by Kaz Morran
The task still wasn’t done. From his knees, Taiyo felt around for more stones to complete the cairn. Having used up almost everything within reach, he shuffled along the dusty ground to his right until the backs of his fingers landed against something cold, slick, and rubbery like a rotting mushroom.
He jerked backward, kicking the cairn. Rocks tumbled down the pile and petered out with a soft echo. He froze and listened for a response. Nothing. Only Walter. If the others had heard, they didn’t care.
After taking several deep breaths and rubbing his palm in the dust to get the carnage off, he adjusted the shirt over his mouth and nose and got back to his feet. Perhaps the relief displaced his diligence. He took the first step of the resumed journey without switching on the headlamp and stumbled again, kicking loose a rock but keeping his balance. Although, as before, the echo of the skidding rock was soft and did not travel far, this time a noise came back in response. A deep grumble that bled not from the walls or crust of the Earth. It came from the spot right behind him.
Counter to his rapid pulse, he pivoted ever so slowly, conscious of every grain of dust being ground beneath the tread of his boots, to face the deep-bellied resonance. A sinister purr, it got louder.
Could it see him? It could sense him.
He raised an arm a centimeter at a time. At the switch on the front of the headlamp, he stopped and rested his finger. Without being able to see it, he had no chance. In the dark, it would outwait him. Outmuscle him. But if he could see, then maybe it could not outrun him.
He pressed the switch.
What he saw threw him backward, scrambling, stumbling, up and over the half-open cairn. His head struck rock. The headlamp careened and skidded across the ground and went dead.
The growl became a hiss; long, vile, and ill-boding. On his rear, Taiyo kicked at the rocks for leverage. Two, three kicks but his boots failed to gain traction until a squishy patch of remains accepted his heels.
It hissed again and advanced.
Shoosh …
He scrambled upright, his feet sinking with a suction sound.
Shoosh …
And a growl. Louder now. Closer. Rocks tumbled as it climbed.
He leaped from the cairn, knocking rocks down with him. Flat out on the ground holding his breath, he groped for the headlamp. Nothing.
He froze. The slow purr was on the move. The belly dragged. Shoosh. Rounding the cairn toward him. He got to his knees ready to run but needed light. He swept the ground. Searching, feeling for the headlamp …
He heard the pads of a foot tread down upon the gore with a squish. One lumbering step at a time, it trampled the ruined tomb as it approached.
His hand hit the headlamp. Backing up on his knees, breathing hard and fast, he fumbled along the strap, to the casing for the switch.
The footsteps kept coming. Taiyo could smell it. His guts lurched into his throat. He couldn’t breathe. The growl vibrated the air, raising his skin as if the claws had already begun to rake his back. Then it stopped its advance. He heard it sniff the air. It could smell him. He stood, slowly, the light still off. He couldn't stop his toes from curling in his boots, his legs shaking. Precariously, he took a step at a time in retreat.
Rocks fell away as the beast shifted its weight atop the cairn. The next sound was the same muddy suction his own feet had made, but what followed was far more horrific. It could’ve been mistaken for the sound of wood being split into kindling if not for the chomping and slopping that accompanied the crunching. Taking advantage of the predator being distracted, Taiyo stammered back farther but startled at the sudden, distant shriek.
Walter. It was only Walter. Relax.
Before turning on the light, he commanded the organs in his chest to stay calm. When he did, he saw the spoils of slaughter drooped over the tomb but not the animal. Walter’s screams must have muffled the sound of it slinking off back into the shadows.
***
The generator and floodlight had toppled not far in front of the collapsed Wormhole where Walter still lied, pinned and moaning. Once Taiyo reached the battered machinery, it occurred to him that he might have the tools to help Walter. He sat on the overturned generator and thought. Walter’s cries carried on, spiked here and there by yelps and pleas for death or freedom. He turned off the headlamp so Walter wouldn’t see and call out to him. Then he felt guilty and turned it back on. Then off.
