The Underground Read online

  Hey, I know it's gross. But it was either that or keep resisting the fly's desperate cries for food! food! food!

  «After you place the Happy Meal order, you go around like you're going to the bathroom. But instead, you take the other door. The one that goes to the kitchen. You go in - and here's the cool part - you go into the walk-in refrigerators

  «Then what?» Jake asked.

  «Then I don't know. I could never see all the way inside.»

  «0kay. So here's the plan,» Jake said. «We watch till someone orders the Happy Meal with . . . what was it?»

  «Extra happy,» Tobias said.

  «ls it just my imagination, or did the Yeerks develop a sense of humor?» Marco asked.

  73 «0nce we have our Controller, we follow him in. No problem,» Jake said. Then he added grimly, «0h yeah, no problem. A little picnic in the Yeerk pool. I'm sure they'll all buy that.»

  «Um, Jake?» Marco said. «You said that last part out loud. We heard it.»

  «0h. Sorry.»

  «Mr. Inspiration^ I said with a laugh. «Come on. Let's -»

  «Uh-uh-uh! Don't say "let's do it," Rachel,» Marco yelled.

  We took turns hanging out above the counter. But we didn't have too long a wait till a woman came in and ordered a Happy Meal with "extra happy."

  We buzzed easily along behind her as she went through the door and into the kitchen. Then into the walk-in refrigerator.

  «Gotta get out of here, man,» I said. «This cold is slowing me down.»

  «Yes, this body has no ability to regulate body temperature,» Ax observed. «What a strange idea. You humans do many unusual things.»

  «Ax, I don't think we're exactly responsible for -»

  «Yes, I know. I was attempting to make a joke. A human-style joke.»

  «Great,» Marco muttered. «Funny Yeerks and now a wannabe-funny Andalite.»

  74 The Controller woman waited patiently and after a few seconds, the back of the walk-in refrigerator split and opened wide.

  She stepped and we flew through the opening. It really was going to be easy this time.

  BrrrrEEEEET! BrrrrEEEEET! "Unauthorized life-form detected." BrrrrEEEEET BrrrrEEEEET! "Unauthorized life-form detected."

  The Controller woman looked around. I saw her blue eyes, each the size of a swimming pool, turn and look. Through the shattered, splintered fly vision, I could see her focus.

  Then she muttered under her breath, "Security fanatics. It's just a couple of lousy flies."

  But the mechanical voice was giving instructions now.

  "Shut your eyes tightly to protect against retinal damage from the Gleet BioFilter."

  «The what?» I asked.

  «Get out of here!» Ax yelled.

  «What?»

  «0ut! Out! Out!» he yelled.

  Ax never yells. So if he does yell, you have to figure it's a good idea to pay attention.

  I spun around in midair the way only a fly can do, and I hauled wing for the still-open crack that led to the refrigerator.

  Suddenly, the whole world blew up in a dazzling explosion of light. I felt my compound eyes

  76 melt. I flew on, blinded, blew through the rapidly narrowing crack and hit the cold air.

  «l'm blind!» I cried.

  «l think we all are,» Ax said calmly. «We're lucky to be just blinded. A Gleet BioFilter destroys all life-forms whose DNA is not entered into the computer controls. Andalite technology, of course. The Yeerks must have stolen the specifications^

  «Ax, are you telling me that filter thing will wipe out any life-form except the one they program it for?» Jake asked.

  «Yes, Prince Jake. I'm sorry to say, yes. Everything but the particular human-Controller.»

  «Then we're shut off from the Yeerk pool,» Tobias said. «They must have this same technology at all the entrances now.»

  It was hard to get too upset by the idea of being locked out of the Yeerk pool. But it was frustrating. And it kind of made me mad. I didn't like the idea of being outsmarted by the Yeerks.

  «There must be some other way in,» I said.

  «l'd like to know what it would be,» Marco said.

  For a moment no one said anything. Then Cassie said, «Well . . . there is one way.»

  «l take it back!» Marco said. «l take it back! I can tell by your tone, Cassie, I really don't want to know.»

  75

  lack at Cassie's barn we gathered around and stared at a small cage.

