Onio

by Jeppsen, Linell

  Rain nodded pleasantly and the old male said, “Greetings, wife of First Son! My name is Sparrow. This is my foster son, Tiki. He has never seen one of his own kind before now and wished to see you up close. I hope you don’t mind.” Mel smiled at Sparrow and looked over at the young adult in his care. It was obvious to her that the man suffered from Down’s syndrome, but his eyes twinkled with a joy so profound it astounded her.

  Smiling at Tiki, Mel said, “Hi, my name is Melody. It’s nice to meet you,” The young man grinned uncertainly for a moment and then used soul song to speak, “Hi, Mel,” he said clearly. “My father and I rejoice to meet the wife of First Son!”

  They grinned at each other for a moment and then Tiki looked down, laughing. Smiles was usually reserved in showing her affection and Mel suspected the dog was harshly treated as a puppy, but now she rose up on her hind legs and seemed to wrap her front paws around Tiki’s waist in a hug. Looking up at his father, Tiki asked if he could go and play with his new friend for a few minutes.

  Nodding his permission, he watched the young man run away with Smiles by his side. Turning to the females he said, “I found the boy when he was just a babe, tossed into a ditch by the side of the road. I thought that maybe I was too old to raise one so young, but the wise ones helped me. Tiki is the joy of my heart.” Turning to Mel, he bowed slightly and said, “Thank you, girl, for speaking to my boy.”

  Mel sat and stared in shock at the old sasquatch who had saved a young human cast-off and raised him as his own son. Her respect for the sasq people rose every day, in leaps and bounds. Rain invited the guest to sit down and join them for breakfast, while his boy played with the dog. The party sat, ate, and exchanged gossip. For a little while, Mel thought her life was perfect.

  ***

  In the king’s council chamber, New Moon sat facing the tribe’s leaders. He watched as they debated amongst themselves the merits of various battle and rescue plans. He knew that none of those plans would work; at least, not without terrible bloodshed and loss of life.

  He sighed and wondered what would become of them all. The small human’s war magic was too powerful. His soldiers were big, yes, and strong, but no one could stand up to the weapons the clever smalls had manufactured. Besides, he thought sadly, warfare amongst them was strictly forbidden by everything he and the wise ones held sacred.

  The youngsters were forgetting, he knew. They thought that “might” meant the ability to get what they wanted. They did not remember that their powers were granted them only with the strict understanding that those powers were supposed to be used in the service and protection of others weaker than themselves.

  The old king gazed at the tribal leaders and their guards and smiled. They were magnificent and, despite all their talk of violence, they were gentle…no match for their enemies terrible weapons. Although his wrinkled, old face creased in a smile, his heart was breaking.

  He gazed at the two young architects of his people’s destiny and wondered how that destiny was supposed to play out. They were smaller than their brothers, and, no doubt, weaker. They were not even full-blooded sasq, but still…. New Moon saw the way the two warriors listened intently to each king, silent and watchful, obedient and wise beyond their years. Nodding to himself, he thought, yes, destiny shines in the light of their eyes. Who am I to know the ways of the stars?

  His tribal leaders were working themselves into a passion though, and the old sasq knew it was time to put an end to their dreams of bloodshed. Holding up his hand, New Moon said, “Enough!”

  The sasquatches grew still and turned to face their high leader. He stared at the most levelheaded warriors and said, “Silver Salmon, I would hear your words again.”

  Silver Salmon was a middle-aged warrior from the far eastern shores of the continent. He had apparently brought his whole tribe, over ninety members, including his wives and children, in order to escape the escalating chaos.

  Silver Salmon climbed to his feet and bowed to the high king. He had been injured during the journey through the tunnels. He stood tall, but his spear arm was cradled against his chest and his hollow eyes spoke of deep fatigue and sorrow.

  “New Moon, thank you for allowing my tribe to occupy your halls. I know that…I know our tribes have not always seen eye to eye. It gladdens my heart that, despite our arguments in the past, you kept your doors open to us. Without your aid and protection, every last one of us would be dead now.”

