Lives Of The Unknown Book 1: The Legend of Andrew Lockeford (16 page)

“Huh? Oh, I think I heard something
about that, but Harry would know more about it.” She turned to the
living room of the house. “Harry! There are people here wanting to
know about that kid who went missing! Remember those police
investigators who were asking about him?”

“How should I know?
I never saw that guy in the first place—why would I? I didn’t have
anything to say to the investigators, and I still don’t now!
Besides, if he
did
show up here to ask for something, I would’ve just brought
out the twelve-gauge.”

The old woman turned back to the
group. “Well, sorry, We’ve got nothing.” She closed the door before
anyone uttered another word.

When everyone got
back into the car, Drake went on a rant. “
Shit!
I can’t believe we went
hundreds of miles for absolutely nothing but
shit!”

“So you admit that this was a waste of
time?” said Keith.

“Hey, I know this sucks,” said
Marlene, “but at least we know this wasn’t some sort of lie that
the investigators made up, right? Andrew really is
missing?”

“NO! We haven’t solved ANYTHING by
going on this trip! Andrew’s either still at God-knows-where, or
he’s just dead, and we haven’t gotten a single clue leading to
him!!!”

“Well, we can’t just give up now….not
like this,” said Bill.

“And where do you suppose we should
look? The desert? The mountains? Both of which are too large and
demanding to go through, by the way. We didn’t even bring any water
bottles….”

“…
.Yeah, I guess we’re
retarded for not thinking this through, huh?”

Everyone sat silently.

Bill looked up to the sky, thinking to
himself. He was somewhat pleased by the idea that he answered the
lady at the door first, that he took the initiative to help
everyone find Andrew, though to little avail. He was, however,
discouraged along with everyone else that there was nothing they
could do.

Then Bill’s eyes widened. He was
looking at a star in the sky that was getting progressively
brighter, soon becoming large enough to show that it wasn’t some
star.

“Guys, get out and look
up.”

“Why?” said Keith.

Bill and Drake went out anyway, then
Keith and Marlene followed suit shortly afterwards. They looked up
into the sky and saw the same sight that Andrew experienced not too
long ago.

What surprised them
the most was that it was not nighttime, when stars are
supposed
to appear. It
wasn’t even close to dusk.

Chapter 16

Three months have passed on Ku-an Doel
since Andrew began his training.

There was a large creature prowling
the forest, different from the area that Andrew and the hupac had
met in. The creature was gray and leathery, having no hair on its
wrinkly skin. Its general body size was somewhere between that of a
moose and a bear. It was an odd omnivore, eating fish and small
mammals where it would find some, yet also eating grass and berries
like salad along the way. It was at the top of the food chain in
its natural environment. However, it would meet a real challenge as
Andrew and the hupac came to visit.

Andrew’s hair had
grown all over; since he was training in the elements, his body
needed to provide some kind of warmth, however minor. Therefore,
Lee was ordered
not
to remove all of his hair permanently during the genetic
procedures. Plus, he no longer had the suit—it had long been taken
off. It would be accurate to say that, aside from the beard and the
long hair on top of his head, the hair on his body grew by fifty
percent. He did not look like a hairy ape,
however.

The human never gave the hupac a name,
as far as he thought. He thought about giving it one for a while,
from something as simple of a name such as “Carl” to a more
eloquent one such as “Shasta,” but he could never decide on
anything. He thought that maybe it would help if he discovered what
gender the hupac was, but he later found out it had no observable
gender—its parts were taken out just like his were. Reproduction
and the idea of living a legacy were not possible for this animal.
If the hupac did have a name, it would simply be “Hupac,” since
that was what Andrew called it from time to time.

The two predators wanted to go outside
of their normal environment, making their way into something more
challenging. They had just found this gray, hairless creature
wandering around, which they would take as their first test. Andrew
was nearly two hundred and eighty pounds now, all earned from
muscle mass, and the hupac had gotten a little tougher as well.
They cooperated remarkably during their time together, since the
hupac could understand everything that Andrew was saying.
Unfortunately, feedback was a problem, since the hupac had no
effective ways of using language or any communication past
primitive vocal sounds and body language. Neither one of them knew
anything about sign language.

“Alright,” said the human, “I’m gonna
distract that thing while you sneak up from behind. Whichever one
of us he or she faces towards, the other one will attack, alright?
So if it’s facing me, then you attack it, and vice versa,
okay?”

The hupac nodded its head.

“Good—and no running away this time.
That was a pain in the ass for me to deal with.”

As the hupac walked around the
creature at a seventy-five meter radius, Andrew walked straight up
to the beast, its eyes meeting his. It was bewildered for several
moments—the animal had never seen a human before, and although its
memory of the scientists was strong, it did not regard Andrew as
one of them. This human was part intel-being and part animal, and
the creature did not know whether to just walk away or attack.
After a few seconds that seemed to drag on for ages, it walked up
to Andrew and pawed him. He did not retaliate, standing strong in
his position, but he was left with five straight tears on his
torso. Doing this enabled the creature to know how durable and
strong Andrew was, and it made its decision with a loud
roar.

At this moment, the hupac sprang onto
the beast at a four O’ clock direction and broke the creature’s hip
upon impact. Startled, the beast turned around and directed its
full attention onto the hupac, forgetting about Andrew. The human
had kicked its other hip, and although he had managed to displace
it, he did not break it. Even so, the creature found itself in a
very painful position, unable to stand and attack the duo. The
hupac pounced and sunk its teeth into the creature’s jugular area,
and Andrew punched and kicked at the displaced hip as much as he
could. The beast remained standing on its front legs, yet unable to
move from pain flowing throughout its body. After about two
minutes, it fell down unconscious, and the two finished it
off.

