Animorphs

  The Extreme

  Converted to E-Book by:

  Kamal Raniga

  My name is Marco.

  I doubt we've ever met, but I'll bet you know somebody like me. Every class has a Marco. You know, the one who's the smartest, wittiest, most charming, coolest, and the best-looking.

  That's me.

  I can't tell you my last name. I can't tell you where I live, either, or anything specific about me that might help certain people find me.

  Believe me, I wish I could. Anonymity has its downside. Last week, for example, I wanted to run through the halls of my school screaming my name so everyone could hear. I wanted to hop on a cafeteria table and dance on somebody's Tater

  Tots until a hall monitor came to drag me away. I wanted to call an assembly so everyone could congratulate me.

  I'd gotten a date.

  And not just any date. A date with the most beautiful girl in our whole school. If not the whole world.

  Marian.

  Not only is Marian gorgeous, with long, black hair, deep, dark eyes, and dimples that make me want to cry every time she smiles. She's also nearly as smart, charming, and charismatic as I am.

  You can see we're a perfect couple. The only flaw I can find in her is that she doesn't seem to think my jokes are very funny.

  That, and her taste in music.

  You want to know the coolest thing of all about this date? Marian asked me out. I didn't have to do a thing. We were just leaving our music appreciation class together when Marian said to me:

  "Wow, Marco, you really seem to know a lot about classical music. And may I say, you are an unusually handsome, manly man. I want you, I want you now."

  Okay, that maybe a slight exaggeration. But she definitely said the part about me knowing a lot about music.

  "Either that, or I can scam teachers like no one else around," I said.

  Actually, I know next to nothing about classical music. But my dad's got a huge collection of classical CD's. Sometimes he'll hog the TV, watching documentaries about Mozart and Beethoven and other wild-eyed guys.

  "Well, I have tickets to Symphony Hall this Sunday afternoon," Marian said. "They're playing Beethoven's Third. It's my absolute favorite symphony. Do you want to come?"

  "Well, I'm more of a fan of his thirty-third," I said, hoping I wouldn't pass out at her feet. Marian had just asked me out on a date!

  Marian gave me a quizzical look. "His thirty-third? I don't get it. Were you making a joke?"

  "Of course! It's a joke, hah HAH!" I said, sounding only slightly hysterical. "I love Beethoven's Third. It's just so ..." I wasn't sure what to say. I'd never heard the thing before in my life. Marian looked at me eagerly, waiting for me to finish my sentence.

  "It's just so ..."

  "Beautiful?" Marian suggested.

  "Yes!" I replied. "That's a perfect word for it. Although I was leaning toward exquisite. Maybe even rapturous."

  "Oh, yes!" Marian cried. "It's all those things! So will you come?"

  "Sure," I squeaked.

  "Wonderful." Marian opened one of her notebooks and scribbled in it. She tore the sheet off and handed it to me. "Here's my number. Call me and we'll make plans."

  "Okay," I said, casually stuffing the sheet of paper into my pocket. I was going to have it framed as soon as I got home, but Marian didn't have to know that.

  "This is going to be so much fun." Marian sighed. She smiled and her dimples made my heart skip a half-dozen beats. Then she reached out with her beautiful hand and touched me on my arm. My whole body tingled.

  Either I had a major crush, or the cafeteria had served tainted meat again.

  "Talk to you," she said, walking away.

  "Uh-huh," I grunted.

  Now this sounds pretty cool, huh? I mean, what more could a guy want than to be asked out on a date by the most beautiful girl in his school, right? For any normal kid, living a normal life, this would be, like, the high point of his entire existence.

  Unfortunately, I'm not a normal kid. And I definitely do not lead a normal life.

  Sure, parts of it are normal. I go to school. Do homework when I feel like it. Eat dinner with my

  dad. Watch TV. Play video games with my best buddy, Jake, and kick his sorry butt.

  But there's another part of my life that's anything but normal. In fact, it's so bizarre, so insane, so absolutely out there that I wouldn't believe it myself if I weren't living it.

  You see, I'm sort of a superhero. No, not Batman, although that's a good guess, with that whole very cool, handsome billionaire Bruce Wayne thing. Not Spider-Man, either. But I do fly, stick to walls, and toss bad guys around like they're plastic action figures.

  Superheroes use their special powers to save the world. And that's what my five friends and I are doing.

  Saving the world. Not from clowns like Lex Luthor or the Joker. I wish our archenemies were as tame as a bunch of comic book supervillains.

  Instead, Rachel, Cassie, Tobias the Bird-boy, the Andalite Ax, my best friend Jake, and I are battling an entire race of aliens who are trying to conquer Earth.

  The Yeerks.

  For your sake, I hope you've never heard of them. Because almost the only people who do know about them are the ones who've become their slaves.

  The Yeerk invasion is a secret. But it's happening.

