Monk Punk and Shadow of the Unknown Omnibus

by Aaron French

  He dodged. Blood splashed from his arm. He rolled in mid-air and came down with his spear planted on the ground. He smashed his sandal into one of the demons, grinding burning mush into the floor. Flames licked his foot. Talons raked his shoulder. He screamed even as he went into another flip, moving away from the fire in the center of the room. The blade of his spear sliced a demon in half. Both parts sizzled when they struck the floor and melted back into each other. Krellu-Doom came within a finger’s breadth of his eyes. He fell back, swiping with his spear to keep Kokuro away.

  Then he felt his back press into one of the pillars. A demon gouged a chunk out of the painted red wood with its talons, showering Sing-kan with sparks.

  Of all the students Sho had trained in his long life, only one had mastered his greatest skill: The Shattering Fist. Sing-kan tightened his right hand, clenching it until his knuckles cracked beneath their wrapping of cloth and iron. He hardened his flesh, tightened his blood, locked his bones into place. Kokuro’s face was a rictus of hate as he swung Krellu-Doom.

  Sing-kan back-stepped and cocked his fist behind his right ear, heaving it forward an instant later. His knuckles, protected by the iron plate, struck the crimson wood of the pillar with a loud crack. For another instant there was nothing—no dent, barely even a scratch. Two demons came from opposing vectors, and Sing-kan stumbled back.

  There was another crack, and a black line appeared. Within seconds it had spread to encompass the pillar.

  A third crack and the pillar broke. The top tore loose from the roof a moment later.

  Kokuro hesitated, but Sing-kan turned his back and ran, keeping the spear in his left hand. He used his entire body, knotting every muscle into a whip-cord of force.

  The next pillar shattered immediately, as the sound of the first crashing into the wall filled Sing-kan’s ears. Kokuro screamed.

  Lines of agony as hot as any furnace ripped along Sing-kan’s back, and the demon came away with steaming tendrils of flesh. But this didn’t slow him. A third pillar, then a fourth. Blood soaked the wrappings of his fist. He dropped his spear. His left hand struck the fifth.

  Flames had engulfed the entire center of the room. Sweat poured down Sing-kan’s body. He could hear the entire building groaning as its supports fell away, smashing open the walls. Another demon tore flesh from his ribs. Hot blood spattered the floor.

  The door by which he had entered was flanked by two pillars as thick as oak trees, with four-eyed dragons carved into the wood. Sing-kan stood between them, spread his legs, and crossed his arms. The muscles in his chest, shoulders, hips, and legs knotted up, storing power. Not a day had gone by for as long as he could remember when he hadn’t exercised them, honed them into weapons.

  He swung a hardened fist to each side. His reach was just barely long enough. Pain from the impact racked every bone. Without hesitation he swung again. Wood splintered. The entire building trembled.

  For an instant Sing-kan had a glimpse of Kokuro leaping through the fire, tendrils of red and orange curling around him and Krellu-Doom writhing like a snake in the heat.

  A demon swooped at Sing-kan. He ducked beneath it, crouching into a run, and shouldered open the doors. His sandals hammered down the hallway. Kokuro howled after him.

  Sing-kan threw himself through the doors, over the steps, and down into the mud. It was cool, instantly soothing his burning muscles and scorched wounds. Cold rain fell from the sky. He rested for a moment, releasing his breath in something that was half relief and half desperate prayer. Then he rolled over.

  The house—the temple—groaned. Sing-kan heard great beams of wood creak and buckle. One snap followed another. Sing-kan saw the Silver Wheel on the roof’s pinnacle begin to fall, slowly at first, then faster.

  He pulled himself backward through the mud as the house collapsed with a roar like a caged tiger. Glided eaves were smashed by a falling spar of wood that buried itself in the mud inches from Sing-kan’s ear. The whole structure seemed almost to dissolve.

  Silence fell over a mound of broken wood, soaked by rain and crackling with the flames. Sing-kan stood. Blood dripped from the soaked wrappings on his hands. He took a step towards the ruined house. Parts of it still stood, but the central chamber and entry hall were in ruins. One of the roof-dragons lay broken at his feet, surrounded by shards of broken roof-tile. The only sounds were the hiss of rain and Sing-kan’s ragged breath. He took a step forward and rested a scorched sandal on a spar of cedar.

