by Chuck Rogers
That was a lie.
There was one thing they were not ready for.
I went to the front of the boat.
"Frame?"
I took up my carbine. Face wagged her tail. She'd been guarding it for me. "Good dog."
I snapped open the grenade launcher's breech. M433 HEDP round. I snapped it shut and strode to the stern. "Stay."
Face 'merped!' in protest but stayed.
"Good dog."
I didn't know what a 40mm High Explosive Dual Purpose grenade would do to a ten thousand pound animal, but it was designed to penetrate two inches of rolled steel armor head-on and annihilate any ill-opinionated human's hiding behind it.
It would probably do something pretty spectacular.
It was simple.
I was back in prison.
Pacific Ocean High-Risk Detention Area.
The Orca gang had bad intentions.
I didn't speak cetacean.
I wasn't wearing black and white.
I had to get a body.
What that means in layman's terms? When you go to prison and you're all alone with no affiliations, you go fuck up or kill someone so the other cons know not to mess with you lightly.
I'd done it before.
I don't know how killer whales felt about battle casualties but they probably weren't used to them. I saw a movie once about an asshole that killed an orca's girlfriend and unborn child and it chased him into the arctic.
Didn't end well for anyone involved.
But you tell me. You're Shamu. You're hungry, and you're eyeing the human pontoon plate special when the mighty Frame throws a thunderbolt and the Shamu next to you turns inside out in Technicolor.
Is that a teachable moment?
Are you singing 'I Wish I Was In SeaWorld, Where Fish Are Always Free?'
Let's find out.
The grenade had a 14-meter arming distance. I picked an asshole orca with a droopy dorsal fin on the edge of the pod.
Cull the weak ones first.
Gonna free you from this mortal coil, Willie.
Penny spoke. "Frame?"
"What!"
Penny flinched but she reached out and found my shoulder. "Alice is right. Orcas don't attack people. Maybe they just want fish."
God damn it.
"Keith?"
"I don't know. Maybe we're the most interesting thing on the water. Maybe if we stop fishing and keep putting along they'll lose interest." Keith shrugged the gleaming Alaskan Guide Gun off his shoulder. He gave me a grim look. "Or we can light them up. You want to?"
I didn't want to.
Humanity had already waged one war against the cetaceans and nearly drove them to extinction. Whale War II wasn't a fight I was looking forward to starting.
End of the day?
The Unsinkable 2 had lost a couple of fish.
As far as I was concerned that was not a first shot fired.
"We could putt along awhile longer. What do you think, Frame?
"I think everyone should shut up and sit down."
We shut up and sat down. I asked Penny to sit on the deck and hold Face out of sight.
We putted along.
We putted around Point Dume.
The pod of orcas followed us. Pod hell, it was a phalanx. They followed us silently. In formation. It was goddamn eerie.
Our primary LZ Matador State Beach was gone. Scraped away right up to the cliffs.
It was disheartening.
Particularly with a pod of killer whales ghosting your not particularly ocean-worthy little pontoon boat.
We putted on up to Plan B. South Beach had a promising strip of sand. Blue water came right up to it and that told me the beach was a lot steeper under the water than it used to be. A lot of her famous stone arches and caves had collapsed. South Beach was a sandbar barely hanging on but the path up into the state park looked clear.
It'd do.
Keith turned landward.
Fifty meters from shore every last black fin pulled a synchronized dive below the surface.
We breathed a sigh of relief.
Keith didn't fuck around. He ran the Unsinkable aground. People hopped off the prow armed and very glad to have solid ground under their feet. I lifted Penny and Face to the beach.
Penny took a knee and let sand run through her fingers.
Face felt sand beneath her paws for the first time and lost her tiny mind. She roared around barking and sniffing everything.
Keith deployed the wheelchair ramp and we got Bobby's bike onto the sand with nothing but spokes touching salt water. The PCH was gone and so were the stairs leading down to the beach, but the tsunami had flattened everything. I didn't need binoculars to see an intact stretch of the Mulholland Highway snaking off into the canyons.
"I'll go with you until you get up on the road. In case we have to push the bike over anything."
I grinned with relief. "I was hoping you'd say that."
"Yeah, well let's do this fast." Keith gave the ever more swiftly moving sun a hard look. "I don't want to be on the water after dark, and I sure as hell don't want to spend the night here."
I looked Keith in the eye. "I don't know how long I'm going to be gone. Or if I'm coming back."
Keith nodded. "No matter what happens. Your girl, your dog and Penny are taken care of. Shit hits the fan? They have an RV already. I have a fall back position back in the canyons."
I clapped Keith on the shoulder. "No matter what happens. I owe you."
Keith nodded. "You do."
I turned back to the boat.
After everything in my life, much less a radioactive rape bear, you wouldn't think there was much left that could that shock me.
Nature waits for no one.
Mar-J stood on the ramp handing down the cooler of food our people had packed. To Raj.
Raj stood knee deep in the surf.
You've all seen it.
You had to have seen it.
Animal Planet. Nature. YouTube videos. Hell, if you're old enough Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.
