Dead Easy

by Mark William Simmons

  I nodded. "Help me," I said softly. "Or get out of the way and off my boat."

  She stared up at me. Nodded. Then pulled a strand of pearls from the multiple bands of gems, coins, corals, and shells that hung from her neck and offered a modicum of modesty where her neoprene jacket gaped open. "Here." She dropped the necklace over my head and adjusted it, tucking it into my shirt. "Do not remove this while we travel. It will keep us linked inside the pathway. She turned to Zotz and presented him with a necklace of gold coins from her décolletage. "And you as well, Sir Demon. You must be able to follow me ere you be lost in the 'tween."

  And, with that, she stepped out from under the awning and moved to the railing overlooking the bow.

  The skies had turned the color of oily guncotton and a sharp, pelting rain had begun to fall. The canvass awning above our heads turned the impact of each drop into a snare-drum report, as sharp as a whip-crack against leather. Liban had left the helm's limited shelter and was exposed to the bitter shower. In moments her hair was plastered to the sides and back of her head. Only her orange wetsuit protected her from a further drenching.

  "Here's an idea," Zotz murmured, sotto voce, "why don't you steer while I go hold an umbrella over the lady?"

  Before I could think of a suitable reply, a wind sprang up. Even though I couldn't feel it, I saw Liban's dark tresses stir, lift from her head and shoulders, and stream back from her face. She reached down and unzipped the orange neoprene jacket and shrugged it from her shoulders. As the top half of her wetsuit slid down her back and off of her arms the clouds parted just enough for the sun to strike her with a stray beam of light. Her pearlescent skin began to glow.

  All around us it was still gloomy and the rain continued to fall. Curtains of darkness swept the river ahead indicating we were headed into heavier weather. But Liban stood bathed in light and her hair was a flag of mahogany and moss, wafting in an unseen breeze.

  And now it seemed that the rain was not even touching her. She stood as if in a bubble of sunshiny, summer day while all about her the world was sinking into storm-tossed darkness.

  She climbed up on the railing and balanced precariously. As she did, something happened to the lower half of her wetsuit. A pattern began to emerge and the material took on a shinier appearance. She flexed her knees and I shouted as she jumped.

  Dove, actually: her leap propelled her forward and she leaned out, her arms coming up as she formed herself into a fleshy torpedo. She cleared the forward deck below by a good seven feet even with the New Moon's forward momentum as a non-negotiable factor, and sliced into the water ahead of us. I ran to the railing and looked down.

  All around the boat the water was dark and blackish green. A short distance off the river was just black.

  Directly in front of the boat, however, was a patch of blue. Water the color of turquoise and azure. Water you only find between virgin beaches and reefs untouched by human industrialization down in tropical paradises.

  Improbably, the blue began to stain the water ahead of us . . .

  "Steer for the blue," I said.

  "What?" Zotz yelled.

  The engine noise alone was enough to make us raise our voices. But a growing sound of thunder was making the twin Mercruisers seem quiet by comparison.

  "Steer for the blue water!" I yelled back.

  "You sure?" he answered. And pointed at the spreading blue stain.

  We were well into the turquoise waves now and the surface turbulence was markedly different. The surface was calm while dark green waves crashed in the distance off of our port and starboard sides. There seemed to be no break in the clouds above us but the rain was no longer striking the boat and our immediate surroundings brightened considerably as if the sun had come out directly overhead,

  But Zotz wasn't pointing at where we were.

  He was pointing up ahead.

  A little less than a mile downriver the Ouachita took a sharp bend to the left.

  The blue stain continued straight on into the bank.

  "Are you ready to do a Fitzcarraldo?" my demon helmsman asked me.

  "Slow down!" I yelled. "Give me time to think!"

  And don't run us into bank with the throttle wide open.

  I studied the blue stain that was supposed to be our "path to the sea." As it approached the bend in the river, the turquoise strip widened and shaded a deeper, darker blue. It was still easily visible in contrast to the dirty green and black waters of the rest of the river. All around us those darker waves rose higher and grew more turbulent: we glided between them as if riding through a sheltered trough.

