Pym (32 page)

“You’re going to love this. It’s guaranteed to kill you,” I said and smiled on my arrival. The trays went down with a thunk before Sausage Nose, and despite the fact that he already looked ill, the shaking hands and sweating pale face evident, there was a clear expression of joy that he was going to indulge further in his unintentional suicide. Maybe it was my anger at the death of my friend or the simple bravado that comes from exhaustion, but before he could even dig into the first serving tray, I did something reckless. Slapping his marble hands playfully, I said, “No, no, no. It’s not quite done yet.” Reaching for the last box of Black Flag industrial-strength rat and vermin poison, I took a handful of those blue pellets into my palm and then, as if I truly was dropping rainbow sprinkles onto chocolate ice cream, I let them fall over the upper surface of the pudding in question. And they looked beautiful there. The monster gazed up at me, gazed at the box of poison that I had in my hand, saw the illustration of the rat there, and smiled. And then he started gorging.

The monster was so engrossed in his final meal that he didn’t notice much else, thinking little of anything but himself and his dessert. I was more considerate. Standing before the creature where he had come to lean against a stool, I thought of the Tekelian child. Looking to the stream that flowed not more than thirty yards beyond, I could see the kid remained on its belly, head at the syrupy stream still. The child, who must have been very thirsty, was so close to the water that at times its head disappeared below the surface, the food-coloring blue covering the back of its gray hair. It was an odd, overindulgent way of sucking in the blue sugar water, and it was this strange technique that led me to walk slowly off the porch toward the back. I was not more than ten yards closer when I realized the youth’s head was not simply bobbing happily atop the surface of the “water” but was bobbing
in
it with an up-and-down rhythm that matched that of the slight, pump-enhanced current. I knew that unless the Tekelians had some yet unseen, amazing amphibious ability to breathe underwater, this poor young thing was dead.

The smaller physiognomy, of course. The poison had done its job long before the colossal man killer behind me could even faint. I was never a particularly good liar.
^‡
Unsure and alarmed, I made the obvious mistake of freezing immediately, staring back to the deck where the gnarled-nosed gourmet clanked his head in the pans. No sooner did the creature catch my eye than I was exposed. Clearly, the beast could read my body language; my pause was the most easily decoded of mammalian reactions, I’m sure the average seal would react the same way. His mouth covered in wet brown, he darted his head to look beyond me to his young charge. Those crisp, ice blue eyes saw the scene and quickly recognized the horror for what it was.

Mr. Sausage Nose didn’t bother with the deck’s stairs, instead grabbing the railing with one hand and launching out into the air as if he could sustain that flight. For a moment there, as he hung above me, he seemed impossibly powerful and graceful, and I knew that, regardless of how much poison he had eaten, my death must be destined to arrive before his did. When he landed, though, stumbling to a stop, I could already see that his invulnerability had left him, that he was diminished. Lurching forward, exposing an awkwardness I had never seen among these creatures, Sausage Nose still managed to get to the small corpse in less time than the fastest human could have. Watching him drag the delicate, now limp body from its sugar-water grave, for the moment, I was overcome with more grief and empathy than fear. Or maybe it was that by this point the fear had become so commonplace in my system that it no longer had the impact it should. Regardless, I couldn’t deny the enormity of what we had done. No creature should have to know the loss of its young. Not even a worm. Not even an evil worm. But when the monster looked up to me, fixed me with those ice blue eyes and gave another scream, this sound beyond the range I knew any man was capable of, my knack for overwhelming fear returned, along with two other things: the enraged beast and his full attention.

It must have been shock that stopped me from running away immediately. I stood there staring at him, meeting his eyes as he tenderly laid the young victim down. Then the monster let out another roar equal to the first one. That was enough to get me moving. After he screamed, the creature grabbed his waist and bent over himself, vomiting violently right on the corpse. Looking over my shoulder as I struggled to run away, I saw him heave again and perfectly white bile spewed past his fangs, covering everything in front of him with a hellishly chunky chowder.

I took off. With every essence of my being, I ran.
^§
Loopy and off balance, Sausage Nose stumbled behind me as I attempted to get beyond him. Despite his sickness, he was moving so fast that on his first attempt to grab me he gave my side a good knock before hurtling past on his own momentum. Slamming into a boulder to my left, he hit it hard, headfirst. If this had been an actual boulder and not simply a hollow stereo speaker covered in papier-mâché rock, it might have actually knocked him out instead of just pissing him further off.

