Applegate, K A - Animorphs 06 - The Capture Read online

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  i Cover Illustration by David B. Mattingly.

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  ISBN 0-590-62982-4

  Copyright © 1997 by Katherine Applegate. All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. APPLE PAPERBACKS and the APPLE PAPERBACKS logo are registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc. ANIMORPHS is a trademark of Scholastic Inc.

  12 11 10 9 8 7 789/9012/0 Printed in the U.S.A. 40 First Scholastic printing, February 1997

  For Michael

  1 .I'm Jake.

  Just Jake. You don't need to know my last name, and I can't tell you, anyway. My story is full of small lies. I've changed people's names. I've changed the names of places. I've changed small details here and there.

  But the big stuff is true.

  All of it.

  The Yeerks are here. On Earth. That is true.

  The Yeerks have made Controllers of many humans. They have inserted their gross, sluglike bodies into people's brains, and made them into slaves - Controllers. That is true.

  Controllers are everywhere. My town. Your town. Everywhere.

  2 They can be anyone. The policeman on the corner. The teacher in your school. Your best friend. Your mother or father. Your brother.

  I know. Because my brother Tom is one of them.

  Tom is a Controller. A slave to the Yeerk in his head. If he knew who I really was - what I really was - he would have me killed. Or turned into a Controller, like him.

  That's what my world is like now. A world where the enemy is everywhere. Even sitting across from me at the breakfast table on a Satur day morning, which is when this part of the story begins.

  "Hey, midget, what's up?" Tom asked as I sat down. That's one of the things he calls me. Actu ally I'm kind of big for my age. Almost as big as Tom. But it's a joke we've had for years. You know how it is.

  "Not much," I said. "What's up with you?"

  "Oh, I'm going to a meeting."

  "The Sharing?" I asked, trying to sound casual. The Sharing is this group that tries to pretend like it's some kind of combined Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. It's really a front organization for Controllers. The leadership council of The Sharing is made up of high-ranking Controllers.

  "Yeah. We're doing some cleanup in the park.

  3 You know, do our part for the community and all. Then we're having a barbecue afterward." He gave me a serious look. "You really should join, you know. We'd get to spend more time to gether."

  I felt a wave of sickness. I tried not to show it. It wasn't Tom talking. It was the Yeerk in his head. The Yeerk who wanted to take my body and use it as a host for one of his fellow slugs.

  As I sat there across the table from him, I was trying to decide something. I was trying to decide whether I would have to ever destroy him. Destroy my brother, who was not my brother. Not anymore.

  "Maybe I will join some day," I said. Like when hell freezes over, I added silently. I poured myself some Wheaties and milk. "So you'll be out for a while?"

  "All morning. Mom and Dad are out playing tennis, you'll have the house to yourself. Throw a party."

  "Uh-huh," I said, and spooned up some ce real.

  It was hard not to just yell at him. To let him know that I knew all about him. What he was. What he was doing.

  At least, some of what he was doing. I had been spying on my brother. He was rising fast in

  4 the leadership of The Sharing. He was a very loyal Controller. The Yeerk in his head had been promoted.

  And he was involved in some new plan. A very big new plan.

  A plan I had to stop. Even if ...

  "Well, take it easy, midget," Tom said, sounding just like he'd always sounded.

  "You, too."

  I waited till Tom was gone. I was alone. It was time.

  I went through the house, room by room, making sure no one was there. Then I got the little matchbox I'd hidden in my desk drawer. I could hear a scrabbling noise coming from in side. I slid the matchbox open.

  I shuddered.

  It was a nice, big cockroach. Brown and glossy and about an inch long.

  Its antennae waved eagerly. The roach tried to force its way out of the box, but I held my hand over it.

  I could feel the roach antennae tickling the bottom of my palm. It was pushing, trying to get away.

  I focused on the roach. Thought about it. Pic tured it.

