by Aaron Dries
Disease.
The word was an iron spoke in his chest. It wasn’t alone.
Rabies.
AIDS.
A knot of needle teeth clamped down on his neck, on the place where Tobias had kissed him the night before. He’d laughed and giggled at the time—the memory was barbed.
The creatures stank of spoiled fruit, shit and wet dog fur.
Caleb couldn’t understand how something so firmly latched to his body could writhe and fling itself about so without breaking its back. He didn’t understand anything—his thoughts were scrambled. Reality was a thin film, and the same claws that had ripped through his back had ripped through it too.
A notion burst in his brain. I’m losing this.
The two other monkeys crawling over him snatched the bottles from his hands and dropped to the ground—
(fight back for fuck’s sake!)
—but he made this work in his favor. Their prizes, and the momentary distraction they gave them, granted him a stroke of opportunity: just enough time to thrash the remaining few from his body. Two flipped through the air and landed on the sand. There was just one left, and it was dug into his neck. He reached up and grabbed the stinking blur, dug his fingers in its hair. Caleb could feel the layers of flesh yielding beneath his grasp; he pushed through it and latched on to the frail chest bones beneath. A surge of power shot through him. His fingers: pistons flexing down, snapping bones.
The snapping skeleton made a victorious thowcking sound that made his determination burn brighter. “I got you! I got you, you sonofabitch!”
Caleb tossed the animal aside, laughing as it hit the ground and lay there, empty of life.
They’re just goddamned Muppets. Watch me as I cut all their strings.
Something hot and syrupy squirted into his mouth; it was bitter tasting. He reached up and touched the half-moon of missing flesh from his neck. Blood coursed down his chest and bruised his cotton singlet top; he didn’t care. He was fucking fearless now, hungry for the next attack. To bleed was to live.
“I’m doin’ it. I’m fucking doin’ it.”
Energy exploded in him, forcing his legs into movement, even though his brain tempted him with lullabies. Wouldn’t sleep be good now? Sleep is safe and silent.
No, he wouldn’t give in. Couldn’t.
Sleep.
Amity was still out there, somewhere.
Caleb stretched over the top of the refrigerator, shuffling dust and forgotten trinkets—a Vegemite jar full of sewing needles, a ball of twine. He heard the jingle of keys brushing against his fingertips before he saw them.
Gotchya.
He limped down the hallway toward the front door, which he’d left open. There were leaves dancing across the carpet, carried on the wind. One plastered itself against the television set.
Don’t go any farther, said the voice, which, thirteen years later, would tell him to give up and lie down on the beach. You’re going to get in so much trouble.
But he didn’t listen, and ran into the still-foggy morning instead. His sister was lost out there, having wandered from the tent where they had been sleeping. Caleb saw the arms of surrounding trees fading out of the gray wash, the sliver of the dark road. The family Holden was still in the driveway; he hobbled over to it and slipped behind the wheel.
“Holy shit!” he said, looking down at the dashboard, knowing the word was something he shouldn’t say. But it didn’t matter; the guys at school said far worse. They even dropped the f-bomb sometimes—the dreaded word that got you sent to detention quick smart.
His fingers were shaking so hard he struggled to insert the key into the ignition. I’ve seen Ma and Pa do this a thousand friggin’ times—it can’t be that hard!
“Stop fighting me,” Caleb told the car. He closed his eyes, took a breath and funneled all of his focus into his fingers. And as though the key had been listening, it slid into place with a satisfying click.
“I did it! I did!”
“I did it! I did!” The sludge of blood and sand in his mouth made his mantra taste better.
His strides dug foot-shaped clods along the shore as he beelined toward the jungle. Caleb stopped.
The sight was almost impossible to handle. It reminded him of those Hieronymus Bosch paintings he’d studied at school, the ones his mother had been so upset over that she wrote to the principal asking if artists of a more “Catholic decorum” could be featured in her son’s class. A shroud of embarrassment had wrapped itself around Caleb as a result. Though the school had listened to his mother’s plea, they couldn’t scour from his mind the images that he’d seen. And this surprised him, as his interests had always leaned toward sports; art was more Amity’s thing. Looking back, he was sure his fascination with Bosch stemmed from the fact that his mother had prohibited it.
