Knife Fight and Other Struggles (31 page)

There was another crash, nearer this time, but it somehow sounded softer. It took Max an instant to realize why: he wasn’t hearing it over the comlink.

“Mimi!” he shouted. The familiar amber <
SIGNAL LOSS
> was his only answer. It was followed shortly by a
crack!
and a monstrous belch.

The silt cleared for an instant, and Max saw the wreckage: a twist of geodesic titanium, two or three lights dangling from wire, surrounding a shattered tangle of metal and plastics, all beneath a galaxy of air bubbles shooting toward the surface.

And he saw the squids. The smallest of them was indeed inside the cage, tail sticking out of the wreckage as its tentacles rummaged greedily inside. A larger squid hung above, tentacles spread like a spider’s web over the wreckage. And the third squid—the giant one, the hundred-footer—lay supine on the rock, its tree-thick tentacles lazily gripping torn pieces of the cage like they were toys. Its eye was as big as a manhole pit, and as black.

Max called up the heads-up display for the harpoon targeting system, and centred on the giant. It wouldn’t be a difficult shot by any means. His thumb hovered below the trigger, and he was about to fire when the small squid emerged from the wreckage. It had something in its tentacles, Max couldn’t help but watch.

It was one of the bodies, or most of one. Mimi? It was hard to tell—the body was not in good shape. It trailed blood like ink from its torn abdomen, and Max thought about babies—about the one Mimi had wanted to make with him. Maybe she had furtively conceived already. If it was Mimi’s body, their little zygote would be mingled in with the cloud. Max shuddered.

The squid dragged the body behind it, wrapped in three long tentacles, over to the giant’s head. The giant’s tentacles rippled and spread apart, and the smaller squid disappeared within them, dragging the body behind it. There was a flurry as the tentacles shifted, and a tremor went along the length of the kraken’s body.

Max swore softly. The little squid was
feeding
the giant. These creatures were cooperating, to pillage the wreck and eat the TV oceanographers. God, he thought: if only we were live now. . . .

Of course, if they were live, it would have been Jim and not Max, and he would have pressed the trigger the second the targeting system showed a lock, and the whole thing would have gone up in a brilliant phosphorous explosion. Then, before the fires had even dimmed, Jim would be off looking for the hatcheries and planting some shaped charges there, and moving off just far enough to escape the blast, but not so far he’d lose the shot. Jim would not feel a pang of regret about the deaths of the people in the studio sub, particularly Mimi, who might have been pregnant with his child. Jim would be so caught up in the moment that he probably wouldn’t have realized it had happened. And Jim would certainly not pause to wonder what the significance of giant squids cooperatively cracking open a studio submarine and sharing the meal meant about the way that squids’ brains worked and just what kind of a hierarchy they’d managed to build for themselves down here in the aftermath of their unlikely population explosion.

And, thought Max as he heard the
click!
of chitinous squid-sucker boring against his armour and felt himself being drawn backward and up and then fast around, Jim would not have likely let a fourth squid get the jump on him from behind. Not as easily as Max just had.

The side of the mountain filled Max’s view for only an instant before the impact came. It wasn’t hard enough to rupture the suit, but it was surely enough to twitch his thumb. The ocean around him caught fire as the phosphorous harpoon tips burst and ignited in the deep-sea water.

The GET team found him in the evening, a coal-black knob at the edge of the
Minnow
’s spill. They were using hovercraft too small to haul the armour on board, so Max didn’t actually see a doctor until one of the craft had hooked up a chain and hauled him back to the base at Sable Island and a team of GET engineers cut him out of the damaged suit.

Max was a mess. The hard-shell suit had protected him from nitrogen narcosis, but at some point Jerry’s three-day regimen of spasmodics and steroids and liposuction had caught up with Max. When the med team cracked open the suit, they found him in full spasmodic flashback.

He’d already shattered his left elbow, cracked his collarbone, and nearly bit his tongue off. Apparently he’d been hallucinating as well.

Max’s delicate condition led to a spirited but inconclusive debate among the command staff as to whether to press the same charges against Max as they planned to lay against Jerry Wylde, and ship them both back for trial immediately. Because there were far too many unanswered questions, and Max Fiddler might be persuaded to answer them if there was a chance that charges could be stayed.

