Loading ammunition soothed my jangled nerves. I’d killed someone. Not on purpose, but that wasn’t better. In more ways than one, that was worse. Huddled over a table in my shame, I focused on not skinning my fingers while keeping an ear tuned to the steady beat of bullets.
Outside, the continuous rattle of bullet fire slowed and then turned to an intermittent drip. No one in the monastery ran in screaming about how the attackers had cleared the building, so I assumed the monastery, or compound, was still secure. The occasional monk shimmied in and ferried a stack of magazines back to the front. But after the fire died off, the monk stopped grabbing bullets off the table. Those of us stuffing bullets into little metal boxes kept doing it.
Tia lay on the bench next to me, curled up with her feet on my thigh and her head on Malia’s lap. My sister occasionally murmured her discomfort, but at least she didn’t throw up. Malia’s hands moved deftly through the mounds of bullets. After a few minutes of practice, she loaded rounds faster than I’d ever managed. Glancing at the pile of full magazines next to her, I caught her eye and she winked at me.
It made me blush and lower my head. After killing several people with a dropped gun and my obvious gastric weakness, I couldn’t imagine Malia had much respect for me. I was deep in the midst of self-castigation when Tia sat up with a sudden movement.
“It’s here! Harlan we have to run! It’s here!” She grabbed my jacket and tugged on it as the whole room turned their heads to look at her. “Hurry, get grandpa!”
If not for the urgency in her eyes, I might have ignored her. But with as much guilt weighing me down, I could’t deny my sister’s fear. “Alright, Tia. Let’s go find him.”
Alaric waved us off — the need for bullet loaders was partially fabricated anyway — and Malia followed as we wove our way through the compound. Tia clung to my jacket, but refused to let me carry her.
We reached the outer section of the monastery in short order. As I reached my hand out to grab the handle of the door where Gramps was theoretically leading the troops, the ground shook under our feet. I scooped Tia up and ignored her protests while Malia pushed the door open. The air shimmered around me and suddenly my body had changed.
No longer was the ephemeral image of a white-skinned woman superimposed over my body, but my skin and bones warped to match that of Yeshe Tsogyal. It didn’t hurt, it was more like pressing a kink out of muscles or popping a stiff set of joints. One minute my body was tense with pressure and the next, I was free.
Malia swore in Chinese and I understood her perfectly. Blinking at me, she said, “What’s happened to you, Harlan?” As she spoke the words, her own body began to melt in to grains of sand. Horror covered Malia’s face as she raised her arms in front of her.
I reached for her dissipating body and my fingers slid through the cascade of sand. It felt warmer than it should have and softer than flour. The atmosphere continued to shimmer around us as the monastery walls shook.
Tia had stilled in my arms, but I could feel the soft pattern of her breath. I lead the way out of the door as Malia’s sand form followed me. Her features had turned waxen, having lost their sharp details, but she could apparently control her body in this form.
Outside the sky glowed purple with streaks of pink coursing through the air like tiny wind sprites. The moment we left the monastery, the building folded in on itself, like origami constructed by invisible hands. The shimmer in the air grew brighter as people ran from the collapsing building, inner rooms suddenly on the outside and hallways exposed to the air.
Between the folding building and the metal walls, the ground had changed into a flat mat of short grass. A meadow spread out to the rear of the monastery as a massive portal floated backward, away from us. Where the portal had not yet touched, the terrain looked much the same as it formerly did: typical central Texas forest poking between modern buildings. But each man-made structure the portal touched folded up like the monastery. Here and there, people sprung from the collapsing buildings and spilled out like cereal from a cup.
Where the portal passed, it left a rolling meadow that resembled something out of a cartoon. Tia shook now, sweating as if she had a fever. Next to me, Malia waved like a serpent on the soft grasses. What distress had troubled her previously had faded. Ripples passed over her sand body and she stared around us as the red robed monks gathered outside of their fallen monastery.
“What the fuck is going on here?” Alaric stepped forward, towering over the monks with his presence and literal height.
One of the monks turned to him, opened his palms and struck Alaric high in the gut, right under his lowest rib. The same monk turned back to us and pointed at me. “This is because of her!” I had no idea what he was talking about. Opening my mouth to protest that I had nothing to do with… whatever was going on around us, I snapped it shut when the line of monks facing us raised a line of bristling guns.
