The Discovery (Animorphs 22), page 5
"Yaa-ah-ahh!" David's father said and backed up a couple of steps.
I saw him draw his weapon from a shoulder holster and point it at Ax. I couldn't blame him. Ax was about the size of a Beanie Baby, with eight hairy legs, blue and tan fur, a wormy sort of scorpion tail, and two very tiny arms.
"'We'? A second ago it was 'I.' How many of you are there?"
Great. Count on a "law enforcement officer" to notice that. I recalled David saying his dad was a spy. What was he, FBI? CIA? Or a member of the shadowy secret force that's always giving Mulder and Scully so much trouble?
Ax had grown to the size of a teddy bear. A really ugly teddy bear.
"Whatever you're doing, stop it!" the man cried. "Stop growing!"
It was Tobias's voice from outside.
"Stop growing, or I'll shoot!" the man said.
Click!
He pulled back the hammer on the gun.
"I said freeze."
Don't ask me why I said that. I guess I had some instinct that maybe all parents are alike and even when faced with a weird, morphing alien, they'll focus on their kids first.
The FBI slash CIA slash Secret Whatever Agency agent's eyes flickered.
"He what?"
Now, let me step back and paint this picture for you: It's me, the snake, thought-speaking to a very suspicious guy, pretending to be speaking from a now cocker-spaniel-sized half-spider, half-Andalite, while getting information from a Bird-boy, announcing that some kid had ditched school early.
Question: Is my life insane?
Answer: Oh, yeah. Definitely.
"I came home from work early," David's father said. "Hah! Got him! I'll ground him for a month!"
The sound vibrations of a door opening downstairs.
Ax was now more Andalite than spider. And he was morphing his way clear of the poison.
"I told you to stop that," David's father said,
snapping back to the fact that maybe, just maybe, having an alien in his house was slightly more important than catching his son skipping a class.
'Cause I'm guessing the bullet will take less than ten minutes to travel.>
David suddenly appeared in the doorway. He stopped dead and stared at Ax.
"Whoa!"
"He says he's some kind of alien," his father said tersely.
"Whoa-oah-oah!"
"By the way, you're grounded."
"An alien, noway!"
I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself. In thought-speak I said,
It would have all been stupidly funny. I mean, it was bizarre, that's for sure. But the humor vanished in the next instant.
Because that's when Tobias said,
And I said to David and his father, in as calm
a voice as I could manage,
"Hide? Why do we have to hide?" David said defiantly.
Dingdong!
The doorbell rang.
David's father kept the gun on Ax, who was now definitely an Andalite.
Unfortunately, the real Spawn, the original cobra, chose that moment to slither out of the closet.
Slowly, David's father turned his gaze down to me. Then back to Ax, then to me again.
He jerked the gun toward me.
BLAM! BLAM!
I felt an impact. Not pain, just an impact. I jerked my snake head and saw a hole the size of a quarter in my body, just six inches up from the far end. I was seeing carpet through my snake body.
Now David's father was taking more careful aim.
Fwapp! Ax swung his tail like a bullwhip! The gun went flying. So did a finger.
"Hey!" David cried.
"Ahhh!" his father yelled.
CRRRRUNCH!
Downstairs, the door exploded in splinters.
David's father clutched his injured hand.
There was a severe, house-shaking pounding as many large feet ran up the stairs.
Two Hork-Bajir warriors leaped into the room, saw Ax, and cringed back.
And then, between them, stepped another Andalite. Older than Ax. And in some way you couldn't quite put your finger on, very, very different from Ax.
"Get out of here!" David yelled.
I'm disappointed. I just got your primitive E-mail and I rushed right over.>
"Y-y-you want to b-b-buy the blue box?"
<0h, yes, definitely,> Visser Three said.
For a long moment, no one moved. Not Visser Three. Not Ax. Not David or his father. Not the two Hork-Bajir.
No one moved. Except me.
