Knife Fight and Other Struggles

by Knife Fight

  Max found the ladder that led up to the kitchen or studio and paused.

  The ratings of Wylde’s Kingdom being what they were these days, Sony would not be as quick to pull Max’s fat from the fire a second time.

  “Fug i’,” said Max. He scurried up the ladder and came out in one of the galleys. It was busy, all steam and sizzle and shouting, as Jerry’s craft services team prepared tray upon tray of the particularly bland cheese and fish canapés that Jerry favoured. One of the chefs there did notice Max, and for a moment he feared he was discovered. But the woman took Max’s arm, led him to one of the doors, and kindly explained that Jerry had declared craft services off limits to him until after the show.

  “Sorry, Jim,” she said. “I’ll make you up a nice fish broth later if you like.”

  “’Kay,” said Max, relieved. He stepped out the door, and then opened another door, and then he was on deck. Lightning flashed at him in greeting, and the hard rainwater drenched him immediately. He walked stiffly out into the dark storm.

  There were no lights in which to hide here, no trickery to bring about his transformation into Jim. Max was alone with his thoughts. A bank of lifeboats swung in the wind, and he thought about lowering himself in one of those. He thought about the two days or more he would spend in his stolen lifeboat. He thought about the Grand Banks fishermen who plied these parts, and the 60 Minutes segment he’d seen on them last year. He thought about the prospects of being rescued by one of their boats and just what they’d do to him when they found out who he was. And he thought about giant squids, and what they’d do to him by comparison.

  “Fug i’,” said Max.

  He stepped back through the hatch and shut it behind him.

  Max took a deep breath and headed for the Minnow’s aft decks—where last he remembered they kept the gymnasium, the infirmary, and his old training maze.

  Max had been working out for barely an hour before Jerry showed up with the med team and the video crew. The intrusion pissed him off: three days was a hopelessly short time to train to begin with. He couldn’t afford to be doing live segments with Jerry today if he were supposed to be doing live segments with giant squid in three days. When the unit producer sidled up to the thigh-sculptor machine to tell him he was on in five, that was what he told her.

  “Don’t worry,” said the producer, a woman with a horse-long face and thinning red hair. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. You with me, Jim?”

  Max sighed and mentally stepped back.

  “I’m with you,” Jim said.

  Jerry was standing slack-faced in the arch of the entryway sipping from a bottle of vintage spring water. He nodded when the producer signalled him, then came over by Jim’s side. The videographer followed him. Max could tell that they started rolling: Jerry’s slack features came alive, with the same demon-jester grin that adorned all his merchandise.

  “Jim,” he said. “Jim Jim Jim Jim Jim.”

  Jim started another set of extensions, wincing at the pain of tearing muscle and stretching ligament as the hydraulics hissed in the bowels of the machine. “Hey, Jerry,” he said.

  “Just keep doing what you’re doing,” said Jerry, and turned to the camera. “Jim is preparing for the fight of his life. So he doesn’t have time for idle chit-chat—isn’t that right, Jim?”

  “Right,” said Jim.

  “Shh! Every extension, every contraction of those atrophied muscles of yours puts you one tiny step closer to being a match for the kraken, and I don’t want to stand in your way—so shh!” Jerry put his finger to his mouth. “Shh! Remember, Jim, the giant squid is probably the fastest animal on the planet—it’s got nerves as big around as your little finger, and that’s a bandwidth to beat. And its suckers? They have little ridges of chitin around them that work like drill bits on your skin.” Jerry made his hand into a claw and turned it back and forth like he was unscrewing the lid of a jar. “Let one get ahold of you, and it’ll bore a hole into your flesh. So be strong, Jim! Be strong!”

  Jim nodded. “You got it, Jerry.”

  “Okay,” said the producer, “cut it. How was that, Mr. Wylde?”

  Jerry’s face sagged. “Fine,” he muttered. “Send the team over. Time to juice him up.”

  Max barely felt the injection when it pricked his arm. Jerry and the TV crew walked out as the steroidal spasmodics kicked in. The med team stayed behind, putting a roll of padding between Max’s teeth and helping him onto a restraining stretcher so he wouldn’t injure himself in the early stages of the muscle-building phase.

