Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [123]
Mr. Sausage Nose didn’t bother with the deck’s stairs, instead grabbing the railing with one hand and launching out into the air as if he could sustain that flight. For a moment there, as he hung above me, he seemed impossibly powerful and graceful, and I knew that, regardless of how much poison he had eaten, my death must be destined to arrive before his did. When he landed, though, stumbling to a stop, I could already see that his invulnerability had left him, that he was diminished. Lurching forward, exposing an awkwardness I had never seen among these creatures, Sausage Nose still managed to get to the small corpse in less time than the fastest human could have. Watching him drag the delicate, now limp body from its sugar-water grave, for the moment, I was overcome with more grief and empathy than fear. Or maybe it was that by this point the fear had become so commonplace in my system that it no longer had the impact it should. Regardless, I couldn’t deny the enormity of what we had done. No creature should have to know the loss of its young. Not even a worm. Not even an evil worm. But when the monster looked up to me, fixed me with those ice blue eyes and gave another scream, this sound beyond the range I knew any man was capable of, my knack for overwhelming fear returned, along with two other things: the enraged beast and his full attention.
It must have been shock that stopped me from running away immediately. I stood there staring at him, meeting his eyes as he tenderly laid the young victim down. Then the monster let out another roar equal to the first one. That was enough to get me moving. After he screamed, the creature grabbed his waist and bent over himself, vomiting violently right on the corpse. Looking over my shoulder as I struggled to run away, I saw him heave again and perfectly white bile spewed past his fangs, covering everything in front of him with a hellishly chunky chowder.
I took off. With every essence of my being, I ran.§ Loopy and off balance, Sausage Nose stumbled behind me as I attempted to get beyond him. Despite his sickness, he was moving so fast that on his first attempt to grab me he gave my side a good knock before hurtling past on his own momentum. Slamming into a boulder to my left, he hit it hard, headfirst. If this had been an actual boulder and not simply a hollow stereo speaker covered in papier-mâché rock, it might have actually knocked him out instead of just pissing him further off.
The house, I thought. Run to the house. This was the only coherent thought I could fix on. At least it seemed rational at the time, as if all I needed to do would be to lock behind me the door on my three-fifths homestead and all my troubles could be that easily kept out. Garth was in there brooding, and I screamed his name as I ran, as if he could help me in any conceivable way. Having been used to this minute commute, I knew exactly which rocks to jump on to cross the saccharine stream. This minor knowledge was in my favor, because the beast had to pause when he came to the water behind me.‖ As I kept moving with every muscle I could manage for the effort, I saw that the monster paced along the bank, back and forth like a great cat stuck in a cage, stopping only to vomit once more. I couldn’t have been twenty yards from the cottage when I turned back to see that Sausage Nose was actually walking away, winded! A sense of relief—mild, but there nonetheless—flashed over me when I realized that this would not be my end, that my life might be spared. It was a feeling I needed and clung to, but it was ripped away when I realized that the monster was merely setting up his runway. Pivoting, robes spinning as he did, the creature ran with speed that made him almost a blur to my widening eyes. In one robust, two-legged spring, the white one jumped across a dozen yards of the stream in a single bound. And it couldn’t have taken him more than three steps to reach me.
I was gripped by my neck and lifted from the ground. He held me up before him and