In the time of Dinosuars

K.A Applegate

My name is Marco. And I'm the idiot who happened to be watching the news on TV, and happened to see the story about the nuclear submarine that went down.

Do you ever wish you could just learn to keep your mouth shut? I do. At least in this case I did. Because if I'd just kept my mouth shut, I wouldn't have ended up trying to suck air through my blowhole in the middle of a raging storm that kept dropping thirty-foot waves on my head. But maybe I should back up. Maybe I should explain why I had a blowhole in the first place.

I'll make this quick: Things are happening here on good old planet Earth. Things most people would never dream of. Things that if you told people they'd say, "Yeah, right. Want to try on this straitjacket?" We are being invaded. Not by spaceships from outer space firing ray guns. I mean, yes, from spaceships, but mostly the Yeerks don't use a lot of ray guns.

The Yeerks are a parasitic species. Like tapeworms or lice or certain gym coaches who think you can't play basketball just because you are somewhat not tall.

But Yeerks don't crawl on top of your head like lice. They crawl inside your head. A slug like a big snail slithers into your ear, oozes into your brain, flattens itself out, sinks into all the cracks in your brain, and from that point on, controls you. It can even force you to listen to Kenny G.

Actually, it's not funny. I tend to make jokes, especially about things that bother me. And the Yeerks bother me. One of those people who has been enslaved by the Yeerks is my mother. We thought she was dead. She's not. At least I think she's not. When I last saw her she was still alive. Trying to destroy me and my friends, as a matter of fact. Which is a lot worse than just being grounded.

Anyway, there are the Yeerks, this parasitic species that rampages throughout the galaxy looking for new host bodies. They control the Gedds, a species from their home planet. They

control the Hork-Bajir and the Taxxons. And their target now is Earth and humans.

What does this have to do with me having a blowhole? Well, there's another species in on this with us. The Andalites. The Andalites are stretched thin trying to resist the Yeerks. An An-dalite task force got hammered in orbit above Earth. One of them, Prince Elfangor, made it to Earth and happened to crash near my friends and me. He gave us the Andalite morphing power. The ability to absorb DNA from any animal, and then actually, literally become that animal.

We use that power to resist the Yeerks. "We" being Jake, who is our prematurely middle-aged, fearless more-or-less leader; Cassie, our animal expert and tree-hugging environmental wacko; Rachel, Jake's fabulously beautiful but totally insane cousin; Tobias, who's a Page 1

K[1]._A._Applegate_-_Megamorphs_02_-_In_The_Time_of_Dinosaurs mouse-eating bird; the Cinnabon-chomping Andalite scorpion-boy we call Ax; and me, Marco, the sensitive, sensible, smart, and good-looking one. Also modest. And honest.

And did I mention cute?

Anyway, I was hanging out with my dad around noon on a rainy Saturday, slumped down in the easy chair, staring at the TV, wondering if I had the energy to go into the kitchen to get more Doritos, when the news flash came on.

A nuclear sub was reported to have developed

reactor problems. It was feared sunk. Rescue ships and divers were on the scene, but the storm was making it hard for them. They couldn't find the sub, which could be dousing everyone on board with radiation.

"Oh, man," I groaned.

"Yeah," my dad agreed. He was slumped on the couch wondering if he had the energy to go to the kitchen and get his Cheez Puffs.

"Urn ..." I said.

"Are you going to the kitchen?" he asked hopefully. I sighed. "Actually, I just remembered I'm supposed to help Jake with some work over at his house."

"Oh. You'll miss the game," he said. "So before you go, could you grab me the bag of Cheez Puffs? And a soda? And a pillow? And give me the remote control."

I carried about twenty-four items to my dad, then took off out into the rain to walk to Jake's house. I had to tell him about the sub. I don't know why, I just had to. I guess I thought we could possibly help. Thirty minutes later, the six of us were assembled on a wet beach. There was absolutely no one in sight. No lifeguards. No little old ladies collecting shells. I mean, it was really raining. We were all soaked through and had wet sand

caking our shoes. All except Rachel, who I swear has some magic ability to repel dirt, mud, and rainwater.

"Well, we have privacy, that's for sure," Jake said, looking around.

"What are we going to do with our outer clothing and shoes?" Cassie wondered.

