Quest for the Ark

by Taggart Rehnn

  Unfortunately, should the part missing from David’s analytical equipment remain AWOL, this cornucopia of additional samples would be useless; and that, if anything, made the need to find it—and find it soon—all the more pressing. To look for the bundle “shaped like an elbow with two perpendicular forearms” over a larger area, the entire group—now stretched quite thin—went out. Their search started from the coordinates where the submarine had surfaced, blacking out already searched/sampled areas, all on the double, yet trying to be discreet, to minimize scuffles. At the same time, most were also tasked with sampling both water and air at those newly blackened out sectors.

  More morose than most because he couldn’t process ‘his’ samples, during the late evening rounds David decided he would sample less and concentrate his efforts in trying to find his missing piece of equipment instead. To that end, he started exploring a few ‘palafitos’ in a sector that, although very close to the coordinates where the submarine had surfaced, Tony had classed ‘AVOID’: a sector rife with pollution, where many palafitos lay abandoned, slowly rotting, not even being reclaimed by a nature in agony.

  In this veritable dead-zone, where the air was laden with stinking toxic fumes and the water iridescent with who knew what, David saw countless dead animals, a few half-mummified corpses, massive oil streaks, and unsightly foam pileups teeming with suspended polychrome gunk. Here and there, inflated like balloons by anaerobic bacteria, he also occasionally found human corpses as well. One ruptured, when he touched with an oar, making him retch. After vomiting, David promised himself never to try that again.

  After one too many failures, following a short tour of a particularly depressing cluster of dilapidated palafitos, getting ready to start the motor, David had stopped rowing. As he turned to pull the ignition coil, he suddenly realized there was light in the ‘palafito’ furthest from him. Moored to it, he also now noticed a camouflaged red boat that looked fairly recently painted—one he had initially mistaken for a trunk. Upon closer inspection, through a crack in the ragged burlap curtain, he also discovered his missing piece of equipment—still packaged exactly as he had left it in Los Angeles, a few days prior.

  That night, Catatumbo was lazy. One of the first glows of the night had shown him the red boat, another then helped him see a silhouette: someone in the part of the veranda right behind the stilt hut’s main entrance. It appeared to be some local young man; and, unless David’s imagination was tricking him, the young man seemed to have rested a shotgun against one of the wooden poles holding the palafito’s roof, to be able to hold an open magazine with his left hand, to be able to masturbate with the right one.

  David chuckled. Some watchman on the lookout!

  Cautiously, he checked the palafito and its surroundings, looking for other signs of human presence. Upon summary inspection, other than the increasingly aroused sentry, there seemed to be nobody nearby. Had David called using his emergency radio, at this distance, even single-mindedly and singlehandedly occupied as he was, the sentinel would have heard him. Even if he somehow managed to contact them without alerting the man in that palafito, stretched absurdly thin as Tony’s group were, by the time the others got there, the equipment might be gone or David forced to stop the man, and then risk damaging it during the struggle. No. He had to recover it, on his own, without delay.

  As stealthily as he could, hoping there would be no dogs or other spotters in another shack of the cluster, David got underneath the illuminated hut’s all-around veranda, tied his boat, climbed using the corner pole, and, after almost losing his grip twice in the mossy wood, slipped behind the man.

  When the watchman discovered David, he hesitated, briefly paralyzed by a mixture of embarrassment and rage. Against the backdrop of a lightning flash, David realized his challenger was a very young man, probably in his late teens, with his entire life ahead of him—and that, froze him for a moment, as well. But then, seeing an opportunity, the still half-aroused sentinel pulled an oversized machete, and swung it—so fast and clumsily he almost got an unintended sex change on the cheap. Seeing the flashing blade miss his shoulder by less than an inch jolted David back into survival mode. Remembering his training, David unsheathed his dagger, stopped a number of thrusts, dodged a few more, and, following a struggle during which both of them fell into the mucky toxic soup, was finally able to drown him.

