by John Shirley
Gatewood snorted. “Man, you really think this is the time to get sloshed? We don’t even have any water in this thing. Drinking makes you dehydrated.”
“Wouldn’t dare not drink, now. Be defying God.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a bloody miracle this bottle didn’t get broken when I was chucked around on that yacht. Supposed to drink it, obviously—God’s will!” He lifted the bottle to the heavens. “Thank you, Lord.” He took another drink.
“Okay, you still got the bottle—what about the saint’s hand?”
Constantine felt in the inside pocket of his coat. Funny, unpleasantly funny, to feel a hand there—as if returning his touch. “There it is . . . No worries . . .”
He watched the yacht’s forepeak disappear beneath the waves; it went with a melancholy parting gurgle. There wasn’t a great deal of suction from the sinking yacht now; the water here wasn’t deep and the yacht ended up only a few feet under the surface. But there were big holes blown in its side.
“There goes a half million prayer donations, down the loo.” He turned to look Mercury over more closely. She seemed asleep, breathing regularly—or in a protective trance of some kind.
“What now?” Gatewood asked. “I don’t think it’ll be safe to hit the shore around here, man. All this action will attract the Syrian military.”
“Yeah. Maybe Lebanon, up the shore.” Constantine was eyeing Spoink, who seemed uncharacteristically quiet.
“I doubt we’ve got that much fuel.”
“Oh shit,” Constantine said, spotting the gunship coming their way again. “Not enough to shoot the yacht out from under us. Seemed sloppy, yeah? Like to be thorough, these bastards.”
The gunship had flown in a wide circle and was on a flight path that would take it right over the launch.
“And they’re coming right straight for us,” Gatewood said.
“Got a knife on you?” Constantine asked.
“What? You’re going to fight a helicopter with a knife?”
“Just give me the fucking knife.”
“Uhhh—no. Wait, yes, there’s a knife in this little boat kit here, for fixing line or something . . . Here.”
He handed over the small pocketknife. Constantine opened it and without hesitation slashed the heel of his left hand. He stretched it out so the blood would drip into the water. He intoned, “Undina Acqus Deis! Undina Acqus Deis . . . Ave!” He sent emanations from his psychic field along his arm, into the spreading splash of blood in the water. It was as if the blood were an amplifier for a signal, transmitting his call, both psychic and verbal, into the depths of the sea. “Undina Acqus Deis! Undina Acqus Deis . . . Ave!”
The gunship was getting closer . . . A few hundred yards off . . .
“Undina Acqus Deis . . . Ave!” He felt no answer to his call, and he went into the deeper level of the incantation, using words that were known to only a few; they were in the nearly forgotten language of Atlantis:
“Aq’ye’M’his’zoharzus! Und’neh’immenum! ’Immenum Gi’es’quis!”
He was aware of Gatewood staring at him; of a peculiar low growling from Spoink. Of Mercury shifting restively in the bottom of the boat. But he kept his focus, concentrating every ounce of psychic strength into the call. And his blood dripped, filtering down into the sea, merging with it like a promise, a promise made with his lifeblood . . .
“Undina Acqus Deis! Aq’ye’M’his’zoharzus! Und’neh’immen’m! ’Immenum Gi’es’quis!”
The chopper was almost upon them.
“Undina Acqus Deis! Aq’ye’M’his’zoharzus . . .”
He felt the response, then: a probe from the depths of the sea. It was looking in his mind for his native language, sensing he knew only a few words of its own. Then a voice rang in his head . . . A voice that seemed female . . .
Who calls upon us?
“It’s John Constantine! I’ve dealt with the Elemental Folk before.”
The Green Lord told us . . . We have heard . . . We have seen your soul pass through our realm, on its way to a strange destiny . . . We have known your ancestors . . . Rather irritating, they were . . . And you humans—we are reluctant to do you any favors! You have taken for more than your allotment of fish—and you have poisoned the rest! You have killed large portions of our realm!
