Beneath the Rising

by Premee Mohamed

  “Gross. Get away from there.”

  Up front, the girl was yelling “Monsters! Monsters!” and I could hear the pilot reply at the top of his lungs. The plane rolled slightly to either side, but the flying shapes simply sped up, getting ahead of us, perhaps a dozen of them. I didn’t need to understand French to know what he’d said: the cargo plane wasn’t a fighter jet and there was no way he could simply outmaneuver these things. The noise of the engine suddenly got much louder and I felt us start to descend.

  “Is that going to get through the window?” I said, unnecessarily, as Johnny was already dismantling one of the boxes to get a flat piece of cardboard. I helped her rip off the final seam as she rushed back to the window and slapped it against the still-intact plexiglass.

  “Don’t know, but our nice oxygenated air could all spill out if it does and if we’re too high, then—oh, there it goes. Yup.”

  The hole must not have been very big, though; the cardboard bowed noticeably, sucked to the hole, but held. We stared at it for a second, hands out as if willing it not to move. The plane was still descending—not, I thought, crashing, just getting lower and lower, the cardboard bowing less noticeably, beginning to slide. Something loud crashed against the opposite side and a window went dark. Below us I saw the beginnings of a city—roads, streetlights, even a few cars still moving around, a dark shining line that could have been a river.

  “Are we going to, like, do something about this?”

  “Don’t think I can,” she said. “We’ll see how much danger we’re—”

  There was a wrenching yowl from the back end of the plane, a noise that sounded so uncannily like a human being that we both leapt back from the stacked boxes, but it was metal ripping. The jellyfish-fungus things were stronger than they looked. The tail of the plane disappeared and spiralled out into the darkness, its signal light flickering just once, like a head still blinking as it fell off the guillotine.

  Now air did begin to roar out, fast, the metallic edge of the pressurized climate replaced with Their smell of death and decay. I covered my ears, not sure what else to do. It seemed clear that we were going to crash—just as I had predicted, not even knowing what other flights we might take before we were done. The noises blended into a white noise of crying, praying, cursing—the pilot—and the roar of the air and some of the less-tightly-staked-down cargo pouring from the rent at the back of the plane.

  “We’re almost there,” Johnny said, dreamily, hanging onto the back of the seat where an exposed metal bar made a good handgrip. “If we can land—”

  “We’re going to crash-land,” I said. “We should get back in our seats.”

  “No, I don’t think we are,” she said.

  “Is that the prodigy talking, or the optimist?” I said, sliding into the back of the seat and grabbing another metal bar that creaked alarmingly under my grip. The plane was now shuddering so hard I could barely see, except for the glowing, greenish tentacles trying to find their way over the tops of the boxes. I grabbed the handle of Johnny’s cargo pants to pull her into the aisle, away from the grasping, prehensile things.

  “Neither. I can see the runway. Hang on.”

  “You can crash into a runway!”

  I turned back as the plane bumped and landed, throwing me into the air and snapping me back down to the floor, and immediately slewing sideways as if we’d hit a patch of grease—maybe we’d dragged one of the flying monsters under the wheels? The praying couple were thrown forwards in their seatbelts, and the tourist was hurled into the cockpit, her scream cut short. The wheels howled on the runway as we spun, spilling boxes from the back where the acid must have eaten at the webbing, wings screeching and sparking as they hit the asphalt on both sides.

  We slid to a sideways stop on the runway. My stomach bucked but kept its load of bile and water—it had been a long time since I’d had anything but gum. More pressing at the moment, I’d hit my head on the metal bar and my leg had started to throb; I hadn’t said anything about it. I kept thinking: blood, venom. Should have gone to a hospital. But told them what? Bitten by a dog? Stung by a scorpion? The wound looked like neither.

  “Ready?”

  “Ready for what?” I said, automatically slinging my bag across my body.

  She pointed at the runway, ten feet below the torn steel.

  “No,” I said, “we’ll break our ankles.”

  “Grab the webbing, it’ll slow you down,” she said.

  “So we can’t use the door?” I said, glancing up to where the pilot was vomiting into the empty co-pilot seat and the three other passengers were clutching each other and sobbing.

