One Helluva Bad Time- The Complete Bad Times Series

by Chuck Dixon

  The sensation of traveling through the field from the floating steel cage off Isla Jicarita was unpleasant in the extreme. A sense of disassociation, of delirious vertigo that had him retching over the gunwale of the raft. The other men with him seemed discomfited but not to the degree he was suffering. They had been through this experience before. That was apparent. What kind of men were these that a trip across millions of years of time was just another day on the job?

  In the end, Maurice knew he would get no answers to these questions. It was best to focus on the mission at hand, to make a good show of himself. And, Priority One, see his employer safely out of the hands of these American pirates. There were also men from his own security team on board the cargo ship. He wasn’t sure how many of them were captive. Or even if any of them were alive.

  He had severe doubts that the others on the op shared that priority, at least not as the prime objective. They carried weaponry and explosives enough to sink a vessel the size of the one they targeted. Clearly, this was not to be a salvage operation. They were ready and willing to lose the Ocean Raj in order to keep it, and whatever was aboard, from the hands of its crew.

  Bohrs commanded the raft he was on. The South African ordered the pilot to slow them. The three big outboards at the aft died from a growl to a purr. He gestured to the other craft, a hand slashed across his throat, and they decelerated as well. He waved them away either side. The rafts drifted closer, slowed to under five knots, spreading out in a row to cover the length of the starboard hull.

  There was no one visible at the rail above. No sign of life or movement aboard. Had they abandoned ship? The horizon was empty of any craft of any kind. They might have been able to get out of sight over the horizon in the time it took the RHIBs to reach the Raj. Maurice doubted it. Marooned tens of millions of years in the past with no hope of return? More likely, the Americans and their crew were concealing themselves on board with a plan to repel any boarders.

  “Attention, Ocean Raj,” Bohrs said into a loudhailer held to his mouth. “You know where we are from and why we are here. You will let down ladders and allow us to come on board.”

  Silence from above.

  “Delays will buy you nothing, Ocean Raj. My orders authorize me to use all force necessary to take control of your vessel. That includes everything from lethal force to the destruction of this boat of yours. Do not be foolish. Lower ladders now.”

  The ship looming silently above rocked unanchored in the current, rising and falling on a mild sea.

  Bohrs barked an order Maurice Franck could not understand. The pilot throttled up and turned them to run along the hull toward the aft section. They swung about, and the RHIB moved close to the flat hull section, the legend OCEAN RAJ, ALEXANDRIA in faded paint on the rust-streaked steel plate high above.

  The men stood now on the shifting deck. The other two rafts drifted behind, coming about to lend support fire if needed. Maurice rose and leaned on the gunwale. The gentle chop lapping against the rafts’ buoyant nacelles was lime-green with vegetation that blossomed all along the big ship’s hull. A smell of jungle rot rose from the stew that made Maurice’s stomach clench like a fist. He swallowed bile.

  With silent professionalism, the men on board raised twelve-foot steel ladders with hooks on the ends. They balanced on the deck, shifting to respond to the swells and drops, angling the top of the ladder over a railing above.

  A voice shouted from the deck above, the caller invisible. An order of some kind. With a groan of a motor and a metallic shriek, the end of a crane swung out overhead. Suspended on a length of steel cable beneath the end of the crane was a fifty-gallon steel drum.

  Bohrs ordered the raft to back away from under the drum. Ladders were lowered, and guns were up. Eyes searched the railings above. Nothing moved. No sounds. The barrel swung on squeaking chains.

  A burst of automatic fire broke the silence. The men on the rafts responded in kind. Suppression fire raked the hull and upper structure of the Raj despite the lack of any visible targets. Sparks flew from metal work.

  None of the rounds fired from above came anywhere near the rafts. Instead, the long burst had drilled holes in the drum swinging overhead. Streams of viscous fluid sprayed from holes punched through the steel to trickle down into the green sea. It was a stinking soup that filled the mercenaries’ noses and eyes with the sharp stink of putrefaction. An oily skim spread atop the water.

