Creatch Battler

by Mark Crilley

  Mr. Vriffnee unlocked the clasps and opened the case, revealing a velvety green interior housing three objects: the detention cuff he'd used to defeat Twain, a leather-bound book (The Agent's Guide to AFMEC Rules and Regulations), and a brandnew viddy-fone.

  “It gives me great pleasure,” said Mr. Vriffnee, “to welcome to the fold our newest AFMEC trainee.”

  Billy shot a glance at Ana in the audience. She winked, and Billy realized—with both embarrassment and relief—that she'd been in on the whole thing: the “six-month wait” had been her way of throwing him off the trail.

  “If this young man is anything like his parents,” continued Vriffnee, “and I'm afraid it's painfully clear that he is, at least as far as rule breaking goes”—

  A smattering of laughter from the audience. —“he will one day make a very fine Affy indeed.”

  Mr. Vriffnee shook Billy's hand again, gave him the heavy wooden case, and invited him to step forward to the podium.

  Billy snuck a quick glance at the expectant faces before him but found that it only made him more nervous. Some of the Affys in the audience wore rows of glittering pins and medals on their uniforms, evidence of their high rank within the organization. A few of the men had long bushy beards, making them look like battle-hardened ship captains.

  “Thank—”

  KEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeee A shriek of feedback from the microphone. “Thank you, Mr. Vriffnee. I, uh, feel really lucky…to, uh…to be here today.”

  The way he said it, people in the audience might have thought he meant he felt fortunate simply to still be alive. Heck, he did mean that, come to think of it.

  “There are three people I need to thank. Actually, two people and one demi-creatch.” A few chuckles from the audience. “Thanks to my mom and dad. You two are the best parents a guy could hope for.”

  His parents smiled and joined hands. “Now that I've seen some of the different kinds of weapons

  you have at your disposal, I'm, uh…really glad you've never done anything worse than send me to my room.”

  The crowd laughed loudly. “I, uh, also have to thank this amazing demi-creatch here”—he gestured to Orzamo—“who until a couple of days ago was just another Scottish terrier, and a pretty lazy one at that.”

  More laughter. Billy looked directly at Orzamo. She had her snout held high, but her tail was moving in a jittery way that suggested she was suffering a minor case of stage fright. “She's the real hero here. If not for her, I'd be dead and the Taj Mahal would be history. Thank you, Orzy. Thank you for everything.”

  Billy was about to step away from the microphone, but then it dawned on him that he'd forgotten something. Or someone. Someone very important.

  “I, uh…I need to thank someone who isn't here today. She can't be here today because she lives miles and miles underground. She's an orf, and, uh…I don't even know her name. Maybe she doesn't even have a name. But she was an important part of this mission. Maybe the most important part. And what she did needs to be… appreciated.”

  People in the audience looked confused. Affys didn't normally say nice things about creatches in the middle of acceptance speeches.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Orf, wherever you are right now. I hope you have lots of kids and… and live a nice, long…orfy life.”

  It was an odd way to end the speech. But one or two Affys started clapping, more joined in, and finally the whole audience was on its feet.

  Billy bowed as deeply as he could bear to and limped back to where his parents were standing.

  Jim and Linda, beaming with pride, indicated that they had nothing to add, and Vriffnee returned to the microphone.

  “All right then, enough of this idle chatter,” he said, adopting a gruff tone that was probably only half in jest: “Back to work, all of you!”

  The Clikk family ended up getting a vacation after all. When they arrived back home early Monday morning, Jim Clikk phoned Piffling Elementary and explained that Billy would be joining them in South Carolina for a week, visiting his ailing grandmother. Which turned out to be true. (Well, everything but the ailing part.) They spent the rest of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and the better part of Thursday doing nothing but lounging around Gramma Clikk's house, a creaky old place near the beach, half hidden in weeds at the dead end of a dirt road.

  Billy soon realized that his mother hadn't been kidding when she'd referred to Gramma Clikk's head-spinning stories. By Thursday afternoon Billy's grandmother had told him about forest creatches she had battled deep in the jungles of Peru, mountain creatches she'd slain single-handedly (waist deep in snow on the plateaus of Tibet), and sky creatches she'd gone head to head with in a battle-scarred biplane worthy of the Red Baron.

