The Unknown

by K. A. Applegate

  Each morph happens differently. Things happen in unpredictable ways. It isn't always smooth and gradual. Often it's unbelievably illogical, and you never know quite what will happen first.

  This time the first change I noticed was my legs. Without getting smaller, they began to morph into bird legs. My five small toes melted together. And from those melted toes grew long talons. Three long talons forward, one turned back.

  Looking down, I could see why people say birds descended from dinosaurs. A hawk talon looks exactly like the foot of a Tyrannosaurus or some other big predator dinosaur.

  A hawk talon is one of those things where you can just look at it and know it's a weapon. They're fleshless and without feathers, so that the blood of prey animals doesn't stick and turn nasty; they're quick and powerful at gripping, but weak and reluctant to let go; and the claw at the end is designed not just to hold a branch, or to

  38 walk on, but to be squeezed directly into the flesh of the prey.

  Nature, as I learned from my parents, isn't always warm and cuddly.

  "She's got le-egs, she knows how to use them." Marco sang the line of an old song. Then he laughed, but the laugh was cut short when his mouth erupted into an osprey's beak.

  The next change was my skin. It lightened toward medium gray. And all across the skin of my arms I saw patterns being drawn. Feather patterns, like tiny trees pressed flat. Networks of tiny veins that overlapped like shingles on a roof.

  Then, rippling across my body, the patterns became three-dimensional. The patterns seemed to swell up and become full-fledged feathers.

  It itched. But it did not hurt. I resisted the urge to scratch. Because already my fingers were not exactly fingers anymore. The finger bones had begun to elongate. At the same time my arm bones contorted and shrank, becoming lighter, air-filled, hollow.

  Bones make a sort of grinding sound when they morph. It's disturbing the first few times you do it. To put it mildly.

  Finally, I began shrinking. The ground began to rush up toward me. Even though I've done this many times, I still can't quite shake the feeling

  39 that I'm falling and falling and falling without ever quite hitting bottom.

  I had left my boots standing right near me. They're rubber boots that come up to about mid-calf. But now, as I shrank, the boots grew. From midcalf height to waist height in less than a minute.

  And I was still shrinking.

  At the same time my internal organs began to shift and rearrange. My long, twisted human intestines became the much shorter digestive tract of a bird. My slow, plodding human heart became the rapid-fire heart of an osprey. Kidneys, lungs, liver. . . nothing stayed the same.

  Then . . . SPRROOOT! My lips bulged out and out and very suddenly became harder than fingernails. I had a curved, ripping hawk's beak.

  I felt my teeth sort of shrivel way. I felt my forehead recede and my chest narrow. All the fat on my body disappeared, leaving me little more than skin and and muscle and hollow bones wrapped in feathers.

  I noticed several of the animals in the cages watching us with great intensity. None more intense than an injured fox who seemed mesmerized by the way we had gone from being huge, threatening humans to small, tasty birds. He watched me with hungry, glittering eyes.

  40 «Better get a move on,» Tobias said. «We should be well clear before Cassie's dad gets here.»

  «Yeah,» Marco said. «We look like we're here to break into the cages and bust the other birds outta here.»

  I spread my arms. But instead of arms I had wings. «l'm ready. Rachel?»

  I looked at Rachel. Her human eyes were just changing color. She stared back at me with an eagle's intense gaze. «Ready.»

  «Let's fly,» I said. I opened my wings and beat them downward, hard. And again. And again. I drew my talons up and beat several times more.

  I rose from the floor of the barn. It was a struggle. We were inside, in a cramped area with no headwind.

  I beat my wings and rose to the loft to perch beside Tobias. Rachel came to rest just across from us. She was nearly twice our size, with wings that stretched six feet from tip to tip and a blazingly white head and tail.

  I looked out through the open hayloft. I looked with osprey eyes. It's as if humans are blind. I saw my dad's truck coming down the dirt road to our farm. I saw through the windshield. I saw his face. I saw the individual hairs on his

  41 head. If a fly had landed on his nose right then, I'd have been able to see its antennae twitch.

  My dad was still two hundred yards away.

