Past, Future, & Present Danger (Book Two of The Absurd Misadventures of Captain Rescue)

by Joshua Price

  Right on cue, Captain Rescue and his ape allies waltzed out of tree cover. While smiling as bright as can be, he fired again at the dinosaur in hopes of driving it away from his friends. At the same time, Harold the Shaman raised his rifle-staff into the air in hopes of making it rain over the dinosaur. For what purpose? He had no clue, that’s just what shaman did, make it rain. The dinosaur stumbled backwards as more lasers bombarded its thick hide, and then it whimpered, hung its head low to the ground, and admitted defeat.

  The hero threw a fist up and halted the laser barrage. “Men! We have defeated this beast. There is no reason to slay it.”

  Captain Rescue glanced over the cliff side; he had always had an issue with heights, but he had to find a way down there to reunite with his wonderful friends. His eyes lit up as an idea dawned on him. He pushed his cape aside and unfastened the grappling hook from his utility belt, the grappling hook just recently acquired and never used. The hero leaned over the side of the cliff, immediately became queasy, and almost fell off. He stumbled backwards and then righted himself. Captain Rescue looked first to his grappling hook, then to his bigfoot friends, and then back to the grappling hook. He nodded with a smug on his face. The grappling hook fell to the hero’s side and he fired the bouquet of black spikes straight into the ground.

  He glanced once more to his bigfoot friends, ignored the worry covering their faces, and simply stepped off the cliff. After plummeting past grey rocks for a few seconds, the hero squeezed the grappling hook’s handle to slow his decent. This plan worked perfectly at first, but after a few seconds, the anchor high above simply popped out of the ground and tumbled over the cliff’s edge. The hero kept his composure for nearly a moment and then became abruptly hysterical.

  The pink dinosaur, which was still recuperating from its run-in with lasers, leisurely lifted its head from the ground. Upon seeing the plummeting spandex dot, the dinosaur jumped to its feet. It let loose a sharp, quick cry and then sprinted for the cliff side as its tiny arms swung back and forth like a marathon runner with a number on its chest. Directly in the dinosaur’s path, Dr. Malevolent stood with her back still plastered against the cliff. The super villain shot a quick glance to her allies and then upwards to the falling Captain Rescue. The only decision she had time enough to make was to get the hell out of the way.

  With a sharp thrust, the super villain outstretched her arms and shoved both Charlie and Freight out of the way before sprinting forward. She and the dinosaur crossed paths, and Dr. Malevolent weaved effortlessly through its feet. Free of crushing danger, she spun around and watched as the giant lizard dove forward, flipped onto its back, and threw its tiny arms into the air. The dinosaur nimbly snatched the hero’s cape within its hands and then gently set him down upon its chest. A spellbound Captain Rescue stood there as the dinosaur’s serpentine tail, which had been altered by the dolphins just for this purpose, wrapped itself around his torso and the carried him to the ground. The two creatures interlocked eyes and instantly formed a bond that would never sever, much the link bond between a hunter and his trusted hound.

  Captain Rescue jumped with glee. “My very own dinosaur! I’ve always wanted one!”

  “Oh great,” Dr. Malevolent started, “the damned thing chases us through the forest, but you’re able to woo its tormented heart in mere moments.”

  “What can I say?! We are kindred spirits!”

  “Your brains are roughly the same size.”

  The dinosaur rolled onto its stomach and then rose to its feet. It growled at the super villain before stepping between her and Captain Rescue. The dinosaur wrapped its tail around the hero’s torso and lifted him onto its back.

  Dr. Malevolent laughed. “Go ahead, you oversized lizard, keep him.”

  The dinosaur leaned its head backwards and nuzzled Captain Rescue, and as he caressed it in return, his new friend emitted a distorted purr that resembled an elephant with a bad case of indigestion. The hero clapped at the animal’s affection, but in doing so, he lost his footing. Captain Rescue teetered for a moment and then tumbled down its back and landed face down in the dirt.

  “Where did you run off to anyway?” Charlie asked as the hero as he spat dirt from his mouth.

