by Susan Berran
Aarrhhh! “Hey Jared, how much chewy have you got in your bag?”
Excellent, I’d solved two problems with one idea . . . WOW I’m brilliant. Jared had to hand over all of his chewy so that we could use it for markers. We had no idea how long we might be lost in there for, so we just kept shoving more chewy into our gobs and then pulling out wads of it as we went along. Then we stuck the globs of sticky gum up onto a wall every now and then, stretching it out to form the gooey arrows. At least now we’d know where we’d been. If only we could figure out where we were going.
“EEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!! ”
There it was again, the horrifying screams of the little kids, from somewhere far off in the distance, but we couldn’t tell what direction they were coming from because the sound just e c h o e d all around us. Those poor little kids. Who knows what they’d seen, or what had happened to them. Every time we heard them yelling, we figured that we probably should call out and answer them back, but there was no point, we couldn’t get to them even if we wanted to . . . and we didn’t want to. Even if we had the map, did we really want to be heroes and go and save them from . . . ALIEN . . . bears . . . who knows what!?
I DON"T THINK SO!
“What was that?!” Jared said suddenly as he grabbed my shirt by the neck and dove down, pulling me down with him.
Way up ahead, Jared had glimpsed a dark fuzzy shadow for just a split second . . . and it was huge. But in the darkness it was almost impossible to make out just what it was. We stretched out on our bellies, straining our eyes as we tried to hurry them into adjusting. With nothing but darkness surrounding us we were frozen in FEAR, barely breathing as we tried to stay completely silent. As our eyes began to adjust to the darkness we started to wish that they hadn’t. It was slowly becoming obvious to us both that we were definitely right in the middle of an ‘underwear emergency’ moment. In other words, there was a very good chance that we were about to DIRTY OUR DAKS.
There wasn’t just one, dark fuzzy shape up there, there were four . . . no FIVE I think. We didn’t want to breath we didn’t want to blink. What if they saw us. Jared leant in closer to me, “I think it’s a gorilla, or Bigfoot family” he whispered into my ear.
“Yeah thanks for the weather report Jared” I whispered sarcastically, as I quickly wiped away the saliva that was now running down the side of my face. It was still too hard to make anything out, but whatever they were, they were either really furry, or REALLY hairy.
The biggest one was holding some sort of club, or axe or something and standing over two smaller ones that looked like they were squatting down. Another HUGE one seemed to be holding something too . . . something like . . . A SPEAR.
Oh nO! We had to get out of there before we became their dinner.
I wondered if the others had seen them too. Yeah, maybe that’s why we heard SCREAMING. Maybe the two smaller ones weren’t part of the ‘family’ at all . . . maybe they were a couple of the little kids that didn’t get away.
I looked at Jared, I could tell he was totally freaked out, because if his face got any paler he’d have lit up the whole place and we’d be goners for sure, but I knew what he was thinking . . . maybe we should try and save the little kids from the ‘BEASTS’ . . . NO WAY! There was absolutely no way that we were going to be hanging around to be heroes. If Miss Croonarc wasn’t bothered to save them, then neither were we. So we quietly continued to slither along on our guts and then straight around the corner at the very next junction. Even then, we stayed on our bellies for as far as we possibly could. We kind of figured that even though we couldn’t really see what they were, we had absolutely no idea if they were able to see us in the dark.
“Ooww!” Suddenly a sharp pain gripped my side, as if something had stabbed me in the ribs. I felt around beside me and picked up a strange sharp object. Twisting and turning it in my hands it felt cold and smooth with a point at one end. It was a hair clip. A LITTLE KIDS HAIR CLIP! Well that clinched it, there was no point going back now, they were done for.
As soon as we thought we were far enough away we leapt back to our feet and began feeling our way along. Relying on the little night vision that we had, the only thing we knew for sure was that we were going deeper and deeper and becoming further and further lost with every step that we took.
“EERRRR . . . OOWWW . . . AARRRR!!”
“Did you hear that Sam?” Jared whispered in a very shaky voice.
“Yeah . . . geez your butt’s disgusting, what have you been eating?” I asked.