Malia shifted her body in moments, reacting faster than I could. All I managed to do was curl myself around Tia before the firing started. Despite the barrage of fire coming down on us, none of the bullets struck home. A field of sand shielded Tia and me from the gunfire as I opened my eyes to look at the scene.
Behind us, the fence around the monastery lay opened and shattered. Portions of the wrought iron had simply melted where other parts bent inward toward the meadow in which we stood. The strangest part of the fence was the way it created a perfect border for the meadow. On one side lay the mystical fairy land and the other, asphalt and a road.
“Move, Harlan!” Malia’s voice urged me forward as her sand body pushed me along. Around us, the monks had moved to get an angle around Malia and based on what I could see, there was a limit to how far she could spread her substance. I jogged through the gap in the fence, uncertain of where we were going or how we would escape the monks and their fury.
“What in the goddamned hell is happening here?” My grandfather’s voice rang out when I had one leg over the cinderblock fence base and one foot in the meadow. He charged between the oncoming wall of angry monks and Malia, who poured herself into a column and wavered between Gramps, me and the monks. “Why are you shooting at my fucking grandkids?”
Alaric tumbled forward, as if someone in the line of monks had tossed him ahead. He brushed himself off and turned toward the crowd, positioning himself just behind Gramps as he did.
“I am sorry Elder, but your grandchildren are cursed.” One of the monks, the one who’d hit Alaric in the gut, answered Gramps’s question.
“Oh, I see how it is, Liang.” Gramps swept his hands toward us. “Well, if they’re cursed, there’s nothing doing.”
I opened my mouth to shout at my grandfather. Liang and the other monks turned to face us, directing their attention away from Gramps. At the same time, my grandfather slung the fully automatic rifle on his shoulder down and opened fire into the line of monks. He shouted as he pulled the trigger. “You kids get the hell out of here!”
Bullets tore into the group of monks, spilling blood and sending the ones who’d been alert tumbling out of my grandfather’s arc. At the same time, Malia extended her body and shielded Tia and me from further attack while Alaric jogged through a hail of fire toward us.
I waited while Gramps unloaded a full magazine into the monks, unwilling to leave without him. But Alaric and the tower of sand dragged me out of the fence as the monks turned their fury toward my grandfather. Everyone in the meadow had lost their minds, my grandfather especially. But my shouts of “stop it” were drowned beneath a sea of automatic weapons fire.
Without Malia and Alaric, Tia and I would have died right there. I was still too stunned to move on purpose. While Malia deflected the bullets that flew our way, Alaric pulled me back. He cursed at us as I watched my grandfather drop. A sword pierced his chest and a series of bullets danced him back like a marionette on a child’s stage.
None of this was real. These people were supposed to help us, not hurt us. They turned their rage onto my little group as the portal that had sucked their monastery up shifted back toward the fence. It stopped short of the assembled monks and began to belch forth clouds of fantasy creatures. Unicorns, fairies, multi-colored sheep, and even more alien beasts roared forth and trampled the monks.
In seconds, they forgot about us or the sparse crowd of survivors outside of the fence and redirected their hostilities to the monsters emerging from the portal. None of the survivors tried to intercept us, lucky them. If they had tried something, I could easily imagine Malia smothering them in a mound of sand.
Alaric collapsed at the opposite side of the street. When he stopped pushing me I followed suit. Tia shivered still and I clutched her to me. My family had dropped down by one in the blast of a wall of firearms. I wasn’t about to lose my little sister.
“Goddamnit!” Alaric turned and swore with his arms flailing behind him at the former monastery. The monks were fully engaged in a battle against the hordes tumbling out of the portal, so they paid us no attention. By then the battle had been joined by centaurs and wild men with hides wrapped over their shoulders and with an extra eye in the center of their foreheads.
Arrows flew out from the melee and I realized the monks wouldn’t last long. When the fantasy monsters finished with the monks, I had a pretty good idea of where they’d go next.
“We need to get out of here.” I grabbed Alaric’s arm and he swung his fist around and hit me.