See, we can't morph clothing and shoes. Just things that are skintight. I was wearing bike shorts and a way-too-small, totally uncool T-shirt under my clothes. Those I could morph.

"I've said it before, I'll say it again," I said. "We have got to do something about these funky morphing outfits. We are a disgrace to super-heroes. Can you imagine us ever being in a comic book alongside Spider-Man? We'd look like the Clampetts."

"The what?" Cassie asked.

"You know, the Beverly Hillbillies."

"Marco, you do realize that Spider-Man isn't real, right?" Rachel asked. Page 2

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"And even if he was, I don't know what fabric that outfit of his is made from. Never bags at the knees or elbows. I mean, come on."

"We'd better get going before someone shows up," Jake said glumly. Jake hates dark, overcast days. It makes him grumpy.

We stripped off our outer clothes and shoes and stuffed them into a backpack. We stuck the

backpack in one of the blue trash barrels they had along the beach.

"Maybe we'll get lucky this time and they won't pick up the trash today," Cassie said.

"Yeah, it'd be a shame to lose those jeans of yours," Rachel said. "If your legs shrink five inches those jeans would almost fit." Rachel and Cassie are best friends. But they don't agree on the importance of clothes.

<Come on,> Tobias called down from above. <There are guys out there who might be dying. Let's just get it over with already!> Floating over our heads was Tobias, a red-tailed hawk. A wet red-tailed hawk. We heard his thought-speak in our heads. We also knew why he was anxious. Tobias does not like the water. But he was trying to act all macho about it.

We waded into the water. Jake, Cassie, Rachel, and me. And Ax. Ax was in his disturbingly attractive human morph. As opposed to his disturbingly, disturbing true Andalite body. He had to return to his own form before he could go into another morph. He'd picked up his newest morph at The Gardens - with Cassie's help, of course. Tobias had to morph straight from his hawk shape. Which, as you can guess, is not all that fun, since a hawk in the surf is pretty helpless.

I swam out a ways with the others. Tobias

looked around once more with his hawk eyes and pronounced the beach definitely empty. Then he sighed heavily and plunged into the water. I focused my mind on the DNA inside me. I formed the picture of the dolphin in my head.

And I began to change.

Now you know how I got a blowhole.

Cassie

I love being a dolphin. How can you not love it?

I'm not crazy about morphing insects. Especially the mindless little automatons like termites and ants. But I'm convinced that dolphins have souls. Or maybe it's just some arrangement of DNA-based characteristics that make them seem that way to humans. But whatever it is, whether it's something mystical or something real, I like it.

We were in the surf, breasting the waves and staggering against the flow. When the cold water was up to my chest I pushed off and swam. It wasn't easy fighting the waves. Humans are not very strong in the water. As I dog-paddled, I began to morph. My fingers stretched out longer and longer. A webbing grew between them, like a duck's feet. My arm Page 3

K[1]._A._Applegate_-_Megamorphs_02_-_In_The_Time_of_Dinosaurs bones shrank and drew this webbed hand toward my body till it was clearly a fin and not a hand any longer.

My legs softened. Like overcooked spaghetti, they twined together and melted into the long tail of the dolphin. At the same time my feet twisted outward and thinned to become the tail flukes. Then, as I gasped and spit out mouthfuls of salt water, my flat human mouth and face began to bulge outward. It was like something out of a cartoon. As if I were made of Silly Putty and someone was stretching my face outward.

My eyes moved to the side and now my vision was largely filled with my own grinning dolphin snout.

More dolphin than human now, I sucked in a last lungful of air through my mouth. When I exhaled, it went out through the blowhole that had appeared where the back of my neck had been.

I dove below the churning surface. I was still in shallow water so I could see the sand and gravel and shells being tugged to and fro by the water.

Humans may prefer shallow water, but it makes dolphins uneasy. So I kicked my powerful tail and headed away from shore. Think about the happiest day you've ever had in your life. Think of how you feel on a sunny day, with no school and no chores, your allowance fresh in your pocket and some really fun thing awaiting you. That's exactly what it feels like to be a dolphin. Then, to all that good feeling, add this sensation of power, ease, of being the perfectly adapted creature in the perfect place.

<Come on, guys!> I yelled, giddy and goofy on the sheer joy of being a dolphin in the sea.

