Women and Other Monsters (3 page)

There were screams outside and the sound of something crashing toward them. 

The old woman looked up, startled, “Him not supposed to be here so soon.  Hurry!”  She began chanting and ordering Clarissa to drink faster. 

Clarissa finished another ladle and her head began to spin.  Bile spooled up from her stomach and into her mouth, but still she swallowed more.  Finally, the ladle scraped the bottom of the pot and the old woman grabbed Clarissa’s hand.  She sliced Clarissa’s palm and shook out a few droplets of blood onto the dirt at the center of the circle.  

A pearl white hand grabbed the fabric of the hut at the entrance and tore it aside.  Henry Jim rose up in defense, but the pale man swatted him aside.  The old woman raised her fist and said, “You cannot keep her!  She do not belong to you!” 

Gauna rushed forward to grab her, he stepped inside the circle and instantly stopped moving. 

“Now, child, out of the tent while he is bound!”

Clarissa crawled past his legs for the entrance, sliding out of the tent and collapsing in the dirt.  The old woman scurried out behind her and lifted her dagger over Clarissa’s heart.  “Are you prepared?”

“Yes!” Clarissa begged.  “Do it!”

***

Francis Jennings stampeded through the tent city, yelling for his wife.  He raised his voice high over the screaming slaves running past, trying to escape the worker’s.  Jennings looked at the far end of the encampment and screamed.  An old negress stood over Clarissa, stabbing her repeatedly.  Jennings lifted his rifle and fired, sending a bullet through the old woman’s skull, but Clarissa did not move.     

The next morning, they hanged ten slaves from the branches of the tallest trees on the plantation.  All went to their death swearing they had not even been at the camp during the incident.  The house negro, Henry Jim, was lashed until the muscles of his back were exposed.  The overseers hanged him upside down by his ankles and left him for the carrion crows to finish.   

Clarissa Rutherford Jennings was buried at the edge of her father’s tobacco plantation near an apple orchard.  Mr. Paul told the mourners that it was the first place she had brought him to when he arrived there fresh off the boat, and longing for his family.  He told them a story about watching Clarissa dance around an apple tree in a way that made him believe he’d found a new home.  He wept too bitterly to finish the story, and was escorted away.  As he passed Mr. Rutherford he patted the old man on the shoulder, but there was no response.  Mr. Rutherford remained silent until he asked to be taken back to the house before the service was finished.   

Francis Jennings touched the cross erected over his wife’s grave and lowered his head, saying one final prayer before leaving.  He did not look at her grave again as he returned to the house. 

An hour later, Clarissa awoke. 

***

The bottom of my boat bounces on the riverbed beneath and I know that we are close to shore.  There are warnings carved into the trees along the bank, telling travelers to go no further.  Swollen bodies float past my boat and I push them away with my oar, sickened by the sight of them.    

“My father came here once before,” I say.  “He told me about this place.  The Christians heard of it from a local village and sent word home.  White men came, dressed like princes.  I have never seen such men, but my father described them as draped in gold and the furs of strange animals.  They had soldiers with them. Some of them brought their whole families.  They paid riverboat men ten times what it cost to be anywhere else on the river.

My father only took the journey once, and made more money than he could earn in a whole year.  He asked the man why he wanted to go to such a terrible place.  This man say he heard that Gauna walked the earth here, and would grant eternal life to whoever was brave enough to seek it. 

My father called this man a fool and told him Gauna does not grant requests.

‘He will for me,’ the white man say.  ‘He will for me.’

My father let this white man off at the shore and waited for him to return until evening came.  The white man did not return.  My father left and never went back.  He was stopped on his way home by bandits who knew he had money, and beat him until he could not see.  He could never be a boatman again.”   

I stuck my oar in the mud beneath the boat and said, “I can go no further, and I will not wait for you.  If you have changed your mind and want to come back with me, I will return your money.” 

The hooded one pulled herself toward the edge of the boat, about to fall into the water.  I lifted her over the side and set her down carefully on the beach.  She wormed her way up the beach like an animal crawling on its belly.  I pushed away, sloshing through the water with my oar, rowing for awhile until I chanced a look back.  

At first I thought it was a white man walking toward the woman, but then I saw that it was not.  She reached up to him, and Gauna bent down to lift her into his arms.  He removed her robes and threw them into the water, touching her face as if he were her lover.  Then he carried his woman into the dark shadows of the jungle. 

When I was a boy, my father told me that in the days of his great grandfather, the white men came and traded gold with the kings of Africa in exchange for the people who lived here.  The white men treat these people like cattle, but forget that Africa is old.  Her people are an old people, and their Gods are old Gods.  The white men not know that some of the Gods follow their people onto those big boats too.

I think about this bag of gold at my feet, enough to buy me anything I could possibly imagine.  I wonder how this woman got so much, and think about those ancient Kings taking bags of gold in exchange for so many of my people.  

I picked up the sack and threw it into the water, watching it sink below the surface.  The splash created ripples that sent the white flowers floating away from my boat.

Codename: Omega

Episode One: SUBJECT 129 (1918)

Technical Sergeant James Scott planted his foot on an injured German soldier’s helmet to launch himself up the trench wall.  Someone shouted, “Go, go, go!  We’ve taken their front line!”  Mortar bombardments sent clumps of dirt flying into his face as Scott scrambled up the traverse, when a German bullet punched through his right shoulder. 

Scott dropped to the dirt.  He struggled to get back up and stay in the fight, peering through thick artillery smoke, trying to see how far he was from the next trench. 
I’ll find it if I just keep moving
, he thought.  A bullet bounced off the brim of his helmet, searing his face with chunks of hot metal.  German rifles cracked and bullets slammed his torso, stinging like hot knives.  Scott gurgled and dropped to the ground.  He rolled over the lip of the next trench and slid down the dirt wall.   

