The Porcupine of Light

There were nine small boats huddled together in the fog. The tenth was gone.

They used small boats, because the bigger ones couldn’t get past the saltwater reptiles undetected.

They used boats because the long bridge that connected the two land masses was a ruin. Its broken ends jutted from each side like gnawed rib bones abandoned by weary predators.

The tenth boat had been there, and then a spiky hump rose from the surface, followed by a massive eyeball attached to an even more massive head.

The boat and its occupants were swallowed whole.

Where it had been the water rippled in silence.

The commander raised his fist.

No one moved.

The remaining boats spun in abandoned motion. Oars dripping cold leftovers.

In the distance a great furnace churned smoke and ash into the curdled, sulfurous sky. Once a dormant volcano, it was now a ceaseless fountain of magic and fire.

After a long time, the commander lowered his fist. The boats continued their long pull toward the far shore.

They landed in the midst of an obligatory drizzle. The tide was up. The beach was narrow. They got their boots wet.

They dragged their boats past the tide line and flipped them, so they wouldn’t fill with the late evening down pour. The oars were stored in the underbrush just past the sand. Something disturbed by their intrusion fled farther into the forest. Everyone was nervous. Everyone pretended they weren’t.

There was a roar from the waterside and a spout of exhalation from the nostrils of what was practically a dinosaur.

They edged away from the water.

The commander ordered them into formation.

The financial analyst found a narrow path of broken foliage leading inland.

She also found blood on the leaves. A lot of blood. Too much blood for the living.

The commander considered his options. The water and its obvious dangers. The jungle and its potential for unknown surprises.

“We go in,” he decided.

No one batted an eye.

They’d been with him long enough and hadn’t died yet.

They had their ten essentials. Their packs and shovels and machetes.

Guns. Large caliber for taking down large game.

Knives. Serrated with 10-inch blades for last ditch futility.

Grenades. For emergencies.

They locked and loaded.

They donned night vision goggles for the deep, deep part of the forest.

In single file they proceeded.

This was’t anywhere anyone wanted to be.

It was atavistic and hospitable to an innately violent existence.

Visualize it any way you want.

They slunk through the trees like slinking back in time one step beyond the next, into the murky backwaters of yesterday, yesteryear and yestereon. To the time of big things that ate little things. Further back than anyone preferred.

Giant insects chittered just beyond their footsteps.

The canopy of leaves, the size of airplane wings, obstructed the light down to dusky levels.

There was a fecund smell of decomposition and new life stirring in the loins of fallen logs.

There was the humidity that latched onto them as marsupial children, slipping into the folds and pits of their tenderest areas.

There was the impenetrable kudzu rife with thorns and stickers. It punctured their clothes, armor, skin and egos.

And they hadn’t yet encountered the wildlife.

A giant pinecone broke free and plummeted to earth.

It stuck in the ground where it quivered with impact.

The commander donned his helmet. The rest followed suit.

There was a high probability of one hundred percent casualties. They were warned beforehand. It was a place no one had come back from.

Yet, this group of unlikely explorers were all volunteers.

There was a preschool teacher, a linguist, a veterinarian, an arborist, a professional escort, an amateur comic, the finance analyst, a sculptor, a librarian, a baker, a metallurgist… you get the idea. Those were their former occupations, of course. From a former time, for a former life. They were minimally trained militia, most of it on the job and in the field.

The thing they sought was what legends were made of.

They called it the porcupine of light.

The one. The savior.

They each had a mark. A tattoo of sorts.

It was in the shape of a spiral. To signify something. A journey perhaps. Or an ever closing intention. Or the strength of compactness.

The symbol was the same. The symbolism was more personal. To each their own.

They wore it on the backs of their hands and their palms. On their backs. On their shoulders. In one case, a buttock. The linguist had it on his tongue, crazy bastard.

The mark was a beacon of their allegiance.

The porcupine was just a rumor.

But also an urge.

An infectious, inveigling curiosity.

It invaded their dreams. It seared itself into their unrequited desires. They knew it was out there. They had to have it. They coveted it. It was their only desire. It was unhealthy, but true.

The look in their eyes was feverish and desperate.

The object of their desire drew them on and on toward itself in a near perfect line.

Even the commander couldn’t escape its allure.

They were its disciples and not the only ones. They had left friends and family behind in the city across the bay. They had left them in order to save them. They had told them they would return. Just like those before them had told them the same thing. They’d all lost someone to one horrible circumstance or another. It was their time to make amends, or die trying.

They were the fifth excursion. The other four had gone the way of boat number ten. That is, swallowed by a hungry and indifferent fate.

