WE wasted a lot of time just getting Karvel to believe what we were saying: that they existed, that they were out there, that they had come. It was only because we were so relentless, and because the painter started to respond to our fear with ample fear of his own, that Karvel finally relented and agreed to at least see what had made us so excited.

“Nobody’s busting in my dome, I’ll tell you that right now. That’s where I draw the line. I didn’t come all the way down here to get bushwhacked by some mythological creatures.”

To protect himself from being exposed to even a room that had been tainted by the outside air, Karvel insisted on wearing protective gear before entering the work area behind his grand illusion. I think he would have preferred a space suit, something airtight with its own supply of oxygen. In lieu of that, however, Karvel settled for a beekeeper’s suit because it covered his body completely, particularly his head. It seemed the BioDome was originally intended to house a hive population as well, for the purposes of pollination and honey production.

“I like honey, hell, I love it. But I don’t like bugs. I like butterflies, we got lots of them. And ladybugs.” Karvel nervously chattered as he dressed. It was clear during our ascent to Mrs. Karvel’s little room that Thomas Karvel rarely ventured behind the set of his own masterpiece. If ever. Garth and I, the recent visitors, the newly arrived guests, had to direct him through the scaffolding to navigate the place. His whole time back there Karvel wore a look of mild disgust, as if he was being forced to peer into the putrid bowels of his beloved. When we finally found our way back to Mrs. Karvel’s poisonous little storage room up high, a wave of floral air freshener greeted us. Its spray was so recent and heavy that the smell of ozone hung nearly as heavily as the ones of weed and nicotine beneath it. Nobody bothered to mention these aromas, of course, because now there was something far more disturbing in the room than rat bait. A cache of rifles was leaning against the far wall. Mrs. Karvel was vigorously polishing the largest of them.

“Honey,” the painter asked. “Did you see anything funny out—”

“I’m not looking out there, Tommy. You’re looking out there. You look out there, and you deal with it,” Karvel’s wife interrupted him, rubbing the oil cloth down the shaft as if she thought a genie might come out. There was a scope on the camouflage hunting rifle in her hand, and for the moment she had no problem looking through that, her bloodshot eye engorged and magnified on the other side. Satisfied with its cleanliness, Mrs. Karvel handed it to me firmly. I took it to the window, looked down the gun’s sight to the place of interest below.

“There,” I said, looking up from the weapon, calling Karvel over to take my place. “There” were the igloos. “There” were the tracks in the snow. Even through his beekeeping helmet, Karvel could make that out, or at least something out.

“Oh boy. Yup. I see something.”

“Shoot ’em!” his wife yelled. Though she wasn’t getting any closer to the window, Mrs. Karvel threw me another hunting rifle from where she was standing. I handed it to Garth, so she threw me another one.

“Look, I take care of in here. I always have taken care of in here, in our home. And you’re supposed to take care of what’s out there. That’s the way it’s always been. That’s the pact. So get outside and shoot them.” Karvel lurched up from the gun’s scope in response, face hidden behind the mesh of his helmet. There was a moment when I expected protests about air quality and biological warfare to emerge from behind the metal mask, but after a few seconds the only words that managed to make themselves heard were “yes” and “dear.”

Thomas Karvel looked even smaller outside, in the open world, the one he didn’t create. The painter was clearly not someone who was used to being out of his element, and even as we walked those few feet, I noticed a change in his demeanor. I could see the Tekelian base camp from where we stood; the rifle’s scope helped, but it wasn’t needed. I could see them moving around individually as well, even make out their robes flapping lightly in the polar wind. Squatting down, I lifted the heavy Browning to my head, undid the safety with my thumb, and aimed the barrel up and over in the direction opposite the camp, and pulled the trigger. Everyone jumped: both men beside me and all of those creatures down there.

“What the hell are you up to?” Karvel demanded, the mist of his exhalation rising up through his mesh face mask.

“I’m scaring them off,” I told him, and I said it like I knew what I was doing.