  The fiercely tattooed warrior stood tall, but tears rolled down his craggy cheeks. “Before the trouble started I was the leader of over three hundred sasq warriors and their families.” He wiped the offending tears away with a fist and continued. “Eight moons ago though, something changed. The small human soldiers began an active campaign against us. As long as they were allowed to steal our people with impunity, they left us alone. However, any resistance on our part was met with their cruel weapons. They used large cannons, and guns that shot gouts of flame. We tried to fight back but they were too strong!”

  Despite his obvious strength and willpower, tears fell again from the male’s eyes. “I lost over two hundred of my people…males, females, and children,” he croaked. “I do not know what has changed, my king, but the small humans are at war with all of our clans now. I have heard that almost a thousand of our people have been captured and taken to the sere lands in the south. My troops are gone now.” He paused to gather himself, and then roared, “But I would have revenge for the destruction of my tribe!”

  Every sasq warrior stood as one, screaming in rage, and New Moon’s heart sank. He had seen generations of the small humans come and go in his long years on the planet. He believed in the old ways, and in the almost forgotten history of his people’s lineage, but he feared that the time had come now for the sasquatches to fight, to take the lives of beings smaller and weaker than they were, in order to survive as a species.

  Chapter 31

  Two weeks later and 583 miles away from the king’s conclave, Lieutenant Colonel O’Dell smiled in satisfaction as the big sasquatch screamed in agony. Its long, bloody fingers spasmed on the piece of white chalk and the chalk disintegrated into powder.

  “Hit it again, Corporal,” he murmured, and watched as Iron Hands jerked and writhed against the restraints that held him captive.

  Two nights previously, Iron Hands and fourteen other sasq warriors had crept under the chain-link fence that encircled the temporary military housing, located just outside of the newest testing facility in the furthermost northern quadrant of the Fort Bliss Army reservation.

  Eighteen soldiers from the Army Corps of Engineers and one squad of enlisted men were sleeping when the sasquatches swarmed into the mobile barracks, screaming inarticulately, tearing into flimsy construction and human flesh with equal enthusiasm. Twenty-nine soldiers were killed in the fray.

  Most of the sasq warriors were at least seven and a half feet tall and weighed in at around five hundred pounds each; the human soldiers were no match against the creatures that savaged them. The MPs set to guard the soldiers only knew that something was amiss when they heard the screams and saw the gigantic shadowy shapes of monsters through their infrared binoculars. They were able to send out an S.O.S. before they were overrun by the beasts, but died knowing that monsters really do exist on this planet.

  Iron Hands and his new tribe would have enjoyed their victory much longer had they left quickly and made their escape underground. Instead they celebrated their blood lust, dancing in the ruins and the bones of their defeated enemies. If they had kept their heads, they might have been able to rescue almost seven hundred captured sasquatches that were being held in a buried bunker, the entrance of which was only a hundred feet away from them by the base of a stony cliff.

  Instead, while they ripped limbs off deceased soldiers and broke the humans’ weapons into pieces in a frenzy of savage joy, Apache attack choppers flew up from out of nowhere and leveled the ground around them in a blistering assault of rocket fire and mac
hine gun scatter.

  Iron Hands took a round in his right shoulder but managed to run and hide behind a giant pile of rocks. Crouching low, he avoided the initial assault but was unprepared for the rear attack of Delta Force soldiers that streamed through the broken fencing like a silent but deadly black snake with fangs of fire and steel. Within minutes, all but three of the sasq warriors lay dead on the ground. The three remaining sasquatches were transported under heavy guard to an underground bunker thirty miles away, and were now undergoing information extraction techniques that were not sanctioned by the U.N.

  “Where are they?” O’Dell barked. “The only reason you are alive now is that we know you know the whereabouts of the rest of the sasquatches. If you don’t tell us where they are, I will turn this machine up so high your brains will boil like soup!”

