We Call It Monster

by Lachlan Walter

  And then a harsh beeping sound broke the quiet.

  “What is that?” Lee asked, breaking from her trance.

  Max looked at her, barely aware of the intrusion. He had a peaceful smile on his face, like that of a lazy Buddha. There was nothing unusual in that, it was just what happened when he remembered how much he loved it out there.

  The beeping sound kept going. Max patted his pocket and pulled out his phone and his peaceful smile turned to a grimace of embarrassment.

  “Ah, sorry sis, I’ve got to take this.”

  “Work, I guess?”

  “Yep. Excuse me.”

  Max got to his feet and walked back into the shack. Lee could still hear him, if only a little: the occasional muttered ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ the rising inflection of questions, half-stifled obscenities. She tuned him out and thought about the beasts that might be sleeping beneath her stretch of bush or beneath her home. There was nothing she could do, she suddenly realised. There was nowhere she could go.

  She was surprised by the feeling of calm brought on by these realisations, and she felt a certain freedom in the fact that it no longer mattered what she did, a resigned acceptance that the real world would always find a way in. They were unfamiliar feelings. She wondered if that was how it felt to finally give up, to finally stop running, to finally stop hiding.

  “Sis, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

  Lee looked at Max as he barged through the back door and strode across the verandah to where she was sitting. She didn’t get up, didn’t act surprised. “You’ve got to go, right?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “What is it?”

  “Sis, I’ve got to go, something’s happening right now.”

  “Don’t you dare!” Lee said as she snatched his arm.

  He snatched it back. “Sis, I’ve got to go!”

  “Maximilian, you’re not going anywhere until you ‘fess up!” Lee shouted, bounding to her feet. Her voice was exactly as it had been when they were younger and she had caught him ruining one of her favourite toys or going through her diary or tattling in front of her boyfriends. It cut Max deeply; he couldn’t help but feel like a little kid, ashamed and embarrassed by his own excitement and insensitivity.

  “Okay, okay. And I’m sorry, time’s crucial, that’s all.”

  “Then we’ll walk and talk.” She led him back into the house and he started gathering his things. “What’s happening?” she asked.

  “I’ve got a guy keeping an eye on things, back at the base. He just told me that some of our sensors at Mt Franklin went out a few minutes ago. Half-a-dozen of them so far, and it’s still happening. It might be nothing, but I’ve had a feeling about the place. When they come from the sea, it’s always from a lava tube or a volcanic crater or an abyss, right?”

  Lee nodded at him as he slung his bag over his shoulder, picked up his keys then headed for the front door. “Well, that’s what they reckon,” she said.

  “Exactly. So, I got to thinking – if they do live underground, they’d probably surface in the same way. You with me?”

  “I think so.”

  They were at Max’s car now, and he threw his bag in the back seat and opened the door.

  “And what’s Mt Franklin? An extinct volcano. I’ve got the same set-up down at Melville Caves, and a couple more around the biggest of the old mines.”

  “Holes in the earth, eh?”

  “Holes in the earth. Passages, chambers, weak points, you name it.” Max stopped talking and threw his arms wide. “I’ve got to go.”

  Despite her reluctance to hug him and consequently end up confined in his arms, she let him embrace her.

  “I love you, sis,” he said, leaning down and kissing her on the forehead.

  “And I love you too, little brother. Be safe out there, alright?”

  “You got it.”

  “And try and visit a bit more often, okay?”

  “I’ll do my best,” he said as he let her go.

  They laughed a laugh born of familiarity before Max hopped in his car and drove away, tooting the horn in farewell. Once again, Lee was left alone with the quiet bush.

  “Well, that was nice,” she said to herself.

  ***

  Lee stood there, staring at the dust storm created by Max’s car disappearing down the long dirt road. It took a long time to dissipate, but she kept standing and staring. And then she shivered suddenly, the chill-gloom that was claiming the eastern side of the land surprising her. She turned her back on the abandoned farm and hurried into the house, intent on lighting the fire and getting warm.

  But once inside, she just felt trapped.

  Maybe it was the slowly growing awareness that she had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Maybe it was a desire to escape the reminder of that terrible time: she wanted to be back out in the open, free of the smell of smoke and ash and anything else that even remotely resembled the fallen ruins of a burning building.

  Maybe it was just time to look at the world from the vantage of a hillside instead of the claustrophobic safety of a bunker.

  All she knew was that she needed to be outside.

  She quickly gathered a blanket, some beers and her stash. The light under the front verandah had blown, and so she lit an old-fashioned lantern that was kept aside for such occasions. She settled into her favourite old chair. She cracked a beer and rolled a joint. She smoked and drank as she looked out at the abandoned farm and the shadowy bush, the blanket draped over her knees. She watched as the moon rose and the stars came out, and she felt something that was almost happiness.

  Hours passed and Lee just sat there, her only company the land and the sky and her thoughts. The only time she moved was to open another beer, to roll another joint, to fetch some water, to go to the toilet. She didn’t eat. She didn’t care to do so.

