The Aeschylus

by David Barclay

  “My buddy?”

  “Melvin. I've seen the way you two stare into each others' eyes, all dreamy like.”

  “Yeah, great. You see St. Croix?”

  “No.”

  “Keep looking.” And then, as he found payroll receipts, “Hey, you want to know how much a roughneck makes out here for a three week shift?”

  “No.”

  AJ tossed the file down. “It's a hell of a lot more than you.”

  “You're breaking my heart.”

  He uncovered accounting information, payroll stubs, insurance claims, sick reports, employee reviews, and everything else he knew existed and hated dealing with at his own job. So far, nothing useful. He tossed more files out the door, then found a couple with banking information he decided to keep. He knew that he and Dutch didn't have a lot of time before Mason came back, but there had to be something in here. Else, why would Gideon keep it all? If the man himself was present, they might have been able to ask him.

  When he got to the end of it, he found he had less than a dozen sheets in the keeper pile. Cursing, he swept a line of cans off of a nearby shelf and sent them clanging to the floor.

  “What the hell is going on in there?” Dutch called.

  “Nothing! Nothing! That's what the hell is going on.”

  “Then you and me better split, good buddy. We're not meant to be visitors.”

  AJ gave the stack on the floor another go, not really looking. Then he stopped. Dutch had said something there, something about...

  Visitors.

  The piles of discard lay strewn across the floor, but he began digging through them with renewed fury. He created a new trash pile in the sink, a metal tub filled with dishes and old food that would have attracted a thousand bugs anywhere but here. He tossed in equipment lists, old memos, hand-written notes, and... and he stopped just as he was about to throw in a visitor's report. The Aeschylus was private property, and it was legally hazardous. All visitors were documented, both at the home office, and here at the site. He pulled a sheet from the list. The paper had been filed a week before, showing a chopper that had come in with men from the east coast office. Three men, to be exact. Two of the men were environmental microbiologists like Gideon. They had been given a task to analyze and document the first appearance of the fungus. It looked like much of their report was missing, but it had all been declared “unharmful” and “non-invasive,” and the entire thing had sign-off from the third member of the party: Valley Oil's head of legal council. Head of legal council, here on the platform. The microbiologists had stayed on The Aeschylus, but the third party had departed shortly after.

  “Dutch!” he called. “Dutch, get in here!”

  But his friend wasn't responding. AJ's voice drifted out into the open air, dying on the high ocean winds.

  5

  “What is this place?” the girl murmured.

  Mason looked at her and then back at the hole. Some kind of basement sprawled beneath him, the earth ripped open at his feet. To his right, one of the base watch towers lay crumpled and burned on the ground. A nearby bunker had its insides blown to the outside. The rest of the base wasn't much better: broken doors, scorched concrete, spent shell casings from another era crusting the earth like seeds. It remained as they had left it, whoever they were. Like the oil platform, however, the inhabitants were gone. Long gone, by the looks of things.

  “Whatever it was, it's dead now,” he said.

  “Where is everyone?”

  “Take a look at this place. You tell me what you think.”

  “It doesn't tell us anything about Gideon's friends though, does it?”

  Mason turned and saw Christian reemerging from the fence. He was wet, the bottoms of his pants dripping. He gave a single shake of his head, and Mason nodded.

  “We're not going any further without taking a swim. Can't skirt around the edge out there any more.”

  “So?”

  “So this is it.”

  “It?”

  “Now you're just being dense. I kind of liked that about you when we first met, but now, you're just pissing in my soup.”

  “But we haven't found anything!” She looked around stubbornly.

  “Why don't you take a look at that gate there and tell me what you see?”

  When they had been at the docks, the path leading into the hills had been overgrown with the fungus. But if that had been overgrown, the main gate here was infested. There were more growths than he could count, bent and twisted and gnarled like old oaks.

  “More of them,” she said. “There's no way through.”

  “That's right.”

  She shook her head, taking another walk around. “They have to be here. Gideon said so.”

