by Arthur C.
Johann moved ever so slightly and the searing pain in his right leg made him wince. Franzi saw his expression and struggled not to show her own emotions. She placed a pair of black scruffles in his mouth. “We figured these would cheer you up,” she said.
“Umm, delicious,” Johann said, forcing a smile. “Almost as nice as the company I had last night.”
Franzi grinned. “I didn’t think you knew I was here. You hardly stirred the whole time… I hope I didn’t bother you.”
“Not at all,” Johann said. “It was delightful. It’s been a long time since I have had someone to cuddle with at night.”
“I couldn’t fall asleep in my hut, Uncle Johann,” Franzi said. “I kept worrying about you. I was afraid… anyway, I decided I wanted to hold and touch you one more time in case.
The girl turned away and tears began to flow down her cheeks.
“Come here, Franzi,” Johann said softly. “Let me hold you.”
The girl leaned over and put herself in Johann’s open arms. For a few minutes she wept silently. “Oh, Uncle Johann,” she said. “This is so terrible. I love you so much and there’s nothing I can do to help you.”
“It’s all right,” Johann said. “Don’t worry about me. Just concentrate on what you must do today.”
He knew what the girl was feeling. I too have experienced the horror, he thought, of being helpless in the face of the death of someone I loved. There is no equivalent agony in our existence.
He placed his hand under her chin and lifted her face from his chest. Her eyes were swollen and her nose was running. “You are a wonderful young woman, Franzi,” he said. “You have made these last years more fun than I could possibly have imagined.”
She looked as if she was going to start crying again. “Now go, child,” he said. “Just leave the scruffles here beside me. I can feed myself.”
JOHANN ATE THE scruffles slowly and pondered the hopelessness of his situation. He moved himself around very gingerly and verified, at least in his own mind, that both his leg and his hip were broken. I am not afraid of dying, he thought. But I will not permit myself to be a burden. If by chance the brankers do not come tonight, I will find some way to die quickly.
He squirmed on his mat until he again found a position where the pain was not too severe. Then, lying on his back, Johann indulged himself by remembering the best moments of his life. Apologizing in his mind to both Vivien and Maria, he returned in spirit to the days he had spent with Beatrice on their island paradise before Yasin’s appearance had shattered the harmony of their perfect life.
She was singing to him on the beach, and he was again enraptured by the sound of her magnificent voice, when his daydream was broken by Siegfried’s sudden appearance in his hut. His son was clearly upset.
“The storm is intensifying, Father,” he said. “The waves are huge. Franzi is terrified. She doesn’t think she can possibly swim out to the island. She wants to go to the caves, by herself if necessary.”
Johann shook his head. “The only guarantee of safety is to be away from the mainland,” he said. “You know that. Rowen and you must do whatever you can to help her in the water.”
“Rowen is frightened also,” Siegfried said. “I don’t think he’ll be much help.” He paced about the hut. “And I will need all my strength to make the swim.”
Johann studied his son. He is afraid, Johann thought. And not in control of the situation.
“So what are you suggesting, Siegfried?” Johann asked gently. “That none of you make the swim at all? Surely you know the kind of danger to which that exposes you. We have no evidence that the caves offer any kind of protection. For all we know, the brankers may have such an advanced sense of smell, or something similar, that they can find you wherever you are hiding.”
Siegfried sat down beside his father. “Rowen doesn’t think the brankers are coming. He constantly reminds me that they skipped two double full moon nights before their last attack. They’ve only missed one opportunity now. Why should we risk our lives in the storm—”
“That is very dangerous wishful thinking, Siegfried,” Johann interrupted, his voice rising, “and I have heard it every double full moon night since our second one here. The truth is we have no idea whatsoever what determines if the brankers are coming or not. Here is the record: they came the first time, but not the second. They came again on the third double full moon night, but not on the fourth or fifth. On the sixth they captured Vivien, Stephanie, and Kwame. Then they didn’t come the last opportunity.
“There is no discernible pattern in this behavior. We have speculated that perhaps the brankers have several different directions of flight, and don’t go in all of them on any single night. Or maybe they don’t attack at all on some double full moons. But we know nothing for certain except that if they come, virtually every living creature they find ends up dead.”
Johann paused for a moment to catch his breath. Siegfried squirmed without saying anything. “If you are determined to go to the caves,” Johann continued, “in spite of everything I have said, then I urge you to leave right away The climb will be difficult in this weather and you need to spend some time deciding exactly where to hide.”
He could stand the pain no more. Johann collapsed on his back on the mat.
“Thank you, Father,” Siegfried said, quickly leaving the hut.
The three of them returned in less than half an hour. “We’re going to the caves, Father,” Siegfried said. “We all wanted to come and say good-bye.”
Rowen bent down first and gave his grandfather a perfunctory kiss on the forehead. “For my part,” he said, “I fully expect to see you again tomorrow And then we’ll figure out what to do with your leg and hip.”
Siegfried kissed his father quickly on the lips and then stood up. He didn’t seem to know what to say “I love you, Father,” he blurted out awkwardly, after fidgeting for a while. “I think you’re a terrific man.”