  A second volley of fire turned the trickle to a shower. The men on the nearest raft were bathed in the spray of nauseating effluvia. The raft deck below their feet was a puddle of chunky broth. A man on one of the other rafts brayed a sudden laugh, and others made remarks in a babel of languages. Bohrs cut them a murderous glare, driving them to silence.

  The men, splashed with the stinking filth, were more determined than ever to raise the ladders and get aboard. The RHIB sidled near enough to bump against the hull. They swung the ladders close, straining to get them secured.

  Maurice stood ready to follow them upward, and his weapon charged and ready in his combat harness. He looked back at the other rafts where men stood swaying with weapons trained upward, ready to supply support fire. A movement in the water behind the other RHIBs caught Maurice’s eye. A protuberance above the surface behind a curl of creaming foam.

  A dorsal fin. The first of many. On a direct bearing for the scent of blood and flesh.

  31

  Wrong World

  “How is my father?” Samuel asked.

  “He was okay the last time I saw him. Still on the mend but cranky as ever,” Dwayne said.

  “Tell me the circumstances under which you left them.”

  Dwayne told him about their interrupted vacation on the Baja. The run-in with a killer team, the flight into the desert. He and N’itha encountering an armed unit that manifested out of thin air to retrieve them and take them somewhere or somewhen. He told a truncated version of his adventures since he’d arrived in this parallel plane.

  “So, I can’t tell you what happened after I bugged out. If anyone could make it back to your dad and Caroline, it’s N’itha. I can only hope and pray; they made it away.”

  “We need to reunite you with them as soon as we can,” Samuel said. He turned to look at One-Eye and his entourage in conversation at a table across the great room. They were drinking something poured from a barrel into clay jars. A plate of cold meat, pepper, and scallions was shared by the group.

  “Guess you don’t have a spare one of these?” Dwayne said. He waggled his arm. The silver bracelet caught the light coming from the ceiling.

  “Only the one I have on. And I use that sparingly. It sends off a signal with each use, allows Harnesh and his followers to lock onto me. I lost them here.”

  “And why are you here?”

  “To find you, Dwayne.”

  “And how the hell does that work? A whole planet and all of time to look in, and you show up right here. A month or so late, but you find me. The odds of that happening are fucking ridiculous.”

  “Caroline sent me after you.”

  “How? When did you see her?”

  The corner of Samuel’s mouth turned up for a heartbeat in the closest the man ever got to a smile. Dwayne’s eyes had adjusted to the gloom. He could see the lines around the other man’s eyes, the graying of the hair at his temples. Samuel had been a few years younger than Dwayne the last time they’d met. The man before him was a good twenty years older than him now.

  “Yeah. Right. Dumb question,” Dwayne said.

  “Not ‘dumb.’ Irrelevant. Let me see.” Samuel gestured for the bracelet. Dwayne undid the concealed catch and handed it over. Samuel examined it.

  “Looks like a power source problem. I can repair it, send you back. Send you anywhen. But it must be carefully done. There are systems installed that would send out a signal if activated. It would draw our enemies to us.”

  “But you can fix it?”

  “Given time.” Another flash of a s
mile.

  “Okay. So, what do we do in the meantime? I mean, what’s your deal here? Shit, what’s the deal with here?”

  “This is one of Guhathakurta’s model worlds.” Samuel used Neal Harnesh’s birth name, the name he had when he was a humble state telephone lineman in India. “This plane of reality has diverged from the one you are familiar with in many significant and sinister ways. There is no Buddha. No Jesus. No Muhammed. Without the presence of the Christians, the Jews are an obscure cult, few in number and without a home.”

  “Is this the past or the present or...” Dwayne shrugged.

  “Yeah. Irrelevant, right?”

  “It is the past. You are seeing, living, the history of a world I am familiar with.”