  "What is that, a rat?" Marco asked.

  «lt's a mole,» Tobias said.

  "Count on Tobias to know his rodents," Marco said. He looked up at the rafters where Tobias was preening - cleaning his feathers with his beak. "How do they taste?"

  «!'ve never caught one. They don't come up to the surface very often.»

  "That is one ugly creature," I said. "And it looks way too much like a shrew." I had morphed a shrew once. It wasn't a good time. The shrew was way too hyped. Way too excitable. And way, way too hungry.

  77 "It's a lot calmer than a shrew," Cassie said. "And like Tobias said, moles spend almost all their time underground. They dig tunnels. See how big the front feet are? They're well-adapted for digging tunnels."

  Marco sighed. "Moleman. You can't even picture a superhero named Moleman. What would the superpowers be? Digging?"

  «Many of your Earth animals are similar to this in shape,» Ax observed.

  "Yeah," Cassie agreed. "It's a very successful shape: rats, mice, voles, shrews, even squirrels and raccoons to a certain extent. Your basic low-slung, four-legged rodent shape."

  I sighed. "So let me get this straight. You're suggesting we morph this mole and dig our way down to the Yeerk pool?"

  Cassie shrugged. Then she winked at me. "Just trying to be helpful."

  "It's probably, what, fifty feet down through the dirt to the top of the Yeerk pool?"

  «At least,» Tobias said.

  "That's a lot of dirt," Jake said. "But I don't know of another way. If we're going to do this, we need to get back to the Yeerk pool."

  "Has anyone figured out how we're supposed to get a whole lot of oatmeal down there after we dig these mole tunnels?" Tasked.

  Jake nodded like he was going to say "sure."

  78 Instead he said, "Nope. But we need to start stocking up. Everyone start bugging your parents to buy instant maple-and-ginger flavor oatmeal. Lots of it. We'll start with that. Then we'll spend our allowances for more."

  Marco shook his head. "No need. I do the food shopping at my house. My dad drops me off, hits Target for all that kind of stuff, then picks me up. I can supply the oatmeal."

  "Okay, then," Jake said. "Nothing left to do but acquire this mole here."

  I made a face. I was nearest the cage. "Does it bite?"

  "I wouldn't think so," Cassie said. "It usually just eats ... I mean, I don't think it'll bite you."

  I turned on her. "What does it usually eat, Cassie?"

  "Well, it eats what you'd expect an underground animal to eat. It eats worms. Mostly worms."

  "Oh, great," I moaned.

  I stretched out my hand and Cassie opened the cage. I touched the mole and kept my hand there while I felt the mole DNA become a part of me. I suppose the mole became quiet and still, the way most animals do when you acquire them, but who could tell? It was already pretty quiet.

  79 When it came to Tobias's turn, the mole got a bit more excited. You have to be in your own body when you acquire new DNA. And now the hawk body was Tobias's own true body. So to acquire the mole, he had to flap down to the cage and grab the poor creature with his talons.

  Just as Cassie's father arrived, we left the barn and went toward the school.

  The Yeerk pool is a vast, underground complex. It's like one of those covered football stadiums or whatever. In the center is the pool itself, but there is an open area all around the pool, so all together it's probably a thousand or fifteen hundred feet across. I'm guessing. We never exactly measured it.
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br />   It's big, for being a hole in the ground. It stretches beneath the school and clear over to the mall. At least the entrances do. The entrances are concealed stairways that come in from angles all around the pool. We've found entrances in the janitor's closet at school (the Yeerks eliminated that one later) and in the dressing rooms at The Gap in the mall.

  «Based on the entrances we've found over time, I think the center of the Yeerk pool is right at this intersection^ Tobias said.

  We were all at the intersection between the school and the mall.

  80 "Well, we can't dig here," I said.

  "We wouldn't want to," Marco pointed out. "We don't want to be right over the pool when we dig through." He made a falling motion with his hands then said, "Splash!"

  "Good point," I agreed. The idea of falling into the Yeerk pool itself was nauseating.

  Jake said, "However, we want to be close to the pool itself so we can tell exactly where it is when we dig through. That way we can dig a horizontal side tunnel out over the pool and use it to drop the oatmeal."

