by Bill Olver
She picked up the pieces and wrapped them in the cloth covering the pedestal, then tied them into a bundle. She would find a way for the pieces to be given to the ronnok somehow. A way that didn’t involve facing their wrath. Even carrying the bundle, she felt lighter. She felt like laughing.
She picked her way through the rotting dead until she found the hathscha and nudged him with her foot. “Wake up, you. I know you’re only sleeping.”
He opened his eyes. “What happened?”
“You were turned to one of the dead by the statue. I smashed it.”
“What happened to Sirena?”
She had sent him into the caverns to die. She owed him many things. “She came back to save you…she was lost in the fighting.” He might not smell the lie in that.
“The General?”
“In a mining machine below.”
His upper lip shuddered as he waited for the worst. “Dead?”
“Knocked out. I knew you wanted him.”
The hathscha rolled onto his side, then pushed himself up on his knees. “Show me.” He wiped his face, smearing the trails of red tears across his cheeks.
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The orang carried a small, rattling bag with her. “What is that?”
“A souvenir.” She led him without further comment as the rumbling grew louder, until his ears felt as though they would bleed, until they stood at a narrow window looking over a vast pit. She tied the bag around her, then started descending on a series of pegs, then jumping lightly onto a sturdy metal pipe.
They worked their way downward. The pipes held, although some of them leaked after he had passed.
The machine ground on, kicking up red dust that looked like blood. She brushed away a layer of dust and rock chips from a small hatch, opened it, and went inside. He could barely follow her. She stood before a second door. “I left him in there.”
He pushed open the door, then leaped through it. Before he knew what he was doing, he swept Sirena into his arms and buried his head in her neck. After a few seconds, he noticed her struggling and let her go.
He let his eyes fill up with the sight of her, his nose with the scent of her. She screeched and hurled herself at him, attacking. He stepped back from her. “Sirena…Sirena…it’s me. Orion.”
He stumbled over something and looked down. Shock almost knocked him from his feet. “Merrill,” he said. The chimp was dressed in a silly uniform of some kind, with a red coat and gold braid. His face was covered with scars that reminded him of the wanted posted the Pinks had given him of General Regis. But surely it was not him. Sirena bent over him, cooing at him, poking him, trying to get him to wake up.
“What did you do to her?” he asked.
Mi Tao, still on the other side of the door, turned and started to climb up the ladder to the door outside. In a second, he pinned her face against the wall of the machine. “What did you do?”
The orang gasped, and he dropped her. She pulled open the top of her vest. Her chest was covered in blood; her little pet marmoset had been crushed between her and the wall.
“Absalom,” she whispered.
“What did you do to her?” He grabbed her head and made her look at him.
Her eyes were filled with tears. “She tried to kill me.”
“What did you do?” he roared.
“I took away her mind.”
He backhanded her, and she landed against the ladder and fell down. He picked her up again; she was murmuring something as he hit her again.
Suddenly, something horrible grabbed him from behind and wrapped fire around his throat. He couldn’t breathe. He raised his hands to try to tear the thing away, but it scrambled through his fingers and pulled harder. Blackness surrounded the outside of his vision, and he sank to his knees, then rolled onto his side.
“That’s enough,” the orang said, and it let go of him, scampering toward her, crawling up her shoulder, and hiding in her hair. Something red, trailing something long and gold.
She reached into her vest and handed it something small and red— the same color, actually— and it chittered in approval.
“Don’t touch me again,” she told Orion. “I owe you nothing.”
He tried to croak out that she owed him for Sirena, but nothing would come out, and he couldn’t force himself to move. She climbed out of the hatch in the roof and was gone.
He lost consciousness for a time. When he awakened, he picked up the General and a bundle of manila envelopes from a safe hidden inside the liquor cabinet and carried him upward inch by slow inch, trying to keep Sirena from hitting him with rocks as she tried to defend her mate.
He had to get the General back to the Pinkertons.
He knew no other way to the surface, so when he reached the strange temple, he walked through it to the tunnel entrance, trying not to step on too many of the dead apes around him. All males. All hathscha of every species. They had searched for a better life, away from the humans and the ronnok and from murdering each other to earn their troops. Apes caught between the human and the ape worlds, accepted by neither, looking for purpose and work and peace.
He brought the General out to the last of the twilight and laid him neatly on the ground, straightening his clothing. Sirena helped him, cooing and patting his fur. For this, she had betrayed him. And Merrill, in turn, had betrayed this little paradise and taken it over for greed. Not for her.
He found a rock the size of his head and smashed it into the General’s face until it was gone, despite Sirena’s screeches.
He dressed, put his guns on, and tried to get her to come back with him to the horse, but she ran away into the shadows.
It would be a long ride to Fort Sill. But he thought he might be able to make a caravan of it on the way back, if he sold some of the stock certificates in those envelopes. He’d come back with an army and some lawyers showing that he owned the place from top to bottom. General Orion.
And then they’d take down that damned sign.
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DeAnna Knippling (No Monkeys in Monkeytown) is a freelance writer and editor in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Her first book, Choose Your Doom: Zombie Apocalypse was released in November 2010 (www.doompress.com). She was recently published in Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Silverthought Online, Crossed Genres, and Nil Desperandum. She received an honorable mention in Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 3, and has been published in Big Pulp multiple times.
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ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Ken Knudtsen (cover illustration) is a writer, artist and loyal drinking buddy. He has been fortunate to have worked on projects ranging from David Geffen (“Inventing David Geffen” - PBS), Wolverine (Marvel Comics), and, of course, the adventures of a little girl and a crazy monkey (“My Monkey’s Name is Jennifer” - SLG Publishing). It is never a bad idea to surprise Ken with a bacon snack.
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The American Camelot meets Grand Guignol in The Kennedy Curse.
To order, visit www.exterpress.com/catalog/kennedycurse
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