He turns.
His face screws up into sadness and fury, the lines on his face crowding one another, pushing to the front. And I wait for him to move, to say something, to pull the trigger and blast me into oblivion. Crunching with every step, he steps up to me, his boots stopping mere inches from my own. Pug Nose backs off. So does Unibrow. But Meredith leans in for a better look.
Goatee leans in, our hoods touching at the top, the fur mingling, his nose and mouth so close to mine that I can see every crack, every pore, the fine hairs poking out from in between his eyes. From this space, his eye looks translucent, as if I can peer straight through him and into his thoughts and memories: the time he broke his arm while riding a bike, hacking off the head of a dog, sitting on the hood of a car with a girlfriend, slurping the last strand of spaghetti, bullets in the brain. But these are not his memories.
They are mine.
And I can’t look away.
“You think so?” he says, his voice a hoarse whisper, rusty, his tongue thick from its lack of use, his language using lips and teeth to shape and stop the words. “You think I killed him?”
I nod. “It was your knife.”
“You mean this one?” His blade is there, in front of my face, separating us, so fast that I never saw him move, not even flinch. He turns it in the light, the glare shining onto both of us in the same fashion, blinding us. “I may have slit his throat, but it was a mercy kill.”
“Was it?”
“Would you want to watch your son die after a long night and an even longer day of sitting in pain, helpless and letting the life drain from you?” He drops the knife from between us.
I think of my wife. My daughter. Shake my head.
“It was a mercy.”
“Slitting his throat wasn’t a mercy. Neither was cooking him.”
“You didn’t seem to have problem with breakfast.”
“Because he wasn’t my son.” I expect the words to penetrate him, sink deep down into his core and rattle the cages of his secret heart.
His face never changes. “He’d rather have lived his life as he had than scavenging and starving like your tiny rabble.”
“Did you ever ask him?”
“I didn’t have to.” He steps back. “It’s not wrong to want to live.”
“Eating people? Servants to those god-forsaken beasts?”
“It’s better than what you do. Looking for scraps, choking down half-frozen fruit and vegetables. I can have all those things, a hot meal, and protection for me and my family.”
“And a lot of good it did, too.” Then he does something I don’t expect him to. He smiles. His sharpened teeth in full view, zig-zagged like “v”s or “w”s that never end. “You just don’t get it do you.” He shakes his head. “You’ve never seen what the Jo-Bran are capable off. And besides, they’ve won. We humans are on the way out. You know it. I know it. More importantly, they know it. So, curse me all you want. Judge me. See if I give a fuck. I’m living and that’s all that matters.” He steps further away. “I did the best I could for my son. I only hope you did the same for your family.”
I picture the blood on their faces. Fixed. Drying. Freezing.
Then he says something in Banjankri and turns around, taking the lead once again.
No one else says anything as we press on. We listen to the snow fall. We listen to the boots crunch. The continued tapping of the shotgun.
Meredith troops on, not showing any sign of emotion. What could be going on in that mute head of hers? If I only had a can of pears for every time I’d had that thought, I’d be feasting for life. She turns her face to mine, kidnaps my eyes with hers, then lets me go, without even the slightest hint of a smile, a frown.
Her captor, Unibrow, is much jumpier than normal; the attack last night must’ve spooked him. But as we near the city, I notice that Pug Nose, too, keeps his eyes on constant search, his head bobbing around like a doe in the middle of the field, watching for any signs of danger. Even Goatee drops back closer to the group.
It won’t matter how many sacrifices they bring or how often they deal with the Jo-Bran. They’ll always live in fear. The thought pleases me, reaffirms my own belief that they live nothing more than a sham of a life. That this isn’t living. Fear is no way to live—especially if it is by choice.
The group tightens closer and closer as we come to the city’s edge. The sun still hangs high, just past noon. It’s on its way out but we still have a few hours until darkness overcomes us. I figure that the Banjankri hope to dump us off, collect whatever reward it is that they receive for their treachery, and get the hell out of Dodge before night fell. I can’t blame them either.
