by Max Brooks
I hadn’t been up there in ages, not since I was scared and starving and half nuts. Now, clad in armor, with a full belly, a rested brain, and a cache of more items than I could store, I was finally in the state of mind to accept another treasure: the view.
It was hard to believe that I used to feel such a letdown looking out over this beautiful island. The beaches, the woods, the dots of red and yellow flowers among the tans, blues, and greens. And so many greens. I’d never really noticed how the darker leaves contrasted with the lighter grass which, in turn, couldn’t have been more different than the brass-tinged stalks of ripening wheat. What a sight. What a sensation.
The breeze alone was enough to give me pause. I’d been taking it for granted. Now, after spending at least half my time stuck down in the stuffy confines of the underworld, its gentle caresses were as delicious as fresh cake.
“Why didn’t I come up here more often?” I called down to Moo, and then, hearing her distant reply, realized I should have been asking a much more important question. “Why don’t I live here?”
As with so many of my critical decisions, this one came with a healthy dose of “duh!”
“Why am I cowering in a bunker like some kind of helpless refugee?” I asked Moo. “Mobs don’t attack me indoors. Well, zombies do, but they only attack the doors, no matter if they’re in a bunker or a house.”
House.
I tingled at the idea. A proper home aboveground. Civilized. Normal.
“New priority!” I proclaimed to the animals, and got right to work mapping out the foundation.
Construction took a full four weeks, which included acquiring all the necessary materials.
At first I considered stone. All that mining had filled several chests with it. The problem was that I didn’t have enough of the nicer speckled white and pink rocks for a whole house, and the dull, drab cobblestone was…well, dull and drab. I wanted a bright, cheery feeling that wouldn’t remind me of living underground. And so I settled on birchwood, two whole forests’ worth. I chopped down every single tree on the island, replanted saplings in the exact same spots, chopped them down again, and then replanted again. I hadn’t forgotten to restore the land to its natural state.
Constantly replanting saplings brought up the guilty memories of causing the extinction of oak trees. “So easy,” I reminded my friends halfway through my second replanting. “If I’d been as careful with oaks as I am with birch trees I could have just lived on apples.”
It was Rainy, whose “baa” gave me an answer.
“Good point, kiddo,” I said, planting another seedling. “If I’d preserved the oaks, I wouldn’t have needed to make new tools and new discoveries. Heck, you probably wouldn’t even be here.”
It was a profound truth that I’d come back to many times, that problems force progress.
“No, I’m not saying it wasn’t a mistake,” I quickly qualified to Moo, “but mistakes can be a pretty good teacher. Maybe the best.”
When I’d finished my second replanting, I had enough birchwood for the primary structure, and it was quite a structure! Twelve blocks long, twelve wide, twelve high, and divided up into four stories.
The first story was nothing but a grand entryway built right over the former site of my “HELP!” sign. Double doors opened onto a spacious room ringed by glass windows and lit by overhead lava. No joke, four blocks of molten rock encased in glass. The idea had sprung from the original reason I’d thought to build a house: the chicken coop!
I still had to figure out where to move my flock and with the hilltop gone, I was plum out of ideas. “What am I supposed to do?” I asked Moo, wishing I could scratch my head. “Make more island?”
“Moo,” she answered, which could only be taken for “Why not?”
I’ll say this for my mottled mate: she could bounce back ideas like sunlight off the moon.
“Why not,” I repeated, rushing back to my chests full of stone.
The goal was solid, but the method took some refining. Initially I tried placing one block at a time, diving down to the southern slope of the hill. Not only did it take forever, but each plunge brought up my first memories of nearly drowning.
There’s gotta be a better way, I thought after my nineteenth or twentieth dive. As is usually the case in this world, there was.
“If only,” I lamented to the animals, “I could just make a whole new beach in one quick step, you know, like I did by pouring lava over water.” Then correcting myself, said, “I mean water over lava.”