  The roach stopped moving and lay still. Not

  5 dead, just quiet. The way animals always get when you "acquire" them.

  I slid two fingers into the box to get a better contact with the roach. It felt hard and dry. I shuddered.

  I absorbed the cockroach's DNA pattern. It was becoming part of me. The DNA - the ge netic pattern - of many animals was a part of me now. Tiger. Dolphin. Flea. Falcon. Trout. Green anole lizard.

  I have the power to morph. To become any an imal that I can touch. The power was given to us, to me and my friends, by an Andalite prince mo ments before he was murdered by the Yeerks.

  I have flown through the sky on my own out stretched wings at more than a hundred miles an hour. I have been a dolphin locked in deadly battle with sharks. I have felt the awesome power of the tiger, and experienced the terrible loss of self, the emptiness and horror of becoming an ant.

  It was the gift of the dying Andalite. A power ful weapon for us to use in resisting the Yeerks.

  It was also a dangerous, deadly curse. Like any weapon, I guess.

  And now I was preparing to become a cock roach. It would be the ideal way to infiltrate The Sharing's new headquarters building. The leader-

  6 ship meeting was in a couple of days. I wanted to be there. But the Yeerks had grown cautious lately.

  They knew we were out here. They believed, wrongly, that we were a group of Andalite war riors, but they knew that morph-capable enemies were hunting them. Opposing them. Hurting them.

  Sometimes hurting them very badly.

  Tom. My brother. Could I destroy my own brother?

  "You don't have to make that decision yet," I said aloud. "All you have to do now is try out this roach morph."

  All I had to do now was become a cockroach.

  7 Cockroaches are not my favorite animals. But I knew a cockroach would be ideal for pene trating a guarded building. Roaches can go any where.

  You may have noticed that fact.

  I put my dog, Homer, out in the yard. I closed the curtains in my bedroom, making it dark as possible.

  "Oh, man, the things I do with my spare time," I muttered. I thought of calling Marco and asking him to come over. Marco is my best friend. He's the one who actually came up with the word "Animorph."

  "No," I said. "Do this yourself."

  The others were all tired. We'd had a rough

  8 time lately. Too many close calls. We needed a rest. Time to deal with normal stuff, like school. Our grades had been suffering since we'd be come Animorphs.

  Besides, this had to be my decision. Tom was my brother.

  I took a deep breath. I braced m
yself. I took another deep breath.

  "Okay, Jake," I said. "Let's do it."

  The first mistake I made was standing in front of a full-length mirror.

  It was dark in the room, but there was still enough light for me to see the changes.

  Big mistake. Morphing is never pretty. It is al ways unpredictable. In fact, if you saw it happening and didn't know what was going on, you'd end up screaming for about two weeks straight.

  The first feeling was of shrinking. It's exactly like falling. Like you're falling forever. I watched myself shrink in the mirror. It didn't look as bad in the mirror as it felt.

  But what really did look bad was my skin as it began to be covered by an armor plate of brown cockroach shell.

  "Aahhh!" I yelped in surprise.

  My fingers melted together and formed a sin gle, many-jointed bug leg. Antennae jumped out of my forehead. They seemed to stick out forever,

  9 then curl back, like they were being blown by a wind.

  My waist was squeezed, and the lower part of my body swelled, forming a swollen insect abdomen. Swollen and brownish yellow with rip ples, sort of like the Michelin man.

  Then, when I was about a foot tall, I felt the last of my bones dissolve. I could actually hear it happening. My spine had been grinding as it shrank. Then, suddenly, I heard a squishy sound, as all my internal organs lost their bone support.

  My skull melted away. It was the last sound I heard clearly, as my ears and human sense of hearing faded.

  I was a bag of loose guts. Almost deaf. Half-blind, as my human eyes shrank and the lenses became distorted.

  My exoskeleton got harder and stiffer and stronger. My wings, glossy and crisp, covered my back. They overlapped at the edges, like the metal plates of a suit of armor.

