Super Kids! The Forgotten World

by Kurt Zimmerman

  Super Kids!

  The Forgotten World

  Copyright 2012 by Kurt Zimmerman

  All rights reserved

  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007BZ3J9G

  Introduction

  “Trinity! Wake up!” My mom yelled up the stairs. “It’s moving day, remember?”

  Ugh.

  I pulled the blankets up over my head.

  Moving day.

  I woke up that morning, thinking it was going to be the worst day of my life.

  I knew I had to say goodbye to my best friend, Hannah. I was dreading that. She’s the curly-haired sports freak that lives next door. We grew up together. For the last ten years, we’ve been best friends. I guess, that is, if you count our really early years. We’re both ten.

  “Trin, you don’t have to make your bed today!” Logan reminded me, as I was absent-mindedly pulling up my covers.

  “Oh, yeah.” I rolled my eyes and slumped off toward the bathroom.

  Occupied.

  It figured. I leaned back against the wall and waited.

  The condo we lived in kept getting smaller and smaller. My family had grown from three kids to five! It used to be just me and my older brother Quinn. A year after me, Logan was born, and for a long time, it was Quinn, Trin, and Logie. Sometimes my friends call me Trin. And Logan hates being called Logie; so that’s why I call him that.

  Three kids sounds like a pretty good size for a family, right? I thought so. But life is full of surprises, at least that’s what mom and dad say. Five years after Logan, Saydee arrived. And three years after that, Kasidee. So now you know why we were moving.

  And I wasn’t too happy about it.

  Was I in for a big surprise!

  Chapter One- The New House

  We did not move into our new house right after we bought it. The month before moving day was spent cleaning, repairing and painting EVERYTHING. Quinn, Logan and I spent every day after school helping, mostly with the paint. We each painted our own bedrooms, after picking out our colors.

  Considering it was our first major painting project, I thought my room turned out quite well.

  “What do you think of my room, guys?” I asked Quinn and Logan, who were both busy trying not to paint each other in their room. They were painting stripes.

  They stopped long enough to inspect my work.

  “Not bad, if you like pink,” Logan offered.

  “It’s not pink,” I said. “It’s Blossom Surprise.”

  “It looks like the Pink Panther’s butt if you ask me,” Quinn said, as he ducked the shoe I threw at him.

  “It looks better than the red and white stripes in your room,” I countered. “You wouldn’t be able to find Waldo in that circus tent!”

  I went back to my painting. It was a nice enough place, I guess. At least we were going to have more room. For everything! The rooms were huge, and that makes a big difference when you are sharing with a big family. There will be one more bedroom than the condo, when dad finishes remodeling. And one extra bathroom! My dad is a builder. He builds everything. He is turning the small garage that is attached to the new house into a big bedroom, so we will have even more space.

  But the best part of the new house was the new yard. At the condo, we had a patio in the back, and a parking lot in the front, and that was it. At our new place, we have seven acres! The front and back yards are plenty big, but beyond the back yard is all woods.

  My older brother Quinn was anxious to start exploring.

  “I found my gear, Trin,” Quinn said, holding up his camping backpack. “Do you have yours?”

  Logan was still digging through the moving boxes to find his, and so was I. Previously clean and folded clothes were flying behind Logan as he searched.

  “Give me a minute,” I answered. “ I have to hang up and put away some clothes first.”

  I really don’t know what the deal is with boys. They think their clothes are perfectly okay to wear, right off the floor. With Logan and Quinn sharing one bedroom at the condo, their floor was always covered with a mix of clean and dirty clothes, mostly dirty. Until mom stepped in, of course. It looked like the same thing was going to happen here, too.

  “You are going no place, buster, until everything is folded and put away,” mom said to Quinn. “And you will learn to use the dirty clothes hamper at this house. Understood?”

  “Time to turn over a new leaf, ‘buster’,” I said with a grin, after mom left the room.

  Quinn shook his head at me and gave me a dirty look. “I don’t see what all the fuss is about,” he said. “I think I should be able to keep my room any way I want.”

  “I think you should too,” I agreed. “But you better want it the same way mom wants it!” I skipped outside with my camping gear, giggling at my own joke.

  My brothers and I kid around a lot, but it’s just for fun.

  When we first moved into our new house, we thought of ourselves as a typical, average family. We had no idea how much that was about to change.

  Chapter Two- The Discovery

  To some kids, being in the woods is scary, but not for us. Our dad likes to go hunting, and he taught us all about how to read the signs of the trail. He taught us why moss only grows on the north side of trees, because it is always shaded from the sun. And if you know where north is, you can figure out all the other directions, even without a compass! It also keeps you from walking around in circles, like some people do when they are lost. Quinn, Logan and I headed out to explore, after the boys had picked up the clothes in their room.

