PAUL RIKER / CATEGORY 21 AND BELOW
Category 1: Power outages and flooding. Some damage to buildings. Minimal risk to citizens.
Category 2: Roofs are stripped, windows are shattered, trees are felled. Citizens may be injured. Heavy rains and heavy flooding.
Category 3: The frames of homes topple. Flooding spreads from the coasts, affecting neighborhoods and low-lying highways for days. Sustained power outages (twenty-four, forty-eight hours). Piers wrecked, boats sunk. Lives lost.
Category 4: Homes ruined irreparably. Citizens must evacuate or risk severe, homebound injuries. Power outages affect millions for weeks. Supplies dwindle. Inundation occurs: torrential flooding, a burden of rain.
Category 5: Large buildings fall. Sharp, unending rain. Flooding does not dissipate and electricity does not, and cannot, return. Recovery (listen, anon) for some areas should not be assumed.
Category 6: Little to no chance that any homes remain standing. Flooding reaches two feet, three feet above ground level. The coasts are gone: simply ocean, now. Citizens who remained in their homes are likely (surely) dead, their only means of survival evacuation inward, inland. Yet, even there, the force of the storm is strong; as the waters that fuel it are so hot, the pressure is so low, and the storm is so huge (yea, so monstrously huge).
Category 7: Complete ruination of the storm’s touchdown point. Buildings do not stand; their shards are swept into the storm, scattered about like schoolyard woodchips. Even inland there is horrific flooding; some evacuation points now necessitate evacuation points. Citizens (their safety an illusion) suffer still from the lashing rain, the wind velocities well into triple digits (two-hundred, three-hundred miles per hour). Such a storm may hoist an automobile off of its wheels and cast it through the sky, as would a petulant child: man’s quadriwheeled creation is flying, flying, and cratering through lain-over hope.
Category 8: Along with rain (cutting quicker, cutting violent), hail drops from the skies. Giant, giant, the size of melonfruit. Flooding? Nary a flood, but the new sea, the expanded sea. The mainlands are bereft of power: the storm now so strong that the earth, the crust of the planet itself, is torn up and tossed through the air; it topples what structures remain (until then they lucky buildings, they fortunate scaffolds). And the storm, the vessel, it does not dissipate like storms of the past. No: it sits. Sits for so long, then traipses into the mainlands, then stalls, then reverses course, accumulating more hot water, gathering more pressurized air, and venturing back, that cycle, hideous cycle.
Category 9: Weeks pass, yet no weakening of the storm. The eastern seaboard has perished; so have its citizens. Those remaining direbodies clamor for something more sustainable as if a possibility, dreams for calmer minds, dreams that are futile, naïve and worthless. And the heat. The heat, the heat, it superwarms that hail, hyperscalds it, it now hot enough to shatter freeways hoisted by the pillars of man, hot enough to scald the scalps of those defenseless citizens. Clear lava, aqueous magma. Godlike, untethered wrath (hope is meager, sliver-thin and wispy).
Category 10: Those far from the eastern seaboard thought they were safe, but lo, how Providence betrays that which yokes humanity to hope! See there: the storm vanishes from the globe and migrates its mass to the western side of the continent. In the blink of an eye it is one place; now, another (what heavenly sorcery is this? why, skies, have you forsaken these citizens?) The storm teleporting to here, to there; to one coast, or the other; no rhyme, no reason except calamity, calamity everywhere. All is lost. Every citizen must hide far beneath the earth, in makeshift bunkers and caves and burrowings – whatever earth remains. Even over land the storm grows. No longer content with atmospheric moisture, it harvests the heat exposed deep within Earth’s (now-nude) mantle (but where is the crust? Cast out long ago. To be nostalgic for supple land!). Finding heat, taking heat, cruel, greedy burglar.
Category 11: O, the storm’s reason and resolve! Citizens are whisked above; they cry havoc, indeed, but their cries mean not a thing to the tempest, its fury unending, its cruelty boundless. Citizens’ only shelter is deeper, deeper underground. They must work with what earthen equipment (mortal equipment, ha! Discern the storm, meager citizens; it laughs at your baboonish folly; it heckles your feeble labor!) to bury themselves into to the tip of Earth’s once-hyperhot mantle, its heat now feeding the storm. It eclipses the continent. Its rains have created an ocean anew, an ocean of discarded wood, brick, and body. Citizens ponder: does this storm wrath like Akhilleus at Troy, when he not only slaughtered Hektor, son of Priam, but drug his holy body through the camps of Akhaia? Does this storm, too, vie for vengeance? Little lives we carry!
