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JOHNNY REB
And the Maverick Men
In
‘The Clockwork Atoll’ Part 4.
Character Created by Tim Frady / Story by Wayne Clayton.
Vinnie was the first one to scamper down the sandy slope onto the beach, followed swiftly by Captain Travis. Shutterbug trailed behind armed only with his camera. As weapons go it wasn’t much but in Jones’ hands it was nearly as deadly. Sometimes he even surprised himself. Occasionally he could have sworn the lens cap was still on when he had taken the shot. But somehow it still came out sharp as a pin.
“Jones get on the radio and tell them we’re at ground zero” Barked Travis as he paced up the beach.
Shutterbug swung his camera over his shoulder and slipped the radio pack from off his back. Setting it on the sand he began to charge the battery and raise the thin wire mast.
“Mavericks in position, repeat Mavericks in position. Over” Jones’ calls were answered by a wall of static which masked the reply from the command centre.
“Repeat message. Over Repeat message” Captain Travis stopped and looked back at Jones as he caught the concern in the young mans voice.
Jones held the speaker close to his ear and finally pieced together the garbled signal.
“Well ?” asked Travis expectantly.
Shutterbug looked up, his face a picture of confusion.
“They say the King has entered the building??”
Travis’s face dropped. A slow deathly chill raced up his spine. King was a day early.
He glanced up into the sky, out over the lagoon but saw nothing. Somewhere high above them a B29 was making its final approach. Travis was almost convinced he heard the soft drone of an aircraft engine but he knew only Johnny Reb was capable of hearing one at that altitude.
Truth was Johnny was already hearing something echoing across the island, but it was no plane. He had heard the sound of a multitude of wheels and cogs begin to turn from all over the atoll. His ears were full of the whirring of motors coming from the 16mm film cameras spread out over the entire land mass and on the decks of the ships out in the bay. Filling the air like the atoll it’s self was made of clockwork.
He knew what this meant. Operation ‘Crossroads’ had begun. But Johnny had heard something else beneath the hum of the gears. There was something hidden in the dense undergrowth of the wild palms.
He sprang up and looked down upon the crater, ignoring the shouts of Captain Travis as he yelled for the Mavericks to retreat back up the beach. It was now that he saw that the smaller hollows which Travis had thought were signs that the mysterious object had skipped the surface on landing were in fact something far more sinister. They were the footfalls of some massive unearthly creature.
Maybe it was the still lingering smell of Sulphur in the air that reminded Johnny of the song he had once heard played by a young coloured boy on his beat up guitar, a song about a fateful meeting at a lonely crossroads far from town. Or maybe it was the sight of the trail of vast cloven like hoof prints which brought it to his mind.
As Vinnie hurried back up the beach to join the others he turned to see Johnny hang in the air, staring deep into the tangled knot of palms. He stopped and watched as Johnny’s hands flashed with crackling energy. He knew Johnny well enough to know this was a sign that Johnny was getting ready for action. And in a split second Johnny was diving head long into the undergrowth.
Vinnie turned to call the Capt and Shutterbug back but before he could finish his sentence he was knocked of his feet by the speeding black and blue blur.
Shutterbug too felt something rush by his ear and was amazed to see Johnny Reb hurtling through the air before ploughing into the earth some fifty feet further on in a great plume of sand and dirt.
“Holy Cow!! Johnny!!!” he barely had time to blink before Johnny was once more speeding by him this time under his own power at full tilt, his face full of rage. Both he and Captain Travis twisted round to see Johnny disappear into a cloud of kicked up dust. It was now too that Vinnie still lying in the dirt looked up to see Johnny race by.
It was then that all three men saw the giant dark figure rise up out of the trees and block out the sun.
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can't wait for the next segment. I'm completely in suspense now