So I handed her my Glock and explained the basics as we prepared to go after the others.
"There was a huge tidal reverse after the tsunamis and the quakes," she explained as we picked our way across a network of broken masts, spars, carefully laid ladders, gangplanks, strung ropes and nets that had been rigged to form precarious catwalks linking the flotilla of captive vessels.
Although the footing looked treacherous, I figured if the Deep Ones had rigged them to support press gangs carrying struggling captives, they'd more than support us in a pinch.
"We did what we could to ferry survivors, food, and potable water back and forth between the safer points of refuge," she continued. "We were running low on fuel and had taken on as many passengers as we could, especially those most in need of medical attention. The plan was to make a run north until we could find where the Mississippi met dry land again. It was thought that would be our best bet for medical facilities near the water."
As I helped her over a tangle of sailcloth and shattered wood I had my hands on her fluted waist and she steadied herself by grasping my bicep. "Have you been working out?" she chirped. She leaned in. "What are you wearing? Aftershave?"
"So what happened next?" I asked, releasing her a little early and causing her to stumble a bit.
"Oh yeah. That's when the Coast Guard cutter showed up," she said, "minus the Coast Guard. Those things that you've tangled with underwater, the Deep Ones? Well, they're not born that way. They start off looking human—reasonably human, anyway. Over the years they change into something that looks like it always came from the sea. In this instance the crew had been replaced by these creatures that still looked human from a ways off. But up close . . ." She shuddered like any twenty-two-year-old girl might and I wondered how much of Mama Samm had been lost along with her power.
"They forcibly escorted us out here and took what was left of our fuel and departed. That was yesterday. We tried radioing for help but the captain suspected—suspects—that someone or something is jamming communications. He took a compliment of the more experienced crew to investigate. That was last night. This morning the Deep Ones came for us.
"We saw them coming from a distance. There was a big argument but we decided to hide as best we could rather than all be taken together. I guess I hid the best," she said in a small voice.
"Thank God you did," I reassured her as she led us across a net surfaced walkway that belonged in some nightmare boot camp. "If you hadn't still been there to cover the radio we never would have found you and there'd be no chance for a rescue!"
It was true but guilt rarely acknowledges logic.
"Did you see where they took them from here?"
She pointed. "Up there."
A steel chain ladder hung from a ragged torch-cut hole in the side of the ocean liner.
* * *
One typically associates movement into the Devil's domain as a downward motion, i.e., a "descent" into Hell . . .
We climbed the ladder and ascended into Hell.
The disco ball was the first clue. It reflected the red emergency lighting throughout the dance club on the other side of the cut-out bulkhead like a thousand fingers of flame. The effect was almost jolly until I noticed the ceiling streamers were dripping on the Lucite-paneled disco floor. What kinds of streamers were rope-like and lumpy, anyhow?
Volpea snarled, hair starting to bristle up across her face. Zotz growled and suddenly the tall Asian fellow who'd been with us since Gordon's visit this afternoon was an 800 pound Bat-Thing, all teeth and talons and barely bridled power. Since his clothing was all part and parcel of the appearance he generated for each transformation the equipment in his ops vest tumbled to the floor as it disappeared with the rest of his former glamour. I took a step back and nearly tripped over Suki's cat form as she had come tumbling out with everything else. Daintily, she padded over to a puddle of viscous liquid that was pooling under one of the grisly decorations and began lapping at it.
"Blood," Samm moaned (I couldn't hardly think of this slip of a girl as "Mama" Samm right now). "Can't you smell it?" she asked me.
"Well? Yeah. Now."
"Not just in here," Setanta said, stepping around the puddles without actually looking down. You can smell it in the ventilation shafts.
"Crap," I said. "Let's move out!"
"Come, Mrs. Bigglesworth," Zotz called.
Suki merrowed and obediently fell into line.
