The Big Reap

by Chris F. Holm

  Five full minutes passed before Ricou struck again. Five minutes of straining to hear some indication of where he was past the sound of my own shallow, panicked breaths and the low, static roar of the distant waterfall. They may as well have been five days.

  It wasn’t until the faint germ of hope that he’d lost interest had begun to blossom in my mind that he struck again.

  The second time, he hit harder. A bone-jarring thud, accompanied by the whine of dry wood taxed halfway to cracking. He must have hit the front half of the boat – nearest where my feet lay – because suddenly the whole shebang was canted wildly, my ankles above my head. By instinct, I tried to shoot my hands out to either side to brace myself, but they were still bound, and I thrashed in vain.

  This time he was gone in a flash, leaving empty space between the bow and the surface of the lake. The bow crashed down so fast the old boat took on water like a log flume at a fair. I sputtered and gasped as it filled my mouth and nose, aspirating some into my lungs despite my best efforts to the contrary and damn near choking on it.

  That cold splash, and the coughing fit that followed as the boat’s wild bobbing slowly settled, spurred me to action.

  Then again, maybe what spurred me to action was the fact that slamming back onto the water’s surface caused a sharp, angular pain to blossom just beneath my right kidney, like I’d just landed on my keys. Only I hadn’t just landed on my keys. I’d landed on Frank’s gun.

  Sure it wasn’t gonna be enough to kill ol’ Ricou here. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t slow him down.

  I rolled onto my side and doubled over, curling fetal and pulling at my wrist restraints with all I had. Searing pain at each wrist, an inch or so of give at most. Not enough to slip my hands out, but enough to wrap my elbows around the outside of both knees. For an endless, awkward moment, I writhed like a fresh-caught bass at the bottom of the boat, my shifting weight chopping the still water of the lake around the tiny vessel, but then I managed to pull through first one foot, and then the other.

  Ricou struck a third time, then, clipping the ass end of the boat and setting it skittering across the water’s surface like a child’s skipping rock. I rattled around inside, my face smacking against the bench seat hard enough to split my forehead open and set it bleeding, my hands helpless behind me. A decade back, I snatched a soul mid-ride on Space Mountain. Got bounced around something fierce barreling around in the dark with no hint as to when the next turn was gonna come. But that couldn’t hold an unlit candle to the bat-blind ass-whupping I was receiving at the hands – or fins, or who-knows-what – of Ricou.

  The boat hit a wall, and settled. I forced myself into a sitting position and leaned forward, ass aimed toward said wall, so I could reach out with my hands. I was hoping for a ledge, or railing, or passageway or whatever, but all I got was a craggy arc of cold damp stone, leaning slightly toward me as it stretched upward into the darkness. Unclimbable and useless to me, even if my hands were free.

  Back to Plan A, I thought, and started scrabbling for my gun.

  The gun was in a concealment holster inside my jeans, cheating slightly right of middle so Frank’s dominant hand could more easily reach it. So goes the theory, anyway.

  Here’s an exercise. Put your hands behind your back. Lace your fingers together, and clasp them tight. Now try to stick that double fist in your back right pocket. Not so easy, huh? Now try doing it in a rocking boat, knocked silly and scared half to Guam, with your eyes closed.

  Which is to say, I dropped the fucking thing.

  Luckily, I dropped it into the bottom of the boat. Which, sure, had taken on some water, but it was drier than the lake, at least.

  When I heard it hit, I sat down on it right quick, pinning it where it lay lest the unseen Ricou knock us for another loop and send it flying. Then I began the awkward shimmy of shuffling my hands up under my butt, past my knees, and one by one around my feet. When I finally got them up in front of me once more, now clasping Frank’s SIG Sauer, I felt a rush of savage delight, and the unmistakable urge to express it by talking shit to the near-immortal feral lifeforce-eater I was trapped inside the cave with.

  Sam Thornton may be many things, but thoughtful and level-headed he ain’t.

