The Threat

by K. A. Applegate

"Aaaahhh!" I commented calmly.

  "That does it, I'm outta here!" David yelped. But he didn't move.

  The world I saw was a blaze of eerie colors. Normal colors seemed to bleed with strange purples and intense reds. I couldn't see objects at all clearly, no forms, no edges.

  53 "I can't see except a blur!" I yelled.

  "You still have a human brain," Cassie said. "You need the dragonfly's visual cortex to interpret the dragonfly's eyes."

  I could sense that I was shrinking, but for some time I couldn't see anything but the hallucination of colors, swirling around me.

  I guess the dragonfly's "visual cortex" (whatever that was) grew in then, because suddenly what I was seeing made sense. At least as much sense as "bug vision" ever makes.

  Lots of insects have compound eyes, which means that instead of forming one big, neat picture the way human eyes do, they break the world up into thousands of separate images. It's like looking at a wall of a thousand TV sets, each one tuned to a very slightly different angle. It's a mosaic. You can see it as one big picture, but it takes work to "humanize" the image.

  But this wasn't just bug vision. This was Super Bug Vision. This was Mega Bug Vision. It wasn't like facing a wall of TV sets, it was like being inside a dome with tiny TV sets in front, to the sides, above, behind. . . . And I didn't have to turn to see in all those directions. I could see them all simultaneously.

  Up, down, left, right, forward, back, all at once.

  So I had a really good view as my legs grew

  54 sharp spikes. And I could see quite clearly as the extra set of legs erupted from my chest like hyperactive worms crawling out of an apple.

  And I didn't miss any part of the show as my shoulders turned green and bulked up like I was wearing football pads. And I definitely saw the way my butt - yes, sorry, my butt - suddenly began to grow. And grow. And grow. Out and out and out.

  I saw backward over my green shoulders as two sets of wings, each translucent and veined like a leaf, grew straight out to each side.

  I was shrinking all this time, but I noticed something interesting. When you shrink to housefly, pretty soon you can't make out anything further than a few feet away. But with dragonfly eyes I could still see Cassie quite clearly, towering above me like the World Trade Center. From down on the ground I could see her face! Of course it was mostly purple, and her eyes seemed to glow in an almost radioactive way, but it was still Cassie.

  I felt myself stop shrinking. I looked around. Something I could do without looking around at all, if you understand what I'm saying. I seemed to have completed the morph.

  I waited patiently for the dragonfly's instincts to kick in. Waited . . . noticed a tiny beetle

  55 crawling beneath me. Waited . . . saw the way the fallen leaves looked like starched blankets piled up. ... Waited . . .

  Movement in the air above me!

  MOSQUITO!

  I don't even remember leaving the ground. It happened too quickly for me to notice. One second my dragonfly vision had spotted something buzzing and fluttering across my millions of tiny TV sets, and the next split second I was in the air.

  I was two inches long, going from zero to thirty-five miles an hour in the blink of an eye.

  The mosquito never saw me coming. He was helpless. He was a Piper Cub and I was an F-15. He had no moves. He had no speed. He lumbered around in a kind of wandering, meandering nonpattern, and I came in on him like a hungry shark on a kid in an inner tube.

  I opened my powerful jaws and hit him going full speed. My bony head smacked the mosquito's body.

  My jaws closed on a crumple of legs. The mosquito struggled briefly, legs kicking, wings still trying to fly.

  It had all happened in a flash. Less than five seconds passed from liftoff to swallowing half the mosquito.

  56 That's how long it took me to regain control. At which point I realized that there were parts of a mosquito sticking out of my mouth.

  And unfortunately, I had a really, really good view of the parts.

  57 «aaaaahhhhh! Would you slow down?» Marco yelled.

  «I'm not going that fast. Besides, how can you tell how fast I'm going? You're a flea. You can't see squat,» I pointed out.

  «l can feel the wind off your wings! It's like a hurricane. If we fall off we'll have to demorph right in the middle of the beach.»

  I was still in dragonfly morph. The view back along my body showed my long, blue-green abdomen. And crouching on my abdomen, sitting like creepy passengers in disorderly rows, were five fleas.

  «Hey, I want to get there, all right?» I said.

