The Unknown Page 4

  56 for The Gardens. The Gardens is the big combination amusement park and zoo where my mom is one of the vets. Below the flyer was a sign-up sheet, bearing a lot of names.

  "Hi, Captain," Marco said. "How's it going?"

  The captain glanced over at the lieutenant who had picked us up. The lieutenant just shrugged.

  "Now look, kids, maybe you don't realize it, but you're in trouble," the captain said.

  "Yes, sir, we realize we made a big mistake," I said. "It was totally an accident. We didn't even know there was anything back here in the Dry Lands. And boy, we'd never, ever come back again if you let us go, that's for sure."

  I smiled innocently. I nudged Rachel and she smiled innocently as well. I prayed that Marco would get a clue and smile innocently so we could just -

  "So. Where do you keep the alien?" Marco asked.

  So much for Marco getting a clue.

  The captain pressed his lips tightly together until they turned pale. Then he said, "Look, kid, this is an Air Force installation. We don't discuss what we do here, but I am authorized to tell you one thing: There are no aliens here!"

  "Yeah, right. Sir," Marco snorted.

  57 "What's your name, son?"

  "Urn . . . Mulder. Fox Mulder."

  "Well, you are in a world of hurt, Fox Mulder. You have violated federal law. You could be thrown in prison!"

  "Sir?" I interrupted. "Please just ignore Mar - I mean, Fox."

  "Yeah. He's an idiot," Rachel added.

  "He just likes to annoy people. We're just kids, you know. We didn't mean any harm. Couldn't you just give us a warning?"

  "A very stern warning, even," Rachel agreed.

  "Normally that's just what we'd do," the captain said. "We do get our share of Looney Tunes and crackpots out here." He looked directly at Marco as he said "crackpots." "However, we have ourselves a little mystery here. See, none of you is wearing shoes. The lieutenant's men searched the area - no shoes. And it is physically impossible to have walked across all that undergrowth and through those rocks without shoes."

  "So we're busted for not having shoes?" Rachel asked.

  "Look, what's the big deal, sir?" Marco asked. "If you have an alien here, why not just tell everyone?"

  The captain gave Marco a long, hard stare.

  58 want the three of you to write down your names and your parents' phone numbers on this piece of paper." He shoved a clipboard at Marco. "We're gonna call your folks. Maybe they'll appreciate your sense of humor."

  I watched over Marco's shoulder as he wrote down "Fox Mulder." Then he followed it by a phone number.

  Rachel identified herself as Dana Scully.

  Then it was my turn. And I drew a total blank. See, I don't really watch X-Files. The captain stared at me as I held the pen poised over the paper and sweated.

  What name? What name?

  "Don't you know your own name?"

  "Urn . . . sure. It's . . . Cindy! That's it, Cindy. Cindy . . . Crawford."

  Marco stared at me. Rachel stared at me. I wrote down the name with a trembling hand and then wrote in some random numbers.

  The two officers left. There was a loud click from the lock closing.

  "Cindy Crawford?" Marco demanded. "What are you, nuts?"

  "Me? Me? How about you?"

  "Every guy in the country knows who Cindy Crawford is!"

  "We have to get out of here. Fast!" Rachel

  59 said. "I gave him the phone number for Pizza Hut delivery."

  "I gave him the number for the Sports Score-board recording," Marco said.

  "I just gave him one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight!" I said.

  "Eight? You gave him eight numbers?" Marco laughed. "Remind me not to ever be a spy with you. Now how do we get outta here?"

  "I can morph to grizzly and-" Rachel started to say.

  "No!" I cried. "These are good guys and, as far as we know, they're, not Yeerks! We can't hurt anyone! We need something small enough to get out beneath the door. I say housefly."

  "I hate doing flies," Rachel shuddered.

  "Ant?"

  "No way."

  "Cockroach?"

  Rachel nodded. "Okay. I'll do cockroach."

  Marco looked at her, mystified. "Flies gross you out but roaches don't?"

  But Rachel and I were already busy morphing and Marco had to hurry to keep up.

  This time the floor didn't rise toward us. It leaped! And the changes didn't involve the gentle, rather lovely transformation of skin into feathers.

  60 This time the transformation started for Marco with antennae. Two huge, long, spiky antennae shot straight out of his forehead.