  She was good at these things. She was practised at them. What she wasn’t so good at was feeling okay.

  No longer was her chest tight in anticipation of danger. No longer did she feel coiled, ready to take flight. She breathed deeply and steadily, in and out and in and out, slowly-slowly-slowly. She realised that she had stopped a long-held habit of almost-unconsciously scanning the horizon. Her gaze drifted, her eyes no longer moving back and forth and back and forth again. She marvelled at the things she saw: dead trees gnarled and twisted, shining silver in the moonlight; dark clumps of leaves hanging in the air like thick, black clouds; overgrown grass that shimmered and rippled in waves; crumbling ruins rendered tiny and meaningless by the land surrounding them.

  These things had all been there for years, but it was only now that Lee really saw them.

  She finally understood how beautiful they were.

  Time passed. At some point, she caught herself idly wondering if she could break into an abandoned farmhouse if the beast happened upon hers. She cracked another beer. She wondered if the beast would just pass her by – in all that space, it could have been over the next ridge and she would never know. She rolled another joint. More time passed. After a while, she began to wonder if Max’s word had spread, and if her friends and townsfolk had fled, and what the empty town would look like drenched in moonlight without even the din of the pub to hold back the night.

  She rolled yet another joint. She cracked yet another beer. After a while, stoned and drunk and pretty fuzzy, she began to doze.

  The sound of thunder broke her from her sleep. As always, she had been dreaming of that terrible day. She had been twitching and moaning, wracked by memories that were nightmares in everything but name. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t look away from the flames that lit up the night and couldn’t stop hearing the roar of the explosions. All she could do was watch herself run into a ruined house that was both burning up and falling down. All she could see was the house collapsing on top of her.

  Trapped in the rubble, trapped in her dream, she simply thought that the thunder was another explosion.

  But then she woke up, and the
thunder was still going.

  She looked around with fright, not quite awake. She saw nothing but the night. The thunder sounded again, four claps that echoed through the sky. Lee knew how sound travelled out there, in the still and quiet spaces. She knew that the thunder might be miles away or just down the road. She waited, and it soon sounded again, the same four claps echoing on and on. Something nagged at her. The thunder sounded again, boom-boom-boom-boom.

  It became more frequent. It became steadier. It became rhythmic. Something roared, and everything fell into place.

  Lee looked back and forth, but she saw nothing. The deafening thunder and the footsteps of a Goliath sounded again, and an enormous thing suddenly came into view, barging through the trees of the abandoned farm across the way. It was half-hidden by the foliage and Lee couldn’t make out much detail, couldn’t see the white of an eye or a tooth. All she could see was that it had finally arrived, and that it was enormous.

  It reared up and roared again.

  It towered over the trees and was the same colour as the night, the same colour as the land – a smear of black, grey and shimmering silver. It roared a third time, and it was as melancholy a sound as the wind in the trees. The thunder sounded again as it crashed back down and walked on, clear-felling the trees with its girth as it strode across the earth.

  Lee looked harder: the thing was drenched in the light of the heavens.

  The longer she stared at it, the more she thought that its four sturdy legs were gnarled and twisted like those of dead trees, and that some of its matted fur formed dark clumps that resembled thick, black clouds, and that some of it shined silver in the moonlight and some shimmered and rippled in waves.

  She realised that it looked like it belonged there, like it was just another part of a strange land that people could never really understand.

  She felt as if she were the crumbling ruins of the abandoned farm, tiny and meaningless in the face of something ancient and unknowable. She felt dwarfed by a thing that had as little regard for her as she had for an insect. And she knew that it would either head her way, or it wouldn’t. She knew that there would be no thought in its decision, only instinct. She knew that there was nothing she could do to sway it. She knew that such an act would be as futile as trying to fix the world.

  She accepted these things, and just sat and waited.

  The thing reared up once more. It swiped at the sky and then crashed back down. The earth shook. It took another few steps and the thunder began anew: boom-boom-boom-boom. The thing roared again as it began ploughing through the trees sprawled out in front of her.

  Lee thought that she heard the crack of splintering wood, but she might have imagined it.

  The thing kept walking.

  AN INTERLUDE

  Watching from a Distance

  In the cold and lonely emptiness of space, a miraculous machine no bigger than a football looked down upon the earth. Its complex array of lenses focused and refocused; its sublime digital brain recorded and transmitted, despite the fact that there was barely anyone left to receive the images it beamed down.

  If it could, it would have wept at what it saw.

  Focus, refocus, record, transmit.

  Its parts usually whirred and hummed. In the star-speckled vacuum, the processes underlying these sounds happened silently. It wasn’t alone up there: hundreds, if not thousands, of fellow satellites also orbited Earth, playing their part in an endless cycle. Being slavish machines without a shred of independence, they were condemned to operate until their orbits degraded or their fuel-cells ran down and another affront to nature’s majesty was gone for good.

