Chapter 15 - Anka
The Man woke to cold, soundless darkness. He felt the goggled pressed against his face - the leather and feathers plastering his skin - but the goggles seemed opaque. He heard nothing; not the radio, or the vents’ hum, or even his breath.
The floor changed grade beneath The Man. It shifted The Man’s weight to his left side. It caught The Man off guard - he hadn’t heard the Wind’s moan to herald the shift. His left side pressed against the packed insulation.
Pain dug its way from The Man’s left hand like a root through soil. A scream rose in his throat.
Instinct held it back.
The Man felt a sharp vibration through the floor. The vibration was something hitting the shell with force. He thought of the impacts with the sky in heavy Wind.
Then The Man remembered the furnace. He remembered the door, the last booming sound. He remembered, just before the explosion, the cry on the Wind.
The Man paused to think. Each time the moving floor took him by surprise. Hot pain waves radiated from his hand, but The Man pressed his lips tight.
By touch, The Man knew he lay on his back. By having touch or pain at all, The Man knew that some warmth must have remained in the shell. But without light, he expected the furnace had burned out.
Then he remembered the open exterior door.
The Man felt another vibration, then three in quick succession. That, he knew, was no feeling of shell striking glass - he’d have felt the floor shift. The source was invisible, but The Man knew something moved on the shell metal. Something heavy.
The Man peeled his right hand up off the floor. He moved it back and forth slowly in empty space. He brought it to his face and felt his goggles and hood. He wiped the glass; the blackness remained. He moved the hand back behind his head. He felt something. He worked his fingers over the something until he determined it was a pipe. Feeling around, he learned that he was lying beside the furnace room shelves.
He stopped with his hand on the shelf and held perfectly still. Another vibration tickled his spine. The Man waited to see if death would take him suddenly, deaf and blind.
Eternity passed.
The Man allowed himself a stale breath through the leather mask. He tried quiet breaths. He tried quiet movements as he brought his arm back to the floor. He tried to prevent his body sliding as the soundless Wind moved the floor.
Keeping silent was all guesswork for The Man. He could be as slow and soft as he wanted, but The Man had no hearing by which to judge his success.
The Man finished thinking. He brought his right arm and hand over to his mask - again, slowly and without sight - and undid the tie. Hoping for silence, The Man set the leather mask aside. He brought his right hand back to his face. He bit down on the loose fingertips and backed his fingers from the glove. The Man let go of the glove with his teeth. He moved his chin to shift the glove down to his neck. Then The Man brought the hurt left hand to his face. He felt it with his cheek. The action made a ball of pain on the end of his arm. It felt crippled and cold. But it felt dry too, and The Man knew then that it wasn’t bleeding. The injury was non-critical.
Next, using his good right arm, The Man pushed against the insulated ground. His body rose until he sat upright. Pain came from fresh sources as he changed position. He felt another shudder in the metal through his legs. He waited for death. When it didn’t come, The Man used the same strategy of slow and gradual movements to stand. He kept his feet spread wide and extended his left hand until he found a shelf. He held his balance in this way while the floor moved.
The Man needed light. Reclaiming sight was his first priority. He worried about any light attracting Anka’s attention - if Anka was the source of the vibrations. But The Man also recalled the short account from the trapper’s journal. It said Anka hunted by other senses. It said Anka had no sight. The Man had no separate account to plan by, he had to trust the old explorer’s words.
The Man thought of his crank lantern. He had set it on the hook above the furnace room curtain. The cranking made noise, however, and the ink-dark space between the shelves and the curtain seemed somehow too open. The Man considered taking the lantern and tiptoeing, deafly, down the stairs to the heart chamber. That door was heavy, banded wood. But, it seemed like a long way…
Then The Man thought of the furnace. A box of matches and torchmaking wood lay beside it. The matches would be quieter than the lantern, though not inaudible. They would also produce dimmer light.
The Man felt for the shelf immediately at his side. Even his sense of touch was muffled, both by the leather glove and the cold. He felt a set of thin spare pipes. He pulled his hand away and touched along the shelf below. He felt his old flat wooden spinner seat.
