Animorphs - The Unknown Part 7

Chapter 14.

'Okay, everyone, demorph,' Jake said. Tobias? You want to go human or stay as you are?'

'l have to stay in hawk shape if I'm going to acquire a horse. In fact, while you guys demorph, I'll go ahead and try and find a horse I like.'

See, you have to be in your original form if you're going to acquire a new morph. And, sad as it may be, red-tailed hawk is now Tobias's true body. Tobias flew off, keeping his wings tight in the narrowness of the barn.

I began to demorph. My swept-back white wings grew fingers. My tiny legs sprouted up and up and up. My yellowish beak spread and softened to become lips.

And one thing was becoming clear: Four kids and an Andalite are kind of crowded in a single stall.

Everyone was about ninety percent human, and Ax was about ninety percent Andalite, when suddenly, without warning, I found myself staring at two old, old men. One was chewing the end of a s...o...b..ry cigar. They were looking over the stall door.

"What the ... what are you kids doing in that stall? And what in the name of all that's holy is that?"

What they were seeing was four kids who seemed to be wearing leotards decorated with feathers. And one really, really unusual creature like nothing either had ever seen before.

"Ax! Keep your head down!" I hissed. I leaped to get between the two old men and Ax's tail.

In case you've never seen an Andalite in person before, and obviously, you haven't, let me explain. Andalites look like a weird cross between a deer, a horse, a scorpion, and a human. They have the bodies of slender horses or large deer, except that their fur is blue and tan.

Their upper bodies seem almost human, until you get to the head, which is so totally not human you'd never mistake it. Like I said earlier, Andalites have no mouths. They eat by absorbing gra.s.s up through their hooves as they run. And they communicate telepathically with thought-speak. Plus, there's the whole eye thing.

Andalites have four eyes. Two are right where you'd expect them to be. The other two are at the end of flexible stalks atop their heads. You know the little hornlike things giraffes have? Picture those, only flexible. And with an eyeball at the end.

And finally, there's the tail. It's long and it ends in a scythe-shaped blade that could topple a tree faster-than-you-can-see.

The tail is what I was trying to hide from the old men. I could only hope that Ax would have the sense to keep his upper body lowered.

"I asked you kids what you're doing in that stall," the cigar man said, more sharply this time.

"Urn . . . grooming our horse?" I offered.

Rachel's eyebrows shot up. "Our horse? Oh, yeah, that's exactly what we're doing. Grooming our horse." She reached over and stroked Ax's back.

"Small for a horse," the second man said skeptically. "What are you feeding that poor swaybacked nag?"

"Horse food," Marco said.

"Horse food?"

"Yeah. Urn ... you know, horse food. Boy, you should see how many cans this guy can eat.

Man, all day long I'm opening cans of horse food and filling his dish."

The two men stared. The cigar man moved his cigar to the other side of his mouth.

"Hah-hah-hah!" I practically screamed. "He's such a kidder! Of course we're not feeding our horse food from cans. We're feeding him alfalfa and hay. Like you'd feed any horse. My friend is such a joker! Total joke machine!"

"Plus he's a moron," Rachel added.

"Your horse is blue," the second man observed. "Never seen a blue horse."

"Never seen kids wearing feathers on their faces, either," cigar said. "And I've seen a lot of things in my time."

Jake was looking at me, waiting for me to come up with an answer. So was Rachel. So was Marco. Our "horse" was blue. There was no denying that. And yes, we had white-and-gray feathers sticking out of the sleeves and collars of our morphing suits.

"We like blue horses," I said lamely.

"Some day, all horses will be blue," Jake agreed.

"You kids step out of there. This ain't right. Not any part of this. Step out of there and let me see what -"

I felt, rather than saw, the twitch that ran through Ax's body.

"Ax, NO!" I yelled.

FWAPP! FWAPP!.

He struck with his deadly tail! But not at the men. In less than a half-second he had sliced the overhead railing that framed the stall. He'd sliced right through it in two places. The railing, a chunk of eight-by-eight lumber, fell directly on the men's heads.

"Ahhh!"

"Owww!"

"Run!" Jake cried.

We stumbled and piled over the two groaning men. Four kids and a very strange blue "horse." Out of the corner of my eye I saw a flash of brown-and-russet feathers.

'l leave you guys alone for two minutes!' Tobias said. 'And what have you done?'

"Get them! Stop those kids!"

We were off and running between the stalls! Ax was morphing to human as he ran. I was finis.h.i.+ng my demorph, losing the last of the feathers. Outside the barn, crowds of people were milling around, waiting for the first race.

"Get out of here. Out into the grandstand!" Jake yelled. "We can lose ourselves in the crowd."

Then, WHAM! A stall door flew open, right in front of me. It cut me off from the others. I dodged around it, but too slowly. Someone grabbed my ankle. I sprawled, facedown on the concrete.

"Ca.s.sie!" Jake yelled. He started back for me, but now there were people pouring into the barn. Stable hands, jockeys, horse trainers, and owners, all worried about what we might have done to their horses.

I looked down. It was some teenager who had my ankle.

"I got one of them!" he yelled.

I didn't want to kick him. I didn't want to hurt him. He was just a guy, probably not a Controller.

