The Cult of Kishpu

by J. J. Shetland

  “You ever met him since you ran away, sir?”

  “I pass the farm every time I’m on holiday in Doncaster. He’s still the same, acting like all crazy and not in a humourless way. He never changed, so why should I?”

  “Well, making our lives miserable just because you’ve had a miserable life won’t do either of us any justice,” said Lukeson. “There are ten billion humans on this planet. There are so few animals left and that’s the point of this organisation. We are finding every talking non-human creature that was affected by that Great Mutation Storm and giving them shelter from the rest of the human race.”

  “We are military organisation, Lukeson, not a charity!”

  “I do not look up to people that think the world revolves around their arses!” Lukeson shouted back. “I don’t know what you think of yourself, but I think you are just a complete –”

  “Keep insulting me,” roared Skipton, “and I’ll have you –”

  “Both of you, shut the fuck up!” screamed Tugson.

  Lukeson didn’t know whether the captain couldn’t take more of the heated discussion or if he was impatient to watch the second half of the Seasiders match.

  “I’m very disappointed in you, Lukeson,” Tugson continued. “Just because you are one of the founders and the most popular leader of all G.C.A., you think you can do whatever you want without my authorisation? Is that it?”

  “I just try to keep up appearances, sir,” said Lukeson. “And, with all due respect, I think our organisation will expand if we solve mysteries like we did with this Akins mystery and help save the world. After all, prevention is better than cure.”

  “Captain, Lukeson has not had a day off since we found him in the Brecon Mountains ten years ago,” said Skipton. “He’s missed out on ten Diwalis.”

  “I think you might be right, Skipton,” said Tugson.

  “Captain, I must protest,” said Lukeson.

  “No, he’s right,” said Tugson. “I will allow no more investigations that will cause any more of our people to die. As for you, Lukeson, you are to have a whole fortnight leave of absence without pay and a visit to a psychiatrist to help you until you are fit for duty. A human one, not these owls here.”

  “Yeah, then maybe you’ll come back with a more realistic mind,” said Skipton.

  “Dismissed, Sergeant.”

  Screw you both. Lukeson had been wondered if Tugson was getting Alzheimer’s disease as he got older or if his depression was getting worst. He knew the captain would never get over the accidental deaths of his wife and his children before he joined the British Army, but he wondered if they had recently been growing in his mind as high as a mountain ash tree and if they were affecting his duties of being President of G.C.A.

  In the early years, Lukeson and Tugson seemed to get on with each other okay; both got on much with each other better than either of them ever did with the hot-tempered Skipton. But after a whole decade, they have been growing apart and arguing more, as much as both of them have argued with the angry lieutenant. Lukeson thought of having Tugson relieved of command for ages, but no doctor at G.C.A. could declare Captain Tugson unfit for duty as animals had no equal rights with the humans. Tugson always did like the animals better than Skipton, but never as much as Lukeson did.

  “Yes, sirs.” Feeling exhausted from failing to help the people he cared about, the Welsh sergeant made his way to the lift. He gave a last salute before the life doors closed.

  “I’m very certain he’s been working too hard,” said Skipton.

  “I think we all have,” said Tugson.

  “Yeah, you’ve been working hard at watching football,” Skipton muttered under his breath.

  “What was that, Skipton?” demanded Tugson.

  “I, uh, was just thinking of some names that could run this place for a fortnight or whenever so one of us could go on holiday.”

  “Right, let’s have them, then,” said the captain.

  “Okay, then. How about, uh…” Skipton saw that Tugson was waiting impatiently for answers. After struggling, he realised that the TV was not turned back on. “Hey, I think Blackpool just scored a goal.”

  Tugson quickly realised he forgotten all about the football match. He grabbed the wooden TV flicker and turned the TV back on. He was in time to watch Blackpool Seasiders for finally scoring a goal. He cheered.

  Feeling proud for getting away from Tugson, Skipton sneaked into the lift. Phew.

