The Coming of the Anthrops
by Harrison Kim
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
“Good grief!” Arms exclaimed. “You must be the Hairy Man I’ve read about in books!”
“Some call me Bigfoot, some call me Sasquatch,” the Hairy Man replied.
“Your mouth is still,” Zero-Arms noted. “Yet you speak through it like an unshaven telepath. And I have this ESP attribute myself, with the soul of the Anthrops marinating within me.”
“The alien molecular presence of the Anthrops has made itself manifest within every sentient creature on earth,” Hairy Man agreed. “Some call it conscience, some call it mercy.”
“I’m carrying a heavy liquid sample of the soul, to transfer to the appropriate feeding area,” Zero-Arms replied, and the Hairy Man nodded and moved his chubby, fuzzy palm across Zero-Arms’ stomach.
“I feel the new slime creator about to be born in new radiation rock,” Hairy Man communicated. “I salute you for your sacrifice.”
Zero-Arms wasn’t sure what that meant, but he grinned with his great, lipless mouth, showing his perfect triangular incisors.
“May I do a safety test also?” asked Bartholemew, and Hairy Man nodded.
Bartholemew swiftly touched the creature’s furry body with his long, febrile fingers, testing with the sensitive ends of his nails, which could detect any lies or deceptions.
“There is something funny here,” he said. “I perceive something which is not true.”
Hairy Man grinned. “What is not true?” he asked. “Do you not believe the fact of my limbs in front of your being?”
“There’s something rather absurd,” said Bartholemew. “I’d say, as the humans do, that it doesn’t add up.”
“It’s okay, my friend,” Zero-Arms declared. “Nothing is one hundred per cent perfect. Everything has a kind of mutancy, is this not so?”
Bartholemew nodded, but he drew his fingers round in a circle, as he usually did when caught between two opposing thoughts. Finally, he retracted most of his knuckles and nodded.
“I will guide you appropriately to the atom bomb silos,” Hairy Man told them. “After you’ve finished your lunch.”
“I’ve eaten enough twigs,” said Zero-Arms. “On to the nuclear facility.”
Hairy Man leaped upright, jogged straight up the hill behind them, leading the two friends to the bottom of a cliff. Hairy Man walked straight up the cliff edge, standing horizontal, his face looming down at Zero-Arms and Bartholemew.
“That is a great circus move,” said the assistant.
Hairy Man spoke. “Here you see a crack in the rock. Arms, this is where you must use your prehensile, diamond-hard jaw to open it wider.”
Zero-Arms pushed his face to the crack and moved his chin forward. He jackhammered and drilled while the fog kept rising around them, keeping them from the sight of drones and cameras.
“Reach In, Bartholemew,” Hairy Man communicated, “and pull back on any levers you might find.”
Bartholemew did, with his short little arms, on the ends of which his fingers clicked out long and slender, the six different sets of knuckles ensuring a very extensive reach.
“I have found the gears you mention,” he stated, and as he pulled the crack in the rock yawned wider, a shriek sounding as it opened.
“Let’s get down to the bomb silos,” Hairy Man said.
“You seem so eager,” said Bartholemew, “to approach these destructive missiles.”
“I want them eaten,” Hairy Man replied, “and turned to peace slime.”
“There’s an odd rotten scent upon the wind,” Bartholemew noted, lifting his head from the opening. “Like burning.”
“I smell nothing,” said Zero Arms. “And I have the largest nose. Open the gate, my friend.”
Bartholemew shifted the rock levers, assuring the cliff crack became wide enough for his very large companion. Soon, all three creatures stood in an oval tunnel.
“Close the gap, so the human authorities do not detect us,” Hairy Man told Bartholemew, who with his sensitive finger ends easily manipulated the levers in reverse, and the yawning hole closed. Only the ghost of a whisper seemed to emanate from its shutdown.
“The rocks are like clams,” Zero-Arms said, as he lifted his foot to his forehead to turn on his headlamp. “This whole mountain is like seafood to the Fluid Anthrops.”
The walls contained the same red-purple hardened cobalt-iron granite as the original Anthrops cave beneath Mt. Usakam.
“We must get as close to the atomic bombs as possible, for the Anthrops’ soul release to have its best effect,” Hairy Man told them.
The booming in Zero Arms’ stomach grew louder, pushing him forward, guiding him along the side of the tunnel towards a dull, cloudy glow in the distance. The tunnel widened ahead of them, and appeared to close behind.
“As if it’s alive,” Bartholemew remarked.
Hairy Man told him: “These mountains are indeed organic and sensitive; they’re like plants really, and they respond to the soul of the Anthrops walking through them.”
As he communicated and Arms translated, Bartholemew wondered How can this be? for he knew nothing goes perfectly well. He knew, from years of practicing his circus tricks, that there was always a catch or a flaw but, then again, he thought, Too much thinking can bring about suspicion in itself.
The three hikers reached a point overlooking the silos, the slender missiles pointing up to the sky, a dot the size of a ship’s porthole in the mountain opening far above.
“Now, how am I going to release this slime?” wondered Zero-Arms.
Drones flew around the missiles, which stood erect and glowing in an ethereal purple light. From behind him, there came a grunt. He turned to see the Hairy Man making noises, although it didn’t seem to be the Hairy Man anymore. The Sasquatch creature roiled and rolled around in a shaking, roiling fit, and its body jutted out horizontally from the ledge above them.
A bang sounded. Hairy Man’s head burst apart, the hair and scalp cascaded down into the emptiness beside the missiles. Zero-Arms watched a bald dome emerging like a boiled egg from what used to be Hairy Man’s cranium.