“It wasn’t me!”
“Oh . . . sorry.”
“EERRRR . . . OOWWW . . . AARRRR!!”
“There it is again!” Jared said now sounding pretty freaked out.
I knew that noise, I’d heard it somewhere before, the grunts and groans, the almost weeping . . . where . . .
Aha, the night before! That’s where I’d heard it. It was the mysterious ‘visitor’ that had been sneaking about and scared Jared. . . not me though. Whatever it was, it must have been checking us out that night and deciding who it was going to go after once it had us trapped in here. And now that ‘something’ was after US! It had to be the HUGE HAIRY BIG FOOT that we’d just seen. It had probably already ‘TAKEN CARE OF’ the small kids and now it was coming after us for DESERT! We didn’t think it had seen us but I was guessing that it definitely could have smelt Jared. He’d been sweating so much that he could out-smell a skunk that’d been rolled in full, fresh Smelly Melly nappies.
“AARRRR . . . OOWWW . . .”
It was getting louder and closer . . . and I just realised that we’d been leaving a nice, big, clear chewing gum trail that would lead it straight to US!!
That was Jared’s plan . . . I knew it was a dumb idea.
Luckily I thought of a way to confuse it.
Jared chewed like his life depended on it . . . because well, it did! Then I stuck up huge chewing gum arrows all over the place, stretching them out and pointing them in every different direction possible. We chucked on our backpacks and took off again, making our way through the darkness to try and get some distance from, whatever it was.
“Ok Jared we should be far enough away now, switch on the torch” I puffed.
“But you’ve got the torch” he replied.
“No . . . back there when we were on our guts you said . . . “Gimme the light” . . . so I rolled it over to you” I told him, starting to get just a little bit peeved.
“Na ahh, I said ‘Snot shines in the night’” Jared prattled on.
“Why would you say that?”
“Because I thought you might like to know . . . in case we run out of chewy.”
Yep, I’m certain Jared’s head was an empty gumball machine in a former life.
Ok, now we were completely LOST! It was the middle of the night and we had no torch. We were separated from the others, they had the map and there was some sort of crazed, moaning, hungry . . . gorilla type BIGFOOT following us . . . AND NO BATHROOM!
We were in real trouble . . . especially about the bathroom. Jared was producing the foulest smells on Earth and my nostrils were burning like the backside of a rabbit sitting in a raging fire.
Our eyes had adjusted to the dark about as much as they were going to. We could barely see shapes and stuff a few metres ahead of ourselves, but there wasn’t much choice. The only way to go was forward. If only we knew which way forward was!
Jared wanted to take the lead because he reckons that he has an incredible sense of direction. Hmmm, I seem to remember Jared’s incredible sense of direction. Yeah like when he was absolutely definitely sure that we were heading in the right direction on our bikes around the bush track in some of the back paddocks of his place.
The bush is almost impossible to get through it’s so incredibly thick and dense . . .
The bush was so thick and DENSE, that there was barely a track going through it at all, but Jared was so sure that he knew his way around it, so naturally we were going absolutely F
LAT OUT!
I had to follow right on his tail otherwise he’d lose me in there for sure. We were racing through the scrub, zooming over boulders, skidding around tight turns, whizzing under branches, jumping over massive mounds of dirt, diving through tunnels, flying off . . . flying off the edge of an old quarry and into the green sludgy water far, far, FAARRR below.
Yep. . . that was when I found out that hitting the water from that sort of height is like a bug hitting the windscreen of your car when you’re driving along; splatt!!
Yeah, like I was going to trust Jared to take the lead . . . I don’t think so. And behind that butt . . . that had to be the most DEADLY place on the planet. Then I figured that as long as the moaning and groaning was getting quiter, then we were going the right way, AWAY FROM IT! As long as we kept moving forward, we had a chance.
“Aarrhh!" I smashed my toes into something . . . something smooth, but SOLID. Whatever it was it seemed to groan and creak and . . . CRACK!
