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Martin Stokes
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The Fresh pulled up to the curb, its air-jets blowing up drifts of newly fallen autumn leaves. The door of the Fresh—white with a red decal depicting a man tipping his fedora in a gesture of thanks—opened and Sonny Mathis folded himself out.
It was cold, he noted. Dark fingers of twilight had crept into the day and the temperature had dropped considerably. He was wearing a cobalt blue suit, very expensive, but thin. His jaw, rigidly square—not, however to the point where it made him look slow or obtuse—and scrubbed with stubble, was shadowed in the dying light of day. Only when they caught that ephemeral light did his faded blue eyes shine.
He tipped the cabby who in turn touched the bill of his hat, just like the man on the decal. Hands tucked beneath his armpits; he watched the Fresh rise half a metre or so off the road then cruise down to the corner, pulling up leaves and other debris in its wake.
Sonny let out a tendon-creaking yawn and walked up the path to his apartment building. Before he reached the steps, he looked up. It always marvelled and, to some degree, mystified him how these buildings were so tall. His apartment building was one-hundred-and-seventy-four stories high, and he stayed thirty from the top. But architecture wasn’t his game, God no. Let the builders do the building and the dealers do the dealing. Far above, shooting back and forth like arrows fired from various directions at once, were clouds of various different kinds of Fresh.
He snapped his gaze back to ground level and went inside. It was warmer and he let his arms fall to his sides. The lobby was large and empty, nothing stood in its cream vastness save for the elevator at the far end. Sonny approached it, his crocodile-leather shoes—genuine, no room for imitations—clicking and clacking on the marble floor as he went.
He blinked twice, and then brought his eye up to the iris-scanner. Grids of light criss-crossed his eye briefly and then the elevator doors slid open soundlessly. He stepped inside, not bothering to check behind, as was his normal routine. He was shattered. The elevator was his palladium and for the moment, all he wanted was a long hot shower and a whiskey.
The lift rose automatically and, like everything in this day and age, silently. The elevator was bare like the lobby.
Architects, Sonny thought in a tone that would have sounded both weary and wondrous had it been spoken aloud. The lift took exactly eighty-three seconds to reach floor 144. He closed his eyes and let the last few days play on the screen of his mind.
The job had gone well, more than well, in fact. Sonny had left Windsor ten days ago; hours after the ITAPO had tried in vain to bring him down at the high court in Cape Town. Sonny had kept a calm yet determined demeanour and denied all charges. He had never been scared; his lawyers were the best and he paid the Judge forty-thousand cash each month just in the event of such an occurrence.
In a way, the ITAPO had done him a favour. The star-port that departed to Terra-Five was a few kilometres down the road from the court. He’d managed to get the impending lawsuit—well, the first part of it—out of the way, as well as get on that cruiser. Killing two birds with one stone was the kind of way Sonny liked to operate; efficient and smooth, kind of the like the elevator he was in now.
Lenard Landon, the CEO and chief spokesperson of ITAPO, had scowled and said they’d get him sooner or later. He was rich, yes, he was powerful, doubly so, but he was still a goddamn crook, and all crooks felt the impersonal and solid hand of justice eventually.
Sonny had put on the most affected look he could muster, then leaned in and had said, “I’d love to see you try.” Low enough so the cameras couldn’t hear him over the babble of reporters and journalists crowding the court’s stairs.
“I’ll get you. See if I don’t. Filth.” Landon’s eyes, large and bulging behind his rimless glasses, had burned with a brief and intense hatred before he whirled and huffed away through the parting crowd.
The elevator came to a stop and Sonny opened his eyes. The doors did not open on a passage or a hall, but straight into Sonny’s lounge. It wasn’t an ordinary apartment block. Windsor used to be nothing but a small fishing village dozing away some hundred kilometres east of Cape Town. After the other major cities started getting a bit too crowded, development started elsewhere. Property prices skyrocketed, businesses thrived, and the majorly rich moved in. That is why Sonny owned the entire 144th floor of this building and not a few frugal rooms like other residents.
