# They Came From the North

After the broken bones and slit throats, there was silence. Martín wipes his forehead; the blood could be his. He checks the bodies. He also checks the cabin. He finds Lucas's body; they hung him there like he was livestock, throat cut and upside down. Martín doesn't cry, but it hurts too much; he remembers his voice, the tranquility it gave him. To him or anyone in the tribe. That's exactly why they killed him.

***

They came from the north, from Kaffeklubben Island. When we still had radios, televisions and internet, we found out: an icebreaker fractured a glacier in search of petroleum. They awakened an ancient species. They weren't greys or Pleiadians, not even us who extinguished ourselves. It was enormous ice and its message from a past that no one can claim as their own.

***

A boreal shark hatches and comes out of the womb on February 23, 1455, the same day Gutenberg printed his first Bible. He sees his mother for only a minute; at that moment, a copepod that lived in her goes into his left eye. Afterward, she follows the trail of a herring corpse. He swims in the opposite direction and they will never find each other again.

***

Martín finds a one-and-a-half-liter bottle of brown water. He took too long tracking them. He ran out of the few bullets and food they had. So Martín didn't just lose Lucas and his tribe; he also exhausted his own resources in this search. He stays other hours in the cabin; checks every corner. The reward: an expired granola bar and a wet cigarette.

***

They looked like white bulls. They looked like them. We assumed the most similar thing to them was an anthill, with a central queen, unreachable, unknown, supposed. They were aggressive and voracious and their favorite snack was us. They tracked us wherever. It was massacres after massacres after massacres. If we lasted so long it was because we became too many humans, scattered everywhere. The military response was immediate and failed. The flesh of these bulls emanated a kind of electromagnetic pulse that made our technology useless: radars, guided missiles, cell phones. Everything died when they approached. White noise was their war march.

***

Martín leaves the cabin. The forest extends cold and foggy. Evening falls. He walks without direction. He looks for a river. Now there are many more than fifty years ago, but he must be careful. Not only are there the white bulls; wolves, bears and pumas also claim territories that always belonged to them. Martín thinks of three things: food, water and that, somehow, Lucas's murder still belongs to *his* world, is something he can understand, something he can grieve for. There isn't only the blind fury of the white bulls. Vengeance stands out among the indifference of nature.

***

In the middle of the chaos, a Siberian newspaper published a note that almost everyone overlooked: white bulls had been seen eating, with the same voracity as humans, entire colonies of *Phodopus sungorus*, the common Russian hamster.

***

The boreal shark crossed paths with humans twice in his life: the first time, it was with the corpse of a French buccaneer dragged to the Arctic. He had died near Tortuga Island after a Spanish siege. Strangely, the corpse arrived intact, swollen with scurvy and water; though this the shark didn't know very well: the colony of copepods had already devoured his left eye and, with the right one, he only distinguished shadows. The shark, without fear, bit the left side. The taste didn't please him and it lacked the gelatinous consistency that only squid have.

***

Millions of resources were spent to understand them and destroy them: biologists, doctors, psychologists, linguists, zoologists and ethologists tried. In some confrontations, one white bull corpse was obtained for every dozen of ours. The necropsies made some things clear: they devoured every human body they found, alive or dead, they didn't seem to be intelligent beings (at least not like us), they emitted that electromagnetic pulse through their muscles, they were blind but detected human essence at about 10 kilometers. Anaerobic, quite strong, but of little weight and terrible climbers. There were no sexual characteristics visible. A group of South African scientists found that the only identifiable biomolecule in their bodies was an isomer of dopamine, which they shared with ***Homo sapiens***.

It was assumed that was how they tracked us: they "smelled" our molecule. We tried to suppress our dopamine and, indeed, the white bulls ignored us, we became invisible to them. But the price was too high: the soldiers who underwent the experiment died suffocated by Parkinson's within days.

***

Martín thinks about his life before the bulls. He remembers his father and the commando training in the Sonora desert. During his adolescence, he thought it would be useless to know how to start a campfire or skin a deer. Also, that it was sadistic for his father to leave him buried underground for days (to get used to the darkness). Now, trained since always to be a predator, he silently thanks his father. He doesn't miss him. He hates him. Though he taught him the most important thing one can know in these times: devour or be devoured.

***

The second time the boreal shark ran into a human he encountered a pile of them. The hull of the Titanic was sinking in the North Atlantic. The shark, now already blind, smelled them all dying about a hundred meters away. He wondered if it was a good idea to approach for a bite, but the water displacement discouraged him. The scent of a female loomed from the north. The shark swam toward her.

