Soft Apocalypses
Page 18
In fact, all the Britons were starting to sweat and stink inside their rubber suits. Thilini decided the best tactic was to breathe shallowly through her mouth.
“Hoy!” Jacoby sat up straight. “I saw something down low off the port bow.”
“Taking her around now,” said Hart. “Bait the water.”
Dawes pulled the lever that released a half barrel of salt pork from a compartment below one of the harpoons.
Thilini watched with growing horror as a dark form rose and rose toward the submarine. When it was 100 yards from the craft, it was clearly the shark and not a whale. Its armored snout was scarred and lumpy from dozens of attacks on ships. It swam closer, attracted by the meat.
Jacoby pulled the trigger on the first harpoon; it struck a glancing blow on the shark’s thick gills and tumbled off into the depths. The huge shark veered away and began swimming west. The harpooner swore long and hard.
“I’m after it!” exclaimed Hart. “He’ll not escape us!”
“Twenty knots … twenty five ….” said Dawes.
They followed the shark for hours. The engines were able to keep up with the shark’s prolonged speed, but the interior of the submarine became a steampot. Thilini had to fetch a flannel cloth to clean the condensation off the windows every half hour.
Shortly after they lost telegraph contact with Trincomalee, the shark dove down into a valley on the seafloor. Dawes turned on the bright electric headlamps so they could better see. The twin beams cut through the murk, and they illuminated a scene none of them would ever be able to forget.
A huge figure sat there in the middle of the sea floor. At least thirty of the gargantuan sharks circled it; they looked like minnows next to it. At first glance, Thilini thought it was a colossal statue of ten-armed Ganesha. If it sat in the sea beside the cliffs of Swami Malai, she guessed it would be able to peer over the temple built upon those high rocks. But as her eyes better focused, she realized that what she took for elephant ears were really fanning gills, and what she thought was a trunk was a bundle of enormous tentacles hanging down on the figure’s distended belly. The arms, yes, those were certainly giant limbs, although inhumanly twisted and ending in too many clawed fingers. And other arms were not arms at all, but massive boneless tentacles.
Surrounding the huge figure for at least two miles around were enormous shards of metal, like pieces of a giant shattered eggshell. They gave off a faint green glow that she instantly recognized.
“The meteor,” she breathed. “You were inside it!”
As if it heard her, the hideous colossus turned its gilled, tentacled head toward the submarine and fixed them all in its gaze. Its four eyes were each bigger than their craft, each blacker than the deepest trench in the ocean.
A sudden vertigo took hold of Thilini, and she could feel the terrible darkness of those eyes spreading through her mind, could feel a cold, alien intellect trying to probe the corners of her consciousness. She clutched her Ganesha figure tightly and began to pray.
She could hear her father reciting a Hebrew prayer behind her; there was so much fear in his voice she thought her heart would break. Jacoby had gone slack in his seat, his eyes rolling up into his skull and a trickle of blood running from his left nostril. Hart had fallen to the floor, jerking as though he suffered some kind of seizure. Dawes just sat there staring at the colossus, muttering “No … no … no ….” under his breath over and over.
Thilini watched as the colossus casually plucked down one of the circling sharks with a facial tentacle. The shark obediently opened its maw, and the colossus reached inside it with another tentacle, pulling out half a whale carcass. It popped the whale into its tentacle-obscured mouth and ate it as a man would munch a buttered cashew.
The colossus blinked and turned its head ever so slightly toward the sharks. Five of them peeled away from their formation and began swimming toward the submarine.
Thilini swore and leaped over Hart into the pilot seat. She quickly turned the sub around and tried to put as much distance as she could between them and the pursuing leviathans. She glanced at the pressure and temperature gauges. Both were climbing dangerously high.
“Papa! Papa, check the engines!” she cried.
His praying stopped. “What?” he stammered, sounding confused.
“The engines! Attend to the engines!”
“Yes, of course.”
She heard him making adjustments and releasing valves, and soon the needles on the gauges were dropping into their safe zones again.
“The sharks!” she called back to her father. “Are they gaining on us?”
“Oh no.”
She took that as a ‘yes’ and pushed the accelerator lever as far as it would go. Forty knots … forty-five … fifty. An unhealthy vibration began to spread throughout the sub, the steam engines clearly laboring under the load. She heard her father cursing and twisting handles behind her.
“Dawes! Dawes!” she shouted, trying to rouse the Englishman from his terrified fugue. When her words made no impression, she slapped his cheek.
His eyes popped open. “Ow!”
“I need a navigator, Mr. Dawes. We’re headed back to Trincomalee. Can you help me get us there?”
“Aye, Miss.” His voice shook and his eyes seemed unfocused. Thilini hoped for the best.
“They’re still gaining,” her father called. “I have done all I can here to improve the efficiency of the engines.”
She thought hard. “Mr. Dawes, do we still have bait aboard?”
“Yes, two barrels worth.”
“Dump it. Dump it all. And pray it distracts them,” she said, gripping the Ganesha figurine.
He did as she ordered, pushing buttons to release the salt pork into the chilly water.
