Authors: K. A. Applegate
The Encounter
ANIMORPHS™
THE
ENCOUNTER
K. A. APPLEGATE
To Michael
The author wishes to thank the
Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota.
Anyone interested in learning more about
the Raptor Center and birds of prey in general
can visit the Raptor Center website:
www.raptor.cvm.umn.edu
M
y name is Tobias. A freak of nature. One of a kind.
I won’t tell you my last name. I
can’t
tell you my last name. Or the name of the city where I live.
I want to tell you everything, but I can’t give any clues to my true identity. Or the identity of the others. Everything I will tell you is true. I know it’s going to seem unbelievable, but believe it anyway.
I am Tobias. I’m a normal kid, I guess. Or used to be. I used to do okay in school. Not great, but not bad, either. Just okay.
I guess I was a dork, kind of. Big, but not big enough to keep from getting picked on. I had blond
hair, kind of wild because I could never get it to look right. My eyes were … what color were my eyes? It’s only been a few weeks, and already I’m forgetting things about being human.
I guess it doesn’t matter, anyway. My eyes now are gold and brown. I have eyes that look fierce and angry all the time. I’m not always fierce or angry, but I look that way.
One afternoon, I was riding the thermals, the upswelling hot air. I rode them way up into the sky. The bottoms of low clouds, heavy with moisture, scudded just a few feet above me.
I looked down and focused my laserlike eyes. My fierce eyes. I could still read — I hadn’t forgotten how to do that. I could see the big red and white sign that said: DEALIN’ DAN HAWKE’S USED CARS.
I pressed my wings back, closer to my body, and began to fall.
Down, down, down! Faster. Faster!
I fell through the warm, early evening air like a rock. Like an artillery shell falling toward its target.
All was silent except for the sound of the air rushing over the tops of my wings. The ground came up at me. It came up like it was trying to hit me.
I saw the cage. It was no more than three feet on each side. In the cage was a hawk. A redtail.
Like me.
The man was close by. I recognized him because I had seen him on his TV commercials. He was Dealin’ Dan Hawke. He owned the car dealership.
He was the one holding the hawk prisoner.
She was a mascot. On the commercials he called her Price-Cut Polly. It made me sick. It made me furious.
I saw the camera. There were three guys standing around. They would be shooting a live commercial soon. I didn’t care.
Dealin’ Dan went to the hawk’s cage to feed her. It was locked with a bike-style combination lock. Four numbers. I could see them as he turned the combination. 8-1-2-5.
I was two hundred yards up, plummeting to earth at seventy miles an hour. But I could see the numbers as he turned them. And the human part of me, Tobias, could remember.
He opened the cage and tossed in some food. Then he closed it again and spun the lock.
Brilliant lights came on. He was starting the commercial. It would be live on TV all over the area.
What I was planning was insane. That’s what Marco would have said. It was one of his favorite words. Insane.
I didn’t care.
A hawk was in a tiny cage, being used as a prop
for some lowlife car dealer. That wasn’t going to go on. Not if I could help it.
“Tseeeeeeeer!”
I screamed.
Twenty feet from the ground, I opened my wings. The strain was terrible. I absorbed most of the momentum and used the rest for speed. I shot across the parked cars to the cage.
I landed on the bars and grabbed on with my talons. I used the hook of my deadly, sharp beak to click the first number into place.
“Hey! What the —” someone yelled.
The bright TV light focused right on me.
“Well, ladies and gentlemen in TV-land,” Dealin’ Dan yapped in surprise, “I guess we have a bird trying to break into our Price-Cut Polly’s cage. Boys, you better shoo him away.”
Yeah, right. Shoo me
, I thought.
I clicked the second number. There were people coming for me. I saw a mechanic swinging a long steel wrench. But I wasn’t going to leave without freeing this bird.
Hawks do not belong in cages. Hawks belong in the sky.
But they were all around me.
“Get him, Earl! Hit the thing!”
“Look out for that beak of his!”
“Maybe he’s got rabies!”
WHAM!
The mechanic swung the wrench! It barely missed my head. I was dead if I didn’t get some help. Fast.
would be a good time!>
I breathed a sigh of relief. Help was on the way.
“HhhuuuurrHHHHEEEEEAAAAH!”
“What in the world was—” the mechanic cried.
I knew what it was. It was Rachel. Pretty, blond Rachel. Although right at the moment she wasn’t pretty — impressive, but not pretty.