  “Gideon is whacked out of his mind. And if you think we're going to stay here and dig through those things at the gate, so are you.”

  The girl might not get it, but he did. This was the end.

  El fin.

  And a grand end it was. No chopper. No Reiner. No goddamned fucking workers, and no goddamned fucking answers.

  He turned to the nearest bunker. Without knowing he was going to do it, he threw down his rifle and kicked the closed door. The metal shuddered under his weight. It didn't solve a goddamned thing, but it felt good. Mason smashed it again, and before he knew it, he was hammering at it with kick after kick, slamming his heel into the door. The metal bent and shuddered, but it didn't give.

  He looked back at the woman, and she was scared. She was right to be scared, stupid cow that she was.

  Mason turned to Christian and made a give me motion with his fingers.

  Christian reached into his pack, pulled out a breach charge, and tossed it to him. Mason caught it with both hands. He slapped it on the remains of the door, pushed the button to arm it, and then rolled around to the side of the bunker. The door blew inwards, sending shrapnel and thunder across the terrain.

  “What the hell do you think you're doing?” Kate yelled.

  Mason laughed. She tried to sound angry, but it wasn't working; she was still too scared.

  “See if there are any more locked doors here, would you Vy? We'll give them a good once-over for the lady before we head out.”

  The woman looked like she was about to say something else, but when Mason bent and picked up his rifle, she paused. “Now, they know we're here,” she said finally. “I bet they heard that all the way back at the platform.”

  “Isn't that what you wanted?” Mason asked. “If anybody happens to be alive and wants to be saved, I bet they'll come running, don't you?”

  “I don't know.”

  “Yeah, well, I do. And we ain't gonna find shit.”

  The anger was on him now, fierce and unbidden, but there was nothing to be done for it. He'd just have to ride it out.

  And so would she.

  He pushed past her into the open doorway. The other side was lined with shelves and boxes and, to his surprise, rifles. It looked like they had stumbled into the middle of a supply bunker.

  “Nice,” the girl said, looking at the munitions. “You could have blown us sky high.”

  “I didn't, so shut your mouth.”

  They stepped past the wreckage of the doorway and into the body of the room. They were greeted by a pair of corpses wrapped arm-in-arm on the floor, almost perfectly preserved. It was an oddly touching sight.

  “There you go,” Mason said. “Nothing but bodies.”

  “These aren't blackened like the others,” she said. “And I'd say they've been dead a long time. Probably suffocated, if that door was sealed.”

  “Well, they didn't die of food shortage,” Mason said, looking at the cans stacked nearby. He couldn't read any of them. Mason could speak Arabic, Farsi, Russian, and a little Spanish, but not German. That was the wrong war.

  “What happened here?” she asked.

  At one time or another, Mason had been all around the world. He'd been through hellfire and darkness, and he always managed to
find his way back. He had a high tolerance for the unexpected, as any team leader did. But his tolerance for the totally fucking strange was just about to hit the red. This place was abandoned except for two stiffs wrapped around each other like a couple of homos, and the only clue they had were more of those goddamned tentacles. Something had torn this place apart, but he was becoming less and less interested in what that something might be.

  Christian appeared in the doorway. “Nobody else here, boss.” He noticed the two corpses on the ground but didn't comment.

  “Then we're packing up.”

  Part of him wanted to scout the whole island. Part of him wanted to bring the other chopper back here and do a full scan, hit every sector, and use thermal vision. But that was wrong, and it wasn't the mission. He had been letting his curiosity get the better of him, and that was dangerous. It was time to cut their losses and go.

  The fact that two of his men had disappeared into the void (quite literally) would eat at him, but he'd have plenty of time to think about that later, say... when he was retired, resting in his own little beach house. He'd tell his superiors that Reiner's helo had disappeared and most likely crashed into the ocean. That was the truth. With radio communications down, that was the most likely scenario, and yet...

  And yet.

  It didn't feel like the truth. It didn't feel right.

  “Vy, your radio still shot to shit?”