  After letting go of the dead man, David climbed back to the palafito, and immediately went to check his precious piece of equipment. By candlelight he inspected the packaging, sighing with relief: it seemed very much intact. Only then he noticed he had a superficial but rather long cut on the left side of his body, a cut he had nothing to clean or dress with. Clearly, the best he could do now was to take his ‘gizmo’ and leave a.s.a.p.

  Preparing to do that, he overheard approaching voices: two other men had just arrived at the palafito, and were now almost at its front door. David looked for an escape route to the back, but found none. The windows had bars and their frames were still quite sturdy. The men probably hadn’t noticed his boat yet, but that wouldn’t matter if he got killed trying to escape. With only his dagger and the young man’s machete at hand, David came to regret not having grabbed that shotgun when he could. It probably was still at the back, rested against that pole, with the discolored porn magazine by its side. Regardless, it was now too late for second-guessing: it would be kill or be killed.

  One of the men lingered in the main room, protesting about something or other, while the other entered the back room, saw blood near the table where the equipment still sat, realized it had been moved, and then tried to call for help. Before he could, David caught him from behind, and covered the man’s mouth with his massive left hand, pressing his right elbow down and back against the man’s right shoulder. With the few rotten teeth he had left, the man bit his hand, furiously. Ignoring the pain, David kept firmly hand-gagging him and slit his throat with a very precise sweep of his dagger.

  While the man he had just slain was still falling to the floor in a pool of blood, the other one entered the room. This was an older man—ordinarily, not a physical match for David. However, between the long cut to his side, the ferocious bite to the left hand, the fatigue of the two previous struggles, and the ever worsening effects of having swallowed some pestilential toxic brew as he was drowning the horny sentinel, winning this third fight now looked like anything but a foregone conclusion.

  Fortunately for David, although the man was clearly high on stimulants and angry as a bagged cat in hell, he was also drunk as a skunk and wobbly as jelly during an earthquake. When he began fighting, his machete swerved clumsily, as if he were trying to make a sculpture out of a large block of air. His thrusts were erratic, jerky, missing impossibly good targets, constantly spitting, grunting, belching and farting, and almost falling as he slid in the pool of blood or stumbled on the corpse of the other man each time he missed a thrust. Eventually, tired of the show, David put him out of his misery, by sticking the young man’s machete into the older man’s stomach, all the way to the hilt. As he fell on the floor, the entire hilt vanished inside the old man’s belly, and he blew one posthumous fart.

  By then, David too had lost enough blood to get quite wobbly. Momentarily disoriented, he held on to a chair and then slapped his own face back and forth a few times, breathed deeply, and went back to the table to grab his precious piece of equipment.

  At that precise moment, a voice surged into the room—this time, from a battery-powered shortwave radio. A grumbly man, with a rather irritating voice, surrounded, it might seem, by a small crowd of thugs cheering and jeering in Bavarian accent-German, was telling the people in that palafito that he and his men were on their way there, to buy that ‘gringo’ equipment, insisting they’d better not sell it to anyone else, and promising they would be there in minutes.

  Very sure he must leave at once, David did.

  Sadly, no sooner had he began moving towards the exit on the front of the shack that the
room started swirling about him. Whether due to blood loss, the filthy water he had swallowed, or some fast spreading exotic infection jutting from the innards of the older man, he was now bonafide wobbly—too wobbly, too disoriented, and too tired to blame it on the fighting alone. The packaged equipment, which altogether probably weighed about fifty pounds or so, normally would have been a piece of cake for him to carry. Now, instead, David was barely able to lift it. Tottering and swerving, he almost accidentally dropped it.

  Even so, seeing the lights of approaching boats not that far away gave him a sort of providential second wind. Reasoning if it had been found by scavengers the bundle—which seemed perfectly intact—should float, he snagged his boat mooring rope with a long perch fitted with a hook—probably similarly used by the locals—, drove it as close as he could to the main door’s access ladder, dropped the bundle right beside it, making a supreme effort climbed on the boat, retrieved the equipment, deposited it on the bottom of his boat, covered it with the piece of tarp that had originally camouflaged the red boat, and started the motor—in such haste he almost forgot to cast off.

