Trembling With Fear 08/23/20

The Part Where They Die by Nicholas Stillman

“We find you guilty of youth,” the old man grumbled. “I sentence you to death by dragons.”

The cloaked judge looked too decrepit and senile to pass for a real one. Cory turned from him and glared into the huge rocky pit which formed the village square. It looked real. Although dragons didn’t exist, the stench of decay truly did, and it wafted up like heat from a volcano.

Cory scowled, and the seniors frowned. The whole sadistic village of them stood around the pit, probably just to dignify themselves for the day. The geezers who had surrounded him earlier stood just as close now, having marched him from the woods to his execution site without a moment’s stop in jail. Those eight or so machete men, bulbous in their faces and bodies, appeared ready to block him if he bolted. His skinny teenaged build produced more sweat than muscle, and his oily face shone like their oversharpened machetes. He eyed the crowd for his confiscated hiking gear, but found only hunches, overcoats, and porridge-colored jowls. They had let him keep his pants and dweeby undershirt–for their “dragons” deserved dignity too, no doubt.

“Do you have any final words for this community?” the pretend judge asked, for what else could he do to feel useful in his years of uselessness?

The ugly faces grew uglier as they smiled. Fleshy puffballs rose. Folds and frown lines sank, deep and dark like the pit. Cory kept quiet and gazed at the beautiful wrinkles beyond them, the cracked pavement that had led him here afoot. He couldn’t spot a single NO TRESPASSING sign along that overgrown road. The crones, after all, wanted outsiders for their hoity-toity trials. Their fantasies of self-importance went far beyond dragons.

The curmudgeons pointed their machetes at a large wicker basket caked with dried blood. It dangled from a pulley on a gallows which spanned one edge of the pit. Cory clambered inside, and though the stench squeezed his stomach, the death smell at least distracted him from the crumpled hags amassed on the hill.

The basket lowered slowly with his puny weight. The rope unwound from a large, wooden wheel. Its axle squealed like the young victims the villagers needed to hear, the whimpers which made the seniors feel like kings. Cory glared once more at their saggy faces and the crumbly homes behind them. The trailers sat like boulders in the dense brush, as insignificant as their dwellers who denied such humbleness. The hovels looked easy to haul and plop here, like the elderly recruits drawn in to replace the dying. The rock curtain rose, and the gray sky became a coin that never flipped for anyone.

Cory held in every death threat he could think of, even if venting them could lighten the basket. The self-proclaimed judges leered over him anyway, awaiting his screams like their favorite song. Only sweat cried out of him now, though, and he sweated out pure hate instead of fear. The shrinking sky pulled everything good away from him. He despised every evil face up there and even his old self among them, the naive kid who had sought to document their backwater village. He loathed every frame he had planned to film, every second of fascination and compassion once held for the monsters above.

The monsters below, whether wolves or bears, didn’t deserve a struggle from him. Every punch, stomp, and kick on Earth belonged on the feeble bones and brains of his murderers.

A mere drizzle of daylight reached the cave floor as reluctantly as the basket. Cory counted four wrenched-apart skeletons with crushed skulls for tombstones. By habit, he reached into his pocket as though for a final grasp of humanity. The villagers, however, had chopped his camera phone into minerals in front of him.

He saw hope: tunnels. One even had light of its own in dapples against the nothingness. Even the child-eating animals hated the elders, for the creatures had clawed to the forest to feed. Cory swung himself out of the basket, and in his very next step, vowed to kill every living human in the village. He envisaged himself reborn from the earth and cast in a new documentary. It started in bliss at the part where they die. He only needed for the beasts to have migrated or to lie dormant in other lairs.

They did neither.

The rotting smell pushed Cory’s back to the pit wall, but the monstrosities emerging from the tunnels made his back bleed. The Komodo dragons looked two feet taller than anything documented and ten times hungrier. The village had bred them to survive the region’s coldness–and its bears.

Cory decided he would struggle with them, no matter how vain. He hunched and prepared to wrestle, dominate, and then of course die. In his last and darkest fantasy, he rode one of the scaly giants out the tunnels and into the village.

The Komodo dragons closed in, sharing their vile breath with his. They stopped and stared, though, as did every lizard that jostled into the cave. Minutes later they still stood, entranced and enticed by an odor they had never smelled before. The tall figure before them reeked of an alpha they only knew from pheromones and instinct. The adolescent’s sweat smelled not of horror, but of hate.

Cory, what remained of him, didn’t know if the monsters would tear off elderly meat with their claws or just their teeth. Either way, the villagers would scream like children in the part where they die.

He glared at the tunnel with the light, and the dragons waited to follow.