Taiyo had two knives, as feeble as they were, and he had the blunt mast of the floodlight. He could give Walter one of the knives. … Absolutely not. He didn’t let himself complete the thought. Taiyo could try and cut Walter free, though getting through bone would be slow, and the blood loss would probably be fatal.
No matter what, Walter was going to die pinned under that boulder. The only thing within Taiyo’s control was whether or not to let death run its natural course.
The same thought must have crossed the minds of the other AsCans, too. Why hadn’t anyone done it yet? Too cowardly? Religious reasons? Lack of empathy? What was Taiyo’s excuse? He just couldn’t. He pictured how brutal the act would actually be: bludgeoning his crewmate again and again with a length of the floodlight mast—a steel pipe—until the writhing and howling peaked and then ceased.
No. He could not.
At least not in such a brutal way. He could smother him instead. Or slit his wrist.
Bloody Christ, what is wrong with me? No way!
“I’m sorry Walter,” he said out loud, but from too far away for Walter to hear. “I’m a coward. I’m sorry. I can’t do it.”
The moaning rose into cries, wails, and then feral snarls and yelps.
The tiny screwdriver in one of the multitools worked to detach the banged-up mast from its mount atop the generator. The noise of Taiyo dragging it back to camp probably helped keep the croc away. Noise was also the hypothesis he was going with to explain why it hadn’t yet preyed on Walter.
He stepped in a shallow puddle. It reminded him how thirsty the exertion and the humid air had made him. Now, not rushed or battling nausea, the pain of kneeling on hard rock felt almost unbearable, so tender his knees had become from all his falls. And yet the pain gave him a comforting familiarity, like stumbling across a favorite food from home while overseas. Scrapes and bruises were a normal part of life; they could’ve come from hiking, sports, or an intoxicating night on the town. Except they hadn’t.
He heard something. He stopped. Listened.
“You’re losing it,” he told himself. There was nothing there. “Paranoid delusions.”
He rested on his hip and brought his face down to the puddle. The slurp filled his mouth as much with silt as with water, but he swallowed the grit just the same. He bent his neck for another drink but froze.
Again, that sound. The creaking of hammocks? Voices? Or … ?
It got louder. A drawn-out groan … then a cry. A tearfully defeated, soul-shaking, human cry. Taiyo swallowed hard. It was just Walter.
He picked up the tip of the mast a dragged on, hitting the perimeter of the security wall a few minutes later. He stepped over the knee-high rocks and let the tail end of the mast crash through behind him. He made a mental note to go back after and fix the break, but down there in the dungeon, his memory wasn’t what it ought to be.
A light came on—someone curious what he was up to—and shut off a second later. When he got the mast to his hammock and tried to erect it, it became apparent he’d need a mound of rocks to hold down the base. He began the task content to keep busy, but in the midst of piling stones, he often forgot he was not entombing a body. An occasional clink of a rock hitting the hollow metal pole would take him out of the trance of ritual, but the monotony would quickly pull him back in.
He propped the meter-long aluminum poles from the busted end of the hammock frame up against the inside of the mast for extra support, and then stood back and admired his work. Fully extended, the pole rose about three meters high and hooked a little at the top like a scorpion tail. Th
e whole thing moved higher and lower by winding a crank. He wound the mast down so the arched tip hung at about waist level and tied on the loose end of the net. The result was a level hammock as good as any.
He lay back in his bed, feet to the mast, and closed his eyes, believing that at last, he would get some sleep.
***
“Hey! Hey! Hey! Wake up. Oh-my-god-oh-my-god … What’s going on? Guys! Tai! Nel! Ronin, wake up. Wake up!” Whatever else Kristen cried came out garbled and overridden by the noise.
“What the—” Taiyo began to say from his hammock, but the noises arrested his tongue.
Humans made sounds that beasts could not, and beasts made sounds unique to the wild, and something profoundly disturbing occurred when they crossed.
From the darkness had erupted a bout of guttural screams, gurgles, growls, and snarls so ghastly and ravenous Taiyo’s gut muscles clenched him into fetal recoil.
