Last Licks

by Troy Conway

  I whirled. Henri Vachon was getting up.

  My left fist traveled three feet and landed solidly on his nose. The big Frenchman bellowed and dove for me with his arms held straight forward, fingers spread wide. I reached out, I grabbed his right wrist.

  I turned my back and yanked his right arm down across my shoulder in the approved technique for the ippon seoi nage, which breaks down in English to the shoulder throw. I gave the judo hold all I had, dropping unto a crouched position under his weight, and straightening at the same time that I yanked down on his arm.

  The Frenchman rose upward into the air, head toward the floor. He seemed almost to hover there in mid-air before he came crashing down. I drove my bare foot into his face, the heel hitting his nose hard and breaking it at the exact moment of his impact.

  Dirty fighting? You bet it was.

  But I was fighting to stay alive. Henri Vachon was fighting to kill me—slowly, by bending my back across his knee until it cracked. We had no referee, no ropes around our little arena. This was an elemental battle for life itself. You do anything you can at a time like that, against a man six feet six inches tall and maybe two hundred and sixty pounds in weight.

  If you don’t, you die.

  The Frenchman lay breathing harshly on the floor for several seconds, while I got my own wind back. He was suffering; I could see that. His nose was bleeding, and pain was etched in furrows across his face and neck.

  Then he moved his right hand.

  I had forgotten he had thrust the revolver into his belt as he came for me. His right hand was burrowing under his body for it. He had had a bellyful of fighting with his bare hands. He was going to put a bullet in my belly, and the hell with anything like an even fight.

  I took a running jump. One foot hit the back of his head; the other came down in the small of his back. His forehead hit the floor. His spine came damn near breaking.

  I whirled and dropped so I straddled his back. His right hand held the gun, and he was bringing it out from under him. I drove my left knee into the curve of his upper spine, and my right forearm about his neck, below his jaw. I grabbed my right wrist with my left hand and applied pressure.

  His neck came back and back, bending at an awkward angle. At the same time, his right hand slithered past his rib cage until I could see the barrel of his gun. I squeezed harder with my forearm.

  His neck was close to snapping.

  The sound of his breathing was like a foot dragging out of wet mud, moist and soggy. My right forearm was all but shutting off his supply of air.

  The gun came out into the open. It turned toward me. I was going to be a dead man in another second.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I dared not release my hold to go for the gun. Henri Vachon would have flipped me off his back with one huge heave of his massive body. It was all I could do to drag his head backwards, using every last iota of my strength, while watching that gun barrel turn to stare into my face.

  The hand that held the gun was quivering. The gun barrel shook back and forth. The Frenchman had had to turn his hand around so he could shoot behind him. It was an unnatural pose but it was all he could do under the circumstances.

  I held my breath.

  The muscles in my arms bulged.

  kraaaaaaakkk

  I slumped forward, letting out my breath. I had broken his neck. I felt his body shudder under me, saw his arm fall, watched and heard the thump as the revolver hit the carpet and skidded away.

  Henri Vachon died, body jerking, breath whistling in his throat. I lay across him, my heart pounding savagely in relief, my muscles turned to water in the reaction to my near-death. I waited until I was breathing more or less normally before I got up and staggered toward the door.

  When my Amazons saw me framed between the jambs, they let out wild screeches of delight and leaped for me. I went down under their combined assaults.

  Fortunately they realized my exhaustion. Eager hands raised me to my feet. Soft lips and soft voices cooed to me, assuring me I would be well taken care of. One girl even found time to congratulate me on my victory over the big Frenchman, telling me that I was now the unquestioned ruler of the island of Thraxos.

  “Put me to bed, honey,” I told the redheaded Janine.

  They supported me between them, out of the anteroom and up a narrow flight of stairs to an upstairs bedroom. Soft hands pushed me down between the sheets and drew blankets and bedspread over me. Gentle lips kissed me to sleep.

  I did not dream. I just lay like a dead man.

