The Invasion (22 page)

“That’s decent of them,” Rachel said dryly.

“Not really. Chapman just said that for a while longer they still have to avoid attracting too much attention. A bunch of kids start turning up dead and people will definitely notice. He said they should just wait—kids can’t keep quiet for long about seeing aliens. When the kids talk, the Controllers will find them and get rid of them.”

“Except that we aren’t going to talk about what we saw,” Rachel said.

“You got that right,” Marco agreed. “We aren’t saying anything. We are forgetting everything we saw. We are getting on with our normal lives.”

“And leave Tom the way he is?” I demanded. “No way. Never. He’s my brother. I’m going to save him.”

“Just how do you figure you’ll do that?” Marco asked sarcastically. “Let’s see, it’s you versus Chapman, the cops, a bunch of Hork-Bajir and Taxxons, and,
worst of all, that creep, Visser Three. All you can do to fight them is turn into a dog and bite their ankles. It’s like being stuck in the most impossible video game ever invented.”

I grinned. Or at least I showed my teeth. “Yeah, it is, kind of. But I’m pretty good at video games.”

“And he won’t be alone,” Rachel said. “I’m in this, too.”

“And me,” Tobias said.

“Me, too,” Cassie agreed.

“Swell,” Marco said. “So suddenly you’re the Fantastic Four. This isn’t a comic book. This is real.”

We heard the sound of people coming through the dunes. The meeting of the full members had broken up.

“Everyone, quiet,” I said. “We’ll let this ride … for now.” I said that to calm Marco down. I had no intention of letting it ride.

I pulled Cassie aside. “Listen, Cassie, I need an animal morph that will let me watch Chapman without him seeing me. What do you have at the farm?”

Cassie got quiet for a moment. “Let me think. We have a lot of injured birds, of course. We have the wolf with the broken leg. We have the wildcat with one eye.”

I waited while she went down a list of all the animals in the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic.

Suddenly Cassie snapped her fingers.“I wonder….How small an animal do you think we can morph?”

I shrugged. I had no idea.

“I may have something in mind,” she said. “It’s not really in the clinic as a patient. It just sort of lives there. It’s small. It can crawl up walls. It’s fast, if you need to get away. And I guess it can hear and see okay.”

Which is how I ended up in Cassie’s barn later that night, crawling beneath cages full of sick buzzards and between a pair of jumpy deer, looking for lizards.

I
did it Monday morning in my locker at school. I turned into a lizard.

A green anole, to be exact. It’s a member of the iguana family. Like you care.

I waited till the bell rang for first period, which was English class. When everyone else was out of the hallway, I just climbed into my locker. I tried to act cool about it, just in case anyone was watching.

The locker was about two inches shorter than me, so I had to crouch. And it was so tight I couldn’t move. The only light was from the three small ventilation slits. I could hear my heart pounding in the cramped, dark space. I was afraid.

It was one thing to turn into a dog. I mean, it’s weird, it’s strange, but it’s also kind of cool. Dogs are cool animals. But lizards?

“I should have practiced,” I muttered under my breath. “I really should have practiced like Cassie said.”

I started to focus for the morphing. I remembered the way we had caught the lizard the night before last. We’d spotted it with a flashlight, and Cassie had put a bucket over it so it couldn’t get away.

It had been fairly creepy, just touching it to acquire its DNA pattern. Now I was going to
become
it.

The first thing I noticed was that I suddenly had more room inside the locker. I didn’t have to crouch down. And my shoulders weren’t scrunched up anymore.

I touched my face with one hand. My skin was looser than it should have been. And pebbly to the touch.

I ran my hand over my head. My hair was almost all gone.

Things began to happen very fast. The locker grew and grew around me. It was big as a barn. Big as a stadium!

It was like falling. Like falling off a skyscraper and taking forever to hit the ground.

I was standing on something sticky, as large as a boulder. How had a boulder gotten into my locker? But then I realized — it was a wad of gum! An old, chewed wad of gum stuck to the bottom of my locker.

