Who: Onyxx. It’s a narrative. Where: Somewhere very high up in a mountain in Tibet. When: Now, pretty much. What: Recap of what he's been doing. Hunting for food. Thinking very dark thoughts. Scaring some Chinese soldiers. Warnings: Dark thoughts. Some very dark actions.
Onyxx really wished one of his foster families had been good enough to take him hunting with them. Oh, several of them hunted, it was just that none of them wanted the foster kid along, except that one that talked about having him run while they shot at him. Luckily that hadn’t happened…although truthfully, right now, he was wishing it had. It would have been less painful than what he was dealing with now.
He’d been up here since late Tuesday night, and he hadn’t eaten since he’d gotten up here. As it turns out, hunting was a lot more difficult than it looked in movies. The climb had taken a lot out of him, and after he’d found a suitable cave – and used his strength to hew a path to it with his fists – he’d found a good boulder to act as a door, pulled it in front of the cave, and gone to sleep. According to his watch, he’d slept for about ten hours, straight into Wednesday morning. It was around then that he realized he’d need light, and that meant fire. With a sigh, he had gone about gathering branches from trees for the fire he planned on making. He’d had to wait for the snow to melt off of them, a process he’d sped up by keeping them close to him and letting his body heat do the work. The drying had taken longer, several hours. This took him into Wednesday night, and it wasn’t until he’d used his lighter on the pile of branches to get the fire started that he realized he was absolutely parched.
He slid the boulder aside just far enough to get out – he didn’t want the wind or the snow outside to snuff out his fire – and collected some snow into a big pile. He floundered for a second then, unsure of how to collect it for his use. He didn’t have a bucket or anything of that sort, and he certainly didn’t know how to make one… Ultimately, he just cupped his hands together and grabbed as much of it as he could. Then he reentered the cave, leaving the boulder cracked so he could go out and get more snow. Once inside, he knew he couldn’t just dump the snow he’d collected onto the fire, but he had to melt it soon, because his throat was actually beginning to hurt.
The first bit of morbid curiosity sparked then. His brow scrunched up in thought and he sucked his lower lip into his mouth so he could gnaw on it while he thought. I wonder…does impenetrable skin prevent burns? Without so much as a second thought, he thrust his cupped hands into the fire, watching as the snow quickly began to melt and his hands, miraculously, didn’t start burning. He felt the heat, but that was it. He couldn’t burn. That was a handy bit of information.
He gulped down the water, and instantly realized he would need a more effective collection method than his hands cupped together. He needed more water now, but he could stall it long enough to make a bucket. For a few seconds he looked around, unsure of how to make a bucket, and then he got an idea. He reached up and broke off a huge section of stalactite – he’d broken all of the stalagmites so he could move around his cave unobstructed – and then carefully broke off a section towards the bottom, thus leaving something that was roughly bucket-shaped. He peered at the wider side, where he’d put the opening, puzzling out in his mind how to hollow this thing out. Well… He lifted the index finger of his free hand and poked it into the stone with relative ease. “Maybe…” He began making jackhammer motions with his finger, and slowly but surely, that stalactite became a bucket.
He didn’t feel any accomplishment from this. He hadn’t really felt much besides rage and pain since he’d read that note. At this point the hunger hadn’t really kicked in, and even when it did, it was lost amidst the pain he was already feeling. Everything he’d done so far? Just motions. Actions. There was no real thought behind them, besides that first spark of morbid curiosity.
He cracked the boulder again and went outside, scooping up more of the fresh snow he’d collected and bringing it in to melt over the fire. Pulling the boulder back into place, he realized there was really nothing else to do today. Heaving a heavy sigh, he sat back against the wall, far from the fire. Somehow the light just seemed a little too bright and warm for him right now. Reaching into his pocket, he removed his cell phone, gazing down at it for a few moments before crushing it into powder in his hand. He wanted no one tracking the GPS signal. He wanted no temptation to return to civilization. As far as he was concerned, this mountain would be his home for as long as he lived.
With nothing left to do, no distractions left to keep him occupied, he could feel his mind drifting towards things he wanted nothing to do with right now. Try as he might, he couldn’t wrangle it, couldn’t stop it from drifting back to Candy and the clown freak and what she’d done and before he knew it he’d punched a six foot hole into the wall behind him. Scooting over ever so slightly brought his leg into contact with the piece of stalactite he’d broken off the bottom of his makeshift bucket, and he looked down at it curiously as another spark of morbid curiosity – that was what he was calling it – lit in his mind. Yet again his brow scrunched up in thought, and before he knew it he was lifting the sharp stone.
He wondered, darkly and perhaps a little hopefully, if all of him was impenetrable.
The air seemed thick around him, thick and heavy and utterly silent. The crackling of the fire was forgotten as he slowly opened his mouth and lifted the broken piece of stalactite into position. He gulped once, convulsively, and then closed his eyes and took a deep breath, which was difficult with the point of the stalactite pressing against the roof of his mouth. His free hand made a fist, and he breathed out a long breath he’d been unaware he was holding.