We pushed through into a dining room. It was in use. The Deep Ones may have had uses for knives but they weren't fork and spoon guys. Never mind the good china, paper plates would have been wasted on them. Likewise napkins. The tablecloths had soaked up a good bit of the gore but the carpeting was still squishy with the overflow. There were maybe a thirty or more chowing down on—well the emergency lighting made everything look red so maybe speculation should be left to those who had the time and stomach for such luxuries.
Volpea was tearing through the remnants of her clothing, looking like some kind of hairy, red hell-beast that walked erect but shouldn't. Her face pinched down and forward as her ears went black and pointed and moved up on her skull. Her hands became blackened paws with sharpened nails and her mouth filled with needle-sharp teeth. As the last of her clothing tore away I could see her tail grow plump and fat and the fur around her cheeks, chin, and down her chest and belly flushed out white.
Volpea was a fox! A werefox!
Zotz was all Tyrannosaurus Bat and charging in just ahead of the fox-woman.
But Setanta was Setanta no longer. He was Cuchulainn, Celtic berserker of song and legend. His golden-red hair was standing on end and seeming to give off sparks as he rushed ahead of the other two. The archangel's sword raised over his head came down and around decapitating four of the finny freaks at once. I glanced at Samm and Liban to be sure they were all right before wading in on my own. The former was pointing my Glock everywhere, the latter had the Mossberg leveled but otherwise wasn't tracking any targets. Maybe she'd shoot if something came close. In the meantime all of the targets were across the room and moving in short, violent arcs. I left the Smith & Wesson in its harness and flexed my increasingly prickly hands as I jogged toward the melee.
It was over pretty quickly.
Even better, it was over pretty quietly. No shots were fired. There was still a chance for some element of surprise.
* * *
Zotz refused to change so he had to stoop like Quasimodo to get through most of the passageways. Volpea held her fox form but remained humanoid enough to walk erect and retain a semblance of speech. And Cuch—well, I remember some buddies coming back from the Middle East that you always tried to talk out of that third beer at the bar—they had that same look in their eyes and you knew things were going to get broken in short order.
Liban looked stronger, now, though she still held the shotgun like it was an alien object. Which I guess it was.
Samm was looking calmer and a little more like Cuch. She kept flicking the Glock's safety on and off and it made me a little more nervous to have her behind me. Finally I put her in front of me where I could keep a better eye on her and shake the odd sensation that someone was staring at my ass all of the time.
We pressed on.
For the next little while we encountered our amphibious adversaries individually and twos and threes so there was no real resistance to speak of. On the other hand, time was slipping away and we seemed to be wandering in a three-dimensional maze.
Liban pulled me aside during a three minute rest break in one of the ship's storerooms.
"I heard the werewolf's threat on the radio earlier," she said.
"It's an old song."
"Where can you go that they won't eventually track you down?"
I shrugged. "It's finally become clear to me that the only way my family is ever going to be safe is for me to be a bigger monster than the ones who hunt us."
She nodded. "Perhaps. Or you could send him somewhere safe, somewhere out of
their reach."
I stared at her. "Are we back to this again?"
"It wouldn't be for Fand. I don't—" There was a catch in her voice. "I don't even know if she's still alive. Opening a faerie door, well, there should have been enough help on the other side to send that monster straight to Hell and tend my sister's wounds in short order. That we have not heard . . ." Liban looked away. "If I take your son into the realm of the Fey, none can follow. He will be safe. He will know peace and be raised as a prince."
"Back up a little, Liban. You said none can follow. Does that include family visits from his mom and me?"
She shook her head. "If he is allowed entry, he must be adopted as one of us. He severs mortal ties. You cannot follow after, even for a visit."
I nodded. "Well, I can tell you right now his mother isn't going to go for it. And I'm even less crazy about the terms. So thanks but no—"
Samm suddenly appeared by my side. "Where did you go? One minute you were behind me, the next minute?"
