by Steven Welch
The flying jellyfish needed food for whatever voyage they were about to undertake.
The engines needed fuel.
Then frost formed over Terry’s eyes and she saw nothing.
She heard his voice, though, right before Jack the Dream Butcher cut her throat.
Terry thought she heard remorse, kindness in his voice. She tried to speak, to ask for release, but her tongue was swollen in her throat and she could only make a gagging sound.
Jack’s hand touched her forehead.
“Do you know the story of Elise St. Jacques and the Aquanauts? It’s gotten around a bit, that story.”
Terry had not heard of this story nor could she say so.
“Well, they did this to us. Bad people, Terry. This is on them.”
Jack’s hand was warm on Terry’s cheek.
“Only things with purpose survive. We’re on our way, friend, and when we reach the other side of the ocean we’ll take care of it. We’re off to a place of fantastic dreams, of great imagination, and we’re set to burn it all down. We’re well and truly going to put things right. We will shut the doors and make the world clean. You can have peace knowing it will all be right again. I promise you that, Terry.”
The quick slice of metal across her throat tingled, and the blood was nice and warm as it poured down her chest.
Her last thoughts were of the pickle contest. The gentle humor of the old television show made old Terry smile as she passed.
THE GIRL WHO SAVES THINGS
Elise sat on a horse named Splatter in the darkness of the Jordanian night and felt the wind on her face as they walked into a winding sandstone ravine.
The night was cold. The sand that lashed her reminded Elise of a time five years before when she met a madman and brought back the ocean.
The Octo-Thing shuffled in her backpack and peaked out, then settled back in. There was a golden light from small fires off to the eastern hills that once had been the town of Wadi Musa. The darkness smelled of smoke, of juniper, and dust that carried two thousand years of horse turds. The winding path before Elise led through a deep ravine and into Petra, a city as old as time.
Splatter was an Arabian, bred and raised by Bedouins that still survived in Wadi Rum. Elise lightly held the rope bridle and felt comfortable on the old handmade saddle covered in a thick blanket.
Tonight the moon would be full. If the girl in Aqaba was to be believed then this was the night when the sunflowers burn and a dream disappears forever.
If the girl was a liar, then this was a waste of time.
Anyway, thought Elise, the painting might already have been destroyed. Or, this is the wrong place. Or the wrong time.
She spent several nights in the desert on the way to this place, playing the guitar that was slung across her back and keeping low. She didn’t even need to use her wrist device for directions because you don’t need a compass when the stars are so bright. Her friend Zuzu taught Elise how to guide her way with the waypoints and traffic lights and yield signs of the cosmos.
She was dressed in a ragged tumble of tough clothes, thick fabrics in layers that protected against cuts and bites. Tall leather boots and the hat like a gunslinger, just because she liked it, but with a lining of Kevlar pulled from an old vest. She could have passed as a cowboy from the old West except for the light glow of the thing around her wrist. Bigger than a watch but not by much and held there by a thick Kevlar strap. A tiny glowing screen and a series of recessed buttons and knobs. The Aquanauts called the device an Aengus, from the old Celtic God of love and poetic inspiration. Elise began calling hers Jules when she was twelve and Jules it had remained.
She pushed a button and whispered into her wrist.
“Dying of thirst.”
A voice from a tiny speaker responded. The accent was French. The tone was condescending.
“When dying of thirst, a common survival technique is to place a pebble in the mouth to stimulate saliva. This is silly as you’ll have little saliva at this point. You’ll just die with a pebble in your mouth, which will be a mystery for those who find your corpse and will undoubtedly lead to unnecessary forensic investigations. Ultimately, you will be judged an idiot who believed an old lie about pebbles. Avoid pebbles and find water. Better yet, avoid water as well and find wine.”
The voice playback stopped.
A tiny tentacle slithered from the backpack and offered a bottle of warm beer. The beer had been hard won in the bar by the shore and now wasn’t the time so Elise pushed the bottle back into the pack. A gust of air jetted from the backpack as the Octo-Thing sighed.
“That bottle’s for a special occasion. And I’m not that thirsty yet.”
She nudged the horse in the ribs and it took off at a trot. The metal shoes were loud on the smooth rocks that had once been a river bed and then a trade route for a thousand years and then a place where tourists would come to take holiday snaps.
“Making too much noise. Damn.”
Elise rolled her eyes and thought she might as well be carrying a neon sign that said “here I am, assholes.”
She remembered neon lights from a trip she took with her Dad to a place called Las Vegas when she was little. The lights were bright and magical and so many colors, like a box of crayons that lit up the night sky with words she didn’t understand and outline renderings of cowboys with lassos.
She pulled back the reins.
“Good girl,” Elise said to the horse as she dismounted. She checked the gun in her right hip holster, a 9mm Glock with a seventeen round magazine. She had larger capacity magazines in her bag but they made the gun feel awkward in her hands and they weren’t her favorite. She checked her vest pockets for items she might need. Gas grenades. Notebook. Firecrackers. Sling shot. Blades. Nylon rope and grapnel. Rubber duck. Check.
