By me, with art by Sam Messerly.
Click here to read from the beginning.
We made a futile attempt to coax Furbud into my garage after a futile attempt to communicate with him in English, but he refused to go inside and kept nudging the truck, even pushing it several feet down the road as if to urge us to get going.
“Apparently he’s been out here wandering the city for a while and hasn’t caused a lot of problems,” said Colander. “So just let him be. We need to go.”
I agreed, but I insisted on driving—this was my vehicle after all, and there was just something that felt right about me taking the wheel again after all this time. Colander called “shotgun” and actually had a shotgun with her—or at least my old rifle. I started up the truck and we flew down the road.
And Furbud came running behind us, ears flapping and trunk whipping about. As I increased speed, I was sure we would quickly outpace the hirsute pachyderm, but miraculously the beast continued gaining speed and jollily running beside the truck. When we were going seventy miles per hour and the mammoth was keeping pace, I knew something was amiss.
“Warbell must have modified you with cybernetics, too, huh?” I said out the window to the absurdly galloping mammal beside me. I was surprised to see Furbud actually nod. Or maybe it was my imagination and just a natural bounce to his head when running so fast.
Colander was reading the Warbell journal on the seat beside me, occasionally gasping or tut-tutting.
“Could any of this be true?” she asked. “This is the most outlandish thing I have read all week, and I read a lot of sci-fi, fantasy, and political theories in the last few days.”
“Furbud was real,” I said. “Maybe the rest of it is, too.”
“I mean,” said Colander, “this is all hand-written. How did Warbell write such a long letter with just two fingers on each hand?”
I nodded as I went into a turn, trying my best to corner without using the brakes at all.
“That’s the part that sticks out to you?” I said.
“Well, it is weird, right?” she said. “My hand would cramp up writing just a quarter of this book, and I am a librarian! They expect me to write stuff sometimes as part of the job.”
Suddenly Furbud trumpeted. We looked outside. As we did so, the mammoth disappeared. We could only see the dust being thrown up by his footsteps, or the weeds getting smashed down on the side of the road. It was actually kind of cool to watch. Then I heard a gasp beside me, and Colander reached across me, pointing into the field of corn. I looked, too—and then I gasped as well.
Out in the corn we could see something huge moving as well, the stalks breaking and falling against an invisible force. As we looked, we realized that it wasn’t just one invisible beast, but two or three based on how the crops were being crushed in straight lines.
The snaps of the foliage rang out in the quiet evening air as the three invisible beings came right towards us.