Captain Nemo

by Kevin J. Anderson

  One bearded pirate turned, braced his legs, and pointed his flintlock pistol. He pulled the trigger, a spark flared the powder, and the ball flew—but the bullet made only a red mark on the dinosaur’s hide. The beast noticed the shot no more than a buzzing gnat. The bearded pirate fired a second pistol shot, but the dinosaur responded by devouring him with two swift crunches.

  A one-eyed brute stopped running and turned about, drawing a curved cutlass in each hand. With greasy sweat glistening on his bald pate, he turned to face the dinosaur. His scarlet silk pantaloons rippled in the breeze.

  As the monster advanced, he screamed a counterpoint yell to the dinosaur’s roar and slashed with both blades, nicking the armored hide. The gigantic reptile bent forward to grab him. The bald pirate continued to stab and slash the tender meat inside the monster’s mouth even as the jaws crushed him. Two bloody swords clattered to the rocky ground.

  Roaring so that the sky trembled and Nemo’s ears ached, the dinosaur threw the mangled swordsman down without even eating him. It stomped the corpse of the bald man into a mess with one huge hind foot, then charged forward on a more furious rampage.

  Nemo dropped down the steep hill until he reached the grassy plateau. Without pausing, he made for the rocks at the edge of the cliff. Foolishly, the pirates followed, seeing hope light up Nemo’s face.

  The dinosaur sprang forward with its muscular back legs, using its tail as a counterweight so that it landed, completely balanced, on the meadow below. The pirates threw knives, stones, and empty pistols at it, but nothing slowed down the monster.

  Nemo rushed to the sheer dropoff where he had weighted down his glider the day before. He uprooted the ropes, grabbed the kite-wing handholds, and took a running start. He didn’t have time to tie himself in. He leaped out into open space, clinging to his glider supports as the winds pulled him up and away from the mountainside.

  The doomed pirates staggered to a halt, howling with surprise as he left them behind. Now they were trapped, with no hope of escape. The cliff dropped to foam-battered rocks far below. Nemo soared away, feeling no pity for these vicious men. If only Captain Noseless could have been among them . . .

  The dinosaur stomped toward its cornered prey. Some of the pirates drew their swords, making a stand, while others hurled themselves off the cliff rather than be devoured by the dinosaur. When the last victims could not make up their minds, the beast chose for them.

  Flying on the winds, Nemo watched the hapless victims, remembering how they themselves had slaughtered the good men aboard the Coralie.

  Nemo banked and drifted over the thick jungles, eluding pursuit. He landed out in the inaccessible wilderness, where he intended to hide until he could hurt the pirates again. These vile men would no longer take him lightly.

  X

  For the next day, taking advantage of whatever cover he could find, Nemo crept through the jungles to the shoreline. He knew this island well enough to take back paths to the sheltered lagoon where the Coralie had anchored.

  Nemo didn’t know how many men Captain Noseless had kept on board while raiding parties scoured the island. Fewer and fewer of the roaming brigands survived, though, as the dinosaur continued to hunt through the night. And Nemo hunted too, looking for means to harm the pirates.

  He stood shin-deep in a mangrove swamp, watching for snakes, but more interested in keeping himself hidden from view as he spied on the three-masted brig. The pirate ship was just across the dark waters of the lagoon. Anger and hatred simmered within his heart.

  The scarred captain paced the quarterdeck. His remaining men talked amongst themselves, subdued with fear. Nemo fixed his gaze on Noseless, despising the pirate. As the sun sank into the west, painting the sky tangerine and scarlet, Noseless glanced toward the swamps, as if he could sense the young man glaring at him from the deepening shadows.

  Nemo wracked his brain for a way to strike at the pirates who had twice destroyed his life. How he hated them! As dusk settled in, accompanied by the night songs of insects, the stillness began to lull Nemo into complacency.

  All at once the island grew ominously silent.

  The dinosaur’s roar split the gloom. The beast crashed through trees, just behind the closer yells of men. Two of the surviving brigands howled in panic as they broke out of the jungle cover by the lagoon. “Help, help!”

