Atilan

     Well, not gone, but smashed into splinters on the ground wasn’t much better. It made grim sense. It wasn’t built to deal with the wind. Nothing was built to deal with this wind.

     The only bright spot was that it looked like everyone managed to walk away. But where had they—

     “Atilan.”

     Roxton was grabbed by the back of the collar and pulled, which was odd because his back had been to a cliff face, and then pulled again, into a cave.

     It was cold. It was damp. It was not a cave that was at all fit for long-term habitation. But it was shelter from the wind, so the village had fled to it.

     “Atilan,” the Honoured Mother said, showing Roxton to her Acara assistant, P’Tunka.

     “Kiaan! Why were you out in the storm? Please, just rest.” P’Tunka helped the Honoured Mother sit down on a low rock padded with a blanket, and that was when Roxton stopped registering Kiaan as the Honoured Mother, and started seeing her as an ageing woman. If anyone was in charge here, it was probably P’Tunka.

     Roxton looked at the cave. All at once, the devastation hit him.

     This was nearly the whole population of the island, and it couldn’t be more than one hundred people.

     “Atilan!”

     A pink blur tackled him, and somehow the shooting pain it sent through his knee was a relief.

     “Tui!”

     “Rii tupawut!

      You ran into the storm, and then it got bigger,” Tui sobbed. “We thought you were gone! And then the white bird came and tried to take Papa away, but Jordie would not let him!”

     “Jordie? Is he okay?”

     Tui took him to a bedroll slung into the corner. Jordie lay sprawled out on it, eyes half-shut, his midsection bound up with bandages.

     “Hi, Mr. Colchester,” he wheezed. “Can I borrow your bag for a second?”

     Roxton immediately pulled out his strongest healing potion. Jordie drank half before stopping. “You’re not healed yet,” Roxton insisted.

     “I know. Other people got hurt. They need it, too.”

     Everywhere in the cave, there were people cringing, clutching limbs, holding each others’ hands, and where was Matuk?

     Matuk was poised over a bowl of somewhat-cooked eggs and a random fruit — dinner.

     “...Why are you eating dinner?” Roxton said, so jarred that he forgot to be upset for a moment. “It’s the apocalypse out there.”

     “Tuikutat is out playing. She needs to come home and eat dinner.”

     He looked outside.

     “Tuikutat always comes home when I make dinner,” he said, staring out blankly at the end of his civilisation.

     Roxton grabbed him by the shoulders.

     “Matuk. Matuk, look at me. Tui is here. Injured people are here. You need to calm down and do your job.”

     “No, no, no, Tui is gone,” he muttered.

     “You’re scaring me.”

     “Everyone is gone. Everyone is gone.”

     “Matuk, I’m going to deal with my father.”

     Matuk stopped muttering. His gaze didn’t clear up, but he did stop muttering.

     “That’s all you want, right? But I need help to make that happen. I need you, and I need you to calm down.”

     Matuk’s breathing started to slow.

     “Nobody’s gone, but people are hurt. What’s the first thing we can do?”

     “Attend to anyone who cannot walk,” he forced out.

     “Okay. Okay, let’s do that.”

     Jordie and a few broken legs fit that description. By the time they were treating the walking wounded, Matuk had gotten his bearings.

     “We need to tell P’Tunka what has happened,” said Matuk, winding a bandage around a little boy’s arm. “I do not know where your father is, but he will find us, and he will try to strike down every last one of us.”

     “Alright, we just have to convince the regent to help us fight the guy trying to annihilate his village. How hard could that be?”

     ———

     “What do you mean, ‘no?!’” Roxton shouted.

     P’Tunka set his jaw, his red-painted face shadowed by the fire he tended. Many people were huddled around it. A baby cried. “I mean ‘no.’ Have we not suffered enough from your presence? Must we also fight your battles for you?”