  “You rock, Jim,” said one of the medics. “I just wanted to say that before your hearing goes.”

  “Temporarily,” added the one who’d administered the injection.

  Max’s back arched in hyper-orgasmic fervor as the spasmodics went to work on the weakened muscles in his lower back. He made happy death-throe noises through his clenched teeth as the ringing started in his ears.

  The spasmodics worked and kneaded Max’s musculature for about six hours before they let him go, and at the end of it Max felt exhausted but good: the AbSucker had over-depleted him, but the spasmodics set the balance right. This cocktail was better than anything he’d used before; Jerry had obviously found a better supplier. These new drugs left his face and back smooth and acne-free, while strong, telegenic muscles rippled and twitched along his arms and legs and abdomen.

  “I’m ready for anything,” said Max. “Even your ridiculous squid, with their finger-thick nerves and their suckers that remove chunks of flesh like a drill bore.”

  Mimi ran a razor-nailed finger appreciatively along Max’s left pectoral.

  “That’s the spirit,” she said. Mimi had shown up about an hour earlier, on the spasmodics down curve, as his hearing was beginning to return, to talk about the shooting schedule and go over the equipment Max would have at his disposal. He hadn’t been able to ask questions during the briefing, but there wasn’t any need to: aside from the military-issue dive armour, everything on the list was gear that Jim had used many times before. The explosive-tipped spearguns; the razor-wire net pellets; the hum-knives and trank-spears and suit-mounted mini-torpedoes.

  He might have asked more questions when Mimi started talking about the squid themselves—but they wouldn’t have been any more in-depth than “Is there some point to telling me all this?” Or “Who cares?” But the questions wouldn’t have been any more effective than the grunts and moans that were all Max could manage: Mimi had developed a theory, and the only way Max could stop her from explaining it to him would be to escape in a lifeboat again.

  Mimi’s theory was that they were sitting on top of an ancient hatchery—and that a shift in ocean currents had raised the temperature in that hatchery by the few degrees it would take to inflate the birth rate and, combined with the Wylde-hastened extinction of their natural enemies the sperm whales, had the effect of unlocking the gate on the kraken population explosion. What she wasn’t so sure about was how so many of the squid had managed to grow to maturity and remain in such a small area. These creatures were giants, after all, with giant-sized food requirements, and the biomass oughtn’t to be able to sustain them in such a large population.

  “The GET researchers had apparently found some evidence of cannibalism,” she had said. “Squid-bits in the bellies of a few captured adolescents. But cannibalism is a population limitation as well as a sustainer: an adult squid would have to eat a lot of babies to keep himself going, and on a daily basis.”

  There, Max had thought between spasms, with the babies again.

  Now, he sat up on his cot and took Mimi’s hand from his chest.

  “Why are you back here?” he said. “Aren’t you violating your parole or something?”

  Mimi laughed—a surprisingly harsh noise, sharper than her nails. It made Max wince.

  “I have my reasons,” she said. “The money being only one.”

 
Perhaps it was the familiarity brought on by his new sheath of muscles, combined with his proximity to Mimi—but he was filled with the sudden recollection of his last sight of her those years past, naked and demonic on the deck of the Minnow, selling him on the beauty of emptiness.

  “Those squid are an affront to you, aren’t they?” he said.

  Mimi raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything.

  “You can’t understand why they’re thriving—and you can’t abide by their thriving either. They’re one more stopgap against the sterilization of this planet.” When she didn’t object or disagree, Max stepped back from her.

  “Are you going to bolt again?” said Mimi. “Jump in a lifeboat and row back to the mainland? I should warn you, don’t think about going home. That little Brazilian hideout of yours is under water now—according to Weath-Net, Atlantica is on the move, Maxie, redrawing the South American coastline as we speak.”

  Max felt something stretch and snap in his throat as a final spasm shuddered up his spine.

  “No joke,” said Mimi. “South America is shrinking.”

