

  Marco laughed. “Cool. Jake the superspy. Nice trick.”

  Tobias asked.

  “Doctors. Five different doctors. I looked them up in the phone book. They all practice at the same hospital. The same wing of the hospital, at something called the Berman Clinic. Berman is one of the doctors Tom calls.”

  It took a few minutes for the facts to sink in.

  “Wait a minute,” Rachel said. “Are you saying the Yeerks are running that hospital? Or at least a part of that hospital? Why would they want a hospital?”

  I hesitated before answering. I wasn’t sure my guess was right. Maybe I was just being paranoid. But Marco, who could teach a class in paranoia, had already figured it out, of course.

  “Oh, man. They’re going to use the hospital to infest host bodies. You check in to have your tonsils out or to have a cast put on your broken arm. You check out as a Controller.”

  Tom came home late that evening. He smelled like wood smoke and barbecue sauce.

  My mom and dad and I were already at the table, eating dinner. My dad had his injured ankle resting on a stool. We were having broiled chicken and potatoes and veggies.

  As he walked in through the kitchen door, my mom said, “Tom, how was the big cleanup? They showed some of it on the news.”

  Tom came into the dining room and took a chair across from me. “It was okay. We filled two Dumpsters full of garbage and dead branches and stuff. Hey, what happened to your leg, old man?”

  My dad winced. “I tried for a shot I shouldn’t have tried for. Twisted it.”

  “Did you have enough to eat?” my mom asked Tom.

  Tom patted his stomach. “Burgers and dogs and chicken. Not as good as you
r chicken, of course.”

  “Actually, your father cooked. He cooked by calling Gourmet Express and having it delivered.”

  “But I did microwave the sauce,” my dad said. “That counts as cooking.”

  Tom winked at my dad. “Well, the stuff at the barbecue had to be better than Dad’s chicken. Good thing I ate there.”

  “Just for that you get no dessert,” my dad said. “And it’s cheesecake. From Santorini’s.”

  “Oooh, Santorini’s?” Tom groaned. “I take it back. I apologize. I grovel. I beg. I love Santorini’s.”

  Homer came in, sensing it was time for table scraps. “Hey, Homer,” Tom said. He scratched him behind the ears and Homer got his happy-moron look, the look where his eyes glaze over and his tongue lolls out of his mouth.

  A totally normal scene. Around a totally normal dinner table. No one would ever have guessed the truth. In my brother’s head was an alien. A creature from another planet.

  I asked Ax about how it works. Ax is the Andalite we rescued from the bottom of the ocean. He’s one of us now, I guess.

  Anyway, I asked Ax about how the Yeerk slug lives in a person’s head. He’d explained it to me. How they can flatten their sluglike bodies. How they can sink between the crevices and cracks of a person’s brain. How they melt like a liquid into every available space. How they wrap their bodies around a brain and attach their own neurons to human neurons.

  Tom must have noticed me staring at him.

  “What’s your malfunction?”

  I snapped out of my daze. “What? Oh, nothing. I was just thinking of something.”

  “You were staring at me. You were staring at my forehead.”

  I forced a laugh. My mind raced to think of a joke. “Really? I thought I was just staring blankly into empty space. But then again, empty space, your head. What’s the difference?”

  It worked. Tom snatched up a dinner roll and chucked it at me. I caught it in midair a split second before it would have hit my face.

  For a moment we just glared at each other.

  “Don’t throw food,” my dad said. “It’s undignified.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Tom’s not fast enough to hit me anymore. He’s slowed down. Lost his touch.”

  Tom raised an eyebrow. “Don’t push it, midget.”

  I smiled. It was a fake smile, but it was the best I could do. “You used to be faster when you were still on the basketball team. I guess hanging out at The Sharing all the time, eating barbecue and potato salad, must have slowed your reflexes.”

  You know, in the old days, Tom would not have put up with that. He would not have let me challenge him and get away with it. He would have had me in a headlock and given me a massive noogie till I begged for mercy.

  But now he just gave me a cold, uncertain smile.

  Maybe it was because he had changed. Maybe it was because I had changed. The silence stretched between us for a few minutes, and my parents, feeling uncomfortable, made small talk.

  “I have homework to do,” I said at last. “May I be excused?”

  “Come back down for cheesecake later,” my mom said.

  Tom caught up to me on the stairs. “I don’t know why you’re so against The Sharing,” he said. “A lot of the kids in your school have joined.”

  “I guess I just don’t like to join things.”

  “Yeah? Well, don’t dump on what you don’t understand. What were you doing that was so important today? While I was out cleaning up the park?”

  I stopped and turned to face him. I was one step higher than he was. We were eye to eye. “Me? I wasn’t doing much of anything. Hanging out with Marco.”

  “Your loss,” he said. “There are things that are cooler than hanging out with Marco. Cooler than being on some bogus team. Important things. You could be a part of something … bigger. You could be part of something great, not just another nothing kid.”

