The Underground Read online

  I morphed as fast as I could. Being terrified always helps.

  17 As soon as I felt my human arms and legs beginning to appear, I fought my way toward the surface. I saw that shimmering, silvery barrier between air and water above me and I used my mutating limbs - feathery, half-bird, half-human stumps - to swim up and up toward air.

  I stuck my face up out of the water.

  "Aaarrrgghhh!!" someone screamed.

  "Oh, my lord, what is it?"

  Some people in a little motorboat. I guess they'd been listening to the music from the Planet Hollywood.

  I sucked air and went down again.

  "I think it was a dead body!"

  Thanks, I thought. / hope that's not a prophecy.

  I focused on morphing a dolphin. I had the DNA inside me, and I'd morphed dolphin before.

  Now I was an eerie mix of human and dolphin. Gray rubber skin and legs melted together to make a tail and hands that were turning into flippers.

  I powered back toward the poor suicide guy. Although by now I wasn't feeling sorry for him, so much as really annoyed. I mean, what is it with people killing themselves? How big a moron do you have to be not to figure out that at least if you stay alive you have some hope, as opposed to being dead and having zero?

  18 Besides, I was missing the fashion show.

  He was a weird apparition as he loomed up in front of my dolphin snout. He had sunk up to his thighs in the mud. He'd fought his way partly out, but was still in the goo up to his knees.

  And now he was limp, motionless. But I knew he sure wasn't going to die if I could help it, the stupid, inconsiderate jerk.

  I buried my snout in the small of his back, bent him backward till he was practically lying on me, and kicked like mad with my dolphin tail.

  He came up with a shloooomp sound and a cloud of disturbed mud. I pushed him up to the surface and nosed him to the riverbank.

  Strong human arms reached for him and yanked him up onto dry land.

  Very strong human arms.

  19 Wel, that's just classic," I complained the next day as we all hooked up at the mall food court after school. I had USA Today. I had our local newspaper and a bunch of others. Every one of them showed the same picture. And they all had basically the same headline:

  Schwarzenegger Real-Life Hero: Gives Mouth-to-Mouth to Drowning Man

  One paper said:

  Terminator Becomes Resuscitator

  20 "This society is way too celebrity-obsessed," I said. "It is so superficial."

  "Yeah, I hate that," Cassie said. She gave me a mocking look. Cassie thinks I'm too concerned with looks and clothes. Cassie is my best friend and I would give my life for her, but you should see what she wears. For Cassie, dressing up is putting on clean jeans and socks that actually match.

  "We were lucky," Jake said. "No one happened to snap any pictures of a pack of raptors carrying the guy to the water. And no one happened to wonder why a dolphin would be so far upstream from the ocean."

  "The man was lucky, too," Cassie said.

  Marco shook his head. "No way. Lucky would have been getting mouth-to-mouth from Naomi Campbell."

  "Where are the cinnamon buns?" Ax asked. "Tobias said he would get some. Cinnamon buns. Bun-zuh."

  Ax was there in his human morph, of course, since the sight of an Andalite hanging around the food court would have attracted just a little attention. But the real Ax did not have a mouth. Did not have the ability to make spoken sounds. And worst of all, did not have a sense of taste.

  So when he morphed to human, he tended to become fixated on taste and sounds. Especially

  21 taste. And especially, for some strange reason, on cinnamon buns.

  "I wonder what happens to George Edelman now?" Cassie asked.

  "Who?"

  She rolled her eyes at me. "The guy. The man. The man whose life you saved, Rachel."

  "Oh. Is that his name?"

  "Yes, it was in all the newspaper articles," she said, exasperated with me.

  I shrugged. "Okay, okay. So his name is George Edelman. Big deal."

  Cassie leaned across the table. "Rachel, you saved this man's life. Without you the rest of us wouldn't have seen him in time. Without you he'd have been a splat on the concrete. You are a hero. A human life was saved. He may go on to cure cancer or something. And you don't remember his name?"

  Now that she mentioned it, I did feel like maybe I should know the man's name. On the other hand .... "Hey, wait a minute. This guy isn't anything to me," I said. "It's not like I'm responsible for him."