To think that we were headed here of our own accord… Hopefully, I would’ve come to my senses, and we would’ve turned around, ran as fast as we could and be off and in search of other packs, other surviving buildings.
Meredith marches, her head tilted towards the snow as if she can read the tracks Goateee leaves behind, forming some indication as to what he might be thinking. It strikes me that not only has our group been broken so quickly, but also who is left. In the whisperings of the nights, under the protection of her constant snore, we’d discussed such things, what could happen, what we should do, when and if it did. And in all of our plans, Meredith was the first to go. I should’ve known all along that she would be one of the last—and probably will be the last. It was such a rarity to find a survivor from a Jo-Bran attack, let alone a survivor that was left in the open.
Before us, the city looms higher than the hills and snow drifts, the mock mountains built up and torn down constantly by the shifting winds. Buildings stick up from the snow like rotten teeth, cracked, discolored, the cavities open for all to see. Huge drifts have piled up along the west side of the buildings, so that anyone willing could walk up them and end up on the twentieth or thirtieth floor. The whole place is dark and silent. You’d think it was a ghost town if it weren’t for all the littered footprints.
A shiver slips down my spine, tripping at the top of my neck and rolling down the rest of me. I’ve seen Jo-Bran tracks before, but never so many. They outnumber the bootprints ten to one. Even if I have no respect for their lifestyle, the Banjankri have bigger balls than me, walking in and out of death. I take consolation in the fact that they don’t do it without fear though; Pug Nose and Unibrow mumble some forgotten incantation, a prayer to an ungodless god.
Goatee stops his tapping.
When we step in between the buildings, into the man-made chasm, the sun disappears, lost behind the dilapidated structures, an instant sunset, instant darkness. I feel like the Jo-Bran will come out roaring and growling, dropping from the windows and empty doorframes like droplets from icicles. They will tear us limb from limb, and we’ll soon resemble nothing more than the scene from last night, a pack of wolves ripped to shreds.
But nothing comes.
We press on further between the buildings, deeper into the decay, the ice, the snow. My heart beats so I fast, I feel like it will burst at any moment, just pop and spare me the terrors of what awaits at the end of this journey. Meredith is the only one that doesn’t seem fazed by what’s before her. She studies the surroundings like someone revisiting a forgotten home. Her calm helps steady my heart. I try to focus on the lack of malevolence, even the Banjankri’s anger has been tempered. But when I start to notice the true quiet of this place, the lack of wind, the lack of words, screams, anything, and it restarts my heart, throwing it into a tantrum. This is a place of death, a place of nothing.
A strip of buildings, a line of townhomes reminds me of my former house. The life I once had. The family the world destroyed. One of the buildings looks to be in decent shape, no cracks or crumbles to show its troubles, the things its seen in these streets. Maybe the stairs are right inside the doorway. You open the door and are greeted with a footstool and a full mirror, a space for your shoes. You can walk through the short hall, passing pictures and shelves with Hummel figur
ines and enter the kitchen. Or you can take a right, head into the living room, sink into the leather couch and flip through the 200 channels or what you’ve recorded or what can be watched instantly. Then you head upstairs to the bedrooms, find your daughter on her bed, studying and listening to her iPod, find your wife curled up with a trashy novel, one of those cheap paperbacks that you don’t mind if the spine breaks or if it’s lost. And you smile, basking in the comfort of your own home, secure, safe from the things that go bump in the night, the made up monsters from fairy tales and movies and fiction.
We round a bend and the strip of house disappears from my sight. So does the vision. That perfect sense of security and happiness is so wrong that it boils up within me, a stew of lies. Luckily, my angry tears evaporate before they ever reach my face.
