Parrothead in Paradise

by PastCat

Chapter 12

We spent a few more days working around the shopping center before we made the trek to Pearl City and Pearl Harbor. We decided to go as a single group, with our carts. If there was anything worth finding, we would be able to bring it back to Base Camp and if there was nothing left to find, so be it. We made our way there on the ocean side, as the vegetation was less dense than it was further inland. Doc took the lead and carried a machete to use in cutting through any plant life that we could not brush aside. Nic and Trish handled our improvised carts while Emmy, Adam, and I did whatever we could to make it easier to get them from hither to yon. The walk itself was not bad, especially in the shade of the buildings that remained standing. The air for the most part was light and refreshing, with just a taste of salt.

The relaxed walk made the sudden feeling of wrongness at our destination all the more unsettling. Our surroundings went from thinned jungle threading between former buildings to an open wasteland. Tarmac was still clearly visible on parking lots and around the buildings that made up the deserted naval base. What little vegetation we could see was brown and nasty-looking. Even the dandelions, weeds that would grow anywhere, were wilted and rotting. Around us, the breeze off the ocean ceased, leaving the air feeling as dead as the land beneath our feet.

We all glanced uneasily at each other. None of us wanted to be here, but none of us wanted to look like cowards by being the first to say something about going back. Doc wrinkled his nose. “We should not be here.” He said in a voice somewhere between a growl and a whine. “The smell… I can’t describe how awful the smells here are. If you took a dead body, soaked it in fuel oil, and set it on fire, the odor downwind would only be a quarter of what I’m smelling of this place.” He looked ready to gag.

“Should we go back then?” Emmy asked. The magic around her horn flickered on and off as she made nervous little adjustments to her pack. “I don’t like this place either. It feels unnatural.” The others nodded at that.

“I still want to see if there is anything we can use.” Nic said after a moment’s thought. “Why not look around just a little? Leave the wagons here on the edge of the forest for now and just do a quick survey of the place. I don’t like the idea of coming all this way to leave before we even look around. I mean, come on. How bad could it be?”

I felt a shudder run down my spine at that. Whether Nic had ever heard of Murphy’s Law before this and just disregarded it I don’t know.. He sure as hell was tempting its application with that statement.

“All right, fine.” Doc said. “But I don’t want to spend more than a couple of hours here. No sightseeing, no playing tourist. We get in, look around, and get out. Got it?” We all nodded. Nic and Trish took off their harnesses and the six of us made our cautious way towards the harbor. The closer we got, the stronger that feeling of wrongness became. We started seeing what looked like scorch marks on some of the buildings, as well as bullet holes of various sizes. It looked like battle damage from some shoot-’em-up video game made for gunning down Nazis. What we saw could not have been left over from the big attack in World War Two; this was of a much more recent vintage. They were still sharply defined compared to the older pockmarks.

It was no more than an hour before we found the first body. It was barely more than a slightly equine shape among the silty deposits everywhere around us. We gave it a wide berth. The sand underfoot was soft to the touch and disturbingly left footprints behind that held their shape after every footfall. Doc ran some of it through his fingers. “Does not feel like sand. More like silt, but very fine.” He muttered. I thought for a moment he was going to taste it or sniff it, but he dusted it off as best he could. “Closest thing I can think of is volcanic ash. Not like the stuff from Kilauea, but more like what Mt. Saint Helens used to dust the US in 1980. I don’t get how it would be here though.”

His description of it as volcanic ash became unsettlingly relevant as we found more remains. As we got closer and closer to what had been the USS Arizona visitor center, they became more and more frequent. The bodies were held captive in a shell of dust in a way that made them look like the plaster casts in Pompeii. Most eerie of all was that although most of them were equine in shape, others, perhaps one in four, were vaguely humanoid. The latter gave off an even stronger feeling of wrongness than the former. I counted about twenty bodies of various configurations by the time we stopped.

We made it to a sturdy-looking structure that had been part of the visitor center, all feeling rather nauseated. It did not help that the breeze had started up again and was blowing off the harbor. The smell coming off the water was excruciatingly awful and it got even worse when the wind picked up. Everything was rotten that could rot. The glimpses we got of what was left of the USS Arizona memorial in the harbor showed that it was covered in some kind of greyish-black growth. The water was sludgy with ash and what looked like a sheen of oil on the surface. Something had happened here; something really really bad. If it had been a last stand for the previous colony, no one made it out alive. Remember Pearl Harbor, I thought. A rallying cry turned eulogy.

Some of the ashy dust became airborne. We took shelter from the wind on the leeward side of the building. “We need to get out of here.” Doc panted. None of us were inclined to disagree. The only problem was the way the wind had picked up and was blowing dust around. The stuff was so fine, none of us wanted to breathe it in. Yet we had nothing to cover our faces with besides Adam’s and my wings. We all huddled together in the hopes that the wind would die down again before dark. Adam and I took the outside, shielding the others as best we could. The feeling of grit between my feathers was awful, but our makeshift shelter mostly worked.