  Christian put a hand to his ear and nodded. Still no ear-to-ear communication, not even short range. It wasn't the platform after all. It's those things, he thought. Here, on the middle of the island, they were still hamstrung.

  Totally. Fucking. Strange.

  Both Vy and the girl were staring at him, and he realized he'd been zoning. Jesus, it was time to go. He'd brought them all of the way out here with no way to get word back. He'd assumed the radios would start working once they had distanced themselves from The Aeschylus, but that had been a mistake.

  “We're leaving.” He looked at Christian. “Did you find somewhere that might be of use?”

  “It looks like they kept prisoners here. The prisoners' bunker locks from the outside.”

  Mason grinned. Maybe not everything was bad luck.

  The girl looked flustered. “So that's it? We're giving up? We're just going back? Sorry guys, we couldn't find your entire staff? You're acting like you don't care. Do you know that?” She was beginning to get that look in her eyes, the one that politicians had when they were listening to every word you said, but it just wasn't getting through. He didn't have to guess where she got it. And that look, as irritating as it was, would make the next five minutes a little easier.

  “Just get your ass out the door, honey.”

  “We're going to find them. We have to. I'm not giving up on those people.” And then, more quietly, “I'm not giving up on my father.”

  When she turned, that's when Mason grabbed her by the hair and yanked back so hard her feet slipped out from under her.

  Chapter 12: New Swabia

  The Island:

  January, 1939

  1

  As The Adalgisa drifted towards the dock, Harald counted fifteen or twenty workers processing the morning's catch. A host of whale carcasses were being flensed and stripped even as new ones rolled in. A pair of men stood over one of the bodies, drilling into it with an enormous steel instrument. Another pair wheeled a dumpster full of viscera out of a warehouse door and towards the ocean. As if to scare trespassers, the single, enormous head of a sperm whale hung at the foot of the pier like a cannibal's trophy.

  He heard a pair of boots and turned to see Jan egress from the wheelhouse. The man stopped next to the lieutenant and gazed over the landscape, as silent as always.

  “The infrastructure is already in place,” Harald said. “These men can work here for weeks at a time. It's extraordinary, isn't it?”

  The other man wrinkled his nose. “I worked in a slaughterhouse once when I was a teenager. I didn't care for it.”

  Harald stared at him a moment, wondering what the hell that had to do with anything, but he let it go. After what he felt was an appropriate pause, he said, “Are the prisoners coming?”

  “I can get them.”

  “Yes. Yes, why don't you do that?”

  Up the pier, he saw two figures appear from a side path and begin walking towards the boat. They were regular German army, and they were a welcome sight. The man in the lead raised a hand to his head in salute. Only, he wasn't a man at all, but a boy. He couldn't be older than eighteen or nineteen, his face covered with pimples. Harald could see the outline of a handmade crucifix hanging on his chest. The cross and the boy both radiated bucolic charm.

  “Welcome to the island, sir,” he said.

  “It's good to see a friendly face. What's your name, soldier?”

  “Metzger, sir. Sergeant Linus Metzger. The man with me here is Doctor Gloeckner. We thought it would be prudent to bring him in case you had any difficulties on the journey. Did you?”

  Harald paused, but only for the briefest of moments. “We lost two men en route, including our captain. Both men, I'm afraid, were buried at sea. The rest of us made it safely. I don't think we'll be needing a physician, at least not until we've had a chance to settle in.”

  The two newcomers exchanged a glance but didn't offer protest.

  “The effort is appreciated, nonetheless. Tell me, who do I have to thank for the reception?”

  After a moment, the doctor spoke. Harald saw he was an older gentleman, his skin as cracked and wrinkled as white sandpaper. “Well sir, the S.S. has been put in charge. The commander, he just arrived a few days ahead of you.”

  “What's his name, this commander?”

  “Haven't you been briefed?”

  “My orders were given as need-to-know.” The men looked at one another again, and Harald felt his irritation rise. “For God's sake, man. What's his name?”