  On board the Coralie, pirates began to mill about. The men on shore shouted toward the anchored ship, but Noseless just stood on the quarterdeck, hands on hips. His face looked more cadaverous than ever, cold and calculating.

  As the terrified pirates stumbled across the beach, the trees behind them bent aside. The bloodstained dinosaur pushed its way into the clearing, and its scarlet gaze locked onto the men crossing the swatch of sand. The pirates beckoned for their captain to send help, to launch another longboat, but Noseless made no move to assist them.

  One of the pirates fell to his knees in an abject expression of prayerful penitence, while the other raced out into the shallow water, sloshing up to his knees and then his waist, as if he could swim out to the Coralie in time.

  The dinosaur stepped over the huddled form of the praying man, batting him to the sand with a powerful sweep of its tail, then lunged into the water and scooped down like a pelican catching a fish. The swimming pirate wailed, only to fall abruptly silent as the creature crunched its jaws. Next, the monster turned back to the beach, where it daintily bit the praying man in half.

  Nemo watched from his hiding place, stunned by the cold-blooded attitude of Captain Noseless on board the ship. Dozens of pirates remained on the Coralie, and all had refused to help their comrades. The young man’s nostrils flared, and he grew angrier by the moment.

  From the beach, the dinosaur stared at the ship, defiant, as if its tiny brain knew that its main enemy lay out there. Its roar split the twilight.

  In response, Captain Noseless’s command echoed across the water. “Fire!”

  The dinosaur roared again as a volley of blasts rang out. Every cannon on the port side of the pirate ship fired. Eight of the balls went wide, striking the rocks, the sand, or the jungle—but five hammered into the beast, blasting huge wounds in its massive body. The dinosaur was knocked backward, thrashing.

  The remaining men on the Coralie surged to the port sides, cheering.

  The monster staggered, wailing and honking. Blood poured in gouts from mangled holes in its hide. It clacked its huge shovel jaws together. Two more cannons fired, and both balls struck, shattering the dinosaur’s spine and ribs.

  At that moment Nemo saw his chance. While Noseless concentrated on his extravagant destruction, the young man slipped into the water. If ever he hoped for an opportunity to get aboard the ship, it was now while the pirates were cheering the dinosaur’s death throes.

  The dying beast twitched, thrashed, and collapsed onto the bloodied sands. Its monstrous primeval body had been ruined as easily as a defenseless cargo ship, another victim of the pirates.

  As the tropical dusk darkened into night, Nemo stroked through the calm lagoon, crossing the distance without a splash. He approached opposite from the gathered pirates and clung to the Coralie ’s barnacled hull at the water line.

  Using the stealth and meticulous care he had developed as a hunter on the island, Nemo climbed the side of the ship, finding footholds on the rough hull planks, pulling himself up by portholes and the hinged starboard gunports.

  He hauled himself over the deck railing and crouched behind a tall coil of rope. Tense and completely alert, he knelt on a bloodied grating, over which the pirate captain must have flogged his poorly disciplined crew. A gunshot rang out, and Nemo ducked, sure that he’d been caught, ready to fight and make a full accounting of himself. But then he heard the hooting laughter of the pirates celebrating their victory.

  Most of them must be up on deck, celebrating, now that the cannons had ceased firing. Without being seen, he scampered to a hatch and climbed down into the rank-smelling shadows. A sa
tisfied and confident smile stole across Nemo’s face as he calculated what he could do, how much damage he could cause. The pirates would rue this day.

  Experiencing an eerie déjà vu, he hurried down the ladder into the main hold. He knew this ship, had lived aboard her for two years. The Coralie had been his home as much as Ile Feydeau or his Granite House cave. He remembered where his bunk had been, as well as those of the first mate, the carpenters, and sailmakers. Most importantly, Nemo remembered where the gunpowder was stored, where kegs of explosive black powder were stacked in the heart of the ship, shielded from outside attack.

  But the protected stores were not proof against an infiltrator like himself.

