by R. Lee Smith
“You don’t mean he will take more of us!” Olivia said.
“A risk,” Murgull muttered, now actually taking hold of her own loose skin and pulling at it. “Terrible risk, but necessary.”
Horumn snorted and spat an amazing wad of phlegm on the cave floor. “Necessary and foolish! Ha! Humans are dangerous enough when all we take are their cattle. Now we will take their women? Mark me, there is no hope! None! If we do not breed with you ugly maggots, we waste away and die! If we do, the humans will find us in our homes and kill us!”
“Enough.” Murgull motioned at the cooler, and Horumn took it away. As Murgull watched the other female drag the coffin with its ghastly secret away, she quietly said, “For all it matters now, I think it was the best of bad choices. To find another tribe is no promise of welcome, oh no. Old Murgull thought to leave the caverns once before. Away to the north, she flew in her youth, to the tribe that had spawned this one, in ancient days. And did she find them? Oh yes. A hunting party high in the mountains, many days’ flight from here. She pleaded with them for the sake of her people, and did they pity her?”
Murgull lapsed into silence, staring sorrowfully into the candlelight. “No pity. Laughter, they threw at her, and stones to strike her down. Broke her wing to keep her on the ground, and put their pricks in her while she screamed and writhed in blood. Chained her, yes, and held her for days…baking under the human sun by day…broken under their rutting weight at night. Until, by the Great Spirit’s favor, she broke free. Ha, free to scramble home with useless wing, useless eye, all ruin and fever and fear. Months and months she scrambled, suffered, and no child, either.” She rubbed at the patch of scar tissue, then seemed to remember Olivia. “No, you are not so ugly. Old Murgull knows ugly when she sees it.”
Even if she’d known the words, she couldn’t think of a thing to say to that. It was hard enough just meeting Murgull’s steady, one-eyed gaze.
Murgull muttered under her breath, then heaved herself up with a groan. “Come with me, little wingless sister. We will find your kind in the commons now. Let us hope together that one of them is sparking.”
6
The common cave was much more crowded when Olivia returned. Several other captive women were gathered around the empty fireplaces, talking to each other in and out of English, sometimes speaking both tongues at once. There weren’t as many as seventeen, if Murgull’s count could be trusted, but maybe the others were still coming.
Seeing them, Murgull uttered a disgusted grunt and released her at the doorway, muttering under her breath about maggots and slugs as she slouched off. Olivia lingered, looking at the creatures—the gullan—grouped together around the raised, flat rock in the middle of the room. She realized she knew which one was hers, and the realization both pleased and disturbed her. He saw her, his strange face contorting with relief, and beckoned her to him. She went, but slowly, looking at all of them together and seeing for the first time the subtle variations between them, wondering if the cracked horns she saw on one or the dull patch of fur on another were marks of age or of the waste.
“Is it wise to let her run loose?” asked a gulla as Olivia joined her captor.
Olivia’s captor tensed slightly. “Murgull took her,” he said.
“And returned her?” The gulla came up to look Olivia over, which in turn gave her the chance to study him. Unremarkable for the most part, he did have one fascinating physical feature that stood him out not just from Olivia’s captor, but from all the others of his kind, at least all those gathered here: Beginning between his wings and ending just above his belt, following the curve of his spine, he’d grown a kind of bristly mane, much thicker and coarser than the rest of his fur, and slightly silvered at the tips. It was just weird enough to make a girl overlook his lack of stature (still taller than Olivia, perhaps, but shorter than every other gullan here), his lack of strength (fit enough, as far as that went, but very lean, which made him seem positively scrawny compared with Olivia’s own captor), and just his general lack of noteworthy features (even his horns were slender and unprepossessing, although on closer inspection, they had a rougher edge to them, almost serrated). “I wonder why.”
“Who knows why that old bat does anything?” one of them muttered, ruining the surly effect of his words by simultaneously hunching down and looking to see if the bat in question were in evidence.
“When does she do things without reason?” the maned gulla retorted, and looked at Olivia again. “But there are good reasons, I suppose…and not so good ones. Old Murgull may have wanted to take a bite, see if humans are any good to eat.” He gave one of the women behind him a dour sort of glance. “They have to be good for something.”
Olivia glared at him, stung on behalf of all mankind. “If eating is all you can think to do with your human, perhaps she would be happier with a less toothsome mate,” she said, then paused as all the gullan gaped at her and added, “Or if your tooth was stronger.” Her words were clumsy, but the double meaning was not lost on him, nor on the others nearby who, after a short, stunned silence, set up a delighted chorus of howls and tooth-snapping aimed at Olivia’s captor, who looked faintly smug.
“What happened to the others?” Olivia asked, looking towards the women. “I thought there were more of us. Did they…? Are they…?”
“They live,” he assured her, but his gaze drifted toward the madwoman and her pot, and his smile died away. “All live yet. These are the humans you must speak with. You may use human words with them, but they must be made to understand. They must not fight us. They must learn to speak properly. They must become tribe.”
“I’ll do what I can,” she said. “But I do not command my people…” She hesitated, then went ahead and said it. “…as you command yours.”