  Christ, he’d lived there, and he’d have been dead there if the liposucking-fans hadn’t shown up. Come to think of it, if the liposucking-fans hadn’t shown up, Max would have welcomed dying. In more than an abstract sense, that had been precisely what he’d been doing there: waiting to die, killing himself by lassitude.

  And the fact was that nowhere he turned did Max find anyone with an even slightly more optimistic view. What was the point in living past the moment when the future held nothing but Atlantica? A giant storm and rising oceans and earthquakes and plagues? Hundreds of millions of people wiped out by Atlantica and its aftereffects? For the first time since the bubonic plague decimated Europe in the middle ages, the global human was in actual decline.

  And so Max had taken a boat down the Amazon—a trip that less than a hundred years earlier would have been a trip of a lifetime, a jungle adventure with piranhas and anacondas and tapirs—but now followed a muddy shoreline washed clean of human habitation by a combination of clear-cutting and the river’s constant flooding. He had ended up in Brazil, squatting in the upper storeys of a sunken apartment house on the edge of Serra Do Mar Bay, eating and sleeping and drinking away the last of his so-appropriately named kill fee, waiting for the end.

  Even Max’s unbeatable survival instinct, his “inner Jim,” could only take him so far. It had required Jerry—or Jerry’s employees anyway—to bring Max back from the brink of death.

  “We’re all you’ve got,” said Mimi, closing the gap between them. Her hands grasped the back of his neck and pulled his face down to her half-open mouth.

  Although the spasmodics had made him more than strong enough to fend her off, this time Max couldn’t summon the will.

  EPISODE 4:

  KRAKEN!

  The sky over the Minnow was incongruously clear the morning of Jim’s dive into kraken waters. Jerry had prepped Jim with a full hour of on-air pre-show interviews, so by the time they led him out to the dive armour, Max was so submerged as to be nonexistent.

  It wasn’t the same for Jerry. His shoulders slumped as they went single file along the catwalk to the dive crane at the ship’s aft section, and by the time they climbed the stairs to the dive crane platform he seemed positively dejected.

  “What is it, Jerry?” said Jim.

  “Goddamn Atlantica,” he said. “It’s back in the Caribbean, and that means, before too long, it’s going to hit Texas and Florida and the whole Eastern Seaboard.”

  Jim slapped Jerry’s shoulder—a gesture that was one of the first character tics in Jim’s repertoire of stock responses to Jerry’s antics. “Take it easy, big guy,” said Jerry automatically.

  “It seems pretty nice here,” said Jim. In fact, it was gorgeous—the sky was a clear robin’s-egg blue, and the morning sun drew colour from even the drab and ungainly Minnow. The small part of Jim that was Max basked in it and regretted that, in a few moments, that brightness would be left behind for a dive eight hundred feet under the ocean.

  “Oh yeah, great for your suntan. But think about our audience,” said Jerry. “If you even have a thought in that pin-shaped head of yours.”

  Jim slapped Jerry on the shoulder again.

  “Who the hell’s going to be watching us with Atlantica running that far inland?” continued Jerry. “Everybody on one half of the continental US is going to be busy nailing up plywood on their windows if we’re lucky, and sucking seawater if we’re not. The one thing they are not going to be doing is watching us hunt squid.”

  “You can’t generalize,” said Jim.

  “Ah, screw you,” said Jerry irritably.

  He might have said more, but they emerged onto the dive crane platform and into the view of three cameras and the studio audience, who were seated on bleachers to either side of the equipment. Jerry lifted his hands in the air and led the chant: “KRA-KEN! KRA-KEN! KRA-KEN!” Jim hollered along gamely, then slapped Jerry on the back one more time, and climbed up the few steps to the place where the dive armour hung, open at the back and resembling nothing so much as a giant cockroach, cut open and disembowelled, so only the exoskeleton remained. As they’d rehearsed, Jim raised his arms above his head, rose onto his toes and fell forward into the thing’s belly. The servo-motors did the rest, closing the suit behind him and clicking the seals, making the carapace complete. Jim wiggled his arms and legs until the flesh fell against the biofeedback contacts properly. The suit’s arms extended with his own, and the HUD flashed up test forms a few inches in front of his eyes. These were meaningless to him, but Jerry had assured him that the controls had been dumbed down and the HUD wasn’t really more than a special effect. The important part was the cues, green on the red of the HUD, that told him what to say and when to say it.