  Still disoriented, guided only by survival instincts, having no clue where he was going, he cranked the boat at full speed to get as far away as he could of the approaching lights. Hopefully, the cover provided by the palafitos between him and the thugs, and the initial confusion sure to follow their discovery of the butchery he’d left at the shack, would give him a leg up.

  He succeeded in putting some distance between his boat and those lights. But a little while later, like the lake itself, David’s mind started getting engulfed by a fast thickening haze. Trying to think, he shook his head hard. He must be hallucinating. For a moment, he’d thought he’d seen a familiar sight: a palafito with a few tacky lights, stilts painted pink, loud music, and quite a substantial lot of people in it, who clearly were seemingly having a jolly good time.

  How could such a place, in Lake Maracaibo of all places, look familiar? Or rather, why would that tavern, bordello, whatever that was, look familiar? Was he feverish, delusional? No! The picture! The picture Tony had shown him! ‘El Putafito’! The Queen? No! Not the Queen: the Empress! No! Not the Empress: ‘la Emperatriz’!

  What was it he had to say? First in English, then in Spanish—or was it the opposite? “If I say it wrong, they will feed me to the caimans,” he thought. “What is it? What is it, David? What the fuck is it I have to say?” he asked himself in loud voice, shaking his head.

  Ready to vomit, tasting blood and rot, and feeling excruciating pain on his left flank, he slapped his face again, twice. Only then, somehow, as if from a sanity reservoir suddenly illuminating his mind, came Tony’s voice, saying, like an echo: “‘Quiero ver a la Emperatriz, de parte de su primo Antonio.’ They will probably ask you to wait, go in, and come back to now ask you what is it you want. To that you will reply: ‘Antonio wanted me to convey his blessings to the Empress by express post.’ Can you memorize that?”

  Having little left to lose, he made a bag of the tarp to carry the equipment, grabbed the bundle with both hands, climbed the stairs dragging his precious cargo, knocked on the door, was asked something he didn’t understand, said nothing, and promptly got the door slammed in his face by someone. Undaunted, he knocked again, harder this time. Now, this monster of a person, taller than David by two inches or so, only dressed like Dame Edna for the Royal Jubilee, came out, glowered at him, and, in a voice to make ‘El Putafito’ shake to its underwater foundations, asked him, even less diplomatically, what in hell he wanted.

  Fortunately, this time David came out of his torpor, recalled the sequence, and instead of a slammed door got a more or less polite request to wait. Minutes later, the same muscular mass dressed in feathers and sequins, the same who had been so threatening on first contact, was now carrying him, semiconscious—yet, still obstinately clinging to his tarpaulin bag—to a back room. There, another similarly dressed, even taller, and more muscled version—of Carmen Miranda this time—pointed toward a bed. As the doorperson was depositing David precisely there, he suddenly let go of the tarp and lost consciousness.

  When he woke up, ‘la Emperatriz’ had him half-cleansed and bandaged, and was injecting him with penicillin—Russian penicillin, sterile saline, disposable syringe, and needles—while someone else was still washing his face with a solution that smelled unmistakably antiseptic.

  Noticing he had come back, the two drag queens helped David sit on the bed, propping him with a few dilapidated cushions. “Hello, little bird. Good thing you were sent by Antonio. Otherwise, you’ll be dead by now. We hid your boat. Boarding and lodging will be extra, but we’ll keep you hidden until Tony drops by. Since here syphilis is rampant and you seem to have an infection, I injected you on both cheeks. Hope you’re not allergic to it. Some Nazis came here looking for you. We sent them off to the Russian section. Maybe they will kill them there. But I don’t know if they will come back. If they survive and find out we duped them, we always have our Kalashnikovs ready, locked and loaded, just in case.

