Diabolical Plots – Page 11 – Diabolical Plots

DP FICTION #61B: “The Old Ones, Great and Small” by Rajiv Moté

School’s out, and everybody wants to see the Great Old Ones: the line into the Miskatonic Zoo doubles back and winds out the gates. The American and Massachusetts flags barely flutter above the gate, and the sun today is merciless in a cloudless sky. I ask my grandchildren, Caleb and Cody, if they wouldn’t rather go to a museum or park, catch a ball game, or go anywhere at all less crowded, but they won’t be swayed. The zoo has been closed for renovations for two years now, and they want to see the Great Old Ones in their new, “natural” habitats.

It was originally built as a prison. It looked the part even when they opened it to public tours, back when I was a baby. It hadn’t done much to change its look in the last 70 years. I’m almost as curious as my grandkids. I’m old enough to have seen America stumble toward evolved attitudes on many things, and the Old Races are a good example. It always starts with fear. Horrors lurking in the dark. And then something shines a light on that fear, and once we see it, we can face it, fight it, drag it into the sunshine, and conquer it. And once we’re not afraid anymore, we can afford to be generous. We make accommodations. We give the object of our fear a place in society—as long as it can never threaten us again. So now the prison for monsters has become a habitat for exotic animals. It happened in a generation.

There is news footage of me, from when I was three, at the newly renamed Miskatonic Zoo. My parents stood behind me, and I toddled up to the thick pane of glass, behind which, under bright lights, was a Shoggoth as big as a moving van. In the footage, I slapped my chubby hands on the glass, and the Shoggoth’s pseudopods shot out and flattened against the barrier, eyes and tendrils forming and dissolving in a frenzy. I laughed, and the camera zoomed in on my innocent delight. The footage was played and replayed. I won’t take credit for changing the attitude of a nation, but I was in an image representing that change. Even today, my claim to minor fame is as “that baby laughing at the Shoggoth.”

From our place in line, we see a metal stair leading to a platform, just inside the gate. A Shoggoth waits under the platform while groups of visitors climb into the howdah on its back. That’s new. A teenage kid in a Miskatonic Zoo uniform shouts something inaudible, and the Shoggoth slowly flows down one of the paths, pausing to let families with strollers pass. Another Shoggoth shambles up to the platform to receive the next riders. Our scientists learned the command language from the Elder Things, at least enough to make the creatures useful. It looks like we’ve progressed since then. They say the Shoggoths started as the Elder Things’ slaves. Now they’re ours. We keep the Elder Things well away from the Shoggoths, of course. Fool us once, et cetera et cetera.

The kid at the counter waves me and the boys through the entrance without taking my credit card, saying “Welcome back, Mister Holyoke!” There is—or was—a screen inside the receiving lobby playing the footage of the three-year-old me with the Shoggoth. They use it in the Visitors Center introductory video too. I can see that Chris and Cody enjoy the conferred status from being with me. I admit it makes me stand a little taller too. It’s the little things, at my age.

The park has changed considerably. Habitats constructed to be “more suitable for the animals’ health and well-being” is a newer concern. Miskatonic now has a school of marine biology as well as zoology, and where once the research was geared toward how to contain these creatures, now it’s about their ecology, physiology, and health.

The Deep One house is completely new. Before, it was a bare, concrete-and-glass enclosure with a cement floor and a murky pool, more for wading than swimming. The fish-men wore collars and cuffs, and the males were locked into kilt-like garments after complaints that visitors were disturbed by the size of their genitals. Now they are unshackled, and let it all fly free. In the lobby there’s an information mural, and an educational video featuring a popular actress, about Deep One reproduction and interbreeding, which doesn’t shy away from the dark history of sexual assault before the species and their half-breed descendants were rounded up. The new, two-level habitat has a facade replica of decrepit Innsmouth buildings and piers, and even an artificial reef some distance off the “shore.” The water’s depth is four or five times the height of an adult, and the bottom is decorated with sea grasses, replicas of sunken ruins, broken columns, and various small, bottom-dwelling marine creatures.

I can’t help but feel that the enriched enclosure is mostly for the benefit of the zoo visitors. The Deep Ones sit as they always had, huddled in small groups on the pier or on the reef, as though they were still shackled together. They stare at nothing, pointedly ignoring all the kids tapping on the glass. As we watch, one of the reef-sitters rolls into the water and paces the tank, as far back from the glass as possible. Back and forth it swims, traveling end to end in seconds with the barest flick of its webbed fingers and toes.

“Stop it, boys,” I say to Chris and Cody, who have joined the other knockers.

“But Grampa,” Cody says. “You did this, and now you’re famous!”

“Just stop bothering the poor thing.” Poor thing. I guess I’m part of the shift. There are no half-breeds in the zoo anymore—I’m not sure what was done with them—but the way these creatures sit in their little circles, not seeming to communicate or do anything, ignoring the constant clamor of children, their bulging eyes staring at nothing and their plump, fishy lips in a permanent “O” of surprise—well, it’s disturbing. I dislike seeing apes in captivity too. A little too human for comfort.

I know I’m projecting. I’m retired, and my main occupation now is keeping my grandchildren occupied while their parents are at work. Otherwise, I do a lot of sitting in silence too, everything behind me, not much ahead.

At the far end of the underwater viewing deck, a sign above a bank of elevators reads “To Father Dagon.” The Shoggoths, Elder Things, Deep Ones, ghouls, nightgaunts, and the fungi from Yuggoth are one thing, but people come to the Miskatonic Zoo to see the colossal Great Old Ones. The zoo houses two of the three “gods” of the Deep Ones—the third, Mother Hydra, is the main attraction in the Stockholm aquarium. Chris and Cody each take an arm and pull me to the elevators. The elevator car’s far wall is glass, and etched into it is a design like the veins of a leaf. An Elder Sign. The Sign is stamped somewhere into all the enclosures, but are most obvious surrounding the Great Old Ones. How they work is still being studied. But they do work. They were the key to keeping the creatures under control.

The elevator slowly descends a concrete shaft while overhead audio describes Father Dagon: how he was captured, his diet, the genetic similarities to the Deep Ones, and evidence for and against him being a mature organism of the same species.

Dagon was the first of the Old Races humanity faced head-on. When he attacked an oil drilling rig, it drew the Great Old Ones out of the shadows and into conflict with American interests. It was just what the nation needed: a monster to target with its military machine, the cost of which was becoming harder to justify to the American people. We uncovered conspiracies, rounded up cultists, weaponized their eldritch lore, and hunted down monsters wherever they lurked. It created jobs, stoked national pride, and returned America to global relevance.

Finally the concrete gives way to the blue-green lighted waters of the tank. Unlike the Deep One enclosure, this tank is unadorned, and massive chains attached to enormous eyebolts in the walls descend into the depths. We see the top of Dagon’s spiny head first. Great spikes webbed with fins crown his head and descend in rows down his muscled back. The elevator sinks slowly, putting us at the level of his huge, bulbous eyes and shark-toothed maw, big enough to swallow the entire elevator car. An Elder Sign-studded collar, just beneath his gill slits, is attached by chains to the walls, keeping the Great Old One immobile.

The elevator pauses so everyone can pose in mock terror for photos.

