Tribulation

by Kaz Morran

  Machesney told Henry and Wumba the AsCans were buried under fifty feet of rock, mud, and water. The tosser still had his sunnies on. “Even if there are survivors, you’d need an army of heavy machinery to reach them.”

  “Don’t mean we give up trying,” said Wumba.

  The pilot shook his head. “Only one way into Kambi now, and that’s by helicopter.”

  “So we go get a helicopter.” Wumba fought the wind and hoisted open the door to the ute and climbed in. “Get in the back,” he yelled to everyone.

  But Ethan and the pilot followed him around to the driver’s side. “You can’t fly in this wind,” Ethan called through the shut window.

  Wumba rolled the window a crack and shouted back that by the time they got to Cairns, the storm would pass.

  Loud enough for Ethan to hear, Henry reminded his partner about a giant tree blocking the highway in the direction of Cairns.

  “Cooktown’s heaps closer anyway,” said Ethan. “Good search and rescue people there.”

  “You’re ex-missus,” said Wumba.

  “Ay.”

  On a good day, Cooktown was just thirty minutes north—close enough to hike the rest of the way if the ute got stuck.

  “Hey,” Machesney called, coming up behind them with a flashlight. “There’s a tree across the road.”

  “Get in the back of the truck, seppo,” Ethan told him.

  Wumba agreed. He told Ethan to ride up front with him and Henry, but the others had to go in the back.

  Driving, water shot up into the wheel wells, adding to the noise of the wind. As Wumba dodged the swaths of debris and plowed onward up the road, Ethan told them about the camp up at Kambi Valley getting destroyed, how even though they’d tied the helicopter down and removed the rotors the quake and cyclone had ripped it from its moorings and smashed it to bits. The com antennae on the hab had crumpled, the ventilation hut had blown away, and the exit chimney had filled in with mud and debris.

  Ethan had no idea how badly the interior of the cave had collapsed, but he was sure it had flooded.

  “We didn’t just abandon them,” Ethan said again, and he said it several times more after that.

  36

  The predator lay in wait, restrained, patient, unblinking, aware. The only movement that betrays its presence is at the tip of its snout where its nostrils flare. Its meals here are abundant; it can afford to take its time. It sniffs. It smells adrenaline. It knows where there is prey. It knows its prey is weak and terrified.

  With stealth, the predator advances, dragging its lanky mass one calculated footfall at a time, the trunk of its body and tail slinking and chafing along the rough volcanic surface, incrementally toward its target.

  Shoosh … Shoosh …

  ***

  Taiyo opened his eyes while he walked, closed them, opened them, closed them. It made no difference; the view would not have changed if he’d gouged out his own eyes.

  Black. Absent. Abysmal. But not empty. … Something was out there in the void.

  Onward to the wall. Lights off and careful steps to go undetected. It shouldn’t have mattered if he did get noticed—he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Still. He’d rather not have to explain.

  A clicking sound made him freeze. He listened. Click-click-whoosh. A speck of blue light glinted amid the eternal night; a smear too faint for him to be sure it existed outside his head, like not being able to tell if the faintest of the stars in the sky were really there or just the brain filling in the blank spots. Dim and close, or bright and far? He couldn’t pin the location except that it was stationary and off to his left. Likewise, the distinct glow felt familiar, but Taiyo couldn't place it. A few minutes later it extinguished.

  He knew from the diminishing echo of his footfalls he’d almost arrived. When his breath curled back onto his face, he was sure, but only once he’d outstretched his palm and placed it gently on the wall to confirm its presence did he cup a hand over the mouth of the flashlight, turn it on, and let a sliver of light reveal the lurid abstraction.

  He stepped gingerly over and around the shards of fallen rock at the base of the wall and followed the pigments—elongated handprints, clawing and straining for life against the beasts from the fathoms—past the great dividing crack until he found a spot of blank canvass. He extinguished and put away the light, then reached down for a different tool. He searched the ground, patting rock, raking gravel and dust, feeling around with his fingers, until he came up with the perfect stone. After brushing the spot on the wall clean, he placed upon it his left hand, fingers spread. He didn’t know how long the marks would last, but it felt right to try.