As he stood there trembling, with his eyes locked on the beach in front of him, he couldn’t help but wish his mother were there to write it all away again. “Oh God…”
There were no demons lurking beneath pomegranate trees, or elfish hogs in clam shells. There were no inquisition barristers being stabbed to death with swordfish blades. The scene that was burning itself into his brain was far worse than anything he’d seen in those textbooks because it wasn’t an image of the fantastic. It wasn’t a work of imagination. It was as authentic as his scars.
Churning clouds of black and mauve stood out bright against the island’s canopy. Beneath this there was the strip of sand, which not so long ago had thrilled them all with its sparkle and warmth. Now it was a red carpet laid out to celebrate slaughter, a gala of the grotesque.
They rocketed back and forth at an incredible speed. So nimble, so light-footed. Some juggled pulpy eyeballs, scooped from the faces of the dead. Others were engaged in a tug-of-war over intestines. Some had dipped their grubby little fingers in pools of blood and smeared the mess across their faces in a terrifying echo of their lives on the mainland, where some had been forced to wear lipstick to appease the tourists as they danced, as they begged on their masters’ behalf.
Now that so many of the travelers who had arrived on Nikom’s boat were either dead or missing, the monkeys’ resolve had become less fiery. They had not been bred to kill; they were just mad for frenzy. So with nothing else to do, the males grabbed females by the backs of their necks and mounted them from behind, their hips quivering and their giant testes swinging. Animal mouths spread wide in yawns, stretching the leathery skin of their faces. The noise was an assault. Peppered throughout the scene were Coke bottles streaked with bloodied fingerprints, empty banana peels. This was a place of sickness, a battlefield. And Caleb, standing so very still, hardly breathing, was among it all.
But not for much longer.
“On your marks,” screamed a voice from the past. It was as though he were fifteen again at the school sports carnival, the air thick with the sweetness of sweat and hot dogs, at the only place he would ever be cheered.
“Get set.”
If he won the race he would be awarded with another certificate and a colored ribbon that his mother would later slip beneath the wax paper of her Memory Lane book. He might even get his photograph in the yearbook! His skinny arms raised in victory, the flash of a camera.
Yeah, that would be just too cool.
“Go.”
He ran.
The family Holden backed out of the driveway.
There was no oncoming car to smash the vehicle into submission. There was just the thinning fog, pulling away in ghost layers. It was an invitation to go further into the early morning, to succeed. And succeed he would.
This is what big brothers do. They don’t give up. Never.
He tore through the narrow Evans Head streets with a dominance he’d never expected to have over the car. It was as though all this metal, the springs and grease, were an extension of his arms and legs. “I’m coming for you, Amity.”
Caleb could see the campsite up ahead and, through the windows, saw the shocked faces of the
State Emergency Service crew, the gasping locals who had volunteered to search for the little girl lost in the fog.
It was then that it happened.
The wheel slipped under his grip, and the Holden skidded sideways across the churned earth. His world filled with an almighty crunch. Flying glass twirled through the hub as the car started to roll.
A monkey with an almost humanlike face dropped the fingers it had chewed from a corpse and leaped onto Caleb’s shoulder as he attempted to run past unnoticed. Its face burrowed in the already soft and wet part of him, where its kin had already torn, shredded and swallowed.
Caleb hit the ground hard and rolled. The landscape began to revolve. Bloodied sand that had been below was now up; clouds that had guarded them all from rain now under his head.
The car twisted and rolled, the frame turning into a horrific mouth of sharp metal teeth that stabbed into his teenage body. He could see bursts of rock through the spider-webbed windshield as the Holden continued down the incline. There was pain blooming inside him somewhere, but Caleb couldn’t pinpoint its origin. It wasn’t one place. It was every place.
He gasped as the car came to an abrupt stop. Waves crashed around him, a cold spray against his face. “Amity, I’m a-comin’.” Words were a bloody chorus. He didn’t have long. There were animals out there in the fog, vicious critters that wanted to hurt and eat his seven-year-old sister.