  “A fucked-up place to be, right?”

  “It is a fate I hope the human race has avoided. You made that possible by the actions of you and your men in Roman Judea. You averted the course of history. That reality will never be realized.”

  “Hold on. If we accomplished our goals in Judea, then why is all this still here? I thought it would just go up in smoke or whatever. This place is over a thousand years past the first century AD, right? Firearms for one thing.” Dwayne thought back to the days they’d spent in the highlands above Nazareth in a running fight with a Roman legion. He still couldn’t get his head around the fact that they might have played a part in saving the life of a young Jesus Christ. Every time he tried, he felt like he was pushing at the limits of his own sanity. How could any of this be real?

  “It doesn’t work that way. Though the main current of reality corrected itself, returned to its natural course, because of your actions, this plane remains as a remnant, going forward to a future with a stark end centuries from now. All you see here will simply go black one day, as though it never was.”

  “Like a deleted scene in a movie.”

  “If that helps you understand it,” Samuel said.

  He knew the guy wasn’t trying to make him feel stupid, but Dwayne still felt like he was always being schooled.

  “These guys, One-Eye and his crew, they’re like Vikings, right?” Dwayne nodded toward the drinking men. They were now playing a game of some kind involving dice or bones, getting louder with drink and play. Coins clinked, and fists pounded the table top.

  “Yes, as you know them. Northmen. They are the rulers of Europe from the Atlantic Ocean to the steppes. They control much of the Mediterranean region as well. The rest of the world, Asia and the eastern coast of Africa is in the hands of the Mughal khans, the descendants of the Mongols, based out of India.”

  “Mongols. Like Genghis Khan?”

  “The same. They have been at war with an alliance of European kingdoms under Norse rule for two hundred years. This is a place where religion is primitive, pantheistic. The Danes and Franks and Allemani with their gods of weather, death, and war. The Mughals have a bastardized system of beliefs; a combination of their own animistic theology combined with the pantheon of the Hindu Vedas. Both faiths are populated by capricious gods whom they believe have little interest or relation to the lives of men. And so, the societies here are not guided by spiritual laws, and they do not recognize any kind of divinity in man. They are ruled by the laws of men only. And that can only lead to either anarchy or tyranny. I’ve seen the final result of all this, and it is ugly.”

  “Hell. Why would Harnesh want to make a place like this?”

  “To make a world in his image, perhaps. Madness? I don’t know or care. I only know that he has to be stopped.”

  “Again, and again.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what’s going on here? This feels like a war zone.

  These guys are gearing up for a fight.”

  “This hemisphere is called Ylfsland by the Northmen after the tribe who first came here. To the Mughals, it is Pedonkibhoomah, meaning ‘land of trees’ in a mangled form of Hindi. They have been fighting for possession of it for eighty or more years. The struggle has been at a standstill for decades. A static front exists along what you would know as the Mississippi River. They fight for a gain of meters. Offensive and counter-offensive with neither side gaining an advantage.”

  “What are we doing here, Samuel? What part are we expected to play here while you figure out how to fix that device?”

  “I have been earning my keep here teaching their gunsmiths the advantages of a rifled barrel. I am seen as something of a seer, touched by the gods.”

  “Crazy, you mean.”

  “Yes. But this culture values madness. You’ll be under my protection. Your familiarity with firearms will be helpful.”

  “Jesus. Jimbo would love all this. Wish he was here instead of me.”

  “There is a battle coming. We are to sail under the next new moon. We will be expected to take part if I can’t get your manifestation unit in functioning order by then.”

  “Soldiering. Can I explain I’m retired?”

  Samuel said nothing in reply; his attention focused on the bracelet he’d taken from Dwayne.

  “Sam, what if you can’t get that thing working?”

  The other man looked up then, the answer in his light green eyes.

  32

  Butcher’s Tide

  The engines of the Ocean Raj came to life, the screws revving, white water roiling in its wake as the big ship pulled away from the feeding frenzy.

