Blood Ocean

by Weston Ochse

  And they came.

  Now, as each of them covered himself in oil and marched back up the steps to the deck of the tanker, Kavika couldn’t help but stare at the spot where he and his mother had been told to live after the death of his father. He’d come so far, so fast. Part of him felt dishonest, as though he hadn’t changed at all, whatever Kaja had said. But another part, a more honest part, felt different in the way that only comes from surviving.

  He was the last. He dove into the oil, then he exited. He pulled on his sharkskin foot and hand pads, then joined the rest of the Pali Boys on the deck. The very last thing was securing the flare from where he’d put it before the oil. It rested in the sheath, ready to be used.

  MR. NAKIHAMA GOT another glass of water from the dispenser. He was more thirsty than he’d been in a long time, as if he’d gone to sleep after two or three bottles of Sake and had just awoken. He stepped into the hall, then leaped back into his doorway.

  Mr. Tagahashi skipped down the hall after his secretary.

  “How much fun!” Nakihama said.

  He stared at the two until they were out of sight. Only then did he notice the colors on the walls. He was pretty sure they used to be white, but now they were striped like a rainbow. The hues were incredible. He especially adored the sea-foam greens and the crème colors. They reminded him of the Fiat 500 he’d had before the Cull. In fact, if they ever returned to Tokyo, it was waiting for him in the parking lot.

  Then the air rippled. It was a small ripple, but it was a ripple nonetheless. The ripple disturbed him. He knew that Mr. Tagahashi didn’t want any ripples aboard ship. Ripples were not regulation.

  Nakihama straightened his tie, as he always did when he thought of his boss, the corporate head and spiritual father of them all. He turned the opposite way and skipped—two steps left, two steps right, two steps left.

  “Oh, yes.” Skipping was definitely authorized. It felt so good to skip. It felt just right.

  LOPEZ-LAROU ROLLED ONTO her side and puked on the floor.

  Oleg came to her and wiped her brow with a cold cloth.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “What? Where am I?” she asked.

  “Aboard the submarine. You got beat up.”

  Beat up. Those two words didn’t do it justice. Flashes of the commandos kicking her in the head, chest and gut flashed through her brain until she puked again, the memory too much for her.

  “Where’s Kavika?”

  “The runt Pali Boy?” Oleg shrugged. “Don’t know. He went up the hatch to the conning tower and talked to Kirill. Probably going to come back so I can fix him like I fix you.”

  She rolled back onto her back and watched the ceiling swim for awhile.

  Oleg cleaned up her mess, then had her lean forward so he could give her water with electrolytes. After he made sure that she and the wounded Pali Boy were okay, she got out of bed.

  Or rather, she fell out of bed. Her feet weren’t working so well. It took awhile for her to convince them to work together, but finally she managed a standing position. With the help of every available surface she began the trek to the conning tower. With any luck, she should make it there by Christmas of next year.

  IT ALL CAME down to this, and Sanchez Kelly didn’t know how he had become the spearhead for this plan. He hadn’t even planned on participating, and now he was the man who would strike the first blow.

  How the hell had that happened?

  Drug dealers do better in the dark. Standing out front was for soldiers, or liveried policemen. Of course, they were fresh out of soldiers and their number of liveried policemen were at an all time low.

  Don’t volunteer, his dad had said to him. Volunteering will get you killed, he’d said. Then he’d gone off and joined the IRA and had died in Belfast. Talk about making a point.

  Of course, Kelly hadn’t really volunteered, this time. He was just asked to do something and he acquiesced. Without even a by-your-fucking-leave, he let them talk him into being the vanguard of a misguided suicide mission.

  Kelly did what he always did when he felt a little overwhelmed. He rolled a joint. He took his time. Knowing that the zeppelin was directly above him, he forced himself not to look... which was much harder than it seemed. Like telling someone not to think of a white elephant and now all they think about is a white elephant. Or like saying, don’t look at me, and you have to look at that person, even if it was going to get you in trouble. But he’d figured out a way to beat it. He’d poured a glass of water onto the deck near the harpoon gun. The lights of the zeppelin reflected mirror perfect in the puddle, giving him a cheat.

  Now rolled, he brought the joint to his lips and lit it. Three short puffs to stoke it, then a deep draft. Hold it. Hold it. Hold it. Ahhhh.

  He turned to look at the city. He had a chance to be the Head Drug Mama Jama. In fact, if he wanted to, he could probably walk away from the harpoon gun, slink back into his cargo container, safe in Los Tiburones territory, and resume business as usual with whoever survived the onslaught. Part of him wanted to do just that.

  The light flashed three times, then went dark, then three more times. Everyone was in place.

  He walked to the bow of the boat and took off his cowboy hat. He wiped his forehead, then waved the hat three times.

  “Yep. That should do it,” he said to no one in particular.

  Then he turned and walked back to the harpoon. It was covered by a tarp. Leb from the Sky Winkers had ensured him that it was ready to fire. All he had to do was point and shoot.

  He heard gunshots in the distance.

  It had started.

  He took another drag and removed the cover from the harpoon gun.

  More gunshots, and now popping noises.

