by Max Brooks
Hitting my head on the doorframe.
Falling forward.
Spinning.
Somersaulting.
Stairs.
Fur in my eyes, mouth.
Smooth skin over hard bone.
My nose cracking, white spots on black.
From the early days of Gombe research, Goodall noted that the chimpanzees periodically had hunting “crazes,” during which many colobus or baboons would be caught.
—CRAIG B. STANFORD, Chimpanzee and Red Colobus: The Ecology of Predator and Prey
From my interview with Senior Ranger Josephine Schell.
Do you know that more people are hurt by bison in North America than by sharks all over the world? Do you know why? Because they try to ride them. Tourists from New York or Tokyo, whatever urban bubble, literally try to jump on the buffaloes’ backs. Feed them, hug them, take selfies with them. They think they’re at a petting zoo, or in a Disney movie. They’ve never learned the real rules, so they think they can just make up their own. This is called anthropomorphizing. This is why families let their little kids play around coyotes, why the Venice Beach “Grizzly Man” tried to live among Alaskan bears, why a whole town in Colorado couldn’t imagine that mountain lions would ever be a threat to human beings. All these overeducated, isolated city dwellers who idealize the natural world.
And they don’t stop with animals. My people too. All that “noble savage” shit. From Rousseau to that alcoholic, woman-beating, racist anti-Semite. Ever see the movie he made in the Yucatan? The simple, sweet natives living “in harmony with nature” until, oh no, here come the evil, pyramid-building, crop-growing, corrupted Mayans! Thank God the Spanish show up as divine punishment. Movie shoulda been called Them Injuns Had It Comin’. I’ve heard versions of that philosophy all my life.
Nature is pure. Nature is real. Connecting with nature brings out the best in you. That’s what I hear from the poor dumb dipshits who come up here every year in their new REI outfits, never having felt dirt under their feet, just aching to lose themselves in the Garden of Eden. And then a few days later we find them crawling through the muck, half-starved, dehydrated, nursing some gangrenous wound.
They all want to live “in harmony with nature” before some of them realize, too late, that nature is anything but harmonious.
JOURNAL ENTRY #15 [CONT.]
The touch on my hand woke me. I sprung back, legs up, ready to kick. I opened my eyes and saw Palomino hopping backward as well.
“Oh God, sorry!” I think I said, and got up to pull her to me. She shook in my arms, or maybe that was me. My neck was aching, my back. As I bent my head to rest it on Pal’s, I felt my skin burn from under the right ear to the base of my shoulder. I discovered, later, that I’d scraped the top layer completely off.
I also discovered, later, how Pal and her moms had survived. Effie said that when the Durants’ window wall had caved, when the first monster stormed in, Carmen grabbed Pal with one hand, Bobbi with the other, and ran up to the master bedroom. Effie’d been right behind them. She’d been the one to slam, lock, and throw a chair under the knob while Carmen forced Bobbi and Pal under the bed.
Then Carmen started grabbing all the dirty clothes she could, and there’d been a lot to grab. Apparently, upstairs was even gnarlier than the living room. Stained, dirty, skid-marked. That’s right. Effie even gagged at the memory of Tony’s shit-streaked underwear, which her germophobe wife snatched up without hesitation and jammed all around the sides of the bed. Carmen thinks these creatures depend on smell as much as sight and sound. She thought clogging the space between the bed and the floor with a noxious moat would mask their own scent.
And it must have worked. By the time their pursuer, Dowager, I think, beat down the door, they were all hidden under the Durants’ bed, behind a berm of filth. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for Carmen, lying there in that dark stuffy stink. Maybe that’s why she hit Bobbi, although Effie insists it was necessary.
That happened right before Dowager barreled in, as the door began to buckle. They’d just gotten under the bed, Carmen stuffing this damp moldy towel over the last open space. Bobbi started to lose it. Heavy breaths, faster, louder. Effie said that Carmen whispered angrily for her to be quiet. That Bobbi kept saying, “I can’t, I can’t!”
