Short Story: The Ferryman

November 10, 2015January 6, 2018 ~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

The Ferryman

The door to the great oven hung open sideways. It looked like an old-style pizza-oven were the pizza’s man-sizes. The interior was a beige, glazed brick that gleamed from the reflections of the outer, florescent lights. Its exterior was plated steel painted a bright, industrial-grade blue with a panel of knobs and big, round buttons of various colors. Above them glowed a small, red-light beside three, darkened others. The white-paint was cracked, half-flaked away to form half a T and “and-by.”

The red light reflected off the white-tile floor that was shined to a high gloss and caricatured the room in its finish. The light taps of dress-shoes and the intermittent squeak of bearings sounded from a door. A gurney crossed the threshold with a somber glide as the steps half-shuffled, half-hobbled behind it. The withered, old frame of Richard Frost maneuvered the gurney into place before the open, oven-door.

His half-hobble worked its way around to the side of the gurney, pulled the white sheet off his charge– a young man who’d partied a little too hard, died of a cocaine overdose. He laid, stark-naked with his eyes closed. Were it not for the obvious discoloration of his skin, no-one would have suspected the man was a corpse ready to be cremated. They might’ve thought him sleeping the best sleep of his life. To Richard, indeed he was.

Richard hobbled to a door beside the oven, stepped in to discard the sheet. He was the last man in a four-generation lineage of crematorium proprietors. For more than a hundred years The Frost Crematorium in Bacatta had stood sentinel to ferry its dead along the final voyage, while the city rose and fell time and again. Like his father and grandfather before him, Richard was raised a future ferryman. He was not given the options nor opportunities of his one-time peers. His future had been burned into stone from the moment he was born.

He stood behind a long, metal table filled with coffee cans of charred screws, bits of blasted pace-makers, and random, metal joint-replacements that dated to charges from the very first ferryman; his great-grandfather Thomas Frost who’d built the crematorium before the city had been even half what it was today. After his death relinquished the business to his son Elliot, he was cremated himself in the very machine that his son later was. Richard’s father had replaced it in the late 1980’s for a new, less-pollutant model, and as his father and grandfather before him, was later cremated in the small room beyond the “parts storage” that Richard currently occupied.

Richard stared out the small window above the table with empty eyes. His vision was fixed somewhere on the distant horizon of Hershman Cemetery and Funeral Parlor’s hilly, tombstone-laden grounds. His work had forced him to this macabre overlook multiple times a day for longer than he cared to remember, and in his old age, it had happened far too often for far too long.

Long ago, when the view was considerably less-expansive, the wide, airy sprawl of the cemetery had given him a reserve to last through the morbid days of work. But some point after his father’s death, perhaps even before, he began to see it with new eyes.

They were darker, grayer than before. All he knew of in the world was the grief of death, and the sound of the ferry-bell as the oven doors slid closed. His only friends had been the corpses and cadavers in their various states of vacancy. With their occasional, twisted or gnarled appearances, he’d had little choice but to become numb to the terror of mortality. So disillusioned was he, that life had never seemed to sparkle as it should; its luster forever soiled by the specter of death that loomed around its every corner.

He heaved a sigh in his usual, lethargic turn, hobbled back for his charge. In truth, he wanted his mortal coil to shuffle off with him. He had wanted it for longer than he had not. It had infected him with a loneliness that kept the luster ever the more soiled. He had never married, was too afraid to grow attached, then watch death claim his lover. For much the same reason, he never fathered children. The thought of ferrying this theoretical spouse or his possible children kept his desires steady, at-bay.

While he’d taken lovers in his youth, he’d been alone since his father’s death with only a few others at the crematorium to handle the business-end of things. Even so, they worked independent of him. The ferry-times were scheduled through-out the days on a sheet of paper, renewed each morning in the small room down the hall. It housed his other charges that waited patiently for their spot on the next outbound ship.

