COLOSSUS

The Colossus of Rhodes appears in Glen Hartwell and starts killing people

         It was Saturday, the 4^th of April 2026, and the Wismer family were driving along Williamstown Road, just outside Brooklyn in the Victorian countryside. They had just passed the Biker Lounge when they saw a tall, thin man thumbing. They were a couple of metres beyond the man, when Albert Wismer braked the Hyundai Palisade, eight-seater SUV.
         “Dad, what are you doing?” demanded April, fifteen, a tall, full-busted raven-haired girl.
         “Stopping to pick him up,” explained Albert ‘Bertie’, forty-one, a medium height, blond man with a slight paunch.
         “Dad, are you mad?” asked May, fourteen, a medium height, redheaded girl.
         “Girls, we’ve got plenty of room,” pointed out Agnes, thirty-nine, a tall raven-haired woman with her hair in ponytail.
         “Sure, if we want to be murdered by a serial killer,” said June, thirteen, a short blonde with her hair also in a ponytail.
         “We’ve got him outnumbered five to one, honey,” said Bertie.
         “That is hardly reassuring,” insisted April as the man walked up to open the rear passenger-side door: “He might have a weapon.”
         “Thanks,” said the man in his late forties, tall, lean with long, yellow hair: “I’m Iain Zabriskie.”
         “Hey, Roy Orbison has a song called Zabriskie Point,” said April, “are you from there.”
         “Not me personally, but my family may have been, we originally came from Greece; but that was nearly two hundred years ago.”
         “Then he’s not from Zabriskie Point,” said Agnes: “That’s located in Death Valley National Park, California.”
         “So what are your names,” asked Iain.
         “I’m Bertie Wismer, this beautiful lady is my wife, Agnes, and the three girls are our daughters April, May, and June.”
         “Is that the months you were born?”
         “Nope,” said April: “May and I were born in January, and June was born in Feb.”
         “Then how did you get such interesting first names?”
         “The usual way,” said May.
         “Our parents are morons,” explained June.
         “Exactly,” agreed April.
         “Girls, you do know we can hear every word that you say!” said Agnes.
         “You should have thought of that when you named us,” insisted May.
         “She’s got you there,” admitted Bertie, laughing.
         “Gotcha, Mum,” agreed May and everyone laughed.
         “So where are you heading?” asked Bertie.
         “Wherever the road takes me.”
         “So you’re a deadbeat?” asked June.
         “June!” chided Agnes.
         Iain laughed before saying, “I prefer to say that I’m a free spirit who goes wherever the four winds take me.”
         “So you’re a snowbird like in the song?” asked April.
         “Pardon her, but she loves old-time music,” said June.
         “How dare you; everyone loves Liv Maessen, Roy Orbison, and Chuck Berry.”
         “Yuck!” said May.
         “She’s right,” said Iain: “Everyone loves Liv Maessen, Roy Orbison, Chuck Berry, and Elvis.”
         “Okay, you lost us on Elvis,” said June.
         “There is nothing wrong with Elvis!” insisted April.
         “Elvis Costello maybe,” said May.
         “He’s cool,” agreed June.
         “No, the real Elvis, Elvis Presley,” insisted April. Then when her sisters continued to laugh at her: “Okay, most of his movie songs were crappy; but he recorded hundreds of great songs too.”
         “If you say so,” teased June, and she and May continued to laugh at April’s expense.
         “Tone-deaf buffoons, only liking rap, hip-hop, and techno-babble,” said April, glaring at her two sisters.’
         “As Elvis once said,” said Iain, “‘there is no such thing as bad music: There is music I like, music I don’t like, music you like, music you don’t like; but all music gives pleasure to someone so all music is good’.”
         “That was in 1957,” said April: “But, of course, he hadn’t heard disco, rap, hip-hop, techno-babble, or electro then ... He might change his mind if he were around these days.”
         “So where are you going, today?” asked Iain.
         “For a nice weekend’s camping out,” said Agnes: “In the forest not far from here.”
         “Our faith has been tested,” said May.
         “Yes, we spent hours last night praying for it to pour rain all weekend, but so far, not a drop,” said June.
         