  He carved along the outer edge of his hand, careful not to scrape his flesh. The rock rounded the tip of his baby finger. Friction made the motions jerky. The rock dragged and skipped in and out of the valley between his pinky and ring finger. He rounded the middle finger; down, up, and down into the crux of his thumb and forefinger. That’s where the rock slipped. He’d been careless. Overconfident. He’d sliced his own flesh. He brought the wound to his mouth. It tasted of iron and the grains of ancient volcanism.

  The blood would not go to waste. He squeezed the drops onto his right forefinger and continued to trace his hand. Down the wrist, he let the line trail off. Then, with the pigment of life and death, he redrew what he’d already carved. On the palm, he wrote AL, the initials of his lost crewman.

  And then Taiyo left, and he hoped he would not have to return.

  ***

  He woke to Ronin breathing, standing over his hammock. The sudden awareness of the hulking figure’s presence made a sputtering of bile well up in the back of Taiyo’s mouth. He swallowed, and it burned. It was the only thing other than bugs that he’d eaten in days.

  “Whatcha doin’?” Ronin sang.

  “Sleeping,” Taiyo answered.

  Ronin’s voice turned dark: “Liar.”

  Taiyo didn’t respond.

  The oscillations of Walter’s howling edged from a trough toward a peak. Remarkable that anybody could sleep. It helped that Walter had all but blown out his vocal cords; most of the pleas and cries now resembled an asthmatic in distress and only occasionally a boar in a bear trap.

  Ronin annexed Taiyo’s bedside crate and took a seat. “Doesn’t being down here scare you?” he said, his voice level and dry.

  Taiyo treaded lightly. He said, “Because of what happened to Anton and Walter?”

  “Nope,” came the cheerful reply. “We won’t die like them. Nah, It’ll be the air that kills you and me. CO2 is over five thousand ppm, methane and hydrogen sulfide are rising, too, and Kristen just woofed. Dry heaved, really. … Don’t fall asleep, hafu. You won’t wake up. I probably saved your life just now.”

  “I’d prefer you let me die peacefully in my sleep.”

  Taiyo tried to close his eyes, forgetting they were already shut. He couldn’t remember what color looked like—how unfair that he couldn’t will himself to produce colors in his mind. But come to think of it, he wasn’t sure the imagination ever really reproduced color. People who said they dreamed in color were probably filling stuff in the way people’s minds fill in strange lights in the sky with flying saucers. At least they used to before camera phones came along.

  “How do you know you’d die peacefully?” Ronin interrupted Taiyo’s meandering bliss.

  “You said we’ll die of bad air.”

  “After further reflection, I believe you are likely to die in drawn-out misery the way poor old Walter is currently doing.” He paused to let Taiyo hear the commander’s moaning. “Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe you’re right, and the air will be what does you in, but the gas chamber is hardly a peaceful way to go. Seems to me there’d be a lot of convulsing and wrenching yourself inside-out, the way Kristen has started doing.”

  “She’s just nauseous.”

  “That’s how it starts. Any time now, she might keel over and turn inside out.”

  Taiyo squeezed his fists op
en and closed to ease his tension. The hammock frame groaned as he stretched his legs and toes.

  Ronin leaned on the foot of the chest-high frame, making the thin aluminum tubing creak as it ground into the rock floor. It began to bend as Ronin put more and more of his weight on it.

  Taiyo sat up. “Please don’t,” he said firmly. “You’re breaking it.”

  Too late. The frame collapsed at the head of the hammock, and Taiyo tumbled out onto hard basalt.

  “Oh, sorry about that,” Ronin said, and as he walked away added, “I guess these things aren’t made in Japan.”

  Alone on the ground in a heap of mangled aluminum and fishnet mesh, it took a moment for the shock to turn into anger. Once untangled and on his feet, Taiyo chucked the net to the ground, kicked the busted frame. He was about to curse in Ronin’s direction but had no idea which way the asshole had gone. Just as well, Taiyo thought once calm. Going after Ronin would solve nothing. A better way to get vengeance would be to show how futile Ronin’s bullying was.

