Chapter Chapter Fifty-Nine
Joe had slipped along the bottom of the river for a while before he started to think more clearly.
“I need to get up out of this river. I’m never going to see Luke from down here and he’s never going to see me”.
He cautiously surfaced and moved towards the bank. He paused for a moment and tried to decide on whether he should change into something small, secretive and scuttling, or big, quick and as secret as a tank! He decided on secretive as he really didn’t have the stomach for a fight right now. He knew the pain in his shoulder wouldn’t allow him to fly for very long, so it would have to be a land based animal. He chose a hare. He hauled himself out of the water and immediately transformed. A hare has great senses; smell, hearing and so on, plus it is quick, really quick. Unfortunately one of the problems with being a hare was that it only had a hare’s eye view of the world, which is about knee height. He tried to get a sense of where he was in relation to the copse where he should have met Luke. He realised pretty quickly that in hare form this was going to be practically impossible. The grass was well over waist height and he found it difficult to see more that a few feet ahead of him. He had no idea where he was.
“I know, I’ll change into a squirrel” he thought “That will get me a better view of the lay of the land”.
He hoped to the nearest biggest tree he could see and changed into a squirrel. He then scrambled, somewhat painfully, up the trunk. When he felt he was high enough he scuttled out along a branch, but the leaves of the tree only seemed to obstruct his view almost as effectively as the grass had done when he was a hare. Normally he would have scrambled to the end of the flimsiest twig and hung on while he had a good look round. But his shoulder was hurting like hell and blood was now dribbling down his front paws, there was no way he wanted to risk falling and injuring himself even further.
Joe began to despair. For the first time in a very long time he felt like crying. He didn’t want to fly, he didn’t know where he was, he was in a lot of pain and worst of all he didn’t have any way of finding Luke or Holly.
“Of all the stupid bloody…” he started to wail, but instead of his normal voice it came out as a squeaky howl. He stopped, mid squeak, thinking, the noise had given him an idea. If he made an animal cry, especially the cry of an animal that shouldn’t live in the woods, Luke might hear it. If Luke heard it and if he realised it was an animal that shouldn’t be there he might realise it was Joe. Plus thought Joe, the noise might give Luke a clue of where he was and then Luke would be able to come and find him. Joe realised there were a lot of “ifs” and “maybe’s” in his idea, but it was the best he had. So if he was going to try he had to decide which animal? It had to be something that was loud very loud and very obviously not native.
He thought for a few moments and then the idea hit him
“A wolf!” he said out loud to nobody in particular. “No wolves had lived in the countryside for hundreds of years. Luke’s bound to work out it’s me and then he’ll come and find me”.
He braced himself between three big branches and changed into a wolf. It was till surprisingly difficult to keep his balance.
“Wolves were definitely not meant to climb and sit in trees” thought Joe.
Once he was settled he filled his lungs, tipped back his head and howled, long and hard. He tried to make it sound a bit like “LLLUUUUKKKEEE”, but not too much. He howled three times pausing between each howl to give the noise a chance to reverberate around the forest and across the grass. Each time he finished howling the silence that settled seemed even more well... Silent, oppressive almost expectant. After the last howl he quickly changed back into the squirrel and hid himself among the branches. As he settled onto the branch to wait he became more aware than ever of how much his shoulder hurt. The blood still oozed and every now and then he felt as if he was going to be sick, on more than one occasion his vision began to blur and swim. It took all his concentration to keep focussed on the forest floor below.
He felt like he waited for ages and then he saw it, a really large fox, moving silently through the undergrowth. Joe watched it for a while. The fox was taking a ridiculous amount of care, it was looking, listening, sniffing, pausing, checking and re-checking before almost every step it took. Three things persuaded Joe that this fox wasn’t a fox but was in fact Luke in the guise of a fox. The three things were; first the foxes exaggerated “over” cautious behaviour (just like Luke) , second the fact it was moving towards where it had heard the wolf howls (Joe reasoned that even if it didn’t know what a wolf was, most animals would instinctively know a super predator when they hear one) and finally foxes are nocturnal and this one was out in broad daylight.
“Luke” squeaked Joe from his tree.
The fox stopped stock still, its ears pricked totally alert.
“Bugger” thought Joe “He can’t hear me properly”.
He wiggled out of his hiding place and started to scramble down the tree. He was about six feet from the ground when his left arm gave way under him and he tumbled downwards. He landed heavily on his back. The fox saw him and cautiously approached, sniffing hard.
“It’s me” squeaked Joe at the fox as it approached “I’m hurt really bad”.
The fox kept coming. Now he was closer Joe was able to get a much better look at the fox. There was something in its eyes, in its slightly mangy coat and its skinny haunches that gave Joe’s penny of realisation a gentle nudge. However Joe was not the sharpest knife in the draw and it wasn’t until the fox licked its lips to catch the gathering drool that his penny really dropped.
“You’re not Luke are you!” squeaked Joe “You’re a proper fox aren’t you!”
The fox showed no sign of having understood this and seemed more intent on gathering itself to pounce on the stricken, bleeding, squeaking squirrel in front of it. Just as the fox sprang, so the squirrel changed. Lying on the floor was no longer a squirrel but a boy. If the fox could have stopped in mid-flight it would have, but it couldn’t. It’s eyes changed from hungry lust to sheer terror in the blink of an eye. It crashed into the boy hard, but was up and running before Joe could do more than grunt. It shot off into the undergrowth like a bullet.
In spite of himself Joe laughed. He propped himself up on his elbow and looked round the small clearing he was in . He still had a silly grin on his face as he thought of the fox. All at once the grin froze on his face. Coming out of the bushes was an Alien scout, its laser was aimed straight at Joe’s chest. From the way the Aliens chest panel’s array of lights was flashing Joe knew it was communicating with the others in the group. He had nothing to fight with and probably not enough energy to do it even if he had. After all they’d been through he was going to get captured because he had thought his brother was a mangy old fox.
The Alien approached menacingly quiet, the lights on its chest panel no longer flashed. Whatever the decision of the group was, it had been made and no further communication was required. Joe saw the end of the laser begin to glow. He could take a pretty good guess at what the decision had been.
“So this is it!” He thought.
Without any warning a huge shape burst out of the undergrowth and smashed into the Alien. It hit the Alien like a runaway steam train. It wasn’t a steam train, it was actually some sort of elephant rhinoceros cross. Actually (if you hadn’t guessed) the “thing” that burst into the clearing was Luke in the shape of an elephant rhinoceros cross. An elephant rhinoceros cross that was doing a pretty good impression of a runaway steam train.
Either way the Alien was well and truly crunched. Its side buckled, and before it could respond the elephoseros’s tusks had flipped it onto its side. The elephoseros then began rearing and pounding the prone Alien with its massive feet. It kept pounding until all signs of life had crushed out of the Alien carcass. Smoke seeped from the shattered shell and grungy dribbley stuff oozed from the broken can that a few seconds earlier had been a bright shiny Alien.
The elephant disappeared to be replaced by a very concerned looking Luke.
“Are you okay?” He asked.
“Nope, got this massive hole in my shoulder that hurts like hell” replied Joe “But I think I’m going to be a whole lot worse if we don’t get out of here fast. Do you think you could give me a hand?” asked Joe forcing a smile.
“Oh if I have to” said Luke smiling back “You just hold on”.
With that he changed into a giant gorilla, scooped up Joe and bounded off in to the forest.