Mortals

by Norman Rush

Ray had the right to pause, to rest. That was the way he felt. There was the view. He was seeing more death in the landscape than he had when he’d looked before, dead bodies in different shapes, more of them against the ground, here and there. From the sky, they would look like dots and commas, like seeds.

  I am going to have to summon my friends right away, he thought. And fortunately he knew exactly what to say, which was Tla kwano, Come here. But unfortunately he was hoarse. His friends needed a sign.

  “Tla kwano,” he said, testing his voice. It was feeble. He cleared his throat and tried it again.

  He was making mistakes. The incorrigible Quartus said, “Oh I shall come to you, my man …”

  “I wasn’t talking to you, meneer. Go back with your lackeys.

  “None of you move,” he screamed at the lackeys.

  It had not been helpful being Satan, thinking Evil, be thou my good, he didn’t know why. He was not well. He was not doing well.

  He realized that Mokopa had sent him off without a spare banana clip for his rifle, which implied that Mokopa had assumed he was probably going to be a burnt offering and that however it went it would be a spasm event and not something involving extended firing. That is, they had thought he would do what he could do and they would follow on and that would be it. He didn’t blame them. He had half a magazine left, enough. So that was what Mokopa had thought and now there was the fire.

  He didn’t want the building to burn. He didn’t want various things to happen. And he had to shoot, because Quartus was doing something, rolling over and over in his direction, rolling over and over like a log, rolling across the ten feet separating them. It made no sense. Ray fired, uselessly, striking the space that the demonic Quartus had already traversed.

  Quartus was at him, he had him by the legs and was trying to pull him down, and even worse, Ray realized, the man was biting his right leg, in fact. Rage and disgust transformed him.

  It was too much. Ray had been unprepared because Quartus’s rolling over and over like a log had not been a normal aggressive act. It had been something else, an invention.

  Ray roared at Quartus. He would not allow it, what was going on, let alone just being touched by the animal Quartus. He unslung his rifle and, gripping it with both hands, raised it over his head and brought it down like a spear, driving the barrel into Quartus’s bare shoulder, tearing the flesh. It was not enough. Quartus was keeping on, like an animal. He was trying to pull Ray down. Quartus was strong.

  Again Ray raised the gun and brought it down with all his force but to the right of the previous wound he had inflicted. It was weak of him and he should have deepened the original wound but it was not something he could do. There was a fresh new wound, anyway. There was blood, plenty of it.

  Ray was in danger of being capsized, dragged over, despite what he had done to Quartus, but then he wasn’t and he could see why. He had hurt something in Quartus’s left arm enough to make it weaken almost to the point of not participating. Quartus couldn’t grip hard with it, claw at him with it. Ray was able to kick his right leg free. He was winning.

  He was okay. There was something he wanted to say but he didn’t know what it was, except that he wanted to say it to his wife. Ray brought the gun down again, but this time Quartus had gotten out of the way, like a snake, an eel. He was half lying down, injured.

  Ray steadied himself and brought his attention back as he had to and as well as he could to the huddled masses of the enemy yearning to be free and kill him, dismember him. He got his gun around properly and put two rounds into the space between them. They were restless. A couple of them were on all fours instead of lying obediently flat. They are restless, the natives are restless, he thought, and these were not conscripts, which was important. All present and reporting were bona fide volunteers. Quartus was lying doubled over. He was touching his wounds. All was well.

  He hoped his enemies had seen that he was learning to be more tender with the trigger of his murder machine. He was getting the hang of it. He was being less profligate with his ammunition. He would have enough for everything.

  But Quartus was on his knees suddenly, looking like he wanted something from Ray. And almost immediately then Quartus was diving at him, at his legs, again.

