The Underground Read online

  "Who are you? What are you doing here?" Then he looked down. "You're not wearing shoes."

  "Yes, I apologize for my slightly ..." I was looking for a sophisticated word like "unconven-

  54 tional," but I couldn't think of it. ". . . my slightly weird appearance here."

  "Yes. Weird." He glared at me for a while, uncertain what to make of my utterly bizarre appearance in his bathroom. Then he shook my outstretched hand. "I guess I'm not one to be talking about 'weird.'"

  "Would you like to have a seat?" I said, indicating the toilet.

  "No. Thanks." Again the look that said, "Wait a minute, I may be nuts, but there's something strange about this." Then he said, "You're awfully young."

  "Thank you," I said. "Actually I'm twenty-five, but I work out, I eat the right foods, and I always wear sunscreen. Mr. Edelman," I said bluntly, before he could ask me any more questions, "why did you try to kill yourself?"

  He sat down on the edge of the tub. I leaned against the sink and tried to look like a very youthful twenty-five-year-old with no shoes. Mr. Edelman looked at me with confused, but kind, gray eyes. He made an effort to smooth his rumpled hair.

  And he said, "I had no choice. It's this thing in my head."

  I nodded. "Okay. Yes. What thing in your head?" ,. "The Yeerk." He made a weak smile, like he

  55 was expecting me to laugh and denounce him as a lunatic.

  My heart beat faster and I missed a breath. I sucked in a lungful and kept my expression fixed.

  "What exactly is a Yeerk, sir?"

  He hesitated again. He was tired of telling stories no one believed. Maybe he was on prescription drugs. They do that in psychiatric hospitals. He was probably loaded up on tran-quilizers or something. All of a sudden, I felt sorry for him.

  "Mr. Edelman, I promise you ! won't laugh. And I won't make you take any pills. And I won't say you're crazy. Can you tell me what you mean when you say 'Yeerk'?"

  He nodded. "Yes. Yeerks are parasitic aliens. They enter the brain through the ear canal. They take over every function of your conscious mind. They . . ." Suddenly he went into a spasm. It wracked his body. He jerked wildly, wrapped his arms tight together, and tried to control it. His mouth snapped open and shut like some mad ventriloquist's dummy.

  I grabbed him by the shoulders, trying to do something to help. But then he started raving. He was speaking in a strange, manic voice.

  "Ill what? Farum yeft kalash sip! Sip! Sip! The pool! Ga/7c?/ast//p/AAAAHHH! Help! Coranch! Coranch!"

  56 Suddenly, he fell silent and almost collapsed. I propped him back up.

  "Are you okay?"

  "No," he whispered. "It happens sometimes. It's the Yeerk. You see, he's mad. Insane. He's in my head and he won't get out. But he is insane! Insane!"

  "Okay, okay, try and chill, okay, Mr. Edelman?"

  "Yes. Yes."

  "Look, I can't stay much longer. But you have to tell me: How is the Yeerk staying alive without Kandrona rays? You've been in here for more than three days."

  I cannot possibly describe the way he looked at me then. Hope. Dread. Amazement. All three.

  I grabbed him again by the shoulders. "I know it's weird, but you have to trust me. How does it happen? Why is the Yeerk insane? How does it survive without the Kandrona?"

  "Andalite?" Mr. Edelman whispered wonder-ingly.

  "Yes," I lied. "Andalite."

  "It's the food," he said, gushing the information. "The food! During the famine after... after you Andalites destroyed the one Kandrona, we found out, they found out that a certain food could help them get by. For a while. But there were problems with it - AAHHH! Yeft, hiyiyarg felorka! Ghafrash fit Visser!"

  57 Mr. Edelman jerked and slavered and yelled for a few minutes and I waited and worried that someone might come. Some attendant or doctor or something. But no one did.

  I wished I could help the man. I had spent enough time close to Controllers of various types - human, Hork-Bajir, and Taxxon - to guess that some of what he was saying was in the basic Yeerk language. And other words were Hork-Bajir. Yeerks seem to adopt some of the language of their hosts. The Yeerk who was in Edelman's head must have been a Hork-Bajir-Controller at one point.

  Mr. Edelman calmed down and got control of himself again. "Sorry. The Yeerk breaks through sometimes. What you hear is the raving of a crazy Yeerk."