         Over in the forest just outside Glen Hartwell, Terri Klein and half a dozen police officers were out having target practice in the forest.
         “Hey, where’s the bazooka?” asked Sheila Bennett, a tall athletic Goth chick, and the Chief Constable of the local police, looking into the boot of Terri’s police-white Jeep Cherokee.
         “We took it out before coming,” said Terri, a tall, attractive ash blonde; senior sergeant and Sheila’s immediate boss.
         “How come?” demanded the Goth chick.
         “Eunice and George from Buildings and Works were a little pissed off at the chaos that you wreaked against nature last Sunday,” explained Colin Klein, a tall redheaded Englishman and Terri’s husband.
         “Then what am I doing here?”
         “We often ask ourselves that, Sheila,” teased Donald Esk, a tall powerfully built forty-something man with short dark brown hair.
         “I took the day off from going to the Muscle-Up Gym to have fun ... I mean to practice my marksman ... markswoman ... marksperson skills, and now I’m not even allowed to.”
         “We brought along a bow and some arrows,” appeased Terri: “As well as a box of detonators which you can attack to the arrowheads.”
         “Whacko the diddly-oh!” cried the orange-and-black haired Goth chick: “So where is everything?”
         They removed a huge, unstrung wooden bow, a dozen or so arrows and a box of detonators from the boot of the Jeep.
         “The only catch is that you’ll need to string the bow,” said Colin: “None of us were strong enough to bend it.”
         “Gimme here,” said Sheila.
         Taking the huge bow, she stood on the bottom of it, attached the twine to that end, before easily bending the bow with her left hand to attach the string to the top of the bow.
         “Easy peasy,” said the Goth chick.
         “Thank you, boss for deballing all of the men in the department,” said Jessie Baker, a huge ox of a man with flame red hair: “Since none of us were strong enough to string it.”
         “Ah, you big pack of sissies,” teased Sheila, aiming the bow at a nearby ghost gum.
         “Run for cover!” shouted Wendy Pearson, a tall honey blonde in her mid forties.
         Everyone else ran behind Sheila as quickly as possible.
         “How dare you all!” protested Sheila: “Have you all forgotten that I am the department’s expert at weaponry and blowing stuff up?”
         “No,” conceded Wendy.
         “Then have a little faith in me. Go and stand side-on to that tree, with a pen in your mouth, and I’ll easily shoot the pen out of your mouth without touching you.”
         “Respectfully I must decline that request.”
         “It was an order, not a request.”
         “Don’t worry, Wendy, I counterman that order,” assured Terri.
         “You’re as bad as her,” said Sheila: “I’ll show you.”
         She put an arrow into the bow, fired the arrow, and missed the ghost gum by a dozen centimetres.
         “Don’t you dare laugh anyone,” insisted Sheila: “That was not my fault; I was distracted by none of you having any faith in me.”
         She fired a second arrow, this time hitting the tree trunk dead centre, to have the detonator blow a huge chunk out of the tree.
         “Something tells me Eunice and George are not going to be much happier when they see Sheila’s latest assault upon nature, than they were last Sunday,” said Colin.
         “Less nattering, so I can concentrate,” insisted Sheila.
         Seeing a large blue gum a dozen metres deeper into the forest, she took careful aim, fired and hit the tree less than a metre below a large, sleeping koala. When the arrow detonated, a large chunk of bark shot up and whacked the koala upon the backside. Shrieking in terror the animal raced higher up the blue gum.
         “Sheils, you almost killed that poor Cola,” complained Wendy.
         “Well, it’s his own stupid fault; what’s he doing sleeping in broad daylight?”
         “Colas are nocturnal,” explained Terri: “That means they sleep all day and are wide awake all night.”
         “Silly buggers!” insisted Sheila: “They deserve whatever they get in that case.”
         ‘Sheils!” protested Colin as the Goth chick started to aim the bow higher up the same tree.
         “All right, sissies, I’ll choose another target.”
         “She’ll probably kill a passing kangaroo now,” teased Terri, receiving a glare from her subordinate.
         
         Stopping the Hyundai Palisade ten kilometres or so into the forest, Bertie Wismer said to Iain Zabriskie as they alighted:
         “You’re welcome to share an early lunch with us, Iain.”
         “I don’t have any money.”
         “That’s all right, we’ve got plenty,” said Agnes.
         “Mum always errs on the side of lots,” explained June.
         “And Dad has the delusion that he can catch some fish at the nearby Yannan River to help out,” added May.
         “There is nothing delusional about my piscine skills,” boasted Bertie.
         “Yeah, when he’s a bit piscine, he’s even worse,” teased April.
         “How dare you,” said Bertie, giving it away by laughing: “I’ll have to remember to tell that one to everyone at work, that I’m an even worse fisherman when I’m a bit piscine.”
         “Just don’t do it to death, like you usually do with a joke,” said June.
         “When do I ever do a joke to death?”
         “Like forever,” insisted April, May, and June.
         “Actually, they’re right, honey,” said Agnes: “You come up with a great joke, then twelve hours later no one is laughing anymore.”
         “We call him Joke the Ripper,” teased May: “Because no one else can murder a great joke as ruthlessly as he can.”
         Ignoring the laughter, Bertie went across to take a large tray of sandwiches out of the boot of the car, while Agnes grabbed some paper plates and wooden cutlery.
         “Who wants sandwiches and who wants coleslaw?” asked Bertie.
         “There is also a cold, roasted chicken,” said Agnes.
         “Any of that sounds fine to me,” said Iain.
         “I want some chicken breast with coleslaw, and maybe half a cheese and tomato sandwich,” said April.
         “Same here,” said May.
         “Chicken leg with mayo, coleslaw and a ham and tomato sandwich,” said June.
         “I’ll have whatever’s left,” offered Iain.
         “You’ll be lucky,” teased Agnes, “the way these three eat there won’t be much left.”
         “Yeah, get in now,” encouraged Bertie: “The teenage girl anorexia thing seems to have past our girls by.”
         “Healthy body images for girls are coming back, Dad!” protested April.
         “About time too,” said Herbie.
         
