Chapter 8 - Honors Earned...
The light of the bronze comet overhead weakly penetrated the forest’s dense canopy. Hudson wondered if he was responsible for the shadows that shrouded so much from his sight, if he had created such spaces of dark when he had sketched that landscape over several recesses in the gymnasium, or if the bronze comet and that teeming jungle had already existed eons before he made the first stroke with his green stick of charcoal. Those musings would before have sent Hudson’s mind into a unending loop of distraction. But Hudson was no longer the same boy. The tent had changed him, and Hudson concentrated on locating the man he knew waited for him.
A hissing vine occasionally twisted around Hudson’s ankle or wrist, but Hudson quickly severed such assaults with his blade. He made consistent, be it slow, progress through the growth. His exposed forearms screamed in insect bites and irritations. Often, the hissing of vines retreated to make room for the noise of growls and more menacing sounds Hudson could not name. Yet Hudson pushed on through the dim forest jungle, determined not to turn and flee after the tent had carried him so far.
“Talk to me, Uncle Mark. Where are you? Don’t keep silent now.”
The trees grew tighter, forcing Hudson to squirm through tangled branches. One compass direction appeared the same as another, and Hudson could no longer determine from which direction he had come. The shadows grew tall. Unseen creatures howled.
“You can do it, Hudson. You’re almost there. You can find the way.”
Hudson followed his instinct and pushed ahead, holding his simple blade before him to warn whatever lurked in the shadows that he was no easy prey. The comet’s bronze light intensified as the branches thinned. The trees again gave one another space. Hudson took another step and discovered a clearing at the heart of such jungle growth, a wide, open space flooded in bronze light, where an alien breeze delivered fresh air to Hudson’s tired lungs.
The jungle forest at Hudson’s back vibrated in a low hum, and Hudson turned to see a swarm of insects rise and blot the sky. A deep rumble sounded beneath Hudson’s feet and the ground trembled. A rapport cracked through the ear, and the trees leaned away from the clearing as a sinkhole collapsed in the heart of that open space. Hudson turned to run, but the shaking ground dropped him to his knees. A shrill reverberated through his skull, and Hudson slapped his hands to his ears as a mass of giant tentacles exploded out from the hole, flaying and striking in a whirlwind of thumping flesh.
Hudson screamed as a tentacle wrapped itself around his ankle before Hudson could crawl back into the forest’s cover. The tentacle’s grip tightened as Hudson attacked the appendage with his blade, but a trio of tentacles came to their fellow limb’s defense, grabbing Hudson’s wrists and arms before the boy could inflict much hurt. Hudson shouted as the tentacles lifted him into the air, shaking Hudson with such fury that he worried his teeth might shatter.
The tentacles lifted their catch higher and higher. Hudson stared downward from such height into the center of the expanding sinkhole, and he gasped as a pair of giant eyes rose from the dark depth. A mouth stretched open, and rings of teeth chattered towards Hudson. New tentacles clutched him, and Hudson squirmed as he felt the breath pushed from him.
A kraken of a creature, with sick gray skin blotched with spots of oozing vermillion, stared at Hudson and lifted its girth out from the hole and into the bronze comet’s light. A wide swath of ink traced behind the lumbering monster, a blight that curled Hudson’s nose. Hudson looked upon the monster and judged it terrible. It was a creature with no business burrowing beneath that jungle forest landscape, a creature too alien for that bronze comet’s illumination, a beast whose skin blistered as it climbed out from the sinkhole.
“Be brave, Hudson. You’ve found it. They’ll be here soon. Be brave only a little longer.”
Hudson willed himself to look beyond the rings of the kraken’s taunting and clattering teeth. In the sinkhole behind the rising kraken’s mass lay a cocoon of green vines, like the cocoon that had encased Principal Maddox. The cocoon pulsated to the rhythm of an internal heartbeat, and Hudson’s bones told him that he had found Uncle Mark. Hudson prayed that he might somehow next find the means to rescue him.
“Just a little longer, Hudson. They’re coming.”
The cocoon rested upon a pile of silver and gold eggs that glimmered in the comet’s bronze light. Hudson couldn’t count the eggs as he squirmed against the kraken’s grasp. There must have been hundreds of eggs filling the sinkhole, treasures the kraken had buried beneath that strange planet’s ground. Hudson could not guess the motivations for a monster to collect so many eggs and to top his pile with a green cocoon. Who knew what sparkled in the eyes of the such creatures who lurked in nightmare and shadow? Hudson wondered if the kraken had sought out that planet teeming with such thick forest, if the kraken had hoped so many hissing vines and such think branches would forever hide his loot from those who searched so far to recover it.
“They’re here, Hudson.”
The trees behind Hudson shuddered to the sound of explosions, and the kraken roared as Hudson’s avian companions charged out of the jungle and fell upon the tentacles with blurred blades and battle cries. The horizon spun in Hudson’s sight before the kraken released him, desperate to release its prey so that every limb might be better wielded for defense. Hudson hit the ground and grunted as arrows and rifle fire whistled and buzzed over his head.
Hudson again lifted his blade and joined in the assault. The kraken cried and attempted to retreat again into the sinkhole. But its girth was too foreign to that landscape, too heavy, too cumbersome to flee the attackers setting upon it. Tentacles waved and swiped, all of them too slow to strike the beings who dodged each attack the kraken threw at them. Hudson had hardly swung his own blade at all, had hardly blinked, before that monster’s bulk collapsed with a sighing breath of death, in the end stranded in that putrid trail of ink its flesh trailed behind.
Hudson sprinted towards the sinkhole as his companions roared victory cheers. He slid down a muddy bank to reach that green cocoon resting atop the egg pile, never considering how he might climb back out. His blade whistled as it quickly worked. Hudson grunted and tore the last knotted vines away.
And then, Hudson smiled.
“I knew you would find me. I knew you wouldn’t give up on me.”
Uncle Mark held Hudson close as the feathered faces of Hudson’s companions descended into the sinkhole and gathered what had been stolen from them. Hudson and Uncle Mark each took an egg and helped carry the unhatched young back through the dense forest. Even the vines balked before them, retreating now deep into the shadows rather than challenge those avian creatures who wielded such weapons. Oblivious to the adventure around him, Principal Maddox’s snoring remained unbroken when Hudson returned to the tent. The chamber soon brimmed with glimmering golden and silver eggs as the comet’s bronze light filtering through the tent’s high aperture illuminated everyone’s joy.
Hudson moved to return the small blade he had taken to its rack when the gray-feathered companion stopped him.
“We won’t dishonor you by asking that you give that blade back to us, Mr. Keel. You wielded it bravely, and it belongs to you now.”
Hudson grinned. “But where would I keep it?”
The avian face laughed. “Why not hide it in your shoe?” The companion took the mallet from beside the gong’s frame and handed it to Hudson. “We were right about you. You helped us find our young ones. We think you should be the one to strike that gong and send us back into the stars. You should be the one to send us back home.”
Hudson’s arms ached as he struggled to hold the mallet, but he hesitated before striking the gong so that he could ask another question.
“Where did that monster come from? Did I bring it to life when I drew it out of Amy Zerlinger’s scribbled paper? Or was it already alive? Did I just somehow know how to draw it?
The companion shrugged. “That’s a wonderful question, but I can?
??t answer it.”
The answer was not the one Hudson hoped for, but it was one Hudson trusted. Hudson grunted and lifted the mallet as high as thin arms managed and once more struck the gong set in the center of the tent’s chamber. The air shimmered. A black, night sky once again filled the aperture’s view. Stars again grew tails, and Hudson recognized when the tent departed from that lush, alien world.
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