WHAM!

"Ahhhh!" I was slammed. I tumbled through the air, covered in something like heavy glue. Water! Just water, but sticky as glue to my fly body.

My wings shook off the water and I found myself flying upside down. I spun around and advanced again.

"0h, man." I complained. "This is a whole new reason not to like rain!"

"I'm going ahead." Tobias said tensely.

"Raining too hard. I gotta land."

WHAM!

A glancing blow from a raindrop the size of a truck. It spun me around in the air.

"Ahhhhhhh! Man!"

"Jake! Are you okay!" Cassie cried.

Once again, those amazing fly wings turned me around and kept me in the air. But suddenly I realized I was in a sea of brilliant lights.

Purple! Red! Green!

Green?

Motion! Every hair on my nasty fly body felt it. Every screen in my fly eyes sensed it. Something moving. Fast! Big! A monstrous wall came at me with impossible speed! It was a mountain! Huge. Tall. Sloped. A mountain moving sixty miles an hour right at me, glowing in a rainbow of eerie colors! A windshield!

"Uh-oh." I said.

"TAAAAAHHHH!" I screamed in thought-speak as the deadly windshield blew toward me.

FLASH!

The jungle! Sudden movement in the deep bush.

A cocked arm.

A human arm belonging to a kid!

A spear flew!

I saw it coming for me. Saw the bamboo point, blackened with deadly poison. One scratch and I was dead. I .

FLASH!

Spear! No, windshield.

My wings beat the air at hundreds of strokes per second. I was fast, but not fast enough. A downdraft! A vicious wind that sucked me toward the windshield. I fought it, then ... in a split second, the wind became a magic carpet.

The power of my wings, the slipstream of wind ... I missed the top of the windshield by a millimeter!

I could actually see color-distorted human faces inside the car. I saw their glowing eyes as I flew past and over and seriously hauled my little fly butt up and up and up.

"Jake? You still with us, Jake?" Rachel asked.

"0h, yeah." I said. "Barely. But I'm here. You know, they really need to lower the speed limit. Cars shouldn't go more than maybe ten miles per hour."

We passed the road and left the eerie stream of fast lights behind us. We all got slammed by more raindrops, but personally, I was past caring about that. Then, even through the cleansing rain, I be gan to smell the grocery store. The fly sensed food. We didn't need Tobias to guide us the rest of the way. Our fly bodies were eager to head for the smell of rotting garbage. I was still reeling from the twin sensations of being attacked by a windshield and a spear. The jungle visions were so real. They were so absolutely real. I mean, I felt every single thing while I was in them. I felt heat and humidity on my skin, I felt bugs buzzing my face, I felt . . .

But I didn't have time for that now. The Safeway was beyond our ability to see. I mean, it was just so big it had no meaning to our fly eyes. What had meaning to the fly was that there was food up ahead.

We zipped in under the plastic sheeting that covered the damaged wall. Once inside the store, everything was very bright. I saw brilliant lights that seemed to be spewing a whole rainbow of unusual colors. There were people walking around below us. There was machinery moving. And there was a mound, a mountain of food all shoveled into one corner.

The Controllers had simply used earthmovers to shove all the shelves, the freezers, the refrigerators, the loose cans, the glass meat display' case, the donuts and cupcakes from the bakery area, the flowers, the cooked chicken and beans . . .

everything that had been in the store, all into one corner.

"You know." Marco said,"if you threw in some dog poop, this would be fly heaven."

"We are not alone." Ax pointed out. "There seem to be many others of this species here."

He was right. We had chosen the right morph. There had to be ten thousand flies in that store. I could hear them and smell them and even see them as they flew past.

"Well, no one is going to notice us, that's for sure." Cassie said. "We could dive right in."

"Excuse me? Hello? We're not here to eat garbage and make maggots." I said. "We are in and out, so let's pay attention.

What's going on here?"

"Well . . . there's that big thing in the middle of the room."

Cassie said. "That's what all the Controllers are clustered around."

"Let's get closer." I suggested. We zipped in our crazy fly way toward the middle of the store. There was a huge object there. As big as a small house, I would have guessed. But it's hard to tell how big something is when you're less than a quarter-inch long.

"Wait ... I think I hear Chapman's voice." Cassie said.

"I don't know how you can make sense out of all this noise."

Rachel grumbled.

"I've done the fly morph more than you." Cassie said.

"Remember, I was in fly morph when I spied on Chapman at the mall. There he is! I'm going closer."

I couldn't see where Cassie was going or where she landed. One fly looks pretty much like the next. And the store was like a fly airport. Flies were zipping all around.

"Cassie? Where are you?"

"I'm close to Chapman." she said. "0n his head, actually. On the bald spot."

"Get off of there! He could swat you!"

"Wait... I'm listening . ."

I buzzed around aimlessly, afraid for Cassie, and trying to figure out what on Earth the big ... thing. . . was.

"Whoa!" Cassie said. "Whoa! Whoa!"

"What? What? What?" I asked.

"Whoa!"

"What whoa!" I practically yelled in frustration. "What's going on!"

"It's a Bug fighter." Cassie said. "It's something new. An experimental Bug fighter. Faster, more weapons ... a new, prototype Bug fighter."

Bug fighters are the small, basic Yeerk spacecraft. They look like a streamlined cockroach with two long, serrated spears pointing forward. Those are the Dracon beams.

"What's it doing here? In a Safeway?" Marco asked.

"It crashed. Duh." Rachel said.

"I don't know." Cassie said. "Chapman isn't talking about how it got here. He's just telling this other Controller it has to be out of here in three hours or Visser Three is going to be madder than he already is. The guy says it's almost ready to go, he just needs to run some tests. Three hours will be no problem. Chapman says, "Good, because if it's three hours and one minute, I'll personally feed you to Visser Three for a snack.""

"Three hours?" Tobias said.

I was surprised to hear his thought-speak voice.

"Tobias! I thought you went for cover."

"The rain stopped." he said. "And I can see down into the store. They've knocked a hole in the roof so the security guys up on the roof can get down into the store quickly. There's a ladder.

I'm flying over."

"What do you see up there?"

"A bunch of nervous human-Controllers with machine guns."

"What should we do?" Rachel wondered. "In three hours they could fly this thing out of here."

"If only we could get some TV news people here." Cassie mused.

"If people could see this thing, and have proof. ."

"The Yeerks have too many people at the local TV stations and newspapers." I pointed out.