by Hugo Navikov
His line of thought was cut off by the sound of scraping metal coming from the far side of the chasm. He and everyone else watched in amazement as a five-foot-wide tongue of metal, slightly bowed in the middle, emerged from about twenty feet below the top of the cliff across from them. It slowly extended upward at an angle toward right where they were standing on the other side. It was a bridge across the chasm, and it was being extended specifically for them.
“This feels like a good sign and a bad sign at the same time,” Flattop the commando said, sounding like he was just spilling the contents of his mind without necessarily meaning to. “A bridge, but, like, to where, y’know?”
But he was right. They were being welcomed, or at the very least allowed across. But why was the platform or drawbridge or whatever it was coming from a low angle and being stretched up to them?
His question was answered as a small door slid open in the cliff wall immediately above where the skinny metal stretch had emerged. It was five feet wide, like the platform, and five feet tall, making a perfect black square in the wall.
“It’s not a bridge,” Brett said. “It’s a slide.”
This conclusion was inescapable for everyone by the time the metal pathway reached the top lip of their side of the chasm wall and locked into place. They waited for any kind of instructions, maybe someone poking their head out of the door on the other side, but none came.
Brett kept his eye on the two wendigos, but the things seemed entirely uninterested in his group. Obviously they ate humans—some of those skeletons at the cryptids’ feet were definitely Homo sapiens sapiens. He also noted that there were some ripped-apart Organization commando uniforms down there that exactly matched the ones that the two remaining soldiers of fortune, Crane and Flattop, were wearing. He hoped the men didn’t notice this, because mercenaries could lose their nerve once their imminent death was duly pointed out to them. This was different from soldiers fighting for their country or from rebels fighting for some ideal: if you were dead, there was no money, and thus there was no point in risking your neck in the first place.
To this end, Brett said, “Down the slide first, boys—we need you to protect the front flank.”
Crane and Flattop moved to obey, but Crane stopped and said to Brett, “Wait. Sorry, Mister Russell, but there’s no such thing as a ‘front flank.’ What you got is sides that you call flanks—”
“Sorry, right, of course. What do you call the front line, then?”
“Um … the front line is called ‘the front line.’”
“Good to know. Now get down there and protect our front line!”
With the terminology settled, first Crane and then Flattop secured their supply bags to their chests, positioned themselves on the wide metal slide, crossed their arms across them and let gravity do the rest, pulling them down and across faster and faster until they whipped right into the black square opposite them and out of sight.
Then Brett sent Ravi, Stefan with his camera, and Lathrop; only then did he situate his butt on the slide, cross his arms, and zoom across the fifty-foot-deep man-made canyon into the darkness everyone else had disappeared into.
The landing area of the slide was well designed, as it used the angle and momentum of the entering body to allow the person to end up in a standing position. Brett laughed out loud at this and saw that everyone else in the small anteroom was smiling at this latest strange development in their adventure.
Brett took a moment to look around the perfectly cubical space inside which they now stood. Its proportions were roughly fifty feet by fifty feet by fifty feet, lighted by bioluminescence just as the “sky” was outside, but whatever chemical reaction was producing these photons, the light was as white and as bright as a fluorescent bulb. It made the perfection of the right angles defining the room starkly visible. For the first time in his entire career of hunting things denied by the scientific world, he wondered if he was observing the work of extraterrestrials. No human hand or even group of human hands could make something so perfectly smooth, especially not given the primitive conditions of this subterranean realm.
Everyone jumped as the sound of rock grinding against rock sounded throughout the chamber. They turned and saw a six-foot-high door open as part of the wall slid to the side. Out of the doorway stepped a plump sixty-something man with white hair and mustache with goatee, with his round metal glasses making him look a little like a chubby Sigmund Freud.
“That’s him! That’s Doctor Merco!” Lathrop shouted to the commandos. “Grab him! Seize him!”