The Man imagined the furnace room. He made a picture to replace the one missing from his eyes. Starting with the shelves at hand, he branched out. He pictured the open space, eight paces, between his current spot and the matches by the furnace. He pictured an enormous eyeless predator, with black feathers and long talons, crouching in that space. He erased that unhelpful part of the image. The Man pictured the furnace.
An idea struck.
The Man lifted a boot a few centimeters off the floor. He glided it over the insulation. When the floor felt even, he set it softly down. The Man spent a second convincing himself to leave the shelf. Then he did it. The Man removed his hand from the old spinner seat and took another gradual step in the imagined direction of the furnace.
Slow and arduous was the journey from the shelf to the stone furnace. The Man imagined it as a journey of leagues, not meters. He Might have been crossing a perfectly flat, skyless desert of soft sand - one in which the center of gravity constantly undulated. Once, The Man needed to drop his foot quickly to catch himself from a fall. His boot came down hard on the padded floor. He waited. He felt no vibrations. The Man had never been so grateful for the insulation.
As time stretched out with The Man’s arms, he began to doubt. He thought he must have chosen his direction wrong. He must have set out toward the door. The plastic curtain must have fallen. He’d somehow passed into the hallway. He thought that maybe he’d turned somehow, and was now walking toward the open hole in the side of the shell, and that any moment he’d step over the end and into the true void of the sky.
Then The Man’s right hand felt still-warm stone. He ran his leather clad fingers over it until he found the metal wall to the furnace’s right. He crouched, and felt the small table and the box of matches. He collected the matches. He reached blindly farther, to the right, searching for burnable sticks.
The Man reached farther than expected. He thought perhaps the Wind had rocked his stockpile loose. He reached to the floor. He touched carefully around the space. He felt something softer than insulation. He tooth-pulled his glove off and patted the soft floor again. He realized he was feeling ash.
Dread swelled in The Man’s mind. He set it aside. He pulled the glove back on and continued to reach.
The Man found sticks. They felt brittle, like dry bread crust. The Man could tell they’d been singed. He felt over the pile until he found one arm-length, thin piece. He felt all over the piece; it seemed as if it could be pulled loose without noise. He drew it off the pile without resistance.
It seemed like hours since The Man had woken and felt the vibrations. He thought of striking the match then, as softly as possible. The imagined creature lurking in the immediate space beside him, waiting for the tiny scrape of a match on a boot; and the diligence of The Man’s cautious movement up to this point; those stopped him from summoning the match’s flame.
The Man felt his way back to the furnace. He found the gap in the stones and felt the metal of the opened door. Its hinges and barrel bolt seemed to be intact.
The metal door was sturdy. But, the hinges squealed when it moved. On the inside the door had few holds. There was one horizontal metal plate which The Man had welded over a slot-window in the original design. The grip on that plate would be narrow.
The Man took one long, good, quiet breath. Then he crouched and crawled into the furnace. The space was cramped and equally dark, but the stones still held the spent fire’s warmth.
The Man reached back to the opening. He gathered his nerves. He grabbed the narrow plate on the inside of the metal furnace door between his right hand’s finger. He pulled the door shut. He didn’t hear it clang, he didn’t hear it squeal, but he felt the metal shudder.
Instantly vibrations followed. This time they went on. Repeated vibrations. Repeated motion on the shell metal. Growing stronger. Coming closer.
The Man felt a sudden humongous impact. The furnace door shook. The blow shook not just the metal in the door’s hinges, but the entire space inside. The Man felt the stones shudder against his shoulder. The prongs of the grate quivered under his boots, and the ash rose from the floor in a hot cloud that made The Man cough.
The Man struggled to hold the door from rebounding open. He desperately pinched the plate between his fingers. Another strike followed. And another. Thumps thundered repeatedly and without rhythm over the outer metal and stones; entirely soundless, somehow deafening. The Man was shaken in a tiny stone box filled with ash. Each vibration sent a jolt of pain through his left hand. With the right, The Man had to keep the door from rebounding, holding it shut with only his fingertips pressing hard on the welded metal plate. The Man had no free hand for match-striking.