  Saddened by what he found himself forced to do with Captain Grant’s fine ship, he cracked open one of the casks and spilled the sharp-smelling black grains over the decking and then ran a trail around the other barrels, so that all the kegs would ignite simultaneously.

  Noseless kept a full storeroom of explosives. With a bitter grimace, Nemo realized that a pirate ship needed to use its cannons far more often than a research vessel like Captain Grant’s. The scarred captain’s additional stockpile would bring about the pirates’ doom.

  He took a smaller cask of gunpowder and walked backward, leaving a long dark line all the way to the ladder. He could still hear the pirates reveling up on deck; apparently none of them felt any grief for the loss of their devoured comrades, nor did they leave the ship to investigate the dinosaur’s carcass.

  Kneeling, Nemo removed his flint and steel. When he struck them against each other, the clinking sound rang out—but the squeezeboxes and singing and laughter from three decks above were far too loud for any of the pirates to hear him. Finally, a spark flew from the dagger blade and landed in the black powder. Igniting with a fountain of gold flecks, the flame ate along the fuse line faster than a rapid walk.

  Foregoing all pretense of caution or silence, Nemo scrambled up the ladder, past the second deck, then through the hatch into the open air. He burst out between two drunken pirates, who reeled backward with a cry of astonishment. Nemo took advantage of their disorientation and ducked past them, shoving with the flat of his hand. One of the pirates grabbed his arm, but he whirled like a cobra and sank his teeth into the man’s knuckles like a vicious animal. The pirate yelped and released him.

  Standing at the quarterdeck, Noseless saw the young man. “Get him!” Only then did the brigand captain look over at the deck hatch, as if wondering what Nemo had been doing below, where a wisp of smoke curled up. His cadaverous face changed, and his scarred visage held a look of horror. “Down below! Get to the powder storeroom!” But the pirates didn’t understand his urgency.

  As the raiders closed in, Nemo threw himself overboard. It was a long drop to the sea, but he didn’t care. He tumbled, landing feet first with a splash and sinking deep. Then he swam underwater as far as he could; when he finally surfaced, several pirates stood on the deck, blasting with their pistols. But their aim was off in the dark, and lead balls splashed all around him in the lagoon.

  Nemo swam desperately to get away, mentally counting down. He looked over his shoulder, wondering how much time remained. Noseless stood on the Coralie ’s deck in the same spot where Nemo had last seen Captain Grant.

  Then all the powder kegs exploded.

  The shockwave punched him like a gigantic fist, hurling Nemo through the water toward the shore. The concussion knocked the wind out of him and made his ears ring, but still he thrashed closer to the shelter of the mangrove swamp.

  Splintered wood showered the water like Roman candles. He heard the wails and screams of dying men. The Coralie burned, flames racing up the rigging and the sails—a complete inferno. The end of Captain Grant’s abused ship, the end of the pirates.

  Shaky, battered, and nearly deaf, Nemo made his way into the thick mangrove swamps. Panting as he held a knobby root, he watched the ship burn and sink. In the flickering orange firelight, he saw no survivors, no men swimming for shore or clinging to flotsam and groaning for help. The pirates had been taken by surprise, and they had paid the ultimate price.

  The lack of mercy bothered Nemo not a bit.

  He gradually got his breath back. He had protected his home and his island, but most of all he was proud to have avenged the murder of Captain Grant. For that, he was thankful.

  XI

  Over the following afternoon, Nemo assessed the damage the pirates had done to his home in only two days.

  His storage sheds had been burned to the ground, the corral torn apart, his vegetable garden uprooted and trampled. Using green vines as crude ropes, he lowered himself down the cliff face into the ruins of Granite House. His caves had been gutted, everything breakable smashed to pieces. Malicious vandalism, not because the pirates wanted anything of his.

  Where he had hidden it in an alcove, he found the journal he had so diligently kept during his isolation. With tears in his dark eyes, he flipped through the intact pages that described his daily tribulations. It had taken him years to put everything together here. . . .

  How he hated the pirates!