Allied soldiers pouring over the ledge landed on top of him, crushing him with their boots in the unseen panic of the assault.  Scott died underneath his fellow soldiers.  He was twenty-three years old. 

***

Medical personnel evacuated the dead from the trenches at night.  They placed James Scott’s bullet-ridden corpse in a covered Army transport and drove it to a secure staging area in Bellicourt. Scott’s body was laid on the floor beside dozens of others in long lines, and female nurses walked up and down the aisles of corpses, checking their dog tags.   

An Army Major walked behind them, jotting down each soldier’s rank, battalion, and cause of death.  His charts went to a clerk in Washington DC, who checked another chart that listed which medal to send the soldier’s family on behalf of their sacrifice in America’s Great War.

The Major came to the body of Technical Sergeant James Scott, making a quick notation and about to move on when something moved.  The Major stopped cold.  The dead man was sitting up. 

***

The dead man ran screaming through the facility, smashing into trays of medical supplies as guards and doctors raced after him.  A guard ran in from outside and dove for Scott’s knees, but Scott shook him off like George Gipp driving through a defensive line to score a touchdown.  Scott leapt onto the back of the same military transport that had brought his dead body to the base.  He clung fast to the bumper while the guards beat him over the head and hands with clubs.  

They piled onto him until he finally collapsed.  The guards stomped him with their boots but Scott roared and pressed up from the floor, lifting twenty men into the air.  He grabbed the nearest guard and picked him up off the ground.  The guard screamed as Scott hurled him across the facility, smashing him into a support beam with a sickening crunch.      

A doctor raced toward the crowd with a dripping morphine needle, screaming, “Hold him still!”  He wrapped his hand around the collar of Scott’s bloody uniform and jabbed the needle forward at the bulging vein on the soldier’s neck, when the entire group of guards and doctors collapsed on top of one another. 

The doctor stood up, still clutching the collar of Scott’s uniform, but as he ripped it through the throng of people, it was empty.  He started pushing everyone out of the way, trying to get to the bottom of the dog-pile.  The man was gone.  “Look around,” someone said.  “He’s got to be here somewhere.”

They searched under the trucks and among the dead bodies until a scream erupted from outside the building.  A sheet-white nurse staggered through the door and said, “A naked man just ran past me into the woods.  I don’t know where he came from.  He didn’t come from anywhere.  He just appeared out of thin air.”

They found him shivering underneath a tree.  The doctor injected him with the needle of morphine and put his lab coat over Scott’s shoulders.  “Everything will be all right, soldier.”

Scott clutched the lapels of the coat tight around his chest and said, “I don’t feel very good.”  Blood spilled out of his nostrils and Scott’s eyes rolled up in his head before he dropped to the ground. 

“Is he dead?” one of the guards said.  “Again, I mean?” 

The doctor bent over Scott and checked his pulse.  He shook his head and barked, “Get this man back inside and call base command.”

***

Half an hour later, a long trail of black cars arrived.  The man who stepped out of the second car made everyone outside snap to attention.  General “Blackjack” Pershing, Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Force, did not bother to return their salute.  He hurried past them into the building and said, “Where is he?”

The guards pointed at the office where James Scott was sitting, staring at the rows of dead bodies.  The young soldier looked up at Pershing as he walked in and said, “Was I one of them?”

The General took off his hat and sat down.  “That is what they tell me, son,” he said.  “Either someone seriously screwed up in that evaluation or you are a goddamned walking miracle.”  He bent forward to look at the bullet hole in Scott’s chest and said, “Do you mind?”

“No,” Scott said.

Pershing touched the bullet hole and looked at it from the front and back, realizing his could see his fingers wiggle on the other side of the young soldier’s body.  He inspected the raw wound across Scott’s right cheek and said, “How do you feel?”

“Cold,” Scott said.

Pershing stuck his head out of the door and said, “Get this man a blanket and some clothes!”  He wiped his hand across his face with a handkerchief and said, “What can you tell me about this?”

“Nothing,” Scott said.  “I don’t remember anything.”  He looked down at his dog tags and said, “Not even this name.”

“Okay,” the General said.  “I need to contact some people.  Can you excuse me for a moment?”

Scott looked out at the bodies again and said, “Take your time, sir.”  

***

They sailed him back to the United States aboard an experimental submarine.  The sub docked in New Jersey and Scott was escorted off of the sub by a group of men in black suits holding submachine guns.  “Where am I going?” he asked repeatedly, but the men did not answer.  They packed him in the back of an Army Jeep and drove him to a small farm outside of Atlantic City where a bi-plane sat idling in an unmarked field. 

He was packed into the back seat of the plane without a word.  The pilot pulled back on the lever between his legs and they took off racing through the wheat grass and corn stalks.  The pilot looked back and said, “Hold on!” just as the plane’s engines roared and they went soaring into the sky.  

He changed planes three times, each time it was the same.  Men in suits who carried guns while escorting him onto the next plane without a word.  From the sky, he watched the landscape below change from lush green fields and streams to what looked like long stretches of flat red rock. 

The heat became so intense that Scott took off his scarf and helmet.  He shielded his eyes from the sun as the plane descended into the barren wasteland of a flat desert.  

The men waiting for him weren’t wearing suits.  They were dressed in white lab coats and PH gas helmets, the kind made of loose rubbery full-face masks except for the wide circles around the eyes and a nozzle at the mouth.  There was no plane waiting for him as Scott climbed down from the one that brought him there.  He was only on the ground for a moment before the pilot gunned the engine and sped away.