A quick look around the deck told him the battle was over. All of the Kaiju Spawn were dead. Their bodies scattered about, pools of the blackish goo that passed for their blood growing around them. Robertson’s body rested on the deck only a few yards away from where Steve stood. One of the Kaiju Spawn, with a gaping exit wound in its back, lay on top of him.
Steve ran to Jenkins’s corpse and snagged the dead man’s P-90, hurriedly checking its magazine. His rational mind knew that all of the Kaiju Spawn were dead, but his nerves hadn’t caught up with it yet. Besides, having a weapon was better than not having in a world where things like Kaiju Spawn existed.
What to do now was the question Steve was faced with. He was alone and that scared the crap out of him. The Night Walker had all the supplies he could ask for and then some aboard it but he didn’t honestly know if he could stand to remain on the ship by himself.
Steve walked to the edge of the Night Walker’s main deck and saw that the yacht the Kaiju Spawn had somehow managed to use to board her was drifting away. It was proof the monsters were learning, evolving in their own fashion. Sooner or later, more of them would find the Night Walker and when they did, everything would be over. That was a concern for tomorrow. Right now, he had bodies to dump overboard…and a dire need to get so drunk that he couldn’t see straight anymore.
BAND OF SOULS
C.M. Saunders
The light from the full moon shone brightly, slicing through the midnight blackness, and reflecting mirror-like off the gently rippling surface of the sea. Although chilly, it was a beautiful night. The kind of night that never failed to make the old man fully appreciate the surreal, enigmatic, and somehow mysterious beauty of the sea.
He stood on the deck of the tiny fishing boat, leaning against the rusty guardrail, and looking across at the twinkling lights of a nearby coastal village. Lighting a cigarette, the man watched as the gray smoke was carried away effortlessly on the salty breeze. He liked being alone on his boat. Fishing was just an excuse, for he very rarely tried to catch anything, he simply enjoyed the solitude. He never strayed too far from the coastline however; he was no sailor. Just far enough to get away from it all.
Placing the cigarette between cracked lips, he shuddered as a light, but icy cold northern breeze blew through him. Without warning, his battered and weary train of thought abruptly stopped, turned, and started chugging slowly back down the familiar and well-worn set of tracks stretching into his dim and murky past. The past he would never allow himself to forget.
The old man had been born into a poor family, had scraped and struggled his way through a lifetime of adversity, and was soon going to die poor. Though not as poor as some, he was quick to remind himself. At least he had a roof over his head and a plentiful supply of food in the cupboard. He should be grateful. It was an unfair, and sometimes cruel world, he mused. Where the rich prospered the poor kept on getting poorer. A resigned sigh escaped him as he surveyed the dazzling array of stars overhead, comparing it to the false neon glow of the nearby village.
He was well into the winter of his life now, the final chapter. He looked upon life as a tenuous ordeal, a little like climbing a huge mountain, overcoming numerous obstacles and pitfalls along the way, then looking down from the summit and seeing a lifetime of hardship and labor with nothing to show except the view.
Inevitably, his thoughts turned to children and his own childhood. As a small boy he had been like a ball of snow: Innocent, pure and uncorrupted. But as he progressed through childhood and into the reaches of adulthood, it seemed as if he had been molded and manipulated by countless pairs of hands, violated and corrupted until nothing much remained of the oh-so-delicate snowball. He had been shaped and squeezed dry by all those around him and then discarded, his purpose fulfilled. Here he stood at the pinnacle of life, feeling wasted, cheated and used.
He was powerless to prevent them as a wealth of nostalgic memories flooded his head, pushing at the weakened boundaries of his tired mind. He was burdened with many regrets, but one in particular haunted him like no other. Children. Or rather, the lack of them. He was an unhappy, bitter old man, but above all, he was lonely. So lonely that sometimes, when sleep eluded him, he lay alone in the empty darkness and thought about dying. During the nights when the arthritis was especially bad, and he lay crumpled under the sheets writhing in agony as white-hot splinters of pain seared through every joint in his frail body, he would even welcome it. Death was looking more and more like a means of escape rather than something to run from, and that worried him. It worried him a lot.
The man’s fragile frame was racked by a deep, retching cough. An unhealthy cough. He gagged and spat over the railing, and after a moment’s thought, pitched the half-smoked cigarette in after it. Only then did he notice a faint knocking against the side of the boat. A brittle, yet rhythmic tapping, keeping time with the waves that gently lapped around the tiny vessel. Curiosity forced him to peer overboard into the cold, dark water surrounding him. In the silver moonlight, he could easily distinguish a small object bobbing up and down with the current and gently bumping against the side of the boat.
The movement of the object was almost hypnotic and as he watched, transfixed, the old man's thoughts turned to pollution. It was funny how his mind worked nowadays. Not so much as a TRAIN of thought as a mad fairground ride of incoherent thoughts and notions, veering sharply this way and that, steaming through one subject into another. The old man had given up trying to control it and was resigned to being little more than a passenger on some wild, demented ride.
