Chapter 99: Night Walk into the Ranch, The Mummy's Horror Part 2
When Klein, Ben, and Gwen trudged back to the main farm, the evening air had already begun to cool. Near the porch, they spotted Todd engaged in a heated, hushed argument with his mother, Joan.
Joan waved her hands dismissively, her face tight with impatience, before turning her back and walking inside. Todd was left standing in the dirt, his shoulders slumped, kicking at a loose pebble.
"What's wrong?" Ben asked, jogging over with a curious expression.
Todd looked up, letting out a heavy sigh. "Mom still doesn't believe me about the monster... Wait!" His eyes went wide, darting between the three of them as if they had just crawled out of a grave. "How are you guys alive?!"
"Nothing to it. The Mummy left in a hurry, so we just walked back," Gwen explained, offering a breezy, completely unbothered smile.
"I see..." Todd blinked, the relief washing over him quickly replaced by a fresh wave of dejection. If the monster was gone, he had no way to prove he wasn't crazy. He shook his head, forcing a weak smile. "Never mind. Come on, I'll take you to where you'll be staying for the next week."
Todd led them across the property, eventually meeting up with Grandpa Max. Together, the group walked toward the designated guest quarters for the week's labor.
They stopped in front of a low, squat wooden structure.
"No way." Klein stopped dead in his tracks. His eyes narrowed, fixing on the dilapidated building.
Gwen noticed his sudden halt. She tilted her head. "Cousin, what's wrong?"
A muscle in Klein's jaw twitched. "If I have to live in that thing, I'd rather go back to the Rustbucket and sleep on the floor."
Gwen frowned, stepping closer to the structure. "Why? It doesn't look that bad."
"This is a chicken coop," Klein said flatly. He didn't even want to waste the breath explaining it. The faint, lingering smell of feathers and droppings was unmistakable. Worse, this was the exact same wooden shed he had accidentally wreaked havoc on earlier that day.
Gwen's jaw dropped. "What?!"
The wooden door creaked open. Ben stepped out, brushing a stray white feather off his shoulder. He looked at Klein and Gwen with a deadpan expression. "You guys would never guess what's in here."
Gwen took a slow step back. "Do you... have chickens on your bed?"
Ben froze, his eyes widening. "How did you know?"
Klein rubbed the bridge of his nose.
Ben shook the feathers out of his hair and let out an exasperated sigh. "Never mind, let's not talk about this right now. Do you guys have any better ideas?"
Klein and Gwen exchanged a single, knowing glance.
"The exact same idea as you," Klein said.
The three of them spoke in perfect unison. "Go find the Mummy."
Leaving the farm behind, the trio slipped away into the fading light, heading straight for Old Man Jason's ranch. The sun had almost completely dipped below the horizon, casting long, deceptive shadows across the dirt roads.
They reached the edge of the neighboring property, greeted by a tall, imposing barbed wire fence. Gwen didn't miss a beat. Her hands flared with pink mana, forming a glowing platform beneath their feet that smoothly hoisted Klein and Ben over the sharp iron thorns, dropping them safely onto the grass on the other side.
Once inside the ranch, they slowed their pace. The night was quiet, save for the crunch of dry grass beneath their sneakers. They swept their gazes across the dark fields, searching for any sign of the bandaged creature.
"Hey. Dweeb, Dork, look over there," Klein said, his sharp eyes catching a faint luminescence in the distance.
Ben and Gwen followed his pointing finger. Scattered across the dark grass were strange, glowing purple indentations.
Gwen squinted at the unnatural light. "What are those?"
"I don't know," Ben said, already jogging forward. "But we'll find out if we follow them."
The three of them hurried across the field, tracking the glowing trail. Ben crouched down near one of the marks, hovering his hand over the faint purple glow. "Are these the Mummy's footprints?"
"Probably. Judging by the spacing, it headed that way," Klein said, gesturing toward the darkness ahead. He took the lead, guiding them along the glowing path until the footprints abruptly stopped at the edge of a massive, freshly excavated crater.
Gwen peered over the edge into the dark earth. "Did it dig this out?"
Ben shrugged, crossing his arms. "It couldn't have just tunneled out of here, right? If Todd wasn't seeing things, this is definitely an alien Mummy."
"It was looking for something," Klein muttered, his eyes scanning the loose dirt at the bottom of the pit.
Moo.
A deep, unnatural sound rumbled from behind them.
Klein, Ben, and Gwen turned around. Standing a few yards away were two cows. But instead of normal black and white spots, their hides were a sickly, purplish-black, radiating the same eerie purple glow as the footprints. Their eyes burned with a hostile light, and they scraped their hooves against the dirt, looking exceptionally angry.
Ben took a slow step back. "I grew up in the city, but cows definitely shouldn't look like that... right?"
Moo!
The two mutant cows let out a distorted bellow and lowered their horns, charging straight at the trio with thundering hooves.
"Gwen, make them stop bothering me," Klein said, not even bothering to raise his hands. He simply turned his back on the charging beasts and went back to studying the crater.
Gwen rolled her eyes, but her hands immediately sparked with pink energy. She chanted a quick incantation, sweeping her glowing hands toward the stampeding livestock.