  “Oh, I was kidnapped and tortured by some brainwashed bigfoot until those guys up there rescued me,” he replied while waving to Harold as his followers, who were still on the cliff above.

  “Tortured?!” Dr. Malevolent exclaimed excitedly. “How bad was it?”

  Captain Rescue lifted the back of his spandex shirt to show off the stylish, thin, and oozing wounds etched across his back.

  “You might want someone to tend to that,” Charlie said as he watched the blood drip down the man’s back.

  “Eh, maybe later. I’m still conscious so it can’t be that bad.”

  As one of Harold’s followers unfurled a rope ladder and tossed it over the cliff side, the dinosaur began growling menacingly at them. The beast did not think highly of the hairy beasts, and to quell its angered heart, Captain Rescue gently caressed its thick hide.

  “We need to give you a name!” he cheered.

  The dinosaur shook with excitement.

  “How about ‘Ralph’?” Captain Rescue asked.

  Ralph yelped with joy; he approved of the name.

  “Did you really just name your dinosaur Ralph?” Dr. Malevolent snickered.

  Ralph spun around and taunted Dr. Malevolent with a throaty growl. Once she got over his putrid breath, the super villain could not help but to imagine how splendid it would be to conquer the world with the help of one of these. With any luck, they came in other colors. Dr. Malevolent always hated pink. It signified everything that she worked her entire career as a super villain to denounce. Feathers would be nice though, she knew many dinosaurs came with feathers. She always had a soft spot for those Velociraptors. They were small, intelligent, and as far as she knew, a lot of them had feathers. Dr. Malevolent smiled; Velociraptors it was.

  Harold slammed his rifle-staff against the ground to get everyone’s attention. “We have to do something about my brainwashed brethren. They cannot be allowed to continue.”

  “We should kill them all!” Freight cheered.

  “I certainly hope it does not come to that, perhaps we can break the spell that they have been put under.”

  “By killing something!”

  “Yes, I do suppose it will have to include killing in some way, shape, or form.”

  “I’m in.”

  “We must then plan our next course of action,” the shaman said as he turned to the others.

  “Hey wait a second!” an annoyed Dr. Malevolent said, “I didn’t agree to helping you with anything.”

  “It is your choice whether or not you lend aid, but if this spirals out of control, the world as you know it may cease to exist.”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “My brethren are amassing. For what end, I do not know, but the fate or your city as well as the world is uncertain.”

  Dr. Malevolent crossed her arms. “Well, I’ll admit you’ve piqued my interest, but I want to make it clear that I do not care about you or our brethren.”

  Captain Rescue cheered. “The gang’s back together once more for another adventure! You don’t know how excited this makes me. I had so much fun the last time.”

  The hero opened his mouth to speak once more, but before he could muster any words, his eyes rolled into the back of his head as blood loss rendered him unconscious. Dr. Malevolent shook her head and chuckled as Captain Rescue fell to the ground.

  Freight, on the other hand, gasped, sprinted to his side, and yelled, “Is there a doctor in the house!?” He thought about his question for a moment and then shot a concerned glance to Dr. Malevolent.

  She chuckled once more, reached into her lab coat, and withdrew a hacksaw. In the most doctor-like tone she could conjure, the super villain said, “We’re going to have to amputate… everything.”
/>   Freight fell to his knees and threw his fists into the air. “You monsters!”

  Charlie decided that everyone had gone insane, and to make sure no one amputated any of the unconscious hero’s limbs, he snatched the hacksaw from Dr. Malevolent. The super villain snarled at the bunny as Harold and his bigfoot rushed to Captain Rescue and began tending to his wounds.

  Chapter 4: Putting the Special in Special Forces

  The hero groaned. For a moment, he thought that perhaps those damn dirty apes kidnapped him again, but he soon realized the darkness he found himself greeting was just his face buried in a pillow. He found further evidence against kidnapping when he glanced over his shoulder to see the faces of Dr. Malevolent, Charlie, and Freight.

  “What happened?” Captain Rescue asked.

  “Well, you lost a lot of blood,” Charlie replied, “but our bigfoot friends coated your back in some stinky mud. They said you’d be okay.”

