Read An Unkillable Frog Page 6

that day they barely spoke, save the perfunctory warnings of ambushes being prepared in empty classrooms. Each boy was walking in the near-stumble of a man freed from long imprisonment. Ian mentioned the dream on the long walk home and the boys fell to contemplation of its meaning. They professed no terror. Despite the death of many millions implied in the magnitude of that conflict, none saw it as a nightmare.

  "It's like we're part of a big story," said Nathan.

  "One we can't see the ending to,” added Ian. He was about to elaborate, drawing on the similarities of their current situation to a series of books where you could choose how the story advanced, but thought better of it. Jeremy could be withering in his views on children’s fiction.

  The pair watched for Jeremy's contribution.

  "Well my lads," he said finally. "Not a story, but a plan. We are part of a big plan.”

  Ian's expression became wracked with joy.

  "A mission!” He repeated this word.

  Nathan was the voice of reason.

  "The fact we all had the same dream doesn't mean it's a mission," he said warily.

  "It could just mean that it's a story-" A dark look from Jeremy and Ian - "… A plan then. One where we don't know what's going to happen. We're just being pushed around like …" He let the obvious conclusion to that sentence die on his tongue.

  "Let's look at the facts, Nathan," said Jeremy. "Someone is trying to make contact with us. If it wanted to push us around, it would send us nightmares and stuff. That makes sense, doesn't it?"

  Faced with this, Nathan merely smiled and looked at his feet. Ian aimed an invisible Sten gun at a billboard across the street and crooked his finger to the trigger.

  "What kind of a mission, do you think? Rescuing hostages, maybe.”

  "No, blowing up a dam!" shouted Jeremy.

  Nathan overcame his reticence.

  "A crashed UFO," he said hurriedly. "We are part of a rescue team that is trying to reach it first but the government has their own squad and they want to recover the bodies and also the engines because they want to make their own one.”

  Thus the likely nature of The Mission occupied their imaginations until late in the journey home.

  No dreams intruded into sleep that night. The frog had been moved from the shoebox to beneath Nathan's pillow, where it seemed quite content. He had tried to engineer a fight between the frog and his cat, but even in the close confines of a gladiatorial area improvised from a laundry basket, there was no conflict. Nathan was disappointed, and spared the frog from any further tribulations. When sleep eluded him that night, he slipped downstairs to the backyard. Clouds slid from the dark atop a fragrant wind, their white flanks swollen with promise of rain where the city lights struck them.

  To the North, beyond the hill into which their trench was inscribed, flashed the remnants of a storm. After a while, the wind stripped the clouds back from the night and revealed a spray of stars within the void. Nathan sat for long minutes and imagined their frog crawling from the ribbon of light, its mouth agape, a devourer of constellations. There was a creak of metal that drew his eyes earthward.

  Nathan's one plaintive attempt at a tree-house last Summer was destroyed by Scott's friends the very next day. Blackie had produced a brace of high-powered crossbows and they had fallen to an afternoon of target shooting. In truth, Nathan's tears at the loss of his shelter were quickly overcome when they let him fire the weapon. It kicked only a little. The bolt easily defeated the thin panels and embedded itself deep in the wood. Nathan and Scott's father has arrived home not much later. It became one of the best times Nathan would ever know with Scott. Like Blackie, he had spent time in the army and was an excellent shot. They gave Nathan another try and cheered when he pierced one of his plastic soldiers they had placed upon it as a target.

  The shattered door of the tree-house was now opening slowly under the touch of the wind. The boy saw then that the leaves surrounding the structure did not move; the breeze must have died some time before. Something was in there pushing against the wood. A pool of moonlight lay just beyond the tree and it was into this stage of ragged shadows that the beast would emerge. Nathan backed away as a shape formed there, until his courage broke and he bolted.

  Jeremy was dismissive the next day.

  "A fox or a big possum or whatever," he said.

  Ian pressed his friend for more information.

  "Did you catch the glint of its eyes? If they flash green it's a dog, and red it's a cat. If we hunt it down we can tell just before we kill it.”

  Jeremy pointed out that weapons were required to complete that enterprise. Ian looked nonplussed. In a precisely worded curse, he said that logistics were not the concern of hunters. Nathan rose on one knee and scanned the entrance to their hide. A hollow-gutted willow at the schoolyard's edge had been their lunchtime refuge for the whole week. Jeremy had cut thin switches of willow-wood and arrayed them close to hand.

