by Sean Wallace
“Maybe,” I croaked. I sounded even worse than the last time I had tried to communicate, but I felt better. Not great, but there was a definite improvement; my head wasn’t spinning and my stomach had settled. The chicken soup smelled good.
“Can you sit up?” asked Frida. “I’ll fix you a bowl of this soup and then take Peachy for her walk.”
“You really are a saint, Miss Muerta.” I pushed myself into a sitting position and watched her putter in the kitchen. Frankenferret sat on the foot of the bed, ignoring and being ignored by the cats while she socialized with Peachy, her best walkies buddy. Frida took Peachy out every day while I was at work, and in return she had a key to my place and unlimited borrowing privileges to my extensive library.
Frida is an artist who specializes in skeleton/calavera images, though her repertoire is much broader, including murals for businesses and private homes and illustrations for children’s books. She is a successful artist, which in this day and age means that she barely makes a living and has to rent a studio in our odd little building. But she is living la vida loca, and her soup is good. She dished up a bowl and put it on a tray, then waited with her hands on her hips until she was sure I could get it down and keep it there.
“I investigated the water tank on our roof,” she informed me. “I worried there might be gunk in there because of all the smoke and debris from the explosions. You know what I found?”
I swallowed a spoonful of soup and guessed, “Gunk?”
“Nope. Pure rainwater. The cleanest water I’ve ever seen. I have a theory about why, but I’m going to do some investigation when I take these rascals on their walk.”
“Okay.”
Frida herded Peachy and Frankenferret out the door and I reached for the remote. No bombs were going off, so I thought I’d better turn on the TV and find out where things stood.
Once again, the Creature Crisis dominated all stations, but now it was the Cloud Squid they couldn’t get enough of. I watched some very entertaining footage of her evading air force jets and attack helicopters. Every time they fired something at her she darted away, leading them on quite a merry chase. What was not so entertaining was the destruction they caused when their missiles hit what was left of the city. So they weren’t making any more headway against the Cloud Squid than they had against Behemoth. And I learned something else from the news ticker scrolling across the bottom of the TV screen:
Danger Zone Has Been Closed . . . No One
Allowed In or Out Due to Radiation Threat . . .
Closed. Yet I still had electricity, cable, water—all the important stuff. This would make life easier, as long as it lasted. Now that the Danger Zone was closed, I couldn’t leave even if I wanted to, so that simplified things. But if they were isolating us, did that mean they might drop a bomb on us? I mean a really big bomb? As in nuclear? Since we were already kind of radioactive sometimes?
I tried to reassure myself that they would have the common sense to realize the radiation from nuclear bombs would travel, along with dust and debris that would cause a nuclear winter. I tried and tried. And tried.
I gave that up and surfed the channels on the TV, until I found a story that was unfolding in real time. The Cloud Squid and Behemoth had discovered each other.
“It looks as though we’re about to see a battle royale between those two monsters.” The reporter was trying to sound worried, but instead he sounded like this would be the coolest thing ever.
The Cloud Squid eased herself into the airspace over Behemoth, moving almost shyly. She hovered over him, her limbs opening like the petals of a flower. He gazed up, his mouth open, revealing rows of teeth that looked like stalactites (and stalagmites).
Damn, I thought. I didn’t want to see them fight. They were both beautiful in their odd ways. But then something amazing happened.
The Cloud Squid began to flash with color. I remembered the idea of bioluminescence: cephalopods communicating with each other using light and color. It was a glorious sight. Behemoth seemed to think so too, from the way he gazed at her.
And then another amazing thing happened. Behemoth’s hide began to flash with color too. And why would the giant lemur with the rocky skin have bioluminescence? Beats me (though he did come out of the sea).
They flashed colors at each other for maybe twenty minutes. Reporters chattered, baffled by the scene, yet feeling compelled to make inane comments anyway. They were still hoping for a fight, but that wasn’t going to happen. The two creatures stopped flashing colors, and then the Cloud Squid drifted away with her rainstorm. Behemoth sat in the rubble he had been collecting and gazed at the news cameras, as if to say, What do you think of that?