The house, I thought. Run to the house. This was the only coherent thought I could fix on. At least it seemed rational at the time, as if all I needed to do would be to lock behind me the door on my three-fifths homestead and all my troubles could be that easily kept out. Garth was in there brooding, and I screamed his name as I ran, as if he could help me in any conceivable way. Having been used to this minute commute, I knew exactly which rocks to jump on to cross the saccharine stream. This minor knowledge was in my favor, because the beast had to pause when he came to the water behind me.
^‖
As I kept moving with every muscle I could manage for the effort, I saw that the monster paced along the bank, back and forth like a great cat stuck in a cage, stopping only to vomit once more. I couldn’t have been twenty yards from the cottage when I turned back to see that Sausage Nose was actually walking away, winded! A sense of relief—mild, but there nonetheless—flashed over me when I realized that this would not be my end, that my life might be spared. It was a feeling I needed and clung to, but it was ripped away when I realized that the monster was merely setting up his runway. Pivoting, robes spinning as he did, the creature ran with speed that made him almost a blur to my widening eyes. In one robust, two-legged spring, the white one jumped across a dozen yards of the stream in a single bound. And it couldn’t have taken him more than three steps to reach me.

I was gripped by my neck and lifted from the ground. He held me up before him and stared at me. I doubt those eyes had ever reflected so much hatred. The creature’s bile reeked, I could smell it through his nose. And then another roar came, and I was covered in the unnatural coolness of his putrid breath, bathed in specks of his vomit and spittle. It was nearly impossible to get fresh air, caught as I was in his exhaust, and when it was over I realized his grip had made breathing impossible anyway.
“Guwk,”
I said to him. It was not the most eloquent final word, but it was all I could manage. There was a sound after that, dead and hollow like a pumpkin being kicked, I had no idea where it came from.

“Guwk,”
the Tekelian said back to me. And then, in a moment of vertigo I first attributed to my losing consciousness, the beast dropped me and fell on top of me. The weight was impossibly heavy, but I could already feel that it was a limp weight, devoid of all flex. Pushing desperately out from beneath him, I saw the metal tooth of the gardening hoe planted halfway into the creature’s skull. And beyond that, my friend Garth Frierson standing in his work clothes, covered in dirt, staring down.

“Well, dog,” Garth said, his gaze fixed anxiously on his own lethal handiwork. “That Negro island you keep talking about is sounding better and better to me.”

*
The left hand being used for toilet duties, unlike in the West, where we are willing to get both hands dirty to get the job done.

†
This was no longer that powerful, given he had only one eye to do it with.

‡
A question not of willing but of able.

§
For years I’ve had the common anxiety dream of running away from danger without being able to distance myself. In Thomas Karvel’s heaven, even
my
dreams came true.

‖
For a creature used to the extreme cold of this polar climate, getting wet was probably the most sacred of taboos.

SAUSAGE Nose didn’t even have the chance to grow colder before Garth and I devised a scheme to get the hell out of there. Our planning didn’t take long. We didn’t really have many options to consider. There was no negotiating with the monsters now. Even if the two beasts who had just died did so only because of the heat, how could we feign innocence at this point? How could we even stall for time? Soon the Tekelian Army above us would be wondering why its prominent citizen hadn’t reemerged.

Our plan: we’d get the rest of the crew and the Karvels off the roof, then turn up the boiler as high as it would go. Then, while all of them were occupied with their pudding, we would sneak out the back, take the snowmobiles, supplies, and sailboat. And then we would sail to Tsalal!

“Or Argentina,” Garth pushed. “Argentina would definitely be a good first choice. Matter of fact, if the others ask, just say Argentina, okay? That would be better.”

We packed the food ourselves, placing a selection of the remaining canned goods and vacuum-sealed packets into the base of the fiberglass sailboat. Garth even wanted to take the microwave popcorn, but I wouldn’t let him. I understood his motivation: the day’s feast had seriously depleted the stocks of the kitchen’s dry goods closet. Maybe there was more food hidden somewhere in the building’s storage units, but even still, there had to be an end to how much food the Karvels had. Falling into a moment of clarity, I realized that the instant the Creole crew had arrived at Karvel’s utopia we had lost our chance for long-term survival here: there were simply too many mouths to feed.

