Animorphs: 2010 - Chapter 5
Ask a Question!
Character Sheets
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Nine (18+)The next day was Saturday. I needed the break the weekend would provide. Granted, I wouldn’t get that much of a break. Not with the plans we had. But at least I wouldn’t have to face going into work and trying to look my platoon in the face and wonder which of them weren’t really...them. I wouldn’t have to plaster on a smile or find myself sifting through every conversation and comment for hidden meaning. I wouldn’t have to deal with the question of whether or not I could trust them, whether or not they would lure me into an empty office to shove an alien in my head.
How did they even get in a person’s head? There were significant holes in my knowledge about the Yeerks.
I couldn’t completely relax, though. I’d been talked into keeping an eye on the people in my command and letting Marco help me. We decided to start by getting a rental car. Both Polk and Hash knew my blue Ford F-250, and even if they hadn’t, it was a giant, distinctive truck. The fact that I had registration stickers on the front window to get onto base and the army and unit vanity stickers on the back window made it all the more recognizable. Marco’s motorcycle was just as memorable, but for opposite reasons. It was tiny and sporty and even though I knew next to nothing about bikes, I could pick it out of a lineup thanks to all the customization he’d done to it. Both vehicles were even worse than Tobias’s green Pinto for tailing someone.
Thus, I found myself at a rental agency early in the morning, picking up a tan sedan. I’d driven to my hometown first to avoid accidently running into anyone from base. I took the rental to Marco’s house, ready to pick him up for a day of tailing and sneakery.
The front door was locked and he didn’t answer when I pounded on the door. I knew he had a hide-a-key somewhere, but I’d forgotten where. I looked under the front mat and found nothing, but before I could get back on my feet Marco opened the door. He wore nothing but boxers and looked like he’d just woken up, blinking and bleary-eyed as he looked down at me.
“What’re you doing here?”
Hastily, I got to my feet. “Did you forget? We’re supposed to go to the base today.”
“Yeah. I mean...you’re early.”
I looked down at my watch. It was half an hour before we’d agreed to meet, but I hadn’t realized that would be a problem. “So, what? You want me to hang out on the stoop for thirty minutes?”
Marco just made a disgruntled face and turned to head back inside, leaving the door open so I could follow him. I closed the door behind me and started to say something, but stopped short when I glanced over at the couch. From behind, all I could see was long black hair spilling over the arm and a small, pale hand; there was a woman asleep there. I looked over at Marco, but he was already in the kitchen.
“Who the hell is that?” I asked in a whisper after I followed him in. A half-empty bottle of tequila and several empty beer bottles littered the counter.
Marco shrugged. “Wendy? Cindy? Something with a ‘y’. Don’t really care.”
“Are you hungover?” I asked, watching him lean on the counter for support while he pulled down a pair of coffee mugs. “Or drunk?”
“Fuck you, Jake. After-” He looked toward the kitchen door, but Wendy/Cindy wasn’t in sight. “After the past two days, don’t think you can guilt me over a night of drinking. Can’t believe we aren’t all permanently shit-faced.”
“But-”
“Stuff it. I ain’t drunk and I ain’t hungover. I’m just...up. And it’s early.”
I watched him try and figure out his coffee maker and had to admit that Marco on an average morning actually didn’t act much different than he did while faced or stoned. It was hard to tell just yet if he was actually impaired or if a bit of coffee and a shower would put him to rights.
Marco started the coffee going and then rummaged through his fridge. He came up with a plate of leftover pizza and started eating it cold. “Hungry?” he asked, offering me the plate.
I shook my head. I had no idea how old that pizza was.
“Whatever.” Marco shambled off toward the bathroom, still carrying his pizza. He was gone before I thought to ask what I should do if the woman on the couch woke up.
Since I was left alone in the kitchen, I started to wash the dishes. Marco had them stacked in the sink. Even though I knew he would wash them eventually if I left them alone, he knew that I would cave before he did and clean them myself. I hated messes, even though when we were kids I used to be just as much of a slob.
“Didn’t think you were they type to cle- Oh!”
I turned around just in time to get a glimpse of naked back and flying hair. The woman from the couch. She’d probably assumed I was Marco when she heard me in the kitchen. A few minutes later, she returned wearing a wrinkled dress and a smile so fake it looked like it hurt.
“Um, sorry about that. I thought you were... Where’s Marco?”
“Bathroom,” I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the dishes in front of me. Her dress was bunched up on one side and didn’t quite cover everything and I was pretty sure she didn’t realize that.
“Oh. Ah, I see. And he... Who are you?”
“He’s just a friend.” Marco came into the room, fully dressed and looking much more alert, and kissed the woman on the cheek as he walked past her. “Why do you clean every time you’re here?” he asked when he saw me at the sink.
“Because your apartment is filthy.”
“That’s your opinion.” Marco hustled the girl out of the room, talking in a low voice so I couldn’t hear.
