“Nobody gives a shit, Alan,” Bill said.
“Sure, of course. Forget the goddamn persimmons. Richard, as they call you, don’t you want to live your own life? Find your own rareness? Use your pecker more? Damn it. I got to go pee.”
*
Quatermain peed in the corner of the room and made quite a moaning production of it.
“Kidney stones,” Bill said.
They unstrapped me and gave me cold-weather clothes and put on their heavy stuff they had left by the door. They had a suit of it for me. They told me their plan as we went outside into the cold air and the constant sun-lit sky the color of wet pearl. It was a simple plan. Kill the dinosaurs to avoid them being experimented on for days, months, years.
Outside the air nipped at us like pinchers.
The blond nurse, Jane, lay dead by the doorway, her neck twisted around.
“Bill fixed her,” Alan said.
“Snapped that bitch’s neck like a chicken,” Bill said.
“She was always nice to me,” I said.
“Supposed to be,” Alan said. “At some point they may have wanted you to reveal your true feelings. They were using her to gradually gain your trust. She would have cut your nuts off with rusty scissors if they asked her to.”
I looked down at her, her mouth open, her tongue hanging out of it like a sock from an open drawer. There was a blood drip dangling off her tongue, frozen there like a dollop of strawberry jam.
One thing for sure, Quatermain and Bill weren’t messing around, and now I was in the mix too. The thought crossed my mind that I had been bamboozled by bullshit and a fast shuffle, but it wasn’t something that would stick. Deep down in my brain cells, I knew the truth, and it wasn’t what Cranston had been feeding me. I was brand new with old knowledge of many things. I could tie a bowline. I could toss horse shoes and a javelin, recite poetry and quote from books. I knew special secrets of cunnilingus. It was odd to know I was so young and yet the size of a full-grown man, a young man with tremendous muscles and endurance. I was—
I busted my ass on the ice and it hurt, so that put some perspective on it. I was human enough. They helped me up and we hustled past more bodies in blue and white uniforms, scattered about like turds in a dog park, their weapons lying on the ice. And there were other bodies there, minus the blue and white. Men and women in white parkas, splotched with blood. I realized immediately that they had been on my new team, Quatermain and Bill’s team.
As we passed, Quatermain said, “If we had time we’d bury them, but we don’t. We have to kill those poor beasts before the word is out and we’re dead as stones.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to make a run for it?” I said.
“Of course,” said Quatermain, “but every creature I ever killed for sport and mounted, every possible redemption I might have is in those big ass swimming fish-lizards. I want to make amends.”
“And if I don’t want to help you make amends?”
“There’s the ice,” Quatermain said.
I looked about me. Yep. Ice. Melting. Out in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t like I truly had a lot of choices.
“You help me do this, and we kill the beasts, we’ll sail away. Or motor away, and do our best to hide, because hide we must. They’ll be coming. They don’t even let small things go. With the drink comes not only muscle and speed, there’s also intense focus. They’ll lock onto us and won’t unlock until they kill us.”
“This is only starting to sound marginally better than the position I was in.”
“That’s exactly how it is,” Bill said. “It’s about doing the right thing because it’s right and no other reason.”
We had reached the edge of the ice now. Our dinosaur fishing boat bobbed in the water before us at the end of the dock.
“In or out?” Quatermain said.
“In,” I said.
We hurried across the dock. I could feel it wiggle beneath our feet. The ice it was imbedded in was melting. We climbed on the fishing boat. It was crewed with other rebels. They were of various sizes, races and sexes. All four of them. Those four and us made seven. It was a small revolution.
One of the revolutionaries, a woman, was our captain. She was small and dark-skinned, but most of her face was hidden by her fur-lined parka hood. Nothing was said. Once we were on board, she disappeared into the wheel house. A moment later the boat was kicking about in the churning water. The three of us climbed to the upper deck. Steam rose up from the once cold sea.
“Stay to the middle,” Quatermain called down to one of the men on deck, who rushed to convey the obvious to the captain. But that was all right with me. I surely wanted her to keep us in that middle, away from those crumbling towers of ice.