But there was still the problem of what the Tekelians would do when they didn’t see their lead warrior coming out with us to greet them. At first I gave this matter little thought, assuming they would take no notice. But already we had been gone so long. And what if they were starting to get sick upstairs as well? Maybe succumbing not quickly, like the child monster did in the heat of the dome, but slowly, comforted as they were by their normal temperature. They were expecting their massive, hooded, sausage-nosed thug to return, and anything less would send off warning signals. So this is what we decided to give them.

Since we couldn’t just reanimate the corpse for the thirty or forty seconds we needed, we decided to improvise. If Sausage Nose couldn’t appear and ease his fellow warriors’ suspicions, then we would simply have to find an understudy for his role. I nominated myself for this—stripping the soiled cloak from the beast with no small amount of disgust. I was willing to take on the danger of trying to pass myself off as the monster, but unfortunately my frame was a poor match for the beast’s jacket size. I even tried adding a line of broomstick to broaden the shoulders, but it was no use. So instead Garth Frierson went, his unique physique finally being applied to practical purpose. Garth’s arms weren’t close to as long as those of the character he hoped to play, but they were as thick. As long as no one got close enough to see that that circumference was simply fat, I hoped he might be convincing. The issue of skin tone, of course, had to be addressed. Any melanin at all would have revealed him to be an impostor. To camouflage him, we relied on teeth-whitening toothpaste, which the bright-smiling Karvels had in great supply. It took about two tubes each to cover Garth’s hands and arms, another for his neck, and two more for his face. Not that we intended anything but his fingers to be seen, but in the wind of the upstairs it felt safer to cover up all that could possibly be revealed. The paste left the former bus driver a tad shiny, but fortunately I found an open box of baking soda in the back of the Karvels’ Sub-Zero, and I blotted it onto Garth’s skin like it was the finest talcum.

As soon as I stepped out onto the roof, I knew that we were right to have made our preparations. All of the creatures’ heads turned on our arrival, and they clearly weren’t just looking for the pudding. As I walked out with the pans in my hands, they saw behind me what looked like the arm of their leader slapping the back of my head to speed me up. Or at least they saw Sausage Nose’s sleeve, wiped clean of bile. And from within this sleeve, they saw a white hand, even paler than their own, which I hoped they wouldn’t notice. In my attempt to hide Garth’s blackness, I’d been a little too eager, I realized once faced with the actual living Tekelian skin tone. In my mind it was white, but really it was flecked with tones of gray.

“You’ve got to come, and you’ve got to come now,” I urged the Karvels as soon as I reached them. You have never seen two more relieved white folks.
^*
In their brief time in the outdoors, their faces had become flushed and ruddy, their noses running and freezing at the same time. Mrs. Karvel was smoking right in front of her husband now, she didn’t even care. I understood. They hadn’t been living in the Antarctic like the rest of us, they’d simply been hiding within it. Pushed well beyond their comfort levels physically and socially, the two scuttled past me to the inside before I could even finish my request. My cousin, on the other hand, proved nowhere near as easy to convince.

“I don’t want to have nothing to do with it, Christopher,” Booker Jaynes said as I came closer. “You see how well your dirty little trick went? You see that all that poison was for nothing? I could have told you that. If it was that simple, slavery would have been over by the seventeenth century.” Jaynes moved past me to serve his mistress another plate of potatoes au gratin, a dish he had prepared himself. Hunka had come with the rest, looking for him, and Jaynes had found her. He had taken special care to ensure that she would receive food untainted by our deceit. None of her kin seemed to notice that her servant’s efforts were a little too attentive. Even when he dabbed a smudge of cheese off the corner of her mouth, the other Tekelians apparently found this intimate gesture not the least bit out of the ordinary, the actions of a good slave and a good lover being more or less the same.

“Just get off the roof, okay? Promise me that. Take your lady and get her as far away from here as you can,” I insisted, interpreting his shrugging nod as an ironclad contract.

“Well that’s just insane,” Nathaniel complained as he stepped in where he was not wanted, coming from behind me after listening to the substance of my little family spat. “There’s simply nowhere to run to, don’t you understand that? This is it. We need to get in with these people, make a place with them. Secure our positions. That’s our reality now. Not some fantasy world.”

Angela Latham stood beside him, so I spoke to her directly as she looked intently at her legal husband. “Angela, they’re not just going to keel over instantly. They’re going to get sick, and when they figure out why, they are going to get angry. And they are definitely going to figure out why.” It was a simple argument, but it was all she needed to hear. Angela turned away from Nathaniel and started walking with me. Nathaniel didn’t follow. And in this moment of my greatest heroics, Angela Latham grabbed my hand with the softness of hers when she reached me, and together we walked past that gaggle of goliaths and toward something I hoped would be our future.

