by Adam Graham
Varlock halted, spun around, and waved him on.
Mitch finally caught up and gasped at a cloudy dome and what looked like an underwater city. It had classical Greek architecture updated to modern times in ways that oddly resembled a 1950s America. It’s still inhabited? I can’t believe this thing is real.
Varlock’s voice came through Mitch’s diving radio. “Quite a myth, isn’t it?”
Mitch spoke activating his underwater transmitter. “How do we get in?”
“There’s an entrance over to the right.”
“Okay.”
They swam right. Varlock ran his hand along the side and pulled a lever upward. He swam in, followed by Fournier. Mitch shivered and shoved in after them.
Towards them swam two humanoids the size of fifth graders with white skin and boyish bodies. Their greeters wore loincloths and had black hair down to their ears, though it also went in every direction.
Voices rang in his head. Visitors, come this way.
Varlock and Fournier followed. Mitch gulped and also made his way into a round enclosure. It looked like an ancient stadium, but the stands were deserted.
Dim lights shined down from the ceiling.
Mitch radioed. “Varlock, where did those boys go?”
A giant sea snake slinked out of an opening in the wall. Its fangs shimmered in the dim light of the stadium.
It lunged right at Mitch.
Chapter 14
Aqua-Mayberry
Mitch’s heart raced as the sea serpent’s snapping jaws neared his face.
The sea serpent disappeared as the stadium filled with light.
Crouched behind one of the seats, the two boys were smiling wide and looked like they were laughing soundlessly.
Standing at the entrance was a glaring man who wore a brown shirt, brown khakis, and a sheriff’s badge. He had no oxygen gear. His scolding voice bombarded Mitch’s head Boys, we’re supposed to be kind to strangers. Now, you get along home. You don’t make any more trouble, or I’ll tell your ma and pa.
Ma and Pa? Mitch blinked and arched his right eyebrow.
Fournier stared at the sheriff. Shrugging, he bowed at the waist and said something in Japanese.
The sheriff turned his head sideways and furrowed his brows. I want to apologize to you fellers for those youngins. What brings y’all down here?
Why did this guy sound like he was from the South?
Isn’t this how y’all talk?
Uh, no. Mitch shook his head.
Oh. The sheriff shrugged. Y’all mind not thinking at the same time? It’s rude.
Mitch frowned. That would be impossible. We can’t hear each other think.
Oh, right. Well, try to give each other hand signals when you’re trying to think to me, so the others can do their best to not think over you.
Fournier raised his hand, stood silently a moment, and lowered his hand again.
Yeah, like that, sir. Thanks. Now, come with me, if you don’t mind. Rest up, and we’ll get you some food and we’ll talk. The sheriff swam out of the stadium.
A red-haired little girl swam toward them. She wore a shell-shaped tank-top, tied on with strings, and looked so much like his baby. Farrow’s heart wrenched. Rosie.
I’m not Rosie. I’m Ariel.
The sheriff smiled. No, child. You’re not Ariel. You’re Darlene.
The little girl pouted. Everybody’s named Darlene or Joyce! I want to be Ariel.
Darlene, you can pretend to be Ariel right fine, but you need to tell strangers who you really are.
I’m Ariel. She did a back flip in the water.
The sheriff shrugged.
They swam by a row of statues each about thirty feet high. The first was a well-aged Greek sculpture of a woman in a tunic holding vials of chemicals. The second looked like the Ten Commandments being held by a short-haired, bearded man. A third portrayed a rough-handed woman in a skirt and long johns. A fourth statue showed an iconic small town sheriff with his hand on the shoulder of his gaping, bug-eyed deputy.
An advanced civilization that made a statue of Andy Taylor and Barney Fife?
The sheriff led them into a metal airlock.
After depressurization, they exited from the airlock into what appeared to be a rustic, one-room cabin. The sheriff took two deep breaths. “Greetings. I’m Plato, the Sheriff of Atlantis.”
Varlock waggled his tongue. “Could you please direct me to your ruler?”