  “Nope,” she said, pointing again. I squinted and saw the police cars approaching the front of the plane, flanked by three airport security vehicles, clearly marked. “We got rumbled.”

  “Christ, update your slang. What year is it again?”

  “Come on!”

  She was right; we’d have a short head start if we bailed out the back, where they couldn’t see. The drop was sickening, and even with the webbing I landed with a revolting crunch, tearing open more skin on my palms on the tarmac and feeling pain shoot up both shins.

  Johnny landed more lightly and took off at a dead run. It wasn’t quite dawn—the stars still shone balefully in a dark green sky—and I wondered how visible we were, me in my jeans and blue shirt, her in her khaki and gray. Our bags thudded against my back as I followed her, hoping she knew where she was going.

  She did not, judging from the language. “Shit! There’s no gate in this fence.”

  “Well how’s a gate gonna help?” I panted. “They lock those at airports.”

  “Hey, there’s no razor wire over here. Come on.”

  “What?!”

  She went over the chickenwire fence first, and as I tossed the bags over I glanced back at the wrecked plane, now brightly lit with a couple of light stands, more being rolled over by the airport staff. The open back end was surrounded by milling people, many in uniform. We had indeed taken one of the things down; something thrashed furiously under the wheels, shooting blobs of liquid that sparkled in the halogens, occasionally lashing out a tentacle that shrieked as it scraped against the asphalt or the hood of a car.

  Now they would know. Everyone would know. Whoever had doubted would no longer have any doubt, not with those things on every news channel in the world. Final days, I thought. Like seeing that darkness come over the hill.

  As I started the climb up the fence, the squares bowing under fingers and toes, the shouting redoubled—and everything suddenly turned white. My eyes adjusted after a second to see Johnny frozen in the spotlight, my shadow printed across her like paint. “Quick!” she yelled.

  I scrambled, now hearing footsteps behind us—or maybe my senses were so sharpened by panic that they sounded closer. Anyway, no time to look back. The links were too small to fit my shoes in, and my arms trembled under the effort as I clawed up the fence on sheer adrenaline, blinking frantically in the blinding light. My jeans snagged at the top, refusing to rip as I thrashed and pulled, unable to get a leg over. The voices became words as I struggled: “Stop! Halt!”

  “Nick!”

  “I’m stuck!” I couldn’t look now even if I wanted to, I was so twisted, the wire stabbing the one knee I’d swung over the top. Finally I wrenched free and toppled from the fence. I glanced back to see the officers, silhouetted in the spotlight, hesitate, clearly torn between chasing us and returning to the monster under the plane. I made their choice easier, racing after Johnny in the darkness, wiping my bloodied hands on my bag; everything hurt so constantly now that I had barely noticed catching them on the ends of the chickenwire.

  “How in the hell are people going to explain that thing?”

  “Depends on if we fail or not,” she gasped. “Remember—history—written—survivors.”

  Back around the front of the airport, neat and quiet in the early-morning chill, its blue neon sign winking unsteadily, we po
unded to the cab stand and hijacked a cab right in front of a pair of British tourists, who were too stunned or polite to yell at us as we slammed the door.

  We were, she said, headed into the city of Erbil, which was a translation—or did she say transliteration?—of ‘Four Gods,’ which gave me the creeps.

  “Which gods? Good ones? Or the other kind?”

  “Best not to know.”

  Many of the buildings looked unbelievably old, too old to still be standing as proudly as they did, towers and arches, domes and walls all the same soft, tan brick, noticeably incongruous with the modern asphalt roads and concrete barriers we passed on the way. We had made cityscapes like this in art class, all rulers and compasses, here a dome, there an arch, nothing flat and boring.

  The cabbie dropped us off in the downtown, still quiet at this hour, people walking around sleepily—either getting ready for work or just getting off a night shift. I breathed in deeply: car exhaust, dust, spices, a strange smell of lanolin or perhaps just sheep, fresh paint, a whiff of detergent from a laundromat’s exhaust vent. The sun was coming up as we walked towards some huge round fort, surrounded with stalls and vehicles, studded with domes and tall minarets as sharp as knives. A riot of colour, the even, crisp bricks, the high wall.

