The Alchemists of Kush

by Minister Faust

  8.

  At last, back at the front door of his crib. Rap’s key, trembling against the lock: clicketty-ticketty-clinketty—.

  Two hands. Shoving the key. In.

  The clock’s angry red LEDs burned 2:03.

  Shoes off. Tip-toed past his mother’s room, even though she probably wasn’t even in.

  A scream.

  He froze.

  The phone rang again.

  He bolted to his bedroom.

  Third ring, and still his mother wasn’t picking up. Was it the police? Or—

  Fourth ring and the answering machine got it, two o’clock in the fucking morning and after the robot voice said nobody was home, that stupid, angry voice sloshed out of the speaker like stomach acid, and calling tonight of all nights, Rap just wished that muthafuckas would—

  Tried pulling off the sweat-drenched shirt sticking to his back like a snake failing at shedding skin. Finally, off, and saw shirt the red spatters and small grey chunks .

  Ran to the toilet, puked until he hacked up nothing but acrid yellow stripes. Briefly considered burning his shirt until he remembered the smoke alarm.

  Instead he cut the old t-shirt into pieces, put them inside an empty 4L Lucerne Neapolitan ice cream tub from the recycling bin, and drowned them in bleach.

  Only bruises were on his chest and thighs.

  Washed somebody stranger’s memories and life off his face.

  Shivered himself to sleep on that hot summer night.

  Dreaming: falling from the clouds till he crashed through the street, and down through the earth until his plunged into magma.

  Two:

  Revolution

  The Book of Then

  1.

  I was in charge of our child army out in the desert, a bunch of chubby-cheeked soldiers feasting from gourds full of mushrooms, snails and beetles during the long nights I trained them to kill.

  The kids—all two hundred of them including stragglers we’d picked up along the way—did like I told them. Shai, he was the next oldest after me, was my second-in-command. We were the ones who planned the counter-attack on the night-raiders.

  That’s what led to every last one of us but me being hunted down and killed . . . or worse. Because there is always something worse.

  By the time we’d spent three months out in the desert, sleeping in caves or in burnt-out homes by day and changing location every night, the kids started toughening up.

  That’s what constant fear and struggling just to live does to you. You just hope you don’t shatter.

  Back then I dreamed every night that my mother was looking for me, and that just when she picked me up, the night-raiders hacked us both to pieces.

  I’d wake up crying, hoping no one had heard me. But whoever was sleeping next to me would be shivering.

  The kids were hardly even crying any more, except when they were asleep. That’s when it was worst. Like dogs howling in the distance. No—like puppies. Whimpering in a mound.

  But still, they got cleverer every day, scrambling through all the wrecked places we found, digging through the ashes and the skulls, finding cups, tools, knives, anything we could use to survive.

  The kids even got good at night-fishing, which is extremely tough, because the water’s black and if the Moon is shining, then all you can see is its reflection broken into a thousand shining stars.

  So you had to keep your eyes open and a sharpened stick in your hand, and then when you saw any movement, strike like a scream of lightning, and hope you didn’t stab your friend’s foot next to you.

  But the fish never saw our fishers, because by then I’d taught almost all of them how to turn themselves into shadows.

  The best fisher we had was Jedu. He was a year younger than Shai, and he taught the others. On good nights, Jedu made sure every one of us ate.

  “You’re the best fisher I’ve ever seen,” Shai always told him. Shai made sure to praise the kids whenever they did their chores right. Me, I thought he was spoiling them.

  We cooked over coals, the remains of covered fires. We kept small fires so we didn’t attract bandits, devils or the murderers who’d slaughtered our people.

  2.

  “Shai,” I told him the night we began planning our revolt, “you know that if we don’t find a way to kill all the raiders, eventually they’ll kill all of us, right?”

  “I know,” he said, nodding like he’d been thinking the same thing but’d been too afraid to say the words out loud.

  But we were both full of shit. We were just kids. We didn’t really know anything.

  The truth is, the best thing would’ve been if we’d just kept running. Found an oasis or some deep caves. The Blackland is huge, and the Destroyer would never’ve found us.

  That’s what we called him. We’d didn’t know who the raiders’ leader was, but we knew they had to have one. The kind who turned whole villages into smoking graveyards.

  So Shai and I had the kids scavenge for all the farm tools they could get, especially anything with a blade. We didn’t have swords or bows, and even if we did, we were all too small to use them.

  But if you sharpened a spade enough, you had a dagger. A rake we could turn into a trident or pike. And a hatchet, that was the best find of all.

  I didn’t know much about fighting except for how to use a dagger, which Duam, the biggest soldier, had taught me. But Shai knew how to wrestle.

  So when we weren’t searching for food, that’s what we did. It was the only real fun we had during that season of survival, practicing with short sticks or long rock chips for knives and throwing each other around.

  “Get im! Throw im! Smash im!” they’d scream, getting so riled up watching a match that Shai and I had to hiss at them to shut up just so every bandit, enemy ranger or devil in the world wouldn’t come butchering.

  But we had two boys, Gab and Ashgaga. Always fooling around. Slacking and straggling. Amazing they lasted as long as they did.