The blow rang my bell. I stumbled and almost dropped Tia, only my determination to keep from losing any more family members maintained my grip on her. “Who the fuck are you?” Alaric spat and advanced as Malia interposed herself between Alaric and me.
Her face formed in the column of sand and she said, “That’s Harlan, idiot. Now stop this and help us decide where to run next!” A sand arm rose and pointed toward the former monastery. “If we stay here, we’re all dead!”
The monks held their own against the wall of mythical creatures for longer than we would have. Their line crumbled before it broke. Alaric stood watching monks break ranks and flee, some of those run down by flanking lizardmen and centaurs, for just long enough for the line of monks to shatter. A giant, only as tall as one of the nearby houses, smashed his way through the remaining monks and bellowed with enough force to rattle the windows behind us.
We tore away then, the only thing keeping Alaric and I together was Malia’s body of sand. Here and there a few people huddled between the buildings, trying to take shelter from whatever new horror stalked them as the world changed. In less than a day, the houses and businesses on either side of the street had either been looted or boarded up with planks.
Burning piles of trash and debris acted like a landing strip for our path as we sprinted from the monsters behind us. With the monks no longer holding back the tide, the broken fence did nothing. With Tia in my arms, I could hardly spare a glance behind me, but the crash of shattering glass and screams of the people who’d chosen hiding over flight pinged the locations of the monsters as surely as a radar.
Alaric wheeled his arms and skidded to a stop, almost losing his footing from the loose gravel of the road. Splitting around him like a curtain, Malia surged forward and stopped. Rather than turn around, she produced a new face on her back and said, “What’re you doing?”
“There! Go there!” A gap led away from Alaric’s outstretched hand as he shook it and turned. The path he’d taken led down an empty alley way filled with toppled trashcans and smashed pieces of shrubbery. From the evidence, I could only guess at what happened here before us.
As if to answer my unspoken speculation, a masked man appeared at he end of the alley wielding a shovel like a club. Alaric dodged under it, Malia let it pass through her, and it flew straight toward Tia.
Golden sparks struck from a blue nimbus of light as the shovel met a round sphere of what could only be magical energy before me. The blue sphere echoed with the sound of a gong as the man dropped his shovel and scrambled away.
Alaric and Malia both turned to regard me with wonder as a number of other people filled in where the man escaped from us. Some of them held shotguns in unsteady hands while others clutched kitchen knives or rakes.
“Stay back! We’re not afraid of you!” I could have laughed at the old woman’s declaration, if she hadn’t worn a look of naked fury on her face. Her nose tilted into the air and she peered down at us through a pair of spectacles that made me thing of a nineteen-fifties schoolmarm. A mitten swathed her right hand, which held a fire poker and her left a semi-automatic pistol.
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Before either Malia or I could speak, Alaric said, “there are a street full of monsters out there that you should be afraid of. And they are coming.”
The woman’s shoulders twitched and she side-eyed a pair of men standing next to her. Identical twins, the men took off in separate directions like reflections of each other and scrambled up the side of the nearby buildings.
Malia shrank down as we stood off with the small collection of people while I searched faces for one that belonged to the people who’d engaged the monks before the portal open up. Most of the people here were older, tending toward senior citizens, though a few kids stared at us between adults.
Malia’s clothes returned as her form resolved back into her human one accompanied by the swishing of sand. Gasps broke out from the onlookers, though many of them remained silent while they stared at me or the blue globe I held up to protect Tia.
“I hate to be rude, but we should hurry.” Alaric spoke right as a crash sounded from behind us, loud enough to shake the ground and punch me lightly in the back.
“They’re sure as shit telling the truth, Maude.” The twin who’d taken up a position to look down our path shouted from the rooftop.
Maude, sucked on her teeth, stared between our group, and nodded. “Show these folks in.”
An older man with a head of white hair and a pleasant grin that ran counter to the fear and anxiety around us, motioned with the shotgun in his hand and pointed the way with the barrel. Though he swung the weapon around with an apparent lack of care, he never once pointed it at us or anyone else standing around. As the group filed out, I was struck by how few of them they were. No more than one line of humanity had blocked the children off while I huddled behind my globe. I realized then that the body of Yeshe Tsogyal was much shorter than I was normally. And I had no idea of how to return to my normal body. I wasn’t sure I wanted to in the moment.
