ANIMORPHS #45: THE REVELATION

Sample Chapter

We ordered burgers from an all-night diner on the outskirts of town. The place was too much of a dump for the Yeerks to check out. I hoped. I made us eat in the car anyway, in a dark corner of the parking lot.

I told Dad everything. Almost.

My story seemed to wash over him somehow. He looked stunned, disbelieving. He shook his head as though everything I was telling him was, well, just too much for the man.

When I stopped talking, the first thing he said was that he had to call Nora.

I let him walk across the gravel parking lot to the pay phone. Let him dial the numbers.

"Honey, it's me," he said. "Yeah, I'm okay."

I could hear Nora on the other end. Yelling, worried, scared.

"I'm with Marco," Dad said. "Where? We're at the..."

I cut the connection and grabbed the receiver from Dad's ear. Slammed it down angrily.

He glared at me. "What was that!" he demanded.

For the first time since the brutality at Russ's house, it felt like the father I knew was with me. Real Dad. Thinking Dad. Authority-figure Dad. For the first time since I'd demorphed, the look in his eye was anything but distant.

"Why did you do that!"

I started to walk back to the car. He followed.

"I said, what was that about!"

I sat down on the passenger car seat. Dad got in his side and slammed the door. He had a door to slam.

"You know exactly what it was about," I said calmly. "If you've been listening to me at all, you know that by now the Yeerks have staked out our house, probably tapped our phone. I'd bet they're sitting on our couch right now, waiting for you to walk in the door so they can..."

"Stop," Dad said angrily. "Stop it. I've listened to you. I've heard every word. But you have to understand... I have no proof, no... how can I believe all these things you say? You changed from a gorilla into my son. But I only think I saw that. I was terrified. I was tortured, then kidnapped. Maybe my mind is making things up. Maybe this is a dream."

Before he'd finished talking, I was on my way.

My skin hardened, then blackened, then thinned like eggshell. Legs and arms shortened until there was nothing left to hold me up. I fell forward onto the seat, shrinking and shrinking until the crumbs from the burger bun looked like boulders, and then blindness cut my view.

Shloooooop!

My waist reduced to millimeters, splicing me almost in half.

"Oh, God!" Dad cried. "Oh, no!"

I was becoming an ant. But I wasn't going to wait for the ant's un-mind to surface. No.

I began to demorph.

I let Dad watch me, and all the horror and weirdness of morphing. I let Dad sit there, alone and up close with his new reality, as I demorphed back to boy. And began to morph again.

Feathers imprinted my skin in 2-D, then 3-D. They grew up and out as my body shrank and my head deformed. My nose grew hard and sharp and hooked. My fingers, though smaller, grew stronger, became flesh-piercing talons. Eyes sharpened to superhuman clarity.

Again, I started the return trip to boy. Back to the form Dad knew as his son.

"I have about twenty other animals I could morph to," I said as the last feather disappeared. "Want to see my lobster?"

A cold sweat coursed in tiny rivulets down the side of my father's head. He didn't need to see any more.

I'd scared him, creeped him out. Made him nervous and worried and concerned. He was handling it. For a guy whose reality had just been completely rocked, he was handling it pretty well.

He looked out through the windshield and stared for a moment at a point far away. The sun was just beginning to think about rising. It gave our desolate patch of the world a preview. Dad looked back at me.

"I get it," he said slowly. "I get it. You've been through hell."

"Through hell and back." I smiled. "A few times."

Dad smiled back.

"I'm going to take you to some friends of mine, Dad," I said. "You can hang out with them until we decide..."

"Whoa," Dad said quickly. "Are you nuts? I'm going to the police."

"Dad, the Yeerks are the police. I can't let you do that.''

He was shocked and confused again. "What do you mean you can't let me. I'm your father. I tell you what to do."

Not in this reality, Dad. Not in this world.

"Dad, of course you're my father," I said, fighting an onslaught of emotion. And it would be so nice to have someone make decisions for me again, I added silently. "I love you. I respect you. But I've been fighting this war for a long time. I've been on more missions, in more fights, and seen more terrible things than you can imagine. This is my fight. My war. Me and my friends, we know what's going on. You don't...."

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