As we chugged out to the more central part of our icy “lake,” the bergs continued to groan like old men on the john, sliding and scraping like shoes on tile. It was a horrible sound, and it was frightening too. Melted fragments larger than our boat dropped loose, sloshed and slid under water, bobbed up near us, or clanged against the side of our puny craft as if they were battering rams. But the boat held.
Into the fighting chairs went me and Quatermain, back to back. Ayesha’s blood, brain, and bone matter had been wiped clean, and the rods were ready with new cable that smelled of fresh oil. Hooks dangled, and from the hooks there were no longer the bodies of Neanderthal, but instead they were baited with great chunks of what looked like beef to me. At least we had enough class not to use the bodies of the fallen, theirs or ours.
“We pull those dinos up, and then we shoot them,” Quatermain said. “Right through their tiny brains.”
He made it sound simple. He had two very large rifles up there, bagged. He opened the bags, gave me one, which I put in a kind of well at the side of my chair, as did he.
He said, “You’ve been taught to shoot, but you don’t know it yet because you’ve never done it. But it’s in your brain. I laid out all that information myself, they coded it, and in it went. Also, you have my DNA, so you may have the basic attributes that helped me have my skill. And let me tell you something, boy. I am the best shot that ever lived with any gun or tossing tool; the javelin, hell, you got that from me too. Let me add something I’ve already told you. Let me speak with perfect conviction once again. Hook them up and shoot them down. It’s for their own good. In time the ice will melt, just as you were told, and out they go. Most likely, before that, they would have been caught by you and Ayesha, carried away and tortured for the sake of experimentation. Longevity drugs being the goal, maybe some toothpaste, or hair grower, or something that makes the dick hard would come out of it. But the bottom line is they will suffer, most likely without a drop of pain killer, because the experimenters want the full experience. It’s horrible, and we humans, just as always, will be the cause. Screw up the water. Fuck up the air. Cut down the trees and shit on the world. We’ll call it science. We’ll call it sport. We’ll…”
Bill yelled up from below where he was hustling out of the wheel house. “Alan, shut up and pay attention. He gets it.”
“Yeah. Right. Sorry.”
Bill came up to the chairs then. He was wearing thick goggles to protect his eyes from the glare of the ice, the shimmer of the water. He said, “I’ll be your spotter.”
“You have binoculars?” I said.
“Don’t need them,” Bill said.
“He doesn’t,” Quatermain said. “He can see a shit spot on a frog’s ass from across these waters where we now float to the ice palace from which we came, can’t you, Bill?”
“Probably. But it would have to be a large shit spot.”
“Naturally,” I said.
“Spot away,” Quatermain said to Bill. Bill clambered up a long tower that rose out of the upper deck near us, nestled himself in a little crow’s nest at the top. The thin tower shifted and rolled with the wind and the waves. There was a small harpoon gun with cables attached to a reel up there.
The tower hadn’t been there
before. It had been welded into place since yesterday. The boat chugged forward.
*
No sooner was Bill in his tower and us in our chairs, strapped and ready, our hooks in preparation for mechanical toss, when Bill said, “There be them two unfortunate sea-goers, Ar, Ar, shiver me goddamn timbers.”
“He saw a pirate movie once,” Quatermain said.
True to Bill’s sight, along they came through the water, swiftly, partly out and partly in, the sun lighting up the ridges of their backs and making the water running down their exposed flesh shine like silver.
“I think they are mad from yesterday,” Bill yelled down. “They hold grudges.”
“He’s not kidding,” Quatermain said “Today, they are looking for us.”
The beasts lifted their snakey heads and kept on coming. I touched my controls and my chair came alongside Quatermain’s. Our mechanical devices tossed our lines with our baited hooks, and no sooner had they splashed the water than our angry dinosaurs hit them, thinking them maybe less as food, and more as an extension of us. Couldn’t blame them.