         After firing off a dozen arrows and terrifying half a dozen koalas, Sheila declared, “Oh, I’m sick of this, I’m going to the gym after all.”
         “Yeah, me too,” agreed Alice Walker, a tall brunette, and bodybuilder like Sheila.
         “Should I let them both go?” asked Terri.
         “If you want the wildlife to love you,” suggested Wendy Pearson.
         “Yeah, okay,” said Terri, although the two policewomen were already a hundred metres or more closer to town.
         
         After lunch the Wismer family were all ready for a rest, Agnes and Bertie upon a large throw rug which they had been sitting upon; the girls retreating to the car.
         “That was a nice meal,” thanked Iain.
         “The girls were afraid that you were a serial killer,” said Agnes.
         “Mum!” cried the three girls.
         “They thought you might carry a gun or a knife,” explained Bertie.
         “Dad!” cried the three girls.
         “Don’t worry, girls, I never carry weapons, I don’t need them,” said Iain.
         Reaching toward his left heel, he twisted something, and began to stretch out in height and width, and slowly his pale white skin started to take on a burnished bronze hue, until he looked like gigantic bronze statue rather than a man.
         “What the fuck?” asked Agnes, swearing in front of the girls for the first and last time.
         “I am called Colossus in this form!” boomed the once-was-man.
         “How the fuck?” asked Bertie as the Colossus of Rhodes, long vanished reappeared and advanced upon them.
         When at his full height, thirty-three metres (or 108 feet) the Colossus raised his right foot, and before Agnes or Bertie could react, he slammed his foot down upon them, crush to paste the two humans and the picnic leftovers.
         “Dad!” shrieked May before fainting.
         “Mum!” shrieked June before fainting.
         April clicked off a series of pictures of the Colossus, before also passing out.
         Hearing the phone clicking, the Colossus turned, raised his left foot and stomped the Hyundai Palisade and the three young girls flat, until the roof of the car was literally touching the floor. The creature smiled as the prestige car squealed like a dying animal beneath his foot as it shrunk down crushing to paste the three unconscious girls.
         
         Mannie and Tory Questal were out doing their daily jog through the forest; something that Tory had insisted upon after discovering that Mannie had been strolling the three kilometres to and from work every day; instead of jogging as he had promised her.
         “Haven’t we gone far enough, honey?” asked, begged Mannie, forty-eight, a tall brown haired man running a little to fat.
         “Just another kilometre,” encouraged Victoria, ‘Tory’, forty-five, a tall mildly pretty blonde: “Until we can really feel the burn.”
         “My legs, heart, and back are burning already,” insisted Mannie, only slightly exaggerating his discomfort.
         “All right, we just go past that grove of blue gums, and then we can rest for twenty minutes before heading back. I know it’s harder for you than for me, because I’ve always had a good health ethic; but if we stick to it, by Christmas you’ll have worn off that paunch and will be as fit as I am.”
         “If I’m not dead before then,” insisted Mannie.
         Laughing, Tory led him through the blue gums, stopping to stare in shock at the compacted Hyundai Palisade.
         “Thank God,” said Mannie as his wife stopped. Then seeing the car: “Was that the Wismers’s Hyundai?”
         “I think so,” said Tory.
         She raced across to try to see inside the crushed vehicle. Looking back at her husband, she said:
         “Oh, my God, Mannie, I think the girls are inside.”
         “How can they be, it’s as flat as a pancake?” said Mannie.
         Then realising what Tory meant, he turned and threw up upon the dried pine needles and gum leaves.
         “Stay there, honey,” warned Tory.
         She did her best to look into the flattened car, before using her mobile phone to take a few gruesome photos.
         
