Animorphs #6: The Capture

by K. A. Applegate

  Cassie grinned at me. “See? Rachel owns this mall.”

  “Shopping and kicking butt. Rachel’s specialties,” I said affectionately.

  We cruised the department store and in about ten minutes, Rachel had found a silk blouse.

  “It was thirty-three dollars originally,” Rachel crowed. “Thirty-three, marked down to twenty-five. Then, a thirty-percent discount for this one-day sale. We got it for seventeen fifty! Do you realize that’s almost half off the original price? Seventeen and a half bucks! For that blouse! Yes! She shops, she scores!”

  “Yeah, but I was only going to spend fifteen,” I said meekly.

  “You didn’t spend too much. Don’t you know anything? You saved fifteen dollars and fifty cents. You came out ahead by more than fifteen bucks!”

  “Wait a minute. How did I save, if I spent?”

  Cassie put her hand on my arm. “No. Don’t ask. Rachel uses a whole twisted math involved in shopping. Don’t even try and understand it.”

  Rachel ignored Cassie’s teasing. “Hey. While you pay, I have to go check something in Juniors. Meet you at the food court.”

  Rachel peeled off, leaving me and Cassie alone in the racks of clothing.

  “So when are you going to tell me your idea?” I asked.

  “I thought Marco already told you.”

  I shook my head. “Nope. He just said ‘think dog poop.’ I did. I got a very bad feeling as a result.”

  Cassie looked a little pouty. “Look, it was the only animal I could think of that could get in and out of a hospital without getting stepped on or poisoned. We wouldn’t even be seen, probably. I mean, they go everywhere. Who even notices them?”

  “Cassie, so far I have done three insects. Flea, that was okay. Ant, that was definitely not okay. And roach. I’m starting to feel jealous of Tobias. I mean, he’s stuck as a hawk, but at least he doesn’t have to go around turning into bugs.”

  “Do you have a better idea, Jake? Because I respect your feelings. I was just trying to help. It’s just a suggestion.”

  I drew a deep breath. “No, I don’t have any great suggestions. I’m just … I mean … it’s just, whatever happened to the good old days when we would be tigers or wolves or something fun? I don’t want to be a fly. I saw that old movie. The Fly. Both versions. The really old one, and the one with Jeff Goldblum. I mean, a fly? A fly?”

  “The movie. I forgot that movie,” Cassie said. She made a face. “The one where the guy has a tiny little human head stuck on a fly body and he’s trapped in a spiderweb and he’s going ‘h-e-e-e-l-p m-e-e-e’ in this little tiny voice? And that guy is so grossed out he just crushes him?”

  We both just stood there, looking kind of sick.

  “Moths?” Cassie suggested.

  “Too slow,” I said. “And too big. They would spot us.”

  “Okay … um … bees?”

  “No way. No social insects ever again. Bees could be as bad as ants that way. No social insects. No hives. No colonies.” I shuddered at the memory of the ant morph. It had been like dying. The ant had no individual self. It was just a part of a bigger machine.

  “Flies aren’t social,” Cassie said.

  “Can I help you?” a saleswoman asked.

  “Oh,” Cassie said. “Thanks, yeah.”

  After I paid, we started walking, heading to the food court to meet up with Rachel.

  “It would just be to get into the hospital,” I said, thinking out loud. “If they are using the hospital to transfer Yeerks into hosts, it will mean they have some kind of a Yeerk pool in there. That’s what we are after. Find that Yeerk pool, wipe it out.”

  “So we would just be in fly morph for a brief time,” Cassie said. “I mean, if we decided to do it. We’d have to demorph to do any damage.”

  “And then, if we create enough confusion, we can escape in some other way. We wouldn’t have to do flies again.”

  “True,” Cassie agreed. “We’d probably only be in the fly morph for a few minutes.”

  “Yep.”

  “So it’s flies,” Cassie said.

  “Yep.”

  Then, both of us, at the same time, said, “H-e-e-e-l-p m-e-e-e! H-e-e-e-l-p m-e-e-e!”

  Here’s the thing about flies.

  Being a fly is fun. It really is.

  Turning into a fly … that is a whole different story.