I’ll save you.
Caleb took off his seat belt and forced himself through the saw-toothed cluster of shattered car and slipped onto the rocks outside. The cave was right there, its mouth wide and dark.
He was shocked by the strength of the monkey. It had shot out of nowhere, bringing with it a well of power that betrayed its size. Caleb’s breath had been knocked for a home run and his mouth was full of sand again, but he was alive. That was what mattered. He hadn’t given in.
The animal’s muscles were threads of force wrapped around bone. And those bones were frail. Caleb had found its weakness, and his fear had made him strong. He crushed its skull with his hands, globs of fish-stinking brain spewing across his face.
He spat at the remains. “Fuck you.” He proceeded to punch the dead thing’s chest. Crunch. “I got you, Steve!” Crunch. “You bastard.” Crunch. “You—” He ran out of insults and pulled his fist out of the remains. Vomit boiled inside him, the bile burning his throat.
En masse, the creatures that had spilled from the trees in search of sugar were a force to be reckoned with. Together, they could tear a grown man apart in seconds. Yet on their own, they were weak. Feeble. Although he couldn’t be sure, Caleb assumed that was why he was laughing now.
He was a good fifteen yards from the jungle, which, now that he was closer, was not the impenetrable wall he’d assumed it would be. It was lush and full of flowers, almost inviting. And now Caleb was more certain than ever that his sister had wandered into it.
How could she resist?
Caleb reached the cave before any of the adults had a chance. He’d been faster and stronger willed than any of them, including his father, who he knew must be close behind with his best mate. Not even that surprise sideswipe off the road and tumbling down the cliff had stopped him! He could see the headlines of the local newspapers now, twirling out of the dark as they did in the movies.
TEEN SAVES LITTLE SISTER.
CALEB COLLINS, STAR OF THE SCHOOL.
PINT-SIZE HERO—AUSTRALIAN OF THE YEAR.
“Amity, I’m here. Just call out to me, bub.”
The cave was dark and throbbed with echoes. Waves struck the rocks outside, shaking the briny walls and startling a flock of cartoonish bats into flight. They twirled around him, their wings slapping together in applause. Caleb smiled as his initial fear receded; they weren’t scary. They weren’t the repulsive, flying rats from the old black-and-white vampire flicks that played on television some Sunday afternoons—the ones that were meant to be scary but, man, were they just so lame. Nope; these bats were happy to see him. Why else would they be smiling at him with their tiny faces as they escaped into daylight? The nightmare was almost over. His heart battered with excitement.
“Amity, where are you?”
There. Now that his eyes were adjusting, Caleb could see her toward the back of the cave, at the rounded place where rock met the barnacled floor. Amity was very still with her back to him; the only movement was the swish of her blond hair in the draft. Her locks shimmered gold, so long they reached halfway down her back. Caleb thought she looked a bit like the Raggedy Ann doll the seven-year-old had left in the tent.
“Are you okay?”
Caleb reached out and set his hand—which shook in spite of itself—on his sister’s shoulder. As soon as he felt the feverish heat radiating through the little girl’s flesh, Caleb knew that he’d been deceived. This wasn’t Amity Collins, the little girl whom he’d taught to tie her shoelaces or braid her hair. The creature under his palm was something else.
It was AIDS. Rabies. Disease.
Caleb’s scream caught in his throat as the figure in front of him spun around with venomous speed. It had simian eyes and cheeks of downy fur. Buckskin lips hauled back to bare black gums and rows of teeth, which were marbled with chunks of flesh.
High-pitched mewls. Shallow panting.
The monkey—coming out of nowhere, out of everywhere—launched at Caleb’s face before he had a chance to get to his feet. In no time at all, it popped his eyes with the splayed fingers of a single hand and sucked up the jelly in two greedy, birdlike swoops. Claws severed Caleb’s nose and lips from his face.
8
Amity glanced at her waterproof watch. She agreed to give herself five more minutes in the scrub before she about-turned and made her way back to the beach. But until then.