  Taiyo’s first idea was to drag his disabled hammock over to a wall and carve out a notch to tie the frameless end to like he’d done with the sock in the flood. Or he might even find one of the glow-worm notches to use as a hook. But that would mean exiling himself from camp and sleeping alone outside the security perimeter.

  He could probably rig something up by sticking the broken poles from the frame into a pile of rocks, but it would take a hell of a lot of rocks to get it anchored well enough to support his shifting weight.

  No, he knew something much better he could use. He just had to find it.

  He told his plan to Nel so someone knew where he was going. One step over the rock-wall perimeter he drew both from his belt and extended the knives. The thumb-length blades twinkled in the light of his headlamp as he walked with the knives out in front of him. He felt ridiculous for it. There was a far greater chance of tripping and stabbing himself than of fending off a predator.

  He imagined scrolling the stats for crocs-versus-pocketknives and finding nothing but pages and pages of shutouts for the crocs. The bios would read:

  Taiyo Yamazaki:

  88 kg (195 lbs.)

  180 cm (5 ft. 11 in)

  No. of blades: 2

  Bite: 689,476 kpa (100 psi)

  Made of: soft, pink, puncturable flesh

  Estuarine Crocodile:

  1,000+ kg (2,300+ lbs.)

  6+ m (20+ ft.)

  No. of blades: 72

  Bite: 34,474,000 kpa (5,000 psi)

  Made of: thick armor plating

  With those dainty little blades outstretched, he swept his headlamp side to side as he crept over the loose rocks and jagged ground. Each drip from the ceiling, shout from Walter, and scuff of his own footsteps sunk into his mind as signs of his impending demise. Each sound built upon the paranoia that the next noise would be his death knell. The ghostly howl from the caved-in Wormhole toyed with his mind like rats in the cupboards.

  The clack of rocks threw him into a crab stance. Poised to defend his life at all costs, the only sound that repeated was that of his heart against his chest, and then of one of Walter’s periodic pleas for death.

  He edged forward, closer to the gurgling cries, in search of what he needed to fix his hammock.

  Another noise arose.

  Off to the right. Not a reptile, though. It more resembled a pack of dogs fighting in the distance over a bone. It was Ronin; his groans punctuated Kristen’s muffled cries.

  Taiyo froze. Listened. He was certain it was Ronin and Kristen. Shit. Shit. Shit. He had to do something. But what if he was wrong? What if Ronin wasn’t hurting her? But of course Ronin was. What else could it be? You have to help her. Now!

  Go!

  But …

  He listened for clues. Something to confirm or deny—hopefully deny—what his tingling skin and frantic pulse told him was happening.

  The noises grew more intense. Definitely a struggle. He’s either killing her or raping her.

  “Hey! … Hey! What’s going on over here?” He flicked on his light and sped his pace toward the scuffle. Their figures came into view at the end of his headlamp beam, but out of focus, and bouncing in and out of the light. “Ronin! Stop! Back off, Ronin!” Taiyo held out one knife in his left hand as a boxer would have his fist poised to land a jab, and kept the right-hand knife back, ready to strike a knockout blow with. He moved to within a few strides. “Ronin, get off her! Kristen, are you hurt?”

  “What the fuck, Taiyo?” Her voice halted his approach. “You fucking creep!”

  Ronin, clothes around his ankles, had Kristen bent over a boulder. Both of them had twisted to face Taiyo and were battering him with insults and demands that he fuck off and mind his own business.

  Stunned, he didn’t move. Ronin waddled forth, stumbled, and caught himself. Taiyo tucked the blades behind his back and dodged a hand meant to seize his collar. He sideswiped another aimed at his face then backed away, too shocked to appreciate that the pants around Ronin’s ankles had prevented a bout of serious violence.

  The resumed symphony of carnal fury chased Taiyo away, though it took every remaining drop of willpower not walk back over and hoark his disgust all over Ronin and Kristen.

  It didn’t make sense. Harassment, vulgarity, assholery, abuse: all implicit in every encounter Ronin had ever had with a woman. And yet, in spite of Kristen’s organic-yoga matt, safe-space, rideshare, vegan dog food, non-binary, homeschool-mom identity, she was a willing participant in Ronin’s rutting.

