by Michael West
“Okay.” Earl frowned and pointed at the book. “So what’s it all about?”
“It talks about gods that came in boats that sailed the sky.” The enthusiastic grin returned to her lips. “In archeological circles, we call them ancient astronauts.”
Earl looked mildly shocked. “You’re serious.”
She nodded excitedly.
Earl threw his head back and laughed. “Okay, see I’m with you on this whole Atlantis thing because it’s there, you’ve found it...but we’re talkin’ aliens now? Brothers from Mars...‘We are not alone’...anal probes? Tell me you don’t believe that shit?”
“There are people on islands in southeast Asia who laugh at the idea of snow,” she told him, then continued her translation, “The book says these beings, these ‘creators,’ took primitive animals from our land and sea, and from them made two races. One was to work the soil of the mountains and plains, the other would till the ocean floor. The riches they found there were to be given back to the gods as tribute.”
Now Alan smiled as well. “Mining operations?”
“Hold the phone.” Earl held up his hands. “Your boss owns a mine?”
Carol took a deep breath before speaking, knowing how her words would sound. “When you spend your whole life looking for lost civilizations, Atlantis or the Mu continent, you read everything you can on the subject along the way. One hypothesis has been that the city was a colony for visitors from another world.” Earl snickered, but she went on, “And one of the theories as to why they came to Earth was to mine it.”
Earl rubbed his eyes. “I take back what I said about you people being intelligent.”
“Officer Preston...” Carol’s face tightened. “No one invited you here. You came to us because you wanted our help.”
“I need facts to believe this Sci-Fi Channel crap,” he told her.
“Believe it or not, let’s pretend for a moment that it’s possible. The ocean floor has enough mineral wealth to rival a hundred California gold rushes. That’s an undeniable fact. Human beings have only now created submersibles that can reach any kind of great depth without folding under the pressure, but marine life has thrived, even at the bottom of the deepest trenches, since the dawn of time. If you could create a worker, a miner who could survive underwater, under such great pressure, you’d have more wealth than Midas.”
“I’m sorry,” Earl said. “I just can’t believe you’d think this shit has more to do with what’s going on than Hays does. That could be some kid’s storybook, an old school Harry Potter or something. Why would you believe any of it?”
“You haven’t let me finish.”
Preston regarded her with patience. “I’m listening.”
“In time, these ‘gods’ lost interest in this world and left their creations behind.”
“Does the book say why?” Alan glanced over her shoulder at the pictographs; the scientific side of him was interested in the book and what she’d deciphered from it, but the part of him that believed Roger Hays was a dangerous man was leaning heavily toward Earl’s view.
“Not exactly, at least not that I can translate. This is written in quite a few different hands, and some of the passages have been covered over, painted out and then re-written...like they were in a big hurry. I’d say there were three possibilities: the visitors had what they needed, there was some kind of natural disaster, or an uprising took place, like the slave uprisings of the Roman Empire.”
The guardsman flashed a quick grin. “I vote for the slave uprising.”
Carol went on. “To make a long story short —”
“Please,” Earl said, still impatient.
“After centuries of being hunted, the beings created to work the sea came to this island. They built a town, took human form.”
Preston laughed again. “This shit just gets better and better. What, they’re werefish?”
Alan spoke up in her defense. “Every society has a myth about shape-shifters, men becoming beasts and vice versa. In Asia, there are weretigers, in Europe, the werewolf, and so on. There are cultures on Earth that don’t know what a kiss is, and yet we see these legends present in their mythos.”
Carol nodded. “If this book is right, it’s because we all spring from a common ancestry, and they’re not just myths. The aliens have given these ‘clans’ the power to change shape the way a chameleon changes color.”
“You’re seriously telling me this town was founded by mutant fish?” Earl asked, clearly hoping they would hear just how crazy it sounded. “Even if this shit was for real, why would they start attackin’ people now? They’ve been here for... what? ...hundreds of years, they set up a fuckin’ tourist trade. What made ‘em snap now?”
“The book refers to the settlers of Colonial Bay as the children of Poseidon.”
“That’s the Greek god of the sea, right? — the one with a trident?” Earl smiled. “Hot damn! That fits, doesn’t it? Whoever’s doing this read that book and drew that trident symbol at the crime scenes to try and —”
“Poseidon wasn’t just the name of the Greek god,” Carol informed him. “It was also the ancient name of Atlantis; children of Atlantis, refugees from Atlantis. When we discovered the city, it was worldwide news. Maybe it set these people off.”
They looked at one another, the brief silence battered by a knock at the door. Alan was the only one standing; he moved to answer it, wondering who this new visitor might be. The knocking grew louder, more insistent.
“Hold on,” Alan told them as he turned the knob.
The door opened and the wide barrel of a gun was pressed against his face.
•••
“Back up,” Larry commanded. “Nice and slow.”
The man backed slowly into the room, the flare gun from Brahm’s yacht still glued to his cheek. The Asian woman sat on the floor with a black man, the yellowed book in her hands. When she saw what was happening, she leapt to her feet.
“Alan!”