  Later, Nemo sat by himself on the beach, knees drawn up to his chin. With the first dinosaur attack, Noseless had retrieved the longboats from the beach, stranding his own men on the island, and those boats had burned with the Coralie.

  Nemo listened to the sighing water out by the sheltering reefs, and realized he simply did not have the heart to begin all over again. He clutched the logbook to his chest, remembering how it had saved him from a sword thrust long ago. The written words were all that remained of those years of his life, now that his home had been ruined.

  Nemo retrieved enough food from his hidden supplies to make a meal for himself. Then he spent hours just smelling the bitter odor of smoke and listening to the lonely wind as he contemplated what to do.

  The Coralie had been destroyed. He supposed a few surviving pirates might still be lost in the jungles, raiders who had survived the depredations of the dinosaur. If they came after him, Nemo would fight. But he would rather avoid the brigands altogether.

  Once again, André Nemo was about to start clean with his life, just as when he had signed on aboard Captain Grant’s ship after the death of his father. Now, though, without the driving juggernaut of vengeance in his heart, he felt empty, aimless. He could do anything he desired now, without being tied down. . . .

  The strange cavern that had opened up on the side of the volcano intrigued him. Numerous caves and passages riddled the island, extending deep into the Earth—but the huge dinosaur had emerged from that place. What sort of subterranean world lurked beneath this island?

  With the new morning, Nemo hiked up to the cave and stared at the wide opening. From inside wafted strange and lush smells, humid air with a taint of sulfur, mixed with the freshness of thick vegetation. Fog crept out of the cave mouth, and faint light came from a glow down the steep passage.

  Nemo knew that he must investigate this place. It was what Captain Grant would have done, to see, to explore, to learn.

  From the tales he and Jules Verne had told each other during their imaginative musings, the theories they had read, as well as discussions he’d had aboard the Coralie, Nemo was no stranger to the idea that the Earth might be hollow, that a new world lay waiting to be explored beneath the crust. To explain the magnetic phenomena of the Earth’s poles, the renowned astronomer Edmund Halley had hypothesized a hollow world composed of concentric spheres rotating like a dynamo around a small central sun, and the American soldier John Cleves Symmes had recently repopularized the idea.

  Now Nemo had a chance to test it for himself. He didn’t know where these tunnels might take him, whether they led to passages extending beneath the ocean floor . . . or even to the center of the Earth.

  He did not undertake such a journey lightly. He secured every useful item he could bring, found a scrap of rope from the ship wreckage and even retrieved two cutlasses and a brace of pistols that the pir
ates had dropped during their flight from the dinosaur.

  He stitched together a satchel made of burnt scraps of sailcloth that had washed ashore from the wreck of the Coralie. He would carry torches coated with sulfur and dried resin, though he could not bring enough to guide his way for long. He hoped that the greenish underground illumination would remain steady enough for him to find his way.

  Nemo sliced flesh from the fallen dinosaur’s carcass, cooked and tasted the meat. Although it was bitter, the flesh seemed nourishing enough and in plentiful supply. Anxious to go, he didn’t want to take the time to hunt other game, so he built a green, smoky fire and cured strips of the reptile meat, which he wrapped in fresh leaves and packed in his satchel.

  His final and most important task was to tear out the writing-covered pages from his journal. He rolled them into a tight tube, which he then inserted into the empty brandy bottle he had kept for so long. He added a note instructing whoever found this message to deliver it to his friend Jules Verne in Nantes, France. He sealed the bottle and went to the end of the lagoon.

  When the strongest current of the tide went out, he gripped the bottle, knowing there was virtually no chance in all the vast oceans that this message would ever see its intended reader. But he had beaten the odds before.

  He hurled the bottle into the waves, watched it bob on the surface for some minutes and float away. He hoped it would drift into the shipping lanes. For a long time he’d clung to nothing more than hope . . . but hope had served him well enough over the years.

  Taking his satchel, Nemo climbed the volcanic slopes to the intriguing cave opening. He took one last look around him at the shores that had encompassed his world for so long, and then he turned toward the mystery ahead.

  Nemo ventured into the cave, not knowing if he would ever come back.

  PART IV