Uncanny Tales of Crush and Pound 8, Page 3

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  The dwarf stumbled along the steep incline that led upward into the dark. When he stopped to look behind, he could just make out the shape of Pound’s head and shoulders with the fading light from the glowing stairs that disappeared into the distance, and he dreaded what he knew lay in the trail ahead.

  “We’re embarking on the part of the journey where I need the human’s help,” he thought to himself as Pound bumped into him from behind.

  “Sorry about that, little fella,” Pound remarked as he backed up a step to give Shad some space. “I can’t see anything in front of me.” Shad just grunted an acknowledgement and stepped forward up the long dark hill ahead. The hill was steep for Shad, yet manageable, and at times Pound had to bend over to grab hold of the rocks on the cave floor since the cave walls were spread outside of his arm’s length to touch. “Why don’t we move to a wall?” he politely asked the dwarf, and the reply was less than friendly.

  “I’m not having any trouble,” Shad gloated. “But feel free to step where you can’t see or feel the ground. Maybe you’ll find a hole that leads back down again. Straight down,” he snickered.

  Traveling with this guy was proving to be a challenge, but Pound was so far into this adventure that there was no going back. The only choice on his plate was to stay with the grumbling bitter companion to the end and hope that they met up with Crush somewhere along the way. Then he could be free of the dwarf once and for all. “And don’t even think about tying that rope around me again. What a nuisance that turned out to be,” Shad grumbled, and Pound regretted the decision to journey with the dwarf. He would be free from the oppression of the little guy’s mocking shortly.

  “Just a little further,” the field agent assured himself.

  “Keep up!” Shad demanded.

  “It could not happen soon enough,” Pound thought in his mind, yet he restrained his frustration for the sake of journey.

  After several hundred yards, a dim light appeared around the edge of a turn in the cave wall, and Pound’s spirits brightened with the evidence of daylight. They must have been stumbling through these caverns all night with the cockroaches at their heels, and daylight must have broken in the meantime. When they turned the corner, they could see daylight shining in through a crack in the rocks above, and they hiked up the trail to stand just below the opening to the outside. Ten feet high in the air, the light filtered through where several stones met, and Pound believed that, with one good leap and stretch upward, he could reach the stone to pull himself up out of the hole. He spit on his hands and backed up just far enough to get a good head start, and as his feet left the ground, he spotted the movement of antennae in his peripheral vision. With one hand outstretched, he caught the lip of the stone like a basketball rim and swung forward to come face to face with a giant cockroach. In one fluid movement, he kicked the roach in the head with one foot and used the other foot to gain leverage on the cave wall. Then he hauled himself upward into daylight as the roach fell to the floor below. Pound dragged himself out onto the stones and quickly turned around to look back down into the hole to find Shad. He disliked him, but he could not leave him behind.

  “I’ll drop the rope down, and you grab it,” Pound instructed as he uncoiled the rope from around his shoulder. Shad had already magically lit up the end of his fingers and was flailing around in all directions to keep the bugs at bay while Pound dropped the rope through the crack to the floor below. Shad and a very precocious roach grabbed hold of the rope at the same time, and Pound yanked on the rope to get them off the ground while the other roaches surrounded and gnawed on Shad’s dangling feet. Standing up to get better leverage, Pound leaned backward and tugged the dwarf and the roach up as fast as possible. The roach came out first and hissed with the exposure to daylight, releasing the rope and skittering back down into the hole on top of the dwarf. Then Shad came out next, kicking his feet to free himself of the toothless insect that had wrapped its mandibles around his ankle. In the daylight the roach released his foot when the light blinded its eyes again, and the creature hissed and spit at the dwarf as he lay on the ground next to it. Shad jumped to his feet and kicked the insect in the head and knocked it spinning back into the hole where the other roaches skittered away into the dark. The taunting of the perpetual hum that emanated from the insect hive beneath the ground floated over the morning air, and Pound was thankful to see the red and green sky of this strange world once again.