Finally, Elise pulled her sniper rifle, the German made R93 Tactical, from a greased leather sleeve on the back of her horse and secured it into a sling along her back. She had used the weapon for target practice and for hunting. She preferred it for its tremendous accuracy and range. The ten round capacity magazine was helpful.
Elise swatted Splatter on the backside and the horse trotted off, back to the entrance of Petra’s canyon.
She looked up to the night sky, a slice of stars above her so beautiful that it stole her breath away. A starry, starry night.
Might need to save them too, someday, but first the sunflowers, thought Elise.
She spoke into Jules again.
“Scenario. Single hostage. Night. Hostage is held in really, really high place. A half dozen bad guys. Hostage is old and fragile. I have limited resources, standard kit. I’m alone.”
The backpack kicked.
“Well, almost alone. Recommendations?”
The wrist screen glowed and the voice with the French accent spoke again.
“We detect a mistake. Les Scaphandriers never pounce into action thinking in present tense, idiot. Only by considering your plan in past tense, as if you have already succeeded and are now sipping celebratory champagne from the shoe of a charming lover, can you hope to overcome adversity. Present tense is for the dead and the authors of pretentious literature. Past tense is for those who have a plan, have succeeded, and now enjoy the fruits of their strenuous labor. Rephrase the question as if you are revisiting a glorious victory.”
Elise wanted to spit but had none to waste.
“Why do I bother?”
With that, Elise St. Jacques of Les Scaphandriers, The Astonishing Aquanauts, and premiere punk guitarist of the Jordanian port city of Aqaba, snapped off the gadget on her wrist and moved silently into the darkness of the ravine known as Al Siq.
She hoped that Splatter would wait for her near the ruins of the tourist shacks, at the small campsite she had created the morning when she arrived. If not, it would be a long walk back to the sea.
Elise slipped into the shadows of the valley’s sandstone walls. The moon’s glow didn’t cut into the Siq but it
was enough to create paths of darkness and light. She stayed hidden as she walked, just in case there was a look-out with a rifle somewhere above or ahead.
“They’re probably long gone, painting burned, my time wasted. If this isn’t a lie. Oh well,” she said.
The Octo-Thing rustled in the bag as a response.
Petra was Jordan’s tourist salvation for decades before The Turn and was one of the world’s premiere trading destinations thousands of years before that. Built by the Nabateans before Jesus was a twinkle in Mary’s eye, this massive city carved of stone had been the perfect trade route. Easily defended because of the narrow, winding canyon that led to the city itself, Petra was civilization’s pinnacle, then a lost city buried in sand, then one of the wonders of the world after being “discovered” by John Smith in 1898.
The layout of the city was vast, beginning with the entrance at Al Siq which led directly to the towering Treasury, an ornate building carved from the sandstone. Beyond that there were other ruins, each more impressive than the next, a citadel high above a wide plain, an amphitheater as grand as anything built by the Romans, everything hewn from sandstone and surrounded by mountains rippling with color.
Elise had come here once before, only a few days after arrival in Aqaba on the Red Sea. She wanted to experience the Rose-Red City, so she made the hard trek across the desert and spent several weeks camping in the desolation. She had no company on that trip except the winds, the stars, the ghosts of travelers long gone, and the little fellow who lived in her backpack. There were challenges, yes, but that was to be expected.
On that first visit she spent her time documenting what she found, meticulously scribbling details in her battered leather notebook. Elise loved learning. There were so many strange, beautiful, and impossible things in the world now. She wanted to capture them all on paper. Her sketches were strong and rough, done in charcoal, pencil, and sometimes the burned points of sticks. She saved her ink pens for her notes and those notes were detailed, written carefully in small characters so she could fit as many words as possible on the notebook’s page.
The beautiful sandscape of Jordan’s interior was one of the purest places on the planet. Craggy mountains erupted from fields of soft sand and rock. Here and there were bits of life, thin plants that found ways to survive. After The Turn there were other things here of course. The knife crickets were worst, as large as goats and hidden in sand pits like the tiny ant lions Elise remembered from her brief time in Florida before things changed. Ant lions were cool whether you were a kid or not. They were tiny little things with enormous open jaws that would burrow into soft sand and wait for other little things to tumble into their trap. Ant lions would wait at the bottom of their tiny sand pit, jaws wide open and exposed, nature’s bear trap. When she was six years old, she never imagined what it might be like to be the ant but that changed after the world turned.
Now, in the deserts of Jordan, in a world of knife crickets and worse, Elise or any unwary traveler could become the ant. Still, such horrors could be avoided though, if you were smart and aware.
Shit. She’d let her mind wander. She wasn’t sure how deep into the Siq she’d gone. The backpack rubbed against the smooth canyon wall and she flinched at the sound.
Focus.
She moved in a low crouch. The muscles of her legs did not burn. She was strong.
Was that a light ahead?
Yes, the glow was still there. A fire? There were a couple of ways to play this. She could try to sneak past, hidden in the canyon’s darkness, but the stars were bright and she knew from experience that eyes adjusted to the night could easily see movement where a moment before there was none. The other approach was to just walk up and see what was going on.