Gigantic drapes as big as the sails of a ship were falling all around me. They were my clothes. In the dim light I could see two monstrous, misshapen things on either side of me. I could just make out the Nike swoosh, and realized they were my shoes. They were the size of houses.

And then the lizard brain kicked in.

Fear! Trapped! Run! Run! Rruunrunrun!

I shot left. A wall! I scampered up, feeling my feet stick to it.
Trapped!
I jumped back. Another hard surface.
Trapped! Runrunrunrun!

I fought to get control, but the lizard brain was panicked. It didn’t know where it was. It wanted out.
OUT!

Go toward the light! I ordered my new body. The ventilation slits. That was the way out.

But the body was afraid of the light. It was terrified.

I was still bouncing off the walls. I could not overcome the panic instincts of the lizard body.

Go to the light!
I screamed inside my head. And suddenly I was there. I poked my head out, and my
body slithered after me. My tongue flicked out and I got a weird kind of input from it. Like smell, only not quite. It kept flicking. I could see it shoot out of my mouth and lick the air.

In the bright light I realized how bad the lizard eyes were. I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. Everything was shattered and twisted around. Down was up and up was down. Colors weren’t even close to right.

I tried to think. Come on, Jake. You have eyes on the side of your head now. They don’t focus together. They see different things. Deal with it.

I tried to make sense of the pictures, using this knowledge, but they were still a mess. It seemed to take me forever to figure it out. One eye was looking down the hall to the left. The other was looking down the hall to the right. I was upside down, gripping the side of the locker, which was like a long, gray field that wouldn’t end.

And all the time the green anole brain was fighting me. Now that it was out of the dark locker, it desperately wanted to go back in.

Chapman’s office, I reminded myself. But where was it?

Left. That way.

Suddenly I was off and running. Straight down the wall. Zoom! Then on level floor. Zoom! Around a
scrap of paper twice as big as I was. The ground flew past. It was like being strapped onto a crazy, out-of-control missile.

Then my lizard brain sensed the spider. It was a strange thing, like I wasn’t sure if I saw the spider, or heard it, or smelled it, or tasted it on my flicking lizard tongue, or just suddenly
knew
it was there.

I took off after it, racing at a million miles an hour before I could even think about stopping. My legs were a blur, they moved so fast.

It probably wasn’t a huge spider. Not if you were a great big human being. But to my lizard eyes it looked as big as a small child. It was huge. I could see the multiple black eyes. I could see the individual joints in its eight legs. I could see the clicking, awful mandibles.

The spider ran. I ran after it. I was faster.

Noooooooooooo!
I screamed inside my head. But too late. My head jerked forward, fast as a striking snake. My jaws snapped. And suddenly the spider was in my mouth.

I could feel it fighting. I could
feel
the spider’s legs squirming and fighting to get out of my mouth.

I tried to spit it out, but I couldn’t. The lizard’s hunger for that spider was too great.

I swallowed the spider. It was like swallowing a whole canned ham. A canned ham that was fighting all the way down.

No, no, no!
my brain cried in horror and disgust. But at the same time, the lizard brain was pleased. I could feel it become slightly calmer.

That does it! I told myself. I am
out
of this morph!

I wanted out of that horrible little body. I didn’t care who saw me, I was going to morph back to human shape. Marco was right. It was insane to get involved in this. Insane!

I heard the ground shake. It was a noise like a giant stomping across the land.

It
was
a giant.

There was a huge shadow in the sky. It was like someone was trying to crush me by dropping an entire building on my head.

The shoe came down!

I scampered left.

Another shoe.

My tail! The shoe was on my tail! I was trapped!

I
n panic, I tried to run. But my tail was caught.

Suddenly I was free! How had that …

I realized what had happened. My tail had snapped off. Looking back, I saw it, still trapped by the giant shoe. It squirmed as if it were still alive. It wiggled like a worm on a hook.