Like baby birds leaving the nest, you saw the seal pups on those dangerously steep Argentine beaches getting their flippers wet.
And the Orcas surfing right up onto the sand to get them some suckling seal.
The time continuum pulled the horrible this can't be happening dilation as I shouted. "Raj!"
Keith shouted one heartbeat later. "Raj!"
The black fin rose cutting a v-wake through the water.
I was in motion.
Ten thousand pounds plus of marine predator surfed into the spume and head-butted Raj off his feet.
There was another heartbeat after Keith and I shouted. The world was silent except for the orca's jaws crunching through Raj's leg bones.
Then Raj screamed.
The orca snapped its head up and down three times and flailed Raj against the sand like Face with one of Lalli's slippers.
The world returned to real time. The surf turned red. I'd been in danger and combat. I was five steps ahead of everyone but still not fast enough.
I ripped the Winchester out of my bedroll.
Everyone started screaming. Mar-J grabbed his carbine and unloaded thirty rounds into the whale's back but shooting a whale around the dorsal fin with a .22 caliber rifle definitely fell into just pissing it off mode. Colin started emptying his revolver.
I ran forward shooting. I worked the lever of the Winchester and put deer rounds into the orca's dome but apparently I was just blasting apart its sonar.
Then again imagine your primary sensory organs being blasted apart by gunfire but you didn't die.
All you could do was flop around with a lovely Hindu gentleman in your jaws and fountain blood out of your blowhole as you screamed. Orca vocal chords are in the blowhole.
You don't ever want to hear a whale scream through its own blood.
The entire orca pod offshore howled and whistled and screamed and made every noise of distress overgrow
n sea mammals could make.
It was a chorus from hell.
The whales screamed. Raj screamed. Everyone on the beach screamed.
The Winchester ran dry.
The world was going to die screaming again.
I would not have been surprised to see the beam hit again.
It sounded like everyone involved was actively trying to summon it.
And maybe that would have been for the best.
Penny knelt in the sand clutching her ears and screaming. "Make it stop!"
Face howled.
Alice emptied her rifle into the orca's snout.
It screamed with every shot.
I have news for you.
You're not going to like it.
The sound of world ending will be an orca screaming as it is shot to death with rifles not suited for the job.
The rest of the pod watched making sounds you will never believe.
Paint the soundscape.
Mar-J shoved a fresh magazine into his carbine. He was weeping openly. "Give it the grenade, man!"
"It won't arm this close!
I vaulted onto the boat and grabbed Keith's buffalo gun.
The surf was red horror.
Raj screamed and screamed as his leg was masticated into mincemeat in spasming orca jaws.
I jumped off.
I landed on the orca's portside pectoral fin.
I put a boot on its caved-in snout.
I had no fucking idea of orca anatomy.
So I slammed the muzzle against the white patch over its eye and fired five times.
Round five the black fish went boneless and flopped.
Mar-J and Colin pulled Raj free.
"Get away from the water!"
No one needed to be told. God bless Alice. She stepped into the red foam and grabbed Face by the scruff and hauled her back. God bless Face. Her lips were curled, her tail was curled, and she was snarling for a fight at a ten thousand to one weight disadvantage.
God help me.
I knew I was the only person on that beach with any real medical experience. Force Recon is frequently in enemy territory on its own so we get more trauma training than the average jarhead.
Every severely wounded individual under my care had died.
I jumped back into the boat and grabbed the woefully inadequate First Aid kit. I vaulted off the prow and one look told me I was going to lose Raj. In most circumstances severed arteries go into vasospasm and retract. That stops a great deal of the bleeding.
That's why dicks like me are taught to twist the knife after it goes in so there isn't anywhere for the artery to retreat to.
There really isn't any artery retreat when someone shoves your leg into a maritime harvester with fifty-six, four-inch teeth. I applied pressure. I applied a tourniquet. I tried to locate the arteries with blood up to my elbows and shreds of Raj slipping through my fingers.
At least he died quick.
Alice moaned. "Oh God . . ."
I echoed the sentiment. But she was looking out on the water.
Two more orcas swam up.
What were they going to do? Hump their way up the beach after us? Maybe disable the boat?
Fuck-that.
I took my carbine that Mar-J had thoughtfully brought ashore, flipped up the grenade sight and aimed. The two orcas broke formation, curved around, and with some wriggling each got a tail fluke in their mouth. They began towing their fallen pod-buddy out to sea.
Leave no one behind.
It was an admirable ethic.
We learned that in the Marines.
The two Shamu's and their mournful burden were only twenty meters from the shore when they released it and the rest of the pod descended.
I don't know the blood volume of an adult killer whale.
But the feeding frenzy was enough to turn what remained of South Beach red.
Don't waste meat.
That was an admirable ethic, too.
Uncle Jimmy taught me that.
I wondered how soon that would fall upon us.
Rumor was in certain dark corners it had already started.
One tries to leave these thoughts to the philosophers and the theologians.
As an old Marine I knew one thing in my bones.
A storm was marching across the horizon. We'd lost our first man before the mission had even begun. Back at the house Lalli was crying and praying. Santa Muerte was shaking her head.
