Downrigger Drift

by James Axler

  Ryan caught J.B.’s eye and picked up his surreptitious nod, indicating that what Donfil had said about their “helping” the ville hadn’t gone unnoticed. Brow furrowing, he decided to ask the tall shaman just exactly what he meant by that at the first opportunity.

  A stern-looking matronly woman with a silver-scaled pattern on her face and hands shooed the others back to work, nodding respectfully to Donfil. “Will our guests be staying for dinner?” Her voice had an odd, sibilant quality to it.

  Donfil nodded, and the woman smiled, revealing needle-sharp teeth irregularly spaced in her mouth. “Then we shall prepare the best of the day’s catch for them.” With that she bustled off to oversee her charges.

  The scarecrowlike Donfil then turned to his friends, his head bowed to regard them. “My apologies, my friends. Our town has had some troubles recently. That was why I was inland this morning. I was looking for help with our problem and was hoping that perhaps another community might be able to offer a solution.”

  Ryan repressed a shudder as he thought of these relative innocents wandering into the hellhole of Poynette. Would have been hung up and gutted before night had fallen, he thought. “Right, but first things first, Donfil. Like, how’d you end up here? Like I said, last time we saw you, you were pretty well set in that whaling town on the Lantic.”

  Donfil nodded, his iron-gray hair bobbing around his face. “Yes, I thought I had found my place in this world, and for a time, it was a good life. Unfortunately, the Great Spirit turned his face from us, and the whales grew harder and harder to find. The ships were staying out longer and longer, and returning with nothing to show for it. I had been saving up to buy a stake in a vessel myself, but when the good ship Phoenix was attacked by a large school of killer whales and nearly sunk, I knew my time there was at an end. A group of traders was planning a trip down the Lawrence, and I hired on with them to sail to the Great Lakes. We moved among the shore communities for several moons, until I found my place here, among these fishermen, and have remained ever since.”

  “Okay, so what’s the problem you all have?” J.B. cleaved right to the point, as usual.

  Donfil lowered his voice, leaning close to Ryan, J.B. and the rest of the group. “Since Waukee was rebuilt many, many moons ago, its people have lived in peace with the lakes, taking what they need and knowing that the waters will replenish themselves. Lately, however, it seems that the Great Spirit is angry with us again, for boats go out on calm days, and a sudden storm will arise from nowhere, destroying our ships and men. The pike, trout, salmon and sturgeon that once filled these waters now seem to elude us, letting our boats come home empty time and again. When they are running, we set our lines, yet they come up empty, or even worse—cut clean off. On night sails, when the spawning fish run under the moonlight, men have disappeared without a trace, on deck one moment and gone the next. A few days ago, a large boat went out and was found floating on the water with not a single hand on board.”

  He shook his head. “I am even starting to wonder if I am the cause for this—first the whales leave the coast, and now this village suffers when I arrive. If we do not uncover what is behind this soon, I feel that I will have to leave this place, perhaps head to the Great River to find a home.” He stared at Ryan with that strange, penetrating gaze of his. “Perhaps the Great Spirit has brought us together again for a reason, eh?”

  Ryan didn’t give much credence to the vagaries of fate, but he also saw no reason to disillusion his old friend. “Mebbe. Are we supposed to meet with these ‘elders’ of yours?”

  “Yes, actually, they wish to see everyone who visits our town, so that they may take their measure, so to speak. If you wish, we could take care of that right now.”

  “Yeah, probably the best idea. Let’s go say hello.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “What do you think?” J.B. asked as they walked a few steps behind Donfil and Doc, both of whom were enjoying a spirited philosophical discussion pitting Native American philosophy against more traditional Western schools of thought.

  Ryan shrugged. “Seeing Donfil sure distracted Doc from his depression, that’s for sure. ’Bout the rest of it, who knows? Mebbe the fish have wised up and just don’t live around here anymore.”