The magic washed over the cows. Their legs instantly tangled together. They let out confused, slurred moos as they stumbled, rolled across the grass, and finally collapsed into a deep, snoring heap.
Klein kicked a loose rock into the pit, satisfied there was nothing left to find here. "There might be other glowing footprints around. Let's split up and cover more ground."
Without waiting for a response, Klein picked a direction and vanished into the shadows. Gwen nodded to Ben and headed off toward the eastern fence line.
Left on his own, Ben began sweeping the western side of the property. It didn't take long before he spotted a fresh set of glowing purple footprints leading toward a cluster of farm buildings.
He reached into his pocket to call the others, only to grasp empty air. He froze.
Wait. Cousin had a phone. Gwen had a phone. He was the only one without a cell phone.
Ben stood there in the dark, his face twisting in sheer frustration. He let out a quiet groan, kicking the dirt. With no way to signal the others, he had no choice but to follow the trail alone and hope he bumped into them later.
He tracked the purple glow past a row of tractors. Suddenly, a harsh scraping sound echoed through the quiet night.
Ben ducked behind a wooden fence, peering through the slats. In the distance, a tall, gaunt figure wrapped entirely in ragged white bandages was furiously digging into the earth, pulling up chunks of glowing purple rock.
Ben squinted. 'Cousin? No, the color is wrong. That's the Mummy Todd was talking about!'
A twig snapped beneath Ben's sneaker.
The scraping stopped. The Mummy's head snapped around, its hollow eyes locking directly onto Ben's hiding spot.
Roar!
The creature let out a hollow, echoing shriek. It raised its arms, and thick streams of white bandages shot out from its sleeves like harpoons, tearing through the air straight toward Ben.
"Let Heatblast burn you to ashes!" Ben shouted, slapping his hand down on the Omnitrix dial.
A blinding flash of green light erupted just as the bandages slammed into the fence. The wooden slats exploded into splinters, kicking up a massive cloud of dust and dirt.
The Mummy lowered its arms, staring at the crater it had just made. The dust slowly settled, revealing a large hole in the ground. But the boy was gone.
The bandaged alien tilted its head, visibly confused.
"Hey! Are you looking for me?"
The Mummy spun around. Standing a few yards behind it was a sleek, blue-and-black feline alien with green eyes and a lightning-bolt pattern on its chest.
Fasttrack smirked, cracking his knuckles.
Roar!
The Mummy lashed out again, sending a flurry of bandages whipping toward the speedster. Fasttrack blurred into a blue afterimage, easily side-stepping the attack. The bandages missed him completely, slamming into a small wooden storage shed behind him.
With a deafening crash, the shed was cleaved cleanly in half, collapsing into a pile of kindling.
Fasttrack didn't give the monster time to retract its limbs. He dashed forward, closing the distance in a fraction of a second, and buried a high-speed punch directly into the Mummy's chest.
The impact sent the creature flying backward through the air. But the Mummy was unnaturally agile. Mid-flight, it twisted its body and fired another volley of bandages.
Fasttrack, already slowing down to admire his handiwork, didn't expect the mid-air counterattack. The thick wraps coiled tightly around his ankle, yanking his feet out from under him.
The Mummy landed smoothly on its feet, using the momentum to violently pull Fasttrack across the dirt. As the speedster was dragged into range, the Mummy reeled back its free hand and delivered a devastating backhand.
Bang!
Fasttrack was launched through the air like a baseball, slamming hard into the curved metal side of a massive cylindrical grain silo. The impact left a deep dent in the steel.
He groaned, sliding down the metal surface before catching himself. Shaking the dizziness from his head, Fasttrack dug his claws into the steel and sprinted straight up the vertical side of the silo, reaching the flat roof in a blur of blue.
He crouched at the edge, scanning the dark farmyard below. "Where did you go, ugly?"
Silence. There was no sign of the white bandages anywhere.
A faint rustle of fabric sounded directly behind him.
Fasttrack whipped his head around, his eyes widening as a massive, bandaged fist filled his vision.
Bang!
The punch caught him square in the jaw, launching him off the roof of the towering silo. Fasttrack flailed in the empty air, bracing for the bone-shattering impact with the ground far below.
But the impact never came.
Instead of hitting the dirt, Fasttrack slammed into something soft and springy. He bounced once, groaning as he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. He looked down and blinked. He was sitting in the center of a glowing, translucent pink energy net suspended ten feet in the air.
Roar!
Up on the silo roof, the Mummy shrieked in frustration, preparing to dive after him.
Suddenly, the night lit up with a brilliant, roaring green light. A massive fireball streaked through the air, slamming directly into the Mummy's chest. The explosion engulfed the creature, blasting it clean off the silo and sending it crashing into the distant fields.
Fasttrack sat up on the mana barrier, shaking his head to clear the ringing in his ears. He looked down toward the source of the fire.
Standing on the ground below, her hands still glowing with residual pink magic, was Gwen. And right beside her stood a towering, plant-like alien with broad shoulders and a head resembling a blooming flame.
Swampfire lowered his smoking hands, his green eyes glowing in the dark.
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