  “This is the Citadel,” Johnny said. “There’s a market here, we’ll be able to get some supplies before we head out to Nineveh.”

  “Which we are going to do how?”

  “You’re not gonna like it.”

  We bought new shirts to replace our ripped and bloodied ones, taking turns changing in the seller’s tent, emerging into a sunlight that made Johnny visibly uneasy. “We’re burning daylight,” she said.

  “Please stop saying that.”

  “Tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll stop saying it tomorrow.”

  I happily rubbed the logo on my new Transformers t-shirt as we walked deeper into the marketplace, which was starting to fill up. She seemed to have some internal list that the stallkeepers were happy to help her complete: bottled water, a bag of salt, a package of markers, a flashlight and a handful of lighters, two shovels wrapped in canvas and string so they formed an unwieldy bundle rather than two razor-edged weapons as we walked through the thickening crowd. The streets were made of uneven, square-edged little cobblestones, not rounded like other places we’d been. I wondered how old they were, how often they had to be re-laid. If it all came from the same ancient quarry.

  There were more stalls than there appeared from outside, with herbs and dried flowers and spices and random leaves, deep-fried street food spitting hot oil, signs and pots and plaques with sayings on them in a dozen languages, huge tapestries and tiny ones the size of a mousepad, some showing disquietingly familiar tentacled things that, upon closer inspection, turned out to just be scenes of mixed seafood. White piles of what looked like porcelain were nougat, studded with nuts. Pigeons ran nimbly underfoot, iridescent, unafraid, driving away the sparrows.

  We stopped underneath a pointed brick archway that ran the entire way around the place and ate pieces of baklava and then bean soup so thick it was more like a dip, pooled with oil and dotted with garlic slices, scooping it out with our fingers and a piece of bread. My hands were filthy despite borrowing Johnny’s hand sanitizer whenever I remembered. Guess I hadn’t remembered enough. Oh well—at home, Mom would say that was what our immune systems were for. Like that time Chris came in bragging that he’d eaten a spider.

  But thinking of Mom and the kids made something curl up inside me in pain, like a nerve poked with a needle while trying to find a vein. I looked around for distraction, eventually settling on the stall next to ours. It was staffed by an old lady dressed in black, squatting on the ground in front of dozens of incense cones and sticks, bottles of dark oil, balls of scented wax, and a handful of clear bags of what resembled candy, like the honey candy you could still get at the museum. “What’s that?”

  “Mm? Oh, in the bags? That’s frankincense, she’s a perfumer. Want to smell it?”

  “You mean, like... what... they brought for Jesus? The Three Wise Men? Gold, frankincense, and... uh...”

  “Myrrh.” Johnny knelt on the dusty rug in front of the old woman, who grimaced at us as Johnny picked up a bag of the frankincense and handed over a small American bill. I wondered how it was that no one seemed to mind American money over here. Weren’t there economic sanctions against Iraq right now? Well, not Iraq really, just Saddam. Or the Taliban or whatever.

  We kept walking as I opened the zippy bag seal and breathed deep—an amazing, sweet, musky smell, like cut wood but also like pine needles, or like the air of an evergreen forest, the clear lacquer on the pews of the church at home. “Oh, man! Thanks. What do they do with it?”

  “You can burn it just as incense, if you like. Or you can use it to disguise smells—the smell of a cremation, for instance. They also sometimes breathe in the smoke because it’s good for the lungs.”

  “Is it?”

  “No; all smoke is bad for pulmonary tissue. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and fine particulate matter. Oh, or you can chew it—you’ve got a good-quality selection there, lots of clear and light-coloured pieces. It’s just tree sap, after all. Boswellia sacra. You can burn the wood too, it smells nice.”

  “Is it?” I felt obscurely disappointed. “I thought people like, uh... I don’t know. Made it, somehow. And it was valuable because it was so hard to make. Like, this amazing, rare, secret substance that practically nobody knew how to make. So that’s why it was one of the things the Three Wise Men brought.”