It was not an auspicious start.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Bad boy, bad boy, whatcha gonna do?
I BURNED RUBBER BEFORE THE STORM and the sinking sun. In my favor the first stretch of the Mulholland Highway from the sea was mostly state park. The highway hung from the sides of the canyons and the overwhelming devastation was below me. I only had to get off and walk the bike around and over shit twice.
Then I flew.
I had to.
The storm clouds engulfing everything behind me were a rolling wall of purple with lightning cracking out of them. It was too easy to imagine all they obscured had been erased. I swear everything looked like the end of the world these days. I would not have been surprised to see the silhouettes of orcas Sharknado'ing in the sky with every flash. The thunderclaps were loud enough to shake the bike beneath me. They felt like near miss artillery strikes. The rain hadn't caught up with me but I felt like I was being shot at.
Then my right hand mirror exploded.
I was being shot at.
Speed was life.
I hunched even lower over my headlight. I gunned the throttle and gave myself to Mulholland Canyon's curves. I hit the 23 and I flew. I entered Westlake Village. I saw a lot of houses in the blur of my passage. Many had burned. Many more had been abandoned. I saw some roads with cars parked in outward vee's blocking the ingress and I saw some smoke coming out of chimneys. I saw that something to the hills west of me was giving off an unhealthy pink glow upwards and I wanted no part of it. I roared past. My biggest fear was a roadblock across the 23 with angry citizens behind it. I was a biker on a bike covered with Raj and orca blood.
I doubted my kind were popular.
Then again the evening was shaping up to be fit for neither man nor beast.
I think those that remained were buttoning down for the deluge.
Then I saw that lovely green and white sign.
101/Ventura Freeway
I took the off-ramp and I was on the 101. Familiar territory. I'd driven it a thousand times. I was home free on the freeway heading south towards Los Angeles. The Sons of Ged, dead ahead, and a pirate's life for me.
That's when I saw lights in my remaining rearview.
You had to be fucking kidding me.
Flashing lights.
Then sirens.
I looked around and I suspect the look on my face was precious.
It was the California Highway Patrol.
CHP Dodge Pursuit vehicles didn't normally mount general purpose machine guns over the light bar much less hillbilly armor slats over the grill and the windshield. Then again, times had changed while I was doing push-ups and learning every nuance of the Lord of the Rings in Bobby's bomb shelter.
The asshole's public address system blared loud enough to be heard over my stripped down Harley's pipes.
"PULL OVER TO THE SIDE OF THE ROAD. THIS IS YOUR ONLY WARNING."
A black and white Chevy Tahoe with a recoilless rifle, (That's a cannon), ring-mounted to the sun roof and an old Crown Vic joined the chase.
I pulled over.
I complied.
The vehicles screamed to a halt all around me. The khaki lackeys poured out in uniform, armored up and geared up for war. A good dozen.
Funny thing?
I had my wallet on me.
I had a picture of Lalli in it she had given me. I had a couple of gold coins. I had my California driver's license.
I stood away from the bike and put my hands up.
"Good evening officers. Ho
w may I be of assistance?"
The expandable batons snapped open.
The heavens opened.
I dropped to my knees and put my hands behind my head in the deluge.
The batons fell on me like they'd rained on Rodney King.
* * *
"I'M US DEPUTY MARSHAL ROMAN MILES."
Marshal Roman Miles?
You've got to be fucking kidding me.
Only this was a deadly serious sort of Marshal. He was big. I'd never seen a US Marshal so desperately in need of a shave and a haircut. He kinda looked like Jesus, if Jesus had been in the Old Testament instead of the New and rather than turning the water into wine he'd come to turn the Philistines into corpses. He was haggard and dressed in denim, but he wearing a Marshal Service windbreaker and he had that circled star badge pinned on his chest. He looked like he'd been riding hard across the Wild West for the last three months.
Pale, unforgiving eyes.
I was in a holding cell. Genuine black iron bars. Brick behind me and wood paneled walls in the station. It sure as hell wasn't a modern law enforcement facility. It looked like sheriff's office out of the 1950's or maybe the old west. It was most likely a relic in one of the unincorporated areas up in the mountains or maybe it was actually a museum. Or a movie set. They had electricity. I didn't know where I was. I'd been hooded after the beating and the drive had been long and twisty. The station windows were covered with thick blankets.
They were in black out condition.
I was ignored after they de-hooding me. I sat in my cell apparently pouting and listened. There were three of them currently in residence. The guy sitting at the desk with the failed attempt at a police mustache was Larry. There was a six-foot ponytail named Jeannie and a guy sitting in the corner desk named Ramirez who didn't say much. They were all wearing khaki and California Highway Patrol badges.
The Marshal grabbed a chair from a desk and turned it around backwards out of reach of the bars. That was kind of folksy.
"What's your story, sunshine?"
He called me sunshine.
"I wasn't even speeding. Why am I in lockup?"
He looked at the Raj and whale blood all over me.
I was fucked.
"The Ventura Freeway corridor and associated cities, townships and unincorporated areas are under martial law."
"May I ask on whose authority?"