Kill Claus!

away."

Chapter 1

I often heard the rumors about the Claus but never believed they were true. The village elders told all hatchlings about the fat jolly old elf dressed all in red who calls out humans with promises of sugar lumps, peppermints, roast meat, and oranges. And how once a human succumbs to the temptation of delicious food, something tastier than fungus, worms, and mildew lettuce, Santa’s tiny elves instantly swarm him, hooking him and then stabbing him with their red and white striped candy canes. And then, no one ever sees that person again.

I knew people who disappeared overnight and never returned, but why believe in some myth about their death or departure? It didn’t make sense. Considering the way we lived, just walking out of the tunnels and jumping into the acid river made sense, after too many days straight on sewage duty and mildew salad. I felt that way plenty of times myself. I didn’t need some misguided notion of Santa Claus to sugarcoat my depression, discouragement and frustration. It seemed as ridiculous as believing that mankind once had a glorious civilization with gardens full of orange, yellow, red and green fruits and vegetables, and pens full of juicy animals. Or that they actually lived in shelters out under the sky, with special furniture to sit on, sleep on, and eat on. Impossible. Someone once told me humans actually swam in the rivers, and I laughed in his face: Good one Santa Claus!

My cynicism lasted until recently. Until the night I woke up smelling fried meat fat and fresh bright fruit—ham and oranges, I think they’re called in the storybooks. We once had scratch and sniff game cards to make life a little more pleasant, gone now but I didn’t like playing them much, anyway. Why do we persist in inventing and preserving an imaginary past for ourselves?

But a few nights ago, I’m telling you, I smelled what I smelled. It was real. Even though it’s forbidden, I’d started sleeping closer to the tunnel mouth because the hot, damp and stinky vapor further down was getting to me. I desperately needed some fresh air. I first caught a whiff of peppermint, and I had to follow my nose. When I thought about it being a joke, my fists curled involuntarily. When I thought about it being real, I salivated like crazy. I got as far as the tunnel mouth. Just starting to look out.

And then they swarmed me. The Claus’s elves.

At least a dozen of them surrounded me, buzzing and clicking as they poked at me with these long hooked poles. Red and white stripes, I swear. Several elves hooked my left leg and pulled me off balance as one of them hooked my right arm. Three of them went in for the kill with the sharpened ends of the hooks pointed at me. I got a quick glimpse of them in the moonlight then: like tiny humans with slightly rounded bodies, dressed in green suits and pointed green hats, with thin, green hands, and mouths that looked more like pinchers.

Twisting and turning, I freed my arm and kicked my leg loose, smashing one of the elves in the head with my bare foot. Its head crackled and some kind of goo came out on my toes, and the thing rolled into a ball, ignored by its fellows. I punched another one of the elves away and started getting up in a crawl, but not fast enough. I felt a sharp, cold pain in my side, just above my waist. Then a warm, liquid feeling. I squealed and scurried away.

But it was too late. I’d been wounded pretty bad.

I had the sense to move away from the tunnel mouth, into the darkness of open air space. That way, I wouldn’t lead the elves back to my village, such as it was, deeper in the tunnels. At least those emergency drills had sunk in, even if the myths hadn’t. So I knew to get under a scramble bush, up close by the trunk and in the middle of the thickest, thorniest scrambles.

But if I could get through, the much tinier elves could. I knew that if they followed me, I was doomed.

Chapter 2

It was night when I woke up to the moon glowing blue, with several layers of aura curled around it, and the stars blinking. I nearly lost my balance on the scramble bush branch, and some long thorns pricked the back of my neck and my hands, causing deep, burning puncture wounds. But I noticed the terrible pain in my side even more. I put my hand down there and quickly pulled it back in disgust. Some kind of ooze or goop seeped from the gaping hole, not flowing like blood, more like blood gel.

No sound of the elves. They must have gone, assuming I was dead.