BOOM! Cr-u-u-u-nch!
“Oh. My. Lord,” Dealin’ Dan gasped. “Forget the bird! There’s an elephant stomping over the convertibles!”
I would have smiled. If I’d had a mouth.
I finished turning the lock. I yanked open the cage door.
The hawk was wary. She was a true hawk, with only a hawk’s mind and instincts to guide her. But she did know an open path to the sky when she saw one.
Out she came, in a rush of gray and brown and white feathers. She didn’t know that I had freed her.
That kind of concept was beyond her thinking. And she felt no gratitude.
But she flapped her wings and rose into the air.
Free.
And right then I had the strangest feeling. Like I should go with her. Like I should be with her.
She was bellowing loudly, tossing her big trunk around and stomping various cars. Having a very good time, by elephant standards. But it was time for us to leave. For Rachel to resume her human form.
I looked up again. I saw the sunlight shine through the hawk’s red tail. She flew toward the setting sun.
I
hear sirens,> I said urgently. Rachel snapped. hear
them? I’m morphing as fast as I can.>
real
cops. Not Controllers.> We had reached a patch of woods behind Dealin’ Dan’s car dealership. It was really just a few scruffy trees between the car place and a convenience store.
I watched from a low tree branch as Rachel morphed back to human again. If you’ve never seen someone morph, you have no idea just how incredibly weird it is.
When she began, she was a full-grown African elephant. Ten feet tall. Almost twice that from head to tail. She weighed at least six thousand pounds. I say “at least” because we’ve never exactly tried to stick her on the bathroom scale.
She had two curved tusks, each about as long as a child. And a trunk that dragged the ground when she walked and could pick up a big, slashing, yelling, dangerously angry Hork-Bajir warrior and throw him twenty feet.
I’d seen her do it.
Controllers. There’s a word you need to know. A Controller is anyone with a Yeerk in his head. Yeerks are alien parasites. They are evil little slugs who live in the bodies of other species and enslave them. All the Hork-Bajir are Controllers. So are the Taxxons.
So are more and more humans. Human-Controllers.
As I watched, Rachel began to shrink. The ropy
tail was sucked up like a piece of spaghetti. Her trunk grew smaller.
Blond hair began to sprout from her massive gray forehead. Her eyes wandered across her face toward the middle. The vast leathery ears became pink and small and perfectly formed.
She was small enough now that she could stand on her hind legs. As she did, her front legs grew smooth and human. Her back legs lost their clunki-ness and became her own long, coltish legs.
Her morphing clothes, a skintight black leotard, emerged.
The tusks
shlooped
back into her mouth and divided into sparkling teeth. She was a very pretty girl, beautiful even, except that she still had a two-foot-long gray nose.
At last, the trunk seemed to roll up and became a regular nose.
She was a girl again. Barefoot, because no one had figured out how to morph shoes. Her mouth was back to normal. She spoke in her normal voice,
no longer in my head. Thought-speech is only for morphs.
“Okay, I’m back. Let’s bail!”
The siren sounds were coming ever closer.
“I hope they have some flip-flops for sale in there,” Rachel grumbled. “This shoe situation is a pain.”
The elephant was gone. The girl had emerged.
See? I told you it would be hard to believe.
It began at a deserted construction site, when we found the crashed spaceship of an Andalite prince. He was the last surviving Andalite in our solar system. He and his fellow Andalites had fought a great battle to drive away the Yeerk mother ship.
They fought and lost.
And now the Yeerks are among us. And they are now trying to enslave the human race.
Before he died at the hands of the Yeerk leader, a terrible creature called Visser Three, the Andalite gave us a great gift—and a great curse.
The gift was the power to morph. To absorb the DNA of any living animal and to become that animal. Never before had anyone but the Andalites themselves been given the power to morph.
It meant a life of secrets. Of terrible danger.
The Yeerks think we are a small band of escaped Andalites. They know that morphs had attacked
their Yeerk pool. They know that morphs had even infiltrated the home of one of their most important Controllers—Chapman.
But they don’t know that we are just five normal human kids who’d been walking home from the mall one night.
Visser Three wants us caught or dead. Visser Three usually gets what he wants.
But I was glad to fight the Yeerks. Maybe I just had less to lose than the others. Or maybe something about the lonely, defeated, yet courageous Andalite prince touched me so deeply that I could never regret fighting to settle the score.
