Henry

• 

A secret is best kept, only kept, if no one knows about it. It stood to reason that bringing Corban to the secret arctic lab would forever demote it to a simple known arctic lab, but Corban was good with secrets.

Today, they were formulating the idea for a hybrid beast. What he wanted was a vicious penguin, but cuddly too. As they walked through the lab they passed by the empty nest of a failed creation: Henry.

He was supposed to be cuddly, warm, loving. Instead, he was rough and excitable. He had teeth too sharp to cuddle. They had found an oasis for him — a jungle that was prone to cold nights.

Nell turned to Corban, with his spiky brown hair. His white Alandrial roots were showing. Years ago, Nell had learned if you died with your hair newly colored you would come back with it permanently dyed. Nell had yet to convince Corban to try it.

“I’m thinking about something one might call a pangolabear,” Nell said. “Part penguin, part polar bear, fluffy, blubbery, snuggly…”

“You’re thinking about Henry?” Corban asked.

Nell’s wings fluttered against his back. “I miss him.”

“He tried to eat you.”

“If I held that against the average monster…”

Corban laughed. “What’s the pangolabear like?”

Nell studied the empty nest. “It might just be a furry penguin, maybe with a better ratio so it could run fast instead of waddle.”

“Is it warm?” Corban asked.

“It’s flubbery with fur?” Nell surmised.

“I need some,” Corban decided.

Nell turned toward away from the empty snow-covered experiment space and faced Corban. “Flubber or fur?”

“Both.” Corban turned away from the lab-pad as well, and met Nell’s eyes. “Aren’t your wings brittle in this air?”

They held hands — the common method of co-creation — and an animal began to take form.

Somewhere along the way, the pangolabear started to emanate heat. The room warmed and the windows cracked as their outer ice and inner hot flash clashed.

“It’s a walking volcano,” Nell summarized.

“Hopefully it spreads the love a little,” Corban joked.

Nell looked at him. “Ah, so you were cold when we made it.”

Corban’s skin began to tint with a classic Alandrial blush. He cleared his throat subtly and turned away. “A little.”

The difficulty with creating new life was not allowing your thoughts to invade. That’s where Henry had gone wrong. Nell had wanted a chameleon crocodile, but something bigger. Something truly impressive.

“I’d like to see Henry,” Nell concluded.

Corban closed the door to the nesting room, to contain the pangolabear, and turned back to Nell. “Sure.” He offered his hand to Nell once again.

Nell made sure he had extra transport packs and he thought of Henry.

With the drop of the travel pack they were in the jungle.

“Henry!” Nell called out. He searched with his mind, but there was nothing.

“The travel pack should have brought us to him,” Corban said.

“It should have.” Nell took another step. “Henry!” With the next step he slipped into a footprint deep enough that Corban would have had to offer his hand to pull Nell out, if Nell didn’t have wings. Nell shook them free of mud and flew up to rejoin Corban.

They trudged the way the footprints led, through the jungle and toward a still marsh. Vines, coated in sticky moss, draped between the tall trees. The air was heavy, but through it Nell could hear the sound of heavy footsteps glopping through the mud. They wove around crater depth footprints.

“Henry!” Nell called through the hollow of his hands.

A shiver ran through Nell. His wings fluttered with angst. He glanced at Corban. “Where do you think he’s gotten off to?”

Corban shook his head. He lifted a large swath of brush. His breath caught and he moved backward.

Nell careened his neck to see what had startled Corban. His foot snapped a twig. Through the branches a grey-green head, the size of a small car, snapped its attention toward  Nell.

Nell’s eyes locked with the beast’s. The head moved toward shore. With a shiver that echoed down each vertebrae of the beast’s spine it came into existence.

The monster roared.
“Run!” Corban yelled.

Nell leaped back and reached for Corban’s hand. As Henry charged Nell burst into the sky. 

Corban crashed against Nell. They rose higher, through the vines toward the sky. The monster rose from the ground and snapped in the air toward them. When the monster’s body smacked back onto the earth, the ground shook. A tree fell toward them and knocked Corban and Nell from the sky. They toppled to the ground, where the monster waited.

When their descent ended, the beast was a few feet away. Nell grabbed Corban once again and rolled with him through some brush. Beneath a bush, a dozen small spiders sprinkled onto them. Corban flinched. His body edged toward the area they had come from, where Henry’s near invisible form had lurked.

Nell pulled him back under the spider-brush. “Sh,” he reminded Corban in a whisper.

