James Baldwin - Stained Glass

“Talya.” I limped towards her as a whine grew in my ears, drowning out the sound of the street. Duke had buried the weapon so far into her body that I could only see a hint of metal. “Hang on… just… we’re going to count through this. We will count together and relax your chest.”

The girl shuddered. Her warm brown skin was milk white with shock, her lips bubbling with dark red blood. Her eyes met mine from across the room, startlingly gold through the wet mess of her silverish hair.

“G-go,” she rattled. She warded me back with a trembling, bloody hand. “Get… out… run… RUN!”

Confused, I backed up towards the entry to the parlor. I ran for the door and flung it open, just as the Buick tore past and gunned for the main road. Duke was white-knuckled on the wheel, his face an expressionless bloody mask, and Vanya was laughing. Even at high speed, I heard it in passing: the same horrible, forced, ‘HAH HAH HAH’ he’d made in the warehouse.

There was no stopping them now. I couldn’t run. I pushed my hands back over the stubble on my head, bleakly watching on as the car turned the nearest corner and vanished.

And then, from right behind me, came the impossibly deep-throated snarl of a huge, angry animal in pain.

For the first time in many years, I froze. Truly froze. I froze because I realized, in that moment, that I needed to run. Leave. Leave Angkor, who I didn’t even know, and Talya, and the Tigers, and the faceless horde of idiots gathering in the sidewalk across from the store, their voices burbling static. I could jump ship and never be seen again.

A shadow fell over me from behind, and I turned and looked up to see a cat the size of a small bus looming over the parlor.

Talya’s Ka was strange, primitive looking lion with a short, stiff, bristly mane. She staggered up to her feet with damp fur, but no excess Phitonic jelly rolled down her flanks. She was gray and white, with a taller, leaner build than any African Lion in the world, but the square face and heavy jaw were unmistakable, as was the blindingly loud roar she made as her flesh rejected the ax still buried in her chest. There was no humanity in her blazing yellow eyes. No control.

“Talya… Talya, it’s Rex…” I circled slowly towards the entry to the apartment stairwell, the knife held up, hand outstretched. Against a DOG, a knife worked just fine. Against this? This lion was at least two thousand pounds of muscle and claws. “Kitten, remember Rex? Zane?”

She dropped her head between her shoulders, and began to pad towards me in a slow stalking crouch. Just before she leapt, I threw the knife at her, end over end. It hit her in the shoulder, point-first, bounced, and clattered to the concrete floor. Fixated on my movements, she didn’t even seem to notice.

“Very well then.” I said aloud. And then I ran for my life.

Talya charged me in perfect silence, and however fast it was she was moving, thirteen feet to a second seemed fairly apt. I made it to the door of the stairwell just as she smashed it in behind me with a paw the size of a dustbin lid. Dodging claws, I charged up the stairs, driven by primordial fear so deep and so innate that pain became meaningless. Talya’s size was advantageous outdoors, but a liability in closed spaces. As I careened off the wall and ran, hopped and crawled to the landing, Talya clawed and swiped the spot I’d been seconds before, roaring in frustration as her head and shoulders got jammed between wall and door. She lunged up at my heels, only barely able to fit in the narrow stairwell.

I twisted the handle on the front door and shot inside, slamming it behind me. It wasn’t going to do anything to help me, but I felt slightly safer as I limped and ran down the hall, around the corner, and began to throw things in the desperate search for the Glock and a fresh clip. There was no way the 9mms in the Wardbreaker would bring Talya down, but the frag rounds stood a chance.

I could hear Talya ploughing through plaster and mortar on her way up the stairs, and emerged back into the hallway just as she tore the door off its hinges and lunged through half-way, bellowing in rage. She pushed forward with a snarl of frustrated hunger and struck the ceiling overhead, sending a rain of plaster into her own eyes. The bedroom door was open. I caught the jamb, spun around, and slammed the door closed with my back against the wood, until I thought better of it and stumbled away, as far from the entry as I could get.

“ Ikun mohya?”

I jumped so hard that I gave myself whiplash, gun pointed at the ready. Angkor was sitting upright, bare-chested, his blanket pooled in his lap. His face was a pale mask of shock.

“What the Hell?” he said.

“LION,” I blurted.

Talya’s bulk struck the door and nearly rattled it from its frame. I scrambled up, and with a flush of manic strength, seized the legs of the nearest bed and dragged it across. Then the dresser, then the wardrobe. The door banged in a second time, the hinges straining. Angkor staggered out of bed, barefoot and in shorts, and crossed the distance to help me pull anything and everything across to block the door.

“Lion? Who?” Angkor’s voice was thick with fatigue. He looked like death warmed over. “What?”

“Talya. It’s Talya.” I retreated to the back of the room and slammed the new clip into the Glock as Talya began to strop the door with her claws. Wood splintered, and the junk pile swayed. “Can you use a gun?”

“Yes… NO! We can’t kill her!” Angkor withdrew from me and flopped to the bed with his face in his hands. “Wait wait wait, let me think of something…”

“Think quickly!” While he wracked his brains, I racked a bullet into the chamber and set a second clip just beside me. “We have about five seconds.”

“Okay! I’ve got an idea!” Angkor flapped his hand, leaning against the leg of the bunk bed as it jolted and shuddered behind him. “Can you piss?”

“What is… the hell kind of question is that?” My accent was bleeding through with stress.

“We need urine. Scent-marking. If he smells a lion bigger than he is—”

“She. Female lion.”

“—No, freaking listen to me. Talya’s Ka is a male lion, trust me. I know lion spunk when I smell it. If we create a territorial scent, he will cut and run. So can you piss or not?”

The man was insane, too screwed up from concussion to think clearly. “No, I can’t fucking piss on command. Get out of way.”

“GODunderfoot.” Angkor groaned, backpedaling, and sniffed. Then he sniffed again. “Hey, I smell cat shit. Is there a cat in here?”

“Yes, there is cat in here, and there is cat out there,” I snapped. “Now get fucking gun and shoot fucking lion before we die, please .”

“Hang on.” Angkor scrambled out of sight, just as the bunk bed toppled over and a gray paw shot through the gap in the door, patting around, then flexing in and tearing the wood like paper.

Angkor whooped behind me. I glanced back to see him lift his hands, poised like a dancer or a stage magician, and then refocused on the lion’s groping paw, sighting down. Breath in, breath out, breath in…

Gravity in the room sucked backwards for a moment, a gathering rush of power, and then one of the worst smells I had ever experienced in my life flooded the room.

I’d smelled a lot of awful things over the years. I’d smelled bodies when they dumped their bowels and bladder after death. I’d smelled the unnatural reek of DOGs and places of corruption. This wasn’t a DOG-stench: it was cat feces concentrated a hundred times more than whatever the human nose was made to stand. It was the Platonic Ideal of cat shit, the distillation of rotten venison, putrid and tarry, mixed with bile, musk, and ammonia.