  Believe me, it's happening.

  The Yeerks are slimy gray slugs that slip into your ear and wind themselves in and around every crevice of your brain. Once they've done this, they own you. Control you. They've enslaved you.

  You become something we call a Controller. Someone with no free will. You can't scream for help, because the Yeerk controls what words come out of your mouth. You can't run, because the Yeerk controls how far and how fast your feet move. And you can't resist when the Yeerk in your head starts to recruit your family and friends into enslavement. Because you're a slave yourself.

  Pretty scary, huh? But maybe the scariest thing of all about this alien invasion is that you can't tell Controllers from normal people. They look normal. Talk normal. Act normal.

  For all you know, your parents may be Controllers. Maybe even your cute, loveable grandmother has designs on subduing the planet.

  So fighting this war - and it is a war - tends to make a guy kind of paranoid. You can't trust anybody.

  That's why I didn't tell you my name. And that's why, ever since we took a shortcut through

  an abandoned construction site one night, life, which I always want to find funny, has been mostly grim.

  It was in that construction site that we met the dying Andalite prince, Elfangor. It was there that he told us about the Yeerks. It was there that he gave us the nightmarish power to become any animal whose DNA we could acquire. Our one pitiful weapon.

  Ever since then, I have not been able to look at another human being without suspicion. No one. Not even Marian.

  And that's why, after experiencing those first few moments of joy after Marian asked me out, the suspicion began to seep into my brain. The gnawing little worm of doubt. What if she was one of them? What if sweet, perfect Marian, with those gorgeous dimples, was a Controller?

  Sure, I might not mind being Marian's slave, but being a Yeerk's slave is a different story.

  One date, I told myself. Then, before we decide to go steady, I can check her out.

  "So then what happened?" Cassie asked me in study hall the day after what had come to be called The Big Date.

  Study hall was being held in the school gym this week. They'd closed our usual classroom. Something about asbestos and lawsuits.

  So instead of studying silently for an hour, a bunch of kids were playing basketball and volleyball while the rest of us, me and Cassie included, sat on the bleachers and talked. It was a big improvement.

  "Well, after I failed in a bold attempt to escape during intermission, we went back in and the orchestra started to play. Again. And they played. And played. And I considered yelling

  'Fire!' just to get outta the place. And when I woke up everybody was gone, including Marian."

  Cassie laughed her gentle laugh. "Oh, well," she said, flipping idly through a veterinary medicine magazine she'd pulled out of a folder. "It sounds like it was for the best."

  "What do you mean, it was for the best?" I cried. "It was a total disaster."

  "Yes. But it doesn't sound like Marian's your type."

  "But she's the most beautiful girl in the whole school," I replied. "How could she not be my type?" I gave Cassie the fish eye. "Wait a minute. Did you guys watch her?"

  "We are your friends, Marco," she said apologetically. "We had no choice."

  "You guys kept her under surveillance for the last three days?"

  "Well, it was mostly Tobias and Ax, since they don't have school. Anyway, she's not one of them. She never went near a ..." She lowered her voice to a whisper. "... Yeerk pool entrance."

  I wasn't sure how to react to that. Yeerks have to return to the hidden Yeerk pool every three days. Marian was okay. Now the question was: Was this good news or bad news? I'd blown my big chance. Was it better or worse that she was a normal girl?

  Something else bothered me. Jake had asked Cassie to tell me this. Obviously. It was a good choice. Typical Jake. He knew that Rachel would just ridicule me. He knew that if he talked to me himself it would seem like he was meddling. But Cassie had the gentle touch. The diplomatic skill to let me know, without making me mad, that they ha d watched my temporary girlfriend behind my back.

  Cassie was watching me, waiting for my reaction. And I was just loading up to deliver something scathing-yet-not-overly-cruel when a shadow fell over us. I looked up.

  "Hey, Marco. Hey, Cassie. What's up?"

  It was a kid my age. He was a little bit taller than I am - which, I'll admit, is how it is with most people. His warm, confident smile made you want to like him immediately.

  But I knew better. See, this particular likeable-looking kid wasn't a kid, and his smile wasn't a smile. Erek didn't attend our school. Erek didn't attend the human race.

  The kid standing in front of us wasn't entirely real. What Cassie and I and everyone else were looking at was a holographic projection. Underneath the projection was an android. An android that had been walking the earth for hundreds of thousands of years.

  Erek and his other android friends are called

  Chee. They were the companions of an ancient race called the Pemalites. The Pemalites may have been the most advanced species ever to exist in the history of the universe. So advanced they forgot all about primitive stuff like wars and worry and sadness.

  Unfortunately, the rest of the universe wasn't so elevated. An evil race called Howlers attacked the Pemalites and destroyed their home world. Some survivors fled to Earth, but before they escaped, their alien attackers infected them with a disease that eventually killed them all.