His eyes snapped back to her. He frowned, started to speak, then took her arm and led her away from the others. “Murgull told you this?”
“She didn’t have to tell me. Is it true? You are tovorak?”
“Yes,” he said, his gaze troubled but steady on hers. “I am tallest. But that is not a name for you to call me. It is only what I am, and you are my mate. Or will be,” he said, looking at the women, “if you can make your humans see reason. I can only make so many commands, my Olivia.”
He released her then, and she felt his stare itching on her back as she went to join ‘her’ humans.
A tallish red-head whose brunette roots were nearly an inch long came to meet her. “That was my male oppressor you put down,” she said by way of greeting. “Don’t get me wrong, it was nice to see it happen, but it was still a dumb thing to do. Of course, he can hardly knock you around, here in front of everyone.”
She stopped, startled, and stared at her. “He hits you?”
“Not where it shows. I’m Cheyenne,” she said. “That big one there, he’s yours, isn’t he?”
Olivia looked over her shoulder and saw her captor at the center of his own small crowd, and yes, he stood over them, all fanned wing and impressive swoop of horn, listening to the low growls of gullan speech in a brooding way. “Yes,” she said quietly. It was on the tip of her tongue to say that he was the leader here, but something about Cheyenne’s piercing stare made her think better of it, so instead she said, “That’s mine,” and let it go at that.
“What’s his name?”
Olivia shook her head and faced the others again. “I don’t know. I’ve asked him, but he either changes the subject or just doesn’t answer.”
“Yeah, I get that too. I don’t know.” Cheyenne contemplated the group of gullan sourly. “Maybe they don’t have names. Maybe they sniff each other’s assholes like dogs.”
Olivia felt a hot flare of anger at those words, wondered why she should be offended, then shrugged it off and said, “They have names. I was with two of their females, Horumn and Murgull.”
Cheyenne gave as violent a start as if she’d been slapped in the face, and all the other humans stopped talking and stared at her. “Wome
n? They have women? I thought…I mean…” Her face screwed up into outrage. “What the fuck do they need us for then?”
A number of gullan looked their way. Cheyenne immediately lowered her voice, but her anger only seemed to grow under their watchful stares.
“What the hell is going on here if it isn’t about women?” she demanded.
“It’s not that simple,” Olivia said. “They have women, but there’s been some trouble, and now they think they need us to make healthy babies.”
“What in God’s name makes them think they can make babies with us, healthy or otherwise?” another woman asked, eyebrows only very slightly raised. She got up from the bench where she’d been sitting and came to join their little circle, holding out her hand. “Hey, Tina Hartwell, how’s it going?”
Olivia shook her hand without thinking and was immediately struck by the absurdity of observing the social formalities in a cave full of bat-people. “Hi. I guess…I guess you better all gather ‘round, because this is something you’re all going to want to hear.” And as the women came to form a close knot around her, she told them as much of Murgull’s story as she bring herself to do, including the baby in the cooler, although she described it as little as possible.
“Are you sure we’re even talking about a disease here?” Cheyenne asked at the end of it. “I mean, this is a really closed community. What if they’re all just super hillbilly inbred?”
“Inbreeding doesn’t cause gross deformities out of hand,” Tina remarked, frowning at the wall over Olivia’s head. “But you’re describing a pretty wide array of physical and neurological defects. It almost sounds like a, I don’t know, a souped-up version of the measles.”
“Nobody gets the measles anymore,” another woman broke in. She stood apart from the rest of them, an older woman who had gone to a lot of effort to hide her age, but after a few weeks without cosmetics, probably looked ten years older than she was. She looked at them, at all of them, with an icy and almost violent dislike, as if she held them responsible for her being here as much as the gullan. “For God’s sake, this isn’t Africa!”
“Yeah,” drawled Tina, meeting that hot stare with contempt. “Yeah, I’m thinking these—gullan, did you call them?—these gullan aren’t exactly up on their shots, lady. And I didn’t say it was the measles, I said it was similar. There are a lot of bugs out there that can cause high fevers, blindness, muscular atrophy, and birth defects, but what’s bothering me is that little bit about how the kids are always worse. And they apparently keep right on getting worse. But I still don’t understand how they think we’re going to make it all better.”
“Weiner dogs,” someone said.
They all turned around to look at her (except for the madwoman with her saucepan, who went on sitting and staring serenely straight ahead). She was easy to overlook, a very young blonde, slender and small-breasted, with the open, earnest face of a child and simply huge baby-blue eyes. She blushed at them, but said it again: “Weiner dogs. See, my aunt, she raises them for, like, show dogs, and every Christmas when I went to stay with her, I got to help her take care of them, so, like, I got to learn a lot about them. They have the highest chance of any breed of dog to develop back problems, like, with slipped discs and stuff. Also dislocated knees and epilepsy and bad ears and eyes. Like, one dog she had was actually born with no eyes at all, I swear.”
“There’s a point here, right?” Olivia asked, hoping she sounded curious rather than outright rude.