“Baa,” interrupted blackstone-colored Flint, forcing me to consider what I’d just said.
“Whoa,” I breathed. “Ya think?”
More “baas” and a “moo” sealed it.
“Mistakes are the best teachers,” I said, taking my empty buckets below. “Even if the mistake is a slip of the tongue.”
Of all the difficult, dangerous tasks I’d accomplished on this island, making more island turned out to be a cinch. Don’t ask me why the lava’s safe and cool in an iron bucket, or why it’s molten hot again the moment you pour it back out, or why when you pour it on water it creates cobblestone, not blackstone, but all those things happened just as I’ve described. Before I knew it I had a cobblestone platform jutting out from the southern shore of the hill. Not only was it big enough for a new coop, the fact that I could safely scoop the lava back up gave me another idea.
Three buckets later, I had my entryway lighting, which, by the way, illuminated a ground-level floor of blackstone. Ironically, the cooled rock had proved more difficult to obtain than its liquid variety. Eventually it took a pickaxe crafted from the last of my diamonds, but in the end I had a smooth, black, lava-lit entryway. And that was only the first floor.
One story up was my wraparound kitchen: a furnace in each corner with chests and crafting tables lining every wall. I learned that wooden slabs, the same kind that made my upper floors and ceilings, could also be used as shelves. I made eight shelves in total, two for each wall. I pictured how each would look with scrumptious, ever-fresh cakes on them, which would be infinitely more civilized than eating them off the floor.
The third floor was my grand bedroom. A double bed looked out across the carpeted floor. That’s right, carpet. Experimenting with wool taught me that two blocks side-by-side got me three thin, flat carpet squares that could be laid right over an existing floor. And in five colors: the standard wool colors of black, gray, and white, and red and yellow, from the two types of flowers. Remember when I’d tried to eat those flowers, and holding them in my hand had gotten me the potential to make dye? And remember when I’d crafted my first bed, and the white wool had changed to a red blanket? Well, both those memories clicked together into a multicolored checkerboard carpet lining the edges of my bedroom. Not the middle, mind you; the middle was reserved for my hot tub.
You heard me.
This invention was my architectural masterpiece. Recalling how my crafting table had torched on the canyon’s blackstone floor got me thinking about a safe way to transfer heat. The final product was a complicated but spectacular achievement that serviced three of the four floors.
It was the inner core of my entire structure; a transparent tower of glass, lava, glass, and water. It lit the first two floors and gave me an unheard-of luxury for the third. I couldn’t believe the sensation of dipping my body into that steaming pool. What decadence! It relaxed every muscle in my body. It worked out nerves I didn’t know I had. I loved my hot tub so much I even built trapdoors in the ceiling above it, so after a hard day’s work I could strip off my armor and drop right in.
Did I mention the top floor was my workshop? I built it larger than the other floors—fourteen-by-fourteen—and encased it in floor-to-ceiling fences. This allowed the heat from my furnaces to be carried away by the ocean breeze.
Like the kitchen, I stacked the corners with furnaces and lined the walls with chests, crafting tables, and my inimitable anvil.
Standing on the r
oof allowed me to see farther beyond the horizon, which in turn gave me another idea: a watchtower.
I’d already used some of my overflowing cobblestone to build an external staircase behind the back of my house. Starting on the former space of my earthen hut, it allowed me to zip from floor to floor in no time, and without ruining the uncluttered layout of my house.
Initially I thought I’d finish at the roof, but then seeing the view from up there, and seeing I still had a ridiculous surplus of cobblestone, I looked up at the passing clouds and thought, Why stop now?
Up and up I went, laying a new floor every ten blocks or so to break any accidental falls, and placing torches in open windows. Those windows let in progressively colder wind. By the next morning, I could feel my teeth starting to chatter. “Last floor,” I said, as the cobblestone in my pack ran out. Laying the last stone, I looked up to the square opening above and saw white. I had walked right up into a cloud.
