I wake thinking I have dreamed this horror, but it’s real. My head feels heavy, stuffed with gummy ooze. I see hazy blue light shot through with blackness, as if some great light above me is swinging back and forth on a long string. It makes me dizzy. The stench is overpowering, so caustic that I dry-heave.
I can’t move. As I piece together the light and shadows as they crawl across the landscape, I see that I’m lying in a heap of corpses. Someone’s hand lies heavily on my face. I taste bile. I spit and slaver instead. A deep, shuddering sob bubbles up inside of me, so powerful I think I might burst with it. Out in the darkness, among the oozing piles of waste and half-rotten body parts, I see the dim shape of something terrible moving among the piles. I have met this monster before, in some other life, some other time. I know this moment in my bones.
I try to pull myself free of the bodies around me. They have cushioned me after my long fall through the darkness. How long I fell, I don’t know. Of all the things I don’t want to remember, that long fall is among them, but it comes back in terrible waves: a slimy, guttering slide to death. My hands are covered in grime. My fingernails are bloody, slathered in mucus from trying to grip the walls of the garbage funnel and slow my fall.
Now I want nothing more than to be free of the bodies that saved my life. A few paces away, I see something else moving. The blue light overhead swings back, and I see Maibe on her hands and knees, spitting bile or blood onto the rotten, uncertain ground beneath her.
The great hulking thing that wanders beyond the next rise of corpses grunts, then sighs. Everything around us seems to shake and tremble as it trundles forward.
I wave to Maibe, but she must not be able to see me. And then I go still, for the monster is upon us.
Maibe raises her head as the great shape of the thing rumbles toward her. I can see only its general outline. It’s an enormous beast, fifty paces or more tall, and has four great front arms, powerful haunches, and the snub of some tail. It lumbers forward. Maibe babbles something that is half-scream, half burst of ragged breath.
The light swings away. The monster grabs Maibe’s body. It takes her head into its massive bony fingers and pops Maibe’s head from her torso as if she’s brittle as a dry stick. It tosses both pieces of her into its mouth. The crunching of the body in its powerful jaws is so loud, I feel it in my own bones.
The monster groans and shifts, causing the bodies around me to tremble again. One corpse rolls off the top of the pile.
The monster snorts and shambles closer to the pile of death that surrounds me. I hold my breath, shaking so hard, my whole body feels like one open wound.
I feel its hot breath on me. Snuffling. Reeking. The light swings back, and I see the face of the thing illuminated for the first time. I bite back a scream, gnawing on my tongue so hard, I taste blood.
It has a roughly human face, a bulbous nose, and a wide-lipped mouth full of jagged teeth, yet there is just one eye, one great yellowish eye that sits at the center of its forehead. A tangle of thick, matted hair is heaped across its massive shoulders. The first set of forearms are the largest, each wrist as big around as my whole body. The hands have just three fingers: a thumb, an index finger, something like a little finger, the smallest as long as my whole arm.
The monster snorts again in my direction, its eye rolling in its socket, searching for . . . what? Movement?
It paws at the pile of corpses with its three-pronged fingers, yanking bodies up. It pops off the heads and eats them. One of the bodies is still alive, like Maibe, and screams.
The monster snorts at it. It makes a deep, regular grunting sound, like laughter.
It plays with that one for a while, tossing her among its hands, slamming her into the piles of corpses until the screams go silent. I don’t want to know who it is. I hope I never met her.
The munching goes on and on. Eventually, the monster snorts a final time at the disturbed pile of bodies around me and shambles off. I lie still and strain to hear it until I can hear nothing. Then I choke on a sob, because I don’t know what else to do but sit in my misery. It would have been a kindness to kill me above. A kindness for me to die in the fall. But the world is not kind.
“Zan?”
It’s Prisha’s voice. “Where are you?” I say.
I try to pull myself clear of the bodies again, my leg and shoulder throbbing. “Can you see me? Where are you?” I ask.
“I can’t move,” Prisha says. She sounds at least a dozen paces away. An impossible distance, in the shape I’m in.
“Is anyone else alive?”
“It ate Soraya,” Prisha says. “Lord of War, take mercy on the fallen. Lord of War, let us die here. Let me die, Lord.”
I hear someone else take up the prayer, somewhere deep in the pile of the dead and almost-dead. I didn’t know Soraya. I’m glad of it.
Maybe we’ll all get lucky. Maybe we’ll die of our wounds before the monster comes back. I want to believe in a Lord of War that gives all what they deserve, but I fear that—among these people—I am indeed getting my due.
I try to surrender myself to true darkness. Maybe I’ll bleed out. But if I bleed out, who will rescue Jayd?
It’s that thought that stirs me. I open my eyes. Darkness won’t come.
But the monster returns.
It shambles among the dead, picking through them like sampling some fine banquet. Its massive eye fixes on a body near me. I hear a rambling prayer and a squeal.
It’s Prisha.
I watch the monster waggling her body high above the ground. It gnaws off one of her legs while she shrieks. I expect it to eat her the way it did Maibe, but instead it lumbers up on its haunches and grabs something dangling from above them, some tentacle or tendril. It wraps Prisha up in the thing, knotting it around her torso, and leaves her there, bleeding and struggling, until she dies or passes out. I can’t tell which. I hope she is dead.
The monster trundles off, leaving Prisha to hang like bait on a line for something far worse, far larger, and I don’t like my imagination then. Not at all.
I don’t know how long it’s been when I hear Prisha again. I’m sweating and burning with what feels like a terrible fever. I hope that maybe this is all this is; some fever dream.
Prisha wails. I don’t know how she has the strength for it. She should know better. She’s just going to draw the thing back. Maybe that’s what she wants. Like me, she just wants this all over.
Her wailing continues. Screams ripple out over the landscape, far off, which makes me wonder how many more have been pushed down here from other parts of the world, still alive.
I grit my teeth. I have two choices: to wait for death or to fight it. No one is coming for us. There is no one to save us but ourselves.