Oh oooo. . . SNAP , CRASH , BANG! IT WAS BREAKING UP! “Ow!” “Arh” Suddenly we were being smacked in the head by stuff that felt like rocks falling from above . . . CRASH, BANG BANG, CRASH, BANG BANG. We were hopping about in tiny little circles, holding onto our heads and swearing as every few seconds, something else SMACKED into us. Suddenly, Jared lost his footing and smashed straight back into me, sending me flying backwards.
“Ooww! ”THUD! “Aarrhh!” I fell to the ground hard . . . CRACK, SNAP, SNAP, CRASH . . . landing amongst the debris that had fallen all around us. As I sat amongst the HUGE, SOLID, dark shapes all around me, I picked up a piece and tried to scan it blindly with my hands. It was cold and smooth and had an odd feel to it. Not hard like a rock, but definitely not soft either . . . we both had the bruises on our heads to prove that. I knew those shapes, but from where? I picked up another one and cracked them against each other. Gee, they sort of sounded like . . . and felt like . . . BONES!
Jared bent down in the dark beside me and picked another one up . . .
“Nah, they can’t be bones” he said pretty confidently. “They’re way too big to be BONES. If this ‘thing’ is a bone then whatever it belonged to would have to be the size of a house. And it would have a smooth rounded end. . . like this has” he said feeling one end . . . “and the other end would have a double rounded smooth part . . . like this has. Aar-hhh! Hey Sam . . . I don’t think these belong to a cow.” Jared said, now about to wet himself.
“Well derrr . . . ya think!?” Gradually, in the dull, night light, we realised that there were heaps of them, of different shapes and sizes. I wasn’t just sitting with the bones that had fallen on top of me, but hundreds thousands of bones all around me, PILES and PILES of them! It had to be some sort of massive GRAVEYARD . . . or maybe a feeding area, or maybe BOTH.
CRACK! “Oh yuck!” Jared exclaimed as he trod on something fragile. “I think I just broke a giant egg and now it’s stuck on my foot.”
He leant down and began yanking and twisting at the thing as he tried to dislodge it when . . . THOOP! Off it came, finally. He lifted it up with both hands really close to his face to try and get a better idea of what it might be.
“Maybe it’s an Ostrich egg . . . or an Emu’s . . . hey Sam it’s really weird, it’s got . . . ummm . . . teeth?”
Suddenly all I could think of was the little kids . . . and the smelly, HAIRY BIG FOOT somewhere back there . . . and their soft little bones as Jared passed the ‘object’ to me.
“It’s a skull!”
“Aaarrrhhhhh!!” We both screamed at the top of our lungs. Jared took off into the darkness, around the very first corner, like a stuffed turkey invited to dinner at Christmas time, while I tried to frantically scramble to my feet and get out of the piles of bones that were burying me.
WOW! What a pal, what a best mate. . . GONE in two seconds. Jared must have been flying too, because his SCREAMS quickly faded into the distance, while I kept stumbling about, thrashing and tripping and smashing more and more of the bones. Finally I was able to crawl on my hands and knees, creeping my way through slowly, inch by inch to drag myself away from the deadly site, but with sweat now pouring into my eyes and sting-ing like crazy, before I could even get to my feet . . . WHACK!
“Ow!” . . . I smacked my head straight into an enormous boulder. But there was no time for sooking, I knew I had to keep moving FAST.
With everything still spinning before my eyes, I hauled myself up and sat on the smooth, rounded . . . TAP, TAP . . . hollow boulder. It was the size of one of those really big soft comfy chairs. And as I began to feel it all over I found that it had a hole the size of my fist . . . no two holes and just below that there were two smaller holes, but really close together . . . and even further down was a HUGE gaping split that seemed to go from one side almost to the other, with rows of really, really SHARP pointy things all along the top and bottom edge. I slowly bent down to get a closer look at the ‘BOULDER’ between my legs. But as I came face to face I realised that this was no boulder, it was . . . the most MASSIVE SKULL EVER! It was HUMUNGOUS. . . and I was SITTING ON IT!
“Eewww!”
I leapt up faster than a frog in a French res-taurant and took off in the direction that Jared had gone. Sprinting around the corner and . . . SLAM!
