Pandora's Temple

by Jon Land

  A bus snailed past the collection of flashing lights and cruised toward the covered bench. The black woman gave up trying to work her cell phone and dropped it back into her handbag with a clunking sound.

  “Right on time,” she said to Katie. “Ten minutes late.”

  The bus ground to a halt, its doors hissing open. The black woman lumbered up the stairs, bus card already in view. But something stopped Katie from following; maybe the way the driver eyed her with what looked like a flash of recognition, or maybe just the fact that she’d feel powerless once on board.

  So she started walking, using the bus as cover to hopefully disappear into the night. The bus’s windshield wipers were sweeping back and forth, and she felt the heavier drops of intermittent rain in advance of the storm’s coming deluge. Torrents began to spill from the sky as soon as she was clear of the bus and it rumbled past her, drenching Katie and every other pedestrian on the street. People dashed, people darted, clutching newspapers or jackets over their heads.

  More cover for her. A blessing, Katie thought, as she approached the head of an alley, intending to veer down it.

  Hands that stank of grime and sweat flailed out for her before Katie got there. One of them closed over her mouth, nearly making her gag from the stench. Her eyes bulged, recording only flicks of motion in the darkness lit regularly now by lightning flashes. She tried to bite the hand covering her mouth and retched from the stench again. She was dragged on toward a car being hammered by heavy raindrops that suddenly claimed the air.

  Katie felt them too, colorless faces flitting in the flashes of lightning, before darkness consumed her.

  CHAPTER 31

  Deepwater Venture

  The rain had just started to pelt the deck when Captain Seven looked up from the shroudlike tent keeping his laptops dry in the storm.

  “Now this is really fucked up.”

  “Make it good, Captain,” McCracken told him. “And fast.”

  “I think I found the crew.”

  McCracken let himself hope Paul Basmajian was somehow still alive, still within the ability of him and Johnny Wareagle to save.

  “Where? Talk to us, Captain.”

  “Here. Right under our very noses . . . and feet. Literally.”

  McCracken looked up at Wareagle, both of them soaked by the rain that at least gave life to the dead air that had enveloped the Venture.

  “You’re standing on them,” Captain Seven elaborated.

  The storm’s wind and rain had tossed the captain’s long gray hair into a mass of soaked tangles that resembled strands of string twisted together. His eyes looked overly bright in the spill of the portable, battery-operated floods they’d rigged to nearby clumped assemblages of steel that seemed sturdy enough to accommodate them. They’d all removed their helmets, now secure in the notion that nothing toxic had been released into the air and tired of having their faceplates mist up on them because of the humidity.

  “Indian?” Blaine said, wanting Johnny’s response to Captain Seven’s latest revelation.

  “Makes sense. Enough for me to detect that sense of life when I first reached the rig.”

  “Your spirits have anything to say on the subject?”

  “This is all new to them too, Blainey.”

  “We don’t need spirits when we’ve got these DNA readings here,” the captain resumed. “It’s just like I figured.”

  “Figured what?”

  Captain Seven began humming the theme music from The Twilight Zone. “We’re traveling through another dimension. Forget the next stop being the Twilight Zone; we’re already there.”

  “Those missing six seconds . . .”

  “You’re getting good at this.”

  “The Indian and I have had lots of experience, haven’t we, Johnny?”

  “Too much, Blainey.”

  “Not with what I believe we’re facing here, you haven’t,” the captain told him. “Good thing is I have. Going back five years in the Mediterranean Sea.”

  “Keep talking.”

  Captain Seven shook his head. “Uh-uh, not ready to yet. Not until I’m sure this is all about the same thing that got me smacked by a tsunami off Greece. Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase hang ten, I shit you not. Anyway, MacNuts, add up everything you’ve faced before and it still wouldn’t equal what we may be facing here, not even close.”

  “And what are we facing here exactly, Captain?”

  He stepped out from beneath the slim confines of the makeshift tent and joined them in the storm. “Whatever picked this rig up and dumped it into some kind of cosmic mixing bowl must have dropped the crew in too for good measure; that’s what those DNA readings meant.”

  “You said they weren’t human.”

  “Because they’re not. Not anymore, anyway.”

  “So what then? Mixed in with the steel and everything else?”

  “Ever see the movie The Fly?”

  “No.”

  “Neither one, not even the original?”

  “No to both.”

  “The scientific principle in both was molecular transference. Problem was in both movies the scientist had the misfortune of a fly entering the mix. So when he emerged from the pod, the fly’s DNA was fused to his.”

  “You saying that’s what happened here?” McCracken asked, as lightning flashed closer, accompanied almost immediately by a deafening blast of thunder.

  “Not exactly. The poor scientist in The Fly, both the original and the remake, was turned into a hybrid, not entirely insect and not entirely human, but some crossbred combination of the two. That’s what happened here. We’re not standing on steel or flesh and blood. We’re standing on something entirely new and unknown, something remade from scratch in those six seconds. We’re talking Day One here. We’re talking those six seconds being like the six days it took God himself to create the world before resting on the seventh.”

