Amrita gulped. That didn’t sound good. She bit her lower lip and typed a quick response.
Then she stopped work on the article and ran a search on Tales to Astonish.
“All right, website all about weird monsters,” Amrita said out loud. “Show me everything you have on Gorgilla….”
“DOES THIS BUS even have walls?” Courtney asked as she hugged herself tightly. She was wearing a big puffy coat, along with a scarf, hat, and mittens. Amrita had to wonder if there was even a person inside all those clothes. But her friend was right. The bus was colder than ever on the ride home.
Colder, and finding even more potholes than usual, Amrita observed, as—
BUMP!
—the bus hit another one, sending her off her seat and a few inches into the air.
But Amrita didn’t really care about the cold or the potholes. Not today, anyway. She was beyond excited because that week’s edition of the Weekly Caller had gone to press and was now in the hands of everyone on the bus!
Well, some people’s hands, Amrita thought. A couple of kids in the seat in front of her were reading the newspaper out loud, and Amrita eavesdropped:
“Come on, let me read it!”
“Oh, you’re gonna love it. Apparently there’s a giant monster on the loose!”
“What? Did she really write that?”
“Ha! Yeah! She says it’s called ‘Grogiller’!”
Amrita snapped and stood up on the bus, leaning over her seat. The two kids were shocked by the sudden invasion of their space, and even more shocked when Amrita launched into a rant.
“It’s ‘Gorgilla,’ not ‘Grogiller’!” she started. “What even IS a Grogiller? That makes no sense! And yes, it’s all true, and it really happened, and I’m investigating this story all the way! I’m gonna prove that Gorgilla is real!”
“We were just kidding around!” one of the kids said.
“Yeah,” said another kid. “Like, just joking! We didn’t mean anything by it!”
Amrita showed her teeth and growled.
“Am!” Courtney hush-whispered. She grabbed her friend by her shoulders and pulled her back down into the seat. “You need to chill. Look, they’re just being ridiculous. You know what you know, and Kid Kaiju does, too. Just focus on that.”
Amrita grumbled. “It’s just…I’m sure I look like a dope! Everyone’s making fun of me.”
“So? Who cares? Stick to your guns! Isn’t that what a journalist does? Goes after the truth no matter what?” Courtney said, trying to lift her friend’s spirits.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Amrita said. “My gut is telling me that there’s something to this story. There has to be!”
BUMP!
The bus rode over another pothole.
“Then what are you gonna do about it, Am?” Courtney prodded.
“I am gonna keep on investigating and follow my gut!” Amrita yelled, above the sound of the noisy bus’s engine and tires.
Everyone around them turned to stare at Amrita.
“Right after I die of embarrassment,” she said, shrinking into her seat.
Courtney put a hand on her friend’s shoulder. “It could be worse,” she said.
“How is that possible?” Amrita said, looking out the bus window.
“You could be stuck writing that cheese story.”
Amrita laughed.
THE BUS DROVE off, leaving Amrita and Courtney standing on the street alone. Courtney started to walk toward her house.
“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, Am,” Courtney said, throwing her friend a wave good-bye.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Amrita asked.
“Uh…home? To do my homework? Watch Paranormal Adventures? Read about monsters?” Courtney replied.
“No, no, no,” Amrita said, taking her friend by the arm and yanking her toward the road. “All of those things can wait. Right now, you are coming with me, and we are heading into the woods.”
“We are?” Courtney said, pulling back a little bit.
“Yes, we are! We’re going to find proof of this thing, this…Gorgilla!”
Courtney shook her head back and forth, faster than Amrita had ever seen her shake her head before.
“I am NOT going into the woods in search of Gorgilla. That is the exact opposite of what I’m going to do. Because what I’m going to do is going to look an awful lot like me walking inside my house!” Courtney turned, and started to walk/run toward her home. Amrita followed.
“What is going on? Yesterday, you were the one who was all like, ‘Yay, cryptids!’ And now you’re chickening out?”
