by Jeff Kamen
They are wondering what to do with the bodies when Yvor appears on a rise and calls down. They set off towards him, treading through rifts of weeds and rubble and weathered glass. All bear arms as they approach the forward party, who stand with bows at the ready. There’s been talk of dogs or wolves among the group but the tracks they’ve seen so far do not match this description, leaving the prints they pick up now all the more mysterious and concerning.
Both brothers are waiting for them. Other hunters are looking on. Jaala nods in greeting, then all questions go blank in her as she sees what is lying in the dirt.
‘What ...?’ Radjík gasps, and those surrounding the body make room for the newcomers to see it properly.
It is a female creature, the body very long and white as gauze and completely hairless, the long pale limbs knotted with muscle. The narrow face is tapered like a deer’s, although only half of it remains, the rest blasted away by a weapon which has also smashed gaping holes in its chest and throat, leaving them cratered with blackened gore. A large nipple on a low mound of flesh speaks of its gender, as does the shape of its hips above the scant loincloth it wears, a knotted fabric it appears to have taken from the wagon. The skin around the eyes and covering its large bald cranium is lightly wrinkled, yet there is no other indication of age. All the blood on it is dry. The wounds appear to be as recent as those of the dead couple, yet no grubs work in the ruined flesh, nor does it smell. As if it might lie there like stone and fall apart and blacken over centuries instead of days.
‘Flies aint too keen on this one,’ says Karl. Jaala flicks him a glance, then crouches at the creature’s heel.
The pads of the long white feet are tough as hide, showing little sign of wear. The powerful thighs reveal thick veins running beneath the semi-translucent skin. Taking a breath, she reaches and takes one of its hands, and with the onlookers murmuring she studies it. It is heavy and cold; leaden. She inspects its long craggy fingers and finds them to be like a cat’s, the nails retractable and dark grey in colour, the undersides clotted with dark dried blood. She turns it over, lets it fall. She is rising to reflect on what she’s seen when she notices something hanging on the other wrist.
‘Look at these teeth,’ says Pétar, kneeling down. She goes to his side and takes a fresh breath. He draws back the upper lip with his knife to reveal a long and partially bloodstained incisor at the end of a row of smaller teeth, the arrangement that of a large and powerful feline.
‘So who the hell killed it?’ Jakub asks, as Pétar inspects the lower section of the jaw. But Jaala is not listening. She is studying the opaque, almost marbled, cornea visible between the eyelids. A pale yellow-orange colour. Like a cat’s. A woman like a cat. How …
She goes to the wrist and lifts it. A thick steel cuff hangs there, a few links of broken chain swinging loose. She turns it in the light and the word MeisterCell flashes dully. She lets it drop, feeling a little jolt inside her that she cannot explain. A sense of unease. Displacement. Rage ...?
Is it rage? Is it ...?
The hunters exchange various speculations and she is asked what she thinks the creature is. She doesn’t answer for a moment, is looking over the long white spattered face again, imagining its feral and scent-driven mind, its hateful and relentless journeys — then she turns to the hunters to find them in a ring, watching her.
‘You can say it,’ she says tersely. ‘It’s a Genetik.’
Pétar sheathes his blade. ‘I think we were —’
‘I don’t know what it is,’ she cuts in. ‘Some kind of predator.’
He nods.
A stocky figure mutters something, and she looks up to find Dradjan looking her way. ‘You mean an animal or what?’ he says.
‘I mean she was made this way. On purpose. She was made to kill.’
‘Eh?’ says Karl.
‘What’s on that?’ says Radjík, indicating the cuff.
‘A name. She was made by the Versteckts to do something. Looks like she did it well.’
The group ask what she means by this, questioning her about the killings, about where the thing has come from. She looks away.
‘You all right?’ says Pétar, coming to her side.