  Captain Rescue licked his dry mouth. It felt like someone coated his back in dirt, which they had, so the feeling fit. He swung his feet over the side of the cot he’d been laid out on and looked around the cramped olive drag tent that he and his friends were alone in. A few feet away, caduceus emblazoned curtains shielded the only way in or out of the tent.

  “How long was I out?” Captain Rescue asked as he tumbled from the cot and planted his feet on the dirt ground.

  Charlie led the wounded hero out of the tent and into the camp. “A couple hours.”

  In those two hours, the bigfoot, with help from those less harry, erected quite an impressive camp. Harold spared many apes from brainwashing and fashioned them into an army. Several platoons of rebels had formed throughout the camp, doing exercises like stabbing the air with their laser rifles. Off to the side and curled up like a puppy, Ralph had found a nice spot to call his own, and he had not eaten any self-aware organisms since his domestication, so one could say he was doing well.

  Followed by his friends, Captain Rescue made his way to a command tent, where Harold and a few of his highest-ranking lieutenants awaited. The bigfoot encircled a miniature model of the surrounding forest. Captain Rescue could easily make out their base camp as well as a village nearby. Within this village was a small figurine of a brainwashed bigfoot with the head of a dolphin.

  “What’s the plan?” the hero asked as he picked up the small model to inspect it and its outstanding quality more closely. The amount of detail put into the tiny work of art disturbed Captain Rescue so much that he had to set it down because it would not stop staring at him.

  With a stick in his hand, one of Harold’s lieutenants pointed at the small model of their camp. “We’ve decided to send a small reconnaissance party to the enemy,” he slid the stick over to the dolphin-headed bigfoot, “to discover what it is they are up to before we plan any further.”

  “Excellent! I wanna go, please let me go.”

  “You are wounded, you should stay here and recuperate,” Harold argued.

  “That’s boring, let me go please.”

  “Well, if you insist, we certainly can’t force you to stay here.”

  “I can!” Dr. Malevolent said with hacksaw in hand.

  “What the…” Charlie started, “didn’t I confiscate that so you didn’t hurt anyone or yourself?”

  He grabbed the hacksaw from her hands, but she just withdrew another from her lab coat. When he grabbed that one, she unsheathed her inanimate carbon rod. Charlie threw his hands up in defeat.

  “So… I can go?” Captain Rescue asked while tapping his foot impatiently.

  Harold the Shaman sighed. “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “Yippee!” He darted out of the tent and into the woods as Harold’s reconnaissance party followed close behind.

  ***

  A rustle spread through the underbrush as a pair of white eyes emerged from within. Captain Rescue crawled out from the foliage and dusted the leaves and insects from his costume. He had taken war paint to a whole new level, a terrible level, smearing the stuff across his face without rhyme or reason. In fact, he had not even used paint. The hero just found a mound of something on the forest floor and went to town. From the smell, he assumed that it was not fecal matter.

  A group of three bigfoot came down a game trail and stopped next Captain Rescue. They had followed him closely as he moved from bush to bush on some quest to be as stealthy as possible. The towering beasts strutted right through Captain Rescue and bumped him without bothering to acknowledge any inconvenience it might have caused. Not that the hero cared, as far as he was concerned, any touch from the bigfoot was a good touch, unless it was a whip’s touch. Despite all he had been through, with the kidnapping and the torture, he still idolized the legendary beasts.

  Harold had given the apes implicit instructions to keep Captain Rescue from harm, so knocking the so-called hero over the head and then allowing him to make the journey back to camp alone would probably breach those instructions. On the way here, they had to rescue him from a multitude of threats, from the mountain lion, to the rattlesnake, to the poison ivy, to the deer. It was a very irritated deer.

  The reconnaissance party climbed to the top of a steep hill, where they hoped to catch a glimpse of the settlement in which their brethren abandoned the old gods for new and aquatic ones. It annoyed the apes to no end, and to infuriate them further, they had to lug along this idiot. One of them glanced behind to Captain Rescue, who had to struggle to keep up with their long legs. The ape laughed and the hero just smiled back and waved, catching no wind of its condescending tone. He had been traveling with his bigfoot entourage for some time now thinking that the settlement infested with brainwashed bigfoot bent on human annihilation was still a few klicks away. Not that Captain Rescue had a clue how far a klick actually was. He had just heard the term used so many times in so many war movies that he could not resist using it now in the forest.

