Chapter Text
A procession crests the dark hill against the setting sun. In the middle is the thing that knocked and flanking it are its hounds clamoring through the dusk now devoid of cicadas.
It cuts a languid, willowy path, swaying with the tide of pilgrim paws. They come in every shape and size. There are mountainous sheepdogs loping forward on dutiful shoulders, little ratting dogs trotting with uncanny zeal, all balding, limping, scabbed. It carries one in the crook of an arm and slings another over its shoulders like a shepherd would a goat.
They descend the hill, and with no sky to silhouette them they vanish into the dark plain. You only hear their hacking breaths, sometimes a piercing cry which would rally another and then stoke the horde into a fever chorus of howls, lasting for minutes before petering out to gasp for air.
They grow quiet as they near. You know they've reached your doorstep when you see their eyes glistening in the dark.
The thing stops before reaching the lanternlight. Its chest does not rise and fall. You catch the glint of a wet pupil in the sunken shadow of its face, a warm glow against the bare slope of its wan shoulder. It holds a rust-tinted dandelion, knuckles bound with the torque of a muscle being pulled to its limit.
It raises its gift to you, from Earth’s new animal and its flock of lepers.
Three nights ago you heard men screaming outside your bedroom window. You snuffed your candlelight and peered through the curtains onto the dirt road leading into town, cracked with drought, and saw the parched earth drinking rivulets of wine-dark liquid.
Those puddles bloomed rows of rust-colored dandelions. Field mice foraged among them and the neighbor’s little girl, who stayed with you, loved to watch-
Your breath hitches.
It laughs. The sound is strangled out of its throat only with rolling strenuous contractions of its entire stomach. The fat and muscle undulate like a worm, pallid skin soft and hairless as a newborn’s belly.
Your index finger lays straight across the trigger of your shotgun, warm and sticky from the pressure of your palm. You angle yourself sideways against the door, raising it lengthwise across your gut to aim hidden against the stomach of the thing.
If it knows, it only bows its head towards the shivering one-legged mutt curled within its elbow.
“My friends haven’t eaten in days,” it says, lifting the rust-colored dandelion to the mutt’s nose. The mutt sniffs, and finding something meaty within, catches it between its teeth. “Have you?”
Your cellar still holds enough potatoes and beets to last one man two months, four men one, rationed.
It’s water you dream of, lost water you mourn every sweltering midday when you wake naked on the floorboards tacky with your own sweat, water you remember when you touch the once loamy soil of your garden seared brittle by the sun.
When you clutch it hard enough the tang of iron oxide still wafts out, acrid, bloody.
(You abandoned all your sheets long ago, tied them outside to catch dew.)
So many eyes flickering like moonlight catching on the waves of a vast black lake- how much water these creatures must gorge upon daily, how much must fly out of their panting mouths roaming across this barren earth, how many men could be sustained from their lifeblood-
Yet here you are, open-mouthed, slick with sweat even in the cool dusk. Your grip on the gun is painful, fire in the junctions between shoulder and neck trickling down each vertebrae, dragging down, down-
It kneels. Lays down the hound slung over its shoulders onto your porch beneath the full light of your lamp. Its hands emerge clearly and you see the same tautness in its bow-string tendons as when it held the dandelion, every digit a bone-bleached, brutal structure made to be lashed like a whip withheld now moments before impact.
The dog is slack and hardly breathing. A pink distended stomach, swollen teats. The horde in the dark rouses, incensed, parched. The thing stands. They whine and encroach no further.
"She would've whelped a litter if she lived another week." It turns, shows you the long rippling line of its back. "Do with her what you will."
"There's many other men here with me now," you cry, your voice a flag in the wind. "With guns, all of us, enough to kill every last one of you."
If it calls your bluff it only cants its head back towards the lanternlight. Its pupils roll forward from the back of its skull to focus on a distant point beyond yours, blown wide to swallow the iris, a black pool glinting with the promise of moisture before receding into nothingness.