The Man waited, tensed in the soundless painful dark, shaking under the assault from the thing beyond the door.
The Man released his grip on the furnace door. It remained shut. The attack on the outside had stopped. It seemed as if hours had passed. For the moment, The Man felt secure inside the close shell furnace.
The Man pulled his right leather glove off with his teeth. He ran his hand through the ashes under the claw grate until he found the matchbox. He used his teeth again to pull the box open while he held it between cold fingers (the furnace was warmer than the rest of the shell, but not comfortable). He set the opened box down. He plucked one sliver. He felt numbly along the splinter until he knew which end was phosphorus. He struck it against the warm stone wall - it seemed somehow to be the least-loud surface.
The match snapped in The Man’s numb, clumsy fingers. Silently, he pulled another in the same way and struck again.
The Man half expected to see nothing; as if the explosions had knocked his optic nerves loose. When the match did strike, and a tiny mote of orange-yellow appeared suddenly in the long void, it blinded The Man. He held the flame to the side, after shifting his finger hold to the match’s base.
The furnace looked as The Man had expected. Tiny, with black stones. The Man saw the metal door was ajar by a sliver. The light was too small to reach the room beyond, but the crack was comforting. It meant the barrel bolt had not been macabrely jarred into a locked position.
The Man brought his left hand up.
The fingers and palm were a ruin. The entire hand looked as if it had snapped along the palm. From the fingertips all the way to the wrist, the hand was like a bloated red-and-black stump of some felled, rotten tree. It looked as though someone had taken his hand and replaced it with a useless chunk of foreign material.
The Man felt a sudden sting in his good right hand. The flame had found his fingers. Involuntarily he dropped the match. The light vanished. The Man was blind again.
He reached down, found another match, and struck it.
The Man didn’t try pulling on his glove. Dragging it back over the mangled hand, crunching all the way, seemed intolerable. He pulled the spacious mitt over his broken appendage instead (he still had to keep warmth from departing through the useless meat). Even getting the mitt on sent blackening, gritty pain waves through his body.
The Man held off lighting the charred wood branch. He needed a sure set of actions first. The Man counted his matches. He had twenty.
The Man used four matches to assess his body. The door had struck him on his shoulder and hip when it blew open, but the black bruise line did not look threatening. The Man felt cold and weak, but able. The Man let the fourth match burn out.
Next The Man assessed his situation. This he did in the dark.
More than anything, The Man had to make his shell safe. He needed to stop the bleed of its heat, and to relight the furnace.
In order to accomplish that first goal, and as another task, The Man had to remove Anka.
Whether the Anka inside his shell now and the Anka from the trapper’s journal were the same mattered. It mattered for The Man’s strategy. But, the name itself was unimportant. Anka was the enemy. It would kill him if it could, The Man felt sure.
If the Ankas were the same, they were blind. Their advantages? Acute hearing and sense of smell, and a mighty build — mighty enough to lift and carry a man. If his Anka and the Anka from the derelict multiship were the same, they had wiped out a crew of able scullers. The Man decided to assume the creatures were one - he had no other way to plot against it.
The Man thought of three ways for removing Anka. One was to wait for it to leave while he hid in the furnace. This was the worst way, The Man thought. With the vibrations serving as his only sense, he’d never be sure it had truly gone. The heat was also slipping continually out of his shell. If he waited too long, The Man would freeze to death.
Another way was to lure or chase Anka from the shell. The Man did not consider this way for long either. Luring it would mean leaving the shell himself. Climbing the rungs one-handed struck The Man as almost impossible under normal circumstances, and especially so if he were trying to avoid attention. And The Man had no idea how he might chase the creature out. He thought of fire. The sharp heat of flame would be foreign to a creature which lived on the glass. But light would not scare a blind creature. Fire seemed too much of a gamble. All-told The Man did not believe he could remove Anka alive.
That left one way.
The deadliest tool of civilization, on all the surface of the cylinder below, was the coilspear. In this moment, in his shell on the surface of the sky, the coilspear was also The Man’s deadliest tool. It had greater range than the bullet hammer. It had more control and a sharper punch than the springflare. For killing Anka, The Man considered no other weapon.
