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Wolftown, Part Five
Wolftown’s wolf response was headquartered in Holy Trinity Lutheran Church and School’s gymnasium, ideal for muddy, wet people. The wolf responders stationed constantly in the gymnasium sandbagged the doorways between the locker rooms and the gymnasium. Expecting Wolftown’s water level to rise another two or three feet, volunteers prepared classrooms for flooded-out families. Somebody monitored the generator. The town plumber, Phil, and a church and school custodian, Gary, bailed out the boys’ locker room.
“What’s wrong with the sewer system?” Wayne asked.
Phil said, “Something blocked it all over town.”
“This didn’t happen last time we had this rainfall,” Gary said.
“I don’t think the sewers were inspected before the storm,” Phil said.
“They should have been,” Gary said.
Phil shrugged. “Try the restroom on the upper floors.”
“We’re muddy,” Wayne said.
“I spread plastic over the carpets,” Gary said.
Wayne changed his clothes and John hung up his foul-weather gear.
The responders napped in classrooms and ate in the combination fellowship hall and school cafeteria. Pastor Virgil Mickelson officiated optional, short church services.
In the gymnasium, Wayne and John sat at a folding table. John plugged his laptop into an extension cord plugged into another orange one, but, at least, Holy Trinity’s wall outlets had surge protectors.
“We don’t have internet access,” Wayne said.
“If you don’t use it, I won’t need to.”
“Why do you have it anyway?”
“Paula thinks computer technology will make conservation easier. I keep notes on floppy disks, write, copy files, and can’t do much more.”
“What about Y2K?”
“Thankfully, she didn’t need to reimburse anyone for wasting $2,000.”
Wayne shuffled through notes and papers left at his folding table seat. “The kid was a missing person.”
“Oh, no,” John said.
“No one said he was when the police asked us to identify him.” Wayne sighed.
“I forgot about the beaver trapper, but I bet he was one of the missing persons Mayor Dwyer mentioned. Search-and-rescue declared him presumed dead today.”
“Condolences,” John said.
“We kept an eye out for him while looking for the wolf.”
“Did a wolf attack him?”
“No idea. I don’t know if we will know because of the flood. The first rabies tests came back negative,” Wayne said.
“Good.” John inserted a floppy disk.
“Here’s a note from Schuster: ‘Megan photographed Zach’s wolf bites, wrote down the measurements, and made a few copies. She said to call if you had questions. Megan can say what she wants. I’m working on Barbara Luben’s evidence. You are authorized to view evidence of Zach and Mrs. Luben’s attacks. I’ll try to bring them to you but can’t guarantee it.’”
“Do you want to look at fatal injures? It’s hard.”
“And harder if you know the people or live in the same town. I need to.”
“Do you want me to start with the hiker or the official first victim?”
“The hiker if it is chronological. I can take notes out-of-order, but I have to put it in order sometime.”
“I know I said I could tell you about the hikers, but I forgot about the police,” Wayne said. “They haven’t found Sergio Vasquez’s body yet, and Miranda Vasquez’s story is a little difficult to understand.”
As one of the most informed people involved in the wolf response, Wayne considered classifying the wolf situation pointless at best and, at worst, prevented an adequate response. He released any data somebody requested; it possibly provoked Mayor Dwyer’s restriction of out-of-town journalism and non-communication with local media.
Wayne suggested the most useful people to contact. Via Sharon Smith, Mayor Dwyer’s secretary, Wayne pestered the mayor for permission to answer the questions or to contact another person. Within half an hour, Mayor Dwyer allowed Wayne to explain details he considered pertinent—except about the wolf which attacked Miranda and Sergio Vasquez. The police continued to investigate Sergio Vasquez’s death. Mayor Dwyer permitted details about how they encountered the wolf, how it attacked, and how it stopped. To John’s surprise, Wayne agreed without argument.
John typed notes and listed evidence to copy.
While Sergio and Miranda Vasquez honeymooned in the woods near Wolftown. On March 6 and 7, they briefly met Peter, a stranger. He warned them about wolves in the area and suggested camping a couple of miles west. However, they stayed at their campsite. They built a fire and bear-proofed their food, which coincidentally deterred wolves.
In the middle of the night, Miranda left the tent to relieve herself. She zipped up the tent, but the hikers woke to a lone wolf inside the tent.
John said, “Sometimes the zipper doesn’t catch the other side of the fabric, but it sounds like it zipped.”
“I asked her. I haven’t had time to find out if a wolf can tear through a tent, but I told her I would,” Wayne said.
Sergio fought the wolf and slashed an escape hole for Miranda. She brandished a burning branch, which ignited the tent. Somehow, Sergio and the wolf struggled out of the tent, as Sergio yelled for Miranda to climb a tree.
Miranda tugged singed, bleeding Sergio from the tent, while the smoldering wolf rolled on the ground. The wolf retreated slightly, giving Sergio time to boost Miranda into a sugar maple tree. She hauled him up, but the wolf dragged him down. While Sergio stopped screaming, the wolf bit Miranda’s leg. The wolf’s teeth shredded her left leg, but Miranda tugged her leg out of the wolf’s mouth.
“How?” John asked.
“Adrenaline,” Wayne said. “But I’m surprised her the bone didn’t break, and he didn’t bite an artery or a vein.”
Wayne continued the chronological order, moving to the wolves entering Wolftown on March 8. Each wolf entered Wolftown on a different side of town by 2:00 PM, March 8. People treated them as a curiosity because sometimes wild animals passed the city limits.
Later, Wayne named the wolves Abel, Barker, and Charlie, although he initially thought Barker and Charlie were the same. Wayne said, “Abel looks like an overweight male, Barker is underweight, and Charlie is average. I don’t know Barker and Charlie’s sexes, but if the wolves are a pack, they are probably females. The wolves are about the same size, but people said Abel was big. Locals have a better idea of a wolf’s size than tourists have, but a wolf looks bigger in real life.”
“Probably more when you think it’s dangerous,” John said.
“And he was fat, and people called him fat.”
“He is.”
“At first, I thought the wolf was pregnant, but he is a male. I think he is bigger than Barker, but not unusually big.”
Around 3:00, Abel loped down Main Street into Holy Trinity Church and School’s playground. Barking and growling, he trotted, then cantered, then galloped. Kids scattered, and adults hustled children indoors, into cars, on top of the jungle gym, or down the street. Witnesses said fleeing felt like a natural response and thought the wolf could not chase everybody at once.
Playing hopscotch, Mallory Vaughn stood on one leg. Abel knocked her down; his paw left a smudged print on her pink jacket. Her older brother, Raymond, swung his stuffed backpack at Abel. He scooped up winded Mallory and dashed to the nurse’s office. On the way to the nurse’s office, Mallory accused Raymond of shoving her, even though Raymond babysat her. She merely skinned her knees, palms, and chin, and bumped her nose.
The wolf galloped out of the playground under a barrage of textbooks, lunch boxes, a ball, a copy of An Explanation of the Small Catechism, and a Furby. The playground monitor, Cindy Brown, slammed the gate shut and locked it.
As Abel wove through traffic, Maurice Williams nearly crashed into him; days later, he told Wayne he wished he totaled his car and killed Abel. The wolf caused erratic driving and two minor accidents. School-hour traffic and pulling over for the police cars complicated matters.
The wolf bounded through the grounds of the Sun ‘n’ Rain Childcare Center and the Giggling Forward Preschool. He circled the blocks and bounded again. Steve Taylor considered shooting the wolf, but the children were too close.
Throughout the town, people called 911 or Happy Howlers to report sightings. The wolves often left before anybody arrived—everybody focused on the schoolchildren. But the number of calls and the locations indicated two or three wolves roamed Wolftown.
Chief of Police Dennis Laufenberg was out of town. Until he arrived, Deputy Chief of Police Kurt Phelps oversaw the police’s response. He told officers to carry tranquilizers and fire a gun as a last resort.
Because a wolf could easily jump Holy Trinity, the daycare, or the preschools’ fences, Wayne recommended that the staff keep children indoors until their parents arrived. To his relief, quite a few adults and children came to the same conclusion. The staff and parents arranged impromptu carpools and pickups. Officer Jones watched for wolves and staff or parents walked the children to the cars.
Police officers patrolled for unaccompanied walking children and drove them home, and they offered rides to accompanied children. Officer Matthews escorted the school bus and officers or parents walked children to their doors.
Around 4:30 PM, one wolf disappeared, probably into the woods, while two others continued prowling Wolftown. Wayne still wondered which wolf fled and which wolf remained.
Raymond and the adults’ reactions scared Mallory more than a wolf running her over. Just as a precaution, Dr. Groves ordered a rabies vaccine. Wayne examined Mallory’s jacket and collected wolf hairs from Raymond’s backpack.
The police unjammed traffic, despite Barker’s presence.
While Abel wreaked havoc, black-and-white security footage tracked Barker and Charlie, either of whom could have also chased the school bus. The wolf walked and loped, stopping to howl or bark. If somebody tried chasing him away, he cantered or galloped. He loitered around Main Street, but neither entered the school grounds nor threatened the parking lot. Wayne supposed the cars scared him.
Calvin, a Happy Howlers’ employee, tracked down Barker or Charlie at approximately 5:00. The wolf saw the car, turned around, and hid in a residential area. Suzanne backed up Calvin, and they almost cornered him. He jumped a fence at 6:00, but they tranquilized him. He headed for the woods and the Happy Howlers employees followed on foot at 6:10, plenty of time for the wolf to pass out. Neither wanted to chase the wolf on foot or search thoroughly for a trail, so they gave up a couple of minutes later. The wolf escaped. Wayne defended Calvin and Suzanne’s decision.
Around 6:30 PM, a wolf mauled Jill Vogel’s off-leash dachshund-Yorkie-miscellaneous mix. The wolf picked up Button and bolted out of the park. Button’s death eventually indicated Charlie existed.
Sightings halted after the attack.
The Happy Howlers administrative assistant, Rebecca Austin, sent information to the local media, which reported the wolf sightings for the evening news or morning paper. Other people heard rumors or they told their friends.
Happy Howlers intended to tranquilize the wolves and ask Dr. Jodi Richardson to examine them. If she declared the wolves healthy, Happy Howlers would tag, vaccinate, and release them. Employees nursed ill or dying wolves, except for rabid ones.
John disagreed with euthanizing animals for any reason but understood the reasons behind killing a rabid animal. Paula and the Nature Protection Society thought rabies and other diseases justified euthanasia. Because of that and Wolftown’s sensitive situation, he felt uncomfortable mentioning his opinion. He thought Wayne guessed, but they did not discuss it.
Wolftown’s nightlife consisted of McDonald's, the Old Wolftown Restaurant, and the Wunderbar, but they were quieter than normal.
“What’s the Wunder Bar?” John asked.
“It’s the only bar in town. One word, W-U-N-D-E-R-B-A-R.”
“Thanks.”
Mayor Dwyer made town officials, his family, and close friends to eat out, buy gas at the BP Gas Station, and play in the park.
“I told him it was a stupid decision,” Wayne said.
“Did something happen to him?” John asked.
“No, but it’s like living in Jaws! Would you have gone outside?”
“I’m a homebody.”
“And you already got into a wolf situation.”
“I had an escape route.”
Wayne sighed.
“You do it,” John said.
“I’m armed and keeping an eye out for the wolf. I don’t want to kill the wolf, but I want to survive.”
Seven businesses and the police station had security cameras. Four businesses had taped over their footage before police requested copies, and two showed barely any wolf. The police refused to turn over their videotaped footage but copied the low-quality time-lapse tapes. Wayne borrowed the school’s TV and paused the footage when necessary.
The security footage showed the wolf returned to downtown Wolftown at approximately 8:30 PM.
A couple of anonymous teenagers snuck out of their houses to buy junk food at the BP Gas Station and eat it in Sugar Maple Park. They noticed wolf tracks in the playground sand. Button died on the opposite side of the park, so Wayne suspected they found the first overnight tracks. The teenagers looked for the wolves because wolves would deter tourism, which their families depended on.
Schuster spotted their flashlights. He told them that Laufenberg ordered the police to send children and teenagers home, regardless of their parents’ usual rules, if the children walked or rode bikes alone after dark. Apparently, the teenagers had sneaked out. They could either go to the police station and give a statement about the wolf or go home without any mention of the wolf. The wolf howled behind the teenagers, too close. Schuster hustled them into the car, but the teenagers went voluntarily.
“I bet the parents found out anyway,” Wayne said.
“I won’t identify them,” John said.
(Part Five coming on August 9 or 16, 2024.)
Health Delays
I'm chronically ill, so when I have an additional health problem (especially several in a row, which happened recently), doing anything is pretty difficult. I'm so used to health problems interfering with plans, that when necessary, I warn people about it.
I've already delayed a Wolftown post once due to health problems, so I definitely did not want to again. Unfortunately, because of an ER visit and needing to follow the doctor's instructions, I have to postpone the next installment of Wolftown for 2-3 weeks. Posting will resume July 19 or 26, unless yet another health problem hits me. On the bright side, since making a goal of posting one story (or part) monthly since October 2023, Wolftown is the first project which's delays I have needed to point out to readers. I posted a couple of other stories by the skins of their teeth; this is an oddly successful, reliable schedule for me.
Even when feeling terrible, I have been able to tell myself stories or bits of stories, and now I generally feel well enough to write them down and edit them. I'm excited to finish Wolftown! It changed so much since the first draft, but I love figuring it out. But I can't work on it at the moment.
Wolftown, Part Four
Mayor Dwyer granted John permission to observe the wolf hunt if he rode along with Wayne McDowell, who agreed with the idea. Also, the mayor authorized John to view Wayne’s scientific data.
The Nature Protection Society was founded in 1985, and Paula hired John in 1997. Over the past three years, he worked hard, gaining real experience, participating in training, and independently studying. He accompanied Paula on the last trip to Wolftown, which went well, and he developed a good business acquaintanceship with Happy Howlers, the wolf sanctuary. Paula sent John to Wolftown alone, despite his newness, because he functioned as an observer, simply giving Wolftown people a good general impression of the Nature Protection Society. Since Wolftown was his first opportunity to represent the Nature Protection Society Wisconsin branch single-handedly, Paula supervised him closely. Neither he nor she expected such a serious situation.
John opted to tell Paula about his and Kevin’s böxenwolf conversations later; something so private and wild required Kevin’s permission. He summarized other events since his last update.
Paula said, “Well, Wayne suggests he hire you for a while. I told him it was your decision.”
“Mayor Dwyer said if I snuck around, I would have to leave town,” John said.
“Finding useful, official information seems difficult.”
“Wayne feels the authorization should be unnecessary. In my opinion, the way he said it was a little suspicious.”
The thunderstorm disrupted the phone lines, but eventually, John heard Paula say: “I’m concerned you might get into trouble with the police, possibly unjustifiably.”
My lawyer says he was a werewolf, and a public defender can’t get here until the flood stops, John thought. As the phone lines went down, he said, “They let an attorney be present and I didn’t feel threatened.”
John hesitated to spend the satellite phone’s battery—he fully updated Paula. If she worried, she would call him. The Nature Protection Society owned the satellite phone but required each employee to bring a satellite phone into the field. Paula and John thought a wolf hunt called for wilderness preparation. The wolves roamed and hunted inside city limits but lived in the woods.
Then John called Paula. “I’m using the satellite phone. About your last concern, so far, I’m not worried.”
“I was going to say leave if you become worried, but can you?”
“If I walked, yeah, but I know better.”
“Oh, good Lord! Don’t!”
“From what I’ve seen, I can’t imagine a worse problem than hiking through a flood.”
“Be careful!”
Because Wayne had a legal question for Kevin, preferably asked in person, Kevin and John watched for him through City Hall lobby windows. They barely saw the street.
“I’m thinking about how other people might look at a böx—transfor—wol—”
“I know who you mean. Böxenwolves.”
“Good. Why do you think people fear them?”
“It is possible the stories about losing control of oneself came from a person’s temperament. A person might feel freer or more primal in wolf form and take advantage of it. I could think of a reason that doesn’t assume böxenwolves exist. How would other people look at it?”
“It’s my personal opinion. Monsters sometimes look like real animals. If people think the real animal is scary, sometimes they are scared of monsters that look like animals. Could people be scared of böxenwolves because people are scared of wolves?”
“Possibly.”
“Do you mind if I ask alike are böxenwolves and wolves?” John asked.
Kevin said, “A böxenwolf looks just like a regular wolf. You can tell the difference when we move, though.”
“Why?”
“It takes practice. I couldn’t figure out my ears and tail.”
“Sometimes people thought one thing caused an effect, but something else did. I’m not saying you are wrong. Do you know what paralytic rabies is?”
“I felt calm and friendly, not at all rabid.”
“With paralytic rabies, an animal can be rabid and non-aggressive. It causes paralysis and sometimes animals act tame. So, could a wolf with paralytic rabies look like a böxenwolf?”
“Swallowing and folding up my tongue was difficult. I’m more willing to believe rabid wolves attacked our town than that violent böxenwolves did,” Kevin said.
“Other people have very different opinions and experiences than mine.”
“I’m here to learn about them,” John said.
Several minutes later, Wayne rushed indoors, and squelched over, as tablespoon-worths of water puddled on the floor. He, John, and Kevin said hello. Wayne said Suzanne Giese (his employee and a wolf attack victim) was stable but showed few signs of recovery. Because of the attack, Calvin Kowalski quit, between the attacks and the flood, and Glenn Malone stayed home.
“What can John know without getting into legal trouble?” Wayne asked.
Kevin said, “If you or someone else accesses a government office’s evidence or data without permission, you would have broken policy and could have broken the law. If the person gives it to someone else, he breaks the law. The person you gave it to may not have had authorization.”
“Great, I’m not going to learn anything,” John said.
“You might not want to get information from Billy Schuster,” Wayne said.
“I believe Billy knows where the line is,” Kevin said.
The conversation answered Wayne’s legal question, so Kevin said goodbye.
“Do you want a job?” Wayne asked.
“If I worked for Happy Howlers, I’d be working for an organization that tries to capture a wolf on behalf of a government that intends to kill it. I can’t work for you,” John said.
“Then I’m going to call Sharon, the mayor’s secretary, every time you ask a question, and tell her I need approval to answer it. I bet after about twenty or twenty-five questions he will let me say anything.”
“They might think the Nature Protection Society is annoying,” John said.
“I’ll take the blame. And weren’t you arrested?”
“The police had questions about the wolf sighting and why I was in town. I felt uncomfortable answering without a lawyer present.”
“I’m glad you and Billy Schuster survived.”
“If I was in a wolf attack again, I would chase it away or tranquilize it. I can’t think of a way to make the wolf attack me, instead of somebody else, without hurting it, though.”
“We have enough tranquilizers for Jurassic Park, and I have an extra tranquilizer gun. I confiscated it from a patroller who tranquilized a wolfjäger.”
“Oh no!”
“The wolfjäger is fine.”
“Good. I don’t want my behavior to cause an unresolvable conflict between us or someone else,” John said.
“Same here. I’m armed, and we won’t get close to the wolf.”
“My first aid kit plans for wolf bites.”
“The tranquilizer might work before someone bleeds to death. I would pick you over most people I have been working with, and I’m including a policeman. Can you be around armed werewolf hunters?”
“Sure,” John said.
“I bet we can’t stop the patrollers but try if you want.” Wayne sighed. “You know, Mayor Dwyer only allows the wolves to be killed because they have killed and injured so many people.”
“Many people would agree with him,” John said.
“I’d like an alternative to killing the wolf. We have a nice, cozy enclosure set up for the wolves. Maybe capturing them will change his mind.”
Inside the Happy Howler’s animal transport van, Wayne began explaining Wolftown’s situation to John. The lack of communication between the teams baffled Wayne and the authorities’ attitudes frustrated him. He considered the combination ridiculously hazardous.
“I’m pretty sure only Mayor Dwyer puts together the information, and he holds a lot of it back. The rest of us guess and work on our own,” Wayne said.
“He probably just releases the most important things,” John said.
“Nothing has worked, so you’d think he would want us to review everything and come up with new ideas.”
Wayne sighed and unfolded a crinkled and marked-up map. He traced Wolftown’s sectors with his finger: one and two fenced in, three open, four being fenced in, and five open. The town center—City Hall, Holy Trinity Lutheran Church and School, Wolftown Bank, Schultz’s Country Store, space for a farmer’s market, and various businesses in old-fashioned buildings—formed the fifth sector. If responders fenced in the first four sectors, the fences naturally formed chokepoints, also sealable. The defenses withstood Wayne’s ambassador wolves in 1983.
Wayne had increased the wolf count to three, and people reported wolves in every sector. The wolf response teams found no wolves or wolf dens in sectors one and two and fenced them off—and then somebody filmed a wolf inside it. The wolf disappeared before Wayne reached the house. Sector three’s four-inch deep running water deterred most activities. Because of awful weather, the authorities called off the search.
“Ready to go?” Wayne asked.
“Sure,” John said.
“I think the wolves left town. If we find them, we will be lucky. Our other attempts didn’t work. Ruby Klug trains some of her wolfjägers to track wolves. Do you know her?”
“I met her last time I visited. She trains them traditionally with legal wolf fur?”
“Right. But they can’t practice on live wolves,” Wayne said. “The search-and-rescue dogs and county K-9 unit track the wolves better than the wolfjägers, but they aren’t trained for wolves, either. No idea why. The wolves are untagged. We haven’t seen the wolves on trail camera footage yet, but we can’t even retrieve the most recent film.”
John and Wayne passed a pair of patrollers hunched in a doorway.
The woods supported a stable wolf population, which ate well throughout the winter. Wolves could find comfortable, rural high ground, even in minor floods. Humans hardly encroached on wolf territory over the past several years, and the region could support many new wolf packs. Police fined people who interacted with wild wolves and Happy Howlers discouraged the practice, so Wayne doubted the wolves were habituated to people. Dr. Groves tested the wolf attack victims for rabies. However, Wayne thought every idea insufficiently explained the wolves’ behaviors.
Wayne parked in standing water next to a meadow and looked through a pair of binoculars. “Do you see the steer in the pollinator habitat?” He handed the binoculars to John.
The steer stood several inches deep in mud. The shelter of plastic tarps and PVC pipe offered little protection, especially considering the wind had half-collapsed it. Hay floated in an aluminum feeder and the water trough overflowed.
“You want to fix the shelter, don’t you?” Wayne asked.
“Yeah, it is annoying me,” John said.
“You should know we want the wolf to eat the steer instead of people. Bring your tranquilizer gun.”
“Most wolves need meat to survive, but the steer looks miserable,” John disagreed with rearing domesticated animals, but he treated them compassionately.
Belatedly, Wayne warned John about a pothole, but his fishing waders protected him. He and John skidded and slipped in the mud. Between heavy breathing, cracking, popping, and oof noises, Wayne told John about the steer.
Every time the wolf killed somebody, other people transferred the victims to the doctor or funeral home. Because the wolf could not return and feed, it hunted somebody else—but the wolf abandoned the site, and the other wolves never approached it. That increased Wayne’s doubts about surplus killing or ordinary hunting.
Wayne thought the wolves might prefer beef, and Wolftown bought four Angus cattle from a nearby farmer, Mike Davis. In various places near the woods, he made the Angus cattle as comfortable as possible. When a wolf charged the nicely marbled, juicy, unprotected steer, a camouflaged hunter intended to tranquilize the wolf, notify Wayne, and if necessary, euthanize the steer and track the wolf.
And to Wayne’s extreme exasperation, the wolves were totally uninterested in cattle.
Wayne and John spread stained but clean towels on the van seats.
“Let’s get out of here before the shelter falls apart again,” Wayne said, turning up the heater.
“What do you think of the suspect who kills like a wolf or a large dog?” John asked.
“I’ve advised the police about the suspect, so I have to be careful. I keep thinking about ways it could work, but I don’t think they would happen in real life. My best-trained ambassador wolf ever is Daisy. Do you remember her?”
“A car ran over her mother before she was born?”
“I raised Daisy from a pup, and I love her.”
“She is really sweet and cute,” John said.
“But Daisy could kill me in a few seconds because she is still a wolf. If she got confused about human behavior, or I provoked her, she would attack. Training a wolf is possible, and it’s possible to train multiple wolves over a few years.” As Wayne spoke, he turned a corner and crawled down the sloping street. A car floated at the end. Wayne reversed and chose another street, saying, “This intersection always floods, but I always try anyway. If the trained wolf hypothesis is true, and the wild wolf pack hypothesis is true, they could have happened at the same time. It’s very unlikely. It’s worse if someone trained a pack of wolves and let them loose. I wouldn’t leave a wolf somewhere and expect it to attack or not.”
