Kamen Rider Altis, Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I don't own or make any claim of ownership of the Kamen Rider series. Kamen Rider Altis and its characters do belong to me.

Note: A friend of mine gave me a suggestion for a Kamen Rider series, and since he said he'd be flattered if I took his premise and wrote a story around it I decided to do so. I'm recycling the Taint from Kamen Rider Chapra because I liked the idea for them and didn't get to do much with them, but at the same time I've updated them so don't assume you know their story or how they work if you've read Chapra.

Dedication: To Bill and Amanda, may you always find each other.

Madeleine Moore took a long swig of the watery beer they poured in Jack's Shack. It was al lot like the local bar in any dusty town off the highway she'd seen before. The bar was scratched in more places than she could count and the screen door the covered the entrance hung from a single screw on its top fastening. The lights were dim and there was a stale smell in the air, but at least the place was quiet, so she had a little while to pump her scruffy new acquaintance for the story she'd come all this way to hear before happy hour.

"You know, you got the prettiest red hair…" he belched and grinned, reaching out for her flowing rust-colored locks, but she gently pushed his arm aside.

"Kev, do you think maybe you can tell the first woman who ever bought you a beer that little story I asked you about now…?"

"Fair's fair," Kev smiled, his eyes surprisingly clear for someone who'd just finished his second beer. As if his drunk come-on had been an act.

"Let's see," Kev said, scratching his stubbled chin with one hand. "It started about two weeks ago when Jesse's little girl didn't come from this campout she and her friends went to…"

Little Jessie. Her parents thought they were sooooo cute naming her after her dad like that. Let me tell you, she had the prettiest smile in the world, and she wore it everywhere she went. School, cheerleading practice, working the pro shop out in Sherwood Springs…

I tell ya, she was the darling of this whole town. There isn't anybody who wouldn't'a changed places with her when what happened in the woods that night…uh, happened.

Tests just wrapped up at school so Jessie got her bunch of friends together and head into the woods for the weekend to just cut loose. It seemed like half the families in town had somebody going along on Jessie's little trip. My little Joey was one of 'em. He spent all week before that promising me there weren't gonna be no alcohol, he weren't gonna be tryin' to get into Jessie's pants even though he was just crazy about her since they were in kindergarten together. Me and the wife, we knew better, but they was all growing up, and we were finally startin' to accept ya can't be lookin' over their shoulders forever.

So half the kids were out on this little weekend campout of theirs, and their parents all driving themselves crazy thinking' of all the things that'd go wrong while the kids were gone for two whole days with nobody watchin' 'em. And, well…somethin' did.

Monday mornin' rolled around, then Monday afternoon, and no sign of anybody who went on that getaway. Most of us thought they just wanted a little more time to celebrate finally bein' adults, but when it got to closin' time on Tuesday and still none of 'em was back home, most of the grown-ups in this town decided to go the woods and bring those kids of theirs back no matter what.

It wasn't until about one in the mornin' that we finally turned somethin' up. It was little Joey, all curled up in a ball behind some bushes and cryin' like he'd been that way for days. He probably had. A little later we found everybody else. They were in pieces in a big clearing, and most of 'em looked like something big ripped their guts out.

We tried to ask Joey what happened, but every single time somebody tried to talk to him he just started screamin' bloody murder. "The bugs! The bugs! Don't let 'em get me! Don't let the bugs get me!" Things like that. We didn't know what to do with him. Poor little kid attacked me when I tried to take him home. Had to knock him out just so we could take him to the hospital.

Some big city foreign…foren…some crime scene investigator came down to look at how our kids got cut up to try and figger out what did it. We don't have any big animals around here that could've killed a bunch of teenagers like that. So when the guy finished looking, he just got in his car and went right back to the city. We had a bunch of people outside waitin' to hear what happened and everything, but he just pushed right past 'em and drove away.

Everybody was scared good after that. People started talkin' about bears or cougars or something movin' into the woods and eatin' our kids for makin' all that noise. Jim swore blind there was some kind of werewolf livin' out in the woods and that it was gonna start eatin' the families closest to 'em after it finished killin' all the animals out there. But Jim thinks Martians kidnapped his wife, an' everybody knows she ran away with Doc Manning.

Point is, everybody in town either locked themselves in to cry their eyes out without anybody botherin' 'em or they were scared out of their minds whatever got their kids was gonna get them next. Speakin' personally, I didn't know what to think. Something did happen out in the woods. No doubt about it. Joey wasn't liable to start imaginin' things, even if he was scared out of his little skull, but what kind of bugs could do the kind of things that had happened to those kids?