When the people a man needs get taken away from him, you can’t ever go back to who you were before.
He’d heard that line in a trailer for some cop movie, and he couldn’t help but feel it was entirely appropriate now. He’d lost Candy once, in a life that only he remembered. She’d been taken from him, brutally ripped away from him and he’d never been the same. Maybe it had been foolish to think that he could go back to normal after that week. He couldn’t handle the loss as an adult, what made him think he could handle it as a sixteen year old? And now this. Now she showed how little she really cared for him, at least in his mind. Her note, professing her love, was confetti upon their bedroom floor, scattered amongst the splinters of the bedroom door. Bullshit. If she’d taken even a second to think about him in all this, she’d have realized what it would do to him.
Maybe she had. Maybe she didn’t care.
His hand was shaking. It took him a moment to realize tears were beginning to make the journey down his face. Another moment passed and he realized it wasn’t just his hand, but his whole body that was caught in the tremors. He sat there for a long minute, a minute that seemed to stretch on infinitely, with one hand poised to push that sharp stalactite right up and into his brain, ending things once and for all.
And then he threw it away.
The next morning, villagers that lived downwind of his cave would tell their neighbors how they had heard the sorrowful howling of the Abominable Snowman in the night.
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Thursday. Still no food, not for lack of trying. He’d punched outside of his cave, and just off to the side. It was deep enough that the wind couldn’t get into it, which made it a perfect place for him to put his bucket in order to gather fresh snow. God knew that he was already suffering; he didn’t need to drink animal piss from melted snow and make himself sick.
That night he sat with the stalactite in his mouth again. It had somehow become a ritual. One of these days he was going to do it, somewhere deep inside himself he knew it. He just wasn’t sure which day it would be. Maybe tomorrow.
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Friday was as fruitless as Thursday. He got his usual excellent haul of water, all of which he’d drink during the course of the day, but that was it. He’d taken to eating leaves without much concern over whether they were poisonous, not that he’d be able to recognize the poisonous ones anyway. So far he’d been lucky, no toxics.
Yet again he watched villagers hunt. He couldn’t see what they were doing that he wasn’t.
He had a healthy beard going by this point, not that he cared. He’d also taken to going shirtless, after he’d accidentally burned the only shirt he’d brought with him while trying to get a fire going.
He hadn’t slept since Wednesday. He’d tried that night, but his sleep had been plagued by nightmares so terrible that he was petrified of letting himself return to sleep. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need sleep.
This time, he spent the entire night with the stalactite in his mouth. It was getting closer. He could feel it.
Maybe tomorrow.
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Success.
He’d finally realized his problem. He was too civilized, too humane. He had to let all of that façade drop away, let the primitive, dark beast inside out. He had to become a predator, determined and merciless, in order to really hunt. And sure enough, he’d found success.
He’d used the trees. He’d hidden in them, waiting and watching for hours until he saw that one unsuspecting deer. It was a good size, too. Could feed him for a while.
Without so much as a single thought, his body snapped into motion, leaping from the tree onto the deer. He bore the deer down with his weight and strength, one knee on the ground while the other leg balanced him, and in one smooth motion he snapped the deer’s head clean off its neck. Good. He didn’t want to have to deal with it later.
The blood fascinated him. Stark red bleeding out onto the pure white of the snow. There was a beauty in it, he thought. A beautiful contrast. He touched the crimson pool, pulling his finger away a second later to gaze in curiosity at the thick liquid that now coated his fingertips. Experimentally, he smeared it on his face. It made him feel less like a man, and more like a beast. He wondered if it made him look crazy.
Sarcastically, he thought that maybe now that he looked crazy Candy might actually give his feelings more thought.
He hefted the body of the deer by what remained of its neck and slung it over his shoulder. He’d made tools during the time he’d been unsuccessful, simple things like a plate of wood and a pointy stone knife. They would do the trick.
It was on his way back that he encountered a trio of Chinese soldiers. They stopped and stared at him as he came around the corner, and he did the same to them. He imagined he must have looked a mess, covered in snow from head to toe, his face smeared with the blood of the deer. The two groups stared at each other for a moment before the soldiers shakily pulled their guns to bear. Onyxx knew how this could end, and he didn’t want it to. Not because he didn’t want to kill these men, he didn’t care one whit about that, he just didn’t feel like pulling bullets out of his dinner.
With one deep breath, he let out an impressive, guttural roar. Two of the men reeled back, their eyes widening in fear. They both spoke in a fearful tone to the third, and he thought he heard something that sounded sort of like “abominable”. Good. These men should be afraid of him. Right now, he was the most dangerous thing on this mountain.
Two of them ran. One didn’t. He pulled the trigger.
He got his face embedded in a tree and his skull crushed for his trouble.
Onyxx continued on back to his cave unmolested. He didn’t worry about the two soldiers. They would be too afraid to come back, and too afraid of being mocked to tell their story. Their careless friend was killed by a wild animal. That’s all that they would say happened.
He wouldn’t put the stalactite in his mouth tonight.