There was no way that Lathrop didn’t know he sounded exactly like a B-movie villain, Brett thought, and wanted so much to remind him how B movies usually turned out for the bad guy. But he didn’t. Instead, he stepped between the door where Doctor Merco was standing and the commandos, who had been so taken by surprise by Snidely Whiplash’s order that they hadn’t even fished their weapons out of the canvas bags they were stored in.
“Whoa, everybody just take a second here,” Brett said calmly but forcefully, putting his hands up with palms forward to help stop the commandos from rushing forward. “Doctor Merco might have our only way out of here. I think it might be a bit premature to abduct him right off the bat.”
Merco said in amusement, “So I’m getting abducted. I’d think some kidnappers would have found the element of surprise valuable in this situation, but what would I know? I’m apparently going to be the victim here.”
Brett, hands still up in front of him in a so-far-effective position of Hold on a minute, turned to address the scientist: “Do you have Ellie White?”
“Yes, she said her husband would come for her, which I think is wonderful, both that she said it and that you did really did come. So romantic!” Merco said with sincerity, then smiled and somehow also frowned at the same time. “I’m really sorry about my silly wendigo grabbing the wrong person. They saw or maybe smelled two females in your group and so each one picked one of them up and brought them here. Or, at least, I assume that’s what happened. Wendigos can be trained, but they can’t speak to explain their thinking. They brought back two women, one of which was my target. Your wife is here, safe and sound—I couldn’t very well toss her back out into that killer environment, especially not if her knight in shining armor was due any moment.”
“Wait, how did you know we were out there in the first place? And that there was the woman you wanted with us? You couldn’t possibly have cameras out there.”
“No, not cameras—just one motion-activated radio-transmitting camera, posted where you exited the tunnel and entered Vulcania.”
“Vulcania?” Ravi repeated. “Wait, I get it: the realm of the volcano.”
“On the nose, sir! I built and installed it when the Organization goons destroyed the barricade I had built upon completing the tunnel.”
“That must’ve been one big-ass door,” Flattop said, and Lathrop slapped him in the arm to remind him what he was doing there, which was most certainly not to hold a friendly conversation with the target.
Merco smiled widely. “It wasn’t a door, my friend. Doors are meant to be opened. The impenetrable barricade I constructed was meant to seal off the entrance forever.” He thought for a moment and added, “Well, I suppose I shouldn’t call it an impenetrable barricade anymore. Those mercenaries blew it up quite handily. In any case, the barrier was there not to keep humans out but to keep in Vulcania’s bestiary of mindlessly violent creatures. Any of them, let alone whole stampedes of them, could completely wipe out every person living on this volcanic island.”
Each member of Brett’s group made eye contact with several of the others, then looked at nothing in particular.
“Oh, no,” Merco said, his chipper demeanor deflating. “It happened.”
“Yeah,” Brett said. “The streets were filled with mangled bodies, limbs, blood … did you make these creatures? Was this a Jurassic Park kind of situation, with you messing with things to find out if you could, without th
inking about whether you should?”
“Um … no. The dinosaurs, hexenas, and all the rest were here no doubt millennia before I arrived in my boat full of scientific whatsit and my crew of assistants who also happen to be experienced mariners. It just goes to show what you can find on Indeed.com!”
“Merco,” Lathrop said with serious disdain in his voice, “you’re trying to tell us that there just happened to be dinosaurs a couple of hundred feet below the surface of this volcano? And also sea monsters in the vicinity?”
“Oh, yes, the ‘sea monsters,’ as you call them. I’m afraid that, while the dearly departed first squad of guns for hire”—at that, Brett recalled the shredded uniforms in the wendigo pit—“are responsible for the breach of the tunnel that apparently released these things down here unto the poor villagers of Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, it is entirely my fault that there are Ogopogos in the waters surrounding Tristan da Cunha.”
Brett knew that name—it was a cryptid sea serpent. “That was Ogopogo?”