Reporters dutifully started their rehash cycle. After another half hour of that, I turned off the set. I was about to drift off to sleep again when Frida came in with Peachy and Frankenferret.
“Our branch of the subway line is intact,” said Frida. “And as far as I can tell, so are the cables that provide our internet and electricity. If you were willing to walk, you could get from here to the edge of the Danger Zone, but you’d have to cross some flooded parts up to your chest, maybe even up to your neck.”
“Are you planning to leave?” I asked.
She looked surprised. “No way. They’d have to drag me out of here.”
I felt happy to hear that. I doubted anyone else would bring me chicken soup. “So—did you see anyone down there?”
“Nope. Something better.” She pulled her iPad out of her backpack and called up a picture file. “I found another creature.”
The picture she showed me was murky. There was very little light in the tunnel, and the water level was high enough to hide a lot of stuff. But right in the middle of it all, a face grinned at me. “It looks like a friendly dog,” I said. “A giant—happy—water dog.”
“He acts like one, too,” said Frida, calling up more pictures. “You can’t see from these pics, but he’s about the size of a school bus. It’s hard to tell how many legs he has, because the number seems to change—see?” She selected a picture where he seemed to have five limbs, and then another where he might have only three, though in both of them he seemed to have a vaguely tail-shaped appendage. “I call him Mega-Whatsis. Sometimes he seems to be solid, but other times he’s kind of gelatinous. Here’s a short video I took on my iPad.”
My stomach stirred uneasily at the thought of looking at something that was sometimes kind of gelatinous, but when I watched Mega-Whatsis in the video, I saw a creature who moved confidently, even joyously, both in and out of the water. “Cool!”
“He’s smart,” said Frida. “Watch this next part.”
Frida’s hand appeared in the bottom edge of the picture. She held a cookie out to Mega-Whatsis. His colossal head filled the frame until all I could see was a giant nostril sniffing the cookie. He delicately maneuvered the cookie into his mouth, using his rubbery lips, then pulled back for a moment and contemplated the taste, his happy face shifting into thoughtful lines. After another minute, he produced the cookie intact and nudged it back into Frida’s hand.
“It was dry,” said Frida. “No creature slobber on it.”
“Wow. Peachy couldn’t do that.”
Frida pulled up some more pictures on the laptop. “I expected the water down there to be full of waste and toxins. But it was more like natural creek water.”
I remembered what she had said about our water tank. “You think Mega-Whatsis cleaned our water? Is that what you went down to investigate?”
She nodded. “But I don’t think it was him. He likes to stay underground. And his water has mud and silt in it.” She closed the picture files and put her pad back into its case. “I’m not telling anyone about this. If those jerks go down there to shoot bombs at Mega-Whatsis, they’ll cut off our supply route. And he’s a big sweetheart, there’s no reason to hurt him.”
I decided to keep the radiation argument to myself for the time being. After all, I didn’t have a Geiger counter.
“Thanks,” I said.
After Frida had left, I surfed the TV stations, looking for evidence that anyone besides Frida knew about Mega-Whatsis. I didn’t find any—now they were full of politicians arguing about whether or not any more money ought to be spent trying to kill Behemoth and the Cloud Squid. They couldn’t agree on that any more than they could agree on other stuff, so I drifted off to sleep again.
Sometime later, I approached wakefulness like a swimmer floating toward a bright surface. I couldn’t quite open my eyes, but I felt one of the cats lying across my stomach. I petted it, enjoying the velvety feel of its fur and its plump, warm body. I heard purring, but didn’t feel it vibrating in the body I was stroking.
And the fur felt too short. Way too short. Almost like you would expect the fur of a seal to be. I opened my eyes and saw the fat thing stretched across me. It tapered to a narrow tip that was lazily curling to and fro like a cat’s tail. It widened as it crossed my body and continued off the bed, on to the floor, and out the window, most of which was blocked by its bulk.