A couple of days later this guy on a bike stopped in town. He talked to Mrs. Waters, that's the old lady who lives next door to me, about the room she was lookin' to rent in the back of her old place. Said he needed a place to stay and wasn't sure how long he'd be there. Was lookin' for somebody, he said.

You could set your watch by how he'd always climb onto that bike of his and just zoom out of sight at sunset every day. Mrs. Waters didn't like how he'd come back around four in the mornin', but he was payin' more than she was askin' for so she kept her mouth shut. I didn't know what to think of the guy myself. A couple times I tried to invite him over for a few beers in front of the game, but he'd always brush it off. Say something like "Thanks, but I have to find somebody," then he'd disappear in a cloud of dust on that bike. The guy was weird, but that was a nice bike…

Yeah, the guy. He looked kinda like a drifter, he had this long hair, kinda, brown. And he always looked like hadn't shaved for a couple days, but in all the time he was here I never saw his beard get any bigger.

But the thing you always noticed when you looked at him and he didn't have them sunglasses of his on was his eyes. He would look at ya and it was like he was lookin' right down into your soul, seein' all those things you don't want anybody to know. Sometimes when I was sittin' inside and heard him take off on his bike, I got to thinkin' about who he was lookin' for. And let me tell you, I was sure as hell glad it wasn't me.

One night I went over to Mrs. Waters to just shoot the shit, but main reason was to see if she knew anything about the guy livin' in her back room. She didn't tell me much, though. The name on his ID said Andy Mulligan, which I thought was weird cuz…he just didn't seem like an Shawn, you know? He seemed like somebody who went by a fancy long name like Anthony or Ulysses or…hell, I don't know.

Weirder thing was she couldn't remember what state issued it. She'd had a couple boarders come through town for a while and rent that room and she never forgot that. After they left she'd always come by and tell my wife how that girl who stayed in her back room wasn't anything like she'd heard about people from Tennessee or whatever.

But the weirdest thing about this Shawn guy was he'd just stay in the room all day. He opened the blinds in the mornin' so Mrs. Waters peeked in sometimes when she was workin' in her yard, but he just sat there with his back to the window all day. All day. Then around six he'd get up, put on his jacket and ride away for the night.

I stopped worryin' about him after a while. He wasn't botherin' his hostess, and the doctors said Joey was well enough to come home. I was happy to see my kid again, but when he got out of the car he just went straight up to his room and stared at the ceilin' 'til dinner time. He didn't talk much over dinner, and didn't go with us to church on Sunday. The wife wanted to send him to see a shrink, but there ain't any of those inside of fifty miles from here.

I didn't see Joey having a serious talk again until I came home kinda late one day and he was sittin' on the porch talkin' to Shawn. He got on his bike and disappeared before I could get out of the truck, and when I asked Joey what that guy wanted to talk about he looked me in the eyes and said, "The bugs, daddy. He wanted to know about the bugs."

I tried askin' about the bugs too, of course, but Joey just got all quiet and stared right off the porch at nothin' I could see. And me and the wife were afraid of havin' him have one of those…what do you call 'em, relapses? Relapses that we didn't want to push him too hard to think about the bugs.

But the night after that, Shawn's bike was still parked out next to the house after the sky was dark. Right away I figured something was wrong and went lookin' for Joey, but he was inside and just sittin' in front of the TV like the rest of the world didn't exist. I called Mrs. Waters and she told me Shawn was still there. He hadn't said anything to her, but he hadn't left his room since gettin' back from a four o'clock dinner.

I figured this I wasn't gonna let him just disappear. I put a six-pack in my cooler and sat down out on the porch to wait and see if he'd come out and get on his bike. He did after a while, but this time he had on this belt.

The buckle had these weird symbols on it like I couldn't even start to tell you about, lady. In the middle of it was this rectangular hole, 'bout as big as a cigarette lighter, maybe. Then on one side he had these three pouches about the size of the hole. The first one was red, then the other two were green and blue. I don't remember what order but those were the colors. I could swear I could see something glowin' a little from inside the first one.

Before he could ride away I came up to him and handed him a beer. "Hey Shawn," I said to him. "You goin' out to look for that guys of yours again?"

"Not exactly," he said then got out his keys, so I reached over and opened his beer for him.

"So what? You find him then?"

"You could say that, and I'm going to meet him now." He sounded so calm it was like he wasn't a person, like there was some kind of alien underneath his skin who didn't know how to sound real. Of course, with what happened right after that I mighta been right.