Seeing by moonlight, I climbed out of the brambles as carefully as I could, but the needlelike thorns still jabbed me many times. I had to stop a lot, too, as the loss of blood from the candy cane wound tired me out.

Back on the ground, I listened carefully for elves, but I couldn’t make out any of their angry hissing and clicking. Only the dog-crickets and cow-lizards made sounds in the darkness. I’ve never seen these creatures, except in old drawings on the tunnel walls. The dog-crickets have wolf heads and cricket bodies, and make a high-pitched barking chirp. The cow-lizards look like mythical cows, except with scales all over and long lizard tails. They make a deep hissing groan, like mooossss. I couldn’t see them, but they didn’t sound close by.

It occurred to me that if I didn’t see or hear any elves, it might be safe to go back to the caves. See if everyone’s alright.

But what if the elves were still patrolling and saw me go back?

Chapter 3

Everything was quiet near the tunnels, and no sign of trouble or elves. As I got closer, I saw strange marks on the ground, like something had been dragged, smearing blood. I felt a wave of panic—these were signs of evacuation or attack.

I rushed into the tunnels, moving as quietly as I could. The drag marks went all the way down, and the closer I got to the living areas, the more blood covered the floor and walls. The first room, usually a kind of guard station and communal area/living room, had been flattened, everything and everyone stamped to rubble.

It looked the same everywhere I went in the settlement. Bone tools and utensils smashed to splinters; blood covering the floors in deep pools, or drying on the walls and mounds of body parts; gelatinous, goopy brains piled and smeared around the rooms. Something had blasted in here to pound everything to a pulp. How could the tiny elves do that? A swarm contained thousands of them, but they only weighed a couple pounds apiece. This looked like a giant hammering machine had charged through, or like everything had been fed into a power press and wood chipper combined.

I saw no survivors. Besides the blood and brains, the main evidence of the people who’d lived here with me—my friends and family—consisted of the occasional smashed or severed body part. Half a leg ending in a partial foot that looked like it had been bitten away. Arms ripped from their sockets. Ears or eyes or noses lying alone on the ground in small splashes of blood. Lots of guts, as if the elves had eviscerated people with their candy cane spears and separated the innards before dragging the bodies away. I began to freak out.

I saw no bodies either. That’s what disturbed me the most. The blood, guts, brains, and the smell of the dead rotting pieces of my friends made me vomit into the piles of fluid offal. The thought that I would never see my people again brought tears to my eyes.

What if I had never followed those seductive Xmas odors out into the open air? What if I hadn’t let my stomach, my gluttony, my greed get the better of me? All these people would be alive, and I would not be broken, bleeding and sick. Self pity. Despair. Anger. Horror. I felt my brain changing in response to this new reality. I’d dropped into a different universe. Screaming, retching and crying, I kicked and clawed through the wreckage. Searching for bodies. Hoping for survivors. Wanting to die. I could see myself doing it from a distance, and I knew it was pointless, but I couldn’t stop.

Stumbling in the slippery gore, offal and body parts of my former tunnel mates, I made my way through all the rooms until I got to the one I slept in. I had been walking aimlessly, but now it seemed like I had made my way here unconsciously. In terms of the carnage, this room was no different than any of the others. But I hadn’t come to see if the people who normally slept near me had survived. I knew they hadn’t, even before I got there. I had come for the only things I had ever owned besides the ragged loincloth I wore: a bowl made from the top of my grandmother’s skull, and a blanket that she had knitted herself from her own hair.

Just before she died, I can still remember Grandma saying she wanted me to have her skull as my very first bowl. She was beaming with pride to be able to give me this precious gift. I was speechless. What an honor. All those people in the tunnels eating out of their hands, with no skull bowls of their own, and my grandma selected me to have hers. Every time I ate my mildew salad out of her skull cap, I thought of her and what a privilege it was, and tears came to my eyes.

