Future Tense

by Frank Almond

  “Wowweee! This is so cooool!” she shouted, above the whoosh of the wind and the rattle of the wheels.

  It was like hammering towards a giant white screen along a wide white highway—I kept thinking we were going to fly off the edge of the world, but we just kept going and going and going…

  Suddenly, a grid of blue, green, and red lights lit up under the ice all around us. They reminded me of airport landing lights, but these were unbroken lines and they were actually inside the ice, more like those disco lights they put under the dance floor. The whole ice sea was criss-crossed with them.

  “What are all these lights?” I shouted.

  “It’s called sectoring,” said the Princess. “They’re searching for us.”

  “Who?”

  Loud organ music began playing—just like the start of an ice hockey end—only the music was more high church than high octane. It sounded like we had the entire hallelujah chorus out there on the ice with us.

  She tapped me on the shoulder and pointed. I glanced to my right and saw seven wedding cake-type hovercrafts coming around the eastern end of the island, in a V formation. I looked back over my shoulder—and saw another skateboard coming after us! It was quite a way back, but I could count three people aboard it. I turned my head back quickly and pretended I hadn’t seen anything.

  “How much farther is it?” I said.

  “Don’t worry,” said the Princess. “They won’t catch up.”

  I glanced over at the squadron of hovercrafts. “No, I don’t think they’ve even seen us yet,” I said.

  “I don’t mean them—I mean the Duck and company,” said the Princess. She nudged me. “As if you didn’t know.”

  “I don’t see why you’re so dead set against my family and friends coming to the wedding,” I said. “After all, dear, it’s my day, too.”

  She giggled.

  “It would make me so happy,” I went on. “Can’t you at least try to get along with my father?”

  “Stop it—you’re making me laugh,” she said, giving my face a playful lash with something slimy.

  “What is that thing you do?” I said, licking my lips and tasting salt.

  “Soon we will be aboard my ship. Your father and the others will no doubt perish on the ice,” she said. “I find that sad, yes, but it is in my nature to destroy inferior species like yours—though I admit your father is one of the most enlightened humans I have ever met. He was even prepared to sacrifice you to save his own miserable skin—I find that very moving. Do you know what I mean, darling?”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” I said. “He’s moved me a lot!”

  Suddenly, a red signal flare burst directly overhead, illuminating the area around us for miles in a bright crimson light.

  “Oh, how tiresome—they’ve spotted us,” sighed the Princess. “Now I’ll have to exterminate them all.”

  “One skateboard against a fleet?” I said. “Oh, come on, not even you could—”

  There was a loud slurp. My board lurched forward and felt lighter. A dark cloud passed over, casting a huge shadow across the ice.

  “Er, Princess, what was—?”

  I heard a fierce squawk, followed by what sounded like someone playing an enormous pair of castanets. I hung a one-eighty and looked up, as I still skidded backwards on two wheels and one foot.

  The giant squid had just silently appeared on the ice and was towering over me, its tentacles lashing and writhing in anger.

  “What the—how the hell did you get down here?” I exclaimed. “I thought you were tapas!”

  It peered down at me with its enormous oily eyes and showed me its chattering beak. That’s when I fell off my board and started sliding across the freezing ice on my butt. It was seeing that beak. That big bone-crunching beak. Man, what an overbite! The thing had obviously pecked the Princess up and swallowed her whole and was getting ready to do the same to me! I backed away on my backside, pushing frantically with my hands and feet. And then my spine bumped up against something big wet and slippery—a gigantic feeder tentacle engulfed me and plucked me up into the air—leaving my stomach forty feet below! It held me up close to its face and stared at me with its big black eyes. I thought that was it. Well, you would.

  And then it swung me away and placed me out of harm’s way on the ice floor, like a chess piece, so that it was between me and the rapidly approaching fleet. It was as though that squid was trying to protect me.

