Troid and Murga undid the ropes on their lifeboat with the same flourish they would likely do anything in their act. Hell, maybe in their minds this really was part of their act. Watch the amazing Troid and Murga brave the unknown, a daring escape artist act for the ages! Kids, don’t try this at home!
As if to prove this thought, the two magicians turned in the direction of the crowd up on the deck and took their bows. Strangely enough, there was a smattering of polite applause among their audience. Quinne herself might have given into the impulse if she didn’t think clapping might make her pass out.
“You think they’ll make it?” someone asked.
Quinne snorted. “Make it where? Do you people keep forgetting that we’re in the middle of the Arctic? Best case scenario is that they end up on a melting ice floe with a starving polar bear.” Still, Quinne couldn’t help but root for them. There were various ports and supply areas around for situations just like this, right? It wasn’t like they were the HMS Terror, where the ship had been forced to float into the unknown. This was the twenty-first century. There was no unknown anywhere left on Earth. Everything had been mapped and quantified.
If that’s true, a little voice at the back of Quinne’s head asked, then how did we somehow manage to run into the first dinosaurs in millions of years?
“Crap,” she muttered to herself. “Those guys are screwed.”
The lifeboat had both a motor and oars, but the oars were probably only intended as backup in case the motor failed. The capybaras had already discovered the oars and decided they were chew toys, anyway, so the magician duo had started up the motor and were already a respectable distance from the ship. Far out enough, in fact, that a number of the people around her had already begun murmuring that it was safe all along, that they should go too, that it would be better to be prepared in one of the lifeboats than being caught unaware if the ship sank. Under any other circumstances, Quinne might have agreed. But the images of the two monsters were still fresh in her mind. Which one would it be, Quinne wondered. The plesiosaurus had definitely been the more aggressive one, ripping right into the ship like it were tinfoil covering leftovers to snack on. The liopleurodon hadn’t done anything until it was provoked, but would it consider Troid and Murga and their amazing capybaras to be invading its territory?
In the end, the correct answer was neither.
Lundgren, of all people, was the first person to notice the disturbance in the water. That was probably because everyone else’s concentration was on the magicians in the lifeboat. Lundgren must have been scanning for threats, because he was one who said, “Look!” and pointed off farther to the south. At first Quinne would have guessed the sudden vortex of water was from the liopleurodon, except almost immediately afterward something emerged, and then kept emerging. It rose up out of the water, at first making Quinne think of a submarine coming to the surface. But as the object kept rising, she realized it was too tall, too thin, like a giant serrated tooth broken off from the Guinness Book of World Records’s largest hacksaw.
It took a few seconds for the improbable sight to register for what it was, and as soon as it did a gasp swept through the crowd.
It was a fin. Huge and gray, definitely bigger than had ever been recorded on a normal shark.
“Holy shart,” Amani said. Apparently she still couldn’t just say the word shit, but Quinne gave her props for at least being somewhat vulgar this time. “It’s just like that footage of the hammerhead down in Mexico!”
“No,” Quinne said. “That’s not the same shark.”
“How do you know?”
“First, I don’t know much about shark migrating patterns, but I doubt it would have swum all the way up to the Arctic. Second, I think that’s much bigger. Think about it, Amani. We’ve have a plesiosaurus and a liopleurodon. What do you think would work next to continue with that theme?”
Amani thought about it for a moment before taking a deep breath. “Oh shit.”
Quinne wanted to congratulate her foul mouth, but the horror show in front of them was just beginning to ramp up. Neither Troid nor Murga seemed to realize that something was coming up from behind their lifeboat. They were far enough away that Quinne couldn’t see for sure, but their movements made them look like they were arguing. The capybaras, on the other hand, had started to get skittish. Murga turned to see what was wrong with the animals just as first one, then the other, leaped over the side of the boat.
“I didn’t know capybaras could swim,” Amani said.
“I still don’t even know what a capybara is,” someone else in the crowd responded.
The capybaras, of course, had dove over the edge as far from the approaching tsunami of freezing sea and prehistoric monster as they could, which meant that both Troid and Murga now completely had their backs to the approaching menace. Wanda started to scream, telling them to watch out, and the call was taken up by the rest of the passengers watching helpless from the ship. Whether because the two magicians heard them or because they finally registered the way their boat shook as the creature approached, the two of them turned around.
Quinne was sure the looks on their faces would have been something to behold, but the two men were too far away for anyone to see. What everyone on the Lucky Lady Duck could see, however, with no problem whatsoever, was the enormous monster out of nightmares that rose up from the sea. In many ways Quinne supposed it look like a great white shark, but only if the largest great white were actually this thing’s tiny newborn offspring. It moved with lightning speed and efficiency, so much that if the crowd hadn’t already been looking at the lifeboat they might have missed its final moments. The creature barely even needed to open its mouth for the two men and their little boat to easily slide into its gullet. As far as Quinne could see, there wasn’t even any blood as it ate the two of them. It hadn’t even needed to chew. It just opened up, swallowed, and then dove back down into the deep. The dorsal fin stayed visible to the crowd for several seconds before it too vanished, along with any clue that the two magicians had been there.
