Animorphs - The Unknown Part 5

"I've changed my mind," Rachel started to say jokingly. But whatever she had wanted to say next was lost because her pretty, human face turned hard and bronze, and her mouth split into the clicking mouthparts of a roach.

'What I was going to say was, "I've changed my mind, roaches are grosser than flies,"' Rachel said.

And that's when we felt vibrations through our antennae. The heavy vibrations of footsteps. Angry footsteps.

It took some practice to use roach senses well enough to understand speech. But we'd had practice. So we were able to hear the captain saying, "Pizza Hut, eh? I'll show the little monsters some Pizza Hut!"

'Move it, boys and girls!' Rachel cried with the giddy enthusiasm she always has when facing certain death.

'RAAAAID!' Marco yelled.

'Really funny, Marco. Really funny,' I muttered. 'Can we just get the heck out of here?'

Air movement! Vibration! Wind! The scent of humans!

The door had been opened. It swept over our heads. We each motored our three pairs of legs. We were out of there!

Chapter 10.

ZOOOOOOOOM!.

We blew across highly polished linoleum squares.

My six legs motored insanely, my antennae waved wildly, my every c.o.c.kroach instinct screamed, Run! Run! Ruuuuun!

So we ran.

Not that we exactly had any idea where to run.

'Where are we going?' Marco yelled.

'How would I know?' Rachel cried.

'Head for daylight!' I screamed.

'How do we tell daylight from plain old lights?'

'l don't know. Urn ... urn . . .' I tried to think of how a roach would know the difference between daylight and plain old interior lights. Of course! Roaches are startled and scared by lights. The brighter the light, the scarier it would be.

'Run toward whatever scares your roach brain worst!' I yelled.

'Oh, swell. This stupid bug brain is already scared to death.'

Vibrations! Lots of them. Big, heavy, earth-shaking. We're talking VIBRATIONS!

Through the muddy, fractured, nearsighted roach senses I saw, or at least felt, ma.s.sive things falling from the sky. It was like someone was dropping trucks all around me!

Footsteps! Shoes as the same size as double-wide trailers!

WHOOOMPF! WHOOOMPF! WHOOOMPF!.

'Look out! There's people walking on us!' Marco yelled.

WHOOOMPF! A monster killer shoe came down from the sky and slammed into the floor just an inch ahead of me. But the roach brain had reacted just in time. The roach brain knew how not to get stepped on.

'Let the roaches handle this!' I said. 'The roach brains are good at this.'

WHOOMPF! My roach body scurried out of the way, barely avoiding the side of a heel that would have squashed me flat and dead in a split second.

'Daylight! I think I see daylight!' Rachel cried.

'Lead on!' I dimly perceived Rachel's roach morph ahead of me. And Marco was just beside me. All together, three scared-as-heck roaches blew toward a bright light.

Suddenly there was a ridge. Pretty high to me, even though it was probably not even an inch high. It was the transom of a doorway, I realized, and I knew one thing: I really wanted out of that building.

'Tobias!' I called out. 'Can you hear me? Are you up there?'

'Yeah. Where are you?' he asked. 'And what are you?'

'We are three lost little c.o.c.kroaches in a big hurry!' Marco said.

'Got you!' Tobias said.

'Thank goodness for those hawk eyes,' Rachel said. 'Now get us outta here!'

'Keep moving and try to bunch up together. And by the way, there's a column coming your way. A column of... vehicles.'

Something about the way he said "vehicles" should have alerted me. But all I could think about was getting close to Marco and Rachel so Tobias could pick us up.

We were on concrete now, and moving slower. When you're bug size, concrete doesn't look smooth. It looks like you're running across an endless field of small boulders. Concrete kind of glitters. At least that's how it looked to my c.o.c.kroach senses.

And another thing about concrete, at least concrete with the sun beating down on it: It's hot!

'l'm gonna fry!' Marco wailed.

'Oh, man, it's hot! I didn't think bugs could feel temperature this much,' I said.

'Tobias! Hurry up, man, we're seriously getting barbecued!'

Suddenly a shadow swooped down. I had to fight the urge to panic and run in a completely different direction.

Huge, rough-textured talons came hurtling down at amazing speed. The nails sc.r.a.ped along the concrete. One talon hooked beneath me and lifted me up, up, up.

'Yeeee-hah!' Marco yelled. 'Red-tailed airlines.^ No more heat. No more concrete. I was up in the air, wind whipping . . .