  SPLEEET!

  For Rachel the change began with the legs. The middle pair of legs. The ones that grew right out of her chest.

  "Yah!" I yelled, even though I knew what to expect more or less. Still, seeing antennae come popping out of a friend's head and hairy, articulated legs from your best friend's chest. . . well, it is gross.

  But I wasn't able to really focus too much on them. Because I was becoming distracted by the fact that one-foot squares of linoleum now looked as big as a front lawn. And by the fact that I could hear the sound of every bone in my body dissolving into mush. And by the fact that my skin was turning hard and smooth.

  SPLOOOT! Legs popped out of my chest.

  SPROUT! Antennae zoomed out of my head.

  My own legs shriveled. I fell forward! I stuck out my hands to catch myself, but I no longer had hands.

  "I've changed my mind," Rachel started to say jokingly. But whatever she had wanted to say next was lost because her pretty, human face turned hard and bronze, and her mouth split into the clicking mouthparts of a roach.

  61 «What I was going to say was, "I've changed my mind, roaches are grosser than flies,"» Rachel said.

  And that's when we felt vibrations through our antennae. The heavy vibrations of footsteps. Angry footsteps.

  It took some practice to use roach senses well enough to understand speech. But we'd had practice. So we were able to hear the captain saying, "Pizza Hut, eh? I'll show the little monsters some Pizza Hut!"

  «Move it, boys and girls!» Rachel cried with the giddy enthusiasm she always has when facing certain death.

  «RAAAAID!» Marco yelled.

  «Really funny, Marco. Really funny,» I muttered. «Can we just get the heck out of here?»

  Air movement! Vibration! Wind! The scent of humans!

  The door had been opened. It swept over our heads. We each motored our three pairs of legs. We were out of there!

  62

  ZOOOOOOM!

  We blew across highly polished linoleum squares.

  My six legs motored insanely, my antennae waved wildly, my every cockroach instinct screamed, Run! Run! Ruuuuun!

  So we ran.

  Not that we exactly had any idea where to run.

  «Where are we going?» Marco yelled.

  «How would I know?» Rachel cried.

  «Head for daylight!» I screamed.

  «How do we tell daylight from plain old lights?»

  «l don't know. Dm . . . um . . .» I tried to

  63 think of how a roach would know the difference between daylight and plain old interior lights. Of course! Roaches are startled and scared by lights. The brighter the light, the scarier it would be.

  «Run toward whatever scares your roach brain worst!» I yelled.

  «0h. swell. This stupid bug brain is already scared to death.»

  Vibrations! Lots of them. Big, heavy, earth-shaking. We're talking VIBRATIONS!

  Through the muddy, fractured, nearsighted roach senses I saw, or at least felt, massive things falling from the sky. It was like someone was dropping trucks all around me!

  Footsteps! Shoes as the same size as double-wide trailers!

  WHOOOMPF! WHOOOMPF! WHOOOMPF!

  «Look out! There's people walking on us!» Marco yelled.

  WHOOOMPF! A monster killer shoe came do
wn from the sky and slammed into the floor just an inch ahead of me. But the roach brain had reacted just in time. The roach brain knew how not to get stepped on.

  «Let the roaches handle this!» I said. «The roach brains are good at this.»

  WHOOMPF! My roach body scurried out of the way, barely avoiding the side of a heel that

  64 would have squashed me flat and dead in a split second.

  «Daylight! I think I see daylight!» Rachel cried.

  «Lead on!» I dimly perceived Rachel's roach morph ahead of me. And Marco was just beside me. All together, three scared-as-heck roaches blew toward a bright light.

  Suddenly there was a ridge. Pretty high to me, even though it was probably not even an inch high. It was the transom of a doorway, I realized, and I knew one thing: I really wanted out of that building.

  «Tobias!» I called out. «Can you hear me? Are you up there?»

  «Yeah. Where are you?» he asked. «And what are you?»

  «We are three lost little cockroaches in a big hurry!» Marco said.

  «Got you!» Tobias said.

  «Thank goodness for those hawk eyes,» Rachel said. «Now get us outta here!»

  «Keep moving and try to bunch up together. And by the way, there's a column coming your way. A column of ... vehicles.»

