by Mat Johnson
“This is unbearable,” I complained, wiping the sweat that had instantly appeared upon my brow.
“Enjoy it while it lasts, dog. You going to be cold soon enough,” Garth responded.
Still, in that moment, as sweat coated my body in a vain attempt to cool me down, it seemed that the walk back to the exhaust fan exit was endless. I had assumed that the boiler room was just little, merely covering the space under the waterfall and deck above, but this mechanical area went beyond the confines of the Karvels’ living quarters and spread back all the way to the dome’s edge. The supposed “room” was larger than a house, with pipes interlooping between the metal constructs in a way that only hinted at order.
The exhaust fan itself rose not to the height of my waist but twenty feet beyond, to the height of the ceiling itself. As the blades swung before us too fast to see, there was only the slightest of breezes to be felt and that came from behind us as the boiling air rushed to exit out of the dome to the great chill beyond. Through the blur of the blades, I could see there was nothing beyond the dome but darkness. Outside, the exhaust tunnel that led into the subterranean ice caves was large enough to park a bus in, and dark enough to hide it there. Although the blue of the ice could be seen beyond, it was far from a welcoming vision. As I looked into the dim abyss, the thought of walking out into it and all the way back to Tekeli-li to enlist our co-workers to do battle seemed the suicide mission that it was.
“Brother, listen to me,” I yelled to Garth over the din. “This plan is crazy. We’re never going to beat those monsters here, even with all of us.” I put a hand on his beefy arm as he reached to open the exit door. Trying to give him a squeeze he could feel even through his padded coat, I leaned in closer. “We should go back. Go back, get that sailboat, drag it with us. Then when we get the others, we all make a break for Tsalal. Tsalal. It’s out there, man, Pym knows where it is. We find him, we find a real way out of here. Black and warm and away from all this beyond the pale bullshit.”
“Dog, I ain’t doing the Karvels like that. Why don’t you just shut your pale ass up and keep an eye out for those snow monkeys? Okay?”
Garth aimed a look of annoyance over his shoulder at me while he pushed the bar on the exit door. For this reason, he didn’t see how prescient his advice had been. Looking beyond Garth out the door, I saw not the expanse of the tunnel but the expanse of a robe draped off of Tekelian shoulders. In that moment, my doom seemed immediate. In horror I looked, because what massive shoulders these were. Though it had been only a few loose weeks since my last close encounter with the breed, I’d already forgotten the improbable size of them. In my mind, I had pushed out their horror. This was the back of a creature that could kill us simply by falling. This was a monster capable of crushing our bones and the meat they held with such speed that we would feel it before we saw it coming. And one was guarding the exit door, ready to perform such an operation. It was only the roar of the engines that distracted the homunculus from immediately spinning around.
Close the door! I mouthed in the most deliberate and precise manner I could, staring straight into Garth’s brown eyes as he faced me, oblivious to our fate.
“Close the …? Man, when are you going to give up? There ain’t no Tsalal, get it? And if you don’t stop with that, I’m going to leave you and your bag of bones out on the—” was as far as he got before that wall of shroud that stood behind him started spinning around. This time it was my opportunity to save Garth from unseen danger, and I jumped to close the metal door. Unable to get past him in time, I was left with only the option of pushing back the big man himself, letting Garth’s startled girth fall into the door to close it. Even still, it wasn’t soon enough. The creature managed to fling his arm into the space between door and jamb, and the pale limb now kept the two from meeting. It wasn’t until Garth saw those gray fingers struggling to reach him that he stopped swinging on me and joined my efforts to reseal the entrance. The only things that kept the monster from knocking it open and flinging both of our bodies with it were a bit of leverage and surprise. For our part, we seemed to be trying the impossible, to slam the door shut and amputate the creature’s appendage at the elbow in doing so; neither one of us was trying to push the arm back out.
“Get the gun off me and shoot it!” Garth motioned with his eyes to his shoulder. There was no way Garth could lift his arms so the strap could be removed, so it was up to me to unhook the rifle with my shaking hands as it bounced around before me.
“Just break the damn strap. Yank it, dog!” was Garth’s advice, but this didn’t keep him from cursing at me when my first desperate tugs did little more than yank his neck. But the clip gave out before Garth’s strength did, and I was able to get his Winchester, cock the bullet into the chamber. The protruding, pale hand, almost as if it knew that it was to be my target, flailed wildly as the beast it was attached to howled in pain at another of Garth’s full-body thrusts. I couldn’t get a good shot with it moving like that, especially since I was too scared to step much closer.
“Shoot it! Shoot it!” Garth said. And I did. And missed. Only for Garth to yell, “Aim it this time,” as if that had not occurred to me. Garth leaned in with all his might and fat behind him, trapping the arm completely if only momentarily. Taking my time, breathing out and preparing to pull the trigger with my inhalation, I focused, staring over my scope at the thing. It was the perfect shot, the hand stretched out all of its fingers in a moment of pain, forming a clear target. So clear was my sight that, for the first time, I noticed those well-chewed nails on the ends of fingers that could only be considered pudgy in relation to the average of his race.
