Chapter 16
Eyes of Orange
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“What was that?!” Sara whispered. For reasons that went beyond the rational, the shriek had frightened her deeply. Somewhere in the darkness of her subconscious, a sub-Sara was crouched with her teeth bared, expecting to be attacked.
The others were spooked, too. That shriek had tickled the primal fear that lurked below the surface of the everyday mind and was meant to petrify and freeze, hold the prey in place until the predator could make the killing bite.
Luis tried to restore reason. “It’s a rabbit,” he said. “Do you remember when we heard the rabbit getting killed by a coyote out at Grandpa’s house? It sounded just like that. Maybe something got hit by lightning.”
“But it wouldn’t scream so long afterwards if the lightning hit it,” Tom pointed out. “That was no rabbit.”
“And lightning never strikes twice in the same place,” Sara said.
“That’s a myth. Think of it logically,” Luis said. “Why wouldn’t it?”
“If it was lightning. It’s weird, it didn’t really seem like lightning to me,” Abby said.
The discussion was interrupted by another shriek.
This one wasn’t as frightening; the subharmonics didn’t tickle the nerves as much as the first one had. The initial shriek had anger and death in it; the second was also very loud but ended in a series of sobs or chuckles. It was strange in a new way.
“Something’s hurt!” Sara exclaimed. Like most all children, Sara loved animals, and the thought of one in pain was terrible to her. She started to walk in the direction of the sound almost as if she were in a trance.
“Sara, no!” Luke said. “C’mon, we don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s some wild animal that will defend its food.”
“Or it’s a trap,” Luis muttered.
“But we can’t just leave it like that! Besides, I’ve never heard a wild animal make that kind of sound,” said Sara.
“This isn’t Earth,” Tom said. “We don’t know exactly what it could be. This is stupid.”
Sara, in her own way as stubborn as Luis, was going anyway.
“I’ll go with you, Sara,” Abby said. She, too, couldn’t bear to think of an animal in pain.
“Don’t worry,” she said to the boys. “We’ll be careful.”
Luke rolled his eyes. “Wait. We’ll all go. I’d just love explaining to your Dads why we left your bloodied bodies in the woods.
“Whatever it is, approach it slowly, okay? And once we’ve seen what’s making the noise, back away slowly, too. Whatever you do, stick together and don’t run. If you run, you trigger the chase instinct and it’ll kill you,” Luke continued.
Sara wasn’t listening. She had visions of rescuing a baby deer or some Gracchian equivalent.
Another wild sobbing cry broke out. This didn’t sound like a gentle animal to Luke. He thought they must all be insane to get closer to this.
Luke, as the oldest and biggest among them, took the responsibility of being in the lead. They left their packs and bikes fairly well out of the damp under a grouping of broad-leaved bushes and proceeded on foot. Luke stepped carefully over tree roots and around branches, trying to not advertise their presence to the shrieker.
The rain continued to pitter patter on the vegetation. Sara shivered as a broad leaf dumped its ladle of rain down the back of her neck. Having a raincoat didn’t always help.
As they grew closer to the site of the lightning strikes and the area of the strange noises, Luke moved slower. Even as his footsteps slowed, his heartbeats accelerated. Did Gracchia have big cats? Bears? He wished he’d studied Gracchian fauna.
A clearing in the undergrowth and trees lay ahead. Luke approached the edge of the open space, the others following close behind. Luis sneezed.
The sneeze didn’t provoke an immediate attack from the shrieker.
Luke moved around the edge of the clearing and stopped behind an outcropping of evergreen bushes. He crouched down, crawled forward and gestured for the others to do the same.
Sara was the least cautious. She poked her head up, impatient to help an animal.
Sara didn’t see an animal, wounded or otherwise. What she did see was two creatures out of a nightmare.
The setting was incongruous for such a horrible sight. The clearing was carpeted with fresh spring grasses and flowers, dotted here and there with gray granite boulders. On the far side of the meadow, a creature lay flat on its back, either unconscious or dead. Crouched over it was another person of the same species, dressed in some sort of shiny metal vest. They both had dark, curly fur and pointed ears on the top of their heads like a German shepherd. The side view of the crouching creature showed a vision of wickedly long, curved claws and a nose that sprang forward before ending in a sharp downturn.
