Paula got into the one where Pedro and Larissa was in and closed it up.
Kathy got into the nearest locker and was about to shut herself in when she saw Rustom firing a laser at the ceiling. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to help us get away from those squid bastards as fast as we can,” Rustom told her. “Now, shut yourself in there and your mouth up and get ready.”
Kathy shut herself in and prepared herself for whatever might come. She started to feel nauseous when her locker started to rumble. She felt like she was in a launched rocket. Then she felt her locker going more horizontal. She thought she must be on the surface but she stopped herself before she opened the door in case it was facing the water instead. She took a deep breath and opened the door. There was no water coming, but rays from the sun.
Kathy stood up and was delighted to see that everyone had made it out of the sub alive and were floating in their lockers like boats. She paddled her arms to move hers and join up with her friends. She joined them in taking their heavy wet military jackets off. Soon, all of them were only wearing wet t-shirts, trousers and boots, except the still unconscious Mengy who still had her jacket on.
“How are we going to defeat these squids?” Kathy asked.
“I got some spears and more aquatic guns that could blow them away,” said Rustom.
“Well, what are we waiting for?” Paula asked.
“Remember our negotiations with the mer-people down below?” asked Stu Pot.
“Stu Pot, look at these monsters,” said Kathy. “Mengy’s magic didn’t kill them.”
“So?” He wasn’t getting her point.
“I don’t think they are normal colossal squids,” she explained. “I think they are magical. And I don’t think the mer-people would accept those magical murderous monsters, even if they were the last squids in the world.”
Stu Pot tried to think of what Lukeson would do in this situation. After thinking with pressure for five seconds, he finally said, “All right, let’s kill them. Rustom, can we have more weapons?”
Rustom chucked Stu Pot and Kathy a spear each and chucked Paula an APS Underwater Rifle. “Stuart, Kathy, take these.” He chucked each zebra a diver’s mask with a yellow cylinder hanging down. “There’s only twenty minutes of air in them so don’t waste them.”
“Right,” said Stu Pot. “Pedro, Larissa, stay up on the surface and look after Mengy. The rest of us will go underwater and kill these monsters. Move!”
The zebras put their gear on and Rustom and Paula followed them underwater, leaving the young penguins to tend to Mengy.
* * *
Pedro yawned.
“We are stuck in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean fighting monsters,” said Larissa, “and all you can do is yawn?”
“I’m bored,” said Pedro. “Those guys down there are having all the fun and we’re just stuck in a floating locker with a sleeping elephant here.”
Then they saw Kathy’s head pop up to the surface followed by Stu Pot’s. They took their diving masks off.
“Has it been twenty minutes already?” Pedro asked. “Where’s Rustom and Aunt Paula? Are they running out of air?”
“We penguins can breathe underwater for much longer, genius!” snapped Larissa. “As for Rustom, he seems able to do anything except die.” Then she turned to the soldiers. “You guys making much progress down there?”
“Nay,” replied Stu Pot, who finished gasping for air. “Not even Rustom can seem to –”
Then both zebras screamed as they were dragged back down into the sea. The little penguins tried to see what it was that dragged them down, but they were well out of sight.
“We’ve got to do something!” cried Pedro.
“But how?” said Larissa. “We have no weapons, no magic powers and no ideas.”
Pedro tried to think and something came into his head when he spotted Mengy. “Actually, we do.”
“What are you doing?” asked Larissa. Then she gasped as she saw her brother turn around and holding up a pair of elephant tushes. “You can’t take those!”
“I’m not stealing them,” protested Pedro. “I’m just borrowing them. We’ll put them back on Mengy after we killed the squids.”
“But how do you know –”
“I don’t, but we’ve got to try to help our friends down blow.” He chucked one to her.
“How do you know those tushes are safe to use?” asked Larissa. “How do you know it’s okay for non-magic creatures like us to use them or they won’t create anything disastrous?”
“There’s one way to find out.” Pedro took his cap off and dived into the vast, rough ocean.
Larissa sighed. “Please forgive us, Mengy, if anything goes wrong with your tushes.” Then she followed her brother into the sea.
* * *
The brave little penguins swam a thousand meters, right into the bathypelagic layer of the Atlantic Ocean. They finally found the squids, Rustom and their aunt Paula, who was losing consciousness as were Stu Pot and Kathy. Larissa thought it was very lucky that penguins were fast swimmers otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to catch up with the gigantic monsters.
Rustom was still alive, but he was wrapped in so many squid tentacles that he just couldn’t break free. He got out his stealth arms out of his back to open up a flag grenade and put it in the squid’s beak. But one of its tentacles flipped it back to explode in the rhino’s face. He went unconscious. Then something else went into the squid’s beak.
“What did you do that for?” Larissa asked Pedro, who didn’t have his tush anymore.
“I assumed the tush would come back to me like a boomerang,” he explained. “That’s what I was thinking.”
Then a white light caught their attention. The squid that held Rustom started to freeze and turn ice white.
“You see, sis?” Pedro boasted. “Progress.”