Rowen and Siegfried left the hut, leaving Franzi alone with Johann. Tears were already streaming down her cheeks. “Dammit,” she said, wiping her tears away with the back of her hand. “I told myself I wasn’t going to start crying again.”
She composed herself and knelt down on the floor next to Johann’s mat. She took his hand and kissed it gently Then Franzi leaned over and kissed him softly on the lips. “You will always be my special uncle Johann,” she said. “I hope to see you tomorrow, but if not, I hope that you do not suffer—”
Her voice broke and she turned her face away. Johann reached out to touch her hand. “You have been a light in my life, Franzi,” he said. “Please be careful.”
Siegfried called, telling Franzi that it was time to depart. She stood up, tried to smile through her tears, and departed from the hut.
THEY HAD LEFT enough food and water within easy reach for Johann to survive for a day. He spent the passing hours allowing his mind to wander from subject to subject, in no discernible pattern, eating a snack or taking a drink whenever he felt like it.
By late afternoon the storm had ceased. The light filtering through the door cracks into Johann’s hut was now brighter, suggesting that most of the clouds had also disappeared. Johann did not know exactly what time it was, but he guessed it was only an hour or so before sunset. As he contemplated the possible arrival of the brankers, a cold tingle swept over his body making him forget temporarily about the pain. His heart began to beat at an increased rate and his breathing became labored.
This must be what it feels like, Johann said to himself, on the last night on death row in one of those American prisons. Johann started wondering what it would be like to die. “Like going to sleep and never waking up,” a philosophy professor had told him in Berlin.
“There is life after death, whether you believe in it or not,” he remembered Sister Beatrice saying to him.
“So what happens to someone like me?” he had asked her.
She had laughed. “You’d probably be classified as a virtuous
pagan,” she had said. “Dante put you in limbo, along with all the unbaptized children who died early.”
But will I see you, Beatrice? Johann suddenly thought. If so, I would gladly die right now. Or, even convert to Christianity. Whatever it would take. I would sell my soul to your devil for one more chance to see your face or hear your voice.
The light coming through the cracks in the door seemed to be dimming. Had a cloud passed in front of the Sun? Or was sunset and the rise of the double full moons now only minutes away?
Johann lay on his mat with his heart continuing to race. To distract himself, he pictured the cave area and hoped that his three family members were all now safely hidden inside. A distant, unfamiliar sound then shattered his mental image.
What had he heard? At first he couldn’t be certain. He lay very still for almost a full minute and then he heard the sound again. It was louder this time. And it was an unmistakable brank brank. There was no longer any doubt. The brankers were on the attack.
Waves of fear coursed through Johann’s body as the frequency and amplitude of the terrifying branker noises grew louder and louder. Soon the creatures were close enough that he could occasionally hear the beating of their wings. Each time his instincts sent him an overpowering panic signal, Johann took slow, easy breaths, and forced himself to remain calm.
Two or more brankers had landed in the village and were on a destructive rampage. Johann heard what he thought was the sound of first one hut, and then a second, being smashed and broken. The brank brank noises were virtually continuous for several minutes, so Johann was surprised when they suddenly diminished and there was quiet except for branker noises in the distance.
Have they gone? Johann asked himself. Is it possible that for some reason they have left this hut alone and missed me altogether?
His momentary hope was quickly dashed when he heard a new pair of sounds, first an odd squeal, and then a sound like footsteps just on the other side of his hut. A second squeal from near the door confirmed Johann’s worst fears. They know I’m in here, he thought, that’s why they have not yet attacked.
A few seconds later the door was suddenly pushed open and the front part of a monstrous head, most of it a solitary black eye whose moving fluid was contained behind a transparent membrane, thrust itself inside. The branker saw Johann immediately and nearly shattered his eardrums by emitting a terrifying brank brank. A similar answering scream from the outside of his hut, near where Johann’s head was lying on the mat, was followed by squeals of conversation between the two brankers who were ready to claim Johann as their prize.
The pair of brankers next began the task of widening the doorway, ripping the wood apart with their powerful talons. As he watched them, Johann wondered why they were going to all this trouble when it would have been so much easier to have simply destroyed his home altogether, as they had the others, and then to dig his body out from the debris.
They must want me to remain alive, Johann thought as he watched the hideous creatures at work. And they must be intelligent enough to know that I could die if the hut collapsed upon me.
In spite of his terror, Johann examined the brankers as they systematically tore apart the walls of the hut on either side of the door. He noticed that they actually had four additional legs behind the front talons, for mobility on land, and speculated that these comparatively undeveloped, thin, jointed legs were probably folded and stowed next to the body when the brankers were in flight.
When the exterior opening was wide enough that both brankers could enter the hut together, Johann saw a third branker land on the ground not far away A deafening exchange of branks ensued. One of the brankers who had been widening Johann’s doorway suddenly bolted and rushed toward the newcomer, who became airborne rather than engage in combat.
When the two brankers were again side by side, they approached Johann with small, mincing steps, almost as if they were enacting some kind of ceremony. White drool was pouring from each of their open mouths. Johann prepared to die, expecting that at any moment the branker talons would begin ripping him apart and putting chunks of his body into those hideous mouths with all the sharp teeth.