  He gave me a look. Like he could tell me incredible things. Like he could open up a whole new world for me.

  I could be a part of something bigger. Something important.

  I knew that kind of stuff worked on some people. That was the first step toward becoming a voluntary host. That was how The Sharing started you out: talk of bigger, more glorious, more interesting things that you could be part of.

  Part of.

  “Thanks, Tom,” I said. “But I don’t want to be a part. I guess I’d rather just be one person. On my own. One little nothing kid.”

  For a split second after I said that, he let the mask slip. For just a moment I saw an expression of pure arrogance and contempt. Yeerk arrogance. Yeerk contempt.

  The look said “We will have you, sooner or later. You and all the rest of your weak race.”

  Then it was gone, and Tom was shrugging like it was all no big deal.

  I went to my room. I did some homework. Later, I went back downstairs and ate cheesecake along with my folks and my brother. One big happy family watching TV and pigging out.

  That night, I had the dream.

  A dream that had begun to appear almost every night.

  I can’t believe we are actually going to practice a morph,” Marco said. “We never practice. We just do it, and when it’s a huge disaster we try and deal with it then.”

  “We need the practice,” I pointed out. “We’re going in as spies. We’re going to this thing to try and hear what they are saying. And it takes a while to learn how to use the cockroach’s senses to understand sound.”

  “This would be a great horror movie. Or at least a book,” Marco said. “Roachman.”

  We were in Marco’s new apartment. It was the first time we’d ever used it. Probably because now that Marco’s dad was back at work, they had moved to a better place. I guess Marco used to be embarrassed over his old place.

  In fact, his dad was out, working late at his new job. I hoped the job would last. Marco had been carrying a big load of family problems for a long time.

  “Is it possible to die of total willies?” Cassie asked. “I mean, do you think we could someday just gross ourselves right out of existence? I didn’t even like touching a cockroach. How am I going to stand becoming one?”

  “Just don’t be near a mirror,” I suggested. “And don’t look at each other while you’re morphing.”

  Ax wondered.

  It’s amazing how quickly we’d all gotten used to the fact that this guy from another planet was with us. I barely even thought about the fact that an Andalite was standing there, looking like a cross between a blue deer, a mouthless human, a goat with eyes on the ends of his horns, and a scorpion.

  The scorpion part is the Andalite’s tail. It has a curved scythe blade on the end. The Andalites can whip that tail forward so fast you don’t even see it move.

  I sat on the edge of Marco’s bed. Tobias perched just inside the window, looking fierce and angry — although, of course, he wasn’t.

  Speaking of odd things I was getting used to. I mean, I was there with an alien, my cousin, my best friend, and Cassie, and they were all getting ready to become roaches.

  Except for Tobias.

  And the weirdest thing of all was that it didn’t seem weird anymore.

  I watched as they all began to morph. I looked away when it began to get disgusting. When I looked again, there were four cockroaches on the carpet.

  Marco thought-spoke to me.

  “Okay,” I said. “Can you guys hear me?”

  Marco thought-spoke. I couldn’t tell which roach was him. All roaches look alike.

  “Hello,” I said loudly.

  Cassie said.

  “Tobias, tell them that was me.”

  Tobias translated into thought-speak.

  again. Say ‘hello’ again,> Marco instructed.

  “Hello.”

  Rachel confirmed.

  “Hello.”

  Cassie said.

  Marco said.

  “You’re a huge dork.”

  Marco said.

  We spent about an hour with Marco, Cassie, Rachel, and Ax learning to translate vibration into human speech. They were repeating the learning I’d done while I was stuck in a Roach Motel behind my refrigerator.

  When they demorphed I looked away again. My dreams had been weird enough lately. I didn’t need any help having nightmares.

  Cassie is the best morpher in our group, even better than Ax — who’s an Andalite, after all. Usually she can kind of control the process a little. Once, when we were morphing birds, she managed to turn totally human except for keeping huge bird wings for a few seconds.

  It was really cool.

  But even Cassie couldn’t do anything to make a cockroach morph attractive.

  It was disgusting. Flat-out disgusting.

  Ax said when he had returned to his normal form. Not that his normal form looked very normal, standing there in Marco’s bedroom.

  “Cockroaches are not wonderful,” Rachel said, shuddering a little. “I mean, I’m sorry, but I don’t like those bodies.”

  “They’re easy to handle, though,” Marco said. “Not like ants.”

  We all exchanged a look. We’d had a very bad experience with ants. That was one morph no one was going to be repeating.

  “You know, guys, this mission doesn’t really require all of us to go,” I said.

  “Look, I just said roaches are disgusting,” Rachel protested. “I didn’t say I didn’t want to do it. We need to know what’s going on with that hospital. The best way to do that is to crash this leadership meeting of The Sharing. And the best way to do that is with roach morphs. End of discussion.”