“Arhh my nose!” . . . straight into a skinny steel pole . . . with a mop on top. Hang on. IT WAS JARED!
“Ooww! What are you doing here? I thought you’d be miles away by now?” I said feeling my nose, which I was sure he’d broken. It felt like he’d shoved it right up into my brain and now my brain was DRIBBLING out through my nostrils.
“Na!” Jared said proudly. “I just jumped around the corner and screamed softer and softer, so whatever was attacking you would think I’d total y gone and then it wouldn’t come after me. Clever, huh?”
WOW, what a pal, I’m so lucky to have a friend like Jared. About as lucky as a cow standing in a bucket of tomato sauce at a butcher shop on NATIONAL BARBECUE DAY.
GREAT! Now we both had a BLOOD nose! Let’s just hope that whatever was following us had a lousy sense of smell. I don’t know if BLOOD really smells or not, but I reckon we could knock over a bull charging at a red rag with our stenchy armpits.
“EERRRR . . . OOWWW . . . AARRRR!!”
Naturally, why not, of course! It obviously had a terrific sense of smell because suddenly the moaning was getting louder and even SCARIER . . . for Jared, not me.
“AARRRR . . . OOWWW . . .”
We had to keep moving, it sounded even closer than before. We couldn’t tell if it was groaning and moaning from a heap of PAIN or just the sound of hunger. Either way we weren’t going to hang around to find out. The trouble was we couldn’t exactly sprint along because every few steps we’d fall over something else in the dark. We desperately tried to stare into the darkness as far ahead as possible, while at the same time, feeling our way along. Sometimes it was easier to get down and crawl on our hands and knees because there was so much stuff in our way and it seemed like we kept SLAMMING into every single bit of it, smacking our knees, cracking our shins and fumbling our way. We were just about KILLING ourselves.
I guess at least we’d save the creature some extra work, because we were already TENDERISED!
“AARRRR . . . OOWWW . . .”
It was still coming! We’d taken turn after turn, doubled back onto our own footsteps, climbed across HUGE objects and even jumped incredible distances to try and lose whatever it was back there.
HOW WAS IT STILL FOLLOWING US?
Maybe it really could see in the dark, like some ZOMBIE, HUMANOID, BIG FOOT thingy.
It couldn’t be the smell of our BLOOD noses, could it? We’d been so careful and I’d made sure that our noses were completely covered up.
You see I told Jared that we needed to get rid of the BLOOD just in case it could be smelt by ‘THE BEAST’, so we had to stop for a seccy, just long enough to sit down in the dark and do some quick first aid on ourselves.
Hang on . . . “Hey Jared. How did you stop your blood nose?” I asked him, suddenly feeling very nervous.
“Easy, every couple of metres I just press a finger over one nostril and blow. Then I stick my pinky finger up there to pull out any clogged bits and flick them up to the roof . . . then I do the other nostril . . . no more blood.” he said happily.
Ah haa. So every few metres Jared had been squirting his BLOOD out like high-pressure spray-paint. All over the wall and floor and wherever else it happened to land and then just to top it off, flicking out a nice big dob of BLOOD clots so that he’d have no BLOOD left in his nose.
Hmmm.
It is definitely possible that when they were handing out brains, Jared thought they said “Ok, over here if you want to put a drain in your head!” so naturally he said “No.”
So now, whatever had been following us could either see the BLOOD trail in the dark or smell the BLOOD trail that was splattered all over the place. Either way, Jared had managed to leave a trail, like BIG flashing arrows for it to follow, that would lead it right to us.
Yep, having Jared for a mate was just TERRIFIC, just great, just awesome . . . just making my chance of SURVIVAL less and less likely BY THE SECOND.
I then very politely and gently discussed with Jared why he SHOULD NOT be splashing his BLOOD about like a dinner bell . . . and that if he didn’t shove something up his nose to stop the BLEEDING in the next three seconds then I was going to poke something so far up his nostrils that he’d be blowing his nose out from his butt for THE REST OF HIS LIFE!
