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

They all want to live “in harmony with nature” before some of them realize, too late, that nature is anything but harmonious.

The touch on my hand woke me. I sprung back, legs up, ready to kick. I opened my eyes and saw Palomino hopping backward as well.

“Oh God, sorry!” I think I said, and got up to pull her to me. She shook in my arms, or maybe that was me. My neck was aching, my back. As I bent my head to rest it on Pal’s, I felt my skin burn from under the right ear to the base of my shoulder. I discovered, later, that I’d scraped the top layer completely off.

I also discovered, later, how Pal and her moms had survived. Effie said that when the Durants’ window wall had caved, when the first monster stormed in, Carmen grabbed Pal with one hand, Bobbi with the other, and ran up to the master bedroom. Effie’d been right behind them. She’d been the one to slam, lock, and throw a chair under the knob while Carmen forced Bobbi and Pal under the bed.

Then Carmen started grabbing all the dirty clothes she could, and there’d been a lot to grab. Apparently, upstairs was even gnarlier than the living room. Stained, dirty, skid-marked. That’s right. Effie even gagged at the memory of Tony’s shit-streaked underwear, which her germophobe wife snatched up without hesitation and jammed all around the sides of the bed. Carmen thinks these creatures depend on smell as much as sight and sound. She thought clogging the space between the bed and the floor with a noxious moat would mask their own scent.

And it must have worked. By the time their pursuer, Dowager, I think, beat down the door, they were all hidden under the Durants’ bed, behind a berm of filth. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for Carmen, lying there in that dark stuffy stink. Maybe that’s why she hit Bobbi, although Effie insists it was necessary.

That happened right before Dowager barreled in, as the door began to buckle. They’d just gotten under the bed, Carmen stuffing this damp moldy towel over the last open space. Bobbi started to lose it. Heavy breaths, faster, louder. Effie said that Carmen whispered angrily for her to be quiet. That Bobbi kept saying, “I can’t, I can’t!”

Effie said the third “can’t” was when Carmen hit her, not an open-mouth slap, but a full-fisted punch right in her eye. I don’t know how she managed it with them all lying on their stomachs. I don’t know how she found Bobbi’s eye in the darkness. But she connected, and Bobbi was stunned into silence. But that wasn’t good enough for Carmen. She grabbed Bobbi by the neck, put her lips right next to her ear, and whispered, “Shut up or I’ll fucking kill you.”

On “you” the door fell in. Effie said she could feel the footsteps vibrating through the floorboards as Dowager stomped past them into the bathroom. The old female must have just poked her head in, reached out to pull the shower curtain down, then come back out to tear the doors off Yvette’s walk-in closet. For a few seconds they heard clothes being ripped down, drawers pulled open. (Why? Just curious or thinking they made a small entrance to another room?)

Then Dowager growled angrily, frustrated, probably, and turned for the bed. She couldn’t have been looking for anything, the way Effie described the sheets, pillows, and eventually mattress tossed around the room. If Dowager had just made it to the box spring, if Alpha’s outside whoops hadn’t pulled her from her tantrum.

They owe them, the Durants. That’s how Effie looks at it now. The grimy concealment, the distraction of their murders. When Effie described it, she couldn’t help but repeat, “We owe them our lives.”

I know I’m getting ahead of myself. Sorry. Back to the moment when Palomino woke me up. I was so dazed, bouncing between thoughts and feelings.

Alpha! That was my first thought, hugging Pal closer as I looked nervously for some dark hairy shape hiding behind a corner. I noticed the scorch marks on the wall at the bottom of the stairs, followed the trail of cinders out to the hole in the window. Through the waving curtains, I saw what had to be the black, charred lump of the towel resting in the ash.

“Pal, what ha…,” I started to ask, but she broke away from my grasp, keeping my hand in hers, and tried to lead me toward the door.

“What… where?” I asked, but she was insistent, a silent pleading in her eyes. I took a few steps, felt my ankles pop, then caught sight of the caved-in garage door.

The garden.

She’d destroyed it.

Alpha had torn the irrigation hose right out from the sink, which was still gushing into the dirt. The dirt, all our carefully sculpted rows were gone, replaced by the thrashed lumps and holes of a kindergarten sandbox. Our seedlings. I saw a few lying among the debris, torn up by the roots, or probably just lifted along with all the other backhoe-sized handfuls.

She’d tried to eat a few, I guessed by the small, slimy green nodules. The tomatoes, the cucumbers, all of Pal’s precious little beans. Chewed up and spat out like miniature horse droppings. Not her droppings though. She’d left that behind as well.

A large, slick pile sat right in the middle of the room. An involuntary function? Just an animal doing its business? Or was there a conscious message?

“Fuck you, Little Prey. Here’s what I can do to your nest.”

I’m just glad I couldn’t smell it. My broken nose was too swollen. Pal could though, with nostrils buried in her sweater. She kept pulling my hand, leading me away.

At first, I resisted. “Don’t you see this? All our work! Everything we tried to do!”

She wasn’t listening, wasn’t even looking. Her face was fixed on the entrance hall, the open front door, something beyond it that I absolutely needed to see. When she looked back toward me, I could see the tears begin.

“Okay, okay.” I gave up the fight, let her lead me out into the falling ash.

At least I thought it was ash. But when the first flake landed just under my right eye, I blinked hard at the icy surprise.

Snow.

Must have been early. I didn’t think we’d have snow for a few more weeks. It wasn’t heavy. It evaporated before hitting the ground, before it could cover the large footprints leading away from my house. Or the blood trails leading to Mostar’s.

Red footprints amid spatters, a track leading from her kitchen door around the front. Pal let go of my hand then, running on to Mostar’s house, disappearing through—through?—the garage wall. I thought there was something wrong with my eyes, or maybe Mostar had opened her garage. I couldn’t see from that angle, or even as I stopped at her open front door.

More blood in the entrance hall, tracking back to the kitchen among a sparkling carpet of broken glass. So much glass. So many colors. Mostar’s artwork. All those intricate pieces. I could recognize little bits; a pink petal, the blue head of a bird, and the cleanly broken leaf of the fire piece I’d been so taken with earlier. All gone. That’d been the popping sound I’d heard during the attack. One by one they’d been hurled against the floor. Not by the creature, not like my garden. I suspected then, and I confirmed it later, that Mostar and Dan had smashed them in a last-ditch defense.

That had been the howl of pain I’d heard from my bathroom hiding place. The blood trail. And the hollow boom. I finally saw the source of that sound after a few more steps. The garage’s sliding aluminum wall had been bashed in. That’s how Pal had seemed to walk through the wall. She was waiting for me inside, along with everyone else. Effie held her. Carmen held Effie. Bobbi leaned against the back wall, hand cupped against her puffy, darkening cheek. Their collective, red-rimmed eyes told me where to look.