The Cult of Kishpu

by J. J. Shetland

  The Cult of Kishpu

  Global Creature Alliance: Book One

  J. J. Shetland

  Copyright © 2017 J. J. Shetland

  KINDLE Edition

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored, in any form or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  PublishNation

  www.publishnation.co.uk

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am very grateful to my family, my friends and beta readers for their really useful feedback and advice, the best sister in the world Beth and her colleague Sam for providing the marvellous cover design, and everyone at PublishNation UK for the proofreading and critique services, formatting, publishing and marketing. I couldn’t have done this without any of you. Thank you all.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

  BONUS SHORT STORY:

  THE RISE OF PETUNIA CLOCKSON

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Nothing here.” It had been the forty-fourth dark and dusty alleyway she had inspected. All she could see were overflowing bins and piles of broken stone bricks. They weren’t what she was searching for. She had no sleep over the previous eighteen hours and the dust flying in the windy air wasn’t helping her, but she still rose above her tiredness to maintain her sharp focusing. The more alleyways she went to only to find that none of them had what she was after, the more she wished her frustrating mission would be completely over.

  “Well, come out and rejoin us, Toronto.”

  As Private Kathy Toronto ran out to the isolated streets of downtown Alexandria, moonlight brightened her stripy face and mane. She was no ordinary zebra. She was a five foot tall zebra that had a white and pink striped body. She had always been those colours, but she never knew why. Her mane that was styled like long hair from a human being and her nose was completely pink rose. Her amber eyes were one of the few things that weren’t pink on her body.

  Kathy was also a biped zebra that could stand and walk like a human being. At the end of her legs, she had stripy feet hiding in her light brown military boots. She was wearing a UK combat uniform and holding an AK-47 machine gun in her stripy hands. A mini solar panel full of Polycrystalline Silicon solar cells was lying on the top of the weapon and its tiny black wires were leading into the heart.

  Kathy went to join her three squad mates. They were no more or less tired and stressed about the mission than she was. Like her, they were biped animals standing up like five foot tall human beings, wearing UK combat uniforms and carrying AK-47s with mini solar panels on top of them. They were all wearing their Mk 7 helmets on their heads, but the air was still too warm to persuade Kathy to put hers on, so she hung its strap around her right elbow. Luckily, it didn’t distract her while she was focusing on her mission.

  As far as the four animals were concerned after searching through the completely human-deserted Alexandria since they arrived, they were the only four living creatures in the city. There had been nothing else besides buildings (some still tall and standing up, some half knocked down and some with dead human beings inside them) and broken roads with hundreds of cracks and holes so large and deep that Kathy thought passing them was like passing through a massive, unstable quarry.

  “No signs of a sphinx at all, Toronto?” The male fox, who had an Essex accent, had asked her that for the forty-fourth time.

  “No, Corporal Martin. Not a single wing feather, a broken claw or any fur.” Kathy had a Canadian accent.

  A sphinx was what she and the other soldiers had been searching Alexandria for, though they felt their mission was more like a wild goose chase than a wild sphinx chase because they hadn’t seen one yet let alone capture it.

  Martin turned to the female badger Corporal Bowe who was reading a map of Alexandria. He asked her if there was anywhere else to check. He was hoping not because like everyone he had enough of this stupid sphinx mission and just wanted a nice sit down with a delicious cup of green lemon tea. But when Bowe took her glasses off after she finished checking the map and replied no, Martin wasn’t relieved either because they couldn’t go back to the commanding officers empty handed. He sighed in frustration as he buried his smooth furry orange face into his white military gloves.

  Then a yawning sound made Martin face the grey green crocodile with long braided black hair hanging down from her head. “The mission is far from over, Rhodes. Eyes kept peeled.”

  “But we kept our eyes peeled for eighteen hours, sir,” said Private Rachael Rhodes, who had a Miami accent. “No one has seen or heard from a single sphinx from anywhere in millenniums, let alone this type that no one has even ever heard of. How would we know if it bit us on our tails?”

  Kathy had to agree with Rachael as she yawned with her.

  “Hey, yawning twins, pay attention!” Martin snapped. “Sergeant Lukeson said our orders are to find a sphinx and bring it back to Blackpool to nurture it,” Martin told Rachael. “After all, that’s the purpose of Global Creature Alliance: ‘Finding animals, nurturing them and giving them protection from all the dangers in the world’.”

  “And learning to fend for ourselves,” Rachael added.

  Bowe and Martin just gave her a hard look. What she said was not part of the famous Global Creature Alliance purpose speech.

  “Why else would the officers train us as soldiers for missions like this?” the crocodile asked.

