He went behind the car to the washing machine, grabbing the yellow broom lying next to it. He returned to the front of the car, raising the broom handle over his head menacingly like a sword, trying to look as intimidating as possible based on all of the cheesy action movies he watched when he was a teenager. Unfortunately, he only looked constipated due to the fact the starring actors in those movies he imitated had all of the talent of cardboard. The car laughed uproariously at Roger’s unintentionally goofy face. Now its tentacles waved around in mirth. He felt a rising surge of burning hatred as he stared at his sworn nemesis, how dare the stupid piece of junk laugh at his mighty pose!
“Goddamn it, I need to get to work, you smug asshole,” Roger yelled, shaking the broom like a waving finger a parent would use to scold a naughty child. “Are you going to cooperate or do I have to whack you? Because I’m more than ready to do it.”
The car’s rumbling laughter deepened as one of its tentacles darted toward Roger, trying to grab him. Roger was sure that would be followed by eating him in one huge gulp. He jumped away from the creature and landed on top of the tentacle. Roger grinned evilly as he stabbed the limb with the end of the broom handle. A dull roaring filled the garage as Roger repeatedly attacked the tentacle, whistling a merry tune. The car quickly yanked the injured limb away, causing Roger to fall flat on his butt. Roger rubbed his gluteus maximus as he stood up. The injured tentacle merged with the rest and formed an organic five-foot-length drill tapered off into a point. A six-foot-long, six-inch-thick tube of tissue connected the other end of the drill to the front of the car. He stared at the drill for a moment, not sure if he should be impressed or run and scream.
“Wow, it looks like you’re definitely overcompensating for something,” he said before he jumped out of the way at the last second. The drill, which had rotated straight at him, embedded in the four-inch-thick garage door. The car’s appendage tried to yank itself out of the door but its connecting tentacle flopped around like a drunken human attempting to dance. Roger took a turn at laughing out loud at the funny sight.
He placed both of his feet on the limb, idly wondering if he would be able to get rid of the stain of supernatural blood off of his nice black wingtip shoes. He gave another of his trademark creepy grins as he stabbed at the base of the drill with the broom handle.
The car screamed out in pain as bright green blood splattered across the gray granite floor. Roger hoped his wife wouldn’t freak out too badly about the mess, although he had the sneaking suspicion he was going to have to clean the mess on his own. It tried to wiggle out from under Roger’s weight, but the latter simply used his feet to press down on its limb, making a watery, squishing noise. It felt like pressing into an overripe, watery tomato. He really hoped the car’s fluids wouldn’t seep into his shoes. He hated it when his socks got wet, regardless if the fluid soaking it was water or alien juices.
A soft farting sound filled the air as Roger stabbed at the connective tissue, a clear fluid spilling out of the wound. He looked up to see if the drill was making any progress in getting out of the garage door. The drill moved up and down so it could successfully get out of the hole that trapped it. Roger assumed that its next course of action would be to skewer the pesky human like a shish-ka-bob.
Roger’s stomach clenched in fear as the drill moved faster and faster, making the hole in the garage door bigger. If he didn’t get his butt in gear and sever the limb, he would suffer a very painful, messy death at the hands of a huge, organic tongue from the mouth of his car. Already, he could see the awl loosening itself from the hole in the garage door.
It’s flailing splattered green blood all over his nice black suit. He groaned in frustration. Goddamn it, this was my favorite outfit! I’m never going to get these damn stains out of it, he thought. The car’s movements became frantic, wiggling the appendage like a sentient tooth.
The drill freed itself from the garage door with a high-pitched roar of triumph that nearly burst Roger’s eardrums. It rose above, ready to pin him to the ground and grind him into hamburger. The rotating tongue quivered in anticipation of splattering the walls with human blood while listening to its victim scream. Of course, with the human dead, the pampering would end as Roger’s wife would plot a bloody revenge against the car. But foresight had never been one of the creature’s strong suits.