The group moved with us between and at the back, as if they would gladly sacrifice us to the approaching mob if necessary. But once Maude started moving, they shuffled along with near-military precision.
We entered a concrete building through a side door. The old man with the shotgun held the door for us as we filed in. He eyed me with a raised eyebrow and flared nostril as I ducked through. I’d only realized how much shorter I was than normal, so I continued to move like a tall, fat, and gangly teenager.
When he shut the door behind us, the old man wrapped a chain around the handle and shoved a metal bar through to make sure. Alaric paused in flight as the old man latched a padlock through the chains. “Is that the only way out of here?”
“Nope.” The old man didn’t say another word as he turned and followed the faint lights in the floor down the hallway.
It looked like a combination hospital and hotel. It smelled like old people. At once I knew we’d entered a retirement home. The odd part about it that I noticed right away was the preponderance of heavy metal doors with equally stout locks on the outsides.
“What is this place?” I spoke aloud without realizing it.
The old man turned to me still wearing a grin and shrugged. “Don’t know.”
How could that be possible? I didn’t press him, something of the wildness in his eyes suggested he’d spoken nothing but the bare truth. We crossed through a large opened area with booths on either side cut off from a set of windows in the front by a large metal grate. Though most of the windows had been shattered, I could still read from the remains of the sign: North Austin Hospice.
A nursing home. But what kind of nursing home had metal locks on the doors and an emergency security gate? Neither Maude nor her coterie paused to explain themselves as they shuffled deeper into the building. Outside, the sound of rampaging beasts rose and fell with the screams of their victims. The smell of burning rubber waged a brief war with old people sweat as Alaric, Malia and I followed.
Several doors had been stopped open and our shotgun toting escort did not pause to close them. Less than twenty minutes out and I already missed the monastery. At least it didn’t reek of elderly, unwashed bodies.
A few doors into the nursing home, Maude turned and didn’t look back.
“Where are they taking us?” Once again, the words leaked out and exposed the massive shard of fear lurking in my heart. The voice both belonged to me in the way that I knew I’d spoken the words and did not belong to me as the tone and timbre of the words issued from a woman’s voice. Strange and stranger, I didn’t mind it; I preferred this voice.
Malia grabbed my hand. “They won’t hurt us.”
How could she know that? But when I glanced at her, she’d locked her jaw into a stubborn grimace. Nothing short of the building falling on us would stop Malia. And with the way her body changed, I wasn’t sure that would be enough. With her hand clutching my free hand, I felt the gravity of her certainty travel through me over our connection.
Tia stirred then, rubbed her eyes, and looked at me. “Harlan?”
Looking over at Malia, I shrugged and said, “Yup kiddo, it’s me.”
“Good.” She pulled the white shawl flapping around me over her face and turned to face toward my arm. As far as I could tell, she wasn’t feverish or shaking anymore. Instead, she collapsed into a deep sleep after the single word.
Maude stopped at a door and extended her arm through it. “Welcome to our base. I bet that giant will have some real trouble getting in here.”
After the titan and the tentacled horror, I wasn’t quite as willing as Maude to tempt fate. “Thank you?”
She nodded and I turned. This was a pool and exercise area, underground to make heating and cooling the pool easier. No windows opened to the exterior of the building and, as far as I could tell, no other exits led out.
“What are yall doing here?”
Several of the men and women who’d met us upstairs gathered at tables set before the walls. They heaped cans of food, electric toaster ovens, and a dozen other items in the area. The pool itself was in the process of draining, as if the people here were drinking it. Gods I hoped not; the water would be toxic from the amount of chlorine in there. At least I was pretty sure drinking the water would be a bad idea.
“We’re getting ready.” Maude waved to the shotgun escort, who closed the door behind us.
“For what?” I exchanged a look with Alaric, who nodded at me.
“For the next wave,” Maude looked me up and down, and glanced over at Malia. “You need to talk to Whinny before we set you up with a bunk.”
“Whinny?”
Maude didn’t answer my question, she only motioned for me to follow her deeper into the pool area. Where an office door opened into a small administrative nook, a group of armed men sat watching us. “In there.”
