The Other Normals

by Ned Vizzini

  “I picked Ember. After I started working with Mortin.”

  “Why?”

  “Because embers turn into flames.”

  That’s because a name has to mean something.

  “Hey!” Mortin calls. “John Johnson! C’mere!”

  I don’t want to go, but it sounds like I’m needed. “I’m gonna …”

  “Go.” Ada nods, understanding.

  69

  THE CAMPFIRE PIT IS A HEAP OF ASH AND half-burned logs inside a circle of smooth stones.

  “We have to make a fire from this,” Mortin says. “Thought you might be able to help.”

  “Can’t you do it?”

  “My lighter’s smashed, remember?”

  “City folk.” Pula smiles.

  “It’s not going to be easy,” Mortin says. “We found this on top.” He indicates a big rock in the grass. “We pushed it aside, but there’s not much underneath. I don’t see any kindling. How’d the people who made this fire even get the logs?”

  “They brought themselves,” Pula says. “In packs. Few days ago.”

  “You saw them? Who were they?”

  “Travelers. Different kinds. Some with the big fishy head, one with the slime feet. Lotsa weapons. Headed back the way you came. They stayed one night and went. You got enough wood left from them if you can start it.”

  “Why can’t you start it?”

  “Oh, I dunno how. Only the grown-ups are ’lowed to start fires.”

  “We can do it if we’ve got a log, a stick, and a string,” I say. “I mean, I’ve never done it, but that’s how you do it in C and C.”

  “What’s that?” Pula asks.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Mortin says. “That’s like a code word for this kid. Here’s your string.” He pulls a loose thread off the bottom of his getma. “And here’s a log.” He pulls a half-burned one from the fire pit.

  I look closer at the ash. It goes deep. Was this fire used on multiple nights? And why was the rock on top of it? Did whoever built it snuff it out?

  I set the log on the ground. It’s split down the middle, as if by an ax, which is good for me—it means the flammable flaky wood in the center is exposed.

  “I need a stick.” Ada approaches. She hands me a six-inch shaft of wood.

  “What’s this?”

  “Broke it off a spear in one of our many battles.”

  “Perfect. Now a knife. Anybody? Gamary? Your ax?”

  Gamary shakes his head.

  “Somebody has to have something! Ada, can I see the princess figure?”

  She hands it to me. I inspect the ragged bottom of the princess’s torso. There’s one piece of metal that seems sharp enough. I try it against the spear shaft. It shaves the wood off, but only a tiny bit. This is going to be painstaking work. Luckily I can do painstaking work. I used to be in Summer Scholars.

  I sit in the grass and use the princess figure to whittle Ada’s spear shaft to a fine point. It takes forever. Pula slobbers as he watches; I figure he can’t control that and it would be rude to mention. He scratches his ear, and I notice something odd about his hand. It’s a human hand, but different somehow, like there’s an extra finger.... It’s too dark to tell. I look back at the spear shaft. The point seems sharp enough. I wrap the string around the shaft once and press the point into the log. Holding one end of the string loosely, I pull on the other. The shaft spins in the log … and quickly hops into the grass.

  “I need another string to keep it stable.”

  Ada pulls a thread off her top and wraps it around the shaft, above the string that’s already there. Now it’s balanced, and if we pull together, maybe we can get it to spin without flying off.

  “One … two … go,” I say. Ada pulls her string as I pull mine. The shaft spins in the log, sending up a tiny bit of smoke that curls away under the stars. Once again, though, the stick jumps out beside us.

  “I got an idea,” Gamary says. “Put it back.”

  We reposition the shaft in the log. Gamary sticks the princess figure on top of it, holding it in place with her jagged nether region. “Now try.”

  Ada and I pull our strings at once. The stick spins but stays still, like a top, with the princess securing it. I swear the figure mouths at me, Good job.

  “Other way!” Ada says, and we pull back, twirling the shaft in the other direction. Smoke puffs up. “Other way now! Keep going!”

  “It’s good!” Pula says. “Almost got it!”

  Ada and I lock eyes, pulling our strings back and forth in sync, spinning the shaft in the log—

  With a piff, a tiny flame bursts up.

  “Yay!” Pula calls.