“But how you know them things even know what a gun is?” asked Garth, and I nodded back that this was an excellent observation, then proceeded to take another shot directly at the Tekelian stronghold. This bullet made a definite impression, taking a block off one of the structures they had created, spraying a cloud of sharded ice. The impact sent robes running, robes hiding for cover. Who is God now? I thought, but then tried to calm my heart and temper.

“I still can’t hardly see anything. Are they leaving?” Karvel asked me. When I looked over at him, he wasn’t even facing the right direction. He was already staring back to the roof door of his precious dome as if he was embarrassed by my action, or just bored.

“Down over there, they’re coming toward us,” Garth shouted, and I looked to the far side and saw a line of five or six of the pale beasts trying to come wide around a snowbank and make it closer to the dome. Aiming again, I took another shot just in front of them, somewhat relieved when the bullet missed and only more clouds of snow were created on impact. To my surprise, though, the invaders kept coming. This platoon of Tekelians didn’t run for cover, try to protect themselves behind a snowdrift or simply haul ass in one direction or the other. Crouched down in their garments, slowly stepping, they kept coming toward us. I reloaded, clicked the barrel back together loud enough for them to hear at a distance, but they didn’t pause, just continued. It was then that I realized they weren’t worrying about being seen. It was absurd, but from the way they were moving, it appeared they were worried I would hear them coming. They were so convinced that their supposed whiteness camouflaged them against the snow, they seemed to think they were invisible.

“See who?” Karvel asked when I said this aloud. “I don’t see anybody. Are you sure somebody’s out there?” the painter asked, annoyed. In frustration I whipped off his beekeeper’s mask, took his head in my hands to aim it at the scene below as these monsters of the past came at us.

“There, right there, in front of your face. Those gray things,” I told him, not even aware of my tone until Garth put a firm hand on my arm to calm me down.

“What? What? I don’t see nothing. Is this your idea of a joke?” Karvel repeated without a hint of awareness, looking right at where the Tekelians crept.

It was then, looking past the painter and his biggest fan to the other end of the roof behind us, that I saw what we should have been worried about the whole time. First, at the far lip of the roof plateau we stood on, a small dot of albino head popped into view. Then, several more heads alongside it. Before I could even utter my warning, I saw the band of creatures those heads were attached to. They were pulling themselves up the side of the BioDome, over by the forty-nine stars and the one solar panel. A second line of attack. Garth turned in time to see the first creature hoist itself completely onto the roof to get us. The creature stood at almost the opposite end of the 3.2 Ultra BioDome’s roof, its colossal frame nearly reaching the sun. Silhouetted as it was against the blue sky, Thomas Karvel finally saw what he was up against.

“Cheese and crackers. What the hell is that?” he asked, pulling on my sleeve as if I could truly answer him. “Man, he’s huge. Look at the size of him. What’s he doing? I think that thing’s making a snowball. Well, if they’re just going to throw snowballs then—” Karvel said, stopping abruptly when the first frozen projectile hit the side of his head, knocking him to the roof and into a mild concussion. More iced balls drilled into our backs as we struggled to pull the unconscious master back to the exit door.

The BioDome door was metal, meant to keep out Martians and snow-loving Islamic militants, so for the moment it held attacking hordes at bay. This was good, because the Tekelians were really trying to get in, and we really didn’t want them to. Cowering as we were, we listened to the thunder of the door shaking under the brutal onslaught. Piling every heavy rat-emblazoned box we could in front of it just in case, we also locked the door to the corridor as we left the room. Dragged unconscious out into the hall, Thomas Karvel lay on his back before us, unaware as the three of us discussed our options, trying our best to yell over and otherwise ignore the sounds of angry fists that seemed to come from all over the outer hull.

“Well that plan didn’t work, did it?”

“No, ma’am, it did not,” we agreed.

“Then you boys need to call for help,” Mrs. Karvel told us with so much calm and acceptance of our improbable situation that I began to realize she was probably heavily medicated as a rule. Trying to match her subdued tones, I made the point that unfortunately there was no one whom it was possible to call: no police, no national guard, no anything.