With the speed of a gunslinger, the black man produced a pistol and took aim at Larry. “Let ‘im go, motherfucker.”
“Give me the book, and he’s all yours.”
“What are you doing, Preston?” the woman asked. “Put that away.”
“It’s a flare gun,” Preston said.
“What?”
“The gun in your boyfriend’s face. It’s a flare gun.”
Larry pressed the barrel deeper into his hostage’s cheek and tried to speak forcefully, “But if I pull the trigger, it’ll hurt.”
The woman stepped forward, her arms outstretched to present the book to Brahm. “Here, take it.”
“What the hell are you doin’?” Preston asked.
“I’ve learned all I can from it. You want it? Let him go.”
Brahm took hold of the book’s brittle binding, pulled it to him, but she gave an insistent tug on the opposite end.
“I said let him go.”
Larry removed the gun from her boyfriend’s face, leaving a ringed indentation in his cheek. She released her grip on the binding and went to him. The click of a weapon being cocked filled Larry’s ears and he turned to look at Preston. Larry was dead in the man’s sights.
Brahm chimed in, “Who are you people?”
“You come in here all Reservoir Dogs,” Preston huffed. “Who the fuck are you?”
Larry’s eyes went back to the woman; he pointed at the book. “We were down in the temple when you took that, and followed you here. Don’t suppose you’d like to tell us what it is?”
She rubbed the circle in her friend’s cheek. “It’s a written history. I’m sure you’d find it very interesting. Shame you don’t read Atlantean.”
Larry snickered. “And you do.”
“They discovered Atlantis,” Preston informed him, his aim steady. “It’s been in all the news.”
“I’ve been on vacation.” Larry swallowed; he shot a glance to the door and wondered just how fast he could run.
“Don’t,�
�� Preston warned. “Who are you and why you trippin’?”
“There are amphibious sharks on this island,” Brahm said, straight-faced. “They attacked Black Harbor Medical Center last night.”
“They’re after my fiancée,” Larry added. “She got bit, and now she...she can change form.”
The woman smiled, but thankfully didn’t laugh. On the contrary, she looked as if she’d been validated by their claims, as if she’d just made some outlandish statements of her own. She moved to sever Preston’s line of fire and slipped her hand over the flare pistol. Larry released the weapon to her, watching as Preston lowered his own gun.
“It seems we have a lot to talk about,” she said.
•••
Carol brought them quickly up to speed. Earl glanced at his watch; he’d heard it all before. Larry’s mouth had gone dry; he walked over to the bathroom sink, filled a plastic cup with water, and drank deeply. Brahm’s face held a skeptical look; he thought for a bit, and they allowed him the time.
Finally, the doctor stroked the pouches beneath his tired eyes and said, “You believe this?”
“If the human race had been engineered,” Alan offered, “it would explain why no paleontologist has been able to find a ‘missing link’ to show the steady progression of evolution. We should’ve been looking for ancient test tubes.”
None of them laughed.
Earl was insistent. “I need proof...facts. Shark-men...aliens...Where’s your evidence that any of it’s real?”
“You want proof?” Larry lifted his shirt. Five cuts started at his left shoulder and trailed off at his right nipple; the blood had dried to crust, filling in the ruts. “When Peggy saw them take that book, she scratched me. I’d say her claws are a good six-inches long.”
Earl studied the man’s wrist and saw the scars. “You could’ve done that to yourself.”
Brahm pointed to Larry, his voice rising. “His fiancée’s DNA has been totally rewritten by engineered genetic information. That’s a fact. I have blood samples and test results to prove it. This is some kind of advanced retro-virus using designer enzymes, probably the work of well-funded experimentation.”
“Hays has pharmaceutical labs,” Earl announced, further validated. “Maybe he’s made himself some kind of biological —”
“Would you forget about Hays!” Carol cried, exasperated.
“Unless he’s a very good shot, Hays is dead.”
They turned to Larry.
The artist went on, his voice tense. “He didn’t make them, if that’s what you’re thinking. These things are what killed his son. He hated them.”
“I don’t know who could have created these enzymes,” Brahm confessed. “Neither do the experts I showed my findings to. But I’m certain it’s not the work of alien prospectors.”
“Actually,” Carol began, “the idea of our creators running a mining operation makes a lot of sense, from an archeological perspective.”
Earl flashed her a skeptical glare. “How’s that?”
“Statues of deities are often given one golden hand, symbolizing that they’re authorities on precious metals.”
Alan joined in, “And megaliths are found in close proximity to mining sites.”
“What’s a ‘megalith?’” Brahm asked.
Everson sectioned off a square of air with his hands. “Large stone markers covered in hieroglyphics.”
“Plus, there are all the anachronistic artifacts.” Carol’s eyes were sparkling. “Two-thousand-year-old batteries found in Iraq. A sunken Greek merchant ship, dating back to 80 B.C., that had an object onboard with differential gears...but they weren’t even invented for another thousand —”
Earl held up his hand. “Okay, I get that whatever that book says, you’re buyin’ it, but I can’t accept this bullshit.”