  * * *

  Night time arrived and it was time for Lukeson’s duty to put the squads to bed. It shouldn’t be too difficult as C.G.A. only had one squad left. He went into the females’ barracks first. He, along with Skipton and Tugson, was one of the few males allowed to be in there. Before the Egyptian mission, there used to be lots of female animals reading online magazines and giggling during pillow fights, but now the rooms were as empty and silent as a graveyard.

  He opened the room that was entitled Squad J on it and saw three soldiers. Mengy was meditating on her bed and Larissa was reading the latest issue of her favourite fashion online magazine, Proud. She was reading it on her wooden I-Pad because G.C.A. always tried to go paperless as much as they could.

  Then Lukeson headed to Paula who was turning her wooden laptop off at her desk. “Anything, Guzman?”

  Paula faced her sergeant. “I’ve been scanning the emerald pieces, researching Egyptian magic and trying to find out who Akins and his magical army was working for. I’ve found no results. I don’t they were working for any deities.

  “While trying to work out why, despite all of them being made out of dust, some of Akins’s monsters were stronger and tougher and produced fake blood when they got shot in the forehead or under the fangs while others completely disintegrated into piles of dust, the very best conclusion I can come up with was that Akins might have meant for them to be that way. If that’s the case, I’m finding it puzzling and even more ludicrous.

  “I can’t find out much about the grey dust that Kathy picked up back in Alexandria from the sphinxes that went through her laser boxes she and Rachael borrowed from me either. As far as I’m concerned, the dust is normal dust. I can only assume that it was the special emerald stone that were creating the monsters, but I can’t physically prove it. My guess is that this is something only a creature with magic can do, sir. I’m afraid that’s all I have for today: guesses.”

  “Okay, good work for today, Guzman.” Lukeson knew it wasn’t Paula’s fault, but he was just hoping for better results than guesses. “Call it a night and continue your research after tomorrow’s training.”

  “Yes, sir,” Paula said.

  “Dismissed.” Lukeson noticed that he couldn’t find Kathy in the room. “Where’s Toronto?”

  “Behind you, sir,” Paula told him before she got into her bed.

  Lukeson saw a still depressed and exhausted Kathy Toronto was behind him. “Tough day at the vets today, Toronto?”

  Kathy nodded so fast that Lukeson thought she was about to explode into tears.

  “All right, get a good night’s sleep,” he said to her as gentle as he could.

  “Yes, sir.” Then Kathy moved to her bed and kept staring at the empty top bunk above her. That was where Rachael used to sleep.

  Lukeson wondered whether Kathy was going to be the same zebra again as he walked out. He knew how much she and Rachael meant to each other. He would help her the best way he could, but he knew it would only be up to her how she would deal with this grief.

  * * *

  Lukeson entered the males’ barracks and the room where the male soldiers of Squad J slept.

  “Sir, sir.” Stu Pot approached him. “Check this out.” He held out a menu from Die Holz Inn, another restaurant in the city, and looked at it. “For my starters, can I have the garlic bread? Then I’ll have the vegetable lasagne for my main course. Finally, I’ll have the blueberry and coconut cake for my desert.”

  Lukeson smiled, applauded and patted Stu Pot on the should
er. Then he reached into the zebra’s left ear, held something between his right thumb and finger and brought it to his right eye. It was a tiny wooden ear piece with a red button.

  “No fooling you, eh, sir?” Stu Pot said sheepishly.

  Lukeson gave the zebra a hard stare. This had been the sixth time he had cheated on his reading. “There is nothing clever about cheating, Potter. I know reading is tough for you, but you can’t depend on other people and gadgets all the time. You have got to believe in yourself. What if you got lost from your group and you couldn’t read anything to save your life? I’d rather see you struggle than cheat like this.” Sometimes the sergeant thought he should have put Stu Pot somewhere else instead of out in the field but he always reminded himself about all the success the zebra had since he became a soldier and all the progress he was making. Then he always thought what his life would have been like if he hadn’t enlisted him.