"Um, look," I said, "we should probably talk about my nanites. Dr. Mooncloud made an interesting discovery recently—"
"About your pheromones?" Samm interrupted. "Yeah, she told me about that." She fished around in her shirt pocket and pulled out a generic squeeze bottle of nasal spray. "Good thing she gave me the antidote."
"Um," I said, "I thought the antidote she was working on was still experimental."
"Hmph." She tucked it back into her shirt pocket. "Seems to be working just fine for me." She smiled and slapped me on the butt as Cuch and Zotz joined us.
"Maybe there's a way to question one of them," Cuchulainn was suggesting.
"Those that have fully transformed," Samm answered, suddenly all business, "no longer speak in human tongues."
"What about the mermaid, here?" Zotz asked. "Maybe she parlay-voos sea-monster speak."
Liban shook her head. "My sister and I are only recently arrived to your shores. These creatures are beyond our ken and none have seen the like neither 'round Manx nor anywhere across the sea".
"That's good to know," Samm said. "They have not spread so far, yet."
I stopped walking. "Maybe I can have a little chat with these freaks . . ."
Zotz looked at me and grinned. "Why didn't we think of this sooner?"
I knew why. I was too tired to think. I'd had very little sleep and the little I'd had hadn't been restful. We left the storeroom, worked our way down a corridor of staterooms, then up a staircase and out onto the Lido Deck. The stars were out.
The monsters weren't.
Neither was Doc, Gopher, Julie, or Isaac the bartender.
"There's never a monster around when you need one," Volpea growled.
I didn't know her well enough to run an irony check, yet.
The Bat-demon had a suggestion: "Maybe if we make a lot of noise they'll come running."
"I need a little calm and quiet to work this," I told him. I can't concentrate with lots of screaming and body parts flying through the air—even if they're not ours."
We went back down below via another stairway and found a theater. And a couple of fish folk down on the floor behind the back row trying to make the two-backed barracuda.
Zotz grabbed one, Cuchulainn the other and yanked. The young-sturgeons-in-love made a sound like Velcro as they were pulled apart. The one in Zotz's grasp went limp. Cuchulainn smacked the other lightly but there was more than enough blood as a result. I did what I always do when entering another's consciousness through the portal of blood.
It wasn't the same.
Not by a long shot.
I had once placed my mind inside the consciousness of a wolf by using a Chakra point. That had been different on both counts. All of the other times I had found an individual's blood to be the gateway.
But I had dealt with creatures much like myself under those circumstances: humans, lycanthropes, the undead.
This was very different.
The blood was different.
And the mind was very different.
It wasn't like being in a space or an area or even a box or container. It was like being in a sponge. And I was being absorbed into a thousand little cells and spaces, fragmenting, dissolving.
Thoughts that were not my own chittered and giggled inside my own mind. Normally I would push the other's consciousness into a position of obeisance and see what I could learn while I was in control of the new flesh. But this thing was unfamiliar, slippery. Its mind was as alien a maze as the dimly lit, gore-strewn decks of the passenger cruise ship we were practically lost in.
I had to get out before I was totally absorbed! Lost in some coral-faceted brain of a fish-thing that was inhuman and soulless.
I tried to turn and saw the others looking at me as if through a fishbowl. My former flesh was in a heap on the theater floor, my head cradled in Liban's lap. Samm seemed to be overly solicitous as well.
I turned the other way. Out through that door! Down a secondary staircase! Through the plaza and the room of cages. Into the temple! Must reach the temple! Warn—!
A twisting wrench and I was staring up into the sea green eyes of Liban.
"I can take over for awhile if you get uncomfortable," Samm's voice murmured somewhere near my ear.
"Fine!" I said, jerking up and hitting the sea goddess' chin with the top of my head as I struggled to sit up. "I'm fine! I'm going to get up now!"
And I did get up. And I fell back down. And I tried to throw up again as I crouched on my hands and knees on the squishy carpet.
I really had to start eating solid food again or the next time my stomach might actually turn inside-out and crawl back out through my esophagus.