  I could see the Duck clearly now—he, too, had swerved off in my direction to get on the safe side of the giant squid. Only he was coming towards me too fast and wouldn’t be able to slow down in time, without a spill—so I figured he’d swerve around me to avoid a crash, because no one would be that stupid—I closed my eyes and screamed! I was skittled over and found myself flat on my back at the bottom of a rack of bodies, staring up into three faces—the Duck, Emma and Jemmons.

  “Get-off-me!” I gasped.

  They all rolled off and sat up.

  “We are sitting ducks out here,” said Jemmons.

  For some reason we all looked round at the Duck.

  “Don’t look at me,” he said. He scrambled to his feet and waddled off unsteadily in the direction of his skateboard. We all watched him mount it and kick off. I jumped to my feet and grabbed him as he tried to whizz past us.

  “No you don’t!”

  I pulled him off and the board flipped up in the air and shot off across the ice.

  “Your capacity for self-preservation is awesome,” I said. “When the universe finally stops expanding and all the stars go out, there’ll be a descendant of the Duck standing in the dark on the last asteroid, saying, anybody got a match?”

  He shrugged me off. “What are you on about? We’re fighting for our lives here—in case you hadn’t noticed!”

  “You’re fighting for yours, you mean.” I pointed at the giant squid. “That monster just saved mine.” I looked round at Emma and Jemmons, and added: “But I’m afraid it ate the Princess.”

  The Duck gave me a shove. “What do you mean—ate the Princess? That is the bleeding Princess! She’s a shape-changer!”

  “You what?”

  “Get down!” cried the Duck, pulling me face down on the ice.

  A huge tentacle skimmed over our heads and slapped around one of the hovercrafts that had tried to come around its right flank. It picked it up and secured it with one of its great suckered arms, and then inverted it and began shaking it, like a kid emptying a moneybox. Only it wasn’t coins falling out—it was the crew. I couldn’t look and averted my eyes—and saw two of its other tentacles slapping the hell out of another vessel on its left flank. This time it wound the hovercraft up in its arm and flicked it across the ice as though it were playing ducks and drakes. The vessel span round and round, skipping chaotically towards the island, where it scored a direct hit and came to rest halfway up the slope.

  The Duck tugged my sleeve. “Come on—that one over there’s empty!” he quacked.

  “Empty? What?”

  I ran alongside him with the others. I had no idea where we were going. We were all just struggling to stay on our feet. I ran round to Emma’s side and tried to grab onto her, but she handed me off like a rugby player.

  “My father said if I didn’t promise to marry the Princess, we’d never get off the island,” I tried to explain, as we were slip-sliding along. “Do you really think I’d marry a fifty-foot squid?”

  “I thought you liked tentacled women,” she said.

  “Oh, I get it,” I said. I lowered my voice. “This is about those Japanese mangas I downloaded off the net, isn’t it? I told you—that was for a linguini promotion Matt was working on.”

  “I think you’ve said enough, don’t you?” she said, forcing a smile.

  “I could never marry a woman with tentacles, Em.”

  She shoulder barged me like an ice hockey jock and I lost my balance and stumbled over.

  “Em—Em, wait! You’ve got i
t all wrong! I hate sushi!”

  The Duck was leading us towards the hovercraft our squid princess had been rattling. She had discarded it and the Duck clearly had a mind to board it. I gave up on Emma for the time being and ran to catch him up.

  “You cannot be serious,” I said.

  “Got a better idea?” he puffed.

  “It’ll be full of guards.”

  “They’ll all have headaches,” he panted.

  He had a point. The thing was just sitting there on the ice, showing no signs of going anywhere and no signs of life on board. Those crew members who had been shaken out of it were either lying on the ice injured or legging it across the ice. To our left, I could see the squadron had broken off the engagement and was speeding away to regroup. We kept running and reached the hull. There was no obvious way onboard.

  “Now what?” I said.

  “Round here, boys!” shouted Jemmons.

  We dashed around the sleek white curve of the hull and found Jemmons jumping up and down, trying to reach a hatchway, but he couldn’t quite make it.

  “Allez up, Rog!” I called.