And they came. All of them felt the same way. We were on a serious mission. But that didn't mean we couldn't have fun. We raced out to sea, surfacing to deliberately plow into the rising walls of waves. We hurried, but we played the whole way. And then we began to see the helicopters chattering overhead and the Navy ships patrolling back and forth across the sea. The waves were high, the winds, too. When we surfaced it was in the valleys between waves. We'd blow out our stale breath and suck in fresh air, letting the gray waves lift us up so we could see.

<We must be near where they think it is,> Jake said.

<Is anyone else sucking salt water every time they try to breathe?> Marco asked. <Is that good for you?>

<We are in the ocean, Marco,> Rachel pointed out. <There's bound to be water in the ocean.>

<Fine, but do we have to be out here in the middle of a storm?>

<Come on,> Jake said. <Let's go below.> I nosed downward and kicked. It was much calmer and quieter below the surface. We were in maybe two hundred feet of water. It's hard to tell, Page 4

K[1]._A._Applegate_-_Megamorphs_02_-_In_The_Time_of_Dinosaurs but it looked that deep, anyway. I was swimming about fifty feet down and could just barely see the ghostly glimmer of sand far below me. Mostly what I saw was murky blue. Not even many fish. I fired an echolocation blast from my head. The sound waves spread out, then bounced back. My dolphin brain drew a mental picture of a seabed scarred by a series of deep fissures. I also "saw" divers in the water, and sensors being towed on long cables from the ships above us.

<Even with our echolocation we need to spread out,> Tobias said. <Those fissures are as big as small valleys. The sub could be in one of them.>

<Okay,> Jake agreed. <But everyone stay within thought-speak range of the person on your left and right.>

Easier said than done. You ever try and swim while keeping in line with dolphins on your left and right? Plus we had to surface to breathe, and each time we did the waves would push us forward or back. Rachel was on my right. Ax on my left. We advanced across the ocean floor, blasting the water with our ultrasonic sound waves. It had taken forty-five minutes of hard swimming to reach the site. We couldn't go beyond two hours in morph. Not unless we wanted to spend the rest of our lives as dolphins.

Forty-five minutes to get there. Forty-five to get back to shore. That only left thirty minutes to search. Not enough.

But twenty minutes later I saw, or felt, a strange picture in my head.

<Hey! Ax, Rachel. I think I got something.> I fired a new echolocation blast and "listened" carefully. Yes, something weird. Something definitely weird. Something too "hard."

<Yeah. I have something,> I said. <Rachel, aim a little to your left. Ax, just a hair to your right.>

In a few seconds, Rachel said, <Nothing. I'm not getting anything.>

Ax said. <A hard, angular object that appears to be jutting up from the seabed. No, from one of the fissures.>

<I'll take a look,> I said. <It could be just some piece of junk or garbage.> I shot to the surface, filled my lungs, and

went down. Down and down, till even my dolphin body began to feel the water pressure.

I kept firing echolocating bursts. And then I was certain. It rose just a few feet from the fissure. But if I recalled my submarine war movies, it was a periscope. The sub's commander must have extended it in the desperate hope that someone would see it.

Someone had. Although not exactly the someone he'd expected Jake

we'd found the sub. Now the question was: How could we get the Navy divers to find it?

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<Kidnap one of them,> Rachel suggested.

Rachel almost always likes the direct approach. And in this case, she was right. We needed to get this done with fast. We needed to wrap this up and bail.

<Okay,> I said, <we kidnap a diver.>

<What?> Marco said. <You're listening to Rachel!?>

It was easy to find a diver. Their wet-suited bodies and stream of bubbles showed up nice and clear on echolocation. The diver ignored us as we drew near. We were just a pod of dolphins swimming by. We weren't what she was interested in. I swam around behind her. The others followed.

<Okay, now, we can't help but scare the poor woman, but be as gentle as you can be,> I said. <Grab a leg or an arm. Rachel, help me push.> One thing you can say about dolphins: There is nothing they can't do in the water. The six of us moved like a well-drilled acrobatic team or something. Hand, leg, hand, leg, we had the diver before she knew what was happening. The others lightly gripped the wetsuit with their dolphin teeth.

"Mblo bio blm blmo!" She yelled. At least that's what it sounded like. Rachel dug her nose in the small of the woman's back. I nosed her neck, and together the six of us propelled her through the water, almost standing upright, at a speed that must have seemed pretty amazing to her. She struggled, of course. I think for a moment she thought we were sharks. I could see wide, scared eyes through her face mask when she turned to look back.