The first thing he noticed when he walked into the lounge was the temperature: it was cold. No, compared to the warmth of the elevator it was goddamn freezing. He saw the source at once. On the far side of the room, where there was no wall and only a huge stretch of glass that gave way to a smoky vista of the city, was an open window. The curtain that hung before it billowed like a woman’s skirt.
Sonny walked towards the open window thinking how strange it was but feeling something come alive at the back of his mind. That something said, be careful, Sonny in a solicitous tone that made him look around suddenly. He always closed the windows before he left and if he didn’t temperature-control should have done it automatically. The wind was always blowing at such a high altitude and it was always cold, too. The architects must have messed up somehow; maybe a circuit blew in their regulation board or a rat chewed its way through a cable. God knew there were enough rats in the slums; and the slums seemed to be expanding every year like some sort of encroaching disease.
His hand reached out and he let it hover over the window for a second. Maybe it was booby-trapped. Maybe the second he applied pressure on the glass, the sweat from his fingers would make contact with an invisible tripwire and there would be a loud hollow boom before his guts hit the walls.
He latched the window shut, and the room began heat almost immediately. There was no reaction of any kind and Sonny let out his breath that he didn’t know he was holding in a shuddery rush. Why was he so jumpy? He chalked it down to exhaustion and let himself relax a little more.
The sun was just a set of smouldering shoulders on the horizon now, scattering gold and orange rays that lit up the smog so that it momentarily appeared to be a cloud of gold. Then the light shifted and it was only choking smog again. It was better to be up here, safe, better than down there in slums with the savages.
Tossing his jacket on the back of a black divan he made his way through to the kitchen. It was a fair walk, too. The lounge was vast and scarcely furnished, save for a few pot plants and some modern furniture an interior decorator had suggested. Less is more, he said, but Sonny thought that was a load of shit, less was less and there was no way around it. The carpet that covered the room was a lush green and reminded him of the fields he had hunted in as a kid.
His father—from whom he had inherited the failing business before resurrecting it—had taken him to a game farm once, when the Kruger National Park still had animals. There, he had taught Sonny how to track game; how to sling a rifle and aim down its sight; how to kill with one shot—through the heart and lungs—so that it was clean and the animal died with dignity. That’s kind of what inspired him to do his carpets this way. After all, the passion his father had ignited in him through hunting had started his other multi-million rand business. Questions of legality aside, it was still a profitable field of trade.
He poured himself a stiff drink, downed it in one gulp, poured another and went to shower. He paused in his bedroom for a moment and stared at the large white talon that had once been attached to a Claw, which stood mounted in a glass case on his wall. He had almost lost his life getting that particular trophy and he kept it there as a reminder.
While the water trickled hot down his body his mind began to wander. It often did when he was in that little cubicle and the water was a steady and monotonous roar in his ears.
After the court case, he had motored straight down to the Starport in a Fresh with his company logo, Mathis Matters Transport, slapped on the side. Karl was waiting for him there. Karl had come from a slum once called Mitchell’s Plain, in Cape Town City. Now, however, all the gang activity that had once been present had poured a solid stream of income into the place. It had been a classic trickle-down effect. Drug production and sales peaked, rich crime bosses got richer, and all the blood money involved was run through legitimate businesses to wash it clean. Eventually when the drugs and everything that followed in its wake decamped, the affluence remained. The suburb had undergone extensive development over the years, turning it into something of similar stature to Windsor. Karl, a dapper, very punctual man, had been staring at his wristwatch when the Fresh pulled up beside him.
Sonny stepped out and they shook hands. “All ready?”
“Yes, everything’s arranged.” Karl’s voice went tight for a moment. “How did it go with Landon?”
Sonny laughed. “Like always, he’s no closer to touching me than he is to losing his virginity.”