  Global Creature Alliance, the secret military organisation they worked for, had sent them to track down one of the sphinxes they heard about so they could capture it in order to study and learn how to tame it. If successful, then it could be civilised like the rest of the anthropomorphic animals at G.C.A., short for Global Creature Alliance, and maybe even live with them.

  When she and the chosen G.C.A. soldiers were picked for this sphinx mission, Kathy never thought finding a mythical creature would be so damn hard. She never imagined in a million years that such a creature even existed, but how wrong she was when she heard that the very only reason that most of the Alexandria population had fled from their beloved city was because of the ru
mour of a swarm of sphinxes attacking it and the rest of Egypt. As the G.C.A. soldiers couldn’t find anything to prove otherwise, that would explain all of the city’s devastation and deceased humans, but if only the rumour was true. Whether it was or not, none of the damage looked like the doing of mankind or any other creature.

  The longer the mission kept on going, the more care Kathy started to lose about it. Even though their commanding officers would not let her and her fellow soldiers rest until it was over, after searching for rumoured sphinxes for nearly a whole day and finding nothing, all she could think of was sleep. Peaceful sleep. If she had nightmares, she wouldn’t give a damn.

  “Maybe we’re doing something wrong to catch this sphinx,” Bowe said in her Ambleside accent. She thought of about what they’ve already done which was nothing more than walk around an entire city of devastation. She tried to think about what they could do differently, but nothing came up in her head.

  “Do you think we could be looking in the wrong places, Corporal?” Rachael asked. “What I mean by that is my research told me that the sphinxes in Ancient Egypt were more benevolent compared the ones in Ancient Greece.”

  “True, Rhodes,” Bowe said. “But don’t forget that it was the Alexandria G.C.A. Army that spotted this sphinx in the first place and tried to capture it before it could alert itself to the whole of Egypt. I just hope Sergeant Lukeson and the rest of the Blackpool army is helping them look through the rest of Egypt the best they can.”

  There had been no contact from either the Blackpool or Alexandria G.C.A. Army since this mission had started. Kathy just assumed that they were either too busy or their communications might have gone out.

  “Let’s not forget,” Martin said, “what’s different about this sphinx is that it doesn’t have the head of a human or a ram, but of an Egyptian cobra snake.”

  No one had ever seen a sphinx with an Egyptian cobra’s head before, but one could only imagine it couldn’t be good.

  “I just wonder why this sphinx couldn’t be like the ancient ones where they could just stand outside a temple and ask us some riddles,” Kathy said.

  Then bright orange reflections shone above the soldiers. They turned around to see the building in front of them light up as high as a wildfire. The high, bright, roaring flames soon started to spread onto the other buildings like strawberry jam on bread and the warm air soon turned to baking heat. Just when the soldiers thought things couldn’t get any worse, they could hear screaming coming from behind the buildings.

  Kathy wondered if the screaming coming from behind the buildings belonged to trapped humans. If so, she hoped they would either escape or get rescued. She became more worried as the flames kept growing and the screaming got worse. “It’s very tragic, isn’t it?”

  “You’re so right, Toronto,” Martin said. “The city of Alexandria is on fire and we can’t find one single sphinx.”

  If Kathy was a higher rank than him, she would beat up the fox for both his selfishness and stupidity. “No, Corporal. I meant all those innocent people dying behind those flames and we can’t help them.”

  “You know the rules, Private,” Bowe said. “We can’t show ourselves to humans. They will only kill us out of fear. Besides, look.” She pointed to the top of the flaming buildings.

  The soldiers were delighted to see three helitack helicopters above the heavy smoke releasing water onto the highest flames. The flames were tougher and going out slower than anyone thought, but the helitacks were still showing them who was winning.

  Then Martin realised that he and the soldiers was still out in the open. “Everyone, take cover in that alleyway!” he ordered, pointing to it.

  Everyone followed him into the alleyway and watched the helicopters do their job. Kathy recognised the place they were hiding in; it was the thirty-ninth alleyway she inspected.

  As she watched the helitacks do their job, she had a thought. “Could those fires be caused by the sphinxes themselves?”

  “That is a possibility, Toronto,” Martin said. “And if you are right, all we have to do is just wait here for them to come out and then we’ll shoot one down.”

  Not all of the flames had completely gone out, but the G.C.A. soldiers were pleased to see it was good enough for three rescue helicopters full of Alexandria civilians to pull up from behind the burning buildings and fly off. They were glad the lucky humans had success of escaping the fires.

  Then Kathy could see some things in the air approaching the rescue helicopters. After putting her helmet on her head, she stepped out of the alleyway and aimed her solar panelled AK-47 at the sky.

  “Toronto, get back in here!” Martin yelled.