The hair blanket was a happier gift, if no less precious, because she gave it to me when she was alive and I was a little boy. To make it, she had to grow her hair out for years before cutting it. Then she would have another several years to knit the cut strands before she could add the next crop. I think my blanket took her fifty years to finish. I was her only surviving grandchild, out of hundreds of eggs my parents laid. Between malnutrition; the cold, damp conditions of the tunnels; and the ravages of tunnel pests, like the mice-roaches, flying centipedes, and blind, amphibious catfish which sucked eggs dry using their hollow tusks, all of their other children died or were eaten as eggs or larvae. I had a few siblings from other clutches who survived to childhood, but diseases took them eventually.

When my grandmother gave me the blanket, she said she was glad she didn’t have to make a choice who received it, because so much time and work went into it. I felt happy and sad at the same time.

May it protect you always, Sesam, she told me, so you may father many clutches of eggs and produce many children yourself.

It had been warm lately, so I wasn’t sleeping with my blanket the night I was captured. I had left it hanging on a hook on the wall, along with my bowl, which should be under the blanket. When I saw the blanket where I left it, I wept. It felt like a reunion with my grandmother—or like finding some old friends in this nightmare where no others remained. More miraculously, even though the wall around it was washed with blood as if it had been pumped from a hose, my blanket itself was clean.

I grabbed both articles from the hook and hugged them to myself. Rubbing the blanket against my cheek, I wiped away my tears and snot. Then I covered my nose and mouth and breathed deeply, enjoying the special smell of my grandmother’s hair—and the way it filtered the disgusting odors of rotting blood and organs in the room. Putting the bowl on my head, I draped the blanket around my shoulders, knotting it at my throat. Thus armored and feeling a bit stronger, I continued my search for survivors.

I kept flailing and blubbering until I found the piles of hands and eyes. That shut me down. I crashed back to earth, falling to my knees, just staring at the evidence of a massacre. The elves did this. The myths were true. But they were only partial truths. Nothing I’d been told referred to this kind of carnage and destruction. It was all about a few people getting caught, killed or disappeared. I don’t think anyone knew what could really happen if a swarm found your village, got into your tunnels.

If we went out onto the surface, if we lived there, this is what would happen. But in the tunnels, we were supposed to be safe.

I stared at the pile of hands and the pile of eyes forever. Frozen. I was in a new universe, and the universe stopped. I did not exist. Nothing existed but those piles. In this universe, that’s what people became—eyes and hands, without bodies, without selves, without lives.

Since I had a body, wounded and bleeding and weak as it was, I was an alien. I didn’t belong. I didn’t exist.

I was already dead.

I wanted to become an eye or a hand, and exist in this universe. But I couldn’t.

I moved forward on my knees toward the piles. The stench became stronger. I could see fingers, fingernails, the color of the irises in the white orbs. The details made all of them more real, made me more empty. The eyes began to see me, the hands clutched at me. Together they began to fill me, pushing out the bile and vomit left in me, crowding my brain, and making everything go black.

Chapter 4

The elves sheared off the hair of their captives, sometimes tearing it off in chunks that also took pieces of scalp, then tossed the strands into a corner. Blood sprayed on the pile of hair from the severed limbs and eviscerations. As the Claus stomped the bodies of the humans, both living and dead, flesh, blood and brains joined the pile. Some of the severed limbs were also thrown in the corner.

Now everyone knows that the Claus has magical powers. Even in this scene of carnage, he found the need to leave a gift— the gift of life, in this case. As a parting gesture, the Claus stood in the corner over the pile of human hair and offal. He dropped his heavy red trousers and began rubbing his genitals. The sight of the sloppy, bloody pile excited him, and he was charged up from the all-day massacre. Just a few moments later, he ejaculated a copious spray of generative fluid on the pile, crying out, Ho, Ho, Ho!

The day’s events really had pleased him. The elves had done great work, rounding up captives and slaying the resisters, and the whole nest of humans was cleaned out. As he continued thinking about the events of the tunnels—the screaming, scurrying humans; the elves swarming, herding and stabbing them with