* * *
The "plaza" was actually a gymnasium.
Of course what would Charlie the Tuna know about gyms or weights or speed bags or stationary bikes? Just a big, airy room with a wood floor, lined by mirrored walls. Half of those mirrors were smashed and most were marked with splats of blood, as well. Dead moist things had been dragged across the floor, into the next room so we took a moment to check weapons and reset our formation.
Something awful lay beyond the next door or two. I could feel it like a sick certainty. The way the olfactory enhanced had smelled the blood through the ventilation shafts. And there was something in the Deep One's mind. Something without language, something beyond imagery—but something that I could feel through his emotions. Something too hideous to grasp but too terrible to not sense.
Everything that I had glimpsed in the creature's mind was heavily filtered . . .
Plaza . . . room of cages . . . temple . . .
And something else. A great dark presence beyond.
>Father . . . <
>Mother . . . <
What?
What could be more terrible than the inhuman slaughter than we'd been practically wading through for the past hour?
Except the deaths of the people I actually knew and loved?
Thinking . . . thinking didn't help. Felling didn't help. Doing . . . only doing would matter now and maybe not even that.
"End of the world, Boys and Girls," I announced. "I'm going first." And I kicked the door open.
It was the room of many cages. A locker room with steel mesh lockers for the gymnasium. It was where the passengers would keep a towel and a change of clothes while they worked out.
It was where the Deep Ones kept their human chattel until they were hungry. Bodies were crammed into the narrow spaces, bruised, bloody, and battered but still alive.
No order was given. Nothing was said. Everyone just fanned out and began breaking open the lockers. Some of the occupants tumbled out dead—heart attacks or strokes brought on by fear, most likely. Others were unconscious or near catatonic. Even the most responsive were too dazed or too hurt to move right away so there was no mass exodus. Just a few ripples of panic.
One prisoner was different in every way, however.
The creature squirming about inside the narrow
cage was all teeth and claws and hair and only half human. Samm tried to calm her before anyone opened the locker door.
"Irena? Baby? It's Samm. Mama Samm D'Arbonne. Remember? I brought help. There's friends here but you gots to calm down before we lets you out. Can you do that, Baby? Put the beast back inside for a little while?"
The creature that looked like some kind of anime juxtaposition of cat and teenaged girl turned and twisted in her confinement but eventually quieted under Samm's quiet reassurances. Cuchulainn pulled off his bloody shirt so that Irena would have something to wear. We turned our backs as Samm set her free and helped her cover up. Sure, there was an element of chivalry involved but we had a perimeter to watch and I was starting to hear strange sounds beyond the next door.
"Irena?" I heard Samm say. "Where is Miss Lupé? Do you know where Miss Deirdre is? What happened to the rest of the crew?"
"I don't know" she said with an awkward mixture of fear and anger. "I tried to change and they piled on top of me. We got separated. I haven't seen them since."
The fact that Irena was alive was a good sign. The fact that the others weren't with her and she didn't know anything wasn't helpful. It wasn't "unhelpful". Standing around doing nothing was.
I started to move in toward the next set of doors and most of the others, "Mrs. Bigglesworth" included, moved with me.
"Shouldn't somebody stay here with the rest of the hostages?" Samm asked. Some had already wandered off, looking to escape on their own, but there were still a goodly number sitting around looking dazed.
"And do what?" Zotz wanted to know. "I thought we discussed this."
We had discussed this very thing.
Back on the Spindrift.
And, before that, on the New Moon.
Any time the question of leaving someone behind comes up—for their own protection, to look after someone else, to perform some extra task—the Tao of the Creature Feature is invoked. To Wit: under no circumstances does the group ever, ever split up or allow anyone to go off alone or remain behind! Those are the people who die first. And, as the group gets smaller, everyone starts dying off more frequently. So sayeth the Tao of the Creature Feature. And we had all agreed twice now to stay together, no matter what.
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