A few blocks away, a group of people, more Banjankri, gather together and wait for something. There are hundreds of them, more Banjankri than I’ve ever seen—or ever wanted to know existed. They stand in a semi-circle, surrounding something towards the end of the street, where the ice and snow has built up and filled the space between the building, acting as a huge wall to shield the city from the light, block it out, board it up and bathe the space in darkness.
Mixed amongst the group are others like Meredith and me. Smaller packs devoured by another group. They are easy to pick out, not just because they are the bound ones, but they are the one’s whose heads droop, eyes closed, praying and wishing the world away. Tears stream down some of their faces as we walk along the outer rim of the half-circle. They know, as well as I, that their lives will end in blood and pain. Their existence snuffed out merely because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and discovered by the Banjankri. I don’t know which is worse: killed by the Jo-Bran in the middle of the night or brought here to their city to be their sacrifices in a place that was once ours.
Not far from the back wall, there is a large ice sculpture, carved crudely from claw. The gashes along the side form intricate patterns, swirls and spirals and skulls that are almost beautiful. I imagine what it might look like if the sun was ever able to shine through it, the arcs and blue carvings that would make the thing glow, an oversized fluorescent light. But then you’d just notice the blood that surrounded it.
All along the bottom, the altar is covered in blood. There are small paths that the warm fluid has carved down the sides of the sculptures, melting it, mixing the blood with ice to stain the ground. How many heads have been rended from their bodies? How many slit throats? Disembowelings? Everything done in the name of their rulers, to appease the addiction to violence.
Again, I turn to Meredith, to see what she’s feeling, to see any sign that she’s worried or scared or anything at all. She stares at the altar, stone faced, cold as the ice and blood at the base of the carving.
Tension hangs thick in the air, erupting from both captors and captives. You can almost taste it in the air, salty, sweat from the neck of your lover combined with the battery sensation of licking a wound. All of us are waiting for something to happen, be it good or bad. We just want it to be done and over with.
The minute I think this, I realize just how tired I am. How long I’ve pushed and pushed, trying to stay alive one more day, push my luck just a little further, hoping that the world will be saved, that someone can find a way to fix everything. Warm the world back up, unthaw and destroy the monsters we’ve brought out from legend. This hope feels so silly and worthless, and I wonder what’s been driving me on for so long, to take in that next breath, to not just lie in the snow and freeze and die.
There is nothing left for me, I think. My pack is broken, my family long gone. And there is no hope in the world. I resign myself to whatever fate has in store for me, willing to take the bitter cup and drink long and hard until every last drop is inside where it’ll eat me into oblivion.
I don’t even care when I see the Jo-Bran come.
Chapter Twelve
Out of the darkness, they emerge. They line every crevice and corner, standing in the broken windows, the doorless doors, in the alleys, on top of snow drifts. Not a one of them makes a sound. No growls. No guttural howls. No roars. They just stand and stare at the altar, waiting.
This is the closest I’ve ever come to one of them. I’ve seen them in the distance, lurking or rampaging through the night. But never long enough to study them up close and personal. It surprises me to see that they hardly look like monsters. They aren’t mangled and twisted, covered in the fluids of their kill. They’re closer to oversized stuffed animals, with their bulging stomachs, the oversized arms, the stumpy legs and the copious amounts of shaggy fur that covers their bodies.
I almost laugh out loud at the thought, but I know better. I’ve seen what they can do, the violence and death they bring with each swipe of those elongated arms. I know there are claws hiding amongst the different shades of fur, teeth ready to tear and chew. Their eyes are the only things that tip them off as hunters, killers. Each of their eyes glows gold, cats’ eyes, refracting the smallest traces of light to pierce the darkness, scoping out their next victims. It’s like we’re surrounded in golden stars that fell, in pairs, from the sky to nestle in the broken bricks of our past.
This is the moment to loose myself, to stow away in the space between my stomach and kidneys, to hunker down within and become a hermit inside my own skin. It will make the fear go away, the worry, the annoyance of waiting for everything to be over. All of it will disappear as I shut down each and every one of my senses.
