Dead Easy

by Mark William Simmons

  "Well—"

  "—or that you could never trust me because I suckered you and used you like a sap—"

  "There is that . . ."

  "—or that you don't like lesbians."

  "It's speech number one," Zotz said, popping up over the back of the boat with the tow-rope from the other empty craft curled around one fist.

  "Really," she said.

  "Yeah. It can't be number two because he gets suckered and used by women all of the time. No signs of stopping, yet."

  "And number three?" she asked.

  "There's nothing wrong with lesbians. Some of the best porn sites on the web—"

  "Zotz!" I interrupted. "How did you get over here so fast?"

  He gave me a wounded look as he tied the second boat to the stern of the first. "It's only twenty yards out and another twenty yards over. If I seem to be moving fast it's because I'm working and you're still standing still.

  * * *

  I took the wheel of the Bat Out Of Hell, the first speedboat we'd inherited from Laveau's former werewolf minions. Zotz was driving the second with the words Screaming Mimi painted on the hull in a garish, windblown font style. Liban didn't look happy but I doubted it had anything to do with marine-style detailing. I still needed debriefing from Volpea and it seemed wise to split out complement between the two boats. In her weakened state, it seemed more sensible to put Setanta at her side.

  Even though this was the most logical organization of our travel time and resources, I knew from experience that I would be punished for it after we arrived. Of course, if Lupé and Deirdre were waiting for me when I arrived with Volpea and Liban, it just meant I would be punished all the more. Incrementally and exponentially.

  I've been told that it's every man's fantasy to be surrounded by beautiful women.

  I can tell you that it is a fantasy.

  And, unless you are very careful, it could be a final fantasy.

  The GPS coordinates were well out into the Gulf of Mexico so, even at two-thirds open throttle we had a bit of time to talk. And the sun was already riding low in the sky.

  According to Volpea, the storm had been fast, vicious and caught even the early evacuees unprepared. The storm surge had topped the levees and the seawalls, the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain had spilled over their banks, flooding everything below sea level and the pumping stations had all shorted out, one by one as the dark waters closed over them, too. Factories, refineries, and chemical plants polluted the flood waters with additional waste hazards and power plants ignited floating oil and gas slicks even as transmission towers topped and power was cut across greater regions. Dead wildlife and living carpets of fire ants floated among the initial survivors. Then the alligators and the cottonmouths came, riding the crest of each new tide.

  The greater threat came from the predators that were already among them. Looters and rapists and criminals of opportunity began to realize that food and water and camping gear and boats were precious commodities. There were stories of heroism as will happen among human beings during a crisis but New Orleans did not willingly surrender its title of the nation's murder capital during the storm, either.

  Once the waters had come and driven the quick and the healthy to higher ground, the storm blew itself out. It was eerie, Volpea said. A one-day hurricane. But what a hurricane! The entire Ninth Ward gone. Flattened or picked up and flung away before being inundated in black silt and grey water. Automobiles tossed down the street or catapulted into buildings. Streetcars lifted off their tracks.

  And people hurled like screaming missiles through storefronts, office windows, and less yielding surfaces or else out into the rain-pelted darkness, disappearing forever.

  Even as the skies began to clear on the second day, the quakes began. Dams across the state, and what was left of the levees and dykes and sea walls, fell apart. Vast, watery sinkholes appeared. Then chunks of real estate disappeared, dropping anywhere from a few feet to dozens. A cascade effect ensued as water rushed in to fill the void and more quakes followed. Tsunamis formed out in the Gulf of Mexico and hurtled in like battering rams and turbo-charged bulldozers, tearing up fragile structures and anything that wasn't fastened down, and pushing the debris, living and dead, either miles in-land or into larger, immovable objects before sucking them back out to sea.

  Within hours a vast shelf of geological strata along the coast gave a deafening groan and shuddered. The subsidence of the land was less noticeable than the rising of the ocean as it slithered inland, climbing over the high ground and falling upon every refugee who wasn't in a boat or a reinforced building more than twenty five stories tall.