The coilspear, unfortunately, sat inside the glass-fronted cabinet in the study. It lay on the other side of the shell. The spare spear from the derelict sat on a furnace room shelf nearby. Without the launching coil, that spear seemed a soft tool.
The Man felt another shudder. It travelled through the shell, then the furnace stones, then the metal of the grate on which he crouched, up through his legs. Anka was still near. And the furnace stones around him only shed more heat as time passed.
The Man found the stick he’d taken for a torch. He couldn’t hold it with his useless hand, so The Man tucked it in the crook of his left shoulder. With the good right hand he took another match and struck it against the wall. He held the sudden light underneath the charred stick end, but the little flame wouldn’t take to the hard, cold wood.
The Man tore feathers loose from the lining of his coat, and lit those with another match. Taking the glove he no longer needed for the ruined hand, The Man pulled it over the stick. He held this above the feathers until the glove flamed.
Then came the time to act.
The Man turned to the furnace door.
He halted. The hinges were squeaky. The Man remembered that now. He tried to think of a way of silently opening the door. He saw the glove burning fast on his stick, and realized he had no time. Holding the torch with his shoulder-crook, The Man set his fingers against the welded plate. He pushed the door open with as little pressure as possible. He kept his senses tuned to his boots, feeling for any vibration through the shell.
As the door spread gradually wider The Man felt nothing but the general shift of the grated floor underfoot. The Man’s world was lit, shifting, and silent. When the opening was wide enough The Man crouched under the mantle. He emerged back into the dark shell armed with sight.
The furnace room was a mess. The Wind had tossed its contents. Pieces of wood loosed from the pile - along with parts for shell repairs - lay like jacks on the floor. There were burned patches of insulation right outside the furnace door. The fire had escaped with the initial explosion. Fortunately, it hadn’t spread through the whole shell.
The Man remembered feeling the soft ashes where he’d expected to find the wood pile. He ignored the impulse to glance at it. Looking at what remained of his supply would only distract him.
The Man held his torch forward and walked slowly across the open space. The small light left hideously deep shadows at the room’s edges. A very large beast might fit comfortably within that unseen space.
The light shone on the plastic curtain without sight or vibration of Anka. The Man noticed, however, two long grooves in the bulkhead metal, and three of the curtain flaps had been sheared off. The undulating floor made the ragged plastic sway. Though The Man couldn’t hear it, he could imagine the rustling sound of that plastic. He took note. Anka was either wise to repeated sounds, or else relied on more than its ears to distinguish real prey.
The Man stepped to the curtain. He set his hand on the shell wall and took comfort in its balance. He ran a finger in one deep claw groove; he lost his comfort. He glanced at the torch and saw that the wood had taken flame. The glove was already spent. He shifted his shoulder to push the burning end of the torch through the hole left by the ripped curtains. The Man held it there for a moment, with his hand feeling the metal wall. Then he stepped carefully into the hall.
The light ran the long corridor a short distance before it lost power. The Man saw the curtain to the stairs and the cargo hold below. It looked undamaged.
The Man began walking toward the study. It was somewhere out there in the far dark. He focused on the floor. He stepped on the places where the insulation looked thickest. He held the burning stick before him, under his shoulder crook, and used his free hand to balance on the wall. He progressed.
The Man stopped.
Something was there. Something was at the light’s edge. It hung near the curved roof of the corridor. The shape was just in front of the spinning room curtain. The shape had not moved, either at the light or The Man’s footfall. He took another careful pace forward. It remained still. He took another.
The shape shifted. The Man went still. The shape seemed to unfold in the air, never touching the floor, as though wire held it to the ceiling. It was a black thing; hard to see in a black hall, against black metal. The whole surface of it moved like rippling smoke. The Man guessed it had a black coat, but the feathers were indistinguishable; smooth like oil.
