Jodi Lee - Ante Mortem

“What could I say? He’d think I was crazy.” Joon took a napkin and began to nervously shred it into tiny pieces. “You saw it too, right? Sometimes I feel like I went insane that night.”

“I saw it. So did Mai.”

“That was Mai?” Joon looked thoughtful. “I remember her, a little. How did she know to come help?”

“I was with her that night.”

“That’s why you didn’t hear the window break.” Joon muttered, more to himself than to Hyun.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault, you weren’t doing anything wrong.” Joon chuckled. “Is that why you were in a bathrobe? I thought I imagined that!”

“My clothes were wet from falling in the lake.”

Joon howled with laughter. “You fell into the lake? Oh shit, you have the spend the night. I need to hear everything I missed.”

Hyun agreed and made a quick call to tell Mai. She told him to have fun and say hello to Joon for her. Meanwhile, Joon stood a few feet away and pretended to make out with a pillow. Hyun gave him the finger; it felt like old times. They ordered pizza and beer and spent the night talking about easy topics. A few times Hyun noticed a sense of discomfort on his friends face, but Joon waved off his concern.

“It’s fine, much better than before. When they first took me to the hospital, I couldn’t shit for a week.”

It was the closest he came to talking about the incident again. Once the pizza was finished, Joon put in a “Girls Gone Wild” DVD and they played “real or fake.” With no way to know for sure, it was a silly game, but it was their tradition. If they had eaten take-out Chinese, they would have put in old Kung Fu movies on mute and made up their own dialogue. Around midnight, both Hyun and Joon were starting to nod off, despite the barrage of “barely legal” Spring Break breasts on the wide-screen TV.

“I think I’m going to call it a night,” Hyun said.

“OK, but where are you going to sleep? My douchebag father took your bed.”

“The couch is fine.”

“The couch is shit. Come on, my bed is big enough so that we can sleep without bothering each other.”

Hyun shrugged. As kids, they had sleep-overs all the time. It wouldn’t be the first time they shared a bed.

“All right, but don’t hog the covers.”

“Right,” Joon winked, “you need your beauty sleep for your woman.”

Because it was a pleasantly warm night, both men stripped down to their boxers before getting under the sheets. Hyun noticed that Joon’s abdomen was swollen and bruised. He quickly flipped over, so Joon wouldn’t catch him staring and become self-conscious. He was asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow.

At first, Hyun thought the hot breath in his ear was Mai. When his eyes opened to Joon’s bedroom, he jolted awake. A strong arm pushed him back down on the mattress.

“I’m sorry Hyun.”

Joon’s voice was ragged and trembled over the words. His hands grasped the edges of Hyun’s boxers and pulled them down.

“What are you doing?”

Joon put his hand over Hyun’s mouth.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “But I need it out of me.”

Hyun struggled but Joon took his arm and contorted it painfully behind his back. Hyun yelped against his friend’s hand.

“Don’t fight,” Joon hissed. “It hurts more if you fight.”

The skin of Joon’s stomach burned the small of Hyun’s back.

“Raise your hips up. I’ll be was quick as I can.”

When Hyun shook his head, Joon wrenched his arm harder.

“I can hurt you, Hyun! Do you want that?”

Hyun jerked his head back, sending his skull squarely into Joon’s nose. Joon fell back and Hyun flipped around to punch him in the stomach. His hand sunk in up to the wrist, and white hot pain lanced the sides of Hyun’s palm. As Joon tumbled off the bed, Hyun pulled his fist back to find two puncture wounds weeping blood.

Down on the floor, a pair of black glistening eyes peered out of Joon’s abdominal cavity. A spasm shook his body, sending the giant larvae out in a swirl of intestines.

“Hyun?”

Joon’s voice was dreamlike. Hyun went to his side, careful to avoid the squirming maggot on the floor.

“Is it gone?” He smiled and Hyun forced back his bile.

“Yes, yes Joon. It’s gone.”

He took Joon’s hand and told him to hold on, that he needed to call for help. Joon was dead before he even finished the sentence. Unable to let go, Hyun wept.

The gods were angry.

The man and the boy were in the forest, just past the clearing of the burial ground, when the sky grew dark and the first stone fell from the heavens and shattered against the earth a mere twelve feet in front of them.

The boy looked at his father, eyes wide with fright, spear hanging loosely at his side instead of firmly in his fist and raised to the height of his shoulder. Under normal circumstances, this lack of preparation and grace would have earned him a scolding, but now his father gazed skyward, head craned back as though searching for predators. When he glanced down at his son, his own eyes were more confused than frightened. He opened his mouth to speak as a tremendous crash shook the ground beneath their feet, causing them both to stumble and turn in the direction of the explosion, crouching low, unconsciously covering their heads with their hands.

This time an even larger stone had fallen behind them, directly into the clearing where so many of their family had been laid to rest. Generations of dead, including the father’s father, mother, several siblings and other children he had spawned. His clan had lived in this area a long time—an area lush with vegetation and brimming with wildlife. There had never been a reason to move on. Starvation had not been the cause of any of the deaths. Sickness, accidents, animal attacks, murder. But never starvation.

A deafening crack that the father and son recognized: the sound of a tree snapping, and a moment later, more cracks as it took other trees down with it, then finally the thuds as they struck the forest floor.

The smell of smoke was on the air and the father shouted at the boy, pointed, and then the two of them were running back the way they’d come, shoulders hunched forward, chins tucked down against their chests, sprinting through the burial ground as more rocks fell all around them.

Most of the stones were small enough not to cause serious injury but the two fleeing figures cried out whenever struck by one of them. Not only were they falling at a great velocity, but they were also hot. Hot enough to burn, and strangely shaped, not smooth like most rocks, but jagged in places, bumpy and rough around the edges. Their color was odd as well—not black or gray or even white, but more of a deep dark purple with veins of yellow striping their hides.

By the time they reached the mouth of the cave that was their home, both man and boy were covered with welts, lumps and blisters of various size and severity. The boy wept freely, gingerly touching a bloody gash atop his head, though it was not the pain that caused him to weep: he was terrified.

Just outside the cave stood the women, clutching each other, their eyes wide with fright as they watched the man and the boy approach. The woman—mother of the boy and mate to the man—used both her voice and hand gestures to hurry them on, while her two daughters whimpered beside her.

“Run!” she urged. “Run or be killed!”

She needn’t have shouted because both her son and her mate were already running as fast as they could, spears dropped somewhere along the way, completely forgotten.

They bowled into the cluster of females, nearly knocking them over in their attempt to get inside to safety.