Vessel, Book I: The Advent

by Tominda Adkins

Jesse paused on the rocky bank and stood very still. He wiggled his fingers and toes, inspecting himself for any damage, and was relieved to find that everything of importance was as it should be―heart: beating, hair: still there, member: intact. He was fine.

  But something was sensationally wrong.

  He watched the tail lights of the retreating U-Haul fade into the deepest smoke at the base of the mountain and disappear. A light rain had started, but it was no match for the forest fire which hotly lit up this small corner of dawn. The occasional burning tree caved, sending up spectacular whirlwinds of gray and orange ash. It was only a matter of time before emergency crews showed up.

  Or so Jackson was saying. He was marveling out loud at the county's slow reaction time as he meandered towards Jesse. Khan was close behind, sucking a busted lip. His last cigarettes were soaked and he was most unhappy.

  Jesse frowned. He couldn't quite put his finger on what was so horribly wrong. There were the obvious things. These very odd strangers in black, for instance. But it was so hard to think. Because everywhere, everywhere, there was the smell. The humming. This crawling, gnawing sense of enemy.

  Hollows.

  Hollows who were burned beyond recognition. Hollows who'd lost limbs, who'd been twisted and mangled beneath tires. Jesse and Jackson watched with a quiet, numb curiosity as a woman writhed indignantly in shallow water, several yards from her own head.

  I'll explain.

  This woman was thrashing around because decapitation doesn't feel all that great, especially when you don't die immediately as a result. There was also the water, the breeze, the stony shore―things that are bound to feel unpleasant against your skin. If you're a Hollow.

  But pain and inconvenience aside, the woman was fundamentally fine. Fine because the water and the sun and all those pebbles she was rolling in hadn't been commanded to destroy her. And fine because her blood vessels and her spinal cord and all the things which normally hold a human together have nothing to do with what holds a Hollow together.

  What holds a Hollow together, actually, was at that moment pouring out of the woman's neck and clouding through the water like dirty oil, swirling toward her wayward head, drawing it back to her. More of the stuff stained the riverbank around other Hollows, numberless splatters and smears which wiggled to life and slithered blindly over the ground. It dripped from torn shreds of burnt flesh, or evaporated into muddy steam and mingled with the smoke. It was everywhere.

  To you or me, that would all just be really gross.

  But to the Vessel, it was maddening.

  The Vessel could smell it. They could hear its silent crawling, its hissing and bubbling, the way dogs hear training whistles. The stench clouded their thoughts, filled them with a nagging hostility, and made their names disappear in brief, barbaric flashes. Flickers of identity vertigo. The stuff, whatever it was, pleaded to them for violence.

  Their only distraction were the hunters, masked and faceless down to their stoically unparted lips. Aside from an infrequent gasp for breath, they were weirdly silent, speaking to one another only in the briefest, most direct commands. And with the exception of the occasional confirming glance, they took little notice of the Vessel. There was still work to be done.

  Work to be done with very big knives.

  A common saying among the Luna Latum hunters, a fun little motto of theirs, starts with the question: How do you outrun death?

  Jesse watched a solitary hunter pause in the path of the last intact Hollow. I say 'intact', but the thing's features were burnt beyond crispy, melted and warped like an action figure left on the dashboard. Evidently, it had gotten too close to one of the flame throwers. Or Khan. Masses of what resembled black worms covered its burns, and it ran like a man still on fire, rage-filled and unstoppable. The hunter faced it calmly, gripping a soiled machete in either hand.

  How do you outrun death?

  Any hunter will answer that question the exact same way:

  You cut off its fucking legs.

  The Hollow focused its eyes―or rather, the molten caverns where its eyes had been―on the hunter, sprinting close enough to lunge. Unflinching, the hunter pitched one machete into a low, powerful spin. The blade whistled in a silver blur before clattering into a spray of pebbles behind the Hollow, whose stride broke at once. The creature toppled forward to the ground, scarcely a yard away from the hunter, its left leg slanting off separately like a felled tree.

  And here was what Jesse saw, what Corin and Jackson saw, what we've all seen since. This was what distinguished a Hollow as a vehicle of death, and not just some human being that refused to die. This was what animated them, thought for them, saw for them, spoke for them, connected them, and linked them to their source. It held their bodies intact, and even put them back together again if, for instance, a Luna Latum hunter successfully hacked off a leg.