  “Don’t let it go out!” Mortin says.

  “Move,” Ada tells me, and she breathes, calm and insistent, on the nascent flame. It hesitates, blocky and orange, and then takes root in the log as she slips it into the fire pit.

  “You did it!” I tell her.

  “We did it,” she says.

  Within a minute we have a full-on fire burning bright under the stars. It’s better than television. It feels so good. It looks so mesmerizing. For a moment I’m happier than I can ever remember being. Then Mortin says, “Now’s a time to celebrate. Where there’s fire, there’s smoke. None of you have pebbles and a pipe, do you?”

  We all keep quiet.

  “Gamary?”

  “No, Mortin.”

  “You’re not holding out on me, are you?”

  “No—”

  “I know you are!” Mortin rushes Gamary and presses his hand against his okapi underbelly. It takes a second for me to realize that he’s pushing into him, into a pouch that Gamary has at his front. Mortin pulls out a small pipe and a handful of pebbles.

  “See? How did I know?”

  “Mortin, that isn’t for you!”

  “You cheap bastard! No wonder you ended up a thaklord. Keeping it to yourself.” Mortin lights up, figuratively in terms of his expression and literally with the pipe, which he stuffs with pebbles and holds over the fire with the tip of his tail. Once the rocks are steaming, he puffs and passes to Gamary.

  “Fine, just to celebrate the fire.” Gamary lies down like a horse. “But I’m enabling an addict.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “What do the pebbles do?”

  “It’s the quartz,” Mortin answers. “It interacts with other-normal brains. Quite pleasantly.”

  “Can I try?”

  “Won’t work for you. And you’ve got a big enough addiction.”

  “What?”

  “Do I have to spell it out for you? You know, John Johnson.”

  But I don’t, really. I rack my brain thinking about it while Mortin and Gamary pass the pipe and laugh and the fire reaches into the sky. I know it isn’t a good idea for them to smoke—Ada won’t even look at them—but what can I say?

  “I’m hungry,” Gamary says finally. He and Mortin have been having an emotional chat about his daughter. “There’s gotta be some fish in that stream. Can somebody spear one?”

  “City dwellers done good,” says Pula. He holds his hands to the fire. In the light of the flame, I see what’s wrong with them: his thumbs are tiny. Underdeveloped. They have only one knuckle, and they stick out across his palms instead of away from them. He has no opposable thumbs. He couldn’t start a fire if he tried. “Got the good fire going, drank some water, nice and juicy, smoking up, extra flavor, best way to have a barbecue.”

  “Oh crap,” Mortin says. “What did he say?”

  Pula rocks back and forth on his heels, talking to himself. “Ain’t had a barbecue in the Echoing Hills for a week, no fires anywhere, but I knew how to save one, huh? And I got it started up again.”

  He turns his head to the moon and howls. The sound echoes through the hills—louder than any cry we heard in the day, and louder than any of his puuu- la calls.

  “You little punk!” Mortin leaps across the fire at him. Pula laughs and runs toward the stream. Answering wolf c
alls sound off the grass.

  All around us, from the top of each hill surrounding the campfire, heads appear: slavering, hairy, pointed. The heads creep forward, on top of men and women on all fours.

  “Barbecue!” Pula calls, dancing by the stream. “Barbecue!”

  70

  A DOZEN CYNOS CIRCLE US. THEY MUST’VE been following all day, tracking my idiotic game of Marco Pula. They crawl closer, slinky and confident. Their hairy arms glisten in the moonlight. They wear getmas; the women let their breasts hang freely below them, which distracts me.

  I back against the fire with Ada, Gamary, and Mortin.

  “These two are smokified inside!” Pula yells. “And this one’s got the girlyparts! But don’t hurt him! He’s my mutant friend.”

  “I’m your friend? Pula, if I’m your friend, let us all out of here!”

  “Nuh-uh. Your friends gotta go in the barbecue; you can stay with me.”

  A big male dog-head comes up to him. One of his eyes is a slit with skin tags on it and tears dribbling out the side.

  “You did good,” he says, and then he speaks a name that vanishes in the air. Pula’s real name. “This fire we gonna keep going a long time.” He licks Pula’s head. “But they all gotta go in the barbecue.”

