Dead Easy

by Mark William Simmons

  As if cued by my words, Zotz eased back on the throttles and the fishfinders eeped indicating "shallow bottom" beneath the hull.

  "You don't understand. I'm not a bad person! Your son would have wanted for nothing. More importantly, he would have been safe!"

  I had no doubts that she believed her own words. The Fey Folk had been stealing human children for so many centuries it was inevitable that they would become invested in self and racial justification. "No, you don't understand," I snapped, knowing an argument was pointless. "I wouldn't care if you were Mary Frick'n Poppins: my boy already has a family. I've already kicked enough werewolf ass on this subject to open my own kennel club. What makes you think a couple of fairies and their Celtic cabana boy are going to make a difference?"

  She shook her head and held her hands out. "Please, I do not wish to argue. You have saved my life. I willingly swear fealty now to you and yours. I acknowledge the wrongs I have done you in my single-minded quest to bring your son under my protection. It is now my wish to expand that protection to cover you, as well."

  Yeah. I was just getting ready to say how the best protection she could offer was from herself. I opened my mouth to say words to that effect when Liban and Suki entered the salon.

  Let me be more specific.

  An explosion of glass marked their entrance as a wave of tapioca pudding hurtled them through the sliding doors at the front of the cabin. The lamp disappeared into the seething tarry mass and the room was plunged into darkness.

  I immediately shifted over to infravision but found I was having trouble with detail on the infrared wavelengths. There was a competing light source in the cabin. Setanta was all big and yellowy as he thrashed about. Fand and Liban were nearly violet, a shade of heat signature I'd never seen before but then I'd never trafficked with elves. Suki was too cold to be visible yet there she was, faintly revealed in a pale green light.

  It wasn't her body temperature lighting her up, however, but the reflected glow from the pudding, itself! It seethed across the floor like a living carpet of bubbles, a giant amoeba that glowed as if lit from within by hundreds of green and white Christmas lights.

  Holiday illumination borrowed from The Addams Family.

  Or ten thousand glo-sticks from some unholy rave, discarded in a toxic waste dump.

  The gelatinous mass rippled into the cabin and began to gather itself into a rising column of goo. Setanta stepped in even as its blobby base receded like a plastic tide, planted his boot-shod feet, and swung Michael's sword.

  The otherworldly blade cut through the rising glow-in-the-dark fruitcake like a hot knife through tapioca. The only problem with that pudding analogy is all those little tapioca "pearls" don't turn into eyeballs and mouths and such when you stick a utensil in it.

  Ours did.

  The chunk that Setanta lopped off fell down into the quivering, bubbling mass that spawned it. It was quickly reabsorbed.

  Zotz arrived from the upper deck, landing heavily in the shattered opening with a lantern in one hand and a loaded spear gun in the other. Although the light from the lantern spoiled the bioluminescent light show, it revealed an interesting series of details. Liban lay stunned, half hung over the countered divider cordoning off the galley area. Suki was struggling to her feet like a drunken beachcomber, an incoming tide of pudding lapping at her unsteady feet. Setanta laid about with his vorpal blade but, alas, there was no snicker-snack—just momentary scorings of the gelatinous goo that reclosed and smoothed over as he cursed and howled and flung small oozy droplets about with frenzied abandon. Fand stood atop the sofa and surveyed the chaos with an expression that seemed strangely contemplative. Maybe that was my imagination. I didn't exactly have time to ponder as my eyes returned to the entryway where Zotz was doing a little contemplation of his own. The carpeting at his feet was shredded and mostly missing, the curtain edges where the sludge had brushed through looked scorched and half eaten. Tiny tendrils of smoke seemed to waft from patches of exposed blackish wood.

  Zotz fired his spear into the blob. The spear disappeared into its jiggly depths with no discernable effect. Except the honking big amoeba seemed to be moving toward me, now.

  I retreated to the galley. Tapioca creature followed.