Karl smiled thinly. He never laughed, and that was something that made you uneasy about him. There was always a look behind his narrow eyes as if he might be planning a hundred ways to dispose of your body.
“Well that’s good, very good. The cruiser is waiting, when you’re ready.” He gestured towards a large hanger where a cruiser stood, its engine warbling and pulsing in vermillion cycles.
“Equipment?” Sonny asked.
“Two long range rifles—under the pretence of photographic equipment. And four pairs of thermal goggles—no excuse needed.”
“Excellent, let’s go.”
They didn’t need to have an alibi for the goggles. When you went to Terra-Five they were just about mandatory. The Claws could see you but without goggles, you couldn’t see them, and if they scratched you... if the toxin in those talons were to mingle with your blood... Well, your insides would become your outsides and blood and other unspeakable matter would begin oozing out from every hole possible.
But no one had been scratched this trip. The pilot had taken them up without any problems. Sonny’s stomach flipped over a few times when the real acceleration had begun—until they were going at one sixth of the speed of light—but that was normal. He’d made the trip so many times he only gave it cursory attention. The bounty was especially good this time around and they’d made the trip back with enough Product to fuel a slum’s superstitious belief for a year. Of course, he never sold to just one slum; that would be needlessly risky, not to mention stupid. No, when the giving was good, you spread it around just like it was Christmas.
He stepped out of the shower. Blowers dried him off and he dressed himself in a loose-fitting white cotton shirt and pair of black slacks. Headed for another drink he paused to look at the talon. Its flesh, which was hard and rippled, wasn’t what the apothecaries and shamans paid for and in turn sold to the ever oblivious public in the form of sham medicines. It was the talon itself, all eight centimetres of dull claw, and the venom inside, which kept business flowing.
There had been a proliferation of the medicines derived from Claw talons over the last few years. This was mostly due to the fact that there had been a proliferation in what the people in Windsor called Dark Lung. Years of inhaling the spent fossil fuels and the thick clouds of smog that hung over the cities and slums like malicious clouds, finally took its toll on a growing percentage of the population. Cell degradation began in the alveoli, turned it black, like something charred, and eventually spread through the entire respiratory system. It wasn’t unusual to see someone sneeze out bits of ebon lung tissue with a spray of blood.
Conventional medicines were expensive and hard to come by unless, of course, you were of the extreme rich like Sonny Mathis. The slums had turned to traditional methods, grinding up Claw talons into powders and potions just as the Vietnamese had done in the past with rhino horn. It was still expensive, of course, because Claws weren’t from Earth, but the dosage needed was miniscule in comparison to modern healing techniques. Most of them relied on illegal apothecaries and shamans who preached its wonderful healing powers to get their fix, and those little shysters relied on Sonny Mathis to procure them Product. Sonny, in turn, went to Terra-Five where he hunted those unsettlingly hard-to-find Claws and returned with the bounty a week or two later. It was illegal, and he knew it. Lenard Landon knew it, too, which is why he was constantly on Sonny’s arse like some bloodhound that smelled a hidden cache of heroin.
Sonny stepped into the lounge again and that’s when he knew something was wrong. Dark had fallen and on this level, above the bright smog that blanketed the suburbs, the stars shone brightly like cold chips of ice. Something was very out of tilt. As a hunter most of his life, Sonny’s senses were keenly attuned. Besides, but for the occasional visit from a friend or girl, he had stayed alone in this apartment. He knew every sound and echo that rebounded from the still emptiness of the lounge when he walked on the carpet, dampened though it was. But now, the echoes came back... shorter. They were matted sounds, clipped parodies. Also, there was a pressure difference usually attributed to someone being in the room. But there was no one... or not that he could see.
Then he saw the note lying on the low coffee table that sat encircled by the three divans. Sonny walked over briskly and scooped it up. The paper was expensive, its edge gilded with gold. There were only eight words on the page, written in a thin and cultured cursive:
I told you I would get you, poacher.