“What’s going on?” Nel yelled. “Roll call. Roll call.”
“Yamazaki accounted for.” Taiyo leaped to his feet and flicked on the headlamp.
“I’m here,” said Kristen, her voice a rattle.
“Ronin?” Nel said. “Ronin Aro, respond.”
The glow of a light arrived before the hammering sound of boot treads. Bounding toward camp was the furious sprint of a man running for his life.
“It’s got him,” Ronin yelled as he hurdled the perimeter.
“What’s going on?” yelled Taiyo, but Ronin stormed right past without reply and dove onto the raft.
“I saw it.” Ronin told everyone, his breaths hitching. “I saw it get him.”
“Saw what?”
“We have to hide. It might come. Weapons… Get off the ground. But we need weapons. Weapons. … It’s got him. I saw it. … Shelter. Get ready. Weapons and shelter.”
The rabid sounds of agony continued to fill the Asylum as the AsCans tried to extract an account.
“Ronin, what the fuck happened?”
They’d never seen him so distraught.
Hands on his knees, bent over on the deck of the raft, he told them through the coughing and panting, “I saw— It was eating him.”
For one frozen moment, the four fired unintelligible queries at each other, until Taiyo seized control. “Come on,” he ordered, but before he could set off running toward Walter, the sounds of agony abruptly ceased.
If ever Taiyo had questioned which gripped a person more, pain or pleasure, he now had the answer. Now that he’d heard the incubus of one being devouring another.
The candidates huddled together on the raft, the only material object that had given comfort and relief to their ordeal. Taiyo ground his thumb into his palm. Without intention, he’d been drawing little stick people. It did not bring his hand to his mouth, but he did swallow hard.
“Do you hear it?” Ronin whispered. “Listen. It’s not done.”
They held still and listened.
“I don’t hear anything.”
“Sh.”
They kept as still as their rapid heartbeats allowed. Nel’s hand gripped Taiyo’s arm; his fist had her sleeve. A twig-like snap broke the silence. Nel’s grip tightened. Then a faint, distant thud. More crunching followed, plus several thuds and smacks. In place of their crewmate’s screams and cries had come the sounds of a predator playing with its victim.
“What the fuck is going on over there?” whispered Kristen, her voice quivering.
Taiyo fought the crushing sense of panic in his chest. “Walter?” he called out feebly.
“Shut up!” Ronin yelled. The words echoed, and the thrashing stopped.
Lights off, they trained their ears to the darkness. At first, the shadows gave no clue as to what they obscured. Minutes passed. No one dared move for fear of disturbing what they could not see or hear. But then, from the recesses of perception, a different sound crept forth from the veil. Something large and heavy skulking along the ground, abandoning the remains of its last kill to pursue its next.
Shoosh … Shoosh … Shoosh …
The sound got louder until Taiyo could hear the plodding of webbed feet and claws on rock driving the creature’s mass across the cave floor.
Shoosh … Shoosh …
“It’s almost here,” Kristen whispered through raspy breaths.
***
On the raft, the four locked arms. Not by strategy. By fear and desperate clinging. Nel’s right hand slid into Taiyo’s left, and their sweaty, quaking fingers interlaced.
For the moment, the air was silent; hot, stagnant, dark, and ominous.
Taiyo tugged Ronin’s sleeve. “What did you see back there?” he whispered.
“I just fucking said what I saw.” Ronin tore his arm away.
“What happened, Ronin?” Nel pleaded. “You were there.”
“Guys, please just be quiet,” said Kristen, though her breathing was loud, like a child trying to rein in tears and keep from hyperventilating.
In time, the four moved from a standing huddle to a kneeling, backs or shoulders touching. They spoke little and listened intently. The sound of the animal’s approach had ceased, but they hadn’t heard it turn around.
It was out there, somewhere in the dark, within a stone’s throw. They all knew it had the prowess and patience to outwait them, yet their only course was to wait.