  When I woke, morning sunlight was streaming into the room. Some thoughtful chick must have tiptoed in with my clothes, because a shirt and slacks, shoes and socks lay across a nearby chair with a black leather gunbelt and holster that held a Luger automatic.

  I got dressed and went downstrairs.

  My stomach rumbled, informing me that I had neglected it shamefully. As I stepped out into the sunshine I found Fleur Devot waiting for me.

  “I am your personal bodyguard, your majesty,” she told me with a dimpled smile. She was pertly pretty in a drill jacket and mini-skirt, a sort of unofficial uniform, I assumed, for my Amazon army. Her right hip held a holstered revolver.

  “Can you use that thing?” I asked.

  She shrugged with Gallic fatalism. “Of course not. But I am the only one who really knows that. It would take a very brave man to try and find out, n’est ce pas?”

  It would. I let her take me to the dining area. With Fleur waiting on me personally, I finished off a pint of tomato juice, a half-dozen scrambled eggs and a half pound of bacon. Plus three cups of steaming coffee.

  When I was done, I asked, “What now?”

  “There are to be executions,” she smiled.

  “Oh? Whose?”

  “The men and the women who refuse to join us. Men like Georges Fortescu and those among the mermen who do not admit you are our king. As for the women—well, that blonde dancer Donna Romminet and her friend Barbe are among them, with a couple of others.”

  I felt this was kid of high-handed treatment, but when yon fight S.E.L.L., you fight the way I had battled Henri Vachon—all out and with no quarter given. We had offered the boys and girls a choice. They had chosen not to join us.

  “How will they die?”

  Fleur frowned. “I am not sure. Janine said something about ontos—Greek for a ‘thing’. It will do the killing for us, I understand. There is a place among the crags on the western tip of the island, not far from here, that forms a kind of hole in the rocks, partially filled with water. They will be cast into that hole.”

  Like sacrifices to Poseidon in the olden days. Man does not change much over the centuries. As victims have been thrown from clifftops before, so would they be hurled again. Sappho had given her life in this manner, say the old myths.

  I went with Fleur to the anteroom that was our headquarters. Janine Karthos and Theophano Linitka were waiting for me. Stella was out drilling the girl soldiers, with Yusefa attending to the details of the executions.

  “We’re going to have to do something about these girls,” I told the redhead. “Fun’s fun and all that, but I can’t go on servicing them the way I did yesterday.”

  “You’re our king,” protested Throphano.

  “Better a live king than a dead one,” I pointed out. “Besides, I have an idea as to how we can make everybody happy.”

  “How’s that?” asked Janine, sitting up straight.

  “Tell you later. First things first. I understand we’re getting rid of the dissenters in our group?”

  “Oh, the executions. Yes, they’re scheduled for half an hour from now. I suppose we might as well get moving.”

  I walked between Janine and Theophano, with Fleur a step to my rear. I noticed that she walked with a hand on her gunbutt, as if she were expecting an attack on me at any moment. I did not know whether to find her attitude reassuring or alarming. It was nice to have her at the ready in case of trouble, but what kind of t
rouble did she expect to happen?

  Some white object glinting in the Aegean sunlight caught my eyes. I slowed my pace and changed direction, walking toward it. From this distance, it seemed to be an upright marble slab.

  Fleur came flouncing at my heels. “What is it?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know, your majesty.”

  We came to a stop a few feet away, and I understood. This was a recent grave, the markings where sod had been laid on top of it clear to read. The gravestone was blank. I walked to the other side. There were no letters on the reverse side either.

  A body laid to rest. Name unknown. But why was there no name? My curiosity was roused, scratching at my brain. I made a mental note to ask Ernst Bachmann about this later.

  We walked back to join the others.

  Stella had lined the women up in rows. They burst into cheers at sight of me, remembering my great moment with all twenty-four of them yesterday. I grinned and saluted them as I stepped out to lead them toward the hole in the crags where the ontos dwelled.

  “What is the ontos?” I asked Theophano.