I’m not being poetic here. I mean the tower was so tall that I was actually standing inside the white, wet mist of a moving cloud! As it slowly drifted past me, I looked down and gasped. My island was so small, just this little patch of green and brown among the endless blue. And that was the only land in sight. I was so high up that even the square edges of the horizon were visible, and yet there was nothing else but ocean.
I’m truly alone in this world, I thought, and the reaffirmation of that cold truth might have been the subconscious reason for my next and final addition to my mansion.
Like the tower, it was situated behind the house, to the right of the stairwell, and accessed through a doorway at the back of the first floor. It was a spacious room, constructed entirely of sandstone. I chose sandstone over birch for a very practical reason. It was easier to clean, and I needed this room to be as clean as possible.
After all, this was my bathroom.
To the right of the door was a sink, for washing my hands. In the rear center ceiling, I placed a trapdoor to air out all the bad smells. Directly underneath it, I placed another hatch in the floor. This was my toilet seat.
It really wasn’t a seat, just a cover for the toilet, and that invention, like the sink, consisted of a water cube directly under the hatch. Unlike for the sink, however, I dug out a diagonal tunnel running all the way to the sea.
And it worked! I dropped a cube of brown earth into the water, ran down to the beach, and watched it wash out into the open ocean.
“Moo!” I called, running from the beach back up to the house. “Moo, c’mere! You gotta see this.”
She snorted, clearly more interested in the patch of grass before her.
“No, for real!” I insisted. “You have got to see this.” When she didn’t respond, I pulled a stalk of ripe wheat from my belt. “Any takers?”
“Moo!” she replied, following me up the western slope of the hill. Maybe it was a little uncool to bribe her with food, but I knew she’d understand once she witnessed this achievement.
Leading her through the double doors, I waved the wheat at my bathroom monument. “How ’bout that?” I asked, explaining how everything worked.
“Moo,” she responded in a flat, euphoria-dampening tone.
“No, I know I don’t need it,” I admitted, “and I know I can’t use it but I built it because…” I struggled for an answer. “Because…I don’t know why, okay?”
I don’t know.
Stopping to think about my answer forced me to admit that I didn’t have one. Why had I gone through all this effort to build a room I would never use? I hadn’t even thought about it during construction. I’d just gone ahead and done it. Why? And why had I been so intent on showing it off to Moo?
Was there a part of my brain that was trying to use this room for another reason? A reminder of the deeper, more uncomfortable questions I’d sworn to someday answer, but was now trying to avoid?
When you’re trying to tell yourself something, listen! I should have realized that right then and there. What I shouldn’t have done was try to deny the confusion bubbling up uncomfortably from my gut. What I shouldn’t have done was try to change the subject. “Point is, I’m done building,” I announced, feeding Moo her wheat, “and this calls for a celebration!”
Rushing up to my bedroom, I grabbed a special tool from the chest. “And what better way to celebrate than with a roast chicken dinner.”
Maybe it was just timing. Maybe the hearts rising from Moo after her meal would have vanished anyway by the time I came back down with the axe. Or maybe it was an expression of her feelings, just like the long, low “moo” that followed.
“Don’t start in with me again,” I said, making for the door. “We had this discussion already.”
“Moo,” she continued, imploring me to change my mind.
“I know what I’m doing!” I snapped, heading down to the coop.
During my monthlong construction, I’d still continued to raise more fowl. Every time a wheat square ripened, every time I harvested extra seeds, I used them to grow the flock. Now I had over three dozen crammed against the straining fences.
Free food, I thought, wading into their midst, and I say “waded” because they were packed so tightly it was like trying to walk upstream. Some looked up at me as I approached, expecting, no doubt, to be fed. Even when they saw my empty hand, some continued to stare up at the falling axe.
They didn’t run.
They didn’t fear.