  "Cut back on throttle!" I yelled as the riverbank loomed nearer.

  "I did!" Zotz yelled back.

  I couldn't tell from the sound of the engines. The continuous roaring of thunder drowned out practically everything else. And, if anything, we were going faster, now. The shore line loomed ahead . . . and above!

  We were sliding down into a trough between giant waves, great looming walls of water to either side. But instead of bobbing back up again with the natural undulation of the swell, we kept going down! The trough became a tunnel and the New Moon slid down beneath the storm, beneath the river, down, down into a sapphire water-slide that easily dwarfed the Lincoln Tunnel. Water closed above our heads forming a curved aqua ceiling.

  I squeezed in next to Zotz and flipped switches for the running lights and the forward spot which I directed into the water-walled tube ahead of us. The tunnel ahead twisted and turned off into darkness but no other features were readily apparent. No rocks, obstructions, visible hazards of any sort. And no evidence of Liban. Not that it made a lot of difference at this point: we had no choice but to follow where the tunnel led. At the moment we weren't even traveling under our own power—a lucky break, actually, as a refueling stop was working its way to the top of our priorities list.

  The next switch I threw was for the GPS screen. It lit with a grey, hissing radiance. No multicolored chart displays, no boat icon to indicate our position on river, lake, or inlet. Just frantic oatmeal magma churning in actinic black, grey, and white. Looking at the static filled screen stirred an unpleasant memory—something from my childhood or, perhaps, in a dream . . .

  Zotz reached over and switched off the GPS. "I wouldn't trust anything that did show up on that screen right now," he said.

  Setanta eventually heaved his way up the ladder from below looking decidedly green. I didn't think his coloring was entirely due to odd light within the confines of our watery tunnel. The houseboat was riding the curved walls of the liquid chute like a bobsled on ball-bearings, skittering up one slope and the then down and over and up the other side. I was starting to feel a little green, myself.

  "'Tis an unnatural way for mortals to travel," Goldilocks groused, grabbing the handrail at the top of the ladder as the boat swayed and swung again.

  "Beats flying," Zotz growled back. "Give me water, any day."

  I wasn't about to point out that traveling by means of an inside-out water hose via trans-dimensional vortices hardly qualified as "sailing". For the moment I was wholly invested in holding on tight and hoping our water-walled conduit didn't collapse or produce something otherworldly . . .

  That's when the ghost of the alien rutabaga with the starfish appendages and the Winky Dink voice materialized in front of us.

  "Okay," I said, "tell me you guys see that."

  They looked around. And then they both looked at me.

  Setanta grinned. "You have horns!"

  "Naw, they're antennae," Zotz corrected. "Rabbit ears. Not even UHF. You should really talk to your nanos about upgrading to dish." He squinted at me. "You're not going to pass out again, are you?"

  I pointed at the alien monstrosity floating directly ahead of us. "You're telling me you don't see barrel-of-seafood-tripe floating in thin air?"

  "You're gonna have to catch him," Zotz told Cuch. "I can't let go of the wheel."

  "I am not delirious!" I insisted. As soon
as I said it I wasn't so sure, myself.

  "Fine. But would sitting down be such a bad thing under the circumstances?"

  "Anything to keep you from shapeshifting into my mother," I groused at the demon as Setanta escorted me back to one of the bolted down deck chairs. The giant rutabaga followed.

  Once I was settled I shooed the big Celt away. "I'm fine! Just going to sit here. Enjoy the ride! Chat with my imaginary friend! Go! Keep an eye on Zotz; he's doing the important stuff!"

  Cuch must have figured being ten feet away wasn't such a risk and backed toward the helm. After a few feet the noise of the water gave me sufficient privacy to turn to the Rutabaga and say: "What is the deal?"

  "The deal?" it intoned.