A pointed part of this folding shadow stretched toward The Man. The point opened. The Man saw, for the first time, substance in the moving, folding, flat thing. He saw two triangular rows of solid, pearly, square teeth. Fangs. Fangs built for crushing and chopping. These were not like daggers or the points of spears; this was a maw of axe blades.
From behind the teeth, a long pink tongue warbled without sound. In a similar soundless way, the shadow that was Anka’s body floated forward. Folding and unfolding extensions of the body - wings, or feet, or claws - propelled it along the round metal ceiling.
This was Anka; killer of men. As it crawled forward along the shell ceiling, The Man stood against it.
With the warbling tongue Anka seemed to be sniffing, or rebounding its voice off the walls. The Man could only guess. He didn’t wait for confirmation. As Anka slid forward he reacted. He backed carefully over the soft insulation.
Anka came on. Its paperish shadow unfolded toward The Man. He looked back. The only exits were by curtains, which might give his position. The Man looked to his torch. If Anka closed the distance, even the crackle of this small flame would probably attract its notice.
The Man sank to the floor until he lay on his side, back flush against the port wall. The Anka was five meters away. The Man scanned the floor insulation. He saw a piece which looked solid, a slug of hard packed feather-grime, but loose from the metal. He pulled the piece off with as light a motion as possible. He glanced up. Anka had stopped. The shadow hung three meters away. Its pointed mouth was open. Its pink tongue quivering at The Man.
The Man flung the piece of insulation. It hit the furnace room curtain. The Man heard neither the impact on the curtain nor the furnace room floor. But he saw Anka’s reaction.
Like a shadow cast by stars shifting for a passing cloud, Anka’s shadow swiftly slid. Anka shot over The Man. Its movement churned the frigid air against his face - Anka was enormous. It was larger than any bird. The Man kept his eyes upon it as it glided past. He looked for its features. Even up close it was inky, flat, and folded. It was like an origami crane, made of oil-dark paper, but with the mass and speed of a steam sloop. He did see that Anka had no normal feathers. Instead there were short angular spines over its body, like flatter porcupine quills.
Anka moved too swiftly for the torch to reveal any other features. The Man held his breath. The creature passed, without sound, overhead. It slammed against the furnace room bulkhead. The impact juddered the metal. The vibration reminded The Man of his broken hand with a shock of pain. He watched Anka fold itself through the curtained door. It was a frenzied, jittery, quick maneuver which left nothing of the plastic sheets.
The Man rose. He alternated between looking back at the room and looking for places for his feet. He backpedaled toward the study. The furnace room entry fell out of his torchlight, disintigrating into shadow. The torch burned low now. The Man quickened his step. By his hand upon the wall, he felt Anka’s frenzy through the vibrating metal.
Finally, the study curtain came into view. It too was mangled. He closed the distance and ducked inside.
The study looked ransacked. Claw grooves had nearly split the desk in twain. The wooden shelves were splintered, as if Anka had entered and rebounded from wall to wall, tearing up the space. The front window, still cracked, at least remained whole.
The Man saw that the glass front of his coilspear cabinet was broken. The coilspear, however, still sat inside, ready for use.
The Man looked behind his desk beneath the window sill. He saw that, to his misfortune, the bullet hammer and springflare hadn’t escaped Anka’s destruction. The bullet hammer haft was snapped, the spring tube was crumpled.
The Man stepped over to the broken glass cabinet. Now there was no choice, even had he wanted a different weapon.
Before he reached for the coilspear, The Man collected spare cloth. He bolstered his torch. The light would burn a little longer. It’s heat, too, was precious now. This far from the furnace, the inside air was as cold as the outside.
The Man realized the greater vibrations made by Anka had ceased. He still felt the floor shifting under the Wind. He opened the cabinet with care to avoid knocking free any broken glass. He retrieved the coilspear.
The Man looked from the spear, to the barrel, to his injured hand, to the noisy loading crank. It seemed impossible to load with one hand. Especially without sound.
Cold crept easily through his leather and into his skin. Even so, The Man paused to think. He huddled around the little torch flame. He used its light to look about the room.
The Man noticed the radio speaker. It perched in the shadowed ceiling above the antenna wheel. He remembered hearing the hosts voices just before the furnace exploded. He couldn’t hear anything now.