“Don’t wolves and dogs respond differently to training?” John asked.
“Training dogs is very easy compared to wolves. The wolf domesticators must have been crazy. A well-trained wolf might not obey commands. I wouldn’t feel safe training a dog to kill a person.”
“He might figure out you are a person?”
“Right. I’m not talking about the police theories because I don’t know their ideas. I definitely wouldn’t leave a wolf somewhere and expect it to attack, even if it heard the command word somewhere.”
Wayne rolled down his window and argued with a patroller, who refused to let him drive through the fenced-off zone, especially because of John, an outsider. Apparently, the alternative routes flooded while he and John wrestled the steer’s so-called shelter. The storm interfered with walkie-talkies and phone connections. However, Wayne made the patroller write a permission slip for the gate guard on the opposite side.
“You probably can’t answer if I asked what happened during the murders,” John asked.
“The wolf response communication sucks, so I don’t know anything about them for sure. I’ll try to get you the evidence legally. But I’ve worked out different theories with the police, and none of them make sense.”
“Do you think the missing persons have something to do with the wolf attacks?”
“We live in a tourist town, so kids get lost, or a stranger commits a crime, and the police ask for the public’s assistance. We’ve had kidnappings and lost hikers, and we find them pretty quickly. Our last murder was about thirty years ago.”
“The police asked me if I saw the naked man,” John said, unsure if Wayne wanted to answer his question.
“I hope he isn’t a drug addict or having a mental breakdown.”
“If he is, someone needs to find him quickly.”
“Right. I think that’s why the police keep mentioning him. If he is only a streaker, I have no idea why he picked a thunderstorm and quiet streets. We don’t have a good picture of his face, but his height, weight, and profile match Dennis Laufenberg’s. But a lot of men look like them.”
“Officer Schuster and…Foster accused him of corruption?” John said.
“I think if Billy Schuster and Zach Foster’s allegations are true, Dennis Laufenberg could have run away. You can get everything else I know from the police, but you won’t learn much from the news.”
“Aren’t Wisconsin chiefs-of-police appointed?”
“A lot of people knew he was a bad cop, but if it was worse than we thought, we have a bigger problem than him.”
“I can’t believe so many problems began at the same time,” John said.
“It gets in the way of catching the wolves. Why would the wolves keep attacking during a flood?” Wayne asked.
“I can think about it, as a scientist talking to another scientist.”
“We’ve been asking outdoors folks if they have seen anything weird in the woods, like uneaten prey or something.”
“I think wolves kill for survival. Hunting gives them the best opportunity to feed. They always attack for a reason, but maybe we can’t figure it out yet. Maybe we need more data, or we need to learn more about wolves,” John said.
“A lot of victims were hamstrung, so it doesn’t look like playing,” Wayne said.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Wolf Alpha, the fat wolf, is the most dangerous one. I’m not convinced the other wolves have attacked people, but I think one ate a little boy’s pet bunny.”
“How is he?” John asked, as Wayne said:
“He will be fine. I talked to him about wolves.”
Wayne convinced another patroller to let him and John exit sector two, then said, “I think the wolves might have killed more people than the police say. If I’m right, the wolf attacks began earlier than the police say.”
“Really?” John asked.
“A hiker said a wolf attacked her and her husband. We found her while looking for the wolf, but we couldn’t find her husband. I’ll tell you about it when we get to the school. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to tell people this, but I bet people will know about it soon.”
“But we had to identify a body. I don’t think he matched the hiker’s description. I’ve looked at the victims or photos of everyone’s injuries, but not him. He looked too young to drink.”
“It’s terrible,” John said.
“I really don’t think a wolf attacked the kid.”
“Wolftown has been through enough.”
“It’s only bad timing. The flood is a very small problem, and Billy Schuster and Zachary Foster needed to speak up about Chief Laufenberg. No one thought the wolves would act like this, including me. The kid only made a bad few days worse.”
Sorry about the delayed posting. Though I can write while sick, I felt too sick to finish part four in time. The next part will be posted on Friday, July 5, 2024.
Wolftown, Part Three
As John hung up the pay phone, police officers carried a hollering man into the jail. John returned to the office area.
“The police brought in a guy yelling about the Constitution and yelling for you,” he told Kevin, a lawyer.
“Not surprising. Thanks for telling me.” Kevin stood up.
“Mr. Dalton,” Lang called.
John went to Lang’s full, tidy police desk.
“The mayor wants to see you in about five minutes,” Lang said.
“Do I have a chance of staying?”
“All the other outsiders haven’t been allowed to search, and now, with the weather, we can’t exactly send them out of town again.” Lang wrote down directions to the mayor’s office, also in City Hall, and said, “Please come back here when you finish.”
Wolftown’s police station’s doors and windows had been modernized, and it had electricity and plumbing, but most of City Hall resembled the 1800s construction. Portraits, photographs, and historical artifacts lined the walls; none included wolves.
Several people sat on benches and chairs through the Wolftown City Hall lobby. They seemed prepared to stay for hours, with things to do, like books, homework, knitting, a card game, coloring, and a happy apple toy. Volunteers set up lunch in a conference room.
John walked up the spiral staircase and down the hall, both wooden and squeaky, to the mayor’s office.
Mayor Dwyer hesitated to allow John to observe the wolf hunt. He assured Mayor Dwyer the Nature Protection Society had no intention of ridiculing Wolftown, inciting trouble, or actively discouraging tourism. If necessary, only John’s boss, Paula, would see the report and notes for months—they could release it when Wolftown’s investigation ended. He also offered to help.
Because regarding wolf matters, everybody consulted Wayne McDowell, who ran a wolf sanctuary, Mayor Dwyer argued that Wolftown did not need John's assistance. Mayor Dwyer reviewed Wayne’s humane wolf capture methods, hoping John had any other ideas, but Wayne thought of them all. Therefore, John could not assist with the wolf response.
The police investigated crimes while hunting the wolf, two potentially connected problems. John may mistake temporary stress and tension with behavior which provoked the police corruption accusations; John pointed out he had absolutely no interest in local law enforcement problems until they affected the wolf. Because he would not have authorization to view police evidence or government findings, his presence was unnecessary and a huge waste of time. Mayor Dwyer thought that John might be in the way, even if he remained in the background, or give responders yet another thing to worry about during a wolf attack.
However, Mayor Dwyer understood why John requested information about the wolf and worried about people’s reactions to the wolf. He agreed asking in person seemed more trustworthy than phoning or emailing.
The flood, wolf, murders, missing person cases, and police corruption investigation stretched Wolftown’s resources so thin that dependable civilians volunteered to help. People adapted their usual lives to the flood and sometimes the wolf; few tourists stayed in town. The police corruption investigation, missing persons, and murders were abnormal, but affected law enforcement and local government, instead of the people in general. The response was normal. Everything else about Wolftown was as usual. John thought Mayor Dwyer phrased the normalcy oddly but could not identify how or why—the ordinariness stretched over multiple sentences and popped up here and there.
John suggested understanding Wolftown’s history might help him predict people’s reactions to the wolves, so Mayor Dwyer explained.
Native Americans lived in Wolftown’s vicinity for thousands of years. European settlers arrived in 1816. Dozens of German families migrated from Wolfberg, Germany, to Wolftown in the 1800s, the first of which founded Wolftown in 1825. Nazis provoked the a major wave in the 1930s. Wolftown supported post-war Wolfberg, and in 1957, the cities twinned.
In Wolfberg, the Wolf Guard protected locals from wolves, which they continued in North America. However, North American wolves posed less of a threat than European wolves, and conservation movements began. So, the Wolf Guard hunted wolves to protect pioneers and farmers if necessary but leaned towards conserving wolves. Their presence proved to be unnecessary, but traditional. When Wayne founded Happy Howlers in 1963, many Wolf Guard members supported the organization. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 banned wolf hunting, restricting the Wolf Guard to activism. Now the handful of Wolf Guards hardly did anything other than wear the traditional costumes for the 4th of July Parade. And John suspected the remaining Wolf Guards were the patrollers, or, at least, the patrollers fulfilled the Wolf Guard’s traditional purpose.
Out-of-town reporters attempted to observe Wolftown, and Mayor Dwyer refused them. Police escorted one to the city limits. Still, Mayor Dwyer decided to consult other people and give John an answer as soon as possible; sneaking information would ruin John’s chances.
The thunderstorm had worsened through the morning. John liked thunderstorms and rainy weather, but something bothered him. He figured he was worried about the flood. As an introvert, John was annoyed by an unexpectedly extended stay in a different city than his own.
Kevin worked at a police desk. Lang gave John the internet password and permission to plug in his laptop but forbade John from using a desk with a computer or answering the phone.
John typed up everything he remembered, in any order, and then sifted through the notes. Of the Wolftown residents John spoke to, he noticed Wayne mentioned the böxenwolf first (to discredit it), Kevin described them, and Lang’s wolf hides (called “evidence”) implied the legend, if John assumed the wolf hides were wolf straps. Mayor Dwyer never mentioned them; neither did John.
A clap of thunder shook the windows and pictures of former police chiefs. Multiple lightning bolts struck simultaneously, so John unplugged his laptop.
John typed, Does Kevin think the böxenwolf myth makes people scared of wolves? Ask Kevin: How does the böxenwolf legend affect people’s perception of a wolf? But John felt uncomfortable thinking up humanities-orientated questions. He wrote them down but decided to ask questions as they occurred to him. John compared it to watching an animal in the wild, rather than in a laboratory.
Kevin wanted to tell John more about the böxenwolves at lunchtime. Volunteers fed people sheltering in churches, schools, and City Hall. When packing for Wolftown, John expected to spend quite a bit of time without refrigeration or reliable access to vegan food. He brought food in his pockets because his car despised large puddles and he walked whenever possible. John got black coffee, grapes, a sweet pickle, and vegetables.
After flipping his tie over his shoulder and spreading a napkin on his lap, Kevin said that a minority of Wolftown citizens actually believed the legend. Most people did not even think about it, let alone be influenced by it. However, during a böxenwolf situation, people would receive information from those who thought böxenwolves existed. Other people would rely on misremembered memories or make up an explanation that made sense to them. People’s behavior varied too greatly for Kevin to predict responses to a confirmed böxenwolf.
"The average person almost definitely thinks the wolf is a particularly ferocious wolf, but a wolf." Kevin crunched a potato chip. "But we can’t separate Wolftown’s emergency procedures from the böxenwolf, and people don’t like that. For example, the fences are too high for a wolf to jump and too slippery and high for the average man to scale alone.”
“The apron on the ground keeps a wolf from digging a tunnel,” John said.
“And I doubt a man would dig one. People must stay indoors until their sector is fenced in. After fencing in a sector, the patrollers search for the wolf. The fences keep people from leaving the neighborhood and the wolf from entering. People are not always willing to comply with the searches and fences.”
“Why use the walls instead of a police barricade and humane traps?”
“I suppose the wolves are too aggressive, quick, and sneaky. Nothing else stops them. And we already had the walls.”
“The people on the street come from the Wolf Guard, right? How do they affect the wolf?” John asked.
“Mayor Dwyer was very reluctant to authorize the patrollers. Higher government must know they exist because they were licensed to use tranquilizers before the wolf attacks. I would be more worried about a person attacking a patroller or policeman than a person harming the wolf.”
“But what if a patroller killed a wolf?” John asked.
“A wolf killing could be self-defense or a scared person cracking under pressure. We haven’t needed a Wolf Guard, though. Wolfberg historians say every hundred years or so, a böxenwolf becomes violent. During attacks, böxenwolves were preemptively jailed.”
“So, people came to the police station?” John said.
“Exactly. Some people sheltering in City Hall had or have a wolf strap in their possession and of their own accord, came here. They were concerned about their safety and came here for an alibi, or to aid the emergency response. The churches are traditional, and the schools are our emergency shelters. If böxenwolves are bad guys, wouldn’t keeping them, the police, and the entire local government inside City Hall be dangerous?”
John nodded; peanut butter and jelly clogged his teeth.
“In Germany, the Wolf Guard would search for the other böxenwolves, capture them, cure them, and destroy the wolf strap. We have had one violent attack attributed to a böxenwolf, in 1878. Some wolf strap owners stayed indoors or were taken in for questioning, and some helped carry out frontier justice. The mob lynched one böxenwolf, and another was killed trying to defend him. The wolf strap owners killed two people during the lynching. Everyone said wolves killed the victims, but who knows what a medical examiner would have ruled it?”
“Could it happen again?” John asked.
“The 1878 incident was chaotic and uncontrollable. Our wolf situation is chaotic in a different way, and our emergency response came from the 1878 incident. A person drawing the wrong conclusion could kill a wolf strap owner. I don’t think modern Americans would be accomplices.”
“I’m pretty sure I can say this. Mayor Dwyer said that police think somebody trained a wolf or dog to attack people. Wouldn’t that look like a böxenwolf?”
“Very possibly. A böxenwolf in human form can work a doorknob. Is it possible for a wolf to enter a building alone?”
“The news said the wolf went through a dog door. Maybe it figured out buildings have food, but that sounds like bear or raccoon behavior, not wolf behavior.
“Sometimes I make up cases and think about them, like a thought experiment. I’m speculating, but criminals have made more stupid plans. I don’t have any evidence of that happening here, and I doubt most criminals would try it. Do you suppose a person could use a wolf as a murder weapon? He’d leave böxenwolf evidence behind, like wolf straps. Maybe the police would disregard the evidence as superstitious and attribute the cause of death to a wolf attack. There are cases of people who were accused of using magic to commit a crime, where using the magic itself was not the crime. I highly doubt an American judge would allow law enforcement to prosecute a case that relies on magic.”
“Then why do people think the straps are evil?”
“For about 1,300 years, Westerners believed that quite a bit of unexplainable phenomena were magic or miracles. They believed a werewolf was not a miracle from God or a mysterious natural phenomenon. The alt—”
John jumped as thunder rolled and lightning struck. City Hall lost power, and the window blinds blocked what dim light landed on them and the windowsill. Lang called, accurately, “The generator will turn on in a minute.”
Kevin said, “Like I was saying, the alternative was magic, and they believed magic came from Satan. The böxenwolf legend began during that time period. Some religious people would use wolf straps and others wouldn’t.”
When children learned about böxenwolves in school, teachers treated it as a myth and never mentioned the Devil—that might lead to Peter Stumpp. Saying that Peter Stumpp’s criminal record gave people negative opinions about böxenwolves understated it. In the common, child-friendly legend, two friends’ hard work made them hungry. The first friend sat down to eat, while the second friend went into the trees. Soon, the first friend saw a wolf run into a field, eat an entire calf or foal, and run away. The second friend came back, complaining of a stomachache. The first friend said, “Of course, what did you expect after eating the whole thing at once?”
John said, “One very hungry, adult wolf could eat a lot of a very small, very young, newborn calf. A wolf eats almost everything, even hair and small bones."
“Did you notice something odd about Lang’s questioning?” Kevin asked.
“I’ve never been questioned before, and I assume fiction police officers behave differently than real ones.”
“He could have told Officer Matthews to question you about the wolf straps.”
“So, they were wolf straps.”
“In fact, Lang has not questioned anybody since I came here, except for you.”
“Is that bad?”
“No, it is probably nothing important to us.” Then Kevin’s tone changed. It fell between admitting he used marijuana once in college and telling an imaginably accepting person his sexuality. “You might not believe this, but before I donated it to a museum, I wore my family’s wolf strap once.”
John bit half through the baby carrot.
“Don’t worry. It didn’t affect my legal services,” Kevin said.
“Do you mind if I ask what happened?” John chewed with effort.
“I transfigured into a wolf,” Kevin said.
John mumbled jumbled words instead, then settled for, “Really? How? What?”
“Just once,” Kevin said. “It was on September 8, 1973, in the woods when I was eighteen. My grandpa thought it was important. Our family has instructions to make wolf straps. I just tied on the wolf strap, and I looked like a wolf. My senses worked like a wolf’s, and I could think like a person. I think that protects people from us. He told me never to do anything while transfigured that I wouldn’t do while not transfigured. I didn’t have any wild animal urges or evil thoughts while wearing the wolf strap or after taking it off. I untied it with my teeth, and I transfigured into a human again. I didn’t like being a böxenwolf.”
Lang overheard the last couple of sentences. “I wanted to be a hare, but Kevin’s recipe didn’t work.”
“You used a rabbit,” Kevin said.
“I am not having this argument again!”
“The legend says the person can transfigure into a hare, but I’m not aware it ever happened. And you would probably agree that was good, or Lang would’ve been eaten.”
“I didn’t know what would happen to my mind if I was a wolf,” Lang said.
“Also, he didn’t want to kill another alleged rabbit and fail,” Kevin said.
“We ate the meat if that makes you feel better. Anyway, Mr. Dalton, you are allowed to observe if you ride along with Wayne McDowell. You will not have access to evidence, but you may make your own notes. Nobody is required to answer your questions, and everybody has the right to refuse you access to something. You must wear a reflective vest because of low visibility and to identify yourself. You must carry a tranquilizer gun, but the state of Wisconsin requires a permit. Is that acceptable?”
“Sure. John handed over his tranquilizer gun permit for verification.
Next part coming Friday, June 28, 2024, hopefully. I have had several bad health problems in a row and if I don't feel better by Monday morning, I might need to delay the next installment by one week.
Wolftown, Part Two
The wolf charged John. He yanked the antiquarian bookshop’s door open and squeezed into the bookshop. Simultaneously, Schuster activated his lights and sirens, and accelerated, and began firing his gun.
As the bookshop door closed, the wolf cracked the glass. Schuster’s car hydroplaned and skidded sideways onto the curb. John flattened himself on the floor but had seen the wolf gallop away.
Schuster stood in front of the bookshop and continued firing. John rushed out, hands raised, and saw the wolf dodge from a doorway to an intersection.
“Hey! Stop! It ran away! Stop! I was in a safe place! The wolf couldn’t attack!” John also yelled other comments.
Schuster alternated chasing and shooting the wolf, radioing throughout, and John chased Schuster. The wolf crossed the intersection a second time and bolted down the block.
Just when two patrollers and a wolfjäger splashed up, Schuster emptied his magazine, and the wolf turned a corner.
“Are you okay?” Schuster reloaded.
John took a deep breath.
“Are you okay?” Schuster resembled a snapped rubber band five minutes ago, but now he looked glued together, and the glue was still wet.
“The wolf isn’t, but I’m fine,” John said.
The armed patroller asked, “Why were you chasing the wolf away?”
“Okay, guys, everything is fine.” John wondered why Schuster tolerated the patroller’s revolver.
“Come on, Dogzilla.” The wolfjäger and handler ran, but the other patroller asked,
“He aided and abetted a suspect. I heard him.”
“You go that way and around in a circle.” Schuster pointed.
“But he helped the wolf.”
“I was present at the time.”
Over the patroller’s objections, Schuster said, “Mr. Dalton, you can go ahead and lower your hands.”
John did.
Schuster spoke deliberately and firmly. “Let’s get back on track. Circle the block, meet up with your partner, and patrol. Radio observations.”
The patroller complied.
“Okey-dokey, we will be stuck here for a while because I discharged my weapon,” Schuster said.
“Your arm is bleeding.”
“It’s fine. I mean we will be here. You are a witness now. Let’s go back to my car.”
“Have I broken a law?” John asked.
“No, sir, but you witnessed the wolf, and Wolftown would appreciate your cooperation in the investigation.”
John understood little of Schuster’s radio message.
“I’d like a lawyer to be present before I say anything,” John said.
“Okay, no problem.”
Sitting in the police car with the door open, Schuster juggled fresh bandages and the radio, both urgent issues. Once John noticed, Schuster accepted his help with the bandage. It was the first time John saw sutured wolf bites in person, and the shooting had torn and separated several stitches. The long pattern and the smaller punctures matched a large carnivore’s teeth, and the welts and scratches were inconsequential.
Schuster and the police dispatcher struggled to send more police officers to the scene. He told a patroller with the other police officers to lend his walkie-talkie to Officer Matthews. “You guys are two blocks away and can’t get anybody here?” Schuster asked. Convincing Officer Matthews to use his radio, Schuster forced himself to speak calmly and evenly. Then his volume increased with every word: “No, Dustin, I’m not going to investigate my own shooting alone! Come on! Get your asses over here, damn it!” He restrained further outbursts and regained his composure.
Finally, the supervisor intervened, and Schuster’s taut rubber band tendencies relaxed.
Observing Dogzilla, John wondered if some people reported false sightings: a wolfjäger misidentified as a wolf. Dogzilla was approximately the same size as a Great Dane, St. Bernard, or English mastiff. His tail and head resembled a German shepherd’s, though his pointy ears sat further apart, closer to a wolf’s position. Soaked fur emphasized his pointer dog shape. Medium-long, bushy fur covered him—mottled and darker on his back and sides, with a light underbelly, and pale facial and leg markings. Especially in low visibility and from a distance, a frightened person unfamiliar with comparing canines might become confused.
On John’s last trip, he met a wolfjäger breeder, Ruby Klug, who said that Germans bred the dogs to hunt wolves and bears. Wisconsin banned hunting wolves, and the dogs mangled anything smaller than a fox. Most hunters trained the wolfjägers for elk and deer.
In 1982, some wolfjägers escaped Ruby Klug’s property, and two or three bred with wolves. Though she, Happy Howlers, animal control, and government departments searched and captured some, the wolf-wolfjägers caused mayhem. Then they mauled a young girl to death. Wolftown requested the public’s assistance in trapping or killing them. The effort succeeded. Although many people supported euthanizing them, Wayne welcomed them into Happy Howlers and had them sterilized.
Between the patrollers’ suspicions and the risk of another attack upon the wolf, John decided to accept Schuster’s offered ride. He overheard an argument between Schuster and another policeman, whom Schuster thought should take John to the police station and question him. The policeman, Matthews, thought he had more important duties. They compromised: Schuster transferred John, and Matthews would question him when time allowed.
Regarding riding in a police officer’s car, John was less than thrilled. He felt all right with Schuster, who uncovered police corruption, which threatened his career. Though John considered himself minimally cooperative, Schuster accepted his hesitations.
Schuster searched and handcuffed John, assuring him it was routine for both people’s safety and particularly important because John rode in the front seat. Foster’s blood had soaked the backseat and dried. Though Schuster rinsed the floorboard and wiped down the interior, blood dribbled and dotted the police car. Also, his bitten arm had stained the driver’s side.
“You’re a wildlife biologist, right?” Schuster asked.
“Yeah, though I’m more familiar with African, Asian, and South American animals than with wolves.”
“How did you end up on three continents?”
“I worked for a charity concerned with the illegal wildlife trade.” Mentioning that he burned out and quit seemed thoughtless, compared to Schuster’s recent experiences.
“Believe it or not, I really hate seeing animals suffer.”
“I agree with you about that, but I was okay in the bookshop.”
“Can I ask you a question that is about wolves?”
“Sure.”
“I couldn’t tell visually, but I fired seventeen times. We found fifteen bullets, and one of them went through the wolf.”
John prevented himself from saying, Poor wolf, aloud.
“I’d say I shot it three times. If it’s the same wolf, I shot it five times total today, and one of the shots grazed it,” Schuster said.
“In the same day?” John asked.
“Yeah. My question is, should the wolf be dead, let alone able to attack?”
“It survived somehow, but it should be dying, and too weak to find a safe place to die.”
“I was trying to kill it both times. I hit its hip and chest.”
“It shouldn’t have galloped.”
“Did you see blood?”
“No, but it was moving fast, and I couldn’t see well. The rain probably washed off blood, too,” John said.
“I’d say he was high if he was a human, but he is a wolf. Here we are.”
Schuster parked behind Wolftown City Hall.
Wolftown’s police station was inside City Hall, and Schuster brought John through the police entrance. In an office area, one police officer worked at a desk. A middle-aged woman knocked on the Chief of Police’s office and entered.
Schuster looked around the seated people and pointed John to the lawyer. Kevin Miller snored under a newspaper, but fumbled and rustled to the surface.
“Hi. Sorry to wake you up,” John said.
Kevin waved it aside.
“Officer Lang said you were a lawyer?”
Kevin nodded, standing up in black socks, and shook John’s hand. “Kev—” he yawned, “excuse me.”
“My name is John Dalton,” John said. “Officer Schuster said to wake you up.”
He rubbed his eyes. “Kevin Miller. I offer any legal services people need, issues with the wolf are pro bono.”
“How did you know?”
“I came here yesterday for that purpose, among others. I might not be available otherwise. Let me wake up for a moment.” Kevin stretched, then retrieved his black shoes from under the chair. He wore a loose paisley tie, partially untucked white shirt, and a brown suit; the jacket hung over the chair’s back.