“Chickens have excellent self-preservation instincts,” Courtney shot back.
“They do not!” Amrita replied. “Come on. Just think of it. If we do find proof of Gorgilla’s existence, do you have any idea how huge that will be? Besides, you told me to follow my gut. Don’t you want me to be a real journalist and get my scoop?”
Amrita batted her eyes at Courtney, looking as innocent and needy as she could.
Courtney growled. “Oh, all right!” she said, turning back around and walking over to Amrita. “Fine, let’s go get Gorgilla! Just make sure I’m back home in time for dinner.”
Amrita clapped and jumped in the air, then the two walked away from Courtney’s house and down the road, toward the woods.
“That was a good guilt trip back there,” Courtney said as she walked through a stand of trees.
Amrita nodded. “Yeah, it was. I learned it from my mom. She’s like the queen of guilt trips.” Amrita slowly came to a stop as a sad realization passed over her face. “Was. I mean she was, like, the queen of guilt trips.”
Courtney put her hand on her best friend’s shoulder. Amrita looked over at Courtney, her eyes clouded in memory. “I can’t believe it’s been two years since I last saw her.”
“And your dad still won’t tell you what happened?” Courtney asked. The two best friends had become like sisters when Amrita’s mom went missing two summers ago. When Amrita needed a distraction from all of the chaos, Courtney was there for her.
The entire town came together to try and find her. For weeks, they searched the woods but they found nothing. No clothes. No note. No clues. The police were dumbfounded. Nothing like this had ever happened in the tiny town, and it frightened everyone. The day Mrs. Kali Lakhani went missing was the last day anyone left their front doors unlocked.
Amrita thought for a moment and then looked straight ahead. “My dad could never explain how someone could just up and vanish like that.” Amrita gave her friend a small, tired smile and started walking again. “Imagine if I cracked that case. Now THAT would be the biggest scoop of my career.”
The woods were quiet, and there was still daylight. It was about 4:00 p.m., so that meant the girls had about another hour of sun so they could see their way through the woods. After that, darkness would fall.
They walked along the dirt, combing through the area where Amrita had seen those two huge eyes the day before. So far, they saw nothing. Just some giant potholes in the dirt.
Then another pothole.
And another.
“Since when are there potholes in the woods?” Courtney asked.
That didn’t sit right with Amrita, and she took a step back to examine one of the “potholes.” It was gigantic. Much bigger than any “pothole” she had ever seen on the street. This one looked enormous. It was almost big enough for Amrita and Courtney to lie down inside!
That’s when Amrita noticed something else really weird about the “potholes.”
They were shaped like footprints.
Colossal footprints.
“HOLY…!” Courtney shouted. “That’s a footprint, Am! Like the kind of print a foot makes!”
Amrita couldn’t believe it. But there it was, plain as day. A ginormous footprint in the dirt! She whipped out her cell phone and snapped a few pictures. Then she slapped Courtney on the arm.
“Proof!” Amrita shrieke
d. “Actual proof! Courtney, this is huge!”
“Like those footprints.”
“Yeah, exactly! Come on, we have to follow these and see where they lead!”
“I was afraid you were gonna say that,” Courtney said. As Amrita ran off into the woods following the footprints, Courtney followed her. Reluctantly.
The girls raced through the woods as they followed the giant footprints. Sometimes they were running alongside them, other times right into and out of them. The footprints led them away from the road and farther and farther into the woods. The sun was starting to fade, making its way toward the horizon. There wasn’t much daylight left.
Soon it would be dark.
And the girls would be alone in the woods with whatever had made those giant footprints.
Gorgilla?
“What’s that?” Amrita said softly as she reached a clearing in the woods. She ducked behind a tree and motioned for Courtney to join her. An uncomfortable, spooky feeling welled up inside her.
“What’s what?” said Courtney in her normal tone of voice.