     “It’s your battle too! It’s everyone’s battle! If I asked everyone in this cave to raise their hand if they’ve been victimised by Roxton Colchester II, everyone would raise their hands except the people who physically can’t.”

     P’Tunka sighed and tried to walk away. Roxton grabbed his arm.

     “How dare you—”

     “Are you not mad?” he demanded. “Are you not angry that some guy and his dropout friend is gonna end your civilisation?”

     “Leave us be.”

     “Tell me you’re mad!”

     “YES, I AM MAD!”

     All eyes turned to them.

     “I am mad! We are mad! Behind our masks of hospitality, we bared our teeth, and fumed, and screamed at him to leave us alone! We have all been unceasingly mad for forty years! So leave us be!”

     P’Tunka turned to walk away again and was stopped.

     “Papa?” Ain said, his young face twisted with terror. “Is that true? Are we in danger?”

     “I — Ain, I—”

     Ain ran off.

     “You’ve been angry for forty years,” Roxton said. “If you stop now, your kids aren’t going to get that chance.”

     P’Tunka dragged his hand down his face, as though trying to wipe something blinding from his eyes.

     “Fine, then. One very trained, very armed, very determined man,” he muttered. “Against one hundred untrained, unarmed, injured villagers.”

     “We are armed!”

     Everyone turned to Tui, who was holding a big rock over her head.

     “WE HAVE ROCKS!” she proclaimed.

     The tension snapped. Like a balloon losing air, everyone burst out laughing.

     “On a more serious note, I have this,” Matuk said from across the cave, pulling a large bonesaw out of his bag.

     His current patient added, “I salvaged knives from the rubble to cook with — don’t hold that thing so close to my face.” (“Sorry,” said Matuk.)

     “I can see if something from the hunter’s lodge survived the fall!” someone shouted.

     Someone else said, “Rocks are not a bad idea, but perhaps we should sharpen them first…”

     The cave filled with talking, motion, people helping. They seemed alive again.

     P’Tunka let out a breath. He could’ve tried to make everyone stop, but he seemed to know that it would be like trying to stop a tidal wave.

     “What if we lose?” he said.

     Roxton shrugged. “Then our options are to fall in a hole, or to fall beating up the guy who put us there.”

     “Eh. I might as well laugh.”

     ———

     /eye-n/

      noun

     Son.

     —Lutari Dictionary Vol. I

     ———

     “It’s going to be hard to maneuver in that,” Roxton muttered, peeking out of the cave.

     The villagers were now sifting through the rubble of the village, pulling out kitchen knives from their homes, bows and arrows from the hunting lodge, and any stick or rock off the ground they thought they could sharpen. It was inspiring. It was also not a very good battlefield.

     Matuk looked out at the same, back from persuading Tui (still grumpy that no one took her “hit him with rocks” idea seriously) to help mix paint. “Not a problem. We do not maneuver.”

     “Right, it’s a jungle.”

     “I suppose. But there is also a saying — manoeuvre means to chase someone into a corner, yes?”

     “That’s the idea.”

     “A Petpet with its back against the wall will fight with everything it has. A Petpet that does not, will not. Ah — tuut tamunta ma, P’Tunka wanted me to tell you the plan.”

     And then Matuk did that.

     “That’s diabolical.”

     “Is ‘diabolical’ good?”

     “Yeah. Can I add one thing, though…?”

     And then Roxton told him about it.

     “That is evil!”

     “Is that good?”

     “Yes!” Matuk threw back his head and laughed, the first real laugh Roxton had heard out of him. “Ha. Being a cornered Petpet is more funny than I thought it would be.”

     Roxton let himself smile a little bit. One way or another, this was going to be over soon.

     “Let’s hope everything we have is enough.”

     ———

     Roxton Colchester II approached the village with a sabre in one hand, a machete in the other, and a net-shooter on his back.

