"Raghupati raaghava rajaraam, patit pavaan sitaaraam."
Beautiful and sad, the mournful notes rang over the desert plain to Faris. Hopping from toe to toe in his oversized sandals to try and keep the scalding leather from the soles of his feet, Faris continued his meticulous efforts to prize the orange fruit from its spiny benefactor.
This is hard…It wasn't fair that he had to be the one to stick his hands into the arms of the barbed cacti. He could barely reach the top of a cactus unassisted, yet he was expected to be able to pluck out a tiny fruit from it?
Then again, if he wouldn't do it… "Nani would have to do it." Faris mumbled out. He shifted, bringing one arm down to his side and stretching with the other for his succulent trophy. "And she can't," his voice was strained as he continued to reach, '''cause she's old." Closer, closer. One finger brushed the leathery surface of the Sticker-fruit, then slipped off as Faris nearly lost his balance.
"Sitaaraam, sitaaram, bhaj pyaare tu sitaraam."
His grandmother continued to sing. Faris bounced on one heel, becoming impatient. He was getting hungry, but, despite the healthy weight of the small fruit-stuffed sack lying a few feet away, Faris wouldn't even consider leaving this fruit unpicked. A sharp squawk cut out from high above him.
Faris didn't even need to look up to check. The cry of the bird, what the biology book called a Phainopepla, was enough to distinguish it to him. Faris loved those birds. White patches were cut out from their glossy black feathers as they spun and dove in the air. They were a delight compared to the lifeless sketches in the books.
With a grunt, Faris hopped up and ensnared the fruit in a palm. "Yeah-!" He began in celebration. He came down from his leap, raking his arm down the spines of the cactus as he went. "Oww!" Faris shouted, falling back from the cactus to land heavily on his backside.
"Behta!" A frail voice, phlegmatic and ragged where the singing had been soft as silk, sounded out. Nani.
They had made camp in a small natural overhang formed by a dune. The mixture of sand and gravel within the dune gave the overhanging portion the stability it needed to protrude over their resting place like a mother bear's paws around her den, though Faris liked to think of it as her jaws. They had driven four posts in the sand, all within the boundaries of the shade cast by the outcropping. These posts tethered down a thick square of leather by the corners to hang stretched a few feet above the ground. The singing was coming from underneath this improvised sun-shield, the source of the delicate melody hidden as Faris ran to the camp.
He came to a halt, spraying up sand before him in a wave as he called out: "Yes, Nani?"
The singing stopped. Faris slipped the sack from his shoulder and crawled under the sheet. The old woman lay there, her singing reduced to a pleasant humming as she continued to thread the needle through the torn cloth in her hands.
His pants had ripped when he fell the other day, sent tumbling to the ground as the sandy dune he had been standing on had given way. It wasn'thisfault, though. The stupid rucksack had dragged him down ass-first; his loins were still tender from the sudden scouring with hot sand that had followed his pants splitting up the seam. If it were up to him, he would just toss the rucksack away, but of course it wasn't; his grandmother's reaction to that suggestion had permanently shut that down as a possibility.
She didn't acknowledge him as he wiggled up alongside of her, keeping his belly pressed to the ground.
"Yes, Nani-jaan?"
She did not answer him, only continued to sew and hum. Faris stretched out and gently tugged on the sleeve of her robe with a child's urgency. "Nani-jaan, what is it?"
She stopped sewing and turned to him with a mock scowl. "Does a grandmother need reason to see her Behta?"
Faris couldn't argue with that, though he had to fight to keep from rolling his eyes at the baby-name. He was far past being a child, he thought. Nani said he was eight, but he had difficulty understanding what that meant. Though he knew what constituted a year, one revolution of their planet about the sun, he did not understand the standard set in order to measure out eight years. Eight years from his birth? Every day was like the last; how could his frail grandmother keep one separate from the next?
