by Wilson, David Niall; Brown, Tonia; Meikle, William; McCaffery, Simon; Brown, TW; T. A. Wardrope
His charm was nearly enough to make Carolina smile, but he was as dumb as a brick. He probably didn’t have much experience with puppies, either. “He already saw me. Don’t you remember? It was just before he tried to flatten me.”
“Maybe he didn’t see you well. You were standing in the shadows.”
“I’m not going out there, and that’s final.”
The building had stopped shaking, but they could still see the monster’s shadow cutting off the bright light from outside. A huge eye, bloodshot and grey, suddenly filled the hole, followed almost instantly by a huge hand, which squeezed through the opening and groped around, trying to catch them, to squeeze the life out of them. Carolina screamed, knowing it was a stupid thing to do, but still completely unable to make herself stop. At least she could take some comfort in the fact that, right beside her, Felipe was screaming in counterpoint.
They’d pressed themselves back as far as they could go, unconcerned about what the pool of foul-smelling liquid they were lying in might be made of. Despite cramming themselves into the deepest corner, it seemed that the fist would inevitably turn them to jelly. The monster was pushing it further and further into the opening. It was three meters away. Two.
Less than an arm’s length out, it stopped. The twists of the bunker’s interior had finally thwarted any further attempt to thrust the arm inside. They could hear the creature’s enraged grunts, feeling the building shaking all around them as the monster raged.
And, though she hated herself for it, Carolina buried her face in Felipe’s chest. She knew it was pathetic, but there was no helping it. She heard him chuckle. “I can’t believe you brought your purse,” he said, his typical male obliviousness not allowing him to spot the difference between a purse and a beach bag.
A pause ensued, as if the creature were distracted by something. The giant hand menacing them stayed suspended in midair, quivering slightly, smelling like rotten fish.
Suddenly, without warning, it retreated, leaving the opening free. As sunlight poured in, they could feel the building vibrating––not violently, but as though giant footsteps were moving away. A bellow of absolute rage reached them from what was unquestionably a good distance.
“It’s gone,” Felipe said. “Let’s go!”
“Go? Where?” But it was too late. Felipe had already sprinted for the door. Carolina followed a bit more cautiously, popping only her head out of the bunker to look around. There seemed to be no sign, no threat, so she stepped all the way out to try to see where the creature had gone.
Its path wasn’t difficult to deduce. A line of palm trees had been pushed aside like matchwood directly behind the little building, and the destruction led all the way to the two-lane road that ran parallel to the beach. The monster could be seen sitting directly in the center of the tarmac, tearing apart a container that had been on a truck. The truck itself was lying on its side on one shoulder, looking like a discarded plaything. The monster raged at the container itself, as if blaming it for some terminal misfortune. Scraps of steel painted hull-red flew until there was nothing left.
A small figure caught her eye. Felipe had instinctively run for the road, but, on finding his path blocked, had stopped like a rabbit in headlights. He stared at the creature in his path as if wondering what sauce it would go best with. Carolina reasoned that that probably wasn’t the best way of dealing with it, but she didn’t want to call out in case the gorilla––it looked more and more like an gorilla, the more she looked at it––heard her.
In the end, it made no difference. Finding that the last pieces of the container had disappeared, the monster looked up to see Felipe standing motionless, as if in challenge. It bellowed again, and Felipe ran. Carolina was relieved to see that the creature was far enough away that Felipe would make it to the bunker long before the gorilla would.
But Felipe panicked. Instead of running towards the safety of the concrete box, he headed for the sea, perhaps in some instinctive “back to the womb” reaction. What he hoped to achieve by this was unclear, but he never made it. The gorilla, eating ground efficiently with its enormous legs, caught him just as he was about to reach the edge. A single swipe of an enormous hand lifted Felipe high into the air. Carolina could hear his screams as he reached the apex of the parabola, and braced herself for the bone-crunching impact that would come when he hit the sand.
