Applegate, K A - Animorphs 21 - The Threat Read online

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  Width1Width3Width6000#1 The Invasion «MEGAMORPHS»

  Width1Width3Width6000Width1Width3Width6000#2 The Visitor #1 The Andalite's Gift

  Width1Width3Width6000Width1Width3Width6000#3 The Encounter #2 In the Time of Dinosaurs

  Width1Width3Width6000Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354#4 The Message

  Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354 #5 The Predator

  Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354

  Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354 #6 The Capture

  Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354 #7 The Stranger

  1 C 1 « S

  Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354 #8 The Alien

  Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354 #9 The Secret

  Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354#10 The Android

  Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354 #1 1 The Forgotten

  Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354 #12 The Reaction

  Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354 #13 The Change

  Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354 #14 The Unknown

  Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354 #15 The Escape

  Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354 #16 The Warning

  Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354#1 7 The Underground

  Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354 #18 The Decision

  Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354 #19 The Departure

  Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354 #20 The Discovery

  Width1Width3Width4646Width3Width1354 ii I

  n

  AN APPLE

  PAPERBACK

  SCHOLASTIC INC. New York Toronto London Auckland Sydney

  iii Cover illustration by David B. Mattingly

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

  No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 555 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  ISBN 0-590-76254-0

  Copyright © 1998 by Katherine Applegate. All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC, APPLE PAPERBACKS, ANIMORPHS and logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 189/90123/0Printed in the U.S.A. 40First Scholastic printing, September 1998

  iv For Miles and Coleman Also for Michael and Jake

  1 My name is Jake.

  And I was one sorry cockroach.

  «Aaaaaahhhhh!» I yelled as I twirled and fell and spun downward toward the ground far below.

  Not that I could see the ground. Cockroach eyes are strictly for close-up work. And they're not even good at that.

  So I couldn't see the ground thousands of feet below. Nor could I see Marco, Cassie, Ax, and David, also cockroaches and also falling through the air.

  I could hear them, though.

  «Aaaaaahhhhh!» Marco yelled.

  «Aaaaaahhhhh!» Cassie agreed.

  Only Ax was silent. He's an Andalite. They

  2 don't scream quite as much as humans. It's not that they're braver, it's more that they're a telepathic species. So I guess they just didn't evolve to do a lot of screaming.

  «We're gonna dieeee!» David yelled in thought-speak panic.

  «l do not believe the impact will kill us,» Ax said. «l don't believe our mass is sufficient to cause death when we impact.»

  «He's right!» Cassie cried. «You can't kill a cockroach by dropping it. Not even from this high.»

  «Unless that's water below us,» Marco said. «ln which case we could hit the water and get chomped by some big hungry fish.»

  «Should we demorph?» Ax wondered.

  «No time,» I said. «We'd get bigger, more mass, and then when we hit we'd -»

  I stopped falling. In an instant something hit me. But it hit me going sideways. A gigantic talon closed around me.

  «That is you guys, right?» Rachel's thought-speak voice asked calmly. «l mean I figure, cockroaches falling through the air, gotta be you guys.»

  «Yeah, you seldom see cockroaches at a thousand feet up,» Tobias agreed.

  Rachel and Tobias had not been aboard the spacecraft. The spacecraft that had kidnapped

  3 the president's helicopter. The one we'd fallen out of. In cockroach morph.

  Maybe I should back up and explain.

  It all began when we discovered that the blue box - the morphing cube - had been found by a kid named David.

  Well, no, actually it all began much earlier. Months ago, when Marco, Cassie, Rachel, Tobias, and I happened to be walking home from the mall by way of an abandoned construction site.

  Which is where we saw the damaged spacecraft landing. And where we met Elfangor, an An-dalite prince. Elfangor was dying. His enemies, the Yeerks, were hot on his trail. He was out of time.

  So he did something Andalites don't usually do: He trusted some non-Andalit.es. Namely, the five of us. He told us that Earth was being invaded by a race of parasites called Yeerks.

  The Yeerks are slugs, really. Not very impressive-looking or scary. But they have the ability to enter a brain - almost any brain - and take control of it. Absolute, complete, total control.

  They've done this to the entire race of Gedds from their own home world. They've done it to the Hork-Bajir. They've done it to the Taxxons.

  They are trying to do it to Homo sapiens. Humans. You and me. All of us.

  4 Already, Elfangor said, there were thousands, maybe tens of thousands of human-Controllers. That is to say, humans who had a Yeerk in their heads controlling their words and actions. The invasion was under way. The Andalite forces had been beaten in orbit around Earth. It might be a very long time before any more Andalite forces could come. Too long.

  Basically, if someone was going to stop the Yeerks, it would have to be humans. Us. Five normal kids. Five average, everyday, mall-crawling, behind on their homework, not sure about their haircuts, awkward around members of the opposite sex, sometimes smart, sometimes dumb kids.

