Xander and the Lost Island of Monsters (15 page)

I
've never heard of white bats. I peer up at them, trying to make out their features.

Red eyes glow, and sharp red claws flex and reach. They make a high-pitched, almost electronic sound.

Those aren't bats—they're white
rats
. With wings.

They swoop down, hissing and clawing, and we duck. I try throwing salt at them, but it doesn't make contact.

The tunnel forks, and the girl chooses left, a narrow and low opening. I go in after her, bent nearly in half. Behind me are the sounds of Peyton's heavy, even breathing and Inu's claws clacking on the hard ground. Only a few rat bats are willing to follow us, and most of those hit the walls and ceiling and drop away. Inu grabs a wing and hurls one against the other, knocking them out of the air like bowling pins.

The girl's awfully quick for somebody who just escaped captivity. The tunnel forks again, and she goes right this time, leading up a slick and steep path. We scramble after her. Not even Inu can keep up.

We zigzag right and left until finally we reach another cave. The ceiling's probably twenty feet high. A dull circle of daylight is visible above. “Up here. Come on.” She begins climbing one of the slick walls. She must have found little nooks and crannies for her hands and feet, but I see none. Maybe she's part insect.

I don't know how the heck I am going to get to the top. I try to follow her lead, but to me the walls feel as smooth as a countertop. I give up and just stand there. Inu leans against me and whines.

Peyton screws up his face. Sweat droplets stand out on his forehead, and he's breathing almost as hard as I am. “I'll go up first and see if we can lower something down for you.”

“What about the hole in your wing?” I point to it.

Peyton shrugs. “Only one way to find out if I'm okay.” He squats, then jumps straight like he's pushing to the surface from underwater. His wings flap twice, then go flat against his back as he shoots up.

The girl's already at the top. Inu and I stand waiting, looking skyward, Inu wagging his tail. I wonder how on earth we're going to get him out. I'm sure not going to leave my dog here.

“Just a sec!” Peyton shouts.

A thick rope of twisted vines studded with trumpet-shaped purple flowers snakes toward me. “Climb up.” Peyton wiggles the vine. “It's secure.”

“Okay.” I try to remember how to scale a rope. We only did it once in PE—we were supposed to climb twelve feet and touch a ceiling beam in the gymnasium. If we couldn't do it, we had to run a mile instead. Yeah. Guess who ran a mile? I can't even do a pull-up.

“Hurry!” the girl yells. “That salt won't last forever on her.”

“Give him a minute. Sheesh,” I hear Peyton say. The vine goes taut. “I'm trying to pull you up, Xander.”

Inu whines. He's got no hands. He can't do this without me. I get an idea. “Here, boy.” I wrap the vines around his chest, making a sort of harness, then tie it and tug. “He's ready!”

Inu rises slowly to the top, and then they toss the vines back down. I try to tie them around me, but the flowers are all stripped from them now and the vines are slippery. My knot loosens every time they try to pull me. “What do I do?” I call up.

“Can you climb it?” Peyton's voice sounds doubtful.

“Yeah, sure. Why couldn't I grow wings, too?” I loop the vines around my left foot, then grab the slimy green rope with both hands.
Three points of contact at all times
, the gym teacher's voice says in my head. See, I
did
pay attention.

I pause for a second, trying to figure out what I should do to avoid falling off.

The girl's face appears in the opening above me. “Come on! I don't have all day.”

“What, do you have an appointment or something?” Peyton's scowling head is next to hers.

“He's not going to make it up here by himself. I'll have to go down and help.” The girl sighs. “Oh. My. GOSH. Could you be any lamer?”

“I most certainly could be,” I say. “You've only seen half of my potential lameness. Seventy-five percent at most.”

She shuts up. Thank goodness. I reach higher with my hands, pull my knees toward my stomach, and unloop my left foot. Then I rewrap my foot, reach up, curl, and unloop. It's a slow, painful process as I crawl up the vine like an inchworm. Finally, just when I think my arm muscles are going to give out, I reach the opening. Peyton hooks his hands in my armpits and pulls me forward on my belly. I flop there for a few minutes like a dying fish.

When I catch my breath, I see we're in some kind of tropical forest. It's hot and humid and filled with the sounds of buzzing insects and whooping animals.

“Where are we?” I ask the girl.

She stares down at me. “You're bleeding. And you appear to be turning into a zombie. Are you undead?”

Now I notice warm liquid dripping to the ground. I turn my arms over. My left arm has caked blood on it, and my right arm has a fresh new slice from my wrist to my elbow. On top of that, my arms are covered in an angry red rash. An itchy rash.

“If he was a zombie, he wouldn't be bleeding,” Peyton says practically. “You can only bleed if your heart's still pumping blood.”

“But if your blood's just sitting in your body, it'll come out anyway.” The girl doesn't sound at all disgusted, the way I'd expect her to. Most girls I know would be grossed out. Not that I know many girls. “Haven't you ever skinned an animal?”

Peyton wrinkles his nose. “Ew. No.”

She rolls her eyes. “Then keep your mouth shut.”

“Well, I've skinned a fish.” Peyton puts his hands on his hips, and his wings unfurl for a second. “It was a big fish, too.”

She shakes her head. “Cold-blooded animals don't count.”

“Whaddya mean, they don't count?” The hair on top of Peyton's head rises like a cresting wave.

She shrugs. “They just don't.”

He stamps a foot. “That makes zero sense.”

While they bicker, I touch my new cut gingerly, trying not to panic at the sight of all that blood. It's not deep—this must be a part of the body that bleeds easily. My ears feel like they're filling up with sand. I gulp and sit down.

“Don't pass out,” Peyton says.

