The Moon Trolley: An Unfortunate Trip

This is the second episode of The Moon Trolley, a sci-fi/fantasy book about a boy who escapes slavery and accidentally discovers an unknown world of magic and aliens. To read Episode One, click here.

His parents applauded uproariously as he and his sister concluded a special performance of their own custom drum routine. Unfortunately, he had accidentally punched a hole through the drum skin with his last note—a development his mother found quite funny. He’d always loved the sound of her laugh…

He had just taken a seat near the fire. Dubaku, the village’s most respected griot, was about to tell a rare story about the meaning of the constellations. Suddenly he felt a prickling sensation on his spine and leapt up, swatting at his back. He turned and realized it was just a guffawing Kukomo. Unfortunately, Dubaku overheard the name he called his sister, and he had to feed the elder’s chickens for a week so that he’d promise not to tell his parents…

They came in the middle of the night, brandishing clubs, leering cruelly, showing no mercy as they tied up his parents and carted them off. He and his sister cried for days. They would not be consoled, despite their grandparents’ best attempts to bolster them. They had not even had the chance to say goodbye…

It was the end of another hard day of crate-lifting at the dock. Their English supervisor flipped each of them a coin. It was paltry pay, but what choice did they have? All that was left in the village were the old and the young. Their grandparents were relying on them. He shuddered to think what would happen to them if “they” ever took him and Kokumo…

“Stay strong, Ata,” his sister whispered as she helped him rise unsteadily to his feet. He nodded heavily, pushed aside the intense pain rippling across his back. Then he pulled himself up straight, willed his tears back into eyes, and walked onward toward the ship. They could strip them of their clothes, clap them in irons, whip them like cattle—but they could not take away their dignity…

A dog licked him on the cheek. He stirred but didn’t open his eyes. The dog licked him again, leaving a trail of slobber across his entire face. He stirred again. He would get up soon, he promised no one in particular. He heard shouting and wondered who was making all the racket. The dog licked him again, more insistently…

The dog. Kojo’s eyes shot open to the sight of two brown eyes and a wet nose inches from his face. He laid there for a minute, disoriented, his face warming under the rays of the blazing tropical sun. But where had the sun come from? Hadn’t it been storming? Then it all came rushing back to him. The clapping of thunder, the giant tentacle—his broken chains—a flood of water flushing him out of the ship—two evil-looking Wings of Prosperity shipmates attacking Kokumo—Kokumo!

He scurried to his feet, no other thought in his mind than the urgent necessity of saving his sister. But how to get back inside the ship? Scanning the beached vessel, he noticed dozens of holes peppering its hull—the kraken’s handiwork, no doubt. Could he climb back into the ship through one of the holes?

“There he is! Just standin’ on the beach!”

Kojo looked up and saw the very same sailors who had attacked Kokumo climbing down the Wings of Prosperity’s hull on a rope. A wave of dread washed over him, hitting him even harder than had that wave of water. If the sailors were coming after him, what did that mean about Kokumo? Was she…? He shook his head. No, he wouldn’t allow himself to contemplate that thought.

The dog hit Kojo with an insistent “WOOF!!” His eyes darted back and forth between the descending sailors and the overgrown jungle at the edge of the beach. Kojo caught his meaning instantly: “If we don’t run, we’re gonna be deader than a dog bone.”

Well, it was something along those lines, anyway.

“But my sister’s still up there!” Kojo said to the dog.

The canine huffed exasperatedly. Then he picked up the end of one of Kojo’s loose ankle chains and began pulling with all his might toward the tree line.

“Now that is not fair!”

The dog paused and tilted his head at Kojo as if to say, “Really?”

“Oh yeah—leashes. Okay, I guess it’s pretty fair.”

BANG! For a moment, Kojo thought something had exploded in the sand next to his feet. Then he looked back at the sailors and saw a smoke cloud around the gross-looking one’s pistol. The man cursed and began fishing another gun out of his shirt. It was in that moment Kojo realized the dog was right. He hated the idea of running while his sister was still stuck in the nightmarish death trap that was the Wings of Prosperity, but the next shot might not miss, and he’d be no good to Kokumo dead.