  If they could, they all would have wept at what they saw.

  Focus, refocus, record, transmit.

  For a number of them, the North American continent came into view. The United States burned: an act of suicidal defiance by its people, against forces far greater than themselves. What had once been a modern-day empire now glowed red with atomic flame, and through the flames immense shapeless masses could be seen, the burning beasts of the Great Plains reclaiming what was once theirs.

  Thick plumes of radioactive smoke drifted north and south, blanketing Canada and Central America. The smoke was almost a solid, tangible thing; not even the ultra-high-tech lens of the most sophisticated spy-satellites could see through them.

  If those miraculous machines could have felt anything, it would have been relief at being spared the sight of whatever had survived such total devastation.

  Those that looked upon South America wouldn’t have considered themselves so lucky, if they could have considered anything at all – the entire continent was covered in a lush jungle of the deepest primordial green, through which enormous things of horn and scale and feather and fur roamed and hunted and fought. Above this fecund mass, great winged-serpents wheeled and soared in the otherwise empty skies.

  Focus, refocus, record, transmit.

  The world kept turning, and a number of satellites found themselves looking down upon the island-continent of Australia. What had once been an empty red desert – what had once been its heart – was now an alien-looking bush-jungle that teemed with life. This unknowable eco-system of fluorescent purples and yellows crept steadily towards the coast, slowly but surely engulfing the country. The land it hadn’t consumed crawled with colossal furred creatures. Squat and brick-like, they dug gouges out of the earth as they crawled, leaving brand new rivers and creeks in their wake.

  To the east – across the ditch – New Zealand had disappeared, pounded into rubble and then swallowed by the sea thanks to the constant earthquakes and tsunamis that heralded forces greater than nature. The same thing had happened to the tiny islands of Micronesia and Polynesia; the sprawling archipelago of Indonesia continued to slowly sink beneath the waves. Gargantuan crocodile-shapes scavenged in its ruins, though there was little left for them to feed on.

  If the satellites could have torn themselves away, they would have done so in an instant.

  Focus, refocus, record, transmit.

  A handful of satellites saw that night had fallen across Europe. Tiny dots of light peppered its coastlines: campfires, lit by the pathetic survivors of humanity’s fall, clinging to life in the safety of sea-caves. The interior of the continent was dark, although its billowing shadows seemed to flex and stir. Without warning, a cluster of campfires on the Norwegian coast went out as one. If the satellites could have believed in a world beyond binary numbers and digital impulses, they would have thanked the creator of that world for the darkness that spared them the sight of whatever had extinguished one of mankind’s last lights.

  Their programming told them to look to the south and so they did, unable to help themselves.

  Grotesque horrors strode across Africa, making a mockery of humanity’s birthplace. More than anything else on Earth, these horrors seemed to have some frame of reference – the satellites coldly transmitted an image of one that bore no small resemblance to an elephant, and another that resembled a rhinoceros, and another that resembled a wildebeest, and so on. But these creatures were all so wrong, sporting too many tusks or horns or claws, standing upright, slithering on their bellies.

  In the dead centre of the continent, another fluorescent bush-jungle grew.

  Focus, refocus, record, transmit.

  A wind like the breath of a god started to blow across the Middle East, attracting the attention of a certain satellite designed specifically to notice such things. If it could have felt horror, it would have felt exactly that at the sight it saw – monumental dust-storms tore across countries older than the Bible, moving with what seemed like deliberate purpose, laying waste to places that seemed destined to know nothing but fear, violence, destruction and death. The dust-storms twisted and turned and sometimes seemed to shape themselves into unformed and lumpen approximations of people, while glimpses of mammoth almost-insects could be seen skittering in the grit they left behind.

  If ever this particular sate
llite could have felt happiness, it would have been at the exact moment that its orbit moved it further east, so that it looked down upon Asia instead.

  This moment would have been short lived indeed: the once-arid deserts of Pakistan and Mongolia now played host to the same fluorescent bush-jungles as Australia and Africa; while India cracked and shook under the tremendous weight of brightly-coloured, multi-limbed, animal-headed giants. China had been cleaved in two, the result of a battle of titans atop the Three Gorges Dam, and the magnificent dragon-birds in its skies were the only sign of life. Most of South-East Asia had been denuded once again, thanks to the toxic effluent of the massive aquatic monstrosities that called its rivers and waterways home; while Japan was nothing more than a wave-pounded ruin, the rubble of its cities picked-through by terrible lizards and incredibly oversized insects.

  To the far north, Russia was a frozen wilderness, white upon white upon white. This particular spy-satellite picked up a tiny movement in the ice, a movement that slowly became an almost continent-wide shudder, as if the tundra itself was awakening from its slumber and readying to show itself.

  Focus, refocus, record, transmit.

  Thousands of satellites looked down on a world that had changed forever. They looked down on a world that should never have been. They looked down on a world that couldn’t have ended any other way. And even though no one cared, they still fulfilled their function.