We arrive in the dead of night. The captain asks if we want to sleep on the ship until morning since they won’t be leaving again until then. I tell him that we’re not interested and leave in the direction of the capital. Nebbana is a fairly small island country no more than about five hundred miles across in its longest direction. Sadly, at the angle, we are taking that’s also about how long our trip is. No worries. Unlike Carnashka, Nebbana is a highly populated country with several major cities, many roads, and regular traffic from any given point. We might be on our feet for a day or so, but I’m sure we’ll easily hitch a ride to the capital from someone. Who wouldn’t pick up a small child and his even smaller companion wandering down the vast roads of a tropical island?
“That’s the eighteenth truck to leave us high and dry!” I belt out.
“Y-yeah, you think aft-ter five days w-we’d find somebody w-w-willing to pick us up,” Trigger moans.
“That’s it!” I scream while taking off my boots and socks. “Trigger, hang on to my collar as best as you can!”
He grabs on and I take off like the wind. We’re getting on that truck whether they want us to or not. You might be able to leave your average child behind, but back on the ranch, my father used to make us wrangle the saedirs by hand. By the age of five, I was already running upwards of twenty miles per hour and I kept running for these last four years. As we get closer, I notice the woman in the driver's seat looking in the sideview mirror. We lock eyes as she freaks out about the kid chasing her and floors the gas.
“Trigger!” I holler back to him. “Give me a boost”
“H-how!?” He yells back.
“I don’t know,” I shout angrily. “Some kind of magic!?”
“Oh…” Trigger says as if he forgot that was an option. “Fēngmó’lì!” I can’t see what his spell did, but it felt like a turbine began propelling me with the wind speed of a cyclone. We’re gaining on the truck again. With a mighty leap, I leap for the bed of the truck. SLAM! Going too fast, we overshoot and land on the engine hood.
“AHHHHH! What do you ruffians want with me!?” the driver screams as begins swerving left and right trying to shake us off. Hanging on with my other hand, I grab Trigger and toss him into the cabin. He lands on her face causing her to freak out even further. In the chaos, I manage to swing into the open window on the passenger side and pull Trigger off her face.
“Now, we’ve had a bad day, lady,” I say to her with as tough a face a nine-year-old can make. “We’re sick and tired of all these drivers passing us by, so you are gonna take us as far Northeast as you were already gonna or my magic friend here will blow us all up for good measure.” Reading the situation, Trigger gulps before giving her a mean stare while nodding his head.
For the next three hours, we rode in near silence. Sporadically the radio would pick something up from a nearby station, but the lady dared not utter a word after our encounter earlier. We arrive at a fork splitting West and Northeast. Since this is her turn, this is as far Northeast as she was naturally going to go. Trigger and I try to thank the lady as we get out of the truck, but the second the door closes she takes off at full speed. I would say that I don’t blame her, but all these drivers are jerks who wouldn’t stop to help a lost kid unless they were forced to.
Just a few miles beyond the fork and I finally see the end of the jungle. If I never have to step foot in the jungle again for the rest of my life, I will die a happy boy. The territory before us known as the Black Plains is way more what I’m accustomed to. It feels like a much bigger version of the fields back at the ranch. Fields for miles and miles. Neither Father nor Uncle Jagan ever told why they call such a vibrant place the Black Plains though.
“S-s-say, Boss,” Trigger says while grabbing my shoulder. He’s shaking enough to mix sugar into tea without a spoon. “It’s g-getting awfully d-d-dark. I th-think we should st-stay the n-n-n-night at that r-ranch in the d-distance.”
“Oh, hey,” I respond, “I didn’t even see that there. While I do fancy me a good ranch, I don’t think it would be good for our luck to bum a night off them after that truck incident. We can just walk until we’re tired and then find a nice tree to sleep in somewhere in the fields.”
“B-b-but it gets v-very dangerous out here at n-night,” Trigger continues. “I’ve h-heard some b-b-b-bad fairytales about this p-place.”
“Bah, “I scoff at him, “I’m not afraid of fairytales. What’s the worst that can happen after the week we’ve had: bloodthirsty monsters just rise from the ground the moment the sun sets?” Not even seconds after I say those words, the sun dips beyond the horizon and the ground begins to rustle. A bony hand sprouts from the ground and then another. Soon, many skeletal hands grasped the soil and pulled up the bony remains of countless dreadknights. Before any of them can fully emerge, I take off across the fields as fast as I can.
“You know,” I holler out, “I only said that as a joke because I didn’t think something like this could happen to me twice in my life!”
“Th-this has happened to you b-b-before!?” Trigger cries.
“With a bunch of cows when I was five, but that is a story for another time,” I shout. “The story for this time is that fairytale! Why are undead here!?”