Instead each of the brankers slid its two talons under Johann’s mat and lifted slightly, to check the weight. Then they picked both Johann and his mat off the floor, backed up through the opening they had created, and laid him temporarily on the ground outside, where he could see the awesome beauty of the twin full moons.
He could also see a dozen or so of the brankers, some flying solo and some as pairs, cavorting in the sky overhead, intermittently screaming their characteristic brank brank. One pair coming toward the village from the hills was carrying an animal Johann had never seen before, something large and reddish in color, that was honking in distress as it struggled uselessly against the power of the four talons gripping its body.
Johann’s pair of brankers was also studying the sky and conversing in their odd little squeals. After no more than a minute or two, he felt their talons between his body and his mat. Their double wings began to beat furiously and they lifted him off the ground, each issuing a loud, triumphant brank brank as it rose slowly into the air. They flew in tandem, one behind the other, with Johann’s body just underneath them. The rear branker’s talons were extended as far forward as they would go, and were holding on to Johann’s thighs. The lead branker had stretched its talons backward and was grasping Johann under the armpits.
Although his fear never really abated, Johann’s primary feeling during the unbelievable flight was one of exhilaration. The brankers flew toward the west, their altitude continually increasing. Their speed was astonishing—Johann guessed that they were flying at least one hundred kilometers per hour. Above the hills they flew, then up and over the snowcapped mountains. From time to time, especially when a new pair of brankers carrying some other prize would come into view, Johann’s captors would trumpet a series of branks, showing their pride in their exotic prey.
The flight lasted almost an hour altogether. On the other side of the mountains was a wide, dense forest, and then a series of lakes. By the time Johann and his brankers had crossed the last of the lakes, they had already begun to descend. The sky around them was now swarming with branker pairs returning home carrying all kinds of booty. Although Johann did not have much flexibility of movement, and any major motion was accompanied by shooting pains from his hip or his leg, he did glance around to see if perhaps any of his other three family members had been captured. He did not find Franzi, Siegfried, or Rowen, but he did see an incredible menagerie of exotic flora and fauna, doubtless gathered from parts of this world to which Johann and his friends had never traveled.
Below them now was a brown barren surface, clearly visible in the double full moonlight, its emptiness broken only by occasional shrubs or other small growth. Scattered around this desert were ten or twelve tall brown mounds, each with a gigantic, thin cylinder rising a hundred meters into the air from its center. Johann noticed that the flight pattern around him was changing. Some of the branker pairs were peeling off and heading in the direction of a particular mound. His deduction that these mounds and cylinders were where the brankers lived was confirmed when his pair abruptly swooped downward, toward a cylinder located in the middle of the group.
They carried Johann directly inside the top of the open cylinder. He was overwhelmed by the activity and the noise that surrounded him. Branker pairs carrying plants and animals were flying this way and that in the crowded airspace. Johann heard hundreds of brank, and almost as many wails from the wide variety of creatures the rampaging brankers had brought back to their home.
The top dozen levels inside the cylindrical nest each had individual alcoves, or rooms, separated from one another by a wall that extended to the rim of the hollow center of the structure. These rooms, perhaps twenty of them on each level, completely encircled the nest. Johann’s branker pair knew exactly where they were headed. They dropped down four levels from the top and
thrust him firmly against the sticky back wall of one of the larger alcoves. One of his brankers next hovered in front of him for a few minutes, removing wall material with its talons and reworking it into something like a rope that it wound around Johann’s waist and then secured, on either side, against the wall behind him. Johann was eventually left alone, trapped against the sticky alcove wall like dozens of creatures above and below him.
The brankers had placed Johann in a standing position with his natural body weight on his broken hip and leg. He tried to change his position to relieve the excruciating pain, but he had very little success. His freedom of movement was severely limited, both by the thick sticky substance that was attached to his back and by the rope around his waist.
His pain was so severe that Johann felt certain that he was going to pass out. Fighting to remain alert for as long as he could, he attempted to examine what he could of the branker habitat. The walls on the side of his alcove prevented his seeing any of the adjacent rooms (although he could hear the creature on his left screaming continuously in a high-pitched whine), but Johann could see three levels of alcoves opposite him, forty meters away across the hollow cylinder. He was able to distinguish three ackyongs, two nepps, and one of the quilled creatures among the collection of plants, animals, and odd objects (including a table and hut wall from his village) occupying these other alcoves. Then he lost consciousness.
He awakened when he felt a branker talon on his back, pulling him away from the wall. His pair of creatures had returned and were apparently now preparing to take him to another location, for they had removed the rope around his waist and were using copious amounts of their drool to reduce the adhesiveness of the wall material.
Once Johann was free of his constraints, one of the two brankers opened a jar it had brought into the alcove, and dipped what looked like a rag into the liquid contents of that jar. The branker rubbed the rag thoroughly all over Johann’s body, starting at his feet. When it reached Johann’s face, the creature was actually surprisingly gentle with the rag, being careful not to put it in his eyes or mouth.