by Sean Wallace
Then what seemed like a huge boulder smashed down. Sarah sprawled on her stomach. The boy flew sideways, tumbled, then vanished, flailing, into the same darkness as her torch.
Sobbing, she tried to hold on as the rock shuddered. It vibrated with the sound of a huge tree being torn from the ground, one desperately resisting root at a time. Pain shot through her fingers as she sought purchase, shredding skin and nails as the movement worsened, the rumbling increased. The moon vanished again. Shadow fell over Sarah. Something black, seeming as big as the sky, rushed towards her. She might have rolled; maybe the rock’s movement threw her. The descending boulder smashed down next to her. The rock under her heaved like a bucking horse, tilting on crazy angles. Screaming, Sarah slid over the edge, plummeting, bashing into bushes and rocks, until finally a jarring thump stopped her fall.
When she could see, through the blood and fear and pain, she couldn’t believe her eyes. Dust rolled from the flanks of Kadimakara; pebbles and stone cascaded down its sides. It was alive, heaving itself up on massive legs, a knobby head rearing from the south on a long, turtle-like neck. The earth trembled, jarring her broken bones. Too huge, too incomprehensible. What had been above the earth was but a piece of its armored spine. There was so much more, still emerging, pushing the soil back in a wave that carried her, rolling her like surf. A tail of rock lashed at the ground, sending trees and boulders flying.
She dragged herself backwards, using her good arm, her good leg; tried to ignore the agony in her ribs, the myriad stabbing wounds.
Another sound penetrated Sarah’s fearful daze. A whooshing sound, low and rhythmic, like a fan blade or some deep bass siren. She turned in the direction, to see Jimmy, dressed only in jeans, his scarred chest daubed with paint. He swung a bullroarer, the painted piece of timber flying around in a circle at the end of a piece of string, making that ghostly noise.
Two other men ran towards her. They too were half-naked, wearing mostly paint, but they picked her up and carried her back, ignoring her groans of pain and terror.
Jimmy started chanting, and the massive creature turned towards him, blotting out so many stars, its feet hidden in clouds of dust and soil. When it took a step, the ground quaked with a resounding crunch, but Jimmy kept his feet, and the sound of the bullroarer didn’t falter.
The two men hauled Sarah back, and all she could do as she clung to consciousness was watch Jimmy facing off the beast armed only with a piece of wood on a string. She could hear the curlews, calling out in a multitude, like cicadas, and the bullroarer whining and Jimmy chanting. She could hear—feel—the thudding of the earth as the creature stepped forward on its towering limbs.
Movement caught her attention. Tearing her gaze from the spectacle before her, she saw, from the direction of the Sentinels, a flitting line of dark shapes—birds winging in the thousands from the splintered outcrop towards the monster. It turned to face them, bellowing, and again the ground shook and it seemed even the stars vibrated with the call.
The birds plunged into the rock, and Sarah screamed at the thought of them mashing on the thick, rocky hide. But they emerged unharmed from the creature’s side and sped towards Jimmy. As they approached, Sarah could see a faint red glow around the birds. And then they hit Jimmy, vanishing into his body. He kept chanting, even as he jerked with each impact, and the bullroarer kept swinging, its siren call unbroken. Bird after bird, impact after impact, plowed into him and was absorbed. And then from the bullroarer came a welter of tiny white shooting stars, shrieking like fireworks as they scribed a brilliant arc across the sky before landing somewhere inside the dark, silent spires of the Sentinels.
The beast roared, then turned and lumbered towards Jimmy once more as the incredible flock plunged into its back, then tore from its chest, only to dive into Jimmy. And the sparks flew from the bullroarer, the glimmering arch so bright it made Sarah squint to look at it.
Sarah saw Jimmy stagger, and the beast fall to one leg, and she heard it bellow one last time as her body and mind finally yielded.