Kevin tidied up in the restroom. John wondered how he managed to fall asleep in the awful chairs.
In one of two interrogation rooms, John told Kevin what happened since his arrival in Wolftown. Kevin asked, “Does something specifically bother you?”
“The local authorities sanction killing the wolf, and I’m worried if a man with a wolfdog murdered people, the wolfdog will be killed,” John said.
“Other than professional concerns, what concerns you?”
“The corruption,” John asked.
“It is completely separate from the wolf attacks. You may feel better if you know the Chief of Police is unavailable,” Kevin said.
John raised his eyebrows. “Really?”
“There are strong reasons to prefer the Deputy Chief of Police,” Kevin said.
“Vincent Woods. Honestly, I think you have scarcely anything to worry about. You can expect routine questions. Why would anybody suspect you?”
“I grew up in a bad LA neighborhood. I made two of my life goals not being shot at by anybody and not being killed by a gang. I don’t want to see a police shooting, too.”
“The police supervise the patrollers closely, but they have been threatening or going beyond their authority. I know what people think of them, and how police respond to them.”
John and Kevin made small talk while waiting for Officer Matthews’ arrival.
Officer Matthews rushed, impatient for the questioning’s ending. Kevin predicted the questions accurately, until Matthews left, and Lang entered with two evidence bags. Both held fur, one wet and one dry.
“Just a moment,” Kevin said. “Why are those pertinent?”
“They may help our investigation,” Lang said.
Pointing between John and Lang, Kevin said, “I would like a minute alone with you, then him, or you, then him. Either order.”
“Me first,” Lang said.
Kevin opened the door a minute later, calling into the lobby, “You had opportunity yourself, Danny!”
“Oh, go tell him,” Lang said.
“He expects me to tell you.” Kevin sat.
“About what?” John asked.
Lang stuck his head in. “You wanted him to be informed before I questioned him and if I told him, you would want to listen, and if you listened, you would find something objectionable.”
“Why didn’t you say so first?” Kevin asked.
Lang muttered, “End with the strongest point,” as the door shut.
“We grew up together,” Kevin said.
“You seemed to know each other,” John said.
“Have you been to the local museum, by any chance?” Kevin asked.
“Last time I visited. I understand that some Wolftown residents think the wolf is a werewolf or böxenwolf. It’s a kind of werewolf?”
“Yes, and I think Lang will ask you about them. How do you want to answer?”
“I’ll tell them I don’t know much about them, and I’d be telling the truth.”
“I can easily stop the böxenwolf line of questioning. Just say so, anytime.”
“But why do the böxenwolves matter to the police?” John asked.
“I highly doubt the police force in general believes in the böxenwolf, as in, believing a man can turn into a wolf. Who could turn from one thing into something else? But just the same, we can’t separate Wolftown’s emergency procedures from the böxenwolf legend. Maybe at some point, the emergency procedures and laws will change, but at the moment, we have them. Wolftown laws state that being a böxenwolf in and of itself is not a crime and that a person who commits a crime while being a böxenwolf cannot receive a lighter or heavier sentence or unlawful treatment owing to his transfigured state. It was a reaction to Germany’s treatment of werewolves. Maybe I can predict the questions.”
“Sure,” John said.
Kevin’s questions included idealizing wolves or having an interest in tanning and taxidermy, German folklore, alchemy, and Satan. According to legend, the Devil gave a person a wolf pelt girdle or belt that transformed the wearer into a wolf. But in exchange for the gift, or as a condition of receiving the wolf strap, the wearer either performed the Devil’s work or the Devil possessed him. Therefore, Kevin explained, in the 1980s Wolftown, people voluntarily turned wolf straps over to the museum or police. Without mentioning specifics, Kevin said that modern experiences contradicted the occult theory. Wolftown citizens owned wolf straps; police found all kinds of things in crime scenes. He doubted Lang would ask about Satan, but the idea mattered to the legend and Wolftown’s history.
Lang asked if John had been to Germany or Poland, killed a wolf, or acquired an uncured wolf pelt or a cured wolf pelt product, or instructions for tanning a wolf hide. He omitted questions Kevin considered unlikely—like idealizing wolves or having an interest in alchemy, German folklore, or tanning and taxidermy.
“This is an example of a suspicious object.” Lang passed John an evidence bag holding a strip of dry fur. “Can you identify the object?”
John felt sorry for the animal. “It looks like a wolf strap from the museum, but I don’t know if this was the one I saw on display or not,” he said.
“Do you notice anything about it?”
“Why?” Kevin asked.
“I’m asking him as a wildlife biologist and because he had some idea about what it was.”
“I’ll answer,” John said. “Can I look at it up close?”
“I brought a pair of gloves and a magnifying glass. Don’t let it trail on the floor.”
The bag listed the fur’s dimensions (about five feet long and seven inches wide), so John pulled out one end, from which dangled a rawhide string. He examined it. “It is a cured strip of animal fur, probably from a wolf or a coyote. I think it is wolf fur, though. Wolves have darker fur on their backs and lighter fur on their bellies, but I can’t tell if it came from the wolf’s back or side. The fur is white and grey, probably from an older wolf. A wolf grows a thick undercoat in winter and sheds it in the spring, and the fur doesn’t have an undercoat. The wolf was probably killed in summer.”
John thought the muddy fur belonged to a young but full-grown wolf, and it died in spring or autumn. The strip changed color from creamy to mottled brown and black, and along with its shorter length, indicated the skinner lay the hide flat and cut side-to-side instead of lengthwise.
The wolf straps’ musty, stinky wolf odor had faded, but the first strap smelled like the plastic bag and the second like Wisconsin’s forests and mud. Furs he sniffed in second-hand stores absorbed perfume, cigarette smoke, closet must, or dry-cleaning chemicals, none of which applied to either wolf strap.
“Thank you for your cooperation,” Lang said. “You are free to leave now.”
“I’d still like to offer assistance or stay to observe,” John said.
“Mayor Dwyer knows, and you need his permission.”
Lang suggested waiting with Kevin, since the wolf response used a buddy system, among other teamwork, close contact, and communication methods. Kevin was willing. To demonstrate cooperation, John agreed.
Since John needed to update Paula, his boss, Kevin directed John to a pay phone and returned to his seat.
“If you don’t feel safe now, you will feel less safe later, and don’t forget about the floodwaters,” Paula said.
“I won’t. I want to stay and find out what is going on. I’m making more observations now than I could last time. If it gets too weird, I’ll leave.”
“Weird how? The werewolf?”
“Yeah. I don’t know how to express it yet, but I’m thinking of something. I think we would miss a lot if we came back later, and I don’t know if it would be a cover-up or people unwilling to talk to strangers.” John spoke over Paula, who stopped talking. “Somebody can find out if they try, but a lot of people wouldn’t try, or they overlooked something, or something has to fit the right way to be understood, or people have impressions. Somebody reconstructing events wouldn’t figure it out easily, and I don’t think I could understand it. I don’t know if multiple observers could, or if they would come to one conclusion. I’m wondering if a local could, but I don’t know if they would try, or if they want to. Sorry, I interrupted. What did you say?”
“Be careful,” Paula said. “Thinking of something else?”
“Like I said, I don’t know what I’m thinking yet.”
“Now, be really careful.”
“I’m probably fine, but the wolf isn’t. I’ll call again before leaving City Hall.”
(Next part coming Friday, June 21, 2024.)
Wolftown, Part One
“Wolves have killed three people in Wolftown, Wisconsin. Most recently, Officer Zachary Foster, 25, died of his injuries at the UW Health University Hospital. The names of the other two victims and details about their deaths have not been released. Foster leaves his five-month pregnant wife, Megan, behind. Wolftown Mayor Herbert Dwyer says, ‘Officer Zachary Foster’s death greatly saddens us in local government, and of course, those in the police force, and, I imagine, members of other emergency services who worked with him. The citizens of Wolftown will no doubt remember his sacrifice for years to come.’ Our listeners may know that Foster and another officer, Billy Schuster, were put on unpaid leave pending an investigation after they brought forth evidence of Wolftown Police Chief Dennis Laufenberg’s misconduct and criminal activity. Wolftown Police Department has revealed some details about the wolf attack that killed Officer Zachary Foster and injured Officer Billy Schuster, and Megan Foster also answered some questions. Megan says that Foster and Schuster felt like they, ‘couldn’t sit around all day waiting for a wolf to kill someone.’ When the wolf attacks began approximately eighteen hours ago, the officers volunteered for duty. At around 5:20 this morning, Foster and Schuster responded to a 911 call reporting a wolf entering a house through a dog door.”
“Why would a wolf do that?” John asked to the radio.
“—Foster sustained injuries on his neck, arms, and legs, and Schuster was bitten on the arm. Schuster shot at the wolf repeatedly, but it escaped. Schuster and an unidentified civilian administered first aid, and Schuster drove Foster to Wolftown Medical Clinic. Foster was then transferred to the UW Health University Hospital. The wolf has yet to be found. Nobody on the property was injured.”
The wolf’s escape relieved John, but he wished Foster survived. Local people and the authorities probably felt even more hostile towards the wolf and upset by it than before.
A police roadblock stopped John, the only person driving into Wolftown, Wisconsin, and a line of cars waited in the opposite lane.
The roadblock police officer said, “We’re checking each car for a dangerous suspect. Have you seen unusual behavior on your way here, either a person behaving unusually or a wolf behaving unusually, or a big dog maybe?”
“No,” John said.
“Have you seen a naked man running around on your way here?”
“No. In this weather?”
“Have you seen a wolf, wolf-dog, or large dog, whether loose or with a person?”
“No.”
“Do you know anybody in Wolftown?”
“Yes, but I’m not going to say who unless I need to.”
“What brings you to Wolftown today?”
“I’m a wildlife biologist from the Nature Protection Society Wisconsin Branch, and I’m here about the wolf. I want to offer assistance if possible, or at least observe the events,” Paula, John’s boss, intended to open the second branch in Michigan.
“We don’t allow outsiders to hunt the wolf.”
“In my opinion, humans killing animals is unethical.”
“Please, say you have something to defend yourself.”
“I have an air horn. I understand what carnivores do and I respect them.” He thought, And I’m not stupid enough to approach the wolf before tranquilizing it.
“You are aware of the killer wolf and highly dangerous suspect.”
And that some locals think the wolf is a werewolf, John thought.
“The other road out of Wolftown crosses a flooded bridge, and if the rain keeps up, this road will become unpassable. By the time you change your mind, it will be too late.”
“I’m prepared for the flood,” John said.
“The tourists have been leaving because of the flood. I’m going to radio that you intend to stay in town. We need to collect as much information about the wolf and highly dangerous individual as we can. We’ve been asking people to go to the police station and find out if they might have useful information.”
“I will keep it in mind.”
“Most of the businesses left their doors unlocked for people running away from a wolf. Go inside and shut the door when you see a wolf. Keep a really careful eye out for the wolf.”
“I will.”
Wolftown’s sign read:
Wolftown
Welcome to the Pack
Founded 1831
Population 1,524
Wolftown’s state of emergency applied to the floods—other current issues were the wolf, allegations of police corruption, and two murders, all of which occurred in the past week. John wondered if the wolf attacks were the town’s last straw. On the drive, he listened to local radio, hoping to learn more about the wolf, and ignoring the corruption and murders. Reporters knew little about the corruption, and police strictly withheld information about the murders. Wolftown’s settlers brought a werewolf legend from Germany, but the news never mentioned it.
The reporters repeated the same wolf information. Authorities identified one killer wolf and at least one other wolf roaming the town. Already, Mayor Herbert Dwyer condoned killing the wolf or wolves. Wisconsin Fish, Wildlife, and Parks Division aided Wolftown. The city also had an animal control department, but Happy Howlers tended to wolves. Dr. Jodi Richardson (a popular large animal veterinarian who treated the odd wild animal when called upon), and dozens of local civilians volunteered to hunt the wolf.
John drove to Wolftown because the people’s reactions seemed odd, and he found insufficient information remotely.
Before coming to Wolftown, John spoke with Wayne McDowell, who founded the local wolf sanctuary, Happy Howlers. Sometimes Happy Howlers and the Nature Protection Society worked together. He understood John’s concern but thought coming was a waste of time. “I bet nobody will let you look around or do anything,” he said.
The police identified the highly dangerous suspect as a person with a wolf, wolf-dog, or large dog. Both Wayne and John acknowledged some modern people successfully trained wolves like dogs. Due to the difficulty of acquiring a trainable pup, Wayne and John guessed the suspect worked with a wolf-dog or a massive, strong dog. In Wayne’s experience, a wolf, wolf-dog, or above-average domesticated dog’s bite force was at least one hundred times more forceful than the attacking canine’s. John trusted his judgment.
Police Chief Laufenberg’s misconduct and crimes seemed unrelated to the wolf, but the allegations’ effects on the police officers concerned John. Officers probably disagreed with each other, leading to teamwork problems. Meanwhile, they worked together for long hours under high stress, managing multiple crises, routine calls, and supervising wolf hunters, which combined could make them mishandle the wolf situation. Because Wayne said the wolf attacked his employees, John thought between the stress, emotions, and cooperating with the local authorities, Happy Howlers might harm the wolf. Wayne said he had distributed tranquilizer guns and people carried their normal weapons. He struggled to reassure people that one dart made a full-grown wolf unconscious—even after Wayne demonstrated on an ambassador wolf. Multiple tranquilizing darts would overdose the wolf. Through experience with various animals, he and John sympathized with people’s doubts about their safety in the few minutes before the wolf fell asleep. Finally, the werewolf rumor could provoke mass panic and violence towards wolves and people, whether or not somebody correctly identified the culprit.
Neither Wayne nor John believed in werewolves, but Wayne told John, “They wouldn’t look like wolves because wolf and human musculature and bone structure are so different, they need to change. It takes a long time for real animals to totally change their form, and an object doesn’t make them change their form.” According to the folklore, wearing a special belt made of wolfskin turned the wearer into a wolf. The folklore called the werewolf böxenwolf.
Wolftown beautifully maintained its brick roads, half-timber buildings, and other historic architecture. A few businesses had lights on, and two people exited a closed gift shop. Despite the rain and workday, cars filled the church parking lots; other parking lots remained empty.
People stacked sandbags, often looking around for a wolf, or under apparent guard. Pairs of people in reflective vests walked wolfjägers, and one pair carried a rifle. John pitied the soggy dogs because the wolfjägers had absolutely no choice about suffering the weather. The thick, cold rain hurt and it was a cool March day.
John owned an eco-hostile, half-useless pick-up truck. The van belt squealed about a puddle of water. He pulled over into a street parking spot, fed the meter, and opened the hood.
“Just so you know, there is no parking here,” a man in a vest said.
“I’m stopping long enough to adjust the van belt,” John said.
“Do you need a tow?”
“I’ve done this before, and once today.”
The man carried a break-action shotgun, cracked open and unloaded. Still, it scared John. He concentrated on the engine.
“We try to be a friendly town, but we don’t welcome outsiders today," the man said.
“The officials want to keep people safe," John said.
“You’ll need to go back the way you came and an hour out of your way.”
John shut the hood. “Thanks for your concern.”
The man spoke into his walkie-talkie while John drove away. Another unarmed pair followed him. He wondered if they had concealed carry permits or hid their guns illegally.
To learn Wolftown’s layout, John drove around Wolftown. He saw weird posts and holes lining the streets on his last visit. The town needed them for a 12-foot tall, rusting, corrugated metal wall, on which they hung detour and Do Not Enter signs. Water trickled under the crack and through drainage holes. On grassy land, a 3-foot corrugated metal apron prevented tunneling. In John’s experience, a farmer's wire fence with a wire apron blocked the average wolf’s entry. Wayne built wire and concrete fences because tourists came so close to wolves.
Before John left for Wolftown, every hotel, motel, and bed-and-breakfast refused to reserve a room, but he came prepared to sleep in his truck. He found a motel room in person, at the first place he asked. The manager warned him about the flood and wolf. She said that the motel cooperated with the police, which meant notifying the police he had checked in. Great, John thought. He checked in anyway. On the phone, the police also asked him to come to the police station (in city hall) for voluntary questioning.
Paula worried about John’s safe arrival and the town’s room availability, and she needed his phone number. She agreed some aspects of Wolftown seemed odd. If, at any point, John felt unsafe, she encouraged him to leave.
John dressed in his fishing waders, raincoat, and rainhat, packed his briefcase in a waterproof bag, and asked the motel manager for directions to City Hall, and walked. Though he planned to visit City Hall, seeking wolf information, he hoped to avoid questioning. Wayne was his only connection to Wolftown.
A patrolling pair followed John on foot, sometimes using their walkie-talkies until a police car sent them away. The officer caught up with John.
“Excuse me, sir, are you the guy here about the wolf?” he asked.
John stopped in front of the Beyond Bagels Bakery. “Me?”
“John Dalton?” the police officer asked, with a tense, stretched expression.
“Yeah,” John said.
“My name is Officer Schuster. With our ongoing situation, walking alone is very unsafe. I can give you a ride, but—”
Schuster’s radio interrupted him. Among untranslatable acronyms and numbers, John heard “wolf,” and street names. An older pair of patrollers hustled out of the bakery.
“Patrollers! Come here for a minute!” Schuster called. To John, he said, “Sir, if the wolf comes here, you need to be somewhere safer. Do you want to go into the bakery or my car?”
The patrollers waited.
“I’m not comfortable going into a police car,” John said.
“When I say, go into the bakery, and you need to comply immediately, or I will put you in the bakery.” He pointed. “Push the door.”
“Sure,” John said.
Schuster answered his radio again, and one of the patrollers listened to the walkie-talkie. By the end of the transmission, Schuster looked like a rubber band about to snap.
“Okay, John Dalton is here about the wolf. You need to keep an eye on him if I leave.”
The patrollers agreed, and John asked, “Why?”
All John understood from the radio was something about “knocked out” and “attack.” Schuster answered the radio again, and hesitated, looking at John. The emergency siren sounded.
“Haven’t you done enough?” the woman patroller asked.
Church bells rang.
“Everybody would understand if you went home,” the man patroller said, as Schuster half-shoved and half-dumped John through the door.
“Sit down and sit tight. Keep an eye on him,” Schuster said. He rushed to his car and sped away with lights and sirens.
The patrollers joined John, and the man locked the door. The thunderstorm, emergency siren, and church bells muffled the police sirens and gunshots. John and the patrollers, Frank and Debby, introduced themselves.
“What happened?” John asked.
“Something bad,” Frank said.
The bakery smelled like fresh bread and doughnuts. Somebody had turned on every light and spilled a still-steaming cup of coffee. John cleaned it up with napkins.
He overheard Frank's staticky walkie-talkie “He got away. We’re fencing in sector four.”
The corner TV blurted robotically, “A wolf attack—”
In another room, a man shrieked the same volume as the TV's blaring emergency address. Frank rushed in its direction.
“—has been reported in sector four. If you are in sector four, stay inside, and lock all windows and doors,” and listed which streets were in the sector.
“I need to go to city hall,” John said. “Is it in sector four?”
“You shouldn’t leave until told,” Debby said.
“Tommy dropped a kitchen knife on his foot,” Frank said.
“Oh, darn it!” Debby said.
“I have a first aid kit,” John said.
“He does, too. The alert scared him, and his hands were sweaty. I’m radioing for transportation to Dr. Groves’ office.”
“But you know Dr. Groves’ office is only good for little operations, like fishhooks and Bunny’s abscess.”
“Dr. Groves knows where to send him. He gave Foster a blood transfusion."
Schuster returned a few minutes later and looked like the rubber band snapped and ricocheted off the ceiling. “Okay, walking to the police station is extremely dangerous, but I can’t keep you here. In the police car, you wouldn’t be detained, but you would be in handcuffs.”
“I like walking," John said.
“No problem. I’ll follow you.”
“Does that mean if we see the wolf, you will shoot him?”
“If he is trying to get you, yeah.”
“Officer Schuster survived a wolf attack,” Debby said.
“Good! Condolences about Officer…Foster.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m not comfortable being in a police car when I haven’t broken the law. And I don’t want the wolf to get shot because of me.”
“Here’s a compromise. If you see the wolf, blow your air horn, and if the wolf runs away, I won’t shoot it.”
John nodded grudgingly. “Can you follow far away?”
“Okey-dokey,” Schuster said.
Schuster trailed about one block behind John. Patrollers gave him odd looks, but let him pass.
Catty-corner from John, a door swung shut, and something moved. A lamppost’s flowers and a mailbox obscured a massive, canine shape. It looked up and down the street, then bolted at thirty or forty miles an hour towards an alley, while John mentally compared dogs, wolves, and coyotes, and decided he saw a frightened wolf. The wolf’s ears were flattened, its head lowered, and its tail between its legs.
Why did the door open? John wondered.
The wolf poked its head around the alleyway and glared at John. Turning to face the wolf, John stared back. It stepped forward. John blew his airhorn, waved his arms, and shouted, “Run away!” He backed against a pull-to-open door, and the wolf laid its ears back and raised its tail horizontally.
(Next part coming between Friday, June 7, 2024 and Monday, June 10, 2024, and then I will post the parts one week apart. Because of a family priority, I can't schedule the exact date yet.)
(Update: Because of an illness, the next part will be posted on Friday, June 14, 2024.)
It
(About: A young woman thinks her ovarian teratoma is a monster and finally finds a doctor willing to treat it.)
“I can’t get no one to address my concerns about my lump, so I thought a doctor wouldn’t repair It,” Jada said.
“I promise I and the nurses will address your concerns,” Dr. Smith said.
Jada yelped and tears squeezed between her closed eyes. A white Sharpie oval marked a distention on her pelvis, with a knife half-embedded in the center. A foul smell indicated a perforated intestine.
“Jada, are you pregnant?” Dr. Smith asked.
“Not pregnant,” she said.
Jada refused addictive painkillers, and the IV acetaminophen barely helped. Rolling her onto her side for a nerve block required stabilizing the knife. Jada already immobilized it with bulky bandages, but even when she lay on her back, the knife swayed. A nurse held it still.
Dr. Smith ultrasounded Jada’s spine for the nerve block and, coincidentally, saw the mass. Without changing his expression or tone, he asked, “Jada, how long have you had the lump?”
Answering verbally interrupted Jada’s self-controlled breathing. “At least eight years.”
“You should feel numb within about half an hour. Have you been diagnosed with cancer?”
“No.”
“The lump is very big and serious. I’m more concerned about it than the knife wound, but your knife wound also needs repair. Have you received treatment for the lump?”
“Nobody’s done nothing about it.”
“We will do what we can, and you will need to stay in the hospital for treatment, possibly overnight.”
“Keep examining me.”
“A further exam may cause too much pain, and you are stable.”
“Fine. Examine me.”
Carrying a backpack and document box, Jada entered the Jacksonville Mayo Clinic Department of Emergency Medicine. She immediately went to the women’s restroom, where she stabbed herself. Jada bandaged her wound and walked calmly towards the triage desk. Another woman in the restroom alerted the triage nurse, who met Jada halfway.
The mass shifted under Dr. Smith’s hands, and wincing, Jada held her breath and clenched the blanket.
“You didn’t hurt,” she grunted.
Something jabbed visibly under Jada’s skin.
“It may be an awkward question, and nobody here will judge you. I need to ask. Has anything living or moving gotten stuck in your body?” Dr. Smith asked.
“No,” Jada said.
“You aren’t pregnant. Do you have any idea what might be moving?”
“It grew in me, and It’s mad.”
“What is It mad about?” Dr. Smith asked.
“At me. Stabbed It, and we’re going through withdrawal, and It’s hungry.”
“Can you describe how It moves?” he asked.
“It moves when It wants to. I can’t make It stop.”
“Can you make it move?”
“By hitting it.”
“When it moves, are you pushing like a bowel movement or something like that?”
Jada shook her head.
Dr. Smith ordered a CT scan, then started reading the green journal titled For the ER Surgeon. Jada had duct-taped the journal and her West Virginia ID to her sweatshirt. The ID stated her age (21), ethnicity, and gender. She wrote in gel pen, and the text resembled a bullet journal. White-outs and corrections dotted the pages.
I’ve had It for at least 8 years, and I lost weight, so you’d see It. I’m tired of asking for tests and doctors not running them. I couldn’t get good medical care. I don’t want to be addicted so I’m not a drug seeker. I’m not suicidal or harming myself, and I can’t kill It because I’d die. I sterilized my hands, abdomen, pelvis, clothes, and knife.