         Terri and the others continued to practice shooting at the trees until 12:00 before deciding to take time off for lunch.
         “I’m certain Mrs. M. won’t mind having a few extras for lunch,” said Terri: “She always makes plenty.”
         “Okey doke,” said Stanlee Dempsey as they all headed into the Yellow House at 57 Rochester Road Merridale.
         Inside the aptly named building, which was yellow inside and out, they met Deidre Morton, a short chubby sixty-something brunette.
         “Ah, a couple of guests,” said Deidre, “welcome everybody.”
         She led them into the yellow-walled dining room, which had a large oval-shaped blackwood desk with a yellow table cloth.
         They had finished the main course and were just waiting for dessert when Terri’s mobile phone.
         “Sheila’s not here, so I’ll have to say it,” teased Leo Laxman, a tall, thin Jamaican who now worked as a nurse at the local hospital: “Why do they always ring while we’re still eating dinner?”
         “Then she would say, quickly scoff down your dessert,” teased Tommy Turner, a short, chubby, blond retiree.
         “There will be no scoffing of dessert, or anything else, at my house,” insisted Deidre.
         “No, but it is what Sheila would say,” agreed Natasha Lipzing, a tall, grey-haired lady in her early seventies.
         “So, Leo, how are you feeling about Tuesday?” asked Freddy Kingston, a tall, balding retiree.
         “I’ve just discovered over the last week or so what the expression ‘Butterflies in the stomach’ actually means. I love Topaz, but getting married and moving into her house is a big step.”
         “But you two are a perfect couple,” insisted Natasha.
         “Although I don’t see why you have to move?” asked Deidre: “There’s plenty of room for you both here.”
         “Yes, but Topaz owns her own house, which she inherited from a favourite uncle, so we might as well live together there.”
         Finally Terri hung up and said, “That was Tory Questal. She’s found the crushed remains of the Wismers’s Hyundai Palisade, with what she thinks is the mashed remains of April, May, and June in it.”
         “To quote Sheila ‘Yeech!’” said Natasha.
         “Can you keep some of your delicious pineapple pie for us when we get back?” asked Terri as the cops stood.
         “By that she means lock it in your fridge so that Tommy can’t eat it all,” explained Natasha.
         “Why does everyone assume that I’m a thieving glutton?” demanded Tommy.
         “He really doesn’t know, does he?” asked Freddy, making everyone except Tommy laugh.
         
         The Edgbaston family were in their co-owned Toyota Land-Cruiser 300 Series, pulling a long trailer with their ten-metre yacht, the Wasted Endeavour, on their way for an afternoon’s sailing at Lake Cooper outside Harpertown.
         “So tell me why we are going all the way from Elroy where we live, to Harpertown?” asked Britney ‘Brit’, thirty-six, a tall, curvy ravenette, Jestyn’s wife.
         “Yes,” agreed Dorothy ‘Dot’, thirty-five, a medium height brunette, with wire-frame glasses: “When we could just as easily have gone to the Yannan River.”
         “You can’t launch a fine yacht like the Wasted Endeavour in the Yannan River,” protested Jestyn ‘Jest’, thirty-nine, a tall, powerfully built redheaded man.
         “Absolutely not,” agreed his brother, Willem ‘Will’, thirty-eight, a short but powerfully built, blond man: “You require a proper body of water, like Lake Cooper.”
         “Which brings us to the next question,” said Brit: “Why did you call the boat the Wasted Endeavour?”
         “Firstly, it’s a ten-metre yacht, not a boat,” insisted Jest: “Secondly, what is the most famous ship in history as far as Australia is concerned?”
         “I don’t know,” teased Dot: “The Queen Mary maybe?”
         “One of the Flotto Lauro liners?” teased Brit.
         “No, my beautiful, but snarky wife,” said Jest: “Captain Cook’s lead ship, the Endeavour.”
         “It was the first ship to circumnavigate Australia in 1770,” said Will.
         “I thought Dirk Hartog was the first European here in 1616?” teased Dot.
         “No, Willem Janszoon was a decade earlier, in 1606,” added Brit.
         “Well I know Abel Tasman in the 1640s became the first European to sight Tasmania and New Zealand,” added Dot.
         “All right, our beautiful, but snarky wives,” called Will to stop them: “Regardless of any Dutch explorers in the 1600s, the man who established Australia as a place for colonisation was Captain Cook in the Endeavour.”
         “Firstly, what does snarky even mean?” demanded Brit.
         “I’m sure they’ve just made it up to impress us,” insisted Dot.
         “It’s amazing how badly they can fail at that,” teased Brit.
         “Regardless, our snarky ladies,” said Jest: “Since the Endeavour was as Aussie sounding a name possible for a ship, and we couldn’t use that name ... we modified it to the Wasted Endeavour.”
         “It still seems a strange name for a boat ... yacht,” Dot said.
         “Actually, it’s the story of their lives ... wasted endeavours,” said Brit, making the two women laugh.
         “My beautiful snarky wife, I would pull over and paddle your wonderful round backside,” said Jest: “If you weren’t such a great bang in bed.”
         Considering for a moment, Britney asked, “Should I thank him, or kill him for that comment?”
         “If it were me, I’d kill him,” advised Dot.
         