  "Don't play coy with me, Al. Lot's of end-of-the-world signage and suddenly some very odd types think I'm supposed to have some kind of hand in pulling the emergency brake. The problem is—besides me not volunteering for role of hero—is that no one is terribly clear about what's expected or how to go about it. Other than some kind of sacrifice. Involving my son. Which ain't gonna happen. So, you got some 'splaining to do. First to me. Then to your elephant head buddy when you tell him I said to take this quest and shove it—along with his dance, dance revolution—where his disco-ball don't shine."

  "Communication . . . is difficult," it answered haltingly. "Distance . . . language . . . context . . ."

  "Ooookay then, I'll talk slow. Who you? Why me?"

  There was a burst of sound—nonsense syllables—that, I guess, was the expression of a name. Whether personal-specific or species general, I couldn't say. As to reproducing any approximation of the alien verbiage with my own lips and tongue . . .

  "Hold on there, Starkist. I take it that you're what Mama Samm referred to as one of the 'Ancient Things'?"

  There was another burst of static inside my head. ". . . known as Old Ones," it finished.

  I sighed. "Old Ones, Great Old Ones, Elder Gods, Outer Gods—Great Crowley's Ghost, man-thing, you illegals from the Outer Dimensions aren't exactly consistent on the I.D. issues and I don't have a scorecard. So, what is your dog in this hunt?"

  "Your mind is very noisy. If you will quiet your thoughts I will answer your queries as best I can."

  "I'm all ears," I said. "And half antennae."

  "First of all, you speak as if my kind is alien and visitor to your shores while your race would claim some legitimate title to this world. My race was the first life-form to take possession of the planet that your kind calls 'Earth'. We were the ones who seeded it with life, crafted the single-celled organisms into protoplasm and sculpted all manner of life-forms—for our own purposes as well as those of chance and jest."

  "Jeepers, Al!" I exclaimed. "You sound like a secret Scientology seminar. Are you trying to tell me you're a Thetan? If that's the case you just trot back to Xenu and tell him we want Tom Cruise back!"

  "I do not know what you are babbling about," it said.

  "L. Ron Hubbard?" I tried.

  "I do not know this Elron you speak of."

  "Sorry. My bad. You're just another alien with Mayflower snobbery and a God complex. Big surprise."

  "You and your kind might well show more respect."

  "What? Respect my Elder . . . Things?"

  "If you do not recognize us as your creators, you must certainly give us due as this planet's defenders and protectors. We arrived in the epoch your kind has labeled the Archaen period, when the entire globe was still covered in water. For countless eons we built our cities beneath the cool green waves. When global upheavals began to create land masses that divided the one, vast unbroken ocean, we established beachheads and communities there, as well. By your Carboniferous period, we inhabited every continent, with our greatest megalopolis sprawling about what eventually became this planet's south pole.

  "Then the octocrine spawn of Cthulhu came, falling down from foul, distant stars, and we battled for dominance, eventually driving them into the seas. We were weakened, even in victory, and in the Permian age our servants, the shoggoth, chose the opportunity to rebel and turn against us. The two that the Enemy sent against you last night were but shadows of what the shoggoth were in our day. Still we had sufficient strength, even unto the age of the Jurassic to strive against yet another invasion of the Old Ones! The Mi-Go drove us out of the northern lands. Eventually our remnants retreated to the Antarctic where we strove in final conflict with the coming of the Ice and the Enemy stronghold of Kadath. In the end we were too spent to prevail against the Great Old Ones in their strength, the betrayal of the shoggoth, and the arrival of the endless cold.

  "Yog-Sothoth closed off all gateways to escape and Nyarlathotep was already mad back then and continually betraying and changing alliances. But before we were vanquished, we wrought the paleogean sciences that kept the Deep Ones in check through the long millennia. And it was we who vanquished Cthulhu and left our seal upon his sunken tomb to keep him slumbering until the end of time."

  "Gee, Al, that's swell," I told him. "I certainly couldn't have done better, myself. Which is why I'm not going to risk messing up millions of years of monster wrangling by sticking my nose in now."

  "But you are the one," Barrel'o'Chum intoned.

  "Dammit! Why does everybody keep saying this crap? How come I got nominated to be the captain of the Titanic? If you're serious about recruiting a competent, capable hero-type, there's got to be better nominees out there! Have you tried looking around? Sifted some resumes? Checked out Monster-dot-com?"