  Obviously swords and spears weren't the weapons of choice in a smackdown with a pudding monster. So the question was WWMD? There was a Model 500 Smith & Wesson Magnum revolver in a hidden holster fastened up under the sink. Not exactly the answer to the just asked question of "What Would MacGyver Do?" and more likely to ventilate both deck and double hull than to discomfort the escapee from a giant lava lamp. The other recessed weapon, a Mossberg 590A1 shotgun with a 14-inch barrel and a cruiser grip, was less of a hazard in that respect. The ridiculously shortened barrel spread the shot pattern "weapon of mass destruction" style, trading tunneling-force for area-of-effect—no small consideration when trying to avoid catastrophic damage below the waterline. Technically, I needed a special background check and tax stamp to possess such an aberration. Had it not been for the increased scrutiny of the state and federal bureaucracy—not to mention the scorn and derision of all the firearm fetishists out there—I might have made the effort to make it legit. Fortunately Coast Guard inspections were rare and rarely thorough this far inland and up river.

  Legalities were the least of my worries right now, however, and the Mossberg, though less likely to send us to the bottom, was still not the prime candidate for pus-buster. I reached for the third option: a spray-can of WD-40.

  Then I dug in my pants pocket past my SwissChamp pocketknife and fished a Bic lighter out of my pocket.

  Yeah, I'd ditched the cigarettes back in those reckless, feckless days of my youth. Never mind the lectures on health and life expectancy; nothing is a surer inducement to give up the coffin-nails than the woman of your dreams comparing her make-out sessions with you to "licking an ashtray".

  A stint in the military, however, had brought me back to the advantages of always having a bit of butane-enhanced flint-and-steel at hand, a pocket MacGyver for those unique and unexpected occasions.

  Such as this one.

  I thumb-popped the cap off of WD-40 and checked the nozzle direction. The many-eyed tide lapped into the kitchen area and I triggered my jury-rigged flamethrower.

  Or I tried to, anyway.

  Hey, it's not easy. Try patting your head and rubbing your stomach. While being shot at. So, something like; left hand positioning the lighter, thumb rotating the flint wheel for spark, dropping to depress fuel valve button—wishing I had gone to the trouble of replacing my lost Zippo instead of a quick and dirty disposable fix—while simultaneously positioning to ignite chemical spray from WD-40 nozzle being triggered by right hand while pointed at proper angle/trajectory to direct enhanced flame back at target without incinerating left hand or blowing up right hand in the process.

  See?

  I fumbled and nearly dropped the lighter on the first attempt.

  I extinguished the flame with the spray on the second.

  The third attempt worked like a charm and the pudding ran smack dab into my miniature flamethrower halfway into the galley.

  Imagine a cockroach screaming. Now imagine a hundred of them at the same time. The pudding made a sound like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir of roachdom and skittered back. I held my makeshift torch before me like Van Helsing's crucifix and advanced. Dracula's nemesis would have roared "The power of Christ compels you!" or such. What deity would a pudding recognize? Bill Cosby?

  The terrible tide retreated a foot. Then two. I gained another yard, using controlled blasts of flame to sweep the forward edge of the pulsating puddle. "Aye!" I exclaimed, doing my half-assed impression of Scotty from Star Trek, "the haggis is in the fire now for sure!" My amorphous adversary turned into a hasty pudding, withdrawing to the midpoint of the salon.

  The rapidity of its backwash knocked Suki off her feet and she went down as if caught in an undertow, the living sludge closing over her lik
e a drowning pool.

  At that point my flame died down. And went out. The can was empty. The room was plunged again into near darkness. The opposite doorway was empty: Zotz had fled with the lantern.

  Light oozed back in my direction: the glowing mucus monster was making another run at me. I retreated back to the galley, noting the scorched linoleum where the creature had flowed moments before: I hadn't done that with my portable brazier! Under the sink, again, and this time I hauled out the sawed-off shotgun and a bottle of Clorox.

  I lobbed the plastic bleach container into the center of the amoeba-like mass and jacked a shell into the Mossberg. I fired almost immediately. At this range and with a scattershot spread, I only had to worry about not hitting anyone else. Taking any more time to aim might have lost my target as it sank into the roiling depths of the creature. The buckshot sieved the plastic bottle and bleach began squirting in all directions as the thing received this latest offering hungrily.