“Oh, if you want to talk to the Ironfisted Despot of Atlantis, you’ve arrived about fifteen years too late.” Sheriff Plato chuckled. “Our civilization has undergone big changes. Have a seat.” He sat in a nursery rocking chair with a sharkskin cushion.
Mitch glanced around. A half-dozen rocks were shaped roughly like chairs. He settled in one, as did Varlock.
Fournier dusted off his and flopped on it. “What’s with the telepathy?”
Sheriff Plato turned his right hand over. “We’ve talked that way since the founding of Atlantis more than 2000 years ago by Athena.”
Cheery. Mitch bristled. “Please tell me you don’t mean the goddess of wisdom?”
“Nah, our founder was a Greek scientist who didn’t get the respect she deserved. So she decided she wanted to build a new world where she would be honored. She chose to use her science to bring her people’s tall tales to life. She first tried to create an Amazonian culture by creating superhuman women on a small island. They could all hear each other’s thoughts, too, and slights led to bloody slaughters.”
What a shock. Mitch snickered. “That would’ve been disastrous with men, too.”
“She tried again with Atlantis, built a floating city, signed up a full complement of Greek Colonists and weighted it so it’d sink underwater. She built it so its dome would obscure it from attackers and so we’d be protected from the ravages of storms. Our city has stood the test of time, but she didn’t do a good enough job of counteracting her design’s initial floating properties. We drifted with the ocean currents all over the place until 1725. Then we figured out how to anchor our city right.”
“Well, guess the City of Atlantis did get extremely lost.
“Yeah, I guess we did.” Sheriff Plato laughed. “Since y’all are wondering, our ancient texts say Athena was a sorceress who ‘magically’ changed our ancestors to give them the ability to breathe underwater via gills. We realize now she must’ve been really a scientist way before her time who mutated our ancestors, altering our genetic makeup. Her tampering with nature also endued us with telepathy, but she also taught us how to hide our thoughts and only share the thoughts we wish to communicate. You’ve not been trained, so I’m not monitoring your thoughts at the moment.”
Fournier imitated the Barney Fife statue’s facial expression. “You expect us to believe this was done by a second century BCE Greek scientist?”
“Well, way I see it, our only other option besides that one is that she really was a sorceress. If you have a better explanation, though, I’ll consider it.”
“An elaborate hoax. Athena couldn’t have set this up any earlier than the 1960s, and after the millennium is most likely. The generation alive at the time is lying to the younger generations about your past and has falsified your historical records.”
Sheriff Plato glared and put his hands on his hips. “You calling my pa a liar?”
“Sir, I mean no disrespect. There’s simply no alternative. If what you’ve been told is true, she was the greatest scientist in human history, and no one’s heard of her.”
“Every Atlantean has heard of her. I assure you, we’ve been here for 2,205 years, as chronicled in our continuous narrative.”
Fournier snorted. “Oh, we have this book about her, and we believe every word it says without any proof? Does she have an action figure?”
“I can get you a drawing as well as a copy of her journal.”
Fournier clapped his hands. “Oh goody.”
At least he sounded sarcastic this time. “Sorry, sir. My associa
te is a scientist. He won’t accept that it’s authentic unless you give him a small, non-returnable sample of the oldest copy of her journal that you have and let him scientifically verify it’s age.”
Varlock stuck out his tongue and waved it side to side like it was an annoyed cat’s tail while saying, “We didn’t come here to dispute the validity of their records!” He stuck his tongue back in his mouth and bowed to the sheriff. “We came to hear your grievances against the surface world and assist you in exacting bloody vengeance.”
Sheriff Plato scrunched together his eyebrows and cocked his head. “Why would we want to go and do a thing like that?”
“For the pollution of the ocean, for them making war in the sea.”
Sheriff Plato turned up a palm. “Thanks to the inventions of Athena, the ocean around Atlantis is kept constantly clean from pollutants.”
“But there’s more than just Atlantis in the water.”
“That might be right, but it’d be mighty imperious for one small underwater city to take it upon itself to be the defender of the whole wide ocean. Besides, we’d never make it in a war on the surface world. I’m among a small minority that can breathe air. Most folk here can’t breathe outside of water, and I required surgery to gain my ability.”