‘I’m okay,’ she murmurs, then a moment later, flushing, says, ‘No, I’m not okay. I’m …’ — and without knowing what she’s doing, she turns on him, turns on all of them, yelling, ‘People did this. Can you believe it? People. They made her like it. They made her a killer. Don’t you understand me? People did this, they killed them, not some animal. Fucking people!’
They stare at her blankly, confused.
‘You don’t know anything,’ she says, then pushes between them and runs out across the ash, the sky like murder across all distances, burning in roaring sepias and blackened reds, and out there she stands alone, wretchedly alone, sobbing emptily in despair.
~O~
She is still trying to compose herself as she makes her way back to the wagon. As she treks up the slope she notices the hunters have been joined by others in the camp, and that a discussion is in progress.
Approaching them, she nods awkwardly to her friends, then notices Pétar is in possession of a white metal cylinder with hanging straps. There is some printed writing and symbols. She sees O2 stamped in red. She asks where they found it.
‘It was me,’ Tanya says, and nods westwards. ‘Out that way. They must have got hurt, maybe badly. We were following their blood.’
Jaala looks back at Pétar. He is fiddling with the narrow end of the cylinder and almost drops it when it starts hissing. ‘Shit,’ he says, turning the nozzle the other way. As the hissing stops he hands the cylinder across to her, apologising. She taps and shakes it, finding it to be lighter than it looks. She reads the print and understands most of it to be instructions of some kind, although many of the words are unfamiliar. ‘It’s harmless. For breathing,’ she says, handing it back. ‘Where does the blood lead to?’
‘We didn’t follow it that far,’ Tanya says. ‘We weren’t sure if it was safe. They were just going straight ahead.’
‘They?’
‘There’s three sets of prints out there. Two shod, one following barefoot. One of the shod people was dragging a leg. They were going south, then they changed direction.’
Jaala nods.
‘The barefoot tracks are bloody,’ Tanya adds. ‘They’re small, like a kid’s.’
‘So, two Versteckts and one more like the female. Only smaller.’
‘Seems that way,’ says Tanya. ‘The smaller one turned south again. That’s where the tracks separate.’
Jaala looks to the brooding profile of the foothills. Versteckts on the run. She wonders if Klaus too has made it away from the fire. Could it be his prints out here? It seems unlikely, very unlikely, yet …
Klaus … Klaus …
In fire he had come and in fire he had gone and she sees him as the old lady had seen him in his suffering one night ... in those later days, bent in discussion ... frowning in a deep bronze glow, both talking in mutters …
She tries to listen in ... eavesdrop …
Something about a city to the south … a coming war …
As if he knew back then that trouble was coming.
‘We should go,’ she says, speaking with effort. ‘We’ve been here long enough.’
The majority of the group seem to agree, regarding the outlying lands with growing unease.
‘What about the bodies?’ asks Yvor.
‘Yeah, we can’t just leave them,’ says Jakub.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Of course not.’
There is a silence. Jakub spits by his boot, then treads it in. ‘What about the wagon? I guess we should take it?’
Striving to think clearly, she says, ‘It’ll be useful. What about their animals?’
‘Don’t know,’ he says, nor, it seems, do the others.
She looks round at them. ‘Listen, I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘For shouting. I didn’t mean it against
anybody, it’s just ... I’m so angry. Not for me, for them. For what they were. They were good people.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ says Pétar. ‘I feel the same.’
She looks up. Like Jakub, he seems deeply shaken by the deaths. Tanya’s solid cheeks are drawn where she is sucking back tears.
‘I know. It’s just …’
She hesitates, unable to find the words. A spray of fine sediment blows over her feet, covering them.
‘We should get them buried,’ says Yvor.
‘Let’s check on those mules, too,’ Jakub says. Others offer to lend a hand and the group disperse.
As they trudge away, she watches Pétar as he tosses the cylinder aside. He stands overlooking the ashen dunes, running on like dry sastrugi beneath the smoggy atmosphere.