“I watched Peggy become this glowing, transparent...I-dunno-what,” Larry told him. “Now that I’ve seen that, I guess I’d be willing to accept just about anything.”
Carol nodded, a hint of her smile returning. “There’s no light on the ocean floor. They must have engineered the workers to be bioluminescent. They have the ability to manufacture light within their own bodies.”
“I saw her,” Alan chimed in, relieved. “When we left the temple, I saw this glowing thing rise up from the rocks. I thought it was...I don’t know what I thought it was.”
“It was my fiancée,” Larry snapped. His eyes darted from Alan to Brahm to Earl and then back again. “And she wasn’t some laboratory test subject. She was attacked, viciously and violently attacked. She barely survived, and now...I watched her change. It was...” His face lightened at the memory. “It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”
The physician offered him a look of disapproval, but Alan nodded his understanding.
“Look at the folklore,” he said. “If you’re bitten by a werewolf, you become a werewolf yourself.”
Earl’s eyes widened. “Whoa...now you’re saying these things can...infect people, like some new strain of AIDS or Ebola?”
“Well...yes,” the physician told him. “It appears they can pass it on through their bodily fluids, by mixing normal blood with their blood or saliva.”
Carol stepped in once more. “If beings could develop a means to travel from one planet to the next, isn’t it reasonable to assume that they would also have any number of advanced genetic manipulation skills like this? They could’ve been able to encode specific instincts and functions into organisms the way we program a computer. It would be like growing your own tools.”
“I once had a microbiology professor with similar ideas,” Brahm told her. “So much of our DNA seems to serve no function. It’s indecipherable junk we call ‘introns.’ That’s one of the reason’s the Human Genome Project was started, to solve their purpose.”
Carol pressed the physician, “Theoretically, isn’t it possible to engineer a creature like the ones you’ve seen, using existing life forms as a starting block, adding elements of a foreign genetic structure to make them more humanoid, then guiding the growth of the resulting mutation?”
Brahm looked at her, silently impressed.
“Harvard,” she said absently. “Theoretically?”
“As I said, they’ve only just completed the map. Just because you know where point A and point B are, doesn’t mean you know the best route to get there. Designing an enzyme, sure, but an entire complex organism? It could take years before we have the skill to do it, if ever.”
Carol was becoming increasingly frustrated. “But say there was a race that was older, more evolved, a race that had the map sooner?”
“Theoretically?”
“Yes.”
“Sure,” Brahm conceded. “It’s possible.”
Earl shook his head. “I can’t believe you can just —”
“I can’t believe any of you!” Larry roared, pointing to the French doors and the sea beyond. “People are dying out there while you sit here and debate this crap! Who the fuck cares where these things come from, or how they got here? What matters is that they’re real. Can we at least agree on that before they bust in here and bite us on the ass?”
The group looked wordlessly at him, belief and disbelief still at war within them.
Brahm was the first to speak, “He’s right. Isolated boats at sea and lone women in alleys are one thing, but they’re getting braver. We need to stop theorizing and get more information before their next attack.”
“And we need to be careful.” Carol ran her hand across the text in her lap. “If this is true, the townspeople are the creatures. But, even if it’s just a storybook, they believe it’s true, and that still makes them dangerous. The temple proves they still worship these things the way their ancestors did.”
She turned to Earl. “You’re a reasonable man. Surely you can at least consider the possibility that these creatures exist, no matter what their origins might be.”
Earl thought of the Indian legends of sea mons
ters, of the species of whale that had remained undiscovered until the end of the last century. He remembered the bits and pieces of strange creatures that occasionally wash ashore, and the clawed mattress from the FantaSea’s cabin flashed across his eyes.
He walked to the phone by the bed.
“Who are you calling?” Alan wanted to know.
Wordlessly, the guardsman dialed and waited for someone to pick up.
“Black Harbor Medical Center,” a young, female voice proclaimed. “How may I direct your call?”
“Yeah,” Earl said. “My mama’s in your hospital. She just had her hip replaced. Anyway, I heard about what happened there and I wanted to make sure she was all right.”
“Yes sir. I’m sorry if you haven’t been notified yet. As you can imagine, the phones have been ringing off the hook here, and with all the privacy laws, it does take time to confirm or deny a patient’s status.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Earl said, then offered up another lie, “One of the stations said it was a wild animal or something.”
There was a pause.
“I’m afraid the matter is still being investigated by the police,” she said at last. “Would you like me to connect you with your mother’s room?”
“Tell ya what, let me speak to one of her doctors.”
“I can have them paged,” the girl offered. “Do you know the name of her attending physician?”
Earl covered the receiver with his hand and looked at Brahm. “What’s your name?”
“Dr. Kyle Brahm.”
Earl removed his palm and repeated, “Dr. Kyle Brahm.”
“I...I’m sorry, but Dr. Brahm is one of the people still missing after the attack.”
And there it was. The attack.
“I see.”
“If you give me your mother’s name I can —”
Earl hung up on her. “All right, I believe there’s something out there.” He turned to face Larry and Miyagi. “Now, I wanna meet your fiancée and see this temple for myself. Any idea who runs it?”