Larissa looked at her tush. “Sorry about this, Mengy.” She broke the tush in half and gave one end to Pedro. She was starting to hope that Mengy could grow new ones.
They swam to the other two squids.
Larissa aimed her tusk end into the squid’s beak and threw it. It was a perfect hit! The squid went white all over and went completely still like a tomb. The zebras slid through the frozen tentacles and the young penguin followed after them.
Pedro, on the other hand, was struggling to aim for the last squid’s beak. The tentacles were flapping all over the place and he knew that if he threw the last piece of tusk, it would just bounce off the tentacles. The brave penguin took a deep breath and charged in, dodging the tentacles as much as he could. He approached the open beak, slammed the tush in and swam away. The squid froze and turned white like the other two.
Paula began to slide through the tentacles of the squid that held her and Rustom the same with his squid. They started to fall down like the zebras. Pedro swam down to them and caught them.
“You see, I told you, no problem,” said Pedro, as he caught up with Larissa. He started to strain his face when he realised how heavy Rustom was.
Struggling to hold up the zebras herself, his sister looked up. “Then how do you explain that?”
Pedro looked up to see the squids above him and Larissa starting to glow whiter than they already were. “Quick! Let’s get these guys up to the surface!” he yelled.
The little penguins maximised their speed. They were just five seconds away from the surface. Four seconds. Three seconds. Two seconds. One whole second… Then vast whiteness took over everyone and everything.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“You guys can’t find them at all?” Tugson was having an anxiety attack. Just when he thought things couldn’t get worse with Squad J on the loose in the middle of a world war, finding out that the radar team had lost them on the giant screen made him think he was very close to having a heart attack.
He and Skipton had been looking at the giant screen revealing the Atlantic Ocean. They had been keeping an eye of Squad J, but
no more than that. Squad J were Blackpool G.C.A.’s last squad, but Tugson and Skipton knew they couldn’t spare any creatures to go out and retrieve them as they were few in number and not military-trained enough or at all. They also knew they couldn’t request squad members from the other English G.C.A. cities or the ones from the other countries because they were busy enough with defending their underground cities and continuing the purpose of G.C.A.
They tried to find and contact Lukeson to order him to come back when they needed his help now more than ever but they couldn’t.
Then something on the screen caught Skipton’s eye. “Zoom in closer to Greenland, Chief,” he ordered.
The chief radar technician, who was a male komodo dragon, had the screen zoomed in on the Atlantic Ocean close to Greenland as it could. It showed nothing, but the sea and about three wooden lockers.
“They must have escaped inside those things,” Skipton said.
“But if they did, how come we can’t track them down?” Tugson asked.
No one seemed to come up with everything.
“Sir,” a female snow leopard called. “I’m getting the reports from the other cities about how safe they are from the missiles above.”
Tugson wasn’t giving up on Squad J, but he decided to come back to searching for them after he checked how the rest of G.C.A. was holding up. “All right, ladies and gentlemen. Load up the security cameras from every city and let’s see how they are doing.”
“British Isles first,” Skipton ordered.
They looked at the giant screen.
“London’s good,” Tugson said
“Manchester’s good,” Skipton said.
“Birmingham’s good. So is Newcastle. York. Sheffield.”
“Yeah!” Skipton cheered like riders on the roller coasters at Blackpool Pleasure Beach. “Doncaster’s safe!”
Everyone had to stop and look at him as no one had ever seen him like this at all. The lieutenant smiled sheepishly and looked at the screen. “Well, Edinburgh’s good. So is Cardiff. Dublin. Belfast.”
Then Tugson ordered the radar animals to move to the G.C.A. underground cities of other countries. The whole of France was good. Germany was good. Spain, Poland, Denmark, Russia, China, Japan, Turkey, both Koreas, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and the United States of America were all safe and unaffected by the human war up above, but were also alerted for anything.
“Well, good to know that G.C.A. has nothing to do with this war,” Tugson said.
Then they got an emergency call.
“You were saying, sir?” Skipton said.
“All right, don’t push your luck!” Tugson pressed the green phone symbol on his wooden laptop and the giant screen showed two men and a woman in Canadian Army uniforms with the G.C.A. symbols on them.
“Corporals Murray, Jacobs and Glass,” Tugson greeted.
“Captain Tugson, we have trouble here in Victoria,” reported one of the male corporals who had blond hair and green eyes.
“How serious is it, Murray?” Skipton asked.
“We’ve been spotted, sir,” Murray replied.
“By rouge animals or monsters, I hope,” Skipton said.
“I fear not, sir,” replied Glass, the female officer with brown long hair and eyes.
Tugson knew the worst had arrived. “Oh, God!”
“We sent out some gophers to check out a strange reporting,” explained Jacobs, who had blue eyes and shaved black hair. “They found out that it was a bomb for any non Canadians coming over. Humans, of course, not animals.”
“How many gophers were caught in the blast?” Tugson asked.
“About seven out of ten, sir,” replied Murray.
“The remaining three tried to pull the deceased ones back to our base so there would be no evidence left behind for the humans,” Glass replied.
“Pity they got spotted in the process,” Skipton said.
“No, sir,” Murray protested. “They were not spotted themselves.”