I start this process, letting my eyes go vacant, disjointed. I start to feel warm, curled in that inner space, the cold fading as I go. But as I start to wrap myself into that cocoon, using the silence as a blanket, it shatters as the Banjankri cheer, loud and long. Though there is a hint of fear in that sound, a tremble in the praise that makes me wonder how genuine it is.
I unfurl myself. Start to feel the cold once again. Taste the remnants of the stew in my mouth. Open my eyes.
Standing behind the altar, a huge Jo-Bran growls. It’s a deep bellied sound that starts way down in its toes, building and building and building. The whole place quiets but for the grumbling sound coming from the Jo-Bran—even the tears, every eye, every face is fixed on the Jo-Bran.
And then it rips through the air with its roar.
The sound bounces off every sheet of ice, brick wall, the ground, the sky itself, amplifying and bringing it into such a terrible sound that my chest vibrates. This is his domain. Everywhere the sound touches is his: Everyone knows this—subconsciously or not. Once the final traces of the echoes have died, he beats his chest three times, a gesture echoed by every Banjankri. They continue to echo his movements, the beating chest followed by a cheer. It builds and builds and builds, a huge flurry of sound and movement, a frenzy. The Banjankri have lost their fear, the fervor of the upcoming sacrifice easing their apprehensions as they continue to beat their chests and chanting, until I think that I understand their words. “Blood, blood, blood.”
I think of Charles’ words. The keeper of life. Blood: the sustainer.
The chanting is so loud that I hardly notice a small group of Banjankri approaching the altar. They drag a woman behind them. She screams, but I cannot hear her over the din, just see the gaping mouth, torn open, and her eyes almost as wide. Though she shifts and twists and struggles, the Banjankri have no trouble hauling her up to the altar. They take her by the limbs, one for each hand, each foot, stretching her out, up and over the altar. She thrashes in terror, her mouth still wide and screaming, but silent to my ears. Another Banjankri stands to the side, right at the woman’s middle, shifting from side to side, uneasy.
I tell myself to look away. But I can’t.
The scene unfolds before me like some grand guignol of the past, a snuff film, and I keep watching, my eyes waiting for the knife, the gun, the axe, the claw, something sharp and terrible to tear this woman apart. I want to know my fate. Everyone should be able to know their death bef
ore it happens, perhaps not the when, but the how. Once she is spread across the ice sculpture, the Jo-Bran lumbers forward, his hulking frame tilting with each step.
And the chanting stops.
The woman continues to scream—the only sound. Like the Jo-Bran’s earlier cry, her shrill scream echoes throughout the ruined buildings, the broken pieces of our humanity. It causes my whole body to shiver, the sound penetrating the forgotten spaces of my lungs and bowels.
I want to tell her that it will all be over soon and that she won’t have to worry about the pain or her next meal or where she will sleep tonight. The cares of the frozen world will finally drift away. It’s impossible though. Even if I screamed these things, she wouldn’t hear me, her own desperate cries drowning out anything but the sounds of her own death.
The Jo-Bran stops in front of her and holds up one of his paws. Protruding from the very tip is a long black claw, set off from the background by its pure darkness. The woman continues to scream. The Jo-Bran’s claw dangles above her, holding, waiting for some sign to drop, but the Banjankri and other monsters just watch and wait. Above, the sky has turned to shades of violence, purples and blues, crimson, fire. Within a few more minutes the sun will have set, and we’ll only have the moon to light this bloody business. Meredith tilts, just slightly, hardly enough to notice, but I see her move forward, though whether from concern or anticipation, I don’t know. The look in her eyes says she’s eager, but I could be wrong—and I want to be.
Then a beam of light shoots from nowhere, a ray reflected from the spire, off a patch of ice, somewhere, anywhere. It hits the altar and the whole thing glows, blood red, too bright in this blackened corner, and I have to shield my eyes.
Dawn of the Yeti Page 4
