Murphy’s Law states that 'Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.' I'd say that Murphy, the wide-eyed optimist, would not have lasted a week in this place. I met the horror of all things going wrong in medias res because for once I was trying to catch some sleep, when it seemed that the world ceased to throw bloody trouble my way.

  Silly me.

  The first thing I felt was a sense of levitation, which was soon revealed to be caused by Billy yanking me to my feet in one swift motion, with enough force to propel me towards the door. He was shouting something, but my ears were not properly connecting to my sleepy brain yet.

  “....ing do something!”

  “Wha-”

  “The river!” Billy grabbed me by the shirt and dashed towards the water. “Fucking idiots, I told them to wait! the otters are gonna-”

  And then we were at the pier, which looked like a scene from a Hieronymus Bosch’s painting. There were dozens of haphazardly built wooden pallets, loaded with half-conscious people in varying levels of being drowned. Other people ran between the pallets, pulling limp bodies through the silt and piling them like human cordwood on the grass, with the hasty carelessness of demons manhandling sinners in Hell. Even the sky on the horizon seemed to vanish into roiling darkness, despite the lights of the early morning.

  But the real Pandemonium was about to start, because I could already see several dozen of brown heads popping out of the water and converging on the human pile.

  “Everybody stop! Don’t move!” I tried to shout, but nobody heard me over the voices of the ones doing the unloading, and the anguished cries of their loads.

  The next noise made it all irrelevant, because the impending tragedy was about to turn into an apocalypse.

  “Haro Apes! Haro!” Kyle, and several dozen of his ‘Apes’ breached the palisade to confront the newcomers, spears in hand.

  “No, no, no…Stop, you dumbass motherf-” I tried to intercept Kyle, putting my unimpressive self between the muscular Alpha Ape and the newcomers. I expected him to argue. To rage about the injustice of not being allowed inside the camp, when Billy’s people were.

  I did not expect him to lay me down with a single punch that dislocated my mind from my skull.

  It seemed my body did a brief, unsuccessful attempt at cartwheeling and sprawled on the grass in a perfect position for me to see the events unfolding.

  And boy, did they unfold! I saw an incredible sight of what I first confused for an airborne hippopotamus, but turned out to have been Billy, who fly-tackled Kyle to the ground. Kyle might have been incredibly muscular, fit, and combat-ready, but Billy had about a thirty-odd kilogram advantage, and used his bulk like a human wrecking ball.

  Eyeblink later, Billy himself was pushed off Kyle by the Apes. He fended off a spear going for his gut, but failed to dodge a kick to the face, which sprawled him next to me. Unthinkingly, I tried to shield Billy with my body, only to get stabbed myself. Only the thickness of the layered spider silk saved me from being skewered.

  Whoever stabbed me, I never learned their name, and they never stabbed anyone ever again. A furry torpedo slammed into them with enough force to break bones, and tore into their stomach with a vicious bite. The man screamed and folded in half. The other Apes ran to the rescue, but immediately stopped, when another one of them fell to the ground with a small javelin stuck through their chest.

  A demon streaked through their ranks, delivering stabs, slashes, and debilitating hits with a spear. The Ape phalanx broke apart like a terrified flock of sheep fleeing from a tiger. The demon stopped for a split second, and revealed themselves to be a slight man with a mess of raven-black hair, and a terrifying smile that was both boyish and monstrous at the same time.

  “‘bout time, Hash!” Billy croaked, “Gotta stop the-” Kyle suckerpunched him in the stomach, and rolled over him, putting Billy in a headlock. I wanted to help, but I had no illusions I could take on Kyle in a fair fight.

  Fair? Fuck fair.

  I went for the eyes.

  Months living as a savage, turned my fingernails into sharp, jagged, dirty claws that made Kyle howl when I raked them over his face.

  I barely dodged a vengeful punch, and would have been crushed by another, if I was not yanked back by the scruff by Billy’s pet demon.

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  I flailed and panicked, trying to get out of my rescuer’s strangulating grasp. And just as suddenly, I was let go, when the demon jumped back to avoid a chopper that almost removed his head.

  Candace, bless her confused but well-meaning soul, misinterpreted the situation and went after the man she saw choking my neck. The man nimbly avoided her blade, took a brutal kick to the thigh that was supposed to connect with his groin, then deftly grabbed Candace in an intimate embrace that put the tip of his javelin next to her throat.