         Standing around the crushed remains of the Wismer family’s Hyundai Palisade Colin took the death scene pictures, since Sheila was not there, while the others watched on in horror.
         “The poor girls,” said Wendy Pearson, “being crushed to death.”
         “Hopefully it was quick,” said Stanlee Dempsey: “But the sixty-four million dollar question is, how the Hell could an eight-seater SUV be crushed so thoroughly flat?”
         “Ed Bussy could do it at his wrecker’s yard in Wentworth Street,” said Terri: “But I don’t see how his many-tonnes-weight auto-crusher could have been shifted here to crush a car, then returned to Glen Hartwell without Ed noticing it had been missing.”
         “If Sheila were here she’d come up with a Doctor Who or Torchwood solution?” teased Wendy.
         “Like the rift in spare-time that Sheils is convinced exists over Glen Hartwell, grabbed Ed’s auto-wrecker, dropped it here, then after some maniac used it on the Wismers’s car, the rift took it back to Ed’s wreckers yard,” teased Colin.
         “That sounds completely plausible to me,” said Sheila, after climbing out of one of five ambulances that pulled up to collect the corpses.
         “What are you doing back here?” asked Colin.
         “Suzette Cummings rang the gym to tell us what had happened,” explained Alice Walker after climbing from the same ambulance.
         “Well, she’s smarter than me,” said Terri: “Because I’m damned if I know what happened here.”
         “We still haven’t looked for Albert or Agnes yet,’ said Terri.
         “They’re over there in that large hole, which looks remarkably like a gigantic footprint,” said Sheila: “We almost drove into it when we arrived.
         “So how are we supposed to remove them respectfully?” asked Derek Armstrong, a tall black American, staring in horror at the huge squashed messes that had been Bertie and Agnes Wismer.
         “I don’t know if we can,” said Cheryl Pritchard, a tall Amazonian brunette in her mid sixties.
         Going to the rear of the ambulance she took out a couple of buckets and short-handled spades to remove the corpses.
         “Hold on,” said Sheila, racing across: “I haven’t taken the death scene pix yet.”
         She took out her mobile phone and preceded to do so.
         Tilly Lombstrom and Elvis Green also stepped from the ambulances.
         “So what do you make of these, Docs?” asked Sheila.
         “Best guess, they’ve been squinched into paste by someone or something unknown,” said Elvis Green, the local coroner, nicknamed due to his long black sideburns.
         “Don’t baffled us with technical terminology, Pelvis,” teased Sheila.
         “About all we can do, when we get the remains back to the hospital,” said Tilly, a tall attractive fifty-something brunette, “is use DNA testing to establish who they were.”
         “So, we’re accepting the cause of death as ‘squinched flat’?” asked Terri.
         “Yes,” agreed Tilly and Elvis as one.
         “You’re right about them baffling us with technical terminology, Sheils,” said Alice Walker.
         “God knows what the Assistant Commissioner will think when you send in the report on this one,” said Colin as they headed back to the Jeep.
         “Oh, we don’t send him reports anymore,” explained Terri, “he said it was too stressful; now we just send him the costing for each case.”
         “It’s only on the rare normal cases that we send him a report,” added Sheila.
         “You really have nearly broken the poor man,” teased.
         “It’s not my fault!” insisted Terri.
         They climbed into the Jeep to await the arrival of Hermione Meldon.
         
         At Lake Cooper, the Edgbaston family had managed to get the Wasted Endeavour into the water without too much trouble and the men were happily fishing over the side, while the women were reading women’s magazines in Brit’s case, or romance novels in Dot’s case.
         “Oh if only we could meet men like Count Edgar in Vampire Don Juan,” fantasised Dot.
         “Isn’t he a vampire?” asked Brit.
         “Yes, but he could suck my blood any day. He wines and dines his victims before making love to them, while biting their necks.”
         “Not their breasts like in Hammer Horror Films?”
         “Strangely enough, no; when my man wants sex, he just says, ‘Spread ‘em white, so I can mount you’.”
         “The last of the gross romantics,” said Brit: “When my man wants sex, he just says, ‘How about it Hotstuff?’ I think that’s why he’s called Jest.”
         “At least he calls you Hotstuff; mine calls me ‘Hey you’, or ‘you with the knockers’.”
         “Well, at least he’s finally worked out what sex you are.”
         “It took him a few years, though,” said Dot, making the two women laugh.
         “Uh-oh,” said Will, “when the Sheilas staff guffawing, it means they’re laughing at us behind our backs.”
         “It’s an essential part of being a 21^st century woman, I think,” said Jest: “Putting down your man in front of other women.”
         “Nah, women have always been like that. That’s why they say Hen’s Party; it’s where the chicks gather to start pecking away at their men. When we have to worry is when they stop laughing at us behind our backs.”
         “You speak much wisdom, younger brother,” said Jest.
         Since they had not bothered to drop anchor, the Wasted Endeavour had been slowly drifting around the serpentine lake over the last hour or so. It was perhaps a third of the way around the eight kilometre lake, when it suddenly stopped with a clunk.
         “What was that?” asked Jest, almost falling overboard.
         “We hit something,” said Brit.
         Looking around she saw two tall golden columns.
         “What a stupid place to put two bronze columns,” said Dot.
         “I am the Colossus of Rhodes,” boomed the living statue glaring down at the four people.
         Looking up, the Edgbastons saw the bronze man glaring down at them.
         “What a stupid place to put a bronze statue,” said Will, looking down at the minor damage done to the stern of the Wasted Endeavour.
         “And what a stupid thing for it to say,” said Brit, a bit of a history buff: “The Colossus of Rhodes has been missing for thousands of years; as if it would suddenly turn up in Lake Cooper.”
         “I am the Colossus of Rhodes,” boomed the living statue again.
         “Yeah, yeah, you already said that,” said Dot.
         “It must have only one vocal track,” said Jest: “Like those talking rubber sex dolls.”
         “Oh, yes!” teased Will.
         “I never thought if he cheated on me, it would be with a rubber sex doll,” teased Brit, making everyone laugh.
         “I am the Colossus of Rhodes,” boomed the living statue, louder and more angrily than before.
         Bending low, the Colossus scooped up the Wasted Endeavour and lifted it head high. Reaching in, it lifted out Brit and threw her into its mouth and chomped her rapidly to death.
         “Britney!” shrieked Jestyn, not believing his eyes.
         Reaching in again, the Colossus grabbed Dot and threw her into its mouth, which was now coated red and pink from the bloody, gory remains of Brit.
         “Help ...” Dot managed to cry, before being ground to mash by the living statue’s bronze teeth.
         “Oh God, my poor Dotty!” cried Willem.
         “I am the Colossus of Rhodes,” boomed the living statue one last time before raising the Wasted Endeavour like a discus and hurling it.
         The girls were right about wasted endeavour being the story of our lives, thought Jestyn before the yacht crashed into the ground two kilometres away; killing both men upon impact.
         