  "Yes. You were not the first choice," it answered bluntly.

  "Really?" Well, snap!

  "There was a wizard in Chicago, a necromancer in St. Louis, a waitress in Bon Temps, and a weather warden—who hasn't spent much time in any one place, lately. We also considered a guardian in London."

  "And?"

  "It was not possible to make contact with them."

  I waited. Finally: "What? Unlisted numbers? Do Not Call list? How come I'm the default guy here?"

  "Apparently most humans are incapable of receiving our telempathic communications. Yog-Sothoth holds the gates and thresholds and that which is perceived is limited to those minds most often kept caged in institutions, hospitals, jails, and madhouses."

  "Nice," I said. "And then there's me."

  "Apparently you are linked to an over-mind, a hive-consciousness that is separate yet coexistent with your own."

  "My nanites?"

  "Your over-mind enables you to comprehend certain frequencies and vibrations imperceptible to humans possessing but a single consciousness."

  "Goody. So, in addition to turning me into a weaponized hormone factory and a Swiss-Army knife, they now make me loony-bin compatible for podcasts from the Twilight Zone?" I closed my eyes. "That's why I'm your nominee for end-of-the-world problem-solver? I'm the only one with a working mail slot for the engraved invitation?"

  "You are the only one we could communicate with and even that has been difficult. At first, only through the erratic filters of your hypnogogic, altered consciousness . . ."

  "My dreams."

  " . . . and later, when you reached certain filtered subsets of preconscious receptivity."

  "While I was unconscious." I opened my eyes and looked around. At ghostly barrel monster and the arched blue ceiling of the water tunnel overhead. "What about now?"

  "You have entered a state of trans-dimensional flux. There are fewer impediments to the hyper-spatial synaptic linkage accessing the temporary wormhole between your planet and the star system where our remnants have taken refuge. For this brief time we may communicate directly rather than through symbolic conceptualizations."

  "And yet," I griped, "you're still managing to make everything as clear as mud."

  "What specificities do you require?"

  I gaped at him—it—the Winky Dink voice in the barrel. "Look, Al, aside from the fact that I'm not really interested in saving the world—"

  "Why would you not want to save your
world?"

  I closed my eyes again. I was so tired. Depression is just a word, a cliché to people who aren't wrapped in its suffocating, grey embrace. I'd managed to ignore the soul-numbing marathon of days and nights without purpose when my family and friends were threatened. But it was a temporary distraction, at best. And when you haven't got much motivation for your own future, investing in something much larger is beyond comprehension. As Joe Stalin supposedly said, one man's death is a tragedy, a million deaths are only a statistic. Asking me to care about the rest of the world was asking me to care about a statistic. Suggesting that my son be sacrificed for a statistic was a good way to become one, yourself.

  If I sound like a right bastard let me say that I have a more practical approach to world-saving. According to the Jerusalem Talmud: "Whoever destroys the life of a single human being . . . it is as if he had destroyed an entire world; and whoever preserves the life of a single human being . . . it is as if he had preserved an entire world." I figured if I could get Lupe, Deirdre, and—God help me—even Theresa out safely, add the babies, before or afterwords, and I was already up to a half-dozen worlds. Let the rest of Planet Earth find some additional heroes-in-waiting.

  I looked up at Al but was too tired to put any of that into words even as I opened my mouth.

  "It is not necessary," alien Al answered. "I am not actually receiving the sound waves that emanate from your vocal apparatus. We commune on an entirely different frequency; articulation would be redundant."

  Telepathy? That would make sense . . .

  "But I do not understand why you utilize the term 'Al' in referencing me as an entity."

  "I've got to call you something," I told him. "The simpler the better since I can't wrap my head much less my lips around that burst of noise you use as a name."

  "And there is some significance to the name 'Al'?"

  "Depends on whether I end up being your bodyguard and you end up being my long lost pal."

  "Pal?"

  "Call me Betty."

  "I do not understand . . ."