  “No, Daddy, no!” Pula squats in front of me, throwing his arms across my legs. “Not John Johnson!”

  “C’mere, you,” Mortin says. In one quick motion, he grabs Pula, lifts him off the ground by his collar, and holds him to the fire. “Back off, you savages! Or you’ll be having him for barbecue.”

  “Ow!” Pula struggles. “You’re strangling me, you big stupid!”

  The dog-heads look to Pula’s father. “You got a count of three to let us out of here!” Mortin orders. His voice echoes through the hills: here, here, here, calling from different slopes.

  “Daddy, it hurts!”

  “Three!”

  Three, three, three.

  “That’s what happens when you get too close to your food, Son.”

  “Two!”

  Two, two, two.

  “Daddy, help me!”

  “One!”

  Pula’s father opens his mouth wide and clacks his teeth shut. The dog-heads leap and attack.

  They tear Pula out of Mortin’s hands. His collar comes off and Mortin stares at it, agog, as they fling Pula to the ground and rip his stomach open. He flails and gnashes his teeth as hungry dog-heads toss his innards out on the grass.

  “Holy crap!” Mortin yells. “Gamary, c’mon!”

  A dog-head jumps at Mortin. He ducks. It sails over him and narrowly avoids landing in the fire, scrambling to the side as Gamary kneels and Mortin climbs onto his back. Two dog-heads leap at Ada. She whips them with the only weapon she has—the princess figure—and tears into the ear of one and the eye of the other.

  A female pounces at me; I kick at her. She watches my foot fly over her head and bites calmly into my calf. I fall. A snarling face jabs forward at me—

  And Ada knocks it away, loosening several canine teeth.

  “Get up!” Another one is already on me, a male, at my ankle. My bad ankle. I kick his face and reach toward the campfire to grab a log. The end of the log is on fire, and it makes a pretty comet trail as I fling it at him. It lands on his head. He howls, fur flaring up, face sizzling. He runs to the stream to put himself out. The log burns in the grass. The dog-heads take notice.

  “Get it!”

  “Stamp it out!”

  They run to it. This makes sense. Lots of animals don’t like fire. There are monsters in C&C that you get a bonus against if you have fire. I grab another log and wave it at the dog-heads, pulling it through the air like a matador, trailing flame.

  “Back off!”

  They snap and growl. My leg is bleeding. They seethe and spit at the heat.

  “Come on!” Gamary yells. “Hurry up!” He kneels with Mortin and Ada on his back.

  “I’m coming!”

  Gamary takes a log and swats at the dog-heads that attack his front, while Ada beats at the ones who circle his flanks. Mortin grabs a rock with his tail and swings it like a club (we are the stoners!), fending off the creatures at his rear. One of the cynos snatches my log with his jaws. It drops to the ground. A group of them stamp it out.

  “Peregrine!”

  They have me now. I’m separated from my friends, with no weapons. Nothing to hit the cynos with, nothing to slash them with, nothing to light on fire and throw at them …

  My getma.

  I pull it off. I’m not wearing anything underneath. Here I am, naked with naked breasts around me, but it’s all wrong. I snap the loincloth like a washcloth at the circling dog-heads. One yelps as it nicks his eye. I dip it into the fire; it catches and I have a flaming weapon again.

  “I can’t”—I swing—“believe”—I swing—“you made me”—I swing—“get naked again!”

  They part for me, growling. One attacks my back, but I spin and hit him with the burning fabric; he retreats.

  “All right, Perry! You crazy naked othersider! C’mon!”

  Almost there. I whip my getma in the air twice more as I reach Gamary’s back and hop on. The dog-heads nip at me. The flames reach my fingers, and I drop the cloth in the grass as we take off. I don’t have anything to hold on to but Ada.

  “I’m sorry Ada I know this is inappropriate I’m naked I hope—”

  “Shut up! When we met, you were naked!”

  Gamary gallops along the stream. The dog-heads follow, snarling and howling, Pula’s slit-eyed father in the lead. They snap at the okapicentaur’s flanks, which are already injured and bandaged from the fight in Subbenia. “I don’t know—huff— how much longer—”

  “Don’t start talking like that.” Mortin clocks a pursuing cyno. “We got you covered.”