  Right now, though, Gramma Clikk was in the middle of her late-afternoon nap. Jim, Linda, Billy, and Orzamo (back in Scottish terrier form) were lazing on the beach, listening to the surf and occasionally making suggestions as to what they should have for dinner that night.

  “How about seafood?” asked Jim.

  “Mmm,” said both Billy and Linda.

  “I hear that diner in town has pretty good salmon.”

  “That reminds me, Dad,” Billy said, picking at a scab on his knee, “what were all those salmon heads for? You know, the ones you bought in Nome.”

  “Oh, that.” Jim Clikk was flat on his back, expending as little energy as possible. “That was for Nessie.”

  “Nessie. You mean, like, Loch Ness Monster Nessie?”

  “Don't ask me what she was doing off the coast of Alaska. All I know is we needed the salmon heads to lure her out of Nome Harbor and lead her back to sea. We had a devil of a time getting her out of there without the locals catching on. This one reporter from the Nome Nugget —that's the local paper—boy, she was a handful, let me tell ya.”

  “So did the salmon heads work?”

  Linda Clikk, who was in the middle of a romance novel— a real romance novel—answered the question before her husband could: “No, of course they didn't work. Every Affy knows Nessie prefers rainbow trout….”

  “Look,” Jim said, “they were out of rainbow trout, so I got the salmon heads. I mean, come on….”

  TEEP

  Jim Clikk jumped up to a sitting position, as if he'd just heard a siren. Billy rose to his elbows. The viddy-fone.

  Linda gave her husband a disapproving look. “Honey, I thought you said you turned that thing off.”

  “I did. You know, from Monday through Wednesday. But I figured today I'd switch it on… just in case.”

  TEEP

  Jim Clikk fished the viddy-fone from a nearby duffel bag and popped it open. The familiar Vriffnee growl came blasting out.

  A new creatch op, thought Billy. It's gotta be.

  Jim Clikk sat up straight and rubbed some sand out of his eyes. “I'm sorry, Mr. Vriffnee.”

  Another blast of Vriffnee anger.

  “Yes, but we are on vacation….”

  “I understand that, Mr. Vriffnee, but…”

  “Yes…”

  Billy's heart was thumping. Here he was, still bruised and bandaged from his first mission. But he was ready for another one. He was ready.

  “Certainly.”

  “The monastery of Erdene Zuu? I've heard of it, yes, but…”

  “Well, yes, of course Linda speaks Mongolian, Mr. Vriffnee, but…”

  Definitely a new mission. But will I be included? Or will Mr. Vriffnee say I need more time to recuperate?

  “I see.”

  “And should we bring Billy along, or…”

  Please say yes please say yes please say yes…

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.” Jim Clikk shot Billy an apologetic glance. “Well, he's going to be disappointed to hear that, but…”

  Billy's heart sank.

  “Thank you, Mr. Vriffnee. We'll be there as soon as possible.”

  TEEP

  Jim turned to Billy with a tired smile. “Vacation's over, son. Skeeter gig. In Mongolia.” />
  Billy was devastated. He already knew the answer, but he asked the question anyway: “Did Mr. Vriffnee say I could come along?”

  “No.”

  Jim Clikk snapped the viddy-fone shut and grinned.

  “He said you must come along.”

  “Really?” Billy was on his feet.

  “Of course. You're an Affy-in-training now, kiddo. You need all the practice you can get.”

  Within fifteen minutes Jim, Linda, Billy, and Orzamo had kissed Gramma Clikk goodbye and piled into the van. Before his father had even put the keys in the ignition, Billy had fired up one of the computers to begin researching the creatches—a herd of five-headed gargazaks, according to his father—that were waiting for them in Mongolia.

  Mongolia. Man, this is gonna be sweet. They're, like, really into horses in Mongolia, aren't they? Maybe we'll have to fight these gargazaks while riding horseback across the steppes….

