Imagination

We were lost. I told Sargent Michaels that, but he wouldn’t listen. He just kept hacking his way through the brush and I gave him a wide berth; that machete would have been just as good at hacking through me.

"The rendezvous was here,” he insisted, smacking the map into my chest. “I know it was. It was.”

I took a look. Oh, sure, the path was clear enough on paper. Get your head beneath this god-damn canopy though and good luck with it. The trees looked so innocent and ordered painted on the map, but never was there a falser lie. I swear we were stuck in one of those enchanted forests I read to my sister about. There’d be a gingerbread house up ahead and before we could high-tail it these trees would cut us off.

“Well, Private?”

I snapped to attention. "Sergeant Michaels, sir!”

He sliced through a sapling palm. “I don’t fucking need that, Daniel. What do you make of it? We there? We been bamboozled or what?”

I sure hoped not. They’d taken my best friend in their last raid. I’d never let them keep hold of Teddy. I can’t count the nights we’ve spent jawing off about this and that, alone beneath the tent with nothing but a flashlight and some blankets. No way I’d ever give up on him. Besides, he knew way too many of my secrets.

"Daniel!” Michaels thumped me with the hilt of the machete. “Focus, damnit! If this is a trap we’re as good as dead, now where…”

Something growled. The fronds of the giant fern beside him trembled. It happened before either of us could react, before he could even turn to meet his death head on. The jaguar burst forth, all teeth and claws and calico mottling. It sunk its teeth into the side of the Sergeant’s neck and stained its white paws with his blood.

The machete whipped through the air and landed in the trunk beside me. The great hellcat tore its gory maw from Michaels, fixing angry eyes on me. Its pink tongue licked along its lips, its tail lashed back and forth as it crouched down, its ears flattened tight against its head.

No way was I going to die here. They still had Teddy, they were probably waterlogging him somewhere trying to force out the location of our camp. I wrenched the machete from the tree and held it out. The jaguar’s claws flashed in and out, in and out, and we danced around each other slowly, moving in a circle.

Then it moved. It flew at me, hissing and snarling. I brought the machete up to meet it, driving the blade into its chest. It pierced through and the thing let out an ear-splitting yowl of pain. The force sent us tumbling back, and I didn’t stop. I pulled it out and sunk it in again, again, again, before it could get up and come back for more, before it could do to me what it did to Sergeant Michaels-

"Daniel?”

Oh, god, they’re coming. They were hiding in the trees. They’re getting closer. I have to be prepared, they’ll jump be before-

“Daniel, dinner’s ready! Come on, stop playing now!”

Gotta make sure it’s dead. I’ll never make it out between the two of them. One more slice, Jesus, but this thing bleeds, I’m getting it all over the carpet-

“Daniel, have you seen the cat?”