  “Sounds like you’re describing the big bang theory, Captain. How the universe itself was created.”

  “That’ll do for starters, only in reverse. The world deconstructed instead of constructed.”

  The wind picked up to near gale force. The rig creaked and groaned around them. A vibration, almost like a quivering, turned the deck wobbly beneath their feet. McCracken and Wareagle noticed the pooling water running suddenly southward, then back to the north in rhythm with the suddenly shifting platform.

  “Remember when I said we might not make it until the storm,” said Captain Seven.

  McCracken and Wareagle both looked at him.

  “Looks like I was close.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Deepwater Venture

  “Evac by helicopter’s out, Indian,” McCracken told Wareagle.

  “No crane to use to lower us off in a basket, even if a ship could get close enough, Blainey. And the extendable gangway’s long gone.”

  “And me without a joint,” Captain Seven commented, shaking his head.

  “You were talking big bang theory, Captain, in reverse.”

  “Rather put my mind toward coming up with a way to get us off this hunk of steel.”

  “But that’s not really what it is anymore, is it?”

  “Nope, not exactly.”

  The rig creaked louder and then shifted mightily enough in the wind to jostle its three occupants.

  “Seems like we should be focusing our attention elsewhere.”

  “Do you know what killed Paul Basmajian or not?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Which?”

  “No, I don’t know and, yes, I may.”

  “You sure you’re not stoned?”

  Captain Seven shook his head again, this time tossing water sprayed from his wet tangle of hair in all directions. “Wish I was. I’ve been dealing with the impossible for what seems like my whole life. What we’ve got here is just a little more impossible than usual.”

  The whole of the Venture seemed to list leeward in the wind, the deck ending up cant
ed at a deepening angle ever closer to toppling over altogether and plunging its occupants into the swollen seas below.

  “But maybe no more impossible than getting off this rig,” Captain Seven continued.

  “Johnny?” McCracken prodded.

  “That stray life pod we glimpsed when we arrived is still wedged against one of the support columns below.”

  “A hundred and forty feet down in not the friendliest of seas, Indian.”

  “I’ve got an idea, Blainey.”

  The rig continued to shake and wobble, growing increasingly unsteady by the moment. Captain Seven worked feverishly, a hand darting back and forth between the keyboards beneath the canvas he now manually held over them to keep the computers dry long enough for him to complete his work and transmit all his findings to the central server at NSA.

  “Anything on board you need to take with you, Captain?” McCracken asked him.

  “Already stuck some samples in my backpack. Laptops are trashed, but we shouldn’t lose any of the data, any of the proof.”

  “Proof of what?”

  “Don’t know since I haven’t exactly proved it yet. I’ll let you know soon as I do.”

  “How about a hint?”

  “It’s impossible.”

  “You said that already.”

  “Still the case.”

  “This coming from someone who specializes in the impossible.”

  “Everything’s relative,” Captain Seven told him.

  A grinding sound of metal scraping against metal left McCracken’s breath bottlenecked in his throat until a twist to his right found Johnny Wareagle lugging a huge flattened chunk of steel.

  Wareagle laid the husk of what once had been steel at their feet.

  “Looks like a derrick arm,” McCracken noted.

  “Used to be anyway, Blainey. It was hanging off the starboard side. Just needed a little coaxing to come free.”

  McCracken tried to estimate the arm’s weight, amazed as always by Johnny Wareagle’s incredible strength. “Those spirits of yours help you with this, Indian?”

  “They warn of an all-powerful force being unleashed here, capable of far more destruction than what we’ve ever witnessed before.”

  “They offer any specifics?”

  “The whole of the world hangs in the balance, Blainey.”

  Level Six, thought McCracken. “So what else is new?”

  The remnants of the derrick arm, nearly thirty feet in length, were smooth and flat, its contours hardly ideal for its intended purpose, but still offering the best hope they had to get off the rig and reach the life pod moored against the support column below.

  The Venture continued to cant heavily leeward, its downward angle growing steeper and steeper by the moment as it shook and rattled around them. A square tool chest of some kind, melted only to be re-formed as a semblance of its original shape, slid across the deck and slammed into Captain Seven’s computer assemblage, driving it forward for the sea. Hunks of the misshapen and hulking appendages of remolded iron and steel began to break off, as if shed, the smaller shards turned into deadly projectiles with each gust of wind. As that wind grew more intense, heavier chunks churned through the air like birds of prey, seeming to swoop down on the rig’s final occupants, crashing back to the deck with heavy thuds that rose over the swirling wind, rain, and thunder.

  Wareagle had located long bands that had once been rubber cables and remained pliable enough to fasten the derrick arm to the sturdiest deck rails he could find on the aft side. Fortune’s one gift to them had been to angle the Venture’s collapse toward the side of the rig where the life pod bobbed amid the waves churned madly by the force of the storm. Lack of visibility became as much a problem here as any, the torrents of windswept rain rendering the view of anything beyond a few feet impossible.