“Yeah, see, weiner dogs get born like that a lot because all the weiner dogs have the same problems, but if you breed them to, I don’t know, a chihuahua, the puppies have a better chance of not having any problems at all.”
“It’s called hybrid vigor,” Tina agreed, frowning at the blonde. “The theory is, if everyone’s got the same genes, the kids inherit all the problems from both parents, but throw some fresh blood in the mix, and all the nice, healthy dominant genes take over. Of course, among other things, this assumes that the problems they’re having are actually due to recessive genes in the first place, which we have no way of knowing since we have no idea what this White Fever really is. More importantly, where do they get the insane idea that they can breed them out with us?”
Olivia shrugged helplessly. “They apparently have some old legend about humans having babies with them.”
“Bestiality!” hissed Ms. Africa.
“Doubtful,” Tina said, much more calmly. “Highly doubtful. Look, a dog can breed with a wolf all right, and grizzlies can mate with polar bears, but these are definitely the exceptions. And even when two species can make a baby, they can’t always make viable offspring. Horses and donkeys can make mules, but mules are sterile, just like ligers and zebroids.”
“Zebroids?” another woman echoed.
“Zebra hybrid. With horses, donkeys, that sort of thing.” Tina explained, and looked back at Olivia. “And those are very closely related species, which, looking at our situation, I’m thinking we’re not. There’s not a chance in hell we’re sexually compatible with a bunch of three-toed bat-people, whereas the odds of us transmitting horrible diseases back and forth are pure gold. You need to talk to these people and try to make them understand a little something called an asymptomatic carrier, because in another month, we could all be dead from this White Fever and they could all be dead from friggin’ polio. They think they have problems now, just try that shit on for size.”
Olivia nodded, acknowledging this, but in her mind, she could only see her captor’s hard, determined face and cold eyes. “I don’t see us convincing anyone,” she said. “And even if we did, I doubt they’d let us go with a handshake and a hearty apology. These are very desperate people.”
“How much more desperate are they going to be in three years,” Tina demanded, “when it becomes obvious to everyone that we can’t make a baby with a friggin’ horny bat?”
Cheyenne’s mouth twisted up in something that could not fairly be called a smile. “What makes them think they’ve got three years to try?” she asked. “I mean, come on, they really think no one’s going to notice we’re missing? No one’s going to come after us?”
“No one’s showed up yet,” another woman said. She smiled nervously when heads turned toward her, reaching as if to put her hair in order before standing up to join them. She was a tall woman, still pretty despite their circumstances and primitive attire; her knee-length dress appeared to have been sewed together from a tent. “Hi, I’m Ellen.” Hands were shaken all around. “That one’s mine,” she added, pointing at the gullan. One of them waved at her. “Mr. No-Name. I call him Bob.”
“One lady goes missing, maybe no one notices,” Cheyenne said impatiently, turning her back on Bob and his buddies. “A bunch of ladies go missing on the same night from the same apartment complex, even Deputy Dawg from our boondock town is going to sit up and pay attention. You better believe they’re looking for us.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Olivia said. “But even if they did, who would look for us here?”
“There had to be clues,” Cheyenne insisted.
“Of what?” Tina shot back, and actually laughed. “I have a vague memory of some busted doorknobs, but no one, and I mean no one, is going to look at claw marks and see claw marks! Any fingerprints they find are bound to go down in the books as ‘so smudged they didn’t even look human!’ Think about it! And honestly? I kind of hope they don’t find any fur, because if they do, the only newspaper we’re going to be in is the one that says Bigfoot Kidnaps Women! I’m a bottom-line kind of gal, and I gotta say, the bottom-line here is, the cavalry is not coming!”
“So why not make the best of things?” another woman asked loudly. She walked over to join them, giving them all a broad smile just a little too smug to be friendly. “Maria Alendez. I seen most of you before. You all walk right past me almost every day, in fact, and I bet you don’t even recognize me.”
“You’re the chick behind the espresso counter at th
e supermarket,” Tina said flatly. “The one who’s always yapping at her cell phone and painting her nails instead of making me my friggin’ five-dollar latte.”
Maria’s lips pursed. “When you grow up the way I did,” she went on, not looking at Tina, “you know better than to stand around and wait for rescue when things go bad. You have to take care of things yourself.”
“Damn straight,” Cheyenne said.
“So when he came to me, I let him come. I let him, all right, and I let him hear me chanting while he was on top of me.” Maria brought her hands up fast, her long fingers waggling as she sang, “A guanchilopostle, a huanchiloé! A ver señorita qué tal baila usted!” in such sinister tones that it should have been ridiculous…and wasn’t. Maria laughed at all their solemn faces, then shrugged and folded her arms. “After he was done, I told him I had magical powers and I had trapped his soul in a candle and unless he told me his name, I would blow it out and destroy him forever.”
All of the women were silent and crowded close, listening. Maria checked to make sure none of the gullan were close enough to hear her, then lowered her voice even further, and said, “His name is Grunn. God, he was scared. I was feeling nasty towards him, so I blew out the candle anyway. He actually fainted.”
Cheyenne laughed, but she was the only one and Olivia noticed that some of the others actually looked upset. She was probably one of them.