  Once out of effective weapons range, the passengers and crew lined the sternward rails to witness the carnage.

  “Those poor bastards,” Jimbo said. He had scopes to his eyes and trained on the RHIBs growing smaller in their wake. He offered the binoculars to Bat who waved them away.

  “Fuck ’em,” Lee said. He watched through Zeiss binoculars. The three inflatables turned about, looking for a way from the gathering of sharks churning the water to white foam all around them. Measured against the twenty-eight-foot length of the RHIBs, some of these animals were forty feet in length. The rest weren’t much smaller. They were prehistoric great whites, no different from their cousins in The Now but for size and appetite.

  The rafts were spun around in the chop raised by the swarm of killers just beneath the surface. Dozens of fins were visible, with many more gliding unseen below. A raft was knocked sideways by a rising body, the underside exposed. By some miracle, the crew righted it before it was capsized or swamped. The mercenaries on board fired weapons into the massed bodies, creating crimson suds of blood and matter. The water turned into a consommé of excreta and tissue that only served to madden the mass of predators to greater fury.

  A red mouth bristling with triangular razors rose from the wash to clamp down on the bow of a raft. The beast used its massive weight to try and drag the nose into the water. The deck canted, and men tumbled forward. His shoulders braced in the rests, one of the mercs fired the big 20mm point blank into the wedge of the big shark’s skull. Geysers of blood exploded upward to come down in a stinking rain.

  The big fish was dead, but its grip on the prow of the raft remained locked. Other sharks turned on the carcass, striking left and right to take bites and worry at the still warm meat. The raft spun about on the axis of feeding sharks. The aft end left the water, the three outboards screaming as the props whirled in empty air. A thirty-footer broached underneath to tip the RHIB higher. Men spilled over the gunwales as the long raft flipped over. The men appeared, fighting to stay afloat for a few precious seconds. Their mouths opened in soundless screams before being dragged under in a welter of frothing water and flashing teeth.

  The other two rafts fared no better. One was flooded to the gunwales after a monster shark leapt from the water to slide athwart it amidships. The beast crashed back into the water, a merc struggling between its jaws. The full weight of the shark ruptured the port pod. Air escaped above and below the waterline. The results were catastrophic, the crew battling to bail the sinking craft as more bodies buffeted it from all sides. The men were up to their knees in rising water; the deck beneath them desc
ended further. They gave up bailing to defend themselves from the converging throng of glistening bodies. With oars and firearms, they made a desperate show of defiance before vanishing under the swirling eddy of hungering mouths.

  The surviving raft turned left and right, seeking a way out of the feeding zone. Bow up; it engaged all three outboards. Up at the bow, a gunner worked the cannon to cut a lane before them. An arc of glowing tracers carved a furrow in the infested water. Crimson gouts rose in a shower forty feet ahead of the raft’s nose. The RHIB, prow raised, broke from the ring of carnivores at top speed on a course toward open water.

  The sea swelled before the racing raft. An island of living flesh breached the surface, a bladed tail slashing the water. One of the sea’s largest predators had been drawn to the killing pool. The mosasaur turned its snout toward the closing craft. The gate-mouth yawned open; rows of ivory colored knives lined the crimson maw.

  The raft jinked hard to starboard. It heeled over in a sudden correction to carry itself around the monster lying in its path. The mosasaur swerved to remain in the RHIB’s way. Too late, the pilot turned the bow to port. The raft skimmed alongside the body of the great beast, flat hull sliding the length of the slippery hide. It reentered the water bow first at the end of a lazy spin. The impact hurled men into the water. The craft slewed sideways; all forward momentum gone. The rotors found purchase once more as the mosasaur plunged out of sight.

  Leaving men treading water behind, the RHIB motored away only to explode from the water, driven skyward off the snout of the sixty-foot saurian returning to the surface. Men dropped into the foaming green. The raft landed, upended, the motors dying as they flooded.