The evidence of those previous attempts was everywhere.

They followed it as it exuded the scent of failure.

There were half digested skeletons hanging from giant cobwebs, and other forms wrapped in the restrictive gauze of entrapment. The teardrop abdomens of over-sized arachnids drooped from the canopy, waiting with endless patience for their next victim.

Carnivorous plants were everywhere. Who knew something so stationary could be so lethal. The plants were beautiful. Lavished in extraordinary colors and patterns. Their smell was a mixture of attractive scents: passionfruit, bacon, petricore. More than one hand was laid on a shoulder, to stay a companion from walking straight into a botanical demise.

Someone tripped over the body of a snake lying comatose in a stupor of digestive ecstasy. It was wide as a tractor tire. The bulge of its most recent helping, a crude hump in its midsection, rippled beneath its ribs and scales. The snake’s closest eye billowed open, rolled once and clapped shut again with indifference. The sanitation expert let out a sigh of relief and hoped no one could smell his fear.

The baker pulled out a knife.

“Let’s cut it open,” he whispered.

“Leave it,” said the commander from some indeterminate spot of observation. “We’re not a rescue mission.”

Hours.

Tension.

Moments of disorientation.

Nervous shit and piss breaks.

The mood was low.

The rain had started up again and marinated them in the slow steady decay of rainforest du jour.

They’d only lost half a dozen to the forest’s toll.

They had no time to mourn.

They’d thought of one another as dead the moment they stepped into those boats.

There was more to come.

There was something stalking them.

It wouldn’t get close enough to be seen because they kept chucking small flares at random into the darkness.

But it was there. It settled in, following the end of the column, waiting for its one opportunity.

It had a repertoire of unsettling sound effects.

Growling, mewling and crying like an abandoned infant or an injured goat. Chittering like an ape or hyena. Going silent for long pauses, knowing silence was the worst noise.

The contingent stopped at a cliff face.

It was a good eighty-five degrees straight up.

The financial analyst was waiting there. She’d gone ahead on her own. She was very brave or extremely unhinged.

“What happened to you?” the escort asked.

The financial analyst raised her left hand, except there was no hand, just a bandage where the hand was when last they’d seen her.

“That thing,” she said in way of explanation. “There’s a way up.” She pointed with her stump. “Someone laid out a path.”

They could see the ropes then. Pressed in the mud. Disguised by nature and time like vines.

“You can’t climb,” the commander stated.

She nodded at her missing hand. “I’ve got some books to balance.”

That elicited a round of gruff chuckling.

“Ain’t that the truth,” the commander said.

She’d been with him since the day this all started. Since the world hatched into this. He knew where she stood. He secretly thought she should be standing where he was.

The slow ascent began. They crawled up the cliff. Slipped. Sloshed. Slid. Scrambled. Covered in mud from head to toe. Born again mud babies.

There were two left at the bottom and one way up.

The financial analyst helped the baker up with her thigh and good hand.

They made eye contact. Then the baker was hanging from the rope.

“Glad it’s not me,” he said.

She didn’t reply. She already had the dagger out and faced the forest.

There it was in the darkness.

Shining eyes like sea anemones.

The baker took one look and scrambled up the slope fast.

It had fur, a scabrous snout and a spine down its back like a sailing fish.

They heard the piercing scream when most of them were well to the top.

It wasn’t a human screaming.

After the baker was pulled over the lip they waited.

And waited.

The forest didn’t move. Not even to breathe.

“It got her.”

“She got it first,” was the reply.

They set up camp at the cliff’s edge. The edge was a natural fortification to the south. Six sentries were posted, two in each other direction. The rest tried to sleep.

While they slept, when they slept, they dreamed.

Arduous dreams which made them whimper.

Repetitive dreams they couldn’t differentiate from the day that had transpired.

Near identical dreams that would have given them pause if discussed.

They were back in the forest on the scent of their quarry and the light. In these dreams some of them would die and not wake.

Others would wake and wonder why they had not died.

The porcupine was there, beckoning them onward. Hinting they were so close. They were almost there.

Some couldn’t believe it was worth it. Even after all they had been through already. The porcupine of light, such a silly idea.

A porcupine? Of light? Of all the things to believe in.

For others it was only right, that what they most believed, hinged on accepting the absurd.

When dawn broke they found themselves on a flat plain on top of the peninsula.

Three had died in their sleep.

A butcher. An architect. And a diplomatic liaison.

There was no sign of struggle.

There was no indication of poison.

It was determined their hearts stopped beating, their lungs stopped breathing and their brains had lost their luster.