         After the remains of Albert and Agnes Wismer were scooped up to be taken to the Glen Hartwell and Daley Community Hospital, a red fire truck arrived with Hermione Meldon the local fire chief. Using the jaws-of-life she quickly cut away enough of the Hyundai Palisade for the paramedics to scoop out the remains of April, May, and June Wismer to also be taken to the hospital.
         “The poor girls,” said Hermione, a tall, Amazonian brunette in her early forties: “So what are we looking for, a giant elephant?”
         “You don’t think Behemoth has returned?” asked Sheila.
         “Behemoth was eaten by Leviathan in case you’ve forgotten,” reminded Colin.
         “Oh, yeah,” said Sheila: “Our witchy friend, Magnolia McCready, saved our pork and beans on that one.”
         “I think the expression is saved our bacon,” said Colin as the Jeep started after the ambulances.
         Forty-seven minutes later the white Jeep Cherokee pulled up in the car park outside the Glen Hartwell Hospital.
         “Finally made it here,” teased Cheryl Pritchard
         “How are Tils and Elvis?” asked Sheila as they alighted from the Jeep.
         “Down in the basement morgue with Jesus,” explained Derek Armstrong.
         “So, what’s up, Docs?” asked Sheila as they arrived in the basement.
         “Oh God,” said Tilly, “if she starts asking if we’re nearly done yet, I’ll scream.”
         “Are you nearly done yet?” teased Sheila: “What, no scream?”
         “I suppose it’s too early to have discovered anything?” asked Colin.
         “Actually we’ve confirmed the identity of Agnes and Albert, due to their DNA being on record from when they were both patients here,” confirmed Jesus Costello, a tall, strongly build dark haired man, the administrator and chief surgeon of the hospital.
         “Agnes from when she gave birth, and Albert after he broke his left leg a decade or so ago,” said Tilly.
         “You know, Tils,” said Sheila: “If your name were Madonna, we could say we have Jesus, Madonna, and Elvis all working here.”
         “I refuse to change my name, just to please you, Sheils.”
         Leaving the hospital, Terri and the others returned to the death site outside Brooklyn to follow the giant footprints.
         “The trick won’t be to follow them, but not to drive into them,” said Colin.
         “They’re nearly a metre deep, so I don’t know how we’d get the Jeep out again,” said Sheila, without taking her eyes off the forest ahead.
         They continued to follow the giant footsteps until they suddenly vanished, to be replaced by a set of barefoot, size eleven men’s footprints.
         “Okay, the trick has just become a little trickier,” said Terri, calling off the search for the night, after marking the co-ordinates to start again after breakfast the next day.
         