  “Nobody knows, lord. I think that at one time many, Many centuries ago there was a here, where the compound now stands. A temple to Poseidon, I believe it was. Men captured in battle were flung to the ontos that lived in the hole. It must still live there. Ernst Bachmann has dropped a few men into its lair to teach any rebels to obey the rules.”

  “Hmmm. A shark, maybe. Or an octopus?”

  Yusefa, with half a dozen of the woman soldiers, was already at the flat stretch of rock that formed a collar about the hole. Studying the rock, I noticed marks that indicated the collar had not always been flat. Hammers and chisels had worked here to make it into a broad platform.

  Many mermen, Eduardo Herrara and his mistress, Juana Batione, Alain Maillot and Georges Fortescu were among those standing here with their wrists tied behind them. I saw the blonde dancer and her girl friend among the few women who had chosen to be executed rather than join my Amazons. Barbe Serrelle looked as if she had been crying.

  “Must they die?” I asked Janine.

  “They must, your majesty. We just don’t have the manpower to keep them all as prisoners under guard. And we don’t dare trust them to set free.”

  The mermen I had no pity for. They were S.E.L.L. agents, as was Geroges Fortescu and, quite probably, Eduardo Herrara and Alain Maillot It was only the women that touched my heart. Then I reflected that a lot of them might be S.E.L.L., too—especially Juana Batione and Donna Romminet.

  “The women first,” snapped Yusefa.

  A hand pushed at Donna. She took a step forward, her legs acting rubbery. She was close to fainting. Barbe came to stand beside her. As one, they stepped off the stone collar and dropped like stones past the jagged edges of the ancient rocks. They hit the water in the pit, making a big splash.

  I held my breath, peering down.

  They sank out of sight. Then through the clear, translucent waters, they kicked their way upward to the surface. Barbe was screaming in stark terror by this time. Her nerve was completely gone. Others were being thrust over the rim and toward that dark, deadly hole in the rocks that was filled with cold ocean water.

  Overhead, the Aegean sun could have been the same that looked down upon the sacrifices to Poseidon that took place here more than three thousand years ago. In the days when Trojan Hector was fighting on the plains of Troy, the priests of the sea god were thrusting captives over this same rim of rock. The same warmth that beat on them, now touched all of us.

  I stared as if hypnotized down into that opening. The gray stone of its walls was jagged, rough. One merman tore open a long gash in his thigh when he hit the water, the red blood flowed out to mingle with the deep blue water.

  The last merman went over. Close to twenty men and women were down there, kicking with their feet, hands tied behind them, trying to keep their heads above water. The hole was possibly fifty feet across, and the water. There was very deep. There was plenty of room for all of them.

  And for something else.

  I heard Donna Romminet scream as she lifted her face to the sun and stared with blind horror, upward at the collar where we were standing. The scream ended in a gurgle as her body was drawn downward. Her open, screeching mouth gurgled as it filled with water. Then she was gone.

  Now the water boiled around the others as pallid white bodies jostled and thumped about the men and women. I gasped and felt nausea churn up inside my middle. Those were sharks down there—albino sharks! Their bodies were a fishbelly white, their eyes were pink. Their mouths gaped, displaying rows of sharp teeth that clamped on legs and arms and hips.

  Madness erupted in that death hole.

  Men and women fought with nails and teeth as they tried to battle the ravenous sharks that fed upon their flesh. I do not think those voracious killers of the deep lived in the ocean; I think thy came from some subterranean sea where there is darkness and very little light from one end of the year to the other. Long ago the priests of Poseidon learned of their existence and fed them to keep them coming back to this hole that looked from their dark world into ours.

  The smell of blood carries far in the water to the senses of a shark. They had learned over the centuries to expect food—living food—to be waiting for them when they came to eat. The priests had kept their bellies full. So had the mermen. Now it was the turn of some of those mermen to die here as they had made others die.

  Blood bubbled into the churning waters.