  Then I lifted my gaze toward the rectangle of blue and white sky.

  I opened my wings, launched myself forward, swooped out through the window, caught just enough of a breeze, and soared toward the clouds.

  There are times when being an Animorph is pretty bad. But definitely not when you're flying.

  42 here is a lot to know about flying. Fortunately, the osprey's brain took care of most of that. It trimmed my tail. It adjusted the angle of my wings. But my brain was there, too. And I flew.

  We flapped hard to get some altitude and rise above the barn and my house. In a few seconds we were high enough for me to spot the orange Frisbee I'd accidentally thrown onto the roof of my house. We circled, fighting gravity, and I could see my dad pulling his truck up to the mailbox to check for letters.

  Higher still, and I could see through my own living room window and see my mom tilting her

  43 head back, eyes closed, relaxing after a day at work.

  «This way,» Tobias called to us, and Rachel and I followed. The sky is home to Tobias. He knows his way around. Rachel and I are just visitors to the clouds.

  «See over there? Off to the east?» Tobias asked. «See the way the clouds are piled up? The slight rippling in the air?»

  I looked with my incredible osprey vision. And I did see the air ripple from heat. The same way you sometimes see heat waves rising from the pavement on a hot day. But these heat waves were half a mile away.

  «Yes,» I replied. «l see them. Is it a thermal?»

  «A serious thermal. We'll ride that a mile straight up!»

  After all this time, Tobias is still excited by flying. I guess I would be, too. It is the coolest thing in the world.

  We flew hard, separated by a few hundred yards so we wouldn't look like we were together. See, red-tails, bald eagles, and ospreys don't exactly fly in formation together.

  I felt my wing muscles grow tired. Flapping is hard work. But when we reached the thermal it would be easier. A thermal is a pillar of rising

  44 warm air. You spread your wings in a thermal, and you can soar with very little energy.

  Then, wonderfully, we were in it. I felt warm air billow up beneath my outstretched wings. And up I soared. Up and up and up!

  «Hah-hah! Oh, man I love this!» Rachel yelled. «l love this, I love this, I love this! Yeeeee-haaah!»

  «So, you're saying you love this?» Marco asked her.

  Up we went, circling over and under and around each other. We were doing an airborne ballet of incredible gracefulness.

  The ground fell away beneath us. Now even our excellent predators' hearing picked up no sound from the cars and houses and stores below us.

  Up we went, till the tallest trees looked like tiny bushes. Till lawns became postage stamps. Till roads became shimmering streams of hot concrete.

  And yet, even though everything below us became small, 1 could still see in startling detail. Especially anything that moved like prey: cats, dogs, mice, other birds.

  «Look,» Tobias said. «A flight of geese!»

  I saw them up above us. They were going the same direction as us, but moving in a tight V-formation.

  «Let's go catch them!» I cried.

  45 Tobias laughed, «Yeah, right. See the way they fly? They never stop flapping. They're like machines. They can fly hundreds of miles. You ever watch a dog try to catch a passing car? That's what it would be like, us trying to catch those geese.»


  He was right. The geese just kept power-flying. Soon they were way past us.

  «How long till we get to the Dry Lands?» Rachel asked.

  «Long time,» Tobias said. «But we're getting some great altitude. That will help.»

  «This will be so cool,» Marco said. «Zone Ninety-one! We will penetrate the very heart of the government conspiracy to cover up alien visitors !»

  «Marco, just how dumb are you?» Rachel asked. «We know about the real aliens. We know they don't look like E.T. or the guys you always see on alien books. And we know the real aliens, the Yeerks, don't go around kidnapping backwoods goobers and doing medical experiments on them.»

  «Maybe there are two different bunches of aliens,» Marco said. «Maybe there are these aliens who crash-landed back in the fifties. Plus the Yeerks more recently.»

  «Yeah, right, Agent Mulder,» Rachel grumbled. «Earth is the crossroads of every passing

  46 alien. We're the McDonald's next to the highway of the galaxy.»

  They argued on for a while, and, not for the first time, I realized my life had gotten weird. I was flying a mile up, listening to a thought-speak debate between a bald eagle and an osprey over the existence of aliens.

