by M. C. Norris
God of the Dead
A kaiju novel by M.C. Norris
Copyright 2014 by M.C. Norris
In celebration of my Volga German heritage, I’d like to dedicate this book to those stalwart settlers who sowed the seeds of my wonderful Kansas family. Arnholds, Norrises and Harrisons, by blood or marriage, I’m pleased and proud to always find myself in such fine company.
Love you guys.
Chapter One
The prospector bobbed on the stern of his balsa, at the heart of the city of rafts. Foam oozed through splits in the rubber air hose clenched between his golden teeth. Taped and spliced at random intervals, the tubing slithered haphazardly around the deck to its point of connection to a prattling compressor. Air streamed through the hollow of his mouth in a continuous howl, as the man with the gilded grin surveyed the fleet of ramshackle vessels. A curved cutacha jungle knife dangled from a cord lashed around his waist. Chipped from years of misuse, the rusted blade of his weapon was hilted to the cropped handle of what looked to have once been a child’s baseball bat.
His was a hard form, lithe and blackened, as if by some inferno in which he’d been forged. Poised on the transom of his vessel, he seemed to exist as a living mockery to whatever kiln had failed to contain him, to smelt the precious metal from his mouth, to tarnish the pearl of his outgrown nails. If the man had eyes at all, they were hidden somewhere in the swath of shadow slung beneath the brim of a faded army hat. However, in all his apparent tranquility, his subtlety of motion, the profound calm that seemed to emanate from this watcher of people belied his natural placement in the chaotic garimpo. He was different from the rest, apart from them, like a dark image burnt upon the setting. A prospector of prospectors, he studied the behavioral patterns of the crewmen throughout the bobbing shantytown with the dark interest of a cat regarding some birds. The other miners were too preoccupied to pay him notice. Their eyes were trained downward, their arms sifting tons of dredged sediment conveyed through the sieves in their tireless search for a few flakes of gold. Unseen were the suppliers, fifty feet below. Working blindly in absolute blackness, the divers plunged their suction hoses into the muck, feeding the process that was the garimpo, as it crept over the Rio Iaco as a collective machine designed to transform pristine rivers and their bordering forests into smoldering paths of destruction.
The prospector slicked back his brimmed hat to reveal a wild tussock of hair. He flung the cap across the deck in the direction of a knot of deckhands hunkered miserably beneath the sagging plastic awning that afforded their only sanctuary from the heat. The nearest of the lot responded with an almost imperceptible nod. They moved as a pack of cooperative predators coordinating some plan through a slight discourse of body language and glances, wordlessly taking to their stations around the balsa. The prospector hefted a large sack of dripping stones, and he affixed this crude system of weights to the nylon cord around his waist.
Orienting himself toward some point on the horizon, he inhaled deep breaths of compressed air through the hose, eyes brightening, as he rose to his toes upon the transom. Beyond the entropy of the encampment, the growling generators, the great bonfires of felled trees that imparted plumes of ash over the verdant reefs of Brazilian rainforest loomed the jagged peaks of the Andes. To these elder gods of fallen empires, the prospector dealt a last glance before stepping off the stern of his balsa, and down into oblivion.
The yellowish color of the water quickly dimmed, as his limp body trailed the sack of stones down into the depths of the Rio Iaco. He plunged until his ears rang and popped, until the fading brilliance of the surface was evidenced only by a sickly effervescence that waned until all trace of the world he’d left behind was snuffed in the grip of absolute blackness. His ears welcomed the tinkling concert of migrating pebbles, the rhythmic chugging of the dredge suction lines. At last, his bare feet were received by a layer of frigid muck at the river bottom. Waiting, just breathing from the airline, he allowed his senses to become reacquainted with this hostile and lightless environment. Once stabilized, he turned in the direction of a familiar groaning resonance, and then traversed the abyss with great moonwalker’s strides until he’d located his dredge’s suction hose, the secondary tool of his trade. Hugging the great vacuum in the bend of his left arm, he released the razor-edged cutacha from his hip.