"I got this one! I got this guy!"

Guy? Excuse me? Guy? I wasn't even wearing overalls or anything. Okay, maybe the workout suit I was wearing for morphing was less than stylish, but hey, guy?

Now I wanted to kick him.

WHAPP! I kicked his hand loose.

"Sorry," I said and scrambled to my feet. I looked around frantically. No Jake. No Rachel. No Ax or Marco or Tobias. All I saw was the back end of what looked like a small mob, chasing someone down at the far end of the barn.

I dodged behind the fallen teenager and threw myself into stall.

"Take it easy, boy," I whispered to the big golden stallion in the stall. "Take it easy. E-e-e-a-a-s-y."

Normally animals love me. This one didn't.

"HhhhREEE-hee-heee-heee!"

I had two choices. Get out of that stall and be captured. Or stay in the stall and be trampled. So I chose option number three.

See, when you acquire an animal's DNA, it seems to put them in a kind of trance. They remain very calm. Which is how it's possible to acquire a grizzly bear.

So I pressed both my hands against the heaving flank of the big horse and I focused my mind. He grew calm and quiet. His DNA flowed into me. It became a part of me.

"One of 'em is still in this barn somewhere," I heard a voice say.

Well. If you want to be inconspicuous in a horse barn, what are you going to do?

Exactly. I started to morph the horse.

Chapter 15.

TA TA TA TA TATA TA TATA TA TA TA TAAAAH!.

I heard the trumpet announcing the start of a race. And I heard the crowd outside in the grandstand murmuring in antic.i.p.ation. But I had other things on my mind.

I had morphed a horse before. So I thought I knew exactly what to expect. But this was not just any horse. This was a racehorse. High-strung, aggressive, and just a little mean.

"Search every stall!" a voice cried. "Who knows what those kids have been doing to the horses! They turned one horse blue!"

"Well, make it fast. The first race has already started."

I heard stall doors opening and closing. They were at the far end of the barn. I had two minutes. Maybe.

I started the morph.

The first thing that happened was the ears. My human ears sort of crawled up the side of my head to the top. Then they sprouted. No big deal. I mean, no big deal once you're used to that kind of thing. If you weren't expecting it and your ears suddenly started crawling up the side of your head while getting long and pointy and covered with golden fur, you'd probably think it was a pretty big thing.

My body began to change very quickly. My b.u.t.t grew huge! I had megab.u.t.t! My knees suddenly reversed direction with a loud, sickening grinding noise. My calves were stretching out, longer and longer. They were practically without meat. Just long bones covered with golden fur.

The fur rippled up across my body. Up my legs. Down my arms. Across my back and chest. I wish I'd had time to enjoy that part because it was cool. The horse had a soft, smooth, beautiful golden coat.

Then my arms started growing. The upper arms bulged with ma.s.sive, bunched muscles. All the muscle was at the top. The bottom was practically just a stick.

As I watched, my fingers melted together.

They looked exactly as if they'd been made of wax and put in a hot oven. They just melted.

"Ahh!" I yelped. For a brief moment I'd seen the fleshless bones of my own fingers. Not something you want to see. Trust me. They were bright white. I could see my fleshless knuckles.

"I heard something! Down there!"

"Just keep searching. No one is getting out of this barn."

I fell forward, no longer able to stand on my legs. I fell forward just as the bare bones of my fingers melted together and hardened into hooves.

CLUMP!.

My front hooves. .h.i.t the ground. And now the horse - the real horse - was starting to get extremely worried. He had come out of his "acquiring" funk. And now he was beginning to realize something very, very, very wrong was happening right there in his own stall.

"HreeEEE-heee-heee-he!"

"It's okay, boy," I started to whisper. But just as I started the word "okay," my entire face exploded outward.

My own nose just got up and left. It moved away. Far away. It sprouted into a muzzle a foot long. More than a foot long!

My nose grew so monstrously huge that it forced my eyes apart. It was incredible! My eyes, which had been just an inch apart, like any normal person's eyes, were spreading further and further. And as they separated, I found my field of vision growing wider and wider.

But then it was too wide! My eyes were staring out of the sides of my head. My eyes were where my temples should have been. And in between those eyes was a nose the size of Rhode Island. My nose had stretched out so far it had dragged my mouth along for the trip.

I heard an awful growling, grinding sound coming from inside my own head. My teeth itched as they were replaced by the thick, flat teeth of a horse.

I was now almost a complete horse. Then, somewhere way, way back, I felt a tail sprout like some hyperactive weed. Okay, now I was done.

The real horse stared at me from one big watery eye. It sniffed me. What it smelled . . . was nothing. At least to a horse brain. Horses and other animals that rely on smell are not equipped for the idea that they could smell another horse and have it smell exactly like them.

It would be like a human suddenly finding herself face-to-face with a person who was identical. Only horses aren't exactly the geniuses of the animal kingdom. They can't make any sense of it.

So, weirdly enough, the real horse's reaction was to grow calmer. It was more or less as if I weren't there. And the stranger thing was that as I felt the horse brain in me awaken and bubble up beneath my own human consciousness, I felt the same way about the other horse.

It was like: What other horse?