I watched the flying dust from between my feathers. There were times when it seemed to form shapes, as though I were watching a play performed by shadow puppets. I saw ponies of different shapes fighting strange things that rose up from nowhere. Some of them were humanoid; others were amorphous blobs or were shaped like quadrupeds. The ponies were armed. They fired guns at the strange things, making them disintegrate with each hit, but every time one went down another rose in its place. As ammunition ran low, the ponies retreated en masse. The invaders followed implacably. A last stand was made around a structure; the defenders were overwhelmed before they could flee. One lone survivor, a pegasus with batlike wings, escaped from the roof. It was carrying something that glowed red even among the gray dust. I swore I saw it look directly at me before it landed shakily somewhere in the jungle. The vision faded and the shadow play crumbled to the ground as the wind died. Once again the area around us was dead.

I got slowly to my feet and shook the dust out of my feathers and fur.The others did likewise and did their best to get themselves clean (or at least cleaner). We made our way back to where we’d left the carts in silence. Even our footprints from earlier in the day had been erased. We took nothing but the dust we could not shake and left nothing behind but footprints to hopefully be scoured away by the wind. Even so, that vision of the bat pony with the glowing red thing stuck in my memory. It was haunting; I wondered if it was something I had hallucinated in the dust or if there was something more to the vision. Magic, perhaps? If so it was much stranger and much more potent than I had ever seen from Emmy or any of my companions.

We all made our way straight to the beach upon returning to the ghost town of Honolulu. None of us wanted to waste precious fresh water on getting the corpse dust off of ourselves, so we made do with the salt water of the ocean. It worked like a charm, making us all go from zombie gray to our natural (for magical creatures at any rate) hues.

“There is no way in Heaven or Hell I am going back there.” Emmy said when we were all drying ourselves in the sun on shore. “That place is too weird and creepy.”

“I agree.” Adam and Doc said at the same time.

“Same. I’m sorry I wanted to drag you all in there behind me.” Nic said. He scuffed a hoof in the sand. “I just wanted to see what was causing that feeling we were all getting. I guess we found it.”

“Yeah.” I said. Then, hesitantly, I asked “did any of you see anything… strange in the dust storm back there? Like, I dunno, shapes or something like that?”

Everyone shook their heads. “I think the rest of us were all too busy trying to keep the dust from flying in our faces, PH.” Trish said. “You were actually looking out into that stuff?”

“Through my feathers, yeah.” I described what I had seen in the dust storm, especially the part about the thestral with the glowing red thing. I looked around at the others. Doc raised an eyebrow. Adam looked equally skeptical and the rest looked concerned.

“Maybe we need to get some food and fresh water into you.” Emmy suggested. “Seems to me you were seeing things.”

“Of course I was seeing things!” I said, my wings flaring. “I just told you I saw things in the dust! There was something about it that struck me as interesting and I thought I would see what you all thought.”

“Well, if it was all your imagination,” Nic said after a moment, “you sure don’t think small, PH.”

“No kidding. If I saw that it would give me nightmares.” Trish added with a shudder.

“So you believe me?” I asked.

“We believe that you think you saw something. Whatever it was, it only showed itself to you. Just do us a favor: if you want to go running off into the jungle in search of buried treasure, take someone else with you just in case, all right?” Adam said.

“Fair enough,” I agreed with reluctance. Telling the others about my vision only made it seem even less real to me. After all, what did I know of war beyond what I had read in history books? The fight I had ... witnessed … was too quick to be cinematic, but that meant nothing given the frame and timing of the medium. I was still worried. If it had been real, could something like that happen to us? I knew I would be seeing those dusky shapes in my nightmares for a while to come.

We spent most of the rest of the afternoon doing some additional gathering among the remnants of the hotels and shops around Honolulu. Doc and I set some more improvised fish traps off what was left of the jetty that had protected Waikiki’s white sands. We didn’t know if we would catch anything, but given that we wanted another alternate source of protein, it was worth the try. We would check the traps again in a day or two to see if they caught anything worth eating. Doc also checked our land traps, snaring a couple of large rats and a cat for us to roast when we had a chance to do so downwind from the ponies. If we were going to eat something from land, it may as well be from some invasive species, right?

Dinner that night was more subdued than usual. Given the shock of what we had found at Pearl, we all wanted to be alone with our thoughts. There was no late night stargazing tonight; by mutual unspoken agreement we all went to our beds early.

Comments

[Dances With Unicorns]

Does that self-help, guide book that Archive wrote have any information on Daring Do who gives practical advice on going on adventures?

[Dances With Unicorns]

Have any of our protagonists thought about checking out the Honolulu hardware stores for mundane hand tools, nails and screws, as well as metal brackets, shovels, and pickaxes?