by J. S. Volpe
* * *
Perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not, the four surviving Zombie Hill Boys were the first to arrive at Ghost Gulch.
The western edge of Dead Man’s Wood ran right up against the sheer rocky cliffs that formed the easternmost skirts of Mount Benta, one of the tallest peaks in the Shen Mountains. For the most part these cliffs formed a looming, unscalable wall that ran north-south for several miles, but at one point a natural cleft cut deep into the rock. Roughly two hundred feet wide, its floor littered with broken boulders that had tumbled from the high cliffs above, the cleft extended for a little over a mile before ending in a huge mound of moraine that stretched up the side of Mount Benta for as far as the average eye could see.
This cleft was Ghost Gulch, and the Zombie Hill Boys exited the western eaves of the forest and entered the gulch two hours after the sun had passed its zenith and begun its long, slow, summertime descent.
They stopped for a short rest and a bite to eat just inside the gulch. They had been walking ever since dawn, and though they had passed through Dead Man’s Wood without so much as a bee-sting, they were tired and hungry.
“Blubby para, eh?” the Mosquito said, looking around a little apprehensively at the shattered rocks and bare, stony ground around them.
Daddy Vermin shrugged. “Cobbles, if youse a kittikin.” He popped a chunk of stale bread into his mouth.
The Mosquito scowled at him. “You ain’t doin’ no veilin’ from these glimmerites, horizontaller.”
Daddy Vermin snorted with derision.
The Hatcheteer shook his head as he scooped from his pouch a handful of the shnozzberries he had picked in the woods a few hours earlier. He tilted his head back and poured the whole handful of berries into his mouth. “Elsa quackin’ ‘bout japclap,” he said around a mouthful of black, oozing berry-mush, “we zilcha be boardin’ for the glitz.”
Daddy Vermin nodded. “Cardman.”
The Mosquito nodded too. “Cardman.”
Daddy Vermin looked at the Brooder, who had been sitting on a boulder staring west all this time, not talking, not eating, just gazing into the depths of the gulch. “And teev? You teev?”
The Brooder didn’t respond. He didn’t even look at Daddy Vermin.
Daddy Vermin walked over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Brooder, broz? You aytoseein’ broodier than potsies this uptodown.”
The Brooder said nothing for a moment, then heaved a long, sad sigh.
“Just knock it off with the fucking stupid slang-talk,” he said, eyes still fixed on the avenue of rocks stretching away to the west. “It’s getting old. And it’s totally retarded.”
Daddy Vermin gaped at him for a few seconds, then shook his head. “But broz…I mean, dude, what’s up?”
The Brooder sighed again. “This is all pointless. All of it. All our strivings, our struggles.”
“Dude, we’re, like, on the trail of a block of gold the size of a troll’s head. How the fuck is that pointless?”
“It just is. Everything is.”
“Where the hell is this coming from? I mean, sure, you’ve always been the quiet, moody type, but this shit you’re spouting right now is just…just…it’s like suicidal-person talk.”
“Yeah, man,” the Hatcheteer said. “This is really kinda disturbing. What’s up?”
The Brooder cocked his head slightly, as if listening to distant music only he could hear.
“I never told you guys this,” he said, “but I met the Snowman once.”
Everyone’s jaws dropped.
“No fucking way!” said the Mosquito. “You met the Snowman and lived?”
One side of the Brooder’s mouth curled up in a small, bitter smile, and he said, “I was just a little kid. I didn’t know who he was. I thought he was just, like, a goofy big-headed clown or something. He didn’t try to hurt me or anything. All he did was talk to me. He…he told me things. I didn’t understand much of it at the time. But now I think I get it.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Whatever it was, it was crazy-man talk,” Daddy Vermin said. “You shouldn’t listen to anything that loopy fuckhead says. The Snowman is, shall we say, a schist and a feldspar short of a full rock collection.”
“He told me what this is really all about,” the Brooder said.
“What what’s all about?”
“Everything.” A tear slid from the Brooder’s left eye and traced a glistening trail down his cheek. He heaved yet another sigh and turned his wet eyes away from the rocks in the west and looked at his fellow Zombie Hill Boys. “I think we’re in a story.”
“What?” said Daddy Vermin, his face screwed up questioningly as if he suspected he wasn’t hearing the Brooder correctly.
“A story,” the Brooder said. “I think we’re just puppets created by some inscrutable being for his amusement. We’re toys. We’re fictions. We’re the playthings of some cruel god.”
“You mean the Twelve?” said the Hatcheteer.
“No, I mean the one who made the Twelve.”
There was a collective gasp from the other Zombie Hill Boys. To speak of something creating the Twelve was unheard of.
“Brooder, dude,” said the Mosquito with a fearful glance at the sky as if he expected lightning to strike at any moment, “I think maybe you should just shut up.”
The Brooder turned his eyes to the west again. “This is just a dumb story. It has to be. Nothing else makes sense. And I don’t think it’s even a very good story. It’s not literary or anything. It’s just…just entertainment.”
The other Zombie Hill Boys looked at each other uncomfortably.
“And now we’re nearly at the climax,” the Brooder said with a small nod. Unexpectedly he stood up. “Oh, well. I guess we’d better go. If I try to leave, I’ll probably just get hit by a meteor or something stupid like that. This is one of those shitty little stories where everything gets tied up at the end. High body count. No loose ends.” He sighed once again. “Hh. Let’s get this bloodbath started.”
He walked west. The others watched him go for a moment, and then the Hatcheteer looked at the others and twirled his index finger round and round next to his temple.
“Let’s go,” Daddy Vermin said. “Whatever else you wanna say, he’s right that we better get movin’.”
They traveled down the gulch. Before long they rounded a heap of rocks, and the gulch’s western end came into view.