  It was the same but not the same. Quartus was crawling up him violently. Ray now had the weapon in aiming mode, for the benefit of the foot soldiers, so he had to maintain this and strike to the side without compromising his stance. He caught Quartus on the neck with the stock of the gun, ineffectively, and then struck a glancing blow that grazed Quartus’s forehead, again ineffectively. He was going to have to kill the man, if this kept up. It was then that Quartus bit his bad knee, his swollen bad knee, giving Ray more pain than he had suffered from all Quartus’s previous efforts.

  He wanted to kick Quartus to death with his better leg, the free leg. He tried it. He tried to kick Quartus hard enough to break something. But he wasn’t in the right posture to put his full force into it.

  “I am going to fucking kill you if you don’t stop,” he shouted, hearing the hollowness in his own voice, kicking him again.

  But he meant it. He was willing to do it, kill a bleeding man.

  Quartus had his arms around Ray’s right ankle. Ray stepped back. He stabbed the muzzle of the rifle into Quartus’s cheek. He wasn’t sure what Quartus was doing or what he was understanding. Except of course that he had to not like what his men were seeing.

  Ray said again, “Understand me, I am going to kill you if you don’t stop.”

  The two fires he needed to pay attention to were the one behind him and the little one in the lean- to over the cots and the radio set. Fire went badly with ammunition stocks. He had to keep his mind on too many things.

  His legs were trembling. His enemies could see that, which was bad. And he could see that both his knees were bleeding, weakly but definitely. And he had to wonder about what foul germs the dog Quartus with his prominent canines had put into him.

  Quartus plunged at Ray yet again, aiming for the knees, making a plaintive sound. Ray jumped back but not quickly enough.

  Quartus had Ray’s penis in his grasp. He had it with both hands. He was dragging at it and twisting. There was white pain all through Ray. It was unbearable and it was unfair. He was already fighting faintness.

  I am killing you now, he thought.

  He fired down, with the gun barrel touching Quartus on the hip. This is what you get, he thought.

  Quartus screamed and let go. His jodhpurs were filling with blood, one leg of them was.

  It seemed nothing could make Quartus lie still or be quiet. He was making animal sounds. His men were showing signs of doing something and they had to be stopped. Quartus had tried to damage him. He was still trying to swallow the pain.

  He had put too many rounds into Quartus. He had wanted to cripple him, mainly, but he had been willing to kill him, and now he was bleeding to death.

  Quartus was jerking around. It was pitiful. He had done it. He had shredded the man’s hip. He was deluging blood. It was coming out and staining the pebbles and it was making Ray sick.

  It was unnatural not to want to help the dying man, if he was dying, and he probably was. He wanted to get help for the fucking stupid man. There was nothing he could do. He wanted Morel to appear and help. He prayed to God Morel would appear. Because he had been damaged, he was afraid. He was afraid the fucker had hurt his penis beyond just hurting it, actually damaging it.

  Quartus’s men wanted to help him too. They were getting to their knees, up on their knees. He couldn’t blame them.

  “Get down,” he said. They were moving around too freely, and he was in hell.

  He gathered himself and shouted something to the effect that they should do something, sit down, it was glossolalia, really, just blurts of sound, pleading sound.

  Quartus was writhing around, still. He was making small sounds.

  An episode of black smoke began, obscuring everything. He go
t down on his knees. He didn’t know which was worse, standing or kneeling.

  He was through killing now, if he could help it.

  Piercing whistling rose and twined together into something hard and terrible, and then his friends were there, thrusting through the smoke, Mokopa, Kevin, everyone.

  They were firing everywhere.

  He wanted to explain what he had done, but there was no time.

  He wanted to tell them he needed to speak to someone because he had killed someone. But there was killing going on.

  He wanted to explain that they had obeyed, Quartus’s men, they had been okay.

  He put his rifle down and relaxed onto his side.

  He wanted his wife. He wanted to explain.

  Confusion was expanding around him and in his weakness he wanted to wave it on like a traffic cop directing things. He wanted to wave it on to encourage it so it could go where it had to so that he could rest. He was already resting. He wanted to sleep more than anything he had ever wanted he could think of. But the confusion had his blessing, was the way he felt.