Faris rolled over in the cramped space under the sheet, staring up at the leather stretched out directly above him. The rough, scarred surface of the hide was just like that which covered a few of the books, though the crack his small hand reached up to trace absentmindedly reminded him more of his Nani's wrinkled face.
"Have you decided what you are going to read today?" His grandmother asked.
Faris had. Had he been selecting them from the start, he would only have read the science books and discard the rest. However, first implemented by his grandmother and eventually taken up by his own curiosity, a rotation of sorts had developed to give Faris an equal chance at all of the different books. He had spent a week trudging through the tongue-tying incomprehensibility of the Spanish textbooks and the cycle had finally returned to his favorite subject. "Yes, Nani-jaan. I'll start now." With that, he squirmed out feet-first from the sun-shield.
The rucksack was lying a few feet away. Crawling over and unlatching it, Faris reached in and began to root about for the book. His hands hit the hard cover and grasped it, pulling the book out. Tucking it under his arm, Faris strode out from the overhang, back into the hazy glare of the sun."Ess moo-cho sol oi!" (Is much sun today!) He chirped out in bastardized Spanish."Yo ess-pare-oh que el frio bengo!" (I hope that the cold me come!) He continued, making less sense by the syllable. Circling about, he scaled the steep northern side of the dune sheltering their camp and sat down. Beneath him, unseen, his grandmother began to sing again as Faris examined his reading material for the day.
Biology – 24th Edition, the title shouted out at him in block letters from over the crown of the pouty-faced fish (a grouper) staring sullenly at him from the cover. Faris opened the book and began to flip through, finding the page he had left off from about halfway through it.
"Gene expression…" It began, "refers to the production of proteins as directed by the information coded within the aforementioned excerpts of DNA. Primary in expressing the gene is mRNA, which is produced according to…" Faris continued reading, stretching out comfortably on his belly as he pored over the book.
The dead man bore down on him, arms outstretched to grab him. To rip him. To kill him. "No!" Desperation cracked Faris' voice as the monster leapt upon him. Reflexively, unthinkingly, Faris shot both of his feet up to slam into the stomach of the corpse. The devil snarled and swiped a grimy hand through the air, fighting to get closer against Faris' straining legs as its jagged claws hissed through the air inches in front of Faris' face. Gathering up his strength, Faris kicked out, launching the beast backwards through the column of moonlight to slam into the opposing wall of the grotto.
Scrabbling frantically at the wall he had collapsed against, Faris pulled himself from the stone floor just as the beast let out a roar and charged him again. Shit! Faris lunged to his right, the grasping talons of the zombie clenching empty air and stone where his throat had been a moment before.
Sloppily pushing off from the rounded walls, the dead man crashed into Faris, pinning him against another wall and beginning to tear at the front of his robes.
Dizzy from horror, Faris snapped a hand up to slam into the face of the zombie, shoving away the snapping, rotting teeth inches from closing around his throat. It was going to kill him. He was going to die here in this grave. Faris jerked his head back to avoid another snarling lunge. "No…" Faris gasped out, panting from fear and exertion.
One hand struggling with the deadly jaws of the zombie and the other desperately closed about one of its clutching hands, Faris was pinned against the wall as the zombie continued its vicious assault. The monster hooked up its free claw, driving claws into Faris' unprotected side.
Agony flared through him. "Aagh!" Faris screamed as the corpse's claws tore into him, shredding his robes and sending blood spattering against the wall.
Change. Something began to grow amidst the fear and agony. This is mine. His eyes grew cold. The zombie let out a guttural groan against his palm as it plunged jointed knives deeper into Faris' side.
This is mine… The rank of his blood began to poison the air as sticky wetness soaked into his robes. The monster was driving its diseased, rotting palm into him as if it were trying to tear out his liver.