  They were supposed to be gathering fruit, since neither one could fish worth a damn.

  But it was my fault. I was in charge. I knew they were stupid and untrustworthy, but I started letting them go out unsupervised.

  Those idiots came back to camp singing—actually singing—under the starlight.

  We were all absorbed by a wrestling match, when suddenly nets like finger-thick spiderwebs were strangling almost all of us. Three of our best fighters ducked, grabbed their pikes and plunged them through the murderers—I saw eyes bulging on those bastards maybe more from shock than the agony that sent their souls to incineration.

  I dipped my knife into every adult leg I could and yanked back hard and sideways. But there were too many of them—

  “Run!” I ordered, everyone dashing for the river, hoping to escape like we did on the night of fire.

  Back then I’d had to turn them all into shadows myself. This time I didn’t because I’d taught them all how to do it themselves. But they were so panicked, they either forgot to do it or forgot how to, and nets took some and arrows took others.

  The rest of us got to the river, chased by slaughterers splashing after us, who suddenly stopped terrified and ran out of the water screaming.

  I looked up and saw why just before a wave knocked me down.

  A giant mouth.

  Rising from the water, taller than a palm tree, skinning back and revealing a thousand stalactite teeth.

  Smoke stinking like puke and shit shot out of the maw, and half the kids instantly dropped into the water. The monster sucked their floating bodies in with a raging roar, sounding like the sky being ripped to shreds.

  I tried running, but the monster rose and slammed into the water, and the swell lifted me off my feet.

  I rammed face-first into the mud, then the water sucked me back, and I was falling into its mouth—

  The abomination my mother named the Devourer of Millions of Souls.

  3.

  Even inside its belly, there were teeth.<
br />
  They gave us our only light, those murderous grinders, shining like devil-shattered pieces of the moon.

  We were crushed in upon each other down there, stacked five and even ten bodies high. Trapped. Suckers on its bellywalls clutching us in place on top of each other, no food, no water but the stinking filth in the thing’s stomach, pissing and shitting all over each other because we couldn’t move.

  Crying there was even worse than back in the cave. It echoed more. It mixed with the Devourer’s rage and came back sounding like our bodies being knackered at the joints.

  The only thing I could do to keep from going insane was to hold onto the fang closest to me.

  “Shai!”

  He was pinned right on top of me.

  “Grab hold of this tooth.”

  “What? Why?”

  “See that crack? Maybe if we can cause this monster some pain, it’ll open its mouth.”

  “And drown us? Or just chew us up?”

  “How long do you think we can survive like this? I’d rather die trying to escape, if that’s what it takes.”

  He shut up. Grabbed on. So did the boys above him and below me.

  “Everyone, pull!” I said. “Now push!”

  We went back and forth, pulling and then pushing. First we could wiggle the tooth. Eventually we could move it. And then the crack split wider.

  And when we broke the tooth, the Devourer howled enough to pierce our eardrums to bleeding.

  Suddenly we were shooting up its throat and exploding from its mouth, falling and splashing in scum and mud and slime.

  I held my breath, splashing, swimming blindly with muck in my eyes and my mouth and nostrils, until I felt rocks and mud underneath my feet.

  Dragging myself out on the shore in the darkness, I collapsed gasping on a bog of reeds and mush, watching the monster submerge and a wave bulging up and crashing a bunch of kids down on top of me.

  4.

  I dragged out everyone else I could see. They were scattered all over the scummy long-grass, hacking up brine.

  I found a shard of the Devourer’s shattered fang, the length of my forearm and still shining like lightning. I tucked it through my sopping waist-sash.

  On my left, Shai, face-down, unconscious. I flipped him over.

  A shard of tooth stood up from his belly. Blood seeped around the base, pulsing, bubbling. And then stopped.

  I ordered the survivors to call out their names. They choked them out spluttering and snuffling.

  We were once over two hundred.

  We were down to two dozen.

  In dim light, we huddled together, shivering and crying.

  5.

  Above the skeleton trees—at last—

  The Sun.

  You could look right at it without hurting your eyes. Pus-white, a pale circle, hovering beyond the fog. Fog as thick as milk . Like grey blood.

  “Everyone! Listen up!” I said. “It’s morning. We don’t know if the monster’s coming back, or if the raiders followed us. Before sunset, we’ve got to get food, water, and a place to hide—hey!”

  Some of the kids were drinking the scum-slicked water.

  Four of them, the ones who’d gulped the most, suddenly puked. Blood shot out of their mouths and noses, burst from their ears and eyes. They keeled over, plunged into the swamps, sank like rocks.

  The others, the ones who’d just been slurping, started keening like hyenas. Yipping and laughing and howling and screeching. Then jumping, staggering, thrashing.

  I ordered them all not to drink the water, but then I saw it in their faces, their terror when they realised it the moment I did: all of them had sucked in water when we’d plunged into the swamps in the first place.

  It started in their fingers. Twitching. Then in their hands and arms. Then they were flailing, screaming and dancing.

  When they stopped, the black from their eyes had drowned to white.