Category 12: But above the fray of windnoise and rainwhistle comes a bellowing cry – could it be sound? Alas and alack, it is the identifying mark of the beast of Gaia’s destruction! Louder than all the screams of all of the widows cursed from all of man’s warring; louder than the cry of a lion when battered by the horn of a ram bleating in heat. The storm’s declaration: I AM AEOLOR. ‘Tis what it says, remaining citizens, those citizens agog: I AM AEOLOR. A name! Markèd sign of agency and self! Walls of lightning turn hydraulic runoff to patches of electrodeathcurrent. In the mantle citizens verily remain, bunkered in the darkness and wet metallic scent of the deeper planet. Cold and cramped and trapped, as a lamb boxed by cascading boulders from some looming, startled mountain.
Category 13: Come the husks. The husks! Stormbodies! Cloudpeople! Tempestlings! These abominations locate the entranceways to the mantlecaves, the hideouts of those remaining citizens, communities built with stone and discarded wood, fed by soaked-through boulder and the flooding waters that drip mercifully below. The citizens’ nutrients derived from bug and rat and root (perhaps some life can begin anew, fostered by the dwindling mind of man; perhaps in the darkness of the mantle can electricity be reconstructed, water flow; can civilization reform and recatalyze: Ha! What dreams, what phantasy!) They husks like the starchildren of some Gabrielian Seraphim: they full of spacestuff: they translucent and glassy, their insides grey and swirling, full of mist and moisture. They stand at eight feet; they weigh but hundreds of pounds; they find the mantlepeople and lift them above their heads and snap them bilaterally, halvèd, cross-sectioned. I AM AEOLOR, they cry as they tear and desecrate. Yea, offense is option – some citizens fight with their rudimentary tools, vacuuming devices, literal stones – and indeed sometimes bodies are felled, huskskin shattering, the storm within them melting into the earthly ether. But there are dozens. And they persist, they persist (O!).
Category 14: Yonder, the husks have heretofore behaved as mindless: appearing, scavenging, and escaping to the surface to be refueled through suckling the stormmother’s rain-pinked teat (O merciless, milky teat!) No more. As whatever rages above reaches unthinkable power, its minions adapt. Intellectualize. Learn. Yet, look ho: beneath the Earth, the mantlepeople have made for themselves a life. A decrepit life, a life of fear and anguish, but still, life; sweet, sufficient sundry. They have established meeting places. Gravel parks. Mudhomes host dinners of boiled potato and fire-roasted roach (the roach, the roach! its flesh the feeling of squishy ecstasy; its shell the brittle bastion of taste betwixt the tongue!). Cloistered rooms where distilled root liquor can be drunk and can singe one’s stomach like the storm’s magmarain. Culture blossoms. But a strengthening storm begets strengthening husks. They now comb through the gravel parks. They shatter tarp windows of mudhomes. They crash into the taverns and discard the root liquor. Citizens are killed, or rather, destructed, like a lion destructing a weaker lion. O citizens! Did you regard your safety as Tantalos discerned that Olympian ambrosia? Now see those poor citizens, ever reaching for safety, as inching away on faith’s feckless bow! Fie, yea, fie!
Category 15: Come the husks further. Citizens note them. Note their behavior. Most act as one; most sprint wildly and flail their stormy arms and exist to kill, inflict storming suffering without mercy or request: drones do not speak; the storm does not crave, want, inquire. They are aggressive, attacking and vicious, husks all. Or: almost all. It could be possible that there are mutations. Exceptions. A different sort. There is a husk on the edge of a gravel park, somewhere, who paces, windy arms at its sides, head turned toward the ground, gently kicking stones. Citizens approach it with their weapons, ready to defend, like a lamb against falling rocks, or a lion against falling rocks, or a lamb against a lion, or a lamb and a lion against falling rocks. The husk upturns its head. If it had eyes, it would be staring. See: it does not move to attack. It raises an arm. It – waves? Yea. An unremarkable wave. Then returns to the kicking of stones. Dark riddle – aínigma!