But Felipe never made it to the ground. A huge mouth intercepted his descent, and the jaws closed on him. Even from that distance, Carolina could see the spray of blood as his body burst.
The enormous eyes fastened onto her, and a second later, they were back to where they had started: she was huddled in the corner while a huge fist groped blindly for her in the dark. Now that she was alone, she found her urge to scream had gone. She cried to herself in the semi-darkness, going over Felipe’s last seconds again and again.
After what seemed like an eternity, the gorilla tired. The hand retreated, but instead of bright daylight shining through, there was little change in the quality of light. Carolina understood that she’d spent the entire afternoon stuck in a round concrete building––and had the building not been there, her day would have ended very badly, indeed.
Where is the army? she wondered. The cops? Someone has to have been told about this by now. But that, like the origin of the creature, seemed to be just another mystery. And she really, really had to pee.
That last was easily solved, at least. A few seconds after removing its hand, the creature once more obstructed the entry, but this time, it was neither its hand nor its face in the opening. It was just a big bit of rotting fur with some kind of huge warts. Thus unobserved, Carolina allowed herself to crouch in one of the smellier corners to relieve herself.
Spurred on by this act of bravery, she walked towards the door, her eyes able to make out some kind of pattern on the fur, roundish, elongated and…
She screamed and skittered back into the far corner.
Fused to the skin of the gorilla, melted and deformed, but easily recognizable, was a human face. No, there were two human faces, melted together at the chin like monstrous Siamese twins. And the other mounds, the bigger ones, could only be their bodies.
She could probably have taken that, she felt, had it not been for the fact that, on one of the horribly grimacing faces, she could clearly make out a single eye, staring at her with a madness she’d never imagined possible.
But what could she do? She moved forward, slowly, afraid that the human figures would jump off of the creature and kill her––or worse. They stayed where they were, however, with that single baleful eye the only sign of movement. But what movement it was: the eye followed her around like a spotlight, pained and malevolent at the same time.
She stared, and then, impulsively, she touched the cheek of the other face, the one without eyes. There was no human suppleness to the skin, just hard, cold, and dry parchment. Like fish scales left out in the sun. The rotting fur that framed it didn’t help, either.
The eye followed her hand, rolling unnaturally around as it did so, and widening in obvious fear as she reached towards the face. She could see muscles working in the jaw, trying to free the mouth from some other obstacle that she couldn’t see. They stood out like thick cords. With an audible snap, something let go, and the face emitted its first sound, a tortured keening unlike anything a human being should be capable of creating. There were no teeth in the mouth.
The sound made Carolina step back, still followed by the eye. Since it had managed to break through its chains, she hoped the face would be satisfied and stop contorting, fall back into its previous torpor.
But she had no such luck. Its mouth continued working, its eye kept revolving, and sound kept pouring forth. She imagined it was trying to speak, but all that emerged were moans and sobs, punctuated by an occasional screech of superhuman pain.
Night fell. The gorilla’s shadow had been replaced by the true dark of tropical night. Stars gave no illumination, and the new moon never would.
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But the sound didn’t cease. Eventually, by dint of what sounded like supremely painful efforts, the voice began to gain coherence, or at least the semblance thereof. Now, instead of sounding like the grunting of some big cat, the noise was that of a foreign language being spoken in slow motion. Moans echoed around the bunker, making the warm tropical blackness feel like a lonely Scottish moor in the dead of winter, complete with howling wind sound effects. She huddled in her corner, afraid to move, lest that single, mad eye should report her presence to the monster above. Sleep was fitful, but, surprisingly, not nonexistent.
She woke with a start. In a groggy state, she thought that the sharp pain in her side––a consequence of the position she’d been reclined in––was the culprit, but then she realized that the voice had become almost recognizably human, and that was what must have woken her up. It seemed to be a stream of some kind of Germanic gibberish whose meaning she could almost make out––some of it seemed similar to the English she’d learned in school.
“Hallo.”