  With his left hand, he caressed the gun. According to Leb, this boat had once been a Japanese whaler. The Winker wanker had told a story about small boats like this one chasing whales across the sea and shooting them so that a chosen few could eat some of the meat. Kelly had seen vids of whales. They were like the amiable fat guy who bothered no one. Why someone would want to eat them was beyond him.

  The shots were coming fast and furious now. Louder deeper sounds told him that the commandos and Real People were returning fire.

  He took another drag on his joint, then placed it behind his ear like a pencil.

  That there were people who had hunted the whales into oblivion was a crime worse than any narco-terroristic-murder he’d ever committed. The kind of people he killed were the kind who deserved it. They were bad people who had bad things coming to them. Like those fuckers in the zeppelin.

  He swung the harpoon so that it was pointing almost straight up, checked the mechanism, took aim, then pulled the trigger. The harpoon shot true, dragging a cable as it rose, and pierced the body of the zeppelin. An alarm sounded immediately and lights snapped on.

  He took the joint out from behind his ear and put it in the corner of his mouth. Puffing softly, he grabbed the cable spool with both hands—it was heavier than he thought; he hoped his stomach wouldn’t rupture—lugged it none-too-prettily to the side of the boat, and then dropped it into the sea.

  A light from above speared him.

  Don’t think of a white elephant!

  Don’t look at me!

  He looked at the zeppelin.

  The bullet took him through the chest and knocked him back against the gun.

  He took another drag on his joint, made a gun with the finger and thumb of his left hand and shot the zeppelin out of the sky.

  FIRECRACKERS WERE GOING off!

  Hooray! He loved firecrackers!

  Mr. Nakihama ran to the window, unlatched it and stuck his head outside. He heard them, but he couldn’t see them. Where were they?

  Suddenly his vision was filled with what he’d expected—explosions of pink and blue and yellow, showering the Floating City with flowers.

  He clapped his hands with glee.

  How marvelous that Ishihama Int
ernational would bring a celebration to this terrible place.

  He reached his hand out and brushed one of the explosions. They were so close. If he could only reach farther...

  He removed his head from the window and ran into the next room, where he was able to open the door to his deck. He hurried outside and leaped onto the railing, balancing precariously as he cheered the celebration. It was going to be a new day. Perhaps this was the day they were going to return to Tokyo. Perhaps this was their final day amidst the ghetto of the sea peoples.

  A brilliant chartreuse pagoda blossomed in the air. He screamed in jubilation as he leaped out and grabbed it. He’d never felt so warm and so good. He loved this pagoda. It was his pagoda and he’d live in it for all time.

  GRISHA WATCHED THROUGH the scope of his Dragunov SVD sniper rifle as the Jap leaped to his death, falling atop the mast of a nearby ship. With all that water in the lagoon, it was a mystery how he’d missed it. An even greater mystery was that this was the twentieth person he’d seen jump from the ship.

  Grisha chuckled.

  There must be one hell of a party going on in there. He remembered once when he was drinking in Greece, he’d had so much Ouzo he’d woken in a car five kilometers away from their barracks. There had been two dead chickens in the backseat. When he’d finally returned and told Anatoli, the damned Cossack wouldn’t let him live it down. People got to calling him Kooritsa Grisha, “Chicken Grisha.” Grisha guessed he’d gotten hungry from the booze and needed some food. The car lighter had been in his hand when he’d awoken; maybe he’d tried to cook the chickens with that. Regardless, it was a tale of what happened when too much alcohol got into you.

  He had to stop watching the ship, however. His job was the commandos. The Draganov had a maximum effective range of 1300 meters—the distance of thirteen football pitches—at which he could knock the center out of a coin with a 7.62 mm round. The commandos were fanned out across the barge surface only 700 meters away. They’d never know what hit them. It would be like the finger of God had come down and tapped them in the head. Not God, though, but rather Kooritsa Grisha.

  He swung his aiming point around, then counted and prioritized his targets. He let his finger rest against the smooth steel of the trigger and waited.

  THE SMALL ARMS fire was becoming a pain in the ass. Worse, the zeppelin had taken a hit. Even as Jacques watched, it lurched and rolled on its axis. Now full, with three years worth of serum from the vats on the ship, it was the only way for them to return to his headquarters in Las Vegas. The loss of the air machine would become a great problem.

  When the firing had started, his men had immediately responded, hitting the decks and rolling into combat firing positions. They’d aimed alternately high and low, each assigned an angle and direction, but held their fire until a target presented itself.

  Jacques had knelt as well, searching for the source of the firing. It was small arms fire and didn’t present much of a problem to their body armor, but they needed to make sure whomever was firing wasn’t able to get a lucky headshot.

  Pot-shotting.

  He’d had the same problem in Denver and in Phoenix. Uppity locals with no sense of their position in the hierarchy, falsely believing that they could attack The Rediscovered Dawn, lawful inheritors of the planet. He’d disabused them of the notion on both occasions, penalizing them by exterminating entire families. It was important that people knew their place in life.

  Like the denizens of this ghetto of a floating city. Did they really think that this was their only option? Did they really not know that California lay less than a hundred miles to the east, and offered a much better lifestyle?