     It would’ve been easier if he could get ahold of the medicine man back by the Pools, but the other two had stepped in. The Shenkuuvian was easy enough to dispatch. Then the little girl popped out of her hiding place and clobbered him with a rock. By the time he woke up, they were all gone.

     The village had been smashed into pieces no bigger than toothpicks.

     Colchester made a sound of irritation. They’d probably left the carnage untouched so he could trip over it.

     “I know you’re in there!” he shouted to the wind. “Hand over the medicine man!”

     “No,” whispered a voice behind him.

     Colchester whipped his white head around to face the speaker, but saw nothing at first, only a trace movement in the treeline that only an experienced adventurer would’ve noticed.

     He repeated himself, louder this time. “I said hand him over, and no one will get hurt! Now, come out and have a civilised conversation!”

     “There is no one,” said the speaker, stepping out, “left to get hurt.”

     A Green Lutari slowly, staggeringly, moved towards him. The Lutari’s head flopped loosely back between her shoulders, as though the neck attached to it were…

     The Lutari came into focus.

     He saw the k’tiin perched on her head. He saw her eyes staring, glassy and unmoving, into nothingness.

     Deep down, Colchester knew that this was always a possibility. That if the ancestors weren’t already real, that this woman would make them real with the sheer force of her anger.

     “Erin,” he said evenly. “Tell me where the medicine man is.”

     “He is gone.”

     Movement from the village. Slowly, Colchester turned his gaze.

     “Everyone is gone,” she said, her voice like an exhalation.

     There were more voices now, from behind him.

     “Why?”

     “Papa, it hurts…”

     “My legs!”

     “Lies,” Colchester hissed. “Every time the weather gets worse, there’s always somewhere you people hide. A sliver of beach, a convenient hole — the ancestors saying ‘I love you,’ or somesuch nonsense.”

     Erin laughed hollowly.

     “The ancestors are the weather. And the weather decided that it does not love us more than it hates you.”

     Cold hands grasped at his ankles. Colchester turned so he had eyes on both the horrors approaching him and began to back away.

     “You’re talking nonsense. This place was a festering pit without me! I made a deal with the island. I made this place a paradise.”

     “A threat is not a deal and a window display is not a paradise.”

     Erin was leading the mob now — a crawling, writhing, screaming mass.

     “I took care of you!”

     “A businessman taking care of his merchandise. You sold our home.”

     Step.

     “You sold our culture.”

     Step.

     “And then you sold our children.”

     Step.

     “Stop right there!”

     Colchester put his sabre to Erin’s crooked throat. She had a lack of reaction to this that was only found in bodies that had spent years acclimating to intense danger.

     “You’re already gone,” he said.

     The blade shook against Erin’s throat.

     “What could you possibly want from me?”

     Erin slowly lifted her head. Her narrowed eyes met Colchester’s.

     “Your life, Ataulat.”

     And then Colchester fell off the cliff.

     The Lutari leading the mob collapsed to their knees the moment it was all over, exhausted and overwhelmed.

     “Ow,” they said, rubbing their knee.

     A bit of green paint came off. And then the rain started, and all the green paint came off, leaving a very orange and very tired Roxton Colchester III on the cliff.

     “I should call my old theater teacher,” he muttered, taking off the fake k’tiin Tui had built out of painted wood debris and flopping forward into the grass. “Turns out I can act if my life depended on it.”

     The villagers in the undead mob picked themselves up and washed the mud, red paint, and fake NeoPox marks off their bodies with the rain. Matuk crouched down next to Roxton.

     “Strange that the rain started when you did that.”

     “I don’t know, mate, I’m not an expert on cursed storms,” Roxton said, muffled by the fact that he was face down in the dirt.

     “...Would you like me to carry you now?”

     “Yes, please.”

     “Look, Papa!” Tui said. “The storm is clearing!”

     “That is—”

     Matuk stopped.

     “It is not clearing,” he said, and yanked Tui off her feet. “It is descending.”

To be continued…