Limbus, Inc. Book II Read online

  “A very large one,” he said. “Technically it’s a sauropterygian. Unlike the plesiosaur it greatly resembles, it has serviceable legs for taking to the shore, though not well. To simplify what we have in mind for you, I’ll just repeat what I said before. You’ll be fishing for a dinosaur.”

  *

  The wind was cold enough to make a polar bear scream, sharp enough to shave with; the water was high and vigorous, and the icebergs were cracking and moaning as they melted all around me. The contrasting warmth of the water rose up and heated the great tuna boat we were in, giving me warm feet and legs; the howling wind in contrast gave me a cold head and body, in spite of my layered clothes, my fur-lined hood and heavy coat.

  For all his abilities and knowledge, I could have told Cranston that while fishing for a dinosaur (and this conclusion I drew without any experience in the matter whatsoever), it is best to have a very large boat, and better yet, best not to do it, and if it has to be done, it should be done from shore with a very long line, not caught on the water and dragged to shore, which was their plan. They wanted it alive.

  Also, I preferred a different sort of bait. Sticking the remains of dead bodies on a hook the size of a Town Car was not my idea of a good time, even if the corpses belonged to what might have been the last surviving Neanderthals.

  But I am ahead of myself.

  So it turns out I’m fishing for a dinosaur because it has come up from a world beneath our world. Not a Center of The Earth world, but a world that lies below the crust, a Rim World, Cranston called it. Still, it is deep down and may not be everywhere beneath the earth, but it is certainly beneath the poles, including the South Pole where I was at the moment.

  Down deep in this world is a roof of burning fire that serves as a sun, and there are clouds and there is an atmosphere, and all manner of people live there in a primitive state, and oh yes, there are dinosaurs and mammoths and mastodons and ape-people and even pirates. I have not seen these things, but Cranston has told me. I thought he was out of his mind, but if you see one dinosaur it’s easy to believe that there are others, and that all the wild and wooly things Cranston told me are true. That the ice caps are melting from Global Climate Change is obvious, but the worry for Cranston and his Secret Rulers is that the world beneath our world will be revealed. Why this is their worry, I can’t say. But, you see, the water-going dinosaur likes to eat people. It’s envisioned that it might swim through the newly acquired waterways, due to the ice melting and find its way to warmer waters and make its way to our civilization. Then, much like an old Japanese monster movie, start tearing down cities and eating fleeing citizens, stomping pedestrians, and receiving an air strike.

  When that was said and done, the next step would be for our current civilization to find and invade the world below, destroying it in all its primitive glory, just because we can. This is Cranston’s and the Secret Rulers of the World’s concern. I guess that’s a good thing, but with Cranston it’s hard to tell. As for the remainder of the Secret Rulers, I assumed the two men who had brought me to the compound were part of that group, and after that, I’m not sure. Maybe they don’t all live there, or stay there, and the others are spaced here and there about the world.

  Not only had the climate changed, but when the ice melted it affected deep pockets of water below the surface. With it came hundreds of dead bodies, drowned out victims. Among them animals and dinosaurs and what I call Neanderthals, because I can’t think of anything else close enough to how they look; large brows, short legs, stocky bodies, all of them drowned and bloated and convenient fishing bait. They are cousins to the man who drove the car that brought me to the compound. Oh yeah, he’s one. He came up from the earth through a passage of some kind many years back, or so I‘ve heard. He ended up with the Secret Rulers, went to work for them. They call him Bill Oldman. I think there’s a weak joke in there somewhere. Me and him got along, were friends actually. That said, when it came to the Secret Rulers he didn’t answer many questions. And contrary to what I thought about Neanderthals, he has the power of speech and is an A-1 thinker. You should play him in a game of chess.

  The thing though is the water. A dormant volcano became less dormant. It heated up, and with the air temperature increase from global warming, this part of the world started to melt like a block of ice on a hot stove. The water that filled the dormant volcanoes rose to the surface of our world, brought with it the drowned from down below. And if that wasn‘t enough, the rising water contained one angry dinosaur. It survived by eating all manner of swimming creatures, not to mention at least one climate investigation team.

