Banshee Worm King: Book Five of the Oz Chronicles (8 page)

Kimball growled and lurched forward.
 
I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck
before he could go anywhere.

The creature stepped forward silently.
 
It was as if it didn’t want to alert the
others of its presence.

I looked at the door.
 
I could make it.
 
I could run
inside with Kimball and shut the door behind me.
 

The creature took another step.

I leaned forward.
 
I
had to go now.
 
I ran.

The creature leapt into the air and swooped down on top of
me. I fell back and pounded my head on the deck.
 
Dazed, I struggled with the creature and
pushed it off me.
 

“Hey,” I said thinking I had shouted, but no one came.
 
“Out here!”

The creature lurched forward and finally let out a shrill
scream, but only because Kimball had his teeth buried deep in its arm.
 
It pulled and yanked feverishly to get loose,
but Kimball wasn’t letting go.
 
The
creature whacked him on top of the head.
 
Kimball whimpered but didn’t let go.
 
He tugged on the creature’s arm and pulled it to the edge of the deck.

“What in tarnation?” Wes asked stepping onto the deck.

“It’s that monkey thing,” I said standing.
 
“Kimball, hold on.”

“That ain’t no monkey.”

“No kidding,” I said.
 
“I need a knife.”

Tyrone stepped out from behind Wes holding his hunting
knife.
 

“Not a problem.”
 
He
moved towards the creature.
 

With one swift motion, it reached up impossibly high and
grabbed a branch and, as if connected to a bungie cord, pulled itself off the
deck, taking Kimball with it.

“Kimball!”

With little effort, the creature hopped to another branch
and slammed Kimball into the trunk of the tree.
 

I heard my dog yelp and the world slowed to a crawl. My
heart was pounding in my eardrums.
 
I
found myself on the edge of the deck, leaning over the railing.
 
I don’t even know how I got there.
 
Kimball was falling.
 
I watched him slip through every inch of air
on his way down.
 
Somebody yelled,
“No!”
 
Somebody else cried “Stop him,” as
if a thing like that was possible.
 
My
first thought was “My dog is falling.”
 
My last thought was, “Feeding grounds.”

He hit the ground with a thud and a whine.
 
He was alive.
 
I could see him moving.
 
He tried
to stand once, but couldn’t do it.
 

I climbed on the railing.

“What are you doing?” Wes asked.

“He can’t be down there,” I said readying myself to jump to
the nearest branch of the tree.
 
The
monkey creature was gone.
 

I felt the railing shake and turned to see Lou climbing up
on it.

I jumped to the branch and swung to another one that was
sturdy enough to stand on.
 

“What the hell, boy?” Bostic said.
 

Lou was about to jump.

“No,” I said, “stay.
 
Keep the monkey thing off me.”

She jumped off the rail and barely reached the limb.
 
“The others can do that.
 
I’m helping you get Kimball.”

“I told you this is their feeding ground,” Bostic
said.
 
“They don’t play cautious
here.
 
They eat whatever falls in their
lap.”

Lou swung to the sturdy branch and I grabbed a hold of her.

Without a word, we both started climbing down.
 
I peered down at the ground below as I
climbed with one eye on Kimball and the other on the ground around him for
Banshee worm activity.
 
It was still.
 
Maybe the worms didn’t like dog.

I stepped on the last branch before the ground.
 
It was about six feet high. “Kimball?”

A second or two went by before he moved.
 
He lifted his head and let out a low
cry.
 

“I’m coming.”

Lou stepped down on the branch.
 
“So, how are we going to get him up the
tree?”

I hesitated.
 
“I
didn’t think that far ahead.”

We heard a grunt from above and looked up to see Ajax
easily climbing down to our branch.

“I should have figured,” I said.
 
“There’s no way Ajax would let Kimball down.”

The monkey creature screeched.
 
I could see its silhouette through the tiny
branches at the top of the tree.
 
Out of
the corner of my eye, I saw Ariabod leap from the deck and onto the tree.
 
He was going after the creature.
 

Ajax joined us on the branch.

“I’ll go down,” I said, “and I’ll hand Kimball up to you,
Ajax.
 
Got it?”

The gorilla nodded.

“What do you expect me to do?” Lou asked.

“Watch out for those worms.
 
The ground moves the least little bit, you let me know.”

She nodded.

I gave her a smile and dropped to the ground.
 
My knee twisted and popped.
 
I curled up and fell on my back.
 
A searing pain shot up my leg and I growled
in pain.

“Oz?” Lou said.

“I’m fine... I’m fine.
 
I just twisted my knee.”
 
I rolled
over and pushed myself on my hands and knees and crawled over to Kimball.
 

He was panting heavily.
 
I placed my hand on him, and he raised his head.

“I’m going to get you out of here, boy.”

“Oz?”

I brought my leg forward and propped myself up on my good
knee.
 
I was hoping I hadn’t hurt the
other one seriously.

“Oz?”

I attempted to push up and put some weight on my bad
leg.
 