This was sudden––unexpected, out of the blue. For a second, Carolina thought that the Brazilians must have finally gotten their act together, that the army had been mobilized and the threat removed. People must be combing the beaches for missing tourists. But then she heard the same voice, this time spouting the same gibberish from before.
“Wait, hello,” she whispered, without thinking.
The voice stopped. Silence echoed through the bunker more powerfully than the earlier sound. “Hallo… English?”
Should she respond to this? Should she interact with the monster? “Yes, some English,” she said.
“I… need… help…”
The first thought that crossed her mind was that whatever else might be happening, the owner of that face––that voice––was beyond all human help. “How can I help you?”
There was a pause, long enough to make her wonder whether she’d dreamed the whole thing.
“Kill me…” Another pause ensued as Carolina processed this. “Please… please…”
Still she said nothing.
“Please…”
“But how? You’re a part of this huge thing. How can I kill something like that? How?” Desperation lent her a fluency that she could never recall having had when taking her lessons.
The voice gurgled. With one final wet sound, it seemed to disappear. And then, with a final effort, more of a series of coughs than real words, it said: “Fire… the chemicals… use fire…”
“But how? I don’t have any fire! I don’t even smoke.”
But all she got from the face was a series of gulps and wheezes. More snaps and pops showed that the figure it was attached to was still moving, but its capacity to speak seemed to have disappeared.
At dawn, it was no longer creaking and popping. But it wasn’t dead. That single, insane eye revolved in its socket and reminded her of her promise to help––a promise she’d never made, but one that the revolving orb seemed determined to hold her to.
I don’t even smoke, she thought, but the eye didn’t seem to care.
With the rising sun, her giant adversary stirred. The gorilla stood, letting the blinding morning light that was reflecting off the white sand into the bunker like a searing flame. The very same flame that she didn’t have. Her heart thumped as the beast took three steps away––could it be leaving? Would she be able to escape none the worse for wear?
No such luck was forthcoming. After its short walk, the rank-smelling creature returned to the utility structure, and the tiny, rolling eye of the thing fused to its back was replaced by the enormous, evil orb of the creature itself––followed in short order by its grasping hand. Carolina, seated in her corner with the bag that had caused Felipe so much amusement, barely even flinched. The growling in her stomach seemed louder and more threatening than the giant gorilla whose presence she’d already grown accustomed to.
She opened the bag, hoping against hope that she’d remembered to pack some cookies, a cereal bar, something––but no such luck. All she had was a thermos full of now-cold water and the implements to make and clean the maté––her single concession to infusion addiction––she went nowhere without, some money, and her cell phone. That last was useless in Brazil, but she lugged it around anyway, feeling naked without it.
No lighter, no flare gun. No hope.
She tried to get into a more comfortable position. Maybe if she ignored it, the thing would go away.
But it didn’t, and after many hours, there were no comfortable positions left, and there was no question of moving into a different spot to pee. All she could do was to try to stay as far from the small puddle beside her as possible.
If only I had a box of matches, she thought. And that thought brought back a memory. A cold spring night camping in Patagonia, and the discovery that the lighter they’d been relying on to light their nightly fires had somehow broken. One of the guys in the group had managed to get a fire lit using only a cell phone and something in her maté kit. The virulana, the steel wool. And she’d brought that very same chunk with her––it was still inside the bag.
But how had he done it? She recalled that he’d taken the phone apart, so she did. Then she stopped to remember the guy himself. As far as she could tell, just another Felipe: good looking, hair too long, and better in bed than in the daytime. She clearly had to change the kind of guy she fell for––but, to be fair, he’d known the cell phone trick, and she didn’t. Even now, with the cell phone battery and the steel wool in front of her, she had no clue as to how it would work.
The battery was a featureless flat rectangle as long as her thumb, and the only thing about it that didn’t look completely inert were a few tiny strips of copper on one edge, with the positive and negative signs beside them. She pressed the steel wool to the edges and nearly dropped the battery into a pool of her own urine when a small spark flew inside the black piece of virulana. She did drop the steel wool, but luckily, it landed on her foot.
