The Stranger (Animorphs) - Softcover

K.A. APPLEGATE is the author of the bestselling Animorphs series, as well as the Remnants and Everworld series, Home of the Brave, and the Roscoe Riley Rules series. She lives in Tiburon, California.

From Animorphs #7: The Stranger:

The sticky red whip of the Taxxon's tongue stopped moving.

But it was more than that. Nothing was vibrating against my antennae. There were no sounds. There were no smells, because the air itself had stopped moving.

Then, without meaning to, I began to demorph.

What's going on? I asked.

I'm demorphing, Cassie said. But it wasn't me doing it.

Are we dead? Is this some kind of hallucination? I asked.

If it is, I'm having it, too, Jake said.

I swiftly grew larger and larger. My center pair of cockroach legs dwindled and disappeared. My lower legs swelled and grew skin.

I fell from the Taxxon's tongue to the ground, too large and heavy to be stuck any longer.

Toes appeared. Fingers appeared. My true human eyes opened.

I looked around, dazed and disoriented.

The others were all there. We were all human again, barefoot and dressed in our skin-tight morphing outfits, like we always were when we came out of a morph.

Ax was back in his Andalite body, just adding to the general weirdness of the scene.

We were inside a building. As we had guessed, it was a lunchroom. There was a kitchen to one side. There were a dozen long tables down the middle of the room.

People sat at the tables, eating. Only...they weren't eating. They were holding forks. They were looking down at plates of food. They were getting ready to speak. They were holding mugs of coffee.

But no one was moving.

No one was breathing.