by Graeme Hurry
“Stand back.” Said one of the spacers. A short haired woman with dark gleaming eyes. The prisoners didn’t have much room to step back in so they scuttled together as best they could at the back of the room. Jeffrey felt something touching his hands and looked back. Jeanette had clasped his hand and given it a squeeze. Her eyes sparkled with hope. The spacers raised their weapons, aiming at the door.
Flashes of lights and sounds of gunfire suddenly burst out in the hallway. It was short and precise. A few rounds fired in quick succession, then silence for a second, then another few rounds. They all held their breath in anticipation. The hall had fallen silent again.
The nozzle of a weapon appeared to peek around the frame of the door. It was followed by the rest of the weapon and the person holding it. Jeffrey gasped. It was her. The red headed woman from the transmission. The prisoners all cheered when they saw her.
She saw the spacers and the prisoners standing in the cargo room and smiled. “We’ve got them,” she said alleviated. She looked even more amazing in person, Jeffrey thought. The smile made her entire face come alive. Tall and broad shouldered like he had imagined she would be, she filled the room with her presence. She walked over and congratulated her crew on a job well done. A revered leader, thought Jeffrey, but then again, how could you not follow a woman like this?
“Listen up,” she called out. “We need to move all of you down the hallway. There is a door and another hallway. At the end of that second hallway we have breached the outer hull and you can access our ship. Hymns and Janson,” she signaled a man and a woman from her group. “You take point. Peters and Mittelmann, you bring up the rear. All of you,” she signaled the group of rescued prisoners. She seemed to actually see them for the first time and her expression changed to one of compassion. Her voice softened from commanding to inviting. “You follow right behind Hymns and Janson. Don’t stop for anything. Don’t stop if we are being shot at and don’t stop if we are being followed. Especially not if we are being followed. A lot of good people risked their lives to get you off this ship, so let’s do them the honor of making every possible effort.” She had hardly finished when a noise was heard again from the hallway. “Here they come, put on your breather masks, and let’s go.”
Peters and Mittelmann guarded the door and with a quick peek out reported all clear. Hymns and Janson sprang out in the hallway with practiced coordination. The ten prisoners scuttled out behind them without any illusion of organization. They bumped into each other but eventually made it into the hallway. Following right behind them were Peters, Mittelmann, and the redheaded woman.
Jeffrey couldn’t see much, but he stayed at the back of the group looking over his shoulders at the three spacers that walked backwards protecting the group from attacks from behind. Movement was painfully slow. It was hard enough to move in low gravity when you were alone, but it was nearly impossible when you were in a group. Even lightly bumping into someone could give you enough momentum to be sent off in the completely wrong direction and you could only exert a small force against the floor. It was like moving on ice. There were some handles on walls and ceiling that you could grip onto, but they were designed for Mechans and it was hard to get a grip on them. They reached the door by the end of the hallway when they heard the opposite door open up.
“Hurry!” shouted the redheaded woman.
Jeffrey was the last of the group to go through the door and when he turned to see behind them he saw Mechans moving into the hallway from the far end.
He heard the shot from assault rifles and here right next to him it was incredible loud. The three spacers behind the group had begun shooting at the Mechans that were piling into the hallway. Jeffrey hurried through the door, round the bend of the corridor, and he was out of the line of fire. Unless the Mechans had weapons that could shoot around corners. He didn’t think they did.
The three spacers came through the door walking backwards firing their weapons.
“Keep moving,” shouted the redheaded woman. “We’ll take up a fortified position here.”
Jeffrey stood amazed, looking at the group of warriors. They were doing this for him. Well for all of them, but also for him. He wanted to tell them how grateful he was, but nothing he said could be heard over the sound of the guns being fired.
One of the spacers was hit and fell back limp and lifeless. Like a doll a child had tossed away. In the microgravity, he bounced off the opposite wall and skidded back out the door towards the oncoming Mechans. “Shit!” someone exclaimed just as the second spacer was hit and fell. Mittelmann and Peters were both down. The redheaded woman took a quick look to see if the group had reached the end of the corridor, but they were not even halfway there. Jeffrey was right behind her crouched down behind the now dead Peters. She hadn’t noticed him. She hunched down and sent several quick three-round bursts down the corridor. The firing from the Mechans stopped for a moment.