  Marco nodded. "I have the strange feeling this will involve some kind of geometry I should have paid attention to in class."

  "You are asking for a lot of precision, Prince Jake," Ax said. "We have no instruments. Stru-ments. Not even primitive human instruments. Struuu-ments. Mints? In-stru-mints?"

  "We have to make an educated guess, Ax. And don't call me 'prince.'"

  "Yes, Prince Jake."

  Tobias had come to rest on a high lamppost. Hawks have amazingly good hearing, so he could still hear us talking.

  I looked up at him. "Tobias? You're the one who keeps track of entrances and stuff. What's your best estimate?"

  81 "And don't forget, we could use some privacy for morphing," Jake said.

  Tobias opened his wings and flew up and up. He inscribed a swift, irregular circle in the sky, then came back to roost. «l think I have a place.»

  82

  It turned out to be a toolshed. It was in the backyard of a house that was empty and had a decrepit "For Sale" sign in the weeds of the overgrown front yard.

  The house was on the main road, sandwiched between a convenience store and a place that sold hot tubs. There was a lot of noisy traffic going by all the time. Some distance behind the house there was a forlorn little park. Just a few trees, some picnic tables, and a lumpy sort of hill with rocks jutting out of the soil. It didn't look like anyone had lived in the house in a long time.

  The toolshed was rusted tin with a dirt floor. It was empty, except for some bags of potting soil and a rake.

  83 "Perfect," Jake declared. "A little cramped, but perfect. But once we're all in mole morph, it'll be roomy enough."

  Cassie cleared her throat. "Dm . . . maybe I should have mentioned this earlier. But it's not about all of us being moles at once. Not at first, anyway. I mean, only one mole can dig at a time."

  We all stared at her as we let that bit of information sink in. Somehow I'd had images of us all down underground digging away together. Now I was getting a very different picture.

  "We're gonna be down there alone?" Marco yelped. "Underground? Dirt pressing in all around us? No air?"

  Cassie shrugged. "Well, you'll be a mole."

  "Well, then it's all right," Marco said with shrill sarcasm. "We'll be moles, so it's okay to be under twenty feet of dirt with no air."

  "Oh, you big baby," I said. "No problem."

  I say these things. I don't know why. They just pop out of my stupid mouth.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," Marco said, placing his hand on my shoulder, "we have a volunteer."

  What could I say? I had to tough it through. "Okay. Fine, Weenie-boy. I'll go first."

  It was hot in the little shed with all of us crammed in there. Hot and airless. And already I

  84 was feeling a little claustrophobic. You know, the fear of tight spaces.

  I focused my mind on the image of the mole. And by whatever weird means the morphing technology works, I began to change.

  The first thing I noticed was that there was more room in the shed. The bodies that had been pressed close were getting farther away. I was shrinking.

  But I wasn't shrinking at the same rate all over. My legs and arms were shrinking much, much faster.

  FLUMP!

  My butt hit the floor!

  "Whoa!" Jake yelled. "Catch her!"

  Jake and Cassie grabbed me. Just in time to keep me from falling over. Too late to save my dignity.

  Marco started giggling. "Heh heh, ha ha ha ha!"

  Cassie was snorting desperately, trying not to laugh.

  My legs had shriveled away, leaving nothing but feet. My arms were nothing but hands. I was still a human being, but with feet alone where my legs should have been.

  Jake and Cassie held my shoulders and balanced me upright. I was like one of those blowup clowns you punch and it rolls back. I was

  85 sitting down, waving my toes and fingers and wishing I could strangle Marco.

  "Wait till it's your tuuuuurn, nyarco!" I yelled. But my face chose that moment to start pushing out and out and out.

  They laid me down on my face finally, since I was now about two feet long. Thick black-brown fur began to sweep across me, transforming me from mostly human to mostly mole in appearance.

  My face just kept bulging outward, forming a fantastically long, ratlike snout.

  But while most of me seemed to be shrinking, my hands seemed to be growing. Relative to the rest of me, anyway. I was growing hands like claw-tipped shovels. Big, flat, hairless, hard, with stubby claws on the ends of each "finger." My hands twisted as I watched, turning outward.