“What’s that noise, my hombre?” Bartholemew yelled, jumping on Zero Arms’ back, wrapping his feet backwards around the huge creature’s stomach while extending his fingers outward, ready to defend.
From all around them, seeping out of the rocks, slid two-dimensional Sasquatch creatures, as the former Hairy Man’s head formed anew as a giant bald baby cranium on a Bigfoot body.
“I am H-man, Lord of the Atom Bomb!” the big baby announced. “Created from the missile mass. As you can see, my head itself is shaped like a rocket top!”
Zero-Arms yelled, “Who the hell are these creatures?!” as the outlines of the two-dimensional figures clustered around him.
Bartholemew jumped on Arms’ head.
H-man’s infant mouth opened, showing a gumless cavern, as he communicated telepathically. “These are the Bigfoot mutants created from the toxicity of this atom cavern, as both you and I, Zero-Arms, were created from the H-bomb!”
H-man jumped from his horizontal position and placed himself in front of Zero-Arms. His two-dimensional Sasquatch henchmen gathered around on their haunches, their mouths agape, and inside those mouths roiled many tiny red suckers. The central parts of their bodies appeared entirely transparent.
“You will throw up your inner Anthrops!” H-man commanded, his mouth making a high whine that reminded Zero-Arms of a terrified horse. “To be consumed by my atom bomb army!”
Zero-Arms breathed deep, to protect the alien soul in his belly but also to gird for battle by tightening his massive stomach muscles. He heard the booming sound of the Anthrops within him, but he could not hear what it said.
“What would be the advantage of eating the fluid essence?” Arms asked, his immensely square and blocky head turned as far to one side as it could, while his long spider legs tensed.
H-man yowled, and his toothless gums smacked as he communicated nonverbally to Zero-Arms.
“You giant green freak! Do you think we want to live forever as mutant psychopaths in this atom bomb cave? Don’t you think we want a conscience?”
“Yes indeed,” said the baby-headed creature, continuing telepathically, his mouth making a high whining sound. “We should be the eternal guardians of this place!” he insisted, his body shimmering horizontal on the rock wall. “Created from the wicked mutant side of the human soul yet infused with alien Anthrops conscience! It’s the perfect match!”
Now, Arms heard what his inner Anthrops were trying to tell him. The rumble came from his stomach, and out his own mouth.
“Jump into the bombs,” they commanded. “And we will consume them.”
He looked over at the pit wherefrom the shiny missiles poked, all surrounded in green glowing light, created from humankind’s fear of itself, the genius of human intelligence and science that threatened all enemies within and without with total, absolute destruction. He glanced at H-man and his radioactively possessed two-dimensional Sasquatches. They existed tormented, created out of human fear; all they wanted was conscience relief, to take in the Anthrops’ essence and find peace. Yet he must obey the booming within him.
“I will jump,” he told Bartholemew. “You must leave my side, my friend.”
“I will go with you,” Bartholemew told him. “I am as a part of you as are the Anthrops.”
H-man sensed what was about to happen. “You must not leap!” he signalled, advancing towards them, then stopping, waving his long furry Sasquatch arms. His baby head bobbled; his mouth howled. “You must make us the peaceful guardians of this place. Throw up the Anthrops within you!”
The two-dimensional outlines around him pointed with their grey ghost arms, as from the missile silos rose a dozen drones.
“The humans have seen us!” Bartholemew exclaimed.
As he turned to look, Zero-Arms dodged with his lightning-quick, spindly legs and the assistant toppled off his back. Arms catapulted through the pack of drones, straight towards the tops of the missiles. Bartholemew turned from where he lay on his stomach to see his friend disappear into the great mass below. Behind him, the Sasquatches vanished back into the tunnel.
“You have made a terrible mistake!” was the last thing H-man communicated, before Bartholemew heard the drones settling.
As he landed on the closest missile, Zero-Arms felt his consciousness dissipating, the collective Anthrops soul within his stomach spreading out, manifesting his and their entire awareness throughout all the nuclear weapons. Zero-Arms knew that through his leaping sacrifice, the Anthrops attained total immersion into the rockets, as a human has mastery of his or her body.
He heard the booming sound of the released Anthrops, combined with the shaking of the missiles.
“We force the rising of the bombs,” Zero-Arms heard. “Up to the hole in the ceiling of the mountain.”
“I thought you wanted to spread the slime of peace,” Arms yelled as he felt his mind molecules drift in all directions and his awareness churn and expand through the rising rocket mass.
The Anthrops’ message drilled into him: “There will be a greater peace when evil is destroyed, and we can feast upon the newly melted rocks and the rubble of a burned-off, radioactive earth.”
Zero-Arms screamed again. “How could this happen? What about human harmony?”
The Anthrops murmured. “We have tried. The humans do not want it themselves. We have tried for ten thousand years.”
“You’re doing this for your own ends!” Zero-Arms yelled, before his telepathic consciousness completely merged with the Anthrops, and both creature and alien became one with the nuclear bombs.
“Survival, sometimes, is preferable to endless martyrdom,” was the last booming sound he heard.
The rockets rumbled, and the missiles gathered speed and force as they rose towards the blue-sky gap and out beyond, into the last green morning of the world.
Below, in the empty cavern, the drones picked up Bartholemew and flew him to the waiting humans in the lower control rooms. During the next hour, until the released missiles reached their targets, the scientists and military security used various methods to make Zero-Arms’ assistant talk. No matter what Bartholemew said, the humans did not believe or understand that the launch was due to the mistaken sacrifice of a creature born from their own H-bombs.
Copyright © 2023 by Harrison Kim