Rage. The silver column of moonlight behind the zombie tinted red in his vision as Faris' gasping moans of pain became silent. He watched with almost detached fascination as the zombie shook its other claw free of his slackening grip and slashed bloody tracks into the arm restraining its head. He supposed it hurt. No, it did hurt, but he could not feel it. The pain was behind him, a trifle. A trickle within the flood rapidly breaking loose inside of him. Not screams but fury pounded at the inner walls of his sanity, seeking to free itself.
This is mine, this is mine- "This is mine!" roared Faris, shaking his bleeding arm loose of his attacker and slamming a fist into its face. Hot, maggoty flesh sprayed into the air as the zombie staggered back, the loud crack of its shattering cheekbone being drowned by Faris' furious cries as he leapt off of the wall.
Pouncing forward, Faris brought another blow crashing into the corpse's face, this time swiping sideways to spin the monster around with a meaty thud as his fist connected with its jaw.
The dead man stumbled away, then gathered, and leapt at him. The force of the fiend's momentum sent Faris tumbling to the ground with the roaring beast atop him. Digging claws into the stone on either side of his head, the dead man dragged itself forward. Faris' arms were pinioned to the stone, the weight of the horror on his chest rendering his arms useless as the creature began to slash down into his unprotected face.
Once, twice, thrice. Three furrows were torn open on the sides of his face and neck as the zombie continued slashing at him, seeking his eyes with jagged talons. Faris bellowed in rage, his pain lost in the heady fog as he lunged upwards from the ground. The sudden shift in its prey's movement upset the zombie from its perch, causing it to dig claws again into his side to keep from toppling off.
Oblivious to the renewed agony as the wounds in his side were again filled by twisting, grasping daggers of claws, Faris rocked his hips up from under the beast to hook the heel of one foot about the monster's face. Pressing the back of his heel to the corpse's neck, Faris wrenched his hips sideways to bring the zombie crashing down to the stone floor.
The strangling moans of the beast struggling against the heel pinning it by the throat to the ground rang as music to Faris as he freed his other leg and shot it over the bucking torso of the zombie.
"This is my life! Mine!" Faris thundered as he seized the wildly-flailing arm of the beast from between his legs and gripped it to his chest.
White-knuckled, Faris threw himself backwards with the arm of the monster still clutched against his chest. The back of both his legs were braced against the body of the monster, one above and one below the arm. Faris' own head hit the stone with a thunk, stars speckling the face of the moon that suddenly filled his vision as he continued to struggle with the zombie. He had fallen back into the column of moonlight, the sight of the monster lost in the darkness of the grotto.
With the torso of the zombie immobilized by the strong legs pinning it to the ground and its arm immobilized to Faris' chest, the force as Faris began to strain backwards had only one place to go.
Directly against the joint of the Corpse.
Ungodly moans erupted from the darkness at his feet, echoing about the grotto as if the walls had begun to wail in agony. The arm of the monster began to bend backwards, warping with the curve of Faris' straining back. Faris' eyes were unseeing, the stream of moonlight casting down a stark halo about the face demonized by rage. The dried tear-tracks cutting through the mud and blood caked about his face were warped and distorted by the ferocious grimace peeling back his lips; they glowed now as lightning tracks with the moonlight.
"My life!" Faris bellowed, tossing himself back once more. The arm of the Corpse snapped backwards as the bone and tendon gave way with a nauseating craaak. The thrashing hand and forearm went limp in his hands with frightening suddenness, even as the monster pinned underneath him in the blackness began to howl in agonized fury.
Letting go of the shattered limb, Faris rolled out of the moonlight and disappeared in the direction of the wounded howls.
The circle of moonlight within the hollow was no longer circular. The continual movement of the moon now cast light sideways through the hole at the top of the grotto, cutting a white ellipse into the floor of the natural oubliette now ringing with tortured screams.
A shout rang out, cutting off the wailing as the thud of a fist crashing into unprotected flesh rang out.
