Above the Spray Lakes

Laura frantically scrambled towards the cliff El and the mutation had just tumbled off. As she neared the edge a light brown and grey shape exploded past her. The Great Horned Owl fluttered over her head and slammed into the rocky ground, thrashing over its side with a painful squawk. The owl blurred, morphing into El before coming to a rough halt. He lay on his back, breathing heavily. Laura stood and walked over to her friend, helping him to a sitting position. She then slugged him in the arm.

“Ow! Damn!”

“You ass. Why didn’t you tell me you could become an owl? I thought you were dead!”

El painfully rubbed his bicep, the injuries his alternate forms sustained were mostly confined to that form, but they left residual aches. He could feel the bruises raising already from the beating bear had taken.

“Sorry,” deep breath, “didn’t know for sure I could do it. Never tried before.” Laura took his hand and helped him to his feet.

“And you thought a fine time to try flying was while plummeting to your death?”

“Seemed like an appropriate time. Besides isn’t it how mother birds make their chicks fly the first time?” He took several uneasy steps to the cliff, and Laura’s arm snaked around him in assistance.

“Yeah, but usually baby birds are not wrestling with giant mutant spiders.”

“True.”

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The two aspiring heroes stood at the cliff’s edge and looked down. Some two hundred feet below the spider lay on the granite. It was on its back, the remaining seven legs curled towards its body. A dark ichor ran down the boulder under it.

Laura let a slow breath out. “We did it, Lassie. We stopped that thing.”

El was silent for a moment before he spoke, “There was a person in there.” They stood together quietly before Laura broke the silence.

“Then we set him free.”

“How do we know that? Maybe there was a way we could have captured him?”

“Did you have any great ideas to subdue that thing? When I tried to fight it, it grabbed my hair and tried to eat my foot.” Her infectious grin began to reappear on her face. “Come on, we did good buddy.”

“We should have been able to do more.”

Laura turned to face El, took him by the shoulders and pivoted him towards her. “Listen, my family doesn’t really talk about this, but...my uncle on my mom’s side is a mutation. When his power activated he began uncontrollably emitting a field of gamma radiation around him. He was in class at the time. The initial pulse affected almost a dozen students and his teacher. They all died of radiation sickness within the week. When I first heard the story from my dad I looked it up, radiation sickness is a horrible way to go. My uncle has spent the last twenty years in a lead-lined isolation room in a government hospital.”

“Imagine what that must be like? No contract with people who are not wearing massive rad suits. The last time he had human contact, he killed people. He was a good and kind boy, but he is deadly to be near. We can assume that the spider ate both people who camped here, or maybe one of the campers was the spider. If so, he ate his friend after turning. We stopped him from inflicting more harm.”

“Is your uncle why you want to be a hero?”

“He is part of it, yes.” Laura’s arms dropped to her sides and she looked down the cliff face. “Oh shit!” At the base of the cliff, the mutation’s legs were twitching and beginning to unfurl. El looked for himself and swore in Chinese.