Then Jada listed her medications and the last time she drank alcohol, smoked, and used drugs, all within the past week. To prepare for surgery, she fasted from food for twelve hours and water for eight. Also, she had checked her golden labrador service dog, Ping-Pong, into a local kennel, and gave the address, and her parents’ contact information.
Next, Jada summarized her medical history. We didn’t go back to no doctor that didn’t listen, she wrote.
At age eleven, Jada underwent the removal of a benign ovarian teratoma by a reluctant pediatrician Dr. Ripley. The non-cancerous tumor developed from a germ cell and grew on Jada’s right ovary; it caused no ill effects yet and removal could damage her ovary.
Jada and her mother suspected the teratoma recurred at age thirteen. She wrote, When I was about fifteen, Mamma thought maybe he left it in, but we don’t have no proof. But her doctor expected her to outgrow the symptoms. The second doctor diagnosed her with an ovarian teratoma. Because the surgery would damage the ovary, the doctor refused to remove the teratoma.
She bounced from doctor to doctor and specialty to specialty. Jada cooperated with tests and treatments. Also, she and her parents researched specific conditions and requested specific tests, occasionally about teratomas. Doctors often deemed Jada’s self-researched conditions and tests unlikely and unnecessary. They addressed other health concerns with the same symptoms. Over the years, surgeons considered operating and always found reason not to, despite Jada and her parents asked.
But Jada gradually differentiated between the teratoma and her other health concerns. Managing the others rarely helped the teratoma. Treating symptoms reduced her overall discomfort, but sometimes she doubted she had the conditions or that the treatments addressed the root problem. I tried talking to them, so they’d understand, she wrote. I tried not telling them about the teratoma and letting them find it.
When she was fifteen, an exam showed the teratoma had grown, but the doctor declared it too small to worry about. Jada wrote, I felt It squeeze tight during the appointment and spread out afterwards.
One gynecologist scanned the teratoma. Jada estimated at the time, it was approximately apple-sized, but the gynecologist compared it to a plum. It didn’t show yet, so we didn’t know It was so big, Jada wrote. Dissatisfied with the blurriness, Jada’s mother wanted another scan, but the doctor said the first was sufficient. I said that a teratoma grows 1.8 mm a year, so It should be smaller. She told me not to trust online health advice. The gynecologist diagnosed her with endometriosis and treated it medically.
Lifestyle changes, alternative medicine, and psychiatry somewhat improved her physical and mental health, and they prevented complications and side-effects. I don’t want to get sick from something else, Jada wrote (hence never injecting illegal drugs).
Nobody thoroughly followed-up on the teratoma.
Jada argued that by removing It, the doctor could exclude it from potential causes of her health problems. She specifically told doctors It mentally distressed her—beyond stress or discomfort arising from being sick. The teratoma Itself bothered her.
I feel It like It is an instinct and a lump. Its moving isn’t a hallucination, and I’ve had them. It twists and untwists my ovary and presses on internal organs. Behavior reinforcement didn’t work and trying to hold it like potty training or Pilates didn’t work.
When her physical health improved, It became more active, which worsened her health. Physical stress aggravated Its behavior and slowed Its growth. Also, Its growth accelerated when she reached maturity.
One psychiatrist thought Jada expressed herself through the teratoma, while another recommended surgery. I’d still have issues, but I’d have peace of mind about It, Jada wrote. The second psychiatrist continued to care for her.
Doctors increasingly dismissed Jada’s symptoms and concerns; she admitted that her later drug use and mental health contributed to their decisions. Her inability to pay prompted some doctors to refuse treatment. Emergency rooms provided little care, waving her off as an addict, placing her under psychiatric treatment, or examining her, treating her pain, and referring her to a doctor.
Jada lost weight to make it more palpable and give doctors one less reason to ignore her concerns. It stays in my middle like It hangs on to something, so it doesn’t show much. It gets hungry when I’m not.
Planned Parenthood maybe would’ve found It and done something. My pregnancy test was negative, so they didn’t examine me. She took over-the-counter abortion pills, which had no effect, as expected.
Jada resorted to addictive substances. I keep It calm with drugs, but It gets mad when I’m clean. Since the first dose, she acknowledged it was a terrible, stupid decision.
Finally, she attempted killing It, while recognizing the idea’s extreme wrongness. Jada inflicted life-threatening physical stress on herself to no avail. I kept track because maybe I’d get too sick and couldn’t help myself recover. Someone always found out.
Between her self-stress techniques and the drug use, sometimes, the slightest effort overwrought her. I’m pretty broken down, she wrote. I don’t think I can get through a bus ride home.
She considered a service dog early in her drastic measures, and quickly adopted Ping-Pong, a golden Labrador. I really need Ping-Pong. She knows when It is acting up, but she isn't trained for the teratoma. She found It by herself.
When Jada threatened to stab herself in a Level 1 Trauma Center’s emergency room, security restrained her. The doctor briefly examined her, then transferred her to a mental health institution. She explained, It looked like normal fat and I looked mentally ill with a crisis.
Dr. Smith slammed the notebook on the desk and snapped at an intern to find references to the teratoma and also each blood test from her medical history—the document box with dozens of copied medical documents. Then Dr. Smith apologized for snapping.
One biopsy of her teratoma was inconclusive. Some blood tests indicated the teratoma better than others; several results could be attributed to other conditions.
The blood test Dr. Smith ordered easily identified the teratoma. The CT scan showed a perforated intestine beyond the knife’s reach. Altogether, the multiple blurry images showed a fetus-like mass, approximately the size of a pineapple, in Jada’s pelvis and abdomen. Dr. Smith resisted the urge to punch his clipboard.
Jada's notebook and medical documents corresponded to Dr. Smith’s examination and tests and her answers to his questions.
Gently, Dr. Smith told sweating, trembling, goosebumpy Jada there was a mass in her abdomen. “And it shouldn’t be there, and it shouldn’t have been for years,” he said.
“You read my journal?”
“The first few pages and the summarized medical history, and it and the medical records were very useful.”
“Was my mamma right about Dr. Ripley?” she asked.
“I’ll look for signs of previous surgery, but the mass might disguise them.”
“Could he have?”
“I don’t have enough evidence to form an opinion.”
Dr. Smith told her that the mass was probably a fetiform ovarian teratoma, which resembled a fetus. Its movement mystified him, but closer examination or later tests could explain it. Waiting years for surgery had probably unnecessarily increased her risks, and the operation would probably resolve some of her symptoms.
“The mass needs to be examined and treated thoroughly. I can examine the knife wound laparoscopically, repair it, and refer you to a doctor for the mass. Alternatively, I can examine the knife wound and the mass laparoscopically, repair the knife wound, and attempt removing the mass. Do you need some time to think about it?”
“Not switching doctors,” Jada said. “Get rid of It. Get rid of Its ovary. Get rid of whatever It adheres to.”
“I will remove the mass,” Dr. Smith said.
“I need to see It, though.”
“You can. If you are concerned about Dr. Ripley’s treatment, I advise preserving the mass and other tissue as evidence. I can arrange the preservation and storage.”
“Yes,” Jada said, nodding.
Anesthesia stilled It.
Blood partially obscured the underlined word “STOP” written on the blade in black Sharpie. The knife punctured Jada’s abdominal wall and pierced the brown mass, leaving other organs intact. Scars and scrapes, healing or fresh, showed the teeth and bones’ range of motion. The teratoma’s bony protuberance had easily reached the perforated intestine.
It stretched from Jada’s ovary to her back and right side. Held to her abdominal wall by adhesions, It wove between her internal organs. The teratoma adhered to her uterus and a few other nearby spots, but, generally, It grew into her abdominal walls. Among the cysts, a different tissue pulsed; two of many blood vessels led to it. A nerve cluster connected Jada’s ovary and the mass’s brain-like tissue.
Dr. Smith aggressively excised the teratoma, including Its adhesions. He repaired Jada’s perforated intestine and double-checked the ones which the teratoma attacked.
The teratoma’s pulsing ceased by the end of surgery.
Due to sheer disgust, Dr. Smith longed to personally throw It, the ovary, the scraps of internal organs in the incinerator and light it. On principle, however, he wanted the oblivious doctors themselves to require Its surgical removal.
Dr. Smith entered the recovery room for the second time—the first time, anesthesia made Jada loopy—, and like the first time, her vitals monitor beeped steadily, healthily. Jada set her greenish-blue cup of Sprite on the table.
“Is It gone?” Jada winced, easing herself upright, though already propped her up in bed.
“Yes, It was successfully removed,” he said. He thought she babbled the same question the first time.
Her black eyes crinkled as she smiled, her second, almost identical reaction to the outcome. “I knew It was gone. I can’t feel It.”
Dr. Smith explained the surgery.
“I could not determine why It was moving,” he said.
“I want to see It.” Jada held out her hand, with long, green, sparkly nails.
“You can see It. It has an eye, and some people may think that is creepy.”
“Did you?” Jada asked.
“No.” The teratoma revolted Dr. Smith, particularly the eye.
This is where you stabbed it.”
It thunked as she turned the specimen bottle. The moist teratoma had a pupilless eye with a cloudy brown iris and a tuft of black hair.
“Because It scratched your ovary, I couldn’t tell definitively if Dr. Ripley removed the first tumor. If you are concerned, I recommend contacting a forensic medical examiner. I strongly recommend that.”
“Was It alive?” Jada asked.
“In the sense that anything able to make cells is alive, the ovarian teratoma was alive. Your blood flow supplied it with oxygen, and cell death began when the teratoma was removed from your blood supply.”
“I knew the treatments didn’t work. I don’t think mine worked, either. Can a teratoma grow on the other one?”
“Possibly. I checked, but you don’t show any signs of another ovarian teratoma, or a teratoma anywhere in your reproductive organs. If another teratoma grows, a doctor should pay attention to your medical history, and probably catch it early.”
“I didn’t want to stab myself.”
“You were very desperate when you came here. You will need to switch doctors, and I can’t guarantee another doctor in the Mayo Clinic will treat you.”
Jada nodded. “I need drug rehab, too. Will you put me in another psychiatric hold?”
“No, unless you feel you need one. We have a psychiatrist, or we can contact yours. You know your state of mind better than I do and the doctors and nurses here will listen to you."
“No. Are you sure?”
“I was monitoring you for a crisis before the surgery, but I’m not inclined to think you are in a mental health crisis.”
“Why?”
“You took precautions that limited complications. You brought documentation that would have allowed me to treat you whether or not you could speak. You wanted to survive. I have adequate proof the monster in your body was real, not a hallucination. Your psychiatric history concerns me, but I do not have immediate concerns about your mental health.”
“So I can tell you something.”
“You can tell me anything.”
“If you hadn’t gotten It, I would’ve tried to cut It out.”
“The Heweryan Miracle” from The Etminay Persecution by Nucha Toch Rishri
In the city of Heweryan, there is a church ornamented with gargoyles and other works of religious art. The devout congregation and visitors attend daily services. St. Peter’s Church came under violent attack in the 70th year of the Etminay Persecution on Easter Sunday during the sunrise service.
Puro Cester was a devout believer of Bolefinne, and he persecuted Christians throughout his life. In the two or three years before his persecution, Cester prepared one rifle, one handgun, and three explosives. He intended to shoot the clergy and congregants and place one explosive before the exit doors to keep them from escaping and keep law enforcement from entering.
Puro Cester entered St. Peter’s Church and closed the doors, whereupon God animated a gargoyle, and it came into the narthex by breaking a window.
Deacon Noc Ade went into the narthex to discover the source of the commotion. He saw the gargoyle drag an explosive into the coat racks and fly downstairs. Promptly, Deacon Ade told the Reverend Erv Neerd what he saw, and the Reverend Erv Neerd told him to call the police. The congregation and clergy fled through a nave window except for Reverend Neerd.
Reverend Neerd went into the basement and found Cester and the gargoyle in a Sunday School room. Cester had broken a window to escape the gargoyle which he feared. He was pinned to the wall and floor by the gargoyle’s talons and horns, and the gargoyle had injured him. He was disarmed of his rifle, and his detonator had fallen from his pocket but did not cause an explosion. Cester’s face and clothes were wet for the Gargoyle had spat water at him.
Cester spoke blasphemies against Christianity, and threatened to kill Reverend Neerd, but could not reach his weapon. Reverend Neerd forgave Cester and prayed for the safety of all concerned.
Law enforcement broke the gargoyle to arrest Cester and they took the gargoyle as evidence.
Cester’s injuries healed well.
In his trial, Cester pled not guilty but was found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment. He persecuted imprisoned Christians but did not use violence against them, and he refused to be visited by St. Peter Church’s clergy. It is not known if he converted or stopped all his persecutions upon release.
The gargoyle was repaired and mounted to the downspout where it remains to this day. The stained-glass window depicts the miracle. A memorial plaque below the window reads:
God miraculously sent the gargoyle
to protect His people from earthly death.
Easter Sunday, 70th Year Etminay Persecution
Marcus on Calospelegna
“Oh no,” Marcus said, as The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze unclouded his eyes. “I didn’t try to be here, or should I have tried? What have I done, or what am I supposed to do now? Of course, I can’t tell gods what to do, and they know me, but I’m not prepared for what they want.”
Marcus attempted to hide his nakedness from the elderly woman dressing him in a tunic. Silently, she buckled the sheath around his waist, tied on his sandals, pierced his ear and lower lip with a needle, and inserted rings. The elderly woman wrapped Marcus’ hands around a double-handed knife hilt. Then the elderly woman left.
Two people stood on either side of The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze, and five more completed the circle around Marcus. A burning cage lit the group.
The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze put the words in his head, including You are on Calospelegna. Winning the labor might resolve the nations’ conflicts and settle the divine rivalries. Won’t such things improve your life? Remember my words. Speak your mind without fear of divine retribution.
To Marcus’ surprise, the words came out coherently and he mentioned things he was unaware he thought. Among other sentences, he said, “I’ve been assertive today, to the lady who wanted me to reglaze her vase after I fired it. I’ve never killed anybody, and I’ve never fought anybody, but I have been beaten up. I couldn’t survive a fight if I had all my fingers. I try to believe the gods know best, but why choose me?”
You believe equally in every god and goddess, and they have never shown you favor, The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze said.
“But I was healed in the Djebu River.”
Anybody may be healed there, regardless of divine favor. Sheath your knife.
Marcus did.
Behind Marcus, The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze parted the two halves of their body. He shut his eyes. Then the Sore-Amaze took Marcus’ arm.
Cringing, Marcus squealed and shrieked, “Please, I am a potter, and I need my fingers. Couldn’t I keep my fingers?”
The Dread bit each finger, excluding the thumb, at the base: one completely off and to puncture the other seven. When its mouth muffled Marcus’ screams, he lost control of his bladder.
A man laughed at him, interrupted by a woman yelling, “He is the most pathetic one yet, but not laughable.”
“It is an involuntary response to fear,” another man said.
But the Dread just left a ring of stinging teeth marks around Marcus’ neck.
While The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze rejoined bodies, Marcus squeaked at the stumps of his missing left index finger. Rapidly, whiteness covered the healed stump and redness spread up the middle finger’s knuckle.
Unsheathe your knife. Look at your knife. Turn your knife over.
Marcus stared at the spinning, flipping green and brown stone in the knife’s hilt. One side of the blade was black and engraved with symbols. On the white side, clearer than a polished bronze mirror, and smoother than a pool, the blade reflected the red puncture marks circling his pustule-scarred neck. And it was definitely a knife, not a dagger—good for general household purposes and sturdy for traveling.
Take the phoenix torch. With two of its eight legs, The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze pointed to the burning cage.
The phoenix cage on a torch handle weighed several pounds, but Marcus carried it comfortably, to his surprise. It strapped to his back. Marcus worried about catching fire, but the flames left him unharmed and pleasantly warm.
The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze said, Look at the warriors. The fighter must kill one or more warriors by dawn. If the fighter fails to kill one or more warriors by dawn, I shall bite off the fighter’s head. I shall deliver his headless body home and his soul shall go to the afterlife. If the fighter fails to kill one warrior per hour, I shall bite off one finger: index fingers, middle fingers, ring fingers, or pinkies. If the fighter does not kill the seven warriors by dawn, I shall transform him into an animal. The transfigured animals participate.
The warriors were struck fatally in war. The fighter faces one warrior from seven nations, and the fighter cannot fight a warrior from his own. One warrior came from Lydan, one from Phahmese, one from Nesatope, one from Jadikira, one from Giruppik, one from Gelumnia, and one from Svalug. One warrior was struck by poison, one by fire, one by trampling horses, one by drowning, one by a spear through his back, one by disease, and one by starvation.
The labor lasts from the eleventh hour past the meridian to the next morning when in the customary time and place, the Sky-God raises the sun fully over the horizon. Therefore, the labor has begun. The rules cannot change during the labor.
You have all that you require. Depart now.
One warrior moved deliberately, while two met, kissed, and went in opposite directions. Two warriors supported a third to some distance away, then the third sat, the first walked straight ahead, and the second went elsewhere. The air cracked earsplittingly, and a horse galloped. The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze departed last.
Marcus ran in the direction he faced, sure to find a warrior in the general vicinity. His sandals fit like he had already broken them in. The phoenix torch hardly swung and despite its brightness, his eyes adjusted to the dark.
He reached a cliff. Darkness and fog obscured the ground, but the moon and stars shone brightly in a perfectly cloudless sky. Marcus worried Calospelegna was on Oridocia, above the cloud bank, and below the rarely seen deities’ dwellings. Whoever climbed the holy mountain became sick; Marcus felt healthy.
Marcus climbed down a knotted rope onto a ledge just wide enough for his foot and smeared with bird droppings. He intended to search the caves systematically and act on whatever he found.
Marcus slipped into a shallow cave full of birds. The first one he saw had its back to him, marked with a woman’s face and neck.
“Please, don’t attack us! The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze transformed us into birds,” another bird cawed.
Marcus shrunk into the open air. He heard a crack and a man’s shout. Somebody grabbed one of Marcus’ arms and he passed out. Twisting awkwardly, the person pulled him aboard clutching him, apparently oblivious to the bird’s tiltings. Marcus was quite aware of it—his stomach and bowels emptied. The bird leveled and glided.
Now Marcus saw that the man’s back ended with birds’ legs and, wings sprouted from his sides. Because he wore armor, Marcus found the first warrior. He whimpered.
“Hold on to me, and I will hold on to you, and we will land momentarily.”
And Marcus realized the warrior saved his life. Therefore, Marcus needed to give him help, a great present, or to save his life, or do a difficult favor, or else divine favor could not salvage his reputation.
The warrior landed in a cave, unstrapped Marcus’ torch, and lowered Marcus onto a nest.
“Are you hurt?” the warrior asked.
Marcus shook his head.
“Do you remember your name?”
Marcus nodded. He realized he heard the man’s native language in his right ear and a translation in his left ear, from which the earring hung. The warrior had a matching pair.
“What is your name?” the warrior asked, smiling.
“Marcus,” he squeaked.
“Flying sometimes makes me sick, too.” The warrior propped the torch outside the cave entrance and crouched by Marcus again. He opened a circular section of armor, which revealed tin tubes.
“…Speared through the back…” Marcus said.
“Yes, and the bird wings and legs allow me to move.”
“And I’m supposed to fight you, but should I now?” Marcus asked.
Marcus remembered The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze’s words: The warrior shall give the fighter opportunity to fight.
“I intervened because falling off a cliff would be a dumb, embarrassing way to lose. I am not hospitable,” the warrior said.
The warrior can save the fighter from accidental death.
“Why could you not prepare for warfare or defend yourself?” the warrior asked.
“I had the plague and water settled on my brain.” Marcus showed the bald, sunken trepanning scar on his head. “My mother thought training would hurt me. I attended school for a few years, and she let me learn acrobatics, swimming, and running, and I played in caves.”
“And rock climbing was safer because a rock could not punch your scar.”
“I suppose, but it worried her, too.”
“Now we must fight, and I suspect you would not want to kill a man in his own home,” the warrior said.
“I won’t be able to anywhere,” Marcus said.
The warrior and Marcus walked a few hundred yards from the cliffside. Since the warrior was unarmed, Marcus set down the knife. The warrior removed his battered armor, showing raw, minor wounds. A green and brown stone decorated his belt.
Marcus jogged in a circle, forcing the warrior to waddle. Then Marcus was on his back in the dirt with the warrior’s talon on his chest; the warrior bent like a curious pigeon.
“You told the truth about your fighting experience,” the warrior said.
“I don’t know why she picked me,” Marcus said, straining his neck to escape.
“Never mind. An untrained, drunk, old man with an ordinary object can be as dangerous and lethal as a well-trained, experienced warrior like myself.” The warrior sighed. “I don’t want to fight like a monster, but it seems I have no choice.”
Marcus picked up the knife and checked his left middle finger’s red second knuckle.
The warrior’s wings cracked, and his talons brushed Marcus’ hair. Another crack and the warrior was a hundred feet higher. After another swoop, Marcus hung from the warrior’s talons, a few feet off the ground.
“I thought you wanted to survive,” the warrior said, perplexed.
“I didn’t know this would happen!” Marcus screeched.
He dropped a few feet before hitting a boulder. Marcus curled up to shield himself from the warrior’s earth-gouging talons. He raised the knife overhead as a warning and ducked. The warrior’s entrails splattered. Immediately, Marcus’ neck stopped stinging and the puncture holes turned white.
He scrambled out from beneath the warrior’s tailwings.
“Why didn’t you think the knife was a warning? Don’t birds have sharp eyesight?” Marcus asked.
The participant cannot kill himself.
He heard The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze’s instructions, Marcus thought.
“Your eyes were human,” Marcus said.
The warrior came here of his own free will, equally willing to survive or die without divine intercession. the warrior wants the selected fighter to earn his life. The warrior willingly faces defeat, whether he dies honorably, by murder, or in another situation.
Shaking, Marcus smeared the gore with his hands, then handfuls of grass and dirt. He made his way to the warrior’s cave, where he washed his face and emptied his ear of something unspeakably disgusting. Then Marcus examined his neck with the clean knife. I have my head and will have one finger.
When the fighter wins the labor, if the transformed animals have survived, I shall break the spell and send them home. If the fighter dies during the labor or after being transformed into an animal, I shall deliver his human body home and his soul shall go to the afterlife.
For safety, hoping the rules allowed it, Marcus brought the warrior’s waterskins to the Calospelegnan caves. He remembered, If a rule does not forbid something, it is allowed.
He marked his route with the phoenix torch. He followed instructions his mother gave him as a boy: If the ground shook or rocks fell, or he encountered water, he left. As usual, he occasionally ignored the instruction that he could not climb to a stopping place higher than the height of his raised arms.
He assumed the warriors lived near the surface, but he found signs of animal and human habitation in deep, dark caverns and passages. For what seemed like hours he only heard water dripping, his movements, the phoenix’s fiery sounds and rustling, and his heartbeat. Talking to the phoenix soothed him.
“I can’t remember being very scared of caves,” Marcus said.
The knife chipped a stalactite, accidentally. Marcus pushed the knife into the floor to the hilt, like a shovel into frosty hard-packed clay earth. His two-handed tug sent him and the knife backward. Marcus embedded it in the cave wall and hung from it; the knife felt secure however he moved. He spelunked much faster, digging handholds and footholds.
While he explored, The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze’s instructions popped into Marcus’ head, and he considered his situation.
I won’t die sitting in a cave overnight. An animal could find the way out or be unable to reach it. They will find me if I am supposed to participate.
Marcus’ red left middle finger turned black and stopped stinging. Redness quickly spread over the webbing between his middle and ring fingers and went slowly up his left ring finger. He wondered if the color changes damaged his fingers, but they moved normally. The coloration tracked time and kills.
Though he dreaded losing a finger, he also worried about killing again. He wondered if it was possible; his ability surprised him.
When his ring finger was nearly red, he rested—losing a finger while actively spelunking sounded foolish. He expected to travel more slowly afterward.
The-Dread-and-the-Sore-Amaze took his left ring finger. Watching his reddening pinkie finger, Marcus remembered, The loss of a finger weakens the fighter and alters his behavior, and self-preservation becomes harder.
Marcus thought, Completing the labors with two thumbs and one finger would have done the same thing! Even thinking the thought was risky under the circumstances until he remembered he could say what he wanted. What could a two-fingered potter do, especially when the fingers were on his non-dominant hand?
The fighter has opportunity to retain all fingers but one.
I’ve wasted too much time…But I don’t want to fight again…
Marcus spelunked to a warm passageway. Voices echoed in the distance, and he smelled old and new smoke. He laboriously read an inscription near a clearly tooled ceiling opening: “The fighter cannot enter the Palace.”