  He stooped down and cupped his big hands. I ran to him and stirruped my foot and he hoisted me up. The small hull door was already ajar—presumably where the crew had abandoned ship—so I threw it open and peered in.

  “All clear,” I said. “Wait—there’s a ladder.”

  I pulled myself in and fumbled with what looked like an emergency ladder attached to the inside of the hatch door. It was a telescopic contraption and I couldn’t immediately figure out how it worked.

  “Hurry up!” called Emma.

  “Yeah, get a bleeding move on!” shouted the Duck, banging on the hull.

  “What’s Princess Squid doing?” I said, as I twiddled and fiddled.

  “She’s off after the fleet!” said Jemmons. “Look at those landlubbers go!”

  I noticed a wire coming out of the hinge side of the door and followed the wall round to a box. I opened it and threw all the switches. The lights went out and a dim blue emergency light came on—the door hissed and the ladder extended down to the ice.

  “About time,” said Emma, being the first head to appear in the opening of the hatch.

  I gave her a hand up.

  “Welcome aboard, ma’am,” I bowed.

  “I haven’t forgiven you yet, Sloane,” she said, flashing her eyes at me.

  Next, the Duck’s head appeared.

  “Here, this is nice—you’ll find me on the bridge!”

  He jumped aboard, waddled down the passageway, and vanished around a corner.

  I pulled Roger in.

  “Horatio Duck’s on the bridge,” I said.

  “Is he now?” said Jemmons. “We’ll soon see about that—I’m taking the wheel of this beauty.”

  “Good,” I said. “Where’re we headed exactly, skipper?”

  “Ah? I shall have to have a look at the charts, matey.”

  Jemmons hurried away, leaving me to secure the hatch.

  “Yeah. Well, don’t take too long, mate!” I shouted after him.

  Emma folded her arms, leant back against the wall, and watched me work.

  “I wasn’t jealous,” she said.

  “What about?” I said.

  “You and the Princess.”

  “That was all the Duck’s doing.” I locked the hatch.

  “I know. He did the same thing to me,” she said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “With Travis.”

  I shook my head and looked dumb.

  “Travis and the Princess are one and the same.”

  “You are kidding!”

  She shivered. “No—it’s true.”

  I took her in my arms and held her to me. “Oh, Em—I’m sorry—I had no idea—I’ll kill her—him! No I won’t—on second thoughts, I’ll kill the Duck!”

  “I don’t think he had any choice. You can see what he’s—I mean, she’s capable of,” said Emma.

  “Yeah. But why did she do it—play us off against each other like that?”

  “To get to you, of course,” said Emma. “She was both your rival and your suitor.”

  “The Love Lives of a Shape Changer,” I said.

  “Hm. Complicated.”

  “But—all’s well that ends well?” I said.

  She smiled and we kissed, softly, romantically, lovingly… and the hovercraft rose up and started throbbing.

  Emma withdrew her lips. I kept my eyes closed and lingered, enjoying the exquisite moment for just a little bit longer.

  “But she’ll be back,” said Emma.

  I opened my eyes. “Yeah, you’re right and the Duck won’t give up while there’s still a chance of getting his hands on her machine—come on!” We held hands and ran together. “We’ve got to stop him—make him take us somewhere safe. I don’t care where I live as long as we’re together!”

  Chapter 19

  We arrived on the bridge—in the top tier of the hovercraft—through a central chute, a bit like a dumbwaiter, which brought us up into the hub of a round control room, via a clear plastic tube. Which didn’t open for us. But we could see the Duck and Jemmons, chasing each other around. We laughed and I knocked on the thick plastic. The Duck shot us a glance and screamed something. But we were sealed in and couldn’t hear what he was saying.

  “What’s he saying?”

  Emma studied the Duck’s lips for a moment. “He’s—trying—to—kill—me!”

  “All this over who’s going to drive the ship,” I said, developing a lopsided smile. I smacked my cheek—I didn’t want to start looking like him! “Open this bloody—” I looked around at the doorless plastic tube we were in and tried to think of a word for it.