“What’s in there?”
“Whinny’s in there. You need to meet her.” She waved again. “Go on now.” Alaric started to lead the way, but Maude grabbed his arm. “Not you. Those three. You stay out here.”
Alaric opened his mouth to protest, setting his feet for a battle, when I grabbed his arm. This close to the darkened room, I could feel Whinny’s presence through the walls. Maybe I was hallucinating. Maybe I’d finally given into the changes of the world and accepted my own madness. But in that moment, a massive presence sat right on the other side of the door sending waves of calm and interest out like a psychic pulse. “I think we should listen to her.”
My words failed to convince Alaric but the small group of gun toting locals did. The moment he tensed, every one of them lowered their guns to the ready, prepared to end Alaric instantly.
“Fine. Don’t die.”
I snorted at him and proceeded onward, first among the group.
As soon as I entered the doorframe, the smell of old people vanished. When I’d stood upon the mountain and first seen Yeshe Tsogyal, I’d smelled the same incense. Now I knew it to be sandalwood and frankincense, mixed with the heady notes of citrus and hemp.
Rain beat the roof overhead, tapping out a wordless mantra, though I knew there to be at least two floors between us and the actual roof. Light flowed out of the darkness, glowing from the surface of the woman’s skin who sat crosslegged on a desk at the opposite wall.
“Whin…” whatever question I might have formed died on my lips at the woman’s appearance. The edges of her body glowed with a golden yellow light while the center, the trunk, glowed with the same white radiance my own body exuded. She sat nude on the desk, but the glow obscured her breasts and groin. A semi-circle of bright gold surrounded her head.
A face stared at us when we walked in. Tears flowed from both of its eyes, from the right the tears were red but thinner than blood. Milk flowed form the left eye. As I watched her, two more pairs of eyes opened on her brow. The first pair were black, the way Yeshe’s eyes looked in my visions. The second pair were pure white, as if she were blinded by cataracts.
Tilting her face as I knelt down, her whole head swiveled like a nightmare from a horror movie. The golden effulgence surrounding her held me in place like it had bound my limbs in chains. Fangs protruded from the next face to stare at me. Those fangs rose high on the figure’s face, high enough to almost block her red-sclera’d eyes. Her whole face was black, not in the manner of melanin, but black as coal, black enough to absorb a portion of the light streaming off of her body.
As those red eyes stared into me, they stripped away the fear and found nuggets of truth in my soul. For a moment, my body flickered between that of Yeshe’s and Harlan. Whinny blinked at me and a voice spoke into my head.
“Man who is woman. What will you choose?”
“Choose?” I spoke aloud, but my voice echoed off the walls as if they’d expanded hundreds of feet in either direction. “What do I have to choose?”
The black-faced figure frowned at me, its tucks appeared to grow as it did. “If you will not choose, it is the trial for you. I am sorry, Harlan who is Yeshe.”
“Trial what trial…” My words floated off into the oblivion as I found myself suspended in a void. To my right sat Tia, playing as she had when she was five. This had been one of my favorite memories of her, the way she looked up to me and made me certain that anything I believed I could do, I could.
Mother had given her a play set of makeup with little plastic lipsticks and powder brushes. I remembered how jealous I was of those toys. Tia giggled as I watched her, staring up at me with utter confidence. She reached up to hand me the lipstick I’d been staring at.
Now the memory twisted in my gut. Instead of accepting the toy from my little sister, I’d knocked it away. Standing there in my vision, I understood why I’d done that. As recently as yesterday I’d been unprepared to accept certain facts about myself. But here, having worn another woman’s body for the better part of an hour, I was ready to accept it.
I couldn’t change the memory, convert myself from a churlish refusal of my sister’s offer. What had happened had happened. But in the moment, hanging there in the void, I reached out with my own pale glowing hand and stopped myself from knocking Tia’s hand away. In that impossible instant, I felt tremendous relief. I’d done more than refuse to acknowledge myself there, I’d wounded Tia’s trust in me.
A blazing star formed at the point of contact between my male arm and my female arm. There in the void, the light grew bright enough that I had to flinch back. When the light cleared and I could see again, I stood alone in my bathroom staring into my mirror. I couldn’t place the specific instance of staring from the way my posture leaned or from the way the light struck through the narrow bathroom window to my right. But I had just left the shower and had dried myself on my towel.