Thinking the warriors might exit the Palace, and looking for an easier route out, Marcus explored the nooks and crannies. He paused. Though he wanted to run from the lion, he sidled down the passageway.
Out of the corner of his eye, Marcus saw the roaring and bleating lion fly on eagle wings. The monster had a goat’s head on its back and a snake’s tail. He bolted, begging the monster to understand his point of view.
A flying griffin, the lion-goat-snake monster, and a bull with eagle wings forced Marcus into a crevice. A lion-bat hybrid crawled overhead.
Stone crunched overhead and a rope ladder fell around his neck. Marcus screamed.
“They understand you have lost your way, and they want you to escape,” an elderly woman said.
Marcus untangled himself from the ladder, strapped the phoenix torch to his back, and climbed up.
“Let me move the stone back for you,” Marcus croaked.
Instead, she stood on the stone, and it blocked the entry. Her earring and lip ring shone.
The elderly woman led Marcus to a cave full of boulders, stalactites, and stalagmites. She perched herself on a boulder.
“Leave the cavern by a different route than the one entered,” she said.
Marcus found a rectangular even crack, and within the rectangle, there was an intentionally carved and coincidentally scarred and bloodstained boulder with a slot.
“Is this the door?” Marcus asked.
“I can’t help you further,” the elderly woman said.
Marcus slid the knife into the slot, although it seemed silly. The wall thunked and rotated and something fastened over the knife’s handle. Rather than have his hands crushed off, or lose the knife, he pressed against the rotating wall. When the door stopped moving, the floor turned upside down, but in a few seconds, without rotating again, he felt like standing upright on his feet.
The steep tunnel opened to a cavern with three other entrances and a sphinx sitting in the middle.
“I always find one when I’m busy!” Marcus checked his left pinkie, red past the second knuckle.
The sphinx stretched and yawned.
“Listen, Marcus of Lucopoli,” the sphinx said.
“Huh?” Marcus tried to slice through a door bolt, but the knife just scraped off.
“Answer my riddle correctly and I shall open the door. Answer my riddle incorrectly and I shall not.” The sphinx recited the riddle that The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze put in his head, which ended with: “What am I?”
Automatically, Marcus rattled off a common Lucopolitan solution: “The correct answer to the riddle.”
The sphinx hissed and batted Marcus, who stepped away from the doors.
“I answered it!” He spun around. “It works against—” Marcus choked on the last word.
Marcus had never seen a scorpion tail on a sphinx before, nor heard of one, nor imagined a sphinx with vulture wings.
“You’re the Lucopolitan warrior?” Marcus asked.
The creature opened the door and chased Marcus to it. He stepped from a floor onto a wall, but his nose broke his fall.
“Is this a trick?” Marcus asked the shut door. “I have to find my way out and fight you, don’t I?”
All attempts to open the door failed.
A warrior wouldn’t let me leave, but…I need my ring finger…Or I could save my right hand and become an animal.
But being transfigured into an animal bothered him, so Marcus ran down the tunnel.
A window in the door showed a bright feast hall, in which several dozen people of various social statuses sat at a richly laid table. More people rested on floor cushions, and even more on the floor, and all eating bread, meat, wine, and all kinds of good things.
He knocked. The generous host might let him stay until dawn (Marcus theorized about fighting and lacked determination), or maybe offer him a bath.
“You are welcome here,” the host called.
Marcus stepped through the doorway into a frosty, damp, dim feast hall with empty dishes, and full of dead bodies. He stepped back and saw the same thing, and wished for another way out.
The host urged him to enter. Marcus picked his way through the others; only their clothing styles and hair length indicated their sex.
“Sit here by me and rest,” the host said.
“I don’t have much time…”
His and the hosts’ breaths showed, and they shivered.
“Set the torch in the bracket.”
Marcus did. The host wore a cloak fastened with a green and brown pin, and he had an earring and lip ring—Marcus wondered if he looted a warrior. Other fighters probably fought before Marcus’ turn on Calospelegna.
“You must have been in battle. You must be exhausted and should spend the night here. Would you like a bath before you dine?” the host asked.
“Thank you, but…I will take one…when I get home.”
“Agnus! I am Unata, a Prince of Gelumnia, and we have already seen each other once. Please, sit.”
Marcus did. Agnus was the elderly woman; an earring and lip ring hung from her face.
“Let the guest wash his hands, and then serve the food,” Unata said.
Unata’s physical appearance made Marcus weirdly uneasy. To avoid looking at the host, Marcus picked up a black and white bowl. Don’t waste time. It doesn’t matter. He examined it from all angles. “Gelumnia…"
“The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze preserved the others from starvation.”
Marcus felt like he had not eaten for a day or two.
“Drink from my cup,” Unata said.
Agnus handed a heavy golden cup to Marcus, who held it in both hands, worrying about damaging it, and wondering why he deserved it. The stem and base were gold and the bowl was another material with natural markings and edges filed smooth. Reluctantly, Marcus tilted the cup to drink, and blood stained the inside of the cup. Shrieking and falling off his stool, Marcus, dropped the skull cup. The phoenix torch toppled onto the preserved people. He wiped his hands on his tunic and hastily righted the phoenix torch. The preserved Gelumnians seemed all right.
“I…” he almost said, Fainted, but decided, under the circumstances, the cup was more than a trophy. “…I have never drunk blood before. Please excuse me.”
“Of course, and I usually wouldn’t.” The warrior lowered himself into his chair again. “Agnus, please help him up. I’m afraid I am too weak to help you up.”
“I’d rather stand.” Marcus leaned against a wall.
“It is my own skull and blood. If you had drunk it, you would have felt better.”
Women brought in serving dishes. Dashing to the door, Marcus tripped on a Gelumnian.
“Eat, though you need not accept my hospitality, but you may be too weak to return and fight me,” Unata said.
“Nothing fights starvation except food…and you are too weak to be a warrior,” Marcus said. “…You starved.” He thought, Why do the deities want me to fight a prince?
“Eat your fill.” Unata’s face was filling out and he sat straighter. “Agnus, help him to the table. I hope you like Gelumnian food.”
Agnus obeyed and scurried from the room. Unata began telling his story.
Leaning on the table, Marcus shuddered and squeezed his eyes shut—the first bowl resembled his grandmother’s chicken feet stew (his favorite), except the cook substituted whole human feet. He said, “I’m never eating chicken feet stew again, and if I look at the rest, I won’t eat anything again.” And he cared little about saying so aloud. Marcus experienced short hunger before and rarely found nothing to eat. Unata’s food smelled better than anything he imagined.
Marcus tried to identify what, other than cannibalizing Unata, was wrong with the dishes.
Along with fresh bread, sweets, and all kinds of vegetables and spices, he caught a strong whiff of outhouse, but not cooked liver and kidneys. Every woman Marcus knew (on the rare occasions they afforded it) cooked cut-up meat and offal, but Unata’s serving dishes contained whole cuts, which he thought suited a wealthy man.
Marcus developed scurvy. His belt slipped; adjusting it meant falling. When he clutched his stomach and hunched over, he knocked the phoenix torch onto the table. Unata muffled a painful moan. The knife jabbed Marcus’ thigh, but he was fine.
Marcus mustered the energy to pick up the torch with both hands. Don’t worry about putting out the fire, he thought. Then his knees gave out and he rolled to his back.
His trepanning scar and others reopened, which confused him. Marcus wondered if the starvation warrior and disease warrior attacked together.
“I can’t kill a starving man,” Marcus said, as Unata lifted him to the stool. He isn’t starving, Marcus thought.
But the food smelled so good, that Marcus hauled himself upright. Maybe eating an olive would be fine if it did not touch the liver. He considered the dishes burnt by the phoenix torch more appetizing than before. And the other meat and organs were raw.
Despite knowing cannibalizing was wrong, Marcus longed to eat. He doubted he could stop himself.
“I can’t eat it…And I can’t kill you slowly like this.”
He found the beating heart in a covered bowl. Unata pushed him down, but Marcus brought the dish with him. He stabbed the heart, and Unata crumpled like a blanket.
Marcus felt less hungry, possibly from disgust. Stumbling through the door and another tunnel, he realized he had forgotten the phoenix torch, but he could not tolerate Unata’s feast hall any longer.
The door opened to a torch-lit garden lush with various plants, and a large fountain splashed out of sight. He tightened his belt and sandals and explored as far as the fountain. The irrigated garden also held cushioned benches and extremely life-like statues.
The walk to the fountain exhausted Marcus. The pool was large enough to swim in; aquatic plants decorated the fountain itself.
Beyond the fountain, out of sight, a woman sang a bawdy sailor song to a lyre’s tune.
Marcus thought, The music will send me to sleep, or I might find giant scorpions and spiders. Or the diseased warrior is malarial. Now he thought about it, since he arrived, he had not seen any live animals, including nocturnal or sleeping ones, or insects and fish. He wondered if fighters became monstrous animals, like the ones in the cave.
Too grimy for a bench, Marcus rested in long grass, somewhere between sleeping and waking.
A splash jolted him. Marcus jumped into the draining pool after a person floating face-down in the water. Marcus swam quickly to her, turned her face up, and towed her to the edge. Unusually, she wore a purple veil over her face, in addition to the normal, optional cap. Under a purple robe, her purple dress covered her hands and feet.
Marcus climbed onto the edge and grabbed the woman’s hands to pull her up. Like a crocodile, the woman flipped Marcus into the water.
He surfaced and spit water; she stood on the pool’s edge, drying her face.
“You were drowning?” Marcus asked.
“You coped well with the apparent situation and worked so hard, I did not want to interrupt you.” She spoke his language with a thick accent.
Marcus shivered on the wet gravel.
“What was the—You’re—Alisha, Queen of Lydan.”
“Is it not easy to lose one’s place here?” Her gold jewelry clinked on the stones.
“I want to go home, and I didn’t want to come here.”
“You know how to leave.”
“But I don’t.”
“Your six or seven fingers contradict that,” Alisha said.
Marcus realized The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze had taken his left pinkie while he slept. His right index finger steadily turned red. Six, he thought.
“Please don’t be upset,” Marcus said.
“My mood does not matter to you, but who have you defeated?” Alisha asked.
“The…flying birdman—”
“Belkish.”
“…him, Belkish, and the Gelumnian Unata.”
“I am not upset regarding the death of Unata. I took your knife while you slept, but you may have it again.”
“What?”
The knife plunked into the water. Marcus concentrated on the knife and avoiding the draining whirlpools but caught occasional glimpses of undressing Alisha. He attributed her odd appearance to shadows and water distortion. The knife glinted on the surface.
“My knife floats?” He ducked underwater again due to Alisha’s apparent nakedness.
Alisha pulled him up by the collar. “Do you not know my ship burned? I drowned. When I washed up on shore, my armor could not be removed,” Alisha said, hauling Marcus out of the pool. “Fight or leave my garden.”
Shiny bronze marked her forearms, legs, and wet hair. Bronze scales covered her torso and hips, and a white linen pattern showed where her tunic ended. Brown, leathery strips ran over her cheeks, chin, feet, and ankles. The marks showed which pieces of armor she attempted to remove. But her body moved as if she was naked.
“Fight or leave my garden!” Alisha yelled.
Marcus shoved her into the water but winded himself on the raised edge. Water gushed from Alisha’s mouth and nose. He stared at her dangling eyeball, but she popped it in, and it swiveled to face him. Marcus lacked the breath to whimper.
Alisha gurgled, “Have you stayed because a six-fingered potter from a poor family will starve and not support his wife and baby?”
“I didn’t want to fight anybody,” Marcus said, backing away. “I shouldn’t have been watching a lady swim, but you could have drowned again…You can’t drown again…And you are a warrior, but a lady, too…in a private garden. It doesn’t matter here?”
Alisha sighed and folded her arms. “If you do not fight or run in ten seconds, I shall remove everything I wear.”
Marcus scrambled up to run and skinned his knee. A few steps later, Alisha threw him and herself into the draining pool.
Alisha, who tended to swear and grunt, often dodged his pummels, slashings, and stabbings. The armor fused to her skin protected her like normal armor, and his knife scored it. Marcus aimed for light brown fleshy areas.
In water shallow enough to stand in, Alisha choked Marcus and restrained his legs. Marcus stabbed through her hand; his knife’s point stopped against his hand. With her other hand, she twisted it away. She grabbed Marcus’ arm, but he sliced her elbow to the bone.
Wading away from the billowing blood, Marcus thought, I can’t kill her! He said, “Let me stop the bleeding…What will the Lydanites do?”
Alisha squeezed the artery. “The Lydanites believe I am still dead.”
Her hand relaxed by the time Marcus dragged her from the pool. He held the already dry knife blade to her mouth, but she had stopped breathing. While Marcus arranged her in a more-or-less straight position and patted her dry, her fish-eaten armored appearance changed to a skin-like one. She removed all her jewelry except for her earring, lip ring, and a green and brown stone on a tight, bronze necklace. He covered her with the purple robe.
Marcus felt vaguely guilty over thinking about his own problems while Alisha died. I will have one finger on my right hand…he thought. The redness advanced up his right index finger.
He dipped his knife experimentally in the water; the water flowed from the smallest details. Cautiously, then harder, he pressed the knife point against his arm. It felt sharp but did not cut him, or leave a red or white mark.
Alisha had piled her gold jewelry (some beaded or set with gems) on the ground, and Marcus considered bringing it with him. He heard stories of Alisha’s wealth, and anybody willing to soak solid purple clothes could afford to. Of course, if Marcus took the clothing and most of the jewelry to Lucopoli, he would be arrested under suspicion of theft. Even the plainest items, the earrings, were risky. Warriors looted each other’s armor and weapons, which hardly fit Marcus’ predicament. Why steal if I will turn into an animal for years? he thought.
Marcus found Alisha’s tent and wrapped up in a sweet-smelling blanket but found sitting on her bed, stool, or even the ground impossible. Alisha left one of her cosmetics jars open on its side. She owned the lyre and a weaving stand. Marcus had never seen a mirror before, let alone a freestanding full-length one. He hardly recognized his pustule-scarred face.
I can’t stay in her home, and I need my fingers.
Marcus took a torch and behind ivy, found a door in the obsidian wall. Then he returned to the pool.
I’ll take the jewelry and ask to keep it. If I can’t, I will give it back. Marcus wrapped the jewelry in purple cloth and tied it to his belt.
Most wounds Unata inflicted on Marcus healed, but Marcus’ weight loss remained, and his scabs healed quite quickly. In the feast hall, he felt sick, which meant the diseased warrior already attacked him. How can he attack me if I feel better? Marcus thought. If he found shelter from the wind, far from the feast hall and garden, he might recover, or avoid another attack. The diseased warrior’s possible attack and the horror of Unata’s feast hall overruled wishing to speak to the phoenix.
As Marcus searched for shelter, a riddle repeated in his head:
I am flat and raised, and rough and smooth. I float, but I am heavier than stone. I am clean but have been in filth. One of my parts is sharp and dull. I turn myself, but you cannot turn me. I can be seen through but cannot be seen into. I represent nine figures and more. What am I?
In a grove, he held the knife to the torchlight. The closest tree whacked him with her branch and the others shooed him, saying:
“If you hide here, he will eat our bark.”
“It doesn’t hurt us much, but it is quite ugly.”
“We don’t like to upset him.”
Out of the trees’ range, Marcus broke up the riddle. He was fairly sure the correct answer was “the knife.” Will the riddle monster eat me if I don’t answer him completely? he thought. But The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze gave it to me….
Marcus flicked, twisted, and otherwise failed to move the knife’s stone—until he turned his entire body. Reflecting seemed different than seeing into or seeing through. The deities oversaw everything, but his labors preoccupied them—that worried and alarmed him, though he also expected it constantly in his normal life.
With the deities’ symbols, the blade showed seven figures. Although the Three-Eyed Goddess and the Two-Headed Deity of Life and Death were the patrons of the shown cities, the knife’s engravings showed different ones. Marcus recognized a couple of symbols as foreign, but forgot which deities they represented, or if the deities belonged to his religion. If the knife’s design included general, vague symbolism, the green and brown stone represented the Three-Eyed Goddess’ hazel eyes. Black and white referred to the Two-Headed-Deity-of-Life-and-Death. The knife’s black, engraved sides symbolized the Death-Head due to the warrior’s deaths, and the white, mirror-like side the Life-Head, showed that the nations would live. “And more” referred to the deity parting into the Goddess of Life and the God of Death. Alternatively, “and more” meant the mirror reflected anybody’s face.
A rider on a headless horse approached, then Marcus noticed the rider’s hips joined a horse’s body and legs. He also either had donkey ears or a unique helmet plume.
“…Trampled to death…” running Marcus panted.
His knife’s stone pointed to the horse warrior, who raced Marcus at a trot, then a walk, occasionally whacking him with the flat. Rarely, Marcus slashed or stabbed, and less often, wounded him.
With a stitch in his side, Marcus slowed to a walk. He gouged the horse warrior’s sword, but the horse warrior kicked Marcus’ ribs. He tossed the torch and knife in opposite directions. Marcus scrambled for his knife.
Continuous lightning, without thunder or rain, distracted Marcus and the rider. Ball lightning drifted around them, and ozone and sulfur filled the air.
The warrior thrust the spear through Marcus’ tunic, intentionally missing his flesh. Marcus chopped the spear in two and picked up the bottom part.
A ball of lightning rolled down the warrior’s sword. The warrior and Marcus’ hair stood on end, then a lightning bolt struck the ground a few feet away. The warrior shouted and reared.
Marcus dropped the spear half, blanket, and jewelry, bolting and shouting, “I’m sorry for stealing! And I’m sorry for burning the torch! What…Do you want me to do…Do you want it back and how am I supposed to do that?”
The walking horse warrior mocked Marcus, who identified the language as Nesatopic. He knew most of the horse’s vulgar vocabulary and the translation reached his ear.
“It scared you, too!” Marcus snapped as if a comment like that ever helped him.
Marcus sprinted to a rocky outcrop, but the horse warrior reached it first. A face-flattening wind blew.
A bird screeched overhead, then the phoenix torch clanged off the horse warrior’s helmet. The warrior collapsed.
A few seconds later, the blanket gusted after Marcus into the smoky outcrop. He called, “Thank you!” The torch, spear, and jewelry clattered off the rocks, and the wind calmed, but Marcus had already tumbled down a flight of stairs.
Stones in the cave’s wall burned and smoked, which alarmed Marcus. Still, he preferred an underground fire to the horse warrior. Cautiously, Marcus retrieved the phoenix torch; the horse warrior had left.
His knife’s stone oscillated from a dim passage to various parts of the ceiling. I don’t want to meet another warrior, he thought.
He had killed Alisha for fear of drowning or choking, and he attacked the horse warrior simply to escape. The next time, he worried he would intentionally fight the warrior, and expected it soon: nearly the entire index finger on his right, dominant hand was red. Why had The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze bitten off his left ring finger instead of the left middle finger? Now he constantly, involuntarily made the worst gesture known to the Crescent Sea. Don’t complain about having fingers, he thought.
The dim passageway contained an out-of-reach stone staircase. Marcus lowered it with a knife slot, and it swiveled to a lintel.
He followed the burning stones to a crumbling structure built into the caves. Because it resembled a temple, Marcus found a good shelter if he could not kill more warriors.
It can’t be a temple, he thought. The rules indicated deities rarely interacted with people on Calospelegna, but Marcus believed the deities should have temples, the fighters, warriors, and preserved people lived on the holy mountain, and they needed to worship.
One oversized man supported the tilting, cracked ceiling; his spear or stylus propped up the doorway. Marcus passed a line of bronze, burning, oil-filled lamps: life-sized people with lifelike expressions leading sacrificial animals or bearing bronze spelt or molten bronze. Marcus thought molten bronze was impossible, especially without a heat source. At the altar, the lamps depicted a priest sacrificing a young woman. Human sacrifice was a known religious practice around the Crescent Sea, but people like himself rarely witnessed it. Due to the sacrifice and unfamiliar features, he worried he found a mystery religion forbidden to him. The deities wanted me to come here, he told himself. Marcus thought the patron deity sent The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze to preserve the priest, sacrifices, and warrior from something, possibly another deity.
“I’m not involving myself. I won’t fight in a temple,” Marcus called.
Against the deities’ wishes, Marcus longed to return to his old life. Those on Calospelegna can leave when the seven warriors are defeated.
Because he killed the chosen warriors of three deities, according to the warriors’ and deities’ wishes, he worried about the other deities’ reactions. Though he remembered, If the fighter survives the labor on Calospelegna, he shall not be subject to divine reaction, he wondered if the deities’ plan included every deity in the pantheon. What about the divine creatures, like The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze?
Then he realized the deities could not heal his hands or mysteriously alter them like they changed the warriors’ bodies. Marcus had not thought of physical modification until that moment; the refusal disappointed him anyway.
The fighter shall be provided for during the labor. If the deities decide unanimously, the fighter may receive divine assistance. In extraordinary circumstances, the deities may reach a compromise.
Marcus believed that of everywhere in the known world, Oridocia was the most likely place to find divine assistance. Thoroughly, he searched the building for something providential.
Every lamp except the warrior’s lit the building’s interior. The warrior’s lamp held a solid, smooth, yellow substance and a wick. The illegible bronze tablet at the lamp’s pedestal shared letters with Marcus’ language.
The wall over the trapdoor was fresh, dried clay, easy to rehydrate and rewrite, the other temple’s paintings, permanent. While Marcus examined the drying comparison chart of deities’ symbols, a trap door opened. His knife slowed and stopped him. But he almost lost the knife. So, Marcus slid onwards, clutching the knife.
Hissing and shouting snakewomen lined the walls and galleries; Marcus assumed they had been preserved, but he stared at them—until several snakes carried an armless, legless woman towards him. Closer, he identified her as the warrioress: Two snakes came from the warrioress’ right forearm and one each from her right knee, left shoulder, and left foot.
Marcus seriously considered spelunking up the slide, but the warrioress dragged him to the center of the warm cavern. Her legs’ snakes held her upright, as steady and still as legs, and the warrioress’ arms coiled firmly around him like rope, at arm’s length. The warrioress wore the green and brown stone on a leather band around her human upper arm, over a mended and patched tunic-like garment.
Positive Ogdolia would understand his predicament, he noticed the average snakewoman flattened one breast more than the other, was of child-rearing age, and had white human skin and unfamiliar clothes.
No! Please, don’t be Svalug!
He spotted a few more snakelets (one nursing) and a complete absence of men or snakemen.
Svalug women!
Marcus lied, “I can’t have children! Men in my family never have children! Not on my father’s side or mother’s side! We can’t!”
Marcus’ ear interpreted the warrioress’ words as the unsarcastic sentences, “Congratulations on your baby. Go home to your wife and baby.”
Snakeskin scarred her black hair and the rest of her pale body, at least what little Marcus saw. Snakeskin replaced one ear. Her right, human eye was deep brown and her snake-eye yellow. The snakeskin was tan with yellow, black, and reddish-brown markings, and the snakes’ eyes were yellow.
A few months ago, Marcus read on the bulletin board that, the year before, the Svalug tribal queen poisoned herself to avoid capture. He bungled her name.
“Katarami. Kah-TAHR-amee. Katarami,” she said. “Mzia, prepare him.”
Mzia roughly bit Marcus’ left arm, cut open the bite, sucked the venom out, and washed and bandaged it. She held his nose until he drank a body-temperature, bloody, herby potion that burned his mouth, throat, and stomach. Both Mzia and Katarami had an earring and lip ring.
The treatment baffled him, but he worried about voicing objections.
Marcus drew his knife and stabbed Katarami, hoping to escape. The single spurt of blood burned his skin. She crushed his hand until he dropped his knife, then she handed it to Mzia.
“We do not fight yet,” Katarami said. “I am crying from the wound. You do not make me cry.”
The deep stab wound had already stopped bleeding, apparently without treatment.
I need a plan…She’ll kill me.
Katarami explained that the snakewomen’s poison was the antidote to hers and vice-versa, which confused her. Fighters required her and Mzia’s early intervention—Katarami grew more powerful than predicted.
Through the explanation, Katarami stopped crying, and white, leathery skin grew over the stab wound. Marcus expected a snake to burst out at any moment.
She isn’t a snake, he thought. Longing to run, Marcus told himself, I need my right fingers.
“Fight now!” Katarami shouted.
The snakewomen and snakelets quieted. Mzia tossed Marcus’ knife to him, and he fumbled it, as Katarami’s snakes slithered away. She sat cross-legged with other snakewomen.