  58 «You think I like having five fleas with their bloodsucking mouthparts stuck into me?»

  «Why are you complaining?» Marco shrilled. «We're the ones sitting here while you go zipping around playing Top Gun.»

  «Aww, shut up, Marco,» Rachel said good-naturedly. «lt's kind of fun. The wind whistling through the chinks in my body armor, rustling the spikes on my legs . . .»

  «You people are all crazy,» David said.

  «At one level, it's kind of fascinating, you know?» Cassie said. «l mean, did anyone ever read the Miss Spider books? Miss Spider's Tea Party, Miss Spider's New Car? This could be Miss Spider Goes Flying.»

  «You people are a//crazy,» David repeated.

  «Dragonfly Airlines,» Rachel said with a laugh.

  «We cannot go any slower,» Ax pointed out. «lt took a long time for all of us to get aboard this insect. Added to the time it took for Tobias to fly us here, we have no more than twenty minutes left in morph.»

  He was right. It had sounded easy, getting five fleas onto a dragonfly. It had ended up being a Three Stooges movie. Fleas don't jump all that accurately. It had taken an hour of fleas catapulting like lunatic trapeze artists through the air to get all five of them aboard.

  59 «How are we doing, Tobias?»

  Tobias was a few hundred feet overhead, doing everything in his power to look like a hawk minding his own business. Unfortunately, red-tails don't hang out by the water, usually. I needed Tobias to guide us into the resort compound. The dragonfly eyes were very good for a bug, but still not good enough to see the thousand yards that separated us from the Marriott's outer wall. Whereas Tobias could easily keep track of a two-inch-long dragonfly.

  «You're wandering a little to your left,» Tobias said. «Straighten up. Yeah. That's good. You're on target and closing in fast»

  «lt's like watching tapes from Desert Storm,» Rachel said. «You know, like Tobias is the jet pilot, and we're the "smart" weapon going for the target. »

  «You put your wars on television for people to watch?» Ax asked. He sounded shocked. «Hu-mans!»

  «Wall coming up,» Tobias reported.

  «l see the trees,» I said.

  «l don't see a thing,» Marco said. «But I'm bloated on dragonfly juice.»

  The trees loomed up, more red than green in my dragonfly world. Huge branches reached out for me. I zipped on through.

  «0kay, I'm going higher,» Tobias said. «l

  60 want to get out of range of that bald guy with the killer eyes.»

  I saw the main hotel building ahead of me. It was suddenly psychedelic red and orange, but it was definitely the building we were aiming for.

  Just one problem.

  «Tobias. Can you see any open windows?»

  «That's what I've been looking for and no, I can't.»

  «We can drop down and go in through the front door,» Rachel suggested.

  «The lobby will be full of people,» I said. «We're small, but we're not invisibles

  «l have a crazy idea,» Tobias said. «The bellmen and all? They have these kind of tall hats as part of their uniforms. And they keep tipping their hats to the guests before they pick up their bags.»

  «That's very polite of them. Who cares?» Marco asked.

  «Well, they raise their hats off their heads . . .»

  «Don't even!» Marco protested.

  «Yo
u want us to zip in under some guy's hat?» David asked. «lt would take split-second timing. And then he'd have to not notice this two-inch-long bug on his head.»

  «Dragonflies can hover,» Cassie pointed out.

  «Let's do it!» Rachel said.

  63 «What is a hat?» Ax asked.

  I didn't have any better idea. Neither did anyone else. Believe me, I was very open to hearing another suggestion.

  «0kay, let's give this a try,» I said.

  I swooped down at top dragonfly speed toward the main door of the hotel. Limousines were stacked up waiting. Security guys were everywhere. Uniformed Marriott employees were trying to squeeze through the security guys to do their jobs.

  «Again, I have to ask: What is a hat?»

  «A hat is something people wear on their heads,» Rachel explained to Ax. «A type of clothing.»

  «Ah, yes, clothing,» Ax said disapprovingly. «Head clothing. Of course. Is there any part of a human that cannot be clothed?»

  «Yeah, the face, which is too bad when you consider Marco's face,» Rachel said.

