by M. C. Norris
“Sir?”
He heard the fawning voice of his Chinese manservant, and he sucked the human blood from each of his fingertips, one by one. From beyond the black curtain, a starved ape emitted an indignant bark. No one liked to be disturbed during feeding time. That was supposed to be their time, when nothing else in the world should exist but master’s floating hand, a lucky baboon, and a bowl of warmish meat.
“What do you want?”
A Bengal tiger’s roar shook the corridor. The great killer smelled flesh, and a primal switch behind those burning eyes had flipped, transforming the striped cat into death incarnate. Anyone unfortunate enough to be dropped into that enclosure from one of the many trap doors throughout the palace would find themselves reduced in worth to the weight of their meat in a monster’s swinging gullet. Somewhere high above, a peacock howled.
“You have a visitor.”
He dipped his fingertips back into the bowl, and swirled them gently in the blood. “Who is it?”
“Mr. Krupin, sir,” the manservant replied. “He insisted that you bid him to come see you immediately.” He lowered his upper-half in a respectful bow. “You know that I would never disturb you down here, as you’ve made abundantly clear, if I didn’t believe Mr. Krupin’s visit to be some matter of urgency.”
Volkov stopped swirling his fingers. He grabbed hold of a fatty cord of flesh. He extended his hand through the curtain, and flung the wet thing at a baboon. With a snarl and a ringing chain, it was gone. His visitor, Mr. Krupin, had in fact brought him those two baboons. He’d delivered them as gifts, two years ago. Of the hundreds, maybe thousands throughout the Red Brotherhood who received Volkov’s orders, Mr. Krupin was perhaps his most inventive. Hideous to look upon, no doubt, but Krupin’s fetish for facial mutilation seemed to symbolize some deeper resent for the civilized world, and perhaps a renunciation of his own humanity. It was a bold statement akin to spitting in the creator’s face, and perhaps that was the proverbial point, for he that has no money needs no purse.
Volkov extended the bowl through the curtain, and inverted it. He relished the baboons’ screams as their meal splattered on the floor, just out of their reach. He would let it rot there. They could stare at that denied meal until starvation had devolved them into living nightmares. That’s when he’d break the Chinaman’s legs with a pipe, and throw him screaming to his flesh-eating apes.
“No worries,” Volkov replied, flashing his manservant a silver smile.
The man pointed a trembling finger at the floor, where a dark pool of blood crept from behind the black curtain. “Would you like me to—?”
“No.” Volkov’s smile fell. He dropped the temperature of his visage by fifty degrees. “Send in Mr. Krupin.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” The manservant bowed his way out of the corridor, trailed by a bobbing shadow that slithered along the torch-lit wall like a dungeon ghost.
Volkov clasped his hands behind his back, and strode down his menagerie corridor. Things unloved glowered back from the shadows, their eyes glowing like twin portals into Hell. Some paced mindlessly, rubbing against the same spots on the stone walls with every turn, until their flesh was scoured down to exposed bone. Volkov paused in front of the tiger’s cage. The beast thinned its gleaming eyes from the darkest corner of its cell. He and the once-magnificent cat exchanged their knowing looks of mutual hatred and respect wrought by two forever locked in a standoff. The creature blinked, turned, and resumed its pacing. Sometimes, Volkov thought about killing it, turning it into a rug. It used to be a gorgeous animal, before it defiled itself just to spite him by rubbing half its face off against the wall. The tiger turned, grinding bare skull against sandstone, and cast Volkov that baleful glare meant to haunt some unlit corner of his mind.
For years, he’d made a hobby of collecting the world’s most terrible creatures, and turning them worse. The people who served him, he supposed, were no exception. Volkov strode further down the hall to an unoccupied enclosure filled with water behind a thick plate of glass. Ruddy streaks circumnavigated the walls, evidencing the slow and deliberate manner in which the creature had ground its life away. His gaze fell to the layer of accumulated waste on the tank bottom. It was all that remained of the bygone tenant.