  As much as he hated the Japanese troudocs, Jacque had to give them props. They’d introduced an hegemony in this backwater, making of their ship a nautical Mount Olympus... considering, of course, that the potential for worship was just now blooming in the minds of the subservient populace. Given enough time for two to three generations to pass, the Japanese would become mythological characters in stories and be worshipped by those struggling to survive aboard the surrounding ships.

  He’d seen it in Needles, California, where the inhabitants worshipped The Man Who Walked Between the Rocks.

  He’d seen it in Carefree, Arizona, where the residents of a nursing home were treated as gods—food, gifts and virgins lavished upon them for their goodwill.

  He’d seen it in Bombay Beach along the Godforsaken Salton Sea where, much like this place, a family had lived in a houseboat in the middle of the water and were treated like royalty.

  He never underestimated a population’s requirement to be ruled. He never underestimated their desire to attribute earthly events to the sublime. The more remote and the more removed the people were, the greater their ability to allow themselves to become subjugated by a belief or an ideal.

  Yes, the Japs deserved props for what they’d done, especially for establishing a string of serum factories along the coast. Although the treaty with The Rediscovered Dawn wasn’t worth the paper it was written on, they honored it because the Japanese, and Ishihama International in particular, had a product that was in dire need.

  A round rang off the deck a few meters from him.

  He switched his frequency to the zeppelin. “Find the source of that fire and remove it,” he commanded. Pot-shotters. Merde!

  He had a dozen commandos in the zeppelin. They’d been there to supervise the transfer of serum and guard it, but had found themselves further engaged protecting it from assault from the city. They’d taken out the man who’d fired the harpoon and were tracking the pot-shotters where they could. Intelligence from the ship indicated that the only armed assembly, other than the Russians, were a missmatched group calling themselves Los Tiburones—The Sharks. Interesting that drug runners should work together and form a collective. If he had more time, Jacques would have loved to study them.

  Where once he’d been an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Montreal, now he was a commander of The Rediscovered Dawn.

  Where once he’d been studying the effects of external stimuli on a culture or a society, now he was doing everything he could to exploit and kill them.

  Ah, how times had changed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  THE MOON HAD been eaten by the sky, hiding their figures. Thanks be to Mother Kapo.

  The wind whistled through the rigging, hiding their noise. Thanks be to Pele.

  He whispered prayers to Great Ku, God of War. The word itself meant to stand up, which was what they were doing. These commandos had been brought in to support the Real People, all of whom strived to push them down. Ku appeared in many forms. Sometimes he was an old man weary from war. Sometimes he was a young man, eager for battle. But tonight he was Ku-ka-ili-moku. He was the Seizer of Land and the Protector of King Kamehameha. Ku demanded sacrifices. He demanded blood. And tonight he would get all these things.

  Kavika had climbed the highest of all of them. With his oiled skin against the blackness of the night and the darkness of the crane, he was virtually invisible. He moved incrementally, squinting so to hide the sheen from his eyes.

  He could feel Bane, Kai and Mikana behind him. Behind them climbed two more.

  They were carrying Hoe Leiomano swords scabbarded across their backs. The blades were two-foot lengths of deadly-sharp steel, and the rubber basket hilts were encrusted with shark teeth, dipped in Takifugu venom, harvested by the Water Dogs. The Takifugu had enough poison to kill thirty men if need be.

  Oceanside, thirty Pali Boys climbed the hulls of the inverted ships, armed with bungees and blowguns. Their slender steel darts had flights made from seagull tail feathers and carried Lion Fish spines. The venom of the Lion Fish wasn’t like that of the Takifugu: it didn’t kill except in massive amounts, but it was the very essence of pain.

  He’d reached the spot where he’d be forced to climb along the thin arm of the crane. Looking down, he saw the tops of the heads of the commando
s. Ku could have reached out and squeezed their heads. He tried that, but nothing happened.

  Two more harpoons struck the zeppelin. Gunfire erupted from the commandos, bullets smashing into the harpoon boats. Splinters of woods danced in the ship lights, but not before the cable reels could be tossed overboard. Just in time too, as the occupants of the zeppelin managed to dislodge the first harpoon. The Water Dogs needed to hurry.

  Kavika closed his eyes and shimmied outwards, prayers to Ku and Pele mixing into an improvised mantra. He opened his eyes again halfway along; he’d passed several of his Pali Boys and was nearing where they’d hung Kaja. He reached it and let his body drift off the arm of the crane; when his feet felt the chain, he lowered himself ever-so-slowly so that his movement wouldn’t cause a rattle.

  He had two bungee cords wrapped around him. He unwrapped one end of one and attached it to the crossbar, tugging on the clip to make sure it was in place, and then tied the other end under Kaja’s arms. He unwrapped the other bungee cord and attached it to the crossbar as well, but this one he left attached to his waist.

  Once that was done, he paused to check the others. Everyone had made it to their assigned man. It was almost time to use the flare. All that was left was to wait until the rest of the Pali Boys were in place.

  “Kavika,” came a tired, pain-filled voice.

  “Easy now,” he whispered. “We’ll get you down in a moment.”

  “Don’t get them killed,” Kaja said.