The Predator (7 page)
Authors: K. A. Applegate
The tunnel was narrow. Boulders brushed constantly against my abdomen. My legs kicked some away. Others had to be moved aside. I should have felt cramped and claustrophobic, with the earth all around me, and my friends close ahead and behind me. But my ant mind was at home in tunnels.
I was traveling down. I knew my head was pointed down, but gravity seemed less important than it did when I was human.
I said, trying to joke away the sudden clutch of very human terror.
Quickly we were out of the sand boulders and in a canyon. That’s what it seemed like, anyway. Like a deep, deep canyon. A crack in the concrete foundation.
We clambered over craggy rocks and squeezed along the narrow crack. All the while the breeze grew stronger.
Then we were out of the canyon. We were on a flat, vertical plane.
Cassie suggested.
First I moved away from them. It was totally dark, so I didn’t have to watch the changes in myself. But trust me, feeling them was bad enough.
Once I was human again, I began to look for a light. Then I froze.
My huge, human feet could crush my friends!
I stood perfectly still and ran my hands along the wall. Nothing. Nothing. A bulletin board. A desk! Phone. Some kind of machine, probably a fax. There! A lamp!
The sudden light was blinding. I blinked and covered my eyes with my hand. As soon as I could see, I looked around. I was in a very small room, like a windowless office. I was alone.
Then I looked down at my body. Arms. Legs. Feet. Yes! Human! Completely human.
I could see them now. Four tiny ants, huddled against the corner of the wall. It took my breath away.
Had that been me? I had been one of them? Down there?
I flicked the light. Seconds later, they began to demorph. I turned away, and focused on rifling the desk.
“That was gross beyond belief,” Cassie said. She was the first to complete her change. “Yeah,” I agreed.
“I don’t want to do that again,” she said. I could hear the shiver of fear and disgust in her voice.
I didn’t answer. I was too scared to want to talk about it. If I talked about it, it would become real, you know? Better not to think. Better to shove it out of my mind.
“This is the place,” Rachel said when she had grown eyes and a mouth again. “I recognize it. Chapman’s office. I was a cat when I was in here, but this is it.”
“Let’s get this done. In and out,” Jake said nervously. “Ax? Find that transponder.”
Ax, now fully Andalite again, immediately began removing a panel from the thing I thought was a fax machine.
I continued looking through Chapman’s desk. Nothing much there. No papers. No files.
Ax looked at me and smiled in that way Andalites have of smiling with just their eyes. He touched a small cube I thought was a paperweight. The paperweight lit up and projected a picture into the air in front of me.
“Cool,” I said. “A computer, right?”
I poked the air, pointing at a symbol that looked like it would be a folder. It opened. The document was written in some totally alien alphabet.
“Sure. Why not? This is a few hundred years more advanced than ours but—“
“You can read this stuff?”
“Visser One? That would be like Visser Three’s boss?”
“Great,” I said. “Forty-seven. Not all like our friend Visser Three, I hope.”
Ax was back at work getting the transponder out of the faxlike machine.
body, I believe. Ah. Here, I have it.>
He held up a tiny, shiny disk. No bigger than a pea.
“Okay, let’s get out of here,” Jake said. “Put that thing near the crack. We won’t have to carry it as far. Everyone, morph back. Let’s bail.”
It was the moment I dreaded. I didn’t want to return to that ant body. It made me want to cry, just thinking of it. But there was no other way. If we tried to sneak out of the basement by going up through the house, we might be caught.
“Boy, I don’t want to do this,” I muttered. But at the same time, I focused on that ant shape. And as I watched, my friends began to change.
Once we had shrunk back to ant size, the transponder seemed enormous. It was far bigger than we were. Standing beside it, feeling it with my legs and antennae, it felt about as big as a two-car garage.
It seemed impossible, but Cassie, Rachel, and Ax managed to lift that monstrous load off the ground.
I mean, it was like seeing three people walking down the street carrying a city bus. That’s how big it was. But it’s true what they say about ants. For their size, they are some strong little bugs.
When we reached the vertical wall, the three of them had to push it ahead and roll it up the wall, like some gigantic steel donut.
We reached the crack. They shoved the transponder in. Jake and I were in the lead.
It took all five of us to drag that thing over the crags of the concrete canyon. But we made it through and back to the dirt tunnel. The transponder was so big it blocked the tunnel. It was like a spitwad in a straw. But with Ax, Rachel, and Cassie behind pushing, and Jake and I clearing boulders—grains of sand—out of the way, we made progress.
It happened suddenly.
There was no warning.
One second the tunnel ahead of me was empty. The next second it was full.
Full of a charging, racing army of ants.
Enemies,
my ant brain said. Now the killing would begin.
14
T
hey’re behind us!> It was Rachel, yelling.
The speed of the attack was incredible. The force of the attack was impossible to explain. There were hundreds of them. Ahead. Behind. Flooding up from side tunnels. Bursting from the walls.
There were three of them on me. They were pulling me, trying to force me down so they could tear me apart.
Tear me apart!
A fourth scampered over my head, brushing my antennae. He locked his mandibles on my narrow waist. He was trying to bite me in half.
There was no defense. We could not win. We would all be dead in a few seconds.
They were machines. Absolutely without fear. Unstoppable.