It was their last great disappearing act, yet nobody applauded. They probably would have been disappointed.
A few people here and there among the crowd screamed or cried out, but the rest of the group was surprisingly reserved. Quinne looked around and saw that most of the people had looks of resignation on their faces. Those few that hadn’t believed what was happening certainly believed now, and those that had already believed had their worst fears confirmed: they were all going to die out here. There was no escape, at least not by boat.
“What was that?” Jimmy asked.
“A megalodon,” Amani said.
“And I suppose that’s from a YouTube video also?” Wanda asked.
“No, just kind of well known,” Amani said. “The prehistoric predecessor to the shark, among the largest predators to have ever lived. There might have only been one or two things that were bigger.”
A long, low, and mournful howl echoed out over the wind. Everyone in the crowd looked around for the source, but there was nothing to be seen. Quinne’s best guess was that the sound had come from somewhere out in the sea. For something to be able to make that sound, over that kind of distance, Quinne guessed that it had to be big. And not just big like the things they had already seen. Big on a scale they couldn’t yet understand.
“And do I even want to know what that was?” Jimmy asked.
“Probably not,” Quinne said. “But if I had to guess, I’d guess what it was not. And that was probably not a plesiosaurus, a liopleurodon, or a megalodon. That was something else entirely.”
Chapter Twelve
“Wait. Hold up. I’m not sure about this,” Quinne said.
“What’s not to be sure of?” Jimmy asked.
“Maybe we should wait and have a doctor take care of it.”
“I’m sure there’s plenty of doctors all over the ship, assuming they didn’t somehow get eaten right along with the captain. But I’m telli
ng you, you don’t want to let this sit for too long. Just trust me. I know what I’m doing.”
“But you’re only a nurse!”
“Hey, you obviously don’t know as much as you act like you do if you think there’s ever such a thing as ‘only a nurse.’ And also? Probably not a good idea to insult the person holding your broken arm in his hands.”
“It’s just, is this going to hurt?”
“Probably. Definitely. I might even say extremely.”
“Oh God.”
Jimmy raised an eyebrow at her but lowered his voice so that only she could hear. Wanda and Amani were standing nearby, where they were watching all the other people trying to make preparations throughout the mostly darkened rotunda. What exactly they were trying to make preparations for, Quinne couldn’t say, but it was human nature to try to do something even when there was nothing that could possibly be done.
“Quinne, seriously?” Jimmy asked. “This is not what I would expect from you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve seen some of your videos, remember? There’s quite a few of them where you are in no shortage of pain.”
“Yeah, but that’s a good kind of pain. The fun kind.”
“Don’t you have some kind of technique you use if it gets to be too much?”
“Yeah, it’s called a safe word.”
“Heh. Well, I don’t think that will stop much this time. Quinne, we have to do this now if you want any hope at all of ever being to use your arm properly again.”
Quinne took a deep breath. “Okay. Fine. Do it on three.”
“Okay. One…”
“Wait, wait, wait! You’re not going to do that one thing, are you?”
“What thing?”
“The thing where you say you’re going to do it on three but then you surprise me by actually doing it on two.”
“That would be a dick thing for me to do. Unless that’s actually what you want me to do?”
“Um, yeah, actually. Could you do that?”
“Doesn’t that kind of defeat the point if you already know in advance that I’m doing it on two?”
“Just, just do it. Please. While I’ve got my nerve up.”
“Fine. One. Tw…”
Halfway through the word Jimmy twisted the broken bone of her arm back into what was more or less the correct shape. Quinne screamed, although to her surprise the pain was far from the most excruciating she’d ever felt in her life. That honor still went to the time she’d done that specialty video for a rather wealthy client, the one where she and Manda Slaughter had needed a handful of thumbtacks and a cactus. Quinne took several quick breaths as her vision shot full of blue and white, then everything faded into a dull, ever-present and throbbing pain.
“You okay?” Amani asked her, stooping down next to Quinne and putting a comforting hand on her shoulder.
“Fucking peachy keen,” Quinne said. She made an effort to lift the broken arm, but doing anything more than letting dangle at her side was too painful. “So what now? Shouldn’t I have a cast or a splint on this or something?”
“If you just sit tight here, I’ll go see if I can find something,” Jimmy said.
“I think there was some kind of janitor supply closet just around the corner,” Amani said.
“Can you show me?” Jimmy asked. The two of them went off together, leaving Quinne to do her quivering (and again, not the good kind) on the floor with Wanda looking after her.
“So,” Quinne said. “Hi.”
“Um, hi?” Wanda said back.
“Haven’t really had much of a chance to get to know each other so far, have we?”
“Is that really something we should be doing right now?”
“Do you have something better to do?”
“Guess not.”
“So why this cruise?” Quinne asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you guys are newlyweds, right? Why a cruise to the Arctic? And one through the Letroix Corporation?”
“What, that isn’t your idea of a honeymoon?”
“Well, I suppose there are plenty who would think so. Except if I ever get married, not that I expect to get married until I’m in my sixties or something, I’ll probably spend my honeymoon in a BDSM dungeon.”