  One by one, by bits and pieces, the sacrifices were torn apart by those hungry sharks. The shark is not a common occupant of the Mediterranean, except for the whale shark. These were killer sharks, deadly and vicious denizens of some unknown sea below the island. Today they were being fed as never before.

  I put out a hand. I found I was holding Fleur. “Let’s get out of here,” I told her. “I can’t stand much more of this.”

  To my surprise, Fleur wanted to go on staring down into that hellhole of horror. She was holding her breath in excitement, and her eyes blazed with something like lust. I remembered the Colosseum, where Roman matrons had found themselves stirred to a fleshly furore by the blood spilled on the arena in the days when the Caesars ruled the world.

  My Amazons were sisters under the skin to those Roman matrons. Right now I was the only in this laboratory compound. My girl soldiers would be expecting me to take care of them. Include little blonde Fleur in that group too. She was pressing her behind against me, turning her blue eyes up, begging with them.

  “Do me, please—the way you did Ilona!”

  I grinned down at her. This was the nymphet who had teased me with the lollipop, the nymphet I had raped on the Athena. I remembered how the pain in her loins had triggered off the lust that accepted me as her sex partner after I had hurt her sufficiently.

  I put a hand under her short military jacket and fondled her soft buttocks. She had on black nylon panties under her jacket. She quivered to my caresses.

  Nobody was looking at us, everybody was staring down into the shark hole. I pinched her behind hard. Fleur moaned, and her eyes rolled back in her head as she sagged against me.

  I remembered her bitchiness, her arrogance. But I began to reevaluate those traits. Maybe she was so obnoxious because she wanted to get a spanking, to get slammed around. Masochists are like that. They’ll do damn near anything to rouse a person to savage anger so this anger will be turned against them in punishment. The lollipop act was just one more manifestation of this submissive instinct. She had wanted me to break loose; she had wanted me to ravish her flesh.

  There was something about her very willingness to be punished and hurt that jabbed a corresponding cruelty in my male hormones. Here on Thraxos the masks were coming off. Fleur was no longer a pretty French starlet; she was a yielding female who needed paid to stimulate her.

  I pinched again and she moaned.

  “I have things to do,” I told her cruelly. “Important thing
s, Fleur. You have to wait. You aren’t important enough for me to put those aside just to pleasure your body. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yes, your majesty! I do understand. I’m not worthy of your attention. But I’ll try to be.”

  I let her go with a slap on her soft rump.

  “Janine,” I called.

  The redhead turned dreaming eyes at me. I told myself I still owed Janine, Stella, Theophano and Yusefa a go-go gambit between the sheets. They had to wait. I wanted to get the action started on this little island.

  “I’m going to visit the mermen. I’ll take Fleur along for protection. I intend to offer them a place with us—if they’ll agree to join forces.”

  Janine scowled “They’re no good to us.”

  “Yes, they are—as pirates.”

  She did not understand, but she was willing to go along with me. She nodded when I explained that with the mermen siding us, we could send them out to loot and steal by boarding ships and by raiding towns, much in the manner of the Barbary Corsairs more than two centuries ago.

  Meanwhile, she would keep the Amazons busy.

  The mermen presented no problem. With Fleur at my side, I invaded their little cubicles, I made them my proposition. These mermen had elected to join us to save their lives. What I offered was something each of them already had in his mind to do, for S.E.L.L.

  “Instead of raiding ships for their scientific apparatus, or dragging off high-ranking officials to a S.E.L.L. prison—you’ll steal gold and jewels.”

  I told myself, the end justifies the means. By turning this laboratory compound into a pirate lair, I would bring the navies of Greece and Turkey (united for a change), maybe even those of Italy and France, down upon our little Thraxos haven. In the holocaust which would result, I’d be able to make a break for it.

  The mermen were eager. This very night, they’d take their submarine out and go hunting for palatial yachts like the Athena or for small cruise ships ploughing the waters of the Aegean and Ionian Seas. I assured them every merman would get a share of the booty he brought back. The mermen would come back; I did not fear desertion, men such as they had become would fine the facilities they needed only in this laboratory-compound.