Cam - 03 - The Moonpool

by P. T. Deutermann

  The snake wasn’t coiling, which surprised me. It lay full-length-out on the floor of the container in a big serpentine arc, that flat bone-white head maybe ten feet away, watching all three of us. At the moment, its six meters looked like six miles. Wearing two German shepherds, I backed against the front wall of the container, and aimed the SIG at the thickest part of the snake’s body. I recognized the smell now as the scent I’d picked up on the boat. Jungle smell, something rotting and hideously primitive. The tongue never stopped.

  “She’ll go for the dogs, not you,” he said. “Unless you interfere, of course. But it’ll be a fairer fight than if you were, say, doing this in the swamp. See the tail? Nothing for her to hold on to down there. They need to anchor that tail to really throw coils.”

  “I’m going to shoot this fucker, starting right now,” I said.

  “Only if you can see her, Lieutenant,” he said. And then the overhead lights all went out. Almost immediately I heard that flowing-grain sound. I dropped the cell phone and nearly fired, but realized in time that that would be pointless. The penlight. Where was that goddamned penlight?

  Both dogs began to growl deep in their chests as I fished for it in my pockets.

  More sliding sounds, and that primordial stink was getting more pronounced.

  My fingers closed in on the plastic light, and I popped it out of my shirt pocket. Tactical instinct took over as I held the light in my left hand, way out to one side, and pointed the SIG into the darkness. I switched it on.

  No snake.

  The light seemed a tiny bit brighter than it had been; maybe the battery had rested, or maybe it was just because the darkness was damned near absolute.

  Where was the snake?

  I scanned the floor of the container in an arc right in front of us, then sensed something looming to my right.

  To my right, and up, not on the floor. I could feel the shepherds pressing harder against my legs.

  I swept the light over there and found myself looking into that white snake face, which was no more than three feet away. The snake had lifted its forebody on its coils like a cobra, which still left about a half mile of snake on the floor behind it. Without thinking, I fired a round at that face.

  The noise was terrific, a painful bang that hurt my ears and startled me into almost dropping the SIG. I felt the snap of the bullet as it smashed into the steel wall right behind my head, after clearly missing the snake altogether and then ricocheting around the container. Then something leathery and heavy whacked the side of my head as the snake finally struck, missing my face but ending up with its neck alongside mine for a single horrifying instant before it withdrew.

  I lunged to the left before it could strike again and tripped over one of the dogs. We all ended up on the floor in a heap of scrambling legs. I still had the penlight but didn’t stop to relocate the snake. I yelled at the dogs to come and bolted for the other end of the container, flying blind along one slippery side until I came up against the back corner of the can. The dogs were still with me, trying hard to get behind me in the corner.

  I pointed the tiny light out into the darkness of the container and listened. Then I realized I was providing a target and quickly shut it off. I didn’t know if a python could see well in the conventional sense or if, like a pit viper, it tracked by infrared. Either way, I didn’t want to help it find us.

  I heard the sliding sound again. It was a huge snake, probably a couple of hundred pounds, and it was making no effort to be quiet. I pointed the SIG out into the darkness and tried to control my breathing, subconsciously aware that breathing was what the snake intended to attack. One of the shepherds growled and then barked. I again held the light out to one side and flicked it on. The snake was right in front of us, head low and flat above the floor, shifting sideways. Two huge coils of its trunklike body were rising behind it as it prepared to throw a hundred pounds or so of hungry muscle at one of us.

  I fired again, twice this time, aiming at the body. I hit it once, and possibly both times. The coils collapsed on the floor with a sodden thump, but this time that head came up, way up, rising almost to the top of the container as the beast arched in response to the trauma to its body. I rolled to the right, keeping the light on the snake, the dogs tumbling with me. We collided with the other side and then scrambled all the way down to the door end. The penlight could no longer reach across the container, so I shut it off.

  We listened.

  I tried to tamp down my own heavy breathing. The shepherds were better at that than I was and didn’t make a sound, although I could feel their hearts going a hundred miles an hour. Like mine.