This was his world. Above, he amounted to nothing. Son of a murdered Maldonado whore, he’d squabbled daily amongst the destitute shat upon this world without a hope or a prayer, all blowing like motes of litter in the wind toward whatever opportunity for new failures arose. Up there, he was shit, but down here—he rotated his body in the direction of the other chugging dredges, and the divers who blindly manned them—he was a god.
Few in this mining camp were experienced. They just drifted in, lost souls with sad histories, piratical minds and criminal records, whose miserable existences floated them through every loathsome occupation as they drifted the natural course of depravity, until at last, they found themselves caught in the great filter of human dregs that was the garimpo. This would be their final stop. Just enough gold could be gleaned from the river bottom to support their indulgences, which were steadily supplied by the droves of peddlers and prostitutes who followed their customers ever deeper into the jungle. The garimpo was a prison without walls, crowded with violent inmates incarcerated on their own volition, a place where the only sentence could be death.
On the bottom of the Rio Iaco, no one ever saw him coming. Slashing airlines, he’d learned, was a novice’s mistake. A loose hose waggling in the current promptly alerted crews to the struggle down below before their mining site could be plundered. Cutting throats was the best method. They died complacently this way, struggling like little lambs against a tether as he gripped their airlines until they bled out. The lightless conditions denied him the pleasure of watching his victims die, and that was a shame. Down here, he could only listen, feel and imagine the dramatic spectacles that he created.
Once he’d dragged his cutacha across their throats, they panicked, so shocked by what had just happened that they never thought to release their oxygen supply line, and swim for the surface. Even as that icy flood of water rushed into their lungs through the gaping holes in their necks, and the river warmed with the spillage of their blood, they never let go of their airlines. They just kept pulling on that hose, pulling until they died with bubbles streaming through their opened throats that the prospector liked to feel fluttering warmly through his fingers.
He advanced through the nightscape in slow-motion leaps. Each bound brought him closer to the sounds of his target, three balsas away. It was the poor bastard’s own crewmen who’d betrayed him. Experienced crews knew better than to show excitement while anchored over a rich mining site. In these waters, it was a deadly mistake to grin like apes, cheering and slapping backs while crowded over a sieve. Ironic, their diver, the only crewman who’d no idea what his labors were producing, would always be the one to pay the ultimate price for his topside crew’s naivety.
The chug and rush of vacuumed sediment was an alluring beacon. He could hear the pebbles rattling up the dredge, the torrent of bubbles spewing from the diver’s airline, and something else—was it singing? The prospector smiled, as he vaulted through the blackness. Sometimes they sang. Fearful, inexperienced, they crooned their garbled hymns over their airlines to alleviate the alienation of the worst position on a mining crew. As the prospector neared the voice in the darkness, he recognized this particular song. It was the Himno Nacional del Peru.
Largo tiempo el peruano oprimido
la ominosa cadena arrastro
Condenado a cruel servidumbre
largo tiempo en silencio gimio
How wonderfully appropriat
e. The prospector hummed along with his victim, as he seized the fool from behind, wrenching his arm around the man’s face and thrusting the cutacha blade beneath his chin. This was his favorite moment. As the diver struggled to escape his deadly headlock, he could feel himself starting to get an erection. For some funny reason, he felt like cutting this one’s head completely off.
The prospector heard his own burbling scream, a sound he’d never produced before, as a bolt of agony shot up through his thigh. Steel squeaked against bone. His cutacha was clenched in the diver’s viselike grip, while the bastard reamed a shank down into the joint of his hip just as deeply as the blade could be driven. The prospector abandoned his suction line to defend himself better against that twisting dagger. White strobes exploded throughout the blackness, as the bridge of his nose was suddenly pulverized by the back of the diver’s skull. It was a moment before his senses cleared, and he realized that he’d lost his airline. The diver escaped with a flurry of kicking legs, leaving the prospector airless and anchored to the river bottom by his own sack of stones.