“Angela!” I kept hearing Nathaniel yell from behind me. But no matter how demanding that voice was, it never got any closer. Nathaniel never made the simple effort to follow after all that he was losing. Angela walked through the exit door with me, and it was only Garth Frierson who seemed to have any reservation over Nathaniel’s absence. As I came into the room, I saw past the costumed Garth to the Karvels, who were busy laying out rifles and ammunition before them in preparation for what was surely to come. Taking off his coat, Jeffree grabbed the largest rifle he could find in the pile, cocked it, and declared, “It’s showtime!” as if Carlton Damon Carter hadn’t been filming the whole time.

“Where the hell is Captain Jaynes?” Garth insisted, still not having opened the door wide enough for those behind to see that he was a fraud but unwilling to close it either with our two comrades on the other side. He’d taken his hood off, and given the smell, I couldn’t blame him. Still, the patches of white toothpaste on his face made him look like he had a mutant strain of vitiligo.

“I told him, but he’s not coming. He’s with that woman. He thinks he can make it with her instead. What the hell can I do about that?”

“But where the hell is Nathaniel?” The question was addressed to me, but Garth was also looking to Latham’s newly estranged wife.

“He’s not trying to hear it,” I told Garth. “It’s on him now.” Garth looked at my indifferent expression and replied to it with his own look of disbelief. He looked at Angela as well, and so did I, and I’d like to believe I saw a tinge of indifference from her too, but I can’t deny that now she was crying.

“Screw this,” Garth spat at me, and before I could stop him he leaned out the door and yelled, “Yo, dog! Nathaniel! It’s time to get your black ass out of here!”

The command certainly got Nathaniel’s attention. In fact, it seemed to get everyone’s attention. All of the Tekelians on the roof looked up from the remainders of their feast to take notice of what had just been said. The now unhooded Garth, who had stepped just outside the door to make sure that he was heard, struck quite a figure before them. Even from the distance both physically and culturally, I could read the looks of shock on the creatures’ faces. Never before had they seen a Tekelian with African features, that much was sure. Or a Tekelian warrior who, after stepping off of the two milk crates we had placed for him by the door, now stood at a mere five feet, six inches tall. The other thing I could tell was that the robe Sausage Nose always wore was a sacred object, a symbol of respect, earned right and privilege. It was clear from the chorus of angry howls that erupted from among them, rising first from the warriors and then from the females and even the children of Tekeli-li as they pushed back their chairs and flipped over the tables. Either we had broken some sort of snowman taboo or they just knew the truth: that the owner of that robe would not have parted with it willingly. Either way, the result was much the same and very immediate. Our reckoning would not be postponed a moment more.

The first one to die was my cousin. The man of my blood who at different times I had looked to as a leader, a boss, even as a friend. The reality of his death somehow eluded my consciousness in that moment of chaos and danger. And they didn’t so much attack him as simply brush Booker Jaynes away.

“Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters: I’m sure we can figure out what is going on here in a peaceable manner!” Booker bellowed. Years of practice at rallies and marches had given him a voice that truly boomed above the crowd. “Let’s just all calm down, and get together in a circle,” he pleaded. Alas, “Can’t we all just form a circle?” was the last thing my cousin said before he was pushed to the side by the nearest of the creatures. The villain didn’t even bother to acknowledge my cousin by looking in his direction. The monster just swung his simian arm out to the side and sent Jaynes off his feet and hurtling toward the BioDome’s curved edge. Booker actually landed briefly, though not on his feet, skidding the remaining distance to where the angle of the roof became too steep to reconcile. And then he was simply gone. Dropped out of sight. It’s a testament to my own capacity for denial that I didn’t accept that the captain had fallen to his demise, instead clinging to a hasty notion that he had simply slid down the side and landed in the soft snow below. His Tekelian mistress harbored no such delusions. I have no idea what Hunka said, but the anguish in her garbled barking was undeniable. It must have been revealing as well, whatever language she used, because on hearing her harsh utterances the crowd of her brethren around her simply froze. Unaware of anything but her grief, the she-creature continued her lament. Those Tekelians kept listening as if taking in a confession, one that lasted until one of their number walked forward, put a hand on her shoulder, and then cut her neck wide open with an ivory dagger. When Hunka hit the ground, her assassin casually kicked her limp body off the side of the roof as well, in the direction her servant had been sent to his demise.