Immobility

“I don’t know,” said Qatik.

“Do you think we will live through this?”

“I’ve already told you,” said Qatik. “I’m already dead.”

“No,” said Horkai. “I don’t mean you and me but humans in general. Is this the end for us?”

“I don’t know,” said Qatik. And then added, almost as an afterthought, “You are not human.”

“I’m sorry you have to carry me,” said Horkai. “I’m sorry I’ve killed you.”

Qatik did not answer. Horkai was tempted to leave it at that, but as they continued along, he found something else nagging him, irritating him, until finally, he couldn’t stop himself from asking.

“Why did Qanik die so much sooner than you?” he asked.

“We are all different,” said Qatik.

“But you told me you were first,” said Horkai. “So you have been around longer. Why wouldn’t you die first?”

“Because he carried you more.”

“Why would that matter?”

“Lots of questions,” said Qatik, and gestured to the roadway before him. “Look around you. There is no one here to answer them.”

21

WHEN THE SUN FELL, it grew very dark, though perhaps not quite so dark as it had been a few nights before when he couldn’t see anything at all. He could now, from time to time, see the outlines of things. Or at least he managed to convince himself he could. The going was a little quicker now, Qatik letting his legs carry him down the slope out of one valley and into the other.

He did not know for certain when he fell asleep, when he started dreaming. One moment he was observing the vague outline of things and feeling the rolling motion of Qatik’s gait, listening to the intensity of the quiet. The next he was asleep. He dreamt he was back in a storage tank, not in storage yet but preparing to be stored. The lid of the unit was closed; he was webbed in. The glass itself was clear, not yet frosted over. On the other side of it was a technician, standing by a bank of machinery upon which he would move a level or adjust a slider, as if mixing a song. He was looking at Horkai, waiting for something. Horkai, not knowing what else to do, finally raised a thumb and the technician nodded and smiled. He reached out and touched a button and the storage process began.

In the dream he knew the feet were always the first to go for him, the toes and then the rest of the feet, though he knew other people who claimed it was the hands that went first, not the feet. Then the numbness spread to his fingers and hands and up his legs and arms, slowly converging on the center of his body. The head and chest were always last, but of course he wouldn’t feel those; by the time his chest was being stored, he would have been administered an injection to suspend his heart. The head was always frozen quickly after that, almost immediately, so as to minimize damage to the brain.

Everything was fine, everything went well, nothing went wrong, not with the storage, anyway. But outside, something was happening. The technician was no longer there, had simply vanished. In his place he saw Rasmus and the twins, Olaf and Oleg. And one other person, bald and hairless, his back to him.

I’m watching myself, he thought for an instant, but then a moment later was filled with doubts and had to ask himself, Is it really me?

As he watched, willing the man to turn so that he could see his face, he saw Rasmus make a gesture that the twins immediately seemed to pick up on. They each took hold of one of the other man’s arms and held them tight to his side. Through the glass Horkai heard the muffled sound of his protest, though he was unable to hear the exact words. The man struggled a little, but the twins kept his arms immobilized.

And then suddenly Rasmus lifted his arm and Horkai saw that he was holding a long, very sharp knife.

He must have made an involuntary noise, because for a fraction of a second the twins glanced toward his tank, the man using it as an opportunity to attempt an escape. And, indeed, the man did manage to break free from one twin and was well on the way to breaking free from the other when Rasmus plunged the knife deep into his chest.

Horkai watched the knife come out and then plunge back down. The man screamed and momentarily slumped out of his vision. Then he was up again, struggling and half turning as the knife came down again, and yet again.

And it was only then, as the man grew looser in the twins’ grip and finally seemed to lose consciousness altogether—unless, in fact, he was dead—that his head flopped in the right direction and his body turned enough for Horkai to finally get a look.

But what he saw was not what he expected. Instead of seeing his own bloodied face staring back at him, he saw the face of Mahonri. And as he watched, certain that the man was dead, Mahonri’s eyes suddenly blinked open. With blood pumping from his chest, he turned to face Horkai’s tank, his face wreathed in an unnerving smile.

* * *

HE WOKE UP FEELING like he was falling, and had just enough time to realize he actually was. He struck something hard enough to knock the breath out of him.

He must have been unconscious for a few moments, perhaps longer. When he regained awareness, it was to find himself in the dark, listening to someone groaning. It took him some time to realize that the man groaning was in fact him.

His head throbbed. His face was pressed into something dusty and he could taste blood in his mouth. His shoulder ached. He pushed himself over and stared into the dark, trying to remember where he was. Was he in storage still, something having gone wrong? He couldn’t feel the walls of the cylinder around him. Dreaming still?

And then he remembered where he was: near a pool in the heart of a mountain, trapped in a shack with a dead man. If the man was in fact actually dead. His skin began to crawl. Where was his knife? He searched the floor beside him, found nothing. He felt around for the cot that he had been sleeping on before it had turned over, but didn’t find it. He felt around for a wall, for any of the three walls of the shack, but didn’t find those either, touched instead chunks of rock and rubble. Had they been there when he’d gone to sleep? No, he didn’t think so—the floor had been clean: Mahonri had been sleeping on the floor and would have swept it clean first. He was sure of that, or reasonably so. He felt around for his own blankets or the blankets that Mahonri had been using, but did not find those either.

And then finally, groping around, his fingers brushed something. Fabric of some kind, a blanket maybe. He passed over it again, brushing it lightly, and then brought his hand down more fully upon it. The fabric, whatever it was, was thick and stiff, not a blanket. The shape was strange, too, and too regular to be just folds in a crumpled blanket.

He took hold of it more firmly and squeezed. There was something inside the fabric and Horkai realized suddenly that he was squeezing a glove.

Just as he realized this, the hand within the glove moved.

He gave a cry and scrambled away as quickly as he could, trying to orient himself in the darkness.

No matter how hard he tried to make it fit, tried to plaster it to the image, he could not picture Mahonri wearing a glove.

That simple fact was enough to open a crack in his perception, to bring everything into doubt, to make his heart slow down, his panic stop. And with that, everything shifted. As quickly as it had sprung into existence, the world that had been building itself up around him in the darkness—the shack, the lake, the dead body on the floor —simply dissolved and was replaced by himself and Qatik, fallen to the ground in the middle of an old freeway.

“Qatik,” he asked, “are you all right?”

He heard a groan again, made for it, knuckling backwards over the ground until he found the man’s hand again. From there, he worked his way up the arm and to the hood. He shook the mule’s shoulders.

“Qatik,” he said again.

“What happened?” asked Qatik, his voice slow and thick.

“We fell,” said Horkai. “You must have tripped.”