  Soon they were rumbling down the bumpy dirt road leading back to the highway. Of course, they had no intention of actually getting on the highway.

  As the wheels left the road and the van soared off into the sky, Billy closed his eyes and smiled, knowing that his life would never be THE USUAL again.

  Billy Clikk dug his fingers into the Peruvian murgwod's dorsal fin. This was not easy. The murgwod was soaking wet and covered in mud, and that was on top of the inch-thick layer of slimy exoblubber that coated its entire body. Add to this the fact that Billy was sweating from every pore after a long day trudging through the Peruvian jungle to get to this spot—an area of shallow water at the edge of a muddy branch of the Rio Urubamba—and the conditions for maintaining a good grip on a murgwod were about as poor as they could possibly be.

  The murgwod could snap at the air and growl all it wanted. Billy wasn't going anywhere. Billy and his parents, Jim and Linda Clikk, had been charged with finding and neutralizing this creatch, and now that Billy had it in his grasp he wasn't about to let it get away.

  As Billy struggled to improve his grip, he surveyed the fearsome beast he was now riding like a bucking bronco: the red, muscular body, the seven-toed feet and their daggerlike claws, the long spiky reptilian tail, the rhino-ish head, the single fiery yellow eye, and the jaws that featured the most ferocious set of incisors Billy had ever seen.

  “Got it!” Billy called to his parents, realizing even as he did so that they were unlikely to hear him from where they were, searching in vain for the murgwod more than half a mile up the river. It was just Billy's luck that Orzamo, his half-dog halflizard friend, was at his parents' side at the moment instead of his. (Billy had actually encouraged her to go help them out, knowing that his parents were pretty tired from a creatch op they'd handled in Norway a day or two earlier.)

  No biggie, thought Billy. Dad let me take on that nine-legged malanoobu by myself last week in Mauritania. How much harder can a murgwod be?

  The murgwod let out a furious growl followed by several defiant grunts, as if it had heard Billy's thoughts and was offended by the comparison. It then launched into an especially vigorous bout of thrashing. Billy dug his heels into the murgwod's ribs, refusing to be thrown.

  “Take it easy, pal,” Billy said. “I'm just doing my job here.” Just doing his job.

  Billy found it useful to treat his bizarre double life—half the time an average sixth grader in Piffling, Indiana, the other half a globe-trotting creatch battler for the top-secret monstercontainment organization known as AFMEC—as if it were no big deal. If he stopped and thought about it for too long it would probably drive him nuts. In fact, pretty much every aspect of his life now required putting certain thoughts out of his head as he focused on the task at hand. This Peruvian murgwod, for instance. If Billy allowed himself to dwell on the fact that this particular murgwod had been terrorizing villagers up and down the Rio Urubamba for the past three weeks, swallowing their chickens and pigs whole and, on occasion, leaving men and women with missing limbs and hideous scars…well, he'd be a lot better off not dwelling on it. So he didn't.

  “All right,” said Billy, panting loudly as he prepared to take things to the next level. “Just work with me here and you'll make things a lot easier for both of us.”

  Billy knew the standard procedure for dealing with a murgwod. He'd studied all the steps just a few months earlier, preparing for his first round of AFMEC entrance exams, and had gone back to the Sea Creatch Guidebook to memorize them word for word while gearing up for the current creatch op. He also knew that every step in the murgwod subduing procedure (“Grasp the dorsal fin firmly with both hands while maneuvering your legs into the riding position,” “Beware of the murgwod's prehensile tail, an agile fifth limb with a viselike grip”) was designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to allow you to knock the creature out with a single shot from a fully loaded Skump pistol, expertly fired into the cranial artery: a half-inch-wide blood vessel tucked just beneath a fold of skin at the base of the murgwod's neck.

  Billy was right where he needed to be to fire that shot, and no doubt the murgwod's cranial artery was where it needed to be to receive it, but Billy's Skump pistol—the one he'd used just moments before to force the murgwod out of hiding—was buried in the mud on the shore behind him. He'd chucked it there when he realized he'd run out of ammo.

  Good thing I brought a klimper dart with me.