  Iron Hands eyes grew wide and his head shook frantically as he tried to spit the heavy tooth guard out from between his parched lips. The torture expert removed the tooth guard, carefully avoiding the beast’s large, bloody fangs, and handed the wounded sasq a glass of water. After he had drunk, Iron Hands was given the small chalkboard and another piece of chalk.

  The scientists had finally figured out that most of the sasquatches could read and communicate telepathically. Their vocal chords were ill-equipped for intelligible speech, but that only meant the humans needed to find a different way of speaking to the beasts. O’Dell found that with the right kind of stimuli, the beasts responded best to simple correspondence on the stock of small, portable chalkboards they rounded up from local day-care centers.

  It seemed that most of the sasq understood rudimentary English and some Spanish. They knew simple arithmetic, and comprehended directional indicators such as road maps, signs and signals. It’s like working with a bunch of preschoolers, O’Dell mused, but knew also that there was a wealth of knowledge lost somewhere in the communication gap between his people and those of the sasquatches he questioned. The wisdom he saw swirling within those brownish-green eyes unnerved him and fed his rage.

  Turning once again to the technician, he growled, “Two more joules…that ought to get its attention.” Iron Hands screeched as the electrical currents coursed through his body, and he howled in impotent fury.

  ***

  How did it come to this, Iron Hands thought, as the lightning bolts set his blood on fire and made his eyeballs bulge from their sockets. Everything had gone so well since he was asked to leave the conclave. He had run to the exiled band of sasquatches and sworn his allegiance. He had enjoyed a week or so of anonymity, while he awaited his chance to rid that rag-tag band of its leader, an old, weak sasq warrior named Sand, who seemed more inclined to mourn his band’s exclusion from the conclave than seek retribution against the king who did the deed.

  Iron Hands plotted the best way to kill the leader for a few days and then, happily, the old sasquatch committed suicide, leaving the rest of the tribe leaderless. It wasn’t hard at all to convince the others to revolt against the small humans. Within days of reaching their decision to take the fight to the smalls, Iron Hands’s new tribe had made their way to this base.

  They had achieved their objective, but even Iron Hands was shocked at the small soldiers’ sophistication and savagery on the battlefield. Now, here he sat, bolts of lightning racking his bones, being asked to give the location of the rest of the sasquatch nation.

  He hated the sasquatch people and the high king most of all. ‘So why not?’ One part of his mind screamed, while another, deeper part of his consciousness argued, ‘No…the sasq are not my enemies; these smalls are the enemy and will kill us all if I give away their position!’ Iron Hands sat, grinning silently, as smoke singed the air and his eyeballs began to rain tears of blood.

  ***

  Unfortunately, the female was not as strong as the failed leader Iron Hands was before he died and was carted downstairs to the crematorium. She started writing quickly on her little chalkboard when the soldiers threatened to slit her son’s throat as she watched. She did not fully comprehend the mileage markers, or actual latitudes or longitudes needed to pinpoint the king’s conclave, but her hasty scrawls were enough to make the lieutenant colonel grin in triumph.

  Neither the female nor her son were safe from O’Dell’s revenge, though. Even as the cartographers mapped out the quickest route to the deep heart of the Rocky Mountains, based on the female’s scrawled map, raw recruits were ordered to shoot the female and her offspring dead, which they did with ruthless efficiency.

  ***

  It had been weeks since Onio and his companions came to the king’s conclave and Onio was growing frustrated. On the one hand, he had never been happier. His new wife was everything he could have hoped for…a deft and sensuous lover, intelligent, joyful, and eager to learn the sasquatch way. Although his days were filled with worry and doubts, his nights were alight with passion.

  On the other hand, although he didn’t think that attacking the small humans outright was the way to go, like so many of the more militant sasq warriors urged, he could somehow feel the noose tightening. Every day a scouting party was sent out to test the lay of the land. In the past, sasq trails were so well hidden they were almost impossible to detect with the human eye.

  Now, however, the scouts hardly stepped foot out of the tunnel before they heard the distinctive clop, clop of chopper blades hovering just beyond the horizon. The previous week, smoke had started rolling down one of the tunnels, filling the main cavern with chemical-laden toxic fumes. Twenty of the largest sasq warriors were dispatched to collapse the tunnel entrance, and then sent north to do the same to two others.

