So, screw revision for my exams- here's the next chapter! I promise it gets more interesting soon...
Chapter 4 - Instincts
He zigzagged left and right as much as his broken form would allow him to; he refused to be a sitting duck.
A gunshot was fired. Randall carried on moving but was waiting for something, searing pain perhaps, something worse than he was currently experiencing. And yet nothing happened. She’d missed.
He ran forward faster, now panting heavily, weaving through the trees and undergrowth. The ground suddenly became sticky and he fell into a boggy area, writhing as the mud squelched around his scales. Yet Randall didn’t give up, and so he continued to struggle, through the boggy ground and finally onto more solid earth.
He carried on further for as long as he could, but eventually had to admit defeat. Collapsing into a heap, Randall wheezed with exertion, his hands shaking and his legs feeling like jelly. This was it. He was done for.
After some time, he realised that the woman didn’t seem to be after him anymore. Maybe he’d lost her in the darkness.
Despite this, Randall didn’t feel relieved. He’d avoided dying for now, sure, but a sudden bought of light-headedness reminded him that if he didn’t eat something soon, it wouldn’t be long before he’d be in an even worse predicament.
Randall began crawling forward again. Every ounce of his physicality protested against this, his body screaming for rest and nourishment, but he persevered and soon came across a parting in the trees which gave way to a clearing. His initial fear was that he’d gone round in a circle and had ended up back at the humans’ trailer, but this was somewhere new. Instead of a trailer, a small, dilapidated shack stood in the middle of this clearing, leaning badly to one side and surrounded by overgrown bushes and plants. Yet there were clear signs of habitation; Randall could just about make out a lean-to which was full of freshly chopped wood, and a twirl of smoke rose up from the shack’s crumbling chimney.
His immediate reaction was to get away- his rather unpleasant encounters with humans in the past couple of days were enough to last him a lifetime as far as he was concerned. But something stopped him from turning tail and fleeing: just in front of the shack was a sizeable yet rickety pen which housed a good dozen or so…things. Creatures of some sort. Randall couldn’t quite identify them beyond the fact that they were feathered and seemed reminiscent of some of the flying monsters back home. Their clucks and squawks reminded Randall oddly of Fungus, for some reason; a particularly jarring association as this was the first time that his little red assistant had entered his mind since he’d been thrown into the Human World.
Randall shook his head and growled, narrowing his one good eye. Now was not the time to be thinking about that sort of stuff, and this was a prime opportunity he did not want to miss. If he could just nab one of these feathered creatures, it might well make a decent meal. And he was
ravenous.Randall looked left and right, and then peered as intently as he could at the shack, trying his utmost to identify any movement or other signs of human activity. There was almost certainly a human inside, but Randall’s stomach couldn’t wait any longer, and his legs felt like they might give way if he didn’t get some form of nourishment soon. He crept forward gently, placing his padded fingers and toes carefully onto the ground and limping slightly to one side as he held his broken arm against his chest.
Eventually he approached the pen. The feathered creatures seemed panicked at his presence and clucked and flapped about, but he wasn’t put off. He identified a small door that acted as the entrance to this wire cage and, to his relief, found it could be opened with a simple lift of the latch.
Crawling inside, Randall briefly smirked. The animals were going crazy now, feathers flying everywhere and wings flapping in alarm. He quickly managed to corner one and found himself salivating at the thought of finally getting something to eat.
Randall’s breathing became deeper, more fierce, as he bared his teeth and a low growl rumbled in his dry throat. He approached the cornered creature with no inhibition; it may well have been only a few days since his arrival in the Human World, but he was getting desperate and had realised that if he wanted to survive, he’d need to adapt without hesitation. All of the anger and frustration shortly before being banished was resurfacing but in a more animalistic form; he could feel some sort of a beast rise within him, and it needed to be satiated.
And so he grabbed the bird and snapped its neck in one swift movement. It stopped squawking immediately. He then roughly took hold of a tuft of its feathers, yanking them off to reveal the dimpled skin underneath, before pausing a moment.
The conscious part of his brain was screaming at him, that this was all wrong- what had happened to the microwave meals, the ready made food, the normal stuff? What was he doing going around killing random animals like this?
But the desire was too strong. He sunk his teeth into the still-warm flesh and, though he knew that if he could see himself, he would be revolted at his actions, an overwhelming feeling of satisfaction washed over him.