“You know the animal?”
Stefan said, “Of course we do! TMI traveled all the way from Atlanta to British Columbia to get some footage for the show. We saw some things that definitely could have been the Ogopogo—or ‘Naitaka,’ as it is called in Coast Salish, the indigenous language of that area.”
Ravi said, “It also could have been a log. But most likely Ogopogo. We follow the strictest ethical guidelines on our show, and we would never positively identify something as a cryptid unless we were really, really pretty sure about it.”
“It destroyed the Slangkop II out of Cape Town. It’s the supply ship that comes here a couple of times a year?”
“I know the Slangkop II. Was Captain Bantu lost?”
“No,” Brett said. “He stayed above ground to see if he could find anyone alive and also secure transport for us away from this island, whenever he can arrange for another ship to pick us up. But who knows if any ship less than a battle cruiser will be able to get past the sea monster that you let out.”
“It was an accident that the creature was released from the water-filled cavitation below us. I was testing the … um, some equipment … when everything went sideways. A large section of the rock separating the Ogopogos’ lair from the open ocean was no longer there and the pair of sea serpents were just able to swim out and bring their eight or nine young with them. They will be a terror on the high seas! But only for a time,” he finished sadly, “because soon enough mankind will destroy them. Once the outside world hears about the massacre of the Settlement, the island and soon enough my underground workshop will be overrun and every monster killed. Who knows? Maybe the acid-laden plant life will be used as biological weapons. Or would that be botanical weapons?” He chuckled at his own wit despite the dire situation.
“Would you please seize him,” Lathrop sort-of-commanded the soldiers, but all authority had evaporated from his voice. No one moved to seize anyone … or do anything else, in fact, since no one knew what they were dealing with here. They remained in the care anteroom.
Finally, Merco seemed to realize this. “My goodness, what a terrible host I am! You must be reunited with your wife, Mister Russell! All of you, please do come inside and see what I’ve built here. I’m going to save the world, you know.”
“Should we leave the guns or take off our shoes or anything?” Crane asked mulishly, causing Lathrop to almost scream with frustration. “I’m just sayin’, it’s not like he’s gonna be able to sneak away.”
“No, by all means, bring your guns! Down here, there’s almost always something that might need to get shot. I wish I could shoot all the plants! It makes being on the surface such an unpleasant experience.” He turned to lead them through the doorway, but stopped and said, “Just to be precise, when I said ‘the surface’ just now, of course I mean the surface of underground Vulcania. I hope the surface surface never has to bear the scourge of those nasty things! I doubt it will, actually, since they seem quite gone off photosynthesis. In any case, onward!”
They followed in single file through the doorway, and as each person passed through, he gasped in awe at the tremendous volume of space they walked into. It was like an airplane hangar; the ceiling of this space must have had the surface immediately above it. In the room, cages lined the wall like a prison, and Brett could see that a fantastic and most likely utterly deadly cryptid was inside each one: there was the jackal-thing, which Merco called a “hexena”; giant insects from their all-too-familiar steel-gray wasp to the megapede to giant ants, beetles, and spiders, which Brett was incredibly grateful they hadn’t run into; and even smaller dinosaurs from the size of dogs to that of horses. The cages were set into the wall, so it was impossible to tell how high or deep they were. But every single door had a being in it, gazing wistfully at the dinner just out of reach.
The dinners were people in the room, of which there were (other than Brett, Merco, and the rest of the group) five: Ellie—Ellie! It was all Brett could do not to run to her—Natasha, and three men who were busily futzing with some piece of equipment. The room had a great deal of scientific-looking apparatuses and huge computer monitors. But the pièce de résistance was the titanic glowing tube across the center of the cavernous space at about twenty feet up: it looked like a horizontally oriented fluorescent light tube at least twenty feet in diameter, shining powerfully enough that it was uncomfortable to look at directly for more than a few seconds.