  My eyes went dark. I thought I was totally blind. Then I realized, no, I could still see. But all I could see were vague lines between dark and light. I was practically blind, but not completely.

  Almost blind. With hearing that was dim and distant, like listening through a door. Even scent was nothing special.

  However, a new sense reared up to fill my brain. Touch! My nose was insanely alive and so sensitive to touch I could feel the air currents around me.

  86 Deprived of vision and much of my hearing, I felt panic. I was supposed to go digging down in the ground like this? Blind? Half-deaf?

  And yet ... I felt the earth beneath my shovel hands and my ratlike back legs, and scraping under my belly. My nose poked at the dirt and felt its texture, moistness, hardness.

  It was certainly better underground. Safer. Oh yes, far safer underground.

  Besides, I was hungry.

  I began to dig.

  From far away I heard a voice say, "Well, she's getting right down to business, huh?"

  "It still looks like a rat to me."

  I dug my claws into the dirt and shoved it back with my "hands." Then again. More. And now the desire to dig was very much stronger. I had to dig! I was surrounded by big, lumbering shapes of gray on gray. When they moved I could see the shifts in the light pattern.

  Dig! I could feel the warmth of the earth calling to me. In some dim part of my mind I could almost form a picture of a cozy little hole, deep down, filled with comfortable grasses and twigs and scraps of garbage.

  I could curl up there when I wasn't waddling through my tunnels. The tunnels where beetles might dig through and lay their eggs for me to eat. Where, in the absolute darkness, my sensi-

  87 tive nose would encounter the squirming squishi-ness of a plump, juicy earthworm.

  Oh, yes, dig!

  "You know, it occurs to me, maybe she's not in total control of this morph."

  "Nah. Come on. You think a moie has strong enough instincts to take over Rachel's brain?"

  "Look at the way she's digging."

  "Hmm. Rachel? Hey, Rachel? How you doing down there?"

  Dig and dig and dig. Now my upper body was down in the warm darkness of earth. Dig harder! Get all the way under. Darkness was safety. The safety of warm, moist earth pressing in all around.

  "She's not an
swering. She's totally gone mole on us. I wouldn't have thought moles had that powerful a set of instincts. Okay, better grab her before she gets al! the way under."

  Suddenly, I felt something grab me! It grabbed my tail. It was pulling me backward. I dug furiously with my shovel hands. I scrabbled at the dirt, but it was too powerful.

  Up, up, up through the air! Exposed! Nothing around me but air, air, air! Emptiness!

  "Hey, Rachel. It's me, Jake. Snap out of it. The mole brain has you."

  I snapped out of it. It was a sensation like ... well, like emerging from a tunnel into daylight. I

  89 was back! I was me. Me, staring through those utterly useless mole eyes.

  «Did not!» I said.

  "Yeah, right," I heard Marco say.

  «l was just trying to get on with it. Hey, I'm here to dig, right? So I was digging, jerk.»

  Jake put me back down by the shallow hole I'd made.

  "Ooookay, Rachel. You were not having trouble. Everything was fine."

  I went back to work. But now the earth didn't seem so inviting or warm.

  88

  Down and down I dug.

  Till my entire body was in the dirt. And now I was no longer hiding beneath the mole's mind. I was a human being, digging blindly into the dirt.

  Why should it have been terrifying? Why?

  Was it the way the dirt pressed in all around me? The fact that I could not possibly turn around? I couldn't breathe! Only I could breathe. Yes, I was breathing. But that panic, that terror of suffocating in a dark place, kept rearing up. I could push it down, I could reason with myself, but that fear of suffocation was too strong.

  I was buried alive.

  Correction: I was burying myself alive.

  Down I went, down and down. I knew I should

  90 be digging a vertical hole, but it was impossible. The mole couldn't dig that way. The best it could do was slope downward.

  I dug. How long, I don't know. It seemed like a very longtime.

  And then, quite suddenly, I couldn't stand it anymore. I needed air! I tried to back up, but no! I couldn't move that way.