Amrita shot her a look. “Keep your voice down! Look!” She pointed into the clearing, and Courtney saw it. It was a huge white dome. The thing had to be the size of an airplane hangar. Bigger. It looked big enough to hold a S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier, Amrita thought. But what was it? Where had it come from? Who put it there? And what was it doing in the middle of the woods in her town?
“Seriously weird, Cort,” Amrita said. “This can’t be just a coincidence. This place must have something to do with those footprints…and whatever made them.”
Then they saw something move. It looked like a person, wearing an all-white jumpsuit, with a helmet and face mask—like a containment suit of some kind. Like the ones that scientists were always wearing in zombie movies when they were trying to find a cure for the infection.
Maybe it was watching too many horror movies at Courtney’s house, but that last observation didn’t make Amrita feel any better.
The person in white had come out of an octagonal opening in the dome. Then another person emerged. Then another.
What was going on out here in the middle of nowhere? Who were these people? They looked like something out of a science-fiction movie. They sort of reminded Amrita of A.I.M.—a group of rogue scientists who had fought Captain America about a jillion times. Except the A.I.M. guys wore yellow jumpsuits, and had helmets that kind of looked like beekeeper masks.
The girls watched as they saw a white jeep drive toward the dome, carrying two more people in white suits. The jeep came to a halt by the dome’s opening, and they jumped out. They beat a path through the overgrown brush toward the opening, and the other people in white suits joined them. “What are they doing?” Courtney whispered, almost angry. These creepy strangers in white suits were using the town to conduct some weird research projects right under everyone’s noses. It was insulting. “Who do these people think they are?”
“Whoever they are, what they’re doing has to be illegal. It’s too weird not to be,” Amrita said.
“What if it’s the government. What if they’re doing government experiments?” Courtney said. “I saw this one episode of Alien Archaeologists that said that the government was planting extraterrestrial plant life in the middle of—”
Suddenly, Amrita clasped her hand over Courtney’s mouth.
“Shhh! They’ll hear us.”
With her hand still over Courtney’s mouth, Amrita watched as the people in white jumpsuits cleared away the brush until they finally made it to the dome. There wasn’t a door, but with the wave of someone’s badge, one quickly appeared. The people in white filed inside one by one, until the last person closed the door securely behind him. Then, once again, there was no one. Just Amrita and Courtney.
Suddenly, there was a deafening…
SNAP!
Amrita jerked her head backward to see an ancient, gnarled tree falling right toward them!
THE TREE FELL HARD and slammed into the ground. Along the way, it took out some other, smaller trees, some branches, and some plants. Anything in its path was heading toward Flat City.
But not Amrita and Courtney. They had managed to roll out of the way at the last possible second. They were now both covered in dirt, but at least they hadn’t been flattened by a tree. They looked at each other, then looked at the stump of the tree that had almost crushed them. It was a clean break. Like something had pushed the tree over. Deliberately.
How big would something have to be to knock over a tree? Amrita thought.
They heard a rustling sound.
“Move it!” Amrita shouted, and the two girls got to their feet and sprinted out of the woods and into the clearing. The girls ran and ran, until they were about halfway between the edge of the woods and the dome. They slumped to the ground as adrenaline coursed through them.
“I knew going into the woods with you was a bad idea!” Courtney said, huffing and puffing. “I could be safe at home watching Paranormal Investigations right now, instead of conducting one of my own!”
“Something just tried to kill us!” Amrita said.
“Oh, you think?” Courtney responded sarcastically.
It was darker than before, as the sun slipped past the horizon line. Lights from within and around the dome grew brighter, illuminating the clearing. The girls caught their breath, and that’s when they noticed that some of the lights were moving.
Searchlights.
“Searchlights!” Amrita shouted. “They must have heard all that commotion!”
“They?” Courtney said as the girls got to their feet. “Who they?”
“Them they!” Amrita said, pointing at the door of the dome that had just opened. Several people in white containment suits ran outside as the searchlights swung right on the girls!