  Marco made a back and forth gesture with his hand. "I don't know. Isn't it the Chinese who say if you save a man he becomes your responsibility? Or maybe it's the Japanese. The Greeks? Someone. I saw it in a movie."

  22 I shrugged again. Now I was feeling defensive. "It was mostly just a goof, you know? I just wanted to see if we could do it. It was ..." I searched my mind for the right word. "It was a challenge. That's it, a challenge."

  Tobias arrived, carrying a Cinnabon cinnamon bun. One of the large ones. Dripping with icing and smelling of cinnamon. Lots of cinnamon.

  Ax's human eyes went wide. His mouth hung open slightly. It was weird, because Ax's human morph is made up of DNA from Cassie, Jake, Marco, and me. So you're always seeing something familiar in him, you know? Like maybe it's your own mouth hanging open, or Marco's eyes.

  Tobias set the paper plate down on the table. "I figured we could all have a bite and then leave the rest for -" He stopped and stared at Ax with an expression of amusement mixed with awe.

  Ax had snagged the bun. He'd snagged the plate and the plastic fork, too. He was busy shoving them into his mouth. Bun and plate and fork. Great big huge bun and little paper plate.

  I reached over and grabbed the end of the plastic fork. Half of it was already in Ax's mouth. I yanked it out. It was too late to save the plate.

  The five of us just sat there for a few minutes and watched as Ax chewed and slobbered and gulped and shoved with his fingertips. It was a

  23 little like watching a python try to swallow a small pig.

  "George Edelman, huh?" I said, breaking the spell.

  "Yeah," Jake said. "But everyone keep an eye on TV and newspapers for a while, okay? If someone noticed our. . . activities ... we want to know about it. Mostly, we have to hope George Edelman keeps his mouth shut."

  "People will figure he's nuts," Marco pointed out. "No one is gonna listen to a guy who tried to kill himself."

  24 Three days later. My house. My still-not-completely-fixed house.

  "Jordan! JORDAN!"

  That would be me, yelling. I was in the kitchen. I had opened the refrigerator and discovered that my white paper container of leftover Chinese food was gone.

  "Jor-DAN! You little thief."

  "What?"

  I turned away from the refrigerator and slammed straight into the kitchen island. We didn't used to have a kitchen island. But our kitchen had been annihilated when my bedroom had collapsed down into it.

  25 The construction had been pretty shoddy, I guess. And it hadn't helped at all that I had morphed into an African elephant in my bedroom. Fortunately, no one in my family knew that but me.

  Anyway, we were in the process of getting a much cooler kitchen now. My mom's a lawyer and she got the insurance company to pay up right away. Plus the builder of the house was so scared that something else would happen, he was doing all the labor free.

  I felt bad about the builder getting blamed. But what was I supposed to say? "Mom, it was me. See, I was allergic to this crocodile morph, and it made me morph out of control so that I ..." You get the idea. Wasn't going to happen.

  Anyway, I slammed into the new kitchen island and fought down the urge to say something I shouldn't repeat. But I was mad, and now I was mad with a bruise on my hip, so i stuck my finger in my little sister's face and said, "You! You ate my Szechuan shrimp! I was saving it. I want it. I want it right now."

  A couple yea
rs ago that would have scared Jordan. But she's getting older now, and more independent. Plus more of a smart-mouth.

  "Rachel, I took your stupid shrimp yesterday. And I threw it out."

  26 "What! You threw out my Szechuan shrimp? You are always doing something with my leftovers."

  She shook her head slowly, pityingly. "It was already a week old, duh. It was too old, duh. It would have made you barf up your kidneys, duh. Shrimp doesn't exactly stay good forever, duh. And oh, by the way, did I mention, duh?"

  "You should have asked me!" I cried, in no mood to be reasonable.

  "Okay, Rachel," Jordan said placidly. "Should I have thrown out your rancid, bacteria-crawling, moldy leftovers like Mom asked me to, or should I have left them for you to eat so you'd end up having to get your stomach pumped?"

  Well. When she put it that way. Boy, I hate when someone gets the better of me. But I could not think of a single really crushing comeback. So I said, "I'll let it go this time."

  Jordan rolled her eyes. "Thank you, thank you, Queen Rachel. I'm so glad you'll let me live."