  The woods behind our house was big. It didn’t stop at the edge of our property, but continued almost another mile before it ended at the Tittabawassee River.

  “That’s a weird name for a river,” Logan said.

  “It means- ‘river running around the shore’, Quinn said. “It’s an old Indian name, but the Indians did not name the river. The early settlers did.” Did I tell you that my brother Quinn is smart? Yeah, he’s smart. And he looks stuff up on the internet all the time, too.

  Some of the trees in our woods are huge. They are so big, the two boys together cannot wrap their arms around them! Some of these are old and dead, but still standing.

  “I bet these trees were here when the earliest settlers came this way,” I theorized.

  We decided to explore going due east, away from our new house. We marked our trail with sticks, laid out on the ground to look like arrows.

  “Look,” I said, pointing. “A deer trail goes the same way we are.” It was narrow, only a couple of inches wide, but you could tell it was used recently, since there were many overlapping deer tracks along it. We followed it for quite a ways, and we marked our way with the sticks, just in case.

  After leading our expedition for a quarter of a mile or so, Quinn came abruptly to a halt, next to a large oak tree.

  “Trin, take a look at this,” he said, excitedly. “What do you make of it?”

  It was a single track. A footprint. A human footprint.

  “Looks like a kid’s foot,” I said. “There must be other kids out here.”

  “No way, “ Quinn argued. “If there were other kids out here, they would have left some kind of evidence.”

  “Duh,” I said. “Look at the footprint. Evidence.”

  “Not just this,” Quinn said slowly, as he looked around. “Something else. They would have trampled the weeds off the trail, or snapped over some of this light underbrush, like we did as we came through that brush patch over there.”

  “Here’s another!” Logan exploded. “And another, and another!”

  We rushed over to Logan’s discovery. “There’s a trail that heads off to the north,” L
ogan volunteered, “and it looks to me like it was recently used by this kid.”

  Quinn wasn’t buying it. “These aren’t kid’s footprints, you two. Look at them. The toes point outward, like an old man’s footprint.” Quinn knelt down and showed us the difference. “Young kid’s feet are straight forward. Your toes point outward more as you get older. These footprints point outward.”

  “Must be an old guy,” Logan said.

  “A little old guy,” I said. “These prints are close together. His legs must be really short.”

  Quinn was already heading up the trail.

  The woods continued to get darker the farther we went, even though it was mid-afternoon. Quinn was slowly moving up the trail, with his head down, watching for prints. The trail he was following was clear. Small, child-sized footprints, but now with an irregular pattern.

  “This is really weird,” Quinn said. “It looks like he was hurt, or tired, or something. I can’t tell.”

  “Let’s go back,” Logan suggested. “It’s getting creepy in here.” He was looking back over his shoulder, as if he was sensing someone following us.

  Our band of explorers came to an open field, right in the middle of the forest. It was right at this moment, at the edge of the clearing, when Quinn tripped. It’s not like Quinn to trip, but stranger things have happened. Like tripping over something that isn’t there, for instance. And even stranger is something that isn’t there saying, “ouch!”

  “What the...,” Quinn blurted out as he stumbled. “There’s something there, right there, in the middle of the trail.”

  “I don’t see anything,” I insisted.

  “Hey,” Logan said, “There IS something there. Look! The air is shimmering, like a mirage.”

  I looked down to see where Quinn had tripped. First there was nothing, but then I saw an area of swirling clear vapor, or something. Then I poked it with my finger. “No way!” I screamed, jumping back. “There’s something there!”

  “Or somebody!” A high-pitched, squeaky voice said, from out of nowhere. “Please don’t kick or poke me again! I’m not feeling well today. Go away.”

  “What the...” Quinn started to say as he reached down to see what he had tripped over. The shimmering area of light started moving into the forest. As it entered the shadows, an image of a small man slowly took shape. It appeared as if he was hurt or sick. He was limping along, holding his stomach.

  I ran ahead, and stood on the trail in front of the little man. He was about three feet tall, with bare feet and tightly fitting brown pants that appeared to have been torn off, just below his knees. He wore multi-colored suspenders over a dark green collared shirt. His stomach stuck out between his suspenders, like a soccer ball. His hair was dark brown and tightly curled, surrounding a round, cherub-like face. He wore round spectacles at the end of his large round nose. The features that were the most distinguishing of all were his ears. They were very large for the size of his head, and definitely on the pointed side!

  The little man stopped, looked at me, looked down at himself, and fainted to the ground.

  Chapter Three- The Visitor

  “I think he’s dead!” Logan said.

