Jase & the Deadliest Hunt

by John Luke Robertson

  “Cole was right there. Right behind me. Hey, Cole!”

  But you hear and see nothing. Worry sets in. “He must’ve accidentally gone the wrong direction.” You wave your flashlight frantically.

  “How’d he do that? Wouldn’t he just call after us?”

  “I don’t know. I’m gonna go look for him.”

  “No,” Willie says. “We have to stay together.”

  “Okay, then. Come on.” You double-time back the way you came without waiting to see if Willie and John Luke catch up.

  You want to walk faster but have to be careful since the ground is so uneven. You’re still calling Cole’s name and hearing no response when you arrive at a three-way intersection.

  “Didn’t we come from the left?”

  “I thought we came from the center,” Willie says.

  “No, didn’t we come from the right?” John Luke asks.

  Oh, this is great.

  You call out for Cole. And you finally get a reply.

  It’s a sound, not a voice.

  It’s the sound of a duck call.

  “Was that—?”

  “Sure was,” Willie says.

  “You think it’s Cole?”

  “You think someone besides us is in these caves with a duck call?”

  You head in the direction of the call. But a few moments later, another one sounds. This is a different duck call.

  And it’s behind you.

  “What’s going on?” Willie asks.

  “Cole!”

  Now you hear yet another duck call—a third kind. This one is directly in front of you.

  “Okay, someone’s messing with us,” you mutter under your breath, hoping only Willie and John Luke can hear you, not any terrifying cave monsters.

  You take the rifle off your shoulder and cradle it in your hands. Just in case.

  “Hey, Cole?” you call out. “You around here?”

  One more duck call. They seem to be coming from every direction. “If you guys weren’t hearing that, I might be a bit freaked out.”

  “I hear them, but they keep changing,” Willie says. “And I don’t know where they’re coming from.”

  “We need to keep heading this direction,” you say. “Shine your flashlight ahead, John Luke. It’s getting dark.”

  No response from your nephew.

  “Hey, John Luke, flash the—”

  You turn around and see only Willie standing there, his back facing you.

  “What’s wrong?” Then you see what Willie’s staring at.

  Nothing.

  “Where’d he go?”

  “I don’t know! He was literally right behind me. John Luke! John Luke, I swear, this isn’t funny. Don’t try to be funny now. Serious.”

  But there’s no laughter coming out of the dark.

  “What is this?” you say.

  “Where’d he go?” Willie asks.

  “You head that way—”

  “No. Jase. We stay together.”

  “So where do you want to go?”

  “John Luke! John Luke?”

  You both wait for a few seconds. Then you hear the multiple duck calls going off, in unison this time.

  “Someone’s totally messin’ with us.”

  “If it’s the boys, they’re so gonna get it,” Willie says.

  “Come on, this way. Straight ahead.”

  You point the flashlight with your left hand, which also holds the barrel of the rifle. Your right hand controls the grip and trigger.

  The stone spears dripping down from the ceiling suddenly look ominous to you. The light bounces off of them and gets sucked into the darkness.

  “Why duck calls?” you ask.

  You don’t hear anything from Willie, so you turn.

  “Oh no,” you say. “No, no way.”

  You aim the flashlight back where you were headed. Nothing but an empty, shadowy passageway.

  “Willie! Come on. I know you’re just messin’ with me.”

  There are many places someone could easily hide. But disappear?

  First Cole; then John Luke; now Willie.

  You sigh and shine the light everywhere you possibly can.

  “Hey, guys?”

  You can hear water dripping. Then you hear something else. Something behind you in the darkness.

  A shuffling sound.

  They are so messin’ with me.

  You wait until it gets really close.

  Then you spin around with both the light and the rifle aimed into the darkness.

  It takes you about five seconds to understand what’s in front of you. Then it registers. This is the biggest bear head you’ve ever seen.

  Those five seconds happen to be the last moments of your life.

  Or so you think.

  A shot goes off. And another. Then several more.

  The bear doesn’t fall but rather darts away from you, down the passageway.

  For a minute you want to chase after it. Then you look up and see John Luke and Willie standing there with . . . Wait a minute!

  That’s me.

  You notice they’re all wearing different clothes than they had on earlier today. Including you. Jase Robertson. The figure you’re staring at.

  “Look, you are not gonna believe this, so just come on out of the cave,” Jase tells you.

  I’m talking to myself. Literally, and not just in my head.

  As you follow them out of the cave, you see Cole, Willie, and John Luke waiting.

  “You guys are alive.”

  “They saved us,” Willie says.

  “We saved ourselves,” Other Willie says.

  You shake your head. You are totally lost.

  “What’s going on?” you ask.

  “Look—we took a time machine to get here,” Other Willie explains.

  “You took a what to get here?” Maybe it wasn’t my imagination after all. . . .

  “They took a time machine,” Regular Willie repeats. “They say it looks like an outhouse too.”

  You shake your head. “No way.”

  “It’s okay,” Other Jase says. “You’re always confused. Because I am too. But we saved your lives. That’s what counts.”

  “The bear got away,” you tell them.