  Mildred, close enough to overhear their conversation, frowned. “Maybe, but what about the disappearing people? I never heard any stories of fish developing a taste for human flesh. Unless these folks are suddenly getting real clumsy, something else is going on.”

  “Yeah, but that don’t necessarily make it our business either.”

  Mildred snorted. “Says the guy who didn’t hesitate to kill half the population of the last ville we came across.”

  Ryan turned his head to stare at her. “Difference between there and here is no one’s tried to chill us yet. If that happens, my response will most likely be the same.”

  “Why don’t we meet the elders and see what they have to say before making any decisions?” Krysty asked. “We’re probably only about a hundred miles or so away from the mat-trans and aren’t that hell-bent to get there, so maybe staying here a day or so wouldn’t hurt.”

  “We’ll see.” Ryan lengthened his stride to catch up with the other two men as they headed toward the second large building. “Donfil?”

  The gaunt shaman stopped with his hand on the door. “Yes, One-Eye Chills?”

  “Anything we need to know about these elders before we go in?”

  Donfil shook his head. “Just answer any questions they have honestly. There is nothing to fear.”

  “Never said there was. Let’s go.”

  Donfil opened the door, and the first thing to hit Ryan and the group was the rank, almost overpowering smell, a sharp stench of guts and blood. This room was set up like the other one, but its long tables were given over to processing of giant tubs of freshly caught fish. With machinelike efficiency, rows of men and women gutted, filleted, skinned and deboned carcasses with precision, completing their assigned task before sending what was left on to the next station. They worked quietly, and the large fish bodies were reduced from their natural state to rows of pale white fillets. Not even the presence of the visitors caused them to lift their heads from their work. Ryan picked out more marine abnormalities, including more than one person who had only one working limb, with the other being what he could have sworn was a fin, but that might have been just a trick of the dim light cast from the high windows on a withered hand and arm.

  The smell was most pungent where they were standing, and Donfil smiled as he led them to the back of the cavernous room, the swish and chop of the knives on the human disassembly line loud in their ears. “You get used to it after a while. Of course, coming in where the fish guts are piled doesn’t help any either.”

  “Excuse me, Donfil, but I fail to see the problem here,” J.B. said. “Looks like everyone’s busy enough, plenty of fish to go around, so where’s the trouble?”

  “To you it may seem busy, John Barrymore, but this is the only shift that is still operating—we used to have two. We have been trading with other communities both around the Lakes and inland, using our extra fish, and if we only have enough to feed ourselves, then our trade suffers as a result.”

  “Makes sense.”

  Ryan thought about throwing a sleeve over his nose in an attempt to block the stench, but decided against it. No sense having to talk to these elders with his arm over his face. He followed Donfil up a staircase on the wall at the back of the room. At the top was a rusty metal door with a rectangular wire glass window in the middle. Raising his walking stick, Donfil pounded on the door, loud enough to be heard over the din on the processing floor.

  The door opened, and what might have been a man or woman’s face peered out—it was that hard to tell. The doorperson was one of the more severe mutations they’d seen so far, completely hairless, with wide, bulging eyes mounted on either side of a flat, narrow head that somehow tapered down into a normal human neck. The rest o
f his or her body was normally proportioned.

  “Donfil More to see the elders, please.” The shaman had bowed his head as he spoke, making Ryan’s eyebrows rise.

  The person spoke with a watery gurgle. “Enter and be welcomed here.”

  Donfil walked through the doorway, with Ryan and his group entering behind him. This room was much smaller, and smelled of freshwater shallows. It was dimly lit, and Ryan heard a gurgle as he walked in, as if someone were slowly pouring out a jug of water.

  At the far end, five people sat in small circles of light provided by a row of round, high windows mounted along the left wall. The right wall was dark, but Ryan got the impression of a large pane of glass of some kind mounted there with something large behind it, perhaps several hundred gallons of water. But he gave it only passing attention, his gaze drawn to the people before him.