“Landon!” Sonny hissed and whirled around.
There was a sudden bright flare of pain in his calf. He looked down just in time to see a chunk of his left calf blink into seeming nothingness as the flesh tore free, hung suspended in the air for half a second, and then began to separate itself into ragged strips before disappearing entirely.
He felt a weight on his shoulder and his lacerated leg buckled. The shirt split open by his neckline then there was a sharp and digging pain just above Sonny’s collarbone. Blood spilled out of both wounds, turning his shirt crimson and making his pants look blacker. He understood what was happening then with lucid clarity. He also understood that in a few seconds if he didn’t act, he would be dead.
He threw himself on the floor, as close to his bedroom as he could and felt the weight on his shoulder dissipate. There was a crazy flapping sound, the sound of wings trying to expand and contract in a closed space, and he started crawling fervently. He couldn’t run, he was pretty sure of that, blood was flowing freely from his leg, staining the carpet, so that had to mean it was a deep wound. Even crawling was an onerous task. Every time he placed his weight on his right wrist he felt his shoulder scream in agony. Just where were they? And why did he make the lounge so goddamn big?
He felt a tugging at his foot and the next moment his shoe was pried off and being ripped to shreds amidst some shrill and terrible shrieking. It saved his life, perhaps, gave him enough of a lead to get to safety before they lost whatever marginal interest they had in the shoe and zoned in on him again. He ignored the pain, drowned it out with his own survival instincts greater and more urgent than physical needs, crying out every time he shimmied forward.
At last, the door was in grasp. He risked a look backwards and saw nothing, of course, except... a shimmering, like the air that rises from a highway on a hot day. He pulled himself inside with every bit of strength he possessed, veins bulging in thick cords on his neck and forearms, and slammed the door shut. A second later, a plethora of sharp pecking sounds like a stuttering machinegun peppered the door.
Sonny lay on the floor, breath whistling in and out of his lungs in wheezing gasps like those stricken with Dark Lung. White spots danced in front of his eyes and he felt on the verge of passing out. No. With sheer effort that few men could have managed, he held on to consciousness—if he passed out now he would die from an excessive loss of blood or if what was out there got in. And just what was out there? He thought he knew, but the real question was how had they gotten here? Not just to Earth but to the 144th floor of a Windsor suburb apartment. Sonny had a certain hunch that it had to do with a bespectacled man by the name of Lenard Landon.
I told you I would get you, poacher.
But how? How had Landon managed to get Claws—he knew there was more than one from the simultaneous attack—into his apartment? Then Sonny remembered the open window, the chill. He scolded himself for not realising at first, but he had been so damn tired. Not now though, now his senses were awake and on fire. They had obviously come through the window. Why had they not attacked at first?
“Easy. They only hunt at night,” Sonny said flatly to no one in particular.
Using his king-sized bed as a crutch, he got up haltingly on his good leg, and then hopped over to his walk-in wardrobe. He whipped a belt from the belt rail and looped it into a makeshift tourniquet. He took the first good look at his calf wound. It was deep, but thankfully, neither it, nor the shoulder injury had been scratched or torn at by those things’ talons. He wrapped the belt just above his knee and pulled it taut, baring his teeth as the pain briefly became unbearable.
It helped, but it was still issuing a little blood. The walk-in closet led to the bathroom. Sonny hobbled there, using the wall as balance. He turned on the bath and doused his leg and shoulder in cold water. He took off his shirt, tore strips of cotton from it and bandaged his wounds. In the mirror, which took up an entire wall of the room, he saw a crazed and battle-hardened warrior, not a human at all really, but a savage, something that belonged...
Of course. They came from the city zoo. There were no Claws on Earth except for the two kept in captivity. Who did he know that controlled the zoo and ran campaigns there monthly to get rid of scum such as him? The Inter-Terra-Anti-Poaching-Organisation, or ITAPO, headed by that most charismatic of fellows, Mr. Langdon.