  Most of those buildings were deathtraps and charnel houses. The windows were mostly shattered from the pressure of the wind, the water, or the barrage of missiles the storm had thrown at them the first day. In some places the glass had blown outward from internal pressure as water rushed up the structure's core displacing trapped air faster than it could vent through the sealed environmental systems. No light, no power, no protection from the elements. Each new quake or aftershock brought more water up the elevator shafts and stairwells, claiming another floor, sometimes tipping the building a bit more, or toppling one completely. Some survivors fought for meager supplies and space as additional refugees arrived. Gordon and some of the other weres were keeping two of the buildings as their own private game reserve for when their own food ran out.

  I wished I had known this bit of information before I had so blithely allowed them to attempt the marathon swim back to their "meat locker". Once again my natural impulses toward mercy and détente had proved the wrong call when dealing with the monsters.

  No broadcast facilities within a several hundred miles seemed to have survived. What meager reports had filtered through had come by way of boat radios farther away or in-land. Ham operators outside the destructive radius of the storm, or via a handful of working satellite radio receivers. Government response was rumored to be slow—the rest of the country seemed to think it was in as much shock as the people who were experiencing it first hand. There were stories of refugee camps set up along the shores of the new flood plain by the Red Cross and FEMA but those were across the wide water and beyond the reach of survivors not already located near the fringe of the disaster.

  There were more stories—tales of massive outbreaks of flesh-eating bacteria, dysentery, warnings about malaria. Reports of looting, civil unrest, piracy, and overnight disappearances. Tabloid-style stories of strange nocturnal sightings, "humanoids from the deep", and rumors of Coast Guard vessels gone missing.

  Then radio reception turned bad. Batteries were running low, to be sure, but there was a quality to the reception that suggested some kind of interference.

  Then silence.

  As Gordon had said just before he opted to walk the plank, we were pretty much on our own down here and likely would be for a long, long time.

  Chapter Seventeen

  As we were closing in on the GPS coordinates Mama Samm had radioed from the Spindrift, the radio crackled to life again. It had been over an hour since the big juju woman's last call and I was getting worried but this didn't bring any relief.

  "Cséjthe," Gordon's voice crackled over the speaker, do you hear me?"

  I started to reach for the microphone then thought the better of it. I signaled the other boat not to respond.

  "I know you're listening," he continued. "You'll keep this channel open to hear from your friends. That's okay. I just wanted to leave a message with you. If you don't want to talk, that's fine. I get the last word this time."

  "Turn off the radio," Volpea said.

  I shook my head. "I'm not afraid of him. And he's right; I need to keep this frequency open in case Mama Samm calls back."

  "I ought to apologize for lying to you about your woman," he continued. "I never should have said she was dead when I knew she was alive. That was wrong."

  Volpea put her hand on my arm. "I'll take the wheel and monit
or the radio. Go sit down in the back."

  "Why?"

  "Because I know him. You don't need the distraction right now."

  "So I promise you nothing but the truth from now on," Gordon continued in the cheery bright tones of a car salesman. "It isn't important that she lives for now. Now is a temporary condition. Are you paying attention? Because here's where the truth part comes in . . ."

  "Go sit down," she ordered.

  "No!" I shouted, knowing what was coming next. I'd heard it before.

  "I promise you," Gordon said in his most earnest voice, "that very soon now we will find your woman. Hunt her and her misbegotten whelp down. And then we will kill them both. That's my promise, that's the truth I owe you, man to man. And then we will come for you on our terms."

  "You should have killed him when you had the chance," she said.

  "I know."

  "Thank about that, hombre, every night before you fall asleep. And every morning before you get up. I know there have been others who have threatened you with the same things. But I am different. My demesne in under ninety feet of water. I got nothing to lose. You think about that. Until I see you again."

  After awhile I said: "I've been operating without an Enforcer for too long."

  "You've got one now."

  "Thanks."