  The five people that made up the elder group basically resembled old, wrinkled fish mutants. They were certainly human, but their aquatic features were more pronounced than the rest of the villes’ inhabitants. As Donfil walked up, one of them reached down to a bucket next to him and picked up a dipperful of water, pouring it over the set of opening and closing gills in his neck.

  Donfil approached the row of watchers and nodded to them. “Elders, I have returned from my mission, and, brought with me a possible answer to our problem.” Introducing Ryan and the others, he quickly recounted his group’s encounter with the bandits and their subsequent rescue.

  The second one inclined his head to Ryan and the others. “We owe you a debt of gratitude for saving our people. We would ask that you stay with us tonight, and be fed and housed, and any other needs you may have will be taken care of, if they are within our power.”

  Ryan nodded, as well. “Thank you. Not that we don’t appreciate it, but Donfil mentioned a problem you all are having recently. I don’t want to give anyone the wrong impression here, but I’m not sure if there’s anything we’d be able to do about it.”

  The third elder leaned forward. Although his mouth was small, he spoke very well. “We cannot ask you to do anything more than you have done already. We know well the cost of hired men and women such as yourselves, and it is an option we have considered.”

  The member on the other end of the table stiffened and looked away from the rest. Ryan didn’t need a sign to tell he wasn’t happy about that last part.

  The third elder continued as if he hadn’t noticed the movement. “However, we could tell you of our problem, and perhaps you could share your knowledge with us. As of yet, we haven’t even been able to discover the cause of the disappearances, either of the fish or our townspeople.”

  A spark of light flared in the darkness to everyone’s right, and Ryan started back in shock as a humanoid form was revealed in the phosphorescent glow.

  Like the doorperson, the sixth elder combined the strangest traits of human and fish into a completely new appearance. Perhaps four feet long, he had no legs to speak of, but a fish tail that waved back and forth in the water as he moved. His arms were a combination of human limb and fin, with a segmented elbow joint that allowed him more flexibility as he swam around the tank. His body, limbs, and tail were all outlined in an eerie, blue-green luminescence, making him appear partly translucent. His face combined what might have been the best or worst of both races, Ryan couldn’t be sure, with a gaping mouth that opened and closed to suck in water, and huge eyes that seemed more designed for a lightless environment than the surface.

  “My God,” Doc said, entranced. He slowly approached the tank, his gaze never leaving the fish-being inside. It in turn swam up to the glass, regarding him with one pale, unblinking eye. Doc reached out a tentative hand to gently touch the barrier, which was answered in kind by the creature rolling over to extend a flipper to him in greeting. “Sentient, or I’ll eat my hat. The wonders of this world never cease to astound me.”

  That wasn’t the only wonder either, for the elder on the far end, nearest the tank slowly stood. “Our brother may be about to speak—he usually lights up beforehand. He will do it by contacting your mind, so just relax and open yourself to him. He does not mean any harm.”

  “Wait a minute—” Ryan began, but it was too late.

  The fishman rose in the tank until he could see everyone in the room, his internal light glowing even brighter as he did so. When everyone was bathed in its radiance, Ryan didn’t hear a voice, but saw a series of images in his head: The village on a bright summer day, the sun shining over the houses, the buildings and the water, making it glitter like someone had scattered a handful of diamonds on the lake… Boats sailed out, the occupants fishing like their ancestors had, and their ancestors before them… A shadow suddenly fell over the harbor, the village, everything in sight…it came from the east, and grew from a speck on the horizon to reality in seconds—a gargantuan, massive tidal wave, seventy feet high, a churning, roiling cascade of bile-yellow, foaming water…people saw it…only had time to point and scream before it was on them…devouring the town under its pounding force, shattering the docks, washing away houses, caving in one side of the processing building…washing away both it and all inside, sweeping them all back out to the implacable waters…leaving shattered debris, broken planks, and lifeless, floating bodies behind—

  WITH A START Ryan jolted out of the vision, coming back to the room around him. The pictures in his head had been so real for a moment, he found himself tensed to try to do the impossible—outrun the mammoth wave that had come crashing through his mind.