  “Sure, but that means this trip is over. Don’t you want to go home?” Other Willie asks.

  “With you?”

  “No,” he answers. “You can’t go home with us. Then things will get messed up.”

  “The world doesn’t need two Willies,” Other Jase says with a dramatic shiver.

  You sit down on the dirt and shake your head. “I must be dreaming or something. I bet this is a dream within a dream . . . within a dream.”

  “Yeah, well, try going back to the Civil War,” Other Jase mutters.

  Soon enough, the doubles leave you guys alone. You wonder whether your mind will ever recover from the past few hours.

  “I gotta admit,” Willie begins.

  “What?”

  “I’m a lot more handsome in person than I thought.”

  You roll your eyes.

  Sometimes Willie can make you truly speechless.

  THE END

  Start over.

  Read “Let the Good Times Roll: A Note from John Luke Robertson.”

  SHREDDED CHEESE

  ONCE YOU FIND OUT what you’re shooting, it’s game on.

  More like game over.

  And you’re laughing and waiting and loving it. This is right up your alley.

  You’re down by the river and nobody’s fired a shot yet. But you’ve all seen the target.

  A golden duck. Not superbright gold but medium gold. A bit bigger than a mallard, with an extra-long beak for some reason.

  Maybe someone painted it. Maybe Count Chocula bred this variety and fed it only his morning cereal. Who knows. It doesn’t matter one bit.

  You’re gonna shoot a duck. And so far, you’ve only seen this one.

  But by the time it starts
to fly off and you fire away with your shotgun—picked out this morning by John Luke—something unfortunate happens.

  The gun works a little too well.

  There’s this wonderful word called vaporization. And that’s exactly what happens.

  As you pull the trigger, forgetting this is a high-powered automatic shotgun, the duck literally vanishes into thin air. Is that even possible?

  It can’t have disappeared. Can it?

  “Ewwwww,” Willie says.

  You search for any part of the duck that’s left, but there’s nothing.

  There’s absolutely nothing.

  Willie comes over. “Uh, Jase?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe next time don’t make it into golden fertilizer.”

  “Funny.”

  “Too bad John Luke had to pick the shotgun,” Willie says. “Great job there.”

  “It’s a shotgun,” John Luke says. “That’s what you use for hunting ducks.”

  “I wouldn’t call what Jase did hunting.”

  “I shot and killed that duck even if we can’t bring back a piece of it,” you say.

  “Not sure if that counts.”

  “Oh, it counts,” you say.

  But later, after an entire day of searching for another duck, someone else disagrees.

  Speaking of counts . . .

  “No. You have to produce the trophy here,” Count VanderVelde says once you’re back at the lodge.

  “Everybody can confirm that I shot it,” you say.

  “Yeah, he shot it all right,” Willie says. “Blasted it like a string of firecrackers.”

  The count shakes his head. “I’m sorry, but in the fine print of the contract, it states—”

  “Not the fine print again,” you protest.

  He spews some meaningless, random blah-blah-blah about the need to preserve the remains of the blah-blah-blah for evidence or proof or whatever.

  “Was there only one gold duck out there?”

  “No, Jase. There are more. Lots more, in fact.”

  “So where’d they all go?”

  “Maybe they saw your shooting spree and all decided to hide in the cave,” the count says. “Or maybe they’re here, in one of the rooms.”

  You laugh, but the count doesn’t laugh back.

  Oh, well, that gold duck was annoying you anyway.

  When you retrieve your bag before hopping on the helicopter to fly back to Fiji, you see something in your bed. Something you thought you’d never set eyes on again.

  It’s a duck. A duck the color of a king’s crown.

  It’s alive, and it’s watching you as if you killed its sister. When you move, its eyes move with you.

  “You better watch out, or you’re next,” you warn it right before leaving quickly. Not that you’re scared of it or anything. Of course not.

  THE END

  Start over.

  Read “Let the Good Times Roll: A Note from John Luke Robertson.”

  SOMETHING IN THE WATER

  IT FEELS GOOD to see the island disappear. You’re all in the helicopter, listening to the rumbling and gazing at the blue water below.

  “Maybe none of that happened. Maybe we were drugged,” John Luke says out of nowhere.

  “What are you talking about?” Willie replies.

  “Think about it. When we arrived, we were given orange juice. Maybe it was spiked with something strange. Something that caused us to start seeing weird things. And every day we ate food they made for us.”

  You wonder if he’s right. “They did keep feeding us strange things.”

  “No, I don’t think we were drugged,” Willie says. “Why would they do that?”

  “Explain the mountain lion that looked like it was half-human,” you challenge him. “And sounded like the count. Are you saying that was a real thing? The count is a mountain lion version of a werewolf?”

  Willie stares at you but doesn’t say a word.

  “I’m just saying that John Luke does have a point. It’s easier to believe that we were drugged than it is to have absolutely no explanation.”

  For a while none of you say anything.

  Cole breaks the silence. “I did think that fish tasted kinda funky.”

