The Message (2 page)
Authors: K.A. Applegate
“It’s okay, my friend,” I said in my own voice. My mouth had formed. I was almost back to normal, all but this huge tail, which was still poking out of the back of my morphing outfit.
Normal, for me, is about average height, I guess. Whatever “average” is. I’m kind of solidly built, not skinny and not fat, with hair I keep short because I
don’t like messing with it. As my friends would tell you, I’m not exactly Ms. Fashion. Mostly, if you want to know what I look like, picture a girl in overalls and leather work gloves, biting her lip as she concentrates on trying to force a pill down the throat of a badger.
Jake once took a picture of me doing exactly that. He has it next to his computer in his room. Don’t ask me why. I would be glad to give him a picture of me in a dress or something. Rachel could lend me the dress. But Jake says he likes the picture he has.
Tobias said, suddenly alert.
I strained my ears. Human ears are so lame. Almost any animal can hear better. But then I heard it, too. A voice.
“Is someone in there?”
“My father!”
Too late. The barn door swung open. My father stood there, blinking sleepily and holding a flashlight. “Cass? What are you doing out here?”
I stuck my hands behind my back and tried to hold my big squirrel tail down while I attempted to morph it away at maximum speed. “N-n-nothing, Dad. I-I-I just couldn’t sleep.”
He nodded. “Okay. Well, go to bed now,” he said crankily. My father is one of those people who needs about an hour and three cups of coffee to wake up.
“Okay, Daddy,” I said.
He hesitated. “Cassie? Turn around.”
“Turn around?” I repeated in a squeaky voice.
“Yeah. Turn around. It’s … just turn around.”
Slowly I turned. As I did, the last of the tail shwooped back into my spine.
“Huh,” my dad said. “I gotta get back to sleep. I swear I thought you had a tail.”
“Heh heh,” I laughed weakly.
When he left I collapsed back on the straw. “I really should have just stayed in bed,” I said to Tobias. “Dreams or no dreams.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. These kind of weird dreams about the sea.”
It was warm in the barn, but suddenly I felt really cold.
3
N
o, I haven’t had any weird dreams about the sea,” Marco said. “I’ve had weird dreams about my sheets trying to strangle me. I’ve had weird dreams about falling from way up high and when I finally land I’m in Sesame Street talking to Elmo. I’ve had weird dreams about that woman who lifeguards at the beach … hmm, well, that does kind of involve the ocean, I guess.”
“You have dreams about Elmo?” Rachel asked him. She put on a worried look. “I see.” She shook her head slowly and made a
tsk, tsk
sound.
“What? What’s the matter with dreaming about Elmo?” Marco demanded.
Rachel shrugged. “All I’m going to say is you should think about seeing a counselor before your condition worsens.” Rachel turned so Marco couldn’t see her and gave me a wink.
“Very funny,” Marco sneered. But he still looked a little worried.
We were in Rachel’s room the next day, after school. Her room is so neat. Straight out of a magazine, you know? Like everything matches or goes together. She has this bulletin board where she puts little wise sayings on Post-it notes.
I drifted over to the bulletin board and read “Don’t think there are no crocodiles just because the water is calm. — Malayan Proverb.”
Just beside that was “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles. — Sun Tzu.”
It made me a little sad. In the good old days, Rachel would have had a bunch of quotes about being a good person or whatever. It just showed how much our lives had changed.
In a very short time we had all grown accustomed to a world of fear and danger. We had arrived at Rachel’s house separately. We had each checked to make sure we weren’t being followed. We had planned the afternoon in advance to be sure that Rachel’s mom and her two sisters would be out.
We had even had Tobias fly over the area looking for anything unusual.
That’s what our lives had become. That and quotations full of paranoia and battle.
Jake hadn’t said anything yet. Tobias and I had both told everyone about our strangely identical dreams. About the voice that seemed to come from beneath the sea. The strange voice that called to us.