I was new in the morph. I hadn't really tried it out yet. And I had no idea how you're supposed to move if you don't have legs. But the snake's own brain knew.
I slithered. Long muscles in my body contracted, shortening one side of my body, forming a half-loop. Then, I uncoiled the half-loop to push my head forward.
I was silent. I was swift. But I was not invisible. And I was losing blood from the bullet hole in my tail.
Sudden movement!
David's father jerked his head back, away from the Visser's tail blade.
David ran straight at the Visser, yelling, "Let him go!"
Ax whipped his tail forward. Fwapp! But his attack was slowed by having to be careful of David.
Fwapp! The Visser blocked Ax's blow!
The two Hork-Bajir stopped looking like statues and leaped forward, blades flashing.
Two Hork-Bajir and Visser Three versus Ax and a snake. It was impossible! Doubly impossible with David and his father running around getting in the way.
Fwapp!
Fwapp!
Tail blades sliced the air.
Shwoop! Shwoop! Hork-Bajir wrist and arm blades slashed.
Ax was quickly driven back, desperate, against the far wall. It was a slashing, tail-whipping madness that ripped posters from the walls and lacerated curtains and sent all the little toys and gewgaws on David's desk flying.
I slithered after him, coiling, stretching, coiling,
sliding across the floor in pursuit of hooves and the big Hork-Bajir, Tyrannosaurus feet.
Target! A Hork-Bajir ankle!
I reared up, I sighted, I fired!
Fast as an Andalite tail, I launched my diamond head forward through the air, mouth open, fangs down.
Thmph!
Yes! I hit flesh! I sank my needle fangs in, all the way. I felt the venom pumping, pumping, pumping chemical death into the Hork-Bajir's leg.
"Rrrraahhhh!" the Hork-Bajir yelled in pain. He kicked, and I was like the end of a whip! He kicked madly, trying to dislodge me, but I was stuck to him by my fangs.
Back and forth! Whipped forward, whipped back. My head was almost still, glued to the vile Hork-Bajir leg, but the rest of my long body flailed away through the air.
Flail forward!
Flail back!
And then the Hork-Bajir began to slow down.
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
David's father had found his gun. He was in the corner, still cradling his bloody gun hand and firing with the other hand.
I saw three circles appear in my Hork-Bajir's chest and down he went.
I disengaged my teeth.
More Hork-Bajir rushing into the cramped room. I remembered Tobias saying a moving van was coming. That would hold a lot of Hork-Bajir.
One big Hork-Bajir stepped on me, not even noticing I was there. A big mistake on his part. I jerked my head forward, quicker than the blink of an eye. This time I bit and released quickly.
Ax was down!
I saw him topple over and I saw Visser Three and two Hork-Bajir close in on him.
And that's when things got really ugly.
"Hhhhrrroooarrrhh!" There was a throaty, hoarse-sounding roar and through the door stepped something even more awesome, more terrifying than a Hork-Bajir warrior. Through the door, bowing her massive head and crunching her huge bulk, came Rachel.
If you were to come across a grizzly bear in the wild, out among the trees, it would look huge. But here, confined inside a bedroom, it was beyond huge. The bear was reared up on its hind legs and its cute little ears were scraping the ceiling. I mean, it scared me, and I knew it was just Rachel in a morph.
You want to know what it's like being a human up against a grizzly bear?
Well, you know that "da,da,da,da" commercial for Volkswagen? Anyway, take that Volkswagen and run it head-to-
head into an eighteen-wheeler going ninety miles an hour. That's human versus grizzly.
You just have no concept, no concept at all, how powerful a grizzly bear is till you're up close and personal with it.
Hork-Bajir are nasty, tough opponents. But even they did a quick double take when Rachel stepped into the room. And behind her, sliding past her with unnatural grace, like molten steel, came a tiger.
The fight had been rowdy. Now it was going nuclear.