  I guess it’s no big secret that I kind of like Cassie. I think she’s really pretty. But when I saw these two huge, glittering, bulging, compound eyes come popping out of her eye sockets, I screamed.

  I mean, I screamed like a baby.

  “Yaaaaahhh!”

  “Great, Jake. That’s going to make her feel good,” Marco said.

  “Marco, you have your eyes closed,” I pointed out.

  “And they’re staying closed, too.”

  “Excuse me,” Rachel said. She raced for the door of the barn and ran outside. A few seconds later we heard the sound of barfing.

  You have to understand. Cassie was mostly still human at the point where the fly eyes showed up. She was about two feet tall and shrinking fast, and the extra legs had already popped out of her chest, and the gauzy wings were growing from her back, but her face was still a human face.

  Until the eyes popped out.

  Oh, man. You think you’ve seen scary stuff? Maybe in movies or on TV? You haven’t seen anything scary till you’ve seen fly eyes pop out of someone’s head like a pair of balloons.

  She was pretty small by the time her fly mouth appeared. I was grateful for that. Because later, when I became a fly, I saw what a fly mouth looks like.

  The eyes were bad. But if I’d seen that long, tubular, sucking, tonguelike thing come rolling out … that thing that spits on the food, then sucks the spit mixture back in …

  Rachel came back inside. “Sorry,” she said shakily. “Anyone have some gum? A Tic Tac?”

  Ax was puzzled.

  “Sometimes,” I said, still fighting the urge to look away as Cassie shriveled down to a few inches. “Some animals give me the willies.”

 

  “Well, it’s just this feeling of being grossed out. Sickened. Nauseated. Creeped. Like your skin is crawling. Willies.”

  Tobias asked.

  “Tell Tobias it’s okay, will you, Ax?”

 

  I smiled at Marco, who was now peeking through his fingers. Ax was learning to sound semi-normal. At least in thought-speak. When he was in human morph and spoke out loud, he still played with every sound and drove everyone crazy.

  Tobias flew in through the open hayloft above.

  “Can you hear me, Cassie?” Rachel asked.

  “Tobias. Do you see her?” Cassie was a true fly now.

 

  “Keep a sharp focus on her,” I said. “Don’t lose sight.”

 

  “Cassie?” Rachel asked again.

  “Tobias? Try her with thought-speak.”

 

  “Don’t lose her, Tobias. Don’t lose her.”

  “She won’t go far,” Marco said. “All the horse manure in this barn? Where would she go that’s any better for a fly?”

  Suddenly in my head I heard

  “Cassie?”

 

 

  “Cassie! Answer us!”

 

 

 

  guys. I’m fine. Sorry. But it’s just such a complete, insane rush! Come on, let’s go, time’s a-wasting.>

  I sucked in a deep breath. I had been hoping everything would be fine. That Cassie would not have any problems. But at the same time, I was utterly disgusted at the idea of becoming a fly. And now she was saying it was okay.

  You’d think it would get easier, slipping in and out of strange shapes. But you’d be wrong. Gross is gross, and always remains gross.

  “Okay, guys. It looks like we’re doing this,” I said, trying desperately to sound cheerful and optimistic.

  “Oh, goody,” Marco said.

  Ax said, totally unaware that Marco was being sarcastic.

  “Sounds like Cassie’s having fun,” Rachel said.

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “Let’s just do it.”

  We did it.

  Morphing was as gross as we’d expected.

  But Cassie was also right. Once you were in the morph; once you got used to the fact that your vision was like a thousand tiny TV screens, each showing a slightly different picture; once you got done freaking about the way your nasty fly tongue stuck out; once you got past the bizarre combination of hooks and bristles and hairs that made up your fly leg; once you got past the fact that nothing looks right or familiar when you’re only about an eighth of an inch long; and mostly, once you stopped thinking about that stupid fly movie …

  Well, then, it was cool!

  I have flown before. As a peregrine falcon and as a seagull.

  Both are cool. I mean, the falcon can go, like, 175 miles an hour in a dive.

  Faster than a stock car. Faster than small planes.

  But flying as a fly is totally, completely insane.

  A housefly beats its wings two hundred times per second.