It was a tentacle.
Two things occurred to me then. The first was that you don’t expect a tentacle to be warm and fuzzy. The second was that the Cloud Squid was probably going to drag me through the window and eat me.
I lay there frozen, waiting for the Squid to make her move. When she ate me, who would take care of Peachy? Who would take care of Sheba, and Buster, and Thugly, and Jingle Monster (four more pets than I had officially declared in my lease agreement)? Would she eat them too? Jingle was grooming the tentacle as if it were another cat. Peachy had rested her head on top of it, and she was snoring again.
I’m not sure how long I lay there arguing with myself. But it was the Cloud Squid who resolved the situation. She used the tip of her tentacle like a hand and gently moved Peachy’s head on to the bed. Then she patted each of the cats and the dog, and slipped away out the window.
I stayed frozen for a few more moments, but I couldn’t resist the urge to look out the window to see where she had gone. I poked my head into mild morning air and the clean smell of recent rain. I saw the tentacle slipping back over the top of the roof. But why was she on the roof?
The water tank, I thought. She’s the one who put the rainwater in there . . .
After all, she moved around in a rain cloud. Maybe the rainwater was a pleasant side effect to one of her visitations. Whatever the reason, I didn’t feel like I wanted to lie in bed anymore. And I was sick of trying to get information out of the stupid talking-heads TV. Instead, I headed for my computer.
I logged onto Facebook. I wasn’t surprised to see that rumors about our creatures dominated the feed. What did surprise me was that there were still plenty of posts about politics, religion, status reports of how people’s diets were going, and pictures of funny cats. Once I got used to that, I composed my own status report and posted it.
To everyone who lives outside the Danger Zone, I said. Please stop bombing us. Don’t send any more troops. And please don’t let them drop an atomic bomb. Stop attacking, period! You’re doing more damage than good.
Once I had posted that, and tweeted an abbreviated version, I got an idea. I logged onto Google Blogger and created a blog called Postcards from Monster Island. It was just a template, but I thought maybe I could get Frida to send me some picture files. As I was plotting and scheming over all this, I realized something.
I felt better. I could breathe. I wasn’t dizzy. My head didn’t hurt. I was snarf-free. And my stomach was no longer my mortal enemy.
So I fed the beasties and took Peachy out for her business. Once we were outside, we even did a little walkies. But our world looked very different now.
A sort of mountain range had grown between my street and Behemoth’s battle zone. It seemed to consist of a combination of ruined buildings and actual rock. Hardly anyone was on the street, which looked largely untouched by the destruction. The temperature was mild, flowers bloomed in pots and window boxes, cooking smells tempted my starved palate, and most of the odd little shops were open, though there could be very few customers these days. The air still had that freshly washed smell, and breezes blew along the new corridor that had been created by Behemoth’s Makeshift Mountains.
Call me weird, but I thought it was an improvement. The noise of traffic was gone too, though I would still hear Behemoth moving big things around, with thuds and groans as stuff fell into place. He didn’t trumpet any challenges, but grumbled to himself, as if thinking aloud. Peachy perked her ears, seeming to understand every word. She even replied a few times.
Once she felt satisfied in every possible way, we came back inside and walked through the empty halls of our building. I wondered how many residents had evacuated. There weren’t that many of us in the first place, maybe around ten people. Our bottom floor had been converted into shops (or maybe the top floors had been converted into apartments, I wasn’t sure). We saw our super just once a month, though he did a good job with repairs. And he had put up bulletin boards next to the elevators, so I saw the note:
Meeting at Houdini’s, Unit 3C, 1:00 pm.
PLEASE COME AND DISCUSS THE CREATURE SITUATION.
The numbering in our building was as eccentric as the residents, so Apartment 3C was on the second floor. The door stood open—someone had stuck a sign on it with an arrow pointing inside.
I pushed the door open further and saw Mr. Abé across the room. He waved from a wingback chair, where he nursed a cup of coffee. As I hesitated on the threshold, Houdini poked his tattooed head around the corner from his kitchen. “Come on in,” he said, with the voice of a carney barker.