  "It's okay," I said. "What's this food? The food that allows Yeerks to survive without the Kandrona?"

  "They discovered it quite by accident. No one guessed what it could do. No one realized it would prove addictive. But it did. Terribly addictive. And over time, the continued ingestion of it began to eliminate the Yeerks' need for Kandrona rays. At the same time, it drove them crazy. You see, it seems to literally replace some of a Yeerk's brain stem."

  I nodded. I could barely contain my excite-

  59 ment. A food that could destroy Yeerks! "What is the food, Mr. Edelman?"

  "Oatmeal," he said. "But only the instant kind. And then, only the maple and ginger flavor." He shook his head. "Yeerks cannot resist the addiction, once exposed. And they slowly, but surely, drive themselves mad. There are dozens of men and women like me. In places like this. On the streets. Or worse."

  "Thanks for telling me," I said. "Urn . . . Listen, is there anything I can do for you?"

  He shook his head a little sadly. "The Yeerks will leave me alone. After all, who is going to believe a madman? I ... I am sorry I tried to destroy myself. It all just got to be too much. This . . . this alien lunatic in my head. My family wanting to keep me locked up in here."

  "Isn't there some way to get the Yeerk out of your head?"

  "No. No. He will'live as long as I do."

  I've never seen sadder eyes. I hope I never see eyes that sad again. I looked away.

  "I just wish . . . the times when I am myself, when I am in control, I wish I didn't have to spend them in here."

  He looked out through the dirty bathroom window with its heavy wire mesh.

  58

  We have our ultimate weapon," Marco reported to the others when we were all safely assembled back in Cassie's barn. "Maple and ginger oatmeal."

  "Instant maple and ginger oatmeal," I corrected.

  "Instant," Marco agreed.

  Cassie, Ax, and Tobias all just stared. Tobias was his hawk self, and he can really stare. Ax was in his own Andalite body, and he could stare with four eyes at once.

  "Oatmeal," Cassie said.

  "Oatmeal," Jake confirmed. "But only the instant maple and ginger. ! guess they don't know why."

  60 «Maybe it's the maple,» Tobias suggested.

  "Maybe it's the ginger. Or maybe it's the 'instant.' Whatever that is," I said. "Who cares? Suddenly we have a weapon to use on human-Controllers. A human-Controller who eats this stuff gets hooked and the Yeerk in his head goes nuts. What we have to do is find some way to get a lot of this stuff into a lot of Controllers."

  I took a sidelong glance at Cassie. Something told me she was not going to approve of this. But Cassie was bending over a cage, poking her fingers through the wire to check a bandage on an injured badger.

  To my surprise, it was Tobias who said, «You know, something about this doesn't feel totally okay. You know?»

  Marco, who had been lounging on a bale of hay, jumped up. "What? What? We have green kryptonite here! We have something that can make Yeerks go nuts. Why is that not a good thing?"

  «lt sounds to me like they get addicted to it. Like a drug,» Tobias said.

  I winced. "It's oatmeal, okay? Not anything illegal."

  «A drug is in the eye of the beholder,» Tobias argued. «lf you get addicted to the illegal stuff and it messes you up, that's a drug to you. If you get addicted to oatmeal and it messes you up -»

  61 "It's still just oatmeal," I said. "Oatmeal is oatmeal. Jeez! I can't believe we're having this conversation."

  "Look," Marco said, "the bigger question here is WHO CARES?! They're Yeerks. They're the enemy. The
y attacked us, not the other way around."

  «What about the hosts? The humans?» Ax asked. «The Yeerks are made invulnerable to their normal hunger for Kandrona rays. They can live inside their human hosts forever, even if the oatmeal is later taken away. These hosts would lose all hope.»

  "If we lose this war we're all going to be without hope," I said. "Ax, I can't believe you, of all people, would even hesitate."

  Ax swiveled his stalk eyes toward me. «We Andalites have been at war longer than you. We understand the temptation to sink to the level of your enemy.»

  "Sink to the level of -" I started to yell.

  Ax cut me off. «We also know that you can't win if you are not prepared to be a little ruthless. It's a question of balance. How far into savagery do you go to defeat the savage?»

  I looked around the barn. Marco and I had drawn closer, almost unconsciously. Tobias was up in the rafters, using his hawk senses to listen and look for anyone approaching the barn. Ax

  62 was shifting on his four legs and stretching his scorpionlike tail.