  Shyness, for the first time, covered him, for his penis. He wanted to shield his shy penis with something if he could find anything. He was on his side, pressing his penis back in between his clasped legs. He could feel the pebbles burning a design of their own into the flesh of his side. It was his fate to be marked. Later he would see what the design of his life would be.

  He was fading, and then Kevin, his friend, was there, crouching beside him and touching him. He felt better immediately. His friends were jumping through the smoke, howling.

  This is it, he kept thinking.

  There was the feeling that this was it, that this was the world, the world was what he was seeing. He was seeing his friends arriving shooting and the villains jumping up and scattering, disobedient villains.

  Come, Satan, he thought, waving his arms.

  And then he was seeing one of his friends tearing the burning tarpaulin free and winding it into a manageable burning mass and hurling that off the side of the building and then finding himself burning, his clothes, and then dropping down and rolling around in a way that reminded him of Quartus rolling around.

  It was hard to participate, lying down, but thank God for his friend Kevin. But he was seeing something. And it was the world, it was one of his friends, his witdoeke friends, doing almost a circus act tearing out and crushing against his chest the flaming tarpaulin and then hurling it over the side and managing to crush the flaming thing into a mass he could fling high out into the air and over the side. And then he knew it was over for him, he was seeing things twice. He had seen the same thing twice. He was afraid.

  “I am sick,” he said to Kevin.

  “Ehe, rra,” Kevin said, touching Ray’s head. Ray was understanding that Kevin had been assigned to him, to protect him like a wife. That had to be the explanation. Because Kevin had his gun with him, his popgun his shotgun and he was not using it against the foe.

  He never wanted to see the same thing twice ever again in his life. He didn’t want to experience anything twice just in general. He wanted everything new, if that could be arranged. He didn’t know if it could.

  There was carnage going on. He couldn’t see all of it. He wanted to stop it.

  The witdoeke had arrived shooting but it had failed to stop the villains from jumping up. They had done that. Ray thought, I have an idea how to end this.

  He tried to get up but Kevin pushed him down.

  “Thank you,” he said to Kevin. But he still wanted to rise, to speak.

  There was something he wanted Kevin to do for him, which was to go and check Quartus, who was lying still. Quartus was dead, Ray was thinking. He wanted someone to say so.

  “Kevin, can you go look at him?” He pointed at Quartus, the dead Quartus.

  But as Kevin crept toward Quartus, horribly the man got up on one knee and with his undamaged leg projected himself up and into a launch toward Ray, both arms extended, like a flying gargoyle, something, a horror from the media, the moron media, something like that.

  Kevin pumped his gun to shoot, but before he could fire Quartus had arrived next to Ray, almost on top of him, his face in a grimace of fury, his fiery gums showing, his face very white. Ray had wanted to take him back alive like Frank Buck the animal catcher, the zoo supplier, whatever he had been Ray admired him, as a boy. He couldn’t remember everything.

  But now Kevin was over them and Kevin was killing him, Quartus, again. Everything was happening twice.

  Quartus’s shoulder and neck disintegrated. There would be mainly his head to take to his what, his friends his beloveds. Blood went everywhere.

  “It is all right,” Kevin said. He was shaking.

  Ray wanted to say things were all right, but one of his friends was throwing a villain off the roof and no one had consulted him. The man might be just wounded and not dead. It made a difference.

  There seemed to be a victory. Action was stopping.

  He said to Kevin that he was through with everything, but Kevin was leaving him. There was a new problem, the fire behind them. Kevin left.

  “I’m coming,” Ray said, unable to move.

  His friends were stamping in the flames, beating at them with nothing, with their own shirts. It was not going to work. It was too late. My knee is a bulb, he thought, a globe, making himself get up.

  He had to tell his friends there was another way down, not to worry. Only he knew about the trapdoor. He had to tell them. But also he felt he had to vomit. It was bad, but he felt the need not to contribute more than he already had to the mess going on. He was fighting for control, and it was odd how something a purely physical impulse could be defeated by a scruple, something so imaginary. But in any case he was conquering. He was swallowing himself.