“Thank you.” Said Jeffrey softly. It was the best he could come up with.
“Don’t thank me yet, we still need to get out of here.” She replied without looking up. The conversation was carried over the radios in their helmets so she couldn’t see who had spoken or where from.
“That doesn’t matter,” said Jeffrey. “You have already saved me.”
That gave her pause. “What are you talking about?”
Before Jeffrey could answer a shot rang out hitting her in the left shoulder. The force of the impact sent her careening away from the door and slammed her into the wall. She saw Jeffrey crouching there next to her. She recovered, and retook her position, but had to change her stance since she could no longer support her weapon with her left hand. “Go. Get the hell out of here,” she barked at Jeffrey, but Jeffrey hardly heard her. He was entranced by the warrior holding out against a superior force to save the innocent.
“You have already saved me,” he said as another shot hit the woman. This time she did not get back into position. Jeffrey looked at the Mechans now moving towards him quickly as they saw their opponent was down. Jeffrey waved at them. “Over here guys.”
He grabbed the woman’s hands and held them in his. They felt big and strong compared to his childlike ones. He saw the rest of the group had reached the end of the corridor and was getting into the awaiting spaceship.
“Thank you my muse.” he said to the now dead woman.
IN THE CANAL
by Anne E. Johnson
Their shoes made crunching sounds on the path, amplified by the overpass. “Should we be down here?” Mike’s date asked.
“Date.” That’s what they were calling it. Mike didn’t know her name. By the end of the night he would owe her seventy-five bucks. Or more, depending how things went.
There was a place down by the falls. He’d brought girls there before. Rock walls for privacy, plus some grass, so nobody got too bruised.
“Kinda creepy,” the woman said, grabbing his arm when her ankle wobbled in her purple vinyl pumps. “Don’t it give you the creeps?”
“If I’m honest,” said Mike, admiring the way the moonlight outlined her cleavage, “the sound of the falls makes me horny.”
They got down to business. And he knew it was business, even if she moaned like she was enjoying it. Something caught his eye as he rolled her over. A flash on the concrete wall along the canal. It moved like a caterpillar. He’d lived there his whole life, been to that spot a thousand times, and he’d never seen a caterpillar like that. Especially not in the springtime. “There shouldn’t even be caterpillars in the spring.”
“Where you going?” she asked him.
He called back to her on his way to the water. “Just hang tight. I’m paying for your time.”
That was the last thing he ever said.
* * *
Police Chief Lianne Bohannon grabbed Detective Jessup’s arm as he headed to the interrogation room. “I’ll come with you, Detective.” She lied, “I want to speak to her.” What she really wanted was to go home and
never see another case file.
Jessup shrugged. “Sure, Chief. If you can get her to make some sense, or even get her to calm down, that would be great. I know it’s hard for you these days.”
“I’ll do my best,” she said sharply. She didn’t like her cops reminding her that she’d just put in a letter of resignation. She couldn’t help that she’d grown sick to death of being on the job.
In the barren room, the woman who called herself Rosa was crying. It was far from the first time she’d been at the station, but usually she was a suspect, not a witness. If this was even a crime.
Trying not to sigh, Lianne checked the report over Jessup’s shoulder. “Rosa, I’m Chief Bohannon. I hear you had a really bad experience. Can you tell me about it? You saw a… creature?”
“Are you gonna believe me? This other guy don’t believe me.” She snarled at Jessup. “It was twice the size of my john. I mean, Mr. What’s-his-name.”
“The victim was named Mr. Trent,” said Jessup. “The bartender at Coby’s knew him. Look, Rosa, maybe your memory’s a little confused. From stress.”
“You think I’m lying? There was a giant worm, I tell you.”
Lianne felt a strange tingling up her neck. She could not speak. Fortunately, Jessup did not have that problem. “You’re saying a worm that ate Mr. Trent? That’s gotta be a mighty big worm. If there was such a monster in the canal, someone else would have seen it by now, don’t you think?”