Then the elevator continues, giving us a full view of all 20 yards of his serpentine body and webbed limbs. Dagon is chained at several points to the wall, and his tank offers little room to move anyway. I’d read there are already protests. Animal rights activists compare Dagon’s captivity to how veal is raised, and there is speculation that the creature might even be sentient. Serious academics use the word “genocide.” And yet I think this manner of holding him seems somehow more respectful. It acknowledges the giant, ancient creature’s power, the threat he could pose.

Then I see the divers. Marine biology students are swimming in the tank, taking scale samples, drawing blood, and scraping parasites from Dagon’s body. Dagon isn’t being shown respect.

He’s being studied.

The elevator reverses direction at the beast’s clawed, webbed feet. During its slow ascent, I stare at Dagon, trying to see the sanity-splitting horror it once was. It is freakishly huge. It has an as-yet inexplicable sensitivity to a particular glyph. But other than that… “Poor thing” indeed.

“Can we see Cthulhu now?” Cody says, just as Chris says “Shoggoth ride!”

The schedule decides it. The next Cthulhu showing is in 20 minutes, so we make our way to the R’lyeh Amphitheater, hurrying past the touch-and-learn displays of non-Euclidean geometry so we can get “good” seats in the splash zone. The amphitheater dominates the zoo campus. A semicircle of concrete steps provides seating for hundreds, and before it rises an artful jumble of greenish masonry blocks glistening in the sun. They feature the same eye-twisting angles and planes from the touch-and-learn exhibit. In the middle of that jumble is the monolith, a darker block of stone as big as a medium-sized office building. It is carved, bottom to top, with an Elder Sign. Floodlights and fog machines set an eldritch, otherworldly atmosphere. The renovation added drama to the show. In past years, Cthulhu was kept in a tank like Dagon’s.

At noon on the dot, the fog machines belch out a dense cloud of vapor, and the floodlights cycle from green to blue to red. A deep male voice booms from hidden speakers, somehow wringing torturous Aklo words through a New England accent. “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.” A beat later, a woman’s voice translates. “In his house in R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.” Applause. Ominous music builds as the fog cloud clears, and then the monolith splits down the middle, the two halves slowly separating. Black smoke pours forth. Then, to the screams and cheers of the audience, Great Cthulhu scrambles out onto the masonry.

Everyone has seen the videos. We all know what he looks like. The octopus head, the dragon wings, the soggy, semi-gelatinous flesh in a manlike shape. He lurches forward, tentacles waving, arms reaching, straining vainly against the enormous shackles that confine him to the stage. Still, his sheer size makes him impressive. If allowed to stand erect, he would dwarf even the monolith.

“What’s that thing on his head?” Chris asks me.

A metal band fits Cthulhu like a crown, but from certain angles you can see that it is held in place by prongs piercing his glob of a cranium. “That’s so he keeps his dreams to himself,” I answer. Cthulhu is the first truly psychic organism studied by biologists and neuroscientists. The research to block his madness-inducing thoughts yielded interesting side discoveries, and mind-to-mind communication among humans is now discussed as a real possibility, with revolutionary consequences.

Cthulhu screeches and blubbers as he strains against his bonds. But they are so obviously secure, that the initial shock of his charge gives way to quiet contemplation of this huge, alien organism. There is no more drama. The rest of the show is devoted to the science, including his disabled telepathy, his not-quite-solid tissue structure, and his probable extraterrestrial origins. His human handlers, so tiny standing beside him, demonstrate how they’ve trained him with simple commands through his neural link. The show concludes with him shambling back into his monolith until the next show. “Cthulhu the dancing bear,” quipped one reviewer on the news.

Chris and Cody loved it, but it was a show geared towards children. It left me melancholy. I keep feeling that something has been lost. Our humility, maybe. Our caution. Or maybe just our sense of awe. Are horror and wonder two sides of the same coin, a coin we’ve put into a hydraulic press to stamp with a logo, turning it into a souvenir? But these are things old men say when the world has outpaced them. It’s rank nostalgia, something Chris and Cody wouldn’t understand. I keep these thoughts to myself.

The line to ride a Shoggoth is long. Many of the visitors at the Cthulhu show had the same idea. I give Cody some money to buy us all ice cream while Chris and I stand in line. Four Shoggoths are queued for the platform. Previous passengers exit the howdah via the opposite platform and stair, behind. With their ever-shifting, amorphous bodies, I can’t tell one of the creatures from another. They had been bred as slaves, I’d read, but at some point they rebelled against their Elder Thing masters. So these protoplasmic masses of eyes and tendrils have some sense of their condition. They are sentient. Now they are pony rides.

Psychologists say coherent human memories don’t go back before the age of about four. My memory of my first encounter with a Shoggoth is surely a product of my imagination and that briefly famous video. In that invented memory, I’m a brave little boy, laughing in the face of an unspeakable horror. I know it was ignorance, not bravery, but it makes me feel good about myself. Proud. I was in the news, and in some small way, I’d helped set the tone for the new, fearless American Golden Age. Put that way, it’s as much accomplishment as any could hope for. I wondered what challenges my grandchildren would face. What would be the fear that spurs their generation to great deeds? Or maybe they’d find a different path to greatness.

We had long since finished our ice cream and held each other’s place in line for bathroom breaks when we finally reach the stair, and then, the platform. A teenager—not the one we saw from outside—opens a gate in the howdah to let out the returning passengers, and then lets us climb aboard. When we all take our seats, the kid utters an Aklo command, and our Shoggoth lumbers forward.

While Chris and Cody record videos of ghouls running alongside us on the other side of a fence, I stare over the railing at the squishy mess that is the Shoggoth beneath us. Eyes, tendrils, ripples of murky color. Ignoring the sign to keep inside the railing, I reach over, fingers splayed, and hold my hand above the creature’s writhing mass.

An eye surfaces from its hide.

It regards my hand without blinking, without dissolving back into its goo. I stare back. It’s impossible to attribute expression or emotion to a Shoggoth’s eyes. There just aren’t enough common reference points with humans. But I wonder, is this my Shoggoth? Did it recognize me? And if it did, what—if any—relationship does our intersecting histories imply between us? I am 76 years old, retired, and I now spend most of my time looking after pre-teen children. I feel a sudden craving for contact with something older than me, something with a perspective that comes from a time people now refer to as “history.” Impulsively, I lean over and try to touch the Shoggoth.

Immediately the eyeball vanishes. The mottled jelly that consumed it quivers and retreats from my touch. I wince. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” I mutter.

“Sir, please keep your hands inside the railing,” the teenager says with the rote cadence of recitation.

I do as I’m told. The quivering subsides, and the Shoggoth lumbers along. While my great-grandchildren laugh, and the ghouls running alongside us howl, I lean back in my seat and close my eyes against the sun, shielding them from the light, but luxuriating in the warmth. I take a nap without any dreams at all.

Author’s Note: I love H.P. Lovecraft’s monstrous, unknowable, unmentionable, indescribable horrors that lurk beyond the edge of comprehension. They’re beings who, by their very existence, invalidate our significance. They threaten our sense of identity and place. They’re the ultimate Other. But unlike Lovecraft’s doomed protagonists, humans tend to meet existential threats, perceived or otherwise, aggressively. What we don’t annihilate, we dominate, subjugate, commodify, and monetize. And only when we feel safe do we finally consider trying to understand the Other.

