The Predator (6 page)
Authors: K. A. Applegate
So is space,
a voice in my head said.
Somewhere, very, very far away, a mother and father wondered what had become of their children.
For a long time, I made up stories about how my mom had survived. Maybe on a desert island or something. But I’m a realistic person, I guess. After a while I accepted it.
And after a while, Ax’s parents would accept that he and his brother, Prince Elfangor, would not be returning. That they had been lost forever in space.
Lost fighting to protect Earth. To help the human race.
To help me.
I spotted Cassie up ahead, walking with some of her friends. She smiled vaguely when she saw me. We were supposed to kind of ignore each other in school, so no one ever figured out that Jake and Cassie and Rachel and I were hanging out a lot.
As I brushed past her I muttered, “Tell Jake I’ll do it.”
Sometimes I really hate having a conscience.
11
I
wonder why these people moved?” Cassie said.
“Maybe they didn’t like living next door to a Controller who is part of a conspiracy to take over the world,” I said. “Or else maybe they just don’t like assistant principals. I could understand that.”
We were standing in the backyard of the house next to Chapman’s. It was empty. There was a “For Sale” sign in the front yard. It did make you kind of wonder why these people had decided to move. Not that Chapman ever acted strange. That’s the big problem with Controllers—you can never tell who is or who isn’t.
“It’s convenient for us, anyway,” Jake said.
It was night. The moon was high and full and bright, so we were hiding beneath a tree. There was a high wooden fence between us and Chapman’s.
Ax was just changing from his human morph back into his Andalite body.
We had already acquired some ants earlier, at Cassie’s barn. We were getting ready to do it. I was scared. Badly scared.
I guess the others were, too. Everyone was talking too much, the way you do when you’re nervous. Cassie was shivering like she was cold, only it was about seventy degrees out.
“Tobias?” I asked. He was in the tree, just a few inches over my head on a low branch. “How well can you see? “
he said.
“Swell,” I said.
Jake glanced at his watch. “It’s time. We know Chapman will be at the meeting of The Sharing, starting about now.”
The Sharing is a “front” organization for Controllers. It’s a way for Controllers to get together
without anyone being suspicious. Supposedly, it’s just a sort of combined Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. In reality it’s a way for the Controllers to recruit willing hosts.
Yes, believe it or not, some people
choose
to accept Yeerk control.
We didn’t have to ask how Jake knew about the meeting of The Sharing. Jake’s brother, Tom, is one of them. A Controller who is very into The Sharing.
“You ready, Ax?” Jake asked. The Andalite had to be back in Andalite form before he could morph. Just like all of us had to be human before morphing into another being. Once, Cassie had tried morphing straight from one animal to another. Nothing had happened. And Cassie is the best morpher.
Ax said.
“Everyone ready?” Jake asked.
“Yep,” Rachel said.
Even she sounded tense. There was a bad feeling hanging over this whole thing. Or maybe I was just being paranoid.
“Okay,” Jake said. “Soon as we’re all morphed, we head across the grass, down along the wall, underground. We find a crack or a hole, and enter the basement.”
“Yeah. Nothing to it,” I said.
I concentrated on the ant I had acquired earlier.
There wasn’t much to think about, really. When I’d held the ant in my hand it had just been this tiny, little dot. You could see that it had a sectioned body and legs, but that was about it.
The morphing began very quickly.
“Whoa!”
Falling! Falling!
That was the first sensation. I was shrinking rapidly. The ground was rushing up at me. It was like one of those nightmares where you are falling and falling but never seem to hit the ground.
I was still maybe a foot tall when my skin seemed to turn crisp, as if it had been burned. It became hard. Harder than fingernails and glossy black.
I looked over at Cassie and nearly screamed.
She was farther along than me. Only a foot tall and hard-shelled black all over. Glistening, ridged, plastic-looking skin.
Her legs were shriveling rapidly. So were her arms, although they had become longer, to match her legs.
The third set of legs was growing out of her chest.
And her face …
Her face was no longer human. Her head was sort of teardrop-shaped. Wickedly curved mandibles were growing out of her mouth — huge, slashing, deadly looking serrated jaws.
Her eyes had gone flat and dead. Just black dots.
Antennae, looking almost like another set of legs, sprouted from her forehead.
Her waist was pinched tight. Her lower body swelled till it looked as big as a watermelon.
I didn’t want to watch. Because I knew that all these same changes were happening to me. I knew it. I didn’t want to think about it. I just wanted it to be over. I wanted the changes to be done.
Suddenly, all around me, huge, raspy spears shot up out of the ground!
Grass! I was diminishing to true insect size. The rough, sharp shafts that were rising all around me were just blades of grass. They weren’t growing. I was shrinking.
One exploded directly under me. I tumbled, end over end.