  «Hey, you know I'm the cutest flea you've ever seen,» Marco replied. «No one has prettier bloodsucking mouthparts than me.»

  I ignored all this and focused on the crowd of people ahead and below me. It was easy enough to make out the scurrying bellmen. And their hats were easy enough to spot. The trick was finding a bellman who was just about to ...

  «Whoa!» Cassie cried.

  64 I blew out of there at top speed. Out beneath the brim! I headed for altitude.

  "Hey, something just flew out of your hat!"

  "Whatever you say, sir. You know who else is hot? Bobbie Battista. You know her?"

  "She's CNN."

  I shot toward the ceiling, cranked a hard right and went skimming at rocket speed. The tex-tured white plane of the ceiling just an inch above me. I spotted curtains and did a neat loop down behind them. I grabbed some curtain rod and hung on, waiting for my stomach to catch up.

  «We're in,» I announced.

  «Now what do we do, Prince Jake?» Ax asked.

  «Wish I knew. We need to get a look around this hotel.»

  «0ur time is running out,» Ax reminded me.

  «We can't demorph with this guy in the room,» Cassie said.

  «We have to find an empty room fast,» I said. «l think I know the way.»

  I zoomed off, skimming just below the ceiling. My goal was a rectangular grate at the top of a wall. The air-conditioning vent. Was there room enough for me to squeeze through?

  I aimed for the vertical opening, turned sideways, folded my wings back and shot through.

  65 «Yee-hah!»

  «What yee-hah? What are you yee-hahing about?» Marco asked.

  «We're in the air-conditioning vent,» I explained.

  «lt is chilly,» Cassie remarked.

  «We must demorph very soon,» Ax pressed.

  I zoomed down an endless square tunnel. There was plenty of light from the various room vents. I zipped along, pausing only to glance into each room we passed. They were all occupied. A lot seemed to be reporters just unpacking. In one I saw what looked like Japanese security guys setting up equipment of some kind. But nowhere we could demorph. It was getting desperate. As Ax kept reminding me.

  «Prince Jake, there are only five of your minutes left.»

  Then . . .

  «What the . . . ?» I stopped flying. I was looking out through the vent at a huge ballroom. But it wasn't the ballroom itself that made me stare.

  «What is it?» David demanded. «Can we de-morph?»

  «No. We definitely cannot demorph here,» I said, staring at the incredible scene through my compound eyes. «We have to get out of here.»

  I took off again, searching, searching, room after room.

  66 «l am not getting trapped in flea morph,» Rachel said.

  «We have three minutes,» Ax said as calmly as anyone could possibly say those words.

  We reached an intersection of ducts. Straight? Left? Right? The vent to the right looked darker. Dark was good. Dark should mean rooms that were still closed up. I turned right.

  Instantly I felt something wrong, something off. There was too much dust. Too little air circulation. Too -

  «Aaahhh!» Something grabbed me. I was yanked out of midair!

  I flapped madly, but I felt myself being wrapped up in tiny, sticky ropes. I could jerk this way and that, but I could not escape. My wings were pinned down. My legs . . .

  «What's happening?!» Rachel yelled.

  Okay, get a grip, Jake, I ordered myself. I stopped struggling. And that's when I saw.

  Radiating out from me in all directions were glistening ropes. The ropes were sticky. Thin but strong. And they formed a pattern. A definite pattern.

  «lt's a spiderweb,» I said. «We're caught in a web.»

  And then, with my all-directional dragonfly eyes, I saw the black, menacing shape hanging

  68 in the air above me. Eight legs. Eight cold, evil eyes.

  The deadly jaws worked, open, closed, open, closed.

  I was trapped in the spiderweb. And the spider was home.

  67

  I rapped by a spider!

  We were in the most secure building in the world. We were surrounded by the security forces of five nations, plus the Yeerks, and I'd been caught by a spider!

  The spider advanced, cautious but not slow. It picked its way carefully across the strands of web. I could clearly see its bulging eyes: a pair much bigger, then two pairs of smaller eyes below. And I could see the cruel mouthparts, specifically designed for tearing apart insect flesh.

  «Two minutes, Prince Jake!» Ax said.

  «l'm demorphing!» David cried.