Effie said the third “can’t” was when Carmen hit her, not an open-mouth slap, but a full-fisted punch right in her eye. I don’t know how she managed it with them all lying on their stomachs. I don’t know how she found Bobbi’s eye in the darkness. But she connected, and Bobbi was stunned into silence. But that wasn’t good enough for Carmen. She grabbed Bobbi by the neck, put her lips right next to her ear, and whispered, “Shut up or I’ll fucking kill you.”
On “you” the door fell in. Effie said she could feel the footsteps vibrating through the floorboards as Dowager stomped past them into the bathroom. The old female must have just poked her head in, reached out to pull the shower curtain down, then come back out to tear the doors off Yvette’s walk-in closet. For a few seconds they heard clothes being ripped down, drawers pulled open. (Why? Just curious or thinking they made a small entrance to another room?)
Then Dowager growled angrily, frustrated, probably, and turned for the bed. She couldn’t have been looking for anything, the way Effie described the sheets, pillows, and eventually mattress tossed around the room. If Dowager had just made it to the box spring, if Alpha’s outside whoops hadn’t pulled her from her tantrum.
They owe them, the Durants. That’s how Effie looks at it now. The grimy concealment, the distraction of their murders. When Effie described it, she couldn’t help but repeat, “We owe them our lives.”
I know I’m getting ahead of myself. Sorry. Back to the moment when Palomino woke me up. I was so dazed, bouncing between thoughts and feelings.
Alpha! That was my first thought, hugging Pal closer as I looked nervously for some dark hairy shape hiding behind a corner. I noticed the scorch marks on the wall at the bottom of the stairs, followed the trail of cinders out to the hole in the window. Through the waving curtains, I saw what had to be the black, charred lump of the towel resting in the ash.
“Pal, what ha…,” I started to ask, but she broke away from my grasp, keeping my hand in hers, and tried to lead me toward the door.
“What…where?” I asked, but she was insistent, a silent pleading in her eyes. I took a few steps, felt my ankles pop, then caught sight of the caved-in garage door.
The garden.
She’d destroyed it.
Alpha had torn the irrigation hose right out from the sink, which was still gushing into the dirt. The dirt, all our carefully sculpted rows were gone, replaced by the thrashed lumps and holes of a kindergarten sandbox. Our seedlings. I saw a few lying among the debris, torn up by the roots, or probably just lifted along with all the other backhoe-sized handfuls.
She’d tried to eat a few, I guessed by the small, slimy green nodules. The tomatoes, the cucumbers, all of Pal’s precious little beans. Chewed up and spat out like miniature horse droppings. Not her droppings though. She’d left that behind as well.
A large, slick pile sat right in the middle of the room. An involuntary function? Just an animal doing its business? Or was there a conscious message?
“Fuck you, Little Prey. Here’s what I can do to your nest.”
I’m just glad I couldn’t smell it. My broken nose was too swollen. Pal could though, with nostrils buried in her sweater. She kept pulling my hand, leading me away.
At first, I resisted. “Don’t you see this? All our work! Everything we tried to do!”
She wasn’t listening, wasn’t even looking. Her face was fixed on the entrance hall, the open front door, something beyond it that I absolutely needed to see. When she looked back toward me, I could see the tears begin
.
“Okay, okay.” I gave up the fight, let her lead me out into the falling ash.
At least I thought it was ash. But when the first flake landed just under my right eye, I blinked hard at the icy surprise.
Snow.
Must have been early. I didn’t think we’d have snow for a few more weeks. It wasn’t heavy. It evaporated before hitting the ground, before it could cover the large footprints leading away from my house. Or the blood trails leading to Mostar’s.
Red footprints amid spatters, a track leading from her kitchen door around the front. Pal let go of my hand then, running on to Mostar’s house, disappearing through—through?—the garage wall. I thought there was something wrong with my eyes, or maybe Mostar had opened her garage. I couldn’t see from that angle, or even as I stopped at her open front door.