  “Where did you get that idea?”

  “I honestly don’t know. Twelve years of Catholic school and everything gets kinda muddled.”

  “Oh, Nicky.” She smiled up at me, tiredly. “God’s not gonna get us out of this one.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in God.”

  “I don’t believe in that one,” she said. “I believe in the other ones.”

  I smiled back and thought again of her grandma’s funeral. That was the frankincense doing that—the smell of the wood just like the smell of the clear crystals.

  Afterwards, when everyone had headed to the church basement for cold lunch, we stayed behind in a back pew. She kept turning over the program, the thick paper muttering against her gloves. Lots of people had worn gloves to the ceremony, and in my teenagery way I had assumed this was a mark of money, just the way rich people mourned. Johnny’s were black lace, a pattern of swirling paisley leaves, closed at the wrists with three crystal buttons.

  Leaning back in the pew, I looked up at the roof of the church and the stained glass, the stations of the cross. I hadn’t spent much time in churches, but it had mostly been in this one—a small but tall Catholic church, built in the twenties, solid, high ceiling. The pews had a sweet, cookie-like smell, and were lacquered so thickly that where it had chipped, you could count how many coats they had put on.

  I took the program from Johnny’s trembling grip and accordioned it out between our laps.

  Joanna Marya Ziegler, 1921—1998. One older photo, one newer, one showing her as new, one as old. I liked the older one, a pretty wartime blonde with an amazing resemblance to her daughter, less to her granddaughter. Bold, movie-star looks—sharp brows, plump lips over a fur-collared coat. The newer photo showed her at some kind of family party, a skinny old lady smiling benevolently at a kitchen table. She had ignored Johnny the few times I’d been in the same room as them—not hateful, it seemed, but disdainful. I was used to it from the rest of her family, so the grandma didn’t seem unusual to me. I assumed that was why Johnny hadn’t seemed too upset. I didn’t know much about grief back then. Or women.

  “Did they name you after her, or was that like a huge coincidence?” I said.

  “They named me after her. I used to wish they had given me her middle name instead. I thought Marya was so pretty.”

  “Meredith isn’t so bad. What’s that, the other grandma?”

&nb
sp; “Great-aunt. Dad’s mom’s sister.” She let go of her end of the program and I folded it back up. “We’re not so good on original names in my family. We’re better at recycling.”

  “Very environmental of you. Who started calling you Johnny, then?”

  “Oh, that was my dad. Ages ago. You know that group, the Waterboys?”

  “Nope.”

  “They had a song before I was born. ‘A Girl Called Johnny.’ You know, it was about Patti Smith and it was supposed to be kinda sad—but my dad liked it. And later he told me a Joanna is a big lizard, like they have in Australia, not a little girl.”

  “Oh, yeah. Like in that movie. Joanna the goanna.”

  “Yeah. She—Grandma, I mean—she hated it when people called me that. I mean it wasn’t just that it had been this big deal when they gave me her name, but that my nickname was a boy’s name, she just hated that. Very big on traditional gender roles and performance. And she hated... she just hated things about me. Not disliked. Hated.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean we thought of you as a boy. It’s just a song. Sheesh.”

  “I know. It’s without meaning and weight. It’s just who I am, that’s all. Not her. Never her. Just me. Always.”

  She took another breath, as if to continue, and burst into tears. I popped her purse open and got out a pack of kleenex. One quick glimpse of the rest of the contents—a few pens, a handful of coins, a notepad that had flopped open to reveal a page of equations with the question BUT NOT MUONS?? written at the bottom, a tube of her sticky pink lipgloss, her massive keyring clipped to a sparkly killer whale keychain. She hadn’t rigged the house electronically back then and there were dozens of keys to get at all the different levels and labs. I used to joke that I hoped we got mugged when we went into the city, so she could smack the muggers with her purse. Knock them through the nearest building, I said.

  I went downstairs first and filled a plate for myself, then her, and was able to hand it to her just as she came in through the door. She gave me her smallest, bravest smile—tired, just like today in the marketplace.