The shoe lifted and flew through the air again.

I shot up the side of the wall and froze in place.

The giant had not seen me. It had not tried to stomp me. It had been an accident. And now my tail … no, the lizard’s tail …

The giant walked on, shaking the ground as it went.

I focused one lizard eye on the figure. It was like trying to make sense out of one of those carnival fun mirrors. But even so, I was pretty sure it was Chapman.

I watched him head down the hall. And with all my power, I ordered my lizard body to follow him.

I tried not to think about the spider in my stomach, or the fact that it was still not completely dead. I tried not to think about the fact that part of my body was back on the floor, jerking like it was still alive. I just raced along after Chapman.

Because Chapman might reveal something that would help Tom.

I planned to follow Chapman to his office. I’d hide under his desk and listen to him make phone calls. I figured sooner or later he might let something slip about the location of the Yeerk pool.

Cassie and I had talked about it. She’d said it could take days of hiding in Chapman’s office before we learned anything. Besides, we could only stay in a morph for two hours. And meanwhile, I would be skipping class. Sooner or later, I’d get in trouble over that.

And the really funny thing is, when they catch you skipping class, you get sent to the assistant principal.

Mr. Chapman.

I could just imagine
that
scene….Sorry I skipped class, Mr. Chapman, but I’ve been in this lizard body, watching you because I know you’re a Controller and part of a giant alien conspiracy to take over the earth.

I would have laughed, only lizards can’t laugh. So I just followed Chapman as he marched down the hall.

Suddenly he stopped. Were we at his office?

I looked around as well as I could. It didn’t look like the office. The spider gave a kick in my stomach.

He opened a door. It swung right over me with a big rush of air. It went just above my head as I hugged the floor.

I concentrated on making sense of the sights. Wait a minute! This was the janitor’s closet, a mess of mops and buckets and cleaning solutions. What was Chapman doing …?

He went inside. I followed, careful to stay away from the high leather walls that were his shoes.

I heard a loud click. He had locked the door behind him.

It was a long way up from the floor, but I could more or less see him doing things to the sink faucet.
I thought he grabbed one of the hooks they used to hang up the dirty mop heads. I was pretty sure he twisted it because I could hear a squeaking sound.

And to my total and complete amazement, the wall opened.

There was a doorway where the wall had been. Strange smells and stranger sounds wafted up from inside the doorway.

Chapman stepped through. There were stairs just inside, heading down into a purple-lit pit. From far away, as if it came from a hundred miles down, I heard a faint sound.

It was a scream. A scream of fear and despair. A human voice, crying out in the darkness of that horrible place.

“Noooo!” the voice moaned. “Noooo!”

I knew what the scream meant. I knew what was happening. Somewhere down there, a human being was feeling the Yeerk slug slither inside its brain. Somewhere down there, a human being was being turned into a mindless slave of the Yeerks.

Chapman headed down the stairs.

The door closed behind him.

I had found the Yeerk pool.

It was right under my school.

S
creams,” I said. “Human screams. They sounded far off, but that’s what they were.”

My friends looked at me. All but Marco, who looked away. It was that same afternoon, right after school. We’d gone to the mall. We figured it was the best way not to look suspicious. No one thinks there’s anything weird about kids hanging together at the mall.

We were at a table in the food court, sharing some nachos. Ever since eating the spider, I’d had a desire to consume lots of junk food to help me forget.

“You were a lizard at the time,” Marco pointed out. “Who knows what you heard?”

“I know,” I said.

“I can’t stand the thought of what’s happening to people down there,” Cassie said. She shuddered. “It’s sickening.”

“We have to do something,” Rachel said.

“Yeah, let’s rush right down there,” Marco said. “Then it can be
us
screaming.”

I realized I had lost my appetite for nachos.

“Marco, you can’t just ignore what’s going on,” Rachel said.

“Sure I can,” he said. “All I have to do is remind myself that hey, guess what? I don’t want to die.”