  “Hey, Ricou! Guess what? I’ve got a gun now, fucko. Which means you’re in a world of trouble. Whaddya think of that?”

  Not much, as it turns out. Because he decided at that moment to smack the boat once more, this time glancing off the left side and rearing up out of the water on his way to eat the tender, delectable morsel that was me. I know, because I reacted by falling backward onto the right-hand wall of the boat, which dipped below the surface and caused the tiny vessel to flood, while squeezing off five rounds in the direction of the disturbance, bringing to bear every ounce of speed and accuracy Frank here’s muscle-memory could muster.

  Blam blam blam blam blam! Five shots fired faster than you could say the words. Five camera-flashes that seared a zoetrope of Ricou’s approach into my retinas. The only glimpses of the beast before me I’d ever see, for scant moments thereafter, he upturned the boat, and plunged me into the chill, mineral water.

  And what a beast he was.

  Thick, muscled limbs, armored heavily with green scales. His hands and feet were thin webbing stretched across elongated bones, with translucent spines jutting out at the end of every phalanx – more fins than human appendages. A glistening, striated chest – fish-belly white – that faded to muted green as the fine scales of its underside gave way to thicker plates of armored flesh. A head near as wide as his torso, with mucus-slick flesh the color of bile tapering slightly to a gaping mouth two feet across, ringed all around with needle-sharp teeth of the same transparent substance as comprised the spines. Gill-flaps pulsing rhythmically on the thick, muscled trunk that passed for his neck. And on either side of his bullet-shaped head, dead black eyes like a shark’s – soulless, lifeless, unblinking.

  He sailed toward me in stop-motion, every muzzle-flash bringing him closer, until he was upon me. Bullets chunked off bits of flesh, off-white amidst the black spray of blood. Spines gouged at my own flesh as he slapped away my gun – severing the leather strap around my wrists – and drove one finned hand into my throat. Breath whistled through my punctured trachea as I tipped backward, flailing. His jaw snapped shut again and again scant inches from the tender flesh of my face, his breath reeking of bait and rotting meat. It’s a good thing I was too scared to think of what that stench represented. Even money he hadn’t flossed since the last child he ate. I stiff-armed him, my fingers finding purchase between teeth three inches long as I tried desperately to keep Frank’s face intact. But he just kept on coming, and so we tipped backward. Suddenly, said boat was upside-down, and me and the fish-monster were a tangled, writhing mass of limbs in the water.

  Ricou rolled me once, then twice, like a croc might a water buffalo. The water churned around us, my nose and mouth filling with water that tasted of my blood and his blood and mountain rock, all alkaline and bitter. I was certain I was going to drown. Hell, I halfway prayed for it. Least it’d mean I’d be out of Nevazut on the quick. But just as my lungs insisted they couldn’t go another moment without inhaling – water or air, they cared not which – Ricou released me, and glided off into the untold depths.

  I don’t know how long he left me for. Minutes, I guess. Twenty, maybe more. It felt like a lifetime. The echoes of our struggle died down to nothing in the vast still hollow of the cavern, leaving no sound to fill the space but the ragged hitching of my frantic breaths, and the waterfall’s constant background roar. The water was achingly cold, and too deep for me to touch bottom. For a time, I splashed madly about; half to frighten him away, and half because I was sure the cave wall or the rowboat must be nearby, but it was clear soon enough Ricou had dragged me toward the middle when he rolled me, because no matter how much I flailed in the stifling dark, I encountered no landmark, no assistance. Eventually, I ceased my thrashing, instea
d electing to tread water as efficiently as I could manage, because my arms and legs already throbbed in protest, and I had no idea how long I might be stuck out here, waiting for him to come kill me.

  When I heard the knock of wood on stone, I could scarcely contain my excitement. It was the upturned boat, bumping against the cavern wall.

  It knocked again. I paddled toward it. Cautious, quiet, with neither hands nor feet breaking the plane of the water’s surface, for fear of summoning the Kraken. Or, at least, its feral Brethren fish-monster stand-in.