Carolina studied the steel wool. Tiny singe marks scarred it, barely visible in the dim light of the utility bunker. But the verdict was clear: the wool had burnt, and it was time for her to make a decision.
Should she attack the monster, try to set it alight? Would that even work? It seemed much too large to be flammable. Maybe her best bet was to sit tight and wait for the authorities to do something about it.
But that could take days. There was no question that the government knew about the creature, but they were probably waiting to see what happened. Without thinking about it, she pressed the steel wool into the battery again, this time making sure she kept it there, even after smoke began to pour from it. Didn’t these batteries have acid in them? She just hoped it held out long enough to get a decent fire.
A tiny dot of light appeared on the virulana, and she moved without thinking toward the gigantic hand resting on the floor. She reached out and tried to press the smoldering steel wool onto a finger.
Carolina realized almost immediately that it was a big mistake, that she’d stepped well inside the beast’s reach. But almost immediately wasn’t good enough. Moving with lightning speed, a huge fist wrapped around her legs and pulled her out of the building. Only her quick reflexes allowed her to duck in time to avoid leaving her brains splattered all over the top of the concrete doorway.
The gorilla placed the fist right in front of its face and studied her for a second. She thought she could see malicious gloating in its eyes, but soon the stench overpowered her other faculties––it made the putrid interior of the bunker seem like a flowery meadow.
A second later, panic kicked in. This monster wasn’t going to keep contemplating her forever, and soon, she would follow Felipe’s lead and become a shower of blood and bone, to be washed off the beach by the next high tide. She frantically pressed the steel wool to the battery, pressing the smoking concoction against the fist with trembling hands.
A small patch of flaking, rotting material came al
ight, and she had hope for a second, but it was too little, too late. She was already being conveyed to the giant maw, and the monster wouldn’t even notice a flame that size.
But in the instant before she was consumed, the flame suddenly spread, as if the creature had been made of gasoline. The hairs on her arm were singed with heat, and the beast screamed like a banshee with a bad headache. Before she had time to react, Carolina was dropping to the floor from thirty feet up. Only a glancing blow against one of the gorilla’s knees, which slowed her descent, saved her from being killed by the impact with the sand. It didn’t save her from hearing several bones break.
She lay there, determined to watch until the beast was gone. It took a surprisingly short time to be consumed, but that time was employed in running to and fro––nearly crushing her with a giant foot in the process––and screaming. When it finally fell into a smoking, ruined heap, she allowed the darkness to overcome her.
* * *
She woke to screams in Portuguese. Hands, arms placing her on a stretcher, lifting her over the sand at a run to a running helicopter. A doctor telling her that she was going to be all right, a guy in a uniform apologizing, saying that they’d had no idea that anyone was left alive, that they were observing the creature to decide what to do with it. Another asking if she knew any of the victims.
The doctor told her not to answer any questions.
But what could she have said? She really hadn’t known Felipe––or at least not anything about him that was anyone’s business. As she drifted into the fog of the painkillers, she knew this particular version of the dumb guy would be her last; it would also be the only one she remembered.
REBECCA SNOW
Monkey See
Diamond-shaped, primary-colored flags fluttered from poles staked around the lot. A gust of wind made them sound like television machine gun fire. A concrete block building stood at the center. Blotches of white paint had peeled, making it look like an overweight Dalmatian. Through the plate glass windows, I saw a small group of men in cheap suits playing cards. One of the men tossed his hand to the table and pushed back his folding chair when he saw me. He tapped one of the other men before walking toward the door. I spun in a circle, taking in all of the shiny used cars parked in rows. Another breeze ruffled my hair and flapped the streamer-flags that anchored an inflatable monkey to the roof of the building. A black and white banner told me that I would ‘GO APE!’ over these prices. I caught a whiff of something foul. Someone must have hit a deer on the highway.