David was going to have a real problem cleaning up his room.
David's room started out with the usual four walls.
Within seconds, it had only two.
It was an explosion of wild, insane violence.
A bunch of Hork-Bajir, a grizzly, two humans, a tiger, a real Andalite, an Andalite-Controller, and me, Snake-boy.
SLASH!
ROAR!
The bed ripped apart. Foam rubber protruded from the gash.
SLASH!
FWAPP!
Rachel swung one ham-sized paw, hit a Hork-Bajir warrior, and knocked him through the wall. Not into the wall. Through the wall.
Crash! Someone or something went out the window.
I slithered forward, under the feet of the Hork-Bajir. I was looking for Andalite hooves. I was looking for Visser Three. I was going to drain my venom sacs into him.
But down there on the ground, looking up at all these monstrously tall creatures screaming and roaring and slashing and stomping, it wasn't easy.
Suddenly, Jake cut loose. Rachel's grizzly might be scarier to see, but Jake's tiger was amazing to hear.
RRRRROOOOOOOOOWWWWWRRRR!
I mean, the floor jumped from the sound waves. The windows rattled. You could feel the air vibrating.
Then, hooves! Delicate, Andalite hooves. But whose? Ax? Or Visser Three?
As I stared through snake's eyes, I saw the hoof changing. Melting. And now growing.
It was Visser Three morphing!
I reared back. I flexed the bones that flared my hood. And I -
A hand reached down and grabbed me behind the neck. It was David.
"Look out, Spawn!" he cried.
David jumped back, startled, and dropped me. I spun, looking to take my shot. But then -
WHUMPF!
A big Hork-Bajir foot came down on me.
It didn't kill me, but it sure slowed me down. I lay there stunned, gazing up at Visser Three as he morphed.
Visser Three has morphs acquired from dozens of planets and moons spread all across the galaxy. We'd seen some of them. I had never seen this one.
It was as purple as Barney the Dinosaur. But it was not cute. And it didn't look to me like an animal that would sing "I love you, you love me." This purple monster did not have a happy family.
It rose from the body of Visser Three, hunched over beneath the ceiling. It had massive shoulders. Massive enough to make Rachel's
grizzly shoulders look puny. It stood on two widely separated feet, each with four thick toes as big around as my thighs.
Its face ... if you could call it a face . . . was in the center of its upper body, so it couldn't turn and look behind itself, only straight forward. Two big eyes blinked from where a guy's chest would be. Weird?
Oh, yeah. Definitely weird.
As I watched in horror, the mouth grew, splitting open, a red-rimmed gash across the creature's belly. Serrated teeth and a tongue that lolled out almost like my own snake tongue.
And all of that was bad. But it wasn't as bad as what came next. Because from the shoulders grew four arms, two on each side. The arms started off smooth and muscular at the shoulder. But they became increasingly wrinkly as they went down toward the place where the hands should be. And instead of hands there were bony, deep, deep red points. They looked like, like, I don't know, like really sharp traffic cones. You know those things they put up on the highway to divert traffic? That's what they looked like: sharp cones on the end of the four arms.
The two sides had separated a little: Rachel, Jake, and Ax on one side, bloody, sweaty, gasping, hurt, and mad. And the Hork-Bajir and Visser Three on the other side of the room.
Between the two sides were the utterly destroyed remnants of David's bed.
Two of the walls were essentially gone. One wall now opened into a bathroom. David and his father were in there. David's father had his gun, but he was looking wildly from one of us to the other, probably wondering where to shoot. Who were the good guys?
The other battered wall opened onto the master bedroom. Twisted, shattered two-by-fours stuck out here and there. Slabs of Sheetrock were all askew.
I wondered where Tobias and Cassie were. But then I realized I could hear a whole other battle taking place downstairs. They were covering our rear.
Visser Three had completed his morph.
He aimed one traffic cone hand at Ax.
FwooooooOOOMPH!