  Jake and Cassie were the only ones not to say much. Jake looked troubled. He was staring, but not at anything real. I could guess his thoughts. His brother, Tom, is a Controller.

  But it was Cassie who surprised me. Usually she's the one getting all moral.

  "Cassie?" i asked. "What do you think?"

  She hesitated. Like she just wanted to keep tending to the badger. She sighed and stood up. When she turned around, I was shocked. She had a stricken look.

  "I ... I don't know anymore, okay?" she said.

  I was confused for a moment. Then it hit me. We'd had a bad run-in with a human-Controller whose Yeerk was Visser Three's twin brother. This Yeerk had found another way around the Kan-drona. He cannibalized fellow Yeerks. Sometimes human hosts got in the way.

  In the heat of the moment, hearing that evil creature speak, Cassie had demanded his destruction. She'd asked Jake to do it. Jake had refused.

  I don't know why, but it frightened me to think of Cassie not knowing what was right and wrong. Or at least thinking she didn't know. Cassie was my best friend. I counted on her to balance me. She was supposed to be sensible

  63 when I was reckless. She was supposed to be moral when I was ruthless.

  But things had gotten more and more confused for all of us, I guess.

  "Look," I said, "okay, maybe this oatmeal is a drug to the Yeerks. But you know what? This is a war. Sooner or later, if we are successful, if the Andalites send help, if the human race rises up, we're going to try and destroy every Yeerk on planet Earth. Right? That's our goal. This isn't like some normal war where you hope you can make peace and compromise. We can't compromise. The Yeerks are parasites. How do we compromise? Let them have a few million humans as hosts?"

  «They will never compromise, anyway,» Ax said. «They must be forced back to their own home world.»

  «So we try and feed them addictive drugs,» Tobias said with obvious distaste.

  "It's OAT-freaking-MEAL!" Marco exploded.

  Cassie suddenly laughed. It was a cynical laugh. I didn't know she was capable of a cynical laugh. "And all the rights and wrongs, and all the lines between good and evil, just go wafting and waving and swirling around, don't they?"

  Jake shook off his funk and stepped to the center of our little group. "I have to ask myself: If it were Tom, and it may be Tom in the end, would

  64 I do this to him? On the one hand, life as a slave of a Yeerk. No free will at all. On the other hand, as we saw with Mr. Edelman, some free will, some ability to communicate, but with this insane Yeerk in your brain."

  «So?» Tobias asked him. «What's your answer? »

  Jake shrugged. "In the Civil War, they were ending slavery. Most of the Southern soldiers who were killed weren't slave owners. They were just guys trying to be brave. Maybe they could have worked out a compromise. Maybe they could have ended the war earlier if the North had agreed to leave some people as slaves. But would that have been right? No. So the war had to go on till everyone was free."

  «0r dead,» Tobias added grimly. «But okay, that's a pretty good example. You're right. I hate it, but you're right. We have to win.»

  I laughed without any humor at all. I'm pretty gung ho. Unlike Cassie, unlike Tobias perhaps, I'm ruthless at times. But even I have enough sense to know the words "we have to win" are the first four steps on the road to hell.

  And I noticed that Jake never answered himself about his brother. Would Tom be getting the magic oatmeal slipped into his breakfast?

  Not a chance. Jake still hoped to rescue Tom some day. And from what Edelman had said,

  66 there was no rescue from an oatmeal-altered Yeerk.

  "Where do we find a bunch of human-Controllers sitting down to eat?" Marco wondered.

  I sighed. "The Yeerk pool, Marco. The Yeerk pool."

  65

  le Yeerk pool. I dreamed about it that night.

  I didn't use to dream much. Or at least, I seldom recalled my dreams. I dream a lot now. Terrible dreams where I'm trapped in some hideous shape, half-human, half-insect. I dream about that awful battle in the ant tunnels. I dream about the screaming, slashing massacre when we took the Kandrona at the top of the EGS Tower.

  But I dream most about the Yeerk pool. I hear the screams and curses of human hosts held in cages while their Yeerks swim in the leaden water of the pool. I hate that sound. I hate the sound of despair. It makes me mad. In my dream I'm mad

  67 at those poor people and I want to yell, "Why don't you fight? Why don't you fight?"