Where, for instance, was enviroterrorist Mimi Coover? Was she alive or dead? Where were the files she’d stolen from GET when she took flight? And, of prime concern, why did Jerry Wylde, mid-broadcast, pull the stopcocks on the
Minnow
’s oil tanks and unleash the largest oil spill the planet had seen in three decades? All Wylde would say on the matter was the oil spill was the only way he could save his ship, but that didn’t make sense; the threat of an oil spill was the only thing that had saved him from arrest for the better part of a decade. He’d done the equivalent of shooting all his hostages when he opened his tanks.

The only explanation they had to go on was the story that everyone in the world who wasn’t battened down against Atlantica saw on their screens. And that, the staff agreed, was not an acceptable answer. Wylde’s CGI squid-monster was more convincing than the one in the old Disney movie, but it was still pathetic: a desperate attempt to inject some life into a questionable property that should have been killed a long time ago. There was something else going on—and Jerry Wylde and what crew they’d managed to round up so far weren’t saying what that thing was.

So they determined to wait for Max Fiddler to regain his senses and tell them what had really happened. Then, and only then, would they take him and Wylde outside, skip the trial, and shoot them both.

Waiting, as it turned out, carried its own risks.

Two days after they arrived, the sky over the GET base was a Jovian bruise, purples and golds and reds that swirled above them and mingled into a malevolent blackness in the east. The oil-dappled waters in the Sable Island shallows—where the complex’s hadrosauric buildings perched on thick alloy legs—reflected the rare beauty of that sky like the mirror on a cokehead’s coffee table.

No one stopped to appreciate that beauty. The sky told them all what the satellite ring would confirm once they reached the command polyp at the low-lying island’s highest point. Atlantica was back on the move.

Max awoke to the roar of wind, the
crack!
of breaking glass, and a nail-tip pain in his elbow. Someone was tugging on his cast.

“Christ, Jim, get up. I can’t do this by myself.”

Max’s eyes slurped open. “Ow,” he said. “Jerry?”

“Fuckin’ A, Jim-bo.” Jerry pulled at Max’s arm again. “I got a wheelchair here. Now come on, get up. The shit’s hitting the fan here, and we gotta move.”

Max winced and sat up. He blinked in the dim light of an infirmary room. Jerry was wearing orderlies’ greens, and, sure enough, he was leaning against a gleaming chrome wheelchair. Max grimaced and swung his feet onto the floor, then swung his behind around and into the wheelchair. Jerry turned it around and pushed it out the door and into a darkened hallway. Behind them, there was another crack of breaking glass, then a howling, and Max felt an icy wind cross the back of his neck. Jerry hurried along the corridor.

“You saw something down there, didn’t you?” said Jerry.

“Mimi’s dead. So’s the rest of the crew on the studio. They were eaten by squids. How do you like that?” Max took a deep breath as Jerry pushed him into a pair of swinging doors. Beyond was a waiting room, rimmed with high frosted windows and a thick metal door marked
EXIT
on the opposite side. There was a candy machine in one corner, the front of which had been smashed with the fire axe that now lay propped against it. Max and Jerry were the only people in the room.

“A lot of people are dead,” said Jerry. “A lot of people are going to be eaten by squids. Squids won, we lost. Next!”

Max noticed water seeping under the exit door. The puddle grew as he watched, like a bloodstain.

“Atlantica,” said Max. Last time they’d spoken, Jerry had mentioned the storm had moved to the Caribbean and was getting ready to take on the Eastern Seaboard. “It’s here now?”

“Here,” said Jerry, “there. Everywhere. But particularly here. The GET bastards evacuated this morning, before their harbour swamped.”

“And they just left us here?”

“Just left us here.”

Max thought about that. He leaned back in the wheelchair.

“Where’s here?”

“Sable Island,” said Jerry. “GET’s got a base here.”

“So they just left us here,” said Max.

“The guard said I wasn’t worth the bullet it’d take to shoot me,” said Jerry. “Asshole. We gotta get out of here, Jim-bo. We’re going down.”

“You shouldn’t have pulled the stopcocks on the
Minnow
,” said Max.

Jerry shrugged. “What can I say? I freaked out. You didn’t see all those squid—all grabbing at the hull,
scraping
it like fingernails on a blackboard. Like they knew I was the one. Like they were smart. And that big one . . . Jesus, he could have torn the
Minnow
up the middle, and he was getting ready to. I could tell, Jimmy, and I freaked, all right? Sue me.” Jerry’s eyes went wide. “I freaked.”

“I see,” said Max.

Jerry nodded, and smiled in a panicky way. “You would have handled it different, right, Jim-bo? Big survivor guy. You would have had a better plan. Shit, buddy, I wish I’d had you on the deck. I may know television—but you . . . you got an instinct for this stuff.”