  Kevin wouldn’t leave him. Kevin was nice.

  Quartus was no longer dying, he was dead. There seemed to be blood leaking out of his eyes as well as from his nostrils, his mouth.

  It was difficult to tell what was going on, except that the buzzards were back and there seemed to be more of them, but he could be glad about one thing, the smoke, the smoke from the fire that was eating its way east west north south, the smoke was having the useful effect of keeping the carrion birds up high above, in their own layer, black above black.

  He had to get up and help his friends, but not with what they were doing, still doing at the moment, which was throwing dead bodies off the building.

  He had to get up and make them stop, and stop it before they got to Quartus, and he didn’t know why. But he didn’t want Quartus thrown over. And he had a right to not have that happen because he had killed Quartus before Kevin did, so Quartus was his, but it was making him sick to look at his handiwork again. So he didn’t know what was for the best and maybe everything was for the best.

  And then he noticed that he was whistling “The Mexican Hat Dance” through his teeth and it was almost enough to make him laugh, because deep in the heart of the rose of their relationship Iris had noticed that whenever he was nervous he would start whistling the damned thing through his teeth, and she had pointed it out to him. He had never realized he had been doing that, something that was such a dead giveaway, so he had stopped doing it, until now. And it had been the same with his drinking, being embarrassing to himself and not knowing it until he saw it in her eyes, the eyes the mirror of the soul, but not her soul, his soul, because what the mirror of the soul meant was that it was the asshole’s soul that showed up glittering in the eyes of the trusting woman who had married the asshole, beloved thing, helpmeet, beautiful thing. And she had been like a spy because the way he had whistled it between his teeth was so softly as to be almost a subliminal thing, until she came, like light, like the morning, illuminating everything.

  When that bout of smoke cleared away Quartus was gone. There was nothing he could do about anything except to get something to cover his nakedness, his groin, with. Because he had the strength to stand,
probably, but not until he got dressed, or mostly dressed. Because as he was, he was an exhausted device, a joke, like a jester running around doing tricks when the castle is in flames, falling.

  He needed pants, but it could be a diaper, a loincloth like Tarzan’s, except that he would need Tarzan’s secret jockstrap to go with it, the reason Tarzan’s penis had never peeked out during his exertions with the various wild animals giving him no rest.

  “Can you get me something?” he asked Kevin, gesturing at his groin.

  Kevin wanted to help, Ray could tell. But he was baffled. He looked wildly around.

  Kevin left him, strode off to find something for Ray. And Ray croaked at him to keep down. It had been a reflex. But at least for now it was safe to walk around normally so he had made a fool of himself.

  Kevin was doing something. He was stripping a pair of bush shorts off one of the corpses.

  Kevin presented the shorts to Ray, and turned his back, pointlessly but courteously, pointlessly because he had already seen everything there was to see. But it meant that things were going in the direction of normality. Courtesy was important during bloodshed. He thanked Kevin.

  Ray got the shorts on. They weren’t clean and they were loose on him, but they weren’t bloody. It was surprising how much pants helped. He got up. He was a little unsteady. But he wanted to join in.

  Kevin asked, “Are you fine?”

  Ray said he was, but in fact he didn’t know how he was.

  Kevin was hovering around him too much and now he was off fetching one of the parasols Ray had observed in use by the koevoet earlier. They weren’t parasols, they were umbrellas, heavy dark canvas umbrellas. He had had no idea that such a thing as a military umbrella even existed.

  “No thank you, my man,” he said to Kevin. And he wouldn’t allow Kevin to hold it over him, either.

  But he wanted help getting Strange News off his chest because the tape was burning where it was passed across his bare skin. There was some chemical reaction, something unpleasant, and the tape was cutting into his neck and sweat was biting badly where the flesh was raw.