With a scream, which sounded more like a whiny shriek than a masculine roar of defiance, Roger stabbed at the limb with all the speed and strength he could muster. His blow severed the limb before the car turned him into human paté. The drill’s body went slack and fell to the floor with a wet plop, splattering green blood all over the front of the garage door, making the room even messier, if that was at all possible. Roger watched its death throes before leaning on the wall, taking a few deep breaths. Exhaustion overtook him as he slid down the wall, not caring if he got his back or his butt dirty in the process. Monster blood and human sweat already covered his suit, so what did it matter? It would be just one more hard-to-clean stain to complain about during laundry time.
What the car’s bloodthirsty tendencies proved was the utter uselessness of trying to tame the damn thing. He took a couple of minutes to catch his breath before he took out his cell phone. The runes carved on it prevented the magical radiation from bringing the cell phone to life.
I should’ve asked the guys to put some of those runes on my car. Then the whole damn ordeal wouldn’t happen in the first place, Roger ruefully thought as he waited for one of the other cult members to answer him. One of the few advantages of being in a group devoted to the Many Arms of the Swirling Vortex was the runes liberally decorated on their cell phones. They ensured a strong worldwide service area and a self-recharging battery.
Thankfully, it only took a few seconds for one of his fellow cultists to answer him. “Hey Roger, what’s up?” A cheery male voice said on the other end.
“Hi, Mark,” Roger said, feeling like a freeloader as he began his request. “I’m running late because my car just tried to murder me again. I had to kill the son-of-a-bitch. Can you give me a ride this morning? Looks like I’m going to need to go car shopping, and this time I’ll get one that likes me!”
Tribe
Mark Wolf
Editor: Don’t assume that everyone wants to rule the world.
The rat tasted just like rat, oily, tainted with a rotting-meat aftertaste. Boiled in a meat stew of pup-dog, cat, Kalij pheasant, and turkey, and simmered in coconut milk with breadfruit and macadamia nuts, I thought I wouldn’t be able to taste it. I was wrong. Oily, tainted rat.
The tribe’s stews used the entire animal but the hair and the squeak. I held the offending member in my fingers—half a rat thigh with leg and feet attached—in front of my face and examined it by the fading light of the campfire. Turned it this way and that; tried to imagine it as baby mongoose. Not much difference between them really, when you come right down to it. Both are happy carrion-eaters.
Back a few years ago, before the burning time, I remember seeing a long trail of mongoose carcasses stretched across the pavement of Hwy. 11 from one side to the other, each representing a poor unfortunate that had joined the smorgasbord line, preying on the kin that had gone before. Hwy. 11 had been one of the busiest roads on the Big Island of Hawaii back in the old pre-burning days.
Sheba, my pit-lab cross, stared hungrily at me from across the fire, eyes expectant. I tossed her the thigh. Snap. Disappeared in midair. I wondered if she realized that two of her latest litter swam in our stew. Probably. Yet, here she was, at the stewpot, all skin and bones and sagging teats. She’d nursed nine pups, but only two hadn’t gone into the stewpot. The two best hunters. If they weren’t successful in the tribe’s hunt tonight, they’d be in tomorrow’s pot.
“Davy. I saw that,” Jenny said. I started, looked over at her, guilty at getting caught, looked down. I should’ve offered her the rat piece; she carried a baby after all, Mace’s baby and my nephew. Her child represented the t
ribe’s future, even if at times it didn’t feel to me as though we had much of one to look forward to.
I raised my head slowly. Jenny smiled at me.
“I won’t tell Mace. Just be more careful. If he catches you feeding your mutt out of the common pot, he’ll kick your ass.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry.” Mace, my older brother and the tribe’s leader, frowned on anything that didn’t put the tribe first.
And he’d hand me my teeth if I tried to argue that keeping Sheba strong enough to hunt served the tribe. To him, a dog represented just so much protein, nothing more. If one were to occasionally corner a pig for the spearing, so much the better, but he didn’t believe in keeping dogs around just for hunting.