  A moment later it vomited the bottle back out but it was too late. The plastic was shredded, the contents dissipated into the semi-solid masses that twisted and shuddered as the caustic liquid began wrecking havoc on its cellular structures. Light bloomed across the room as Zotz returned with lantern in one hand and a very large pistol in the other.

  Correction: a large Very pistol in the other. "Fire in the hole!" he yelled, extending the flare gun and firing into the quivering mass of protoplasm. The flare barely ignited before burying itself deep in the glowy sludge.

  Forget the cockroach choir analogy. This thing was shrieking like a ten thousand cicadas performing of all of the operas in Wagner's Ring Cycle simultaneously! Zotz broke open the Very pistol and ejected the spent shell casing. As he loaded another flare I looked around the cabin for another weapon. Setanta was still in full berserker mode, doing his Cuisinart impression with Mikey's sword. His hair was standing on end, practically giving off sparks of static electricity and, if willpower and earnestness counted for points, this thing would have been dead five minutes ago.

  But his blade continued to make meaningless and temporary dimples within the ever changing landscape of the blob, and I looked about for other options.

  "Fand!" I called, "can you reach the lamp?"

  I had an idea that, if she could retrieve the table lamp—somehow pull it back out by its electrical cord—she might be coached into stripping the wires in such a way as to shock the creature when the plug was re-inserted into the wall outlet.

  And it was quickly obvious that getting Fand to pick her own nose right now might be too complicated a task as she was still standing on the couch, still staring at the bubbling mass as if contemplating some dark nightmare from which she might never wake up.

  Okay. I was pretty much at the end of my What Would MacGyver Do approach with the blob, what other options were there?

  The blob . . .

  Silly me. I'd been formulating from the wrong premise. If this thing was anything like The Blob, I should be asking: What would Steve McQueen do?

  As in The Blob. 1958 film. The sort made popular on the fossilized drive-in circuit. Directed by Irwin S. Yeaworth, Jr.; theme song by Hal David and Burt Bacharach. Protoplasmic life-form falls to earth in meteorite. Old hermit discovers said meteorite and is promptly eaten by gooey orange nougat center. Enter Steve McQueen as teenager Steve Andrews in his first starring role. Along with his girlfriend Jane Martin, played by Aneta Corsaut (who would go on to greater fame as "Helen Krump" on The Andy Griffith Show) they run about Downingtown Pennsylvania, attempting to warn the Downingtown townspeople. Of course, no one pays heed to those pesky teenagers until it's too late and the orange goo devours a good chunk of the town's population. And it gets bigger with each successive meal: people, cars, a supermarket, a movie theater, even a diner until they discover the thing can't take the cold . . .

  So . . .

  I snatched the fire extinguisher off of the galley wall praying it was a CO2 model.

  It wasn't a CO2 model.

  So much for luck and the chance to employ a cold-based weapon attack. But when you're brawling for your life you use whatever is at hand. I pulled the pin, pointed the nozzle, and pulled the trigger just as Zotz fired a third flare into the quivering mass of pustulescent sludge.

  Almost immediately a grey film began to spread across the toxic tartar sauce where I applied the gaseous exhaust of my fire extinguisher, its shapeless congerie of protoplasmic bubbles shuddering and becoming fixed as if undergoing petrification. Some of the bubbles burst, emitting a noxious vapor as the beast convulsed and then collapsed in upon itself. The interior of my boat was a shambles and I wasn't sure as to Liban's and Suki's condition, yet, but the foamy collection of eyes and mouths were filming over or gaping with an evident slackness that said that death was eminent for this gummi-beast. I turned the canister of the fire extinguisher in my hands and examined the face plate: it was a Halon suppression unit.

  I looked over at Zotz as the thing gave a last convulsive shudder. "Grab a gas can, a couple of the mini-charges, and ready the inflatable dingy. As soon as I pull Suki out, we're going to have a quick Viking funeral."

  "Aye, Cap'n." He turned to go and jumped backwards into the galley.