“There’s nothing natural about it.” The veterinarian said to himself after his diagnosis.

Grave duty was assigned.

The commander resigned back to his tent to gnaw on their fates.

The sun contended with the clouds for paltry ambiance.

They mingled on the cliff edge.

The view was eventful.

There was the foreboding forest from which they had come.

Its serenity mocked them with deceptive innocence. What lurked below made some of them sick to even think about.

Beyond the forest was water to the west and north.

Farther west was home, the city, like a mirage. The possibility of returning at long odds.

Back south. The way they’d traveled. All the way across so much land. So many recesses of unspeakable calamity. The mountain breathed fire. It set the tone with its perpetual horizon of glowing red.

When the mountain erupted for the first time in a thousand years no one suspected a thing. Not the seismographers or engineers, sensitive dogs or empaths. No one.

The explosion happened without notice.

It was like magic.

It was magic. That’s exactly what it was. Some of it anyway. It was hard to explain. Nearly impossible.

The mountain sent its innards skyward and cast them like runes to the eyes of the gods and the fate of the region.

The region responded. Many fled. Many died. Many, somehow against all odds, survived under the fallout of ash and liquified earth.

Everything changed. It mutated, grew rampant and out of control. Fish and fowl and worm and chittering squirrel. Creatures that never existed oozed out of the mountain. Giant reptiles appeared. Mammals grew to exceptional enormity. Leviathans of yore surfaced from the depths. The forests became jungles and suffocated the land with their grasping and groping. Sick, sinister beasts emerged from the shadows and the netherworld to lay waste to everything.

And the porcupine of light emerged too. A creature unlike the others. A creature that bore their salvation through its genesis.

“Sir, over here,” the preschool teacher waved to the commander emerging from his tent. He had black rings under his eyes like mold on fruit.

They disappeared into a copse of slender trees, with bark soft and wrinkled like knuckle skin.

In the midst of this, a scene of gentle violence. If such a thing could exist.

The commander studied the latest casualty.

They’d sacrificed so much. This awful existence taking and taking. Was it worth it?

The dead man leaned against the trunk of one of the trees. Numerous branches extended from the tree in a natural formation, but then curled back. The branches thinned to needles and had found the man’s main arterial access points. His neck, his armpits, his groin. The man was as pale as milk. His countenance drooped, sheer with sorrow. The tree was glowing with the highlights of veinous activity. It pulsed with vibrant life. Blooming buds, the red of blood, yawned open like the mouths of baby birds. It was menacing and beautiful to behold.

“Should we cut him out, sir?”

The commander pondered sympathy, empathy and compassion. He wondered why there was always time for debilitating remorse and fear.

Here was evidence that physical pain was nothing compared to the pain of mental anguish and hopelessness.

“Leave him. He wanted this.”

The two men, still alive and breathing, kept the dead man company for a time. Both contemplated how long it took for the branches to find him? How did he suffer so silently that no one would hear? Was what he most feared a product of his own mind? Was it out there waiting for the rest of them? Did he make the wiser choice?

“Time to go,” the commander said.

They left the arborist in his copse of exsanguination.

The other trees stopped reaching toward their bodies, full of vitality and rich with blood.

On they continued. Across the flat top of the peninsula. A half day of calm. There was one bird. An ugly, vulturous monstrosity cruising low over the land, eyeballing for an easy lunch. The group dropped to their bellies and let it pass.

The sense of better days ahead was palpable.

The amateur comic made a joke. A sensible, tolerant joke.

Everyone in earshot laughed at the joke.

The laughter was good. It made sense in the wake of things.

Tragedy couldn’t best them. Their laughter was the tranquility at the core of the hardship.

Yet, when they reached the gully on the other side, they knew, deep down, this wasn’t the end.

The second night they slept and their sleep was uninterrupted.

Dawn arrived. No one disappeared in the night. No one dug graves in the morning.

No one wanted to be the first into the gully.

The commander led by example.

“Keep close,” he commanded.

There was no path. Only a creek trickling down the gully.

They followed the creek down through the forest.

Down felt better than up.

They still didn’t like it.

There were too many variables; things could go catastrophically wrong at any moment.

The darkness closed in again. They slipped and were covered in more mud from head to toe. They kept their eyes peeled for unexpected company.

The baker shot a black shape perched high above them.

Its fall was interminable as it crashed through the trees.

“What was it?”

“Got me.”

The commander signaled to stop. He wasn’t happy. He was losing control. Morale was low. They were getting sloppy. He knew it.

“There,” he said.

They tensed themselves for a fight.

“Here it comes,” the comic said with a frown.

“It’s a house,” someone near the back of the column said.