  So, don’t worry. Try to recover, little bird. Your fancy toy in the tarp is here, right beside you. I guess it’s like a teddy bear to you. Also, worry not: nobody is going to rape you either—unless you want them to, that is. Just so you know, there were a few volunteers who came to ask.” That entire avalanche of words fell from the Empress’ mouth before David could interpose even one sound, burying him alive in suffocating confusion.

  So he waited a few seconds, looking at the Empress’ fluorescent lips to make sure they weren’t moving, took a breath, and prepared to start asking questions. However, right at that very moment, a shootout, to make any modern urban warfare movie seem subdued, exploded outside—followed, immediately after, by a storm of screaming and howling highly suggestive of mass flailings at Ancient Rome’s Coliseum. As the shooting and beastly howling seemed both to get more intense and closer and closer to David’s room, an entire army of drag queens took defensive positions and started sweeping ‘El Putafito’s surroundings with machinegun fire, some throwing a few grenades and, one of them, not only grenades but also poisoned arrows.

  Caught unawares by this maelstrom of explosions, shots and insults, David had to get closer to the window to see what was going on. Pushing hard with both elbows he was trying to raise from the bed and about to clamp on a handle on his way to study the battleground, when someone shrieked: “RPG! RPG!” Like a child throwing a ragdoll, the Empress pushed him back on the bed. Then everyone ducked, except one of the towering drag queens, who growled, in a powerful tenor voice: “No, no, no, muñeco!” and, in rapid succession, shot the rocket making it blow up in mid-air, killed the RPG-shooter, and, a split second after, something else; something that exploded as if an M183 demolition charge assembly had just gone off—following which, the boat, who sure was carrying a lot of ordnance onboard, violently detonated, splitting in half, high above the water surface.

  At about that same time, a few neo-Nazis began climbing to ‘El Putafito’, only to be rapidly decapitated by combat drag queens wielding daggers, machetes, and katanas with proficiency comparable to that of seasoned Special Forces’ commandos. Following a very short hiatus, there was even more cursing, and howling, and growling, and machine gun fire, another explosion—and then, a sudden, sepulchral silence.

  After a few moments of calm, David finally was able to check the surroundings through some of the high-caliber bullet holes on the walls. From above, Catatumbo lightning and boat pieces still on fire now illuminated a Dantean scene of carnage. Many floating corpses, though headless and armless, were writhing and jerking and bobbing and splattering—clear sign a small armada of fish and caimans had arrived to claim their dues. Clearly, in this less heavily polluted part of the lake, the smell and taste of blood immediately got the local fauna’s undivided attention.

  “Nothing gets wasted in the lake!” joked the Empress showing David the massacre, as ‘she’ played with one of his unbelievably long gol
den nails. “Seems Tony has sent the cavalry to rescue you—and, indeed, little bird, you deserve it: you have a nice round ass. For that reason alone, I will give you a discount on your boarding and lodging. Seems you also brought a bit of a bounty to us.”

  “A…what?” asked David.

  “Let me explain. I usually don’t give a fuck about anything other than customers who try to leave without paying in full—but, I wanna know: Why do all these hands my people that collected during the attack have these matching rings on them?” said the ‘Empress’ opening a bag with at least a dozen severed hands. “Are they ‘sisters’? I think not…?”

  Shaking his head, David jerked his face away from the pile and grimaced in disgust. “The symbol in those rings is the Valknut, the emblem of Neo-Nazi pagans, supposedly worshipers of Wotan, better known as Odin,” he said, holding his nose.

  “Oh, so Thor was a Neo-Nazi too? I’m sure he has a nice hammer!” the ‘Empress’ chuckled, winking at David.

  “That I don’t know. But these sure as fuck want to trigger Ragnarokk—like some zealots want to bring about the End of the Days. They think when the Rapture happens they will take the elevator upstairs—after they hated and starved and damned and exploited and judged and insulted enough people, just to prove how just and loving they are. What else, right?” he commented, twirling his index around his right ear.