  Onio felt like a honeybee smoked out of its comb, and knew that the time of waiting was over. He, personally, thought that the sasq nation might do better in the far north. He understood that the American armies had little jurisdiction in the northern lands, and although the cold weather was not too much of a problem for the sasq, it would be bothersome, even deadly, to the soldiers that chased them.

  What about Melody, though? Onio thought, uneasily. He had seen the joy and contentment that came over her features when she turned her face to the sun. Also, her flesh was not nearly as impervious to weather as the sasquatches skin was. She would have to live underground, like a mole, bundled up against the chill on a daily basis, in order to survive.

  He studied his wife’s profile as she sat by the fire with his mother and grandmother by her side. She was laughing at something and her pale cheeks were flushed pink with pleasure and the heat of the flames. His heart skipped a beat as she caught his eye and winked. He adored the little human woman with every fiber of his being, but he knew that their timing could not have been worse. The small human soldiers would find them, and soon, if he was any judge!

  He saw Wolf and his father, Hunter, approaching and rose to meet them. It was time to go to the king’s chambers for the next round of debates. Onio stifled a sigh and smiled at the approaching males. Just as they turned to head into New Moon’s private council hall, he heard a panicked shouting coming from the east end of the cavern. Onio also heard the sound of frantic barking.

  The sasquatches owned and cared for many dogs, but he recognized this dog’s cry, as Smiles owned a particularly hushed and bashful voice due, he thought, to her neglect-filled upbringing. Looking to his left, he saw his wife get up, along with Petal and Rain, and run toward the commotion. Something is wrong, he thought with sudden certainty, and we are in peril!

  Onio, Wolf and Hunter ran to see what had happened, making their way through the crowd of solemn onlookers to their females’ sides. Mel stood sobbing and Onio put his arm around her shoulders while staring down at the small human boy who lay in a pool of his own blood on the floor.

  It was the boy named Tiki. His father knelt at the boy’s side and wept as Rain turned his foster son over, and they all saw the horrible gunshot wounds that etched a deadly path across his back.

  Onio heard the whispered comments; it seemed that t
he boy and dog had left to play and when the boy was shot, Smiles had dragged Tiki by one sleeve back to the safety of the cave. Now she cowered by his side, tail tucked hard up under her belly. A moment later, a number of scouts ran through the tunnel entrance.

  Most of the king’s guards were picked for their strength, stature and cool wit. These guards, however, looked almost hysterical with fear. The head guard, whose name was Willow, exclaimed, “They are coming…the small human army, many hundreds of soldiers, are coming down the tunnels! Hurry, hurry, we must seal this tunnel now or we will all die this day!”

  With a cry of alarm the sasq warriors started pulling the support beams and rocks around the tunnel entrance down. Onio knew, with his heart sinking like a stone in his chest, that all of their options had just been narrowed down to one. The sasquatches would go to war.

  Chapter 32

  The sasquatches packed their belongings with solemn efficiency, and within minutes of the guards warning, they were walking en mass down the northeastern tunnel that led towards Wyoming and Montana.

  Warriors took up the vanguard and the rear of the column, surrounding the king, females and children on all sides. They walked in complete silence, alert to the booming sounds of cannon fire behind them and the teeth rattling percussion of falling rocks that accompanied each assault on the abandoned cave. Every hundred feet or so, the sasq’s stopped and waited while the bigger warriors collapsed yet another tunnel entrance.

  Dust rolled through the air, bringing tears to Mel’s eyes and causing the little ones to weep in fear. Onio, Blue, Wolf, Tanah and Two Horses walked in front of Mel, Petal, and Onio’s aunt, Sunshine. Rain walked beside her husband, Bouldar, who was being carried on a litter. He looked disgusted with himself, as though he was heartily sick of feeling like a burden to his tribe. Onio told Mel though, of all the voices heard in the king’s chamber, it was Bouldar’s voice New Moon sought most often.