by Zack Archer
We encountered a staircase and headed up, reaching a landing. Hollis didn’t have any of her weapons, so I blasted the door down with my metal darts.
Hooking a right, we flew down another glass-walled corridor. We saw the canals, which meant the snipers, now dozens of them in boats, could see us.
They opened fire, blasting apart the windows. Glass filled the air, slicing our exposed flesh as we covered our heads and plunged ahead. The echo of footsteps sounded behind and ahead of us. It was clear that we were surrounded and outnumbered.
Glancing back, I spotted one of the Turk’s men, a ferret-faced killer with a braided beard. He aimed a pistol at me and I shot him down. Then I shot down the three men behind him as we searched for a place to hide.
“We need to separate and draw them off,” Hollis said. She moved over to a cubicle with a stuff penguin pinned to one of the walls and hid the attaché case in an accordion file. “You hide, and I’ll get them to follow me. When they do, ambush the bastards and we’ll come back for the case.”
It wasn’t the best plan, but it was the only one we had.
“Here! Over here!” Hollis shouted as I ducked behind another cubicle.
Peripherally, I watched her head through another door. I waited, but nothing happened.
Nobody came, so I rose to follow her. I reached the door she’d entered and opened it to find her splayed on the floor.
Nobody came so I rose to follow after Hollis. I met the door she’d entered and opened it to find her splayed on the floor.
Dixie stood over her.
I brought my cannon up, ready to blast the woman into eternity, but she beat me to the punch. The rod in her hand, which I reckoned was a cattle prod of some kind, met my chest and the blue light dancing at the end touched my flesh.
A teeth-rattling pain gripped my body. My eyes rolled back, I bit my tongue, pissed my pants, and passed out.
I woke to the sound of thumping music and screams.
“Don’t open your eyes,” a distant voice said. “And don’t say a word.”
It was Slade.
“What?”
“I just told you not to say a word, dumbass.”
Rousing, I moved my head left and right, stars in my eyes, ears throbbing. I was in a semi-darkened room with my arms and legs strapped to a bed. My cannons were gone. I struggled in my bindings, which were elastic straps hooked around my wrists and ankles, but was unable to budge.
“You’re tied up, Dekko.”
“I know.”
“You were double-crossed.”
“I know that too. Question is, where am I?”
“Unknown at this point. I can’t get a signal or a good read,” Slade said.
Figuring I didn’t have much to lose, I shouted.
The music stopped and Slade’s voice vanished in a burst of static.
Footfalls echoed on the other side of a door that was partially open. A form lumbered into sight, grabbed the door and pulled it back to reveal a bear of a man with a giant, domed head. His face was fringed with whiskers, his mouth pulled back in a dirty grin, and when he moved, the jewelry he sported—earrings, and gold chains looped around his neck—jingled like wind chimes.
“He’s up!” the big man shouted, throwing off a vinegary musk as he glanced back. Then he looked to me.
“Let me explain how things are going to work,” the big man said.
“Sure,” I replied.
“You don’t got shit right now.”
“I can see that.”
“You listen to exactly what we say and you do it. You copy that?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Otherwise bad things will be done to you.”
“I wouldn’t want that to happen…”
“Shut the fuck up.”
I fell silent. More people appeared at the doorway. Three men and two women who looked like castoffs from some seventies biker movie. They wore tattered clothing, not uniforms. Ratty sweat pants, soiled shorts, torn T-shirts, sports jerseys, whatever they could apparently find. One of the women was holding my cannons.
“Hot damn,” the woman said, brushing past the big man to get a look at me. “Told ya he wasn’t dead,” she said as the others snickered.
“Pretty soon, he might wish he was,” one of the other men said, high-fiving the other goons.
The big bald man produced a large knife and flicked it open. “Time to take you to see the man,” he said before slicing off my bindings.
I was roughly hoisted to my feet and one of the women tossed a sheet over my head that had holes for the eyes and mouth.
“I didn’t realize we’d be trick-or-treating,” I said.
The woman jabbed me in the ribs with one of the cannons. “Do not speak unless spoken to.”
“You just spoke to me,” I replied.
She pulled back a fist and the big, bald man whistled at her and made a motion with his finger. “Save some of that for later.”
I stared at where the cannon on my stump should have been and the woman smiled. She pointed to the other side of the room, where a stack of metal darts were visible.
“You think we’re idiots?” she asked.
“Absolutely,” I replied.
The woman’s smile faded. She grabbed my arm and pulled me down a hallway as the bald man followed behind us. At the end of the hallway two men with automatic rifles fronted a black metal door with the words “Movin’ On Up” spraypainted across it.
They stepped aside, and we moved through the door into a stairwell. I was dragged up the stairs to a landing where another door was opened to reveal a sunlit corridor with an entire wall made of glass. I was shocked to see that we were at the top of a very tall building, one that looked down on the entirety of South Beach and the canals that were fifty or sixty feet beneath us.