  So there I was, with Bill Oldman and Cranston and sometimes, the two giants, and a crew of men and women who wore blue and white parkas and carried guns, all of them studying me with jaundice eyes.

  Oh yeah, the goddess is with me too. She’s my fishing companion. Ayesha by name, that tall African-looking woman with legs that seem to begin somewhere near that mythical world below, a head with a halo of black hair like a threatening storm cloud framing her face, drawing attention to her strong features and eyes so dark and deep they seem like tunnels leading you straight to hell. But oh that mouth, and how it tastes, and those legs, how they wrap, and that face shiny with beauty. Finally we had become lovers. Not just sex partners. During our long and fruitless fishing trips for the dinosaur, we had become not only sticky close, but soul-close.

  I had never known a woman like her. Enigmatic, strong, purposeful, and someone with a bit of dinosaur fishing experience. And with something in her background I didn’t know about, but something that lay coiled there like a snake about to strike. I could sense it. She was unique and wonderful, but inside her head not all was right with the world.

  *

  I climbed up the railing that led to the chairs in the conning tower. The tower was open to the sky, though the chairs we sat in for fishing could, with a touch of a button, cover our heads with a shield against sun and rain, sleet and snow.

  Ayesha sat in one of the chairs with the great rod settled into a steel boot on squeaking swivels. The rod was a hundred feet high and made of steel and fiberglass and things I had no idea of. It rose up tall in the sky like a fat finger pointing to the clouds, then it bent at the tip, way up there, and a cable about the size of my thigh spun out of that and went off in the water with its great cork (aka bobber or float) the size of a kayak, and beneath that was more cable, dipping down deep in the water with that mighty, sharp hook with its meaty portion of a drowned Neanderthal.

  “They’re already dead,” Cranston had said. “I see no sense in wasting the opportunities their corpses provide.”

  Bill Oldman had quivered slightly at that comment. But he said nothing.

  That was then, this was now, and it was me and Ayesha on the tower in our fighting chairs with our rods, Bill Oldman down below, manning a cannon-sized harpoon launcher if things went wrong and we couldn‘t bring the beast in alive. Killing it was supposed to be the absolute worst-case scenario.

  I fastened my shoulder straps and waist band, glanced at Ayesha in her heavy clothes and close-fitting hood, her hands on the gears that worked the rod and the great spinning reel that was six feet above us on our rods. It was the size of a large industrial drum with coils of cable squeezed around it like a hungry anaconda preparing for a meal.

  Our chairs were about a foot apart. She with her line in the water, and me sitting with enough cable reeled out so that it and its huge hook were resting on the floor of the ship below. A stout, tall woman wearing a blue and white jumpsuit, an electronic cigarette hanging from her mouth, was struggling to stick a corpse on my hook. Thing I had noticed about the blue and white uniformed folks was they were not as strong as me, or Bill, Ayesha, Cranston, and the others. Oh, they were all solid and in shape, but they had not been given the tonic that had been given to me. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know a lot of things about my employment. What I did know was the world was far stranger than I had imagined. Di
nosaurs and Neanderthals were in it, and down below it, living in a land with air and water and fiery skies.

  As for our quarry, we had seen the beast a few times, even got hits on our lines, but the meat had been taken and the hooks had been straightened. New, bigger, better-made hooks had been brought in, but we got the same results. What I remembered most was seeing the beast rise up out of the water, massive as a whale, long as a train, flexible as a rubber hose, pulsing with color, blue and red and aqua green, grays and browns mottled about its head, an elongated mouth so full of teeth that when the sun hit them they threw off a glow that nearly blinded me. I thought then that we needed stronger hooks and a better place to be, but here we were, fishing for a dinosaur, re-equipped, courtesy of the Secret Rulers. More importantly, they had brought in with the new hooks and stronger cables peanut butter and wheat bread at my request; that was for me to eat, not for the dinosaur, though the idea of the big beast going smacky-mouth over a huge peanut butter sandwich had its appeal.