More blood in the entrance hall, tracking back to the kitchen among a sparkling carpet of broken glass. So much glass. So many colors. Mostar’s artwork. All those intricate pieces. I could recognize little bits; a pink petal, the blue head of a bird, and the cleanly broken leaf of the fire piece I’d been so taken with earlier. All gone. That’d been the popping sound I’d heard during the attack. One by one they’d been hurled against the floor. Not by the creature, not like my garden. I suspected then, and I confirmed it later, that Mostar and Dan had smashed them in a last-ditch defense.
That had been the howl of pain I’d heard from my bathroom hiding place. The blood trail. And the hollow boom. I finally saw the source of that sound after a few more steps. The garage’s sliding aluminum wall had been bashed in. That’s how Pal had seemed to walk through the wall. She was waiting for me inside, along with everyone else. Effie held her. Carmen held Effie. Bobbi leaned against the back wall, hand cupped against her puffy, darkening cheek. Their collective, red-rimmed eyes told me where to look.
The body was lying facedown. Flat, smooth, tremendous feet glittering with so many embedded shards they looked like a treasure trove of rubies. The blood trickling from those wounds mixed with the large red circle that spread from the breathless torso, from the knife-topped bamboo that sprouted from its silver back. Consort. I could see my reflection in his blood, following another trail that led to the far corner of the room.
Dan, sitting against the wall, cradling Mostar’s limp form. For a second, just a second, I thought she might be sleeping. The rise of her body under Dan’s heaving chest. I should have known right away that no human neck can twist so far to one side. But the closed lips, the gently shut eyes. She looked peaceful, alive.
Dan told me later what had happened, how she’d pulled him inside the house and ordered him to start smashing her art. She’d disappeared into the workshop as he’d grabbed all her sculptures off the shelves. One after the other he’d hurled them against the floor. He wasn’t sure how many he’d destroyed, half a dozen maybe, when the kitchen sliding door had toppled down. Mostar must have heard it too. She shouted from the garage, “Keep smashing!” And he did.
He told me that the beast had half stepped, half leaped at him, and come down hard on a floor of broken pieces. The whole village must have heard the roar. Dan watched the giant stumble backward, tread on more shards, then disappear back outside. He told me he felt like cheering, even crying, but Mostar had shouted, “Don’t stop! Expand the minefield!”
Her word, “minefield.” Always with the war metaphors.
He’d thrown everything to the ground. “Hard as you can,” she’d said, “everywhere!” He’d covered the kitchen, the living room, the entryway, every direction leading up to the garage.
Mostar was still inside, working on another spear. This one had been for her. You could tell by the short shaft that was now rising from the dead ape’s back. She’d just been tying off the wire when the garage door imploded right in front of her.
“She didn’t call for me.” That’s what Dan said. No cries for help as she’d turned and braced the butt of her spear against the wall. She must have known she was too little and weak to cause any damage, but if she could use the animal’s strength and size, if it was angry enough to charge without thinking…
That’s what she must have counted on as Consort came at her, impaling himself on the blade. But it worked too well. All that weight and speed. Dan doesn’t know if it was the inertia of the attack, or if the monster actually intended, despite the pain, to pull itself down the spear’s shaft to Mostar. Dan didn’t see any of this happening.
She was dead before he reached her. All he could do was drag her body away from the dying killer. And it didn’t die right away. It lay there for several minutes, facedown, coughing up blood, jerking every so often as the spear swayed like a flagpole in the wind.
Dan, holding Mostar in the corner, watched as Alpha came stumbling out of our house, clutching her charred, smoking mouth. He’d heard her pained cries, and that’s why, he believes, the rest of them didn’t finish us off. Their leader was hurt, unable to command. She probably wasn’t thinking about anything but getting away, finding a safe place to lick her wounds. They probably followed without question. Obedience trumping bloodlust.