She rubs her temples, finding Klaus again among the voices. Has she been wrong the last few years? Were those stupid and risky climbs to watch the dome based on nothing? On nothing? Had he already gone from the world, or at least from that northerly location? Had he been warning Grethà of something back then, or had it been the other way round?
She returns to the camp slowly, deep in thought.
~O~
Once the dead couple are wrapped, she and some of the hunters meet with the heads of the families to discuss the situation.
They decide in the end to leave the creature’s body where it lies as a warning for people who might follow. Then they debate their onward route. The wagon’s discovery has given rise to speculation concerning the proximity of the Stollen, the tunnel connecting the wilderness with the coastal plains, through which the merchants travel. Given that the bloody tracks are known to be headed that way, she is asked for her view.
She tightens her wraps, looking to the south, to where the taller peaks of the Ridge stand in remote shards, ice-tipped in places. Then she looks round at the company, aware of a background racket of coughs and groans. Most of those regarding her stand in blackened rags that hang loosely on them, their eyes deepset in their skulls. Some nibble at small tainted apples seized from the orchards as they burned, wincing as they swallow. They look like creatures unearthed, beings escaped from the charred pits of hell. ‘We need to turn east,’ she says. ‘There’s water out that way and we can still get to the coast if we need to.’
A discussion takes place during which she is challenged several times. She explains that if they head west looking for the tunnel they’ll risk running into danger as well as missing the entrance. When forced to justify this claim, she asks which of them know what to look for, what the entrance looks like, and none do. She repeats her argument, adding that should they stray too far, she does not want to imagine what they’d be faced with, weakened as they’d be without water. The discussion is interrupted by an old man who comes through at a limp, saying, ‘Smoke’s coming in, I say we get moving. If that means going east, let’s go east.’
There are murmurs of agreement. She looks to the hunters and receives a few nods. ‘Then let’s move,’ she says, and leaves the company to organise their departure while she goes out to inspect the wagon. It looks empty, but when she goes to the front she finds Radjík up in the box with a cloth bag on her knees, picking through the couple’s meagre possessions.
Radjík turns, her eyes raw with grief. ‘We gonna follow them, yeah?’ she croaks.
‘No. We’ve got to keep going.’
‘Why?’
‘We can’t risk it. I’m sorry.’
‘That right?’
‘We need to go.’
‘Laj doesn’t mind. Nor does Karl. They wanna get em.’
‘I understand. But we can’t.’
Radjík’s expression distorts, becoming savage. ‘What do you understand then? Eh?’
‘Look, you’re not the only one —’
‘We gonna let em get away with it? Yeah? That right?’
‘Look, we don’t know exactly what happened, and we don’t have time to follow tracks into the middle of —’
‘Yeah? That right?’
‘Please,’ Jaala says, but Radjík snarls back, ‘You don’t care, you don’t care about no one,’ then clambers over the seat and jumps down and runs to the far side of the elevation and disappears.
For a moment she considers chasing after her, but leaves it, sighing. Instead, she surveys the rolls of material lying scattered everywhere, loosely flapping, trying at once to picture what happened and to stamp the bloody images out.
Others arrive to help and between them they pack away the fabrics and make an inventory of supplies of food and water. The couple’s dearest possessions are to be buried with them, the rest of the goods kept for future use. The burial takes place an hour later. When the bodies are gone from sight one of the mourners sings quietly. A few join her in husky tones and Jaala stands with her hands clasped, trying to think back to the last words she exchanged with the couple. Back when Anya was safely within reach, someone she could visit at any time, talk to, whatever her cares.
After the service, they pack up quickly and prepare to leave. Just a single mule from the wagon team has been tracked down, half-starved but alive, its legs tangled in its lines where it had bolted. The rest have vanished. Fresh mules are fitted in the wagon’s harness and they begin the long haul out from there, tall wheels creaking over the broken ground.
As they head away, she looks back to the burial spot as she had looked back at Ansthalt — in tears, in disbelief, and in fury. And in fury too she thinks of the people who’d made the killers what they were. The same kind who once had made herself.