Category 16: Citizens again find the cautious husk. Difficult, as it is prone to wandering. Sometimes amongst these parks, sometimes amongst the mud highways leading to the aboveland’s hatch, sometimes between the arches of mudhomes. Some citizens in fact cast their stones, as they would at any husk, but the husk’s failure to retaliate shutters this behavior. The citizens come to know it as calm; they come to know it as the Pacifist. It is smaller, more lithe than its kin. Its arms taught and compact, its torso sculpted and cut. Legs strong. Hands mighty but gentle, hands to cradle, not obliterate. The way it moves is graceful, almost feline. Silky and hypnotic. The citizens, then, wave. They call hello. What ho, why do you not aggress? they say. Why do you not bisect us, tear our innards asunder, &c? The husk turns forward. Arms (was it mentioned, heretofore, the might of those brachial danglings? Some might – rippling and firm, wooden but plump, alluring) limp at its side. It kicks a stone. I AM AEOLOR, it says, dismissively, and saunters away, a visage of gloom embossed on that handsome frame.
Category 17: An interlude: there is a gathering at a root liquor tavern, a haunt, one could say, a hidey-hole of joy (so few, so few). Much root liquor is drank. Many songs, the songs of the aboveland, are sung. The songs of the great bards – David of Bowie, Prince of Rogers Nelson, Bell of Biv DeVoe. “Wild nights – Wild nights!” The citizens stumble home. The night is clear and cool, although there is a wetness – are those not drops of moisture falling from the mantle’s roof, disregarding the irrigation woven by their encumbered craftsmen hands? No matter. No husks, tonight. Except one. The Pacifist. It lurks about the homes, kicking stones. Citizens find it; in liquored courage they wave to it in the way it waves to them; in liquored courage they move close. Close enough to grab its hand. That hand – strength. So much strength. It feels not hot, not the heat of the slaughterstorm, but cool. Delicate. It, this husk, does not pull away. Citizens do not pull away. Citizens hold tight to that hand, pull the husk mudhomeward. There, in their silken purpureal nightening, they remove their clothes. The husk removes nothing, but it does not do nothing, no; its hands feel, its hands cover the expanse of the citizens’ flesh, their bruised bodies, their ribs exposed and bony from months of malnourishment. The pleasure in that touch, arching lower, lower on the body. Betwixt mons pubis. Let the controlled rain wash over those shattered crevices. I AM AEOLOR, it asks. Yes, the citizens say. God, yes.
Category 18: The Pacifist has disappeared. The search is fraught with challenges. More husks. Their attacks far more aggressive and damaging; they kill, yea, but what is death within the mantle, when life seems so insignificant – or did, at least, before the touch of it, the Pacifist, the exceptioned one. When finally it is found, that Pacifist, it is far from the encampment. The Pacifist says nothing when approached. Does not even offer its meager wave. What is there for the citizens to say? They return home. They return to their lives of evasion, imbibing root liquor, yearning, yearning.
Category 19: The mantleroof is leaking. Scouts to the aboveland report that the storm is all-consuming. Projectors and prognosticators claim it covers the entire planet, like Jupiter’s great red stain of a storm, only larger – a palmprint, a footprint, a torsoprint. So much inundation can only be refuted by the olivine hull of the mantle for so long. And thus: the mantle sieves. A trickling at first, but soon droplets, rivulets, wetting the gravel parks, rifting mudhomes, muddying root farms. Still, the continued onslaught of husks, who now come quadriarmed, quadrilegged, biheaded, so demonic but also so inconsequential, they are, as the citizens still pine and opine on the Pacifist. It, that solo specimen, rejects the citizens over, again, over, again. It sulks away. It hides. Gone from the gravel parks, gone from the highways. Gone from its lonesome kicking of lonesome stones. One manufactured evening (there are no evenings, evening is illusory, like sun, like light, like stellar cycles), the citizens (drunk, sad, doomed) search hither and thither and, lo, they find it, that pacifistic charlatan, crouched in a ditch, fingering the muddy outcropping of stone and steel. What here! the citizens say. After the night we share you but leave? We thought we were souls intertwined. The way you moved in intimate quietude. The way you whispered I AM AEOLOR into our open ears. That meant nothing? Answer, you great swirlèd hussy! The Pacifist looks at them. It shrugs. It forms its words slowly, each word the product of Herculean effort. AEOLOR DO NOT WANT HURT YOU, the Pacifist says. AEOLOR LOVE BUT AEOLOR STILL AEOLOR. What, pray tell, does that mean? Cease your beriddling, knave! AEOLOR IS ME. BUT AEOLOR PART OF ALL AEOLOR. ALL AEOLOR STRONG AND BEING STRONGER. ALL AEOLOR DESTROY LIFE. The citizens understand. Now it is their turn to shrug, to finger the muddy outcroppings in resignation. So, they say, you must destroy us because that is the divine mission of the storm. I AM AEOLOR. And the storm is growing in strength, is it not. And it will soon crack and crumble the mantle, will it not. I AM AEOLOR. We know. You cannot speak it. But your silence speaks louder than your words. The citizens turn away. The Pacifist noises. A kind of grunt. A wheeze. Some sound of sadness.