Dan couldn’t stop apologizing later, about how he didn’t think to come looking for me, about how he just huddled there, sobbing quietly, holding Mostar’s cooling corpse. I didn’t judge him. I still don’t. He couldn’t even talk when I first saw him. The grief, the loss. I envy him. I didn’t feel anything at that moment, bending over him, reaching out to touch his tearstained cheek.
I remember his face darkening with the shadows of everyone crowding around us. I remember turning to face them. The silence. No one knowing what to say.
Then:
“We have to kill them.”
That was me. And it wasn’t.
I hadn’t planned on saying those words, or the ones that followed. Someone else was talking, a part of me I’d never met.
“Kill until they’re too afraid to hunt us, or until none of them are left.”
All eyes were on me. No pause. No debate. One by one they silently nodded.
I looked down at Dan, then over to Mostar’s face. “We have to drive them off or wipe them out.”
I felt Pal’s arms slip around my waist, her head nodding into my stomach.
“We have to kill them.”
According to Darwin’s Origin of Species, it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is best able to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.
—LEON C. MEGGINSON, professor of management and marketing at Louisiana State University, 1963
From the NPR program Fresh Air with Terry Gross (2008).
GROSS: …And so you’ve taken on the name of your city as a form of public remembrance.
MOSTAR: Well, I know to some it sounds like…what did Jerry Seinfeld call “Sting”? “A prance-about-stage name”? [Chuckles.] But the inspiration came from Elie Wiesel, when he said, “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.” That is what my life, this new life I’ve been given, is about. That is why I became an artist.
GROSS: To remind the world of the tragedy of Mostar?
MOSTAR: Yes, but not in a tragic way. I’m glad you used that word “tragedy,” because it exemplifies what I believe is the critical danger of negative remembrance. Most humans are not masochistic by nature. The human heart can only absorb so much pain.
GROSS: And you feel that discussing tragic events in their barest form runs the risk of repelling people?
MOSTAR: Not always, but far too often. We can’t just mourn the deaths, we also have to celebrate the lives. We need Anne Frank’s diary, but we also need her smile on the cover. That is why I decided to become an artist, when I had that inspiring moment.
GROSS
: Can you talk for a little bit about that moment?
MOSTAR: It wasn’t long after the siege.
GROSS: The second siege.
MOSTAR: Yes, when the Serbs had gone and the Croats turned on us. This was in May, when we weren’t sure the cease-fire would hold. There was a house I passed every day on my way to the hospital. It was just a charred wreck. I’d never really looked at it before. I must have passed it hundreds of times. But that one day, that moment when the clouds cleared and the sun caught a special verdant glint…I stopped. I turned around. I couldn’t believe it. A sparkling waterfall of ice.
GROSS: But it wasn’t ice…
MOSTAR: No, it was glass. Wine bottles that had melted down their wrought iron rack.
GROSS: Oh…
MOSTAR: It was truly exquisite, the way these hard rivulets had dribbled through their black cage. The frozen fluidity, the way it captured the rays. I couldn’t believe that something so beautiful could come from fire.
JOURNAL ENTRY #16
October 17
They’re probably full. Why else haven’t they attacked? The Durants and Reinhardt. A lot of meat. They know we’re not going anywhere. They think we’re just here for the taking. Or maybe it’s Alpha. Recovering from her wound. Is she spooked? The deterrence Mostar was hoping for? Wouldn’t that be nice. I don’t want to believe it has anything to do with the body rotting under the tarp in Mostar’s workshop. Dan doesn’t think any of them saw it on their way out. Hopefully, they think Consort’s just run off. Maybe they’re looking for him. I hope that’s the case. I can’t afford to think about them mourning.
Not yet.
I also can’t delude myself into imagining that they’ve moved on. We’re all still choking on their smell. It’s heavy in the air, thick despite the crisp, frosty chill. For whatever reason, they’ve given us about forty-eight hours’ peace, and we’ve used every last second to prepare.
