The absolute animorphs 5.., p.1
The Absolute (Animorphs 55), page 1
They keep going, and going, and going . . . I pushed off with my feet, flapped my wings, and sprung straight into t h e air. Through the t r e e s . Above the waterfall.
Tobias and Ax followed, and we flew oven The Gardens. Three identical ducks, morphed f r o m the same DNA. . . . We decided t h r e e ducks flying by themselves looked a little conspicuous, especially to Controllers who were probably looking f o r t h r e e ducks flying by themselves. So we hooked up with a flock of mallards heading in the direction of the capitol. We leeched on to t h e back of their V f o r m a t i o n , and flapped off over the mountains.
This wasn't sleek, soaring r a p t o r flight. With our round heads, long necks, and plump bodies, we looked m o r e like bowling pins with wings.
I was the Energizer Bunny with feathers. The Energizer Birdie . . . The author wishes to thank Lisa Harkrader
for her help in preparing this manuscript. Thank you to Art Alphin
CHAPTER 1
For Larry, Austin, and Ashley
And for Michael and Jake
Cover illustration by David B. Mattingly
Art Direction/Design by Karen Hudson/Ursula Albano If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this I dove. Tucked my wings. Folded my tail. book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the Hurtled toward earth!
publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book." I was a bullet. A bullet with feathers.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored And feeling pretty righteous until Tobias rockin a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permiseted past. He skimmed the top of the freight sion of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to train and looped sideways in a corkscrew roll, Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 555 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
wing over wing. His feathers grazed the big gun ISBN 0-439-11525-6
of one of the tanks.
Copyright © 2001 by Katherine Applegate.
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc.
Red-Tail Spiral of Death happens to be my favorites Printed in the U.S.A.
First Scholastic printing, March 2001
We pumped our wings and shot past the locomotive. Two guys wearing bib overalls and ball 1
caps sat inside. One, the engineer, I guessed, The M-ls belonged to the National Gu
was driving while the other watched the track They were chained one to a flatcar, their big gu ahead.
rotated toward the back. And they were heade They weren't wielding Dracon beams. Or
toward the city.
weapons of any kind. And they weren't paying Truck and Humvee convoys had been snaking
any attention to the osprey and red-tailed hawk into town for days. Battalions of National Guard who'd dropped from the sky to spy on them. soldiers from all over the state were bunkered in
Now they were bringing in tanks.
the Chee hadn't heard anything from their Yeerk Still, something prickled at the back of my sources, either.
brain. Something didn't seem right.
Tobias and I were here to do a little firsthand Battling aliens every day of my life has fineinvestigation. To find out if our state government tuned my already rampant paranoia.
had finally realized Earth was being invaded. To I powered my wings and caught up to Tobias see if they were mounting a defense.
and the locomotive. A beautiful thermal radiated Or to see if this was a carefully laid out Yeerk up the side of the mountain. I fanned my wing plan. Were all those National Guard troops Conand tail feathers and soared on the billowing jet trollers? Some of them, yeah. But all of them?
of warm air.
We were talking thousands of soldiers. If they The freight train clattered below. One engine were all Controllers, we were in big trouble. We pulling a line of flatbed cars, loaded with military were talking serious doo-doo.
tanks. M-l Abrams.
But we were betting they weren't. Hoping
Yeah, M-l Abrams. I knew them as well as I they weren't. Careful prior planning wasn't Visser knew my own PlayStation. All those hours playOne's usual MO. He usually jumped in with both ing Tank Commando had finally paid off.
feet and a lot of noise. And if the details didn't 2
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work themselves out, he just ripped a sub train. If there were, your raptor eyes would've visser's head off and plowed ahead with his next seen it a mile off. You're just a paranoid freaks maniacal plan.
A paranoid freak whose wings felt like they were going to snap off if I didn't stop flapping Besides, with a Blade ship and a fleet of Bug them.
fighters at his disposal, the visser didn't need a
where the tanks are going, right? The train's not On the other hand, Visser One had been
going that fast. Why don't we just land on one pushing for all-out war. To wage war, you need an and find out?>
army. And if you need an army in a hurry, why not I dove toward a flatcar in the middle of the hijack an existing one? If the highest-ranking Natrain and swept over the top of the tank. My tional Guard officers were Controllers, Visser One talons skidded across the big brass padlock on could easily round up the rest of the troops for a one of the top hatches. I locked them around a mass infestation of host bodies. And if he got the metal cargo cage, pulled my wings down, and tanks out of the way, noninfested troops couldn't hunkered against the bottom of the cage. Wind use them against him.
whipped the feathers on the top of my head. Chuk-chuk-chuk-chuk.