The baker scoffed. “It’s an apartment complex.”

There was a multitude.

Treehouses built out of the existing forest.

They were abandoned, except for killer millipedes and rot.

The first house collapsed the moment one of them stepped inside for inspection. They dug his crushed body out of the debris and laid it aside for burial.

In the rest they found remnants. Of human life. Of survivors that had made it this far and continued on after a time. A tea set. Bills of money in an empty rum bottle. Old electronics.

There was a note.

We had to leave. The note said. It will return.

“That’s an ominous comment.”

“What’s new?”

“Pack up,” said the commander.

They listened to the forest as if it was listening back. The silence was waiting to eat their most fearful thoughts.

They returned to the ground with the few items of use they had found.

That’s when they discovered the baker’s body was missing.

They brandished their guns like the experts they were.

Deadly serious.

Hell bent on not dying this time.

For most of them, it didn’t work out so well.

“Shoot to kill,” the commander said.

Rewind.

The past.

A thousand days ago…

Human communities had survived for years after the first eruption. Scavenging, rebuilding, making the best with what they could. Trying to fight back and reclaim some semblance of what they had. They tried not to forget their humanity against all odds.

When the dead sea monster washed up on the shore of their city it was impaled with spears of light.

The light had killed it. Like a poison eradicating evil.

The light was the answer.

Here exists a thing that kills sea monsters, they thought in awe.

Here was something that could fight back.

They used the quills to protect themselves.

That is, they used the light. The light from the creature born with the monsters. Born from the volcano.

The volcanic light.

They used the light for protection. For guidance. For inspiration.

They stood their ground against the onslaught of the outside world.

But the light was a finite resource and it quickly began to wane.

Some few were chosen. For an expedition. The first expedition. The first of many. They would go across the water, to where the sea monster drifted from. They would find the porcupine of light. They would find it and tame it and bring it home.

The expedition members were tattooed with a precious few remaining drops of light.

That’s when their dreams started.

Dreams calling them.

Dreams of binding. Dreams of declaration. Dreams of a better life.

Dreams the world could be set in order upon.

The porcupine wanted them to find it. It was there to save them.

The dreams became a calling. The calling became a fever. A fever to be ridden until it broke.

They made a plan and set it in motion.

Here.

Now.

The present.

Bad things happened.

When they broke out onto the beach, fleeing the terror in the gully, a mere handful remained.

The commander was there and a few others.

The commander had to be dragged out of the forest screaming.

His left leg was gone up to the groin.

The bone and meat leaked past the tourniquet

He wasn’t going to make it.

He spoke in delirious quotes of utter nonsense.

They all nodded in fidelity.

Oh, you wanted to see the monster?

Whatever it was wasn’t compelled to pursue them onto the beach.

Some of them saw nothing but a jagged shadow with the head of a bird and the body of a snake.

That was before it tore them limb from limb.

The sculptor saw a golem, with the devil’s true name scrawled backward on its forehead.

That was before it severed his jugular.

The commander saw a banshee with mouths for eyes and teeth for hair.

That was directly before his amputation.

The librarian saw the insides on the outside.

There was no consensus.

The most likely culprit was death.

They sought the light. This was the reaper in the dark.

The contingent’s footprints defaced the sand in a disorganized meandering along the coast.

Here was the plan nearing its conclusion, countless hours and a slaughter of lives later.

They dragged the commander on a stretcher made of driftwood.

He looked dead already.

His eyes shot open and he looked around in a frenzy.

‘Where?” he asked.

They halted their progress and huddled around him in protective grace.

The last thing he saw before he closed his eyes, to the peaceful thought of a good night’s rest, was a shimmering light down the beach. A blurry golden lump of fuzz.

“Ah,” he said.

They leaned in to hear the rest.

There was no rest. It was a story they all knew.

They left him on the sand, to be eaten by whatever came along first.

The remaining few struggled on the beach. They followed the light ahead, as it ambled along at a pace keeping ahead of their own.

It was big and it glowed like a hot nugget of gold.

They tried to move faster. They encouraged one another. Their quarry was within reach. They needed a desperate push to catch it.

Miraculously, it was nearer. They were closing the distance. It wasn’t slower. They weren’t faster. It was as if the beach itself were shrinking, forcing a conclusion.

They closed in. The creature came into focus.

They shielded their eyes from its brilliance.

It was big, remember.

The size of a house.

They stopped and watched. They craned their necks in tribute at the sloping shape of it.

Hundreds of quills stuck from a half-dome of back, dripping light down the porcupine’s lichen-spotted mass. They were menacing in volume and sharpness. They quavered as it waddled back and forth on plodding, stumpy legs. There was a susurration, like bamboo in the wind.