Sonny decided right there, staring at himself in the mirror, that the second he made it out of this mess he was going to pay Langdon a visit, and remove his fingernails one by one with a pair of pliers. He uttered a crazed bark of laughter at this thought and lurched back into his bedroom.
There was a .50 Desert Eagle that he kept in his bedside drawer. It was an old weapon, sure, but it still worked and would put a hole big enough to stargaze through in anything it hit. He looked at it appraisingly, feeling its comfortable weight in his hand, inched back towards the door, and pressed his ear against the wood.
Silence.
In sudden inspiration, he went back to his bedside table, picked up the phone that lay there and called Karl. He answered on the second ring.
“Listen, Karl. I’m in some serious shit here.” Sonny said quickly into the receiver.
“What kind?” Karl said immediately.
“They’re Claws, two of them, in my lounge.”
“Claws?” He said, incredulous. “Are you sure, Sonny? There aren’t any-“
“They’re from Langdon.” Sonny said.
“I see.”
“Bring help, man. Hurry.”
There was a click in Sonny’s ear and that undoubtedly meant that Karl was on it. He felt he could relax a little more now, knowing that there was some sort of cavalry coming. Before he could proceed any further on how to deal with the Claws outside of his door, his mind insisted he figure out how they got in there in the first place. Landon sent them; there was no question in the matter. The courts couldn’t bring down Sonny Mathis, hunter of the ever-diminishing population of Claws, so Landon had taken it into his own hands. An image flashed across his mind, startlingly clear, of Landon and a few of the handlers from the city zoo hovering next to his apartment in a Fresh, emptying the contents of bulging burlap sacks through his open window only to have apparently nothing fall out of them. It was plausible, but who opened the window?
Why, the ones who had power over all the buildings, of course: the architects.
Sonny had always known that Landon had a serious agenda and a little power, but enough to sway the opinions of the architects? He wracked his brain and found no other solution, unless it was just a fluke in the system and his window opened randomly... but, no, he just couldn’t see that happening. Landon must have somehow convinced the architects it would be better if Sonny became bird food.
“Well, I’ll make you bird food, Mr. Animal-Lover Landon,” Sonny said, smiling and looking at the silver gun in his hands. Speaking to yourself isn’t one of the healthiest habits to ever develop, Sonny knew, but right now he didn’t much care.
He crossed back to the door and listened again, still nothing. He rapped his knuckles softly on the expensive mahogany that could have fed a family in the slums for a year. The barrage of pecking on the door started again at once. Sonny started and took a step back on his bad leg in reflex. He screamed and felt a dull anger rise inside him. The number of these things he had killed on Terra-Five was almost laudable and now there were two, just two, making a fool out of him.
He levelled the ancient weapon towards the sounds of the pecking and fired twice. The weapon gave an enormous kick. The sound was deafening in the closed room, but Sonny could still hear the screams of an injured Claw. He’d hit one! He hit the bastard!
He lurched forward and peered through one of the holes he’d made in the door. There, lying sprawled in the passage, its great head lolling on the green carpet, was a dead Claw. Watching a Claw die was a beautiful thing under other circumstances. Whatever gland made it invisible shut down, and the bird materialised; from the inside to its glistening coat of feathers.
One wing of the purest white was folded on the other like someone saying a prayer while lying on their side. An eye, red as a hot coal, stared sightlessly at the ceiling. In its chest was a hole the size of a bagel and blood, sickly and black like tar, oozed out.
Sonny whooped in triumph, and then the eye he’d been looking through the hole with—his left—was veiled with a red film before darkness succeeded it. The pain was enormous and ripped through him, throwing him on his back, screaming. One hand came up to the spot where his eye was a minute before and touched on horrid emptiness.