“We can equip you with modified scuba gear that will allow you to breathe water while fighting in the air,” Varlock said.
Sheriff Plato laughed. “Why, but one bullet, and our water tank has sprung a leak, and we’re back to writhing on the ground! No, we’ve done had enough of war downs here. Why, we’ve had one hundred and five separate wars lasting at least six months for control of this small city. Not to mention a few hundred coup attempts and rebellions.”
So this had been another big waste of time. Mitch glanced over at Varlock. Guess he couldn’t have anticipated the King of Atlantis turning into a laidback sheriff.
Fournier raised his hand. “Your society doesn’t seem Greek to me.”
Would he ever stop trying to get them executed? Mitch cleared his throat. “What he means is, what exactly triggered your people’s most-evident transformation?”
Sheriff Plato smiled. “Now, that’s a story.” He took a deep breath and slapped his lap. “Well, it all began about some forty-five years ago. An ocean liner crashed above us. We like to keep our gills out of other folks’ affairs, but my pa had gone out for a swim in the wild and saw one of the victims, a beautiful young woman by the name of . . .what was it again? Ah yes, Anastasia. He found one of the oxygen tanks from the wreckage, put it on her, and brought her to this very room to be seen by one of our physicians. I hear tell that she wouldn’t have survived in the hands of your doctors.”
“Uh-huh.” Mitch nodded. Please get to the point already.
“Anyhow, when she’d done arrived down here, the doctor treating her had to replace her air-breathing organs with water-breathing organs. Now, she didn’t strictly need such a major organ transplant, but my pa had decreed she could never return to the surface world alive.
“So she lived among us here in the ocean, and got a reputation for making waves,” Plato laughed at his own joke. “Anyway, we had a tradition of abandoning unwanted children outside our city walls. She rescued them at the risk of sharks and cared for them, either until they died or until they grew up. She wound up needing a whole orphanage.”
“Why did she get away with messing with tradition? Daddy have a thing for her?”
“Sure, Pa wanted her to be his queen, but she was on a mission for the Lord and refused him. After that, he’d get mad and throw her into the dungeon from time to time. Then a rebellion was raised against my father. It was, let’s see, oh, about twenty years ago. It is forever known as the last war. For, on that day, my father was about to be slain by the rebel leader, and Anastasia threw herself in between them, bless her heart. When both sides saw Anastasia was dead, the war was ended.”
Mitch tapped his foot, feeling Varlock and Fournier glaring at him.
Sheriff Plato smiled and rambled on. “Pa saw how wrong he’d been and pleaded with the God she served to bring her back to teach him to do what was right. What do you know, when she’d done been dead for two whole days, life returned to her! She served us for another fifteen years, and Pa and all the people of Atlantis done got baptized.”
Oh brother. Mitch sneered. “You expect us to believe people rise from the dead?”
“No, I expect you to listen to a mighty sovereign respectfully, son.”
Right, this wasn’t an online forum. “My apologies, Sheriff.”
“Apology accepted.”
Fournier coughed. “Dare I ask what’s the deal with the Mayberry routine?”
“Well, towards the end of her life, Anastasia couldn’t swim around much anymore, and asked me to fetch her from the surface this thing called The Andy Griffith Show. So I went up to find one for her and encountered a Chinese fishing boat captain. He told me that he could get the entire series on something called a DVD in exchange for my people helping him to harvest several tons of fish. This we did gladly. However, we needed to convert the DVDs to Region 18.”
“Region 18?” Fournier leaned forward.
“Yep. To play the DVDs in our amphitheater, we have to convert their outdated formats to ours. Anyway, we worked for two years and obtained every episode of Andy Griffith. We all of course watched it with her, but she died before she could see Return to Mayberry.” Sheriff Plato closed his eyes and sighed.
“Perhaps that was just as well.” Mitch smirked.
“That might be so, I reckon.” Sheriff Plato shrugged. “Anyhow, we earn two new DVDs every three months simply for providing the Captain with fish we catch for free. Our favorite films so far are The Little Mermaid and Finding Nemo.”