“No, you wouldn’t. That’s something I’ve figured out about you so far. You like to talk like this super-worldly, over-sexed vixen, but there’s a definite softer side.”
“Okay, fine. If you really want to know, I plan to take my eventual honeymoon at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. But that’s beside the point. What are you doing here?”
“Hey, it’s not like we have a problem with this trip or anything. I was loving it, up until the point where a massive dragon-thing tried biting our heads off. But you’re right. It wasn’t our first choice. Everything about this trip was sort of last minute.” Wanda shrugged in a way that almost came across as shy. “Including the wedding. We were only engaged for a month, and we knew each other for just six months before that.”
“Talk about quick. Must have been love at first sight.”
“I guess. But maybe it’s more like… what do they call it when you fall in love with someone who’s been taking care of you?”
“The Florence Nightingale Effect.”
“Yeah, that’s it. He was my nurse while I was in chemo. We fell in love. And then…”
Quinne suddenly had the feeling that she had stumbled into something more personal than she had been ready for. “And then what?”
“And then I stopped chemo.”
“So your cancer went into remission? What kind was it?”
“Colon cancer. And no, it didn’t.”
It took Quinne half a second to get her meaning. “Oh. I see. Uh, I’m…”
“Don’t. Everyone’s sorry. I just assume that.”
“Um, do you mind if I ask a few questions about it?”
“Normally I’d say yes I do mind, but honestly, what’s the point in holding anything back anymore? Ask away.”
“You… you don’t look sick.”
“There’s lots of people with debilitating illnesses that don’t look sick. That doesn’t mean they’re not struggling in ways you can’t see.”
“I guess, it’s just… when I picture cancer patients…”
“You’re seeing me on a good day. I may not be on chemo anymore, but I’m still taking various meds for the pain. I want to experience what I still can while I still can. I’m not going to a sick bed until I absolutely have to.” Wanda actually chuckled. “I’ve kind of developed a thing with beds. I won’t go anywhere near them if I can. Drives Jimmy nuts. We’ve had to get creative any time we want to get intimate.”
“Jesus. So you two fell in love, got married as soon as possible, took the first cruise you could get, and whoops, got stuck in all this.”
“Pretty much. Ironic, I know. Try to take every advantage of how much life I have left, and instead I end up cutting it shorter. And taking my husband down with me.” She paused at that. “Husband. Still so weird to call him that. Before I went into chemo, I’d kind of assumed that marriage would just be a part of human existence I would never experience. But Jimmy was there. Sometimes I wonder if he’s only there because he pities me.”
“I don’t know. It certainly looks like love to me,” Quinne said.
Wanda gave her a sad smile. “Yeah, it really does sometimes, doesn’t it?” They both saw Jimmy and Amani returning, with some kind of cord and a broken broom handle in Jimmy’s hand. “You don’t need to tell him that I said any of this, okay? Given everything that going on, I think we’ve both almost forgotten. Strange, yet it’s nice.”
“Lips are sealed,” Quinne said. When Jimmy and Amani were back Jimmy did his best to use the broom handle as a splint, and while the cord was a terrible binding, it would at least work for the next one or two hours. And although none of them said it out loud, she could see it on everyone’s faces: they all kne
w there were only a couple hours left. They were either going to get rescued, or else the monsters surrounding the ship would get tired of waiting for morsels to fall in the water. For all any of them knew, the ship could be slowly sinking with all the damage to it.
“Hey, look,” Amani said, pointing to the center of the rotunda. Gordon and Mickey were there again, and it looked like they were setting up some kind of box for someone to stand on.
“Wait, weren’t those two hanging around while those people were trying to get into the lifeboats?” Wanda asked. “What happened to them? It’s like they just disappeared.”
“Or else whoever was writing the script for this particular disaster movie completely forgot they were supposed to be there,” Jimmy said.
“Don’t be silly. It’s obvious that those two and Masterson would be the main characters,” Quinne said. “We’re just background extras. The writer wouldn’t forget about the two main sidekicks. And also, there’s this whole thing where all of this is real and not a movie, in case you didn’t remember.”
Masterson strode in into the rotunda from somewhere, and again Quinne was reminding of an aging pro-wrestler who honestly didn’t know how to act like anything other than a wrestler. He even had beautiful arm candy clinging to his side. The woman he had been talking with earlier stayed near him at all times. Judging from the messy state of her hair and deep flush of her cheeks, Quinne had an idea of what they two of them had been doing immediately before this.
“Huh,” Wanda said.
“What?” Quinne asked.
“Looks like we’re not the only ones who got busy tonight,” Wanda said. “Who would have guessed that being almost eaten by sea monsters was such an aphrodisiac?”
Masterson stood up on the box Mickey and Gordon had provided for him, effortlessly stepping on it without looking like he’d practiced it, or else simply expected that there would always be some kind of stage for him to stand on and hold court no matter where he might go. “Okay, everyone, listen up!” Masterson ejaculated.
Arctic Gauntlet Page 9