  On the Yeerks' side they had faster-than-light spacecraft, thousands of impossible-to-detect human-Controllers, Dracon beam weapons, and seven-foot-tall, bladed Hork-Bajir warriors. On our side we had ... we had nothing.

  Except.

  Except that Elfangor gave us something: the power to morph. The power to become any animal we could touch. He transformed us with the blue box. And since that awful night when Prince Elfangor died at the hands of the Yeerk leader, Visser Three, we have used those powers to fight them.

  Sometimes we even win.

  5 We found Elfangor's younger brother, Aximili. (We call him "Ax.") That made six of us. And that was it. Five kids and one Andalite against the might of the Yeerk Empire.

  Just us six. Until . . .

  Until David found the blue box. W
e assumed it had been destroyed. It hadn't.

  Now, we had it hidden. But too late to stop the trouble that followed.

  David found the box and bad things started happening. Bottom line: Both his parents were taken by the Yeerks. They were infested with Yeerks. They are both Controllers now.

  What could we do? We had to use the blue box to make David one of us. The sixth Ani-morph.

  But the timing could not have been worse. We were just starting on what would be our most vital mission.

  The leaders of the United States, Japan, Russia, Germany, England, and France were meeting in secret to try and work out the problems in the Middle East.

  We learned that one of those leaders was in fact a Controller. And we knew that all the rest were targeted by the Yeerks.

  The Yeerks were going to try to use the conference to infest the leaders of the entire free world.

  6 If we let that happen, that was the ball game. Earth was done for. We had to try and stop it.

  On our way to scope out the Marriott resort where the meeting was supposed to happen, we saw a stealth-shielded Yeerk spacecraft kidnap the President's helicopter. Or maybe it wasn't the actual President's helicopter. It might have been a decoy.

  Confused yet? Not as confused as we were.

  The Yeerks stunned everyone on the chopper and then used holographic projections to make it look like the helicopter was still flying along. They dragged someone from the helicopter. Someone with a gash in the bottom of his shoe.

  Look, we were cockroaches at the time. The shoe was all we could see. We assumed the Yeerks would infest this guy. The president, or whoever it was.

  But no. Visser Three merely acquired his DNA so he could morph him.

  See, Visser Three is the only Yeerk in all the galaxy to have managed to take control of an An-dalite body. He's the only Yeerk who can morph.

  Now he could morph Mr. Slashed Shoe. Whoever he was.

  Sigh.

  Do you see why my grade point average has dropped? I have to deal with this kind of stuff. It's enough to make your head explode.

  7 But at least we didn't splat or end up as fish food. Tobias and Rachel snagged us out of thin air and carried us to safety. Now all we had to do was deal with our possibly strange new Ani-morph, David, while finding a way to save the leaders of the free world. And not get killed.

  Something's bothering me,» Marco said as Tobias and Rachel set us safely down in a secluded area between sand dunes.

  «What's bothering you?» I said.

  «Well, I'm in a cockroach body, just fell out of the bottom of a spaceship belonging to brain-stealing alien slugs while trying to save the president of the United States, was rescued by a girl who's temporarily a bald eagle and a guy who's permanently a red-tailed hawk . . . and yet, it all seems normal somehow. Like, okay, that's just to be expected. It's finally happened, hasn't it?»

  «What's finally happened?» I asked.

  «l've gone insane,» Marco said. «Deedly deeedty deedly looopy! Nutso. Insane in the membrane.»

  «Yeah, well, keep it together,» I said, trying to sound like the leader I supposedly am. «The entire human race depends on us winning this battle.»

  «Poor human race,» Marco said.

  It was a joke. Just not a very funny one.

  8 He demorphed in the dunes. Five of us had no problems. One of us had a serious problem.

  "Rachel, Cassie. Look the other way," I said.

  David was the new Animorph. He had not yet learned how to morph clothing. Actually, none of us could morph it very well. We could only morph skintight clothing that ended up being a kind of mishmash of bike shorts, leotards, and T-shirts.

  Basically, in our morphing outfits we looked pathetic.

  But not as pathetic as poor David.

  «l'll take care of it,» Tobias said. He flapped away, catching the salt-heavy breeze off the water and soaring up and out of sight beyond the dunes.

  9 Tobias was still a hawk. Tobias may always be a hawk. He spent more than two hours in the morph and was trapped in it. Now he has regained his morphing powers. But he cannot return to being permanently human without losing his ability to morph.

  «l do not understand humans and their strange beliefs when it comes to clothing,» Ax said. He was in his own Andalite form. His four hooves sank deep in the sand. Tobias would let us know if anyone was coming close enough to see Ax.

  «You wear artificial skin and artificial hooves. When it is cold that makes sense. But when it is warm it seems strange. And you get so concerned when some article of clothing is missing or worn in the wrong way.»

  "You mean like that time you wore socks on your hands?" Marco asked him.

  "Or the time you wore underwear on the outside of your pants?" Rachel added, still discreetly turned away.