And then my eyesight failed. My eyes simply stopped functioning. I was blind!
Blind, and falling, rolling, cartwheeling down the side of a blade of grass.
12
I
was standing upright. I knew that. I had stopped falling.
But I was blind.
No, not completely blind. It was not just blackness. But my eyes saw no detail. I could see patches of light and areas of darkness. But they were misty and fragmented, and my ant brain was not interested in them.
No. The world was not about sight anymore. It was all … something else. I knew I was getting something. Something … a sense. A feeling, almost. Then, I could feel … I could feel my
antennae waving. Waving back and forth, searching. Searching … no. They were
smelling.
My antennae were smelling. I was looking for a scent. Several scents. It was not like human smell. Not like Jake had described dog scent when he’d morphed his dog, Homer.
That kind of scent is full of possibilities. Subtleties.
This was different. I was looking for just a few scents. Just a few smells.
I tried to prepare myself. I had been through this before. There is usually a time, a brief few seconds, before the animal mind appears with all its fear and hunger and intensity. I needed to be prepared. Ants were tiny and weak. Surely their fear would be extreme. I would have to be—
Then, wham!
The ant’s mind erupted inside my own!
There was no fear. None.
There was no hunger.
There was no … no
self.
No
me
.
No me.
No …
My antennae swept the air. Strange. Not home. Not the colony. Enemy territory.
Smell them. Smell their droppings. Smell the acrid
odors they smeared along the ground to mark their boundaries.
Strangers. The smell of others. They would come. There would be killing.
Killing. Soon.
Move.
I began moving. My six legs picked their way nimbly. I was a nearly blind insect, picking his way through a forest of giant, saw-edged grass blades.
Food. The smell of food. Find it. Take it. Return to the colony with it.
Change direction instantly. Move toward the smell of dead beetle. Others around. Us. Ours. They had the right smell. They were not enemy.
Moving faster now. Feet feeling each blade of grass. Antennae sweeping the air, searching for the scent of the enemy. Searching for the scent of the dead carcass that we had to find and return to the colony.
Close now. The scent of food was stronger.
Mandibles working. We would touch the carcass. We would judge its size. If it was too big to carry, we would hack it into smaller pieces and carry the chunks to the colony.
Or enemies would come. And kill.
The smell of enemies was everywhere.
There. We had reached the dead beetle. I scented the air. I touched it with my legs, touching again and again to learn the size.
I?
My
legs?
Confusion.
The others were with me. I opened my cutting mandibles wide and bit into the beetle, slicing tough shell, biting into meat.
Fight?
Suddenly, I realized that there had been something … a sound. Yes, not a smell. Not a smell. Not a feel.
Listen to me. You are not ants. Fight it!
Fight
it!> Yes, not a smell or a feel. In my head. My.
Me. Marco.
That wasn’t it at all. I had been reborn.
I said. exist.>
But I could hear the others now, snapping back into reality. Becoming again. Crying.
Terrified.
They are only parts, like cells. Just pieces. What kind of foul creatures are these?>
Ax is right. Each of us is only a part. Like a single cell within a human body.>
Rachel said.
One by one, we said yes. It was only partly true. Yes, I had gained control over the ant mind. But it was still there. It was powerful in a totally new way. It was the simplicity that made it hard. The ant was a piece of a computer. Just a tiny switch, a part of a much bigger creature—the colony.
She was right. I could kind of see. But nothing I saw made any sense, anyway. I could recognize blades of grass. But a long, sloped wall that seemed about six feet high was a mystery to me.
The wall. Tobias’s talon.
If there was a fence, you couldn’t prove it by me. I saw nothing. The bottom of the fence was seven or eight body lengths above me. Irrelevant.
Tobias said.
We did. I barreled through a forest of grass. Then, very suddenly, it ended. We were out of the grass and racing across a moonscape of boulders, each the size of my head.
In my ant brain the alarm bells were still ringing. Enemies! Enemies! Their scent was everywhere.
But it was not fear I felt from the ant brain. It was not capable of emotion, or anything like emotion. It simply knew that there were enemies close by.
And it knew that it would come down, sooner or later, to kill or be killed.
13
W
e hit the wall. I knew it was the concrete wall of the foundation. I knew, logically, that just a foot or so over my head, the wall became wood siding. But I could not see that kind of distance.
What I saw and felt and “smelled” was that the horizontal world had simply stopped. Reality had a corner. The entire world, as far as I was concerned, was a corner between concrete and sand, one vertical, one horizontal. The concrete was full of cracks and pits big enough for me to climb inside of.
She was right. I found the tunnel, too. It was one of
theirs.
It belonged to the enemy.
Ax said.
Jake said grimly.
We headed down the tunnel. The smell of the enemy was powerful. Their stench wrapped around us. We were an invading force. We were going deep, deep into enemy territory.