  "Any attempt to rush this Forward Observation Post will be met by force," said Jeremy grimly. "This is our fortification too. Out there we might be at their mercy, but here," - he whipped the rod through a clump of leaves for effect - "we can defend.”

  "We can't defend here as well as the hill," said Nathan. "Or lay a trap for this thing I saw, if it's after me.”

  Ian ceased slashing the tree trunk with his switch. His voice was that of the zealot who wakes to find his fervour the currency of the realm. Ian's face was lathed from a billet of steel:

  "Traps," he stated.

  Opening his school bag, Jeremy produced a wide sheet of paper, onto which was scrawled a contour map of their hill.

  "I was saving this for when we were next at the position. I have noted the most likely angles from which we might be attacked.”

  As Jeremy spoke, the leaf-blinkered light playing through the enfolding branches revealed his Sergeant standing behind the other boys, nodding in approval.

  "We are vulnerable from both the South and East.”

  Seeing the confusion in Nathan, Jeremy orientated the map.

  "We can barricade our Northern flank easily, because we are aided by the natural fall of the land. But the East is largely flat. The South is where we roll rocks; it's steep as hell. But a determined aggressor ...” He halted and looked at Nathan, wanting his absolute command of that word to be impressed upon him.

  "A determined aggressor could still exploit that means of attack.”

  "This will take a lot of work, but we can do it," said Ian resolutely.

  Jeremy looked at the Sergeant and then Nathan. "It is best to fight on ground of our own choosing," he said. "History has proven that.”

  Nathan looked downwards. A small lizard raced amongst the tree-litter in darting flicks of its body, down through the twigged boughs before ascending to where the fallen branches lay. The boy knelt and watched it. No effort for him to shrink to the animal's size, the canopy of leaves above distanced to an atmosphere of white-dappled green. Now the lizard was crocodilian in size. A slick rainbow sheen danced about its scales; its black eyes spun lightly in their orbits, seeing all.

  This close, Nathan saw its muscles flex as it ran, silver cables scoring gouges in the wood where the talons landed. For a moment the sky was framed with a reptilian eclipse of rounded jaws above a swollen gullet, heaving with breath. Then the lizard turned and was lost to sight.

  "Nathan, do you think you can get up to the hill on Saturday? Tell Scott you're staying at my house. He never calls to check," said Jeremy.

  Nathan was at his normal size in an instant. He nodded, saying:

  "OK, but we are going to need some kind of weapon. Traps are fine, but if this thing gets past them, I don't want to be left up there without something to defend myself.”

  "Ourselves," Ian said emphatically.

  Nathan's eyes dropped again and he repeated Ian's last word in admonishment. Jeremy quickly noted that the school bell had probably rung long ago. Laughing, the boys burst from the cover
of the willow tree and ran to class.

  The next day, Ian opened a thick book entitled Guerrilla Warfare Through The Ages and laid it upon the pine needles. He tapped a picture of a spiked log suspended above a path knowingly.

  "The proper name for it is Malayan Gates," he said sternly.

  "Shouldn't it be Malayan Gate? There's only one of them," observed Nathan.

  Ian frowned. "No, it's still Malayan Gates. Now check this one out."

  He flipped forward a few pages.

  "This one is really nasty, the Venus Flytrap. It's like two combs made out of metal locked in together.”

  Jeremy laced his fingers in a matrix by way of example and proclaimed "Intermeshed" loudly.

  "Intermeshed," agreed Ian. "And once your foot slips in between them, you can't get it out. They have to amputate the whole foot.”

  Nathan pointed out that it would be impossible to make such a device without welding equipment. This produced an argument about whether wood could be an effective substitute, given that its tensile qualities were nothing like metal. Nathan started to suspect that this discussion was prolonged overly by Jeremy's obsession with the word "tensile.” Finally, the Venus Flytrap was abandoned when Nathan found another entry in the book.

  "These look easy," he said. "We just dig a hole and line it with spikes.”

  Ian smiled. "Hey, and when we're cutting the spikes, we could double up and make some to tie onto a branch that's going to whip around and stick into people, like in that movie.”

  Jeremy agreed. "That