The Coming of the Anthrops
by Harrison Kim
part 1
Eisenhower Arms rose as a spontaneous embryo from out of the South Pacific Sea in the aftermath of the 1952 U.S. H-bomb tests. Due to the radioactivity, his body mutated to a huge stomach and head on immensely strong but spindly legs. He grew mighty eagle wings instead of arms, and he soared around the world on those wings, bringing a message of peace.
Tormented warmongers who had never breathed a calm moment shot him down and cut off what they called his “deviant limbs.” After this, Eisenhower Arms became known as Zero-Arms, striding wingless across the world in search of human harmony. He always travelled with his high-school friend, Rennie Bartholemew, a bald, three-foot-high gnome who often communicated by performing circus tricks.
The two moved through the Rocky Mountains, among the tall fir trees, Zero-Arms striding on his long, spindly legs and Bartholemew hanging onto his back. Those legs were Arms’ strength, double jointed and able to run at great speeds for hours.
The huge mutant darted up a burbling stream, and along the bottom of a cliff, all the rock edges lay in shadow under a crescent moon. He stopped by a small hole in the cliff, pulled out his diamond-hard lower jaw. His prehensile chin jutted, fitted exactly into the gap. Arms lifted with his mouth and the hole widened.
Bartholemew jumped down and slipped in. The assistant pulled at some levers inside, until the hole became large enough for Zero-Arms, who turned on his head-top light by lifting his back leg up to his forehead.
At the hole in the cliff, Bartholemew mashed the levers again, and the space closed silently back to its original size.
“We are here, loyal Anthrops!” Arms bellowed, striding forth into the darkness. “Here to collect the slime of peace!”
Bartholemew kept ahead of him, his shadow outlined by the headlamp, its colour purple and jade, like rocks on either side of him. A dull booming noise emanated from far below. The tunnel curved in a switchback, and the two creatures followed it round, Bartholemew cartwheeling with his strong arms, his back arcing as he followed Zero-Arm’s light.
After the fourth switchback, the entire tunnel echoed with the booming and, in the distance, the Anthrops’ cavern loomed, Arms’ light couldn’t reach the other side, because the cavern encompassed the entire hollowed-out inside of Usakam mountain. The Anthrops had eaten away at the iron-cobalt rock for years, to sustain their essence.
Zero-Arms turned his light to one side and saw several Anthrops shimmering and sliding inside the purple and grey rocks, like bulging blue veins.
“Looks like the slime is waiting in its usual spot,” Bartholemew proclaimed, cartwheeling his way over to a hollow area where a viscous oily substance was seeping in from cracks around it. “Thank you, loyal Anthrops for this gift,” Zero-Arms shouted.
The booming sounds from the rocks all but drowned out his cry.
“What are they saying?” Bartholemew asked.
“They say they’re old,” Zero-Arms said, “It won’t be long before there will be no more peace slime.”
He played his headlight along the rock walls. Long, wide blue bulges thickened and thinned just beneath the cobalt and iron, the Fluid Anthrops, the remains of a race of liquid space creatures that had been trapped inside the mountain ten thousand years ago. They couldn’t survive in the outside air. It didn’t have enough radioactivity, contained too much oxygen. They remained feeding and growing within the rock, consuming it and excreting the slime.
Zero-Arms and Bartholemew had been collecting this peace slime for years, likewise Zero-Arms’ father before him, and his father before him. Upon contact with the outside air, it dispersed into a few billion molecules and spread throughout the world, where it would be breathed in by every sentient creature. Even at this molecular level, the slime calmed every creature, especially humans, like a secret influx of alien benzodiazepine.
“Have you the bucket?” Bartholemew yelled, and Zero-Arms reached and lifted his purple wool garment. He felt along his massive bulging belly for his navel and, when he reached the crossing of the skin, he pulled upon the strings that dangled therefrom. Upon the pulling of the strings, the skin bucket birthed from the humungous girth of Arms’ belly.
Bartholemew grabbed the sticky protoplasm, as the bucket unravelled much like a fire hose, and pushed it into the Anthrops slime. Arms sucked in his belly and began to load up the liquid, while Bartholemew poked the bucket downward.
Around them, the Fluid Anthrops kept up their deep and mellifluous booming, like a long, unending one-note chant. They used telepathic powers to sift through the contents of the minds of the two slime collectors. “Your world is ever more conflicted and closer to the edge,” the Anthrops’ voices hummed. “When there is no more slime of peace, all will fail.”
“Are there any more sources?” Zero-Arms asked through the ESP of his extra-cranial spaces. “After you are gone, are there any other Anthrops anywhere on this earth?”
“You must carry some of our soul,” came the voices, “the fire of our core.” Then they murmured again. “To the crevice of the atom bombs.”
Zero-Arms breathed in, to pull in more slime as Bartholemew guided his skin bucket.
“They must mean Colorado,” he said to his assistant. “Where the mighty weapons lie.”
“All your life, you’ve supplied slime,” Bartholemew told him. “You can’t save the world forever. Why don’t you retire, my hombre?”
Zero-Arms nodded, as best he could, as his neck was thick as a tractor tire, but he could not leave the world to its own devices. He and Bartholemew had delivered the slime of peace to the outside ever since they could both remember.
“What you must do,” came the Anthrops voice, “is to tap right into our viscous bodies with your hammer and chisel. Break us apart, take out some of our soul.”
“How is that going to help?” Zero-Arms asked.