I could hear Sheba’s pups off in the distance baying. Their sire had been a wild dog with a bit of Rhodesian in him. I knew that because the pups had that backward running spinal ridge fur that Rhodies are known for. Great pig hunters, Rhodies.
One of the keikis a few yards behind me in the shed coughed. An auntie shushed her—hummed a lullaby. Another child coughed. There were nearly thirty children and as many non-hunters bedded down in the shed. I hoped the cough had to do with the vog and not another cold or flu. Those seemed to constantly run rampant through our little tribe community.
The evening air had a snap to it hinting of frost or snow in the higher elevations of Mauna Loa. At nearly thirteen-thousand-feet high, the volcano could get snow nearly any time of the year. I decided that I probably should build up the fire a bit later in the night for the returning hunters. They’d be sweat-soaked and chilled.
The skies overhead were clear and star-filled with the spiral of the Milky Way very obvious. Now that there were almost no electric lights on the island, except for a few places that had solar panels and batteries, stars always filled the sky except during vog.
Jenny snored lightly. It was my duty to stay up as guard for the children, though with my bum leg and my eighteen tender years, I probably wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight if the Honomalino or Naalehu tribes raided us.
They would be after the children, particularly the girl children, to increase their tribes’ populations and make them even stronger. They were already too large for us to fight. We kept an uneasy peace with both groups, trading breadfruit, oranges, other citrus, vegetables, including dry land taro, pakalolo, and roasted coffee beans, and occasionally scrounged goods from the old houses in Ocean View for their dried fish, mac nuts, coconuts, and smoked meat.
The smoke from the fire squirreled around. My bad leg ached and rather than trying to move out of the occasional smoke wisps, I just shut my eyes from time to time.
* * *
My horse, Sybille, ran toward me when I called her. Overhead, in the night, the storm raged, thunder crashed, and lightning lit up Sybille’s dry, wind-lashed pasture on South Point Road.
I could hear Mace shouting my name at the same time I called Sybille. As she galloped closer to me, her skin and muscle began falling from her bones. She reared up before me, fleshless except for her head. One second I was beneath her hooves, the next I was falling once again from her back, knowing all the while how badly my leg would be shattered when I hit the ground. I started to choke—and woke up.
“You’re dead, idiot!” Mace shouted, his hands still around my throat.
“Leave me alone!” I shouted back. I pushed him away. Even though he was in his twenties, I was a strong kid, in my upper body anyway. I looked at the fire. It had burned down quite a bit, so I’d been asleep for some time. A couple of new guys, locals I didn’t know all that well, added wood to the fire. Mace gave me a disgusted look and stood up, turned his back to me, and directed a couple of the hunters to put a small pig over the fire.
Was that all they’d got? No, there was another small pig. The tribe would eat for another day and the pup-dogs would be around for at least another hunt.
Mace watched the two new guys closely. Mitch and Kaipo were their names. I knew he didn’t trust them—thought they were spies for the Honomalino tribe. He was probably right. They’d showed up a week ago, said they’d had a falling out with one of the Honomalino chiefs. Possibly. Thing was, falling outs in the larger tribes meant retribution in the old Hawaiian way of settling differences. A club to the head. Their story just didn’t add up.
That’s why Mace kept them close—so he could keep an eye on them. He wouldn’t let them go haring off by themselves to locate our dispersed taro fields, vegetable gardens, or orchards. If they were spies, all they’d be able to report on was the lousy hunting abilities of our little Kahuku tribe. Mace could care less about that.
The air stank of singed pig hair. I’d hoped maybe they’d dig an imu and have roasted pig. No such luck. Stews stretched further. My pup-dogs wiggle-danced their way up to the fire, all excited and proud. I hid a grin. Mace hadn’t said anything nor did he pull out his war club and dash the dog’s brains out. They must have been helpful. My suspicion was confirmed when Mace stepped back to the fire and stirred the pot, noting how few scraps were left in it. He turned to me.
“Make yourself useful and dump this out for your dogs. They done alright. Clean the pot thoroughly afterwards. I don’t want any of us getting sick.”