Rajiv Moté is a writer living in Chicago with his wife, daughter, and puppy. His stories make appearances in Cast of Wonders, Metaphorosis, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Truancy, and others, and he has served as a slush-reading Badger for Shimmer. During the day, he gathers source material by masquerading as a software engineering manager. He scrapes off excess words on Twitter at @RajivMote, and occasionally realizes he should put some effort into rajivmote.com.

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DP FICTION #61A: “The Eat Me Drink Me Challenge” by Chris Kuriata

The first YouTube video received over seven million hits before being taken down.

A shaky camera held by a giggling friend captured a teenage boy standing in a well-tended backyard. Dressed in cargo shorts, he stared solemnly down the lens before announcing, “I’m Shyam Rangaratnam, and this is the Eat Me Drink Me Challenge.”

After taking a deep breath and a dramatic pause—as all on-line daredevils do before embarking on their potentially painful stunt—Shyam broke the seal on the familiar purple vial, and emptied the liquid onto his tongue.

An audible poof sounded as the teenager twisted and writhed, shrinking away like an ice cube under running water. The camera zoomed into the grass, swishing back and forth before discovering miniature Shyam—no bigger than a salt shaker—cavorting through the leafy green jungle he’d thrown himself into.

“Aw shit, dude,” the friend behind the camera guffawed as he stomped his sandaled foot into the grass. “Look out! I’m going to crush you!” In his over-exuberant Godzilla impression, the camera man came frighteningly close to stomping Shyam for real. Every adult watching the video cringed, astounded by how close these kids came to filming a gruesome tragedy.

Escaping his friend’s joking foot, Shyam scrambled through the blades of grass—each one capable of slicing him as deep as a piece of sheet metal—and climbed into the dollhouse positioned in the middle of the lawn. Toy collectors identified the dollhouse as a vintage My Little Pony Lullaby Nursery (which in the box sells on Ebay for upwards of two hundred dollars) that likely belonged to Shyam’s mother back in the 80’s.

The dollhouse rumbled, shaking like a rocket ship preparing for blast off. First, the plastic roof popped into the air, making way for Shyam’s head just before as his arms burst through the side walls and his feet came out the bottom.

Woozy, Shyam stood up and stumbled back and forth with the body of the dollhouse still wrapped around his chest. The hard plastic dug into his neck, cutting off his air supply.

“I can’t breathe” Shyam croaked, clawing at the Hasbro plastic. “Dude, I’m serious.” He fell to the ground and rolled like a burning man performing STOP DROP AND ROLL. The camera went shaky as his friend rushed to help, shutting off—just as all great internet videos do—a moment too soon.

The first to make the long, arduous trip up the rabbit hole was the Mad Hatter. Going up is always more difficult than going down. Given the chance to do the journey over, the Hatter would have gone sideways.

Despite arriving with best intentions, eager to leave behind the wild past that resulted in the multiple death sentences necessitating his emigration, the Hatter joined a bad crowd. Millinery shops always attract dangerous outliers, and soon the Hatter found himself at the centre of an underground anarchist movement: The Gonzo Flamingos.

When FBI officials infiltrated the group in the 1980’s, the Hatter made a deal with the US government. In exchange for a reduced prison sentence for the Flamingos’ acts of vandalism and destruction, he gave the military a sample of Eat Me Drink Me, which he’d smuggled out of Wonderland sewn into the band of his hat as an insurance policy for emergencies such as this.

The Hatter understood the value Eat Me Drink Me held in this new land.

During Reagan’s conflict with the USSR, no military scheme was deemed too wacky; be it training Olympic gymnasts in the art of karate, or building satellites to zap nuclear weapons in outer space like a game of Missile Command. The Hatter’s Eat Me Drink Me was analyzed, synthesized, and reproduced in high volume. Thousands of soldiers were shrunk down to allow the easy dissemination of armies into enemy territory, where they’d return to normal size and overpower. Genius strategy.

Only problem was the Russians soon had Eat Me Drink Me of their own. The red-loving Queen of Hearts, angered over the Hatter’s escape from her majestic death sentences, hoped to jeopardize his deal by sending an envoy of knaves up the rabbit hole bearing Eat Me Drink Me for the Soviets.

With both sides possessing the same strength weapons, the threat of mutually assured destruction created peace.

In the late 90’s, the horrifying truth was revealed that great numbers of soldiers shrunken down in preparation for a full scale operation were never restored to full size due to a lag in the production of Eat Me. A documentary film chronicled a group of such soldiers who’d been living in a shrunken community in Afghanistan, made of US and Russian soldiers alike, both having quit any allegiance to the countries that had forsaken them. The documentary concluded with a heartbreaking sequence where the filmmaker offered a dose of Eat Me he’d acquired from a mysterious source, but after taking a vote the shrunken former soldiers decided they couldn’t return to full size after years of living small, and chose to remain in the community they’d formed beneath the rocks and the sand.

In 2002, the US government offered an apology to the families of missing shrunken soldiers, now estimated to be over a thousand. Instead of reparations, a monument was unveiled in the shadow of the Vietnam memorial wall, standing seven inches high and requiring a magnifying glass to read the names of each soldier etched into the alabaster column. The controversial monument had been designed by a Hawaiian artist well known for his ability to write the Lord’s Prayer on a grain of rice.

To no one’s surprise, the Mad Hatter was turned down at every parole hearing and served each year of his sentence until 2007 when there was no choice but to release him. Those closest described him as bitter over his treatment by the prison system, and his resentment only grew when he was included in a class action lawsuit brought forth by the families of the shrunken soldiers.

Maybe he needed the money, or maybe he was out for revenge, but after meeting with the heads of several underground businesses, he sold the recipe for Eat Me Drink Me and the horrible, wonderful stuff flooded the market, available for the first time to the average person.

Nostalgia propelled the popularity of Eat Me Drink Me as a recreational drug. Children of the 80’s who suffered nightmares of miniature soldiers crawling out of their toilet drains or climbing into their throats at night to choke them now leapt at the chance to reclaim the childhood anxieties their parent’s shitty generation had saddled them with. Approaching the end of their thirties, they flocked to Eat Me Drink Me as a cozy reminder of their youth, like the golden age of Madonna, audio cassette tapes, WrestleMania, or anything else their pre-teen children didn’t know or care about.

Obviously, the stuff wasn’t sold at Costco—you had to know a guy who knew a guy, but there were tons of those guys around. Eighty bucks bought a nice dose of Eat Me Drink Me. The drug could be purchased in full confidence. This was no sandwich baggie of broken up herbs, or a frightening clump of there-could-be-anything-in-there powder wrapped in a dirty wad of paper. Eat Me Drink Me came in a professional purple vial of liquid and a coin-sized tin of fresh cake. The producers clearly valued quality.

Positively, no one became an addict. No one blew through their kid’s college fund to fuel all-night EMDM binges. The drug was used sparingly, like a weekend trip to the cabin. Most Eat Me Drink Me was consumed on birthdays and anniversaries—special occasions when the kids were sent to a sleep over, or Mom and Dad booked themselves into a hotel room.

Yes, Eat Me Drink Me was primarily used as a sexual aid.

There’s no need to be graphic; becoming small and restoring yourself has all sorts of applications in the bedroom. I bet you’re thinking of half a dozen right now. Experimentation came naturally.

Therapists who specialized in intimacy counselling saw their business plummet. The divorce rates for people married between 1995 and 1999 lulled.

The same scene played out in households across North America.