  “All systems are green,” read Jim.

  “And green means—” started Jerry.

  “—Go!” finished the audience. The crane swung out over the gunwale of the ship, and then Jim felt a sharp jolt and fell. He hit the water with a spine-wrenching smack, and the suit took over.

  When Max came to, the HUD told him he was already at four hundred feet—just halfway down to his rendezvous with the video crew and the deep-sea studio with its cable comlink to the surface.

  Until he reached that studio, he would be utterly alone: just Max, the ocean, and the recorder in his suit. He took a breath of suit air and watched through the darkness for the star-cluster glow of the studio lighting rig that would eventually rise on its tether to meet him.

  “Hey, Jim,” said Mimi. “You okay in there?”

  Mimi was one of the five crew members in the studio sub. There would be a camera on her, and if Max had wanted to, he could have watched her on the head’s-up display. But he didn’t want to see Mimi right now. He read his lines. “Just fine, Doctor Coover—but I’m getting a mite peckish. Got anything to eat in there?”

  “Maybe we’ll have some calamari later on—together.” She silkily ad-libbed that last word.

  The studio was quite near now. It was a bubble sub, suspended in the middle of a geodesic titanium cage rimmed with lights and cameras. From the briefings, Max knew it was immense—something like a hundred fifty feet in diameter, with a cable of steel and polymer and fiber-optics a dozen feet thick extending up to the Minnow—but as close as he got, it resembled nothing more than a particularly garish Christmas-tree decoration to Max.

  The whole massive bauble twisted slightly on its tether, sending spears of light sweeping through the dark water. The HUD flickered in Max’s suit with a rejoinder to Mimi’s ad-lib. But Max minimized it and peered out into the shifting gloom. Adrenaline sluiced through his arteries like quicksilver, as the light spears panned and flickered over the bellies of giants.

  “Do you see that?” he whispered.

  The bauble shifted again, and several of the lights winked out
.

  “Mimi—Doctor Coover?” said Max.

  Mimi didn’t answer him directly. But her microphone picked up enough of the frantic chatter of her crewmates—“Shit, we’ve lost the feed!” “—Forget the feed, Hank, we’re—” “—pressure! We’ll implo—”—to give her an excuse. The bauble was swinging erratically. The lights were winking out in a now-familiar shape of expanding pattern. Max had more than a clue as to what the problem was.

  They’d hit pay dirt: the squid had arrived, apparently in force. At least one of them had a grip on the submarine and was yanking on its moorings—and one of them was heading straight toward Max.

  “Jim.” Max whispered it like an invocation, as his own suit lights winked on, the servo-cameras fired up and the HUD came back in deep crimson combat mode. The numbers and bar-graph displays blurred in front of his eyes, however, as he got his first good look at the creature in front of him.

  It was impossible to tell scale exactly, but this thing looked far larger than the sixty-foot glow-monsters they’d used for the infomercials. From Max’s perspective, it was a nebula of tentacles that filled the ocean, lined with suckers as big as dinner plates and centred around a beak that gleamed like sharpened mahogany.

  Max flailed backward, the jets at his waist instantaneously translating the impulse into a rearward thrust that should have taken him far from harm’s way.

  It should have—but as fast as the suit’s biofeedback chips were, the kraken’s thigh-thick nerves were that much faster. A long tentacle lashed behind Max and wrapped around him like a boa crushing a muskrat. There was a sickening sound of tooth-on-metal as the suckers tried to bore into Max’s armour.

  Max watched in horror as the image of the beak grew larger in his faceplate, opening and closing, and then as a cloud of black—emerging from the squid’s ink sac, no doubt—billowed toward him like a steroidal blackout. And then there was just the HUD, deep red on black, and the sound of more suckers going to work on his suit, and a terrible clicking sound coming up through his ribs, as the beak made contact with his armour. Max felt his eyes heat up with tears of despair.