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions, Doctor Logie.” I said, sarcastically. “Quinn, give me a hand with him.” Quinn and I picked up the little man and took him back into the clearing. As soon as we got him out into the sunlight, he faded back into invisible.

  “I think he should stay in the shade,” Quinn suggested. “In fact, I think we should take him back to the house right now! Then we can decide what to do.”

  Quinn picked up the little man and slung him over his shoulder. “Wow, he’s really light,” Quinn noted as he picked him up. “Trin, you take the point, and Logan and I will follow you back to the house.”

  It seemed like forever to get back. The little man became visible every time we went into the deep shade of the forest. “I didn’t realize we were so far from home,” I observed. On the trip, the little man let out a series of burps and farts that told us he was still alive. We finally made it home. As we crossed the back yard in the sunlight, the little man turned invisible again, but other than that, he seemed like a normal man, only smaller.

  Mom would have been shocked to see us returning with an unknown person slung over Quinn’s shoulder, so we decided not to take him into the house. Instead, we went to the old clubhouse that the previous owner had left in our backyard.

  “Put him over here, Quinn,” I instructed. “I think I know what he needs.”

  “Look at him,” Logan said. “He’s not a regular human person, look at his ears!”

  “We’ll worry about his looks later, Logan,” I said, as Quinn was laying him down on the clubhouse floor. “He seems to be breathing alright, but his stomach is making the most unusual sounds.”

  “When we first saw him, he was holding his stomach,” Logan observed. “I bet he ate something he shouldn’t have. He was burping and farting all the way home.”

  “Run into the house and pour us a glass of milk from the fridge,” I said. “Really cold milk will sooth a gassy stomach.”

  When Logan returned, I sat the little man up on the floor and held the cup to his lips. He was startled when the cold glass woke him up, but drank a little bit of the milk. After a few seconds, he gulped the rest of it down and opened his eyes. The sight of the three of us must have frightened the little man. He was shaking, even with me hugging him around his shoulders.

  “Easy, take it easy,” I said in a soothing voice. “Nobody will hurt you here. We only want to help.”

  The little man’s eyes were bulging, as he carefully scanned the room. He seemed to be searching for something.

  “Hi, little man,” Logan said. “Are you okay?”

  “I am NOT a ‘little man’ as you say,” the stranger said bravely, in his high-pitched, squeaky voice. He was still shaking. “You should know that I am one of the tallest in my family, so don’t call me little.”

  “I’m sorry,” Logan apologized. “I didn’t mean to be rude. What is your name?”

  “I cannot tell you my name unless we are properly introduced by a mutual friend,” he said. “It is a serious lapse of protocol. I shall not tell you.”

  Quinn stepped in. “Listen buddy, I just carried your burping and farting butt over a half mile to help you. I think that makes us friends, don’t you think? Tell ME who you are.”

  “Very well,” he said, “I’ll tell you, then you can introduce me to everyone else. My name is Glute. I am an Acree. Who are you?”

  After we were all introduced, and after Glute started acting a little less nervous, we tried to discover something about this mystery person. He would not tell us where he lived, or what he was doing in the woods. He would only say he was visiting the forest, but didn’t live there. He belonged to a race of people called the ‘Acree’. He also said he needed to get back.

  “You Ex-Isles are going to keep me captive and torture me, aren’t you?” He finally asked.

  “Of course not. No one is a prisoner here, Glute,” I assured him. “We only want to help.”

  “If I am not your prisoner, I will take my leave of you then,” he said, “and let my thanks remain.” And with that, he hopped out of the clubhouse, stepped out into our back yard, and disappeared into the sunlight.

  Chapter Four- The Second Sighting

  After such a bizarre meeting with Glute, you would expect the three of us to spend the next week or two looking for our new acquaintance. And we did.

  “How long are we going to sit out here today?” Logan asked, as we approached the clearing. We were all loaded down with chairs and lunch. It had been two weeks since we found Glute in the woods.

  “All day, if we need to,” I answered. “He’s the most incredible person I’ve ever met. I want to be his friend.”

  “Summer vacation is almost half over,” Quinn observed. “I hope we don’t have to wait all summer to see him again.”

  As it t
urned out, that day was our lucky day. Just before lunch, we noticed a slight shimmer of air approaching us in the clearing.

  “Glute, is that you?” I asked.

  Silence.

  “Glute, we know you are there, we can see you.”

  “No you can’t!” Came the squeaky reply.

  The three of us started clapping and smiling. It was him!

  “You’re not supposed to be able to see me when I have my bender running,” he said. The voice was right in front of us. “Either you must have special powers, or my bender isn’t functioning.”