Kids looking for a confiscated phone or video game memory card would sneak into their parent’s bedroom and snoop through the nightstand. Brushing aside socks and underwear, their fingers would knock into something hard at the bottom of the drawer. Horrified, the kids would find themselves holding the recognizable set of purple vial and miniature cake tin.

“Gross out! I can’t believe they’re doing that in the house. Now I can’t get the visuals out of my head.”

The two minute and seven second video posted by Shyam Rangaratnum reshaped his generation’s entire perception of Eat Me Drink Me. Within twenty-four hours of uploading his challenge video, tens of thousands of kid’s were searching their parent’s bedroom, rescuing Eat Me Drink Me from the realm of disgusting, old person sex and making it a part of modern day, youthful fun.

The formula of the video was easy to replicate; get small, climb into a toy dollhouse, get large, and smash the toy to bits. Sure-fire hilarity.

Every kid brought their own twist to the Eat Me Drink Me Challenge, making their version better than the one that had inspired them.

One video showed a young man climb into a Barbie dollhouse his friends threw off a bridge, capturing him exploding out in a burst of pink plastic shards before splashing unharmed into the water. Another showed two young women playing Han Solo and Chewbacca sitting in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon before blasting the good ship to smithereens like it smashed into an asteroid. One fool hardy young man straddled a lit cherry bomb, growing back to normal size milliseconds before detonation. The explosion burned a hole in the crotch of his pants and left him rolling across the asphalt parking lot from the nut punch, but if he had mistimed eating the cake by as much as a heartbeat, he would have been torn apart into dangling little pieces.

Every school held special assemblies, bringing in speakers to warn teenagers about the dangers of playing around with EMDM.

“You may think this is all fun and games, but no one knows the long term effects of chemically induced concision coupled with accelerated restoration. Just say no.”

Kids jeered and laughed. They’d heard about the “Just Say No” campaign from their parents when Nancy Reagan peddled the same corny platitude. Either someone they knew, or they themselves had taken the Eat Me Drink Me Challenge with no ill effects. All this handwringing and unfounded scare-mongering was ridiculous, and would be laughed at in twenty year’s time, like Reefer Madness or Duck and Cover.

The Mad Hatter’s legal troubles were never ending. An artisan tea maker claimed he came up with the recipe for Eat Me Drink Me and sued for patent infringement. During depositions, it came to light the Mad Hatter had used Eat Me Drink Me on multiple occasions without his paramour’s consent. As many as thirty victims came forward. His passport was revoked. Already suffering financial hardship, and facing eviction from his garden on Mount Pleasant, the Mad Hatter ended his tea party by hanging his belt over top of a door. In the end, all he had left was seven hundred dollars in mint condition coins.

Most internet fads disappear into the sands of time, like the ALS ice bucket and the Harlem Shake, but the Eat Me Drink Me Challenge lingers, tormenting those who took part and forever chilling those who didn’t with the reminder, There but for the grace of God go I.

For once, the adult’s warning had merit. There turned out to be long term detriments to using Eat Me Drink Me. These effects went unnoticed amongst the parents of these teenagers, as they had already shut down their reproductive factories.

But their children had yet to perform all their life experiences, and so they bore the brunt of Eat Me Drink Me’s disastrous after-effects.

Post-mortems showed that Eat Me left the system within seventy-two hours. Drink Me, on the other hand, lingered in the body like radioactive material. Before cremation, all corpses need to be tested for traces of Drink Me. Just as a pacemaker in a crematorium will cause an explosion, burning a body with Drink Me will poison the air for a two mile radius.

Drink Me attacks the reproductive system of both males and females. A male who has ingested Drink Me carries remnants in his sperm. A female carries remnants in the lining of her uterus. Not the eggs, because the eggs are already formed at birth.

The babies came out small. No more than the size of a tooth.

A shrunken baby happened when just one of the parents had been exposed to Eat Me Drink Me. If both of them had ingested the foul stuff then the baby came out like… well, it’s probably better not to know. Normally, people say your imagination will always be worse than the truth, but in this instance, there’s no way you can imagine something worse than the truth. Trust me.

Although the shrunken babies were carried to full term, the hospital treated them like preemies. The miniature infants received intensive care. Staff volunteered overtime. An unspoken agreement had been made, that modern medicine would overcome the insidious effects of Eat Me Drink Me, and the children would not be made to suffer for the ill-advised decisions made by their parents or their grandparents. One day, there would be cause for celebration. Rather than perish, the shrunken babies would prevail.

Shyam Rangaratum, the young man whose boredom and natural sense of showmanship set this whole ordeal into motion, of course sired a shrunken child. Like everyone else, he held out hope his son would outgrow his disability, that by his first or second birthday he would catch up to normal size. That didn’t happen. The medical community’s attempt to introduce Eat Me into a baby’s system did not take. Shyam knew his son would never grow bigger than his middle finger.

Other than that, his child was completely healthy. He learned to walk and talk just as well as the children of Shyam’s friends. Shyam’s son often smiled. He was capable of experiencing happiness.

After great discussion and soul searching, Shyam and his wife Uma decided to conceive a second child. They agreed it was the right thing to do, even knowing full well the baby would be born shrunk.

“We could get a donor,” Shyam said. “You’re fine. You could have a normal baby without me.”

In bed, Uma pulled Shyam close. Times were still early, and she had faith the shrunken babies would forge a new normal. It seemed cruel to deny their son a sibling, someone who would share his perspective of the world, someone with whom he could scheme and dream.

Shyam and Uma’s children will never feel the need to move to the desert where bitter old soldiers live hidden under the sand. Instead, they will master the real Eat Me Drink Me challenge, claiming their rightful place in the world, living so well even the giants will envy them.

Chris Kuriata lives in (and often writes about the Niagara Region). His stories about home-invading bears, whale-hunting clowns, and time-traveling kittens have appeared in many fine publications such as Shock Totem, OnSpec, The NoSleep Podcast, and on-line at The Saturday Evening Post. Find out more about his work at https://chriskuriata.wordpress.com or on Twitter @CKuriata

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DP FICTION #60B: “The Cliff of Hands” by Joanne Rixon

“Lhálali’s bloody viscera,” Eešan cursed. She searched the cliff face for a hold and found nothing. Finally she spotted a thread-thin crack and wedged her wingtip claw in it so she could reach upward with her stubby grasping-hands.

“Watch out,” Aušidh said. “If you fall now you’ll get hurt, won’t you?” She dipped in a little swoop less than a winglength away from Eešan in the air. The shadow of her wide membranous wings rippled across the uneven stone and the little burst of wind ruffled the sparse black fur on Eešan’s back.

The others circled farther away, the curves and points of their silhouettes slowly churning the air as they gawked. Eešan was putting on enough of a spectacle that half her hatchmates had turned up to watch.

“Yes,” Eešan said tightly. It made her feel sick to have to speak her fear out loud. “If I fall, I’ll die.”

“Oh.” Aušidh circled up and around again, landing on the cliff face just beneath Eešan, her grasping-hands and wingtips confidently catching in a clean four-point landing on the irregular stone surface. “I didn’t think you were that high up yet.”

“Don’t be stupid, you wouldn’t die,” Xhufu called down from her perch on a little outcropping several winglengths higher than Eešan. “You might break a bone if you didn’t slow yourself at all, but anyone can glide if they try.”

“Of course she would die if she fell,” Dhabelh scoffed, dropping to hang upside down from her grasping-hands to get her face closer to the conversation. “Eešan is pinwinged, what do you think pinwinged means?”