  Something about the way he said "vehicles" should have alerted me. But all I could think about was getting close to Marco and Rachel so Tobias could pick us up.

  65 We were on concrete now, and moving slower. When you're bug size, concrete doesn't look smooth. It looks like you're running across an endless field of small boulders. Concrete kind of glitters. At least that's how it looked to my cockroach senses.

  And another thing about concrete, at least concrete with the sun beating down on it: It's hot!

  «l'm gonna fry!» Marco wailed.

  «0h, man, it's hot! I didn't think bugs could feel temperature this much,» I said.

  «Tobias! Hurry up, man, we're seriously getting barbecued!»

  Suddenly a shadow swooped down. I had to fight the urge to panic and run in a completely different direction.

  Huge, rough-textured talons came hurtling down at amazing speed. The nails scraped along the concrete. One talon hooked beneath me and lifted me up, up, up.

  «Yeeee-hah!» Marco yelled. «Red-tailed airlines.^

  No more heat. No more concrete. I was up in the air, wind whipping . . .

  «Ahhhhhhhhhh!» I was falling! Tobias had lost his grip on me and I was falling, falling, spiraling, tumbling through the air.

  How far I fell, I can't say. My cockroach

  66 morph can't see farther than a few inches. But It seemed as if ! was falling a long time.

  Failing . . ?

  «Cassie!» Tobias yelled.

  Falling , ,

  «Cassie!» Rachel echoed.

  «What about Cassie?» Marco asked.

  «! dropped her!»

  POOMPH!

  I hit the ground. Dirt! It billowed up around me as I slammed Into it.

  But I was not. hurt,

  I was on my back. My legs pawed madly at the air, «How do you turn one of these things over?» I asked. ! felt ominous thunder rumbling up through the ground.

  «Cassie! 1 see you!» Tobias yelled. «!'m coming for you, but Cassie, you have to move! I can't make it in time! You have to move now»

  His tone was not exactly reassuring. «What's happening?»

  «!t's that column, Cassie. It's coming right at you!»

  «Column? Of what, troops? Soldiers?»

  «No. Tanks.»

  And then 1 realized that wasn't, thunder ! was hearing and feeling.

  67 «Cassie! Move!» Tobias cried as he plummeted toward me in a full-speed stoop.

  «l am moving!» I motored my roach legs like a roach caught in a sink. But I was pawing the air. And the thunder was more than thunder now. It was like a continuous, nonstop explosion.

  BBBBRRRRRBBBRRRRRRMMMM!BBBBR-RRRRBBBBBMMMMMM!

  Wings! Wait! Roaches have wings. All I had to do was -

  Too late!

  «Cassie!»

  Something blotted out the sun. I felt my little roach body pressed into the dirt. It seemed to

  68 last forever. The pressure was unbelievable! And yet...

  Suddenly I was up off the ground. But not free. I was stuck. Stuck to the tread of a tank, and going slowly around as the tread came around toward the front of the tank again.

  I scampered my legs again, but now two of them were not moving. I was stuck faceup on a dirty treadmill. I would not survive another crushing by the tank tread.

  I tried my left wing. No good. It was squashed.

  I tried my right wing. Yes!

  I flipped over, landed on my four good feet, turned a sharp left and ran like a lunatic for the edge of the tread. ZOOOOM! I fell! I hit the dirt and I ran. I ran and ran and ran without even thinking about stopping.

  Tobias lifted me up from the ground, and I was still running with my four good roach legs.

  Marco seemed to think the entire thing was hysterically funny, of course. He laughed for the next ten straight minutes as Tobias flew us away from Zone 91. And while Marco laughed, Tobias apologized for dropping me.

  Tobias set us down outside the boundaries of the secret base.

  We demorphed in a gully formed by a small stream.

  69 "Are you okay?" Rachel asked me, once she and Marco and I were all human again.

  "Considering I was run over by a tank, yes, I'm okay."

  Marco grinned. "I wish I could see the look on Captain Torrelli's face when he realizes we've all three disappeared."

  Rachel punched Marco in the arm. "You moron! Why did you keep provoking him with all that alien talk? He would have let us go."

