The Return (Animorphs 52), page 1
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Chapter One
“On your right is the door to the Oval Office. The office of the President of the United States, perhaps the most powerful person in the world.”
Marco threw me a look. One of those looks that said, “If they only knew.”
If they only knew there’s someone else right here on Earth possibly far more powerful than any president or king or prime minister.
Jake and Marco think it’s better people don’t know the truth about that someone else.
Me?
Lately I wonder.
Lately I think it might be better to go public.
Let the world know that Earth has been invaded by an alien species led by someone—something—more evil and more powerful than most humans can probably imagine.
That’s what I think.
I’m Rachel.
No last name. You probably already know why. But in case you don’t, it’s for security. Yours and ours. And it’s the same with all of us. We’re the Animorphs. Jake, Tobias, Cassie, Marco, and me. We’re also just kids, at least on the outside. You wouldn’t know us if you saw us cruising the mall on a Saturday afternoon or riding a bike down the middle of the street.
Or touring the White House with a bunch of other kids.
Fact: We aren’t like other kids.
We were once. But never again.
After a certain point, you just can’t go back to where you started. Even if you want to. Which I have to admit—I don’t.
To repeat: The Yeerks are here. Parasitic aliens. Their goal is to conquer the human race. And believe me they’ve been doing it, one human at a time.
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But they’re getting impatient now. And more aggressive.
Maybe you’ve seen something about the Yeerks on the internet. Maybe also about us. Recently, we were involved in a big throw down on an aircraft carrier out in the middle of the ocean.
And there was an episode with some campers that went bad. The actual events got some press coverage, but the stories were buried on the back pages. Relegated to Web sites run by sci-fi fans.
The only people who believed the few witnesses with the nerve or dementia to tell the truth about what they saw are pretty much the same folks who believe every nutty story they hear from the media.
Most of the American public thinks the Yeerk invasion story is something straight off the front page of the Enquirer. Baby born with antelope snout. Melted Snickers bar in shape of St. Francis’s head cures rabies. Yeah, like that’s really happening. Or just another urban myth. Like Batman. And alligators in the subway. I’m not one of those kooks or cranks. And I’m here to tell you that the Yeerk invasion is not a myth, urban or otherwise. The Yeerk invasion is real. Yeerks are slugs. They crawl into your ear, fit themselves into your brain, and then take control. Which is why hosts are known as Controllers. The problem with human-Controllers? They could be anybody. Your sweet mother, your smelly science teacher, the cute pitcher on the local softball team. And they could be anywhere. At home, at school, at the park. In the White House.
I glanced at the window. Saw a red-tailed hawk circle in the sky. Tobias.
One of us. But a nothlit. A boy who stayed in red-tailed hawk morph for more than two hours and got trapped there.
Along with Cassie, Tobias is my best friend in the world. Also kind of my boyfriend. The kind with feathers.
It’s a long story. But because of an inscrutably powerful being known as the Ellimist, Tobias can morph his human self. Even choose to be that human forever, give up the morphing. The fight. Life as a bird of prey.
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But he doesn’t choose that option.
Because, just like me, Tobias doesn’t want to go back to where he started.
TSEEW!
Faint, but oh, yeah.
Dracon fire!
Half a second later, Tobias crumpled in the air. My heart stopped. The wind sucked out of my lungs. Pain. Disbelief. I watched Tobias plummet to the ground. A scream. Then lots of screams followed by the sound of crashing doors, splintering wood, breaking windows, and thundering footsteps.
“What’s going on?” one of the chaperons shouted.
I already knew. Marco and Jake, too. And Cassie.
The Yeerks were attacking the White House.
Men in slim, dark suits, ear wires tucked into their collars, poured into the hallway. Secret Service. Barking orders.
“Please move quickly toward the exits!”
Two guys herded the crowd toward double doors at each end of the hallway. Jake motioned to us and we stepped out of the flow or panicked people. Gathered around him.
“I can’t believe this,” Marco hissed. “The White House! You know what this means, don’t you? The Yeerks have finally declared war. Open war. No more covert operations.”
Yeah. Open war. We’d expected the move, but not in this way. Not an attack on the White House.
Oxygen was returning to my body. And along with it, all the hate I felt for the Yeerks. For what they had done to Tobias. For what they had done to all of us. I was glad the covert war was over. Glad not to have to pretend anymore.
“Tobias is down,” I said. “I saw him get hit. The Yeerks want war, they’ll get it.”