Category 20: End is come: water is rivering through the mantle. And this new water, this gatecrashing water, it is hot, nearly boiling. The husks have gained unthinkable strength. They are as large as a lion, as fast as a lion, as keen and perceptive as a lion. But as the hot streams fall, fall, becoming hotter, becoming harsher, flooding the mantle, dissolving the habitat, rising, rising, there is a call. A sole husk, elevating above the fray. The citizens look. The Pacifist. Two-armed, two-legged, small-framed, unchanged by the times, unwilling to turn as monstrous as its brethren. That husk, the citizens’ husk, raises its taught and sinewy arm to the earthen ceiling. They, those mightier husks, gather. They briefly relent from the bloodshed, the perpetual hunt. As the rain waters soak the stronghold, chaos descending from the ceiling, the chaos emanating from the husks ceases. They huddle, circular, around the Pacifist. Nothing is said. No cries of I AM AEOLOR. No noise, no hurly-burly. There is only silence. The citizens, observing at a distance, try to understand. At the very least, they sense there is something being communicated. Some otherworldly dialogue. The husks, like the Pacifist, raise their arms. A piece of the roof has shattered. Water drops like lead, splashes, strikes some gathered citizens, burning their flesh. The husks turn their heads. The Pacifist jumps, leaps, flies towards that fissure, towards that break. As it rises, elevates, floats as a leaf on the breeze, it begins to extend itself. Stretch itself. Its body unfurling like some great sail, thinner and thinner. It gains altitude, higher, still higher, until its body hits the water. It is not scalded. It is not destroyed. The water instead absorbs itself into the Pacifist, that body unrelenting. It splashes from its sides, still falling, but less so, and soon, in only moments, the fissure is covered, dammed. Groans, cries. Words: AEOLOR HURT, AEOLOR PAIN. And: AEOLOR HELP AEOLOR. And: PLEASE. Two husks move. The citizens do not know these husks; they are as indistinguishable as any other, the same as any other. Yet there they are. Expanding. Turning to gossamer. Incanting the refrain of the Pacifist. AEOLOR HELP AEOLOR. The running water dissipates further. More join. More and more hover, float, expand, and make themselves one with the crags of the ceiling. Like that, minute after minute, there is less and less rain, until, soon, overhead and looming like great birds of prey, are all of the husks, flat, taught, their forms a canopy of storm and swirl. Louder and louder still they wail, louder, louder, until, finally: they do not. Until sound stops. Until their bodies, so ballooned with the water of the mother vortex, burst, explode, their vapors cascading to the ground below. And then? There is nothing. No rain. No noise. No signs of their presence. It is quiet, and the ground dries, and the mantle heats, warms. Gradually warms, then hottens, then swelters. It is too hot, the citizens realize, until a few posit to their group – maybe there is heat, coreheat (the earth still lives!) because nothing exists to deplete it. Can it be true? No. But maybe. And so they venture down the highways, find the portals to the aboveland. Few climb the near-infinite ladders. Few unlatch the diamond hinge, push open the door, tuck their heads to the outside, feel the chill breeze, see the sun. Smell the dewy water. Taste the sky about them.