  “Please don’t throw that hearing device away, sir,” Stu Pot begged. “It helps. It really helps a lot. I won’t need after I get better at reading. Besides, Paula made it for more reasons than just for my benefits.”

  Lukeson surveyed the device and glanced back at Stu Pot. “I’ll keep hold of this and I will decide when you can use this, but not before. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Just remember this, Potter. Every struggle you go through is not failing, but helps you climb the ladder of self-improvement. Now, to bed, Private.”

  “Yes, sir,” Stu Pot said.

  Then Lukeson went to Pedro’s bunk. He took his earphones and iPad off him. “Bed now, Pedro.”

  “I was asleep,” Pedro protested. “I was listening to sleepy music and I was nodding off until you came –”

  “You call this sleepy music?” Lukeson held one earphone to Pedro’s ear and it played loud rock ‘n’ roll music. Then he slammed the earphones and iPad into the young penguin’s sock drawer. He moved to Rustom. “Comfortable, Rustom?”

  “Well, if this is the best bed I can get,” Rustom said, “then I won’t complain.”

  “You sorted out the paperwork?” Lukeson asked.

  Rustom reached into his left trouser pocket and handed a handful of paperwork to the sergeant.

  Lukeson read them quickly as he could and they all appeared to be in order.

  “By the way, Sergeant, Mengy was very helpful getting me enlisted,” Rustom said. “A little too helpful for my liking.”

  Lukeson scoffed. If you think that’s forceful, wait until you get trained by Skipton and Tugson tomorrow. “Good night, gentlemen,” he said. Then he turned the lights off and left the room.

  * * *

  Even though he was the third most powerful man in the entire G.C.A. organisation, unlike Tugson and Skipton who had penthouses under their offices in Log Scraper, Lukeson never yearned for luxury things. All he needed was his small room with a bed, his tiny bathroom and his book collection of his favourite Welsh authors all published in Welsh in the training barracks.

  Lukeson rarely spent time in his room anyway. He was always busy training his soldiers, working in his small office or away on a mission for a long time. But he liked to be kept busy because it always distracted him from his upsetting childhood – all bullies and no friends of his own species all because of his strange point of view of things and his weird hobbies. It was all the swearing from the bullies that made him hate it with a vengeance.

  He was always glad when he came into his room. He felt it was the one place he could relax after a stressful mission or a difficult meeting with his commanding officers. And since he had done all of those things today, he was gladder than ever in his life to be in the room.

  As he started to pack for his fortnight of absence, he turned on his radio and heard the most depressing news as always. The news always told everything wrong with the human world: overpopulation of human beings; lack of space in the world to grow trees and food; oil, coal and nuclear power getting less and less as every second went by; lack of job and volunteer opportunities for half the population; deforestation; wars still going on between the humans. Even with the disappearance of the animals, the humans haven’t seemed to change.

  However, on the positive side, listening to the news made Lukeson feel a bit better when he could see his animal world was the opposite of that. He was glad that the animals were being more civilised and there were more opportunities for them. They were also being more flexible on renewable energy sources unlike most of the humans on the surface. He was thinking these animals were the best people on the planet and the human beings up above should take not a leaf out of their books, but the whole tree. Maybe even the whole forest. But he knew meat would be back on the menu the moment any animal is shown to the surface of Earth.

  Then Lukeson decided to sit on his Indian mat and practice Dhyana before he left. He always felt better when he did it. Then a beep came from his iPhone. Annoyed, he picked it and read the text. But then the more he read it, his smile grew bigger. Despite his strictness and lack of humour, deep down he was always an optimistic and never a quitter on anything, even though he was always smart enough to never get his hopes up high. He hadn’t been looking forward to his fortnight off, but this text changed everything.

  Lukeson gave one last look at the sleeping barracks before he walked off. Out of all the squads, Squad J was his favourite. Not because they were the ones he had been on the most of his missions with or they were the most different among all the talking animals he has ever met, but because they were the ones he related to the most; all being orphans and all shared the belief of making the world a better place to live in by accepting and living with other creatures instead of making wars.