There was something too familiar for comfort in those words. The volume of the conversation undulated, as if Lianne were hearing it through a moving vehicle with open windows. She worried she would pass out.
“But it coulda just got here,” Rosa was saying. “Like, swum up from Boston. They have all kinds of weird shit down there.”
Jessup let out a small groan. “Maybe. But there are a lot of ships and boats on the canal, let alone on the Merrimac River itself. Someone would have seen it.”
Rosa pounded the cheap aluminum table. “I don’t know what no ship seen, but I know what I seen! First we were, you know, getting familiar on this mossy place by the falls. Then the guy says…”
“Mr. Trent?” Jessup asked.
“Yeah. He says he sees a little caterpillar or something. Climbing by a rock over near the water. He leans over to take a look. Then out of nowhere there’s this huge snakey worm thing. I mean huge. Big teeth and things on its head.” Her index fingers wiggled against her head. “Big horns. Hey, you ok, Chief? You pregnant or something? I didn’t think a brown-skinned lady could get that pale.”
Lightheaded and short of breath, Lianne struggled to keep her eyes focused as the room spun. What overcame her were fragments of memory from early childhood. Her grandfather, of half Abenaki tribal blood, placing his dry hand to her face. An image of a widened, slimy maw full of teeth. A flash of curved gray horns, ringed from centuries of growth. “Tatoskog.” That word, over and over, in her grandfather’s voice.
“Excuse me,” Lianne whispered. She stumbled from the interrogation room, waving Jessup away as he moved to help her. “Tatoskog,” she muttered. She wasn’t sure where she was going, but the outside called to her urgently. A great answer to a great question waited out there in the New Hampshire wilds. Or maybe in its history.
* * *
Blackish-brown water in the Middlesex Canal reflected the sun as golden threads. The water was never still. Steve Jessup had twenty years on the force and a Glock snuggled against his rib cage, but he had never felt so much sense of danger. “Spooks and goblins, buncha crap,” he muttered, furious at himself. “Just search for clues. You’re a cop. You’re a grownup, for god’s sake.”
But, like every New Hampshire boy, he’d sat around campfires listening to talks of monsters and murderers. The stories were always set on quiet evenings, when a breeze against the neck hairs could be a witch’s fingers. When a lantern sprayed frosty light on bushes, tree trunks, and swirling bats but always missed the wraith hovering at the forest’s edge.
Just to prove he wasn’t alone in the world, Jessup clicked on his walkie talkie. “Jessup here. Um, looking around for the body and any evidence of, you know, a huge worm thing. Heh heh.” It was nervous laughter. Anything could pop out of that inky canal.
“Dredging team gone?”
The dispatcher’s voice made Jessup jump so violently, he nearly fell into the water. “What? Yeah!” He pulled a few deep breaths to calm his voice. “They’re gone. It’s just me. Wasn’t there supposed to be another couple guys?” Lennox took several seconds to respond. “There was a robbery at Murray’s grocery. With a stabbing. All the cars are there. But I can call someone away if you need backup.”
Ashamed of his weak nerves, Jessup said, “No, no, I’m good. I’ll call if anything changes. Over and out.” He clenched his jaw and got to work, appalled at his own lack of professionalism. Flashlight in one hand and long stick in the other, he examined the brush just beyond the area where the initial search team had focused. It hardly surprised him to come up empty. “Dang body probably halfway down to Boston by now,” he grumbled, watching the current roll southward. His gaze fell on a dark area in the concrete wall just downstream. A flash from his mildly misspent youth reminded him: those little overflow drains made great hiding places, and they just fit one smallish person. If the murderer was a native, they’d know about that nook.
Proud of his police work for the first time that day, Jessup used two rusted steel grip bars in the canal wall to lower himself even with the opening. Peeling off a strip of soggy cardboard from a crate of broccoli that blocked the entrance, he leaned into the dark, damp tunnel. The scent of garbage and mold brought his late-afternoon bag of Fritos up into the back of his mouth. “No corpse,” he growled, once the snack was safely swallowed again.