Most of the city was indeed flooded, the buildings gone, but there were ten or twelve structures whose summits were still visible. Wires and what appeared to be zip lines were strung between the buildings, so many that they resembled a huge spider web. I saw people climbing across the wires, pushing handcarts. Beneath the wires were dozens of boats of various shapes and sizes.
“Dream Catcher,” the bald man said.
My gaze smoked into his. “What?”
“Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it,” the bald man said, staring off into the distance. “Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. That’s what the Turk always says.”
“That’s lovely.”
“Well, that’s what those wires are and that’s why we call ‘em the Dream Catcher. They let people trade between buildings, divvy up barter, do business with the runners and the seasteaders. Some of ‘em are down there,” the man continued, gesturing to a number of what looked like handcrafted boats bobbing in the water under the wires, alongside people on jet skis and newfangled machines called “Flyrides,” personal watercraft hooked to hoses that allow the user to fly around through the air on jets of water.
“Where are we?”
“One of the tallest buildings still standing in SL,” the big, bald man huffed. SL is Sunlandia. It’s the new name the man gave the city.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Cyrus,” the bald man replied.
“I’m Nick.”
“We know,” Cyrus said.
“Mind if I ask how?”
“Your friend told us. The dark-haired one.”
“Hollis.”
Cyrus shrugged. “Don’t know her name. Only know that she’s feisty and has some nice jugs.”
“What happened to the others?” I asked, ignoring this.
“The other bitches you were with?”
“My friends.”
“A smorgasbord of sluts,” the woman in front of me hissed.
“Like I said, we got one of ‘em,” Cyrus said.
“The others?”
“Don’t worry about the others,” the woman answered, scowling, which led
me to believe they must have found a way to escape.
At the end of the corridor was a curtain made of beads. Raucous music reverberated as we passed through it. The space on the other side was so expansive that I assumed it had to be the penthouse. The floors were made of polished stone, the walls shingled with dark wood, and in the center of the whole thing was a hot tub large enough to fit twelve people, and a plasma screen dangling from the ceiling on a heavy metal chain.
I knew the hot tub could accommodate twelve people because that’s how many were there. An equal number of men and women, all of them nude or semi-nude, frolicking around, swilling booze, popping pills, and engaging in a variety of sex acts.
“You like what you see?” a man asked.
Someone pulled the sheet off my head and I spotted the source of the question. A tall, tanned man with a mane of silver hair and a beard like a conquistador. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and shorts with black slippers and bore a faint resemblance to Jimmy Buffet…on meth.
I could tell by the black doll’s eyes that it was the man himself. The one called the Turk.
The Turk strode forward, smiling, not a care in the world. He had a cigarette in one hand and a martini in the other.
“Life is good,” he said, his voice soothing, almost buttery. “For me anyway,” he added, before pointing his cigarette at my stump. “Can I say one thing, my friend?”
I nodded.
“That is one gnarly hand.”
I held it up for him to admire. “You like it?”
He ashed his smoke. “It’s gruesome as fuck, but yeah, I dig it.”
I noticed that he had a crude tattoo of a snake that began at the base of his neck and continued across what I could see of his bare chest.
“I like your ink.”
“It was done in remembrance of me taking over this city.” He held up his martini as if in toast, gesturing to the bank of windows on the far side of the penthouse. “You ever seen a more gorgeous view of anything in your life?”
“It’s breathtaking.”
I noticed that the partiers in the hot tub had fallen silent and someone had turned the tunes down. In point of fact, the revelers stared slack-jawed as the Turk drifted past them. I followed him until we stood near the windows.
He removed a silver cigarette case from his pocket and flipped it open. Removing a cigarette, he offered one to me. I nodded.
“Take it,” he said of the case. At my perplexed look, he added, “I make it a habit of giving gifts to people I’m going into business with.”
I slipped a lung rocket out of the case and pocketed it. “Who says we’re going into business?”
He grinned. “I have a feeling you’ll want to hear my offer.”
“Care to share?”
The Turk didn’t immediately respond. Instead, he pointed down to the water. “I used to be way down there. Risking my ass on a daily basis for ninety-seven grand a year when I first started out.”
“DEA?”
He seemed surprised that I knew. “How’d you know?”
“A little birdie told me.”
He smiled. “I think I’ve talked to that same little birdie.”
“What did he say?” I asked.
“She said something that was most interesting. That you and your friends were sent down on a mission of sorts to find an antidote for the plague.”
I was silent. The Turk grinned. “When you crash a helicopter, Nick, best practices dictate that you destroy it.”
“I’ll remember that next time.”
“We found your bird. The dead pilots had documents on them. Once we had those, we reached out to a close personal friend of mine—”
“Let me guess. Dixie?”
He nodded. “Pays to have someone working for you on the inside. Little trick I learned while taking down the cartels. It’s that whole ‘keep your friends close and enemies closer’ thing…”
“Speaking of friends…”
“You’ll be happy to know that most of yours escaped. They’re free. At least for the moment.”
Inwardly, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“But, one of them is here with us,” the Turk continued.
