Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [70]
“Yeah, okay. Okay, man. You right. I guess, I guess I can—” It was just in that first moment of Jeffree’s pacification that his host, a creature whose draped figure I’d previously assumed to be a curtained wall, turned around. What fierce, dead-eyed monsters these were, I thought, staring at it. This one was the most horrific beast I’d seen among them, a full head taller than the rest of his colossal kin and that damn sausage nose, like it had been chewed by a bear before being judged inedible and abandoned. While the overgrown homunculus I called Augustus seemed soft and harmless, like a rotting marshmallow, looking at Jeffree’s sausage-nosed specimen, I was reminded of the ferocity of these barbarians. Without warning and without letting Jeffree finish his sentence, the creature shot out a hand toward Jeffree’s bald head, the impact causing the cowrie-shell necklace that Jeffree always sported to clack like a rim shot.
“Motherfucking kielbasa-nosed prick!” Jeffree responded, and immediately I knew where his welts were from. Jeffree pulled his hand back as if to use it for punching but, taking in the size of his target and the hopelessness of his task, dropped it again in frustration. For his part, Mr. Sausage Nose paid him no mind, merely walking farther along the village path as he had just urged Jeffree to. Carlton Damon Carter, giving his partner a tortured glance, smartly started following the beast, but this had no effect on Jeffree, who after wagging his head several times, turned to me instead.
“You stay here. You put up with this, I’m going. I’m going back to join that fat bus-riding bastard, and I’m going to get somebody up on that radio, and then we are all getting the hell out of here.”
“Don’t you think—” I started, but having made his decision, Jeffree began walking off. Back toward the tunnel we had first come through on discovering this place, in the opposite direction of his personal monster.
“RKARKKARKIV,” Sausage Nose roared with such a violent collection of consonants that my own body froze up. First the sound hit, then the air that made the sound. Angela’s petite hand flew to her equally diminutive nose to shield her from what came out of the screaming creature: the breath of a lifetime diet of lard processed through the body of an ape. Jeffree may have smelled the aroma too, but by now he’d walked pretty far away and made no motion to stop. Clearly infuriated, the beast repeated his roar, leaving poor Carlton Damon Carter to curl his arms over his ears and head in response. It was then I noticed that the other Tekelian breed, those that had been casually walking past us and stopping only to give us curious stares through their albino eyes, now had come to a complete and expectant halt as they waited to see how this situation was resolved. It was Jeffree himself who gave them an answer, although I doubt that the creatures had any understanding of what the raised middle finger signified, or of Jeffree’s verbal instruction to “sit on it and rotate.” What the crowd did understand, what it was impossible to misunderstand, was the meaning of Jeffree’s creature’s response. When Mr. Sausage Nose shot his hand out from his robe, I assumed it to be another violent hand gesture in response, but it was violence itself. The dagger, which is the only word I can think to describe it, was clearly made of bone that had been sharpened on one end. Thrown from fifty feet away in a blur barely visible, that point went directly into the socket that held Jeffree’s left eye. When Jeffree collapsed on the ice, red pooling into the ground around him in an unexpected burst of color, the crowd decided it had seen enough and moved on.
Close up, the wound was even more grizzly, even more so for Jeffree, still being unmercifully alive. It was only the angle that saved him from death—the dagger exiting at his temple instead of depositing in his brain. Judging from the blow, he should have been dead, but we knew he was alive because of how loud he was screaming.
After a few