  Then he heard a noise, a mingle of gasp and sob, and a burnt hand shoved aside a tile and groped the cold air. Kokuro’s other hand followed, and rain steamed as it fell on Krellu-Doom’s blade. His face was unrecognizable, a mess of blood and exposed bone. He opened a mouth of broken teeth and hissed something incomprehensible. He coughed blood. One of his eyes was swollen shut, but the other burned with hatred.

  “Kan...” he hissed.

  He died. Blood dribbled from between his lips as his eye closed and Krellu-Doom fell from his limp fingers.

  Sing-kan’s brother was dead at last, his soul fled to its judgment.

  Sing-kan’s eyes went to the black sword, the weapon of evil gods. He couldn’t leave it here—such things had a way of finding new masters. For a moment, he considered picking it up, but chased the thought away. He didn’t trust himself to carry it and then sink it in the mire. Even now he was tempted to take it for his own. A voice whispered that he could use it differently, as a weapon against evil rather than for it.

  The temptation grew as he stared at the crack of red running along the blade.

  Suddenly, Sing-kan had a terrible sense of something in the mist and rain around him, an evil presence that weighed on his soul. A shudder of fear ran down his spine. He tore his eyes away from the sword and turned, bringing quivering, bleeding fists up to a defensive stance.

  A great lump of darkness had appeared in the mist. It moved closer, and every step seemed to echo in Sing-kan’s heart. It walked on the surface of the mire with legs like stone pillars but didn’t sink. Sing-kan couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but watch it approach.

  The evil took the form of a great turtle, its beak pronged and glistening, its eyes cold lumps of clay sunk deep in gnarled sockets. Stagnant water pooled among the rotting plates of its shell, and black moss hung down its limbs. The stench of a rotting corpse filled Sing-kan’s nostrils, twisting his stomach.

  But somehow, he knew its attention wasn’t on him—he was nothing more than an insect in its gaze. Its dull eyes were on Krellu-Doom.

  Sing-kan looked down at the black sword. A mist had surrounded it, making the blade’s edges watery and indistinct. As he watched, the blade itself shimmered, and the crack in the weapon seemed to shrink, as if it were receding into some horizon.

  Then it was gone, melted away into the mist. Sing-kan felt a deep, ageless anger in the cold air around him and turned back to the turtle. A worm dropped from its open mouth as it roared, a sound full of malignant despair.

  Suddenly, as quickly as it had appeared, the demon vanished, and Sing-kan was left alone with Kokuro’s corpse and the ruins of his temple. He thought he could already see some of the broken wood reverting to mud.

  Sing-kan didn’t have enough strength left to carry Kokuro’s body away from the marsh. A grave deep in the muck somewhere would have to serve for his brother’s corpse. The fate of the soul was in the hands of a power far above men.

  He could only pray that he would be guided safe through the mire and out into the green, sunlit lands once again. It had been three years since he had visited Master Sho’s grave. His presence was overdue.

  After taking a few minutes to clean and bandage his wounds as best he could, Sing-kan set off into the mist, picking his route carefully. His thoughts turned to the brother he had lost. Sing-kan tried to forget the dark warrior he had faced, and remember Kokuro as he had once been: a brother and a friend.

  Sing-kan would offer prayers for him, too, when he came to Master Sho’s
grave.

  About the author: Sean is either a form of lichen that grows on distended bookshelves or a writer, lover of esoterica, dude, and student of the martial arts who resides in Madison, Wisconsin. He writes mostly to impress girls. His previous publications include a story in Rogue Blades Entertainment’s Rage of the Behemoth anthology, the serial novel Memory Wipe in Ray Gun Revival 1.0, and the short story collection Six With Flinteye.

  The Key to Happiness

  R. B. Payne

  The misshapen man rammed his staff deep into the snow and rested his deformed body. Gulping the thin air of the high Himalayas, his lungs burned as they filled with shards of frozen fire.

  He scanned the snow-covered mountains, specks of icy blood flaking from his eyes as he squinted in the bright sunlight. At another time, he would have thought the granite peaks were beautiful.