  Taiyo slowed his pace and kept the lamp and his eyes on his footfalls. Isolation made people do weird things, he supposed. Like murder and cannibalism. He welcomed the change in mental imagery. Certainly, Ronin was capable of killing people—he probably had before, if any of the gulag escape stories were true.

  In spite of the headlamp, Taiyo lost his focus and stumbled over a crack in the ground. He landed on his side, and far enough from the noise that he stayed down to catch up with his thoughts.

  In the instances in his mind between haunting flashbacks of Ronin and Kristen mid-coitus, he recalled the hands and fists that Ronin had fully intended to smash him with. If anything, the incident had confirmed the threat Ronin posed. If not to Kristen, then to Taiyo.

  Taiyo sat there, light off, filtering out the faint but horrific sounds of Walter coming from one direction, and Kristen and Ronin from another. He tried to mull over the assumptions and suspicions whirring in his mind. With effort, he confronted his lingering fear—a hypothesis, really. If not the croc that had gotten to Anton’s body, then it almost certainly was Ronin. And if Ronin was that out of his mind, then who’s to say Ronin hadn’t caused Anton’s drowning as well.

  But the evidence was weak. Weaker than the evidence against Taiyo for treason. Ronin had lost his multitool in the flood. Taiyo had claimed Anton’s. But that did little to convince Taiyo of anything.

  A different assault to his senses gave hope to a resolution. Not a noise this time. A smell. A wretched, rotting smell wafting over from a nearby pile of rocks. It was the smell of evidence.

  Taiyo’s quest to repair his hammock would have to wait.

  ***

  Methodically, stone-by-stone, he uncovered the body. He kept his undershirt over his nose and mouth, and his jumpsuit zipped up over it. He wished he’d gone and found one of the rebreather masks before committing himself, though. Bouts of gaging kept forcing him to retreat.

  He set the rocks aside with quiet care. For the time being, not a sound echoed amongst the walls and ceiling of the Asylum, so the slightest noise would’ve alerted the others. He didn’t need them mounting a witch hunt on him for grave robbing.

  Judging by the boot he first uncovered, the arm he dug and felt around for, then found, was Anton’s left. The flesh was rotting, and the bones were exposed, but the left forearm remained attached to the body except for the missing hand. That confirmed Taiyo had remembered right: the left hand, and only the hand, had s
lipped off in his grip while he and Ronin were dragging the body over to its resting place.

  So what about the right arm?

  He cast the light on only the parts he needed to see, though what came through in his periphery was plenty enough to churn his guts. The right arm proved harder to isolate, mainly due to the eviscerated abdomen and emptied ribcage that had already been uncovered. Not injuries Taiyo would have associated with drowning.

  He threw up.

  He stepped away for a few minutes, finding water in a crevasse in the ground to splash on his face and have a drink. The nausea eased, but his skin felt like steamed gyoza. So had Anton’s, but shredded and chilled. The upper half of the jumpsuit was already tied around Taiyo’s waist, but the rising humidity had soaked his undershirt through with sweat. He peeled off the undershirt, swished it around in the water, and barely wrung it out before he put it back on and up over his mouth and nose. Feeling somewhat revived from the cool, clean shirt and birdbath, he returned to the cairn to finish the task.

  The damage to the right side of the body looked fresher, the carnage more vivid. The bones were crushed and bent at wrong angles, and the whole mess was coated in strings of flesh and sinew, which made it hard to say for sure if the right forearm was still present or missing.

  He shut off the headlamp and backed away to think, and to breathe. Prod further to be certain, or recover the body and go find the generator so he could fix his hammock?

  He began to put back the rocks. The mess of guts was indication enough that the right forearm had been removed—the only question was how.

  In putting the stones back on top of the remains, he kept the light off—to spare the battery, yes, but also for his own psychological stability. Like when they’d first constructed the cairn as a group, the repetition made him feel like a witness to the ritual, not a participant. He was thankful that his mind had let him detach from the gruesome reality of what he was doing, replacing stone after stone atop the corpse he’d just exhumed. He knew, however, that he hadn’t yet come in contact with enough dead bodies to grow immune to the haunting aftereffects.