What if these men weren’t aligned with the others? What if they really were just innocent travelers who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Only one way to know.
Elise stepped out of the shadows and walked into the center of the Siq toward the light.
“Is someone there?”
She spoke loudly in English. She knew some Arabic as well but would rather start with her strength, English or French. She’d be fine with Orcanum as well but that was tough to pull off with a dry mouth.
The glow was a campfire in the path’s center. Just beyond she could see, through a sword slice of canyon walls, The Treasury of Petra. Just that small first glimpse was stunning.
First though, the problem at hand. There were two figures huddled around the fire. They were dressed in black and Elise thought there were rifles at their sides but she couldn’t be sure.
“Hello? Do you speak English? Parlez-vouz anglais? Hal tatahadath al’iinjlizia?”
The figures stood quickly and raised their weapons.
“Stop right there,” said the taller of the two in English.
Elise slowed her pace a bit. She could see them in the fire glow now. Both men wore dark fabrics and ball caps. Those were definitely rifles, but they didn’t shine or glint in the reflection of fire or stars so Elise suspected that the weapons weren’t in great shape. Didn’t mean they couldn’t put a bullet through her head though.
“Hey guys,” she said, “sorry to freak you out. Just passing through. You have any water?”
“Stop where you stand.”
The rifle cocked.
Whoa. Elise dug her heels into the gravel and threw her hands up.
“No worries.”
“Why are you here?”
“Like I said. Just passing through. I want to see that,” she said, motioning toward the Treasury, “I’ve always wanted to see that since I was a kid. Supposed to be awesome, right?”
“You like that kind of thing?”
“Well, what do you mean? I guess, yeah. I mean, it’s like one of the wonders of the old world. They carved that shit out of rock with their hands, right? So yeah, I guess it’s rad.”
“Rad. Right.” It was the smaller of the two men this time and his voice was a squeak. They both sounded English, but Elise wasn’t sure, they might have been Irish. She wasn’t good with the dialects of the old United Kingdom.
“So, do you have water? I can trade. I have some chocolate.”
“What’s that on your back?”
“Rifle.”
“The other thing.”
Well, here we go.
“That’s my guitar.”
“Rad, right?’ The tall one laughed, and it didn’t sound nice.
“Look guys, not sure what’s going on here, but I’m just going to pass by and check out Petra, ok?” Elise felt her friend shift slightly in her backpack. A familiar weight traveled along her leg and down to her calf. Her heart beat a bit faster. She took a deep breath.
“You some kind of rock star? Some kind of artist?” The smaller man didn’t sound curious when he asked. He sounded like he was accusing her of something.
“Right.” She let out a deep breath and took another one in.
“You can pay the artist tax, girl,” said the tall one.
“Artist tax?”
They laughed. Elise felt her skin crawl.
“Steady on, girl. Just your guitar and a promise.”
“What’s the promise?”
“That you’ll change your ways. We won’t believe you, of course, so we’ll just take your hand too. As insurance. Once we’re done having fun.”
He pulled a hatchet out from his coat.
“Lots of fun. Then, no more hand. Can’t play the bloody guitar anymore, then, little miss artist,” the small one said. He giggled.
“Not going to happen. I just came for the flowers.”
She dropped and rolled to her left just as a cloud of smoke erupted from the campfire. Her 9mm was drawn fast and in her hands, held tight and straight. Her finger was on the trigger guard, not the trigger. The two men were enveloped in a thick white cloud. They waved their arms frantically and coughed. They cursed and shouted, their weapons falling to the sand. Then both men fell ove
r and didn’t move.
Elise slowly slipped the gun back into its holster and stood.
Both men were unconscious. She felt the familiar weight of the Octo-Thing as he scrambled back up her leg and into her pack.
“Tight work,” she said. There was a burst of air from the backpack as if in answer.
Elise wasn’t about to waste any of her own gear so she cut strips of leather from the men’s clothing and used it to hogtie them. They would sleep for hours, the gas was strong, and when they woke they wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while. She gagged them and hoped that they could breathe through their nose. And if nobody came to find them? Well, that’s the way of it, she supposed, not much luck on their side.
When Elise cut strips of their clothing for rope, she had found many dry and shriveled human hands tied to the tall man’s waist.
A part of her hoped that the men were never found and never freed.
She picked up the hatchet. The blade was clean, but the handle was sticky and thick with old blood and meat. It smelled awful. Elise took a deep breath and hurled it off into the canyon as far as she could.
They had skin jugs of water but she didn’t recognize the skin so she didn’t feel comfortable drinking out of them.
They won’t suffer long, she thought. If they don’t get freed, then something will find and eat them. A knife cricket or sand worms or the weird flying krill that could carry messages but strip meat from bone in seconds if so motivated.
She had no sympathy for these men who had been ready to rape and mutilate.
She pulled her switchblade from a sleeve in her vest and popped it open. Elise stood over the tall man and he looked up at her with wide eyes. She had an expressive face but now in the darkness Elise was a marble statue. Time passed. The blade trembled in her hand and Elise closed her eyes for ten seconds. She closed the blade and place it back into her vest.