Abby couldn’t suppress a tiny gasp as she recognized the creature. This was a being out of Gracchian mythology.
The creature’s head snapped up as it surveyed the meadow. Even in the wet drizzle, the kids could see its bright orange eyeballs roam the perimeter, perhaps sensing their presence, checking for danger. The eyes seemed lit from within by a glow that seemed supernatural. Luke found himself remembering his Dad saying that Van Gogh called orange the color of insanity.
Apparently finding no threat, the creature stood and pointed something at its companion on the ground. There was a hissing noise and a small flash of light, much smaller than the ones which had so stunned the children before. The body on the ground disintegrated into a pile of black dust. Even as they watched, the Humans could see the pile dissipate in the rain, washed into the soil of the meadow. Abby wondered what strange plants might now grow from such a beginning? Whoever or whatever the person on the ground had been, he was now returned to the earth forever.
The surprises weren’t over. One of the gray boulders halfway between the observers and the frightening being moved and revealed itself to be not another boulder but rather a Human being, a sodden heap on the ground. It lifted a feeble hand to the creature, seemingly in supplication. The thing with the terrifying orange eyes bounded over with another of the horrible shrieks that froze the nerves. Yet the Human on the ground wasn’t paralyzed. A hiss and a beam, similar to the one the creature had used on its fallen comrade, shot out toward the hairy attacker and stopped it as if it had hit a stone wall. The orange-eyed thing didn’t disintegrate, perhaps afforded some protection by the metal vest it wore.
But the creature, person, whatever it was, was slammed onto its back, hitting hard one of the gray boulders. The kids could hear bone crack, and for a moment, all was still. The Human, too, was motionless.
This was all too much for Sara. She leaped to her feet but didn’t quite know what to do next. Staying put had become intolerable, yet it was not clear who was the villain of the players in the meadow. The orange-eyed thing was terrifying, horrible, yet she didn’t understand what was going on. It was like walking into a movie theater during the last few minutes of a film.
Abby, too, came to her feet, albeit more slowly.
“That,” Abby said, pointing to the orange-eyed creature with curly fur, “is a gibble. The book said they’re a myth, but they’re not.”
“A gibble?” Luke asked.
“We’ve been learning Gracchian from a book about Gracchus fairytales,” Abby said. “One of the things in the book is a description of a gibble, kind of like a troll. It has orange eyes and eats Gracchus who stray in the forest and get lost.”
Tom was thrilled. “That’s what I saw! When I wrecked the car and no one believed me. That thing ran across the road, and I swerved and hit the tree, and everyone said that it was just some little animal!”
Tom picked up a stick and approached the two fallen bodies, Human and gibble. Vindication was sweet.
Abby wasn’t listening. Her eyes were on the Human who had fired the shot at the gibble. She
could see part of his head, hair plastered down by the rain, gray clothes wet and dark. Abby knew this person.
Tom poked his stick at the gibble. It remained still.
Abby ran to the fallen man and knelt by his side, not afraid of whatever gun he still had in his possession. The man’s eyes opened and looked at her without comprehension. Then a spark of recognition and humor came into his face.
“Ah, Abigail Elaine…. Ellsworth,” he said, a hiccup of pain punctuating the last word. His eyes closed for a moment. Abby saw a wide band of some sort on his wrist with a little nozzle that protruded towards the fingers. This must be the weapon that he’d used to shoot the gibble. It had a series of differently colored buttons on the band, and Abby knew that she was looking at a Xenoth, the weapon that Luke had described ages ago.
“It’s our neighbor!” Tom gasped. “It’s Mr. Neudel. What’s going on?”
“I told you something was weird,” Abby said. She didn’t think anymore that Mr. Neudel was a bad guy, but obviously he was mixed up with strange happenings.
Mr. Neudel reached inside his shirt with a weak hand and pulled out a small black box that was attached to a long cord around his neck. With an effort, he pulled the cord over his head and handed the box to Abby.
“You must, honor-bound, get this to Quirinal,” he whispered. “Tell….the gate.”
“Gate?” Abby repeated. But Mr. Neudel eyes closed again.
Sara said, “He’s not speaking in English, he’s speaking in Gracchian.” She was right. The LMD had been translating the wounded Human’s speech.
