With the Axe I push at the chest of the small Munie, careful, not touching the big one. After a few pushes its eyes open and look around, and then it sees me and I put my Glove out to tell it to be quiet. It understands, and I'm thankful for this too, so I walk around the long chairs trying not to make a sound, no crinkling of the Suit, until I'm above the head of the large Munie and its fat lips croaking Bastard Air.
Lift the Axe with your Axe Hand. Line up your shot. Swing.
The small Munie moves away from the big one, waking it up with a sudden opening of its eyes. A second later I cut its neck in half with the blade of the Axe, the ugly head and ugly body two different things, instant, the Munie dead but the sound loud, dull and wet, the dark blood a mist on the long chairs and the small Munie and the Suit, which I don't like. And in the corners I see the others, and they're awake.
**
We have thirty seconds to one minute on our side. Before anything, before hunger or anger, they'll fight over who's the biggest of them now, who gets the better nest with the dead Munie in it, which they'll sleep on top of to be sure of their safety. I know this as the Keeper of the Time, and from watching them, knowing them as much as anyone can know them. I use these seconds to grab the arm of the small Munie and pull it over the long chairs so we can go out into the night, away from the nest and into the City.
I let go of the small Munie's arm and we run through the street and through the Wood that's grown in it. Already I hear the others behind us, chasing, faster than us, hungrier than us, angrier than us, and I know we don't have time, not enough time to get out of the City, and even if we did it would it only get us killed outside the City. This is why I'm not trying to get out of the City.
I lead the small Munie to the stairs that sink into the ground. We go down to the place where the trains hide under the water, where they used to move free with Real People Inside them. The small Munie stops like I knew it would and I grab its arm again, pull it, drag the Munie behind me with the sound of the others coming close, and I walk down into the water.
“No want,” the small Munie says.
“No choice.”
The small Munie fights me because it hates water. All Munies hate water, they're scared of it. I would live in water to be safe from the Munies if I could, but its not safe for other reasons, has too many things hiding in it, too much I don't want to think about, but it's safer in the water than out there with the Munies because one scratch would let the Bastard Air in and I can't let that happen, not now, not after all this time. Filled with bad things, these tunnels, but behind us is worse.
I hold onto the small Munie and make my way in, right away floating from the Air in the suit, and I keep the Mask Mouth pointed up and my back to the water, my face in the inches between the water and the brick at the top, covered with slime and dripping on the Mask. The small Munie does its best to do the same, but it shakes and swallows water, coughs it out, swallows more. I wave the other Glove and kick at the water to make us move. It's slow but it works, and the Mask fogs up from the water and from my fast breaths and I try not to think of the Beasts that live in here, under us, their teet, their tails, their cold eyes that see through the water, the Beasts that live in the trains.
The Axe. You dropped the Axe.
After a long distance, how much I can't see or tell or know, we get between two cars of a drowned train and kick over to the other side. Small bits of light begin to come through the Mask, dim light from the Moon, and I know we're close to the other stairs, the up stairs. I can't hear the small Munie anymore, don't know if its alive, but I can't do anything but kick and wave and pull it along.
We reach the stairs and I claw at the wall with my Gloves until my feet can touch the ground, walk on it. Its hard but I use the stairs, strain and come up from the dark water. I pull the Munie out, drag its small body up three stairs. When we're clear and onto dry ground, I'm surprised to hear it cough.
**
We leave the City, head up into the Mountain. I have no Axe and I know the Munies aren't far behind us. We're tired but we climb, using the Trees to hold onto as the Beasts in the leaves shout at us, shout from the grass, shout from the sky, and our breaths, too, shout from our lungs.
When we reach the Steep and trip through the garbage, I push the small Munie over the ledge and climb over. I look through the Long Eye and see what I thought I'd see but wished I wouldn't- the Munies, blindly tracking us up the Mountain, sniffing the Trees, crashing into them, sniffing again and crashing again. Their bad eyes are why we're alive. The small one looks up at me with those same bad eyes, that squeezed face. I look back into them, like if I look long enough I'll understand why I've done this.
I lead us the rest of the way up and the small one stops when it's able to make out the Trailer in front of us. It points and says, “Inside? Want inside?”
“We can't. The Munies will find us, no, we can't go in there.”
“Munie.”
“This way, through the Wood, come this way.”
We take the small Trail through the Wood faster than I've ever taken it, even dragging the small one. I check the Watch to see how quick but find it broken, ruined, stopped by the dark water. I only have a second to be sad for it, for the time and for the job I failed. I didn't keep the time. It's lost forever now.