“Dude, so helpful. Thank you.” I try to stop the bleeding by putting pressure on the cut with my hand. To get my mind off of it, I look up. We're definitely in a tropical rain forest, with a canopy so high I can't see the tops of the trees. I've never been in a real rain forest, but the zoo has a replica that looks exactly like this, with giant vines and trees so green they almost look plastic. It's dark here, and more humid than the bathroom on the hottest summer day during the hottest shower. Oversize ferns with leaves bigger than Peyton's wings sway all
Jurassic Park
–like, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a T. rex thundering through. Birds trill and monkeys chatter over-enthusiastically. What do they have to be so happy about? I wish they would shut up for a second so I can think.

The girl stands over me. “Not to be rude, but do you have any food?”

Finally I get a good look at her. Her eyes shimmer green and gold and brown, and she has thick light eyebrows that arch. Black eyeliner is smudged all over her lids, so I figure she's at least thirteen, if not older. Who knows when girls start wearing makeup? She has a smattering of light brown freckles over her nose and cheekbones. She doesn't smile. She doesn't…anything. Her face is expressionless.

“I…I don't know,” I stammer. I hadn't thought about it, what with running away from a murderous witch and all, but now my stomach growls in agreement. Every bit of the food's back on the ship. Along with my shoes, the comic book, and anything else that could have possibly helped us on this quest.

I fumble with the netsuke on my belt, remembering the monkey with the rice that Obāchan showed me. Is that our food? Is it going to turn into hamburgers? I pop open the monkey's box. The rice sits there.

Nothing happens. I pour a few grains onto my palm.

Inanimate.

The girl is unimpressed. The corners of her mouth turn down. “Well. Guess that was a useless question. Surprise.” She turns on her Conversed heel and scampers off, her hands gripping vines and bushes—almost like she's swinging through them—as she makes her way into the thick fern underbrush.

Peyton kicks the ground with his toe, sending up a small cloud of dirt. “You could at least thank us for rescuing you!” he calls after her.

She doesn't turn around. “Yeah, great rescue. Now I get to starve to death more quickly. At least the snow woman fed me once in a while. Thanks a lot.” The girl's voice trails through the air as she disappears into the jungle. “If you'd listened to me, we wouldn't be here.”

“C
ome back!” I shout.

She can't be off in the jungle all alone. She's dressed like she was standing in line for a rock concert when she got kidnapped, not prepared for the wilderness.

“Xander, if she wants to go, let her. It's not like we know what we're doing.” Peyton examines his scabby wing.

My rash itches like crazy. I wonder if there's a jungle plant I can mash up and put on it. Obāchan always uses aloe for cuts, but I have no idea what its leaves look like. I can't even tell lettuce apart from cabbage. “But she led us out of the cave. I think she knows her way around,” I point out. I still have the grains of rice in my hand. I pop the three grains into my mouth without thinking.

Suddenly I'm chewing on three big wads of onigiri. Cold rice balls, filled with chicken. My cheeks puff.

Inu and Peyton stare at me for a moment. Then Peyton nods and holds out his hand. “Dude.” Inu barks. I give them each a couple of grains, and soon we're all eating.

I feel much better once I have something in my stomach. I take a deep breath and look toward the broken foliage where the girl disappeared. “Can you fly up and find her? Or a way out of here?”

Peyton wipes a grain of rice off his chin and pops it into his mouth. Hey, it's survival time, not manners time. He spreads out his wings and tries jumping upward, but one wing hits a tree trunk and one hits foliage. “Not enough room. Besides, if I go up there, I might not be able to find you guys again through all these plants.”

Woof!
Inu charges forward.

“Find her, Inu!” I yell. Not that we trained Inu to be a search-and-rescue dog, but by now I know he understands a lot more than we ever thought he did.

He galumphs through the underbrush.

We follow.

A yellow snake thicker than both my thighs put together slithers in front of us. Python. We all freeze. Even if it's not poisonous, it could choke us to death.

Maybe Peyton has a point. Maybe we should let her be on her own, if that's what she wants. “Okay. If we don't find her in, like, five minutes, we go back to the boat.” If we can, that is. I glance behind me. The vegetation we crashed through has sprung back up, and now I can't tell which way we came from. Anyway, do we really want to go through the snow woman's cave again?

An animal chatters overhead.
WOOF, WOOF, WOOF!
Inu barks in response.

“What's the matter, boy?” I look up, but I can't see anything except swaying branches. “It's just a monkey.”

“Xander.” Peyton shakes my shoulder and points upward. “That's no monkey.”

Now, through the leaves, I can spot the girl, way up in the top of a palm tree, her legs wrapped around the trunk. She must have shimmied her way up there to get a coconut.

“I tell you, she's a real Tarzan.” Peyton nudges me.

Whack! Whack! Whack!
The girl is pounding the coconut hard against the tree, trying, I guess, to crack it. When that doesn't work, she hurls it down. “Stupid green coconuts!”

I leap back, narrowly avoiding getting conked in the head.

“Let's go.” Peyton hops in a different direction. “I don't even like coconut.”

“I didn't offer you one!” the girl yells down. She leans back, her feet on the trunk, and grabs another coconut, twisting it around and around until it breaks off the tree. “Hey, guys!” She waves at us. “Thank you so much again for rescuing me. Now you just go do whatever you were going to do, and so will I.”

“All right,” I say in a voice loud enough for her to hear way up there. “I guess we'll enjoy this endless supply of onigiri all by ourselves.” I put a rice grain into my mouth and let it puff up into a ball. Then I take it out and hold it up to show her. Her eyes widen. “Let's go, Peyton.”

“Finally.” Peyton's already moving. “Real nice girl. She should be friends with Lovey.”

“Wait!” the girl calls. She scrambles down from her perch, super quick, and leaps into my path. “You found your food?”

I pop the onigiri back into my mouth.