  Extra legs suddenly sprouted from my chest. Only it wasn't exactly a chest anymore. I was a stunted, six-inch-long bug, with a few disinte grating strands of brown hair and shrunken, but still somewhat human, eyes.

  Not attractive. Not even slightly.

  Then I lost my eyes. It took a second to even

  10 realize that I could still see. Then, oh yes! Yes, I could see. But not the way I saw with human eyes.

  A weird, wavy mountain seemed to wrap all around me - my clothes. They looked different, blue and green and gray. Kind of. It's hard to de scribe, exactly. I couldn't see very far, just a few feet. And what I could see was sha ttered into dozens of little images. I saw little bits of vast fibrous walls - my socks. And dark tunnels made of thick slabs of what could have almost been wavy, corrugated concrete - the legs of my jeans.

  The fibers of the carpet looked gray-green to me, and as big as ropes. My hairy, jointed roach legs would catch in the fibers as I tried to move.

  I felt the roach brain surfacing. I'd been through it before. It's different each time, de pending on the animal.

  Sometimes it's a bunch of raw energy and fear that takes over your own mind so you think you're going crazy.

  But not the roach brain. I didn't feel great hunger. I didn't feel great fear. The roach was . . . calm. Confident. Unworried.

  I laughed. I mean, in my head I laughed, be cause I no longer had a mouth or a throat or any thing at all that would make a laugh.

  I was so tensed up, expecting the cockroach

  11 to be a bundle of energy and fear. But mostly it just felt like resting.

  The roach brain wanted to take a nap.

  Cool, I thought. It's gross. It's disgusting. Marco and the others will hate the idea, but when I tell them how easy it is to handle -

  VIBRATION!

  Get ready. Get ready. What was it? Get ready.

  LIGHT! LIGHT! LIGHT!

  12 C 44-R-F T £ -R

  R

  UN! Run from the LIGHT!

  Imagine being in one of those race cars at the Indianapolis 500.

  Now imagine that instead of sitting in one, you are strapped facedown underneath one. Your nose is about a tenth of an inch from the road and you're going 180 miles an hour.

  That's what it was like when I ran. My roach legs powered like something from a Roadrunner cartoon. I blew out from under the folds of my own clothing. I blew across that carpet. I was rocket-propelled.

  Someone had put the light on in my room. And when that light came on, my roach brain stopped being calm and relaxed.

  13 Zoooom! Three miles an hour. That's very fast when you're only an inch long.

  Vibration . . . vibration . . . vibration . . .

  Heavy steps rattled the floor. They vibrated up through my legs. My tiny roach brain knew what they meant. Something very, very big was walk ing around.

  Chasing me! RUN!

  Zoom! across the carpet. Suddenly, a wall!

  Up? Left? Right? Which way?

  Vibration . . . vibration . . . vibration . . .

  Wait! A crack. It wasn't much of a crack. Just enough space to slip a quarter through. No way I could fit.

  Or could I?

  My underside scraped the floor. My hard brown wing cover scraped the bottom of the baseboard. But I barely had to slow down.

  I was in the wall! Hah! The big things that rat tled the floor would never catch me now. I was safe here. A nail as thick as a tree trunk stuck up from the wood. I went around it.

  On either side of me I saw bright, straight lines of light that seemed to go on forever. They were the cracks beneath the baseboards. To one side a thick, shiny slab with irregular edges intruded into the wall - the edge of the kitchen linoleum.

  High above I could see other lights, more cir-

  14 cular and dimmer. These were the holes where pipes entered the wall.

  AHHHH!

  Something moving! Close by. Oh, gross! A cockroach!

  Get a grip, Jake! I told myself. You're a cock roach, too! But still, you just don't want to be face-to-face with a roach as big as you are. I mean, he was right at eye level. The other roach's antennae felt me, sweeping over me, tangling briefly with my antennae.