Eešan clenched her jaw and reached up. For her hatchmates the sick terror that twisted in her chest might as well be a vague rumor. As far as Xhufu could understand, anyone could glide. She couldn’t comprehend the hard, boring reality of life with only one functional wing.

Eešan’s left wing wrist had broken as she hatched; her shell had been too thick and her eggclaws too weak. The complex joint had healed as gnarled as a wind-sculpted eešanyalh bush on the edge of a canyon. Now, she was so pinwinged that she could barely get herself around the rookery on the ropes and baskets used to ferry babies and the elderly up the cavern sides. She had never had the strong, flexing shoulders that propelled her hatchmates as they ate up the sky.

“We could get you down, Eešan,” Uliinh said. She launched off the side of the cliff and into the air, flying across Eešan at a diagonal and latching onto the rocks above her. The turbulence of Uliinh’s wings almost knocked Eešan loose. For a frantic beat of her heart Eešan clenched at the stone, pulling her misshapen left wing as close as it would come to her body to keep from falling to her death.

“Between the four of us,” Uliinh said, “we could glide you down again. You don’t have to prove anything, you know. Just be patient with the Choir, they’ll persuade themselves.”

Eešan huffed out a bitter laugh and reached up again, hauling her body another winglength up the cliff. Uliinh was wrong, twice over—Eešan wasn’t sure even this dramatic scene she was throwing would be enough to convince the Choir, and she was sure Uliinh couldn’t catch her if she fell—but she didn’t have it in her to argue and climb at the same time.

Twenty winglengths above her, the orange-brown sandstone turned red with the handprints of every adult in the rookery. Sun beat down on the painted prints; the heat on her back and head was making her dizzy. The sunlight on the dips and protrusions in the cliff face cast tricky small shadows, fooling the eye into seeing room to maneuver where there was none.

The color difference between the dark gray siltstone at the bottom of the cliff and the paler white and orange sandstone layered above it created temperature fluctuations that made the drafts here unpredictable and sharp. That combined with the strange shape of the cliff was what made it the Cliff of Hands, where each child of the rookery flew into adulthood. Only a skillful flyer could come at the Cliff at just the right angle to make a pass at the Hands and, without landing, leave a handprint there on top of the cloud of handprints left by the rookery’s ancestors.

Only a skillful flyer could earn adulthood, the right to raise their voice in the Choir, and the rookery’s respect. She knew that respect would only ever be partial for someone pinwinged, but she wanted it desperately anyway, craved every speck of it she could get. Thinking about it twisted the fear in her chest into rage, and she channeled it into her muscles, powering her another winglength upward.

There—a crevice in the cliff face gave her holds for both the clawed digit at the tip of her right wing and her right grasping-hand.

She concentrated on the rock, ignoring her hatchmates chattering and fluttering around her, and stretched her left grasping-hand as far up as it would go. That wasn’t very far: grasping-hands were good for landing, latching on to a surface and clinging, but climbing steadily upward wasn’t a movement that came naturally. Her short lower limbs could only reach half as far as her wings, making her progress slow and awkward.

“This is so pointless,” Dhabelh said. “Even if you make it all the way up to the Hands—and I don’t think you’re going to—it’s not going to count.”

Eešan was glad that at least Dhabelh wasn’t trying to imagine how Eešan was going to get down. At the edge of her vision, sweat blurred the shapes of individual bushes and rocks below together with their own shadows into a rust- and copper-colored blanket.

More sweat gilded the tough membrane that stretched along her sides from the long tips of her wingfingers to the outer edge of her grasping-hands, but her broken wing couldn’t stretch out to let the sweat evaporate in sheets. She’d always had trouble regulating her body temperature because of that.

“It has to count, doesn’t it?” Aušidh flitted behind her, one side to the other side and then back again.

Eešan scowled and pointedly oriented her ears away from Aušidh, ignoring her.

“No.” Dhabelh hung from one grasping-hand, then switched to the other, making climbing look easy. Of course, if she lost her grip and fell, her wings would catch her. “That’s not flying the Hands. She’s not flying it.”

“There’s no rule about flying it.” Aušidh sounded puzzled and Eešan squashed an intense flare of frustration. Aušidh was always so frustratingly naïve. “You just have to put up your handprint. That’s what I did.”

“No one’s been stupid enough to try this before,” Xhufu put in. “Who knows what people will think.”

“But Aušidh, you flew it. How does the ritual go?” Dhabelh’s question was rhetorical; everyone knew how it went. “You take off a child and fly into the cloud of ancestors and land an adult.”

“It would still count,” Aušidh insisted.

“We would need a Choir to decide,” Xhufu said. “Eešan, did you ask what everyone thought? I didn’t hear about it.”

“I didn’t hear about it either,” Uliinh said.

“If you didn’t hear about it, obviously I didn’t ask for a consensus yet,” Eešan muttered. She did not have the patience for this conversation right now. “You fire-shit sun-eaters.”

The dust from the cliff stained her belly and chest a dusty orange, bright against her black skin. Sweat gathered under the bandolier that crossed her torso. To save on weight, she’d taken everything off it except for a hand-sized grass basket full of paint. She’d woven the basket herself, spent weeks collecting clay, watadh eggs and the eešanyalh bark that gave the paint its bright red color.

It had taken help, another way she was ruining the ritual. She couldn’t fly, so she couldn’t gather eggs from the watadh nests on the cliffsides herself. Although Pwabeš hadn’t asked why Eešan wanted the eggs, Eešan hadn’t been keeping her plan a secret. But she hadn’t tried to present it to the whole rookery either. She’d been too afraid they’d tell her she wasn’t an adult so she wasn’t qualified to make the decision to risk her life for social status.

She was so shitting tired of being a child.

Eešan climbed silently for several minutes and Dhabelh and Xhufu flew off—not far, just catching a thermal until they rose above the clifftop and soared there, in sight but beyond talking range. Aušidh and Uliinh stayed on the cliff face with her.

Ten winglengths to the bottom of the Hands. Uliinh shifted on the rock impatiently, flapping out into the air and then returning to the same spot. She was waiting for Eešan to give up; she probably had some stupid plan to call the others in to carry Eešan to the ground when her limbs gave out. The bottom of the canyon was too far below for that heroic plan to work, though, Eešan knew. If she reached the sunset alive, it would be because she’d climbed not just to the bottom of the Hands but all the way to the top and over the lip of the Cliff. That way she could rest and then shuffle down the slope on the other side.

Her chest was tight with fear she was losing the will to ignore. She reached up, her pulse loud in her ears. The movement triggered the ache in her limbs that would eventually weaken her. Eventually, she wouldn’t be able to climb.

When she’d been planning, she hadn’t thought she could be this terrified, not the whole time. She’d imagined herself as more courageous, as losing the fear once she began. Now it was too late to back down. She would be strong enough, or she wouldn’t.

It was almost funny. She’d trapped herself into seeming brave.

Six winglengths below the Hands, the rocks jutted out from the cliff and she had to climb up and out, clinging under the rock over empty space. Right wing, left grasping-hand, right grasping-hand. Her left wing membrane caught the air and the wind tried to suck her out into thin air. She flexed her shoulders, twisting hard to pull herself back flush with the stone above her. Right wingtip again, and as she pulled herself up the protrusion, a gust of wind threw a scatter of sand in her face.