'Ahhhhhhhhhh!' I was falling! Tobias had lost his grip on me and I was falling, falling, spi-raling, tumbling through the air.

How far I fell, I can't say. My c.o.c.kroach morph can't see farther than a few inches. But it seemed as if I was falling a long time.

Falling . . .

'Ca.s.sie!' Tobias yelled.

Falling . . .

'Ca.s.sie!' Rachel echoed.

'What about Ca.s.sie?' Marco asked.

'l dropped her!'

POOMPH!.

I hit the ground. Dirt! It billowed up around me as I slammed into it.

But I was not hurt.

I was on my back. My legs pawed madly at the air. 'How do you turn one of these things over?' I asked. I felt ominous thunder rumbling up through the ground.

'Ca.s.sie! I see you!' Tobias yelled. 'l'm coming for you, but Ca.s.sie, you have to move! I can't make it in time! You have to move now'

His tone was not exactly rea.s.suring. 'What's happening?'

'lt's that column, Ca.s.sie. It's coming right at you!'

'Column? Of what, troops? Soldiers?'

'No. Tanks.'

And then I realized that wasn't thunder I was hearing and feeling.

Chapter 11.

'Ca.s.sie! Move!' Tobias cried as he plummeted toward me in a full-speed stoop.

'l am moving!' I motored my roach legs like a roach caught in a sink. But I was pawing the air. And the thunder was more than thunder now. It was like a continuous, nonstop explosion.

BBBBRRRRRBBBRRRRRRMMMM! BBBBR-RRRRBBBBBMMMMMM!.

Wings! Wait! Roaches have wings. All I had to do was - Too late!

'Ca.s.sie!'

Something blotted out the sun. I felt my little roach body pressed into the dirt. It seemed to last forever. The pressure was unbelievable! And yet...

Suddenly I was up off the ground. But not free. I was stuck. Stuck to the tread of a tank, and going slowly around as the tread came around toward the front of the tank again.

I scampered my legs again, but now two of them were not moving. I was stuck faceup on a dirty treadmill. I would not survive another crus.h.i.+ng by the tank tread.

I tried my left wing. No good. It was squashed.

I tried my right wing. Yes!

I flipped over, landed on my four good feet, turned a sharp left and ran like a lunatic for the edge of the tread. ZOOOOM! I fell! I hit the dirt and I ran. I ran and ran and ran without even thinking about stopping.

Tobias lifted me up from the ground, and I was still running with my four good roach legs.

Marco seemed to think the entire thing was hysterically funny, of course. He laughed for the next ten straight minutes as Tobias flew us away from Zone 91. And while Marco laughed, Tobias apologized for dropping me.

Tobias set us down outside the boundaries of the secret base.

We demorphed in a gully formed by a small stream.

"Are you okay?" Rachel asked me, once she and Marco and I were all human again.

"Considering I was run over by a tank, yes, I'm okay."

Marco grinned. "I wish I could see the look on Captain Torrelli's face when he realizes we've all three disappeared."

Rachel punched Marco in the arm. "You moron! Why did you keep provoking him with all that alien talk? He would have let us go."

"Actually," Marco said, with no trace of his usual att.i.tude, "he would not have let us go till he contacted our parents. And we couldn't have that, could we? So I deliberately provoked him because now he'll just write us off as another bunch of deluded wackos. If we'd seemed perfectly sensible he'd really wonder what we were doing there with no shoes."

Rachel glared at him suspiciously. But I knew Marco was right. Like I said, Marco's a clown sometimes, but he's not dumb.

"So now what?" Rachel asked. "It's getting late. We need to get home."

'You guys should morph as soon as you're ready. It'll be cooling down soon. Fewer thermals equals harder flying.'

I was starting to feel like an idiot. I was the one who seemed most concerned about the idea of Yeerks in horses. But we'd learned absolutely nothing. All we'd managed to do was get ourselves detained by the military police and almost squashed by a tank.

Rachel obviously was prepared to shrug off the horse-Controller idea. I think she halfway doubted we really did see that Yeerk crawl out of that horse.

The others were even more skeptical. And I could see their point: Our real problem was about Yeerks taking over humans. If they wanted to experiment with controlling horses, well, that was a pretty low priority.

'l hear something,' Tobias said. He was perched on a twisted, gnarled piece of dried up wood. 'Everyone down. Hide till I see what it is!'