“Ah!” her father cried, jubilant. “They’re stopping! They’re stopping!”
Thilini kept the engines hot and pressed the submarine on to land. An hour after they distracted the sharks, she reduced speed and Dawes took over piloting duties so she could send a brief telegraph back to shore.
Martin Rothschild and an array of British naval officers were waiting for them at the harbor when they docked. The morning light was just breaking over the horizon.
“Did we receive your telegraph properly? You said thirty of the blasted sharks?” her uncle Martin asked.
She nodded, unbuttoning her rubber jacket to cool off in the morning air. Her cotton undershirt was soaked. “Perhaps even more. And they are but sardines compared to the leviathan who controls them.”
Martin looked to her father. “Is this true?”
He nodded gravely, watching medics pull Hart and Jacoby from the submarine; both were completely insensible. “Every word.”
“They will eat anything they can devour,” she said. “No ship is safe here. No one on Earth has a weapon strong enough to combat the leviathan. I am terrified to imagine the weapon that could, for it would surely endanger all other life on the planet as well.”
Martin twisted his gloves in his hands and stared out at the sea. “What shall we do? If we cannot take our tea and timber out on the water –”
“– you can take it by airship,” Thilini said. “My father and I thought on this. We have the means to create larger and faster airships suitable for all manner of cargo. Just give us a week or so to draw up new plans, and we may begin building in the factory here.”
“What shall we do when that monstrosity has devoured the whole of the ocean?” Dawes was still sheet-pale. “What will we do when it decides to come up on land?”
“Then we will do what we must. But in the meantime, I say give the monster the sea, and we can take the sky.”
Her father left to discuss the details with her uncle. Thilini stood on the docks, staring out at the gray expanse of water, remembering the cold touch of the leviathan’s mind in hers. She did not know whether it was a solitary conqueror, a lost traveler, or an exile marooned by its own kind on her planet.
But she
did know that if it ever emerged from the depths, she would sense it. As she kissed the top of tiny Ganesha’s head, she vowed she would move Heaven and Earth to stop it.
About the Author
Lucy A. Snyder is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, Switchblade Goddess, and the collections Orchid Carousels, Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Her writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Hellbound Hearts, Doctor Who Short Trips: Destination Prague, Chiaroscuro, GUD, Apex Magazine, Nightmare, Best Horror of the Year and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
Lucy was born in South Carolina but grew up in San Angelo, Texas. She currently lives in Worthington, Ohio with her husband and occasional co-author Gary A. Braunbeck.
Lucy has a BS in biology and an MA in journalism and is a graduate of the 1995 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop; her classmates included authors Kelly Link and Nalo Hopkinson.
She has worked as a computer systems specialist, science writer, biology tutor, researcher, software reviewer, radio news editor, and bassoon instructor. In her past life as an editor, she published Dark Planet and selected poetry and software reviews for HMS Beagle. She currently mentors students in Seton Hill University’s MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction and coordinates the writing workshops at the annual Context conference.
If genres were wall-building nations, Lucy’s stories would be forging passports, jumping fences, swimming rivers and dodging bullets. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com.
Publication History
“Magdala Amygdala”—Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 5, Night Shade Books, 2013. First published in Dark Faith: Invocations, Apex Book Company, October 2012. Winner of the 2012 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction.
“However ….” (co-written with Gary A. Braunbeck)—Hellbound Hearts, Pocket Books, September 2009. Honorable mention, Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 2
“Spare The Rod”—Eulogies II: Tales From The Cellar, Horror World, July 2013.
“Miz Ruthie Pays Her Respects”—Dark Faith, Apex Book Company, May 2010.
“The Cold Gallery”—Legends of the Mountain State 2, September 2008.
“Abandonment Option”—What Fates Impose, Alliteration Ink, September 2013.
“The Cold Blackness Between”—Once Upon A Curse, Dragonwell Publishing, December 2012. Originally appeared in Aoife’s Kiss, March 2008.
“I Fuck Your Sunshine”—Vampires Don’t Sparkle, Seventh Star Press, March 2013.
“Carnal Harvest”—1000 Delights, December 2001.
“Antumbra”—Apex Magazine, February 2014.
“Diamante and Strass”—Fictionvale, March 2014.
“Tiger Girls Vs. The Zombies”—Redneck Zombies From Outer Space, Woodland Press, 2014.
“Repent, Jessie Shimmer!”—Appalachian Undead, Apex Book Company, November 2012.
“The Leviathan of Trincomalee”—Steampunk World, Alliteration Ink, 2014.
Table of Contents
Magdala Amygdala
However ….by Gary A. Braunbeck and Lucy A. Snyder
Spare the Rod
Miz Ruthie Pays Her Respects
The Good Girl
The Cold Gallery
Abandonment Option
The Cold Blackness Between
I Fuck Your Sunshine
Carnal Harvest
Antumbra
Diamante and Strass
Tiger Girls vs. the Zombies
Repent, Jessie Shimmer!
The Leviathan of Trincomalee
About the Author
Publication History