         At 7:30 sharp the next morning, Harry Hancock, started waking up his tenants at his small campsite, a few kilometres outside Elroy Township. He had four four-bed wooden bunkrooms each with a small en-suite. Also, a gymnasium-cum-storage building, and a dining room-cum-kitchen building. All were built of solid red gum or blue gum, all without planning permission or permits of any kind from the local council, or permission to log the trees used to build the campsite.
         “Wakey, wakey, eggs and baccy,” called Harry, a tall, muscular dark-haired man in his fifties, knocking at the door of cabin one.
         “I thought Jews didn’t eat bacon,” called back Horace ‘Horry’ Harrison, fifty-two, a tall balding man.
         “It’s a saying, Horry,” called back Harry.
         “Ignore him, Harry,” called Horry’s wife, Claudette ‘Claude’, forty-eight, a tall buxom redhead with grey streaks in her hair: “He thinks he’s a wit, but he’s only half right.”
         “Ha-ha, it is to laugh,” said Horry: “One of these days, Claude, pow, zoom, straight to the moon.”
         “Now he thinks he’s Jacky Gleeson,” said Harry.
         “More like Jerky Gruesome,” said Claude, making everyone except Horry laugh.
         “That’s a good one, Mum,” said Neville ‘Nev’, fourteen, a tall, lanky redheaded boy.
         “Yeah, you really nailed Dad good that time, Mum,” said Winifred ‘Winnie’, thirteen, a short brunette girl, with braces.
         “What is this, get poor Horry day?”
         “You can’t be too poor, if you could afford a weekend for four at this place,” insisted Claude.
         “Pow, zoom, straight to the moon,” repeated Horry as they started to get up.
         “One of these days, I’ll pow, zoom him, straight to the moon,” warned Claude, making the teenagers laugh.
         “That was another good one, Mum,” said Winnie.
         “Yeah, we’ll have to nickname you Nailgun, if you keep nailing Dad like that,” said Nev, between laughter.
         “That was not a good one, it was a stupid one,” insisted Horry.
         Fifteen minutes later, they and a dozen or so others were seated at chairs at the wooden tables in the dining room.
         “All right, bring on the grub,” called Horry.
         “Are you forgetting what day this is?” asked Harry.
         “Yeah, it’s Sunday, so what?”
         “It is the Lord’s Day, and we are having a half hour religious service before breakfast today.”
         “What?” demanded Horry: “If I’d known that, I could’ve stayed in bed an extra half an hour.”
         “You Philistine!” cried Claude.
         “Anyway, we don’t want a Jewish service, we’re Catholics.”
         “I’ll be conducting a non-denominational Christian service.”
         “But you’re Jewish!” protested Horry.
         “Strangely enough, I notice that every time I take a pee,” said Harry, making everyone except Horry Laugh.
         
         It was an hour later, when Terri Klein and the others set out in her police-white Jeep Cherokee to continue following the Colossus’s suddenly man-sized footprints. They had been on the trail for about fifty minutes, when they got a call from Suzette Cummings at Mitchell Street Police Station, telling them that Lulu Wellins had been out walking her dog, when she had found the yacht ‘Wasted Endeavours’ crashed two kilometres from Lake Cooper.
         “Two kilometres from Lake Cooper, or two kilometres around Lake Cooper?” queried Terri.
         “She stressed two kilometres from Lake Cooper, in the middle of a blue gum grove,” insisted Suzette.
         Thirty-eight minutes later they were standing around, looking at the smashed remains of the Wasted Endeavour, with the shattered remains of Jestyn and Willem Edgbaston around it. Beside them stood Luella ‘Lulu’ Wellins, eighteen, a petite pixie-cut brunette teen, and her a massive bull mastiff ‘Woof’.
         “We were just out walking through the forest and we found it,” said Lulu.
         “It’s a mystery, I’ll say that,” said Terri.
         “Woof,” agreed Woof.
         “I couldn’t have put it better myself,” said Sheila patting the big dog.
         They all looked up at the sky, as though wondering how a yacht could have fallen two kilometres from the nearest waterway.
         “It must have fallen through a time and space rift,” insisted Sheila.
         “But it says Endeavour on the main part of it,” said Lulu: “And the four Edgbaston’s owned the Wasted Endeavour.”
         “Maybe aliens lifted it in a tractor beam and it slipped out and crashed back to Earth,” suggested the Goth policewoman.
         “Of more importance,” said Colin, “where are Britney and Dorothy Edgbaston? All we have here is Willem in the wreckage of the yacht, and Jestyn a hundred metres or so away from it.”
         “Yes,” agreed Terri: “Willem and Jestyn would never have gone out yachting without Brit and Dotty.”
         
         Over at the campsite, to Horry Harrison’s delight, the service was over, and they had started to have breakfast, scrambled, or poached eggs, with bacon, beef sausages, and or mashed potatoes, mashed pumpkin, peas, beans, and carrots. However, they had barely started eating, when there came a horrendous wooden crashing sound from outside.
         “What the Hell was that?” demanded Claude.
         “Don’t care, eating,” said Horry, scooping food greedily into his mouth.
         “I’ve seen steam-shovels that pile in food less greedily than you,” taunted Claude.
         “Don’t care, eating,” repeated Horry.
         As the crashing continued, Harry, Claude, and most of the others got up to go outside to check.
         Cabins one and two had been crushed flat, reduced to little more than kindling.
         “My MP3 player!” said Winnie.
         “That’s nothing,” said Nev: “The Stevensons left their dog in cabin two.”
         “Ruff-Ruff!” cried a short fat fifty-something woman, Bridget, racing across to the kindling which had been Cabin 2.
         Hearing another wooden crashing sound, they looked around to the right, where they saw the living statue, the Colossus of Rhodes, standing upon the crushed ruins of Cabin 3.
         “Get away from that, you freak!” shrieked Harry Hancock.
         “I am the Colossus of Rhodes!” boomed the bronze statue.
         It raised its right foot to stamp upon Harry, who, along with a dozen other people, turned and fled into the pine and eucalyptus forest.
         “I am the Colossus of Rhodes!” boomed the bronze statue again as it started after the fleeing campers.
         “Oh, my God, I’m gonna die!” cried Bridget Stevenson, seconds before the Colossus stamped her and four other people into paste.
         “Keep running,” cried Harry, trying to help the slower runners.
         At first the runners seemed to have no chance, but then the trees began to grow closer together and reach greater heights, dwarfing even the Colossus’s thirty-three metres.
         “I am the Colossus of Rhodes!” boomed the bronze statue, angrily uprooting old-growth gum trees and tossing them toward the fleeing campers.
         Winnie shrieked as a tall red gum flew toward her; however, it went straight over her head crushing to death a couple at the front of the procession.
         With the passage blocked, the few remaining runners had to take a hard left to get around the tree, an action which saved their lives as two more old-growth trees crashed down just beyond the first tree.
         