“Be careful,” Uliinh said. She half-spread her wings then paused.

“Yeah, thanks,” Eešan couldn’t help snapping. Uliinh, with her strong symmetrical wings, wasn’t the one with something to fear here. Yawning emptiness ached underneath her.

Without a spare hand to wipe her eyes, she had to wait for the breeze to dry the blur of sandy tears. When she could almost see again, she reached with her right grasping-hand and dug her fingers into a thin crack in the stone, moving herself sideways to get around the edge of the protrusion and back to a section of the cliff that was merely vertical.

The tricky wind blew up against her, pressing her helpfully into the stone. She wrapped her left grasping-hand around a knob of sandstone and hauled her body up.

Then the crack shifted under her right grasping-hand, the whole layer of stone sloughing away from the cliff. The wind caught her right wing membrane. It sucked at her, pulling her out and away.

Her left wing scraped uselessly against rock. Her left grasping-fingers began to slip off the round knob of stone.

No. Staying a child forever was a kind of death, and she had rejected it. She rejected the wide open space just as strongly, with sick sharp twist of her guts.

The gritty stone tore sharply at the pads of her fingers, bright red flashes of pain in a thundercloud of fear.

“Ancestors and descendants,” Aušidh swore as she finally noticed that Eešan was falling.

Eešan’s flailing right wingtip claw caught on a small divot in the stone with an agonizing twist—caught, and held.

Her right grasping-hand found another small flaw in the stone. She shoved her fingertips into it, grinding the rough stone into the raw scrapes on her fingers like friction could fuse the two surfaces into one.

Breath rushing in short, panicked pants, Eešan pressed her torso and wings as close to the cliff as she could. Her heart drummed in her ears, fear and relief fusing together. It had happened so quickly. Death one second, and then she’d caught herself.

“Skwayašúliwa’s shitting mouth,” she breathed. She was alive.

Aušidh hopped belatedly into the air and fluttered to a spot just below Eešan like she thought she’d be able to catch her if she fell.

“Dhabelh, Xhufu!” Uliinh whistled, calling them down from the thermal.

“Stop worrying,” Eešan said. When she risked a glance up she saw bright red blood seeping out around the base of her right wingtip claw. She’d splintered it. “Shit.” She laughed, a little hysterically. “If I fall that means the Choir will have to count me as an adult, right? If I die in the middle of this they’ll talk about my corpse like I’m a real person?”

“No!” Aušidh said. “Stop talking like that, Eešan.”

“I’ll talk how I shitting want to.” The giddy panic rush was making her rude. Ruder. She didn’t care. The Hands were right there.

Two more painful winglengths up and the stone in front of her face turned red with old paint.

“Need a hand?” Xhufu snickered as she landed a winglength away. “Get it? A hand?”

For Xhufu there was nothing dangerous happening here. The reminder hurt like an old, deep bruise. Eešan squeezed her eyes shut for a second, then opened them to grope for her basket of paint.

“Here.” Aušidh shifted closer and reached out, turning the loop of bandolier that had migrated as Eešan climbed until the paint was behind her back. “Can you reach it?”

“Thanks.” Eešan dug the fingers of her left grasping-hand into the thick paint. It was almost too dry to use after baking in the sun so long, but she spit into her palm and made a fist, squishing the paint in the moist saliva and spreading it around.

Then she reached out and pressed her hand to the Cliff. When she pulled it back, a fresh red print shone out at her.

It looked exactly like every other handprint: three fingers, a thumb, the pads of her palm forming a sacred three-sided circle. For once, she was no different than anyone else, now or at any point in the tangled nest of history that cradled the rookery. Eešan shut her nostrils flat like she was in a sandstorm, an indescribable feeling rising up in her lungs. Relief and anger all mixed together with pride and the spitting bluster that had gotten her all the way up here.

She’d done it.

“How much longer is this going to take?” Dhabelh asked.

“Why? Getting hungry, lump-ass?” Aušidh said.

Eešan took another long moment to memorize her handprint. She would probably never see it again; she couldn’t just fly past it to confirm it existed like everyone else could. Then she reached upward for her next hold.

“I saw you put your handprint there,” Dhabelh persisted. “So you don’t need me here anymore.”

“Right,” Eešan said. Her grasping-hands throbbed. “You can go if you want to.”

“Stay, Dhabelh.” Uliinh rolled her neck worriedly. “She isn’t down yet. What if she falls?”

“Even if you force the Choir to admit you, everyone is still going to know you didn’t fly it,” Xhufu said. She spread her wings, ready to launch. Eešan could see the sun glowing through Xhufu’s wing membranes, the light picking out each vein that ran through them, before she dove sharply to the side and came out of it a hundred winglengths away.

Eešan would never know what that was like, to dive like that. To get the last word in a conversation because she could just escape it.

“That rotten intestine was supposed to stay until you reach the top,” Aušidh grumbled. She climbed at Eešan’s pace, a few winglengths below her. “She’s selfish. I don’t know why you told her about this.”

“The Choir will listen to her,” Eešan said, although she wasn’t sure it was true. Her wingtip was leaving small streaks of blood on the half-faded handprints she was climbing over. It would take months for the claw to recover from this abuse. It would probably blacken and fall off before it healed. “She’s not a liar—she’ll confirm that she saw me place my Hand. It won’t be just my friends witnessing for me.”

Aušidh cleared her throat of dust and spit a hunk of phlegm off to the side, obviously a commentary on Xhufu. Uliinh drifted into a shady spot and clutched at the stone, watching, waiting for Eešan to fall. Dhabelh surprised Eešan by joining Uliinh instead of following after Xhufu.

The top of the Cliff waited several dozen winglengths above her. Eešan climbed.

Joanne Rixon organizes the North Seattle Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Meetup and is a member of STEW and the Dreamcrashers. Her short fiction has recently appeared in The Malahat Review, Fireside, and Terraform, and you can find her on twitter @JoanneRixon.

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DP FICTION #54B: “Colonized Bodies, Desiccated Souls” by Nin Harris

The PPMS had cordoned off Jalan Mandailing. They had guards posted along the banks of Sungai Chua. But it was not enough. The battles ranged from midnight till the cock’s crow and the call for prayers every dawn while the sun painted delicate fingers of rose across a yellow ombre sky. In the daytime, the blistering heat of the day kept the undead under protective cover. Even in their present state the British could barely handle the heat of the tropics. Penghulu Udin discovered he was exceptionally good at killing the undead. He could spear them, decapitate them, blow them up or use the bamboo blowgun the way his Dayak ancestors had before they had travelled to Selangor to build a new life by marrying into the Javanese community. He learned how to construct bombs from the materials they’d scavenged from the army barracks. He’d trained a small army that grew larger, and larger. They’d called it the “Persatuan Pertahanan Manusia Sejagat” or the PPMS for short. Udin sometimes thought that they were being rather grandiose by calling themselves an alliance for the defense of all of humankind. But on other days, he felt that this was precisely what they were. It felt like they were defending more than their piece of the earth. It felt like they were defending all of humanity. He marvelled when no one challenged his command. Instead, they called him their Penghulu, as though the Alliance was a village. They were a community against the damned who had come from across the vast sea to colonise them. Their colonisers had been desiccated from the inside, transformed into the undead who cannibalised them in an entirely more literal way. The undead had been created from the contagion that infected every omputih in sight. All of the British running administrative duties, all of the navy, the army, the merchants and their wives, even their mixed-race offspring. Not a one was spared.