  It was the decided form of something never meant to be seen, and it had decided to look insurmountably, incomprehensibly revolting.

  In the void left behind by the cleanly severed leg, more dark, wormy organisms amassed, swarming thick and fast. The sight made good old-fashioned gushing blood seem desirable, yet it was merely a prelude. With sickening quickness, whole tendrils burst from the wound, improbable and much longer than any human leg should ever be. The Hollow, for all his thumping and screaming, appeared tame by comparison to these nightmarish limbs. They twisted and flopped and coiled along the ground, seeming to shift between solid, liquid, or gas with each new angle but always remaining opaque and putrid-looking.

  And what was it? Was it death? Decay? Hell? The Vessel marveled at this unsightly thing, and at the many identical scenes around them, cooling their divine vehemence with human shock. It didn't have a name to them, whatever it was. But it was why the five of them existed. That much they understood.

  The hunter stepped deliberately around the writhing mutations, lifted his remaining machete over his shoulder, and swung it downward.

  Jesse flinched away. Only then did he notice that he was standing by himself again. The others were walking over to two hunters who, instead of dicing up Hollows, were standing around having some kind of debate. Ghi was on the ground between them, flat on his back, hands over his eyes, groaning.

  The problem seemed to be that they were afraid to touch him.

  The hunters resumed a state of silence when Jackson stepped in, and Ghi wheezed his disoriented thanks as the larger Vessel hoisted him to his feet, casting worried and wildly unfocused eyes to the strange, aloof figures. They did not deign to speak, not even when Corin, with all appropriate caution, faced them in open acknowledgement.

  He was close enough then to notice that their blinders covered their eyes completely―there were no holes to see out of. And yet the hunters still seemed to be looking right back at him. Corin cocked his head, took a sideways step for a different angle, and got the eerie result he anticipated. The hunters followed his movements in silence.

  "Who are you?" he demanded, doing his best to sound bold instead of thoroughly creeped out.

  No response. Jesse, who had wandered over to regroup, paused to watch this exchange. He waved a hand in passing before the featureless, unblinking eyes of the blinders. The hunters did not flinch. They merely frowned. More sourly than they had been frowning before, if that were possible.

  Jesse turned to Corin and shrugged.

  A shorter, presumably female hunter joined them, flicking black matter from her blade before sheathing it between her shoulders. She dismissed the stoic pair with a few foreign words, and then her full attention landed heavily upon the Vessel. With a gloved hand, she lifted the face of her blinder and looked at them with living eyes.

  "Well," said Stella Rosin, with frank disappointment. "You're certainly not what they're expecting."

  Ghi, having wrangled his vision back into proper alignment, focused it immediately on her face. He jumped back into Jackson, who responded quite like a solid wall. Jackson remembered Stella, too―her
compact stature, her mercury eyes, her small nose, as petite and pointed as the rest of her. And her weapons. With one swipe of his arm, Jackson scooped Ghi behind him, glaring at the woman who was less than half his size.

  Corin hadn't forgotten Stella either. He aligned himself with Jackson, waiting for her to act and anticipating the worst. Befuddled, Jesse looked between the two parties as if watching a ping-pong match to the death. Khan towered menacingly behind the others. He had no idea what all the sudden tension was about, but he sensed that something might need to be set on fire.

  Other hunters emerged from the thick smoke then, abandoning their grisly duties as if answering some call to contention. They paused when the water closest to the bank began to swell and circle, and when the pebbles underfoot vibrated ever so slightly. Khan bristled, the air above him wavy with heat.

  "Who are you?" Corin asked again, this time with a deliberate threat in his tone.

  All of the hunters stood very, very still. All of them except for one.

  "Oh, enough," Stella snapped. "We're on your side. Isn't that obvious?"

  No, it wasn't. The earth didn't settle. The heat didn't extinguish.

  "We got off on the wrong foot, I know," Stella proceeded, her tone bold and informative, not at all apologetic. "My mistake."

  "Why did you attack me?" Ghi croaked. "You. Back in New York."

  "Didn't you hear me?" Stella stared him down. Her steely eyes ran over his face, closer and more thorough than a new razor. "My mistake."

  "How do you know about us?" Corin asked. He nodded at the nearest Hollow carcass, one that had been utterly fried by Ghi. "And them?"