No one else had heard the voice in their dreams. Marco had made jokes. Rachel had been supportive but skeptical. Only Jake had remained silent.
I suppose you could say Jake is sort of our “leader,” although he’s not bossy in any way. It’s more like this natural aspect of his personality. He’s the one you just automatically look to when there’s trouble.
Of course, I look to him for other reasons. Not that I would ever tell him or anything, but I really like Jake. You know, as in
like.
He’s very cute, in a big, strong kind of way. He has brown hair and dark, dark eyes. He seems very serious until you get to know him. And then you realize he’s still pretty serious, but he also knows when to laugh.
Jake has to know when to laugh because Marco has been his best friend since they were both in diapers. They’ve competed and fought and disagreed the whole time. Marco’s mission in life is to find the
humor in everything. Even in his best friend.
Marco is kind of cute, too, although he’s not my type. He wears his brown hair long and has these amazing eyelashes that I would love to have myself.
Marco isn’t interested in being in charge, or even in being part of a team. He wants us to just quit the whole thing. He wants us to forget the Yeerks and forget morphing and just try and stay alive.
But at the same time, it’s Marco who is very aware of all the security problems. He’s the one who makes sure we never discuss anything on the phone, where enemy ears might be listening in.
Rachel is my closest friend. She has been for years. How can I explain Rachel? First of all, she and Jake are cousins, and they have a lot in common. They seem to grow strong people in that family, because Rachel is the strongest person I know. It’s like nothing ever intimidates her. She’s totally fearless, or at least that’s how she seems.
To look at her you’d think,
Oh, she’ll grow up to be some airheaded model,
because she’s very tall and pretty and blond. But I pity anyone who mistakes Rachel for a wimpy airhead.
Sometimes I think Rachel likes the way everything has worked out. It’s like all along there was this Amazon warrior locked up inside of her, and now she has an excuse to bring it out.
But she was not a person who believed in dreams very much. “Well, okay,” she said, “if we’re done with the dreams, let’s—”
“Rachel,” Jake interrupted, “I think I have something that may be interesting.” He pulled a videocassette out of his bag.
“Cool. A piece of prehistoric technology,” Marco said.
“Not everybody has DVR,” Jake said. “I guess no one else watched the late news last night?”
“I was busy watching reruns of
Sesame Street,”
Marco said, giving Rachel a sly look. “Last night it was the one where it was a sunny day, sweepin’ the clouds away.”
Jake rolled his eyes up to the ceiling, the way he’d done a million times before when Marco said something irrelevant or annoying. “Rachel, can we go downstairs and use your mom’s old VCR?”
“Sure,” Rachel said. We trooped down the stairs. Except for Tobias, who fluttered above our heads.
“Hey, Tobias,” Marco said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you, are hawks like seagulls? I mean, do they poop while they’re flying?”
Down in Rachel’s living room, Jake turned on the TV and popped in his cassette.
“There was just this one small story,” he narrated, as, on the screen, an old guy in a bathing suit held up a piece of what looked like metal.
“So now we’re interested in hairy old guys who should be wearing shirts?” Marco asked.
“This old guy says he found that on the beach. It washed up during the storm a couple of days ago. Watch.”
The camera focused on what looked like a jagged piece of metal, about two feet long and one foot wide. As the camera zoomed in, I saw what looked like letters. Only they weren’t any alphabet I had ever seen.
Now the tape was showing the anchorwoman smiling, and then it went blank. Jake turned the VCR off.
“Okay … so?” Marco prodded.
Jake sighed. “So the night the Andalite landed, when I went inside his ship to get the cube that gave us our morphing powers, I saw writing.”
I felt a chill creep up the back of my neck.
“I could be wrong, I mean, I’m not some expert,” Jake said. “But I think it was that same alphabet. Those same kinds of letters.”
Suddenly no one was laughing. Not even Marco.