We enter the Cavern as the sound of the Munies ripping into the Trailer with their claws hits us from behind.
**
I can see Inside the Cavern with the Night Eyes but the small one can't, so it keeps its fingers tight on the folds of the Suit Leg, follows my steps as I make them. Moving this way, awkward, careful not to rip the Suit, I lead us down the slippery stairs and into the lower part of the Cavern where the stream spits and bubbles past.
“Water, hear water.”
“Yes, we're not close, we won't fall in.” I try to calm it but it's eyes are wide and its chest rises and falls so quick I think it might go black at the eyes and fall down to the rock and hit its head. I do the only thing I can think of, what my mother used to do, which was to touch my face, and even though I doubt it will work it does, so we move again.
We reach the Yellow Room and hide in with the Supplies, sit between some of the boxes. The small one comes in close and holds at my Ribs, and at first I try to move away, my instinct to move from the Munies, but then I see it won't hurt me, and so I don't move.
From the mouth of the Cavern above us comes the sound, the one I was afraid we'd hear, the croak-croak sound. The small one is scared again and touching its face does nothing to quiet it down, I know if I don't quiet the small one soon, they'll find us.
“Quiet. Please be quiet, they'll hear.”
I think of my mother again, what she would do to calm me down. The thing that worked was always a story. So I tell the small one a story.
**
The last story my mother told me was about a world made out of sand. It was a great land of deadly Sun where people once lived among the great, flaming hills. These people who lived in the hills, they made buildings, great, big buildings right there in the sand which they built out of respect to their leaders. They would shape them like triangles sometimes, with great, big points pointing to the Sun, and they would build these places to put to bed these leaders they loved so much.
And so other people, years and years and years later, would find these buildings, find them in the sand, and they would open them up to see the leaders inside because they were curious to meet them and all the things they slept with. They would come from very far away to meet them, but also to take the things the leaders slept with, which isn't a nice thing to do but it was in their nature to do it.
As the story goes, these people found another building in the sand, years after all the other ones, when they thought there were no more to find, because this one was hidden far below the sand. They were very happy and very excited to find it, and like they always did, they opened it. But what they found was more than a leader and its things.
It was an invisible Beast.
The Beast ran at them through the Air, going from one person to the other, to the other, then to other lands and to other lands after that until it was in all the lands and attacking all the people. It attacked them, yes, and many of them fell, fell and never got back up. But some of these people didn't fall, and the ones who didn't fall, they changed. They became like Beasts themselves, but not like the one hiding in that building in the sand. These were Beasts that could be seen, Beasts made from the people who didn't fall, who didn't sleep, who were what people called Mune to the attack of the Beast in the Air, Mune to the Bastard Air.
The lands, the times, they were changed after that. Changed forever, as if nothing was real anymore.
**
The small one holds tight, its arms and legs shaking against the Suit. Funny how I want nothing more than to help it be still, more than even hiding from the Munies who make those noises above. I understand that its scared of the black around us so I go into a box and take out a Stick Light, the ones I used to use before I realized not to, and I snap it between my Gloves and it lights up between us.
I sit again. “That story. Haven't thought of it in a long time. My mother, she told it to me.”
“Mother?”
It was the last thing she told me before she took off the Suit. I begged her not to but she took it off and put it on me and said I'd grow into it, I'd grow into it, take my father's watch, I had to go now, and then she left and I didn't see her after, only heard her Inside me, heard her Inside.
The small one touches the Mask, curious like the people in the story, to see what's Inside, but then it jumps when a loud noise comes from above us, from Inside the Cavern, a crash against a Spike in the floor and then a blind slap down to the rock. Then it begins to cry, really cry, and as I watch it I know the name, that name I thought of before, it's as true for the Munie as it was for me.
“Child,” I say, and it sounds hollow Inside the Mask.
Calm the Munie down. Keep it quiet, any way you can.
I release the clips around the neck, hear the s-sss of the Air coming in. I take the Mask off and lay it on the rock next to me, feel the cold on my Face, smell the moist plant smell of the Cavern. I take the small one's fingers, warm like fever, and put them to my cheek. She stops crying when her skin touches skin.
She looks up and sees my face. Sees my eyes for the first time.
“Mother?”
“We used to say Woman.”
I hold the Light in the Light Hand, the small one in the other, and we listen to the Munies coming to us, slapping and stumbling and clawing through the black. Without the Trailer, without the Mask, without the Watch there's only the waiting, the waiting to see what comes first- the Munies, or the Death, or the Change.
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