He had to struggle just to focus on anything, let alone concentrate. Pollution? Where did that come from?
The sight of the flotsam probably. Just one more insignificant piece of litter to add to the eternal cesspool of the sea, which had been poisoned so badly, so completely, that it now resembled a gigantic festering toilet. Generations of ignorance were to blame, and it was now far too late to start preaching the gospel about pollution. The tipping point had come, and now it was too late for change. People had known the dangers, known the risks, for decades, but persisted to systematically destroy the environment, our life-support system. This piece of floating debris was just one of many millions such despicable items that filled every sea and ocean in the world.
Or was it? Another new idea, until now silently lurking in the ever-expanding shadows of his mind, thrust itself forward for its moment in the limelight. This item wasn't just rubbish. It was unique, special. He didn't know how he knew. He had stopped asking 'why' a long time ago, and now he just went with the flow.
He wanted it, whatever it was. He wanted it so badly that before he could reason with himself, he was down on his hands and knees, stretching out one withered arm as the rest of his body howled in protest. Frustratingly, the object bobbed just beyond his reach.
The old man leaned further, balancing precariously on the smooth wooden deck and clinging to the safety rail with his other hand. He could slip at any moment, lose his grip, or the old metal rail could simply give out, but the old man didn't care. From this new vantage point, he could identify the strange object, though at first he chose not to believe it. It was a bottle, of all things. Not the modern, plastic kind, but the old-fashioned, heavy glass variety.
Even as he considered the possible implications of his find, he smiled triumphantly to himself as his gnarled fingers closed around the cold, clammy neck of the bottle. Gingerly, he got back on his feet.
Why? Why did he just risk slipping or losing his balance and falling overboard into a certain watery grave for the sake of a discarded bottle? A piece of rubbish. Standing motionless with a puzzled frown on his face, the old man searched through his muddled and confused mind for a plausible answer but found none. All he knew was that the bottle was somehow special, valuable perhaps. It seemed to call him, implore him to rescue it from the watery depths.
His suspicions were compounded when he finally looked down at the bottle he held. There was something
in it. Something small and white. It looked like a folded piece of paper, a message perhaps?
He could barely contain his excitement. A message in a bottle! It was the kind of thing books were written about. Images of one-eyed pirates and long lost buried treasure surged through his head, fueling his growing excitement. Then his mental roller coaster took another of its unscheduled little detours, and thoughts of a different nature began to surface. Young school children sealing their names and addresses in bottles and, spurred on by thoughtless, uncaring teachers, launching them into the already litter-infested North Sea with the half-baked notion of contacting people in Oslo or some other faraway place in the name of a school project.
Whatever the case, the rational side of his mind chipped in, there's only one way to find out.
As gray mist began to settle outside, he carefully carried his find into the cramped, dimly lit cabin to study it more closely. It certainly was an old glass bottle, not the common cheap plastic variety. Maybe an antique. A sturdy cork had been rammed into the neck, which had then been dipped in hot wax. Somebody, somewhere, had obviously gone to a lot of trouble to preserve the contents of the bottle and keep it away from the ravaging sea.
This fact spoke volumes to the cynical old man. It couldn't simply be a children's prank, or even a school project, kids were far too lazy these days to go to such lengths, much preferring to spend endless hours watching television, allowing their young and impressionable minds to turn into useless fleshy masses. There had been no such thing as television when he was a boy, and as a result, he always seemed to be doing something worthwhile with his time, always active. Without doubt, television was one of the pitfalls of modern life. A shameless device, which rotted the brain and devoured huge chunks of the most precious commodity of all…time.
He stood the bottle on the small, but sturdy, oak table in the cabin, and pulled up the rickety old kitchen chair on which he sometimes sat to ease the flaring pain in his joints and aching back. Leaning forward, he clasped his gnarled hands together between his knees and rubbed them together vigorously in order to restore some feeling. The bottle stood to attention on the table as he squinted at it warily. Judging by the style and overall appearance, it was obviously very old, but strangely unmarked by its time spent floating amid the murky depths. It was slightly scuffed and scratched, but otherwise in perfect condition.
Picking the bottle up again, he tried twisting the cork to break the seal. It didn't move. Undaunted, he twisted the cork again, harder this time, bolts of pain shot through his arthritic fingers, but he carried on regardless, eager to uncover the secret of the bottle. He twisted and strained until his face was a deep purple and veins stood out on his forehead, but eventually the combination of sickening pain, shortness of breath, and sheer exertion forced him to stop.
Moments later, as he sat in the decrepit wooden chair still gasping for breath and nursing the bottle protectively in his arms, the strangest feeling overwhelmed him. The bottle belonged in the water. He should throw it back immediately or face severe consequences. The notion was so strong that it banished all seeds of doubt from his mind. This was something way over his head. Something he could never hope to understand. He should not be involved. He instinctively knew that whatever he had stumbled across was far more sinister than a simple school project.
