The Invasion (26 page)

I felt the same despair. We were fools. This wasn’t some little group of alien bad guys we were dealing with. To build this underground city, these guys had power we couldn’t even imagine.

That’s almost what it was. A city.

There were buildings and sheds all around the rim of the cavern. And we could see yellow Caterpillar earthmovers and cranes at work on the far side of the cavern. They seemed weirdly normal in this incredible place.

And there were creatures everywhere. Taxxons, Hork-Bajir, and other things I couldn’t even begin to guess at.

But mostly, there were humans. A lot of them.

At the very center of the cavern was a pool, like a small lake, maybe a hundred feet across, and perfectly round. Only the water wasn’t exactly water. It moved more like melted lead, and was about the same color. The sloshing sound we could hear was the liquid of the pool being rippled and splashed by hundreds of fast-moving things below the surface.

I knew what they were. Yeerks. Yeerks in their natural, sluglike state. They were swimming and cavorting in the pool like kids on a hot day.

Near the edge of the pool were cages. In the cages were Hork-Bajir and human beings.

Some of the humans screamed for help. Some cried silently. Some just sat and waited, all hope lost. There were adults there. And kids. Women and men. More than a hundred, packed ten to a cage.

The captive Hork-Bajir were kept in separate, stronger cages. They paced and howled and slashed at the air with their bladed arms.

I almost lost hope. I felt like my heart had stopped. This was a place of unimaginable horror. And we were so few, and so weak.

Below us on the stairs I could see the Controller cop and Cassie. He was dragging her roughly
whenever she stumbled. They had reached the bottom of the stairs.

“I’m going to morph,” I said. “I’m going to get Cassie away from him.”

Marco put his hand on my shoulder. “Not time yet, dude. Be cool.”

Cassie’s okay, Jake,
Tobias said.
She isn’t hurt. Just scared.

“He’d better not hurt her,” I said. “Keep an eye on them, Tobias.”

There were two low steel piers built out over the pool. On one, Hork-Bajir-Controllers politely guarded a line of humans and Hork-Bajir and Taxxons.

This was the unloading station.

One by one the people knelt down, bent over, and dipped their heads toward the slimy surface of the pool. The Hork-Bajir helped them.

As we watched, a woman calmly bent over, her head just inches above the lead gray pool. A Hork-Bajir held her elbow gently, to help her keep her balance.

Then we saw the thing dribbling, sliding, squirming, crawling out of her ear.

A Yeerk.

“Oh, no …” Rachel moaned. She sounded like she might be sick. “Oh, no. No.”

When the Yeerk was all the way out of the poor woman’s head, it dropped into the pool and disappeared beneath the turbulent surface.

Instantly the woman cried out. “You filth, let me go! Let me go! I am a free woman! You can’t keep doing this! I am not a slave! Let me go!”

Two Hork-Bajir grabbed her. They dragged the woman to the nearest cage and threw her in.

“Help!” the woman screamed. “Oh, please, someone help. Help us all!”

H
elp! Please, someone help us!”

We had been hearing cries like that all the way down those steps. But now we were close enough to give the cries a human face. It cut straight to my soul.

There was a second steel pier. That was the loading station. There the host bodies were dragged from their holding cages to have the Yeerks reenter their heads. It was a pretty basic process. They grabbed the hosts, whether human or Hork-Bajir, and forced their heads down into the pool.

The people sometimes fought and screamed, and sometimes just cried. But they always lost. When their
heads were yanked back up out of the pool, we could see the slugs still slithering into their ears.

After a few minutes they would become calm again, as the Yeerks regained control. Then off they went, once more slaves of the Yeerks.

It was a horrible assembly line, from the unloading pier, to the holding cages, to the infestation pier. They moved the poor victims through at a pretty speedy rate.

But there was another area we could only now see. There, humans and Hork-Bajir waited on comfortable chairs, sipping drinks and actually watching TV. Taxxons squirmed around like gigantic, spiny maggots.

I heard the faint sound of a television set. I was sure I could hear laughter from the humans. They were watching the show and having a good laugh.

Those are the voluntary hosts,
Tobias said.
Collaborators.

“What are you talking about?” I demanded.

You remember, what the Andalite told us. Many humans and Hork-Bajir are
voluntary
hosts,
Tobias replied.
The Yeerks persuade them to let them take over.