The freight train rolled along the tracks. It A shadow slid over me. Tobias latched onto wasn't going all that fast for a train. About ten the hull of the tank, behind a big metal ring. miles an hour. Maybe fifteen downhill.
He hugged the metal.
Sunlight filtered through the pine needles and I wheeled again. Studied the train. Someflickered over the camouflage green of the tanks. thing still seemed odd. What was I missing?
I saw no other movement. No life-forms, ex Nothing, Marco. There's nothing scary on this traterrestrial or domestic.
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5
Normal. Everything looked —
Wait.
I turned my head.
Another red-tailed hawk swooped around a
curve ahead. Behind it, in formation, flew a squadron of golden eagles and peregrine falcons. We were definitely not alone.
The red-tailed hawk shot toward the train. The eagles and falcons followed, banking and diving above the tracks.
experiences Tobias directed his private thoughtspeak to me.
Yet.
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Tobias slipped down the hull of the tank and anymore. The Yeerks know who I am. Or know crept underneath, into the dark cavern between who I was, anyway.
the tank's tracks. Where he could see without beYeerks. I'm sure you know all about them by ing seen.
now. If not, here's the condensed version: slimy But I was on top. On the turret. I couldn't gray slugs that slither into your ear canal, flatten themselves out over the surface of your brain, move without catching the hawk's eye. I pressed and seize control of your body. Parasitic aliens myself against the floor of the cargo basket who are conquering Earth, one human at a time. and w atched. Waited. Hoped my gray-and-white My mother was a Controller, controlled by one feathers blended in with the camouflage paint of of the most powerful Yeerks in the Yeerk Empire, the tank.
the former Visser One. We rescued her, killed the Right. We're talking about hawk vision here. Yeerk who'd slithered into her head, staged a No such thing as camouflage.
fake death for my dad and me, and evacuated to The red-tailed hawk kited above the train. Exthe mountain valley of the free Hork-Bajir. amined each car, each tank, that passed below. Which should've been great. And it was. For
And no, I hadn't seen an indoor toilet in weeks. James and his gang. A group of auxiliary AniBut I wasn't complaining. I had my mom morphs we'd recently recruited to help us fight back. Had my family back. And, as an added the Yeerks. Disabled kids by day. Superheroes by bonus, algebra homework was now only a distant, night. Or something like that.
quickly fading memory.
The Animorphs — originally just five human But for the Animorphs, and for the war we
kids and one Andalite — are trying to stop the were fighting, my mother's escape was the beginYeerks. I'm one of the human kids. Marco. That's ning of a long, terrifying, downhill slide. And we all I'm going to tell you about me. No last name. were about to hit rock bottom. Hard.
No address.
A big part of the reason we were struggling Not that it probably makes any difference
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was that the Yeerks had had better weapons than their families and flee to the Hork-Bajir valley. us. Plus, they outnumbered us about three gazilRachel with her mom and two sisters. Cassie lion to six. But we had a couple of advantages with her parents. Tobias with his mother.
that helped level the playing field.
And Jake. Alone.
One: We could morph. We could touch an anWe tried to get Jake's family out. Even Tom, imal, acquire its DNA, then become that animal. his brother, who'd been a Controller since the beA dying Andalite war-prince gave us that ability, ginning of the invasion. But the Yeerks got there and with it we could infiltrate, spy, destroy, and first. Turned his mom and dad into Controllers, kick Yeerk butt in ways no human ever could. too.
Two: Since morphing is Andalite technology, the Turned Jake into someone none of us knew
Yeerks believed we were all Andalites. The foranymore. mer Visser Three, commander of the Yeerk invaAx moved to the valley, too. It had become our sion of Earth, had turned the planet upside down new sort of base.
looking for a rogue band of blue aliens.