“I’m not Jim,” said Max. “My name is Max Fiddler. I am an actor.”

Jerry squinted at him. “We’re not back to this, are we? All right, Max, Jim, whatever you say. Tell me what you saw down there. See where those smart bastards lived? Anything we can use?”

Max looked around him. The entire floor was covered in water now and more was coming. He thought about the mountain and the giant squid—and the glimpses he’d had of the rest of it: the quivering walls of eggs that clung to the upper slopes of the sea mountain and the adult squids that circled them, guarding against the hungry smaller ones; the spectacle of a thousand squid, diving back to their homes in the trench, in sensible retreat from the spreading oil slick around the
Minnow
; and the behemoth, large beyond scale, that fell past him in the sun-dappled waters near the surface, trailing black strands of the same oil slick that would coat Max’s own armour just a second later; its great black eye as large as Max, with a depth to it that, at first, Max mistook for intellect.

Maybe it was partly intellect he saw in the squid’s eye, but he also recognized something more intimately familiar—and ultimately far more dangerous.

Max wheeled himself over to the exit door. He braced the wheels with his hands and opened the door with his foot.

“Is this a plan?” Jerry asked hopefully. “Because we could sure use a survival plan right now, Jim.”

Rain hit him in a sheet. Max squinted through it, at the raging Atlantica outside. The ocean had indeed come up to the doorstep—if it were clearer outside, he would no doubt be able to see to a flat watery horizon, interrupted by nothing but the tops of a few buildings, and perhaps the semi-circle of a radar dish, poking above the waves.

Behind him, Jerry Wylde shouted something, but it could have been a dog barking at his heel; the roar and thunder of Atlantica was all.

A little electric contraption inside played a song every time you opened it.
Da, da da Da. Da, da da Da.

He hadn’t heard the song in nearly ten years, but he would have recognized it even if it hadn’t been Sarah Michelle Gellar on the front of the card: wooden stake clutched in one hand, hovering over her breast—her airbrush-smoothed face unmistakably stricken.

Whatever had happened with that stake, she hadn’t meant it.

Inside, one word:

OOPS.

Yeah, he thought: Not much to choose from in the Apology section of the Shoppers Drug Mart greeting card aisle, and why would there be? You bought cards because your friend had a birthday, or got a job, or turned forty, or was going to graduate from something. Not because you fucked up.

He closed the card, left it finishing the Buffy riff on the dark shelf as he made his way back to the prescription counter. He spied movement of light and shadow in back, behind the low shelves of stock. He craned his neck.

“Is it ready yet?” he called.

She emerged, flashlight dangling from one hand. “I’m still looking.”

“Oxytetracycline. Under ‘O’.”

“
Oh
.” She showed him a middle finger. “We’re not the fucking library.”

“Come on. I’m erupting here.”

She tilted her head, raised an eyebrow, as if to say:
No shit.
He caught a glimpse of himself in the little mirror by the reading glasses. Florid boils the size of grapes crawled up his neck, swirling around the largest one—the first one—glistening on the edge of real eruption, just beneath his left eye. “No shit,” he said.

She approached the counter, where bars of afternoon sunlight hit it. Her long ginger hair hung matted down the shoulder of her white pharmacist’s smock. She chewed on her lower lip, and as he noticed that, he noticed a small blemish at the corner of her mouth. She must have seen him looking; her hand drifted up to cover it.

“That must really hurt,” she said. “You got painkillers? Tylenol Threes? Vicodin? I know where to find lots of those.”

“That’s not wise,” he said, “all things considered. I’m more worried about the infection than the pain. Stick with the Oxytetracyclene, thanks.”

“Just trying to help.”

“Thanks.”

She went back to the shelves and cupboards, clicked on her flashlight, and he wondered:
What was she even doing here? She sure as shit wasn’t a pharmacist.

He took out his own penlight, found his way back to Apologies.
Sorry We Missed You
, said a clean-cut young man sporting a vintage leisure suit and drawing a bow and arrow on a circa-1972 archery range.
How About a Do-Over?
was inside a card with a squalling baby wearing an upturned bowl of pasta on her head.
Don’t Quack Up Over This
was behind a cartoon showing three ducks in straitjackets, in a padded cell, glaring at the ceiling. He clicked the penlight off and stood in the dim, grey light that was all the gathering storm outside would allow.

At least he had options.

“Hey,” she called from the back, “do you have anything to drink?”

