Mat Johnson - Pym

As soon as I stepped out onto the roof, I knew that we were right to have made our preparations. All of the creatures’ heads turned on our arrival, and they clearly weren’t just looking for the pudding. As I walked out with the pans in my hands, they saw behind me what looked like the arm of their leader slapping the back of my head to speed me up. Or at least they saw Sausage Nose’s sleeve, wiped clean of bile. And from within this sleeve, they saw a white hand, even paler than their own, which I hoped they wouldn’t notice. In my attempt to hide Garth’s blackness, I’d been a little too eager, I realized once faced with the actual living Tekelian skin tone. In my mind it was white, but really it was flecked with tones of gray.

“You’ve got to come, and you’ve got to come now,” I urged the Karvels as soon as I reached them. You have never seen two more relieved white folks. *In their brief time in the outdoors, their faces had become flushed and ruddy, their noses running and freezing at the same time. Mrs. Karvel was smoking right in front of her husband now, she didn’t even care. I understood. They hadn’t been living in the Antarctic like the rest of us, they’d simply been hiding within it. Pushed well beyond their comfort levels physically and socially, the two scuttled past me to the inside before I could even finish my request. My cousin, on the other hand, proved nowhere near as easy to convince.

“I don’t want to have nothing to do with it, Christopher,” Booker Jaynes said as I came closer. “You see how well your dirty little trick went? You see that all that poison was for nothing? I could have told you that. If it was that simple, slavery would have been over by the seventeenth century.” Jaynes moved past me to serve his mistress another plate of potatoes au gratin, a dish he had prepared himself. Hunka had come with the rest, looking for him, and Jaynes had found her. He had taken special care to ensure that she would receive food untainted by our deceit. None of her kin seemed to notice that her servant’s efforts were a little too attentive. Even when he dabbed a smudge of cheese off the corner of her mouth, the other Tekelians apparently found this intimate gesture not the least bit out of the ordinary, the actions of a good slave and a good lover being more or less the same.

“Just get off the roof, okay? Promise me that. Take your lady and get her as far away from here as you can,” I insisted, interpreting his shrugging nod as an ironclad contract.

“Well that’s just insane,” Nathaniel complained as he stepped in where he was not wanted, coming from behind me after listening to the substance of my little family spat. “There’s simply nowhere to run to, don’t you understand that? This is it. We need to get in with these people, make a place with them. Secure our positions. That’s our reality now. Not some fantasy world.”

Angela Latham stood beside him, so I spoke to her directly as she looked intently at her legal husband. “Angela, they’re not just going to keel over instantly. They’re going to get sick, and when they figure out why, they are going to get angry. And they are definitely going to figure out why.” It was a simple argument, but it was all she needed to hear. Angela turned away from Nathaniel and started walking with me. Nathaniel didn’t follow. And in this moment of my greatest heroics, Angela Latham grabbed my hand with the softness of hers when she reached me, and together we walked past that gaggle of goliaths and toward something I hoped would be our future.

“Angela!” I kept hearing Nathaniel yell from behind me. But no matter how demanding that voice was, it never got any closer. Nathaniel never made the simple effort to follow after all that he was losing. Angela walked through the exit door with me, and it was only Garth Frierson who seemed to have any reservation over Nathaniel’s absence. As I came into the room, I saw past the costumed Garth to the Karvels, who were busy laying out rifles and ammunition before them in preparation for what was surely to come. Taking off his coat, Jeffree grabbed the largest rifle he could find in the pile, cocked it, and declared, “It’s showtime!” as if Carlton Damon Carter hadn’t been filming the whole time.

“Where the hell is Captain Jaynes?” Garth insisted, still not having opened the door wide enough for those behind to see that he was a fraud but unwilling to close it either with our two comrades on the other side. He’d taken his hood off, and given the smell, I couldn’t blame him. Still, the patches of white toothpaste on his face made him look like he had a mutant strain of vitiligo.

“I told him, but he’s not coming. He’s with that woman. He thinks he can make it with her instead. What the hell can I do about that?”

“But where the hell is Nathaniel?” The question was addressed to me, but Garth was also looking to Latham’s newly estranged wife.

“He’s not trying to hear it,” I told Garth. “It’s on him now.” Garth looked at my indifferent expression and replied to it with his own look of disbelief. He looked at Angela as well, and so did I, and I’d like to believe I saw a tinge of indifference from her too, but I can’t deny that now she was crying.

“Screw this,” Garth spat at me, and before I could stop him he leaned out the door and yelled, “Yo, dog! Nathaniel! It’s time to get your black ass out of here!”

The command certainly got Nathaniel’s attention. In fact, it seemed to get everyone’s attention. All of the Tekelians on the roof looked up from the remainders of their feast to take notice of what had just been said. The now unhooded Garth, who had stepped just outside the door to make sure that he was heard, struck quite a figure before them. Even from the distance both physically and culturally, I could read the looks of shock on the creatures’ faces. Never before had they seen a Tekelian with African features, that much was sure. Or a Tekelian warrior who, after stepping off of the two milk crates we had placed for him by the door, now stood at a mere five feet, six inches tall. The other thing I could tell was that the robe Sausage Nose always wore was a sacred object, a symbol of respect, earned right and privilege. It was clear from the chorus of angry howls that erupted from among them, rising first from the warriors and then from the females and even the children of Tekeli-li as they pushed back their chairs and flipped over the tables. Either we had broken some sort of snowman taboo or they just knew the truth: that the owner of that robe would not have parted with it willingly. Either way, the result was much the same and very immediate. Our reckoning would not be postponed a moment more.

The first one to die was my cousin. The man of my blood who at different times I had looked to as a leader, a boss, even as a friend. The reality of his death somehow eluded my consciousness in that moment of chaos and danger. And they didn’t so much attack him as simply brush Booker Jaynes away.

“Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters: I’m sure we can figure out what is going on here in a peaceable manner!” Booker bellowed. Years of practice at rallies and marches had given him a voice that truly boomed above the crowd. “Let’s just all calm down, and get together in a circle,” he pleaded. Alas, “Can’t we all just form a circle?” was the last thing my cousin said before he was pushed to the side by the nearest of the creatures. The villain didn’t even bother to acknowledge my cousin by looking in his direction. The monster just swung his simian arm out to the side and sent Jaynes off his feet and hurtling toward the BioDome’s curved edge. Booker actually landed briefly, though not on his feet, skidding the remaining distance to where the angle of the roof became too steep to reconcile. And then he was simply gone. Dropped out of sight. It’s a testament to my own capacity for denial that I didn’t accept that the captain had fallen to his demise, instead clinging to a hasty notion that he had simply slid down the side and landed in the soft snow below. His Tekelian mistress harbored no such delusions. I have no idea what Hunka said, but the anguish in her garbled barking was undeniable. It must have been revealing as well, whatever language she used, because on hearing her harsh utterances the crowd of her brethren around her simply froze. Unaware of anything but her grief, the she-creature continued her lament. Those Tekelians kept listening as if taking in a confession, one that lasted until one of their number walked forward, put a hand on her shoulder, and then cut her neck wide open with an ivory dagger. When Hunka hit the ground, her assassin casually kicked her limp body off the side of the roof as well, in the direction her servant had been sent to his demise.