He was about to set that beer down on a fencepost when my wife came runnin' out of the house screamin' her lungs out. Tears was pourin' down her face. In the second I was takin' all this in I heard Shawn's bike roar and before I could stop him he was riding away like he always did.

"Damn, woman, what is it?" I said to her.

"Joey!" she bawled up at me. "Joey's gone! His window's wide open!"

"I bet I know where he went," I said and dropped them beers like a bad habit. I got into the truck, checked to make sure my .44 was still in the glove box, then I peeled out of there so fast I didn't even hear the cans explodin' under the tires. I was sick of this all this mysterious crap, and I was gonna find out what was goin' on.

I followed Shawn for a while. He looked back a couple times like he was makin' sure nobody followed him, but I've lived in this town my whole life and I know a thing or two about where's a good place to make sure nobody sees ya. It wasn't too long before I realized he was headin' outta town. Back to the woods where all those kids got cut up.

He parked next to the dirt road that goes into the woods, and I waited a while and went in after him. I checked under the seat and found my flashlight, then I went into the woods after him. At first I tried to see if I could find him without my flashlight so he wouldn't know I was there, but after a minute I bumped into enough branches I figured he musta heard me and turned it on anyway.

Next thing I knew something grabbed me from behind, twisted the arm with my gun so that I dropped it and curled its other arm around my neck. "What are you doing following me?" I heard a voice in my ear. It was Shawn.

"My kid's missin'," I said. Or I gasped, more like. "I saw you talkin' to him I figured you knew where he was."

"Damn," he said then he let me go. He stepped on my gun while he stood there shakin' his head. "This isn't your fight."

"Where do you get off sayin' something like that? Joey's around here, isn't he? He was talkin' to you about the bugs, whatever those are, and now he's gone and you came zoomin' out here when you heard that."

"Yes, I think he is," Shawn said. "He told about 'the bugs' that killed his friends. I came out here to find them. And I think he came hoping to see while I did it, to get some closure."

I was all, "Closure?"

"If they die that'll be the end. His friends will be avenged. He probably saw I was home later than usual and figured I was going after the bugs tonight," Shawn explained to me. I ain't never been much of a shrink, but what he told me some kinda sense. If Joey could see whatever killed his friends dead and buried, maybe he woulda been able to put it behind him.

"Then let's go," I told him. Shawn opened his mouth for a second then shook his head and went running into the trees. He got a flashlight of his own from the inside of his Shawnet and started swingin' it around lookin' for something. After we ran a minute I heard these weird sounds, kinda high-pitched. Sounded a little like crickets, but like really BIG crickets. A little after I heard that noise, I wasn't touchin' the ground anymore.

Shawn grabbed my arm before I could fall too far, but my flashlight dropped right out of my hand and rolled out of sight down the hole I was danglin' over. He pulled me out of that hole like I was a stuffed animal or something. With one hand. And maybe you notice I'm kind of a big guy.

"What in the HEEEEEELL made that?" I heard somebody who sounded just like me say.

"The bugs," Shawn told me. "And look." He dipped his fingers into this little puddle of red stuff on the ground. There was a little trail of it going back about teen feet or so from the edge of the hole, and down into the ramp inside it.

"That's blood."

"Human blood," he explained to me. I probably needed him to do that the shape I was suddenly in. Everything I thought I knew about the world seemed to just disappear into thin air right that second. Then he said something that brought me rushin' back.

"Stay here."

"Like hell. You're sayin' that my kid's blood, isn't it?" I wasn't thinkin' about how Joey beat us out there. Maybe whatever was down there grabbed him and took him away.

Shawn pulled something out of that red pocket on his belt. I couldn't see what it was, but it glowed a little just like I thought. "You're not equipped for this," he told me. "Just trust me that if your son's still alive, I'll bring him back."

He didn't wait for me to answer. He jumped down the hole and ran. It took me a second and then I jumped down after him. I landed kind of hard, my ankle still hurts a little, but I got up and ran hard as I could. Shawn hadn't gotten far, but I wasn't surprised to see why.

Doesn't mean I didn't nearly mess myself seein' what he saw.

In front of him were these big red ants. Big as dogs. They were making that cricket noise I heard up top, except it was even louder now. Shawn turned around and saw me there, cussed I think but obviously I couldn't hear him, then threw me his flashlight. Then I swore I lost my mind.

He took the glowing thing in his hand and stuck it in that rectangle hole in his belt buckle. His whole body started glowin' like whatever it was, then he had this black suit on with these red metal plates all over. He had this helmet on too, all silver but with these big yellow buggy eyes. I almost expected him to start talkin' back to the bugs and have 'em all eat me alive, but then he whipped out this hammer and squished the closest bug's head with it.

