by Mat Johnson
Since we couldn’t just reanimate the corpse for the thirty or forty seconds we needed, we decided to improvise. If Sausage Nose couldn’t appear and ease his fellow warriors’ suspicions, then we would simply have to find an understudy for his role. I nominated myself for this—stripping the soiled cloak from the beast with no small amount of disgust. I was willing to take on the danger of trying to pass myself off as the monster, but unfortunately my frame was a poor match for the beast’s jacket size. I even tried adding a line of broomstick to broaden the shoulders, but it was no use. So instead Garth Frierson went, his unique physique finally being applied to practical purpose. Garth’s arms weren’t close to as long as those of the character he hoped to play, but they were as thick. As long as no one got close enough to see that that circumference was simply fat, I hoped he might be convincing. The issue of skin tone, of course, had to be addressed. Any melanin at all would have revealed him to be an impostor. To camouflage him, we relied on teeth-whitening toothpaste, which the bright-smiling Karvels had in great supply. It took about two tubes each to cover Garth’s hands and arms, another for his neck, and two more for his face. Not that we intended anything but his fingers to be seen, but in the wind of the upstairs it felt safer to cover up all that could possibly be revealed. The paste left the former bus driver a tad shiny, but fortunately I found an open box of baking soda in the back of the Karvels’ Sub-Zero, and I blotted it onto Garth’s skin like it was the finest talcum.
As soon as I stepped out onto the roof, I knew that we were right to have made our preparations. All of the creatures’ heads turned on our arrival, and they clearly weren’t just looking for the pudding. As I walked out with the pans in my hands, they saw behind me what looked like the arm of their leader slapping the back of my head to speed me up. Or at least they saw Sausage Nose’s sleeve, wiped clean of bile. And from within this sleeve, they saw a white hand, even paler than their own, which I hoped they wouldn’t notice. In my attempt to hide Garth’s blackness, I’d been a little too eager, I realized once faced with the actual living Tekelian skin tone. In my mind it was white, but really it was flecked with tones of gray.
“You’ve got to come, and you’ve got to come now,” I urged the Karvels as soon as I reached them. You have never seen two more relieved white folks.* In their brief time in the outdoors, their faces had become flushed and ruddy, their noses running and freezing at the same time. Mrs. Karvel was smoking right in front of her husband now, she didn’t even care. I understood. They hadn’t been living in the Antarctic like the rest of us, they’d simply been hiding within it. Pushed well beyond their comfort levels physically and socially, the two scuttled past me to the inside before I could even finish my request. My cousin, on the other hand, proved nowhere near as easy to convince.
“I don’t want to have nothing to do with it, Christopher,” Booker Jaynes said as I came closer. “You see how well your dirty little trick went? You see that all that poison was for nothing? I could have told you that. If it was that simple, slavery would have been over by the seventeenth century.” Jaynes moved past me to serve his mistress another plate of potatoes au gratin, a dish he had prepared himself. Hunka had come with the rest, looking for him, and Jaynes had found her. He had taken special care to ensure that she would receive food untainted by our deceit. None of her kin seemed to notice that her servant’s efforts were a little too attentive. Even when he dabbed a smudge of cheese off the corner of her mouth, the other Tekelians apparently found this intimate gesture not the least bit out of the ordinary, the actions of a good slave and a good lover being more or less the same.
“Just get off the roof, okay? Promise me that. Take your lady and get her as far away from here as you can,” I insisted, interpreting his shrugging nod as an ironclad contract.
“Well that’s just insane,” Nathaniel complained as he stepped in where he was not wanted, coming from behind me after listening to the substance of my little family spat. “There’s simply nowhere to run to, don’t you understand that? This is it. We need to get in with these people, make a place with them. Secure our positions. That’s our reality now. Not some fantasy world.”