Katarami’s snakes half-surrounded Marcus; she controlled them like arms and legs, and she required at least one stationary snake to stand upright. He wished he had two whole hands and the phoenix torch to brandish at the snakes on one side while knifing with the other hand. When Marcus attacked one side, Katarami tended to bite or coil around the opposite side. Still, Marcus half-severed her shoulder snake, and he ducked the two or three spurts of blood.
Her snakes constricted him, but eyes shut, and head turned aside, Marcus plunged the knife into her chest. Katarami’s coils relaxed. He wriggled his arms free, then Katarami knocked him down as she fell.
Through a closed mouth, Marcus yelled “Get off!” Katarami bit his back as he fought free.
“Please stop. I don’t want to cut your head off,” Marcus gasped wheezily. He attempted to wipe his face clean on a sweating arm and cautiously squinted.
Katarami’s mouth and the remaining snakes hissed at him. Like lizard eggs half-dug up, a white growth covered her heart and shoulder; Marcus expected a baby snake to burst out any moment. Either run now or cut her neck and run, he thought. But he doubted he could chop off a head.
Marcus grabbed the larger snake from her right forearm and slashed through it. The snakehead’s fangs embedded in his arm, but he kept a slippery grip on the smaller one and pried out the head. He yanked the smaller snake towards him. Clumsily, Marcus slashed her shoulder and throat to the spinal cord and a snake’s head drooped mid-bite.
The watching snakewomen quieted further. They will kill me, Marcus thought.
“Please don’t kill me,” he called.
Katarami’s mouth and snakes hissed in unison, and Mzia hurried to listen. She completely ignored Marcus, which relieved him. Then Mzia left, calling, “Do not tend her wounds. Follow him, if necessary, but do not kill him.”
Marcus untangled himself and crawled out of Katarami’s reach. Something kept her snakes alive and functional, but Katarami’s human body became limp and still. Her snakes fought independently, but he dodged them and stepped on one just enough to immobilize it.
Though he longed to escape, he rolled Katarami over and checked the wounds. Her clotted neck lacked a leathery growth. Marcus slit her neck, heart, and the leathery growths over her snakish stumps. A minute later, they stayed open, and her snakes had weakened.
In severe pain, Marcus hobbled from the cavern. The scorpion-tailed monster galloped down a passageway, so Marcus dodged into a room—full of baskets holding snake eggs. He crouched behind a boulder.
“Hold arrows!” Mzia ordered, and others echoed.
“Marcus of Lucopoli, leave the nursery!” Mzia said.
“I know four…five…two Marcuses, three Marcoses, and two nicknames, so who do you mean?” Marcus asked.
“The Marcus of Lucopoli who is a potter.”
“Marcus of Lucopoli cannot be a potter,” Marcus quavered.
“Look in front of you. Walk. Turn when I say. For every child you step on, I will remove an organ.”
Walking, Marcus said, “I haven’t stepped on children. I didn’t mean to disturb your…eggs…”
Soon, Marcus became too dizzy and weak to drag himself further, and he fainted.
Marcus vaguely remembered what happened next and drifted in and out of consciousness. Mzia bit him, easily made him drink the potion again, and the scorpion-tailed monster stung his upper back and buttocks. People carried him to a well-lit cave and moved around him, sponging, and bandaging the bites.
Agnus and somebody else balanced wheezing Marcus upright. He folded to the stone floor.
“Well, you’ll hold yourself up in a minute.” Agnus creaked to the floor and propped him up. “Open your eyes. Count your fingers aloud, not your thumbs.”
Marcus squinted at the hands Agnus held up and mumbled, including his thumbs, “One…two…three…four…five…No!” According to his black right middle finger and his reddening right ring finger showed approximately an hour passed since he entered the Svalug women’s cavern. His right ring finger was red halfway to the second knuckle.
“Close enough for now.” Agnus laid his hands down. “You’d’ve’d six, but Katarami hasn’t died. You’d’ve died if Mzia and the Winged Manticore hadn’t gotten you, and if Katarami hadn’t sent them to you. So many fighters died after fighting the snakewomen, The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze turned the Sphinx into a Winged Manticore to cure them.”
“Do I have to kill him?” Marcus asked.
“Who?” Agnus asked.
Marcus pointed to the Winged Manticore. “I don’t want to. And isn’t he Lucopolitan?”
“No! Don’t kill him! He is not a warrior!”
“Good.”
“The Lucopolitan warrior carries Calospelegna on his back, so he won’t help you. Us preserved ones have very specific instructions.”
“From the caverns? But how long has it happened?”
“Longer than you’ve been here. You can’t stay with us anymore,” Agnus said.
“…But I’m too weak to fight now…”
Agnus and another woman silently hustled Marcus to the three-way passageway. Marcus’ knife and phoenix torch seemed heavier than before. Every part of his body hurt, and he struggled to breathe, but his legs steadied during the walk.
Marcus leaned against the wall to chase his breath; it refused to be caught. Considering the night’s events, of course, he felt sick. But his ribs ached and his breathing hurt. His bandages numbed his bites, or so Agnus claimed.
He wished The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze took his fingers from left to right, rather than the most recently fully reddened one. Then he could just hide until dawn, keeping his right hand intact. Even a trained fighter could not kill the other three in the time remaining: one hour at the earliest and two hours at the latest.
It's too late to save my hands, but the deities want me to fight, Marcus thought.
He determined that every lethal wound he gave a warrior was quite different from the wound from which The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze preserved him. Also, wounding the preserved part hardly affected the warrior, and, if the wound fell on a preserved part, the warrior survived an imaginably lethal injury—the monstrous elements functioned as armor. Marcus hated planning how to kill, and it disgusted him, but to kill a warrior quickly, he needed to attack the most human spots. Confident in finding a warrior if he went in the direction his knife’s stone pointed, Marcus limped down a passageway.
He came to a carved rolling stone with an incomplete machine. Marcus manipulated his knife in the slot until a metal bar emerged from the stone and completed the handle—the wrong shape for hand-turning. As Marcus pedaled, the stone rolled aside.
Marcus went into a stuffy chamber lit with oil lamps. He walked slowly from necessity, which saved him from drop-offs. Too weak to hold up the phoenix torch except to mark his route, it scraped the floor.
The venom continuously wore off, but Marcus felt feverish and shaky, both reasonable aftereffects of his recent activities.
Marcus found many dead-ends, but one had an inscription with backward letters. Marcus’ knife reflected them, and he read, Find the door. Marcus’ knife quickly cut through the thin wall.
He stepped into a corridor with a grooved wall, and, experimentally, Marcus pressed his foot to it. His foot stuck to the wall. He steadied himself with his knife and then raised his other foot to the wall. Stones ground and the walls shook. Some stones lowered, while others rose.
The groove ended facing a wall with a passage too high to jump. Marcus uncomfortably walked on the ceiling. He pulled himself into it, and, to his relief, he felt like standing the right way up.
An inscription over the door read: The fighter cures the disease.
The door had a deep recess with five fingerholes, clearly hand-shaped. He scraped dried gore from the fingerholds. Holding his knife between his palms, forming one complete hand, slid his knife into the slot. If he made a fist or raised or lowered his hand, sharp spikes and a wobbly stone would ruin them.
When the door opened, a recognizable smell wafted down the tunnel: plague.
I can’t kill it. I can’t reach the River Djebu. Then Marcus wondered if only his knife killed warriors.
Doctors knew that, inexplicably, an immune person in direct contact with the plague spread it to a healthy person. Until Marcus healed, his friends’ parents worried about his buboes bursting and infecting their children. If he stood close enough to smell it, he risked carrying the plague to Ogdolia and his baby. Maybe he could purge his lungs and bathe before going home.
Apparently sleeping, though the plague caused days-long insomnia, plague victims lay on beds and the floor, dribbling pus, cerebrospinal fluid, urine, vomit, and diarrhea.
As Marcus splashed and shuffled through similar rooms, his mouth was so dry, he thought it absorbed the water before it reached his throat. He suddenly needed to urinate in an overflowing bucket. Then he forced himself to continue walking. Sweat soaked Marcus and his teeth chattered. Despite double vision, he recognized the furnishings from his trip to Phahmese.
A hydrocephalic, pustule-covered Phahmesian man lay on a bed in an otherwise empty room. He wore a linen skirt and a belt with a green and brown stone; he also had an earring and lip ring.
Marcus felt for the disease warrior’s weak, rapid heart. The warrior held Marcus’ hand to his chest and his red down-turned eyes fixed on him. Probably from Marcus’ dizziness, the room spun. He tasted barley gruel and felt as anxious as he had when, aged six, he contracted the plague. Why am I sick again? he thought.
“You are immune. Please, tend the sick with me,” the disease warrior said.
“No, but I want to,” Marcus said. “…I should…”
“But you love your wife, and she—”
“She is in Lucopoli.”
“She came here for treatment, for she is near death.”
The disease warrior pointed to the bed, where infected Ogdolia lay under a sheet. Marcus rushed to her. Ogdolia’s long, black, curly hair had been cut to her scalp and one side of her head shaved clean for trepanning. Pus dripped into the freshly sewn cut.
“Unfortunately, the pus from her head entered her brain, and she will likely die soon,” the disease warrior said.
Marcus believed him; the complication terrified his mother. He whispered comforting things to her, but also thought, But she couldn’t become so ill in a few hours! Hydrocephaly developed after a few days. “Don’t believe him,” he whispered.
“Don’t you know, unfortunately, mothers spread the plague to their unborn and nursing babies?”
“Yes, but it isn’t normal…” Marcus felt Ogdolia’s fever long before he touched her forehead.
“It often happens, but, fortunately, we have a treatment.”
Marcus sniffed the pus on his hand.
“Perhaps extracting the baby will save your child, but, unfortunately, your wife will likely die.”
“How did she come here?” Marcus asked, gently turning over Ogdolia’s hand.
His wife burned her finger while cooking supper; the burn appeared as he examined the spot.
“She came with other plague victims,” the doctor said.
The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze brought everybody here, Marcus thought. “I’m hallucinating her. And I don’t want to spread the plague.”
The disease warrior felt Marcus’ forehead with a hot hand. “Your fever is too low to cause hallucinations.”
“Don’t involve her and our baby!” Marcus found the warrior’s heart again. “They have nothing to do with my situation! …And I shouldn’t spread the plague.”
“Of course, I will treat her, but, unfortunately, she may—”
Marcus slid the dagger through the man’s heart and blood trickled down Marcus’ arm. The gruel taste disappeared. Scared he doomed Ogdolia and their baby, he looked at the thankfully empty bed. All plaguey bodily fluids disappeared.
Returning to the passageway required all of Marcus’ effort. The stone pointed down the remaining passageway, but he slumped to the floor.
I can’t participate as a sick, lame animal…
Throughout the night, Marcus had worried that the shock of The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze taking him would hurt Ogdolia or the baby. A potential life without them was awful, and if he lost more fingers, he doubted he could support himself, let alone them. Having the maximum number of fingers prevented future suffering. By fighting, Marcus gave himself the opportunity to save at least one finger, maybe more.
And if he sat longer, he would fall asleep. Marcus forced himself up and followed the passage, which led to Belkish’s cave.
He wandered around Calospelegna. When Marcus encountered the warrior, he said, “I can’t kill you outright, and you have suffered too much to attempt a battle.” His earring and lip ring marked him as a warrior.
Marcus’ symptoms had faded somewhat, but he was too exhausted to reply. Eventually, his knife’s stone pointed to the rock outcrop, where he collapsed. Involuntarily and immediately, Marcus fell asleep.
The warrior prodded Marcus at an awkward angle with his spear. Marcus scrunched up, but then he lunged forward and stabbed the warrior’s thigh. The warrior limped circles around the outcrop.
Marcus checked his right pinkie, red to the fingernail. He worried about tracking time with totally red fingers. Katarami’s death also complicated matters: unless he fought her again, he expected to lose one finger from his dominant hand. Guiltily, he thought she might die.
Scared of the horse warrior, Marcus decided to find the fire warrior.
The fire warrior’s wick was out of reach, but Marcus figured out that his stylus or spear functioned as a lamplighter. Quickly, the beeswax melted into floor groves. The ceiling and the warrior’s slab lowered, and Marcus crouched underneath. The alternative was retreating, and he doubted, if another route existed, he had the strength to find it.
The warrior, glowing red-hot, stopped in a dark and silent room with a slightly tilted floor. Tin dripped onto the slightly tilted floor. Marcus cut a foothold and inserted his knife in a slot—but his right pinkie disappeared. He stood up, then snatched his knife from the approaching tin. The bronze deformed.
The webbing between his white left index finger and olive thumb reddened. Marcus expected to fight two or three more warriors, but all his fingers had either been taken or turned red and kept. Oh no…he thought. Marcus realized how much his red fingers encouraged him.
“They can be taken? But I saved them!”
Marcus carved deep footholds in the wall and three fingerholds for his left hand. Wobbling, with his right hand, he activated his knife key. One stone in each wall slid aside and ice-cold water poured through them. A vent in each wall let in fresh air.
“It has an exit somewhere, and the water probably opens it,” Marcus told himself.
A red mound with a black crust illuminated the steamy room, but as the water rose, the light faded. The steaming phoenix objected to the water; Marcus quavered comforting things. Though the water warmed, Marcus swam to the pouring ice-cold water, worried about the temperature increasing. He coughed from sulfur fumes.
Marcus swam on his back to the grinding stone and into the passage. Regretfully, he held his breath, unstrapped the phoenix, and entered the passage. The phoenix sank underwater and extinguished.
The passage tilted up, then down into a half-filled chamber. The red and black mass followed him, occasionally shedding a floating, gray substance. Marcus wedged himself into a corner. Ice-cold, filthy, smelly water flooded the chamber, but just as water reached the ceiling, it drained.
The water brought him to a drain partly filled with ice-cold water and ice chunks. Though he inhaled some water, he survived. Now the red and black mass resembled a person, and whether it was a Winged Manticore-like situation or the fire warrior, it scared and confused Marcus. The warriors are supposed to be human, he thought.
He swam toward the light but bumped his head on the ice. He cut an air hole in it. While making a large hole to escape through, he lost his knife. When he found it, he lost the air hole and cut a new one. It was the thickest ice he had ever seen.
Meanwhile, the fire warrior oozed into Alisha’s pool, like thick mud, and swam near the surface, melting the ice, slightly warming the water, and breaking free of the pumice. Marcus watched him for a few seconds.
Get out of the water, Marcus thought.
Marcus cut a new air hole and attempted to widen it, clutching his knife in both numb hands. He struggled to stay afloat. The fire warrior brought Marcus’ pathetic stabs. Heat radiated off the fire warrior.
Then the fire warrior took a deep breath and submerged again to knock the remaining pumice from his charred body. On the sixth try, Marcus clambered out of the pool.
“Leave the water before the lightning hits it!” Marcus called. “…It isn’t…normal lightning…”
The fire warrior floated by Alisha’s body, talking to her, and periodically dunking himself and rolling over. His charred burns began healing into severe burns.
Marcus warmed suspiciously quickly. I don’t know how to kill him, Marcus thought. Also, he found himself incapable of moving—until the fire warrior swam towards him with his knife. Marcus backed into a rosebush.
The fire warrior tossed Marcus’ knife into the bush, asking a question in a language very similar to Marcus’.
“Please repeat it. I didn’t hear it,” Marcus said, staring at the fire warrior’s green and brown teeth. Gold tinted his lips and ear.
He recognized some words in the question and his ear filled in the rest: “Why did you cut Alisha in such a manner?”
“I don’t know how to kill people! I didn’t want to, but she was drowning me.”
“I hope I won’t avenge her. If I killed you from revenge, I would not give you opportunity to earn your life, and I would not be killing for our purpose.”
“I can’t fight you,” Marcus said. “But…The last time I stabbed you, it didn’t work, so I want to escape…”
I will overheat…And I can’t survive another battle, he thought, finding the knife.
The fire warrior returned to Alisha. Feeling like a low-life, Marcus jumped onto him and stabbed him twice in the back. The fire warrior sunk and bobbed to the surface.
Once recovered from the cold shock, Marcus hobbled to the garden door.
The sky dimmed and, suddenly, the sun swooped over the horizon. Lightning abruptly halted. A total eclipse darkened the sky. It hurt his eyes and, because watching an eclipse was bad luck, he focused on his two-thirds red thumb. The sun emerged, flashed closer and northward, and then darkness fell again.
I’m supposed to be an animal, Marcus thought.
The Winged Manticore landed beside Marcus, who squeaked and brandished his knife.
“What’s wrong with the sun?” Marcus quavered, as lightning resumed.
“A deity other than the Sky-God moved it. The Sky-God intervened to save the world. The deities are discussing the situation. At the moment, I must examine Anaxeus, a scribe and warrior from Jadikira.”
The Winged Manticore padded to the pool and Marcus followed beyond stinging range.
“Please, let me keep my fingers,” Marcus said.
“I do not decide.”
The Winged Manticore grudgingly entered the water and pushed Anaxeus to the edge, then wrangled him onto the gravel, forbidding help from Marcus. He examined the body briefly, while Marcus paced to keep warm.
“Anaxeus is quite dead,” the Winged Manticore said, approaching him. “You shall keep a finger. You need only worry about one more finger and warrior.”
“I can’t fight more,” Marcus said.
“It is your decision.” The Winged Manticore had a lip ring, and his earring tangled in his mane.
“Do they truly want to be here and fight me?”
“Oh, yes. They have various reasons and motivations, but I cannot discuss specifics with the fighter. I may say that you killed Thones and Katarami in the same hour, and no other fighter has killed two in one hour.”
“Who was Thones?”
“Thones was a soldier and doctor present at the first outbreak of plague, in Bekhet. Katarami led the Svalug tribe. Belkish began a civil war in the Empire of Giruppik. A volcanic eruption destroyed Anaxeus’ home long ago, and the nursery rhyme Insula Peninsula comes from it. I believe you know the other warriors’ stories.”
“What about the horse-man warrior?”
“I cannot discuss him yet.”
“Agnus, the other preserved Lucopolitans, and some warriors have been dead for years, but how can they be alive?” Marcus said.
“The deities resurrected them, and they are very alive. Every warrior shall die and go to the afterlife.”
Like a cat, the Winged Manticore quietly groomed himself dry and clean.
Marcus worried about what would happen when other nations discovered he killed their people. He wondered about Ogdolia’s reaction to the night; she might understand.
Marcus’ right thumb reddened, and his left thumb turned white. He kept his other four fingers.
“But I can’t work anymore,” Marcus said. He barely held the knife.
A couple minutes later, Marcus asked, "Is the correct answer my knife?"
"Yes," the Winged Manticore said.
Finally, The Dread-and-the-Sore-Amaze appeared to Marcus. The deities have reached a compromise due to extraordinary circumstances. Marcus shall become a boar, and the sun shall finish rising in a customary manner. Manticore, send for Agnus.
The Winged Manticore flew away, while Marcus begged for his fingers.
He dropped to his hands and feet, and two of his lower teeth jutted over his lip. His two front cloven hooves missed half of each, but he wobbled like a piglet. His normal squeaks and squeals became pig-like. Agnus approached.
Open your mouth, The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze said to Marcus.
Agnus set his knife in Marcus’ open mouth and lashed it to his tusks.
Continue with the labor, The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze said.
Marcus practiced walking and moving faster around Calospelegna. White, red, and black colored his front hooves, which had one clove each.
Marcus correctly assumed the horse warrior would find him, and Marcus dreaded dying. The horse warrior moved at a pace difficult for him to match. The spear hardly wounded Marcus.
He dodged between the horse warrior’s legs and stopped but failed to trip the horse warrior. As the warrior twisted and turned, looking for him, Marcus sliced through a leg; the horse warrior kicked him and lost his balance.
Marcus charged the struggling horse warrior’s back. He stopped just short of goring with his tusks. A boar body was too unwieldy to attack the warrior face-to-face. But the horse warrior turned over and blocked his knife with his spear, so Marcus ran behind his back. Marcus cut through the spear and plunged his knife into the horse warrior’s side at approximately chest height. He easily shook free of the horse warrior, who gurgled, unable to stop two more attacks. Then Marcus backed out of a spear’s reach.
The horse warrior’s clothing resembled a horse blanket, and Marcus had seen a green and brown stone fastening it at the belly. So, Marcus knew he defeated the last warrior.
The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze descended and restored Marcus’ human form, which felt much better. The red on his thumb stopped spreading, which relieved Marcus—now he stopped worrying about keeping his fingers.
“Who was the horse warrior?” Marcus asked.
He was Klonos of Nesatope, The-Dread-and-Sore-Amaze said.
But he won games and fought many battles, Marcus thought. …He lost an army at the Battle of Natyline.
You completed the labor and defeated the seven warriors.
“But more than eight nations live around the Crescent Sea, and I don’t know how many more live beyond it. We have more than eight gods, too. Why did killing the seven warriors help the situation?” Marcus asked.
The deities chose the nations for specific purposes and with reasons mortals might not understand. Great changes may come to your life. I shall carry you home now.
Yoshi the Electromagnetic Cloud
Little Boy blasted Yoshi’s body to ash and bits of bone, and the shockwave carried her far from Hiroshima. She remembered the pain that lasted a fraction of a second. Then she remembered the explosion—the light blinded her first, and then the sound rattled her eardrums.
Now wind tore her apart, painlessly, but uncomfortably. Yoshi tasted metal and smelled burned flesh, and underneath it, dust and burning rubble. She attempted to rub her eyes and sniffle, but her hands passed through her face. Scared, she looked at her transparent, oddly-colored hands, and no air came through her nose. Yoshi looked around and yelped at the distance between her and the water, and her and dry ground, and went into hysterics.
Eventually, Yoshi heard a man calling for the crying person. Yoshi forced herself through the air to him, relieved to find an adult. But when Yoshi reached the Imperial Japanese Army soldier, he disappeared. She dissolved into tears again.
Yoshi forced herself through the air to Japan much faster than she expected and wondered if she missed Hiroshima. But Yoshi recognized the bay islands, and Hiroshima was larger than the other nearby towns. An unusual, dissipating cloud hung over the city.
Before the air raid, she had picked up a leaflet from the United States, warning of a bombing raid worse than the ones on Germany. Yoshi begged her mother to evacuate, but her mother needed to work and they did not qualify for official evacuation.
Hiroshima consisted of scorched buildings, limbless trees, rubble, and ash. Yoshi instinctively shrunk from the developing firestorm, except the heat felt tolerable. The bombing overcame the firebreaks that she and other children had built, which annoyed her, and the concrete buildings, which alarmed her. She dreaded her mother’s munitions plant blew up.
Her mother told her, during an air raid, to absolutely never, ever, under any circumstances, for any reason whatsoever, even in an emergency, be on the same street as a munitions plant. Yoshi searched for it anyway and then her home, but found neither. Her mother was probably in a demolished hospital.
Yoshi, an only child, was too young to care for herself under the circumstances. On a normal day, she thought she was old enough. Her father died honorably in Saipan. Most of her extended family lived elsewhere in Japan; she forgot their addresses and looking for her mother’s address book was ridiculous. Stories of what Americans did to Japanese people and Japanese-Americans scared her, and so nothing would convince her to live with her Japanese-American family. Her family’s friends might take her in temporarily, or tell her where to find help.
Yoshi grew sadder and angrier through her search for Hiroshima and despaired of adults responding to her calls. She doubted the survivors could help her. They congregated together and walked in lines, with their arms and legs spread apart, and flesh and ragged clothing hanging off their bodies. Some made incomprehensible sounds with wide-open mouths, which Yoshi strained to hear. Occasionally, people near her slumped or fell. Her mother was probably in the same condition.
So, Yoshi approached a group of survivors. A few feet away, the ones closest to her fell over dead, and smoldering wood ignited. That scared Yoshi—there was something deadly on the ground, like a gas leak. Fluttering backward, she bumped into another victim. A mushroom cloud proportional to the person’s size erupted and ash and miniscule fragments of charred bone piled on the ground. Terrified, Yoshi bolted into the air.
Yoshi felt safer over Hiroshima than the Sea of Japan, but she worried about coming too close to the ground. Lingering smoke and dusty particles accumulated in her cloud without feeling dusty or smoke-filled. She adjusted her cloud to hear the wind, the only sound, better. Then she regained her normal vision and, if she wanted, she could see beyond human’s light spectrum, which explained the weird colors.
Along with missing her normal sense of taste and touch, she longed to smell anything except the sickening stench of her own body burning. She was not hungry or thirsty, and her other bodily functions seemed nonexistent. It scared her, and felt weird, but seemed good under the circumstances.
Finally, Yoshi thought the deadly thing on the ground must have been repaired, shut off, or aired out, and she descended to Hiroshima again. Her presence accidentally killed people. Yoshi realized that, inexplicably, she had cremated the victim. It horrified her, but she could not convince herself she was wrong.