A voice cried out in the darkness, now filled with pain. Struggling voices, one panting in exertion, the other growling in fury, echoed about, constantly shifting position as if their originators were rolling about one another.
The ellipse was changing. The pale silver was beginning to glow brighter as the ellipse continued to be skewed sideways by the shifting light.
The back of one hand broke into the light that was now beginning to show threads of gold, scrabbling about for something, anything. The hand reached out to the opposing side of the light and clutched something in the blackness. A cry of triumph was heard, abruptly transforming into a wail of pain as a snarl broke off into the schlock of teeth clamping down on tender flesh. The arms shot back across the transforming light to its owner, the bloodied hand clenched around an object.
A furious cry rang out, followed by a sharp crack. The roars of the wounded beast became gargles as a jaw broke in the blackness. Another cry, another crack. Dark liquid sprayed into the silvery-gold circle of changing light from the unseen blackness.
The cracks continued, becoming wetter and more diminished, now sounding like a piece of fruit being mashed to a pulp. The gargles ceased; no, the gargles had ceased, but still the degenerating cracks cut through the dark.
They stopped. So, too, did the furious shouts of rage. The circle of rapidly-growing sunlight streaming into the grotto from above, if splattered with blood before, now glimmered and danced upon the shallow puddle of red liquid spreading on the stone floor.
A soft cry, like that of an animal in pain, crept into the still air. A halt, a shuddering breath, and the wavering cry broke from trembling lips once more. Hurt filled it. The voice quivered and broke; then, soft weeping cut through the blackness.
Faris came back to himself. He was standing… no, hunched over a shapeless mass lying limp against one of the walls of the grotto. Golden sun continued to filter through the aperture in the ceiling, broadening, threatening to reveal the destroyed figure of the monster. Faris stumbled back, pulling his left hand free of the holes his clenching fingers had torn in the dead man's throat.
Clattering against a wall and landing in the bloody puddle with a splash, the jagged stone that Faris had smashed in the face of the beast with was cast away.
The adrenaline left him, bleeding out with his wounds and his tears to allow Faris' fatigue to inundate his limbs. He sank to his knees in the puddle, warmth soaking through the cloth and into his knees.
His head heavy with exhaustion, Faris focused on the circle of light above his head. Just go there… He was so tired… It will be alright… Faris reached a hand up, grasping at the clouds drifting high up across the open sky in the tiny window of the grotto. "Let me out…" he repeated. With a final lunge, Faris grasped for the light and fainted dead away, plummeting face-first into the golden shimmer adrift in the pool of blood. Darkness took him.
"…thus signaling to the ribosome that the assembly of the protein has been completed, and removing it for future use-"
"Faris!" Gravelly voice made even more hoarse by panic, his grandmother called out for him.
Oh no… Faris dropped the book into the sand and leapt to his feet. The plea had come from below him, under the unseen crook of the sandy overhang where they had made camp.Is it the Wehsh? Faris asked himself in a panic as he began to run. Scalding sand made his footprints shallow as he slid down the far side of the dune, circling back to the camp in a tight arc.
"Nani!" Faris shouted out as he came around the edge of the hill.
The sight was awful. His grandmother was sprawled out on her stomach, one hand spasmodically twitching in front of her towards the rucksack like a dying bird trying to take flight. A dark stain of wet sand was splayed out in front of her downed head. Faris' stomach lurched as he recognized the scent of blood. Behind her, one of the posts of the sun-shield lay where it had been knocked out from the sand by his grandmother's haste. The leather sheet of the sunshield now fluttered free, slapping the freed corner down onto the sand with a sharpthwackevery time it hit.
"Nani-jaan!" Faris cried out, sounding like the child he was as he ran to his grandmother's side. The ease with which her limp body turned over as he pulled on her shoulder terrified Faris. The boy continued to shake his grandmother, shouting down as he shook a frame that now felt more bone than flesh. "Nani-jaan, get up!"