  «No!» I roared. «You'll be crushed inside this

  69 duct.» I couldn't break loose of the web. At least not without some extra weight.

  I began to demorph, maximum speed. I was a two-inch-long insect. A few moments later, I was a four-inch-long insect with some very weird features. The web sagged. I hit the metal floor of the duct.

  «What are you doing?» Rachel yelled.

  «Aaaahhhh!» Cassie cried suddenly.

  «Cassie's hurt!» David yelled.

  The spider kept advancing. I kept growing. I was five inches long. Already my dragonfly features were being altered as human DNA began to reassert itself.

  My backward vision showed the fleas, separated by more distance now, as the flesh beneath them swelled. But one flea was no longer well.

  One flea was oozing blood. Blood was squishing out through the armored plates.

  My blood! My morphing body must have created a semihuman artery! The sudden surge of blood pressure had burst Cassie's insides.

  My mind was screaming. Cassie hurt! The spider still coming on! My own body this weird mess.

  But I was free of the web! I buzzed my wings. Nothing! I was too large. I had to remorph, get back down to dragonfly size.

  Shrinking ... too slow! And now the spider

  70 was bold again, advancing at an eight-legged trot. Its mouthparts were gnashing frantically.

  I was morphing as fast as I could. Mostly dragonfly again, and free of the web. But Cassie had fallen off!

  «0ne minute, Prince Jake,» Ax said, with a definite tone of desperation in his thought-speak voice.

  «No! I'm not getting trapped likethis!» David screamed. «No! NO! N000!»

  He began to demorph. I buzzed my wings, lifted off, and spun quickly around in midair. I saw Cassie lying helpless on the floor. I swooped down, snatched her up in my jaws, and hauled like I have never hauled before. Back the way we'd come.

  But now David was growing, weighing me down!

  Too little time!

  I saw the grate. I saw the vertical slats. I folded my wings, shot through, and screamed, «DEMORPH! Now! Now! Now!»

  Five fleas catapulted off my back and spun through the air, growing larger even as they fell.

  «Cassie!
Demorph!»

  I released her. I watched her tumble away, out of sight as she fell and fell the millions of miles to the floor of the banquet room.

  71 I was shedding the morph by the time I lit on a narrow, curved tabletop.

  «l can't get out of morph!» Marco yelled.

  My heart stopped beating. «No, no, no! Marco, keep trying! Keeptrying!»

  I was emerging myself, growing on the table-top. Wings disappearing, abdomen shrinking, legs thickening.

  My own eyes were emerging, and through them I could see someone morphing not a foot away on the table. But it was like no morph I've ever seen. The person wasn't changing, but simply growing.

  Growing as a flea. A one-foot-long flea. Larger. Two feet long!

  Let me tell you something: There's a reason that insects gross people out. Someday go find a blowup photograph of a flea. And imagine it becoming human-sized.

  It stood on six bristling legs. The body was the color of rust. It was narrow, as if it had been run over by a train. It was built of interlocking plates of armor. Its head was a hideous helmet, with a ring of spikes raked back all around the top and sides. At the bottom of the helmet were more spikes, like some horrible parody of a mustache. Two stubby antennae protruded. Saber-toothed tiger "teeth" stuck straight down.

  73 It had two black, button eyes. Dead, soulless eyes.

  It was now a flea as large as a dog.

  «Marco?!» I cried.

  «0h, please, help me! Help me!»

  72

  I could not stand to look at the thing.

  «Marco?» I cried again. «MARCO!»

  Marco trapped in some hideous, oversized flea body? And Cassie . . . what had happened to Cassie?

  Suddenly, over the edge of the table, she appeared. She was fully demorphed. Her own self, even though I was still only halfway through the process.

  She looked right at Marco. She placed her hands on his sides, ignoring the sting of his bristles as they poked into her skin.

  The flea . . . Marco . . . tried to jump. But the legs that could fire a flea through the air were too weak to move the huge thing he had become.

  74 "Come on, Marco," Cassie said calmly. "Clear your mind of all the fear. You can do this. You will morph. Focus on the picture of yourself. Form the picture in your mind. Let go of the fear and focus on the picture of your own body."