  In the chairs the wind was cold and the heat from the water did little to warm my feet. The heat rose up through the metal but became cooler with height; those icy winds negated it in the end, up there in the chairs where we perched like birds. I pulled my scarf over my mouth and reached out and touched Ayesha’s hand. She rolled her knuckles in my palm, then removed her hand.

  She looked at me, said, “I have to concentrate.”

  “On what?”

  “Fishing.”

  “Yeah. Well, when it hits, then you can fish, until then we can hold hands.”

  At that moment there was a call from below. My baiter had the corpse on the hook. Romance was over. I hit a lever and the cable began to roll up and curl beneath the tip of the rod, dangling the hook and the bait. I hit more levers. The rod flexed back and flung out, tossing the cable and the bait (the arms were still on the torso and they flapped in the wind as if trying to fly) into the water with a significant splash. I took hold of the toggle and worked it. My chair spun then, and the cable and its bait swung around our ship, and within instants, my chair’s back was against the back of Ayesha’s chair.

  “I think tonight,” I heard Ayesha say, “you get to be on top.”

  “That would be nice,” I said, “but just so you know, positioning doesn’t matter much to me. Just as long as you are connected, so to speak.”

  “Everything in life is about position. Everything.”

  We waited and waited, touched the mechanisms and swung our chairs to different positions, but never got so much as a nibble. The daylight was constant; we were in that part of the world where night could go on for months, and then it was daylight’s turn, which was how it was now.

  I could hardly believe it, but even fishing for a dinosaur, with my intent to save the world beneath us from discovery and exploitation, I was bored. The clock moved, the daylight didn’t. My inner workings didn’t respond properly. I looked at my watch, the fine one they had given me. We had been at our chore for four hours. Lunch time. I went below. I had peanut butter on bread, went up and Ayesha went down, came back with a kiss for me and caviar on her breath.

  Time crawled on as if its legs were broken. Finally, twelve hours from the time I began my fishing shift, it was over. We hit the switches and rolled our lines, and the rotten corpses that remained were deposited in the freezers on the boat, ready for tomorrow’s baiting.

  The boat toiled its way through the boiling waves toward shore. It docked and we disembarked into a great fortress made of ice. It was beginning to melt around the edges, but was mostly firm still. Oddly, it was heated, and the heat held and the ice held. It was the changing of the climate and the boiling from below that was gradually eroding it. In our massive igloo rooms were large, inviting beds. Ayesha invited me into hers.

  “You will think of me tonight as She Who Must Be Obeyed,” she said, and showed me a grin that made me tingle from ears to toes. Later that night, I can assure you, I would have called her anything she wanted to have been called, and I would have called myself by any name.

  In the morning we went out again on the ship. The light was still the same and the waters were still the same, and the job was just as it was before, except for one thing. An hour into our shift, Ayesha got a bite.

  *

  Plesiosaurs bite big.

  Okay, not technically a plesiosaur, but the thing in the water bit big.

  The beast was strong, even when it nibbled. A nibble and slight pull could make the boat quake and feel as if it were about to be yanked below the waters like a cheap, plastic float. Today we learned there were two of the monsters. They swam as a pair; we just hadn‘t realized it before.

  We had our chairs back to back, were talking about this and that, sort of flirting, building up for another night in the sack that would involve wet gymnastics and happy determination. Then my reel screamed like an injured panther. Screamed so loud my ears felt as if they would bleed. The cable darted across the water, way out wide, and then it dipped.

  I yelled out, “I got it.”

  This wasn’t entirely true. It had me.

  As my cable sliced across the water, Ayesha’s reel whined and her line hummed, and she had a hit as well.

  Since her line was on the opposite side of the boat, her chair having been swiveled back to back to me, it was clear that we both had a bite. And our bites were heading in opposite directions.

  “Oh, hell,” Ayesha said.

  “Took the words right out of my mouth.”

  Now her line turned and went beneath the boat.

  That wasn’t good.