“That’s not me—I’m against all that! And anyway, ah . . .”
The machine gun projecting from the side of the chopper was tilting down toward them. Constantine could see a big man grinning down at them as he centered the launch in his sights. Constantine turned to Gatewood and made a motion to zigzag the boat, to make a more difficult target. Gatewood nodded and began to weave the boat across the sea, away from the shore.
“. . . and I’m sorry about my irritating ancestors,” Constantine went on. “Like to make up for it—I’ll owe you one big-time, if you can help us out. That machine is about to kill us; it’s only about fifty feet over the water.”
How will you repay us?
“I don’t know—I’ll think of something, got no choice and I’m as good as my word!”
But your word does not always mean what it seems, so we have heard. You regard an oath as subject to interpretation.
“Won’t be around to repay you if you don’t do something—”
The machine gun opened fire and 16 mm bullets stitched down into the surface of the sea, the last rounds of the burst smacking the launch’s prow, showering Constantine with splinters. But the strafe missed hitting anyone in the boat. The chopper pulled up short and wheeled about, hovering so the gunner could fire again . . .
Very well, John Constantine—but as you say, you will owe us big-time. And one day we will collect . . .
Constantine had expected the elemental to manifest as a shape of water, the way Mercury had that day, but the she-giant who rose from the water was more a thing of ooze and slime and seaweed, pieces of old shipwrecks, with seawater taking the place of her blood.
And yet the whole came together with harmonious beauty as she rose gigantically from the water. She was made of seaweed and plankton and algae and wood, but her body was translucent—the sun struck through her, making an emerald light that lit the silhouette of her skeleton: a ten-story-high roughly human skeleton made of parts of sunken ships, its ribs the ribs of shipwrecks, its skull sections of hull; her hair was streaming seaweed and her eyes were whirling jellyfish in seafoam; the bones of her hands were spars. And in all she was a breathtakingly magnificent creature, woman shaped and roaring with surging currents. Some elementals were more substantial than others; it seemed to Constantine that this one amounted to a sea goddess.
He felt an unholy thrill looking up at her. She was here of her own accord, of her own free will, but still he, John Constantine, had prepared the way; he alone had summoned and persuaded her. This statuesque, glorious expression of the sea was an expression, also, of John Constantine’s will.
Moments like this explained why he was a magician, though it seemed to keep him always with one foot in Hell.
Distantly he made out astonished faces in the gunship staring at the giant elemental. And then she reached out and her fingers closed over the man at the machine gun. He screamed as she plucked at him, trying to pick him like a fruit. But his harness held most of his body in place, so that she was only able to pull his upper half free.
Vermin! Came her voice, reverberating in their minds. Vermin—infesting my realm!
Burlington’s upper half separated sloppily from his lower half, so that he was gone from the waist up except for his spine, which stuck out from his quivering, blood-spouting lower parts, waggling in the air and dripping spinal fluid.
She flung Burlington’s remains into the sea, and sharks came, bid by the sea elemental, to churningly feast.
The gunship began to back away, but she grabbed it by its landing struts with her coursing, solid-but-liquid right hand, her left reaching under the rotors toward the men in the chopper—but she
hesitated, seeing the sky suddenly boiling over them then, clouds thickening to black, spitting lightning, and parting for a hideous face.
The gigantic face of the Carthagan battlefield showed itself in the clouds: a thing apish and reptilian at once. It came to Constantine that the face was familiar from some childhood moment of rage. Constantine had seen that face for a flicker when he’d punched Jamie Ellis, the day Jamie had peed on his new shoes. And again, he thought it stirred even deeper memories. Now it reached out taloned paws from the sky, and from the ground, and from the stars, and from the center of the earth all at once. It reached out to slash at her. She let the chopper go and struck back—a force, Constantine saw, not of water and slime and wood, but of psychic presence compacted into the shape of a hand, the power of one colossal soul striking at another. Lightning and water exploded together, a great cloud of steam hissing up to hide the combatants. There was something in the pillar of steam that was like two vaguely human-shaped storms clashing, storm front to storm front. Great waves were lifted up by their clash, threatening to become a tsunami which would smash over the church on the shore and the settlements nearby.