  Say “hello, there” out loud. In the time it took you to say that, a fly’s wings beat two hundred times.

  A fly moves at about four miles per hour. Which doesn’t sound very fast, compared to a falcon hitting almost two hundred miles per hour. But trust me, when you’re only an eighth of an inch long, four miles an hour is like warp factor nine.

  And what’s really cool is you can do that going down, going left, right, or straight up.

  And you can change directions in no time. One minute you’re shooting straight ahead like a bullet, the next tenth of a second you’re going straight up.

  Cassie was right. It was gross, but it was fun.

  Ax yelled.

  I cried as I blasted straight up at what felt like the speed of light.

  Rachel exulted.

  Marco said. he added a second later.

  I said after we had all spent a couple of minutes getting used to the fly’s simple instincts and pretty decent senses.

  Tobias was the bus. The hospital was a couple of miles away. Flies are fast in relative terms, but in actual speed, Tobias was a lot quicker. It would have taken us hours. Tobias could carry us there in a few minutes.

  Cassie said.

  Tobias said.

  Marco echoed.

  Tobias commented. And then we were off.

  I clung to Tobias’s feathers. It was easy enough to do. Fly legs can grab on to glass, or hang upside down on a ceiling.

  I could feel the wind whipping around me. It rattled my wings and actually whistled through the chinks and joints of my tiny exoskeleton.

  An incredible array of aromas assaulted my sensitive antennae. Unfortunately, the main things my fly brain seemed interested in were anything sweet, anything rotting, or anything decayed and putrid.

  Rachel pointed out.

  Suddenly, a monster! It loomed huge in my compound eyes. Smaller than me, but still way, way too big.

  I yelped.

  Cassie asked.

 

  Tobias cried.

  I answered.

  Actually, I was lying. The flea was working his way along Tobias’s skin, beneath the feathers, looking for a good place to sink his penetrating, bloodthirsty tongue.

  But somehow I didn’t think Tobias would want to hear that.

  Tobias said.

  Marco said.

  Cassie whispered to me in thought-speak so that no one else could hear.

 

  she said.

  That’s what I told myself, anyway. I guess it was true.

  Tobias said.

  Marco asked.

 

  Rachel moaned.

  Marco mimicked.

  By absolutely terrible luck, the old version of The Fly had been on TV the night before. Like fools, we’d all watched it.

  Ax grumbled.

  Tobias said.

  I leapt from his back. I opened my wings. The slip-stream was so fast it sent me tumbling, end over end through the air. But as my speed dropped I quickly gained control.

 

  Rachel said.

  Ax said.

  I saw him fly past me like a buzzing, wobbling, careening jet fighter. At least I think it was him. I fell in behind, following his wake.

  It turned out Ax was wrong. What he’d thought was a window was actually a small sign on the side of the building. With fly eyes you had to get pretty close to see anything. So we blazed along the face of the building for a while, trying to spot it.

  Tobias called to us. Suddenly I could feel a rush of cooler air, billowing out at us.

  I said.

  I turned into the current of air and seconds later was in the relative darkness inside the building.

  I reminded everyone.

  Rachel said.

 

  Rachel and Marco peeled off and soon disappeared from sight.

  The three of us flew out into what we figured was a hallway, since it seemed very long and had bright lights all along it.

  Cassie said.

  Below us, barely visible, we occasionally caught sight of big, moving oval shapes — the tops of people’s
heads. But with our limited sight, they seemed like floating islands of hair moving on a blurry sea.

  I asked.

  Ax reported.

  I said, trying to reassure myself as much as the two of them.

 

 

  Ax said.

  Cassie said.

 

 

  Ax reported.

  Cassie suggested.

  I agreed. Now I was getting the scent, too. A dark, deep, rich aroma. Sweet and oily.

  I called to them in thought-speak.

 

  Ax said.

  Now the scent was more powerful than before.

  I said.

  We landed. My six legs, each armed with sharp talons and sticky pads, gripped the smooth surface of the door.

  Cassie said.

 

  Seconds later, we were on the linoleum, marching jerkily forward. We passed beneath the door, then instantly took flight again.

  Cassie said.

 

  No one did.