Brett noticed that everything in the carved-out space—like everywhere else in Merco’s domain, the walls, ceiling, and floor were all as smooth as polished marble—was oriented to point at the eerie energy tube in the center. Whatever was going on down there, it was all about that cylinder of light. But what he was about down there right then was his ex-wife … who had apparently left off the “ex” part when talking to Doctor Merco.
That was intriguing.
She sat in an office chair in front of a large table which had, under glass, an equally large map of the world. Various marks had been made over certain spots on the glass over particular places. When Ellie saw Brett enter the room, she quickly stood up and waved happily.
Happily, Brett repeated to himself. Maybe she had told herself she would marry him again if he showed up—if he survived—to rescue her and take her back to civilization. Or she might just have told Merco that they were still married so he’d be more inclined to let him see her. Or something else. It didn’t matter, because he was there and she was safe. As nonplussed as he was about Merco’s wendigos plucking her away in the first place, he wasn’t mad at all at the man now that he saw what good care he had taken of Ellie, who looked none the worse for wear from her travel via giant cryptid.
Brett waved back with a big smile. He still had no idea what was going to happen inside the weird scientist’s lair, let alone what they were going to do once they had to go back out into Vulcania, but this sure made the whole disaster feel a lot less disastrous.
Still seated at the table, unmoving, unsmiling, and with no visible reaction to the remainder of her travel mates was the woman they all called Natasha. Maybe she didn’t think they’d be able to actually rescue her, or maybe she didn’t want whatever rescue they offered, but she looked unthrilled, to say the least.
“How rude of me!” Merco cried when he noticed the group looking at Natasha. “Please allow me to introduce my daughter, Nadia.”
Nadia! Brett thought with amusement. I was so close.
Nadia-not-Natasha didn’t wave, move, or blink. This made Merco laugh heartily, and he said, “She’s quite the sassy lassie, isn’t she? Told the Organization all about what I was doing down here, very naughty of her, indeed. But she didn’t count on them forcing her to come down here herself to get me to come back! Ha, ha! She hasn’t said two words to me since my Ithaqua brought her back, but I know my daughter well enough to know she didn’t think any travel would be required for her to earn her millions for selling out her father … and the entire human race, for th
at matter.”
Brett looked at Lathrop. “You knew the whole time why we’re going after this guy?”
“I don’t feel compelled to tell you anything, Mister Russell,” Lathrop said as he avoided meeting the eyes of anyone in the room. “However, I choose to inform you that I was not briefed on the nature of Doctor Merco’s superweapon, only told to bring it and him back at any cost.”
“You don’t know?” Merco asked incredulously. “My goodness, do none of you know what’s going on down here? My dear Nadia didn’t tell you how I’m going to save the world? This isn’t a ‘superweapon,’ my friends–it’s a super-savior! Why don’t you all sit at the big table with Nadia and allow me to explain? I guarantee you won’t want to stop me once you see what I’ve done here.”
“Actually, Doctor, we haven’t the time nor the inclination to listen to whatever crackpot extortion scheme you’re planning to use this weapon for. My employer wants you and the weapon delivered to them in Geneva, and that desire has been the subject of considerable investment.” Lathrop indicated to Commander Crane to get on with it already. “We will escort you from this hellish island back to Cape Town and then to the Organization Black Ops site at an undisclosed location so you may voluntarily share the offensive strike capability you developed and brought here.”
At that, Nadia at the table let out a laugh of irony mixed with bemusement. This threw off Lathrop and Crane–and everyone else present, really–and Merco added to the confusion with a laugh of his own as he said, “My friends, Nadia here is helping me tell you that you can’t bring this ‘capability’ anywhere. This island, this volcano, is the so-called ‘superweapon’!”
While Merco talked, Ellie went for broke and stalked right over to Brett and put her arms around him. They held each other for a moment and looked in each other’s eyes. Yes, indeed, Brett thought, we’re getting rid of the ‘ex.’