One of the few things he did enjoy about the dead was their patience. Richard had long ago learned of the virtue. It was necessary, expected of a ferryman of his repute. The ferries would have to be properly timed. Otherwise, the families would receive chunks of fat, chips of bone in their urns. Such cases were the gravest disrespect to the families and the dead. Patience was needed to ensure every last bit burned to ash. Only the metallic, medical implements were left behind, too heavy to be vacuumed up during the process, and too solid to burn otherwise.

With his slow gait, Richard angled to the front of the gurney. He gave a heave of his arms against the inner-pan that held the corpse. It slid along its tracks, crossed the mouth of the fiery furnace, hung half in and half-out– just enough to be supported by the oven’s bottom, but not enough for the door to close. As usual, he backed the gurney up, stepped around its side to wheel it back into the “waiting room” down the hall. It was a few moments before he returned, found the dead man as he’d been left.

With a final heave of tired and shaky old arms, Richard readied to ferry the young man across the divide. The door shut with a heavy squeak and a loud click of its lock that sealed it. Richard thumbed the green button, caused a yellow light to come on beside the red. The lettering had flaked off entirely, but the faint discoloration of blues spelled out “engage” above it. The next light wouldn’t turn green for at least two hours, nor would the last button be pushed until then– its lettering and imprint long gone, but the words “disengage” clear in Richard’s memory. The fourth, final light had never lit, and for that matter, he wasn’t sure it ever would. The gleam of yellowed, white-paint was still intact, plainly read-out “Fault” for those supposed times when the ferry would break down. It never had, and likely, never would.

A loud, mechanical fan spun up to a steady thrum. The sound of gas-jets emitted behind the door. Richard sighed. He hobbled back to the window, ready to begin the two hour stare that would give way to another push of a button, and another packing of dust in an urn.

For the second time in his life, his view of the cemetery changed. It wasn’t a visible change, nor was he sure why it happened. Perhaps this was merely the nexus-point of universes, or perhaps a pot of water had finally begun to boil after years of watching it. In any case, he felt certain of the change. He was ready. He wasn’t sure how, but he would die soon. He welcomed it with a thirsty gaze that had settled on a particularly grand tombstone of a mourning angel.

Richard knew of more ways than most to invite death’s call, had seen enough of them to know which were the simplest, most peaceful, and which were the most violent, messy. Self-inflicted shotgun blasts were bad, but nowhere near the level of carnage of an explosion or a fire-victim. The latter seemed the most fitting; fire. Perhaps he would ferry this young man off, prepare his ashes, then ferry himself. It was the most sensible. Why leave another soul to ferry the ferrymen? He would simply pull up his moors himself, sail off across the divide ne’er to return.

A peaceful determination set itself upon him, relaxed him more than anything he’d known. He knew how to bypass the oven’s safety notch. All it would take is some duct-tape and an arm-pin, like the doctors put in broken bones. Then, a press the button, and he’d crawl into lay down, close the door behind him. He would let the fires ferry him over the sound of the departing bell that screamed even now as the oven’s primary mode engaged.

He closed his eyes, smiled. When they opened again, he turned for the door only to have his heart-stop. Before him stood a suited visage of his burning charge. He gave a throaty terror-moan, stumbled backward. The young man frowned at him. Richard fell to his rear, grabbed for what he could, came up with a metal hip-joint.

“Wh-what d’you want?” He moaned in a high terror. “Who are you?”

The ghostly visage of the young man stepped through the door with a sad click of his tongue, “Poor Richard, you know only of life’s pains.”

Richard climbed to his feet, back-stepped with the heavy hip-joint raised high, “G-get back! I’m n-not afraid to use this.”

The man took slow, somber steps forward, came within arm’s reach. Richard’s arm came down, brought the hip-joint with it at the man’s head. It passed through his head and torso, only dissipated them with waves like a smokey mirage in a small wind.

He gasped, back-stepped further, met the room’s far-wall. The young man cornered him, placed his hand on Richard’s shoulder. A cold rocketed through him.

“You’ve ferried the dead for so many years, you’ve become them,” the young man said. “You were born, yet never lived. What fear afflicts you so?”