  Billy wiped the sweat from his eyes for the umpteenth time that afternoon, reached down, and pulled the dart container out of his back pocket. He wished that his Affy friend Ana García could be there to see him as he snapped it open with his left hand while maintaining his grip on the murgwod's fin with his right. She was the one who had taught him how to open a klimper dart case with one hand. She was also the one who had thought he was crazy when he proceeded to practice doing it for hours on end, first with one hand, then the other. (“Next thing you'll be opening one with your feet,” she'd said with a laugh. Billy had been too embarrassed to admit he'd already been working on that. And had become pretty good at it, as a matter of fact.)

  No second chances with this sucker, Billy reminded himself as he raised the klimper dart into the air and prepared to jab it into the murgwod's neck. Klimper darts were nearly as effective as Skump pistols, but they contained only a single payload of klimp toxin. One inch too far to the left or right and this dart will be about as deadly as a big fat kiss on the lips.

  Billy watched and waited, remembering the words he'd memorized the night before from the guidebook: “The murgwod's cranial artery reveals itself once every eleven seconds, raising the skin at the base of the neck by a mere fraction of an inch as blood courses through it. The well-trained Affy will take notice of this momentary irregularity in the surface of the skin as he aims and fires his Skump pistol into the artery at pointblank range.”

  Point-blank was out of the question. If Billy hoped to have even half a chance of piercing the murgwod's leathery skin, he'd have to raise the klimper dart over his head and bring it down with all the force he could deliver.

  The murgwod let out a vicious growl and shook Billy so hard he almost fell off. Billy had to mash his whole body down against the murgwod's back just to stay put. Making an accurate klimper dart stab under these conditions seemed next to impossible.

  I can do this. Just have to stay focused. Put everything else out of my mind.

  The murgwod slowed its thrashing for a moment. Billy sat up straight again, breathed deeply, and held the dart just above the murgwod's neck before raising it into position high in the air.

  One shot. That's all I need.

  Billy kept his eyes trained on the skin at the base of the murgwod's neck, watching, waiting. The murgwod lurched violently back and forth. Dollops of its exoblubber pelted Billy in the face.

  Then he saw it: the skin swelling as blood coursed through the cranial artery. Bingo!

  But just as Billy was preparing to deliver the crucial blow, the murgwod ceased its thrashing, took hold of Billy with its tail, and dove h
eadfirst into the river. Billy lost all sense of balance as he went entirely underwater. He'd barely had a chance to hold his breath before he went under, and for a moment he feared the worst: that the murgwod would just go to the bottom of the river and hold him there. But no. It had other plans.

  The murgwod resurfaced long enough for Billy to see where it was taking him: downstream, to a spot where the river descended into a treacherous patch of rocks and rapids.

  Urubamba rapids, thought Billy. I can handle that. A lifetime of extreme sports—including a near suicidal entry in Lunatic Louie's Whitewater Madness rafting competition a year or two earlier (in which he'd bagged first prize)—had prepared Billy for the sort of risks that would have most kids his age wetting their pants.

  Even Billy had his limits, though. And when he took a moment to consider what lay beyond Urubamba rapids, he realized that all the extreme sports in the world wouldn't be enough to bail him out this time.

  The falls, thought Billy. It's heading for the falls! Urubamba Falls. A one-hundred-foot sheer drop to pounding water and jagged rocks. If Billy went over, the chances for survival were virtually nil. Murgwods, with their hard skin and flexible bones, were pretty much designed for going over waterfalls and sailing through without a scratch. Sixth graders like Billy Clikk were designed for going over waterfalls and breaking every single bone in their entire bodies.

  Billy tried to come up with a plan as the two of them plunged underwater again, his already aching limbs struggling to maintain a good grip on the dorsal fin. If he let go of it, the murgwod would use its tail to pull him under its belly, depriving him of both air and any means of seeing where they were going.

  Maybe I should just pry this tail off me and take my chances trying to escape, he thought. The murgwod will survive, but so will I.

  It might have been the smart thing to do, but Billy could not consider this as a serious option.

  No way. Can't let this murgwod live to terrorize more Peruvians.