“Thank you for coming on such short notice,” Volkov said. He’d heard the sucking air being drawn through Mr. Krupin’s bared teeth, but he chose not to turn around. Not yet. He never liked to look too long at that man, because to behold the self-inflicted mutilation inspired dark impulses in Volkov, and he didn’t want to kill Mr. Krupin. He needed him. Mr. Krupin was family, and family had no ugly members.
The man beside him grunted. He raised a finger, and pointed toward the empty tank.
“It died,” Volkov said. He unclasped his hands, and folded his tattooed arms across his broad chest. “She was like a bitter woman, and refused to find happiness here.” Volkov frowned down at the layer of detritus on the tank bottom, as if reading the creature’s leavings like thrown bones. “But, I suppose there is more to learn from its death than there was ever to be learned by observing it, in life.” He turned toward Krupin, permitting himself a glimpse of that wired mess of a face. “I’ve got the dolphin’s head upstairs, in my freezer.”
Volkov turned away, and began to walk again. Mr. Krupin followed him, as he anticipated. “I presume you’ve been watching the news, yes?”
The man trailing his heels emitted a grunt.
Volkov whirled around. He seized Mr. Krupin by two fistfuls of wires, and he yanked their faces together. “I’ve warned you before, and I’ll never warn you again. When you come to Mongolia, you will come to me as a man, or I’ll show you an animal. Take this mess off your face.”
Volkov hated Russians almost as deeply as he hated Chinamen, but for business reasons, his disdain was kept simmering beneath the surface—most of the time. Volkov’s Red Brotherhood was as much a hybridized offshoot of the Russian mob as was he, with his broad face and Asiatic yet emerald eyes. The Mongolian blood was the only blood in his veins that he claimed, despite Volkov’s known relation to a certain Russian prostitute. The last man who’d dared to call him the “Moscow Mongol” was forbidden to speak the “M” phonetic again, a penance Volkov ensured by feeding both of his lips to a monitor lizard.
Volkov shoved the ugly face with force enough to slam Mr. Krupin’s bare back against the stone wall. He hung there for a moment, glowering from the shadows. His tattooed chest rose and fell. At last, he blinked. He raised a hand to dab the blood from his torn lip piercings. Unfastening the contraption buckled behind his head, the wires sprung, and Mr. Krupin’s face relaxed. His slackened lips fell wimpling around his tongue.
“You know why I called you here?”
Krupin nodded. “I’ve seen the news.” He thrust himself off the wall, slapped his hands against his pants, and rolled his painted neck. “Going to need a bigger dolphin tank.”
Volkov flashed a silver grin. “Isn’t it fun watching them all try to pretend they don’t know where the monsters came from? It’s nobody’s fault. Not the Navy. Not our heroes, who brought contaminated water back from another moon.”
“Europa,” Krupin said, jabbing a finger skyward.
Volkov’s eyes took on a shimmer. “Where the wild things are.”
“Yeah. That’s why I thought, like, why’s he calling me, even?” Mr. Krupin said, throwing up his hands with a shrug. “‘Cause I got you the moon juice already.”
“That’s the trouble.” Volkov cleared his throat. “It’s gone.”
“Gone?” Mr. Krupin cocked his head. “Where’d it go?”
“Into the gullets of the European elite.”
“Wait … it got drank?” Krupin frowned, narrowing his eyes. “Why’d they drink the moon juice?”
“What they drank was vodka. Very expensive vodka.”
Shifting back and forth on his feet, Mr. Krupin could only frown. He looked as though he wanted to say something, but never
did. No one had likely ever accused him of being the smartest man in the world.
“They sing to it, Mr. Krupin.” Volkov turned to his favorite henchman, and mirrored the angle of his cocked head. “Did you know that?”
Krupin’s eyes flicked over the incomprehensible map that was Volkov’s face.
“The Mongolian distillers in Nantong. They sing to their water. They believe that water has moods, and so they adjust the mood before distillation begins, by exposing it to certain tones that infuse the water with the perfect energy for transformation, and before you laugh, consider that the best vodka in Russia has always been distilled by the Mongols.”