  Oldman was at the wheel, and he saw the situation immediately. He turned the boat wide, letting the line glide out, and by this time Ayesha had turned in her chair so that we were side by side.

  My catch rose up out of the water, showing us all its magnificent beauty and horror simultaneously. Drops big as my head flared off of its shiny teeth. It let out with a howl, if you can call it that. Frankly, the sound was indescribable. It reached down in my gut, deep in my soul, and ripped at me. I could see one great dark eye, big as a subway tunnel, and then it dipped down and the water exploded and the boat washed heavy.

  “By the gods, it is so beautiful,” Ayesha said.

  Now the cables were swinging in close to one another, and there was no doubt that within instants they would cross. And they did. They came together with a whine of metal cable and a screech of our reels being strained so hard the oil on the reel and on the cables smoked with friction. Then the boat, I kid you not, spun like a top. I felt the hilt of the rod vibrate in my hands like a washing machine coming apart. I let go of that and went at the gears, trying to disengage, but no dice. It was hooked up tight as a banker’s vault.

  That’s when one of the cables snapped. Ayesha’s cable. The cable popped, whipped and flew back. It came with an explosion of glistening drops and what I think must have been blood from the mouth of the beast, and along with that came the hook, minus its bait, and minus its dinosaur.

  It came back at Ayesha like a missile. Struck with an explosion of red and grey, black skin pieces and fragments of bone. Ayesha’s decapitated body sagged in the chair. The side of my face, shoulder, and chair were soaked with her blood and brains.

  My cable locked tight, pig-squealed, and then it too snapped. I yelled as if I had been struck. But I was unharmed. My cable swung loose in the water, minus bait and hook, and the reel’s kick-switch went to work on its own and recoiled my cable.

  I unfastened my belt, moved to Ayesha’s chair. Her hands were still on the levers. Her right leg, which I knew when unclothed would show a fine little scar in the dent of her knee, was pushed out as she were trying to stomp a brake pedal. I watched as her leg went limp and her body sagged.

  I sagged myself, right to my knees.

  *

  When the ship was brought in that night, Bill Oldman came to where I lay on the upper deck in a pool of Ayesha’s blood at the foot of her chair. He tried to lift m
e to my feet, but it was as if I didn’t have any feet. I couldn’t get my mind to do what my body needed to do. Finally Bill picked me up like a rag doll and carried me down the stairs effortlessly, off the ship, and onto the shore. I think he may have carried me as far as my room. I don’t remember anything after that. Not until I came out of a deep pool of shock, floated to the surface and screamed; that’s when the fine-looking nurse I had seen before, when I had first been taken in by Limbus, appeared with a sedative, which I fought against. But Bill and two other men, thin men with gray faces as slack as paper sacks, helped hold me down as she gave me the shot.

  The nurse said, “Let yourself go,” and I went, racing along a string of smoke, or was it blood, or was it sweat, or was it a string of thought? I can’t tell you because I don’t know, but that’s how it seemed, as if I were crawling like a spider along a string of matter that was sometimes soft and sometimes hard, sometimes the color of smoke, sometimes the color of blood, and in my mind’s nose were scents that couldn’t be, the cinnamon smell of Ayesha’s skin, the stench of blood and brain matter, of feces and urine that she soiled herself with when she died, of the wet air and the strange odor of those huge beasts as they leaped out of the water and their stench was mopped up and absorbed by the air.

  My sweat and fear were part of the stink. Along that line I crawled, and then I swung under the line, clung for dear life, scuttling with six legs and then no legs and there was no line anymore. There was just a wisp of smoke and the smoke had all those aromas and stinks in it, and then I was falling into a deep black pit that popped with electricity and contained the warm water of the ocean, but when I awoke, the pit was my bed. I lay there strapped down and weak in a pond of my sweat. It was the position I had first found myself when I had been brought to the Secret Rulers by connection to Limbus. It seemed a popular method of sedation and control. A theme was at work.

  Cranston came in and sat in a chair by my bed. As he sat he carefully adjusted his trousers so that they maintained their crease, looked at me, said, “Sometimes it happens. An agent dies in the field.”