They just stood there, looking around, looking at each other, or continuing to look up at me as the iron cleaver chopped their squawking lives into loose feathers and plump pink carcasses.
I’ll never forget those eyes: so small, so trusting. I’ll never forget those high-pitched squawks.
There was no blood. One more quirk of this crazy world. I knew there should have been, though, remembering some buried metaphor about it being on my hands.
Finally, I was left with three baby chicks looking up at my notched blade.
“Free food,” I sighed, then brought the axe down for the last time…on the pen’s gate.
“Go on,” I told the hatchlings. “You’re free.”
The chicks wouldn’t budge. “Go on!” I yelled. “Go! Get outta here!”
They only meandered in small, lazy circles, as if the mass slaughter of their community had no effect on them.
“Okay, fine!” I barked, raising my weapon again. I chopped up the rest of the fence until there was nothing left but the cobblestone base. Only then did they casually peck over to the beach.
The cooked meat was soft and savory and it made me sick to my stomach. So this is what guilt tastes like, I thought between bites.
After dinner, I walked down the dusk-lit hill to my friends. At least I hoped they were still my friends. What would they think of me after what they’d seen? Was it even half as bad as what I thought of myself?
“I chose to make new lives and I chose to take them away,” I said, my eyes fixed on the setting sun. “I didn’t have to. I wanted to. I chose.”
At that moment Moo looked silently up at me. Did you learn?
“I did,” I said, refusing to meet her gaze. “I learned that nothing is free. Everything has a price, especially if that price is your conscience.”
Satisfied, Moo looked away.
“Make no mistake,” I continued, “I’m gonna cook and eat every last one of them. The only thing worse than taking their lives is wasting them. And unless I’m someday pushed to the brink of starvation with no other choices left, I swear I’ll never raise my hand against another life that doesn’t threaten mine.”
And at that moment, Moo shuffled just a little bit closer to me, offering a forgiveness I didn’t feel I deserved.
I’d like to say that it was a nightmare that woke me in such a funk. It would have been a nice excuse. But the truth is that, just like the first time, I didn’t remember anything. Even if I had, I doubt it could have competed with the horrible memories of what I’d done the day before. Still shroud
ed in guilt, still replaying those squawking cries, I slouched slowly downstairs, and practically collided with a creeper.
It was standing in the middle of the entryway, right in front of the open double doors, and vibrating with the hiss of a fuse.
Quick as lightning, I jumped back and off to the side, into the bathroom. The explosion was deafening: an earsplitting blast of splintering wood and shattering glass!
Unhurt, I twisted around to a sickening sight. The entryway was destroyed, all the windows gone, including the glass ceiling.
Molten lava was pouring down, covering the floor, blocking my exit. I slammed the bathroom’s wooden door shut, but it promptly burst into flames. I was trapped and I was naked. I’d taken everything off before going to bed. No tools to knock out an exit, not even a spare block of cobblestone to seal the doorway. I looked up at the ventilation hatch, too high to jump through, then down to my only other option: the toilet.
As the burning door disintegrated in a flood of flaming rock, I threw open the hatch and leapt into the potty. Instantly, the current took hold and flushed me through the sewage tunnel. I plunged into the sea, shot back up to the surface, and gasped.
My house was burning, lava sparks igniting wood. The expression “spreading like wildfire” suddenly took on new meaning as fresh planks caught in a chain reaction that threatened to consume the entire mansion.
Was there some way, any way, to smother the flames? Maybe a bucket of water? But all my buckets and reserve iron were either in the entryway or up in the workshop.
What to do? What to do!? The flames rose and spread, eating my beautiful home like a flickering, ravenous beast, and leaving, like the discarded bones of a meal, fireproof objects suspended in mid-air. Windows, chests, furnaces, all surrounded by cubes of flowing lava.
The hill was now a volcano. Blazing liquid oozed down the eastern slope before me, demolishing my precious garden. And on the western slope…
“Baa!”
THE ANIMALS!