Angela Latham stood beside him, so I spoke to her directly as she looked intently at her legal husband. “Angela, they’re not just going to keel over instantly. They’re going to get sick, and when they figure out why, they are going to get angry. And they are definitely going to figure out why.” It was a simple argument, but it was all she needed to hear. Angela turned away from Nathaniel and started walking with me. Nathaniel didn’t follow. And in this moment of my greatest heroics, Angela Latham grabbed my hand with the softness of hers when she reached me, and together we walked past that gaggle of goliaths and toward something I hoped would be our future.
“Angela!” I kept hearing Nathaniel yell from behind me. But no matter how demanding that voice was, it never got any closer. Nathaniel never made the simple effort to follow after all that he was losing. Angela walked through the exit door with me, and it was only Garth Frierson who seemed to have any reservation over Nathaniel’s absence. As I came into the room, I saw past the costumed Garth to the Karvels, who were busy laying out rifles and ammunition before them in preparation for what was surely to come. Taking off his coat, Jeffree grabbed the largest rifle he could find in the pile, cocked it, and declared, “It’s showtime!” as if Carlton Damon Carter hadn’t been filming the whole time.
“Where the hell is Captain Jaynes?” Garth insisted, still not having opened the door wide enough for those behind to see that he was a fraud but unwilling to close it either with our two comrades on the other side. He’d taken his hood off, and given the smell, I couldn’t blame him. Still, the patches of white toothpaste on his face made him look like he had a mutant strain of vitiligo.
“I told him, but he’s not coming. He’s with that woman. He thinks he can make it with her instead. What the hell can I do about that?”
“But where the hell is Nathaniel?” The question was addressed to me, but Garth was also looking to Latham’s newly estranged wife.
“He’s not trying to hear it,” I told Garth. “It’s on him now.” Garth looked at my indifferent expression and replied to it with his own look of disbelief. He looked at Angela as well, and so did I, and I’d like to believe I saw a tinge of indifference from her too, but I can’t deny that now she was crying.
“Screw this,” Garth spat at me, and before I could stop him he leaned out the door and yelled, “Yo, dog! Nathaniel! It’s time to get your black ass out of here!”
The command certainly got Nathaniel’s attention. In fact, it seemed to get everyone’s attention. All of the Tekelians on the roof looked up from the remainders of their feast to take notice of what had just been said. The now unhooded Garth, who had stepped just outside the door to make sure that he was heard, struck quite a figure before them. Even from the distance both physically and culturally, I could read the looks of shock on the creatures’ faces. Never before had they seen a Tekelian with African features, that much was sure. Or a Tekelian warrior who, after stepping off of the two milk crates we had placed for him by the door, now stood at a mere five feet, six inches tall. The other thing I could tell was that the robe Sausage Nose always wore was a sacred object, a symbol of respect, earned right and privilege. It was clear from the chorus of angry howls that erupted from among them, rising first from the warriors and then from the females and even the children of Tekeli-li as they pushed back their chairs and flipped over the tables. Either we had broken some sort of snowman taboo or they just knew the truth: that the owner of that robe would not have parted with it willingly. Either way, the result was much the same and very immediate. Our reckoning would not be postponed a moment more.
The first one to die was my cousin. The man of my blood who at different times I had looked to as a leader, a boss, even as a friend. The reality of his death somehow eluded my consciousness in that moment of chaos and danger. And they didn’t so much att
ack him as simply brush Booker Jaynes away.
“Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters: I’m sure we can figure out what is going on here in a peaceable manner!” Booker bellowed. Years of practice at rallies and marches had given him a voice that truly boomed above the crowd. “Let’s just all calm down, and get together in a circle,” he pleaded. Alas, “Can’t we all just form a circle?” was the last thing my cousin said before he was pushed to the side by the nearest of the creatures. The villain didn’t even bother to acknowledge my cousin by looking in his direction. The monster just swung his simian arm out to the side and sent Jaynes off his feet and hurtling toward the BioDome’s curved edge. Booker actually landed briefly, though not on his feet, skidding the remaining distance to where the angle of the roof became too steep to reconcile. And then he was simply gone. Dropped out of sight. It’s a testament to my own capacity for denial that I didn’t accept that the captain had fallen to his demise, instead clinging to a hasty notion that he had simply slid down the side and landed in the soft snow below. His Tekelian mistress harbored no such delusions. I have no idea what Hunka said, but the anguish in her garbled barking was undeniable. It must have been revealing as well, whatever language she used, because on hearing her harsh utterances the crowd of her brethren around her simply froze. Unaware of anything but her grief, the she-creature continued her lament. Those Tekelians kept listening as if taking in a confession, one that lasted until one of their number walked forward, put a hand on her shoulder, and then cut her neck wide open with an ivory dagger. When Hunka hit the ground, her assassin casually kicked her limp body off the side of the roof as well, in the direction her servant had been sent to his demise.