Until then…
She felt alive, at one with the jungle around her. The odors were raw and plush, as palpable as the humidity. Wild hands of sight and smell touched her with tenderness that was by turns cruel and arousing.
I’m meant to be here.
It was a living world. There were trees strangled into submission by vine and rot, which, given time, would fall to the ground and become the mulch for further trees, homes to animals so small she didn’t stand a chance of seeing their scurrying. Dewdrops floated through shafts of pale light, thrown from the thick canopy overhead. The ferns were doorways that led to additional layers of vegetation. She passed through it all. There were the exploding colors of the flowers—yellow, orange, blue, purple—freeze-frame fireworks that made her skin tingle. And beyond all this there was darkness she couldn’t wait to brighten.
Amity came to a giant, half-collapsed tree that resembled a hunched old man with a beard of branches and dangling moss. He appraised her with kind, tropical bird eyes. She laughed into her silence, so happy to be away from all of the RED that haunted her, lost now in GREEN that was so easy to give herself over to.
Oh, Caleb, I wish you’d come in with me. You’d love to see this.
Maybe then you’d understand.
Maybe you’d forgive me for wandering. Again and again and again.
The high she was riding was more powerful than the few times she’d tried drugs. Those three occasions had been with her brother: once at the Lismore Light Festival, another time at one of Caleb’s friends’ apartments in Ballina, and another time in the middle of the night on the Evans Head beach. Amity and Caleb had dropped the ecstasy pill in the pub restroom, watched the end of the cover band, and, with arms draped over each other, walked to the water, gushing love for one another as they went. There, they lay upon the sand and drew dot-to-dot star pictures with their fingertips.
“God, the world is so big,” he’d signed to her.
It was a wonderful feeling. But this was better.
Amity giggled into her clammy hands. She’d spent so many years trying to pinpoint from where her desire to explore nature had sprung. There had been times when she’d given herself a migraine trying to figure
it out—to justify it all. And this was why she laughed now.
It so-oooo doesn’t matter why. It never did.
A huge butterfly swished through the air on huge wings—a flapping spectrum of color and shape that blurred together to form the illusion of a warrior’s face dressed in war paint. It landed a yard away on the old tree man’s knee.
The temptation to touch it was strong. Her hand was outstretched.
Its body throbbed against the mossy bark; the wings arched and relaxed. Antennae twitched at its head. Curiouser and curiouser, she thought with a smile.
Three plops of RED splashed against the insect. Startled, it dashed off into the air.
Amity glanced overhead as a hot splatter of liquid landed on her face. There were monkeys swinging through the trees above, leaping from branch to branch with Coke bottles curled up in their tails. She jumped up and down, thrilled by the sight—the way their sleek bodies looked against the cross-stitch canopy, which was lit with stars of dimming sunlight. The way their fur glimmered red. Like the liquid. That had been on the butterfly. And was now on her face. In her nose. On her tongue.
She held her hand up to her eyes. Blood.
What the hell?
Strong hands wrapped around her from behind, pushing her flat against the old tree man’s belly. Sweaty fingers wormed over her mouth.
9
Robert Mann forced the girl against the tree. “Christ almighty, don’t budge an inch!”
He’d been running through the jungle, away from the beach, when he saw her standing there as though she hadn’t heard all of those screams and shrieks, and had no reason to be concerned by the monsters. And monsters were what they were. Hell, maybe they were even demons. Robert didn’t have a religious bone in his body, but he always figured he had the potential.
One day, it’ll be a case of “the straw that broke the camel’s back”—someone I just can’t bear to live without will die—and horribly, most likely—and I’ll go a-running to the Big Book for comfort. He had observed it happen many times over, with colleagues deciding that, Yeah, I guess it’s time to get that suspicious lump on my neck checked out, only to be diagnosed with cancer a week later. These were grown men who had never once stepped inside a church in their lives, and then jump cut: they’re kissing the withered hand of a priest, weeping into his frock, begging him to pull some strings with the Big Guy upstairs to organize some angel to overnight FedEx him some instanta-cure (it’s simple, you see: just add water).