Humanoid-Nuclear (Humanoid Trilogy #1) [ON HOLD]

15

A snowflake fell in my eye, irritating it. It had been at least three weeks with me and Jay, and the entire time, the snow hardly took a break. Along with that, Jay was--too say the least--a pain in the left butt cheek. He would never stop eating, he woke me up in the middle of the night, he'd get distracted, he'd try to shepherd me around if I got too far for his liking, laid almost directly on top of me if I was trying to sleep to 'keep me warm', and you don't even want to know what I had to do when he needed to 'go'.

Trust me, you don't wanna know.

Zyrites were everywhere, and we fought an estimate of five a day. We didn't see any other humanoids like Jay, but we both had theories as to who that cardinal humanoid was. I trained Jay more and more, and now he could lie down, sit, stand, roll over, attack on command, and speak. Well, speak as in make noises. We're still working on that last part, but we're getting there.

"Jay, come back!" I ordered, watching him saunter off on the black, rocky, small mountain range we were on.

Of course, he didn't come--as we were still working on this--continuing through the three to four feet of snow. His pointy ears twitched in every direction as he sniffed, his breath a cloud of white against the cold.

Suspicious, I said, "Jay? Did you find something?"

His eyes scanned the terrain, ears beginning to flatten against his head. He growled a low, alligator like rumble from his throat, then turned and galloped to me. With a swift motion, he bit down on the hood of my brown coat and swept me off my feet, carrying me like a mother cat would carry her kitten by their scruff. I grasped the front of my coat so I didn't choke as he ran, shaking my body as he did. I could hear the ground thumping behind me, pulsating as if it were alive, and I turned my head to see an actual army of zyrites running after us. Six had harps and arrows, the harps only three feet tall. One had a tuba. Nine had a fiddle, violin or viola. Two had a clarinet. And lastly, one had a bassoon.

They began to shoot, lighting their arrows on fire by snapping their fingers and creating sparks across their charcoal arrow heads. Jay was quicker than a mountain goat on the slippery rocks, surprising me only the slightest. A fiddler and an archer slipped in the snow, breaking their knees against the sturdy rock, and a violist fell down a steep side. Jay skidded to an abrupt holt, and when I looked down, my gaze was met with a ten foot drop into an ice covered lake. The zyrites continued to run at us, still shooting. Jay looked back and forth, uncertain about how he should go around this, then set me down gently next to him and stared at the mutants.

"Get 'em, Jay Feather!" I exclaimed, digging into my pack for my laser gun.

Jay bolted at them and burst into a fighting frenzy, acid spilling everywhere and melting more than just zyrites. I had Jay refill my laser gun's canisters with his stomach acid, so now I could help in some way. I left plenty of holes in all the zyrites, Jay leaving them melted to the ground or dented by teeth, claw, or tail. He threw one of the zyrites off the ledge with his teeth, sending its tube flying along with it.

Zyrites fired at us, leaving me and Jay with a few nasty gashes. Sometimes they missed, hitting the rocks under our feet. Both Jay and me would miss occasionally, hitting and melting the rock as well. We were now down to only three mutants: an archer, a violist, and a bassoon player. The snow beneath us was now melted, dirty, and churned up. We stared at each other, each of us with the cliff that led to the icy water on one of our sides as we waited for either group to make a move. Jay was incredibly frantic, so I had to calm him by petting him and soothing him with my words. He would usually act like this if we fought lots of things at once.

The archer loosed an arrow, missing its mark and watching it embed itself into an unstable crack in the rocks. A loud, unsettling crack echoed in the brisk air, followed by a disconcerting rumble along with the ground shaking.