This is when Angela Latham screamed. I forgot that she was even beside me until I felt her hand stop me from closing the exit door. And before I could figure out what was going on, she screamed again, and this time I heard the name she was yelling. It wasn’t mine.
Nathaniel Latham stood, bewildered, at the far end of the roof, separated from us by an army of monsters. All of Angela’s disinterest of only moments before, whether feigned or simply delusional, was gone and replaced by a selfless passion I had long accepted she didn’t have in her. They were closing in on him, having finally formed that circle that Captain Jaynes had begged for. Their horrible robes, packed in the fibers with ice and flapping heavily in a gust of polar wind, soon shrouded Nathaniel from our sight, but not before he could scream “Angela!” back to his wife and she could run out the door and after him. I tried to stop her. I tried to close the exit before Angela could escape to certain doom, but she was already too far out there. I tried to hold her wrists, tried yelling to her that it was hopeless, but years of step aerobics, spin classes, and Bikram Yoga made Angela too nimble for me. Ultimately, as those Tekelian warriors closest to us refocused on getting into the dome at the rest of us, it would take the strength of both Garth and Jeffree to remove me from the open door as well, as love overpowered my self-preservation. But they did.
The door was closed. When I turned around, the Karvels were armed and looking at me. Or at least looking past me, aiming their rifles at the demons that lay just beyond.
“Grab a gun and get ready to start shooting,” Mrs. Karvel instructed me without taking her eyes off the closed metal door. Already it vibrated as the percussion of an unknowable number of frozen fists banged on the other side, enraged.
“The heat. We have to turn up the heat. That’s what makes the poison work, that’s what killed the big guy. They can’t handle it, that’s their weakness,” Garth told them.
“You turn the heat up any higher and you’re liable to blow us all straight to hell. The damn thing’s broke, so just grab yourself a shotgun. I’m sure filling them with lead holes will kill them just as good.”
“My wife has never spoken a truer word,” the painter said, and he even put down the double-barrel in his hands for a moment to grab her face and kiss her.
“You fellas want to make yourselves useful?” Mrs. Karvel continued when he released her. “Then take the other exits and guard them too. Somebody cover the boiler room and somebody cover the garage door. Because they sure as hell are coming for us now. Just a matter of holding them long enough, right? As long as we keep firing these rifles, we’re going to do us just fine.” Mrs. Karvel gripped her Browning as she said this, giving it a little shake. Her husband did as well, massaging his hand along the hilt as he stared at the banging door. I wanted a gun too. I wanted to feel that strength, to have something to cling to. I wanted to know the texture of revenge, the weight of it. To at least feel powerful in this moment of complete doom. So loading up with arms and ammunition, Garth, the engineers, and I did just that. And it was as good to grab something within the tempest as I thought it would be.
But it was all illusion. The shooting began only moments after we left the room, the first gun blast coming as the Tekelians finally managed to burst open the exit door. I tried to count the shots as we made our way down the ladder to the main level, and the Karvels must have got off more than two dozen between them, stuttering their blast so that they could take turns reloading. Still, despite the impossibly long pauses between shots, the whole endeavor couldn’t have taken more than forty-five seconds. By the time the four of us had climbed down to the main floor, the guns went silent. In their wake was the dull sound of meat being pounded and the short yelps that could have come only from human mouths. The inevitable had come to pass, the beasts had stormed the gates, with all their might. I didn’t even bother looking to my compatriots to discern the moment. It was all so fast, but there was no question what was happening.