  And they all began slogging away to nowhere.

  “Where are you going? Come back here!”

  They ignored me, or maybe they didn’t hear me . . . I couldn’t tell which.

  I tried grabbing them, punching them, kicking them, knocking them down. It didn’t make a difference. This entire land, this ugly, horrible, shit-stinking bog as far as I could see, these swamps of death, had murdered all us kids who’d survived the night of fire more than three months before.

  Everyone but me.

  So I was alone.

  6.

  I ran. As best as I could. In the mud.

  Sometimes it sucked its way up my legs as far as my ass, like it was trying to eat me. I pulled my way out with branches, vines, anything I could reach.

  When night came, I climbed a tree, hid up in one like a bird, hoping there weren’t any lions or devils that’d find me sleeping and rip the meat off my face.

  I was shaking with fear up in those branches. I could even hear the leaves rattling. I clutched my fang-shard so hard my hand bled.

  But finally I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and I fell asleep dreaming I was falling. Falling into my mother’s arms. Before some horrible thing crawled out of the darkness to rip us into meat and blood.

  The Book of Now

  1.

  Rap’s legs: jolting under his covers.

  Feet, aching from breaking through the street after falling a millionth time in his dreams.

  The shell of Sunday morning cracked open.

  Sweating. Dry throat. Tongue like sandpaper.

  Sleep’d sucked. But even it was better than the shakes and cold he’d had the night before. When he’d been lying literally one footstep away from having had a shotgun paint his brains across the linoleum of a hip hop clothing store in Kush.

  Had to take a whiz. Fought it. Finally went, then back to his room.

  Terrified the phone would ring.

  Or that the door would knock.

  And that cops would Taser him and haul him away just like they did the goateed man in the skullcap—or worse, the men busting in would be friends of the killers that the goateed man had crushed.

  Rap hauled out comics. Tried to read.

  When lunch came and he’d been in his room the whole time, his mother knocked on his door. He told her he was sick. She didn’t push it—just insisted he get his homework done.

  He skipped dinner, too, at which time she finally came inside his room to check on him.

  Smelled the ice cream pail full of bleach, saw the cut-up cloth soaking in it.

  “What’s this?” Suspicious.

  “Science project,” he said immediately. He hoped not too immediately. To sell it better: “I asked you for help with it three times already. I couldn’t wait forever—”

  “Well, I’m sorry, butt I’ff been busy tryingk to pay the bills around here,” she said instantly. Bingo.

  To keep her reeling. “That’s where you were last night?”

  “Yes, as a mutter of factt.”

  “Cuz I thought maybe you were over at—”

  “I wass workingk.”

  A breath. “Are you planning to go to school tomorrow?”

  Sure as hell felt sick, so he figured he must’ve looked it to her. She left and returned with a glass of water. “Probably just the flu,” she said.

  He drank it down, the water filling the cracks in his lips, driving out their pain. “Sleep it off,” she said, closing the door behind her.

  He’d barely slept the night before, but his mind ached like he’d been sleeping for a day. For a life.

  When he didn’t look better on Monday morning, she gave him permission to stay home from school and asked him if he wanted Jell-O. When he said no, she frowned and told him she’d call home to check up on him.

  While flipping frantically through papers in her satchel, she verbally uploaded her schedule to him: a 9 am meeting with the Multicultural Health Brokers Coop, a 10:30 at EISA to help some new Rwanda family . . . . By the time she recited her 1 pm with a Nuer woman trying to fin
d work, he was lost.

  “There’re sambusas from Mebrat’s in the fridge if you gett hungry,” she said, kissing his forehead. She returned with a tube of skin cream and said. “You’re ashy.”

  Told him what she’d left in the fridge for him. Maybe twice to set up that she really was busy. And then running around frantically looking for something (papers? Always papers).

  Heard the apartment door click shut. Closed his eyes. Tried to sleep.

  Thunder.

  And his eyes opened.

  2.

  Tuesday. Rap went to school, but in first period he was a zombie and must’ve looked it, because people were avoiding eye contact with him even more than usual.

  No wonder. At the class break, saw his face in the bathroom mirror: stoned-looking, crazy eyes. Groggy and angry at the same time.

  Math class. Supposed to be doing trig. Couldn’t focus. Half of every minute: sketching action poses of Static, Adam Warlock, King Peacock, ’Pac, Lupe, NWA’s original five.

  The other half of every minute: sweating, staring at the door, bracing for the constable to charge into the classroom and cuff-haul him out to a waiting cruiser.

  Lunch. Wasn’t hungry. Went to the school library to check the newspapers. No mention in Sunday’s, of course, but Monday’s front page hefted

  Four shot dead in store

  Three suspects in custody, police suspect Somali drug gangs

  Hustled the paper over to a carrel, heart punching his throat, thinking the store had to’ve had a security camera, pleading

  Don’t let my photo be in there . . . .

  Photos, yeah, but none of them his.

  Family-supplied shots of the victims, mug shots of the two shooters. The story cited a third man in police custody charged with aggravated assault—

  “Hey!”