***

The eschatological temptation was too much: extremist groups surged around the world. The white bulls were a punishment from god. Those of Semitic heritage traced their origin in the seven plagues of Yahweh; Buddhists thought of them as the definitive separation of the skandhas. Collective suicides and death squads completed the extermination. If indeed a god was punishing us humans, we wondered what sin the Russian hamsters had committed.

***

Martín takes the last drink from the water bottle. He will vomit violently two kilometers ahead. But now, he keeps walking: he thinks of the nights when Lucas lulled them all with a lullaby. He never believed that hard, ruthless men, ex-military, strikebreakers, police officers and hitmen, would curl up like puppies around a campfire and let themselves go, tranquil and docile, by the singing of a dwarf as thin as Lucas. Martín didn't want to accept the world he was in, a wild, animal one; he didn't want to accept it, except when he approached the campfire and that voice made him close his eyes with a smile.

***

We abandoned the cities. We became tribes again, money gave way to barter, democracy to feudalism, technology to ritual. The world's history was going in reverse. No one accumulated more than food and water. No one cared about the market or bribes. Now, living or dying depended on your tribe; what mattered was the continuity of the common. The group protected and saved; sometimes, even from the bulls.

***

Guilt and pain are distributed in equal parts inside Martín. He was the one who contacted the loggers from the west, he was the one who convinced the council to make deals with them, he was the one who served as interpreter and diplomat. And for a few months, everything went very well. But the wood, treated to prevent termites, the heat source that allowed them not to die in winter, became Lucas's misfortune.

***

We always believed the world would end with us. It wasn't exactly like that. What disappeared was the human world, at least as we knew it. No company, no government survived. We had to resort to other things, things we didn't expect would emerge: compassion was a little more useful than violence. And so, we scraped a little more life, we created a space for ourselves, ever smaller, but still something ours.

***

One of the matriarchs told him straight:

"They envy him. They want him for themselves."

"We can't give him to them," Martín answered. "He belongs to all of us. Without him, we will die."

"There will be war if we don't hand him over."

"Then we'll go. And we'll win."

"We can't afford that luxury," the matriarch approached and put her hand on Martín's shoulder. "The many come first. Remember that. Lucas makes our life better. But without the wood, we wouldn't even have life. Live with us and let him go."

The matriarch walked away. Martín looked at a log burning. He realized how much he enjoyed the warmth of that campfire and, for a second, he preferred it to Lucas. He felt he had betrayed someone, not Lucas, not him, not the tribe. Simply, he felt like a traitor.

***

"Don't do this to me, please."

"It's a truce, Lucas. Only this way will we all be together. If not, we'll have to go to war."

"Then let's go! You and I can kill their cacique! At night. This very night."

"There would be more war, Lucas."

"Then, we kill all the loggers. Keep one or two craftsmen, learn their art and, and, and..."

Lucas fell silent. He was afraid, he didn't understand the why of his sacrifice. Or he did understand, but understanding his destiny didn't mean he wanted it. He hugged Martín for a good while. Martín only patted his back.

***

In a week, a group of four henchmen, half from Martín's tribe, half from the loggers, came for Lucas and took him to a cabin far from both villages. They would assassinate him and, with his fresh heart, the alliance between the peoples would be sealed.

If Martín had decided to follow them about three hours earlier, he would have reached Lucas alive, would have rescued him and they would have made their own tribe, one of two people, one with lullabies all the time. But he took too long, fear of not being able to return stopped him, of knowing that saving Lucas was, somehow, also condemning him to the wild, to the wolves, to the pumas, to the bears. Martín could protect him from four distracted henchmen, but never from a pair of white bulls.

***

Martín hears something, undefined: white noise, the war roar of the bulls. He really has no reason to run now, he ran out of granola bar and is very tired. He doesn't even carry his machete. Fighting would be useless; running too, but he does it anyway. He moves as fast as dehydration lets him. In the distance, he sees an electricity tower. He runs toward it.

Martín climbs with his last strength. The metal is cold and morning dew makes it slippery. By climbing a few meters, it would be enough to get away from the white bulls, but he keeps climbing, to the top. He settles in, lights the cigarette he found in the cabin and looks at the forest, which becomes whiter and whiter. Martín thinks it's the fog covering the horizon, but then he sees it move as if it were a liquid. At some point, he thought the tribe would keep him safe, that there would be a moment when humans and white bulls would live, each on their own side. Now he realizes that this planet no longer has room for him or for any who resemble him.

***

The boreal shark passed near Kaffeklubben when the icebreaker fractured the glacier. He heard the bulls escape from their millenary prison.

Decades later, when the last of the humans was devoured, the shark descended deeper than ever; he hunted an abyssal jellyfish. He never knew what beauty was, nor compassion, nor contempt, nor hate. He finished his dinner and rose to more illuminated waters.

For him, the last fifty years of humanity were a blink, a warm current where he swam once in summer.