“Alright, alright,” he said begrudgingly. “Let’s go.”

The two of them took off. The dog was twice as fast as Kojo, which wasn’t surprising since he had twice the number of legs. He barked urgently.

“No, I can’t go faster!” Kojo huffed. “You try running with these chains attached to your ankles!”

BANG! BANG! Kojo looked around wildly and saw their pursuers had reached the beach and were now sprinting after them, pistol-blasting away with wild abandon.

“Maybe I can go faster,” Kojo acknowledged.

Powered by adrenaline and a bit of heel-nipping, they reached the jungle’s edge before the sailors had made it halfway up the beach. Kojo hesitated for a second, eyeing the dark mess of ominously looming trees and overgrown vegetation with trepidation. But any predators in there were surely better than the two chasing them. He took a deep breath and plunged into the forest.

It didn’t take Kojo long to realize that this particular jungle was less hospitable than most. In fact, by the time he’d run through his ninth spider web, crashed through his twelfth picker bush, and stepped in his eighteenth ankle-twisting hole, he very much began to suspect the jungle was actively trying to get them to leave. Thankfully, however, their pursuers were having just as much trouble as he was. Kojo looked over his shoulder to check on them and—

And fell flat on his face. He lay there for a moment, utterly dazed. The dog skidded to a halt, circled back, and began nuzzling Kojo in the ear urgently. Kojo groaned. With great effort, he rolled over and sat up. “What happened?” he said dumbly.

The dog scurried over to Kojo’s feet, huffing and whimpering. Following his gaze, Kojo saw that the chain trailing from his ankle had gotten tangled up with a tree root. Not just a “looped around once, no big deal,” kind of tangled—this was a full “squirrel stuck in a pile of fish netting” kind of situation.

Kojo and the dog locked eyes. They both knew there was no escaping this…at least not before the murderous sailors caught up with them.

“You’d might as well keep running,” Kojo told him miserably. “Go have a good life…find a nice dog family—"

The dog was gone before he finished his sentence.

“Fair enough,” Kojo sighed. He didn’t have to await his fate for long—the sailors made up all their lost ground in a matter of seconds.

“Oi! Bart! I found ‘im!” The gross, greasy-haired sailor crashed through a bush and stopped a few paces away from Kojo, pistol raised triumphantly. A moment later, Bart showed up too. The larger sailor was puffing, coughing, and looking generally disgruntled with all the running he’d had to do. Now that they were right in front of him, Kojo could see at least two dozen new cuts and bruises all over both of their faces. He wondered whether that had been Kokumo’s doing or the forest’s.

“Great,” Bart wheezed. “Can we jus’ shoot ‘im now? Please, Rufus?”

“We really shouldn’t if we can avoid it,” replied Rufus. “He’s of no value dead…be like tossin’ a crate of gold overboard, wouldn’t it?”

Bart snorted. “A pouch of it, maybe. Look how pathetic ‘ee is.”

Kojo glared up at him malevolently.

“Still…” said Rufus doubtfully. “Not sure we can afford it after tha’ slave girl…”

White-hot fury rose up within Kojo like a burst of dragon fire. “What did you do to Kokumo?” he shouted.

Rufus replied with an ambivalent shrug. “Taught ‘er a lesson. Mighta killed her—who knows?”

Kojo had never been more furious in his life. He wanted to thrash Rufus—utterly destroy him—find out his worst fear and subject him to it for the rest of his dying days—but all he could do was lay on the ground and fix the sailor with a murderous stare.

A shadow suddenly passed over Rufus’s face. The sailor flinched, and for one wild instant, Kojo wondered if he’d been able to inflict pain upon the man through force of sheer will. But the moment passed as quickly as it arrived, and Rufus pointed his pistol at Kojo’s face.

“Alright,” he said. “Yeh’ve convinced me, Bart. We’ll tell the boatswain ‘ee tried to run.”

BANG!

I hope you enjoyed Episode 2! To see other episodes, visit my profile or my website. If you’d like to join my email list, below, I’ll let you know when I post future episodes. You can also sign up to become a “Moon Trolley Test Driver” who gives me feedback and input on episodes before they’re published.