A few minutes later I heard the sound of the woman getting her things together and then storming out of the apartment. She slammed the door behind her so hard the windows rattled.
“What did you tell her?” I asked when Marco came back in the room.
“‘Thanks.’ That’s polite, right?”
“Only if you don’t follow it up with, ‘Please leave now.’”
“Oops.” Marco didn’t sound very apologetic as he put the empty pizza-plate on the stack of dishes I was washing. “So you got us a nice, boring car for the weekend?”
I considered pressing the case of the Wendy/Cindy woman. He’d been a womanizer before, but never quite the ‘wham, bam, thank you ma’am’ type. He’d never forgotten a girl’s name, not that I could remember. Marco was more the type to think that every woman he met was ‘true love,’ at least for a few weeks until he got bored.
But we had larger things to worry about that day than Marco getting drunk and bringing home a club-hopper.
“Yeah, got us the car. We’ll leave whenever you’re ready.”
Marco poured coffee into a travel mug and headed out without a word to me. Neither one of us spoke, about the woman or about anything else, as he locked up the apartment and I led him down to the rental car. He just slouched in his seat, grumbling occasionally, and I didn’t see any reason to disrupt his bad mood.
We’d decided to trail Captain Hash. Actually, I had decided to start with Captain Hash. I told the others it was because it made sense for the more important alien to take the body of the higher ranking officer, but really, none of us had any idea if that were true or not. Still, I just couldn’t quite bring myself to tail Polk yet, and I was utterly convinced from Cleever’s behavior the night of the incident that he couldn’t be more than a peon. A poor one at that.
Hash lived off-post, in a quiet little neighborhood very much like the one I’d grown up in. I’d been to his house a few times before, for company MWR functions and once for a Super Bowl party, so finding it wasn’t a problem. We parked on the cross-street a few houses down, where we could see his red minivan in the driveway but where he couldn’t see us through a window.
And then we settled in to wait. I’d known, somewhere in the conscious part of my brain, that tailing someone like this would involve a great deal of boredom, but I still wasn’t fully prepared for it. Marco almost immediately pulled out his iPhone and started playing games on it, but I didn’t have anything to keep me distracted. My phone barely had a working camera on it. It didn’t take long for my nervousness about trailing my commander to degenerate into pure boredom.
Around mid-morning, Marco woke me up from a nap and pointed toward Hash’s house. The captain was heading out to his van with his youngest daughter, Alexis, towing him along by one arm. Six years old, blond pig-tails, pink shoes. She looked like the quintessential small child. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was intrude on a man about to go on an outing with his kid, but I didn’t have a choice. I started my car at the same time he did and followed him through the neighborhood, staying about a block behind him at all times.
Following was easier when we got to the highway and I could put two or three cars between us. Hash got off near the edge of town and pulled into a Chuck E. Cheese’s parking lot.
“Well, this is really helpful,” I muttered. “We discovered that the man spoils his little girl. Aren’t we just the saviors of the earth, following him all the way out here?”
Marco wisely didn’t say anything. Even I knew I was just looking for a reason to complain about this, and if he said a single word it would be all I needed to pick a fight with him.
“We’ll probably get the police called on us, sitting in the parking lot of a little kid place.”
“We’ll have to go in,” Marco pointed out.
I glared over at him, almost crashing into a car backing out of a parking space in the process.
“Don’t give me that look, Jake. You know we can’t just leave him alone in there.”
“It’s a Chuck E Cheese. What do you think he’s going to do in there? Have a battle meeting in the ball pit?”
“We’re not going to learn anything if we just sit outside in a bunch of different parking lots. It’s bad enough we can’t figure out how to bug the inside of his house.”
“Fine. But what are we going to do? It’s a kids place. We’re going to look like pedophiles.”
“So we’ll sit at a table and pretend we’re waiting for some little kid to get done playing. Why are you making such a case about this?”
I didn’t answer. I was making a case because I really didn’t want to go in there and intrude on a simple father-daughter outing. And I hated Marco for shooting down all of my arguments. In a reverse situation, I probably would have said all the same things he was saying, but that hardly made it any better.
We parked and went inside. Marco chatted at me while we waited in line about how his ex was always late dropping his kid off and we’d probably have to wait a while before they showed up, making sure that the young woman at the counter overheard so we could have a ready excuse for entering. She made some commiserating remark as she took our money and Marco smiled and winked at her.
We picked a corner table where we could see the entire dining area and tried to look as unobtrusive as possible. Hash and Alexis were seated in a booth along one wall, which surprised me. They both had drinks, but no food, and Alexis wasn’t bouncing around or running off to play on the game side.
It was still mid-morning, late enough to eat lunch if wanted but still too early for there to be a crowd. I sat with my back to Hash, just in case he looked over a recognized me.
“Well, this has got to be the most exciting play date ever,” Marco said.
“Shut up. Maybe she doesn’t want to go play.”
