Day 16 - Breadcrumb Trail Finale

Hey guys! Grace Nask here with Day 16 of the April Challenge. Today we have the rest of Breadcrumb Trail, a short story for teens and above. If you're just coming in, Lily, our main character, has pledged to help her neighbor Hansel defeat a monster from another dimension. Can they do it? Let's find out! So let's get to it!

What did this little idiot have against leisurely jogs? I swear I’ll go into cardiac arrest if I run anywhere else today. But it sounded as if my daily routine would be cut short by a monster eating both of us, so I don’t think it’ll be a problem.

Puffing hard, I glanced at the sun. Dark blue seeped into the sky. In the other direction, the clouds reflected the black to come. We had two minutes at most.

The scream sounded again, much closer than before. I paused, listened for a moment, then shifted directions to the end of the street. Panting, I rounded the corner, and OH MY GOSH WHAT THE HECK IS THAT!

At the end of the street, a giant mass bulged about the size of a car. It didn’t have a form besides a larger lump for the body and a slightly smaller lump for the head. The whole thing consisted of black rock pulsing with reds and oranges in intervals. The parts of it facing the sun shone weaker than the rest of it. Even from the other side of the street, I could feel the heat radiating off in waves. How big of a kingdom is that place?

On the monster’s sides, three tentacle-like arms thrashed around on the ground, inching it forward with sluggish movements. It moved slowly but steadily. Nothing stopped it; whoever screamed vanished. It had found a new target at the end of the street: none other than my little idiot Hansel Walsh.

He hadn’t been able to tie himself to the lamppost; rather, he resolved to stand three rungs up the ladder propped against the lamppost, level with the monster’s head. Even from here I could see the unmasked terror whitening his face, but Hansel’s jaw was set. With one hand he held onto the solid pole; with the other, hands shaking, he held out Matilda’s emergency sword.

Longer than Hansel’s arm, it too pulsed with a low blue-green glow between the cracks in black rock. Compared to the monster, however, the little idiot could have brought a hairbrush. The sword needed activation if Hansel had a hope of beating this thing, activation I clutched in my hand from fifty feet away.

How on earth could I get over there without dying a miserable death?

Panicked, I looked around at my surroundings one last time. Tall buildings hemmed me in on all sides, each one bathed in the blood of the sun.. A little ahead of me, the only alleyway in my vicinity hunched over in a corner. On its side, one of the ricketiest ladders I’d ever seen spindled to its roof, glinting in the weak rays of the crescent moon peeping out. How fantastically convenient.

Second-doubting my gut got Hansel in trouble once; this time, I didn’t hesitate. I raced to the ladder and climbed, emitting a soft moan every time it creaked underneath my weight. Well, at least this thing warned me when it wanted to abuse my life, unlike certain little idiots I could name!

Mercifully, the top of this three-story building was flat. I crawled over its black, burning top, cursing everything when my knees rubbed through dirt or smacked into rubble. It took a momentary eternity to cross, one that let the monster keep the advantage. Its slithering form couldn’t have been more than a couple of yards away from Hansel. I scurried faster...until I got the end, that is.

Between this rooftop and the next, a three-foot gap spanned. Uggggg…. But there wasn’t time to waste. I stood up, lost my balance, gained it again, then surveyed the gap once more. It wasn’t too wide. Look at that; it wasn’t too deep, eithe--oh my gosh how did the concrete get so far away?! Why did I do that to myself? Ok; ok; focus. Whatever fears I had, Hansel’s had to be a thousand times worse. Keeping my eyes on his trembling form amidst the ever-darkening sky, I leaped over the gap and onto the next rooftop.

Just this roof and then Hansel’s. I crossed the flat top and the gap between without incident. Ok; ok; good. I made steady progress. Never mind that the monster had, too. It stopped a foot away from the swordpoint in Hansel’s hand. Hansel, for his part, had slashed around with it from his place on the lamppost, and it did nothing. But the monster hemmed him in; the little idiot couldn’t leave.

The monster continued to wait. What it waited for, it wasn’t too hard to tell. The moon shined, but the sun remained with its last bits of light. Two streaks of purple and dark blue survived in the sky, but based on the monster’s heat flushing through my body like mini suns themselves, it wouldn’t be long until they, too, vanished.

This new rooftop closest to Hansel, however, had to be difficult. The two sides of it slanted into a point of convergence at the top, making the whole thing tilt at an angle fatal to climb, considering the burning monster at my feet. And to think I wanted to sue my mother when she signed me up as a school cheerleader in the eighth grade!

Hugging the top of the peak, I half-crawled half-shimmied down the roof, cursing every time I lost my balance and had to scramble for footing on the unsteady tiles. Throughout all this, I kept an eye on the sun; one strip of dark blue remained of it, virtually invisible among the tall buildings.

By some mercy, I reached the end of the roof in one piece and slid to the edge, as close to Hansel as I could get without joining him in the monster’s clutches. Below me, the little idiot whimpered at the sight of the massive black rock monster in his face. From here, I could feel the heat radiating off its form and felt my skin start to peel. I’d have to pay my dermatologist double for this one.

“Hansel!” I shouted in what should have been a yell but came out as a whisper. He didn’t so much as look up. I cleared my throat and tried again. “HANSEL WALSH!”

The little idiot fumbled the sword and almost fell off the ladder. When he righted himself, he stole a quick look at me before focusing back on the monster. Without letting his eyes waver, Hansel asked, “You came back, Ms. Green?”

“No,” I explained, my tongue slathered in sarcasm, “I’m a figment of your imagination come to cheer you on as you get mauled to death by a monster from another dimension.”

“Oh. Ok.”

Every time I ask myself why I didn’t have children, I’ll come back to this moment. “Yes I came back you little...lovely child.”

Hansel’s face lit up. “Thank you so much, Ms. Green.”

I scoffed. “Thank me if we don’t both get killed. And...it’s Lily. I’m not going to die as Ms. Green. Now do you want your precious fingerprints or not?”

Hansel nodded a tiny bit, his face holding the monster’s gaze. I bent down on the gutter of the roof, hand clutching a shingle for dear life, and held out the papers to him. He placed the hilt of the sword between his legs to grab the papers, then regarded both of them together. On most of the sides, the handle was a tattered brown, but a small square in the center shined like a mirror.

I watched Hansel but gradually became aware of another sound. The heaved breath of something awakening. Dread squeezing my chest into a ball, I glanced over at the monster. The entire being shifted backward, as though getting ready to spring. I glanced at the sun...and found it gone. Night had come. “HANSEL!” I screeched.

Hansel pressed the fingertips into the sword just as the monster sprang. The sword burst into a new blue-green life, as brilliant as a roaring fire. The monster tackled Hansel, toppling the ladder. I screamed as the orange flames collided with the turquoise ones in a blinding flash of light. Heat and force smashed into my body, ripping it off the gutter Bits of blackness shattered my vision like a scattering of bullets. Then something cracked, and darkness encompassed my being.

I guess Hansel turned out alright. He arrived at the age of thirteen quite nicely and convinced someone like me to embark on an epic quest to save his dimension. He succeeded, too; from that day on, no one saw or heard of the monster again. Of course, if someone from those two months of hospital time I served asked me if it was all worth it, I would’ve told them absolutely not.

But who cares about me? I’m just Lily, neighbor to the old abandoned apartment complex on Meadow Street. Hansel would’ve disagreed on his worth, I think; he died a hero, and that’s what mattered to him.

The little idiot.