Sarah awoke in her camp bed. Any thought, any hope, that the horror of the previous night had been only a nightmare was vanquished a moment after she opened her eyes. Someone had taken off her clothes and daubed her wounds with a chalky white ointment. Her body, what she could see of it before the pain made her rest her head back on her pillow, was more ointment than skin. One arm was tied in a splint, as were both her legs, though one not as extensively as the other. Outside she could hear chanting and the rhythmic clacking of sticks, and some murmur of conversation.
The girl from the canteen entered shortly after, carrying a bowl of brown creek water and a piece of pink-stained cloth.
“How you feelin’?” she asked.
“I’ve been better.” Sarah risked a smile, was rewarded with only a twinge of pain from the ribs. “Thank you.”
The girl bobbed her head. “The flyin’ doctor, he’s comin’ for you. Won’t be long, now. You should rest, eh.”
Sarah nodded.
The girl gave her water and checked the worst of her cuts and bruises, the tightness of the splints.
“So what happened?” Sarah asked.
“Some men, they climbed Kadimakara. They fell. Maybe they were drinkin’. There’s no drink allowed ’ere.”
The title of a research paper flashed in Sarah’s mind: Supernatural phenomena and their causal relationship to seismic activity. She smiled, shook her head carefully, so as not to set off any more pains.
“I do believe you’re right. But what about Jimmy? The creature?”
The girl just smiled.
“Help me then.”
The girl gave her a puzzled look.
“I want to see.”
“You can’t from ’ere, missus. Too many trees . . . ”
Damn.
She heard the hum of an approaching aircraft.
“Doctor’s comin’,” the girl said.
Sarah nodded, the thought of being carried to the plane and then flying out not particularly appealing. Although they would have morphine. The plane made her think of something else, but she would have to hurry.
“Help me, can you please? Before the doctor gets here?”
The girl gave her a suspicious look, but nodded hesitantly.
“Great. Can you get that box? Yes, that one. Can you set it down here, so I can see it? Next to my good arm.”
The girl did as Sarah asked, and then Sarah talked her through connecting the relevant wires. Fortunately she’d done most of it the night before, before Steve . . . She concentrated on her equipment, trying to fight off the sudden shaking that made her hand quiver over the laptop’s keyboard.
“What time is it?”
The girl shrugged. She wasn’t wearing a watch, just bangles of colored beads and leather. “Late afternoon. You slept all day. It’s good, it’ll help you get better.”
“Sure. Now, let’s see if it works.” Sarah gritted her teeth as she operated the computer. “Bingo,” she muttered as the uplink finally connected.
Raised voices outside told her the doctor had landed. It wouldn’t be long now, just a short drive from the bush airstrip; like the community, the landing field was also shielded from the quake by the twelve needles of the Sentinels.
Sarah swore. She needed just a little more time. There, the latest satellite photos, from this morning . . .
“I’ll be damned,” she said.
The girl moved around to look at the screen as Sarah zoomed in, the area around Kadimakara drawing exponentially closer.
“Jimmy,” the girl said.
Sarah stared at the screen. Kadimakara was buried once more, but out of place and tilted slightly, its base still showing signs of massive disturbance. She could see the settlement, its buildings still standing. Even her campsite showed up.
“What?” she whispered. “That can’t be.” She panned the image and homed in on the Sentinels. She looked at the girl, who didn’t seem surprised at all.
&nb
sp; “There’s thirteen,” Sarah said. Outside, a curlew called.
Postcards from Monster Island
Emily Devenport
Sometimes people ask me, “Why didn’t you run?”
“Because I had the Martian Death Flu,” I tell them.
They look at me funny because they’ve seen the footage of people clogging the roads, and the subways and trains, desperate to get out of town the day he waded ashore. I wasn’t in that crowd. I was flat on my back in my studio apartment, blitzed out of my mind with medicine. Two of my cats slept on top of me and my dog was snoring beside us when the whole building began to shake. Some of my books fell off their shelves, and I could hear the dishes clattering in their cupboards. I thought it was an earthquake. I considered dragging myself out of bed and crouching in a doorway.