Hungrily, he bit again and again, tearing more flesh off the bone, blood trickling down his chin.
However, his pleasure was to be short-lived.
A pool of yellow light flooded out into the clearing and onto Randall and the pen; the door of the shack had been opened, and silhouetted against this bright light was the figure of a human.
“What the…?!” it exclaimed. Randall lifted his head and gasped. As much as he wanted more to eat, he wasn’t going to hang around. He dashed out of the pen as quickly as he could, but for the second time in so many hours intuitively felt a gun being aimed at him.
And, again, for the second time, despite tensing himself for an onslaught of pain, nothing happened. He scampered away into the trees.
Yet this time, it was not poor aim that had been Randall’s saviour. No, this time, it was mere curiosity that had saved his tail…
For the rest of the night Randall slept restlessly in a tree near the edge of the clearing where the shack was located. He’d been torn- on the one hand, this human (like all humans in that part of the world, it seemed) was armed and dangerous and staying nearby perhaps seemed counter-intuitive. On the other, Randall had gotten quite the taste for those feathered creatures, and food sources were hard to come by in the swamp. He figured that the human wouldn’t spend all of its time in the shack, and so all the lizard monster had to do was wait for it to leave before making his move again.
It would be a longer wait than he’d expected, however. Throughout the following day, not once did the human leave his abode, and although the first bird had assuaged his hunger for a while, by the afternoon Randall felt the all-too-familiar pangs beginning to return. The only benefit they provided was as somewhat of a distraction from the constant pain from his multiple injuries, along with his thirst which had steadily been making itself known since he’d had his first Human World meal. Randall was in a sorry state indeed.
Yet he persisted, peering through the trees at the shack, waiting patiently. At one point he thought he’d seen some movement, a flash of red, but it disappeared as soon as he tried to identify it.
There were also some strange noises in the swamp during the day, noises that he’d never noticed before committing to his stake-out. Perhaps he’d been too frightened to notice them before. He was sure he’d heard the scream of a child- the scream of several children, in fact- but he couldn’t identify the direction from which they came and he didn’t want to leave his tree unnecessarily.
His energy waning, Randall fell asleep in the early evening. For the first time since his arrival in the Human World, he dreamt. It was an unnerving dream, more like a nightmare in some ways; he was back in his lair again, working on the SE, but it began to melt before his eyes, forming a giant metallic puddle on the floor.
And then he was melting, looking up, trying to scream but unable to, no sound coming out, just whispers and…and laughter. But not his laughter- the laughter of others. They were laughing at him. Cackling. Shrieking.
Randall awoke and within moments any trace of the dream was gone from his memory. For a second he struggled to identify where he was before reality slapped him round the face. It stung.
The house. Right. The house.He glanced over at the shack and to his dismay saw a glowing yellow light through one of its windows, and the same tell-tale curl of smoke lifting from its chimney.
Randall snarled in frustration, his animalistic side edging out once more. He wanted food. He wanted food
now.Slowly sneaking down through the tree, Randall plopped onto the ground and began to make his way to the pen again, his muscles aching from sleep. A doubtful voice in his mind kept asking questions- why wasn’t this place guarded? Why weren’t there any guard dogs? He’d been taught about such creatures in his training, and this seemed like just the sort of place a human might have a guard dog. Why hadn’t the human shot him when he had the chance?
But Randall was almost entirely acting on instinct by this point, and so any remnant of reasoning that might stand in the way of a full belly was pushed rudely to one side.
He was salivating by the time he reached the small wooden entrance to the cage. This was going to be good.
However, it wasn’t to be as easy as last time. Randall tried opening the little door of the pen as he had done the previous night, but it was stuck. He scowled, fumbling with the latch, only to encounter the coolness of metal on his fingertips- a padlock.
Randall needed only a moment to decide he’d test his jaw strength on this thing, and so turned and pressed his face against the entrance, padlock firmly wedged between his teeth. But before he had a chance to clamp down on the metal, he spotted something sitting on the porch just metres in front of him- something his poor eyesight wouldn’t have noticed in the darkness if he hadn’t had turned his head in that direction.
Two bowls.
Hm. Randall was sure they hadn’t been there yesterday…Though, again, his eyesight was poor at this moment- he might’ve missed them.
Nevertheless, his curiosity got the better of him, and he let go of the padlock and skulked forward, hunkering down as low as possible as he approached the entrance of the human’s home. He began slowly climbing up the half a dozen or so steps that led up to the porch, becoming increasingly wary. This didn’t feel quite right, and yet…
As Randall approached the bowls, his eye ridges lifted in surprise.