  Wareagle lowered the derrick arm, angled like a playground slide, for the waters below. While he held it in place, McCracken used the long bands of rubber cabling to lash it tighter into place against the deck rail. He was just starting to feel the odds had swung in their favor when the support column to their right broke away, pitching the rig into a severe downward list.

  McCracken grabbed hold of the deck rail to which he had just fastened the derrick arm, fearing it would give way from the strain. But it held and he glimpsed Wareagle clinging in similar fashion to the arm itself, seemingly suspended between the rig and the storm-ravaged night. Then Captain Seven came sliding his way across the deck, clutching fast to the backpack containing the last of the samples he had moved off to collect. McCracken swept a hand downward and caught the captain by his silvery mane of tangled hair just before he went over the side.

  “What a rush!” Captain Seven cried out, pulling himself back in wobbly fashion to his feet. “Better than drugs, man, better than drugs!”

  “If you liked that, you’re going to love this,” McCracken told him as the rig continued to collapse around them.

  CHAPTER 33

  Deepwater Venture

  The platform was shaking and quaking, seeming to sway back and forth on an increasingly unsteady base beneath it.

  “You’re first to take the ride, Captain,” McCracken said, as the rig listed farther over to the side off which the former derrick arm was placed.

  “You would’ve thought I’d learned my lesson five years ago in the Med. I hate the fucking water.”

  “You like living?”

  In that moment, McCracken could only count his blessings that Captain Merch had insisted that they bring lightweight, inflatable life jackets with them from the chopper that had ferried them to the Venture from the Coast Guard cutter. But he was also under no illusion that the vests could prolong life all that long in these seas. Waves this powerful could take a man under and fill his lungs with water no matter how good a swimmer he was or how well his vest performed. The best McCracken could hope for now, for starters, was that their plunges into the raging waters below would leave them close enough to find one another and plan from there. Perhaps locate some debris to cling to or, even better, use to fashion some form of craft to ride the waves well enough to survive the storm. With the life pod likely gone, it was the best they could hope for.

  If falling hunks and jagged fragments of twisted steel from the collapsing rig didn’t kill them first, that is.

  For now there was only the darkness, the raging waters below, and the storm itself. McCracken could feel its force buckling his knees, as he and Wareagle hoisted Captain Seven atop the makeshift slide, holding their collective breath when they shoved him forward to whisk him on his way.

  They could hear Captain Seven wailing, riding the slide the way Slim Pickens rode an atomic bomb in the final scene of Dr. Strangelove. He disappeared from view, swallowed by the night, the storm giving up no trace of him again.

  “You’re next, Blainey,” Wareagle said over the howling winds and pelting rain.

  “Since when?”

  “Since my weight could be too much for the arm to handle and one of us has to get our findings back to shore.”

  “For Baz, then,” McCracken conceded, easing himself up onto the slide.

  “For Baz,” Wareagle acknowledged.

  And then McCracken pushed himself into motion.

  The plummet was like nothing he’d ever experienced before. Not the high-altitude, low-opening parachute drops from five miles up. Not drops into the ocean in full battle gear. Not even the feeling of the g-forces of a space shuttle launch a generation before upon his return, at least unofficially, to government service.

  The makeshift slide’s drop approached forty-five degrees. But gravity kept McCracken braced to the steel, arms tucked by his sides to avoid slipping off and eyes squeezed open to the storm to steady his plunge into the water once the end of the slide came up.

  Ultimately, it came much quicker than he’d expected, no more than the length of one desperately held breath. He had barely registered he was coming upon the end of his ride when the
blackness of the night welcomed him, followed almost immediately by the crashing waves of the sea. He felt himself plunging beneath frigid waters and then clawed back to the surface only to be smacked by a swell. Salt water flooded his lungs and he hacked it out with the taste of fuel oil lingering in his mouth. The surface was thick with dark drilling mud that smelled sour and spoiled. McCracken finally found his breath just as the storm-fueled currents slammed into him again. A sweep of his gaze found nothing until he glimpsed Johnny Wareagle fighting the waves toward him.

  “Captain!” McCracken yelled out, the storm swallowing his cry. “Captain!” he wailed again anyway.

  Wareagle somehow managed to reach him just as a grinding screech found both their ears. They looked up to see the last of the Deepwater Venture toppling over above them, its steel carcass seeming to tilt straight in their direction as its remaining three columns collapsed into the sea. They dove into the pounding swells instinctively, both feeling the vibration of thousands of tons of steel smacking the wave-ravaged surface, the sensation grinding their teeth together even with their breaths held.

  McCracken had seldom known fear like he felt in that moment, the very real fear that reaching the surface again would be impossible. That whatever terrible secrets this rig had held would remain just that and the death of Paul Basmajian would never be avenged. Recharged by that resolve, McCracken drove himself toward the surface, coming up in a valley between two mountainous waves to find Wareagle close enough to reach out for. He grabbed Johnny’s life vest at the epaulet just before the heavy seas splashed more of the refuse from the drilling mud into his face, making it feel as if it was raining gravel.