Houdini had a magician’s name, but his true passion was the classic sideshow. He honored that tradition with the tattoos that covered him from head to toe, and he split his time between his circus memorabilia shop and a variety of sword-swallowing, fire-eating, knife-juggling gigs. His apartment was dominated by his personal collection, but everything was lovingly displayed, not jumbled together.
Over his couch hung a giant poster featuring all of the lions and tigers in the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Beneath the leaping cats sat Beetle, whose specialty was mounting insects for collectors and museums, and his partner Poe, who did professional skeleton articulation. Both held plates with orange scones made by Oskar, who perched on one arm of the couch, sipping a cup of mint tea. Oskar owned a bakery, and seeing the scones reminded me that my stomach was back to normal.
The gathering was completed by Frida, who fussed at the computer with her occasional boyfriend, Gee, who was a buyer for the Museum of Weird Stuff.
“So . . . ” I took account of my neighbors. “We’re the ones who stayed. Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me.”
Oskar sipped his tea. “Running seemed like a hysterical reaction,” he said. “Like lemmings jumping off a cliff.”
“Yes,” agreed Mr. Abé. “I’ve lived through much worse conflicts. And I can tell you from personal experience that refugee camps are not necessarily better than war zones.”
If you were wondering why two normal guys like Mr. Abé and Oskar would be friends with a tattooed knife juggler, a skull-faced artist, the Bug Guy, the Skeleton Guy, Mr. Weird Stuff, and Crazy Cat/Library Girl, I can only say that Mr. Abé’s remark about refugee camps might explain why he’s willing to look past the surface and put up with our eccentricities. And as for Oskar, baker par excellence, he’s a very nice fellow with a flaw that was well tolerated in Germany, but is decidedly odd in the US. Oskar looks like Uncle Fester from The Addams Family. He smiles like him, too.
Houdini snagged a chair for me and for himself. “So here’s why I called the meeting.” His tone was so commanding, even Frida and Gee stopped surfing. “For all intents and purposes, we are now in the Danger Zone. We are stuck here, and we’re the ones getting hurt by the bombs and stuff. We have to start telling t
he outside world what we want.”
“Won’t they just ignore us?” asked Beetle, around a bit of scone.
“Maybe not,” I said. “We’re what passes for experts now.”
Mr. Abé raised an eyebrow. “Interesting. How did we pull that off?”
But Poe was nodding enthusiastically. “No, we are! I’ve been tweeting about it. I got the president’s office to talk to me—can you believe it?”
“Good.” Houdini waved a hand at Poe as if he were one of his side show performers, and he wanted everyone to step right up. “Because the biggest problem we’ve got is not the creatures. It’s the idiots in Congress who want to drop an A-bomb on us. The only thing we’ve got going for us is that the president is commander-in-chief, and he thinks it won’t work.”
“But what will he think when he finds out we’ve got three creatures now?” I worried.
“There are more than three,” said Gee. “I think there may be as many as seven in our city alone. So far. Look at the pictures we took.”
Frida tapped the screen to show us action shots. “They’re all doing stuff, but none of them are attacking people. See? There are people in all of these shots—some of them taking pics like we were doing, so it won’t be long until the outside world finds out.”
“Ah, but what are the creatures doing, Miss Muerta? That’s what we need to prove.”
Gee pushed a lock of his blue hair out of his face. “All we have is theories about most of them right now—except for Behemoth. Frida thinks he’s an artist.”
That remark provoked a conspicuous silence. But Frida was undaunted. “You notice he’s been piling debris up? Well, he’s fusing it together in particular ways. Look . . . ” She found the video she wanted and hit play. We watched Behemoth shove debris into piles, then look at it critically. He rearranged things a bit, then pondered it again. When he felt satisfied, he stretched out on the pile and his underside began to glow.
When he stepped away from it, the result was an oddly pleasing amalgam of cityscape and mountain range. I had never seen anything quite like it.