  I needn’t have worried, because in this case, the Kraken was summoning me.

  As I approached the boat, the knocking increased – not in periodicity, but in intensity. What at first sounded tentative, as if the water’s gentle lapping had incited it, became purposeful slams, like Neptune himself dashing the vessel against the rocks. And as soon as I realized there was some manner of intelligence behind the knocking, I began to reverse course, but too late. My feet kicked against soft, muscled fish-flesh just as the boat made its final voyage, slamming into the rock wall so hard it shattered.

  Ricou had destroyed the boat.

  That managed, he turned his attentions once more to me.

  I broke into a full-bore freestyle away from him. No destination in mind but away. I made it five strokes before he grabbed my ankle and pulled me under.

  The weight of the water pressed against my temples, my eyeballs, my ear canals. My punctured trachea was clotted, but not enough. Water seeped in and made me cough, which in turn caused me to take on more.

  Still we descended.

  How deep the cave was, I’ll never know. Because as I thrashed against Ricou’s grasp – he gliding with speed and purpose under the power of the three limbs not holding me – I somehow managed to break free. I clawed my way to the surface like a man possessed – which, it occurs to me, is precisely what I was – and upon breaking it, filled my lungs with blessed air.

  Until Ricou pulled me under once more.

  We plunged again. Again I struggled. And again, I managed to break free.

  The third time we played our little game of down-and-back-again, I realized something, I hadn’t managed shit. That fucker kept letting me go, just to get my hopes up so he could dash them all over again, as surely as he’d dashed my boat against the rocks.

  Well, fuck him. I was done playing his game.

  Time to play one of my own.

  The next time he pulled me under and let go, I shuddered and went limp.

  And listened.

  And waited.

  My lungs burned. My limbs ached from cold and lack of oxygen. All I wanted was to kick my way up to the surface. But with a little help from Air Marshal Malmon’s peak physical condition and strict mental discipline I didn’t. I just floated, neutral-buoyant and lifeless. Like a drowned rat.

  Like bait.

  But Ricou was the cautious sort. I guess it’s how he’d spent so many centuries haunting the Amazon without winding up on the angler’s hook, the hunter’s blade. He didn’t come at me head-on. Not at first. Instead, from nowhere it seemed, he bumped me hard, at speed, and then disappeared once more into the cold black water.

  The blow startled me. Knocked from my chest what little wind I had. I chewed at my cheeks and clenched my eyes and begged Frank’s body to hold onto consciousness for a little while longer, promising I’d reward such cooperation with getting it out of here alive. I didn’t know if I could keep that promise, but I knew for sure I’d try.

  As with the boat, the second blow was harder. This time, he hit me full-on in the chest. I heard ribs snap. Felt sickly heat bloom at each break.

  When he hit me again, I was ready. I’d studied up. I’d listened to his first two approaches, and I thought I could gauge the vector of his approach by his fin-strokes. Direction and velocity, enough for me. Vision dancing with phantom spots as my brain screamed out for oxygen, I struck, punching the cold nothing in front of me.

  And feeling teeth.

  Then cold, wet guts.

  Ricou was built for power. Built for speed. And he was coming at me all lickety-split like, thinking he’d bust me up but good. Mouth open, chompers ready. Unfortunately for him, it wound up he swam mouth-open right onto my fist, plunging it so deep down his own throat that when he snapped his jaw shut on me, it left a semi-circular dotted line across one pectoral muscle, and another on my back. Which hurt like all get-out, but if his thrashing was any indication, not near as much as me clawing my way through his esophagus and into the soft-and-squishy that surrounded it.

  We danced like that a while. He thrashing, me neck-deep in nasty fish guts and yanking away like a magician looking for the end of my rainbow handkerchief, both bleeding like crazy in an environment too lightless for us to see the water go all Kool-Aid. And then I found it, a small sphere, about the size of an acorn, the only thing chalk-dry in his whole mucusy body. I got a hold of it and squeezed.