Pulsing blood throbbed inside his ears. He jerked the shank from his hip. Swarms of voracious fish began to attack the open wound. They rushed out of the blackness from every direction as he sawed at the nylon tether. He felt them slapping at his body with their fins, pummeling his thigh in a burning torrent that he knew would never subside, only increase in intensity, until their collective bloodlust had reduced him to a pile of bones.
He swatted at the living darkness, sawing at the cordage until at last, with a liberating snap, the prospector was rocketing skyward through the swarm, threshing the water in an effort to confuse the ravenous horde until he’d distanced himself from the worst of them. The piranhas pursued him, tearing away gobbets of flesh with every strike, but lack of air was his greatest agony. His eyes bulged, his throat swelled and collapsed, as burning lungs fought to pull a lungful of water through his clenched teeth. Thrusting higher with every kick, he could finally see an amber effervescence of light, just beginning to radiate down through the gulfs of blackness from somewhere high above.
He was going to surface right beside his victim’s balsa. The danger was obvious, but at this point, it wasn’t possible to deviate from the most direct course to the surface. Even if his lung capacity was sufficient to carry him back to the relative safety of his own vessel, there would be no sanctuary for him there. By now, his escaped diver had surely alerted the whole garimpo to the presence of pirates, a threat that no one took lightly. Every miner in the city of rafts was going to be up there waiting for him. Lost divers were a regular occurrence. So long as his victims never surfaced, no foul could ever be proven, but this time, he’d blown it. His herd of prey was keenly aware of the lion in their midst, and they were going to turn on their predator. He’d prowled the garimpo long enough to anticipate the brutal justice that would be in store. He and his crew would be blamed for every diver who’d ever gone missing. Odds were, his shipmates were already dead.
The shimmering aura of the surface brightened with every thrust. The temperature of the water warmed as he broke through some frigid barrier, yielding to whorls of golden light. At last, his shaggy head exploded from the surface, wide-eyed and sucking air like some awestruck troglodyte newly birthed of the primordial soup. When the hacking cutachas didn’t flail upon his skull, when his ears failed to detect the cries of outrage, the pop of small arms fire that he expected as his welcome back to the surface world, he whipped his head around, confused. He was all alone. Alone and treading water in a floating ghost town of abandoned rafts.
He pinched the water from his nose, coughed, and spat. Most unsettling was the lack of background noise. Not once, since he’d joined the garimpo could he recall a single moment of stillness. Not a single compressor prattled. Not a dog barked. There were no shouting voices. Even the churning conveyers had been halted. Belts hung slackened, sieves dripping. There was not a solitary sound emitted by any living or mechanical thing, from the garimpo to the dense jungle beyond.
The prospector hovered on the surface, blinking in the sunlight, still expecting an angry mob to appear at any instant. There was a peculiar odor in the air, he noticed, as well as a strange haze that seemed to have fallen over the Iaco valley. It wasn’t tenuous like a bank of fog, or even mist. It was more difficult to perceive, like some trick of weary eyes that imparted a slightly greenish tint to the color of things. The prospector squinted up at the sky, where the effect was most noticeable. It was not exactly blue. No less hot and bright, still spangled with clouds, normal in every way but in its hue, which had somehow fallen out of normal spectrum. Strange, how such a slight adjustment to ordinary tint could feel so bothersome to the eyes, bumping everything off-kilter, making the world feel so alien.
The prospector swam toward his balsa. The smell that hung so available in the air was equally perplexing. He peered cautiously at the other rafts as he neared his own vessel, still anticipating some form of reciprocal violence to erupt, some consequence to his actions, but no penalty was delivered. The odor was twofold. Its base was comprised of the mustiness of forest litter, the slimy stuff beneath rotten logs that reeked of mold and snails, a fungal wildness that emanated from the essence of decomposing wood that was somehow both pleasant and off-putting to the senses. It was the reek of bygone life, and of every creature that reveled in life’s destruction. The sharper edge was something acrid, yet nutty, something more difficult to compare to any known scent but perhaps that of toasted almonds and crushed ants. He didn’t know. The prospector hauled himself wetly onto the deck of his raft.