  Gazing down from the hill’s summit, the party could see the settlement a few thousand feet below. This entire time, Captain Rescue just assumed that where the apes tortured him and the target of their reconnaissance were the same, but as he gazed at the foreboding camp, he realized that was not the case. In this settlement, many of the bigfoot had left behind their underground dwellings and migrated to the surface. Captain Rescue stared into the distance and tried his best to catch a glance of one of the fabled dolphin-headed bigfoot he saw miniaturized back at the camp. He strained and strained to see something, but despite his best and most painful efforts, the hero could not make much out from this distance. He would have to get closer to glimpse one of those wonderful amalgamations.

  As if reading his thoughts, one of the bigfoot gave some hand gestures to the others, and they dropped to their knees, hugged the ground, and began their descent. Captain Rescue followed suit and fell to his hands and knees. He crawled across the ground paying little heed to the forest debris poking his stomach. The hero had made great strides in his acceptance of the forest and everything found within. While he would not have been caught dead crawling on the forest floor a few months ago, now he just continued hoping, in the back of his mind, that nothing crawled up his pant leg.

  Crawling from bush to bush, Captain Rescue descended the hill in stealth mode. He hoped that not even the birds in the sky would be able to detect him, and the brainwashed bigfoot on the ground would be clueless to their presence. After an uncomfortable five minutes, Captain Rescue and his entourage made their way to the bottom. Conveniently, some ancient glacier had deposited an enormous boulder down here for them to spy behind. While they were getting into position, something rustled in the nearby bushes, and the party took advantage of the house-sized boulder and dropped to their knees to huddle behind it.

  “Where are you taking us?!” a voice cried out.

  Out of the trees, a group of brainwashed bigfoot emerged dragging with them a string of shackled humans. An ape, large even by their standards, led the pack. This alpha male turned to his prisoners and laughed as he
yanked the chain forward, causing them to stumble and fall to the ground. While many of these apes were indistinguishable from each other, this one felt oddly familiar to Captain Rescue. He was certain that he met him six months prior in the forest. The more he pondered on it, the clearer the memories became. He had tried to strike up a conversation with the giant ape, but he was less than friendly. Now, Captain Rescue could see why. He was evil.

  “Great,” one of the prisoners said, “we finally prove that bigfoot exist, and the first thing that happens is they kidnap us.”

  Captain Rescue watched as the bigfoot continued their journey into the city and immediately recognized the weapons slung over the shoulders. Not too long ago, he had carved his way to the surface wielding one of these laser-spouting beauties. Every so often, a bigfoot escort would take the gun and point it at a prisoner in a most threatening fashion. The acts of cruelty sent impulses through Captain Rescue, impulses directing him to do something brash, something foolish, something heroic.

  As he watched the apes manhandle the prisoners, Captain Rescue was unable to resist these urges any longer. The hero jumped to his feet, but before he could save anything, a giant hairy hand grabbed his shoulder. The hero looked up to the apes in anguish. They just pointed to formidable alpha male and then drew a line across their necks with their fingers. Captain Rescue gulped. He valued his neck quite a bit. Disappointed, he sighed, slumped down, and collapsed against the boulder.

  “What are you doing? We have to save them!” the hero whispered.

  “We stand no chance against that many of them, now is not the time for heroics,” one of them said.

  “Wait a second… you guys can speak English?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why am I just now learning about this?”

  “We don’t talk to just anyone, and you are not worthy.”

  Captain Rescue smiled. “But I am now?”

  “No.”

  His smile evaporated.

  “We did not want you to get us killed,” the ape added.

  The hero sighed, “I have not gotten anyone killed during my entire career as a superhero. I’ve come close a few times! But no one’s ever died.” Captain Rescue pointed upwards to the top of the boulder. “Now give me a lift.”