  Stella's shoulders sank. So these punk excuses for gods didn't know anything. Except maybe how to start landslides and forest fires. Great.

  At her gesture, the other hunters returned to their grim work. Stella was not sure where to begin. Explanations, by conditioning, were not something she was comfortable giving.

  "We're the Luna Latum," she offered sullenly. "Ring any bells?"

  Not a jingle.

  "The good guys," Stella summarized. "We've been around for awhile."

  There was a collective, enlightened "Oh" from the Vessel. Slightly reassuring.

  "The bedouins," Corin said, not quite ready to relax his stance.

  Jackson was even farther from convinced. "So you're one of them, huh?" he asked, with accusation in his tone. "Then how come you don't look Egyptian?"

  Stella knit her brows in confusion and then sliced him with a glare. "How come you don't look Egyptian?"

  Jackson pursed his lips and looked decidedly downriver, unable to answer.

  Stella shook her head. "Anyway," she said, flicking an errant black glob off her forearm, "Sorry about the bridge mishap. Their trucks slipped past us somehow." This was said without inflection, as if she were apologizing for coughing in the library. Not for the flaming bus wreckage lighting up the morning behind her.

  "What exactly are they doing?" Ghi asked, staring past her. He appeared no less nervous than before. Hunters were hauling coffin-sized steel boxes in and out of the ambulances, collecting the Hollows―the ones which were still moving, anyway―into them separately.

  "Putting those things where they can't hurt anyone," Stella said, with a subtle sting in her voice. "That's our job. And we've been doing it just fine for a very long time."

  "And what's with the masks?" Jackson indicated his own eyes. "How do you see?"

  Stella shrugged. "Hollows are deceptive to the naked eye. My people use more refined senses to look at them. As for you five ...."

  She flipped her blinder down over her eyes again and smiled.

  "Yes. You all look much better this way."

  The five men shifted uncomfortably under the small woman's gaze.

  "Interesting," Stella noted. "I don't have to hold my breath to see you." Her smug smile retreated into a familiar, strict line. This Q&A could go on for hours, judging by how little the Vessel seemed to know. And she couldn't afford much more time humoring them.

  "Look, boys," she said. "I have a friend up on that bridge who is dying to answer every single one of your questions. But right now, I need some information from you. Starting with whatever you can tell me about that young lady you've been traveling with."

  It only took half a second. And then the daze of shock dropped off of Jesse faster than a pair of generic-brand pants.

  So that was what felt so very wrong. My absence. Jesse turned around. They all turned around, around and around, only to see that I was nowhere in sight. After all the chaos and panic, they had only just noticed.

  Thanks, guys.

  Jesse raised his hands to his mouth and gasped. "Jordan."

  "Yes, let's start with her name," Stella said patiently.

  Ghi scanned the river, turning on his heel and tripping. Corin wheeled on him. "I thought she was with you!"

  "Does it look like she's with me?"

  Jesse pushed past them to go looking downstream, and the group started breaking apart to join the search. Before any of them made it more than a few steps, however, Stella raised her voice.

  "She isn't out there," she said, in a tone that was maddeningly calm.

  They stopped. Jesse's jaw dropped. Horrible things dawned on him. He swung around.

  "Where is she?"

  Stella ignored his question. "I need to know who she is. Why she was with you, and what she knows."

  "Jordan Murphy. She's just my assistant," Jesse sputtered, marching over to place himself in front of Stella. "She's not part of this."

  Stella shook her head. "I'm afraid she is now."

  "No, really," Jesse insisted. "She won't tell anyone about this. Never. She's very dependable. Just let me talk to her. Where is she?" He glanced to the ambulances farther up the bank, pausing when Stella showed no immediate reaction. "You're not going to hurt her, are you?"

  "Hurt her?" Stella said, sounding disgusted by the very presumption. "Of course we wouldn't hurt her. But they might."

  She turned and pointed to the mountainside, at the dawn-faded brake lights of a U-Haul. It was all the way up the access road, about ten seconds from reaching the highway, and there wasn't a thing anyone could do to stop it. A single ambulance was tailing it, but it was far behind.

  You can imagine the hysterics which followed. Primarily from Jesse. "Oh my god," he reportedly said, over and over again. "Oh my god."

  God my ass.