  He glanced around to see his friends similarly shaken. Krysty’s hair had coiled tightly up around her neck, J.B. had taken his fedora off and was running a hand through his hair. Mildred’s eyes were wide as she stared at the rest of the group, while Doc barely repressed a shudder at seeing the watery death engulf the town. Jak simply wrapped his arms around himself, his head down, having seen a foe that even he could have no effect against.

  Ryan cleared his throat, which had gone strangely dry, even in the damp room. “He a doomie?”

  The second Elder considered the question. “To a degree. Some of what he foresees does come to pass, enough that we must take every vision he chooses to impart to us seriously.”

  “Yeah.” Ryan rubbed his chin, also choosing his words carefully. “Look, if what’s on your horizon is something like what we just saw, there’s nothing we can do about it. Seems like the best idea would be to think about pulling up stakes and moving elsewhere.”

  His suggestion brought urgent muttering from the elders, all of whom leaned toward one another to confer among themselves. Ryan looked at the rest of his group and shrugged, earning puzzled looks from the others in return.

  After a minute or two of impassioned discussion, the five elders turned back toward the group. “That choice has been discussed as well, and then, as now, we have decided to stay here, to try to find a way to stop this from coming to pass.”

  Ryan halted the snort of derision rising in his head, turning it into a cough instead. He was still trying to find a diplomatic way to point out the folly of their decision when an urgent banging on the door startled everyone.

  The doorperson walked over and opened it to see a new person, slick with sweat and panting hard, as if he had run a good distance to get here. He clutched a cloth-wrapped bundle to his chest, the lower end leaking some kind of noxious, black fluid.

  “Elders, please, forgive my intrusion. There’s been another attack—Melob’s boat—and they have brought something back. You must see!”

  He was waved into the room and entered hesitantly. When he reached the center, he knelt and unwrapped the stained cloth from what it had been holding.

  On the floor lay the forearm and hand of some kind of lizard creature. The fingers were webbed, but each one also ended in a sharp, black claw. The arm was covered with thick, dark green scales, each as wide as a fingernail, and overlapping all the way down. Black ichor still oozed from the injury that had severed the limb,
staining the floor.

  The elders reacted with expressions ranging from anger to surprise to shock. There was a clamor of noise as each one tried to speak at the same time. Only when the sixth elder glowed brightly again, lighting up the room, did the rest quiet down.

  “Tell us what happened, Qualen,” the elder on the left end said.

  “Don’t know whole story. They were north of the harbor and set upon by one of these things as they were hauling in their lines. It was creeping up on one of the crew when it was spotted. Made a grab for him anyway, and that’s when its arm got cut off by someone with a ’chete. Dived off fast enough that no one got a good look at it. They hauled in their lines and sailed back fast as they could.”

  Ryan had been keeping an ear on the conversation while he leaned over the limb, drawing his long knife to poke at it. The hand contracted sluggishly, fingers curling in response to the stimulus. Straightening again, he drew the toe of his boot through the black blood and waited for the elders to finish talking among themselves again.

  “Yes, Ryan Cawdor.”

  “Well, I don’t know what we can do about that wave that may or may not be coming at you, but this is a damn sight different.”

  “Oh?”

  Ryan’s answering grin was cold. “These things bleed, so they can be hurt. And if they can be hurt, they can also be killed.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The conversation was tabled until after the communal meal was served. Ryan and the others headed back to the other hall, where they were served a thick seafood chowder, filled with chunks of fish, what looked like large crayfish, and an array of vegetables. Baked oat scones accompanied the dish, which many used to sop up the soup. Despite the wide array of mutations, the villagers were polite and civil to each other, with several stopping by the table where the attacked boatmen ate, to clap them on the shoulder or offer their commiserations.