Facedown on the timbers, he was afraid to examine the throbbing agony at his hip. Eyes clenched shut, he breathed deeply for several seconds, focusing on the gentle lap of water against the transom. His fingertips slid over the lashed timbers, down his flank, to a raw and ragged mess that was his upper thigh. He winced, cupping his hand over the fist-sized divot that had been scalloped right out of the muscle by the fish. He’d known more than a few miners who’d died as a result of infections they’d contracted while working in these waters, and his wound felt worse than most he’d seen.
The prospector’s eyes flicked open in response to a nearby splash. Raising his head from the timbers, he peered up over the low transom. Two meters astern, rings of water expanded from a gently fluttering form. Beating wings slowed, as a small bird pirouetted on the water’s surface. Within seconds, it was still. Dead, but hardly alone in its lifeless state, it shared the river with brown and glistening backs that were suddenly evident, drifting between the anchored balsas in a grim migration. Miners, amidst countless fish, all floated together through the eerie silence of the garimpo.
Pushing himself up from the deck, eyes wild and searching, the prospector swiveled his head in the direction of his raft’s makeshift cabin, and there they were. Beneath the plastic awning, his crew lay still. Upturned faces, bloated to caricatures by the effects of their strange deaths, they extruded their blackened tongues at the sky.
Snatching his cutacha from the timbers, he leapt to his feet, heart drumming inside his chest. He rotated in the center of the deck, poised to defend himself from the unseen threat that had to be lurking in the sky, the water, or in the dark jungle beyond. His logical mind demanded something, some hint of an explanation, but nothing was granted him. Nothing but the delicate forms of winged insects that fell from the air like bits of ash to settle soundlessly, lifelessly, upon the water. The distant slap and crash betrayed the occasional bird falling down through the forest canopy.
The prospector grimaced with every breath of tainted air that he sucked into his lungs. The greenish tint to this new reality, the acrid mustiness, these were the only clues as to what plague must have passed over the area while he was down on the river bottom. Cupping his hands to either side of his bearded mouth, he succumbed to the wild impulse to release an earsplitting bellow. Only the echo of his own anguished voice resounded through the desolate undergrowth. As minu
tes passed without response, the prospector was left with little choice but to accept the fact that for unknown reasons, he alone had managed to survive.
The outboard motor wouldn’t start. After several attempts, he weighed anchor. Employing a paddle as a rudder, he rode the current, maneuvering his balsa through the floating necropolis of rafts, where whole crews were slumped into their conveyers, giving them the appearance of lazy hogs asleep at their feeding troughs. On almost every vessel, bodies were folded over the sieves, imparting themselves headfirst into the same muck over which they’d toiled. Dead divers trolled from the ends of taut lifelines. Their corpses rolled languidly in the current.
The encroaching forests on either side seemed to sag with collective despondence. Withered boughs of foliage hung dully from branches, divorced of that natural luster that was indicative of vegetative life. Beneath these sickly bowers, the banks of the Rio Iaco were strewn with the residents of what had so recently been a bustling sideshow to the garimpo. Campfires still smoldered amongst the collapsed forms, four-legged and two, all reduced to an ominous state of equality, as macabre markers on every spot where a peddler, prostitute, dog or a chicken had drawn a last breath. The prospector’s gaze lingered on a blackened torso whose lower half extruded from the cooking fire that she’d been tending.
Downstream, the odor grew stronger. He clasped a hand over his mouth and nostrils, as if his fingers could filter it from entering his lungs. Not that this stench appeared to do him any harm. At least, not immediately. If the poison in the air was in any way connected with the extinction of so much life, then it was a guess that the lethal concentration of this mysterious gas must have dissipated as quickly as it had been unleashed. He was just lucky, damned lucky, to have been down on the river bottom, and separated from his air hose at the precise instant that a wave of death swept over the city of rafts.