  “Lift?” said Emma.

  “Open this lift!” I yelled, hammering on it like mad. “Open the lift!” joined in Emma.

  And then we watched in dumb horror as Jemmons caught the Duck and hurled him over a bank of computers and dived after him.

  “He’ll kill him!” I gasped. “What the hell’s got into him?”

  I shuffled round inside the tube and tried to find something to press or pull—I felt like a mime artist—but there was no way out, or even back down. We were trapped. All we could do was watch, although there wasn’t much to see, because they were both still hidden behind the control desk.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “The Duck always gets out of these tight situations.”

  Suddenly both men rose up like puppets—and Jemmons was choking the Duck with a length of electrical flex!

  “Do something!” cried Emma. “He’s killing him!”

  “So what?” I said. “I mean, so what can I do?”

  Emma gave me a dark look and started beating her fists against the clear tube again.

  “Let him go, Roger!” she screamed.

  I banged with her. But I couldn’t help thinking about the psychological metaphor I found myself in though. The tube, I mused, was like a fallopian tube and the flex Jemmons was strangling my father with represented the umbilical cord…it suddenly became clear to me: I wanted my father to be dead.

  “Stephen!” screamed Emma. “Do something!”

  “Let him go! Let him go!” I yelled.

  The Duck was struggling for his life and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. And then the Duck managed to get his feet up on the console and started running along it, like a motorcyclist on a wall of death, smashing the controls about. The hovercraft lurched and roared, and rose up and down. Jemmons tried to restrain him, but the Duck was flipping himself about like a trout on a hook, kicking everything he could reach. Suddenly the chute hissed up and Emma and I tumbled into the control room.

  I rolled back up onto my feet and charged over to jump on Jemmons’s back. He swayed about and tried to shake me off, but he wouldn’t let go of the plastic cord around the Duck’s throat. By now the Duck had stopped kicking and was just twitching.

  “Roger? Roger?” I cried
. “Let go—you’re killing him!”

  “Kill the Duck, kill the Duck, kill the Duck…” Jemmons kept repeating.

  “Yeah,” I smiled, tilting my head on one side. “Kill the Duck…kill the Duck…”

  Emma ran around to the other side of the control desk and climbed up to try and unlock Jemmons’s hands.

  “Steve!” she screamed.

  “What?”

  “Look at his eyes—they’re dilated and staring—I think he’s having a fit!” she cried.

  “That’s no fit,” I said. “He’s been brainwashed to kill the Duck—that replicant that attacked me in the attic was chanting the same mantra—I remember joining in.”

  “We’ve got to bring him out of it,” cried Emma. “Roger, let Mr Duckworth go, he hasn’t done you any harm, has he? What has Mr Duckworth ever done to you? Just ask yourself that, Roger.”

  But I could see the counselling stuff wasn’t working, so I got off Jemmons’s back, wrenched one of the monitors out of the control panel, and smashed it over his head. Jemmons and the Duck slumped to the floor. I dropped down on my knees, tugged Jemmons’s fingers away, and untwisted the flex from the Duck’s neck. The Duck took a huge gulp of air and then dozens more in quick succession. Emma climbed down off the desk and knelt down to see to Jemmons. I helped the Duck to his feet.

  “Did you have to hit him so hard?” said Emma.

  “Well, it was attempted murder,” I said. I looked through the observation window and saw the giant squid being chased by eight or nine hovercrafts. “Anyway, that’s the least of our worries—the navy’s got Princess Squid on the run.”

  The Duck heard me—though he was still unable to speak—and stumbled over to the window to take a closer look.

  “She’s leading ’em straight to us,” croaked the Duck.

  “Why doesn’t she just get in her time machine and escape?” I said.

  “That’s a point,” said the Duck. “That’s a good point.”

  “She loves a fight and hates to lose,” I said.

  “That’s it!” said the Duck. “She’s going to take them on! There’s a chance!”

  “A chance for what? Let’s just get the hell out of here,” I said. “She’ll keep them busy for a while.”