But maybe she'd heard stories about dolphins helping drowning people. Or maybe she just liked dolphins. Maybe it was just so obvious we were on a mission. After a few seconds, she relaxed. We let her go and I swam up and offered a dorsal fin. She took it. Cassie came up on her other side. And now she cooperated with us, holding on to our dorsal fins as we raced more easily ahead. We stopped directly over the sub. The diver couldn't see it since it was way below us. But we made a nice show of racing down, then back up, so she'd know what we were doing.

Unfortunately, all this took time. Too much time. We had no choice but to demorph in the open sea.

We swam half a mile away from the search area and demorphed. Bad for most of us. Worse for Tobias, wallowing with waterlogged feathers in salt water. Ax, in his own body, could swim quite well. We remorphed as soon as we could. And now, with plenty of time, we went back to the site. We had to make sure the divers were there.

<Hey, these guys work fast,> Tobias said when we got back to the site. Page 6

K[1]._A._Applegate_-_Megamorphs_02_-_In_The_Time_of_Dinosaurs A small submersible was already pulling away from the submarine. I guess it was some kind of rescue vehicle for taking people off sunken submarines. We hovered above the sunken sub. It was

wedged deep in the fissure. It was hard to see how they'd ever get it out.

<May I ask a question?> Ax said. <What is the purpose of these submarines? This is a very large craft for simply looking at the seabed?> A second small submersible was on its way down. It was zipping along. And the divers were all heading for the surface.

I winced. The purpose of this kind of submarine was a little embarrassing to explain to an alien. <Actually, Ax, it's a military submarine. See the rows of hatches along the back? It's a nuclear missile sub. There's a missile under each of those hatches. Armed with a nuclear warhead.>

<Ah. I see.>

<It's deterrence. You know, in case the enemy uses nukes on us, we have these safe on our subs,> Marco explained.

<Well . . . okay, we don't exactly have one right now,> I said, feeling fairly idiotic. <But we used to. And we may get one again.>

<We're shopping all the sales,> Marco said brightly. <Enemies "R" Us, EnemyMart, J.C. Enemy. Don't worry, we'll find one.>

<Are those guys all in a hurry or what?> Rachel asked.

Cassie said.

I looked down. The rescue vehicle was already pulling away from the sub. But instead of heading up to the surface, it was simply racing away. Like it was desperate to put some distance between it and the sub.

Tobias said.

<Outta here!> I yelled.

We turned and took off. We powered our tails and tore through the water like torpedoes.

The rescue vehicle was a quarter mile ahead of us. I lost sight of it when we shot to the surface to breathe.

Up, suck in air, down and swim, and up, suck in air, down and swim. It was slower going on the surface, but we needed to breathe because we were straining every muscle in our bodies.

<This is probably stupid,> Rachel said.

Flash! A light so bright it seemed to burn right through me. Page 7

K[1]._A._Applegate_-_Megamorphs_02_-_In_The_Time_of_Dinosaurs WHAAAAAAM! The shock wave hit us.

I tumbled through a world that was being torn apart at the seams. And then that world went black.

Rachel

I don't know how long I was unconscious. But when I came to I was on the surface of the water. I was lolling there like some kind of dead fish. First thought: Where are the others?

Second thought: How long have I been in morphl

<Cassie! Tobias! Jake!> I yelled in thought-speak. No answer. I moved my tail and flippers. Okay, at least I wasn't injured. I dove below the surface and looked around. The water was clearer than it had been. Strange, given the fact that a nuclear warhead had just exploded.

<Marco! Ax!>

Marco answered. He glided up beside me.

<No. But I was knocked out.>

I fired an echolocation burst. Fish. A pair of distant whales. No dolphins. Although if they were floating on the surface they might not show up.

Marco said. <We dive down, then look up. They should be silhouetted against the sun.>

<Good idea. Only it's raining. There's no . . .> I'd been about to say there was no sun. But the golden rays were piercing the water around me.

<Must have cleared up. Man, we may have been out a long time.> We dove down deep. We looked up. And there, outlined against the sun, were four tapered shapes.

<Come on,> I said and shot toward them. I bonked one of them with my nose.