“What have I told you about jumping to conclusions, Skipton?” Tugson said to him. “It makes you sound impatient and stupid.”
“It was the tracks they left when coming back to base that the humans spotted,” Murray told him.
“I didn’t say it was the bodies of the gophers that got spotted, sir,” Skipton said. “You were the only who was jumping to conclusions.”
“Sir, we don’t know how long it will take for the humans to get here,” Jacobs said. “We are going to have to fight them, even though we know it’s against our laws. We don’t know what else we can do.”
And, even though they weren’t showing it, both Tugson and Skipton were clueless themselves. Now they wished they hadn’t let their pride get in the way and sent Lukeson away. It was always their sergeant that would come up with the good ideas to secure negotiations and defeat the enemies. Tugson and Skipton tried to put themselves in his shoes, but they just couldn’t think like him. They became leaders from mere experience. Even though they were smart enough to plan their military plans without causing too much destruction, they had to rely on Lukeson’s genius ideas, marvellous negotiation skills and great judgement of character in order to make their organisation and their missions successful.
Tugson sighed. “All right, we’re coming over. Maintain your positions, Corporals.”
“Yes, sir,” the Canadian corporals said before the screen went blank.
“Skipton, with me,” Tugson said, as he started to wheel himself out of the radar room. “Carry on, everyone.”
* * *
Skipton had followed Tugson to Platform Two at the Blackpool Underground railway station. The entire station with its four platforms station building looked like a wooden giant toy Paddington Station set. It had the full works: cafes, benches, lampposts with LED light bulbs and recycling bins. It was usually full of lots of passengers coming and going from all places from G.C.A. worldwide, but today it was empty due to the animals panicking about the world war going on above them.
“What about here?” the lieutenant asked. “There’s no senior officer to take over from us now Lukeson’s gone.”
“When I said we’re going to Victoria,” Tugson said, “I meant me and all the spare soldiers I can find from our cities. We need to fight off the human invasion in case they mistake us for the cause of the war up above. You are to stay here and look after this place.”
“What? Me?”
“Well, you are second-in-command under me, are you not?” Tugson said. “Or are you not worthy of your rank?”
It was not just those words Tugson said that got to Skipton; it was all also the self-doubt his own father gave to him. All the ‘you will always be a nobody’ and ‘no one will ever admire you’ quotes was coming back to him. It was making him determined to prove his worth. “Of course I am, sir.”
“Then prove it,” Tugson said.
Then his private wooden train coach arrived and the driver, a mole called Rogers, opened the door for him. He wheeled himself onboard and ordered Rogers to head to Paris. He closed the door behind and the train rode off, leaving Skipton to make his way back to the city.
* * *
“All right, ten-shun, everyone!”
No animal seemed to have heard Skipton as they were too busy panicking.
“I SAID, ATTENTION!” he roared. “HEY, I’M TALKING TO YOU!”
Still no one cared.
He walked to a section of the G.C.A. guards. The guards were military trained like the soldiers, but their commitments were always to the city unlike the soldiers who travelled to wherever the mission took them.
“You guys, help me to gather the citizens and keep them in order,” Skipton said.
“No can do, sir,” the leader of the guard group, a European green toad, yawned. “We have been trying to do this for three hours non-stop and we would rather face court martial than try again because our lives can’t be asked to do so.”
Skipton knew he couldn’t afford to court martial the last
line of defence for insubordination, but he couldn’t let the animals keep on panicking as they were. Only now did he realise that his childhood on the farm wasn’t so bad. It was much more peaceful growing the vegetables back then than keeping these animals in order right now. As he tried to maintain order, he was beginning to wonder about his leadership skills. Then he started to wonder about Squad J and about Lukeson. He realised that they were the ones who had successfully accomplished many of G.C.A.’s missions for the last three years. He hoped they were all fine and dreaded to think about if they weren’t.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Mengy groaned. Her eyes kept opening and shutting. She didn’t know whether she was dying on Earth or just waking up in Tian, which was one of the oldest Chinese terms for heaven. It was also the one she believed that she will go to when her time would come. When she woke up properly, she discovered that she was still on Earth and still alive. She didn’t know where she was, except that she was in a sea cave with a big hole on the big rocky ceiling with blue sky rays shining through it. Then she realised that sea water was up to her waist.
“It’s just you and me, Mengy.”
Mengy turned her head to the right and saw that Paula was manacled on the wall. Both wings and feet. She looked as if she had been up for ages and was fed up.
“I only woke up an hour ago,” she explained. “And I don’t know how we got here or where the rest of our friends are.”
Then the elephant noticed that she was manacled on the wall as well. Not just her arms or her legs, but her trunk as well.
“I don’t know whereabouts is this cave or who captured us and why.” Then Paula saw Mengy using her tongue to point each side of her face. “Yes, I can see your tushes are gone, Mengy. I don’t know where they are.”
Mengy gestured towards to Paula.
“Me taking them?” scoffed the penguin. “No way. I’m a penguin who specialises in technology, not ivory.”
But Mengy was still pointing her tongue at her. Then she lowered it.
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