Mr. Krupin stared at Volkov. He licked his lips and swallowed. “You turned the moon juice into vodka, then.”
“Diluted, of course, into three hundred gallons of the most expensive vodka ever distilled.”
“That’s good, then. Right?” Mr. Krupin nodded, gazing at the empty dolphin tank, at Volkov, and back again. A bewildered frown remained tilled into his brow. “So …” He licked his distorted lips. “Why did you call m—?”
“Because I had it right there in my hands!” Volkov doubled-over, fists clenched, roaring so loudly that it made the torches flicker. An unseen beast replied with a low moan. Volkov pressed the butts of his hands to his temples, his face screwed into a red knot. He rested his forehead against the cool glass of the dolphin tank. “I held the most powerful weapon in the world right in the palm of my hand, and I never even saw it for what it was.”
There was no getting that water back. Not unless he could roll back time by two years, and have a second chance to make the most of that stolen cargo. Never in his life had Volkov regretted anything so deeply. He’d made an extraordinary profit on the Europa brand of vodka, enough to fund the Red Brotherhood’s trafficking operations well into the next generation, but money meant nothing in the shadow of the greatest power that the world had ever beheld; power that should’ve been his to wield.
They were so perfect. The new creatures emerging from the sea were everything that Volkov had ever wanted from his hobby, but had never been brave enough to imagine. His attempts to create the perfect abomination, a purely destructive force that somehow remained comfortable in its own skin, had never amounted to anything more than an enjoyable diversion from his work, but his perspective changed on the day that Mr. Krupin brought in the dolphin.
The Allied Navy, as it turned out, were involved in some similar shenanigans. While tinkering with trained animals that performed terrible tricks, they’d evidently stumbled onto something huge. They’d discovered some mechanism of direct control over their test subjects, because no amount of thrown fish could ever inspire a dolphin to behave in the strange manner captured on drone footage. Something else was going on. It was something technical, and the first step was solving that mystery, if Volkov hoped to ever have anything better than a flesh-eating baboon on the end of his leash.
Volkov narrowed his eyes at Krupin. What his henchman lacked in intelligence, he made up for with pure determination. Disadvantaged in the Brotherhood by his Russian heritage, Mr. Krupin was driven to outperform the Mongols in every task. He would storm the gates of Hell and bring back the devil’s pitchfork if he thought that by doing so, he’d gain some favor.
“What do you want me to do?” The corner of Mr. Krupin’s mouth was quavering, his eyes brightening, like a dog anticipating a treat. This was a man who was ready for orders.
“I need you to deliver the dolphin’s head to Nantong, China.”
Chapter Four
Filling its storage bladders with seawater, it pumped the fluid through its gill slits, timing each surge with a whip of its flagella. In this chugging style of locomotion, the creature was able to ascend from the depths, and into the dead zone. This was a vast desert without landmarks, with no visual points of reference throughout those gulfs of midnight blue. It was an ocean layer too deep to glimpse the sun, yet it was more than a mile above the sea floor. Up might as well be down. Directions were irrelevant. Navigation was only possible if one was equipped with the ability to perceive magnetic fields, while remaining aware of subtle changes between thermocline layers. The dead zone was so devoid of life that even the scale of living things was totally subjective. A creature might wrongly appraise itself as being quite enormous, until confronted by something else drifting through the gloom. Only then could the question of one’s size be put into perspective.
Chugging, whipping, it felt the pressure of the depths relaxing, but this brought no relief to the discomfort. Quite the contrary, the ocean’s weight was something of a stabilizing force that helped its organ systems function properly. The nearer it drew to the surface world, the more ghostly thin it began to feel. Whole years of its life seemed to fly by as lost seconds, while some binding essence of its existence was being diluted. The great pupils of its eyes constricted to pinpoints, and then vanished. Neurological misfires rocked its body with spasms. Somehow, it intuited that the consequence of reaching the surface might be death, but if it dared to slow its pace, death was a certainty.
