"HhhhREEE-hee-heee-heee!"
I had two choices. Get out of that stall and be captured. Or stay in the stall and be trampled. So I chose option number three.
See, when you acquire an animal's DNA, it seems to put them in a kind of trance. They remain very calm. Which is how it's possible to acquire a grizzly bear.
So I pressed both my hands against the heaving flank of the big horse and I focused my mind. He grew calm and quiet. His DNA flowed into me. It became a part of me.
"One of 'em is still in this barn somewhere," I heard a voice say.
Well. If you want to be inconspicuous in a horse barn, what are you going to do?
Exactly. I started to morph the horse.
Chapter 15
TA TA TA TA TATA TA TATA TA TA TA TAAAAH!
I heard the trumpet announcing the start of a race. And I heard the crowd outside in the grandstand murmuring in anticipation. But I had other things on my mind.
I had morphed a horse before. So I thought I knew exactly what to expect. But this was not just any horse. This was a racehorse. High- strung, aggressive, and just a little mean.
"Search every stall!" a voice cried. "Who knows what those kids have been doing to the horses! They turned one horse blue!"
"Well, make it fast. The first race has already started."
I heard stall doors opening and closing. They were at the far end of the barn. I had two minutes. Maybe.
I started the morph.
The first thing that happened was the ears. My human ears sort of crawled up the side of my head to the top. Then they sprouted. No big deal. I mean, no big deal once you're used to that kind of thing. If you weren't expecting it and your ears suddenly started crawling up the side of your head while getting long and pointy and covered with golden fur, you'd probably think it was a pretty big thing.
My body began to change very quickly. My butt grew huge! I had megabutt! My knees suddenly reversed direction with a loud, sickening grinding noise. My calves were stretching out, longer and longer. They were practically without meat. Just long bones covered with golden fur.
The fur rippled up across my body. Up my legs. Down my arms. Across my back and chest. I wish I'd had time to enjoy that part because it was cool. The horse had a soft, smooth, beautiful golden coat.
Then my arms started growing. The upper arms bulged with massive, bunched muscles. All the muscle was at the top. The bottom was prac- tically just a stick.
As I watched, my fingers melted together.
They looked exactly as if they'd been made of wax and put in a hot oven.
They just melted.
"Ahh!" I yelped. For a brief moment I'd seen the fleshless bones of my own fingers. Not something you want to see. Trust me. They were bright white. I could see my fleshless knuckles.
"I heard something! Down there!"
"Just keep searching. No one is getting out of this barn."
I fell forward, no longer able to stand on my legs. I fell forward just as the bare bones of my fingers melted together and hardened into hooves.
CLUMP!
My front hooves hit the ground. And now the horse — the realhorse — was starting to get extremely worried. He had come out of his "acquiring"
funk. And now he was beginning to realize something very, very, very
wrong was happening right there in his own stall.
"HreeEEE-heee-heee-he!"
"It's okay, boy," I started to whisper. But just as I started the word "okay,"
my entire face exploded outward.
My own nose just got up and left. It moved away. Far away. It sprouted into a muzzle a foot long. More than a foot long!
My nose grew so monstrously huge that it forced my eyes apart. It was incredible! My eyes, which had been just an inch apart, like any normal person's eyes, were spreading further and further. And as they separated, I found my field of vision growing wider and wider.
But then it was too wide! My eyes were staring out of the sides of my head. My eyes were where my temples should have been. And in be- tween those eyes was a nose the size of Rhode Island. My nose had stretched out so far it had dragged my mouth along for the trip.
I heard an awful growling, grinding sound coming from inside my own head. My teeth itched as they were replaced by the thick, flat teeth of a horse.
I was now almost a complete horse. Then, somewhere way, way back, I felt a tail sprout like some hyperactive weed. Okay, now I was done.
The real horse stared at me from one big watery eye. It sniffed me. What it smelled . . . was nothing. At least to a horse brain. Horses and other animals that rely on smell are not equipped for the idea that they could smell another horse and have it smell exactly like them.
It would be like a human suddenly finding herself face-to-face with a person who was identical. Only horses aren't exactly the geniuses of the animal kingdom. They can't make any sense of it.
So, weirdly enough, the real horse's reaction was to grow calmer. It was more or less as if I weren't there. And the stranger thing was that as I felt the horse brain in me awaken and bubble up beneath my own human consciousness, I felt the same way about the other horse.
It was like: What other horse?
I tested the horse's senses. Excellent hearing. Good sense of smell. But eyesight was a mess. I was nearsighted, but far worse than that was the way I was staring in opposite directions at the same time. My eyes looked left and right. I had no depth perception in those directions. I couldn't really tell very well if something on my left was two feet away or five feet. If you had put two sticks in the ground, I probably could not have told you which was closer.
But directly ahead of me, there was a zone where my horse eyes overlapped. Only there did I have binocular vision like humans and hawks have. I could see depth but only in the area right in front of me.
It was strange. But what was disturbing was the level of energy the big horse had. It was like every single muscle in my body was being given an electric jolt. I was an entire power plant of pure energy!
But there was nothing uncontrollable about the horse brain. I felt hunger, but not the raving, lunatic hunger of some species. I felt an edgy concern, but nothing like the insane, mind-eating fear of a small mouse or squirrel.
/ can handle this,I told myself. Just one thing left to do. I have to get out of the stall and out of the barn. And morph back and find the others.
Okay, three things to do.
There was just no way to be subtle about it. I stuck my big golden head out over the stall door and did what no horse has ever been smart enough to do: I slid the little lock to one side and pushed the stall door open.
Just act normal, I told myself. Yeah. Anormal girl who's turned into a racehorse.
I stepped out. I could see in both directions simultaneously, so I saw the two groups of stable workers at opposite ends of the barn.
Ooookay. Just walk on down.
One of the men froze. He stared. And then he came rushing over. "Hey!
It's Minneapolis Max! He's out of his stall. How the ... someone is going to catch some grief behind this! Joe! Grab his bridle, for crying out loud!