The chopper was making a break for it, heading for the horizon.
And Constantine could see that the tsunami was building strength.
“Oh holy shit, what have you done?” Gatewood shouted.
Constantine shouted, “Undina Acqus Deis! Great elemental, your task is done—I render you gratitude! Those who would destroy me flee! Now return to the peace of your domain!”
Your kind have stolen the peace from my domain with your echo machines and your black spills and your poisoned rainfalls. But I go. Only, remember—gratitude is not enough. I will extract a price from you one day . . .
There was a reverberating finality in these last words, and the elemental suddenly collapsed into the sea with a thunderous surge. Steam dispersed in streamers, and he saw that the brutal god was gone from the sky as well. Instead, a great wave was roaring toward the launch and the shore, carrying barnacled spars and fragments of wooden ships on it, like weapons in a fist.
“Hold on!” Gatewood shouted, turning the boat, trying to outrun the wave.
They raced along for a handful of protracted seconds; then the surge caught them, lifting the boat up and nearly capsizing it. The launch’s side was smacked by a fragment of masthead, cracking but not quite stoving in. They spun sickeningly, water cascading over them . . .
But when the wave subsided they were still afloat.
The wave passed on to crash heavily on the beach, but below the church. Merely a dire hint of what a tsunami could be.
“Shit, man,” Gatewood said. “We barely got through that. Hey, Constantine, were you responsible, a couple years ago, for that big tsunami that smashed into Indonesia and India and—”
“No! Christ! Everyone tries to lay it all at my door. You can sod off with that.” Constantine groped for another cigarette. He was feeling nearly exhausted by the psychic effort of the invocation and emotional turmoil from so much happening in so short a time. But at least the gunship was gone . . .
Or was it? There it came again, a chopper on the horizon, bearing down on them. “Oh no,” Constantine muttered. “I can’t call the elementals again . . . They won’t come a second time today.”
Gatewood stared at the oncoming chopper. “Uh-uh. That’s not the same helicopter. That’s one of ours—should be the one I called from the radio room. My cousin Norm’s the pilot . . . I hope he’s not too fucked up. He’s scary when he flies loaded.”
11
WHERE FLOWERS DEGENERATE . . .
The Mediterranean Sea, in the middle of nowhere
“You wanta hit on this?” the helicopter pilot asked, waving a large blunt under Constantine’s nose.
“No thanks, mate, I’m confused enough already.”
“Ha ha, confused enough . . . !” He paused to suck at the blunt and went on, spewing smoke with the words, giggling, “That’s funny!” The chopper wobbled in the air, seeming on the point of spiraling down into the sea. But somehow he kept it more or less on course.
Norm the pilot, a heavyset guy in uniform, with a pointy little beard, small jolly eyes, and stringy brown hair that couldn’t have pleased his CO, was piloting a big, double-rotored Chinook belonging to the U.S. Army, a transport chopper with its unmanned guns out front.
Constantine was sitting in the copilot’s seat. Spoink was in back strapped into a chair against the inner bulkhead next to Gatewood, Mercury slumped in a harness beside them. All Constantine could see outside the Chinook was ocean, far below them. Way, way below them.
“What’s the range on this thing?” he shouted over the engine noise.
Norm blinked at him. “ ‘What’s a raging ding,’ you say?”
“How far can you go? We’ve got to get to France!”
“Don’t have that kinda range! No clearance there anyway, not for this flight! I already gotta make up a big story about getting lost to get away with this shit! Just doing it for my cuz! I’m gonna have to fucking kick in the direction finder and say it went blooey! Hey, you’re not CIA are you? ’Cause if you are I’m gonna have to drop your ass in the Med from here!”
“What? No!” Constantine was taken aback by the sudden change in the conversation’s direction. “People are always asking me if I’m in with that lot. Wouldn’t go near them.”
