The teenagers were all too paralysed with terror at the unearthly transformation from beast to man they had just witnessed to care about the Native American’s frank state of nudity, which he covered up with one of the bathrobes.
‘No more of this Mothra and Godzilla business, my friend,’ he muttered grimly to Zakaria, who was still in his gorilla form and almost comatose on the floor. ‘I am glad I came prepared,’ he continued, glancing at the bonsai trees, ‘since three of you now need my skills. I will not ask questions; I will tend to those in greatest need first.’
His manner of speech was deep, slow and considered; this was a man who thought a great deal before uttering anything, and each syllable was as finely crafted as an Old Master’s brushstroke.
‘The kid’s been shot,’ the woman yelled from the front. ‘William’s busted up bad too, but I think the kid’s worse.’
The man looked at the reflection of her eyes in the rear-view mirror and bowed his head slightly, maintaining an intense eye contact with her; his appreciation of the value of silence and non-verbal communication was more than apparent. He then turned to Daekwon.
‘Child,’ he droned, ‘hand me one of those bonsai trees, please.’
Daekwon, overwhelmed, frightened and confused, obeyed in nervous silence. Each of the bonsai trees was almost as large as a fully-grown person, and Daekwon was the only one of the teens strong enough to move them. He reached for the closest one and, grunting and straining, managed to drag it over to Jun. The boy was barely breathing now, his chest rising and falling only with the slightest of flutters, and his entire torso was a sticky mess of blood.
‘He’s gonna die,’ Paola wailed, her eyes puffy with tears and her lower lip quivering. ‘He’s gonna die, Jun’s gonna die, Mios Dio, oh my God…’
‘Not if I can help it,’ the man said, shuffling over to position himself between the bonsai tree and Jun.
He closed his eyes and placed his right hand over Jun’s forehead, and then dug the fingers of his left hand into the earth inside the ceramic bonsai pot. He swallowed slowly, and then drew in a long, deep breath. After this he began to recite an ancient chant in the language of his tribe, the Chimariko, who had long since vanished from the earth. His whispering and muttering and singing was in turns melodious and atonal, chaotic and structured, ear-splittingly loud and barely audible. As he sank ever deeper into the intensity and fervour of the incantation, a heat started to grow in the back of the van. The teenagers stared in overpowering awe and sheer fascination as the vehicle started to rumble and vibrate, the shuddering and creaking of the metal growing exponentially in intensity with every passing second.
The man’s hands started to shimmer with a barely perceptible green aura as sweat beaded in gleaming droplets on his forehead and face, wrung from his tight skin by an apparently herculean effort. The glistening perspiration began to run freely down his face, which was contorted into a grimace that spoke simultaneously of a paroxysm of agony, an immensity of concentration, and something else entirely, something otherworldly. Tremors and shivers rippled through the shaman’s limbs, and every vein in his body bulged and pulsed, like writhing pythons being cooked alive on the hot stone of his rocky muscles, with only the tenuous membrane of his skin preventing them from exploding.
‘Come on Lightning Bird,’ the woman whispered, her fingers like throttling vines around the steering wheel as she stole glances at the surreal spectacle via the rear-view mirror. ‘Come on, come on, save him. Save him.’
Around Jun’s forehead his hair began to curl and smoulder, and the effulgence from the green aura surrounding the man’s hand was now intense enough to illuminate the entire van, dousing everything in it in a fluorescent hue. The shaman’s prayer, chattering through clenched teeth, morphed into a moan, low and saturated with such a depth of crushing pain that it sent sizzling chills scuttling across the skin of everyone present.
‘Hold on brother, don’t let go, don’t let go,’ the woman urged.
The moan bloomed into a shrieking wail, and the man started to rock on his knees, his entire body shuddering and heaving with the madness of one caught in the delirium of a fatal fever. The hundred-year-old tree was withering at a hyper-accelerated rate, and the rich topsoil in the pot, taken from an ancient forest, was starting to dry up and turn to barren sand. Small patches of Jun’s hair now started to catch fire, the tongues of flame flaring up and then dying just as quickly; lives born and at once extinguished, leaving in their wake only a foul, hanging smoke.
The shaman dug his fingers deeply into Jun’s face in one final burst of intensity, screaming out the terminus of all his pain and agony in a brutal howl that reverberated through the truck and almost blew the back door out with its volume. With that he collapsed, slumping into crumpled heap of quivering limbs and dripping perspiration, his bony chest heaving as he sucked in huge lungfuls of air with the thirst of a drowning man pulled fresh from the waves.
‘Is it done?!’ the woman asked, her eyes afire with a strange