“When you push your jaw into our bodies and suck up some of our mass, we shall live within you, in your stomach and belly. Take this part of us inside you to the fresh cave in Colorado. where we can rejuvenate next to the radioactivity of weapons of mass destruction.”
“Is that not a dangerous locale?”
“For us, it will mean the interplay of opposites, the possibility of apocalypse combined with the nurture of peace slime. We can neutralize these weapons by eating them!” The Anthrops hummed again. “Part of us will live within you until you find the cave for atom bombs. We can make much more slime in a place full of a contradictory mass.”
“What if the impact of those weapons is too strong for you?” Zero-Arms asked.
“We will all die here if we don’t seek another radioactive source,” came the voices.
Bartholemew lifted Zero-Arms’ skin bucket from the water.
“That’s all the slime,” he said. “Reel it in, boss,” and Zero-Arms pulled the bucket with his immense stomach muscles, for although he appeared to weigh about four hundred pounds, most of that being his belly, the muscles around his navel could crush a man’s arm like a matchstick. His headlight shone all around the rocks as he sucked up the full bucket.
Then he stood up high on his long insect-like legs, a bulbous blimp of a creature. He pushed his face close to the rock. His prehensile jaw jutted forth into the solid iron and granite, a jaw hard as diamonds that shattered the cobalt-infused stone and, from behind the cracks, came the liquid soul of the Anthrops, juicing into Zero-Arms’ mighty mouth, and he slurped up a couple of litres of the alien essence. He swallowed, then drank some more. “You taste bitter,” he told the Anthrops.
“Perhaps we are,” came the voices, and Bartholemew looked up. “What are they saying?” he asked. “They sound angry.”
Zero-Arms turned to him. “It’s but your interpretation, my assistant. These creatures are trying to survive, just like us. We must carry this swallowed essence to a new rock home. You must assist with all doors and defence.”
“This I will surely do,” Bartholemew announced, cartwheeling his way towards the tunnel switchbacks as Zero-Arms played forth his light and the two creatures moved from the Anthrops’ cave.
“We thank you, O mighty Arms,” came the booming of the Anthrops left behind.
Upon opening the cliff hole again and upon arriving once more at the light, Zero-Arms and Bartholemew proceeded to let loose the slime bucket. Bartholemew pulled it forth from Arms’ navel, and in the morning sun, the steaming black ooze of the Anthrops evaporated quickly into the air, to dissipate its way around the world and into the lungs of the billions of beings inhabiting the planet. Even a few molecules of this substance, when well distributed, would prevent disaster. Arms imagined heads of state around the world waking up and simultaneously inhaling the peace slime.
The two creatures rested while the liquid evaporated. They ate pinecones and chewed goats’ beard moss from the trees, slurped from the many streams around Mount Usakam.
Zero-Arms held the Anthrops’ soul within a certain compartment of his belly, keeping it warm and safe within a stomach pocket. “On to Colorado!” he announced.
The two compatriots began their journey south, Bartholemew clinging to Zero-Arms’ back and the seven-foot-tall armless giant striding at twenty kilometres an hour up and down the mountain valleys of late spring.
“I wish I still had my eagle wings,” he said, as the two travellers moved along the edge of the borders, always keeping away from humans and blending into the forest. Arms was coloured mostly green; Bartholemew lifted his arms and legs while upon his friend’s back and looked exactly like a tree stump.
They did not stop for sleep, Arms considered it a waste of time, and Bartholemew could doze on Arms’ shoulders. They reached Colorado overnight. By dawn the outlines of the atomic missile silo campus came into view, the electronically wired walls, the drones buzzing overhead, the complex lying at the head of a v-shaped valley under ice-cream cone mountain tops
“Thanks be to the Anthrops within me, we have arrived,” Zero-Arms announced. He proceeded away from the missile base at first, edging up into the cliffs and rocks where he might sense an entry hole, his long, wide nostrils opened in anticipation, while Bartholemew catapulted up into a tree, climbing end over end and, from its very tip, ascertained the wind and weather and determined: “This is the optimum time,” when thick fog moved in.
“A fog moved partly by the molecules of peace slime within it,” Bartholemew pronounced.
“Does the slime have a consciousness of its own?” Arms wondered as he watched this fog waft in, and now with the alien soul in his stomach, he detected a rumbling and a buzzing, which morphed into a directive: “Go up, go up.”
“I think you should rest, O my hombre,” Bartholemew stated, for Arms’ belly sagged low, a sure sign of necessary rejuvenation. “Let us eat some more twigs and goat’s beard.”
“Only because you say, my assistant,” Arms told him, “for I am twitching with eagerness to complete this mission for the good of the world.”
When they rested under scraggly pines for a moment after their meal, Bartholemew noticed one of the trees above him, which contained a rather gigantic dangling goat’s beard moss. “That does not look like a natural plant,” he stated.
Zero-Arms opened his nostrils to sniff. “This is an alien creature,” he said. “Quick, let us go into camouflage mode.” But hardly had he uttered those words than the goat’s beard came to life. It wriggled and shook and, from the tree, leaped a figure completely coated in what first resembled a grey goat’s beard mass but, upon focus, became a massive wall of hair. Bartholemew perceived a red opening in this wall.
“Greetings, O mighty Arms,’ said the figure from its unmoving, scarlet-rimmed mouth. “I have been expecting you.” He rose to his full height of about five feet. “I am the Hairy Man,” he said, “and the Fluid Anthrops have spoken to me in the wafting of their slime molecules.”
Copyright © 2023 by Harrison Kim