“Or maybe they’re meeting someone.” Marco jerked his chin toward their table and I turned to look. Two more people had arrived, a middle-aged man and a woman, and they slid into the booth on the opposite side of the table. “Curious.”
I shrugged. “So, maybe they’re related or something.”
“Dude, you are so deep in denial.”
“Am not. Come on, he’s not going to meet with...you know, others with his daughter right there.”
“You think? Let’s find out.” He got up and I started to follow, but he motioned for me to stay down.
I watched as he made his way back to the kitchen door and started flirting with a waitress. Since I had no idea how that was supposed to help anything, I rolled my eyes and turned my attention back to watching Hash and the others. They were all engaged in intense conversation, even Alexis. Somewhat desperately, I tried to spot any familial similarities between Hash and either of the newcomers.
My phone rang and the caller ID told me it was Marco. I glanced around but couldn’t see him anywhere on the dining floor, so I answered. “Where’d you go?”
“In the kitchen. Keep the line open but don’t make any noise, okay?”
“Why?”
“You’ll see in a minute. Just stay quiet and don’t hang up.”
Curious, I did what he said and waited. Soon, Marco came out of the kitchen wearing an employee t-shirt and an apron and carrying a tray of something. He delivered the tray to Hash’s table and I realized that I could hear them through my phone.
“But we didn’t order this.” The woman. She was trying to keep Marco from placing the tray on the table.
“I know. Complementary from the kitchen, for the 1,000th customer. There was supposed to be a fanfare to go with it, but we’re running a little short today.”
“Really, we don’t want it.”
“Please, ma’am. If I bring it back they’ll get all on my case and-”
“Okay, fine.” Hash cleared a space in the center of the table. “Just leave it here and go.”
Marco put his tray down and headed for the kitchen. Through the phone, I could still hear the four at the table complaining about being interrupted.
“It doesn’t matter. Just eat it and stop complaining.” For a moment I couldn’t place the voice, then I realized it was coming from Alexis. She reached across her father and pulled off a piece of what I finally recognized as cinnamon sticks. “We’ve only got an hour. Tell us about the place you found.”
“It’s on the edge of town, maybe half a mile from here.” The man leaned in closer as spoke, but that just made it clearer over my phone. Marco must have hidden his phone somewhere under the tray. “Part of a shopping strip next to a grocery store. Not quite as big as command wanted, but the ground composition is perfect for the tunnel.”
“Do you have the geological report?”
The man put something on the table. From my seat, I couldn’t tell what it was. “The realtor gave it to us. Probably the best their human technology can manage. Once we get in there, we can do a better survey.”
Alexis picked up the object and looked it over. Alexis, not Hash. My gut dropped as I realized she was the one running this little band of Yeerks. They hadn’t only taken my commander, they’d taken his six-year-old little girl as well. I balled hands into fists on the table, but there was no one to fight. I couldn’t exactly strike down the aliens around the table, I’d only accomplish hitting their hosts.
“It’s tiny,” Alexis complained. “The sub-visser isn’t going to like it.”
“Well, if he doesn’t like he should give us a better budget.” The woman poked at the cinnamon sticks on the table but didn’t eat any. “This is California real estate we’re talking about. A quarter acre here costs as much as an entire Fenish moon, kip curse it. These humans are insane.”
“Keep it down,” Hash warned. “There’s too many of them around to be talking like that.”
The woman shrugged. “No one can hear us. Isn’t that why we picked this place to meet? Everyone’s distracted chasing after their little brats.”
“Hey.” Alexis looked offended and shoved the object back across the table toward the man. “Not all the kids are brats.” When everyone just looked at her for a moment, she glared at them. “What? Oh, shut up, you don’t have to live like one.”
I looked up as Marco joined me at the table, looking mightily pleased with himself. I put my own phone on speaker so he could listen in as well.
“Look, you’re just going to have to find a way to make it work with what you’ve got,” Alexis told the other pair. “I’ll try and talk to the sub-visser about increasing the budget, but everyone’s tight right now. We can only create so much capital without drawing attention. Just make sure it’s big enough for the tunnels we need.”
Marco raised his eyebrow in surprise at me, but I ignored him and focused on the phone.
“We’ll, we’ve got a few other options.” The man pulled out a stack of other objects. With them all spread out on the table, I realized they looked like half-sized compact disks in clear plastic cases. “But they’re not going to be as easy to get to.”
Suddenly my phone started buzzing and the display told me that Cassie was trying to call. I jumped to turn the phone off before the people at the other table heard, but a quick glance over at them assured me that they hadn’t noticed a thing. They were all engrossed in looking at the little disks.
I’d accidently hung up on Cassie in all my fumbling with the phone, so I called her back.
“Jake? I think you two need to come back here.”
“We’re a little busy right now.”
“No, I mean, you really need to come back here. We found another one.”
“Another one what?”
“Another Andalite.”
Next
Previous