  She shrugged. "Thank me when the son-of-a-bitch is dead."

  * * *

  The sun was an orange smear on the horizon when we arrived at the GPS coordinates, deep in the Gulf of Mexico.

  The first clue to Mama Samm's position was a giant oil platform, canting at a nineteen degree angle. Several hundred feet of massive orange support pillars thrust up out of the ocean on the east side. The west end of the platform, however, was tipping down into the water like a high-tech chute with a busy assortment of cranes, towers, buildings, and sub floors frozen in mid-slide.

  I had never seen the Spindrift; I only knew that it was an oceanographic research vessel and off-campus classroom for the University of Louisiana. According to Volpea, Irena had gotten permission from her professor to bring my family on board at the last minute when the students and crew evacuated back up the Mississippi River. They should have been headed north when the storm hit. Now they were a hundred and fifty miles to the south and well out to sea, piled up against a sagging oil platform. According to the last radio transmission, more than an hour earlier, the Spindrift was a hundred-and-fifteen footer with a twenty-eight foot beam. We were looking for a research vessel with a dual decked front half and an enclosed pilothouse, and a low draft access deck on the back end. Additional superstructure on the stern and starboard side for launching small submersibles and raising heavy samples should have made the ship easy to spot.

  Under normal conditions.

  There was nothing normal about the events unfolding in the aftermath of Laveau's storm. Certainly not the profusion of boats that were piled like so much flotsam and jetsam against the downward slice of the drilling platform. It was as if some mysterious force, like a giant magnet, had drawn every boat still afloat within a hundred mile radius. There were over fifty immediately visible and half of them were riding low in the water, crushed between larger hulls, or overturned and tilted bow or stern downward. It was a cacophony of wreckage ranging from a seven story cruise ship to a scattering of fishing boats and ocean-going tugs, with a couple of Coast Guard cutters and a dozen sailboats tossed into the pile-up.

  We circled the wreckage slowly and finally spotted the Spindrift near the out detritus of smaller craft. Maneuvering carefully, we threaded our way between the bobbing, upside down keels of small fishing boats and a knifelike sailboat that drifted like a curious shark. We passed into the shadow of the great ocean liner that reared upward like a steel mountain range, blotting out the setting sun and throwing us into premature gloom. Zotz and I turned on the boats' searchlights at the same time.

  The Spindrift's hull was painted black in contrast to its white cabin structures and pilothouse. The low-slung back access was so low to the water the ship seemed non-existent in the gloom and I ran the Bat Out of Hell into the side, miscalculating the distance at the last minute. Hey, never said I was a sailor—just wanted a house on the water. At the other end of the state. At least it was easy to step over the gunwales and onto the big boat's lower deck.

  I pulled a flashlight out of my ops-vest and my Glock 20 out of my shoulder-rig. Everyone was geared up, now, armed, equipped and Volpea had even dressed for the occasion, making due with some of Lupé's spare clothes I had tucked away in a box in the spare closet.

  Yep, I was in for some definite punishment when I saw Lupé again.

  Volpea actually had the most experience as an enforcer for the former demesne of New Orleans so she took point as we worked our way around the boat, checking hatches, compartments, and large storage lockers and bins.

  There were several labs—wet and dry, an engine room, quarters for the crew with ten berths, quarters for the students with twelve berths—or maybe it was a male/female division thing. Everything was in disarray, though whether that was from the storm or from something more sinister I couldn't immediately say.

  We worked our way up to the pilothouse and then back down the port side of the vessel. No sign of Mama Samm.

  "She said somebody took the others," Zotz said. "Maybe they came back and took her, too."

  Volpea held her hand up. "Everyone be quiet," she murmured. I need to listen.

  We stood there in a silent semicircle as the red blush outlining the dark silhouette of the ocean liner turned to a bruised purple. Volpea stood on tiptoes with closed eyes and, after a bit, began to breathe deeply, taking long draughts through her nose.

  "I could do this more easily if I transformed," she murmured.