That impulse didn’t make it past the notion stage. I couldn’t even muster the ambition to be worried as more books tumbled off my shelves and the windows rattled. I only managed a little curiosity when I noticed that the shaking was a side effect of slow, ponderous booms, spaced like colossal footsteps. If the Statue of Liberty took a walk through town, she might make noises like that.
Wow, I thought. This is the weirdest fever dream I’ve ever had. And then I fell asleep again.
All night long I felt the tremors and heard the sirens. Once I awoke to a sound like ten foghorns going off at once. The cry was challenging, yet . . . oddly lonesome. That was the only time during the night when I believed something might really be going on. I thought I should at least try to get up. And then I passed out.
When the bombs started to drop, I pried my eyes open and squinted at the window. Morning light was trying to penetrate the dust and debris floating in the air. It wasn’t making much headway.
Any normal person would have been thinking about evacuating the scene by that point. But the Martian Death Flu, though not actually from Mars, made me feel anything but normal. For one thing, when I sat up, the room started to spin. For another, my pets let me know in no uncertain terms that they were hungry. Plus my dog needed to potty.
I had to answer my own call of nature first. Halfway to the bathroom, I decided I’d better crawl if I really wanted to get there. Afterward I took more medicine, my head pounding in tune with the bombs going off outside.
The war sounded like it might be about a mile away. My apartment shook more than it had during the night, yet everything was still pretty much intact. My pets didn’t like the noise, but they seemed more worried about their stomachs, so I staggered out of the bathroom and fixed their bowls.
I could barely hold myself upright long enough to do it. Once my dog had eaten, she reminded me that I needed to do something more challenging. I managed to get her collar attached and find the pooper-scooper. Then it was out into the cold, cruel world.
We passed one of my neighbors in the hall: Mr. Abé. He operated an African clothing shop on our street. As the booms and rat-tat-tats shook our building, I lurched back and forth across the hall, and Mr. Abé gracefully sidestepped me.
“Sorry,” I rasped.
“I hope you feel better soon, Miss Herrmann,” he said. “Terrible racket, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I managed, before Peachy almost pulled me off my feet. She had her priorities, and she would tolerate no delay.
Under the circumstances it was crazy to get into the elevator, but I knew I wouldn’t make it down the stairs. I don’t remember how we got outside from there, but we ended up in the alley behind our building. Peachy did her business cautiously, but not as nervously as I expected she would. She stopped from time to time and perked her ears at the sounds of battle. She sniffed out her favorite spots, and I pooper-scooped. Then she pulled me back toward the alley door, and I took a moment to be grateful she wasn’t going to insist on walkies. The way I was feeling, it would have been more like draggies.
Just before we got through the door, that foghorn cry sounded again. It was much louder without the walls of our well-constructed building to muffle it. Both Peachy and I were extremely impressed. Instead of loneliness, this time I heard a note of exasperation.
Peachy trotted through the door and I stumbled after her. I don’t remember how I got rid of the poop I had scooped, but I can only hope I did the right thing with it. I made it back up to our floor and into our little apartment.
I really wanted to fall into bed. I also wanted to throw up. But I made myself grab my phone, and I also snagged the remote. All four of the cats were on the bed by then, but they made room for me once they realized I was about to fall on them.
For several moments I just lay there, the remote and phone still clutched in my hands, my stomach and my head competing for Most Amazingly Wretched Body Part. I waited until I was fairly sure I wasn’t going to throw up, and then I dialed the first of my three jobs.
They were part-time jobs, the best I could find with my new bachelor’s degree in library science, and I juggled them to keep myself afloat. Only one of them paid for sick time, so I had planned to dose myself with the medicine and stagger in to work, regardless of how horrible I felt. That plan had wilted in the painful (and extremely filtered) light of day. I speed-dialed the morning job.
An operator told me the number was no longer in service. I got the same message for the afternoon job. The number for the evening job didn’t even connect with a recording; it just made horrible noises.
I gave up on the phone. “Guess what, gang,” I croaked. “I don’t have to go to work—ever again.”