“I assume you don’t mean fruit punch,” he said, and she said, “Fuck no.”

“You proposing a trade?”

“No. I’m talking celebration.” She emerged again, and shone her flashlight on a candy-jar-sized container of pills. “See? Found it.”

“Great.” He dug into his backpack and pulled out a small silver hip flask. An indeterminate amount of scotch sloshed inside.

She had two small plastic cups ready by the time he made it up the aisle, and he measured a dram into each. She lifted hers, took a delicate sip, and made a face. “Nasty,” she said, appreciatively.

“Not used to the hard stuff, are you?” he said, and she motioned to his cup with her flashlight: “Bottoms up,” she said.

“Bottoms up.”

He set the empty cup down and looked at the jar. There had to be a thousand capsules inside. He picked it up, hefted it. “I don’t need all that,” he said. “Give me a week’s worth.”

“How many’s that?”

He squinted. “You’re not from the pharmacy, are you?”

“I am. But I don’t work—didn’t work back here. I do cash. I was on cash when it happened.”

He poured another dram into his cup. She still had lots left in hers and waved him away when he offered. That was fine; she was going to talk about it now. He let his mind wander as she told her story: about how she’d been on shift two hours when the lights seemed to flare, and dim, and then there came a swishing sound. She had been helping a customer, an older man in a light grey business suit. The swishing sound was the sound of the fabric collapsing in on itself, now that the man had vanished.

“Just
swish
,” she said, and wiggled her fingers. “Not just him. Everybody.
Swish
.”

“Almost everybody.”

“Yeah.”

“Why didn’t you go home?” he asked, and she motioned to the glass storefront. The clouds were massing dark again. And, he saw, the insects were back. They tapped on the windows, and a cyclone of them swirled over the parking lot.

“You’ve seen it out there. You’ve
been
out there.” She finished her scotch in a gulp, and this time didn’t stop him when he poured some more. “I may be crazy but I’m not stupid. There’s food in here. Lots of water, in bottles. And with the dispensary in the pharmacy—I thought I could do some good. Because that’s important now—right?”

Important, yes. Too late—also likely.

But he didn’t say that. “Right,” he told her. “Have you done some good?”

She shrugged. “You’re the first one to come by. It’s been three days. So you tell me.”

Although it hurt to do so, he smiled. “You’ve done some good.”

“Think it’ll make a difference?”

He sighed. “If I knew,” he said, “I don’t think I’d still be here.”

She asked him more questions: Had he seen anybody else since it happened? When did the boils start? After the event? Had he tried to pray?

Yes, from a distance; and yes, the first one came as he stood alone at the bus stop outside his house, blinking at the flaring sun.

And yes. He had tried to pray.

“But before I get going too long, the question always becomes: What to say? At this point in the game—what do you say?”

She nodded, and announced that she thought she was getting drunk.

“I shouldn’t be doing this,” she said, flicking the edge of her empty cup with her thumb, knocking it over. “Maybe this is why—I’m still here.”

“Drinking on the job?” He considered that. “Maybe.”

“You should take one of those pills. Make you better.”

“Maybe,” he said, and unscrewed the top of the jar. He pulled out a capsule—half red, half yellow—and put it on his tongue. He swallowed it dry.

She got unsteadily to her feet, turned and went into a drawer. She came out with an empty pill bottle, and handed it to him.

“Fill it up,” she said, and he did.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” she replied. “Is there anything else I can do for you?” And she repeated, in a pleading, accommodating tone: “Anything?”

“Yes,” he said, and he was glad—and a little sad—to see what looked like relief in her eye when he told her what he needed most.

Da, da da Da.

I am sorry, though for what I do not know,
he wrote as he stood on the sidewalk outside the Shoppers Drug Mart. The locusts lighted on his shoulders, in his hair, before they were carried away in the hot wind that swirled over top the empty cars and trucks that sat empty in the parking lot.

Da, da da Da.

He looked at it again—and crossed it out, and wrote,
Forgive me.
Then he scratched that out, and circled OOPS!, and signed his name below that, and shut the card. He held it lightly between thumb and forefinger, and raised it over his head—and stood there until the music stopped, until the wind snatched it from him and carried it away with the locusts.

“Thank you for the pen!” he said, back inside. “Hey—thanks!” He took two more steps into the store. “Hey!”

In the end, he slipped the borrowed pen into the breast pocket of the pharmacist’s smock where he found it, curled empty like a sleeping cat on the floor behind the counter.