“Over there!” shouted one of the people, as two others hopped into the jeep. They were heading right for Amrita and Courtney! The girls started to run back toward the woods.
A voice boomed over a loudspeaker. “Halt! You two! You’re trespassing on private property!”
“Oh, man,” Courtney said, running. “Not only does something try to kill us with a tree, but now we’re trespassers? So not good!”
“Keep running, Cort!” Amrita said, pumping her legs. “We have to make it back into the woods before those creeps catch up to us! It’s dark enough.…I think we can lose them in the woods!”
Amrita could feel her heart in her throat. A giant lump had formed there, and she could barely swallow. That’s when she realized how afraid she really was.
The girls ran as the jeep quickly followed, catching up to them. The engine sounded closer and closer, the jeep’s headlights illuminating the path in front of them.
“Don’t let them get away!” said one of the creeps.
“They’ve seen too much!” said another.
At last, they reached the edge of the woods. The girls dived inside, and kept on running. Smaller branches broke as they pushed their way past tree after tree, moving fast as they could.
The girls turned around just in time to see the jeep come to a sudden stop at the edge of the woods. The people in the white suits got out and started looking around.
“That was close,” Courtney said, as she started to run again.
Amrita was just about to turn and run with her friend, when she heard it. Like something hitting metal. Suddenly, the lights on the jeep went out. There were screams. The screams were coming from the people dressed in white.
Amrita whirled around, and caught a glimpse of what was happening behind her in the darkness. She saw a giant hairy hand take a swipe at the jeep, reducing it to pieces.
Amrita turned, ran, and didn’t look back.
AMRITA AND COURTNEY trudged along the side of the road in darkness. They were cold, tired, sweaty, dirty, and scared out of their wits. Amrita glanced at the time on her cell phone as she typed. It was 6:45 p.m., and she had about a bajillion missed calls and voice mail
s from her dad that she hadn’t bothered to return.
She was dead.
“I’m so dead,” Courtney said, as if she was reading Amrita’s mind. “I should have been home for dinner forever ago. I told you it was a bad idea to go out looking for that thing! Remember when I told you it was a bad idea? I meant it!”
Amrita put an arm around her friend. “Look, if it makes you feel any better, I’m just as dead as you are. My dad is going to kill me for coming home so late without so much as a phone call.”
Courtney gave her a look as if to say, How is that supposed to make me feel better?
Slowly, the fear faded from Amrita. All the excitement of the afternoon started to bubble up inside her, and she could now barely contain her enthusiasm. “But come on! This is a real story! Strange happenings in the woods! A monstrously huge hand, which, presumably, is connected to a monstrously huge creature! Mysterious dudes in weird white suits. A secret hideout in the middle of nowhere! We trespassed! We almost got captured!”
It was only then that Amrita realized they had stopped walking, and that she had grabbed her friend by the shoulders and was shaking her. Amrita gave Courtney a sheepish grin and let go.
“Yeah,” Courtney said in a serious tone. “That’s right. We almost got captured.”
The pair started to walk again.
“Sorry,” Amrita said. “I didn’t mean to get you in trouble. But something finally happened in our boring old town! This is too amazing!”
Courtney bit her lip, a nervous habit she had. “I mean, it was pretty amazing. Did we really just come face-to-face with a cryptid?”
“More like face-to-hand, but yeah, I think we did! What else could it have been?” Amrita answered as she continued to type on her phone. “I’m posting everything to Tales to Astonish!”
Amrita typed quickly, posting the photograph of the giant footprint, along with a message:
Courtney cocked her head and gave her friend a funny look. “Since when do you have a Tales to Astonish account?”
Amrita smiled, not taking her eyes off the screen. “Since I saw a giant monster! And since I signed up last night, after I got back from your place, silly!”
Marvel Monsters Unleashed: The Gruesome Gorgilla! Page 3