The Hidden

by K. A. Applegate

  “But the reading says the signal’s honed in on this area!” someone shouted from outside.

  “Yeah, but it’s also picking up four other readings in four other directions!” someone else said. “If you ask me, this is some kind of wild-goose chase.”

  “Don’t let the visser hear you say that,” the first man said uneasily. “He just pulled up.”

  The voices faded as the truck lurched forward, picking up speed.

  Tobias was still around. Faint but around. Silence.

  Uh-oh what? I thought. I held still and watched the Cape buffalo watch me. Not a good feeling. Trust me.

  It was hot and waves of the animal’s thick, musky scent were nearly overpowering. Even for me. But the stench wasn’t anything compared to the pure power in the broad, muscular body and the deadly threat of its massive horns.

  The buffalo snorted, blowing a rush of hot, moist air out through its nostrils.

  Tobias was starting to sound a little frantic.

  The buffalo snorted again. Tossed its head in a threatening, hooking movement, pulling the ropes taut.

  The truck began to slow and lean into the bend.

  The truck nose-dived, sending almost a ton of buffalo surging right at me. The ropes tightened as a rippling wall of muscle —

  SNAP!

  One of the ropes broke and pulled apart like a piece of thread.

  I whipped left and flattened myself against the wall of the truck as the buffalo skidded forward and sideways, fighting the remaining restraints.

  The buffalo bellowed again, thrashing in anger.

  WHAP!

  Another restraint. Gone.

  The last two ropes were around the buffalo’s neck. Somehow I figured they wouldn’t be there for long.

  It whipped its head around in a frenzy. The buffalo was going to break loose, and either trample or gore me to death. Impale me on those wicked, gleaming horns.

  And then Visser Three would have the morphing cube.

  There really was only one way out of this.

  I inched sideways, watching the buffalo watch me. It was tense, just seconds from erupting again. I was shaking. I had to get past those horns but I knew it’d never let me get behind it where it couldn’t see me.

  The truck braked harder.

  The buffalo stumbled forward, past me, to the ends of the remaining ropes.

  Trembling, I laid my hand on the buffalo’s thick hide, right at its midsection, and began to acquire it.

  The buffalo gave one last thrash, then went into a kind of dreamy, semi-trancelike state. It happens to most animals when we acquire their DNA. Most, but not all.

  “Hey, what’s with the roadblock?” The shout came from the truck’s cab.

  The truck was barely creeping forward now.

  In a minute it would be stopped and searched.

  Would I have enough time?

  I stripped down to my morphing outfit. Jammed my clothes out of sight behind one of the truck’s wide, wooden slats. Laid the blue box on the floor of the truck and focused on the Cape buffalo’s DNA.

  Crrreeeaaaacccckkkk!

  My skull split straight down the center and began to thicken, dragging my head down with the weight and back into my bulging, beefy shoulders.

  Sproot! Sproot!

  The bones broadened, following the contours of my huge head, shot out, and flipped up into three-foot horns on each sharp, lethal side.

  My skin darkened and thickened into a tough, coarse-haired hide.

  My body was bloating, stretching and expanding, bulking out further and further, piling on pound after pound of sheer muscle.

  My fingers melded together and were sucked back into my hands. Tough hooves banded around the edges like metal plates.

  “I’m telling you, don’t open that! I’m hauling African Cape buffalo here, mister, and I don’t think you want to —”

  “Never attempt to think for me.” A cold, sinister voice. A voice I had heard before. A voice I would never forget.

  Visser Three.

  My morphing had stopped when I’d lost concentration.

  I refocused. Fast.

  Schloop! Schloop!

  My ears elongated. Sort of stretched out, drooped, and grew fringed hair.

  The latch on the double doors clunked open.

  “I’m telling you guys, don’t do this!”

  “Shut up and get out of my way!” Visser Three roared.

  Sproot!

  A tail shot out of my hind end as the double doors swung wide.

  “See, I told you —” The driver stopped, his eyes wide with horror. “The restraints broke!” He backed away. “Run!”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Visser Three snapped. “I —”

  The Cape buffalo gave an explosive snort through its wide, quivering nostrils.

  And immediately, without warning, my own buffalo instinct kicked in.

  Fury.

  No fear.

  Fight to defend. Fight the threat.

  Protect the herd.

  I tossed my head, blew a harsh whoosh of air from my nostril, and surged forward, heart pounding, fueled by rage and adrenaline.

  “Run!” the driver shrieked, taking off.

  The pitch of his screams hurt my ears and my hair-trigger temper exploded. Hooves clattering, I burst out of the truck like a tornado, slashing and hooking, slamming into cars and trampling Controllers beneath my powerful legs.

  More screams. Shouts.