She awoke. Thwack! Faris jumped as the loose sun-shield cracked into the sand behind him. She tried to push herself off from the ground with her hands and failed, collapsing to the ground with a soft cry of pain. "Mukhadaraat…" She pleaded pitifully, begging him with her eyes.
Faris started. "Ah… ok!" He jumped to his feet and darted for the rucksack, dredging his feet through the bloody sand as he dropped to his knees and began to search inside of the bag. Another thwack rang out as his trembling fingers thrust into cramped darkness, searching for…there! Faris pulled out a small purse and ran back to his grandmother, fumbling with the knots sealing the purse shut.
Everything else in the rucksack had some type of marking upon it. The purse did not. The books all had titles and authors, or other distinguishing marks upon them; even the leather journal, empty, had the fleur-de-leis burnt into its front. However, no mark interrupted the black silk of the purse. It dangled like an ebon teardrop from the golden strings tying it closed.
Faris upended the bag in his palm, clutching his hand about its precious contents. In front of him, wrinkles turned to crevasses by the intense agony stretched across her face, his grandmother continued to groan and hold her palms tight across her waist.Just hold on… Faris mentally pleaded as he began to draw lines in the bloody sand in front of his Nani.
Four short horizontal lines were drawn, perpendicular to the shivering body of the old woman. Faris pinched his fingers together in the small mound he had poured into his hand from the purse.Not enough.It wasn't enough. Faris ferried what was in his palm as carefully as he could, but it was no use. Only three of the furrows were able to be filled with the sparkling, glowing red powder.
It was hypnotic. Small white gems gleamed like diamonds in the bloody rough of the Mukhadaraat. No, bloody wasn't the right word. The powder wasn't bloody; it was beautiful. As beautiful as it had ever been.
Faris rocked back, clutching the empty purse to his chest with both hands. "Nani, it's ready!" He frantically squeaked out, tapping the sharp blade of his grandmother's shoulder. Her face came out of the dirt, bloodshot eyes staring beadily first at the purse in his hands, then to Faris, then finally down to the furrows in front of her. Hunger blossomed in her eyes. With a colossal effort, she dug her hands into the sand and pulled herself forward to lay her face in the dirt directly next to the nearest furrow.
Her eyes closed tight. One hand came up, blocking the path of one nostril with a thumb as the other hand raised to cover the opposing side of her face. She leaned in, and began to inhale heavily through her nose.
Sand and powder alike flowed up, glomming together to create obstructions in her nose that were noisily cleared out with further huffing and snorting as his grandmother moved her head to the left, snorting up the fine line of red powder as she went.
Faris, having turned around to face the desert as she began, fought to keep a disgusted grimace from spreading across his face. He knew she had to do this,knewshe was sick, but he could not watch his grandmother use her medicine without feeling that something was wrong. That she was doing something wrong. With much grunting and coughing, his grandmother finished the first line of Mukhadaraat, and began on the second.
Her sickness was something she had contracted, she had once said. Contracted from Before, as she called it. Faris could not remember Before. Flashes of light, of steel, of flame; this was all he knew of Before. He had just been a baby when they left. The sickness she had spread to everyone, she had said, infecting good and bad alike.
His Nani broke into a fit of coughing behind him, gagging out and spraying the back of Faris' neck with sand and phlegm. Faris calmly wiped his neck clean.
It wasn't her fault. He knew this. His Nani loved him. She had told him so; had promised him. Yet, darkness overtook her sometimes. The Wehsh. It clutched her, she said, moving her limbs like a puppet. It was the Wehsh that made her sick. The Wehsh that made her cry out late at night for the Mukhadaraat. It was the Wehsh that made her scream and wail for no apparent reason, clawing at her face and body in a frenzy. The Wehsh turned her into a beast, tinting her green eyes red and shaping her teeth into fangs.