  It crumbled.

  Ricou stilled, teeth still buried in my back and chest.

  And as one, we sunk together into the depths.

  THEN

  Despite the vents at regular intervals through which faint, dilute wisps of spring cool sluiced downward, the air inside the bunker hall was warm and dry and still. It smelled of tobacco, pipe and cigarette, as well as people too long confined. Many of the doors that graced the hallway on either side were closed, and all were unmarked. Those that were open revealed a strange hodge-podge of seemingly unrelated rooms, as if they opened into different buildings altogether. To the right, a bare-concrete-walled war room, where dour, jackbooted men pushed what looked like children’s toy tanks and airplanes across a table at the center of the space, wholly occupied by a map of Europe, while headphoned others manned radios, reading codes to others still who clacked away on the odd, typewriter-y cipher devices of which the Nazis seemed so fond. Across from that to my left, posh living quarters hung with large gilt-framed Carravagios and three-quarters filled by a mahogany four-poster bed, which stood, draped with rich linens and multiply bepillowed, atop a plush Oriental rug of tan and green and red. Past that, a room piled high with rations, guns, and ornate trinkets – candelabras, tea services, jewelry – in gold and silver. And yet further down, there was a dark room bare but for ten cots, on top of two of which slept fitfully a pair of fully clothed soldiers.

  I trod the busy hallway in mute slow-motion like a specter, flinching reflexively whenever anyone got too near, as if contact might break whatever spell allowed me to pass among them unnoticed. Despite the heat, I’d left my overcoat on, and even buttoned it, but I could still detect the faint, acrid scent of bile emanating from my shirt. My hands shook. My eyes darted fitfully from face to face, certain I’d be fingered at any moment as an interloper – a spy.

  But no one seemed to pay me any mind.

  “Lilith!” I hissed, once the general who hurried past me with a wordless head-nod greeting had disappeared up the stairs, leaving me momentarily alone. “Damn it, Lily, what the hell am I supposed to do now?”

  And though I could not see her, and the hallway was plainly empty but for me, Lilith replied as low and clear as if she’d breathed the words into my ear. “For starters,” she said, “you’d best never call me Lily again, or you’ll find out what fresh hell it is to wind up on my bad side. Understood?”

  Given the lusty pin-up image Lilith’s throaty purr conjured in my mind, I had trouble picturing her having a bad side, though I confess I wouldn’t have minded spending a couple hours looking for it. Still, I was clueless in the belly of the beast and desperately needed her help, so in the interest of appeasing her I said, “Understood. Now – what happens next?”

  “You see that door up on your right? The windowed one with light shining through?”

  “Yeah, I see it.”

  “That’s Hitler’s office.”

  “He in there?”

  “There, or the adjoining living quarters,” she said. “He’s been holed
up inside for weeks. It’s almost as if he knows you’re coming…” she chided.

  “Sure. Nothing at all to do with the fact that damn near every army on the planet wants him dead, or that the Ruskies have been doing their best to bomb Berlin clean off the map. So what do I do?”

  “Your job,” she breathed.

  “How?”

  “That, Collector, is for you to figure out. I’m afraid whatever happens next, I cannot intervene.”

  “So this is like some kind of Collector rite of passage, then? A ‘see if the new guy passes muster’ sort of thing?”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “You’ll almost certainly fail horribly, and likely get your vessel killed in the process. In fact, I’m betting on it.” Visible or not, she sensed my sudden panic. “Fear not, Collector. If your vessel dies, your soul will simply be evicted, and reseeded somewhere else at random. No one ever knows quite where. I’ve selected Angola in the office pool, which is why I’m forbidden from influencing you from here on out.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Yes, I know it’s a long shot, but what was I to do? I drew a crap number in the lottery, so all the populous nations were already taken by the time I was allowed to choose.”

  “I meant, ‘Shit, I’m fucked.’”

  “Oh. Yes. Most probably. But, you know, good luck regardless and all that.”