C.H.U.D.

He examines me with bright eyes.  Eyes, the color of amber, a rich deep yellow like shimmering honey fresh from the comb, glistening and wet. Its pupils dilating from the beam of my torch, thin vertical slits of glossy obsidian. Stygian daggers piercing the stillness of the night. A tremulous hush overcomes me. Leaden legs, frozen in fright, hold me in place, a mortal sculpture. Crocodilian humanoid underground dwellers, C.H.U.D., for short, had been an urban myth. Folklore passed down through the generations to scare people off from this area of the expanse. Now I know it to be true, for standing before me is one of the creatures. Bathed in the dim glow of my failing ray of protection stands a monster of legend, a parable of the dangers of the world come to life. It walks upright like a hominid, using its sinewy hunter green tail for balance. A rudder built by Mother Nature for power and precision adapted in Darwinian fashion for a new purpose. I have no doubt in my mind that in attack mode, the beast will revert to its base instincts. Dropping low to the sewer floor, horizontal with the meniscus of human detritus, impending death surfing towards its next victim in a ravenous tidal wave of unencumbered rage.

“Dare”, I say in response to the juvenile game of chance presented to me.  

Truth is not an option. Staring into the cerulean oceans of my crush, Jenny Thompson, aka the most popular girl in school, a celestial body pulling my heartstrings in a tractor beam of infatuation, I know better. The queen with her flaxen crown, the heritor of an opalescent array of denticle transcendence, an aquiline goddess slumming with the dregs of secondary school society.  

“Come on, Welly”, she says with a knowing wink of her left eye.  

Jenny and I have been row mates since primary school. “Thompson, Wellington”, Welly for short. I’ve had a front row seat to the budding beauty who has blossomed into this lotus flower. A bouquet of vanilla and peppermint enraptured my nostrils daily, bewitching my senses in an olfactory Elysium, encasing my heart in a cage of wanton desire.  

“Dare”, I say again with conviction.  

I'm not ready to bare my soul to my fair Ms. Thompson, certainly not here in the bowels of her parent's townhome amidst the inebriated and the strung out.  

“Ok”, she says. A frown exhibiting her distaste for my weakness.  

“You have to go out to the sewers. The forbidden ones, in the expanse. For one hour.”

My cowardice of the heart, feelings padlocked in chains, is my undoing. It seems so silly now. In this stitch in time, a single declaration of affection could have avoided this dilemma. No doubt it would have created other ones. Would she have laughed? Mocked 

my tender expression of amore? Dumped her loser boyfriend on the spot and eloped with me?

Leaned across the circle of social misfits and planted her full lips on mine in a passionate first kiss? Gather with her tribe, pointing and chanting loser, loser, laughing like hyenas at my sad display? 

None of that matters now. I wheel on my heels and run for dear life. Sweet, silly, stupid precious life. I hope it hasn’t seen me in the pitch black of the sewer tunnel. I hope it hasn’t smelled my fear, primal and visceral, the smell of stalked prey. I hope it hasn’t heard me splashing through the sewer like a fish out of water, careless and foolish as a spawning salmon, thrashing about without concern of danger. The ear-piercing shriek, almost avian in tone, which emanates from the gargantuan says otherwise. Running towards the grated exit, trying to keep my bowels from releasing, I mutter a prayer to a higher power, babbling like an insane person, speaking in tongues. Maybe I should let them go, my bowels, that is, a la the humble squid and its ink cloud. Clouding my escape with a Taco Bell shitstorm isn’t heroic, but better to live another day than be a late-night snack for a C.H.U.D. 

I reach the grate, only to find it has been locked from the outside, a beaming Cheshire cat smile appears out of thin air in the gloomy evening.  

“Jenny, Jenny let me out! Jenny, the chuds are real! Jenny, open the grate!” Her smile feels hollow, her vacant lifeless doll eyes look right through me, I am nothing to her. A fun game that is all. I feel the shaking of the sewer floor, the tremors of terror ripple through my body. Hot breath on my neck, the aroma of decaying flesh, sweet and sour. The last moments of my life as its conical teeth clamp down on my ribcage. Its head thrashing side to side, my life ebbing and flowing on the edge of expiration.  

Her smile widens, seeming to relish in my untimely demise.  

“Welly, Welly, wake the hell up!” Bleary eyed and confused, I wake to Jenny shaking me violently, shouting at my drunken face to get out of her house. Her pure breed pit bull, Milly, is clamped onto my left pant leg, tearing a fresh hole in the denim of my brand-new blue jeans.

“Welly, you need to leave! My parents are home! I’m supposed to be grounded. Everyone else left hours ago.” She clutches my face in her warm soft hands, kissing me softly, slowly. “No more booze for you, lightweight. You missed all the excitement. I broke up with Tom. He cheated on me with that ginger tramp Pauline from the cheer squad! I caught them in the act! I chased him down the street with a butcher knife!” The image of the star quarterback running in fear from a maniacal jilted lover, pants around his ankles, bare assed to the world starts me laughing. Deep, belly laughing. Hearing of this wonderful turn of events that transpired while I had lain in Van Winklian repose causes a creeping trail of a grin to crease my face.  

“Get out, idiot! I'll see you tomorrow, row mate. I like you, Welly. Don’t ever change.”

“Truth?”, I question.

“Truth”, she says.