I nodded, hid a smile, suddenly happy. This was as close as Mace ever got to complimenting the pup-dogs. They must have been helpful, indeed. “Okay, will do. Anything else?”
“How much sleep did you get?” More of a look of concern than disdain from him. Was he going soft?
I looked at the sky. False dawn. Another hour perhaps before real dawn. I turned back to him. “Probably three hours.”
“Okay, once you clean the pot, bed down. You’re going to stand watch again tonight; hopefully, this time you’ll stay awake all the way through it.” He reached over and punched me in the arm, hard. I winced and rubbed it. It hurt like hell, but it also felt a bit like awkward love. I’d take it that way any day.
“I won’t let myself fall asleep tonight,” I said.
“See that you don’t.” Trace of a secret smile.
I wondered about him. As hard as our life now was since the world went to hell, there were times that he seemed to prefer it over the days before the missiles flew. I saw a trace of Dad’s smile when he turned toward Jenny. She was stretching and yawning. She’d probably go back to sleep after she exclaimed over the hunters’ prowess.
I watched the two interact, saw him place his hand on Jenny’s belly. They’d only been married a little over a year, right after Mace had returned from Afghanistan and a month before the missiles launched. More of Dad’s smile. Made me think of the last time I saw him, just before he jumped on an island commuter to Oahu for a business trip.
No one knew what prompted Korea and China to join hands with Iran and launch nukes. Well, Iran and Korea were understandable. China, though, I still didn’t quite understand what the thinking was there.
Here the U.S. was their biggest trading partner, and they nuked us. I even used to play World of Warcraft and other computer games with some Chinese kids. Good players and pretty cool. I sometimes wondered if they’d lived through our retaliatory strikes. Probably not. Maybe the Chinese just wanted to be the only game in town instead of one of the top players. Whatever they wanted, it didn’t matter anymore. What they got was irradiated.
We’d been sorta lucky in Hawaii. Dad was probably dead, though. Ground zero in a Korean sub missile launch. Word had it that it’d been a small nuke and mainly took out Pearl Harbor. Our fleet had been out at the time so North Korea had been the first place they’d sailed to. North Korea probably glowed at night now.
“Hey, Davy. Did you hear?”
I turned around, limped over to shake hands bruddah-style with my best friend, Rudy, all two hundred forty pounds of local Hawaiian-Portagee.
“Hear what, dude?”
“Mace didn’t tell ya? Ah, man. I got the biggest pig. No, check it. Your pup-dogs practically ran it onto my spear.”
“Wish you coulda been there, man,” he said, “it was sick.” He looked down at my bum leg.
“Me, too. Maybe in six months.” I frowned, remembering last night’s dream. Sybille had tossed me and shattered my leg when an axis deer had sprung out of the tall grasses on her pasture edge and startled her.
I’d had one operation to repair it and had been scheduled for two more. But war intervened and there no longer were hospitals to go to. I’d just have to heal the best I could on my own.
Sybille had been one of the first of the livestock along South Point Road to go into the pot. As the tribe grew, other livestock on the farms from Kahuku to Naalehu, a distance of around ten miles, joined her.
“Hey, dude, you okay?”
I snapped out of my memory stroll. “Yeah, man. I’m just feelin’ so useless, though. And Mace caught me sleepin’ on guard duty.”
“Again?” Rudy shook his head at me.
I nodded, shoulders droopin’. “Yeah.”
Rudy stepped closer, whispered, “I could get ya’ a little ‘keeper-upper’ if ya’ wanna?”
I shook my head, gave him my best “shut up” look. “Nah, don’t even talk about it. Mace would banish you if he thought you had ice. You know that.”
“No worries, man,” Rudy said. “It’s the last of my old stash. I only kept it around for—well, things like what you were talkin’ about.”
“Forget it. I’m just gonna have to start sluggin’ down the java at night, that’s all. At least we got plenty of that.”
“True, dat.” And it was. We had coffee and pakalolo plants at every one of our dispersed garden plots. Both tended to help in close trading with the other tribes.
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