  But then it's me. It's me being led out onto that steel pier by a pair of Hork-Bajir warriors. It's me kicking and screaming and begging, "Please, please, someone help me!" Knowing there is no help.

  Knowing I am doomed, and feeling the despair, and hating that feeling inside of me.

  I feel the Hork-Bajir kick my legs from under me. And I'm facedown on the steel pier. And they shove me forward till my face is just an inch above the gray sludge of the Yeerk pool.

  It seethes and boils with the swift movements of the Yeerk slugs.

  And then my head goes down. Down into the liquid. And the Yeerk that will own me is there. I see him, a gray slug, a vague, indistinct shape in the liquid.

  I struggle, but what can I do against two Hork-Bajir? I struggle, but my head is held there as I scream bubbles.

  The Yeerk touches my ear. Like a large snail. That's how it feels. Then the pain ... it forces its way into my ear! It's inside my ear! The pain is incredible, but so much worse is simply knowing it has me.

  It surges into my brain.

  And I am yanked, gasping, up from the pool.

  68 I try to grab my ear. But my arm no longer works.

  I try to yell. But my mouth is not mine anymore.

  So I scream, in some dark, lonely corner of my own brain, I scream.

  And the Yeerk chuckles as it opens my memories and reads my life. And I give way to the despair.

  When I woke up I had soaked the pillow with my sweat. I stared at the clock. Three-twenty-seven. a.m.

  The Yeerk pool. We were going back to the Yeerk pool. And I, Rachel, mighty Xena, fearless, pulled the covers up over my head and shook.

  At dawn I got up and put on a robe. It was cloudy out, so the dawn was just gray. But I went to my window and opened it, just as I do every morning.

  Tobias arrived, almost silent. He swept inside and landed easily on my dresser.

  «How you doing?» he asked.

  "Fine," I whispered. "How about you?"

  I have to whisper when Tobias comes over. My sisters are right in the next room. I keep my door locked.

  «l had a nice breakfast,» Tobias said. «A lucky hunt.»

  69 I went to my desk and opened my book. It was my homework. "Can you stand math?"

  «l've gotten so I kind of like math,» Tobias said. «lt's something that's the same for all humans or whatever.»

  I opened my book.

/>   I guess it was a weird scene. Me, with this big red-tailed hawk perched on the edge of my desk. Sitting there in the glow of a single lamp, while the rest of my family still slept. But we did it lots of mornings. Whenever Tobias managed to find an early breakfast and it wasn't raining.

  «You worried about going back to the Yeerk pool?»

  I laughed nonchalantly. "If I'm ever not worried about going to the Yeerk pool, you can lock me up with Mr. Edelman."

  «Yeah. Look, I'm going with you guys this time. What morph do you think we'll use?»

  I sighed. "You don't have to do this, you know."

  «Yes I do. What morph?»

  "I don't know. Probably fly or cockroach. Do you have an entrance for us?"

  Part of what Tobias did with his long days, while the rest of us were in school, was monitor the movements of known Controllers. He kept

  71 track of the ever-shifting entrances to the Yeerk pool. It was fairly easy for him.

  «Yeah, I have an entrance,» he said. If he'd had a mouth, he would have grinned. «You guys are going to love this one.»

  I gave him a sidelong look. "If it leads to the Yeerk pool, I don't think I'll ever love it."

  70

  «T

  «This was not easy to figure out,» Tobias said proudly. «Hours and hours of following known Controllers. Then I had to keep stealing peeks in through the windows. I even morphed to human to check out the inside. That's how I found out about the Happy Meal.»

  We were flies. The six of us. We were inside a McDonald's, zipping madly around. It was crazy. The scent of food was everywhere. Pickles. Meat. Ketchup. Grease. Special sauce.

  My fly body thought it had died and gone to heaven. Outside of a good trash dump, there's no place a fly likes more than a fast-food restaurant.

  «What about the Happy Meal?» Cassie asked.

  «Why is the meal happy?» Ax asked.

  72 Tobias decided to answer Cassie's question. «That's how you signal. That's the code. You go up to the counter and say "I'd like a Happy Meal. With extra happy." That's the signal.»

  I flew upside down along the ceiling, looking for a place to land and rest. I buzzed to a nice greasy patch near the deep fryer, turned a back flip, and set down. My mouth - actually, it was more like some insanely long straw that could curl up - extended down and began spitting digestive juices onto the grease, then sucking up the resulting goo.