  We said "hi." At least, we said the roach ver sion of "hi." Which wasn't really "hello." It was more like, "Oh, you're a roach, too."

  Now, in the darkness inside the wall, I felt calmer. The electric fear was gone. The suddenness of the light had been the problem. That and the vibration.

  I could still feel the vibrations, but they were different now. Further away.

  Okay, I'd had enough of being a roach. It was time to get to some safe place, demorph and find out who had been in my room.

  Why was someone in my room? A few minutes earlier, and they would have caught me in mid- morph. Stupid of me. Stupid, stupid.

  Where could I go to demorph? The garage? Yes, the garage. There weren't any mirrors, and I sure didn't want to watch myself morph again.

  15 Through the kitchen, out under the back door; that was the way.

  I went to the bright crack ahead of me, the kitchen. I scampered up on the ledge of linoleum. I stuck my head and antennae out beneath the baseboard. The vibrations were all far away. In some other room.

  I emerged from the crack. Over my head was an incredibly high canyon. It went up and up, far higher than I could see. Two parallel walls, just a few body lengths apart. Of course. The refrigerator. I was behind the refrigerator. One side of the "canyon" was the kitchen wall, the other side was the back of the refrigerator.

  Someone really should sweep back here. There were dust bunnies the size of couches.

  But no problem. I was getting the hang of it now. Follow the baseboard. To the next wall. Turn right, and then there would be the door.

  No problem. I was in charge.

  Some big barnlike structure was ahead of me. It looked like one of those old-fashioned covered bridges.

  Huh. Probably an old matchbox.

  I went in, trotting along on my six jointed legs.

  Wait. I wasn't moving anymore.

  What the . . . ?

  I tried to run.

  16 I was stuck!

  I tried a
gain. One leg was free, but the others were frozen in place. What was ... I felt around with my antennae.

  Now my antennae were stuck!

  I couldn't move. I couldn't move at all!

  I was trapped!

  17 5o?" Rachel demanded. "What was it? How did you get trapped?"

  "I'll bet I know," Marco said, grinning sardon ically, which is the only way he knows how to grin. "Jake checked in, but he couldn't check out."

  I nodded. "Roach Motel. I walked into a stu pid Roach Motel. I ran right onto the sticky paper and, man, I could not move. Very frustrating."

  "You know, you could do commercials for the Roach Motel company," Marco suggested. "Take it from me, Roach Boy, these things really work."

  It was later in the day, and we were in Cassie's barn. Rachel, Marco, Tobias, Cassie, and me. As usual, the place was filled with wire cages, and

  18 the cages were filled with animals. Rabbits, foxes, baby deer, eagles, opossums, mourning doves, all of them injured or sick. Some of them feisty and ready to be released.

  We were lounging around on bales of hay and piles of feed sacks. All except Tobias, who was up in the rafters high overhead, and Cassie, who was feeding some of the animals.

  Everyone seemed to think my roach experi ment was funny.

  Except for Cassie. Cassie was the only one not smiling. She was giving me a very disapproving look. "Jake, you of all people should know bet ter."

  She was right. I knew she was right. But that just made me stubborn.

  "Look, I was just trying out the morph to see if it would be good for us to use."

  Cassie totally did not buy my argument. She put down the bucket she was carrying. She took off her heavy work gloves. She came over and stood about a foot from me. Then she stuck her finger in my face.

  "Uh-oh," Marco said in a loud whisper. "Jake's in trouble."

  "Big time," Rachel agreed.

  "Jake," Cassie said, "don't ever do that again. Now, you are sort of the one in charge, but I am telling you, don't ever do that again. Don't

  19 ever try some new morph without one of us there. Do you understand?"

  "Cassie, I was just - "

  "Uh-uh. No. Don't tell me what you were just. Don't ever do that again."

  «Um, Jake? I think this is the point where you just say 'yes, ma'am,'» Tobias said, in the thought-speak that comes with being in a morph.