  My mom walked in, carrying two leather briefcases. One was normal size. The other was one of those big, kind of square ones. She hefted them both up onto the counter.

  She looked tired, like she usually does when she gets home from work. She's not all that high up in the firm, so she works constantly. But she

  27 grinned. "Hey! Congratulate me. I'm a celebrity. Did you girls eat? How was school? Where's Sarah? And don't tell me she's at Tisha's house again. Every time she comes home from there I end up buying her another Barbie."

  "School was fine," I said. "We haven't had di nner. You want me to make something?"

  "Or we could order out," Jordan said smugly. "Rachel would like some pus-oozing, rotten shrimp."

  "Mom! Mom!" Sarah yelled, tearing in through the door from the backyard. "Tisha says they have a lawyer Barbie! A lawyer Barbie. Just like you!"

  "So what's this about being a celebrity?" I asked.

  "Oh, well, I was mostly kidding. You know that guy in the papers a few days ago? The one who was rescued by Arnold Schwarzman? He was on TV and CNN."

  "Schwarzenegger?"

  "No, the man he rescued. Anyway, guess what? I'm his lawyer. His family says he's incompetent. They want to -"

  "Incompetent? Is that where you have to wear those adult diapers?" Jordan asked.

  "No, honey, not incontinent. They are alleging he's incompetent. Not able to look after his own affairs. That's what they allege."

  28 "Nuts," I translated. "Wacko. Allegedly wacko."

  "Don't say wacko," my mother said, looking pained. "Mentally unbalanced will do fine. His family want to have him institutionalized permanently."

  "So what are you supposed to do?" I asked. "Prove he's not wacko? I mean, he is, right? He jumped off a building."

  "Lawyer Barbie could save him," Sarah said.

  "Actually, it's a little worse than that," my mom said, gathering Sarah up into her arms. "Apparently this poor man claims he has an alien living in his head."

  My heart beat three times real fast. Then stopped.

  "He calls them Yerks or Yorks or something."

  29 o that's the nuthouse," Marco said with satisfaction as we all gazed up the hill at the pleasant-looking but weirdly quiet two-story structure. "I always suspected I'd end up here."

  He gave me a wink. I had to laugh. See, I was about to make that same joke about him. He beat me to it.

  Cassie sighed. "I don't think the patients probably like to be called nuts," she said.

  "Of course not," I agreed. "They'd have to be nuts to want to be called nuts."

  Marco gave me a discreet low five behind my back.

  «Cassie's right. It's not politically correct to call nuts nuts,» Tobias said.

  30 Cassie looked at me. "You know, I could swear I heard that bird talking. I must be nuts."

  We all laughed. Even Jake, who was trying, with the usual total lack of success, to get us all to behave seriously.

  We were gathered near the Rupert J. Kirk State Mental Health Facility. It was two floors of red brick. There was a little fountain just outside the front door, and lots of shade trees and lawn chairs sitting out on the grass. It could have been an old folks' home, or a slightly aged apartment building. Except for the fact that it was encircled by a high chain-link fence. And there were three strands of barbed wire atop that fence. And there was heavy wire mesh on the windows. But aside from all that, it looked perfectly nice.

  "Who else has the willies?" Cassie wondered. I held up my hand.

  "What are willies?" Ax asked. He was in human morph.

  «A vague, creepy feeling,» Tobias explained. «The subtle, unsettling sense that something you can't quite see is desperately wrong.»

  "The feeling I get when I reach the school door every day," Jake muttered.

  "School, nuthouse, what's the difference when you get right down to it?" Marco asked philosophically. "Dumb rules and bad food in both places."

  Jake jerked his head to indicate we should

  31 move along. We were on the sidewalk across the street, lurking along a row of parked cars. And what's weird is, I swear the sun went behind a cloud the moment we reached the facility.

  We walked along, with Tobias flitting from tree to tree overhead.

  "Easy enough to bust in," Jake observed. "A fence, a door, big deal. Not like the Fenestre mansion or the Yeerk pool. Easy."

  "Yeah," I agreed. "So we get in, we find this George Edelman and try to figure out if he knows something about the Yeerks. Then we leave Marco behind and get out."