She decided to avoid people, especially her mother, and including people in Yoshi’s condition. She saw them in the distance.
Another massive shockwave hit Yoshi, followed by a detonation. She turned in the detonation’s direction, where a mushroom cloud hung. Obviously, with an unfamiliar weapon, the Allies attacked Japan, and Yoshi suspected the United States carried out the bombing raid. She wished the bomb made small explosions inside the city, explaining the cremated victim.
Yoshi saw a transparent radioactive lady in a nurse’s uniform. She watched for quite a while, unsure how to treat a distraught adult.
But the nurse asked, “Little girl, do you need help?”
“Stay away!” Yoshi yelled, panic overruling politeness. “Don’t touch people! Don’t touch me!”
“I won’t. I am Hara-san. Who are you?”
“Yoshi,” Yoshi said, backing away. “I can’t go near anything. Or anybody. Living people die if I touch them.”
“The United States bombed us and asked Japan to surrender.”
“Japan won’t surrender,” Yoshi said, confidently.
“They used one bomb on Hiroshima, and I suppose they did it again to Nagasaki.”
“One bomb?” Yoshi asked.
Hara-san explained what little she knew, then said, “You were right to stay away from people. Come with me if you want.”
“I want my mother,” Yoshi said.
“I wish you could find her. But if we are radioactive, we will make her sick.”
“Couldn’t you please treat her?”
“I wish I could, but I can’t. Come with me if you want.”
“If I bump into somebody, he sticks to me, and I don’t like it. Stay away from people.”
Yoshi sped away from Hara-san.
The Japanese free people and the Korean slave labor had become radioactive clouds, and before conflict arose, they moved away from each other but remained in contact.
Concerned, Hara-san checked on Yoshi, and convinced her to visit other radioactive clouds, who lived over the Sea of Japan. Unable to speak Korean, Yoshi visited the Japanese group. But Yoshi thought she somehow killed the cloud who called for her and the idea scared her too much to associate with other radioactive clouds. Hara-san comforted her.
The radioactive clouds listened to the radio. Because the ability seemed separate from their hearing and radioactive clouds frazzled electrical wires, the radioactive clouds thought they received and transmitted radio signals.
Over the radio, Yoshi heard the disconcerting news of Japan’s surrender. It made sense because it stopped the atomic bombing. She hoped nobody dropped an atomic bomb again. Then she observed the occupation of Japan and the war crimes trials and wished the rebuilt Hiroshima was more like the one she remembered. From anger, she plotted vengeance and punishments.
Whatever sort of being the radioactive clouds were, only they knew they lived. The Japanese radioactive clouds figured out they were not true ghosts, yūrei, and, therefore, they were not vengeful ghosts, onryō. The words monster and mutant seemed wrong. They survived the atomic bombings, but in such a changed state, they did not consider themselves hibakusha, such as the living victims Yoshi encountered in Hiroshima. Yoshi considered herself half-dead. She longed to be completely alive in Japan, either as she had before the bomb or as a hibakusha.
The radioactive clouds rarely interacted with people for their safety and because the situation was unbelievable. Experiencing it forced radioactive clouds to accept it. Yoshi despaired of finding a solution to her existence.
Lonely and bitter Yoshi lashed out at marine life or the occasional seabird or coastal animal until a codfish became a radioactive cloud—it was an innocent victim, like her. Because the codfish bumbled around wreaking havoc, Yoshi absorbed it. She supposed she constantly killed microorganisms and plants, too. Following the codfish incident, when frustrated, she practiced controlling radiation.
Hara-san tried to calm Yoshi, but they disagreed with each other and argued.
They removed themselves from their conversation before Yoshi became violently upset. She was so temperamental; the other radioactive clouds feared her. She also scared herself; she might kill them. She ran away from radioactive clouds if enraged and, eventually, Yoshi stopped visiting radioactive clouds entirely. Occasionally, somebody came to her.
Radiation was odorless, invisible, tasteless, and scentless, but Yoshi and the other radioactive clouds sensed the various kinds.
Yoshi discovered that if she hovered near Hiroshima or Nagasaki, the radiation increased her strength and volume. Feeding on nuclear radiation was a personal choice among the radioactive clouds. Having a head start, Yoshi swelled. She realized the more she grew, the greater the risks she posed to people.
Observations of fasting radioactive clouds indicated she could live off background radiation quite well. Yoshi practiced emitting or restraining all types of radiation—gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared radiation, and microwave radiation—, and, therefore, she needed to feed. Also, the radiation remained on Earth, but Yoshi held it within her cloud and lived far from people. Because discharging radiation simply put it into the atmosphere again, she reabsorbed it immediately.
Once able to contain her radiation so that living things survived her presence, Yoshi began eavesdropping on university courses. She learned physics and English. Gradually, with interruptions, she added various nuclear studies and the language used by each nuclear power spoke.
Correctly, physicists predicted that the nuclear radiation drifting around the world and decaying would become less harmful. Initially, physicists believed the radioactive clouds were part of the drift, possibly held together by wind currents. But radiation dotted remote spots or blobbed together in small clusters.
Physicists called the phenomena “radiological lakes.” Everybody thought the radiological lakes were a normal side-effect of the atomic bombing.
Physicists thought the atomic bombs might set the atmosphere on fire, and they calculated the chances were extremely low. The radioactive clouds surprised physicists. To many people, the effects of nuclear weapons seemed like rogue waves or out-of-season tornadoes.
The radiological lakes were too high in the atmosphere to harm people on the ground or at sea. Airplanes skirted them. Radio waves disrupted communications, but people coped. Meteorologists tracked radioactive clouds’ paths, while astronomers accounted for them while planning space flights. The radioactive clouds bypassed publicized aircraft or spacecraft. In several instances, a classified craft approached a radioactive cloud and, in seconds, it dodged the craft or withdrew from the flight path.
The nuclear programs frustrated Yoshi. The news reported steps taken to prevent nuclear war, but Yoshi had an obvious solution: stop making bombs and destroy the instructions.
When the United States, Soviet Union, and other countries tested nuclear weapons, Yoshi sensed the radiation gush from the weapons, rather like smelling water. Yoshi traveled at light speed to every test site. The fallout concerned her as much as the radiation, and collecting radiation from the open air was easier than from a contaminated area, where a descent might add to the problems. So, Yoshi swept through the area and the fallout gathered inside her cloud.
Physicists’ plans and experiments accounted for the radiological lake’s (Yoshi’s) presence, but she drove them to inaccuracies regarding non-alive radiation. After noticing the problem, Yoshi shortened the time spent at test sites.
Power stations, radioactive materials processing facilities, and waste sites popped up with little risk to people. Using her radiological senses, Yoshi agreed with physicists that the background radiation was low. Due to potential accidents and the unfamiliarity of nuclear technology, she thought placing it near a city was inherently unsafe.
Because she did not know the effect she had on plutonium, uranium, and other radioactive materials, Yoshi decided against depleting radiation from the warheads, processing facility materials, power station fuel, waste sites, and the like. But she wondered if to stop nuclear disasters, the risks she posed to people were acceptable. She lacked the confidence and scientific data to interfere or experiment.
Yoshi coincidentally arrived at the Bikini Atoll before a test, and instead of feeding, waited for the test. Whatever happened could not be worse than a nuclear detonation. She extended a sliver of her cloud. Gingerly, Yoshi soaked up the radiation from the unexploded warhead. It felt like eating a whole ginkgo nut if lava filled the center. And nothing radiologically terrible or wonderful happened. The warhead caused a pinprick spike in her overall radiation and settled into her cloud.
The physicists declared the warhead a dud that inexplicably heated the weapon. They thought the radiological lake’s temperature remained below the case’s melting point. Transferring radiation from an object to Yoshi or from Yoshi to an object produced heat, which Yoshi thought was obvious. Worried about test delays, the physicists said it was a one-time incident.
Though Yoshi wanted to absorb more warheads, she wondered about the long-term effects and if they stuffed her permanently.
The Soviet Union built the Mayak Production Association in the 1940s and it produced weapons-grade plutonium. The processing method involved ammonium nitrate and acetates. Previously, the Soviets flowed water contaminated with radiation directly into Lake Kyzyltash. They dumped radioactive waste into the Techa River, Lake Kyzyltash, and Lake Karachay. Before the Soviets collected the cooled waste from Lake Karachay, the lake’s radioactivity lethally dosed people who entered it. Belatedly, deep beneath the Mayak Production Association, the Soviets built concrete and steel storage tanks, each inside a faulty, badly monitored cooler, for ammonium nitrate and hot radioactive waste.
Yoshi wondered how the population of over 240,000 lived. The people, even factory workers, seemed oblivious to the radioactive isotopes inside their bodies and spread finely across the community. She sensed it; doctors studied radiation health problems.
The Mayak plant was among the radioactive clouds’ best feeding grounds; Yoshi always checked that she was alone before feeding there. Elsewhere, from other accidents, she taught herself to identify radiation and fallout spikes. She attributed the Mayak burst to another radioactive cloud feeding—until it persisted.
Upon observing Mayak, Yoshi regretted waiting. The tanks had exploded. Flickering radiation and fallout continuously poured across Russia. She absorbed the exploded tank’s radiation and collected fallout closest to the Mayak Production Association, the rest blended into the pollution.
She expected everybody to die, even if the Soviets evacuated them. Many people survived the high contamination levels. The Soviets evacuated approximately 10,000 people over two years and hardly cleaned up the site. They suppressed media reports about the accident.
Yoshi decided to investigate unusual radiation immediately, giving herself plenty of time to absorb it.
In England, the Windscale Piles produced, among other radioactive materials, weapons-grade plutonium, which required uranium. Rapidly after the Mayak Disaster, Yoshi sensed the Windscale Fire.
Yoshi arranged herself over the fallout. Operators thought the accident, rather than Yoshi, increased radiation. They remained on site to extinguish the fire or minimize further problems.
Quickly, Yoshi found over one hundred displaced, flaming uranium cartridges. She plunged a filament through the concrete containment and wiggled it through the cartridges, which depleted their radiation. Because the fire threatened the other radioactive elements, she drained them as well. The radiation level rose and then plummeted steadily while she worked. Then she retracted the filament, collected stray fallout, and went into the upper atmosphere over the Irish Sea.
On the radio, Yoshi learned that not only did she set the building on fire, but she fatally poisoned the operators and sickened nearby people. Because she temporarily increased the hazards, Yoshi decided to respond to nuclear accidents when either the operators finished their work or the situation became unmanageable.
The government accurately predicted little fallout or radiation from the Windscale Piles fire, but the nuclear accident scared people. The government censored the media. To Yoshi’s relief, the Windscale Piles would be decommissioned, but the lack of evacuations concerned her. She thought Soviet and British authorities underestimated nuclear radiation’s dangers.
Yoshi preferred the current Japanese government to the one she grew up with.
Hara-san encouraged Yoshi’s hypothesis that the radioactive clouds might survive outer space. Yoshi’s scientific arguments confused Hara-san after a certain point, but she liked the idea.
Radiation filled space. Gaseous planets and nebulous clouds existed, but they had high gravity and Yoshi low. The space race sent capsules of living things into outer space and retrieved them alive; Yoshi lacked a capsule, and, according to mainstream biology, could not be alive. Movie monsters contradicted mainstream biology and irritated and insulted her.
Yoshi eased a filament into outer space and felt her first pleasant sensation since 1945. To relax, Yoshi waded through half-atmosphere, half-outer space and let the upper half’s radiation drift around. Earth was a radiological desert compared to space.
Her fallout particles clung to her cloud. She left them behind at the same rate as on Earth, but she collected them much more easily; they tended to hang in one place or travel in a calculable direction and speed. Yoshi discovered if she discharged radiation in a specific direction, her filament moved. The principle worked on larger parts of her cloud.
To shrink her cloud, Yoshi emitted more radiation than she absorbed. She hoped the radiation would not damage celestial bodies out of sight. Sometimes she thought that being Yoshi, her radiation would hit the only extraterrestrial life in the universe.
Over the years, Yoshi wanted to take revenge on the United States, but attacking the rented United States bases in Japan risked harming the Japanese people. She wanted to keep radiation from American civilians, especially children. Finally, Yoshi had a feasible plan. Every attempt of Hara-san’s to ask about Yoshi’s increased grumpiness, isolation, and practice failed.
Manhattan Project historical sites in Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Hanford burned down, and the Truman Library and Museum, Truman’s home, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, and offices or laboratories of living Manhattan Project scientists also caught fire. The spreading fires injured various people and others nearby suffered mild to moderate radiation sickness.
There was no good explanation for how the fires started. They caused structural damage and their spread and locations seemed to allow people to escape.
Authorities struggled to lower intense media interest in the fires but suppressed the radiation sickness reports. Some witnesses reported an odd, glowing cloud overhead; most people attributed the witnesses’ claims to fires, stress, or lying.
On July 23, 1960, in Hawaii, servicemembers fell ill with radiation burns and radiation sickness or even were reduced to charred bone and ashes. Many survivors died in hospital or developed cancer.
Survivors reported hearing a child’s crying and wailing, possibly in a foreign language. Some attributed the sound to an open window or to their friends dying, but a medic said a patient insisted he look for a child. The medic glanced around at adults. People across the bases reported a burning, meat-like stench.
Investigators mapped the same event in every Pearl Harbor base, approximately moving west to east, and generally lasting an hour. It affected buildings prohibited to civilians. Inside the buildings, the problems emerged from the top of the building to the bottom and from one end of the hallway to another.
The event shorted out all communications and electrical systems across the base. Some military families complained of radiation sicknesses, but the doctors determined it was mass hysteria.
The investigators thought if the descended radiological lake caused the event, locals would have suffered, too. They searched in vain for a radioactive device, fallout, or high background radiation.
Less than an hour after the last Pearl Harbor attack, nuclear missile silos experienced similar events in a similar pattern. Every missile silo hatch had been melted; the hatch was the entry point. Especially in the most affected areas, heat damaged the concrete, and the air vents had been melted or overheated and warped.
Most missile silo airmen died within a month, and many were too ill with radiation poisoning to report their experiences promptly or coherently. A few airmen said that the dust cloud or a child cried and wailed. Many said that dust fell to the ground, rose into the air, and blew through the ceiling or air vents.
In each silo east of F. E. Warren Air Force Base, investigators found, burnt into a concrete wall, a stick figure wearing monpe trousers, a kimono-style top, and sandals. Of the surviving witnesses, none recognized it.
Entering an American base scared Yoshi, but she knew she could defend herself from any kind of assault.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima happened too quickly for Yoshi to remember the injuries as they were inflicted. Now she wished she remained ignorant, but continued her attack.
Throughout Yoshi’s rampage, she drew the emitted radiation to her again and gathered fallout. She listened to radio and television broadcasts and military transmissions. Yoshi outpaced the military aircraft following her. She temporarily ignored most aircraft, which flew away from her, and the submarines.
The media remained silent about her military attacks but reported the fires. Yoshi cared little whether the atomic scientists lived or died; she wanted them to experience a radiological attack on something they valued. She assumed they loved their jobs. And the scientifically ignorant authorities might imprison the scientists for concocting another hazardous nuclear experiment.
Physicists and meteorologists encouraged people to remain indoors due to increased radiation. As Yoshi moved east, some regions started evacuations—but she passed before evacuations succeeded—or suggested sheltering in a bomb shelter. She heard one nuclear siren in North Dakota and none anywhere else. Quite a few stations delayed reporting Yoshi's movements, just in case people panicked.
The military called DEFCON 1 a training exercise, which seemed unusual to Yoshi. She had almost completely disabled the United States’ nuclear defenses. In Georgia, Yoshi worried the United States would accuse Japan and retaliate, despite Japan’s clear nonparticipation and the fact that military technology was incapable of her actions.
Yoshi detoured to Washington, D.C. and after checking several other buildings, found the White House. On an exterior wall, Yoshi made her stick figure mark and wrote a note: I died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Japan or another country did not send me to attack the United States.
Then Yoshi went to Arlington and easily found the Pentagon, from which non-essential personnel were evacuating. Yoshi hovered high above it and then lowered part of her cloud.
The remaining servicemembers wore NBC suits, but they offered little protection from Yoshi’s presence, let alone when, on the top floor, she raised her filament’s temperature high enough to vaporize people. Everything else in the immediate vicinity melted or reached its flashpoint. Radioactive fallout billowed. Yoshi decided another vaporization would spread the fallout too far to collect.
As she worked her filament through the rings and down the levels, she noticed a Coast Guardsman trying to attract her attention and distance himself simultaneously. His face had melted off before he became a radioactive cloud.
“What?” Yoshi snapped.
“Do you deplete Soviet missiles?” he asked.
“Why?”
“The Soviets probably know we don’t have missiles, so they will launch at us.”
“Will you or the Soviet Union attack Japan?”
“Who cares about Japan? If the Soviets—”
Yoshi snarled and reached for him, but he backed away.
“The radiation will affect Japan. Please, deplete the Soviet warheads. I don’t know how or I would.”
Yoshi warned him about absorbing radiation clouds and giving people radiation poisoning.
Then Yoshi depleted the Soviet warheads, limiting collateral damage when possible.
A Soviet observed a stick figure mark and message write itself on the Kremlin’s wall: I died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Japan, the United States, or another country did not send me to attack the Soviet Union or the United States.
Feeling unwieldy, Yoshi tracked nuclear aircraft into remote areas and ate the missiles. Alternatively, she waited for the aircraft to land and trawled a filament over them.
Yoshi rarely submerged herself underwater because she killed millions of marine creatures every time. Emitting visible light illuminated just a few feet in any direction and from above, she could not study the terrain. Therefore, hunting submarines was much harder than airplanes. She hovered above the ocean until she sensed a submarine’s nuclear torpedoes and missiles, and then her trawling filament melted through the submarines and absorbed the warheads.
The revenge satisfied her and while still lonely and bitter, she had vented most of her frustrations. Even her remaining problems seemed tolerable. However, she worried about losing control of the radiation and destroying the Earth. Yoshi’s cloud felt stuffed and bumpy due to carrying over 19,000 missiles.
She rushed beyond Earth’s orbit and stretched out. The radiation seeped from her cloud.
Then Hara-san peered at Yoshi as if standing on tip-toe on the thermosphere.
“Have they shamed me?” Yoshi asked.
“Yes, and the others won’t visit you,” Hara-san said. “I will, though, and I want to. You are my friend. But the other clouds won’t welcome your return to Earth.”
Yoshi ran away crying, feeling ashamed, and thinking Hara-san hated her. She felt guilty about killing people. However, Yoshi thought her rampage was right, and she was not particularly ashamed of herself.
Physicists and meteorologists called Yoshi’s rampage a “radiological storm.” Conspiracy theorists and some physicists thought the radiological lake moved too intentionally and restrictively to be a natural storm.
Yoshi’s planned route kept the Sun in view behind her. A one-way journey to a celestial body’s orbit required several minutes to several hours, and finding the celestial body’s current orbital location took longer. She tolerated the unnerving distance between planets if she traveled at light speed.
Yoshi visited acceptably hot Mercury, where the Sun shone too brightly to look at directly for long. Closer to the Sun, she felt uncomfortably hot, and looking at it hurt. She believed the Sun’s gravitational field might pull her into it or a solar flare could absorb her radiation and kill her. In the opposite direction, beyond the asteroid belt, Yoshi worried about losing sight of the Sun, and so she always escaped storms. She warmed herself up with radiation. Yoshi swam in the gas planets and, at long last, found two things she could smell: Jupiter and Uranus. To her annoyance, they stunk of ammonia, rotten eggs, something offensively sweet, and bitter almonds. On tolerably cold Pluto, the Sun shone as brightly as a full moon on Earth.
The elements and chemicals reacted with Yoshi’s fallout, and they accumulated in her cloud. The only side-effect was that she felt them in her cloud. Soon, she accustomed herself to them.
But beginning beyond the asteroid belt, Yoshi felt odd, and on Pluto, weak. The weakness and wrong feeling combined with the isolation and darkness alarmed her. Yoshi jetted herself to Mars, rested for several days, and recovered. Radiation sustained her life, which baffled her.
For a home, Yoshi found a pretty, cozy spot near the Aristarchus Crater, with a good view of Earth. She bleached drawings into the grey rock and lasered rough spots smooth. After practicing elsewhere, Yoshi lasered structures akin to furniture and climbing gym equipment, around which she shaped her cloud.
Yoshi’s attack spawned four radioactive clouds, who fed on radioactive waste and nuclear tests and lived above Nevada. Despite officially not existing, they worked for the Department of Defense and drilled in outer space.
Yoshi missed Earth and though she liked living on the Moon, outer space was too empty and lonely to endure alone forever. She shrunk herself to a manageable size, then she listened to the radio and television signals, resumed university courses, and observed nuclear matters. Hara-san visited her and told the other 1945 radioactive clouds that Yoshi was alive.
Even though Yoshi could absorb the world’s nuclear weapons and discharge the radiation in space before losing control, she decided against it. Yoshi regretted her rampage caused international panic and killed innocent people. She hated that she had created more radioactive clouds.
Still, she wanted complete nuclear disarmament. Hopefully, governments would disarm themselves, but her missile silo attacks raised Cold War tensions and she doubted she could absorb a nuclear war. The proliferation of nuclear weapons slowed to a liferation because the Soviet Union and United States replaced their weapons before increasing their arsenal. Their activities delayed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and she approved of the treaty. Every time she ate a warhead, the country made another one. Before it frustrated her into a rage, she abandoned the idea.
The Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty relieved Yoshi’s radiation fears; she switched to feeding off radioactive waste, cooling pools, mining towns (background radiation only; nothing inside the mines themselves), and accidents. She learned to deplete them without causing fires or making people moderately ill.
Businesses stopped selling radioactive toys and housewares. As more fission power plants popped up and radiological medical equipment was invented, engineers developed coping mechanisms for a descending radioactive cloud.
Militaries were developing anti-radiation technology and defenses against it.
Suddenly, colored light flickered over the East Urals Radioactive Trace, formed by the wind blowing across the Mayak Production Association. Some people said a cloud glowed and showed blue sky in the gaps, or flashed red or orange as it had during the Mayak Disaster; very few noticed a human form and hardly anybody reported it. As birds and insects fell dead from the sky, metallic dust rose into the cloud, and so did hair and bugs, small animals, and fish, which landed gently a short time later.
Many people felt overheated on a cool day. Cases of mild radiation poisoning increased briefly, but some people’s radiation-related health issues improved. Hip or knee replacements, bone pins, and the like shifted and one man’s prosthetic leg stuck to the refrigerator for several minutes.
Across the region, electrical wires frizzled; replacing appliances and electrical wiring required months. Pacemakers malfunctioned. Cars refused to start. Jewelry coiled up, magnetized together.
Scorch marks appeared on structures and the ground and grass ignited. The Mayak Production Association’s fuel was depleted and the building caught fire, but the contaminated smoke and particles whooshed into a cloud.
The cloud vanished. The ash showed very little radiation and much of the previous fallout disappeared. The best explanation was an outbreak of small tornadoes that blew the fallout away, making the fallout somebody else’s problem.
Japan rented military bases to the United States, which bothered Yoshi. To force the American military to leave Japan, she stalked the bases with slightly less aggressiveness than she had at Pearl Harbor. She worried about affecting or scaring the Japanese people.
The United States reinforced its military installations, set up sensors, drilled evacuations, and stationed an American radioactive cloud above Japan. But Yoshi absorbed him, then the other American clouds.
The urban legend of Shadow Girl (also known as the Shadow Woman, the Ash Girl, or the Ash Woman) originated near the United States Forces Japan bases. The first reported sighting occurred on April 9, 1979, in Tokyo. Earlier unexplained disappearances, all involving piles of ash or radiation spikes, have been attributed to her.
The Shadow Girl smelled like burning meat and other unpleasant odors, such as sewer gas, cyanide, and ammonia.
Her physical appearance varied. She was either a young teenage girl dressed in monpe trousers, a kimono-style top, and sandals or a pretty, young woman dressed in a kimono and with a hime haircut. In some accounts, she was a shadow on the wall and when she reached out of the wall, her arm appeared to be made of dust and ash. Other witnesses said her entire body was made of dust and ash and she cast a glowing, radioactive green or blue shadow or that while killing, her hand glowed.
The Shadow Girl waited in alleys or behind buildings for a United States servicemember in uniform to pass. Once servicemembers were advised to wear civilian clothes off base, she chose a white person, normally a man. The Shadow Girl lured the victim closer by crying. She asked, “Are you an American?” If the person answered, “No,” she vanished, but if he answered yes, her touch cremated him or gave him severe radiation burns.