One of my legs came loose, torn away. Ripped out by the roots.
I could feel my waist being sawed through by grinding sharp mandibles.
A searing liquid was fired at me. Poison. They were stinging me. Stinging me again and again, and ripping me apart.
Human. I wanted to be human again. Please, just let me live long enough to become human again!
My waist would snap. The mandibles would not release me.
Then, suddenly, the pressure around my waist was gone. Instead, I felt the sandy soil pressing against me.
I was growing!
I couldn’t breathe. Sand blocked the air. Pressure. Then, the ground around me opened up. I swear it was like climbing up out of a grave. The air! Fresh, clean night air!
I exploded up out of the sand.
Jake was on top of me, pushing against me as he grew. And the others, who had been only inches away in the tunnel, also pressed together in a rapidly growing heap of misshapen bodies. I tried to squirm away, but it was awkward. I was only half human.
But at last I lay there on the ground, staring up through human eyes at the stars.
“Cassie?” Jake asked.
“I’m okay,” Cassie said.
“Me too, Jake, thanks for asking,” Rachel said. We were all alive. All in one piece. Four humans and an Andalite.
I looked down and saw the disturbed sand, where we had pushed our way up and out. Thousands of ants, almost too small to see, were racing wildly around.
There, too, in the dirt, was the transponder. I picked it up.
Rachel was stomping the ground back down, trying to flatten it out so it wouldn’t look strange.
“Jake?” I said. “Let’s not do this again any time soon.”
He nodded shakily.
“One day I’m a lobster. Then I’m an ant. I figure the next step down the evolutionary ladder is a virus or something. And I just want to say right now, I’m not doing it. I am not going to become phlegm, even to save the world.”
It wasn’t much of a joke, but there was a kind of lame little laugh from everyone. And Rachel stopped stomping the ants—I mean, the ground.
That night, when I went home, I took a shower. I found the head of an ant. It was still locked on to the skin of my waist.
Lots of people think only humans fight wars. That only humans are murderous. Let me tell you something — compared to ants, human beings are full of nothing but peace, love, and understanding.
A month or so after the experience with the ants, I picked up a book about ants. The author said, “If ants had nuclear weapons they would probably end the world in a week.”
He’s wrong. It wouldn’t take them that long.
15
I
was cool. I was fine. I slept okay. There were dreams, but I just put them out of my mind.
When I got up the next morning, I ignored the fact that my dad’s eyes were red, like he’d been crying. He was getting worse, not better, as we got closer to Sunday. To the second-year anniversary of my mom’s death.
But I had to put that out of my mind, too. I had to put a lot of things out of my mind. It was getting to be a habit.
I saw Jake in the hallway at school. I pretended not to notice him.
I saw Rachel, too. She had a dark look in her eyes. Like she hadn’t slept. Like something was
really
wrong.
Even Cassie seemed grim. It had gotten to all of us. It’s not so easy to just forget terror. It’s not easy to just ignore the memory of your leg being ripped off.
Of being dismembered. Torn apart.
One of these days, I thought, one of us is going to go crazy. Totally, lock-me-up-in-a-rubber-room nutso. It was too much. This wasn’t how life was supposed to be.
One of us would snap. One of us would lose it. It could happen, even to strong people.
I knew. It had happened to my father. I used to think nothing could ever destroy him. But my mom’s death had.
He used to be an engineer. A scientist, really. He’s incredibly smart. We had a nice house. We had a nice car. I used to live practically next door to Jake.
I know all that stuff isn’t important. I know having things isn’t what life is about. But it was still hard when my dad just stopped going to work. Jerry, his boss, tried to be nice. He gave him a couple of weeks to deal with losing Mom.
But a couple of weeks was not enough.
My dad’s a janitor now. Part-time. He gets jobs through a temp service. He unpacks boxes at
department stores. That kind of thing. But I don’t care what kind of job he has. That doesn’t matter.
What matters is that when I lost my mom, I lost my dad, too.
See, people can snap. People can lose it. I know.
I cruised through the morning classes. No big deal.
At lunch I ended up at a table with Rachel. She didn’t seem to notice me. She was just hunched over her meal, eating mechanically.
A girl named Jessica came walking past with her tray. She bumped into Rachel, which made Rachel drop her fork. It splattered down in the food on her tray.
I don’t know if Jessica did it deliberately or not. She’s the kind of girl who thinks she’s tough.
“Watch it!” Rachel snapped.
“What?” Jessica demanded, acting outraged. “Are you yelling at me? Don’t give me any of your mouth, I might have to slap it for you.” Then she shoved against Rachel’s back.
In a flash Rachel was up, out of her seat. She spun around. She grabbed Jessica by the collar of her sweatshirt and pushed the girl back against the next table.
Jessica probably outweighs Rachel by fifty pounds. But it didn’t matter. Rachel had her on her back, on the table, scattering dishes and food everywhere.
Rachel leaned over Jessica and in a voice of cold steel said, “Don’t. Touch. Me.”
I saw Jake across the room. Too far away to intervene. Cassie was with him. It was up to me.
I jumped up and raced to Rachel. I took a deep breath and shoved both my arms between them.
“Back off, Marco,” Rachel said.
“Get her off me! She’s crazy!” Jessica cried.