Abby grabbed the box tightly with one hand and put the cord over her head, then tucked the box inside her shirt next to her skin. The edges of the box felt sharp, and it seemed to emanate a warmth of its own, curiously alive.
Mr. Neudel, relieved of his burden, spoke once more. “You must go now. Take the box. More Lural follow the path. They are the trackers, the…..hunters.”
“What’s Lural?” said Luke. But Mr. Neudel was no longer conscious.
“I’ll tell you what a Lural is,” said Luis.
“That,” Luis pointed to the orange-eyed creature lying thirty feet away, “is a Lural, and if there are more of them, we need to get away.”
“Luis is right,” Luke said.
“You saw what the gibble, the Lural, did to his companion. He vaporized him. We can’t leave Mr. Neudel here; he’ll die. Either they’ll kill him or he’ll die from being out in the rain.”
“Tom’s right,” Sara agreed. “We have to take him with us.”
Luis was poised to argue but thought better of it. “A travois,” he said.
“What?” Abby said.
“We need to build a travois, like the Indians made. It’s like a stretcher made from branches and buffalo hide and stuff.”
“Luis made one last year when we were studying American Indian culture in Ms. Tavish’s class,” Sara added.
Luis was already walking, then running back to the bicycles to retrieve their backpacks and salvage what materials he could find to make a travois. Buffalo hide was in short supply here, but Tom’s discarded bicycle tube and some of their spare clothing could work.
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Luke had pictured the stretcher as being something that they could attach to the back of one of the bikes and haul it along. After Luis, with help from the others, stripped down two branches, then put in some precarious cross supports bound by bicycle inner tubes cut into strips, it became obvious that the travois wouldn’t survive two minutes being towed by a bicycle down the bumpy forest path. The stretcher, with Mr. Neudel strapped on, would have to be carried by hand. As originally made by the plains Indians in pre-wheel society, the travois had been pulled by dogs or pulled by horses over fairly level ground.
The travois was constructed as quickly as possible, but it still took almost an hour to collect their materials and assemble them into something that wouldn’t immediately fall apart. Tom was glad that he had his folding pocket knife; he wasn’t sure that they could have shaped proper poles without it. Luke twisted and tightened knots under Luis’ instruction, and Sara put her rain poncho over Mr. Neudel, trying to make him as warm and dry as possible. He seemed to drift in and out of consciousness, but he never really recognized them.
As Luke, Sara and Abby lifted Mr. Neudel onto the makeshift travois, Abby couldn’t see any blood on his body, but the Lural thing didn’t have any bloody wounds, either. Perhaps Mr. Neudel had been hit by one of the energy weapons, too. Abby cast an anxious look toward the Lural, but it lay still. It could be dead, but she wasn’t going to get close enough to see if it was breathing.
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” Luis said. They were all nervous, wondering when the hunters would show up. This was a dangerous neighborhood.
Tom and Luke used two more inner tubes to strap down Mr. Neudel on the stretcher.
“Don’t put it across his chest; he won’t be able to breathe,” Sara said. “Put it up here, across his shoulders.” She adjusted the strap, and Luke tightened it. Sara thought that the whole apparatus made Mr. Neudel look like a dangerous mental patient, but she didn’t say this out loud. She was afraid that she’d start laughing and not be able to stop. They were all on edge.
Luke particularly was getting very nervous. Like Abby, he kept looking at the unconscious Lural, half expecting it to leap to its feet and rend them with its wicked claws. And Mr. Neudel had said that more of them were coming. Maybe the Lural had tracking devices on them, or perhaps they had told their mothers where they were going before they left home. Whichever, there would be someone, something, coming to look for them and soon. Luke knew this in the marrow of his bones. Danger was close.
The makeshift stretcher was as ready as it would ever be. Tom lifted the bottom and Luke took the top handles, near Mr. Neudel’s head. Mr. Neudel was a small man, and for this they were grateful. Still, Tom wondered how they would ever be able to carry him all the way back to town. They left the meadow, Sara and Luis in the lead, Abby trailing the stretcher. She cast a final, worried look at the Lural.
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Awakened by the movement, Nicholas Neudel locked his eyes on Tom’s. “Sentimental. I should have known, young one. Sentiment will get you killed.” And with this, he lapsed back into unconsciousness.
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After ten minutes on the path, a flash of lightning lit the trees and a boom of thunder shook the air.
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