  Jake raised an eyebrow. "Okay, I think we may have to put a limit on the number of nut jokes. This is serious."

  Marco made a deprecating noise. "Nan. This isn't serious."

  "Every time we start to take something for granted we end up getting hammered," Jake warned. He grinned in anticipation. "We'd have to be nuts to get careless."

  No one laughed.

  "I say, we'd have to be nuts. . . oh, fine. Don't laugh. I don't care."

  "We need an open window or something," I said. I looked over the building. No open windows that I could see. It was thick glass and heavy wire mesh all the way.

  32 "We can't hurt anyone," Jake pointed out. "No fighting. Those are innocent people in there. We can't take the risk of hurting anyone. It's too far to travel in fly or cockroach morph. Hmmm. Maybe not that easy, after all."

  Just then, like an answer to our prayers, a truck drove up the driveway and around to the far side of the facility.

  "Was that a food truck?" Jake asked. "Tobias? Can you go take a look?"

  Tobias flapped away and came back in less than a minute. «lt's a food delivery. The truck looks pretty big, and it's dark in the back.»

  Jake nodded. "Okay, I don't think more than three of us should go. We morph to bird, fly into the truck, morph to human, then to cockroach. We hide in some of the food and they carry us right in. Rachel, this is your guy. I mean, you saved him. So you're in. I'll go. Tobias doesn't have a useful morph, and Ax is too obvious when he passes through his Andalite phase. So it's Marco or Cassie."

  We flipped a coin. Marco won. Then we explained to Ax what it meant to flip a coin.

  It took twenty minutes for us to find a place to morph into seagulls. Seagulls were less noticeable than birds of prey. Unfortunately, the place we found was a Dumpster. It was an empty Dumpster, but still . . .

  33 As soon as I had my snowy white wings, I was up and out of there. We zoomed around, gaining altitude, and watched as Ax and Cassie retrieved our shoes and outer clothes. We still can't morph regular clothing, just whatever is almost skintight. In my case a leotard.

  Tobias stayed up at a higher altitude, looking for trouble of any kind.

  The three of us waited and watched the back of the grocery truck. There were two guys unloading it. One looked like the driver. The other was wearing a white apron. Probably a cook or something from the
facility itself.

  «We need to time this right,» Jake said. «l don't want to be a seagull trapped inside a truck.»

  «0ne one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand . . .» Marco counted off the seconds between trips by the truck driver or white apron guy.

  «How about right now?» I said. I spilled air from my wings and dove toward the back of the truck just as the driver went into the building, pushing a dolly loaded with tomato crates.

  Jake and Marco fell in beside me and we swooped, swift and neat, into the dark of the truck. I opened my wings and tilted my tail down to kill my speed. Then I took a quick glance around and used my remaining momentum to zip

  34 over the top of a wall of cardboard boxes and land in a cramped area behind.

  I felt pretty pleased with myself. Marco and Jake landed beside me. Marco landed a little clumsily and sort of rolled and fluttered into the wall of the truck.

  «That was dumb, Rachel,» Jake said. «You should have waited.»

  «l knew it would work,» I said. I seethed a little at Jake calling me dumb. He wasn't always so careful. Of course, he is our unofficial leader, so I guess he feels responsible. Although as far as I'm concerned, I'm responsible for me.

  «0kay, let's demorph,» Jake said. «But this space looks pretty tight back here. So everyone watch your el bows.»

  "I'm telling you, I saw some birds fly in here," an irate voice said.

  "You see birds? I don't see any birds. Let's get this unloaded. I'm on overtime here, and my company don't pay overtime."

  I heard some grunting and the sound of more boxes being lifted. I began to demorph as fast as I could.

  35 Jake was right. It was crowded. We went from being three birds, each smaller than a chicken, to being three kids. We were jammed together, and it wasn't pretty. Marco's hand and fingers were just emerging from his feathers when his arm bones sprouted and forced the fingers into my eyes.

  I twisted my head aside as well as I could. But my head was the size of a grapefruit, with my eyes still stuck on the sides and a beak jammed tight into the space between two boxes, so it was hard to move.

  There was a pain in my back and I had this jolt of fear. Was I feeling the morphing itself? The Andalite morphing technology keeps that from