Under our boat they went, dragging our lines. One line went left, one went right. Our chairs rotated about on squeaking bearings and kept turning, us to the back of one another, pivoting the circumference of our platform. Then they dove deep. The reels spun, the cables sang and split the water with a sound like someone tearing rotten sheets.
The boat went dragging across the water.
“They are way down under,” Alan said, “and they are dragging us toward the ice.”
“Reverse the engines,” someone below yelled, and the engines were reversed. There was a straining sound like an apple being forced through a straw, followed by a grinding. The boat locked down and ceased to move quickly. The dinosaurs tugged. The boat’s engines billowed with black smoke.
“Cut the engines,” I heard another yell from below, and the engines were cut. Now the boat was going across the water like a wagon being hauled by two great horses.
“Harpoon them,” I heard Quatermain yell out.
Chunk, came a sound from above. I looked up to see a cable unreeling from the harpoon gun, then glanced at the water as it hit one of the great shadows beneath the water, striking the beast square in the back. The harpoon went in smooth. A dark wetness trailed up and spread over the water. Another harpoon was fired, but now the hit beast was diving down, and the harpoon missed its mark. The other dinosaur followed its companion.
Down they went. The boat bobbed and tipped. For a long, agonizing moment it seemed as if we would be pulled under. Finally the boat rested firm, but you could hear all manner of squeaking and scraping as the cables tugged at us. A chunk came out of one side of the boat as a cable effortlessly cut through it like a hot knife through butter.
“They have gone down and intend to pull us with them,” Quatermain said, “but the boat will hold.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course not,” he said, “but would you have me say otherwise?”
The cable with the harpoon attached snapped loose with a ka-ping, ripped out of the water, whirled around our heads in a fan motion, wrapped around the tower like damp spaghetti.
“You dead up there?” Quatermain called out to Bill.
“Yeah,” Bill said.
“Good,” Alan said. “Don’t get no deader.”
Then to our surprise the fishing lines stretched out again and the boat began to move, and the beasts were pulling us in a new direction, but with the same intent. We were once again heading directly toward a great iceberg that rose from the water like the Empire State Building.
*
We were moving fast. We could ride it out and see what happened, or release our cables.
“We got time yet,” Quatermain said.
I tried to believe he sounded sincere.
Trails of blood from the injured beast were causing the water before us to look like spills of ink. The iceberg loomed closer and closer, and we had no idea how much of it was underwater and in which ways it projected. We might feel what parts of it were below long before we reached the visible part above water.
If this wasn’t enough of a consideration, there came a noise like someone beating a thick pillow with a belt. I looked up.
A black helicopter.
One at first, then two.
Bullets slammed into the boat and pinged all around us.
“Shit,” Quatermain said. “Someone got word to Cranston and the Rulers. There’s rat shit in the soup now.”
Bullets pinged on the tower above as the copters flew past. Quatermain yelled out, “Bill, you dead again?”
“Yep,” Bill said.
“Good,” Quatermain said. “Hang in.” Quatermain looked at me, said, “That’s a joke, he isn’t dead.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I got that.”
*
So the monsters were pulling us fast as an arrow toward the icebergs, the boat was starting to come apart, black helicopters (five now) had appeared, and only luck had kept us from catching a bullet in the teeth.
Another pass from one of the copters. Bullets buzzed by my head like wasps. By this time we had thrown up our head shields, designed to keep the rain out, not bullets. The shots struck the head shields, and one came through and buried itself at my feet like a lawn dart. Before the shield had slipped into place, I looked up at the chopper. Saw Cranston. He was dressed in a sharp black suit, as if off to the opera and not an employee-killing spree. He had one leg hooked inside the copter and was hanging out of an open side with a .45 in each fist, spitting metal bees at us. I only glimpsed the pilot.
The copter dipped and rose and moved on.
Quatermain pulled a rifle from the well beside him, an old elephant gun. Another of the copters came near. He lifted the gun and fired. The glass eye of the copter exploded and there was a burst of red. The copter buzzed just over us, almost hitting the crow’s nest, then hit the water and broke into pieces. I looked toward the water, saw the big, bronze man swimming with a speed a porpoise might have envied.