  "We only brought the one change of clothes along," I muttered.

  "Would my nakedness disturb you so, knowing what I am?" she asked me with a quiet smile.

  I shook my head. "It's a question of punishment."

  She looked at me for elaboration.

  I didn't give any and she went back to sniffing the air. "You smell . . . different," she said with her eyes closed.

  I coughed. "Different cologne. You—um—like it?"

  A little shrug, her eyes remained closed. "It's okay." She sniffed some more. Then, finally, she crept around to a hatch set in the deck amidships and pointed. Setanta and Zotz hunkered down and grasped the handle and latches. I planted my feet, aimed the flashlight with my left, the Glock with my right, and nodded. The hatch squeaked back and up and I filled its dark hole with light.

  Something moved and a pole shot out of the hold, jabbing up at me like a rigid cobra. Volpea grabbed it as it went by and yanked upward, catching an arm with her other hand and, in a moment, we had a young black woman out and secured. I flashed the light around but the remainder of the hold appeared to be empty.

  "Bang stick," Volpea observed, laying the pole aside. "Divers use them to drive overly aggressive sharks away." She was holding our "captive" effortlessly with one finely muscled arm about the girl's chest and shoulders.

  Some of the fright was already fading from her eyes as she seemed to realize that we meant her no harm. She was probably one of Irena's fellow student-crewmembers. Tall and slender, she was maybe twenty, no more than twenty-two. She wore baggy culottes that looked like they belonged to a larger roommate and a man's denim work shirt tied beneath her breasts to reveal chocolate abs that looked like sculpted mahogany.

  "It's all right, Miss," I said, moving the light so that it wouldn't blind her and shining it up on me, instead. "We're not going to hurt you. We're here to help."

  She gasped. "Oh thank the gods, you finally made it!" Volpea released her and the girl rushed over to me and threw her arms around me. "I couldn't be sure it was you, Mister Chris! They came back once and I had to abandon the radio."

  "Holy crap!" Zotz was saying.

  "It's me," the girl was saying in that voice that was just so wrong now.
"Don't you recognize me? I'm Sammathea D'Arbonne!"

  "Mama Samm?" I said.

  She snuggled in a little closer. "Hey, you smell nice . . ."

  "Holy crap!" I said.

  * * *

  Our ancient ancestors worshipped power and they worshipped the goddess. Archeologists have turned up hundreds, maybe thousands of ancient little clay and oolitic limestone figurines from prehistoric sites. The most famous of these is called the "Venus of Willendorf," others are called "Venus figurines." These small statuettes of idealized, obese female figures have long been thought to be fertility totems, used in worship and the casting of sympathetic magic. The idea was the fertility of the "mother-goddess" could be bestowed upon the women of the tribe but also that fecundity could be transferred to the crops or the flocks or whatever the tribe sought to have in abundance, as well.

  That was the theory.

  Of the paleontologists, that is.

  Apparently, there are practitioners of power who store their—I don't know, this isn't my field—mojo? In such a way as to "bulk up" over time. You've seen how body builders increase muscle size as they grow in strength. And fat cells propagate to store potential energy for the body when calories aren't burned in sufficient quantities to equalize food consumed. Apparently there is a way in which people of power store their "mojo" for those times in which it may be needed. A skeletal Marie Laveau had exhausted her stores and had to utilize a resurrected Rasputin to act as her proxy when she summoned the storm. Mama Samm, in opposing both Laveau and Rasputin and dispersing the storm out into the gulf had used up just about everything she had. All of that potential power that she had accumulated over the long years was expended in a single day.

  And not just what was stored in bulk form.

  The woman was far older than the girl we found in the hatch appeared to be. In loosing that much power she had unraveled knowledge and wisdom, matters concerned with years of experience and study. She'd lost one and a half times her body mass and more than half her age in the process.

  Mama Samm D'Arbonne was a twenty-two-year-old young woman with no mojo left, so to speak, and only her wits to protect her now.