Richard squeaked, cowered, “Wh-what d’you want? I’ve nothing left for the dead nor the living.”

He frowned deeper with a tilt to his head. The cold hand fell back to its side, “I’ve only a wish to understand, poor Richard. Why fear life so much that your only reflection is in the dead?”

“I-if I speak, w-will you go? Will you let m-me go?”

The young man stepped back, “You fear death, and you fear life, yet you wish for one in place of the other. Why?”

Richard wasn’t sure an answer was buried somewhere in the dead man’s words, but eased out of his cower, rose to his slumped posture. “A-are you a ghost?”

The man turned away, motioned Richard after him, “Follow, and we will speak.”

He headed from the door as a man might, the only difference was that of the smokey opaqueness that conjured him from the ether. Richard’s curiosity thirsted for understanding; had he gone insane? Was he hallucinating? Was he, in fact, now dead of a sudden malady that claimed his physical form? He had to know, hobble-shuffled along the room with his right hand sliding along the table for balance. It fell to his side at the door while the apparition sat in a chair across the room to stare at the ferry. Richard was cautious, but worked his old bones to the seat beside him.

“You are the ferryman,” the young man said as Richard settled. “And you’ve known no other place but that divide between life and death. Why is that?”

“Wh-why d’you wish to know?” Richard managed.

The young man sank in his chair, the wispy edges of his shoulders slumped, “I’ve known nothing but the world. In my short years– less than a quarter of your time upon this earth– I’ve seen countless countries, loved many women, and perhaps through them, fathered a few, bastard children. I’ve driven fast, expensive cars, and sailed across tropical waters for unimaginably beautiful islands where debauchery is a national sport. In all of them, I never had the slightest sense that I was ever destined for anything. I merely enjoyed the journey I was on.”

Richard watched the young man hang his head at the polished floor, his ghostly visage invisible to it. He stared at the reflections of lights where his body should have been.

The young man lamented his loss, “All these things I’ve done, and in the end, here I am, reflection-less. The few souls that remember me now will either forget in time, or cross the divide as I will, taking those memories with them.” He looked up at Richard, “I’ve made no mark but that which has taken me from myself. It is all we are given. Less than we should expect. Even so, you’ve the chance to leave one as I did, but refuse. I only wish to understand why? Have you no dreams? Ambitions?”

Richard was stung by the questions. He stared at the wall between the ferry and the room beside it, hoped to recall any long-forgotten desires for the sake of the dead. That the young man had appeared to ask the questions seemed as important as his patient anticipation that awaited a response. So patient were the dead, and at so great a distance was the long-lost burden, he feared the dead-man might grow angry. On the contrary, the silence was welcomed. The dead man evermore vigilant in it, steadfast through its emboldened duration.

Richard’s memories showed the slow progression of his age as his hair turned from infant brown to adolescent chestnut, grew longer, shorter, then grayed to white with age. The sun rose and fell on a million lost moments in time against a foreground of grammar schools, chocolate malts, and giddy, boyhood pass-times. The light gave way to darkness in mirrors and windows of the aged man as he was passed the title of ferryman. It was with a slow deterioration, like that of his youthful skin wrinkled by time, that he saw himself slump into his half-hobble, half-shuffle hunch.

Richard began to reply, his mouth unable to close fully as his distant stare filled with tears, “I… I remember as a boy… I wanted to see the castles of Europe.” He broke his stare to meet the stoic gaze of the young, dead man, “I clung to that dream for longer than your life, but I could never go.”

He nodded, “Was it a matter of station? Poverty?”

“No… only my own fault. I could never justify leaving my work to wait for me.”

The young man sighed, “Poor Richard, you know as I do we dead are ever-patient. You’ve given so much to us– all the respect any burned man or woman could ask for– and yet you’ve never asked for anything in return.”