“Everybody slow down,” Jake cautioned. But he looked at me when he said it.
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Jake never loses a chance to imply that I’m some kind of shoot-first-ask-questionslater loose cannon. I gulped some air, tried to slow my pulse. Jake is our leader. We do what he says. At least we have so far. But it gets harder and harder for me. Maybe for all of us.
“Split up,” Jake ordered. “Battle morphs. Be ready for action. But don’t do anything stupid.”
No time to get mad about that “stupid” remark. I knew it was meant for me. More Secret Service men thundered into the hallway. Broke open the doors to the Oval Office.
I stepped away from Jake and slipped behind a heavy curtain. I was going grizzly. My biggest, baddest morph.
Just for a moment—just for the goof—imagine a tall, blonde human girl turning into a grizzly bear, in an animated Disney version. No doubt the process would look graceful. Whimsical. Charming, even.
Let me tell you something. The people at Disney do not know squat about the reality of morphing. Not the people at Nickelodeon or the people at DreamWorks, either.
You watch somebody morph, you could lose your lunch.
My face stretched and thickened.
My shoulders bulked up.
I closed my eyes to concentrate, speed the process when…
“What’s the matter with you? Get out of there!”
I opened my eyes. The curtain had been ripped aside. A Secret Service agent glared at me. I glared back.
“Quit fooling around, kid. We’re trying to save your life.”
I’d risked my life more times than I could count. Fought every kind of monster the galaxy could muster. And he had the nerve to tell me to stop—fooling around!
Tobias was probably lying dead on the White House lawn.
And this clown wanted me to stop fooling around.
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The guy didn’t know beans about what was happening on his own watch. That’s when it happened.
Something snapped. Some spring inside me just went BOOINNGGGG!
Maybe when he was lying on the ground in ten pieces he would figure out I hadn’t been fooling around.
I wanted blood. I could smell it. I could taste it.
Was it the grizzly in me that wanted to kill?
Or was it the me in me?
I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to know.
I just wanted to take his face off. I snarled and reached out to slice him from head to toe.
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Chapter Two
Fortunately for him, I hadn’t morphed claws yet. Or teeth. Or much in the way of size.
I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror across the hall. I didn’t look like a grizzly. But I didn’t look like Rachel, either.
Bottom line?
I looked like a big girl with a nasty look on her face and a serious hormone imbalance. Long dark hairs sprouted from my chin and cheeks.
“Come on, kid. Quit playing. Get out of here.”
The Secret Service guy yanked me from behind the curtain and shoved me toward the exit.
But it was too late.
Two Hork-Bajir-Controllers came crashing into the hallway. The Secret Service man looked flabbergasted.
He was prepared for assassins or terrorists.
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Guys in hoods with ragged eyeholes. Guys with foreign headdresses. Guys in American military camouflage garb.
But not for seven-foot-tall alien invaders with feet like T-rex and huge, razor-sharp blades on their elbows and knees.
Hard to believe the Hork-Bajir are gentle creatures when they don’t have a Yeerk slug sitting in their cranial cavity controlling their minds and bodies. Of course, these two Hork-Bajir were Controllers. They weren’t gentle. And they were going to kill us both.
The Secret Service agent fired his gun.
I ducked back behind the curtain. Hoped he could hold them off for the short time I needed to finish the morph.
I closed my eyes and concentrated, willing the pace of the morph to accelerate.
CREEEEEK!
My face cracked open. Mouth stretched wide into a macabre grin. Nose spread. Ears migrated. Grizzly bone, muscle, skin, and fur emerged and l
My thick, curved claws were still growing when I stepped back out from behind the curtain.
The Secret Service agent had taken cover behind a desk. His face was white, his hand tight around his pistol.
The only reason he was still alive was that the Hork-Bajir had gotten tangled up in all the little chairs and desks that lined the hallway. Skinny-legged French-gilt jobs or something that now lay splintered on the floor.
“Andalite!” The Hork-Bajir paused. Not sure what to do next. The Yeerks think the six of us are Andalites, the aliens who invented the morphing technology.
But only one of us is Andalite. Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill. Younger brother of War Prince Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul. Ax was a cadet in the Andalite Military Academy when he got dropped down in the middle of this war.
The rest of us are humans. Make that four humans and a red-tailed hawk.
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Tobias.
The one who was lying dead outside.
I stood up on my back legs and screamed.
Only it didn’t come out as a scream. It came out as an earsplitting grizzly roar that was enough to drain the last tiny bit of color from the Secret Service agent’s face. I looked at those two massive Hork-Bajir and didn’t see victims of the Yeerk invasion. I saw murderers.
