the mortis (12 page)

In the hall, the emergency outage LE
Ds are the only light source—small blooms along the wall on each side every five feet or so.  The black patterned carpeting.  Park walks the hallway in the direction of the main entrance, toward the conference rooms. 

He listens as he passes by each guest room door, all of them closed, and he hears no movement, no voices.  The corridor is silent.  There
’s no way of knowing how many of these rooms are occupied, if any of them are.  He keeps walking until the hallway opens into a small reception area, completely vacant, and there is a bank of lifeless elevator lifts to his right.  He presses the call button with his thumb as he goes by, just to remember the feeling of such simple causality. 

He passes through the Makoa
’s main entrance lobby and follows the signs to the conference rooms.  He passes the Hawkmoth and the Cymbidium.  Then the Liparis.  The Calanthe.  Lastly, he reaches the Jumellea on the right.  The card-reader mechanism that controls the locks has been disabled.  The front panel is open, the electronics exposed, the battery.  He opens the door and enters the room.

A woman is inside, one of the women in masks.  A faded grey sundress.  She is standing beside a teak conference table at room
’s center, holding a service tray in one hand, watching him.  Black office chairs with casters are spread around the circumference. 

There are plates on the tabletop.  Silver flatware.  The woman pauses for a moment, and then
without a word she resumes gathering the dishes and placing them on the tray.  Circling the table.  She doesn’t look up at him again. 

A warm light from the outside filters down through windows built into the domed ceiling.  Park walks to the table and he takes up one of the plates and holds it close, in
haling the scent of the residue—the smell of meat, of heated animal flesh—and something about the smell makes his mind slip loose, become untethered.  He brings the plate to his mouth and tongues the surface like a dog, and the taste is something he never thought he’d sample again in this accursed life.  When he finishes, he sets the plate down hard and takes up another, and then another, and then he goes to the woman and snatches the tray from her hand.  She offers no resistance.

When Park finishes with the plates, the woman asks him to sit down, and her voice is thickly slurred under the mask.  She brings him a chair.  Stay here, she tells him.  She exits the room, and he immediately rolls the chair to the side of the table furthest from the door, facing it, and he takes one of the serrated steak knives from the tray and sits back down, holding the knife low in his lap, out of view. 

After a short wait, a man enters—the same man who pulled him to his feet the day prior.  Strikingly tall and reed-thin.  Closely cropped white hair.  Chapped and reddened skin, the kind you earn through surviving an endless cycle of exposure to salt water, to sun, to a hard wind.  He could be in his fifties, sixties, it’s hard to say.

The man is smiling.  His white, squared-off teeth.  He is removing a pair of soiled garden gloves finger by finger, and when he has them both off he holds them by the cuffs and slaps them a few times against his thighs.  There is a dirt-caked
bolo
machete hanging from a belt holster clipped at his waist, the same machete the Lavelha garden staff used to carry, beating back the ever-wild Torluna landscape while the guests slept.

No one says anything.  The man folds the gloves and pockets them and then approaches the table.  Still standing, he leans forward on the surface with both hands.  The raised, red welts are visible on his arms, running from wrists to biceps.   

“I am glad you came,” says the man.

The man says more than that—going on in his low, droning voice, slightly accented—but Park isn
’t really listening to him.  Lately his mind is having more and more difficulty catching on to the events around him, almost like a bicycle that keeps slipping gears.  Soon Park decides that it would be a good idea to interrupt the man.

“
Is there any more?” Park asks.

The man stops speaking mid-sentence.  He pauses for a moment, staring. 
“More what?”

Park points at an empty plate in front of him.

The man smiles.  “Yes.  There is,” he says.

And Park waits, but the man doesn
’t say anything further.  There is no offer, no invitation, and Park doesn’t ask again.  They lapse into silence. 

  After a time the man says,
“Don’t you first want to know what it is?  What it’s made from?”

Park shrugs. 
“Have you had it before today?”

The man nods. 
“Yes.”

“
How many times?”

“
Too many,” says the man.

“
And it stays down?  For all of you?”

The man looks at him, frowning. 
“What does it mean, stay down?”

“
It doesn’t make you sick?”

The man is smiling again. 
“No.”

“
Then I don’t care what it is.”

“
You just want it,” says the man.

“
I do,” Park answers.

The man stops smiling.  He shakes his head slowly side to side. 
“You’re hungry,” he says.  “I understand that.  But you will need to understand what I’ve built here if you want it to feed you.”

The man takes him outside.  Park doesn
’t want to leave the building, its relative safety, but the man tells him to go, so he does.  The man leads him on a tour across the sheltered grounds behind the Makoa building, and as they walk together Park stays several steps back, trailing.  The steak knife is secured in the waistband of his jeans, at the base of his spine. 

The man is gesturing, making references to landmarks.  Pointing to places where he
’s seen things happen, things you don’t want to remember but you remember anyway because you can’t help it.  At some point the man abruptly stops walking and turns to Park and says that his name is Nil.  They shake hands, and Park notices again the lesions developing up and down the man’s corded forearms. 

It
’s becoming clear that this man is sick.  He isn’t too far along—everyone seems to succumb at their own rate, according to their own constitution.  Their own individual capacity to resist.  The man is fighting the good fight, but it’s obvious that the mortis sequence is there, active, inside him.  The changes in his skin are one sure sign but they’re not the only sign.  There is also the way the man moves, stiffly, and the frenetic pace of his thoughts pouring out and the empty expression in his eyes that goes far beyond ordinary hunger.  The pure famishment in him.    