Eventually, Taiyo’s thoughts turned into words. “Why did you leave him?” he asked Ronin. He hadn’t meant it to come out like an accusation.
Ronin replied sharply, “Walter is dead.” Then Taiyo felt Ronin’s hot breath against his cheek, and the discreet words licked his ear like the tongue of a serpent: “I didn’t leave him. … I stayed and watched until it turned on me.”
The realization rose inside Taiyo like a pressure wave expanding his veins until his chest could hardly contain his boiling blood. “You let him die!”
“I told you what killed him.”
“Why didn’t you help him?” Chest-to-chest, Taiyo yelled in Ronin’s face.
Before Taiyo knew the strike had been launched, the force of the world slammed him down onto the deck. His head rung and throat burned. He couldn’t breathe—couldn’t gasp or cough. Ronin had him pinned by the neck. Fingernails clenched the flesh beneath his chin, pressing on his larynx. Strangling.
The talons shook, jerked, gripped harder, and released. The others had jumped in to pull Ronin off.
Ronin roared down into Taiyo’s face, spraying him with wretched breath and insults.
“Everyone shut up,” Kristen yelled. “Just shut up. Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! You fucking children, just shut up a second so we can think.”
After a long time out, Nel made a diplomatic attempt to discern what had happened to Walter. “We’re not accusing you,” she told Ronin. Her voice stayed level. “You were with him, that’s all. A witness. It would help our survival to know the specifics of what you saw.” She had to repeat herself several times before she got a response.
“You want to know what happened?” Ronin didn’t sound mad; more hurt than anything. He leaped off the raft. “Come with me, and I’ll show you.”
37
A spider’s web isn’t only its sleeping spring but also its food trap.
—African proverb
Silence fed the darkness like road kill to a raven; a silence so absolute it had grown into a presence, one that sat on Taiyo’s chest and pecked at his eyes. His brain had peeled back its non-vitals, saving calories for calculating his next move.
In time, the raven had its fill. It, too, perished and began to decay.
Exhaustion would eventually drive the surviving four candidates to their hammocks, and like cooling engines, the subtle creaks of the aluminum frames buried the silence. But the noises did nothing to illuminate the dark or erase from memory what they’d seen: a path of shredded cloth, bone fragments, and cherry-red entrails. Taiyo had counted nine paces between the head and the bottom half, which remained pinned beneath the boulder. They hadn’t s
tuck around long enough to locate the torso, if it remained at all.
Nel sat in her hammock about six paces from where Taiyo lay in his. He watched the green light blur as she fumbled her phone. It hit the ground but appeared to survive. More carefully now, she fought the shakes and struggled to keep her finger from skidding across the screen.
He offered to type it out for her, but she refused. The phone was for emotional support, she said, like a teddy bear or Vicodin. When she dropped and retrieved the phone again, he went to her bedside, knelt, and took her wrist.
“Here,” he said and steadied her arm on his one raised knee.
“I have to record the … the …”
“The accident.”
“I have to record it in the log,” she said.
“Will you write how it happened?”
In the screen light, he saw her head turn to him and hold a look. What it meant, he wasn’t sure.
She said, “I’m not going to speculate.”
He stayed with her a bit and then said he’d be back soon. “I have to make a record of it as well.”
He went to the west wall. When the tears stopped flowing, he used the blade of a multitool to reopen the wound between his left thumb and forefinger, and he traced another handprint onto the canvass. This time, he wrote the initials WT.
***
Almost to his own surprise, Taiyo made it back to camp without getting killed. Once in his hammock again, he felt Ronin’s eyes defying the void as if stalking him in infrared. From arm’s length, Ronin spoke in a low voice: “Tragic, isn’t it? Walter, I mean.”
Taiyo grunted in the affirmative.
The hovering mass of Ronin’s body heat and odor alighted on Taiyo’s skin. For the moment, the discomfort distracted Taiyo from the danger. Kristen and Nel had gone just out of earshot to fortify the perimeter. Once done, the plan was for all four candidates to return to the Wormhole to make a cairn for Walter’s remains.