Bottom line: We were human kids, and the
But he didn't find us, because he never
Yeerks knew it. And we'd thought that was the looked in places we might actually be. Cozy subworst thing that could happen to us. urban houses on tree-lined, Leave-lt-To-Beaver We were wrong.
streets. Noisy school hallways between classes. We needed more help. More firepower. More
The food court at the mall. Not your typical AnAnimorphs. So we recruited humans we knew we dalite hangouts. Well, except maybe the food could trust. Humans the Yeerks had written off. court. After this war is over, I fully expect Ax, our Humans they wouldn't infest.
resident Andalite, to spend the rest of his life in Disabled kids.
human morph at Cinnabon.
The Yeerks caught on to what we were doing, After we rescued my mother, though, it didn't and in the the last battle we lost the morphing take Visser Three long to figure out the "Andalite cube. The blue box that gave anybody who
bandits" just might be human. He was promoted touched it the power to morph. Our one weapon, to Visser One, and he poured most of his rethe weapon Visser One had never been able to sources into finding us.
overcome, had fallen into Yeerk hands. Yeah, we The other Animorphs were forced to rescue
could still morph. But now the Yeerks could, too. 10
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Things were very, very bad.
I looked into the sky. The red-tailed hawk circled. Examined the tanks below. Its eyes locked onto mine.
Birds do not have lips. Birds cannot smile. But I swear this one did.
CHAPTER 3
TSEEEEEEEER!"
The red-tailed hawk rocketed from the sky, eyes gleaming in triumph.
Chuk-chuk-chuk-chuk.
The freight train was giving me a free ride right toward my enemy.
I flapped to the top of the cargo bin and found a foothold.
Tobias inched onto the bed of the flatcar. Four blocks of wood were wedged against the tank's tracks, two in front, two in back, keeping it from rolling. Tobias stood beside one of the front blocks, in its shadow, out of the hawk's line of vision. 12
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the sky, aiming for you, right?> he said. I dove. Sideways and down, toward the hull of
sounded confident, like I really knew what I was Thungk-crack.
doing.
above me.
I spread my wings. Flared my feathers.
Thump.
Fanned my tail. It's what raptors do when they're And fell backward into the cargo basket. He threatened. Make their bodies as large and menlay on the bottom of the cage, unmoving, his acing as possible.
neck twisted back and to the side.
What raptors do not do is plan suicidal fake
was one intense-looking bird. My wings were acThe train rattled around a curve. We swooped tually covering a thick steel tube that jutted up over the side. Stayed low. And came beak to beak behind me through the cargo basket.
with the pack of golden-eagle-Controllers. A steel tube I was betting the hawk, in his Did I mention that a golden eagle is almost rush to skewer my guts, hadn't noticed.
three times as big as an osprey? That it's got I glared at him. Dared him to hit me.
about three times as much attitude and, in my
"TSEEEEEEEEEEER!"
opinion, is wound just a little too tight?
I stood my ground. Held my perch. My tail
And that's just your regular, run-of-the-sky feathers flicked up and down like a lever, adjustgolden eagle. Stir in a crazed Yeerk and a terriing my balance to the movement of the train. fied human host, and we're talking one seriously Tobias watched from the shadows, wings
demented bird.
tense, ready to blindside the hawk if I failed. I cut sharply to the right. Tobias was already The hawk plummeted, his beak aimed at my
ahead of me. We powered our wings and shot exposed chest.
toward the front of the train, six golden eagles on Six feet above me. Four. Two.
our tails.
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Chuk-chuk-chuk-chuk.
The clatter of flatcars nearly drowned out the sound of beating wings. We whipped past one car. Another. We were gaining on the train. The eagles were bigger. Meaner. But not as quick. If we could outlast them, we could outdistance them. I flapped my wings. We rounded the CHAPTER 4
curve.
Five falcons circled above us. They weren't as big as the golden eagles. Not even as big as me or Tobias. But a whole lot faster.
One of the falcons peeled off. Dove!
<0h, man. Not this again. I am so tired of being dive-bombed by birds.> The falcon dropped from the sky. Another But this wasn't just any bird. This was a pereperegrine zeroed in on Tobias. grine falcon. Not a bullet with feathers. A misI pumped my wings. Scanned the rail bed, sile. A missile shooting toward me at two hundred searching for an opening. A hiding place. A miles an hour.
shield.
Which gave me zero time to think up a suiciNothing. dal fake-out maneuver.
A wall of trees on one side. A freight train on We were absolutely, positively toast.
the other. A flock of psycho-eagles behind.