  I knew I hadn’t killed the thing. Primitive animals, Trask had called them. Like a dinosaur—hit it in the ass and it took a few minutes for the impact to register all the way up in the brain. But then, look out.

  Sliding sounds again . . . and then a chilling, prolonged hiss, followed by the reek of primordial ooze that seemed to hang over this reptile. I had no sense of where that hiss had come from, other than it wasn’t behind me. I looked up and thought I saw a small red square at the top of my line of vision. Then I remembered there had been what looked like a glass window up there. Was Trask watching, using night vision gear? Watching, and possibly even filming? Like Hitler when he had his rebellious generals hung on meat hooks in the basement of the supreme court building in Berlin?

  That thought pissed me off. I raised the SIG and took careful aim at that dim red square and fired one round. When I can shoot carefully, I’m going to hit what I aim at, and this time no bullet came spanging back at me from the other end of the container.

  Then the snake hit. I felt a hammer blow on my raised forearm, a sharp pain as several dozen backward-curving teeth sank into my arm, and then I was being buried under the satin coils of an infuriated python. I distantly heard the dogs get into it, with lots of savage growling and snapping, but I was too busy to wonder what they might be accomplishing. I crumpled into as round a ball as I could and switched the gun from my right hand to my left just before the snake pulled hard and took my forearm straight out away from my body. Before I could react or retract it, it had pushed a coil completely over me and now had a partial grip on my chest, a grip that instantly tightened.

  But my left hand was still free.

  And the snake’s head was not free, attached as it was to my right arm. I knew there was only one way to end this.

  I turned sideways, to my right. Instantly the snake increased the pressure and I felt my ribs starting to compress. I couldn’t see anything, but actually didn’t want to. I pressed the muzzle of the .45 against the snake’s head and fired.

  The first thing that happened was that the damned thing gripped even tighter. I could exhale, but I could not inhale. The gun was still pressed against something. Just before I fired again, I realized it was pressed against my arm. The area where the teeth were embedded had gone numb, but I moved the barrel slightly, found what I prayed was the head, and fired again.

  This time I felt a lance of pain—the bullet must have grazed or even penetrated my own arm. Then the snake really constricted. I saw a red cloud coming toward me through the darkness, and I went out. The last thing I heard was another one of those hideous hisses and the roar of the shepherds as they attacked the snake in total darkness.

  I could breathe.

  I couldn’t move, couldn’t see, but I could breathe. I could hear.

  The shepherds were whimpering and tugging at my legs, but I was wrapped in what felt like a ton of slippery muscle meat.

  Slippery. Contrary to popular opinion, snakes aren’t slippery, so I’d done some damage with those two body shots. And the fact that I could breathe meant that I’d done some real damage with the head shots. Now the problem was to get out from under before the damned thing stiffened up and pinned me here forever.

  I backed the dogs off and started to wriggle my way out from under a mile or so of dead coil. At one point the head flopped down into
my hands. It was a satisfyingly soggy mess. I fished out the penlight. I had to see.

  Bad idea.

  The top of the snake’s head was ruptured; the bottom was gone, with the lower jaw unhinged and gaping open large enough to accommodate a soccer ball. Its eyes looked no different dead than alive. I felt the coils moving slightly. My bowels constricted.

  Was it dead, or just getting its second wind?

  Then I examined the head and realized it had to be dead. Had to be.

  Primitive creature. The head was dead, but the snake’s body hadn’t got the memo yet.

  Frick stuck her face into mine. You coming, or are we going to eat it?

  I slipped out from under the mess in one quick move and took a deep breath, which hurt like hell. All my ribs felt like they’d been cracked, and even my innards felt like they’d been repacked inside.