My building shook, the dishes rattled, and another book fell off the shelf. I should have been worried, possibly even depressed to lose my livelihood. Yet somehow I felt relieved. I knew it wasn’t a rational reaction, but I couldn’t help it.
I pointed the remote at the TV and pushed the ON button.
I didn’t have to surf for a news channel. The story was on all of them. I hadn’t seen that kind of coverage since 9/11 (though I was in the fourth grade at the time, and spent most of my time watching the Cartoon Channel, so maybe I wasn’t an authority on that). Talking heads babbled about the giant creature who had waded ashore, and the bombs that didn’t seem to do anything but annoy it, and the pollution and/or nuclear waste that had probably created it, and the wreckage that used to be our city, and the conference with the president that was supposed to happen any minute (but never did on that night)—and on the bottom of the screen scrolled the words: Scientists Baffled by Behemoth.
It was hard to get a good look at him with all the smoke, fire, tracers, exploding debris, etc. But I could see bits and pieces. He was colossal (apparently they felt behemoth was easier to spell). He sometimes stood on two legs, sometimes on four, and I couldn’t help comparing him to a giant lemur—except that he had a thick tail that he used to bash things.
Another not-so-lemur-ish characteristic was his hide. Instead of fur, he had these triangular rocky scales that seemed impervious to everything they hurled at him. No missiles could penetrate that hide. And some of them were really big missiles.
They did no damage to Behemoth. But they did plenty of damage to our city. Just when I thought they would wise up and stop with the bombs, a troop of marines jumped out of an airplane and parachuted onto him. They bounced off too. When they landed, the ones who didn’t get tangled in their parachutes launched grenades at him. He turned and walked away from them, toppling several buildings that had been damaged by the bombs.
“This just in,” said the reporter, who sounded like he might OD on the excitement. “All troops are being withdrawn. Readings on the Geiger counters are spiking. The creature seems to be generating dangerous levels of radiation.”
That didn’t sound good. But no one had anything very smart to add, and amazingly, the behemoth story began to suffer from the same problem every other big news story seems to have: endless rehashing of theories and footage, without anything new or intelligent to offer.
I passed out again while waiting for clarification on the radiation
thing. It sounded pretty bad, and it also sounded like a good reason to clear out, assuming I could find a way to wrangle four cats and a dog. And my dizzy, flu-bedeviled ass. To where, I couldn’t imagine. Because no shelter was going to take my pets; I had heard about what happened to the pets in New Orleans after that hurricane.
Maybe the radiation wouldn’t reach my part of the city . . .
A few hours later I woke to hear someone on the TV saying that Behemoth wasn’t radioactive all the time, just when a lot of missiles had been fired at him. Like maybe it was a defense mechanism or something. But then they started that old rehash again, and I stopped listening. The only thing that made my ears perk up was a rumor that another giant creature had been spotted over our city, this one in the clouds.
Yes, that was the Cloud Squid. She showed up inside a thunder storm. The rain thrashed us so long, parts of the city flooded. It did clean most of the smoke and debris out of the air, though. You’ve got to look on the bright side.
The bright side was pretty easy for me to see. Because, thanks to Behemoth, I wouldn’t have to drag my half-dead carcass out of bed and go to work anytime soon. Sadly, it was that simple. I wondered if I might qualify for some kind of hazard pay, or even radiation disability. When I passed out again, I dreamed I was taking selfies of my new, glow-in-the-dark face, and I kept having to do it over because I couldn’t quite seem to capture the pretty colors of my triangular scales.
When I woke up, my neighbor Frida stood looking down at me. “Bernadette—are you still alive?” she asked.
This was an ironic question, considering that Frida, who actually did look like Frida Kahlo when she wasn’t in Santa Muerta drag, had painted her face to look like a flowery Dia de los Muertos skull. The effect was quite gorgeous, but it looked as if Death herself had paid me a visit. Death carrying a container of chicken soup. Accompanied by a pet ferret on a leash.