They lay in silence for a few minutes. Birds began chirping and the rustle of the forest returned.

Nell crawled out behind Corban. He made sure all of the spiders and whatever else lay on the forest floor was off of him.

“I’m usually better with monsters,” Nell said.

“Do you think he’s lonely?” Corban asked.

“Lonely?” Nell looked at Corban in disbelief. “You want to make another one of those?”

“Did we even make that one?” Corban asked. “He’s changed. Grown.”

Nell knelt beside the large crater of a footprint. “I don’t know. I was expecting Henry to stay the same as when we left him. He was…his life cycle isn’t what I expected.”

“Henry grew up?” Corban mused.

Nell stood. Before he could turn he heard it. 

Corban took his hand and yanked him toward the woods. Henry stood up. If they had flown, they would have flown straight into him.

Nell didn’t look back again. He ran, off the clear cut path and into the dense woods. They moved too slow, while the sound of footsteps and crunching trees became louder.

Nell closed his eyes and imagined another of Henry — a mate for him. It appeared before them, it’s body flattening a portion of the forest.

The footsteps behind them slowed to a stop. There was a large roar, then silence.

The eyes of the new monster flickered. Before them it’s skin changed from an olive green to a dark turquoise.

“Stunning touch,” Nell said to Corban.

Corban tilted his head. When he did, Nell caught a glimpse of the monster behind them. He stood still.

“I believe our time here has run out,” Nell said.

He looked toward a patch of trees. He struggled to will his body to move, while hot breath grazed their skin from both directions.

First, the female roared. A loud guttural sound. Before they could move, the male’s jaw opened wide and he charged.

It happened in a blink. One moment, the forest surrounded them. The next, there was nothing but darkness and pressure. Nell felt a tooth scrape across his leg, cutting deep into his flesh as he passed through the monster’s mouth.

Somehow, that was the worst of it. He slid down the throat like a slide, and soon realized the monster was too large to have to chew. When he had settled, he could feel his skin healing from the wounds. He adjusted himself so he could feel like he had accomplished something, though he had little sense of up or down.

“So,” Corban’s voice gurgled in the darkness. “That wasn’t Henry?”

The question asked more who else could it have been.

“I don’t know,” Nell answered. “We aren’t on speaking terms.”

Corban laughed, though it wasn’t much of a laugh in the absence of much oxygen.. “Because he ate us?”

“It may be related.” Nell pushed against the squishy stomach. “Who creates a monster you can be alive inside of?” He’d created plenty of monsters, and he had hunted down even more, but this had been the least responsive to his mind and the most destructive.

“Someone who wants to have the wonderful experience of being eaten?” Corban suggested.

Nell nudged him into the oozy stomach lining. At least, he hoped that was what it was. “Must have been Ach,” he joked.

“Yes, he loves digestive slime on his argyle,” Corban joked.

Nell laughed. He pulled a travel pack from his pocket. “I suppose…will this work from inside?”

Travel packs often took with you what you carried, or touched.

“Only one way to find out,” Corban replied.

In the darkness, Corban’s hand found Nell’s.

There were two possible outcomes: one, the travel pack transported them and they were free. Two, they transported with Henry, or whoever they were inside of, and they were as trapped as before but somewhere else.

Nell glanced in the direction of the arm, where Corban must have been. “To be safe, we should jump before we transport,” Nell suggested.

“Or transport to the scrog enclosure so we can see who wins,” Corban suggested.

Scrogs were big monsters Nell had found in a wiccan realm. They had sharp talon like claws, much like a crab that had met a velociraptor. They had too many tongues and eyes on their face, and a secret scorpion tail with sharp teeth that dripped poison.

They were Nell’s favorite species he’d discovered, better than anything they had made.

“I am not allowing this to eat my scrogs,” Nell defended in a huff.

“I bet they could gang up on it,” Corban said, tempting Nell with a monster showdown, though they might not see much of it from inside one of the monsters.

Still…

Nell shook his head. “No. We jump on the third number of the count to three?”

They needed to be on the same page, no missteps.

Corban held his hand, still. Nell had the travel pack in the other hand.

Corban took a breath, from what little air was left. “Zero, one, two…”

They jumped on two. When Nell was certain they were as far from any monster parts as possible, he dropped the travel pack and thought of not taking the monster with them.

They landed on their backs, surrounded by scrogs.

“Do you have another travel pack?” Corban whispered.