Humidity swathed the night as did the low-hanging mist that had been a persistent torment since the contagion started. Udin’s cotton shirt clung to his back, clumping against deep gouges that were slow in healing. The contagion had not spread to him. None of the Asian denizens of Kajang were infected by what had turned the colonial soldiers, officials and merchants into shambling beings with eyes that rotated biliously within desiccated sockets. Not even when they had been scratched, gouged, and even half-consumed. There were members of the PPMS who had missing limbs, eyes, and various maimed body parts. And yet, none of them had transformed into the undead.

The hunger had transformed Sir Roger Lawford into a mindless, drooling automaton of preternatural gluttony. Udin had himself shot the nobleman with a rifle he had taken from the corpse of an undead lieutenant. Lawford had been a stiffly starched man with a stiffly starched wife. He had two children who liked to beat and pinch their amahs, their cooks, and the children of the servants who lived in their mansion. That mansion was now gutted; the ravenous members of the Lawford family had glutted themselves on the brains, meats and marrow of their servants before they were killed by Udin and his men. Udin had ordered the construction of a bamboo fence around it, and around all the homes of the omputih who colonised them. That fence had been studded with metal spikes and small sachets with holy verses pinned inside them. It held the undead back, but unholy hunger caused them to persevere against the orisons and vigilant guard of the PPMS comprising the Mandailings, the Bugis, the Tamil and the Hakka population of Klang.

Udin wiped the sweat off his brow as he removed his cotton shirt. The muscles of his aching pectorals and upper arms strained as he reached to clean and dress the wounds that gouged his back. He used the iodine and bandages from one of the many first aid kits they had scavenged from the hospital and the army barracks. Wincing, he washed and then applied iodine to the lacerations. It hurt, but at least the wounds would not be infected. Udin was careful about that. He could not afford to die. He needed to protect the people he loved. Salmah, Nyonya Salleh and his many Dayak-Javanese cousins. He then bandaged himself as best he could.

“Din,” came a soft whisper in the night. “Udin. Are you there?”

“Yes sayang, I am here. I was just dressing my wounds,” his voice was mellow and warm as he replied.

“You were wounded again?” an odd edge of panic inflected Salmah’s voice as her footsteps shambled on the plank boardwalk outside their hut.

Udin said, “Like every other night, sayang. It’s nothing new to us, kan?”

They had fought in different sectors today for the twenty-first day in a row. He missed her badly. As Salmah grew more skilled in fighting, so was her leadership needed to keep the undead at bay – delegation involved also one’s beloved in these exigent times. No one could shoot a rifle like Salmah, and she was nonpareil in the reloading of weapons with bullets during tight situations. When she took charge, no one argued with her. He never could win any argument with her, he thought, melting with both fondness and longing. Udin hoped they would have time for more than just food and banter tonight. His back hurt, and his soul was weary. He was in need of physical comfort.

Udin moved to slide the door open. Salmah crawled in bearing with her a tiffin carrier fragrant with the Peranakan cuisine he so enjoyed. “I visited Nyonya Salleh earlier and despatched some zombie corporals who were trying to break into her house. She packed this for us. Her Ayam Pongteh and Jiu Hu Char is inside. She also made otak-otak,” Salmah said with a strained, yet impish smile.

Udin couldn’t help but laugh at the irony. “Otak-otak! Nyonya Salleh is a funny one. I hope there’s no otak in the otak-otak!”

“Eesh, tak adalah, Udin. She managed to get some fish and she remembered how much you liked this. You know, from the days before the disease changed everything.”

Salmah trailed off, her voice uncertain in the silence.

Udin was reminded of the days when he was just a boy working in the printing press owned by Pak Salleh, Nyonya Salleh’s husband. The days before the Undead Wars began, barely a quarter of a century after the Selangor Civil War that had helped shaped the town of Kajang and the destiny of its inhabitants. No one knew when the first infection spread. Only that the disembowelled human bodies started to stack up, attracting flies. Only that grey-skinned walking corpses started to crowd Jalan Reko, Jalan Mandailing and teemed along the banks of Sungai Chua until they were beaten back. There were no guides. They learned how to kill the undead through trial and error. Through fire, through decapitation, through nightly recitations of Quranic verses and the help of the pak bomohs and the pawangs. Bamboo seemed to frighten the undead and so bamboo walls poisoned with holy water kept the British at bay. But it was not enough. It created safe spaces but the undead British kept coming at them.

At least a dozen of his men patrolled the perimeters of the watch-house, but they left Udin within for his moments of privacy. He took what moments he could have. Alone, and with Salmah. Everything he did, he did to make Kajang safe again for Salmah.

He told himself this, and believed it with all of his heart.

Quietly, he helped Salmah unpack the food. He enjoyed the quiet moments of domesticity that they were still able to share.

“You eat first, Udin, I’ll take over the watch.” She wiped her face where it was scratched. Udin stilled. He had not noticed that she had been wounded.

“Salmah, are you fine, sayang?” he asked.

“Sure, I just had to kill five of the undead on the way here. It’s nothing to be concerned about. I’ve killed more than that before,” said Salmah with some nonchalance as she stretched to undo the frizzy topknot on her head. She smoothed her long fingers through her ikal mayang tresses before she redid them into a sanggul at the nape of her elegant neck.

She was so beautiful, his Minangkabau love.

They were supposed to have been wed in the Minangkabau way. The Minangs were a matrilineal people but Udin loved that about Salmah. Loved that she took charge in their relationship. Loved the life they had made together out of cooperation and mutual trust. They were going to be married. But then their family and friends had been consumed by the undead. They had been left in disemboweled piles outside their home before the PPMS had been formed out of grief and anger. They had to be burned because they had no time for Muslim burials. Even the pak imam who would have married them was dead and the mosques had become infested with the undead. Udin and Salmah decided to live together in sin anyway. After all, who knew how long they had to live?

Nobody in the PPMS seemed to mind, mostly because theirs was not the only such arrangement. Lovers huddled together to take what comforts as could be had against the encroaching horrors of the night.

“If you’re sure, sayang. Iodine’s in the first aid box. Do you want me to…,” he began, half getting up to help clean her scratches.

“No, no. Just eat your dinner, I’ll grab the first aid box.” said Salmah. Her voice sounded oddly distracted and almost distorted as she rummaged through the supplies in the watch-house they had built together along the banks of Sungai Chua, the river that was the lifeblood of Kajang.

Reassured by Salmah’s confident movements as she removed her kebaya to fully clean her wounds, Udin started his dinner. He dished out rice, ayam pongteh and the jiu hu char onto the enameled plate they kept in the watch-house. Carefully, he opened the last tiffin container where steamed otak-otak lay, fragrant and redolent of fish lightly spiced and seasoned with fresh herbs from Nyonya Salleh’s courtyard garden.

He ate carefully, delicately even. His table manners often amused Salmah.

“Will our children be as delicate as you, bang?” Salmah had asked him more than once during his courtship of her when he’d been an assistant printer in a printing press. When he’d been saving his money for their wedding.

“Delicate? Me? Excuse me, I am manly and strong,” he would say and show off his forearms just so she knew.

She would laugh fondly at him but always bring him more food from her mother’s Nasi Padang stall that had been popular with the Sumatran workers along Jalan Reko. Salmah’s mother had been a Minangkabau widow who had never remarried. She had been one of the casualties of this long war. He had held Salmah as she wept in abject sorrow at her orphanhood, that first horrific night when this new war had begun between the living and the undead.