<Hey! What? What?> Tobias yelped. <Jeez! You scared me to death. Good grief, I thought you were one of those lousy wildcats.>

<Tobias, only you would wake up suddenly and worry about wildcats,> Marco said.

<Try sleeping in a tree in the woods,> he grumbled. <You'll worry about them, too.>

We nudged each of the others. Ax and Jake revived. Cassie revived, too. But she woke up screaming in pain.

<Ahhh! Ahhh!>

That's when we noticed the blood leaking from her eyes and blowhole. Page 8

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<Oh, oh, it hurts!>

<Demorph!> Jake yelled.

Gradually the gray rubbery flesh melted away and a human girl emerged. As she demorphed, the dolphin's pain was left behind. I nuzzled in close, giving her a dorsal fin to hang onto.

"Wow, that really hurt," she said calmly, once her human mouth was back in place. She looked around. "Why is the water so calm? Why is it sunny?" She lifted herself up a foot out of the water, using Jake and me as support.

Then she settled back. "Urn ... am I awake?"

"And this isn't a dream?"

<Can't be a dream,> Marco said. <There's not a single Baywatch girl around. Carmen is always there when I dream.>

"You're sure this is reality?" Cassie asked before I could make a crushing remark to Marco about the total impossibility of Carmen Electra ever even looking at him.

<Cassie, it's not a dream,> Jake said.

"Okay. Then why is there a volcano over there?" No one said anything for a few seconds. Then all at once we dove down under, leaving Cassie floundering and yelling, "Hey!" I dove down twenty feet, turned and powered my way straight up. I exploded from the water, smooth and sleek as a missile. I shot up into the air, up where I could see beyond the tops of the short, choppy waves. I took a look. Then, too stunned to line up for a dive, I belly flopped. The first dolphin in history to belly flop. <There's a volcano over there! There's an actual volcano! We don't have a volcano. I would have noticed that.>

<That was a definite volcano,> Tobias agreed.

<Is it some weird effect from the explosion?> Jake asked. <Like maybe setting off that bomb in the fissure caused some kind of sudden erup-tion?>

"We have to get back! People could be hurt!"

<Something is way wrong here,> I said. Volcanoes don't just suddenly erupt. Besides, look how high that thing was. That takes hundreds of years of lava and ash building up.>

<How do you know anything about volca-noes?> Jake demanded. <Did we do volcanoes in school?>

<No it was . . . some other place,> I mumbled. But they all just waited. Waited to hear how I knew about volcanoes. <Oh, all right. It was the Magic School Bus, okay? They went into a volcano^

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<Excuse me,> Ax said politely. <But something very large is coming toward us. A pair of creatures of some sort. I just echolocated them.>

<A pair of whales,> I said, dismissing it.

<Not whales,> Ax said.

"Uh . . . what is that?" Cassie asked. She was staring hard, but she started to morph back into dolphin.

<What?>

"That!"

I turned to follow the direction of her stare. We all turned. It rose ten feet from the water. A very long neck. Like a gray-green giraffe. On the end of that neck was a sculpted, streamlined head about two feet long. And coming up, right behind it, was another tall neck and head.

<No way,> Tobias whispered.

<What is that, the Loch Ness monster?!> Marco cried.

<It's Visser Three in morph!> I said. <No, wait, can't be. There are two of them.>

<No way!> Tobias said again.

<They're coming after us!> Cassie said.

<As I said,> Ax said smugly, <not whales.> Tobias

I knew what it was. Or at least I knew what it looked like. But I wasn't about to say anything. If I was wrong, Marco would tease me about it till the day I died. Besides, it was impossible. Totally impossible. So I didn't say anything.

But oh, man, I hauled my dolphin tail out of there.

<They're too fast,> Jake said. <Man, they're fast!> We were plowing up the now-placid water. We were going flat out. But the creatures were gaining on us. And the whole time in my head I was going, No way, no way.

And yet with each glance at those long necks, with each flash of those snake heads, I became more convinced.

The creatures were no more than a hundred feet back.

<We can't outrun them,> Jake said grimly. <We either have to split up or fight.>

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<Fight!> Rachel said. <They're just some kind of big squid or something probably. Let's get them!>

I liked Rachel even before I became a hawk. But now I really like her. She could be a bird of prey. She'd be a natural.

But she was wrong this time.

<Split up,> I said.

<We haven't tried yet,> she said.