“Augustus!” I yelled, and after a confused look by Garth, I repeated my call, louder, loud enough to be heard over the twenty-foot-tall fan and all the machinery behind it.
“Chris!” came back to me. Not in the voice of my runt of a Tekelian. No, this voice was human. This voice was female. The woman I loved. And her voice brought a chorus of others behind it.
Hearing the responses, Garth eased up on the door, and the arm revealed itself to be that of my brief roommate and supposed captor. Augustus stood there, nursing his wrist, smiling at me.
“Friends,” he managed, and I thought he was talking about us till he stepped to the side and I saw Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter, Angela Latham and my cousin Captain Booker Jaynes standing behind him. Right on CP Time, they had joined me.
SPEAK no ill of the successful black male sellout, for he has achieved the goal of the community that has produced him: he has “made it,” used his skills to attain the status that would be denied him, earned entry at the door of the big house of prosperity. His only flaw is that he agreed to leave that community, its hopes, customs, aspirations, on the porch behind him. It is a matter of expedience as much as morality. I say this to forestall any judgment on Nathaniel Latham, who given the state of the world, just might have been the last sellout in history. And it was not completely fair to say that, in the end, Nathaniel Latham sold out his community for the Tekelians, for what he did, he did not only for himself but also for his wife. Unfortunately for Nathaniel, this was not how his wife viewed his hiring out of himself as an interpreter to the Tekelian army. Unfortunate for Nathaniel, but very good for me.
“You know, historically, many of our people have joined up in the armies of our oppressors as a means of solidifying our place in society,” I offered, refilling Angela’s tea as the group of us sat on the porch of our three-fifths of a home in Karvel’s paradise. I was comfort, solace, all things good and understanding. I could be. Nathaniel had proven unworthy and I the opposite. I could take my time now, and needed to. All of them, not just Angela, looked to be in mild shock in the plush, manicured surroundings after spending so long in the monotonous white hell that was Tekeli-li. Poor Augustus was nearly delirious now that he was removed from his natural habitat. And it was clearly not just a psychologically traumatic reaction the creature was experiencing. The heat of the
room, while a perfect sventy-two degrees and unnoticeable to me, seemed to have the effect of wilting him. Before he could faint, we relocated him to the walk-in freezer, a place Augustus was happy to go when he saw the culinary treasures there. The only one who looked worse than the savage was my cousin Captain Booker Jaynes, who’d grown older in the last weeks at a rate accelerated beyond the limits of space and time. I couldn’t tell if this aging had occurred back at his frozen love nest in the weeks since my absence, or simply by walking in the imposing threshold of Thomas Karvel’s sanctuary. My grizzled cousin stared up at the colossal painted ceiling nearly the entire time, muttering what I assumed was the first prayer to make it past his full lips in years.
“No. No, my son-of-a-bitch husband has really gone and done it. He joined up. He’s trying to be one of them, trying to get in good. I know it. I’ve seen him act that way with potential corporate clients, that same groveling act. It’s disgusting. He’s limping around the tunnels wearing one of their robes now, tripping over the damn thing because it’s too long. He won’t even look at me. And if he was getting any extra food, I wasn’t seeing it.” Angela sighed, rubbed her skin, which must have itched after being numb with cold for so long. “I thought you were as good as dead, and then come to find out you guys have been living high on the hog this whole time? Unbelievable. I should have left with you when you asked me.”
“You should have,” I told her. But I held her closer when I said it so it didn’t come off as a dig.
Immediately, the thought of Angela Latham inserted into this utopia made the whole BioDome thing more appealing. More sustainable. Mentally I reshot the last few weeks with Angela by my side instead of just Garth Frierson, and this faux past seemed like one worth building a future on. This came in the briefest of flashes, because soon returned the noise of the Tekelian hordes banging away at the structure of the 3.2 Ultra BioDome like it was an aluminum piñata, just waiting for their target to implode and reveal its treasures. From the sound of it, they were all over the roof, and there were at least a hundred of them up there. Maybe it was just acoustics, but it started to sound as if all that beating might actually be working, and in moments the sky might literally come falling down upon us.
This monstrous reality wasn’t the only thing that told me the idea of Angela and me staying in this artificial environment could never work. The other great clue was the look of Mr. Thomas Karvel, who sat a good fifteen feet away, staring at six of his seven new guests with unhidden trepidation. I recognized the look. It wasn’t hatred, or racism, at least in any substantial sense. It was just that, clearly, the six of us were more startling to him presently than the one unfortunate Tekelian who was no doubt that moment ravaging Karvel’s stores of frozen pastry products.
“How did you find us?” Mrs. Karvel asked, and her tone immediately challenged my observation: no hint of animosity in it, aggression.
“I’m a tracker. I’m a tracker; I can track things.” Jeffree started talking, pausing between the first sentence and the second to give Carlton Damon Carter time to remove the lens cap from his camera and capture the discussion at hand. The fact that Jeffree had only one eye now, that his empty socket was covered in a white leather patch, did give him more gravitas. “You see, you got to get a feel, you know, in your heart, for your destination. You got to imagine it, see, in your mind, and then the ancestral spirits—”
“We took the tunnels straight here,” Angela interrupted, unaware of the reckless eyeball attack being thrown by Carlton Damon Carter in response. “Augustus got us to the tunnel, and then we just came straight here. It’s easy to pick the right path when you get closer: the walls along this route are melting. They’re covered in wet ice. That exhaust fan you have there is blowing heat straight into Tekeli-li,” she told us.