  “But Mortin—huff—I can’t breathe—huff— I shouldn’t have smoked—”

  Gamary slows. I look at his sides. The bandages are streaming off him. The moonlight is making his blood black. Cynos bite his back hooves. They can’t just crawl on their hands and knees; they can run, with their knees acting as feet and their feet curled up behind them. When they get close, they rear up on two legs to take bites. The end of Gamary’s tail is gone; it bleeds onto the grass. They’re taking us down, I think, like hyenas bringing down a wildebeest.

  Roaring, Pula’s father leaps through the air and clamps down on Gamary’s leg. With a twist of the cyno’s head, Gamary’s thin shinbone snaps sideways. He screams and keels over. I jump off him and roll away in the grass. Gamary hits the ground with a thud and some cracks—his ribs. Ada gets to her feet and runs toward the stream with Mortin. I go to Gamary and grab his arms as cynos bite into his hide.

  “Bigmeat!”

  “Freshmeat!”

  I pull, like he’s a friend I’m trying to get off the couch. “Come on, Gamary. Up!”

  “No, othersider. Go with your friends. It’s too late.”

  “What about your daughter? You have to see her!”

  “I’m going to. Don’t you understand? I’m going to....”

  He smiles. A cyno snaps at me, but it isn’t to try and eat me—it’s to shoo me away from his meal. I back off, letting Gamary’s hands fall to his sides. He kicks his head back, still smiling, and collapses.

  I run, naked, crying. I shut my eyes against the image of steam rising from Gamary’s opened flesh. Behind me, his body scrapes against the grass as the dog-heads drag him away. “Barbecue!” they call. “Barbecue!”

  71

  WE REGROUP BY THE STREAM. “STUPID pebbles!” Mortin gasps. “We would’ve been fine if I weren’t smoking!” He punches the grass, wild-eyed, maddened.

  “Are you okay?”

  “No! Are you okay? What kind of stupid question is that? Don’t ask any more meaningless Earth questions. In this world, when we talk, we mean what we say. My friend just got eaten alive! I’m not okay! You’re not okay either! Your leg is bleeding and you have no clo
thes!”

  “I can help with that,” Ada says. She pulls a bandage off her shoulder from where the guard jabbed her back in Subbenia. Her wound is dark but not wet. She washes the bandage in the stream and hands it to me. It’s the bare minimum that will cover me; I put it on like a diaper. For my calf wound, she presses grass against me until the blood dries. It looks like I’m growing a small lawn, but it feels better.

  “Oh, that’s cute,” Mortin says. “You two get quality time while Gamary is eaten because I can’t keep my head straight for forty-five seconds. If I hadn’t smoked … if I’d been alert … I would’ve seen that trap coming a hundred helms away.” Mortin takes out Gamary’s pipe, which I’m sort of surprised he’s held on to in all the excitement. “No more. We’re burying this to remember him by. I don’t even need to smoke. It’s just an oral-fixation thing. Here”—he rips up a clump of grass and chews it—“just as good!”

  As Mortin chews and spits, we dig a shallow pit by the stream and place the pipe inside. I notice Pula’s leather collar around Mortin’s shoulder. “What about that?”

  “Oh, I figured we should keep it. Might need it. We don’t have much!”

  “We should bury it.” I slip it off and place it next to the pipe.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know—respect?”

  “That cannibal dog ragamuffin doesn’t deserve any respect!”

  “He tried to protect me.”

  “So?”

  “He was just a boy,” Ada says.

  “So?”

  “His dad had him ripped open in front of us!” I yell. “It’d be dishonorable not to bury something of his!”

  “Honor? What do you care about honor? Honor gets people killed!”

  I know where I’ve heard that before. Suddenly I have an idea who Mortin corresponds to. “At least they die for something,” I say, and he doesn’t protest further as we bury Gamary’s pipe and Pula’s collar, piling dirt on top until we have a small mound by the stream.

  “You want to say anything, Peregrine?” Ada asks. “You believe in God, right?”

  “Ah … it’s complicated. This whole thing … I don’t even know what I believe anymore. Do you believe in God?”