“Where?”
The Turk smiled and motioned at a woman standing on the other side of the room. The woman was in her late twenties, muscular, her face drawn and covered in cheap makeup. She carried a silver platter that balanced several martinis. She handed one to me.
“I’m not a big drinker,” I said.
“I insist. It’ll help take the edge off during the show.”
I picked up the martini and sniffed it. “What show?”
The Turk gestured to several armed men, who marched forward and prodded me toward a door on the other side of the penthouse with the barrels of their guns. As I plodded forward, the door opened to reveal the top of the building, a huge apron of concrete that was centered by a circular, sparkling blue pool. I noticed a small, waterlogged object on the ground off to my right. Squinting, I saw that it was a bear. The same one I’d given to Hollis.
Turning, I noted that on one end of the pool was a set of stairs that led down into the water and on the other, was a fifteen-foot tall diving board.
A metal halo and a series of thick, metal wires were connected to the diving board and ran the length of the pool before connecting to a large cement pedestal on the other side of the roof.
Ringing the pool were tiki torches, lounge chairs, and covered cabanas filled with dozens of men and women who were dressed in bikinis and swim trunks. They were eating and drinking while perched on the edges of their seats. All eyes were on the pool—specifically, the ginormous alligator floating in the middle of it.
“Ever seen a bigger one?” the Turk asked as he appeared alongside me and pointed to the gator.
“No.”
“Sixteen feet, nose to tail. We call her the Big Gal.”
“Must’ve been hell moving it up here.”
“I lost four good men,” the Turk said, gesturing to two of his men who held up arms without hands that vaguely resembled my own. “And pieces of two more.”
The Turk snapped his fingers and a curtain on one of the cabanas opened. A big-breasted woman with a shock of platinum hair was marched out at gunpoint, led over to the diving board.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“The game’s beginning,” the Turk said.
The woman was forced to climb the ladder up to the top of the diving board. One of the Turk’s female warriors followed her up and placed the metal halo on her head before wrapping one of the metal leaders around the woman’s midsection, locking it in place with several large clips.
The Turk whistled and everyone fell silent. It was then that I noticed small things I’d missed before. The fact that the concrete was mottled with dark stains here and there that might be blood. The tiny metal cages just below the surface of the pool that were filled with either pieces of chicken or human flesh, I couldn’t tell which. I watched the woman who was carrying my cannons plod across the roof and place them on a circular table near one of the cabanas.
“You know the rules!” the Turk shouted. “If you’re in, place your bets!”
The Turk’s goons moved forward and tossed paper money, jewelry, and other valuables into a little plastic child’s pool overseen by a fat man wearing shorts, a yellow bandana and little else.
The Turk motioned to his female warrior who was standing on top of the diving board. The warrior handed a long knife to the big-breasted woman. The woman reluctantly took the knife in her trembling hand.
The Turk looked back at me. “You a big hunter, Nick?”
“No.”
“Neither am I. I always hated how unfair it was. Some guy with a rifle capable of slinging a bullet thousands of yards against an unsuspecting creature armed only with the teeth and claws God gave it. Unlike that, this is going to be a fair fight.”
“What the hell is going on?”
“That woman
up there fucked up. She turned against us, me, but rather than put her down, I’m going to give her a chance. Knife against teeth and claws. A fair fight. If she wins, if she beats the Big Gal, she goes free.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.
The Turk’s face fell. “Do I look like I’m kidding?”
He circled his finger in the air. The Turk’s warrior shoved the woman from the diving board.
She plunged straight down and then the metal leader snapped taut, suspending her four feet over the pool. The alligator immediately dove toward the bottom of the pool and then rocketed back up. The monster breached the surface and snapped at the woman, who brought her feet up at the very last second.
The female gator crashed into the water and circled around as the woman struggled with her bindings, trying to free herself.
The Turk’s people began hooting and hollering, conducting side bets on whether the woman would live or die. I closed my eyes and said a prayer for her. When I opened them, the alligator was launching itself out the water again.
Two things happened simultaneously. The gator ratcheted down on her foot, biting it clean off, and the woman freed herself from the metal leader.
She dropped into the pool, her mangled foot leaving a bloody slick. Arms out, she swam across the pool, splashing frantically as the alligator moved laterally.
Sideways! I screamed to myself. Don’t try to swim the length of the pool! Swim sideways!
The woman didn’t swim sideways, but instead chopped at the water as the gator swam down and then headed back up toward her. As if sensing this, the woman stopped swimming and brought the knife around.
The alligator slammed into her and the woman brought the knife down on the gator’s head.
The blade snapped off. The crowd cheered. The woman screamed.
The gator clamped down around the woman’s neck. Blood geysered, and the gator took the woman up in its terrible embrace and began rolling sideways with her. I’d read a book on alligators as a child and recalled that they did this to drown their prey.
In seconds, the woman stopped moving. The crowd grew silent as the gator dove to the bottom of the pool, where it commenced feeding on the woman.