  Pound began winding the coil of rope around his shoulders, and he took the time to survey the area around him. For the first time he noticed that they were on the outer edge of the dead forest. They had made it through in one piece no less, and they stood upon a lone rock outcropping that laid between the dead forest and a sandy cluster of pits which wound around the bottom of the mountain. To his astonishment, there was however a single living tree that was housed in the center of the outcropping of pits, and the sign of living vegetation gave Pound some hope that he would be able to call upon the tree for assistance. Pound looked the pits over, and he was not so sure that he liked their appearance.

  “What do you know about this place, Shad?” he asked, not knowing whether he would get a straight answer or not.

  “I know that if you fall into one, you’ll not be completing the journey to the mountain,” Shad replied with his usual flare for negativity. “But that’s why you’re along. You can talk to that tree out there, can’t you?”

  “I suppose,” Pound answered, and he put his hands to his head and concentrated on communicating with the tree. Feeling its life essence, he probed down into its heartwood and detected no malice within the tree. Then he put in a polite request for a ride across the pits to the base of the mountain. A few seconds later, the outer limbs of the tree began to quiver. The tree leaned forward to pull its roots out of the ground on one side, and then with an equal lean backward, the remaining roots popped out, sending clumps of sand and soil rolling down into the pits that bordered both sides of the tree. Amazingly, the tree began walking on the tips of its roots, meandering on the narrow ledges between the pits and disturbing the soil all along the path toward the rocky outcropping where Pound and Shad were stranded. “That was simple enough. I don’t see what all of the fuss is about,” Pound said to the dwarf as they watched the tree slowly make its way to them.

  Meanwhile, the clumps of sand that had tumbled into the pits collected at the points in the bottom centers of the conical depressions. Suddenly the sand in the bottom of the pits was heaved upward in mighty throws, and for the first time, Pound noticed that there were large spiny tusks sticking out of the center base of each pit. As they watched, each set of tusks would throw the excess sand and soil upward out of the low point in the center of the pits to the top outer edges. Sand and dirt flew in all directions, pelting the tree with the gritty spray as it marched through the maze of pits.

  “Ant lions,” Pound whispered as he recognized the creatures. “We have them on earth, but they’re usually very small,” he said as he held up his thumb and forefinger with a tiny space in between them. And if he was confident before, that confidence had slipped away when he thought of what might happen to them if they fell into the pits. He spent many hours as a child, bored out of his mind, laying on the ground and watching worker ants carry heavy loads across a yard to the underground nest, only to fall helplessly into the ant lion traps. A few survived, but most suffered the fate that awaited them at the bottom. Pound rolled those thoughts over in his mind as he looked out over the field that lay before him, and he wondered how this was going to end. “Maybe we should go back . . .” he began to suggest his thoughts aloud, only to be cut off immediately by the dwarf.

  “And do what? There is no way back except through the dead forest, and then what?!” Shad grumbled. “If this is the only way, we have to take it.”

  “So much for thinking aloud,” Pound thought to himself, being careful not to let his r
eal thoughts slip out verbally. Calling the dwarf a green-sprinkled fecal log of rainbow happiness probably would not go over well. And he would probably have to explain the insult to boot. Fortunately for Pound, the walking tree arrived just then, and he wasted no time clambering into the upper limbs before Shad even had a chance to protest the absurdity of riding a tree along a narrow ledge of sand through a maze of nasty pits. “Are you coming along then?” he asked with a wicked grin. This time he made sure not to lower the rope.

  “This is ridiculous,” Shad remarked as he bent down on his tiny legs and leaped up to grab hold of a lower limb, and then he wrapped his legs loosely around the same limb to hang upside down from the appendage.

  “You got that right,” Pound added as he ordered the tree to head back through the pits from whence it had come to the base of the mountain. The full distance would have measured a mile by Pound’s estimation, and he guessed that it would take a few hours to get there by walking tree. Shad dangled onto the lower limb as they started out, and he wondered just how long the dwarf was going to hold on in that position before changing up and getting a more stable seat. It did not take long to answer Pound’s question.