Andrew and the hupac found a cave to
use as shelter for the night, taking their newly-earned prize with
them. The human took an old log and a few sticks he found for
firewood, while the hupac laid the entire time in the cave doing
nothing. The human took a long time to get the fire going, seeing
how all he relied on was the friction burn of rapidly twisting a
stick onto another stick, but he had enough wood to keep the fire
going throughout most of the night.

He took off the dead beast’s skin and
decided that he wanted to make some leather clothes out of it.
Unfortunately, he was unsure how to do it. He had no string, and it
would take some time to find some stone, carve it into a point, and
use it to pierce holes into the leather where the string would go
through. Andrew searched diligently for some vines—they were the
best substitute for string, in his opinion. He went out, took some
vines back to the cave, and as he was just about to start working
on the stone tool, his hunger kicked in. The hupac also became
hungry, but it had already begun eating.

Andrew set up some sticks above the
fire in a way that would allow him to cook his meat. After the past
couple months, he had been very desensitized to the ideas of
killing some animals for food and anything else he needed, but he
still preferred to cook his meat rather than eat it raw. He never
wondered if the hupac would prefer it that way, too.

By the time he finished his meal, he
had grown tired, and he only worked on making his stone tool for an
hour before going to sleep.

The hupac stayed up longer, watching
Andrew while thinking to itself. It could not speak, but it could
still think like a human. In its mind existed more than just ideas
and representations of its physical world. It also thought about
the future, such as where they would go next. It thought about the
relationship it had with this human, how things have changed from
paranoia and hatred to something like cooperation. It knew nothing
about friendship, since hupacs are generally solitary animals.
However, this hupac could not deny that it was a good thing to have
Andrew around. Without his help, there would have been a weak
chance of taking down that gray, leathery creature, and there
wouldn’t have even been the idea of going outside its natural
environment. If animals don’t stay in their own environments
because it’s all that they have, then it’s because it’s all that
they know. Plus, getting out of one’s normal environment requires
one to receive help when needed, not to mention dealing with fear
of the unknown.

The hupac had developed an idea on its
own a few weeks ago, a concept that animals normally don’t conceive
because they almost always have it in the wild—freedom. The only
reason that the idea of freedom existed in this hupac’s mind was
because the human had partially taken it.

A while back, the hupac wanted to eat
some lemurs for a snack— upon realizing this, Andrew refused to let
it happen. As the hupac came into sight of some lemurs, the human
stood right in its way. It bared its teeth and jerked its head to
the side, signaling Andrew to get out of the way.

“I’m not letting you eat those
lemurs—there’s no need to,” said Andrew.

The hupac managed to raise its brows
so that it looked astonished, in a way that said, “What do you mean
you won’t let me???” It then growled ferociously to give him a
final warning, forgetting that the lemurs could—and did—hear
it.

“One step closer and I will take you
down. You know I will.”

They went at it anyway, and all of the
lemurs scampered away from the area for at least an hour. In the
end, Andrew did win, with one hand pressing the hupac’s head onto
the ground. It laid still in disgust, up until a few seconds after
the human had stepped away. He won most of the fights between them,
yet the hupac still kept its pride inside as an alpha, even if it
was no longer true.

The fact that the hupac didn’t get to
do what it wanted to do, that it was forced to comply to Andrew’s
will, elicited a feeling of resentment, especially since it still
didn’t know what was so wrong about eating lemurs.

According to evolution, as monkeys
eventually turned into cave dwellers and then into humans, their
intelligence increased, and their bodies became capable of using
this newly-found intelligence in many different and expanding ways,
including speech and language. However, with this newly-found
ability, as well as the expansion of communication and thought,
came limits and responsibility. As language developed and humans
could communicate with each other in elaborate ways, they told each
other what they thought was right and what was wrong—the birth of
morals and ethics. Animals may have some ethical values as well,
but mainly it concerns their own survival. Humans, however, have
ethical values based upon other people’s benefits as well, not just
their own. It was evident to humans that freedom and free will were
“good,” something that should be kept, yet as times passed….well,
are humans as free as wild animals are today? The hupac and its
species wouldn’t know—at least, not for a long….long
time.

Humans will always have conflicting
opinions, and whoever becomes more dominant, whether it be by
reasoning or by force, those dominant victors and their opinion
shall have freedom, whereas the losers are oppressed to submit to
the victors. Are humans forever bound to struggle for freedom as
long as everyone is not one and the same? Even in a totalitarian
world, where everyone is forced to have the same opinion, there is
always somebody that pops up who feels differently, and he or she
sees how oppressed his or her race has become.

Andrew had been thinking about his own
freedom—the hupac believed he was asleep, but he was still awake
with his eyes closed—and how he had been free to do what he wanted,
away from humans and aliens alike. He didn’t worry about the hupac
taking away his freedom, mostly because he was the victor. And
yet….he felt empty again. He ultimately had all the freedom that he
wanted—freedom from society, from government, from all of the
modern world’s nuisances. And there was nothing to really reach for
anymore. He knew that in time, he would be taken back to Juvir and
be used as a soldier, having to obey once again. He hated the
feeling of having little to gain and everything to lose. He didn’t
want to go back. Not to Juvir, not to Earth. This was the only
place for him.