I saw killers.
And I saw blood.
I dropped down on all fours and loped toward them.
Dracon fire singed me but I didn’t even feel it.
When I jumped, I brought both of them down with one tackle. Blades scraped me. Tore through my fur, into my flesh.
But I paid no attention. Nothing could hurt worse than the pain in my head—and my heart.
Then, suddenly, something grabbed me, pulled me away.
A gorilla. Full grown. Marco, in his favorite battle morph. I snarled, turned on the hulking primate. But he shoved me off balance.
I watched Jake in tiger morph and Cassie in wolf morph rush in to finish the fight. One of the Hork-Bajir managed to jump up and escape through the window. I was furious!
This was my fight and I’d been winning. Why couldn’t Jake and Cassie find their own Controllers to kill?
Jake pinned the other Hork-Bajir. He bit his soulder hard and then released him. The Hork-Bajir leaped to his feet and followed his buddy out the window, escaping in the direction of the Rose Garden.
I heaved myself to my feet and bellowed.
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Taxxons. Huge, voracious centipedes. They’ll eat you—dead or alive.
Jake turned away, an enormous Siberian tiger in a White House hallway. Something about the way he just took it for granted that he could tell me what to do, tell me when to fight, when to back off, control me when one of the people I loved most was lying dead on the ground…
Something about it made me beyond angry.
Nobody told me when I was out of a fight. Nobody.
Not even Jake.
Why did he think he could do it?
Because I let him think he could. That’s why.
Maybe it was time to show him he couldn’t.
I’d rough him up. Not much. Just enough to let him know that I could take him. Any time. Any place.
I stood quietly on my back legs. He didn’t hear a thing. He was listening for sounds outside. Trying to gauge his next move.
I was just about to jump him when Cassie came tearing down the hallway.
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I wasn’t afraid. Let them attack. I would tear them apart and enjoy it.
I bounded through the broken window toward th sound of chopper blades. Toward pandemonium.
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Chapter Three
The President was the prize in a serious game of tug-of-war. Secret Service agents inside the helicopter were trying to pull him in. A Hork-Bajir-Controller was trying to pull him out.
At least ten Taxxons writhed and hissed and hungered for blood. Several Hork-Bajir hung onto various parts of the chopper, attempting to prevent it from lifting off.
One Hork-Bajir did a chin-up. The chopper blad took his head off. Horrible.
The head rolled across the lawn, and five of the Taxxons followed in a frenzy, dizzy with the excitement of fresh meat.
The other five Taxxons closed in around the chopper. Tore at the Hork-Bajir body. Their weight caused the chopper to dip. The Hork-Bajir with a grip on the President’s leg stumbled.
I plowed in like a tackle!
Broke up the line of Taxxons.
Slapped away the Hork-Bajir body.
Yanked two more Hork-Bajir from their grip on the chopper blades. Now the chopper would take off.
I heard the blades whir. The wind whiffled my fur as the chopper carrying the President rose over my head.
Now the aliens focused their attention on me.
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I stood strong. Bleeding and roaring. Slicing and biting at the air as they came at me.
One after another they fell.
I was blind with killing rage.
Blindly efficient. A machine.
And then, suddenly, all was quiet.
The only sound was my own panting. The plop-plop of blood dripping from my muzzle.
I ruled! Was surrounded by dead Hork-Bajir. Watched a retreating band of Taxxons. The roar of a tiger alone is enough to frighten most people to death. But I’m not most people.
Jake growled.
We circled each other.
Big deal!
A grizzly can take a powerful amount of biting. Jake could sink those tiger teeth three or four inches deep and still not penetrate the shaggy bear coat.
I dropped my front paws to the ground and ran.
He didn’t expect it, didn’t really think I’d do it. I caught him off guard, rammed him in the ribs.
He let out a snarling cry of surprise and flew several feet across the yard.
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But tigers are cats. By the time he hit the ground, his feet were underneath him and he was gathering his body for a spring.
I tried to move, but he was too fast!
He landed on me, and I fell sideways. I was sure I could knock him off, but he held on.
I flailed, twisted. But I couldn’t dislodge the tiger.
But I could feel the life seeping out of me.
It was his calmness that sent me further into a blinding, scremaing, homicidal rage. He was so arrogant! So sure of his own superiority!
I thrashed! I screamed! I roared!
But he was right.
I was losing.