  Rather, he was thrown across the cabin as the Big Daddy version of the mini-pudding we had just turned into a Baked Alaskan smashed its way into the salon. If the last blob had come in like high tide, this one was a tsunami! We were shoved about as a vast tonnage of angry, Hulk-green, glowing goop surged across the floor and crashed up against the walls like a stormy, oil slicked sea.

  I turned the fire extinguisher but it was sputtering in my hands, all but spent. "Shoot a flare at the drapes!" I yelled at Zotz. I meant to take us down in flames if there was no other way. But even that way was lost: the Very pistol had been torn from his hands when the battering ram of protoplasm had smacked into him. The lantern was gone, as well.

  If anything, though, it was brighter now inside the salon. The green glow from the luminescent sludge that continued to pour in upon us was brighter than the illumination we typically ran at night on the river. And it was joined by a pulsing violet light as Fand began to scream.

  They weren't incoherent screams of terror, though.

  "Odael si vali shaerael sor shys eil toil . . ."

  They were words—Old Englisc or Anglo-Saxon from the sound—and, though rage comes closer to describing their pitch, they were more like a warrior's timbre of challenge.

  " . . . shol tia aelaestia sai ti eil sai ti eilyli . . ."

  Fand had finally stepped off of the couch but instead of stepping down, she was floating up. And drifting across the cabin toward its center. Toward the sludge beast's center.

  " . . . tasia iar moria shaesi air talyr vaeres . . ."

  And the purple light that pulsed and reflected back from the walls and ceiling and, finally, even the green-tinted surface of the beast, itself, was emanating from the faerie queen. The nimbus of energy that crackled and shimmered about her slender form was growing brighter and pulsing more frantically with every word that she spoke.

  " . . . eil ialai toli eilor sar air tae shi iaraesia paeryr . . ."

  And finally she hovered and turned in midair. Her face at once terrible, became momentarily soft and tender and all too young and vulnerable. "We will be together again my love. If not in this world, then in the next. Until that time, keep my vow and oath: protect the father as you would the child. This sacrifice must not be in vain."

  Setanta shouted: "My queen!" And began to wade into the creature as if to reach her by swimming its protoplasmic currents but she spread her arms and set her face back to its terrible mask of purpose as she turned again.

  "Aelael mai, mar air shi pyli!" she cried as she dropped into the seething mass of roiling corruption.

  Thunder filled the room.

  An infinitesimal glimpse of something—somewhere—between the molecules of the air.

  Air that rushed in to fill the emptiness p
reviously occupied by a room-sized monster and a child-sized queen.

  Both were gone.

  Vanished.

  The only acknowledgment of either's former existence were three sounds.

  That transitory crash of imploding air—a Tupperware burp of artificial thunder as the world resealed itself.

  The sustained weeping of a great warrior, now on his hands and knees.

  And the hiss and sizzle as each tear fell upon the scorched and smoking floor.

  * * *

  Nothing else came out of the river during the next hour.

  Nor did Fand return from where she had 'ported with our displaced foe.

  Setanta made a weak protest when we hauled anchor and prepared to make way, but Liban assured him that her sister could find her way back to him, wherever he was. Once it was safe to return.

  Her words were encouraging, her eyes and voice less so. Thereafter Setanta withdrew into himself to nurse his inner wounds.

  We spent some time dealing with outer wounds, as well. Liban was bruised, cut, and mildly concussed from being hurtled through the glass door and across the main cabin. Setanta, Zotz, and I had varying degrees of burns from contact with the caustic slime. Fortunately Zotz and I had kept pretty much to the thing's perimeter while Setanta's ongoing commitment to dressing like a gay leather biker had largely protected him when he waded into it.

  Suki wasn't so fortunate.

  A ninety pound Asian woman had gone under and stayed under until we'd killed it. Then stayed under some more when the second half of The Blob Double-Feature arrived. I didn't know how fast these things could feed, but what was left behind when Fand opened a momentary door to some otherwhere was only a fraction of the size and weight and mass of a ninety pound Asian woman.

  And didn't look human.

  It looked like a cat.

  A golden-eyed, sable brown, Burmese cat with two tails.

  That looked as if it had been put in an industrial-strength clothes dryer and treated to a half-hour of tumble-dry at high heat.