“Fucking CIA’s everywhere—like the bull in the fucking china shop, dude! Those spooky-ass dicks want you to do shit for them without any accounting for it—you know, off the books—but they’ll turn your ass in if you’re into some shit on your own. Run a little weed into Baghdad for your Gs, and they want to blackmail you or bust you. After all I did for those fucks.”
“What’d you do for ’em, then?”
“Oh, brought in a bunch of ‘detainees’ from a secret base in fucking Kuwait, is all—they put ’em in a special wing at Abu Ghraib, same system as Gitmo. This wing, the ‘detainees’ got no designation, no official status, see, nobody knows they’re there. Red Cross don’t know. So the CIA’s assholes can interrogate ’em any way they want. I took a few dead ones out of there since then . . .”
Constantine glanced at Norm. He might’ve been talking about boosting stereos instead of smuggling hooded human beings for the CIA.
“But I do a lot of ‘extracurricular’ shit, of course; my cuz back there, he knew that. I owed him a favor. He got me some other backdoorsmen. Pays good. See, those guys wanta get out bad.”
“Backdoorsmen?”
“Deserters. They go out the back door, like. More of those than the Pentagon wants you to know. Too much freaky shit going on in Iraq—backdoorsmen can’t deal.” He turned in his seat to Gatewood, held out the blunt. “Hey cuz, you wanta hit this?” Gatewood shook his head and yawned. Spoink only glared. Norm turned back to Constantine. “What’s with that Haji guy? He an Ali Baba?”
“He’s not what he seems, mate. Nothing to worry about.”
But Constantine did worry about Spoink—if he still was Spoink. He had seemed reluctant to board the Chinook, hesitating halfway up the rope ladder. He hadn’t said a word since the yacht—and that was unnatural for Spoink. Constantine suspected that the Iranian terrorist who’d originally belonged to the body had returned to it and shoved Spoink out somehow. Or perhaps he was in there, too, but repressed.
Constantine wasn’t clear on what to do about it. If he assumed that a terrorist had taken over the body, he had to turn the guy in somewhere—didn’t he? But it went against Constantine’s nature to turn anyone in. Snitching was antithetical to him. And even though Spoink had said the guy was a terrorism big shot, Spoink might’ve misunderstood something. Maybe he was just a radical Muslim fundamentalist. That didn’t make him a terrorist. And if Constantine did turn him in somewhere, he risked Spoink’s spirit life. Could be a problem in the afterlife if you think you’re in a body all cozy, and then, bam, somebody puts you up against a wall and shoots you. Tr
auma makes ghosts.
Spoink wasn’t easy to like, but Constantine liked him anyway. And Spoink had come through for him. Ought to try to stand by him.
All Constantine could do right now though was keep an eye on the bearded git. And hope I know what the bloody hell to do when the time comes . . .
Trouble with that plan was said bearded git might just kill him, first chance he got. Best not turn his back.
“Gotta let you guys out right here!” Norm shouted over the booming of the rotors.
Constantine leaned in his seat to look out the window of the chopper. “But—there’s nothing out there, mate! We’re in the middle of the bloody sea! You going to dump us in the ocean?”
“Look over that way! Down at five o’clock!”
“At five o’clock? Oh, right—twelve o’clock high and all that . . . looks like a tanker of some kind.”
“Of some kind is right, man. The sinking kind if you, like, kick a bulkhead or something. A real rust pot called Medusa’s Revenge. Greek guy named ‘Papa’ Papandreis is captain. That’s where you’re going next. Don’t sleep facedown on his ship or he’ll, like, sneak in and sodomize you.”
“Here! I’ll not sleep at all on the fucking ship. He expecting us is he?”
“Yeah, I radioed him before I picked you up. You got to pay him something to drop you on the coast of France. Get you there tomorrow I expect. I got a regular thing with him: I drop him deserters and money, pick up dope. He gets me the pretty good shit. Deserters pay him to move them across the Med.”