Leagues behind and below, the pursuer’s threshing tail churned the water into foam. The massive bioelectric signature rose like a sentient thunderhead, pulsing with electrical currents that scrambled magnetic fields, and spun the internal compass of its prey like a top. This was a hunter from the extreme deep, where forever-darkened skies were searched by gaping, soulless eyes, and where the particles that settled down from above were sampled by masses of wriggling organs. It was death incarnate. Once prey had been targeted, a switch inside its mind flipped, and there was no turning its course.
The fleeing creature chugged toward the sun’s brilliance, whipping its flagella with mechanical rhythm. It refused to alter its suicidal pace. It would die in motion, fighting its way upward until its heart ceased to throb in the burning sunlight. Muscle control became corrupted as the enormous predator closed in, wracking its nervous system in a field of bioelectric chaos. Stunned, its flagella could barely twitch. The chase was over. Tipping askew in the endless blue, the prey submitted itself to the inevitable.
When the moment of devouring arrived, the monster’s snout instead rushed past, serrated knives gleaming in the barnacle-encrusted acreage of its jaws. For an instant, their eyes met. As one gaped into the frigid depths of the other’s soul, and the other gaped back, each came to know something intimate of the other, and then it was over. The killer’s vast and serpentine form undulated by for what seemed like an eternity, until the field of electric carnage dissipated with a final thresh of the great tail.
Tumbling end over end in the monster’s wake, the lucky one came to the realization that the threat had passed, and that its life had not been taken. While the day had at once become something of a gift, perhaps the greater gift was that of perspective, because it understood its scale in a vaster world than it might’ve dared to reckon. Inflating its bladders with seawater, it dipped its head downward, and vanished back into the midnight blue.
****
The monster unhinged its massive jaws. Torrents of seawater gushed through lateral vents as its terrible mouth yawned into killing position. Bulging eyes crossed their independent fields of vision to focus on the target’s underbelly. With one final lash of its tail to rocket its mass skyward, the hunter slammed into its prey, and the two breached the ocean as one. Midair, squealing steel panels shredded as the monster thrashed the inedible thing in its jaws, before crashing disappointed back into the sea.
The prey’s ruin floated strangely upon the waves. The hunter circled, watching its lights flicker dimly, as a column of black smoke billowed up into the air. Its dying sounds were unlike those of any creature that the hunter had ever encountered, nor did it behave in any familiar way. The wounded thing didn’t flutter upon the water, or swim dazed in mindless circles. Its cries were not one, but the collective shrieks of many. The hunter slithered around the smoldering carcass, tasting the water with its masses of barbells.
The flavor was acrid and charred. While its oblong body resembled prey from down below, this thing was something else, and it was unfit for consumption. Although it was a waste of time and energy to attack what couldn’t be eaten, there was still a reputation to uphold. The waters over the trench were the monster’s hunting grounds, and trespassers were never tolerated.
Barrel rolling over the sea, the hunter lifted its great tail out of the water, and brought it down upon the intruder with a slap so fierce that the seas trembled. The collective squealing stopped. The flickering lights went out. At last, the invader behaved in a normal way, sinking lifelessly down into the deep.
One invader had been dealt with, but now the monster was agitated. There might be more of those things trespassing through its territory, and the monster felt compelled to show some feats of strength. It hoisted the spiny fan along its back in a crimson display, declaring dominance over its kingdom. Slashing at the water with its tail, the monster snaked over the surface, war flag billowing in the wind. It welcomed a challenge from anything that dared to cross its path.
****
The naval officer sidestepped down the row, shaking hands with a steely grip. “My name is Captain Roswell. I’ll be your primary point of contact, here on the Barrier Reef. I’ve spent the last eighteen months overhauling your old NEWT program, and on behalf of the admiral, I’m proud to offer an opportunity for reinstatement in the Allied Navy.” He pivoted at the waist to gesture toward the surreal spectacle looming in the background. “Welcome to the zoo.”