“Get your friends, the co-workers you said they captured. Whatever you have to do, you do it. We got guns, we just need the people to hold them off, kill them if they try to come in here. And get me some ice for Tommy’s head too, he’s going to have quite the lump on him.”

In the excitement of the moment, motivated largely by a desire to simply run away, I seized on the request to get help as if it was my destiny. Not a thought did I give to the actual logistics of how we would manage to escape the 3.2 Ultra BioDome unprotected, or make it back through the frozen wasteland and repeat the journey that had almost killed me, or how we would do all this in time to make it back here for whatever siege this white woman had in mind. These questions must have also occurred to Mrs. Karvel, because as she stared down at her husband’s slack face, her plans became more specific.

“We got two snowmobiles: Tommy got him a real good blue one, and got me a pink one to match. But you can’t take ’em, can you? Because the garage door is right down there, facing their camp. As soon as you open it, they gonna be all on us. All on us,” she repeated, standing up and grabbing me by the shoulder as if I intended to disagree with her. I wasn’t. “You boys, you take the exhaust tunnel. Exit’s in the mechanical room. Don’t go near the boiler, that thing’s an accident waiting to happen, just head for the back door. That’ll get you far; that tunnel comes up out past where you say they are. You take that, you get out past them, and you get us some goddamn help. You hear me?”

I heard very well. Packing my old snow gear with Slim Jims and PowerBar gel this time, I was ready to get the hell out of there. The exhaust tunnel, it seemed, was perfect for our escape, a better solution we could not have asked for. In his fear that his precious dome would somehow be located by rogue nations with heat-seeking satellites, Thomas Karvel had also provided himself with the perfect escape hatch. Walking past it, I could easily see that this boiler system was a truly monumental construction, something I would have paused to be awed by had the moment allowed for it. After cranking off the water of the waterfall, Garth and I walked under its last sweet drops to get to the mechanical room’s door and make our way out of Karvel’s utopia. Without the waterfall, it was loud. In the room, though, it was absolute cacophony. The roar was the first thing that attacked my senses as we began our trudge. Clogs, pistons, lubes reverberating like a junkyard orgy. Before the vibrations could overwhelm me, I was hit by another assault. The heat. We walked through what felt to me like a nearly solid wall of heat. The main interior of the 3.2 Ultra BioDome was kept at a perfect seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit. Within the boiler room, though, it felt like twice that.

“This is unbearable,” I complained, wiping the sweat that had instantly appeared upon my brow.

“Enjoy it while it lasts, dog. You going to be cold soon enough,” Garth responded.

Still, in that moment, as sweat coated my body in a vain attempt to cool me down, it seemed that the walk back to the exhaust fan exit was endless. I had assumed that the boiler room was just little, merely covering the space under the waterfall and deck above, but this mechanical area went beyond the confines of the Karvels’ living quarters and spread back all the way to the dome’s edge. The supposed “room” was larger than a house, with pipes interlooping between the metal constructs in a way that only hinted at order.

The exhaust fan itself rose not to the height of my waist but twenty feet beyond, to the height of the ceiling itself. As the blades swung before us too fast to see, there was only the slightest of breezes to be felt and that came from behind us as the boiling air rushed to exit out of the dome to the great chill beyond. Through the blur of the blades, I could see there was nothing beyond the dome but darkness. Outside, the exhaust tunnel that led into the subterranean ice caves was large enough to park a bus in, and dark enough to hide it there. Although the blue of the ice could be seen beyond, it was far from a welcoming vision. As I looked into the dim abyss, the thought of walking out into it and all the way back to Tekeli-li to enlist our co-workers to do battle seemed the suicide mission that it was.

“Brother, listen to me,” I yelled to Garth over the din. “This plan is crazy. We’re never going to beat those monsters here, even with all of us.” I put a hand on his beefy arm as he reached to open the exit door. Trying to give him a squeeze he could feel even through his padded coat, I leaned in closer. “We should go back. Go back, get that sailboat, drag it with us. Then when we get the others, we all make a break for Tsalal. Tsalal. It’s out there, man, Pym knows where it is. We find him, we find a real way out of here. Black and warm and away from all this beyond the pale bullshit.”