My body repulsed me, then and now. Not only was my mass absurd and grotesque, but I hated the root between my legs, loathed the way I had to scrape stubble away from my cheeks every day. Nothing about me looked right and until a few months ago, I’d thought I despised my corpulence. But there in the mirror now, I recognized what it was exactly I despised. This body was the wrong one and I would do anything I could to find the right one.
Tears flowed from my own eyes there, as they had so many times in the same position in my bathroom.
“What do I do?” The echo played back and forth, deeper and longer than the echo of my bathroom.
“Choose.” The voice spoke to my mind, unlike the dripping from my shower or my own voice, the mind addressing me did not echo through the world.
“I hate myself. I don’t want to choose that…” As I spoke, my body exploded in a burst of red, gold, and blue light. When the bursting colored faded, I was left with a body whose skin looked bleach white, like the sun had never once kissed its surface. I had narrow hips and small breasts, and I was a head and a half shorter than when I stood with my girth jigging in the steam. Black hair, smooth and shiny, flowed like molten obsidian down the side of my shoulder. The ever present white shawl met my hair right above my breast. Where it had covered my modesty before, the shawl parted as if to allow me the full view of my form. A small spot of black hair lay between my legs where my root had been plucked away.
I did not miss it.
“This is what I choose.”
“This is harder. You will carry the weight of many lives upon your shoulders.” Contempt. The voice held little other than scorn for me, as if it were sure I would fail.
“That’s fine, anything is better than… the other.”
“You will be both stronger and weaker.” The voice’s tone carried a note of warning.
“I don’t care about those things. Please, don’t make me go back to the other one.”
“Pain will follow you, pain inflicted upon you and upon those you love.” The voice pitied me now, it’s tones begging me to make a different choice.
“Wait, I don’t want to hurt the people who depend on me. I want to protect them.” As much as it hurt, as much as I loathed myself as a man, I wouldn’t take on this form at the expense of others.
“Good. You follow the path of wisdom. Harlan who was Yeshe. Yeshe who is now.”
Fire roared through my veins, igniting the nerves in raging waves of pain. A figure stood before me, with three distinct heads. Flames billowed from the two visible faces, one crying and one filled with rage, and that fire burned at my very soul. Below the waist, the figure’s black, gold, and red skin merged into a single pyramidal shape, like a dagger with three sides. The blade spun independently of the figure’s top and dug into a series of stacked figures. The top one had a grotesque face with suppurating sores lining its cheeks and forehead with horns poking out right above the sores. Its skin was red. Below that writhing figure lay another with a pig’s head and a man’s body. Below those two lay four more people, all of them pierced by the three sided dagger.
The pain of the fire had faded as I lost my awareness in the pile of humanity beneath the dagger’s point. With that freedom, I heard the voice again. “You must pick a name, child.”
I’d always liked Harlan just fine, but I knew it wouldn’t fit me anymore. Neither would Yeshe. “Harriet…. Harriet Yeshe.”
Words in a script I could not decipher sprung up between me and the dancing dagger woman. Like neon splitting space, they traced themselves across my field of vision and left trailers behind. With the force of a punch to my chest, those words slammed into me and left me dazed in the moment.
“It is done, Harriet Yeshe. Beware the dwellers in the lake. They mean you no harm now, but soon their hunger will overwhelm them. Do not allow yourself to share my fate.”
I blinked and took a step back. Malia caught me with both hands on my shoulder. Sitting before me was an old woman with straggly white hair spread out from her crown like a tent, or a maypole. She flashed me a swarthy-toothed grin and for a moment, the dagger woman appeared superimposed over her frame.
Tia sat up in my arms at full attention, as if she listened to the woman speak. But the moment I righted myself, Tia shook her body and sniffled. “It’s nice to meet you too, Whinny. I wish you could come with us.”
“Is she talking to you?” I stared down at Tia with wonder evident in my voice.
“Of course, Harriet. Isn’t she talking to you?”
I shivered as my kid sister looked through me and addressed me by a name she had no way of knowing.