  The penlight was failing fast, but I still took one more look back at the huge snake, just to make damned sure it hadn’t revived. It was still there, leaking copious amounts of nasty fluids onto the container floor, its massive coils still moving. I turned off the light. The darkness was almost comforting, now that I knew there wasn’t a Pleistocene worm monster coming for me. My right arm was starting to hurt. I was glad I hadn’t wasted any flashlight on the wound. Besides, we had bigger troubles than that right now.

  I checked the SIG. The slide was locked back. I extracted the spare mag from my belt and fed my friend. Then I realized I could see. Sort of, anyway. I looked up. The little red square up high at the other end was now a little white square.

  Had Trask been watching our wrestling match down here in the box? I hoped he had, because that soft white light meant that night vision equipment was no longer running. With any luck, I’d parked one in his eye and he was no longer running, either, but that was probably too much to hope for. Right now we had to get out of here.

  The small viewing aperture put just enough light along the ceiling for me to finally see the crack. The front third of the upper container’s floor had dropped down to form the ramp. When my weight had come off, it had rotated on spring hinges back up into position, which meant there had to be a latch. The problem was that the ceiling was almost nine feet high. I couldn’t reach it, and thus I couldn’t use my knife to probe the crack and find that latch.

  I looked around for the shepherds, and found them cautiously sniffing the snake’s almost inert body. My ribs hurt just looking at that thing, and I still hadn’t pulled back my shirtsleeve to see how big a mess I had there. I needed to get something antibiotic on it pretty soon, though, or the snake would have lost the battle and won the war.

  The SIG. I could reach the ceiling with the SIG.

  Now the question became: Was it a center latch or a side latch? I’d walked right down the middle of the container and hadn’t detected any sagging or lack of support under my feet. I voted for center latch.

  “Cover your ears, mutts,” I said. I lay down on the floor, holding the gun up with both hands. I fired directly up into the crack on what I hoped was the centerline of the container. Once again, the noise was really startling. I missed the crack by about an inch the first time, steadied my grip, hit it with the second round, and then bracketed that with the next two rounds. The dogs were cowering in one corner, and the space was filling up with gunsmoke. There was a ragged hole of shattered plywood in the middle of the ceiling, and my face was covered with bits of wood. I rubbed the debris off my face and felt a scrape of metal on my cheek. The latch?

  I rolled to my feet and got out my utility knife. My right forearm was beginning to throb now, and my ears were ringing. Fortunately I still had that tiny square of white light, or I’d never have been able to find the crack, much less the latch. I held up my right hand and, yes, there were tiny bits of metal on my hand. I examined the crack, but it hadn’t opened or changed shape. Center latch and side latches? Or maybe it just needed some weight.

  I squatted up and down on my haunches a couple of times to limber up my thigh muscles. Then, pointing the knife straight up, I thrust my whole body, right arm rigidly extended, up at the ceiling as hard as I could. I jammed the serrated point of the knife into the plywood and held on as I fell back down to the floor. I felt burning lines of pain running up and down my right arm.

  The plywood held and the knife came back down with me, showering me with more wood bits.

  I tried again, with the same results, except this time I felt the plywood move just a little. I rested for a minute, and then took another stab at it, moving the aim point to one side of where I thought the latch should be. Definite movement, but apparently there was enough of the latch still there to hold the ramp. I got out the SIG again and used up two more rounds in the center of the hole already there. It was getting hard to breathe with all the smoke.

  I rested again for a minute or so and talked to the dogs. Their sensitive ears wouldn’t work for a week after this. Neither would mine, probably. I was really thirsty and beginning to wonder if we were ever going to get out of here. I kept hoping Pardee had recovered and was probing the boxes outside looking for the source of all the gunfire. Unfortunately, I was eight feet or more below ground level. If the upper box doors were closed, he could be right outside and unable to hear anything.

  I stared up at the mess on the ceiling. If I’d learned anything in my life, it was that persistence was everything if you were in a jam. Maybe if I could use the knife to pry the seam down and get a hand in there, I might be able to hang, dead weight this time, and pull the whole thing down with just my body weight. The thought of jamming my unprotected fingers into the splintered hole up there made me wince, but I had to try something. The air was filling with CO2 and there was no air supply that I could see except for the snake hole. The shepherds were lying down and panting heavily.