He looked back towards the door and saw his eye swinging like pendulum by the optic nerve from the blood-covered beak that had stolen it from him poked through the hole in the door. The beak opened and closed like scissors and the eye was gone. Sonny fired blindly a few more times until there was nothing but dry clicks when he squeezed the trigger, but all missed. The Claw went silent again.
Shakily, he propped himself up on one elbow. Blood gushed freely from the socket, running down his chest in rivulets and pooling in between his legs. It was bad now, very bad. For the first time since this whole ordeal began, Sonny acknowledged the fact that Landon might actually win and he might die at the hands of that which he had hunted with such ardour.
He collapsed on his back again and, through his remaining eye, the world began to move in slow grey waves. His eye darted around the room looking for anything that might help. There was nothing really. The large bed, two bedside tables each with a lamp propped on their surfaces, various paintings, a few windows arranged in a circular pattern that looked out on the indifferent disc of moon in the sky, and the encased Claw talon mounted on the wall. There his eye froze and a thought whispered across his mind, as silent as a snake moving through tall grass. The thought was that the religious maniacs sometimes used the talon for the healing of grievous wounds as well as for diseases. He pushed the thought away. He was the pusher after all, the pusher!—not the user blindly consuming a phoney medicine that had no proven effects, benign or malignant.
“Stop it,” Sonny groaned. “Just stop it. Karl will be along soon, yes. Karl will bring help. Karl will kill that fucking thing in the lounge.”
He was talking to himself again, but that was alright. Any concerns he might have had about his sanity were now just flickering sparks in the distance behind. The world began to darken and all Sonny was aware of before he passed out was a shadow on the moon, looking absurdly like the horn of a rhino.
What woke him was the blaring drone of the phone ringing from faraway. It was hard, so hard, to swim up from the depths of unconsciousness, but something—maybe his lascivious lust for revenge, or maybe nothing more than sheer instinct to survive—forced him. The ringing sounded like the sea heard when you held a shell to your ear, warped and distant. Eventually the sounds began to discern themselves into sharp tenors. His head felt like a leaden weight, the blank socket where his eye had once nested was a fierce and burning crater. Sonny realised with unsurprised rue that he couldn’t feel his left leg. What a mess.
The phone continued to ring and to Sonny it sounded like insane laughter coming from maybe the architects, maybe Landon, maybe both. He pulled himself to the bedside table where the phone lay by digging his elbows into the carpet and shimmying forward. Tired was not the right word to describe how he felt once he had managed this journey, exhausted was closer but still not quite there. He felt bone-weary right down to the marrow.
He lifted his arm—it seemed to weigh about a thousand kilos—and tried to grab the telephone. He succeeded only in swiping it to the floor where it was more accessible. He groped blindly for the receiver and somehow managed to hold it to his ear.
“Please tell me good news, Karl.” Sonny rasped in a thin voice.
“I’m afraid there is no good news, poacher,” said the cool and easy voice of Lenard Langdon. “Not for you, anyway.”
Sonny again felt no surprise, only a dull pulsing anger. “I killed one. I killed one of those Claws you sent for me.”
There was an uncertain pause and then Langdon said simply, “I told you I would get you.”
Sonny breathed into the receiver and said nothing.
Langdon continued glee in his voice. “Since the judge was up to his eyeballs in your filthy money, I had to take the matter even higher. I doubt you had a clue who you were playing with in the first place, Mr. Mathis. That’s beside the point, I guess. The architects seem to agree with my view and they all thought you’d be better off... decommissioned.” There was undeniable pleasure in the last word. “A simple window. I doubt you realise how much sway I needed for that. It was worth it, all of it.”
Sonny could just imagine Langdon pushing his glasses back up the ridge of his nose as he spoke and burst into laughter. He couldn’t help it; hilarity was a welcome visitor in all this chaos.
Langdon sounded suddenly like an offended child. “What?” He said sharply. “What is so goddamn funny?”