A sharp pain turned my stomach.

“Oz?”

“What?” I asked in a huff.

“The ground moved.”

The words left her mouth and entered my ears like a
missile.
 
It was all the motivation I
needed to ignore the pain in my knee.
 
I
stood and looked for solid footing.
 
Bending down at the waist, I placed my hands underneath Kimball and
lifted.

I had forgotten how heavy he was.
 
I limped back to the tree trunk and tried to
lift him even higher.
 
Ajax’s long arm
dangled down and waited for me to hand Kimball up to him.
 
He was ready to do his part.
 
If I could only do mine.

The ground underneath my feet shifted, and I stumbled
back.
 
It shifted again and my foot
turned sending a shooting pain through my leg.
 
I fell to my knees.
 

A worm emerged just a few feet away from me.
 
Its mouth opened, and I saw the teeth up
close and personal.
 
It wasn’t a fun
sight.

I scrambled back to my feet, but the pain was too
much.
 
The ground shook.
 
Kimball began to squirm in my arms.
 
I tried desperately to hold on to him, but it
was too much.
 
I dropped him to the
ground.

As I reached down to pick him up again, I felt myself
rising into the air.
 
Kimball was getting
farther and farther away from me.
 
I
could see the ground sinking away all around him.
 

A Banshee worm raised its mutant head out of the ground
next to my dog, and wrapped its mouth around his stomach.
 
Before I even had time to scream, the worm
bit down and killed the best friend I had ever had.

My world began to shrink.
 
I reached up absentmindedly and felt Ajax’s arm.
 
Working my way down from his elbow to his
wrist, I realized he was holding onto me.
 
He had lifted me up at the last moment and saved me from the Banshee
worms.
 
He saved me, but doomed my dog.

I heard Lou screaming the word “No!” over and over
again.
 
Her voice blared out like a
siren.
 

Ajax slowly lifted me up to the safety of the branch.
 
His eyes were wet, and he couldn’t look me in
the face. A strained hoot-like whimpering was all he could manage to form with
his tongue-less mouth.
 

I felt like I wasn’t really there.
 
I couldn’t really be there.
 
If I was there, my dog was dead.
 
“I want to go back,” I said.
 
I was babbling.
 
It didn’t make sense.
 
I didn’t want to go back down with the
Banshee worms.
 
I was trying to say I
wanted my dog back, but somehow my brain knew that wasn’t possible.
 
I wanted to go back just a few minutes.
 
Just to the point where I saw Kimball looking
over the deck of the treehouse.
 
If I
could go back there, I could get my dog inside before that monkey creature
showed up, before my dog fell.
 
I could
save my dog.
 
I would still have my dog.

“You can’t go back,” Lou said.

Five

I had survived the end of the world.
 
I had survived the Takers.
 
The Délons almost had me, but I got
away.
 
The Silencers, the Myrmidons, the
Flish, all of them.
 
I had survived them
all.
 
I was Creyshaw.
 
That’s what we do.
 
It’s what we were made for.
 
It was easy in a weird kind of way.

Sitting in Bostic’s mansion in the trees, staring at the
homemade wood planks that made up the walls, I couldn’t see how I was going to
survive this time. Kimball was gone.
 
Kimball was my family.
 
He was
part of me.
 
I couldn’t go on without
him.

I sat perfectly still as if doing so would stop time
itself.
 
I stared angrily at the wood,
trying to push it backwards, to set the world spinning in the opposite
direction.
 
It was connected to the
tree.
 
The tree shot up out of the
Earth.
 
The Earth spun in a direction
that moved time forward.
 
If I
concentrated hard enough and pushed the wood backwards, the tree would push
against the Earth, and we would go backwards in time.
 
It didn’t happen that long ago, I told
myself.
 
I just had to push a little,
just a tiny bit, just enough to get my dog back.
 

It didn’t move.
 
I
saw the shadows of the others moving behind me.
 
They whispered and signaled silently to each other.
 
They were crying, too.
 
Kimball was one of theirs.
 
He fought with them.
 
For them is more like it.
 
Protecting all of them was more important to
him than his own life.
 
That’s just the
kind of dog... warrior Kimball was.

Minutes passed and I stared.
 
Hours passed and I stared.
 
The night passed and I stared.
 
My eyes felt locked.
 
I couldn’t have closed them if I’d wanted
to.
 

I heard the heavy thumping of Wes’ footsteps approach.
 
He pulled up a flimsy folding chair and sat
next to me. I could hear the chair groan as he applied his weight to it.
 
He sat for a few minutes without saying a
word. I could hear him swallow and sniffle.
 
He cleared his throat and said, “Son, your family is here for you.”

I managed to move my head slowly and look at him. His eyes
were red and swollen.
 
He had been crying
all night.

He placed his hand on my shoulder.
 
“Did you hear what I said, Oz?
 
We are your family now.
 
You’re one of ours.
 
We’re hurting for you, boy, and we want to
know what to do for you.”