“Plan B! Plan B!” I began to yell to Garth, scuttling him toward the boiler room. I wanted it hot in there. I wanted it Texas hot. I wanted it hot like the very line of the equator. I didn’t want to simply defend myself: I wanted to see those monsters melting. I wanted them to be like the tigers in “Little Black Sambo,” pooled like butter on the floor. I didn’t care what else firing up the boiler would do, I was going to turn that thermostat as high as it would go and burn those beasts to the ground.
“I’ll do it.” Jeffree, his hand on my wrist, stopped me. “You don’t know nothing about anything mechanical, man. I’m not even trying to insult you. We’ll manage the boiler, even fix it if we have to. Leave this to the professionals. Leave this to Jeff Free.”
In that one moment, I believed Jeffree was every bit as heroic as he always told everyone he was. His jaw was so square, his forehead so shiny, the cowrie shells around his neck announcing a triumphant chorus as he spun around, possibly smelling his mechanical prey. I no longer saw a fool, an incompetent. This was a man. A silly man sometimes, sure, but a man nonetheless. Jeffree knew the dangers of his task, that if he was going to make a successful escape he would have to cross back through the BioDome to get to the snowmobiles. Jeffree knew this, and he took this nearly suicidal action anyway. Jeffree got to be the hero, and for my part, in that moment, I was actually happy to have him on our side. I would like to think that maybe I had never truly “gotten him” before this moment. Jeffree had simply stood outside the proper context. And Carlton Damon Carter caught him there in his element for digital posterity, both Jeffree’s heroic speech and his impalalike bouncing away toward danger. After Jeffree disappeared down the storage corridor, Carlton Damon Carter put down his camcorder, closed the LCD display screen, and then handed it to me. He didn’t say a word either, just pressed it into my hands, folded his own hands firmly around my own before giving them a squeeze. Carlton Damon Carter’s eyes, his actions, imparted everything. He knew that most likely this would not be a task they would return from. That if he didn’t give up his camera now, there was a good chance no one would get to see any of this.
“Film me too, as I run after him,” Carlton Damon Carter whispered. And then, chasing after his husband, he was gone.
Arthur Gordon Pym lay in our sailboat, a bottle of bourbon in one hand and my bag of bones in the
other. Whatever exploration he’d been making of the facility had been halted by his blood alcohol level. Fetal and clinging to the bag of the late Dirk Peters as if the remains were his to control, the man was completely oblivious to the coming storm. I didn’t bother waking him to get my treasure back, just grabbed it and swung it over my own shoulder for good measure. The sailboat was already too heavy to lift off the ground without Pym in it, so Garth and I dragged the boat along with us on the way to the exit. With the screams of the beasts echoing behind us, we could see their long and violent shadows along the corridor walls, and we pulled faster. As we passed the piles of bulk snack treats and liquid refreshments, Garth and I simply knocked the boxes into the sailboat on and around Pym, who offered not a peep of complaint, not even opening his eyes.
At the garage, the Karvels’ snowmobiles sat pristine and factory clean, looking as if they were virgins to the continent of powder that lay just outside the hatch door. As we tied the boat to the vehicles, a rope to each tow, we listened for sounds of an outside presence waiting for us when we opened the doors but heard none. No, all the sounds of intrusion were coming from inside the terrarium. The wailing, the aggravated howls, the metal clanging and glass breaking.
“We got to get the hell out of here, dog. We can leave the doors open, see if Jeffree and C-note make it out from a distance, but this sitting and shitting thing ain’t going to work,” Garth said, his eyes stuck on the door to the hallway behind us. And Garth was right. His face was covered in toothpaste, but he was right. Our gas tanks were full, the engines started. I was sitting on a bright pink bike with floral decals, but I didn’t even care at this point. We hit the door opener and were out onto the snow at full speed the moment the gate had risen high enough for us to duck through.