Nil tells him that he originates from Stockholm—Östermalm district, have you heard of it?—but he
’s been in America for almost forty years.  Long enough to be more U.S. than Sverige, he says.  Then he tells Park that he came here to this islet to find a kind of paradise and that he did; he found it.  I achieved what I wanted without even knowing my true want for it, Nil says.  How golden can a man’s luck be?

Together they walk the perimeter of the private Makoa grounds, keeping close to the base of the white wall that runs, fifteen feet high, all the way around the hotel Lavelha.  Park remembers the way that the
private grounds looked before the collapse.  Everything cultivated and groomed—immaculate—with a broad lawn area and an acre-wide rare orchid display, for God’s sake.  Several white alhambra gazebos with red roofs.  A small, open-air, natural amphitheater was once carved out of the earth at the south end, and a troupe of Mirasai women would stage a dance performance for the tourists each Tuesday and Thursday after dinner service.  A footpath used to wind through the copse of tamarind trees, and there were small, unobtrusive placards identifying every native plant by its genus.  Secluded bowers with canopy swings and wicker benches.  But everything is gone now—everything has either been taken apart by scavengers or overtaken by a dense, bristling foliage, like a reclamation.     

The man starts showing Park the changes he
’s made across the expansive grounds.  His improvement projects, he calls them.  The fifty-gallon PVC barrels with makeshift filter screens for collecting rainwater.  The small vegetable garden that he maintains himself, by hand.  Roma tomatoes and butter leaf lettuce and danver carrots.  Cucumbers and sweet basil and renegade spinach and orange gypsy peppers.  There isn’t much yield, Nil says, but it’s enough to make it worth the cost of upkeep.  We do all right for ourselves, we surely do.

He shows Park the barricades he
’s built up—the places where he’s worked to reinforce the vulnerable points.  He brings Park to the wickedly barbed spring traps he’s laid out to catch small animals or to deter any human or semi-human trespassers.  An eight-foot pit he dug with a dozen sharpened punji stakes made of adansonia wood coming up from the depths.  Park nods at everything he’s told.  He maintains eye contact with the man, and he asks all the right questions.

The man brings Park to a cul-de-sac at the far end.  On the other side of the wall are the purest untamed Sielve wildlands, and that
’s all.  They’ve reached the point where the grounds extend the furthest away from anything resembling civilization.  A cluster of neem trees grow there, close to the wall, and there is a crude lean-to structure nestled among them at the centerpoint.  The lean-to is constructed out of branches woven and interleaved together with no recognizable pattern or thought process.  The man nods toward it. 

“
Look inside,” Nil says.  “Go on.”  The man’s arms are crossed. 

Park stays where he is. 
“What is it?” he asks.

Nil frowns.  He doesn
’t seem to like questions, at least not the wrong kind. 

“
Check the wall,” Nil says.  He uncrosses his arms and points.  “I took a pickaxe to a section there.  Bored a hole all the way through, like a tunnel.”  He makes a few two-handed swinging motions, baseball style.  “Then I rigged up a door.  A trap door, out of wooden planks.  So the hole could be covered or open, whatever I want.”

“
Why the hell would you ever want it open?”

The man is smiling again. 
“To let the fossa cats in.”

Nil walks over to the wall, and there is a mud-covered length of rope hanging from a pulley mechanism.
  He takes the rope in his fist, gives it a few quick jerks and the trap door rises and falls slightly, revealing the opening in the wall. 

“
They come through the hole, thinking of meat,” Nil says, “but then they become meat.”

Park just watches, nodding.

“I capture them,” Nil says.  “I take them hard and I break their wild necks.”  He snaps his fists downward.  “Fourteen of them, that’s how many I’ve taken.  We have a kitchen inside with a fire oven to prepare them after.” 

Both men go silent.  There
’s nothing but the distant chirring of cicadas and the steaming heat and the foliage winding its way through.  Nil’s eyes are fixed on his creation as though he’s admiring the engineering behind it, or maybe recalling the feeling of the animal in his grasp.  The torsion of the warm, lithe body under him.  The smell of its blood and its urine and its fear. 

After a while Park speaks. 
“How do you get them to come through,” he asks.

Nil doesn
’t look up.  “Through?”

“
Through the door.”

“
That’s what I say before.”  The man is visibly annoyed now.  “I told you to look,
blåman
, and you start to ask why instead of looking.  You should learn better.  If you want to join, you should learn better.” 

Nil points
to the tangle of branches that comprises the lean-to structure and he says, “You want to know how to bring the wild in?  Look there.” 

Park stays where he is, and the man watches him for a moment before leaning in and spreading apart limbs so that the view is unobstructed. 

“This is what you do,” Nil says.  He seems calmer now.  “If you want to know how to catch the wild and break it so that it serves you, this is how.”  The man nods down.  “Look.  This is how you will stop being a servant to wild things.”

Park eventually approaches and enters the copse through the opening that the man made for him.  He steps high over the low branches and bends others aside, and soon he reaches a small clearing in the center of the thicket.  The lean-to structure is there and the trap door is directly in front of it.  Anything that comes through the opening in the wall will be funneled right in. 

Park goes to the entrance of the lean-to and bends down, and inside the dark interior are the remains of a woman.  Blood-covered.  Everything is tattered, torn apart, from the ribcage down.  Without meaning to, Park looks at the face, and it’s the face of the woman he freed from the desk unit, the woman who chased him down and used her teeth once she had him in her grasp.