The Man stepped around the broken cabinet glass littering the floor. He set the coilspear gently on the ground and reached a hand up to touch the speaker’s mesh. He felt vibration through it, softer than Anka’s. The vibration was continuous, not starting and stopping like it would had it projected speaking voices. The speakers all through the ship were buzzing with static, The Man realized. He assumed either the Wind or Anka had shifted the antenna’s alignment.
The Man set the torch down beside the coilspear at his feet. He studied the position and alignment of both objects. He performed, mentally, a series of one-handed actions: pick up the coilspear, take its spear from the holder, load it into the barrel, crank back the shaft, set the weapon down, pick up the torch, set the torch under his shoulder, pick the coilspear back up, and finally, brace the coilspear on his right shoulder and left forearm, with his right hand upon the lever - ready to launch.
The Man stared at the speaker until he could see the vibrations in the mesh. Then he reached out and turned the adjusting wheel. The wheel squealed; The Man couldn’t hear, but he knew it did. He instantly felt Anka’s approach through the wheel and the floor. Even so, The Man turned the wheel slowly. He had to. He ignored the swift approach of doom. He watched the speaker mesh.
The mesh rattled with sudden arrhythmia. It was the effect of speaking voices - the radio hosts chattering through every speaker. They filled the shell with uneven sound which The Man could not hear.
The Man took his hand from the wheel and instantly started the mentally practiced actions. In the exact order and way he’d pictured, The Man loaded and cranked his coilspear. The cranking produced noise. It took ten seconds with two hands, longer with a broken one. All the while The Man felt the floor shuddering. The Man himself did not shake. He could only hope the speakers kept Anka distracted.
The Man did not hear the soft click telling him the coilspear was armed, but he felt it in the handle. The Man went through the rest of his tasks just as planned. He stuffed the torch under his shoulder and set the loaded coil in his arms. His fingers felt cold against the trigger.
The Man leaned against the sooty wall to help with balance. He ducked into the hall. He could see the radio room curtain, but the others were beyond his torchlight. Still feeling the vibrations, but not knowing where they came from, The Man stopped. He faced the barrel down the hall. He waited.
The torch shadows undulated on the wall. Standing still, The Man felt colder than he had while moving. He breathed at an even pace through his mask.
One undulating shadow thickened suddenly. It hurtled along the corridor ceiling towards The Man. The Man raised the coilspear. He took aim at Anka. He exhaled, and squeezed. The spear surged from the barrel. The lastiwire line trailed behind.
The spear punctured the shadow on its left side. The spear stuck. The shadow roiled and twisted. It bolted backward to merge with the darkness. The eighty meter lastiwire line spun all the way out; the line went taut before The Man could react. The coilspear jerked out of his balancing hold. The Man watched barrel and spear fly into the dark, soundlessly.
Then The Man saw them reappear. Anka came at him. The Man dropped to his belly. The motion wasn’t silent, but the clamor of the radios and the dragging coilspear must have masked him. Anka swooped above. The Man saw his torch guttering and had to lift it from the ground.
Anka passed him by. It ripped through the torn curtain flaps to the study. The Man thought that Anka must have sensed his location, but ignored his small noises in the confusion of larger ones.
The coilspear tumbled toward The Man as it trailed behind Anka. The Man dropped the torch. He tried to grab the flying barrel, but the long lunk of steel only smacked him painfully on his forearm. The Man watched the coilspear disappear through the torn curtain flaps.
The Man grabbed his torch and started crawling backwards. He thought quickly. All around him the shell shook, writhing in the gale Wind and shivering from Anka’s assault. He guessed Anka would destroy the speakers, one by one, until none remained. He didn’t think he could get his coilspear back. And anyway, Anka had survived a true shot.
The Man decided the best way forward now was to lure Anka from the shell. If he waited until the speakers were broken, crossed to the exit door, then tossed a stick out against the black ice covering the glass, it might draw Anka from the shell. At the exit he could crouch low as it glided over, then shut the door once it was gone.