  His split-second hesitation to stab a woman cost him dearly, because Candace slapped the sharp point away, and head-butted him in the face. To his credit, the man did not loosen his grip on her, just pressed the point against her eye instead.

  I've had just enough of this.

  Half-a-dozen of the Apes laid dead or injured. Dozens of the newcomers were drowning in silt, not ten paces from the shore, some drowned, some skewered with spears. At least the otters slithered away, rather than participate in the pointless slaughter.

  Senseless, senseless!

  “Stop! Everybody fucking stop!” I roared at the top of my lungs. It only gave me a second of their attention, but a second was enough for me to look up at the horizon, where unexpected salvation rolled forward like heavenly cavalry.

  It gave me an evil, evil idea, the effects of which I never managed to live down.

  “Winds! Wiiiiiiinds!” I screamed at the sky, waving my fists at the avalanche of dark clouds speeding towards us. “I told you to stop! ” I shook an accusatory finger at everybody and nobody in particular, in a display of ludicrous rage that astonished just about everyone, me included.

  The first gust of the hurricane-strength wind that just rolled over the seaside cliffs barely puffed up my loose tunic to billow, just the right way to make me look a sliver-bit intimidating.

  “Damn you all! Damn you all to Hell! Wiiiiinds!” I roared the last time, and immediately ducked, covering my head.

  Just in time, when millions of tons of cold oceanic air rolled over the flat of the river, gaining momentum. The dried reeds and riverside bushes were blasted clean off and sent like shrapnel towards everyone still standing. A split second later nobody actually was standing, because the wind sent them tumbling.

  The newcomers from the Meadows were washed out onto the shore by a sudden tsunami wave. The Apes were blasted away like leaves. I saw Candace and the terrifying guy tumbling together in a protective heap of limbs, instinctively calling a truce in the face of nature's wrath.

  The tarp spread over the Duplicators tore off its moorings and flew straight at the second wave of Apes led by Danton, enveloping them in a predatory embrace like a flying Kraken.

  The Duplicators swallowed the overpressure and amplified it into a roaring bass that shook my bones.

  The few fires we had lit, burst into tiny supernovas.

  I'm not sure how long the blast lasted. I was too busy trying to burrow my head into the grassy soil, and fearing for my life. But then, just as abruptly as it started, it stopped. Unlike the summer gale, this one did not end in a tremendous downpour.

  I rose to my feet. I knew I had to milk the moment while it lasted.

  “Peace! There will be peace, you hear me, you bunch of absolute cretins? Peace!” I roared in my best Angry-Dad voice. “Or Hevens help me, Im gonna blast your fuckin’ ungrateful asses off the surface of the Earth!”

  I looked around, trying to lock eyes with everyone who gave me even a hint of defiance. I did not expect them to believe I suddenly developed magical powers, and the ability to call hurricanes down on my enemies. But astonishingly, their faces showed the kind of awed doubt that suggested they entertained the possibility that in fact, I might. I was suddenly struck with a horrible realization, that a lot of those people might be superstitious enough to actually latch onto that belief, and really, would that be much weirder than what already happened to us?

  “Yes, Boss,” I heard Candace croak, disentangling from the warrior-demon. She theatrically raised her hands in a gesture of surrender. “No more fightin’.”

  “Yes, Boss,” Billy parroted, with deep enough authority in his voice that a lot of his people followed suit, at least those strong enough to speak. The black-haired warrior sheepishly nodded and muttered as well.

  “Yes… Mr Mularski, my people yield,” Theo Danton said crisply, limping towards us, his Apes in tow. Kyle tried to argue, but Danton pinned him with a snake-like gaze, and the younger man relented. His “yes, Boss” was a petulant whisper, but the rest of the Apes repeated it, some with a greater degree of fearful supplication towards me that I was comfortable with.

  “Good.” I gazed over the river. I thought I could see the head of the Alpha Otter, as she looked back at me and submerged.

  Truce? Truce.

  “No more fighting. Ape shall not kill Ape, and all that shit. No more secrets either, no more bullshit, no more hostages. We're in this together, and we have much, much worse problems to tackle,” I said, and immediately regretted my jinxy words.

  The monster descended from the sky, lighter than a feather. It was seemingly innocuous, but I immediately saw it for what it was, the harbinger of doom, far more dangerous than any beast I encountered here.

  I let it land on my outstretched hand, where it bit me gently and melted.

  The first snowflake of the coming winter.

  HERE ENDS PART ONE.