Category 21: Fin. It is a wet world, yet, still, a world. Surviving citizens live on mountain peaks as the water around them drains, moves back into its atmosphere. Tools are migrated to this new ocean, as are mementoes, trinkets, loved things. Crops are planted on land, and on that (rich, nutriented) land, crops are grown. Life resumes because of water, because of the sufficient water, water somehow fresh, satiating, as if born from geysers and kissed by the hot lips of sun. And yet: citizens long for the Pacifist. They imagine its body, its kind words, its gentle caress. Night after night as the citizens sleep in their aboveland grasshomes they vie for the touch and care that only the legionnaire of a vortex can provide. They wander, kicking stones just as that Pacifist would, in that same meandering way, its mind focused on something, something unknown, something besides violence, besides humanity’s eradication. So, then: citizens open the hatch. The hatch leading to the mantle, long since heated over. Sweat pours from the citizens’ brows, shortness affects their breaths. It is hot, but manageable, bearable. The citizens climb beneath, into the earth below. They are descending. Their descent is different than it was those many moons ago, when the storm ravaged the abovelands. It is slow, arduous, but far easier, better lit; the mantlepeople’s lighting, the structure of the caves, all still remain. Moving through the tunnels there is a peace, but not an abandonment. Something is here, the citizens realize; something crawls beneath these surfaces. The citizens are afraid; they equipped no weapons. They ache from the climb. Their eyes are weakened by the light of sky; these caves are enclosing and shaded, the citizens’ bodies making these familiar traversings unfamiliar, in so little time – cruel body, cruel mind. They step forward on those highways, feel the warm metallic sand sift underneath their toes. They wonder on the Pacifist. Yearn for its touch. Its swirling body. Feel its arms around them. Troubles turning to molecular nothingness. They do not know what they expect to find, but it is not a husk on the side of the road. Two husks. Over twelve feet tall, eight arms, four heads, beteethed, somehow, and, simply, standing. Emitting growls and grovels. The citizens approach them, and the husks stop, discern. They nod. HELLO, they both say, waving two of their eight arms. The citizens press on. More scenes: husks, talking. Husks, working. Husks entering buildings, new buildings, buildings more impressively advanced than the meager mudhomes that the citizens as mantlepeople scrabbled together in the infinite dark. On the streets of their previous encampment there is chatter, something like laughter, if that is possible, which it is, because, look, in the gravel parks: are those not little husks, husklings, swinging on those berocked swings, climbing on those makeshift gymnasiums; and are those not guardians, watchers, sitting, facing forward, discerning these children, expressionless, but bodies relaxed in love; are they not huskhusbands, huskwives, huskkeepers; is this not husklove? Huskchildren, two, three, are hoisted up into the arms of their huskparents, tossed into the air. They emit sounds of happiness; their tinny cries are true. One such huskchild, still only with two arms, two legs, moans in its husktongue yet every so often emits a word of the aboveland. HIGHER, it wails, glee a spiral of noise within its body. HIGHER, HIGHER. The huskparent tosses that child with jubilance. It is the Pacifist. It is. The Pacifist. Throwing that huskchild, a gentle toss, full of nurturing, full of love. There are no facial features on the Pacifist’s head, but it is hard for them, the citizens, to not read a smile, not see that storming joy. The Pacifist could turn. It could arc its body just so and gaze upon all of those citizens, staring on at this new life and yearning, yearning for it. It could. But the citizens do not want this. They think: do not look at us. Let us slink back to our aboveland, our land of constant sun and lush evergreen, where the sky is clear and the threat is behind us, let us leave you, you glorious shadowstorm, let us leave you in this calm, this tranquil moment of solitude and rest, the mist swirling in your body, inner rain, but gentler, now.
Paul Riker is the recipient of the National Society of Arts and Letters' Holl Merit and Jones Merit Award—its top prize in literature for the state of Indiana—and the SmokeLong Quarterly Comedy Prize. He was also a finalist for the Iowa Review Award in Fiction, the Montana Prize in Fiction, and Pithead Chapel's Larry Brown Short Story Award. His work has been featured or is forthcoming in Salt Hill, CutBank, the Nashville Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. He is currently an MFA candidate in creative writing at Purdue University, and lives in Lafayette, Indiana.