  "Actually," Marco said, with no trace of his usual attitude, "he would not have let us go till he contacted our parents. And we couldn't have that, could we? So I deliberately provoked him because now he'll just write us off as another bunch of deluded wackos. If we'd seemed perfectly sensible he'd really wonder what we were doing there with no shoes."

  Rachel glared at him suspiciously. But I knew Marco was right. Like I said, Marco's a clown sometimes, but he's not dumb.

  "So now what?" Rachel asked. "It's getting late. We need to get home."

  «You guys should morph as soon as you're ready. It'll be cooling down soon. Fewer thermals equals harder flying.»

  I was starting to feel like an idiot. I was the one who seemed most concerned about the idea of Yeerks in horses. But we'd learned absolutely

  70 nothing. All we'd managed to do was get ourselves detained by the military police and almost squashed by a tank.

  Rachel obviously was prepared to shrug off the horse-Controller idea. I think she halfway doubted we really did see that Yeerk crawl out of that horse.

  The others were even more skeptical. And I could see their point: Our real problem was about Yeerks taking over humans. If they wanted to experiment with controlling horses, well, that was a pretty low priority.

  «l hear something?» Tobias said. He was perched on a twisted, gnarled piece of dried up wood. «Everyone down. Hide till I see what it is!»

  He flapped his wings and took off as Marco, Rachel, and I crawled down under a bush. Unfortunately, it was a thorny bush.

  "Oh, this is fun," Marco muttered softly.

  «lt's just some horses. It's okay,» Tobias called down from the sky above.

  Marco started to crawl out from hiding. I grabbed his arm. "No. Wait," I hissed.

  A half dozen horses climbed stiffly down the side of the gully heading for the water. They were led by a gray stallion.

  "See? Horses. Now can I get this thorn out of my butt?"

  71 I shook my head and put my finger to my lips. ! watched the horses climb down, I looked closely for anything that looked strange or unusual But they sure looked like any old horses.

  Four of the horses lowered their big heads and began to drink.
A fifth horse stood guard,

  The sixth horse was a very nice-looking roan that almost looked as if she'd come from thoroughbred stock. This mare paused beside the horse, standing guard and almost seemed to be whispering in his ear.

  Then, suddenly . . ,

  PLOP! PLOPPLOPPLOP! PLOP!

  The horse began to do what horses do. if you know what I mean,

  "That horse is taking a dump," Marco whispered,

  "Thanks for pointing that out, Beavis," Rachel said, "We wouldn't have noticed without you."

  "Horse patties," Marco said. "Prairie pies, Heh-heh-heh-heh."

  'That does it. I'm not sharing a bush with -" Rachel began to say.

  "Shh! Look! Look!"

  To my amazement, the horse who had been pooping stopped. The other horses looked over at her and neighed. ! swear they were laughing.

  72 And then the horse in question walked away, moved behind a tree out of sight of the other horses, and finished her business.

  "A modest horse?" I asked smugly.

  Rachel nodded. "Yeah. It does seem just a little weird."

  We waited till the horses had finished drinking and moved on. Tobias flew down and landed beside us. I crawled out through the brambles and brushed myself off.

  "I've never seen a horse hide behind a tree to do her business." I looked at Marco and Tobias. "Are you guys satisfied? These are not normal horses."

  73 he next day was Saturday. We met at my barn.

  How do you spy on horse-Controllers? How do you observe the actions of a group of horses with Yeerks in their heads? That was the question.

  "We morph horses, of course," I said as I pried open the jaw of the fox who'd been eyeing me hungrily when I was an osprey the day before. I popped a pill in his mouth, held it shut, and blew on his nose to make him swallow.

  "Horses? Didn't you morph a horse once?" Jake asked me.

  "Yes. I morphed one of our horses. It was amazing. But we have one problem: We only have the one horse here right now. She's got distinc-

  74 tive markings. And we can't exactly go walking around the Dry Lands looking identical."

  "Identical horses," Marco mused. "Sweet Valley Horses. Hmmm. That could be a TV show."

  We were all there together. All six of us, including Ax. Ax was in his human morph. Once again I was struck by just how weirdly handsome he was. It was strange how you could see little hints of Rachel, Marco, Jake, and me in him. There were some expressions, sometimes when he smiled, for instance, when it was like looking in a mirror and seeing a male me. It was a little creepy.