One was piled high with shredded, cooked meat, and the other was full to the brim with water.
Randall paused. Something in him really didn’t like this, it really didn’t seem right at all…He felt like he was being watched, although he couldn’t see any movement at the two windows of the shack. He battled with his instincts for a good thirty seconds, torn and yet unable to pull together any rational thoughts, before finally giving up and plunging his face into the water.
His good upper arm curled around the bowl, tilting it so that he could drink every last drop. Once his thirst had been quenched, he turned his attention to the other bowl, panting in anticipation. He could barely contain his growls of contentment as he shovelled down the meat; this was somehow even more satisfying than his previous evening’s meal.
Once he was finished, he stopped and looked up at the shack in front of him, gathering whatever thoughts he could. He abruptly chastised himself- what if the food had been contaminated? Or worse, full of poison?
The lizard monster suddenly spotted movement at one of the windows- the rustling of a grimy netted curtain. He had been watched.
Panic rose in Randall and so he turned tail and fled, unsettled at the feeling of being observed- of being manipulated.
Over the course of the following week or so, Randall returned every night to the shack to find the same meal and bowl of water placed out for him. He’d waited for as long as possible after the first instance for fear that whatever poison he’d assumed had been placed in the offering would begin to take hold, and yet no ill effects arose. And so he returned again and again, grateful for this small act of mercy.
However, it was a small act of mercy indeed; the food and water provided, although by far better than nothing, was not enough for Randall to build up his strength again and so only sustained him at his current level. Additionally, his injuries still plagued him, although he did find that his open wounds seemed to be healing more quickly.
A negative side effect of no longer having to roam the swamp for food was that he had more time to think. And the more he thought, the more he realised how disturbed his thoughts were.
The screams of children were almost constant now. They weren’t very loud, sounding as though they were coming from far off in the distance, but they varied in pitch and intonation to such an extent that Randall often found himself fixated on them.
He also found himself spotting movement down on the ground below him whenever he was perched up in his tree. This wasn’t natural movement, the movement of the swamp in a gentle breeze or of any animals that happened to be about. This was a jerky movement, as though the ground was fracturing, like a mirror split in two, a hole in reality spied out of the corner of his eye that evoked a lurching feeling in his stomach, that of falling freely, acid in mouth, shuddering of his bones, shaking of his emaciated frame. And yet when Randall oriented his attention to whatever the origin of this movement was, the fracture repaired itself, smoothing over, as though nothing had happened. He found himself increasingly on edge, waiting for that feeling again, expecting it, obsessing over it. That lurch. The acid. The fall.
He was losing his grip.
Another evening came, and Randall again approached the shack. Although he was still wary, this had become somewhat of a routine and the fears and doubts in his mind that had initially plagued him were now almost forgotten.
However, something about this particular evening instinctively struck him as being different, and as Randall came close to the porch, he realised why he’d detected a change in the atmosphere.
The human was there, sitting blatantly on the porch no more than five metres away from where the bowls were placed in their usual position.
Randall stopped at the foot of the steps. No matter how kind this human had been to provide food and water for him, his automatic reaction was that of fear and uncertainty.
And yet the human sat in the shadows of his porch, still and calm.
As Randall stared at the human, his good eye adjusted further to the deeper level of darkness in the porch. He could just about make out the human’s outline; a large, broad man with rigid posture, gun propped up between his askew legs- a stance of confidence and authority. The human’s eyes somehow gleamed blue in the darkness, and they were staring directly at Randall.
There was something reminiscent of the animal kingdom in this stand-off between the two of them, as though Randall were challenging the human’s authority as alpha male of this patch of land. However, there was no competition to be had- Randall was submissive, lying almost flat on the ground by the steps, and the human stayed hidden and menacing in the shadows, as though daring the lizard monster to approach.
There were several minutes of this impasse, the two very different creatures staring at each other intently. Eventually the fear subsided in Randall and he turned and glanced at the bowls up ahead of him before turning back to look at the human.
He did this several times more before deciding that, heck, he was hungry and after all, if the human was going to kill him, wouldn’t he be dead meat by now?
So he slowly crawled forwards, up the steps and onto the edge of the porch where the bowls lay. With a final curious glance at this strange, silent figure, Randall turned and tucked in.