“W-well,” Trigger answers, “they s-s-say that the Dreadnought Armada had trouble t-taking Nabbana by air or s-sea, so the t-t-troops marched through Masduo, r-r-rowed to shore in the dead of n-night, and tried to take Dryadsah b-by foot. But Steve the Mammoth, b-before he was King, fought them off with the Nebbana army, n-not sparing a s-s-soul. They s-s-say their hatred c-causes them to r-r-rise up every night to this d-day.”
“I guess that explains why they call this place the Black Plains,” I say letting out a deep sigh. It doesn’t matter how far we run as more and more of them crawl out of the ground in any direction we go. They grab at us and swing their rusty swords as they surface. Luckily, I’m much faster than any of these lumbering ghouls even after they have fully risen. If I could keep this up all night, we’d be fine.
“They won’t be catching us after all, isn’t that right, Trigger?” I try to boast to my little buddy. He doesn’t respond. I turn my head back and realize that he passed out from exhaustion while maintaining a death grip on my outer collar. I reach back and grab him to carry him in a more secure position, but then it starts to hit me, too. The initial adrenaline is wearing off about the time I realize why Trigger passed out: we haven’t slept in three days. It’s not exactly like there is always a good spot for you to crash when you are walking along the side of the road in a rainforest and that's about how long we’ve been on foot since the last city on the main highway. I can feel my eyes getting heavier as I continue to dodge and weave these monsters with Trigger cupped in my arms almost like I’m playing some type of contact sport. I won’t last much longer either. I’m told after three days you start to hallucinate and auditory hallucinations are starting to kick in. I can hear faint music playing.
Wait a minute. I don’t even recognize this song. Can you hallucinate music you’ve never heard before? Maybe if you are a songwriter or something, but I’m definitely not that creative. It’s getting louder by the second. A bright light bounces over a nearby hill with the music accompanying it. Both are coming from the same source: a militarized vehicle of some kind. The buggy zooms by and mows over many of the dreadknights in the process. Several more buggies of the same kind follow it. Men in masks lean out the sides and shatter some of the ghouls with heavy bats. They howl with enjoyment, not unlike those drunkards we ran into back at the ferry town.
One of the buggies pulls up toward us. They must have noticed something other than the dreadknights wandering around. A few more pull up and encircle us. It seems the bright light and loud music prevent the dreadknights from rising up nearby but looking at these wild freaks in masks makes me wonder if I’m trading one evil for another. On the very brink of passing out, I start to recall my dad telling me about these types. He called them Mengma Xiji, which literally just means masked cultists but they prefer that older tongue for their name. He told me that the one they follow is unreliable and that under no circumstance should I ever get involved with them. Anyone who gives up everything in life, including their own identity, to follow some fool around in a caravan of similar people is no good in his view. However today, I may not have much of a choice.
“Ay, look. A child and a jungle rat.” I overhear one of them say.
“It’s probably his servant,” another says. “He can’t keep it if he joins us, but we can always sell it back into the slave trade once we cross into a kingdom that’s still in it.”
“Hey, kid,” one of them yells. I can no longer keep track of if it was the first, second, or another. “Want to join our club? You get this cool keychain.”
“Fuck off,” I reply in an exasperated tone.
“Ha! What a mouth for such a young brat,” he chuckles out.
“It’s not so bad, kid,” another says jovially, “all you gotta do is give up everything you ever were, are, or would be and become just another faceless man in a mask. Beats giving up your life instead.” The man pulls out a curved blade and shines it with a rag.
“Don’t really see a difference there,” I bark back. “Besides, sounds like a horrible way to meet girls.”
“Hey! Number 137 over there is a girl,” the other one shouts.
“Present,” one of them in the back of a different buggy stupidly hollers as if to prove a point.
“Thanks, Number 137,” he hollers back to her. “Oh well. We always try to get them young, but I guess dying is more your style.
I hold Trigger tighter to my chest as the masked man steps closer to me with his blade in hand. My eyes grow so heavy that I’m not even sure if I’ll be awake to see myself die. A pretty lame way to go after the month I’ve had, all things considered.
“Oh shit! Number 84, he caught back up to us,” a cultist in yet another buggy screams as he drives by.
Suddenly, a man in a red suit, cloak, and hat leaps over the circle of buggies and clobbers the lunatic holding a knife to me with a wooden training sword. He most definitely has a real sword hanging from his hip, but I guess he felt a wooden trainer was more than enough. He manages to knock out seven of them before the others pull out of the circle and escape.
“Don’t run! Bah, freaks,” He says as he loads the incapacitated cultists into a buggy that was left behind, likely because he knocked out the driver. Then he notices me. “They caught a kid this time. Well, I can’t exactly take you to the detention center.” He may have had more to say, but finally, that is my breaking point.
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