He was just swingin' it all over the place, and every time he did another of them bugs got smeared on the floor. A couple of them bit him, but they didn't look like they got through that suit of his. As soon as he killed the last one, he grabbed me and ran into that tunnel they came from. I heard more of them cricket noises coming up from behind us.

I had no idea where he was takin' me. On the way I saw other tunnels in the walls and he smashed a couple more ants with that hammer of his. I bet he could've smashed into Fort Knox with that that thing. But right then, I was tryin' to hang onto his promise to save Joey with it.

Suddenly we were inside this room. This huge, just gigantic room. I thought I heard the cricket noises comin' from everywhere, and that's probably exactly what I did. I swung the flashlight around lookin' for 'em, but in the middle of the room was this big chair. It was made out of rock, and sittin' on it was another one of them big ants.

Except it wasn't really an ant. It was bigger than the other ones, big as a guy, and it was sittin' in that chair like a regular guy. And it didn't exactly have six legs like the other ones. It had this long pair kind of like a normal person's, this little shriveled pair comin' out of its stomach, and another pair like arms. One of 'em had Joey off the ground by his throat. His eyes were shut tight but he kicked a little at the big ant. I wasn't even thinkin' when I brought my gun up and shot that big ant in the head. But it just bounced off. The ant looked up and saw us there. If bugs could look mad, this one did.

Shawn I saw holdin' his hammer like he wasn't sure what to do, but the ant did it for him. It dropped Joey and jumped at Shawn. Shawn hit it in the side like it was a giant baseball and before it even landed he was runnin' after it to hit it again.

But then it kicked him and knocked him across the room, and then it spat this…stuff at him. The stuff, I think it was acid or somethin'. It started eatin' into the metal on his suit, but then he pulled the red thing out of the hole in his belt, grabbed into another of them pockets, and pulled out a blue one and stuck it in there.

Just like before he started glowin' and his suit changed. This time the plates were blue, and he had this fin on his head like a shark. His hammer changed too, it was a spear now. 'Cept it was kinda weird…

The ant jumped on him again, but he rolled out of the way and jumped over these other ants, the little ones that showed up out of nowhere. The big one started makin' them cricket noises even louder and suddenly it seemed like the whole room was full of 'em, and every single one was chasin' after Shawn as he jumped around, tryin' to get away from 'em.

I ran over to Joey while the ants was leavin' us alone, but when I tried to pick him up and carry him out I saw the whole floor except for that chair was covered with the ants. The big one looked over at us, and I was afraid he was gonna jump on us and spray acid all over, but then Shawn was jumpin' at him. He stabbed that spear into the big ant's shoulder, then he lifted the big ant and tossed it to the other side of the room.

Then Shawn did the weirdest thing. I mean not really, I guess, but he held that spear straight up in front of him and waved one of his hands over his belt. Then he said something like "Oceanic Restoration," and threw the spear right at the big ant. It went right through it and stuck in the wall, and the ant started thrashin' around makin' these angry sounds, but then it just kinda…disintegrated.

And then the other ants started makin' those same angry noises and thrashin' around. This black…stuff started comin' out of 'em and go into the spear, and as it did they started gettin' smaller and smaller until they were just regular-sized ants. Over where the big ant was was this…guy. This dead, naked guy I'd never seen before. He had a hole through his stomach the same place the ant did, though.

After that, Shawn, regular old Shawn and not that knight thing he turned into, took us both outside and made sure we got home. After that, he drove away again and I ain't heard nothin' about him since.

Joey's doin' better, at least. He started smilin' and started lookin' for a job for a few days after that. He won't talk to me about Shawn, though. He just says "That's over, dad" and goes back to whatever he's doin'. I don't know who he really was or how he knew to come here, but…I'm glad all the same.

The screen door out front creaked a couple of local good old boys walked in. One of them took off his cap, rubbed his bald scalp and fixed Madeleine with a probing eye.

"Hey Kev, this that lady come to ask you 'bout the bugs? Didn't I tell you all that weird stuff was true after all?" he sniggered. "Shut up, Jim," Kev said and threw a handful of peanuts at him. "That all answer your questions, miss?"

Madeleine put away the tape recorder as the others ambled up to the bar and started, loudly, discussing the day with the bartender, taking that as her cue that her time was up. "Yes it does, thank you very much for your time."

"Don't thank me, thank Shawn if you ever find him," Kev replied and ordered a fresh beer. Madeleine made her way out of the bar and into the shining white car parked outside. She unlocked it, climbed in and motored away from Jack's Shack.

She had a long way to go before she heard her next story.