“Listen!” Mrs. Karvel said, and I thought she was going into some sort of rebuttal, but in fact she meant just that: listen. Slowly the hammering above us was decreasing. Together we stood, each looking up at his or her own bit of ceiling above. The unseen assault trickled from a hurricane to a drizzle and then dried completely up until Karvel’s radio voices and Kool-Aid waterfall were, once again, the arena’s loudest sounds.
“Shhhh!” Jeffree added totally unnecessarily. “It’s stopped!” He used hand gestures, his arms fully out to his sides as he crouched slightly, patting down the remaining sound in a pantomime of the obvious.
“But why?” I asked, looking at the silent ceiling above us. We knew so little about them, about their intelligence, culture, or history of military engagement. We had no way of anticipating their next move. They could’ve stopped for tea for all we knew. But that didn’t mean we didn’t want to gut those motherfuckers.
“It could be a bomb. It could be a bomb that they planted and now they’re running away while a bomb explodes, that could totally be it.”
“Jeffree, that is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my—”
“They must have a way in. They have no reason to bang on the walls anymore,” Mr. Karvel said slowly, in a near whisper, his eyes growing up into slits and darting to the side as if at any moment the monsters might appear from behind a magenta rhododendron bush.
The knocking wasn’t completely gone. Once we were back in the mechanical walkway, above the clanging of the machines doing as they do, you could hear it. The last rapping. The sole percussion that now stood out. I do not know if it was less threatening because it was only a lone request or because there was something to the rhythm itself that almost soothed us with every quick hit. It was coming from upstairs. It was coming from the room that the beast had last seen us escape into.
It was harder climbing the ladder to get to the top tier this time since we were holding the rifles as well. Jeffree, for no practical reason I could see, held the strap of his rifle in his teeth as he pulled himself forward, grunting loudly enough for Carlton Damon Carter’s camcorder to capture each guttural utterance. Mrs. Karvel and Angela stayed in the terrarium along with Captain Jaynes, who seemed to be adjusting to the dome no better than Augustus and clearly needed no additional shocks at the moment.
There wasn’t a peephole in the metal roof door that separated us from the unknown, and at the moment this seemed to be a great failure of design. Couldn’t an architect who had the understanding that such a door was needed to keep the metaphorical wolves at bay have also understood that one might need a safe way to see if there were wolves at all? Leaning against the door with all our strength, Jeffree, Carlton Damon Carter, and I each attempted to hold it secure as we cracked it open to peer out at whatever was calling. There, standing with the same demeanor as any other door-side solicitor I’d encountered, was the Nathaniel Latham, shivering in the cold. His face was drained to a mortal gray by the elements and the stress that was clearly weighing upon the brother.
Angela was right. This was the face of a traitor, a man who forgoes his own just to better himself. But maybe that’s too harsh, maybe I was biased. If the Confederates had won the American Civil War, wouldn’t descendants of the blacks freed by fighting with the gray army have seen their ancestors as heroes? Maybe then it was simply a question of who would win this battle, this war.
“We need to talk.” Nathaniel stood before me, urging. “Listen to me, Chris, this is not a joke. They’re going to destroy everything unless we do what they say.” In the word everything I heard not this building, structure, but all the people in it. Possibly all of humanity, if we were its last representatives. “This is not a debate. This is not a negotiation. You know what these things can do. Don’t play games with our lives here.”
“If there is a game at all in play, it’s of cats and mice. And you, sir, are in the role of the vermin,” said Arthur Gordon Pym, Nantucketer, pushing past his lesser envoy so that we could take in the power of his threat. Pym stood alone, but behind him we could see the albino hominids forming a martial line at an even fifty yards away along the side of the roof, their pale robes rustling as the Antarctic
wind gusted. This may have been an attempt to seem nonthreatening, but if it was, it was a failed, miserable attempt.
“What do you want?” I said this more to the gathered army than the two men who had been sent to represent them. As if they could understand me.
“There is no need to yell. In betraying the Gods, you have already garnered their attention.” Pym seemed more sober than usual; either they had cut him off before he reached his limit, or he was taking his job seriously.
“I’m about to betray your natural-born cracker ass if you don’t get the hell out of here,” Jeffree offered by way of bluster. This however went unfilmed, as even Carlton Damon Carter was more engrossed in recording the legion of warriors that stood just beyond.
“Control your man,” Pym said to me, his spittle nearly covering every inch of the dozen feet between him and our door. I could see that no one wanted this conflict to end quicker than the man that stood before me, although for entirely different reasons than mine. Somewhere back in Tekeli-li there was a cool glass of fermented khrud waiting for him, its contents still and forlorn, and Pym missed it no less than any man had yearned for his true love. “We are here to discuss this civilly and calmly. Let us end the distractions and attend to the matter at hand.”