It was the Wehsh that made her beat him. When he was slow preparing the medicine, when he dropped the purse, when he made any mistake, the Wehsh made her strike him until his nose bled and his eyes ran. His grandmother loved him. He knew that. She had promised him. His grandmother sometimes gently ran her fingers through his hair while softly singing to him in the night. The Wehsh made her clutch him by the hair and drag him through the sand, tossing him to the earth and striking him in the face, the stomach, the head.
With a shuddering sigh, his grandmother finished the third line. Faris closed his eyes tightly, bracing himself. A soft breath came from behind him.
"Faris?"
"Yes, Nani-jaan."
"Behta, you didn't put out four units." Units. That was what she called them, a laughably-precise term for the sloppy troughs drawn in the sand. She said those were the standard amounts that people took Before. When they had her sickness, that was.
Faris let out a slow, shuddering breath. "I know, Nani-jaan."
A pause. "Why is that, Faris?" The sweetness in her voice was deadly.
Faris bit his lip. Fear struck through him, as the silence stretched. She repeated the question.
"Because there isn't any more, Nani-jaan."
The silence grew to a roar. He could sense the Wehsh. He heard it in the ragged breaths coming from behind him, could feel it in the gaze boring into the back of his head. Blood began to trickle from his lip, so hard was he biting it, but he could not feel the stinging pain.
"That can't be…" Soft, almost reflective. He felt her get to her knees. "That can't be." Her voice was strong, stronger even then when she had been singing.
"That can't be!" She screamed at his back. Faris jumped at her sudden shout. "You are lying!"
Faris shook his head, unable to force himself to turn around as he screamed back tearfully, "I swear that's it! I swear!"
A blow clouted him on the side of his face, sending Faris crashing to the ground. His grandmother leapt upon him, striking him about the face as she screamed down at him. "Liar!" She screeched at him again and again, punctuating each word with a blow.
Faris tossed his head from side to side, trying to avoid the sharp spines of his grandmother's bony knuckles. He had done this before, but the insanity now blazing in her eyes was beyond anything he had ever seen. She is going to kill me this time!
Spindly fingers wrapped in a vice about his neck, holding him still as she screamed down, "You took it for yourself, didn't you!" She smashed a fist into the child's face. "Didn't you!" The shriek of a banshee roared down at him.
Faris couldn't breathe. He desperately tried to unwrap the vice from about his neck with tiny hands, but his grandmother continued to choke him with iron fingers.
"Wallahi- Wallah… (I swear- I swear…)" He gagged out, consciousness rapidly fading.
The blue sky framing the bloody-eyed demon standing over him was beginning to fade out, tendrils of black spider-silk beginning to spread through his vision.
He was going to die.
Suddenly, the vice about his neck was gone. Faris gasped for air, the flow whistling in and out of his deconstricting throat. The black curtains threading through his vision cleared to show his grandmother lying a few feet away with her arms wrapped about her knees.
"Behta, I'm sorry…" She wept, "So, so sorry."
She is crying... His heart broke. He rolled over, crying himself, and hugged his grandmother fiercely from behind. "The Wehsh…" He choked out. She sobbed even harder as the boy held her frail body to his. "The Wehsh made you do it, Nani-jaan." It wasn't her fault. Her medicine, he must have dropped it somehow.
Guilt welled up in him. Of course he had dropped it. That was the only thing that made sense. "Nani-jaan, I'm sorry!" He wailed, burying his head in her lap. She loved him, she had promised so; yet, he had betrayed her like this. She needed the medicine, needed him, and he had failed her. "It's my fault, Nani!" He cried, tears spilling down to soak the hem of her dress.
The old woman hugged her sobbing grandchild to her. Hopeless eyes stared past his bowed head to the ever-barren South as she softly began to sing to him. There was no way out. Her grandson would die in the desert, never able to become a man. She crooned to him, rubbing a soothing hand up and down his back to calm him.
If the desert wouldn't kill him, the Wehsh would.
They were going to die here.