  Human-Controllers fleeing in all directions. Dashing between the crooked, haphazardly parked cars. Hiding behind them. Hiding in them.

  I saw them through a gray haze of fury, smelled their terror and followed it. No puny car could block my path.

  Howls of pain.

  I wheeled, broadsiding a human-Controller, sent him spinning.

  Attack the threat! Destroy the threat!

  Normally I was a calm, peaceful, grazing animal.

  Until I was threatened. Provoked.

  And then, nothing could stop me.

  “Call the cops!” someone yelled. “Call back to The Gardens and get a tranquilizer gun out here!”

  “Where’s ‘here’?!” another voice shouted.

  “The woods along the highway! Outside the back gate! Hurry!” the guy hollered, crouching on top of his car.

 

  The word echoed faintly in my enraged brain.

  I ignored it.

  I was a pile driver, wrecking anything and everything in my path.

  Tobias said frantically.

  Huh? Who cares about some cube? Wait. Hang on. The box. Oh, yeah.

  I fought the powerful animal’s fury for a moment. Struggled to subdue its instincts and pull my human self back into consciousness.

  “Two! There’s two! Look out!”

  I turned and saw the Cape buffalo I’d acquired pounding out of the truck, charging people with its horns and growing more agitated when it missed them.

  Then it whirled and stampeded straight for Chapman. The assistant principal of our school. Member of The Sharing. And a high-ranking Controller.

  THUD!

  Chapman flew through the air and hit the ground with the same dull “whump” a watermelon makes when you drop it.

  Tobias yelled.

  I ran back toward the truck. Stopped. Powered up my short, stocky legs and body-slammed Visser Three’s limo with everything I had.

  CRRRRUUUNNNCCCHHH!

  The car alarm went off.

  EEEUUUUU! EEEEUUUU! EEEEEUUUU!

  The real Cape buffal
o was going berserk. Smashing cars. Goring headlights. Bellowing and snorting and roaring with rage.

  Panting, I leaped back into the truck, grabbed the blue box in my mouth, and barreled back out onto the highway.

  I saw it all in one second.

  Chapman, down and out on the pavement.

  Cars wrecked and crumpled, Controllers sitting on top of them, clutching the roofs and looking petrified.

  Visser Three, surrounded by a protective wall of frightened Controllers, screaming out enraged orders.

  The original Cape buffalo, thundering across a field and into the woods.

  I ran. The buffalo’s herd instinct surged and I ran.

  I crashed through the underbrush, trampling saplings and ripping through sticker bushes without a second thought.

  The scent of the real Cape buffalo was thick in my nostrils. I followed it deeper and deeper into the woods until the screams and shouts of the Controllers back at the roadblock were completely lost.

  The buffalo’s hearing — my hearing now — absorbed and gauged every sound, checking for any potential threat to my herd.

  My depth perception wasn’t so great, but I had a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree, wide-angle range of vision, which was going to make it pretty tough for anyone to sneak up on me.

  This was a good thing.

  I couldn’t run very fast — nowhere near the speed of my wolf morph — but what the buffalo lacked in miles per hour, it definitely made up for in sheer bulk and muscle. Nobody, and I mean nobody — except maybe a lion — would take me on, and I could still outrun a lion if I had to.

  And then there was man. The most infuriating scent, the most unnatural threat.

  But the air was clean of man-scent.

  The buffalo’s brain, so powerful in its fury, began to shift its concentration in the quiet woods. Sort of downgraded from an all-out, fight-to-the-death attack mode to a standby alert that noted all sights, scents, and sounds, then dismissed them as nonthreatening.

  It was a relief. It allowed me to get a firmer grip on the buffalo’s natural instincts.

  Tobias said, wheeling high in the sky above me.

  I said, kind of embarrassed.

  I found a dense bramble thicket where I could demorph, then, thinking twice, moved on until I was in a small clearing surrounded by a few trees. The thorns and stickers might not have hurt the buffalo’s tough hide but they would’ve ripped my skin to shreds.

 

  Tobias swooped down and landed on a nearby branch.

  I opened my mouth and dropped the slippery, spit-covered box on the ground. Then focused on my own DNA and felt the changes begin.

  Even though everyone says I have a talent for morphing — and I have to admit I usually can sort of control the process — it still doesn’t follow any real, precise pattern. So I wasn’t surprised when the first thing to go this time was my tail. It drooped slowly and then started to melt like hot wax, then —

  SCHLOOP!

  Was sucked right back up into my body.

  Bones began to grind and crunch, reshaping themselves.

  My eyes crawled closer together. My ears shriveled and shrank.

  SPROOT! SPROOT!

  Ten human toes shot out of the crumbling hooves. My bones adjusted and reformed into ankles, then knees, then hips. My massive horns crumpled, deflated, and rolled back up toward the cleft at the center of my head.