It was more than his troubled mind was able to comprehend. His out-of-control mental roller coaster ducked, dived, and took another unexpected turn, leaving him confused and disorientated. Half-remembered images from old horror movies flickered inside his head along with fragmented memories of eerie ghost stories read as a teenager during the Second World War as the bombs crashed and the fires of destruction burned through the night.
GET RID OF IT!
This interfering voice was so strong, so commanding. A low, primal voice urging him to forget the whole idea and just return the damned thing from whence it came before it was too late. There was something strange and faintly absurd about the whole situation, finding the fabled message in a bottle for Christ's sake. It was so unlikely and so unreal, it simply did not happen. Not in real life anyway.
Which was all the more reason to open it. What possible harm could it do? It was only an old glass bottle with a scrap of paper inside. He had to know what secrets the bottle was hiding from him. Besides, even if it was dangerous in some obscure way, he would rather regret something that he had done than something he wished he had. Throwing the bottle back for somebody else to claim was out of the question.
The old mantra curiosity killed the cat suddenly appeared from nowhere in the rancid stew of the man’s brain with such power and clarity that he actually spoke the words out loud then looked around, startled by the sound of his own voice. The phrase now held a dark, chilling undertone, and he found himself wondering about the origins of such a disturbing yet popular saying.
His heart was beating fast, and he was still trying to catch his breath following the exertions of the last few minutes. His heart beat faster still when he realized that inexplicably, he held in his right hand the comically over-sized wooden mallet, which he kept on the boat for odd jobs.
Despite the biting chill in the night air, the old man's face and torso were covered in a greasy film of sweat. Now his heart positively hammered away inside his chest cavity, making his head ache, and his hands shake. Momentarily, he actually feared a heart attack. This could be the end right here, alone on his pathetic little boat clutching a mallet and an old bottle. For some reason, the thought struck him as funny, and for the first time in weeks, he chuckled softly. The overriding emotion, however, was one of luckless despair. If he died now, he would never know. The bottle would have won.
The chuckling stopped when he realized what the mallet was intended for. While he had been preoccupied with playing psychological power games with himself, embroiled in what seemed at the time a fair and democratic fight for supremacy, he had obviously failed to even consider what was probably the voice of reason. His mind had already been made up, though he hadn't even noticed in all the excitement. Apparently, he had decided to smash the bottle some considerable time ago, then spent more time locating the mallet, which could have been anywhere. The ensuing private argument had been nothing more than a smoke screen to distract him from the business at hand.
As his mind had already been made up, thereby avoiding any tricky decision making, the old man decided to go with it. He lifted the mallet high above his head, held his breath, then brought the heavy instrument crashing down. The bottle was an easy target even for a man of his age and stature. It disintegrated under the considerable force of the blow with a loud "pop", showering fragments of twinkling glass onto the wooden floorboards around his feet.
Most of the remains of the bottle lay scattered on the unsteady table before him, and sure enough, amidst the sparkling debris lay a folded piece of yellowed paper. The message. Now, at last, he was going to discover whatever dark secret the bottle had been keeping. Mindful of the sharp splinters of glass the man gleefully snatched up the message, tongue protruding rudely from the corner of his mouth in a child-like gesture of triumph.
It wasn't paper exactly, more like some kind of thick parchment. As he eagerly unfolded it, the man thought of ways in which the message could change his empty life for the better. It had to be money, had to be. At the very least, he could perhaps sell the thing to a museum or something. Maybe he could even repair the smashed bottle, or find a suitable replacement in a junk shop somewhere. Money was the route to happiness in this day and age, love was a dated cliché that had nothing to do with it. He had been in love once though, a long time ago, but dear Alice had died and left him alone in this cruel, heartless world. A world, which he couldn't fully understand and could play no real part in. At best, he was an unwilling spectator, doomed to watch from the shadows as other people lived their lives. He no longer had any family or close friends to speak of, and the only people who ever visited were those who had to in the course of
their work—social workers, home help.
But all that was soon going to change. From this day on, nothing would be the same. He was convinced of it. He could hardly contain his excitement when he thought about the plethora of opportunity that would surely be heading his way.
Reading the message proved to be the hardest task of all because the almost unintelligible spidery scrawl had faded considerably with age. Even so, the old man was captivated.
To the Finder,
I have to be quick, they are coming for me now. I cannot go without first telling my story, the truth must be known so whoever you are, spread the word - Death is not the end, somehow we go on. Though I am not sure whether this is a blessing or a curse. I shall explain: Myself and my good friend Jonathan Campbell left Southampton dock on the day of November 10th, 1879, aboard the good vessel Christina. The night on which we left, there was a terrible storm that took everyone by surprise, and by the time it cleared most of our instruments were damaged beyond repair and worse, we were hopelessly lost. We had supplies for only a few days, and so all we could do was pray to be rescued.
Fearful Fathoms: Collected Tales of Aquatic Terror (Vol. I - Seas & Oceans) Page 30