The Man crawled past the radio room curtain. He guessed the speaker in there was still fixed. He rose to his feet and paced backward down the corridor, keeping his eyes locked on the study.
Anka’s shadow lurched into the hall. The spear in its body banged off the walls. The Man crouched, preparing to drop again, but Anka flew against the radio room curtain.
The Man quickened his backward pace toward the furnace room. He felt the cold of the sky deep in his body now - not just in his limbs, but stealing the warmth from his stomach. His core temperature dropped faster and faster.
The Man reached the furnace curtain. His shoulders brushed the drapes as he entered - he had no time left for cautious silence. He rushed to the woodpile. He needed something with enough weight to make sound against the ice outside.
The Man held his torch over the space beside the furnace where his stockpile of fuel had once been. He saw ashes, and little else.
Almost the entire pile had been consumed in flame. Ironically, the insulated floor alone had been spared when the flame escaped - peeled off and thrown back by the explosion. The stick The Man held now as a torch was probably the largest piece of remaining fuel.
The Man’s shoulders sagged, but he didn’t quit. He turned from the pile. He moved to the shelves. Any small piece of metal would do. The torch flame made complex geometric shadows against the shelves’ sundries. The Man scanned the nearest one quickly for a small gear or pipe.
The Man noticed suddenly that the floor vibrations had ceased. He noticed, because a lone shudder shook the room and the shelves’ contents. The Man turned. He looked at the curtain.
Anka hung before the door. The spear had fallen from the shadow; the tangle of lastiwire and the dragging coil launcher had been shed. The creature seemed to shiver in the air, an internal vibration The Man had not seen earlier. Black wet drops fell from the unfolding thing. Anka looked wounded, but with strength still for killing.
The Man took a single footstep toward the shelves. Anka reacted. It unfolded to the floor, releasing its ceiling hold. It spread wide across the open space. It seemed to spread its wings, though there were other black folds within the spread creature, as though Anka were made of pointed flat quills and devouring pockets. It slid over the insulation as it slid over the roof. It slipped a meter closer.
Three meters.
The Man moved the torch slowly to one side. The ordinary shadows merely shifted. Anka’s shadow seemed to draw closer to the light, swaying to follow it. A fold which must have been its head opened. The white axe-teeth showed. The pink tongue hissed silently at the flame.
The Man’s eyes flicked to the shelf. He caught the glinting silver of the spare spear. Anka stepped closer.
Two meters.
The Man tossed the torch to the floor at his feet. Anka threw itself upon the flame. The Man tracked its head as the light faded. He grabbed the spear in his numb left hand. The Man took aim at Anka’s tongue. He exhaled, and struck. The spear surged forth. The word, ‘Anka’, carved in its blade, stood out in the last flicker.
The Man went blind again. He felt the haft of the spear tear away from his hand. Then, searing agony tore through his left hip.
Zero meters.
The Man collapsed. Pain was all around. He crawled back from the place he had last seen Anka.
Another pain flashed on his shoulder, this time a blunt strike. The Man scrabbled backward, one-handed, dragging his hurt leg.
No fresh blow came. The Man held still. The floor continued to vibrate.
A moment passed.
The vibrations slowly died. The Man waited until they stopped entirely. Just as carefully as he had after waking, The Man crawled in the direction of the furnace.
He found the stones. They were cold now, though The Man’s sense of touch was near gone. He felt around inside until he discovered an irregular box shape with his dull hand. It was the box of matches. He pulled the box open with his mouth, managed to get a match between his teeth, and managed to strike it on the wall.
The Man crawled back into the chamber. The burning match trailed smoke up his face. He crawled to the nearest patch of floor insulation. He held the match against it with his mouth as long as he could.
Majestically the flame took. The Man pushed more insulation onto the budding flame. Then more. He held his hands close. He resisted the urge to stick his hand inside the pyre. Slowly, ever so slowly, blood crawled back to his extremities.
After an eternity of moments spent shivering at the flame, The Man looked across the room.
In the center of the room, on the floor, lay Anka. The Man’s spear stuck up as a long silver shaft from the black, crumpled, dead pile.
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