“It’s just... just-” A tear spilled out of Sonny’s eye, cutting a track through the gore on his cheek. “You’re such a nerd!” He burst out, and laughed harder than ever.
He dropped the receiver and realised he wouldn’t be able to pick it back up again. That was alright though, that was just fine. Laughter continued to boom out of him in ragged caws. Then Sonny didn’t know if he was crying or screaming. It tapered off to a wracking sob. He curled up his right leg up to his chest—the left one wouldn’t work no matter how hard he willed it—wrapped his arms around it and wept like a little baby, not being able to understand how quickly his ruin had come.
Karl wasn’t coming, he saw forlornly. How could he? He couldn’t pass the iris-scanner and since he wasn’t the police or fire-department, he didn’t have override codes. He wasn’t coming and Sonny had neither the strength and will, nor the firepower, to fight the remaining Claw. Unless he somehow managed to stitch himself up, there was no hope. He had no medical supplies in his bathroom, no bandages, no medicine of any kind. Or...
His eye, bloodshot and bulging, flicked to the talon on the wall. It was such a widely used cure; it had to work, didn’t it? The very apartment he was dying in was proof of that. If the demand wasn’t so high, he couldn’t have sold so much Product to pay for it. Majority rules, right? Right?
He looked through the hole in the door and darkness gleamed on the other side. It took Sonny six minutes to get into a sitting position—he was so weak!—and another three to get the lamp off the bedside table. With every remaining fibre of strength that remained, he hurled the lamp at the glass that held the talon. There was a tinkle as the glass fell inward and the talon thumped to the floor next to his leg.
He looked at it wonderingly and with rekindled hope. Of course it would work. It couldn’t not work. He could still beat Langdon, could draw strength from this marvel and dispel the impotence he felt now. He could win.
The shamans Sonny had seen preparing the talon usually ground it on a rough stone before adding the powder to some boiling water. Sonny didn’t have any such apparatus so he settled for popping the entire thing in his mouth. It tasted flat and stony. He could feel the strength flowing back in to him instantly!
The sharp point of one claw punctured his tongue but Sonny hardly noticed. He only sucked at the stony talon as the poison worked its way into his blood and shot through his veins.
He thought of a random occurrence then. It had happened when he was eleven. His father had taken him on a trip to the Kruger Park before poachers had completely broken down its ecosystem. They had been on a game drive, in the back of a Jeep riding through the thorny and unforgiving bush. The brakes slammed on and Sonny was thrown rudely against the back of the front seat. Ahead of them and slightly to the left, four men were taking a chainsaw to an unconscious—or perhaps dead—rhino’s horn. Sonny had forgotten about this memory almost entirely, but now it swarmed back with alarming force. The sound of that chainsaw chewing through the horn of that rhino perforated through the air. They had loaded it on a waiting truck and fled while the rhino’s blood turned the earth muddy. Sonny had looked on in horror and thought they were disgusting, how fucking downright disgusting those savages were.
It was this thought that rang truer than any others did as Sonny Mathis’s cells began to break down and blood burst from every orifice in his broken body. He died frowning as if in thought, the talon of one Claw protruding from his mouth like some sort of alien doorknob.
Later, Langdon and three burly hired men came to remove the other Claw, each with a pair of thermal goggles over their eyes and a long electrified stick that would paralyse anything it touched. They found the room empty except for the beautiful bird and Sonny’s body. They also found a shattered hole in the bay window. The other Claw had fled after blinding Sonny, believing its prey to be dead. Sonny, in a dead faint at that time, had heard neither its farewell shrieks nor the smashing of glass as it left.
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Martin Stokes is a 20-year-old student and bartender. He likes Science Fiction and Romance... but has a love of the night and the restless wind and the pawing dead, Horror, in a word. ‘Claws and Savages’, is his second published short story and concerns itself with a future South Africa that shares similarities with today’s one.