  “Kathy, what are you shooting those helicopters down for?” Rachael demanded.

  “I’m not,” Kathy replied. “I’m helping them.”

  Still remaining in the alleyway, Rachael, Martin and Bowe could see what Kathy was seeing through the heavy smoke. The things approaching the helicopter looked very ugly and vicious. All the G.C.A. soldiers knew was that those things couldn’t be human air support coming to help the helicopters.

  “They could be the dangerous sphinxes!” Martin aimed his solar panelled AK-47 and ran out of the alleyway. “Everyone, fire at will!”

  Rachael and Bowe joined Martin and Kathy out in the open. They fired shiny yellow bullets at the hundreds of furry sphinxes around the helicopters.

  The solar panels on top of the gun and the panel wiring linked into the heart of the gun were how the bullets were being produced. Everyone at G.C.A. called them solar bullets. They were just as fast and powerful as a normal metal AK-47 bullet. The gun never needed to be reloaded like a human gun as the genius inventors at G.C.A. had created and modified the solar panels to make them reliable and produce unlimited ammo for the soldiers day and night. It saved them a lot of time, not having to reload guns with magazine boxes.

  Despite these powerful bullets, no one could never actually hit a single sphinx. All the rumours were true. They had cobra heads on top of their lion bodies with dark golden wings and they were acting savage and merciless.

  Kathy started to think the monsters were both quick and smart enough to dodge the bullets before they could get hit. As she knew these were not the famous sphinxes from Ancient Egypt or Ancient Greek or anywhere else in the world, she began to wonder if the sphinxes they were firing at were created by someone or something. If so, she wondered why would their creators make them be bloodthirsty for reasons she didn’t know or dared to think about.

  “Cease firing!” Martin ordered.

  “Why, sir?” Rachael asked. She got her answer when Martin pointed upwards. Seven Egyptian Air Force helicopters had arrived to help the rescue helicopters. They tried firing their gun turrets at the sphinxes, but they couldn’t hit a single one themselves. They were no better than the G.C.A. soldiers on the ground. Then every military, helitack and rescue helicopter were covered up by ten sphinxes each and were pushed back to the ground.

  Kathy was horrified to see the building the helicopters were pushed into explode like a firework show. “Are you sure we can’t do anything for those poor people, sir?” she sadly asked Martin.

  Martin sighed sadly. “No, Toronto. We tried our very best.”

  An angry Kathy aimed her weapon for the sphinxes to fly out of the flaming rubble, but nothing came out. She wondered if the monsters were suicidal.

  Then Rachael turned around and fired.

  “What the hell are you firing at, Rhodes?” Martin demanded.

  “Two o’clock,” Rachael said.

  “There are monsters attacking innocent folk and you’re wasting your time firing at clocks?”

  Rachael sighed and pointed with her claw.

  Martin saw a sphinx falling to the ground and landed next to an unfinished constructed building about ten yards away. “Let’s go!”

  Rachael was very disappointed when she received no praise for finally hitting a sphinx. “‘Good shot, Rhodes’,” she mut
tered.

  “I’m impressed, Rach.” Kathy patted her scaly back.

  That lifted Rachael up. She and Kathy had been best friends since they were very young animals. They were almost always on the same page with each other and always understood each other the best out of their own squad in the Blackpool G.C.A. Army, Squad J. Martin was leader of Squad B and Bowe leader of Squad D. Even though each squad was trained the same way and they all served the same purpose at G.C.A., it was hard for a soldier from one squad to work with soldiers from different squads as they never knew each other as well as the ones from their own squad. But luckily they could do it when they had to do it like on this mission as it had always been a part of G.C.A.’s training. Their commanding officer Sergeant Lukeson put these four animals together to search Alexandria because they were the stealthiest and had the most tactical minds out of the entire Blackpool G.C.A. Army.

  * * *

  Kathy was sent forward to find the shot sphinx. The other animals were hiding behind the wall corner in case their friend flew past her. She stopped as she found the shot sphinx in the abandoned construction yard and hid behind an unfinished stony brick pillar that was just her height. She peered around to see the sphinx’s right wing was bleeding, but it was still moving and it was creeping towards a young Egyptian boy who looked to be eleven and looked very terrified. All she could see on his body was a black t-shirt and glasses on his bald head. She couldn’t see his legs, but she assumed that were trapped under tons of rubble and wondered if that was why the boy couldn’t escape the sphinx as it licked its bloody snake fangs.

  Kathy remembered that hiding from humans was the most important thing on a G.C.A. mission otherwise everything it stood for would go up in smoke. She tried to stay behind the corner of the brick pillar to hide from the boy and aim her gun at the sphinx, but it not staying still made it very difficult for her.