  Lukeson had never taken any time off since he helped to start this business. He began to worry about how Tugson and Skipton will treat Squad J. He had tried his best to make them follow their regulations, but he was worried about what his commanding officers will do to them. He knew the animals well enough to know their limits and how and when to push them, especially Stu Pot, but his commanding officers didn’t. He knew they would do whatever they wanted because of their rank and they never understood the animals like he did. Then Lukeson thought maybe Squad J had been depending on him so much for the last three years, so he decided to give them the test to see if he was right.

  As the LED lights of the log houses and wooden lampposts started to turn off, Sergeant Rhys Lukeson disappeared into a dark corner of the city and no one, not even the Bat Night Security Patrol up above or the Hedgehog Bat Night Security Patrol on the ground, noticed him.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The wooden torches with LED light bulbs led the way in the heavily dark night for their owners Squad J. They could see nothing but fallen trees and fungus on the high hills of the beautiful Whanganui National Park. They were very tired and exhausted because they had been walking through the park for hours and have been ordered not to take a rest until their assignment was over.

  Pedro drew a quick breath. “Boy, these hills are quite… hilly.”

  “Yeah, my feet are killing me,” Kathy said. “We’ve been searching this park for a long time and found no monsters.”

  “Surely Skipton wouldn’t mind if we sat down for five minutes to see where we have been and where we haven’t been yet,” Larissa said.

  They sat down on massive rocks under a big willow tree.

  “Paula, you done any research on these New Zealand monsters?” Stu Pot asked.

  “I’ve done a fair bit, Stu Pot, but I wouldn’t say it’s my best subject,” Paula explained, as she looked through her rucksack. “Let’s just see how much of the park we’ve already covered first.”

  Rustom looked at his T.M.D. and was about to tell the rest of his squad mates, but he was shocked that they were more interested in watching Paula slamming two small metal poles into the ground. Then she pressed the red button on each pole and a blue digital map of the national park appeared between the p
oles. It showed all of the park’s hills, trees and the Whanganui River. Then bright bold red lines appeared on the map like a map line. The lines showed where they had been since they started their mission. According to the map, they had covered eighty percent of the park.

  “Eighty percent?” Kathy cried. “And we still hadn’t found any damn monster!”

  Nobody snapped back at her because they understood that she was still not over Rachael’s death yet. They would have done their best to support her if it wasn’t for their training sessions by Skipton’s standards. They were finding a single training session with him more exhausting than their previous near-death experienced Egyptian mission. If Lukeson was here to train them, it would have been very different.

  Pedro didn’t realise he yawned loudly on Larissa.

  “Beak it up, Pedro!” his sister yelled. “If you hadn’t made us stowaways on the last missions, we wouldn’t need to be here.”

  “Beak it up, Larissa.” Rustom put his hand behind his ear and tried to listen. Everyone waited for him to respond. After ten seconds, he finally gave up and said, “It must have been the wind.”

  “Remember Skipton’s orders, guys,” Stu Pot said. “We must not rest until we have found the secret hideout of these monsters, even if it means searching both islands of New Zealand.”

  “God, that Skipton,” Pedro moaned. “He’s pushing too far. Lukeson never pushed us this far.”

  “I don’t think he’s even meaning to push us,” Kathy said.

  “Well, pushing us to fail,” Rustom said. “And I don’t mean fail in order to succeed; I mean fail to make us out to be worthless.”

  “Still, as we’re soldiers, what choice do we have?” Paula said.

  Stu Pot remembered what Lukeson told him before he left. Just remember this, Potter. Every struggle you go through is not failing, but helps you climb the ladder of self-improvement.

  Then he began to wonder where his sergeant was. All he and his squad knew was that Tugson and Skipton told them that Lukeson needed a fortnight’s holiday so he left. No one knew where he could be or even guess because Skipton and Tugson were training them now. Though the squad tried to view being trained by the top two powerful men in the whole of G.C.A. an honour, they would rather have Lukeson training them. It had been only one week and they were still missing him. Even Rustom said he would rather have Lukeson than Skipton.