Quatermain fired again. His shot caught the bronze man in the back of the neck. I saw meat and water fly, and then the bronze man was gone beneath the waves under a wide swath of blood.
That’s when my hooked creature worked the hook out of its mouth, leaped high in the air. For something that large it seemed like an impossible jump. Its jaws widened, then snapped around one of the low-flying copters, dragged it down. I saw the big, dark-haired man inside of it; it was just a glimpse, but it was him, and the inside of the copter was splattered with blood. The beast landed hard, swirling beneath the water with the machine in its teeth.
The wave caused a backwash. It hit the boat like a giant’s fist.
The hook cut loose of the dinosaur’s mouth. It whipped high on the cable, its tip catching sunlight.
I hit the levers, recoiled the cable so fast it was nearly subliminal, and saved us from that disaster.
Looking up, I saw Cranston’s copter coming at us, the others behind it in formation. He was still hanging out of it, firing. I noticed now that on the front of his copter were the painted letter and number G-8. The pilot at the controls could be seen clearly through the great windshield. He looked as cool as the icebergs. They were so close I felt as if I were in the machine with them. Cranston swung out through the opening again, fired those .45’s. A shot plucked at my shoulder and banged off the metal chair behind me, leaped up and kissed my ear lobe and whistled away. Neither wound was major.
I swung the rod, disengaged the cable, swirled the hook, splattered it against the front of the copter’s windshield. The hook knocked through the windshield, hooked on something, and the copter spun. I wheeled my chair and flung the hooked machine way out over the water. But it wasn’t enough. Something went haywire with the reel. The copter was jerked back toward us.
“Shit in a pan,” Quatermain said.
For a moment, it looked as if the loose line would drop it short. But not
quite. It caught the edge of the deck and there was a fiery explosion. The boat came apart like wet cardboard. We were dragged down by the warm waves. As I went under, I saw the shadow of one of the copters beating its blades above us.
Right before going under, I had instinctively gulped in a breath of air. The water was warm, but not boiling, as too much ice had melted into it. It wasn’t pleasant though, and I was down deep.
I stayed down for as long as I could, and then I had to come up. When I did, there was Quatermain clinging to a large plank from our boat.
“Hi, kid.”
I grabbed hold of the plank, feeling no more confident of it than if I had clutched a straw. There was an explosion in the distance that made the water rise high, and there was fire in the sky. The remaining helicopters, too low and too near the explosion, snapped and crackled in the flames like insects caught in bug zappers. Their great blades went sailing across the sky. Icebergs shot upward and came apart, and their fragments floated above us like clouds against a blazing sunset, began to fall down. The water heated up considerably.
“Balls,” Quatermain said.
*
The volcano way down below had exploded, just to make sure we were awake.
A whirling blade from one of the helicopters whistled over our heads. Smoldering body parts splashed in the water. Ice chunks plunged down all around us.
The water began to move, fast, and then drop. It sizzled and smoked.
“Cheers, kid, nice knowing you.”
The water plunged even more, and we went down with it. Then we were sailing along toward a great iceberg, and the water dropped away before it. We came to a massive gap in the ice. The water was flowing into it, and we went along with it.
I glanced back along the icy tunnel, could see the sky, the water. Fire was blowing out of the water, spewing high. Rolls of lava tumbled into the waves, turned them to steam. So steamy I could no longer see.
Down we washed, so far down that I accepted that I was doomed. Lava flowed in behind us, sizzling the water, creeping up on us like a cat on a crippled mouse. Then there was a strange rush of water as if we had been caught in a vacuum of some sort. We shot along as if taped to the head of a bullet. Went so fast I lost grip on the plank, lost awareness of Quatermain. I didn’t know if I was up or down, dead or alive, still under that bridge, in the warehouse, on a gurney, or if anything I knew was true, or if it was all just a bubble somewhere in my brain.
Limbus, Inc. Book II Page 12