“Dog, I ain’t doing the Karvels like that. Why don’t you just shut your pale ass up and keep an eye out for those snow monkeys? Okay?”

Garth aimed a look of annoyance over his shoulder at me while he pushed the bar on the exit door. For this reason, he didn’t see how prescient his advice had been. Looking beyond Garth out the door, I saw not the expanse of the tunnel but the expanse of a robe draped off of Tekelian shoulders. In that moment, my doom seemed immediate. In horror I looked, because what massive shoulders these were. Though it had been only a few loose weeks since my last close encounter with the breed, I’d already forgotten the improbable size of them. In my mind, I had pushed out their horror. This was the back of a creature that could kill us simply by falling. This was a monster capable of crushing our bones and the meat they held with such speed that we would feel it before we saw it coming. And one was guarding the exit door, ready to perform such an operation. It was only the roar of the engines that distracted the homunculus from immediately spinning around.

Close the door! I mouthed in the most deliberate and precise manner I could, staring straight into Garth’s brown eyes as he faced me, oblivious to our fate.

“Close the …? Man, when are you going to give up? There ain’t no Tsalal, get it? And if you don’t stop with that, I’m going to leave you and your bag of bones out on the—” was as far as he got before that wall of shroud that stood behind him started spinning around. This time it was my opportunity to save Garth from unseen danger, and I jumped to close the metal door. Unable to get past him in time, I was left with only the option of pushing back the big man himself, letting Garth’s startled girth fall into the door to close it. Even still, it wasn’t soon enough. The creature managed to fling his arm into the space between door and jamb, and the pale limb now kept the two from meeting. It wasn’t until Garth saw those gray fingers struggling to reach him that he stopped swinging on me and joined my efforts to reseal the entrance. The only things that kept the monster from knocking it open and flinging both of our bodies with it were a bit of leverage and surprise. For our part, we seemed to be trying the impossible, to slam the door shut and amputate the creature’s appendage at the elbow in doing so; neither one of us was trying to push the arm back out.

“Get the gun off me and shoot it!” Garth motioned with his eyes to his shoulder. There was no way Garth could lift his arms so the strap could be removed, so it was up to me to unhook the rifle with my shaking hands as it bounced around before me.

“Just break the damn strap. Yank it, dog!” was Garth’s advice, but this didn’t keep him from cursing at me when my first desperate tugs did little more than yank his neck. But the clip gave out before Garth’s strength did, and I was able to get his Winchester, cock the bullet into the chamber. The protruding, pale hand, almost as if it knew that it was to be my target, flailed wildly as the beast it was attached to howled in pain at another of Garth’s full-body thrusts. I couldn’t get a good shot with it moving like that, especially since I was too scared to step much closer.

“Shoot it! Shoot it!” Garth said. And I did. And missed. Only for Garth to yell, “Aim it this time,” as if that had not occurred to me. Garth leaned in with all his might and fat behind him, trapping the arm completely if only momentarily. Taking my time, breathing out and preparing to pull the trigger with my inhalation, I focused, staring over my scope at the thing. It was the perfect shot, the hand stretched out all of its fingers in a moment of pain, forming a clear target. So clear was my sight that, for the first time, I noticed those well-chewed nails on the ends of fingers that could only be considered pudgy in relation to the average of his race.

“Augustus!” I yelled, and after a confused look by Garth, I repeated my call, louder, loud enough to be heard over the twenty-foot-tall fan and all the machinery behind it.

“Chris!” came back to me. Not in the voice of my runt of a Tekelian. No, this voice was human. This voice was female. The woman I loved. And her voice brought a chorus of others behind it.

Hearing the responses, Garth eased up on the door, and the arm revealed itself to be that of my brief roommate and supposed captor. Augustus stood there, nursing his wrist, smiling at me.

“Friends,” he managed, and I thought he was talking about us till he stepped to the side and I saw Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter, Angela Latham and my cousin Captain Booker Jaynes standing behind him. Right on CP Time, they had joined me.