The cuff glints sharply in her mind. You, someone had once decided. You fit. You’ll do. You. You can live forever.
Chapter 40 — Vadraskar Rising
Another day passes and they stray on through a bleak wilderland of menstrual fogs and cold burnings and phantom incarcerations. The ash lifting and coiling in the distance, walls of it hanging raggedly for miles.
They stop and go on, stop and go on, hunched and leaning in the wind, wrapped by any means head to foot and the animals groaning dully in protest. Again and again they find where death has left its traces. The bones of small animals litter their way; and other bones. They discover a small casket of ribs in an open pit and some maintain it is a child’s. Jaala surveys the clifftops with bloodshot eyes. No movement. Nothing breaking that barren profile.
They continue, the vehicles swaying arthritically. Their course lying in one long elemental silence between the desert and all that dry talus land bordering the south. And so the hours pass.
At times they search for traces of vegetation, but there are none, nor any tell-tale glints of water, no dark seeps to investigate, just weathered grey ledges and worn mounds of shale and endless grit and dust. Nor can they leave their route: the foothills are banked high with sediment and stand as high walls against all entry.
Like the others she begins to wilt from thirst. She can’t understand it. The tyrant emerged from the east, the presences insist on it. Insist. But there are no inroads anywhere along those terrible embankments, only a few gutted chambers to explore. Nowhere a damp seam, a pool, nothing to sustain them.
All that day the crack of falling rocks is like the echo of the waterless storm that seems to permanently brood and linger there. Old colourless terrain standing dry and sun-blasted and alien to man or beast or bird. Where millennia of heat and frost have ravaged the cliffs with the force of detonations. Scouts venture into a series of deeply ruptured fissures with no wet inlets to discover and no water stored in a thousand gaping cracks, and it seems that all which had once stood tall in the rock has been hurled to the ground and all that once remained hidden lies sprawling in the open. All is naked here and all is silent and all of it testament to the nature of constant change.
Behind her wrappings her breath tastes sour as winter grapeskins. Her throat is parched with a fine grit she cannot clear. When the legs of a mule go from under it, the laden goods scattering across the ground, she l
ooks on blankly, confused. For a short while it lies there breathing like a smelterfire, then it dies. The hunters squat around it and a couple of them unbuckle the pannier straps while the others lift. As they set about hacking the meat from its hind quarters, she puts her fingertips to her temples and rubs them gently. Very gently. Hearing something. A strong and guiding voice.
They go on again, the meat wrapped and the raw carcass left for the crows. Before long an old man perishes, his frail body finally giving out in exhaustion. They split the ground and dig wearily and two men carry him across and lower him down. He lies in the pit like some jaded sculpture left to crack apart in the sun. His widow standing over him like his vertical twin, eyes downcast and her rough skin pale and flaking. When he is covered over, they lay a gorse wreath upon the dirt and dry sobs rack the camp.
Before they leave, a meeting is called. Those who speak do so with dry snaps in their mouth. The men bearded and wild-looking, the women harrowed and pale. Directing their comments at Jaala, they demand water, demand what has been promised to them.
She watches them distantly, their angry moving lips, feeling only within herself some kind of tortured respite. Only in the presences ...
Only there ...
Where Vadraskar gazes down from lofty white walls at the seething crowds ...
The sun up high and on the steps of the lower buildings the huge oiled drumskins being beaten with heavy hide-bound clubs. Smoke drifting from the mouths of muscular statuary across the populated square.
Blinking, she looks to the north, finding a clotted blackness where Ansthalt had stood that time before. So alluring, fated, imposing behind the dunes. Then she grimaces.
Watching the tyrant escape her prison escort in a slicing wash of blood. A dead hand dripping, hanging from the chain, and her own wounds nor more than raking scratchmarks, already beginning to heal. Those darkly flashing eyes upon the distant mountain, driving on the mule, fighting her way northwards with her load of looted wealth and an old tin trunk.