  Good grief.

  After a while I tuned them out. It is very quiet in the high air. No noise from the ground. None. Sometimes you hear the engines of a jet flying by, five miles farther up. But mostly all you hear is the soft rushing of wind over feathers. And the sound of your own wings beating.

  We used the altitude of the first thermal to jump from thermal to thermal. We would fly out of one gentle vortex of warm air, descend to the next, and let it raise us up again.

  And after a while, I saw the roads becoming fewer and smaller. The houses thinned out. The gas stations were miles apart. I saw cows and sheep standing around in random patterns far below.

  And then even the cows and sheep were left behind as were the last homes and businesses. Below us the ground was dry, covered with yellowed grass, and marked out by barbed-wire fences.

  47 Tobias said, «Hey. Check out that sign down there. The one by the dirt road.» I aimed my osprey vision and read:

  STOP!

  GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. RESTRICTED AREA.

  AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT.

  ALL OTHERS ARE SUBJECT TO ARREST AND

  PROSECUTION. THIS MEANS YOU.

  «l'm guessing this is the beginning of the famous Zone Ninety-one,» I said.

  «Friendly, aren't they?» Rachel said.

  «lf you were trying to conceal a vast government conspiracy to hide an alien spacecraft, you'd be paranoid, too,» Marco said.

  I wasn't sure whether he was joking or not. Sometimes it's hard to tell with Marco.

  I could see the base called Zone 91. It was a cluster of squat, unattractive buildings that all looked as if they'd been built forty years ago. There were three very large buildings that looked like aircraft hangars. And there was an airstrip. But I could also see lots of vehicles: trucks, Humvees, even some tanks.

  And there were horses, just scattering, sauntering through the base like it wasn't there.

  «Marco, I know a lady you'd love,» Rachel

  48 muttered. «Her name is Crazy Helen. Crazy, because she sounds like you.»

  «Let's look for those horses,» I suggested. «l think that's the place to start.»

  «The phone-using horses,» Tobias said. «Horse-Controllers.»

  Something about the way he said it made it sound like he doubted the whole thing.

  «We did see a Yeerk crawl out of that horse's ear,» Rachel said defensively.

  «And we did almost get fried by a Bug fighter's Dracon beam,» I pointed out.

  «You didn't actually see a Bug fighter, though. And with pathetic human eyes, who can tell if it's a Yeerk slug or just a plain old snake? Now that I can become human again, I can really remember how blind humans are.»

  «l cannot believe you don't believe us, Tobias^ Rachel complained.

  «l didn't say I don't believe you. It's just that it doesn't make any sense. I mean, why would Yeerks want to infest some skanky wild horses?»

  «l don't know,» I admitted. «But I know what I saw.»

  «There!» Rachel said. «A bunch of horses. Over by the water hole. Maybe that's them.»

  We banked sharply left and headed toward them. There were half a dozen mares, two gangly colts, and one big stallion who stood off by him-

  50 self on a slight rise. The stallion sniffed the breeze, head high.

  «That's not them,» I said.

  «How do you know?»

  «Because they're acting exactly like horses, that's why. They have colts. And the stallion is behaving like a stallion. The horses we want won't act that way.»

  «0kay. Well, you guys need to demorph,» Tobias said. «You're nearly at the two-hour limit. There are some rocks over there. You'll have shade and privacy.»

  So we headed for the rocks and landed. They were just a pile of rocks like any other jumble of boulders.

  Except that we'd overlooked one vital fact: They were on the far side of the sign. The sign that said this means you.

  49

  He flew down into the rocks and demorphed.

  It was a nice little enclosure, with tall, rounded boulders all around us and clean, dry sand under our feet. We were completely hidden from anyone coming in any direction.

  Tobias came to rest beside us as Marco, Rachel, and I returned to our human forms. Of course, as always when we came out of a morph, we were in our morphing suits, and barefoot.

  The sun beat down, but we were mostly in shade. A warm breeze blew and whistled between the rocks: WHEEE-HEEEEEE-WHEEE-EEEEE-WHEEE

  "All we need now is a picnic lunch," Marco

  51 said. "Tobias! Go rustle us up some juicy rats and toads."