A two-inch water beetle skittered along the top of the opening. “How did I ever fit in here?” he asked it. “Let alone stand the smell.”
Huffing with frustration at his wasted time and wet pants and shoes, Jessup moved his hand up to a higher grip. But he stopped when a strange caterpillar caught his eye. It was about the size of his thumb, with loose, beige skin that rolled and folded as it dragged is sections closer to the opening.
“You are one ugly bastard.” The worm stopped, rearing its head off the concrete but holding onto the vertical surface. Above its squashed face, two spikes poked like antennae.
“Are those horns?” That prostitute he’d interviewed about the murder. Horned water snake. Started out tiny. He looked at the worm. The skin over its face stretched. Black eyes bulged out from pin pricks. From a hair’s-breadth slit exploded a massive jawbone lined with rows of salivating fangs. The body inflated like a parchment Hindenburg for a second, then settled into the shape of a giant sea cucumber. Its back arched. Its open maw dripped putrid saliva down the retaining wall.
What it did next, Jessup could not attest to. He dived head-first into the overflow drain. With nothing to grab onto, the only way to stuff his middle-aged bulk into the opening was to wriggle inch by inch. Between the exertion and his panic, he breathed in great gulps of mildewed air. But he did not have time to think about it.
His lower right leg was caught. Hot pain followed, and a keening growl. The horned serpent creature had him.
Kicking madly with his left leg, his shoe hit something spongy. Jessup kicked wildly with his left heel at the worm’s head or chest or whatever it was until the monster loosened its grip a little. Ignoring the sensation of ripping flesh, Jessup forced himself deeper into the drain. The walls pressed so tightly against his ribcage, he could barely fill his lungs. His right leg burned and trembled.
Thinking fuzzily that he should have just let the damned worm eat him, Detective Stephen Jessup dropped his face into the black slime and passed out.
* * *
“Tatoskog.” Lianne repeated the word as she drove to her parents’ house on the northwest corner of town. Beneath the punctuated sound of the serpent’s name was a backgroun
d of stress. Should she quit the force? Should she stay? The day before, she’d been absolutely sure, but something about this case was shaking her resolve to break free.
Her mom and dad were sitting on the front porch as she pulled up the drive. “Where’s Granny?” she demanded, running past the hugs they offered. Granny Bohannon was where she always was since Lianne’s folks had taken in her in: slumped in her wheelchair in front of the living room TV. Her eyes stayed glued to the screen when Lianne hurried to her and kneeled. “Hi, Granny. It’s Lianna.” No response. Lianne stroked the soft, loose skin on her grandmother’s forearm. “Granny? I need you to remember something for me.”
“She’s not too good at that these days,” said Lianne’s dad, who stood in the doorway. “Unless it’s a memory from really long ago. Those she’s hanging onto.”
Lianne swallowed hard, noticing the sadness in her dad’s eyes. “Sorry about your mom, Daddy,” she said. “But it is a really old memory.”
He nodded with a brave grimace. “Worth a try, then.”
“Granny? Do you remember when Grandpa used to tell us those old Abenaki tribal stories when me and George were little?”
Granny finally looked at her through rheumy eyes that showed no recognition. “Hello, dear. Can I help you?”
Liana tried not to let her face show disappointment. Making her voice more formal, she hoped she sounded like a kind stranger seeking information. “Hi. Um, yes, ma’am. I was wondering if you knew any old Abenaki folktales.”
“Abenaki?” A light sparked in Granny’s eyes, clearing them. “Abenaki. My Joseph was half Abenaki blood. So many fine stories. My favorite was the one about the Drum Spirit. The Creator was deciding who would live in the world, and a banging sound grew closer and closer. Finally the Drum Spirit showed up and said, ‘I want to come to the world.’ And the Creator asked, ‘Why should I let you, Drum Spirit?’ And the Drum Spirit said, ‘So that I can play along while the people sing.’ And from that day forward, the tribe’s songs always had drums playing along. Isn’t that lovely?”