  On a high cliff, the subtle movement of a dark-furred creature caught his attention. The beast had been stalking him for the past week, but it never approached closer than a few dozen yards.

  Regardless, he knew this beast by sight.

  A blast of wind swept a cloud of snow and ice across the face of the mountain and when it cleared, the creature had gone.

  At least for now.

  As his heartbeat slowed and his blood pressure stabilized, a dim feeling of hope rose in the man. He had finally reached the base of Nyalam Pass. Before him lay a tumble of splintered ice that covered the rise like a collapsed city. Snaking through the maze of jagged outcroppings and gaping chasms was a narrow path trampled flat by mountaineering teams, border bandits, and the occasional trader. The trail climbed to a ridgeline and disappeared over the top.

  The Tibetan frontier was only a few miles ahead and Lhasa was a six-day trek if the weather held.

  The man adjusted the blanket that clothed his body and numbly gripped the staff in anticipation of moving on. He no longer recognized these hands as his own; his knuckles were gnarled and his fingers were elongated and oddly muscular. These were not the hands of a physician.

  They were the hands of something else.

  Summoning his energy, the man ascended the trail. His feet, too large for shoes, were wrapped in rags stained with blood and bits of frozen flesh. Each step crunched on ice that cut like glass. Behind him, a crimson trail solidified in the sub-zero temperatures.

  As the trail steepened, he rested every twenty steps. In the distance, Mt. Everest seemingly floated atop a bank of clouds; far below him, the blue Bhote Kosi River flowed into a Nepalese valley still verdant from the short summer. With each step, the summit of the mountain pass seemed further away but he pushed ahead, wanting to cross before nightfall.

  Several hours, and hundreds of steps later, the ice field became crisscrossed with steep granite ridges and the trail made a series of switchbacks toward the unprotected side of the mountain. Here and there, Tibetan prayer flags on bare wooden poles marked the trail. The faded squares of cloth—blue, white, red, green, and yellow, with their ancient symbols—snapped in the bitter wind.

  The man hesitated, realizing he wasn’t cold. He wasn’t even uncomfortable.

  Hypothermia?

  His mind, trained in the medical arts, raced through the checklist of symptoms. Shivering. No. Vomiting. Nausea. Dizziness. None of the above. Apathy? Certainly not. Weak pulse? No, his heartbeat was strong.

  Dr. Javier Garcia, heal thyself.

  If only he could.

  No doubt, this was another symptom of the infection. Every day it was something new. He looked at his arm for the thousandth time since the attack. The bite wound in the tissue had healed and the surrounding inflammation was gone. He touched the coarse red and brown hair that had sprouted. At first it had been a few odd strands, but now it was luxuriant fur that covered much of his arm. Somehow it was spreading to his other arm, as well.

  The mark of the yeti.

  That’s what the damn superstitious locals thought. As a visiting physician, he had spent the entire summer tending their aches and pains, treating their broken bones, and delivering their babies. In repayment, they had chased him from the village.

  “Ban-manche,” they had screamed. Yeti.

  Admittedly, this infection was an aggressive condition, and not like any he had ever seen in his years of medical practice. He figured that DNA damage had occurred and his body was quickly altering. Most likely it was a mutation in his PTEN gene. Yesterday, he had not even recognized his reflection in a pool of water at a river crossing.

  There would be help in Lhasa. There had to be a civilized hospital there. It was his only chance. Had he gone to Katmandu, the locals would have killed him along the way. Only this isolated trail would be safe.

  He quickened his pace up a steep incline as the trail edged along a cliff face; on one side, a sheer drop of several thousand feet. An odd sensation ran up his legs as his opposable toes clasped the hard rock to give him stability on the dangerously narrow path.

  Voices carried to him on the wind and he knew that men were approaching. Men. Instinctively, he reached high on the rock face, and using the smallest of outcroppings, scaled the rising cliff wall to a niche formed by a crack in the blue granite. He waited silently as six monks bundled in heavy orange robes trundled down the mountain, unaware of him.

