"I can morph to grizzly and—" Rachel started to say.
"No!" I cried. "These are good guys and, as far as we know, they're, not Yeerks! We can't hurt anyone! We need something small enough to get out beneath the door. I say housefly."
"I hate doing flies," Rachel shuddered.
"Ant?"
"No way."
"Cockroach?"
Rachel nodded. "Okay. I'll do cockroach."
Marco looked at her, mystified. "Flies gross you out but roaches don't?"
But Rachel and I were already busy morphing and Marco had to hurry to keep up.
This time the floor didn't rise toward us. It leaped! And the changes didn't involve the gentle, rather lovely transformation of skin into feathers.
This time the transformation started for Marco with antennae. Two huge, long, spiky antennae shot straight out of his forehead.
SPLEEET!
For Rachel the change began with the legs. The middle pair of legs. The ones that grew right out of her chest.
"Yah!" I yelled, even though I knew what to expect more or less. Still, seeing antennae come popping out of a friend's head and hairy, articulated legs from your best friend's chest. . . well, it is gross.
But I wasn't able to really focus too much on them. Because I was becoming distracted by the fact that one-foot squares of linoleum now looked as big as a front lawn. And by the fact that I could hear the sound of every bone in my body dissolving into mush. And by the fact that my skin was turning hard and smooth.
SPLOOOT! Legs popped out of my chest.
SPROUT! Antennae zoomed out of my head.
My own legs shriveled. I fell forward! I stuck out my hands to catch myself, but I no longer had hands.
"I've changed my mind," Rachel started to say jokingly. But whatever she had wanted to say next was lost because her pretty, human face turned hard and bronze, and her mouth split into the clicking mouthparts of a roach.
"What I was going to say was, "I've changed my mind, roaches aregrosser than flies,"" Rachel said.
And that's when we felt vibrations through our antennae. The heavy vibrations of footsteps. Angry footsteps.
It took some practice to use roach senses well enough to understand speech. But we'd had practice. So we were able to hear the captain saying, "Pizza Hut, eh? I'll show the little monsters some Pizza Hut!"
"Move it, boys and girls!" Rachel cried with the giddy enthusiasm she always has when facing certain death.
"RAAAAID!" Marco yelled.
"Really funny, Marco. Really funny," I muttered. "Can we just get the heck out of here?"
Air movement! Vibration! Wind! The scent of humans!
The door had been opened. It swept over our heads. We each motored our three pairs of legs. We were out of there!
Chapter 10
ZOOOOOOOOM!
We blew across highly polished linoleum squares.
My six legs motored insanely, my antennae waved wildly, my every cockroach instinct screamed, Run! Run! Ruuuuun!
So we ran.
Not that we exactly had any idea where to run.
"Where are we going?" Marco yelled.
"How would I know?" Rachel cried.
"Head for daylight!" I screamed.
"How do we tell daylight from plain old lights?"
"l don't know. Urn ... urn . . ." I tried to think of how a roach would know the difference between daylight and plain old interior lights. Of course!
Roaches are startled and scared by lights. The brighter the light, the scarier it would be.
"Run toward whatever scares your roach brain worst!" I yelled.
"Oh, swell. This stupid bug brain is already scared to death."
Vibrations! Lots of them. Big, heavy, earth-shaking. We're talking VIBRATIONS!
Through the muddy, fractured, nearsighted roach senses I saw, or at least felt, massive things falling from the sky. It was like someone was dropping trucks all around me!
Footsteps! Shoes as the same size as double-wide trailers!
WHOOOMPF! WHOOOMPF! WHOOOMPF!
"Look out! There's people walking on us!" Marco yelled.
WHOOOMPF! A monster killer shoe came down from the sky and slammed into the floor just an inch ahead of me. But the roach brain had reacted just in time. The roach brain knew how not to get stepped on.
"Let the roaches handle this!" I said. "The roach brains are good at this."
WHOOMPF! My roach body scurried out of the way, barely avoiding the side of a heel that would have squashed me flat and dead in a split second.
"Daylight! I think I see daylight!" Rachel cried.
"Lead on!" I dimly perceived Rachel's roach morph ahead of me. And Marco was just beside me. All together, three scared-as-heck roaches blew toward a bright light.
Suddenly there was a ridge. Pretty high to me, even though it was probably not even an inch high. It was the transom of a doorway, I realized, and I knew one thing: I really wanted out of that building.
"Tobias!" I called out. "Can you hear me? Are you up there?"
"Yeah. Where are you?" he asked. "And whatare you?"
"We are three lost little cockroaches in a big hurry!" Marco said.
"Got you!" Tobias said.
"Thank goodness for those hawk eyes," Rachel said. "Now get us outta here!"
"Keep moving and try to bunch up together. And by the way, there's a column coming your way. A column of... vehicles."
Something about the way he said "vehicles" should have alerted me. But all I could think about was getting close to Marco and Rachel so Tobias could pick us up.
We were on concrete now, and moving slower. When you're bug size, concrete doesn't look smooth. It looks like you're running across an endless field of small boulders. Concrete kind of glitters. At least that's how it looked to my cockroach senses.
And another thing about concrete, at least concrete with the sun beating down on it: It's hot!
"l'm gonna fry!" Marco wailed.
"Oh, man, it's hot! I didn't think bugs could feel temperature this much," I said.
"Tobias! Hurry up, man, we're seriously getting barbecued!"
Suddenly a shadow swooped down. I had to fight the urge to panic and run in a completely different direction.
Huge, rough-textured talons came hurtling down at amazing speed. The nails scraped along the concrete. One talon hooked beneath me and lifted me up, up, up.
"Yeeee-hah!" Marco yelled. "Red-tailed airlines.
No more heat. No more concrete. I was up in the air, wind whipping . . .
"Ahhhhhhhhhh!" I was falling! Tobias had lost his grip on me and I was falling, falling, spi-raling, tumbling through the air.
How far I fell, I can't say. My cockroach morph can't see farther than a few inches. But it seemed as if I was falling a long time.
Falling . . .
"Cassie!" Tobias yelled.
Falling . . .
"Cassie!" Rachel echoed.
"What about Cassie?" Marco asked.
"l dropped her!"
POOMPH!
I hit the ground. Dirt! It billowed up around me as I slammed into it.
But I was not hurt.
I was on my back. My legs pawed madly at the air. "How do you turn one of these things over?" I asked. I felt ominous thunder rumbling up through the ground.