  «No need,» Tobias said coolly. «Just eat that snake you're sitting on.»

  "Yaaahhh!" Marco screamed as he leaped to his feet and began slapping his behind frantically.

  A small black snake slithered away from the pocket of warm sand where Marco had been sitting.

  "I'm bit! I'm gonna die! A rattler bit my butt!"

  «lt's not a rattler, and he didn't bite you,» Tobias said. «He's just a harmless bull snake.»

  "No snake is harmless," Marco muttered. "But keep your hawk eyes open in case a rattler does come for me."

  «l will protect your butt from snake bite, Marco,» Tobias said solemnly.

  "Let's just morph back," Rachel suggested. "We don't need to rest. I feel fine."

  "There's no rush, is there?" I asked.

  Morphing is tiring. It wears you out. Sometimes we've had to morph very quickly with no rest between shape changes. But that's not the best way to do it. You feel much more energized if you wait a little while.

  Rachel shrugged. "No. No rush." She stretched up on her toes and looked around at the boul-

  52 ders. The WHEE-EEING wind caught her hair and blew it in her face. "It looks like some scene from an old Western. The good guys are up here in the rocks hiding from the bad guys. All we need is six-guns and rifles."

  CHICK-CLICK!

  «What the -» Tobias cried.

  CHICK-CLICK! CHICK-CLICK!

  I froze at the sound. I'd heard it before in real life. And I'd heard it on TV a thousand times. It was unmistakable. It was the sound of weapons being cocked.

  I looked upward and there above us, pointed straight at our heads, were the black muzzles of automatic rifles.

  I was so busy staring at the guns, it took a few seconds before I even noticed there were people holding the weapons. They wore helmets covered in camouflage fabric. Desert-style camouflage in shades of tan and beige. Their uniforms were desert camouflage, too.

  Their faces were not friendly.

  One of the soldiers stood up and put his hands on his hips. "Okay now, here's what we're going to do. The three of you are gonna lie down, facedown in the sand, and
place your hands behind your heads, fingers laced together."

  I thought, The three of us? Of course! They thought Tobias was a hawk.

  53 "But we're not doing anything," Rachel protested, sounding pretty much like I remember her sounding years ago when her mom would catch us rifling through her closet looking for clothes to try on.

  "You have illegally entered a restricted government facility," the man said. "And you are in a world of hurt. Sergeant! Search them for weapons or contraband. And someone chase away that big old hawk there. He's staring at me."

  "Yes, sir, Lieutenant."

  «You guys, just go along with them,» Tobias said as he opened his wings and began to fly off. «l'll keep an eye out for you. Just play dumb.»

  "You heard him, Marco," Rachel whispered with an exaggerated wink. "Be yourself."

  Naturally, Rachel was completely unafraid. But then, Rachel is never afraid. I was afraid. But that's because I'm sane, unlike Rachel.

  The soldiers leaped down from the rocks and quickly searched us as we lay facedown in the sand. It was a quick search: We were wearing our morphing outfits.

  "All right, get up. Put on your shoes," the lieutenant said.

  I winced. Shoes! Oh, man, we'd never be able to explain this.

  "No shoes, sir!" the sergeant said.

  55 I saw the frown form on the lieutenant's face. "Hey. Wait a minute. It's a couple of miles back to the road. How'd you get here without shoes? For that matter, there hasn't been a car down that road all day. How did you get here at all?"

  I looked at Rachel. Rachel looked at Marco. Marco put on a big grin and said, "It was the Martians, Lieutenant. We were dropped here by aliens."

  54

  My name is Captain Torrelli. I am in charge of security for this facility."

  We were in a very small, very airless, very brightly lit room. There were no windows. And whenever the door opened you saw a guy in an Air Force uniform.

  A tough-looking guy in an Air Force uniform.

  A tough-looking guy in an Air Force uniform, cradling a small machine gun.

  There was also a bulletin board. On it were small posters reminding everyone that "Security is our business." And exhorting everyone to tolerate "Zero Defects."

  But there was also something more familiar that caught my eye. One of the little flyers was