“I think what washed up on the beach is a piece of an Andalite ship,” Jake said.
Suddenly, without warning, I felt the ground swirl beneath me. I fell straight back, not even caring that Jake caught me in his arms just before I hit the carpet.
4
I
was falling, falling, falling.
Falling into the sea.
Splash! I hit the water. But still I fell. Down and down and down through blue-green, sunlit layers of water.
Suddenly I opened my eyes. I stared up at Jake’s concerned face.
Glancing across the room, I saw Rachel with the telephone to her ear, preparing to dial.
“She’s awake!” Jake said.
“I’d better still call an ambulance,” Rachel said.
“No!” Marco snapped. “Not unless we know she’s hurt. It’s too big a risk.”
Rachel’s eyes flared the way they do when someone tells her something she doesn’t want to hear. “I’m calling nine-one-one,” she said tersely.
“No, Rachel, I’m okay,” I said. I sat up. My head felt a little woozy, but I was all right.
Rachel hesitated, her fingers just above the keypad. “What about Tobias?”
I looked around the room and saw Tobias spread out on the floor, one wing crumpled beneath him.
He looked dead.
I jumped up and ran to him.
“Rachel, Cassie seems okay, and nine-one-one can’t help Tobias,” Jake said.
Rachel replaced the receiver and ran over to Tobias.
“He’s not dead,” I said. I could feel him breathing. Then, just as suddenly as I had, he woke up. His enormous brown hawk’s eyes opened, instantly fierce.
His first reaction was pure hawk. He hopped up and flared. Hawks flare just the way cats do when they’re trying to intimidate someone. They hunch their shoulders and fluff up their feathers to make themselves look bigger than they are.
“Everybody stand still,” I said quickly. “It’s okay, Tobias, you were just out for a minute there.”
He quickly gained control over the hawk instincts.
“It happened to me, too,” I said. “I passed out. And then I had the dream again. Only this time I could hear an actual voice. Or at least I heard thought-speech.”
“Okay, now this is getting weird,” Rachel said. “Because at the same time I thought I kind of felt something.”
“Yeah,” Jake agreed. Marco nodded.
but … but it’s like someone is sending out a distress signal. Like they are calling for help.>
“Only this someone is in the water, or under the water, or something,” I said. “Seeing that video, seeing that writing, it was like suddenly the message grew stronger.”
“Or it may have just been a coincidence,” Jake said. “This isn’t a dream. I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t a dream. Even I halfway saw something. This is some kind of a communication.”
“Well, this is all very interesting,” Marco said, “but so what? I mean, are we getting some kind of psychic message from the Little Mermaid?
What are we supposed to do about it?”
Jake looked closely at me. “Cassie? Was the voice in your dream a
human
voice?”
I was startled by the question. I hadn’t really thought about it. I actually laughed. “When you asked me, the first thing that popped into my head was no, it isn’t human.” I laughed again. “But that doesn’t make any sense.”
“So what is it?” Rachel asked. “Yeerk?”
I let my mind drift back to the dream. I tried to hear the sound in my head again. “No, not Yeerk. It reminds me of something … of someone.”
I snapped my fingers. “Yes! That’s it! It reminds me of the Andalite. When he first thought-spoke to us. That’s what it’s like.”
“The Andalite,” Marco muttered. He looked away. I knew he was remembering. We all were.
We had been walking home from the mall at night. Walking through a big abandoned construction site, when the Andalite ship had appeared above us.
It landed, and out came the Andalite prince, fatally wounded in a battle with the Yeerks somewhere in space.
He was the one who had warned us of the Yeerks — the parasite species that inhabits the brains of other creatures and enslaves them, making them Controllers. It was the Andalite who had warned us, and who, in desperation, had given us the great and terrible weapon—the power to morph.
We had been hiding, cringing in terror, when the Yeerks caught up with the Andalite. When Visser Three himself, the Yeerk leader, had murdered him.