The Butterfly Artist Read online

flew into the canvas tent wall, wrapped up in its thick fabric as glass, wood and dirt showered over him. He heard the snapping crackle of electricity, but was so bound by the tent cloth that he could not break free to see what damage had been done by the lightning blast.

  Gunfire erupted from the camp’s perimeter. Shouts swept across the hilltop, bouncing through the unwanted turban that engulfed Giles’ head and face like a mummified python.

  “Njoni hapa! Upesi, upesi!”

  “Hapana! Tunaenda Nyumbani,” followed by several bodies running past, some stepping on the tent remains that still pinned him tight.

  More gunfire, two or three shots from an electroshock rifle, then shouts.

  “Hapana! Nzi mkubwa! Tuko hapa, tuko hapa!”

  Frantic screams, no words now, only terror – erupted from behind him as he finally extricated himself from the remaining tent shreds. His neck flamed in agony, dropping him to his knees. He was barely able to crane his head up to see what was happening.

  The camp lay strewn with charred bodies, smoking in the dull glow of innumerable small fires. Only a handful of soldiers remained, the rest of the camp either fled or slain. Before them loomed two gargantuan, silver-chested apes, tree-high with four arms flailing from each torso. The troops stabbed with their bayonets, piercing each giant with their steel slivers. It looked as if they would gain the advantage over the mutant simians as the giants visibly slowed under the blades’ onslaught.

  Then a whir, an electric whine spun up from just outside the camp, to Giles’ right. Sparkles flickered around a long tubular projection as the whine increased in frequency and intensity. Behind the tube, atop the vehicle to which it was affixed, sat two dark figures aiming the device at the battling guards.

  This Kabilari had a lightning gun. A lightning gun!

  Light flooded the camp as the sky cracked open, a forked stream of electricity catching the remaining soldiers mid-rib, thrusting their tattered remains tumbling a hundred feet or more into a smoking heap down the hillside, a trail of sparks tracking back across the electrified earth to the artillery piece.

  The dark impressions of the gunners had etched themselves onto Giles’ retinae as the hell fire passed. Both figures were naked; one with the lower torso of a striped tsetse, the upper torso of a native woman; the other with four arms that ended not in hands, but in insectoid claws.

  Giles lay flat for fear of being discovered.

  The Kabilars ransacked the camp, genetically obscene mixtures of insect and human DNA picking through the bodies, eating raw flesh and dancing amid the smoldering corpses. One winged child held Chelsea’s singed and severed head aloft and threw it to passing feasters at the banquet of dead flesh. They promptly chewed Chelsea’s eyeballs out of their sockets. Screeches and laughter flooded the night air, a bacchanalian racket that frightened birds and monkeys from the distant trees. The gorilla mutants beat their chests in spite of their wounds, their bellows trailing off into the valley to join the echoes of the Kabilars' din.

  A click and the touch of cold steel on the neck flooded Giles’ body numb with fear. His spine burned as if a red-hot rivet had been driven in – but no shot had been fired. The shotgun barrel simply hovered there above his neck. He ventured movement, fully aware that he should be dead already.

  The gamble paid off in a clear view of his would-be executor. Long, pale legs led up to a naked torso, female, athletic. His eyes traced copper hair up from the shoulders, exquisite ropes of cellulose that ended in the head of Emile Beckwith.

  Her eyes were without white or color – pure black. Only with the few remaining flickers of firelight was he able to see that her eyes were not smooth, but shone with a hundred facets in the burning glow. He suppressed his nausea but was still unable to speak.

  She whispered to the injured Giles “play dead” – the slightest hint of a buzz to her words – then struck his head sharply with the gun’s butt. The last thing he saw as he swooned was a flying form, half-tsetse, half-infant, above Emile, in the air. The Great Fly had found him again.

  Red, sunburned skin scratched his nerve endings to consciousness. Cracks must be appearing inside his throat, he thought. With great effort he strained to raise himself up on his elbows. The hillside fluttered black and white in the afternoon sun – the corpse-infested ground covered with a snow fall of Papilio Odius. A million death heads winked at him from the carrion heaps, skulls flying from bone pile to bone pile, a cool winged breeze counteracted by the rising heat of fermenting bodies. Here were enough specimens to make him wealthy forever, but never enough to buy back his sanity or return his obliterated longing for the fly-sympathizer – or was it fly-lover, for the child-thing was white – Emile Beckwith, not enough to return his innocence. He traced the impression of a female footprint left in the loamy soil. Their trail led west, toward the interior.

  He reached back to massage his neck: A black antenna grew out from the center of the bump. The fly was now a part of him. The burning pain had stopped.

  Coda

  Iglensk and Dutarov sat leaning against the outside wall of the elephant pit. They smoked unfiltered cigarettes and shared lewd jokes, as hired guards often do. There was not much else to do as security officers of the Kinderzeit zoo. Smoke, joke and talk.

  “So this new elephant keeper. I hear he’s crazy.”

  “Who here isn’t?” Dutarov quipped.

  “No, certifiably bonkers.”

  “Really?”

  Iglensk took a long drag off his cigarette, exhaling words with his carcinogens. “Government shipped him in after a court appearance. Seems he killed a white man down in the tropics, then wiped out the porters and guards who had gone along on the expedition."

  “How could he do it alone?”

  “Who knows? The air down there does strange things to a man.”

  “I know,” agreed Dutarov. “One of the guys I trained in the army went down there. The most innocent boy you know, a mama’s boy. The army didn’t even soil his spirit. He went down south, though, and came back with the clap and a bounty on his head.”

  Yes, there seems to be no end to the evil churned up in that humid air. Anyway, as I was saying, he killed the whole lot of them, then burned their bodies. It appears that some of them may have been cannibalized.”

  “Cannibalized? Don’t tell me – dismissed on grounds of insanity.”

  “Yes. Then the judge sent him here to work with the animals. Since the chap had worked here before, the judge reasons, the return to life as it was before he went to Ngome might serve to restore a bit of his mental health."

  “Do you think there really is a cure for such a person?”

  “I don’t know. He seems tranquil enough, though. Doesn’t cause any problems. You would think . . .”

  An alarm klaxon stopped Iglensk in mid-sentence. They both sprang to their feet, looking for the source of the disturbance.

  A shadow fell over them and melted southward.

  Above them floated a large gray mass. An elephant calf, dead, trunk, tail and limbs hanging limp toward the ground like a jellyfish’s tentacles. The pachiderm glided smoothly through the air. The guards blinked, dropping their rifles, and it was several seconds before the shock left them enough vision to glimpse colors splashing along the calf’s topside. Ten thousand butterflies, each attached to the rough skin by a metal needle, carried the body aloft over the zoo walls.

  Chadwick Giles sat cross-legged in the elephant pen, a half-spilled jar of pins at his side. He watched the dead animal’s ascension with great interest – through his multi-faceted, blackened eyes. The same winds that tickled his antenna would, he knew, eventually take the beast’s corpse back to its homeland, near Ngome. He understood now what it meant to bring his art to life.

  ###

  About the Author:

  Forrest Aguirre’s fiction has been published in over fifty magazines and anthologies. His work has received honorable ment
ions in several Year’s Best anthologies and he was a finalist for the StorySouth Million Writers Award. Forrest is also a World Fantasy Award recipient and Philip K. Dick Award finalist for his editing of the Leviathan 3 anthology with co-editor Jeff VanderMeer. Forrest lives in Madison, Wisconsin with his wife, children, and ferret.

  Connect with me online:

  Google+: Forrest Aguirre

  Blog: forrestaguirre.blogspot.com