  "You know, maybe this is funny to you guys," David said. "But it's not all that funny to me. What if someone came along?"

  I laughed. "Well, David, if they did, I think they'd probably notice the four-eyed, scorpion-tailed, blue, half-deer-looking alien before they worried about you."

  10 Just then Tobias swept in on the breeze, turned, dropped toward us, and let loose of a pair of swim trunks. Orange. And a T-shirt bearing a Grateful Dead logo. Both had price tags still attached.

  David snagged them before they hit the ground.

  «Remind me we have to return those to the Kahuna Beach Shop,» Tobias said.

  "You stole them?" Cassie asked.

  «No, I borrowed them. Besides, I'm a bird. Birds are not capable of stealing. What are they going to do, arrest me?»

  "We'll find a way to get the money to the store," I said. "We don't want to even start down that path. In an emergency like this, maybe we can grab something. But we have to make it right later. That's the rule."

  David dressed quickly and Cassie and Rachel were allowed to turn around.

  "About time," Rachel muttered. "I've been staring at a dead sand crab."

  "You know, it would be amazing," David said.

  "What would be?" I asked.

  He shrugged. "Us, with our powers? We could take anything we wanted. We could like morph into cheetahs or whatever, run into some jewelry store, grab the diamonds, and get away at sixty

  11 miles an hour. What could anyone do? We'd be outta there. Plus, we'd morph back to humans."

  "Let's do that," Marco said dryly. "Right after we figure out how to keep the Yeerks from turning the most powerful leaders in the world into alien-infested zombies. As soon as we're done with that, we start ripping off jewelry stores."

  "Hey, I was just kidding," David said. "I guess I forgot you're the only one allowed to make jokes, Marco."

  I glanced at Marco. Was he mad at the shot? Yes, a little. I looked at David. He had been kidding, right?

  Later I'd have to talk to Cassie about it. Cassie was a lot better at knowing what people were thinking and feeling than I was. She'd know. Hopefully.

  In the meantime, I had to remember to treat David like any other member of the group. It wasn't so bad that David and Marco didn't totally get along. There were times when we all got on one another's nerves. It was natural.

  "Okay, time to get serious here," I said. "They caught us by surprise. Maybe they know that was us scurrying around up there, maybe they don't. But one way or the other, we have to get inside that resort and get busy."

  "We have to get past the greatest security in

  12 the world just to get into that place," Rachel said. "We have to go by air. But we can't use bird-of-prey morphs. That'd be slightly noticeable."

  "No problem," Cassie said. "It's the beach. There's one kind of bird no one can keep off the beach. Seagulls."

  "Yeah, well, I don't have a seagull morph," David pointed out. "But I'll bet I could morph back into golden eagle morph and bring one down."

  I winced a little at his eagerness. The basic idea was sound. Only there was no need to have David morph again. "Tobias?" I yelled up to him. He was ridin
g the breeze, almost stationary above us. He spilled air and dropped down closer. "Sorry to keep sending you out for things, but can you get a seagull?"

  "Alive?" Cassie added.

  «Can I grab a gull? Puh-leeze. Can Michael Jordan hit a three-pointer? They're just rats with wings.»

  "Tobias is like really into the whole bird thing, isn't he?" David commented.

  "Tobias just has some fairly definite opinions about birds," I said. "He respects most eagles, owls, and other hawks. Looks down on gulls and pigeons. And he absolutely hates jays, crows, and golden eagles."

  13 David laughed. "He's like a racist or something, only with birds instead of people."

  "All those birds are different species," Cassie pointed out. "Humans are all one species. Not really a very good comparison."

  David shrugged, and looked a little sullen. "Whatever."

  I started to say something, then stopped myself. I was feeling edgy and strange. We were about to try to violate a resort with security that would make Fort Knox look like a Wal-Mart during a clearance sale. We were up against security from France, Britain, Japan, Germany, Russia, and the United States. Plus, we were competing against the Yeerks, who had already infiltrated the place to some extent.

  And I was going in with no plan, no clue, and a new guy I wasn't totally used to yet. How would this guy do in a battle? How would he do when it got really rough? He'd done okay when we were roaches being chased around. He hadn't panicked. But things could get worse. They could get way worse.

  I noticed Cassie looking at me, reading the worry on my face. I looked up at the sky like I was searching for Tobias. When I lowered my face again I had on my "fearless leader" expression. No point in making everyone else nervous, too.

  Tobias actually did appear just then, carrying

  14 a squirming, kicking, flapping, very, very annoyed seagull in his talons.

  «That was actually fun,» Tobias said with a laugh. «Snatched him out of midair while he was diving on some guy's sandwich. And, as much as I so did not want to, I acquired the gull. David's not the only one without a gull morph.»

  Cassie took the poor gull from Tobias and comforted it. Cassie handles lots of animals. She brought it to David.

  "I'm starting to get this down," David said, pressing one hand against the gull's wing. "Just focus and his DNA is mine."