  “Drugged,” John Luke repeats.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Willie rolls his eyes. “Well, none of us are gonna tell the moms what happened on Fantasy Island, got it? I don’t care if it was real or some kind of hallucination. What happens on Tabu Island stays on Tabu Island.”

  “Easy enough for you to say. I’m among the walking wounded here. Do I have to remind you that you shot me? Literally shot me in the face? I mean, I am still wearing a bandage on the side of my head.”

  “You got nicked by a tree,” Willie says.

  “Oh, I’m telling Missy and Korie. No doubt about it.”

  Willie shakes his head.

  You keep going. “I’m gonna give you a shirt that says Got Milk? Maybe a bandanna that says it too. ’Cause I’m gonna milk this for a very, very long time.”

  The helicopter flies on, and you keep wondering about the mysteries of Tabu Island.

  THE END

  Start over.

  Read “Let the Good Times Roll: A Note from John Luke Robertson.”

  THE BIG RED GLOB

  DAYLIGHT BEGINS TO SLIP AWAY as you enter the cave and trek deeper and deeper into the unknown. A cloak of doom settles over your soul. Then again, maybe that’s just you being a tad dramatic since you could simply be feeling bloated from the double-stacked pecan waffles you ate this morning.

  “It’s cold in here,” John Luke says.

  And the farther you get into the cave, the more you agree with him. You zip up your jacket and keep the powerful beam of the flashlight in your hand directed straight ahead. The shotgun is strapped around your shoulder.

  You take a left down a wide passageway that dips lower and lower. As you pass a flat wall with water streaming down it, you notice markings on the stone.

  “Look at these.” You stop for a moment to examine them. They seem to be not just markings but a series of pictures.

  “Are these, like, some kind of ancient cave art?” Willie asks.

  The top picture shows a group of people clustered together. The one right underneath it depicts something big and round and red attacking the people. The third picture shows the big red thing just sitting there, with a caption that says, Burp!

  “What’s that say?” John Luke asks.

  “‘Burp.’”

  “It doesn’t say burp.” Willie always has to argue.

  “It says burp. You look. It’s supposed to show that the big red glob ate the people above.”

  “That says bug.”

  “It’s burp.”

  This goes on for about five minutes.

  “Can we just go?” Cole says.

  “So we’re looking for a big red gob of goo?” Willie asks.

  “If that thing wasn’t red,” you say, “I would’ve thought they were drawing you.”

  “Really funny. You are jealous of my manliness.”

  “The only manly thing about you is your odor. And it’s the smell of a caveman.”

  The boys laugh. This only prompts Willie to keep going. “Look, why order a kid’s meal when you can get a Big Mac?”

  “That doesn’t even make sense,” you say. “I think you’re missing Uncle Si, ’cause you’re startin’ to sound like him.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re right.”

  When Willie says you’re right, then you know you’re in trouble. And that’s exactly when you hear the deep, booming roar. It echoes all around you.

  “Did you hear that?” Willie asks.

  “Uh, yeah. It was the loudest bear roar I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  “I don’t want to see what made that,” John Luke says.

  “Oh, we’re gonna see it,” you tell him. “And we’re gonna haul it out of these caves.”

  It’s easy to have confidence w
hen you’ve got an automatic shotgun with a hundred rounds in its ammo magazine.

  You reach an intersection that forks to the left and right.

  Do you take the left fork and go—?

  Oh, let’s just keep going.

  You head right and guide them in the direction of the big, bad, beary-scary roars you just heard.

  “Be ready,” you warn the guys behind you. “But don’t shoot me in the back.”

  “I’m not making any promises,” Willie says.

  Another loud, deep sound booms past you. You feel it under your skin and deep in the caverns of your soul. But maybe that’s being a bit dramatic again because you could be feeling those seven pieces of bacon you had with those waffles.

  You slow down.

  You stop.

  You itch underneath your arms.

  You check to see how bad you smell.

  “Hey, what’s up?” Willie asks. “Why are we stopping?”

  You feel it. The eye of the beast. Or maybe just the eye of the tiger. You’re not sure.

  Something’s ahead—I know I feel it.

  “Shhhh.”

  “What’d you say?” Willie asks in a loud voice.

  “I said please shut that yapper of yours. Comprende?”

  “Oui, monsieur,” Willie says.

  “Dad, that’s French.”

  “I know that, Mr. United Nations.”

  “Shhhh,” you hiss again.

  The flashlight you’re holding illuminates twenty yards of passageway in front of you. The shadows play tricks in these caves, so you blink several times to make sure the dark and slow-moving something at the end of the chamber is real.

  “Is that a-a—?” Cole stammers.

  “Yep.”

  It’s a bear. A bear that takes up most of the space in the cave tunnel ahead.

  “I’m going to keep my flashlight on it.” You gesture with the other hand. “Willie, come in front of me.”

  “For what?”

  You shake your head. “To ask for an autograph. Or maybe just to do what we’re out here to do.”

  Willie slips in front of you and fires off three rounds right away. The shotgun blasts drill your eardrums. The big beast screams and shuffles, sounding really, really angry, and then it roars full force.

  “Uh, what now?” Willie asks.