Макс Брукс - Devolution - A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre

“Yvette! Tony!” No doorbell or even knocks. Mostar hammered at the elaborate wood with side fists and open palms. “Open up! Open the goddamn door! Now!” The urgency, the violence of her assault.

Bobbi, now fully awake, pulled back a step. Carmen and Effie both hugged their daughter. I grabbed Dan’s arm. A new thought closing my throat: What if Reinhardt hadn’t been the first house?

I was about to take Dan with me around back, my brain filling with what might be waiting, when the front door slowly swung open. This relief wave broke though as soon as I saw the ghoul who answered.

Red, wet, unfocused eyes glimmered out from sunken, dark cavities. Thin, unshaven cheeks hung above chapped, cracked, scab-rimmed lips. Shoeless feet, a stained white T-shirt, sagging, worn sweatpants held up by a shaking hand with dirty nails. The reek slammed me a moment later, wafting out from the doorway in an invisible, humid cloud. Body odor. Bad breath. The slightest hint of feces.

“Tony?” I could see Mostar’s slump, thought I heard her sigh. Am I projecting? Filling a gap? I feel like she wasn’t surprised. The rest of us though, that collective flinch.

“Tony.” A little louder this time, her words matched by the slow, air chop of her hand. “Where’s Yvette?”

“Oh…” His mouth hung open at a crooked angle, exposing a row of stained teeth. “Yeeaaah.” A slight narrowing of the eyes, like someone who accidentally walked into the wrong room.

“Yvette.” Mostar tried looking past him, around him, then back for a third, “Yvette!”

Licking of the lips, and another “Yeah…” as he turned his back.

“No, Tony…,” Mostar started to say, then followed him in. A slight jumble from the rest of us. Dan’s spear catching on the doorframe. A quick “Sorry” to the nearly struck Effie as he left the weapon outside.

I was already ahead of him by then, almost gagging from what I smelled inside. Sweat, feet, and concentrated, stale urine wafting from the downstairs bathroom. And what we saw…

Had it been anyone else, in any other circumstance, I would have just considered the homeowners to be slobs.

Towels on the floor. A few clothes. Wineglasses amid the bookshelves and empty bottles. The pillow and comforter on the couch, stained brown with the darker residue of body oils. No worse than a college dorm room, or a few of my fellow twentysomethings in their first apartments. But this home, these people.

And it wasn’t just the mess that got to me, or the smashed iPhone lying under an iPhone-sized dent in the wall. It was the magazines. Covering the glass coffee table, over and under and wedged in between crust-bottomed coffee mugs. Wired, Forbes, Eco-Structure. All of them wrinkled and bubbled with water damage. All of them with Tony’s face on the cover. THE DAWN OF ECO-CAPITALISM, THE GREEN REVOLUTIONARY, FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT.

“Tony!” Mostar took his arm, turning him toward her. “Where is Yvette?” Gentle, firm. “We need to talk to both of you.”

“Sure, yeah, Yvette…” His eyes—is that what you call a thousand-yard stare?—gazing into space, brow furrowed, tongue circling his lips. “Yvette.”

His pause gave us all a moment to hear it.

zzzzzp zzzzzp zzzzzp

Mostar shook her head, maybe angry with herself for not realizing it sooner. (That’s how I felt, at least, forgetting to check the garage.) I might have knocked on the door if Mostar hadn’t pushed past me and thrown it open.

Bright light flooded in, with an invisible, acrid mist.

Yvette, or what she’d become, practically fell off her elliptical.

“What­WHAT?” Her voice was high, scratchy. Bounding into the living room, dripping, wild. That’s how I’ll always think of her eyes. Wild. Frantically darting to everyone and everything. Her face, her frame. We were looking at a skeleton. Under the soaking sports bra and yoga pants. Skin wrapped so tightly over sinewy bone. Had she been eating at all? What can you do to your body, your mind, in so short a time?

It hadn’t even been two weeks. That quick for someone to fall apart? That easy?

I guess it depends on who you are to begin with, how tightly you’re already holding on.

Adversity introduces us to ourselves.

Nice to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Durant.

“What­what­what­do­you­want!” I could still hear gibberish squawking from the noise-canceling headphones around her neck. Not music, some kind of talking. Inspirational? Guided imagery? Her own voice?

Mostar barely uttered, “Yvette,” but was cut off with a frantic “What­you­want!”

Recognition, adaptation, Mostar shifted from the command stance with Tony to a conciliatory, de-escalating, “Yvette, Love, we have to get you out of here.” Soft, easy, as with a child or a jumper. “You know about the animals out there?” A slow, non-startling gesture to the unrepaired broken windows. “You know they’re surrounding us, right? That they’re getting more aggressive? Did you hear the—”

Yvette cut her off with a chattering, “What­no­I­don’t­know­anything­about­any­animals.” Skin steaming in the cold air, head quivering with each syllable.

“Don’t­know­what­you’re­talking­about.” Her breath, five feet away. I could smell the starvation.

Mostar, caring, concerned. “You must have heard the screaming. Vincent? You heard him, right?”

At that, Carmen put a comforting arm around Bobbi.

Mostar continued with, “And now, last night, Alex…”

“I­don’t­know­anything!” Yvette chattered. Her accent, upper class English, gone. This new one, old one, a thick Australian twang. “You­need­to­go!” Head bobbing maniacally at the door. “Go… go­go­go­go!”

“We all need to go,” Mostar said slowly. “We need to take what we need to live on, and all move into the Common House, where we can protect each other.”

I was already thinking, planning ahead, as to how we’d take care of them. The shower, first, hot water and a scrub. We could hold her down, if we had to. At least Tony might go quietly. Two more mouths to feed. And clothes, I’d wash theirs by hand. I wouldn’t mind. Clean, safe. They’d come around. They’d have to. All of us together, cramped, sharing everything. No choice.

“You need to hurry,” Mostar continued, enunciating each word slowly. “Don’t take anything, just come with—”

“No­no­no!” Yvette backed up a step, jutting out her lower jaw. A cornered animal, that was all I could think of, a monkey in a cage. “You­need­to­get­out! All­of­you­out­c’mon­now­now!”

Tony had sat back down by then, melting into his sleep stain on the couch. He didn’t seem to acknowledge what was happening around him. Didn’t look or move.

“Yvette, please!” Mostar, losing patience, almost pleading, holding out her hands with a desperation that tightened my abs. “We don’t have time for this! They’re not afraid of us anymor—”

She never finished.

At that moment her head happened to face the huge living room window behind us.

I turned just in time to see the dark shape standing right in front of the curtained window, right before that window collapsed.

The scramble.