  As the tree straddled the first narrow trail between pits, the sturdy hardwood started to lean heavily to one side, the side which Shad was attached to, and Shad’s body swiftly slid along the smooth bark toward the outside of the tree. Before the dwarf knew what was happening, his legs had slid off the flexible end of the limb, and he was flopping helplessly on the end of the branch by one hand in the breeze. As a result, sand that had been knocked loose by the tree’s unfortunate movements rolled down into a pile in the center of the pit below, and with nervous anticipation, the mandibles of the oversized ant lion flicked the new piles of sand upward in all directions. Grains of sand and chunks of loose rock flew outward to strike the tree in its unbalanced position, and Pound closed his eyes and hid behind the trunk to keep from getting pelted by the rocks and blinded by the sand. Shad, however, was not so lucky to be shielded by the tree’s gangly limbs. The first blast of sand thrown from the pit caught him straight on in the face, and with his mouth wide open in surprise, he swallowed a mouthful of grit.

  With quick thinking, Pound climbed out to the other side of the tree to try to achieve some center balance to the tree’s movements, risking his own safety in an effort to bring equilibrium to the tree’s lumbering actions. At first, the rebalance of weight seemed to help, and Pound held on tight to the flimsy limbs as the tree swayed back to center on the narrow ledge of sand. Even Shad seemed to recover rather quickly as the dwarf used the sway of the tree to lift his legs up over his head to grip the limb once again. When the ant lion threw the second swath of sand and rocks, Shad braced himself tight against the limb and held on for dear life as several rocks sailed by his head and into the foliage above. With his vision partially blocked by the leaves, Pound was unprepared for the pelting that he received from the stones, and he slipped off the edge of the limb that he was clinging to and fell face first into the sand. The fall of fifteen feet into the soft sand did not kill him as he rolled over onto his backside, but with the disturbance of his fall, the sand poured down over him and tumbled down into the belly of the pit where the ant lion had lain dormant. Pound held deathly still at the bottom as the sand covered the lower half of his body, and he waited to see what the reaction of the ant lion would be. The mandibles of the creature flicked the first round of dirt directly at him, covering him in sand, and Pound sat still for another moment as he waited for the tree to receive the commands that he was mentally projecting to rescue him from the pit. Pound heard the growling of the ant lion as it lifted its head above the surface of the sand, and for the first time, he saw the beast for what it was, and he feared for his life. The mouth was full of nasty, gritty teeth, and if its jaws opened wide to belch out a roar of delight as the eyes that were poised on its fuzzy head spotted the tender, juicy human that had fallen into its trap. The ant lion crawled out of the hole where it had lain hidden and hungry, and it flicked a heap of sand over Pound’s head to smother him where he lay.

  For the first time on this journey, he was deathly afraid that he would never see earth again, and Pound hurriedly stood to his feet and unwound the coil of rope that was twisted around his shoulder. The ant lion flung another mound of dirt at its prey and missed as Pound quickly tied a loop in the rope. Desperately, he tossed it up at the tree which was leaned over the edge of the pit, and the rope missed and fell helplessly back down in the hole. Before Pound could reel it back in for another throw, the ant lion lunged at the lasso with its mandibles where the rope then lodged around a barb in its jaw.

  “Ah, geez!” Pound exclaimed as the ant lion twisted its head back around in a semicircle and yanked the rope and Pound together out of the sand and deeper down into the hole. As he flew through the air to the opposite side of the sandy pit, Pound let go with his hands and dropped the rope that he had carried for so long, and he sailed like a bullet into the sandy wall. Dust flew through the air, and Pound coughed hard once to get the dirt out of his mouth that had flown in from the impact as he stood to his feet, knee deep in sand. The ant lion turned on its prey with lightning speed, and Pound was within reach of the terrifying insect as it flicked another round of sand at him where he stood on the wall of the pit. For all of his fighting experience with the DAM, Pound struggled to find a way out of the situation in which he now found himself.

  Chapter 2

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  Flushed Away