  When the smell of men had dissipated on the wind, he dropped to the trail. He had forgotten the staff in the alcove above. It didn’t matter; he probably didn’t need it anymore.

  A sharp pain razored into his heart. He clutched his chest and dropped to his knees. Momentary relief passed through him as he realized a pulmonary edema would actually be a blessing. It would certainly solve his problem. Or would it? It might just cripple him. A cerebral edema would be better; at least he’d never know what hit him.

  Moonlight lit the snowy plateau and a cold wind caressed his fur. His strong legs easily climbed the rocky slope. Higher and higher. Slung beneath an arm, the lifeless body of a snow leopard. The hunting had been good. A faraway howl echoed through the glacial fields and he knew the others would soon be at the cave...

  He snapped from his dream. The sun had moved a few inches toward the horizon. He had been asleep on the narrow trail for some time. It was late afternoon.

  From above, a rumble thundered through the crevasses as a slab of ice separated from the mountainside. Clots of snow rolled past him and then he saw the wall of white rushing down the mountain.

  Avalanche.

  His legs thrust, and as his stride stretched longer and longer, he bounded up the rocky path to where the trail opened onto a wide snowfield. If he could cross it, he might be safe. Redoubling his efforts, he raced for a granite outcropping.

  Before he could reach the rocks, a wave of snow swept him from his feet and tumbled him down the mountain. A split-second later, the full avalanche crushed him. Beneath the moving snow, his body contorted, his lungs screamed for air, and his arms flailed like a drowning man being swept along a river bottom.

  Darkness took his mind to a place as black as a moonless night.

  ***

  Shimmering light pulsated with each shallow breath. Breathing in, the light contracted to a pinpoint. Breathing out, it expanded. Then, the light shrunk back to a dot as he painfully inhaled.

  Later, Javier realized the light was a portal. A room of red and copper and wood and brass lay beyond. He forced a deeper breath, and the portal expanded. He could almost see... what?

  His breathing became a meditation. As he gained more control of the portal, he realized he might hold it open long enough to pass through. The beguiling aroma of cedar and jasmine smoke drifted to him. He breathed deeply, held the portal open, slipped through, and opened his eyes.

  A ceiling of rocks greeted his consciousness and realization came slowly. He was in a cave, but it had been transformed into a home. Rock walls had been chiseled flat and painted in reds and blues. Carved in a wall was a fire pit whose flames provided warmth. Nearby was a worn cabinet painted with peacocks and flower
s. Its shelves were crowded with amber bottles that reflected the firelight in a prism of colors.

  Feeling stronger, Javier wanted to sit up, but couldn’t. He craned his head to get a better view from the cot. Wiggling his fingers, he could feel the rough wool of a blanket. That was good. He tried to curl his toes. A flutter contracted his chest as he realized he couldn’t feel his toes. Nor his legs. Nor his hips.

  “Hello?” he said raspingly, his chapped lips and throat dry from the thin air. “Is anyone here?”

  No answer.

  A few minutes later he turned to look as a heavy wooden door creaked. Snow swirled into the cave as an old man entered; on his shoulder, a few sticks of firewood. Brushing off ice and snow, the man removed a thick blanket to reveal an orange robe.

  Javier cleared his throat and spoke in broken Nepali. “Excuse me. I am thirsty traveler who thirsts.”

  “You are American?” said the monk, surprisingly in English.

  “Yes.”

  “Ah,” said the monk, filling a kettle with water and placing it in the fireplace. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “Can you help me sit up? I’m in a lot of pain.”

  “I am sorry,” said the monk matter-of-factly. “Your back was broken in the avalanche. You must not move.”

  Javier’s head dropped firmly onto the bed as anger and frustration boiled inside him. He had diagnosed the injury when he awoke, but still, he had hoped it wasn’t true.

  He was trapped.

  Javier closed his eyes as depression consumed him and he fell back into unconsciousness.

  ***

  Later, the monk loudly clunked a wooden spoon in a tin pan.

  Javier pulled himself from his twilight world.

  “I am Tenzin Jinpa,” said the monk as their eyes met.

  Javier could not remember his own name. His mind searched, fuzzy, surely he had a name. “Javier,” he said finally. “How long have I been asleep?”