         Terri and the police were still at the site where the wrecked yacht ‘Wasted Endeavour’ lay, talking to Tilly, and Jesus, when Terri’s phone rang. Connecting, she talked for a minute, then said:
         “That was Harry Hancock,”
         “Has he still got his illegal campsite outside Elroy?” asked Colin.
         “Not anymore,” said Terri. She played them a video of the Colossus stomping through the forest: “Apparently, it stomped flat the first three cabins, plus the Stevensons’s dog.”
         “Oh, not Ruff-Ruff,” said Sheila.
         “Afraid so,” said Terri. She turned up the speaker so they heard the rampaging statue say:
         “I am the Colossus of Rhodes.”
         “The whosits of what now?” asked Sheila.
         “The Colossus of Rhodes,” repeated Colin, relying on his thirty years as a London journalist for knowledge: “It was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World before it mysteriously vanished.”
         “So how do we defeat it?” asked Terri.
         “According to legend, it was animated by a green liquid poured into its left leg, through a plugged hole.”
         “So, if we can let the green stuff out, we can de-animate it?” asked Sheila.
         “Exactly.”
         “So where’s the bazooka?”
         “In the boot of the Jeep,” said Terri: “We put it back yesterday after you’d finished trying to murder every koala in the area.”
         
         In the forest around Elroy, the Colossus had killed all except Harry Hancock, the Harrisons, and two other campers.
         “Oh God, I don’t think I can run much further,” complained Claude.
         “Come on Mum,” said Nev.
         He and Winnie each grabbed their mother by one arm and started pulling her along with them.
         “Oh Lord, just leave me to die,” said Claude, “I’m about to have a heart attack any second.”
         At that moment, they heard the sound of a siren, and Terri’s Jeep Cherokee appeared just ahead of them. Seeing the Colossus not far behind the runners, Sheila swerved the Jeep to the right to loop around behind the statue.
         Hearing the annoying siren, the Colossus hesitated, not certain whom to chase after, the runners or the car. Finally, it continued after the runners, now seriously slowed down by the old-growth gum trees.
         Stopping the Jeep less than ten metres behind the living statue, Sheila jumped out and raced around to take the bazooka and a box of shells from the boot. Slamming a shell into the bazooka, she aimed it at the bronze statue.
         “Cop that, young Harry!” cried Sheila firing the bazooka.
         Unfortunately, too wide so that the shell shattered an old growth pine tree on the right of the living statue.
         “Try to hit the Colossus!” shouted Colin.
         “Thank you, Professor Obvious,” shouted back Sheila loading a second shell into the bazooka.
         This time it detonated in the small of the statue’s bronze back, making the statue grunt, but without stopping it.
         “No, Dingleberry, hit that small plug-like thing just above its left foot.”
         “Calling me a Dingleberry!” grizzled Sheila loading a third shell.
         This time the shell hit half on, half off the plug, bending the plug inwards, but not destroying it.
         “I know, aim better!” called Sheila loading a fourth shell.
         This time she hit the plug-shaped object dead on, shattering it and allowing a flood of thick green fluid to pour out.
         “Yatzi!” cried Sheila.
         Grabbing the box of shells, she raced back toward the others in case the Colossus fell backwards.
         Instead, it screamed, “I am the Colossus ....”
         Before stopping still in mid step.
         “We’d better collect some of that goop for Tilly to analyse,” said Terri.
         Back at the campsite, Horry Harrison had enjoyed a massive breakfast of scrambled eggs and poached, mashed potatoes, carrots, toast, bacon, and a mountain of crispy chips. Finally finished, he let out a loud burp and walked out into the camp ground.
         “What the fuck?” asked Horry, staring at the three shattered cabins: “What the Hell happened here?”
         

         THE END

         © Copyright 2026 Philip Roberts

         Melbourne, Victoria, Australia