  At that moment, a third man appeared at the end of the pier. Tall and fit, he was decked from head to toe in Schutzstaffel black, his blond-gray hair slicked back with tonic. He walked towards them with the cold ease of a snake, his boots gliding along the deck. He stopped just in front of Jan. “Your name?”

  “It's an honor, sir. My name is Sergeant Ja—”

  “You will assume a straight posture when you address me, Sergeant.”

  Jan straightened, looking flustered. “Sergeant Jan Eichmann. I am at your service, sir.”

  “And you are the new lieutenant?” the man asked, turning.

  “Oberleutnant Harald Dietrich, sir.” Harald had so many questions, but they all seemed to tumble up and stick in his throat. It wasn't the time to ask them yet, in any case.

  The man continued to stare at the pair of them, giving every mole, every crevice, every line of their faces scrutiny. At last, he nodded as if satisfied. “My name is Höhere S.S. und Polizeiführer Schutzstaffel Commander Cornelius Richter, and I am in charge here. Welcome to the new colony, gentlemen. Welcome to New Swabia.”

  2

  Dominik huddled next to the girls in the back of the half-track. They were on their way inland now, his thoughts of freedom a distant memory. For all his feelings of helplessness, however, the island was still a wonder. The air carried a thousand bizarre smells. A thick mist hung in the sky, viscous and ethereal. Dominik looked to the ground and saw intermittent growths of saxicolous greenery sprouting from the gravel, as large and strange as everything else. His stomach growled, and he wondered if any of it would be edible. He thought not.

  As they passed beyond an outcropping, a trio of dark birds passed overhead. They fluttered over them and landed on the water, squawking and fidgeting in foreign bird tongues. The girls, who had been quiet since their arrival, perked up. Zofia stood and looked over the edge of the truck, gawking at the bright blue eyes and the strange orange markings on their beaks. There should be dozens, Dominik thought, but they are so few. Where are the rest?

  “Sit down,” J
an said from across the truck.

  Dominik grabbed Zofia around the waist. “Go on, honey. Sit down.”

  “But I'm watching.”

  “Sit. It's dangerous.”

  Lucja sighed. “Are we there yet?”

  “Probably not much longer,” Ari said without conviction.

  “This driving service is quite the treatment though,” Dominik said, trying to lighten the mood. “Do you think they'll have a feast prepared?”

  “I certainly hope so. I could use some tea.”

  The half-track turned back towards the center of the island and passed underneath what looked like a rocky bridge. Then, as Dominik stared at it, he realized it was too regular, too fleshy. He traced its origins down the rocks and then stopped, unable to believe what he was seeing.

  Ari's mouth hung open. “What the... ?”

  Zofia threw herself into Dominik's arms. “Papa!”

  Over the side of the truck, the road dropped into the largest crater Dominik had ever seen. Its gaping mouth led straight into the bowels of the earth, swallowing the sunlight around it. Out of that blackness he saw, for the first time, the things that would one day devour The Aeschylus. Like Kate, he tried to classify them and found he could only think of them as tentacles. Impossible, he thought, but that was what they were. They stretched and grew from the edges of the hole like fingers, creeping up through the landscape and encircling the mountains beyond. Like the chasm, they were enormous, though he had no grasp of how far they would grow and how dangerous they would one day become. Dominik tried to imagine what could be at the bottom of that hole and couldn't. It might very well go to the core of the earth.

  He felt his shirt against his chest and realized he had begun to sweat. Just as he thought he might scream, the path veered away from the crater, and the half-track turned. It bounced happily over a few ruts and then continued through the valley towards their camp, leaving the chasm behind.

  As they got closer, he could see that it wasn't a camp they were headed to at all, but a fortress. The walls formed a protective semi-circle around it, metal fence wrapped between. Dominik saw the barbed wire and the watch towers, the men with guns, the jagged rocks that poked and pushed over the barriers on all sides. Just beyond those barriers, he knew there was nothing but the open, unforgiving sea.