  The Chee, being androids, weren't affected by the disease. To honor the spirits of their former companions and creators, they infused the essence of the Pemalites into the bodies of wolves.

  Now you know why your dog is always in such a good mood.

  And since the Pemalites created the Chee in their own image, the Chee are pretty friendly themselves. In fact, they're pacifists, sworn - and programmed - never to harm another soul.

  Still, they hate the Yeerks and help us out whenever they can.

  "Uh-oh," I said, still feeling a bit cranky over the possibility that Tobias had been watching Marian through her bedroom window.

  And I hadn't.

  " 'Uh-oh'? Nice welcome," Erek said, sitting down between us. "Would you mind if we talk in private?"

  "I repeat: uh-oh."

  The air around us began to glow. The sounds of the gym - kids talking, the bouncing of the basketball, the squeak of sneakers on the court - disappeared. We could see everything happening in the gym, but it was as if we were looking out from inside a Saran Wrap bubble.

  "I have extended my holographic projection to include the three of us," Erek explained. The Erek we were looking at now was a steel-and-ivory android that looked an awful lot like a dog, maybe a greyhound, standing on his hind legs. "Everyone else in the gym sees and hears the three of us talking about last night's game."

  "Well, if that's all you want to talk about, why all the secrecy?" I said brightly.

  Erek smiled grimly. Not brightly. I felt the sense of another "uh-oh" growing inside me.

  "What is it, Erek?" Cassie said.

  "Our sources tell us the Yeerks have been trying to develop a way to broadcast Kandrona rays using human satellite technology," Erek told us.

  "They seem to have found some place on this planet isolated enough to allow them to erect a satellite station without interference. If they're

  successful, they could turn every backyard swimming pool in the world into a Yeerk pool."

  I felt sick to my stomach. "That is definitely not good."

  Kandrona rays are what the Yeerks consume. Their food. They absorb it when they're in the Yeerk pool. It's their Achilles heel. They need the rays to survive.

  Every three days when Yeerks go down to the Yeerk pool, they slide out of their host's brain and take a Kandrona bath. Meanwhile, most of the hosts, the ones who don't want to be slaves, scream and cry and struggle and beg to be set free.

  I've been to the Yeerk pool. It's a bad place.

  We've imagined destroying the Yeerk pool. It would be a huge blow to the Yeerks. And we would if we could, but the place is about the size of a football stadium, with better defenses than the White House, the Pentagon, and Fort Knox put together. We just don't have the firepower.

  "You know, Erek," I said, "nothing personal, but sometimes I'm not so sure I like you. You're nothing but trouble."

  Erek grinned his steel-and-ivory dog grin. "Sure you're not just cranky over blowing The Big Date?"

  I shot Cassie an outraged look.

  She winced. "Okay, so the Chee helped us out. It's not easy to watch someone for three days."

  "Swell. Is there anyone, anywhere who doesn't know that I crashed and burned on The Big Date?"

  "She wasn't your type, anyway," Erek said. "She had taste in music."

  "Oh, so you're a big Beethoven fan?"

  Erek nodded his android head. "I was the maestro's valet for quite a few years. He was an awful person, but he made music my masters would have wept to hear."

  We met after school in Cassie's barn - aka the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic - to discuss the situation. Cassie's parents are veterinarians. While her dad runs the clinic, her mom runs the vet staff at The Gardens, an amusement park and zoo. Cassie helps out at the clinic, giving suppositories to cranky skunks and stuff. And let's face it: A wildlife clinic definitely comes in handy when we need to acquire a new morph.

  The get-together was like opening night of the local freak show. Four kids who regularly become fur balls. Erek, the ancient Android. Tobias, the red-tailed hawk, keeping a lookout from the rafters. Ax, the Andalite, in his human morph.

  Ax's human morph is a combination of DNA

  from me, Jake, Rachel, and Cassie. Together we make one disturbingly beautiful person.

  Ax is the only Andalite on Earth. In fact, he's Prince Elfangor's younger brother. Ax was in his human morph because, well, let me put it this way: Cassie's mom and dad are about the coolest parents you'll ever find, but if they were to walk in and find their daughter shooting the breeze with a blue-furred, half-humanoid, half-deerlike creature with a mean scorpion tail, no mouth and four eyes, including a pair that sat on swiveling stalks atop its head ... they would definitely freak.

  "Do you know any more details?" Rachel asked Erek.

  Rachel is your basic psycho-babe. And I mean that in a nice way. She's a tall, willowy, supermodelesque blond. You might think she was a mall-rat airhead - until you called her an airhead. Then, after she removed your left kidney, you'd realize your mistake.

  Rachel's a great person to have on your side in a fight. The only problem I have with her is that she's always looking for a fight.

  "Details? I'm afraid not," Erek replied. "We've infiltrated much of the Yeerk force, but we don't have access to everything."

 

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