  I put away the SIG, stretched my thigh muscles again, and tried my previous trick of jamming the knife. This time the center of the plywood panel bellied out a little, but it didn’t come down before the knife pulled out again. So I took a deep breath, moved forward a few inches, and jumped again, jabbing at the crack with the knife in my right hand while grabbing for a fingerhold with my left. It would have worked except for the fact that my left arm, injured in a tussle with a mountain lion a few years back, let me down, literally. So I switched hands—the knife in my left hand and my right hand going for the gold.

  It hurt. Splinters under the fingernails always do. But I managed to get four fingers jammed into that crack tight enough that I could hang there, extract the knife, and then jam it into the crack and turn it sideways.

  Now I had two handholds. The one on the left hurt my upper arm, but the one on the right made my fingers feel like they were on fire. I began to bounce, trying to set up a rhythmic pull on that panel, and finally, with a loud tearing noise, down it came. It happened so unexpectedly that I forgot to hold on, and back it went, slapping into the ceiling with a mocking crack as I tumbled down onto the floor. My snakebite reminded me that it was still there.

  I yelled in frustration, but then noticed that the whole panel was drooping an inch or so below the ceiling above. No more latch, so its own weight was working for me this time. One more straight-arm knife jump and I was able to pull it down to face level and, this time, hold on to the damned thing. The air became instantly fresher. I stared up into perfect darkness, though. No lighted aperture in the upper container. Who cared.

  Using the knife in a series of sticks, I pulled myself up the ramp and to the base of the exterior doors. The dogs tried to follow but couldn’t gain any traction. I told them to hang on and went looking for those latch plates Houston of the ICE had told me about. I had to do it all by feel, and then remembered the penlight. It still had a tiny spark of power left, and this allowed me to find the safety release lever. I pulled that, and the sockets for the locking lugs came off.

  I pushed on the door in front of me. The bottom moved; the top did not. Persistence, I reminded myself. Almost there. A f
ew more minutes of humping and thumping and I found and released the top latches. Now: Were they locked from the outside or just shut? Time to find out.

  This time when I pushed, and to my vast relief, the door opened, and I rolled out onto the dirt of the junkyard path. I looked around for bad guys, but it was just me in the semidarkness. The fresh air felt wonderful, but the shepherds became frantic when I rolled out of sight, so I went back to the container doorway to reassure them—and found that the ramp, with my weight gone, had come back up, leaving them in their subterranean prison. They were audibly not pleased with that result.

  It took another fifteen minutes of wedging and hauling to get them out of there, and their frantic efforts to “help” had just the opposite effect. I swore at them, and they undoubtedly returned the favor, but finally all three of us were outside the dreaded snake pit and gratefully breathing in the smells of rotting junkyard debris, diesel oil, rust, and ancient grease. It smelled wonderful.

  Now to find Pardee. And that bastard Trask.

  Ari Quartermain joined me in the ER at a little past one in the morning. He looked like he hadn’t been to bed in a couple of days, and that gray tinge I usually associated with cardiology patients was back in his face. I was sporting a bandage the full length of my right forearm and several new injection puncture wounds from an enthusiastic if not very competent male nurse.

  The ER docs had been visibly disturbed when they saw the scale of the teeth marks on my forearm. It was obvious to anyone who looked at them that I’d been bitten by at least an alligator, except for the fact that the individual tooth marks were much too small, and far too numerous. The .45 had laid down a quarter-inch-deep gouge right through the middle of the bite area, but none of the docs had picked up on the fact that it was a bullet wound. That, in turn, meant no police report was necessary. For the moment, anyway; one of the docs had mentioned he was studying to be a tropical medicine specialist and wanted to talk to me later. I mumbled some promises I didn’t intend to keep and then closed my eyes and gritted my teeth as he tended to the wound with some kind of liquid fire.