The porcupine was a sloppy thing. It moved forward with a mindless determination.

Its broad tail dragged in the mud behind it.

It wasn’t really a porcupine at all, that much was clear.

It was something else. A smoldering pyroclast of animated magic. Born from the volcano. Lost and lonely.

They followed.

The creature approached a mound on the beach covered in algae. The shape was similar to the shape of the creature itself, but considerably smaller. It was desiccated and losing its form to weathering and decay. They looked a pair. Maybe siblings, or perhaps, erstwhile mates. The creature nudged the mound hard enough to scare the crabs out from beneath it. It was a bad idea. The mound shifted and slide down further into itself, like a rotten apple.

Done with its inspection the creature turned toward its followers. Its head swiveled, revealing its long snout, glistening with wet. It looked at them with confusion and fear.

It lifted one lip baring some very nasty teeth.

It set its body in an aggressive posture. Its quills moved of their own accord, agitated, like the bristling spines of a sea urchin.

The crew stepped back in unison, still a coordinated unit, down to the last four.

The porcupine grew brighter. Its eyes glared with fury.

It was obviously sick. It was spitting mucus from its nostrils and the sides of its mouth. It was trembling with some kind of muscular tick. They could see the fright in its eyes, rounded out by an instinctual need to defend itself.

It was deranged, possibly rabid and dying.

It trembled.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the porcupine of light tucked its feet in and nestled its head on the sand. It lay there, breathing. An unsettling rumble coming from its lungs indicating, if nothing else, its problems continued internally as well.

I know.

They were disappointed too.

The crew rallied around the creature. Their initial confusion and disgust discarded for a saturnine reverence. Here was a thing that shouldn’t exist. It had come from the volcano and, unknown and unwittingly, called them to commune with it. It was sick and, if the mound of bones and ravaged skin nearby was any indication, it might be the last of its kind. Therefore, it was sick and it was lonely. They concluded it was just another awful creation of the mountain and its fire. It was a sad, pathetic creature, living a sad pathetic existence, on this stretch of sand.

It wasn’t a savior in its own right. It wasn’t something new and wonderful that was fated to answer their questions, the how and why of this new life. It wasn’t the answer they were hoping to find, for this new world they had to endure. Yet, they had found it and it had its uses. Aside from the near spiritual yearning that had compelled them to seek it out in the first place, the prospect of what it meant for their future and their posterity was the sole reason for being there. If they could equip themselves with its protections, they would endure.

The four remaining members, of the ten boats, of expedition number five, knew what they had to do.

They dug a ditch in the sand thirty meters away. It was a wide hole and it was a deep hole. They all had to fit.

They built a roof of the thickest driftwood they could find.

When they were done they chose the comic and handed her a bag with all the grenades. She had reflexes like a weather vane and was nimble as a fox.

She approached the porcupine.

She solemnly set the clutch of grenades against its exposed belly.

The porcupine adjusted in its sleep and settled on top of the grenades.

Then she pulled the pin on one last grenade, left it and prayed to the rain she did not slip as she ran with death right behind her.

It took hours to collect the remains.

To say there was a carcass would be to misinform.

The pieces had blown across the beach.

A brief, luminescent shower of gore and viscera.

Meat, fur, teeth, claws and of course, the quills.

Its skeleton was a jumble of eradicated symmetry.

The quills were easiest to find. They still shone with the same alluring light. They collected them first. As they were the primary asset.

Once they found all they could, they broke it down even further. There was no part they would leave underutilized. The porcupine was no more, but its legend would live on. It, as totemic idol and conduit of the mythological, was just beginning.

They built a giant bonfire and roasted what they could.

It was tough old meat and the most delicious meal they ever had. They sat around the warmth of the fire as the sun went down. They melted the quills in the blaze. The metallurgist fashioned rudimentary spears for each of them. How or why it was him that survived was anyones guess. The rest they divided into chunks of ore they could more easily manage, and set it out to cool in an unbroken ring enclosing them.

They rarely spoke, caught in their own reveries of loss and redemption.

They watched the reptiles and giant mollusks stalk each other in the shallows. They trusted the dim glow of the circle would keep them at bay.

They knew in the morning they would have to go back. They would pack what they could for easier transport. Their task wasn’t near completion. They would have to brave the monster that was still out there and maybe others, most likely others. That was tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that. In this moment they were content that they could see more than just the dark.

Satisfied, with their bellies bloated, and warm from the fire, they fell asleep to dreams of a future in command of the light.