  Tobias said, ruffling his feathers and looking the other way.

  I began to say, “I know,” but it came out as, “waaaw waaw.”

  “I know,” I repeated, once my jaw finished shrinking. I flexed my fingers, bent down, and picked up the box. “And I know something else, too. We might want to steer clear of the real buffalo if we can. I, uh, don’t think it trusts humans very much.”

  Tobias said.

  “Good,” I said, exhaling. “The Gardens’ll send out a search party and probably a helicopter …”

  Oh, that was a nice picture. And just what we didn’t need. My mother buzzing around the sky, searching for a lost Cape buffalo, while we dodged Yeerks in helicopters who were trying to kill us.

  Tobias cocked his head. Listening.

  “What?”

  he said. I watched him lift off, make a quick circle.

  “Are you sure it’s the Yeerk helicopter, or is it the black one with a big ‘The Gardens’ logo on the side?” I asked.

  he said tersely.

  I took off at a trot, clutching the morphing cube and trying to keep to the soft carpet of pine needles since I was barefoot.

  Tobias glided along only a few feet above my head. Every couple of minutes he’d flap hard for altitude, land in a treetop and check out the helicopter’s progress.

  he said, swooping back down and landing on a tree branch a few yards ahead of me. His head jerked and he fell silent.

  “What?” I said, huffing a little as I jogged toward him. “What, Tobias?”

  And then I broke into the clearing and I saw for myself.

  The Cape buffalo stood there, quivering. Twisting. Its eyes bulging with panic. Its mouth gaping in a silent scream. The scene was pretty bizarre all by itself. But in our world things always had to be slightly more than weird.

  See, the Cape buffalo stood there, but instead of a Cape buffalo head and face was our assistant principal’s.

  Chapman.

  A freak of nature.

  So help me, that’s the first thought that swept into my mind, as I watched the buffalo stumble and squirm.

  It sprouted a human leg covered with coarse, black animal hair.

  Fringed, shaggy ears whipped out of Chapman’s head, then shrunk into dachshund-sized ears.

  Tobias finally blurted, sounding a little nauseated.

  “It’s morphing,” I whispered. I covered my mouth with my free hand and fell back a step. It was really terrible.

  Chapman’s skull split in the center and a pair of horns flowed from the crack like waves.

  Tobias said, turning away and staring at me instead of the buffalo.

  “It must have touched the blue box,” I said helplessly, thinking back. I had laid the box down in the truck while I morphed …

  “Oh, God. It saw me morph. In the truck. And then somehow, while I was out rampaging around the highway, it must have ripped free of its remaining restraints, brushed past the box, and then … It had plowed straight into Chapman and without even knowing it, had acquired his DNA.”

  I fell silent, not even realizing that I’d been speaking aloud.

  Tobias asked, keeping his fierce, hawk’s gaze fixed firmly on me. Like if he didn’t see the buffalo, it wouldn’t exist.

  “It could, because it doesn’t even know what’s happening to itself,” I said quietly, watching as the morph to Chapman finally became complete. “
Look.”

  he said, but did anyway.

  The buffalo — Chapman — was down on all fours, and though the human form was apparent it was covered in coarse hair — thankfully. Suddenly, it began tossing its head and making hooking movements even though it no longer had its horns. It snorted, then sniffed the air with its now-pitiful human nose. Slowly, watchfully, it lowered its head and bit off a mouthful of weeds.

  “It’s grazing,” I said, feeling nauseous.

  The buffa-human stiffened. It looked around, then spotted me. Issued a challenging snort and then a weak, warbling, “WAAAA!”

  “I can’t watch this anymore,” I said, as the buffa-human — or Chapman or whatever it was — crawled and lurched toward me on its hands and knees. It was trying to charge, to hook me with its nonexistent horns, to kill me. To protect and defend.

  I stepped aside as it lumbered past, its human head swinging and its tongue lolling out. Not even realizing it had missed me.

  Tobias said, as the buffa-human stopped. Turned.

  And slowly, creakily, straightened up onto its knees.

  Wrong. It was all wrong! This terrible, twisted creature made my skin crawl. An adult — an assistant principal — was not supposed to huff and grunt and drool. Was not allowed to crawl and snort and pant. It betrayed everything I knew to be true about — about —

  “It has a human brain, Tobias, but it doesn’t have a clue as to what to do with it,” I said, unable to stop staring at it, the way some people stare as they drive by car wrecks. It was grisly, it was gruesome, but I couldn’t stop watching as the creature rose, wobbling and unsure, onto two legs. “Look, it’s learning. It’s watching me and learning!” The sight was both disturbing and exciting.

  Tobias said, flapping to the top of the tree for another helicopter check.

  “We can’t just leave it here,” I said, watching as the buffa-human took a first shaky step toward me.