If other people accompanied the man, the Shadow Girl attacked anybody who responded to her question. She rarely chased people who ran away from her. Some survivors reported mild radiation poisoning.
Yoshi narrowly escaped a folklorist (Dr. Hughes) equipped with a Geiger counter. Killing him would just attract more researchers, and she had let other people live. By the time he published his findings, she had stopped her attacks.
Though Yoshi disliked the Shadow Girl urban legend, it did not upset her.
The U. S. Embassy considered the Shadow Girl a complete fabrication. No law enforcement investigator, either Japanese or American, found radiation or radioactive fallout in Japanese alleys, and they discredited other claims. The Japanese government refused to renew the United States’ military base rent contract. Coincidentally, the radiation attacks stopped.
Conspiracy theorists loved the situation.
Yoshi watched a movie: The Radioactive Thing from the Hypocenter. It insulted her—the filmmakers definitely based the monster on her. She wanted to write a rude note for them but thought it might scare them.
Biologists discovered that radioactive clouds confused migrating animals and birds, but peculiarly, the radioactive clouds avoided migration routes. When flashing, radioactive clouds attracted animals that saw light beyond human sight. Some seemed to flash when the animals naturally moved towards them.
Also, radiological clouds, sometimes called electromagnetic clouds, complicated the new idea of nuclear winter. The clouds trapped fallout and radiation apparently permanently. At their average accretion rate, they would block the sunlight within hundreds of years; the largest (Radiological or Electromagnetic Cloud #5) in less than one hundred years. In a nuclear war, the clouds would collect massive amounts of fallout and radiation, and the skies would never fully clear, and bands of decaying but lethal radiation would float across the world unpredictably, instead of following wind patterns.
Countries occasionally mishandled radioactive waste, certain that before it caused serious harm, a radioactive cloud would absorb it. Yoshi noticed in her nuclear inspections, that minor problems went unfixed, despite her warnings, until she wrote a strongly-worded note on the head of state’s wall. If it failed, she left another note on a wall of the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs or the International Atomic Energy Agency. As a last resort, or earlier if the problem threatened people’s lives, she depleted the facility’s nuclear materials—fully aware she reaffirmed people’s reliance on radioactive clouds. Some people considered her a symbol of safe nuclear energy or anti-nuclear energy.
Mysteries and misconceptions about the radioactive clouds abounded, some only clarified if researchers spoke with the radiological lakes at length, and scholars tended to overlook their colleagues who communicated with natural phenomena.
Yoshi studied more than enough for a PhD in physics and experimented in outer space. Her studies, experiments, and personal experiences convinced her some ideas were incorrect. Unable to explain why or offer another idea, she thought her opinion did not count and argued with physicists in her head anyway.
Among people who thought hibakusha were still radioactive, a minority believed that hibakusha could turn into radiological lake or had radioactive superpowers. However, since the 1940s, Hara-san correctly thought some people considered hibakusha monsters—she simply had not told Yoshi, who would interpret it as the people calling her a monster or evil. When Yoshi finally heard the theory, she ridiculed the premises and overlooked the conclusion that hibakusha were monsters. Then Hara-san told her. The complete wrongness of the idea upset Yoshi.
A growing number of people thought the radiological lakes were intelligent and maybe extraterrestrials. A respected pseudoscientist, Dr. Tremblay, hypothesized that one extraterrestrial attacked the United States and the Soviet Union in 1960 and returned to its planet. He thought the extraterrestrial was a radiological cloud. Next, either a different extraterrestrial from the planet or the same extraterrestrial returned in the 1970s-1980s to attack the United States military bases. Therefore, the people of Earth were in great danger of another attack by hostile extraterrestrials, who intended to defeat the world’s militaries and impose their own rule for nefarious purposes, like slave labor or stealing the Earth’s resources. Some pseudoscientists argued the extraterrestrial merely armed its spaceships with radiological weapons, which explained the atmospheric lights. Dr. Tremblay said the lights could be a spaceship—the extraterrestrial must live somewhere, like every other living thing—, but he preferred to explain it with electromagnetic radiation and glowing radioactive elements.
In Yoshi’s opinion, Dr. Tremblay essentially called her an evil monster with horrible intentions. But she helped people. She accidentally harmed the people with pacemakers and metallic implants, and, therefore, would not attempt mass magnetization again.
From Hara-san’s perspective, people amassed more data about Yoshi than the other radioactive clouds combined, because of her alarming activities. Her actions prompted Hara-san and some other radioactive clouds to respond to would-be-contactees.
“If you were more active and helped people, people would notice you,” Yoshi snapped, and ran away.
By then, most radioactive clouds faded, hardly distinguishable from background radiation. Among the feeders, Yoshi was the most vigorous. Feeding sites ran low and the radioactive clouds complained about losing Mayak as a feeding source.
During the Three Mile Island accident and Chernobyl’s meltdown, Yoshi absorbed the radiation and fallout. The power plants remained open. She deposited radiation blobs over the Poles and on the Moon, where a few radioactive clouds had moved.
Immediately upon South Africa announcing its complete nuclear disarmament, Yoshi absorbed the warheads, processing facilities, waste sites, and everything else she could find. The same happened in former Soviet Union countries and whenever a country shrunk its arsenal.
Yoshi fought against the Argentinian, Brazilian, and North Korean nuclear weapons programs. Argentina officially stopped adding nuclear weapons when the dictatorship ended, then Yoshi absorbed their capabilities, and they abandoned the program. The tiny Brazilian program persisted with anti-radiation devices. On her second trip to North Korea, Yoshi noticed everybody had been replaced, from janitors to physicists to governmental officials. She easily tracked the previous workers down: they showed a dangerous level of radiation and compared to other countries, North Koreans owned few electronics, which emitted just enough radio waves to disguise contamination. The old workers were in concentration camps. She verified their names and discovered that the North Korean government imprisoned their families, too. So, Yoshi let the program continue—she worried about sending more people to the prisons—and monitored the radiation levels more closely than in other countries.
Israel had a policy of deliberate ambiguity about its nuclear weapons. Even though Yoshi snuck into Israel’s nuclear affairs, people noticed radioactive clouds near Israel, and she interfered with the country’s policy.
Yoshi hunted down nuclear materials thieves and poisoned them, depleted the weapons, and told the authorities where to find them.
Terrorists threatened and plotted to use dirty bombs. The conventional explosives’ detonation would spread the radioactive material; there was no nuclear explosion. When Yoshi caught dirty bomb makers, she poisoned them, leaving them identifiable. She wrote a note on the authorities’ walls and guarded the bodies. She waited outside the compound. The first Italian soldier to spot Yoshi caused a convoy pile-up. However, Yoshi had scared the local terrorists too much to take advantage of a crash.
Yoshi depleted salted bombs, nuclear weapons containing radioactive isotopes for extra fallout. She appeared to the engineers, too. Because authorities approved their activities, she burned those involved to death and destroyed the facilities.
The nuclear bomb plans Yoshi found online scared her and irritated her. She despaired of deleting them.
Japanese radio usually played somewhere in Yoshi’s cloud and she half-paid attention to it. When she heard about the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, she preemptively depleted the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
Then Yoshi lurked in the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station until the Russian soldiers mutinied. She also made the Ukrainians a bit edgy, despite a note reading, I am not attacking Ukrainians, and another warning the Russians against arresting the nuclear technicians.
Yoshi regretted her attacks, but she was happy that the United States left Japan. She wished she found another way.
Military anti-radiation shielding sapped energy from the electromagnetic clouds (the modern term for radiological lakes) so that the shielding partly powered itself. Scientists adapted the technology to collect background radiation for electrical power; an ethics board determined it was like harvesting methane and carbon monoxide. To slow climate change, scientists proposed shrinking electromagnetic clouds by collecting radiation, though the fallout particles posed problems.
Some scientists, including Dr. Nakano, thought the electromagnetic clouds had at least animal-like intelligence. Dr. Nakano objected to keeping them inside a power plant without their consent or domestication, and the longer he studied electromagnetic clouds, the more intelligent they seemed.
Dr. Nakano and others deduced that electromagnetic clouds interfered with military nuclear weapons and communicated with heads of nuclear powers. Electromagnetic cloud #5 provided the most data. He and others thought the electromagnetic clouds could be weaponized, or their actions may increase tensions, or a government could carry out a nuclear attack, blame it on electromagnetic clouds, and succeed because the general public understood little physics. Unlike many other experts, Dr. Nakano wondered if the electromagnetic clouds wanted to provoke nuclear war or accidents—they lived on radiation. Once he knew Hara-san and Yoshi better, he changed his mind.
Countries wanted to prevent each other from weaponizing electromagnetic clouds and stop the electromagnetic clouds’ attraction to their defenses. But radioactive clouds tended to be neutral. Dr. Nakano insulted Yoshi when he asked if she was pro-North Korea; she flew to Mars in a huff and Dr. Nakano apologized via Hara-san and a rover.
So, the United States government contracted Dr. Nakano to trap at least one electromagnetic cloud in an old missile silo converted into a power plant, named the Fermi Electromagnetic Radiation Power Station. Dr. Nakano focused on Electromagnetic Cloud #5, the largest. The government and press said it wrought the most havoc and that controlling it protected people. Yoshi and the other radioactive clouds became suspicious.
Omitting information to gain Yoshi’s trust, Dr. Nakano persisted. Providing electricity for impoverished countries seemed like a good cause, and so did preserving the ice sheets. Yoshi wanted to shrink enough to live on Earth constantly; she wrung radiation from her cloud almost as quickly as she absorbed it from the Sun.
Yoshi entered the Fermi Electromagnetic Radiation Power Station on November 30, 2033, and due to her electromagnetic interference, photographers stayed home, reporters took notes on paper while wearing NBC suits, and live-streaming was impossible closer than one mile. The roads shut down as a precaution and satellites changed paths.
A team closed the silo doors behind Yoshi. She eased through the corridors and new tunnels.
Once the radiation levels above ground lowered and stabilized, Dr. Nakano allowed the press access to the power facility. He banned them from visiting Yoshi at her own insistence.
The construction crew had removed the interior doors, wiring, and furnishings and filled the ventilation system with concrete. Water covered the silo like a dam, except for the silo’s doors. Walkways connected buildings. Cargo airplanes transported energy cells to and from the Fermi Power Station, and employees lived on-site or in an easy drive. The plant powered itself.
Dr. Nakano’s team entertained Yoshi with TV and radio signals and an Internet connection, and established a telephone link between her and weak, fading Hara-san. He dropped vivid, mildly radioactive cadmium pigments through the door. Yoshi added them to the radioactive matter with which she colored her cloud. Also, he tracked down Yoshi’s family, who refused to believe him; it upset Yoshi’s hopes.
The committee treated Yoshi like an animal or inanimate force, and so, by treating Yoshi like a person, Dr. Nakano risked his career. He omitted his suspicions that Yoshi had vaporized people. If they thought she was a murderer or a rogue cloud, they would cap the door, provoking a rampaging escape.
Yoshi missed traveling wherever she liked and watching the scenery. She deciphered code words indicating she was a captive; power station radio communications changed suspiciously frequently. Also, she required more sunlight than was provided by resting for an hour under the open door.
Yoshi explained to Dr. Nakano the difference between sickening and shrinking. Though he supported her against the power plant’s committee, he told Yoshi there was no solution. She melted the door open. Somehow, Dr. Nakano convinced the committee to tidy up the doorway and leave it open.
Yoshi forced herself to stay inside the silo. Then she peeked at the scenery. She threatened to give herself sunlight holes, so Dr. Nakano scheduled safety precautions that allowed Yoshi to trail a filament in the open air once daily.
The radiation collectors gathered whatever naturally flowed from Yoshi, but sometimes she emitted radiation intentionally to speed up the process. It began to hurt. She stopped intentional releases; Dr. Nakano supported her decision before the pushy, goal-orientated committee.
Yoshi realized, at her current shrinking rate, that even with Dr. Nakano’s promise of more efficient technology (that required decades or centuries to fulfill), she would emit a useful amount of radiation for thousands of years. She doubted a governmental program could last for thousands of years. If she weakened too far, they might close her inside, like boarding up an old mine.
She needed more sunlight than Dr. Nakano arranged. Yoshi pushed against the ceilings, choosing the thinner, radiation-collecting areas. The ground over the tunnel shifted as the lead above the concrete melted and dirt fell into the molten lead.
Dr. Nakano reminded the operation’s committee that gaseous lead gave people heavy metal poisoning and contaminated the ground. The committee refused to build sunlight holes for several reasons: the operation’s goal was shrinking radiological lakes and Yoshi fed on sunlight; employees would quit or strike if Yoshi exposed herself; they thought a legitimately sick radiological lake could not burn through the silo; and they doubted Yoshi adequately contained the fallout and radiation.
Over several days, heat soaked through the soil and turned the lead into a gas. The pool’s water steamed, then simmered, then boiled, while Yoshi melted through the pool’s bottom.
Dr. Nakano stopped arguing with the committee and Yoshi; he hated the business side of the power plant and sympathized with Yoshi. Technicians sandbagged the areas, minimizing water loss. He encouraged Yoshi to continue—nobody could stop her or punish her.
Hours later, the weakened pool’s bottom cracked open. The water soaked her, but it boiled off.
Dr. Nakano fell out of favor. He told her his replacement, Dr. Donovan, would arrive in two weeks. When Dr. Nakano led the operation, Yoshi felt uneasy about her situation, and she thought the replacement would change matters for the worse.
Yoshi escaped, deciding that even if people contacted her, she would only help if they started a major nuclear disaster or war again. Worried about the other radioactive clouds’ wellbeing, Yoshi breached the other three electromagnetic power plants around the world. Two clouds left, one of which visited regularly, and one remained.
Yoshi rushed into outer space and recovered for a day. Upon returning to Earth, she passed to Hara-san radioisotopes that emitted gamma radiation. Hara-san was too weak to find them herself.
Dr. Nakano developed a cheaper backyard or rooftop radiation collector and a charity spread them through impoverished regions. Yoshi regularly flew over them.
Countries built fusion reactor power plants, safer than fission ones.
As the radioactive clouds’ feeding grounds decayed, the clouds extended filaments into outer space. The practice complicated space flights. To assist the course plotters, Yoshi surrounded the metal with her cloud, then took it into outer space, where she raised her temperature to the trash’s boiling point. Once it vaporized, the particles remained in her cloud.
The French government decided to completely disarm their nuclear weapons and Yoshi finished their years-long project in a couple hours.
Along with destroying shared nuclear weapons, Yoshi absorbed warheads in the worst condition, plus five each in the United States and Russia, to equalize their and China’s arsenals. The definition of “worst condition” became relative. However, she never interfered with North Korea.
North Korea and several non-nuclear countries decided against signing the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, but Israel signed for the first time. The United States intended to—until China refused to sign.
To defend itself against China, Taiwan developed nuclear weapons from its nuclear power program; the United States also assisted them. Anti-radiation machines and disguising their weapons as North Korean kept Yoshi at bay. She missed the crisis’ signs while vacationing on Venus and she did not eavesdrop on the government.
Though Yoshi still felt bitter regarding her existence, she dreaded how other people would suffer during a global nuclear war.
She hovered over the East China Sea and the Yellow Sea throughout the Taiwan Missile Crisis. It was the most serious nuclear close-call in world history, and Yoshi thought her immediate intervention would escalate it. To her relief, politicians defused the situation.
Several countries built hypersonic missiles, designed to launch from space at several times the speed of sound. For a short time, governments thought she incinerated a particularly large piece of space junk. But she melted the painful anti-radiation machines around launch sites and factories and stalked the grounds, and the governments calculated trajectories and reviewed satellite photographs.
On the nuclear powers’ walls, Yoshi explained why she let North Korea’s hypersonic weapons orbit the Earth. She worried that the governments would blame North Korea, even though no country had developed weapons close to Yoshi’s abilities.
Yoshi wondered if her non-interference with North Korea provoked nuclear conflicts. She worried it would lead to war.
Yoshi and Hara-san considered themselves the only 1945 radioactive clouds left. Some had disappeared, maybe into outer space and might return, and others seemed to slightly elevate background radiation and drift aimlessly.
Yoshi squeezed radiation from a warhead to Hara-san’s general vicinity. Hara-san did not want to interfere with politics, which was why she had not taken a warhead herself years ago. By the time Hara-san finally agreed to a warhead, the anti-radiation machines could have killed her. Slowly, Hara-san regained her strength.
In South Africa, President Cilliers had quickly rebuilt the country his coup destabilized. He showed off South Africa’s abilities and wanted them to include nuclear weapons. Repeatedly, governments searched for a nuclear program, and altogether, their investigations indicated South Africa had the capability.
Yoshi wrote messages to each nuclear power to warn them that China covertly assisted South Africa’s nuclear program. She wrote exactly what the investigators needed to know. Her information was completely accurate and truthful; politics and supervision hid the information well from other governments, but Yoshi found it.
She destroyed the first nuclear-related shipment from China to South Africa. China denied all involvement. After sinking the second shipment, Yoshi informed other countries of China’s involvement. The news leaked. On the third shipment, Yoshi alerted the other nuclear powers to its location, but nobody stopped it. She attacked the fourth. China blamed Russia or the United States for destroying the shipment conventionally—which contradicted satellite images. Thinking foreign countries needed to see the situation themselves, Yoshi let the next shipments land in South Africa.
Pakistan and India’s land conflict had resumed. Russia supported India and China Pakistan; China deployed troops in Pakistan. Russia and China tugged neutral Iran towards one side or another amid rumors of Iranian nuclear weapons, which Yoshi tried to debunk. The United States supported Iran’s political decisions and an investigation indicated it lacked a nuclear program. After China, Pakistan, and their allies, invaded Iran, Iran joined the Russian side. As promised, Russia declared war on China.
Yoshi burnt through anti-radiation shields. Then she melted nuclear production facilities’ machinery, shorted out military communications and destabilized the silos’ supports, and intercepted raw plutonium and uranium. In civilian areas, Yoshi used a filament, but in military areas, she lurked and slapped her mark into the servicemembers’ backs.
The rest of the time, Yoshi patrolled the Earth. Half the world’s military transmissions cluttered the atmosphere and she deciphered the gibberish nuclear codes. She trawled filaments to crash or sink nuclear aircraft and submarines if she encountered them.
Coordinating with Russia and its allies, the United States invaded South Africa, and, promptly, China declared war on the United States.
Argentina and Brazil signed a treaty to defend each other, and the United Kingdom and the United States considered a similar treaty. The United Kingdom and Israel remained neutral; the other countries joined the war.
The United Nations fractured. Argentina, Brazil, Israel, and the United Kingdom were the united nuclear nations and the number of united non-nuclear nations dropped steadily as they joined the war or other countries forced them into it.
Argentina and Brazil joined China’s side officially.
News stations debated who would launch the first nuclear missiles; Yoshi convinced herself with evidence and bias that the United States would. She considered writing, Do not launch a preemptive strike in the various countries’ state offices, but she and Hara-san thought it would raise suspicions.
But China launched nuclear missiles first, on June 10, 2058, in a coordinated strike with North Korea. Most missiles targeted Russia and the United States. As Yoshi snagged warheads, Russia and the United States retaliated, and the other nuclear powers followed; Argentina and Brazil consulted each other first. Yoshi caught a Pakistani missile in Israel. Then Israel’s President nearly deployed nuclear weapons in self-defense.
Of the thousands of missiles crisscrossing the world and landing on every continent except Antarctica (the United States placed nuclear defenses in Guam), Yoshi missed three. A fourth detonated as she absorbed it. Before the new radioactive cloud knew what happened, Yoshi bumped into it. She hurried away, crying in distress. Two additional missiles reached their targets, but Yoshi caught more. The seventh missile detonated within her cloud and the blast uncontrollably inflated her and raised her temperature. The eighth missile landed in a location already struck once.
The smaller countries used up their nuclear weapons or became disabled. The United Kingdom conventionally declared war, on the United States’ side, and threatened nuclear retaliation if a missile hit a target. A South African missile landed and the United Kingdom launched a single missile. Yoshi intercepted it.
Yoshi intercepted a few missiles so close to populated areas and the ground, surface water boiled and steamed and she ignited wildfires. She brought several endangered species to extinction, changed the conservation level of more species, and killed a breaching great blue whale. In the atmosphere, along with incinerating quite a bit of space junk and an internet satellite, she crippled astronauts, whose safe return to Earth was already unlikely.
Absorbing radiation and scooping up the fallout in her wake swelled into a mobile fallout cloud. Thousands of people reported the radioactive lake’s usual shadows and multicolored glows, and hundreds a humanoid form.
When the United States fired one missile toward China, Yoshi thought the war ended, but a couple of minutes later, Russia launched the very last missile.
In less than two hours, the nuclear war ended. For another hour, Yoshi depleted the world’s remaining missiles. Over 22,000 missiles, either whole or their radiation and fallout stuffed her cloud.
Even after Yoshi jetted great streams into deep space, controlling her form required too much concentration in an open atmosphere, let alone while avoiding radioactive clouds. She squeezed a painful amount of radiation from her cloud. It puddled around her and she flew several light-years away from it, then repeated the process.
Pitying North Korean people, she absorbed the entire country’s fallout and radiation. She barely dodged a radioactive cloud.
Then Yoshi absorbed the fission reactors in affected countries. She thought they might meltdown and that she might not reach them in time.
Beyond the Moon, Yoshi relaxed her radiation field and aimed radiation into deep space. She expected to live for hundreds of thousands of years, and generally be too radioactive and sun-blocking to return to Earth.
Yoshi returned to Earth. Hara-san tended to the new radioactive clouds, some of whom absorbed some radiation and fallout. She moved the radioactive clouds away from affected areas, and Yoshi cleaned up.
Her cloud scattered radiation and fallout. Yoshi felt uncomfortably hot in places and struggled to move the hot patches to a cooler area. Chilling herself on Pluto only worked if she remained there.
Worldwide for days, auroras colored the sky. Some thought it was a sign, or fallout, or Electromagnetic Cloud #5 releasing radiation.
Yoshi needed to stop absorbing radiation intentionally—the radiation oozed out however she tried to contain it—but, first, she dragged the radiation surrounding Earth past the Moon. She rested between Earth and Mars.
Hara-san yelled from hundreds of miles away, “Yoshi, how do you feel?”
“Full,” Yoshi yelled. “Is there a problem?”
“I believe some have gone to attack their enemies.”
“But it never got past the theoretical stage!”
“I suppose they volunteered or thought of it by themselves or the program restarted.”
“I’ll stop them,” Yoshi said. “It means the nuclear war hasn’t stopped yet.”
Ultimately, Yoshi absorbed every fighting radioactive ghost. It intimidated the others, some of whom already feared her.
Yoshi dribbled and shook off radiation on her route to Mercury. She tried to aim the jets towards the Sun since the radiation traveled at a constant velocity and she thought the Sun would absorb it.
But Yoshi’s fallout felt compressed. Emitting radiation hurt again.
According to Hara-san, countries continued their nuclear weapons programs.
Yoshi swept through the exposed parts of plutonium and uranium mines, leaving behind enough radioactive elements for peaceful purposes and forcing miners to dig deeper. She destroyed every nuclear weapons facility and silo.
Her cloud melted down. She rushed into outer space, a radioactive cloud trailing behind her. Her attempts to discharge the risky radioactive elements failed, and then a warhead detonated. Yoshi’s cloud was too unwieldy to catch the fallout and radiation, which she also considered the terrible opposite of a solution.
Hara-san followed Yoshi because she had sensed the radiation. Yoshi sped away from her, worried about killing her. Both traveled at light speed.
“Can you discharge the radiation?” Hara-san called.
“No,” Yoshi said. “I’m going to explode.”
“Let me suck radiation.”
“You will have the same problem.”
Still, Hara-san gathered up some and dodged the shockwaves from detonating warheads.
Yoshi felt a chain reaction. She swerved around Mercury, but quite a bit of radiation struck it.
“Turn around before we reach the Sun,” Hara-san said.
“I don’t want radiation to destroy the Earth, and I don’t know what it will do to other places,” Yoshi said.
“Direct it at the sun and you will feel better,” Hara-san said.
“No, I won’t, and I can’t direct it anymore,” Yoshi said.
“So, wait in deep space.”
“No. I won’t recover and I’m too dangerous. Leave me alone. I don’t want to die arguing with you.”
“I will come with you as far as I can.”
A few minutes later, Hara-san stopped and watched. Yoshi forced herself onwards until the heat overwhelmed her. Her radiation and fallout traveled at her living velocity into the Sun.