“Udin,” began Salmah, snuffling a little as she spoke. Her voice sounded almost distorted.

“Yes, sayang?” he said absentmindedly as he picked at the otak-otak, which tasted creamy and succulent, flavoured delicately with turmeric leaves. It was possibly why this piscine delicacy had been named after brains, Udin mused.

“There’s something I never told you about my father, `din.”

“What is it? I thought he was a fisherman who died at sea?” he said as he licked his fingers.

Done with his dinner, Udin grabbed a canister filled with water from Sungai Chua. He washed his hands quietly in the glow of the hurricane lamp that sat on an emptied wooden arms crate. Behind him, a rustling sound as Salmah tidied up the hut.

“Actually, he was a naval officer, `din. My mother…and he — they never married. He left her here in Kajang to make her fate. She and my grandmother raised me. She told everyone she was a widow.”

“Oh Salmah, who are we of all people to judge, after all we’ve been through together? You know I will stick with you through it all.”

He laughed gently at what he supposed was a confession that she thought would shock him as he pulled out a pilfered cheroot, snipping off the edges before he lit it for a post-dinner smoke. This was part of the stash he looted from Sir Roger Lawford’s mansion, along with many gold ingots and jewelry. One day, when this was all over, he would build a fine home for Salmah and their many children from the proceeds of his many lootings. In this new world created by horror, who really cared about bloodlines, ancestry and legitimacy anymore, kan?

The snuffling grew louder as she said, “No, Udin, it’s worse than that. I’m so afraid to tell you. So afraid…”

Salmah’s voice sounded even more distorted as she wheezed. Outside, only the sound of the waters of Sungai Chua lapping against the pier could be heard. Where were his men? Usually the sound of their chatter would be loud enough that it inhibited Udin a little when he wanted some comfort from Salmah.

The edge of his hunger blunted, Udin suddenly realized something was seriously wrong. It was too quiet outside. There was a strange tension inside. The air felt unbearable. But he could not turn to look at her. Udin could not explain why. Foreboding pebbled his bare skin.

Udin started breathing in shallow gasps. He removed the cheroot from his lips before a strange anxiety caused him to return to smoking, almost desperately.

In the silence, Salmah’s snuffling sounded almost animalistic. The confines of the watch-house felt unbearably small. The urge to scream clotted his airways.

Finally, he forced himself to ask, “Salmah, are you feeling alright? You haven’t been resting. If you have the flu you should take the vitamins that are in that other first aid kit we grabbed from the barracks when we killed those soldiers. It’s beside the gunnysack of rice I grabbed from that warehouse last night.”

He knew his words were a lie even as he said them. Perhaps he was trying to delay the inevitable. Perhaps he was just feverish from the wounds. Perhaps they were infected. Perhaps…

Udin’s voice trailed off as he listened to her laboured breathing. A familiar stench filled the confines of room. He inhaled the tobacco smoke, not wanting to accept what was happening. He dragged on the cheroot as though it would save his life.

Salmah began to speak. He did not want to hear the rest of what she was going to say, but there was no avoiding it, was there? It was an inevitability.

“Udin, my father, he was an Anglo-Indian. He grew up in India with the other Anglo-Indian children. Udin. I’ve been lying to you because I was afraid…afraaaid of losing you. And I was hoping foolishly enough that I would be skillful enough to avoid being infected. But now, Udin…”

Salmah’s voice trailed off into a night that now manifested into Udin’s cold horror. The truth he did not want to acknowledge from the moment she entered the watch-house, with that strange, glassy look in her eyes.

Udin was still stubbornly reluctant to look up. “Look at me, Udin.”

“I can’t, Salmah. I can’t,” he said. If his men saw him as he was now, they would shoot him as a traitor, he thought. As a coward. So be it, then. Salmah had always been the strong one. She had always been the real Penghulu here. Perhaps the PPMS was now lost.

Fortunately, he would be dead before the PPMS got to him, he thought.

“Please, look at me, Udin. I need you to see me as I am now,” she begged.

“Salmah. I will always love you. If you’re going to kill me, please be quick and gentle about it, but I want to remember you the way I loved you.”

“Udin, please look at me. Udin,” she begged.

“I can’t, Salmah. If I do, I don’t know what I’ll do. I’d rather you kill me than I kill you.”

She sobbed as Udin sat as still as stone, as cold as death. His gut churned with the food she said came from Nyonya Salleh. He did not dare question too deeply what he had consumed, what had winged its way into his body. He controlled his gag reflex.

He was meat, and he was to be killed. But he would not kill her.

An exhalation like a tender sigh caressed the contours of his face as Salmah’s desiccated fingers ran through his hair.

“Selamat tinggal, Udin. I really wish you’d look at me, just once.”

Silence descended like a death sentence.

Udin clenched, waiting for a mortal blow that never arrived. He did not know how long he lay still, until the cool breeze of the night air was all that he could feel. Until the stench abated because of the winds that blew in through the open door. He opened his eyes. His men were still silent. Too silent. Oh Salmah, he thought with sorrow. One night, he’d have to face off with her. One night, if the PPMS had not now been obliterated by the growing army of the colonial undead.

Alone in a house they had built together amidst a fortress of bamboo, Udin made his preparations. The undead feared the bamboo. The bomohs and the pawangs who worked for Udin’s army believed this. Another lie, Udin acknowledged with a bitter smile. Another lie they told themselves as they tried to fortify against the encroaching night with its attendant contagions. Outside, the sound of thousands of shambling feet. Udin got up, and pulled out his rifle. As the first pair of misshapen hands pulled apart the wooden planks of the watch- house, he took aim and fired.

But in the jungle that surrounded Kajang a lone woman strode with her rifle. A woman of two cultures, made monstrous by one and rejected by the other. A woman rejected by her lover. With the easily shambling steps of a zombie and the military skills that she had cultivated, she unconsciously mimicked the desperate gestures of her former lover. She too, slowly took aim and fired. And fired some more. She fired at both the human, and the zombie host alike until there were no more left for any war.

Salmah kept walking without feeding on the hosts she had decimated, bolstered by anger, fed by grief. Salmah walked until she reached the pier, until she reached the port. Salmah walked until she found a boat she could navigate on her own into the Straits of Malacca, into the arms of a remote island in the Malay Archipelago where she could exist and feed, undisturbed. There, Salmah built her home at the base of a dead volcano that broke away into the sea, and laid out her traps for errant fishermen. If they looked like Udin, she plucked out their eyeballs and swallowed them whole.

Author’s Note: This story was inspired by a postulate I gave in my creative writing lecture about writing impossible things within an ordinary setting. For us, the ordinary setting would be the town of Kajang which is next door to our university. I then threw in zombies to my example, and while I was telling them the story about Udin the zombie-killer, the story took a life of its own and I knew I had to write it down. Along the way issues of hybridity and of passing crept in (I am mixed-race) and then I wrote an ending that surprised even me!

Nin Harris is an author, poet, and tenured postcolonial Gothic scholar who exists in a perpetual state of unheimlich. Nin writes Gothic fiction, cyberpunk, nerdcore post-apocalyptic fiction, planetary romances and various other forms of hyphenated weird fiction. Nin’s publishing credits include Clarkesworld, Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, The Dark, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Lightspeed.

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