Farrow smiled. Two twenty buck DVDs every three months in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in fish? That was a great deal—for the Chinese. “So how did you become the Greek, undersea Mayberry, again?”
“After she died, we the people decided en masse to honor her memory by becoming a truly great society based on the ideals of Mayberry. So I gave up being an iron-fisted despot, only to wind up being freely elected Sheriff.”
Huh? “Why would you give up being a king with an inherited right to rule?”
“Son, the Greeks invented democracy, and we’ve done all been accepted into another king’s realm, so no one else can be king anymore but—”
“Him!” Varlock stuck his tongue out and made a gargling noise. “I suppose it’d be against his laws for you to get into a battle to the death with Powerhouse?”
“Well, I reckon so, but why would I want to fight this feller?”
“You’re just too cowardly!”
Sheriff Plato jumped up and stood over Varlock with his arms folded. “Son, there comes a time in a man’s life when the courageous choice is not to fight. But if I need to, I can. Now, as chief defender of Atlantis, I’m endowed with my mighty power belt. When a shark attacked me, I tore it in two like a piece of papyrus. Still, unless a man is hurtin’ the people of Atlantis, it’s not my place to be his judge, jury, and executioner.”
Mitch glared at Varlock. Yeah, genius. Why would a happy-go-lucky, peace-loving sea sheriff do our dirty work?
Fournier raised his hand. “Powerhouse is conspiring with the media companies to develop technology that will make it impossible for you to convert DVDs to Region 18.”
“What? Sheriff Plato snarled. “How dare the villain! My people work hard for three months providing fish for surface dwellers, and he wants to take away our pay! I’ll meet this Powerhouse on the field of honor, and he will answer for this. Where is he?”
“Seattle.” Fournier sounded proud of himself.
“I’ll be there in five days, rest assured.” Sheriff Plato nodded while squaring his jaw. “We’ll see who stops us from getting our DVDs. If you’ll excuse me, I must go and exercise. I’ll have food brought in for you.” He left the cabin.
Fournier
grinned. “It worked like a charm.”
Varlock licked his chin “Yes, I was very impressed by how I handled that.”
“You! But I was the one-”
“That’s not how it will look in the report. You see, not only don’t we take blame for mission failures, the team leader always gets all of the credit for any success that occurs. It’ll be your turn when you climb up the ranks and get to be the team leader. For now, you must settle for not harming your position with King Bel with a failure.”
Uh-huh. He’d have to fact check this clown. Mitch folded his arms. “I’m not sure this will go well. Sheriff Plato doesn’t strike me as being stupid enough to fight Powerhouse without verifying if the allegation is true.”
Varlock smiled. “Don’t worry, Atlanteans never bother to find out if a charge is true. By the time King Plato learns the truth, Powerhouse will be dead.”
Mitch Farrow rubbed his aching back. This tin can is brutal.
Varlock announced, “We’re pulling into port.”
Mitch’s black cell phone rang. He took the call.
“Sir, this is Tyler Thomas. Caught an intruder at the detention facility.”
Mitch scowled. “I’ll be back at my lair in an hour. Do nothing until then.” He hung up and texted his driver. “Come and get me.”
The sub came into port. Mitch climbed out through the porthole. His limo was parked out front. He said to Varlock, “I’m leaving. I’ve got business to attend to.”
Varlock nodded. “Plato should make landfall on Saturday. Do be at my office to enjoy the festivities.”
“Wouldn’t miss it.” Mitch got in the waiting limo and sped to the Dorado Incorporated building. He took the executive elevator to the third sub-basement. There, he changed into his Pharaoh costume.
The Pharaoh turned on the overhead viewscreen and texted Thomas to put the prisoner on screen.
It blinked and displayed a slight, trembling blonde in a red windbreaker, a Precious Moments T-shirt, jeans, and open-toed shoes. Standing next to her was Tyler Thomas holding an AK-47 to her head. She was vaguely familiar as she sat on a folding chair in the center of a cement block room.