Richard was respectful, but earnest, “Young man, what could the dead ever offer me in return?” The young man understood, averted his gaze. Richard continued, “I’ve ferried you dead across your divide my entire life, known nothing but to see you go across that fiery sea, emerge as ash on the other side. Through it all, I’ve never wanted for food or shelter. It would be gluttonous to ask for more from anyone– alive or dead.”

The young man returned his gaze to his marine guide, “Would you not accept a gift were it given?”

Richard thought heavily on it. When he replied, a question gleamed in his eyes, “It would be rude of me to refuse any gift. It is simply not in the nature of a man like myself.”

He reiterated, “You mean to say you are most grateful of any gift you receive?”

Richard hesitated, “Of any gift but that which allows me to continue this perilous existence.”

The dead man frowned, “Poor old man. You’ve been afflicted so heavily by the burden our circumstance has forced on you. Would you not grant us all forgiveness– past and future– for snuffing the flame which warmed your soul?”

This time, Richard couldn’t hesitate, “Young man, I would never blame the dead for what I’ve lost enduring their final journeys.”
Suddenly, the room lit up in front of Richard, nearly blinded him. The young man rose from his seat, stood before him. As his vision returned, the light faded to reveal a dozen more apparitions. He recognized them all as they frowned with guilt: these were the dead in the waiting room, the ones that still lay in their refrigerated cabins down the hall. There ferry-bell had yet to ring for them, but even so, they were here.

Richard’s eyes widened. His jaw slacked. He saw a dozen pairs of eyes swell with tears, a dozen mouths upturned at him with remorse. The young man stood before the specters like him that crowded the ferry-room, spoke with his tone harmonized by the others’ voices, his own louder than the rest.

“Poor Richard,” they said together. “You have our deepest sympathies, as we would yours. It is now that we gift you with that which is most precious to all, and that which we no longer have; time.”

The light flared again. The group disappeared. Richard was stunned in his seat as the ferry-bell sounded again, much sooner than he expected. Either his visit with the dead had lasted longer than he knew, or something had hastened the ferry’s pace. He rose to his feet to as the machine’s thrum died out, threw open the door, confused.

The man’s corpse had been fully burned, its ashes ready for collection in the other room. Even so, what had sped along the process? For that matter, what had his soon-to-be passengers meant about time? He stared in at the glazed brick in the vain hope to understand. A flicker of orange suddenly appeared to the right of his vision.

A voice sounded, that of the young man as though a whisper on the wind, “Accept this gift with the humblest gratitude we can give.”

The orange, “fault” light gleamed bright in the center of Richard’s vision. In almost forty years the ferry had held strong, ready at the beck and gentle guidance of its masters to transport their passengers across the divide of life and death. Now, as though he’d been outright told, Richard understood. The dead, with all of their guilt and respect, had given him the only thing he could never take for himself; time. It would take time to call the repairman, time to deduce the problem with the machine, and time to repair it. It would take even more time then to ensure it was up to snuff, ready to sail again.

In that time, Richard knew, he would not be present. He closed his eyes against tears that welled there. They slid down the once-numb surface of his cheeks with a stuttered breath, his voice a whisper, “I accept your gift.”

Krubera: Part 7

November 6, 2015November 5, 2015 ~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

The Jungle

It was another three watches, or six hours, before the darkness set in. The team had gathered their things, began to make their way down the slope and back through the forest. They crisscrossed their steps over more vine traps, emerged on the far-side of the mist-covered plain that had receded in the darkness. They headed west for the mountains, cut a straight path through the plains until forced to curve around a large lake. Water rushed between the banks of a stream that wound from the lake beneath the mist.

It was two hours after nightfall when they’d made the five kilometer trek between the forest and the mountains. They rose from the ground to high peaks that were by the high darkness. Everywhere about them were large, coniferous trees, similar to yews. Their trunks were wide– fifty meters at the smallest– and stretched a hundred or more meters into the air. The larger yews, it seemed, were close to that in width but doubled in height. All seemed clad with the same, iron-hued bark they’d seen elsewhere. Some of the trees had shed their coil-like bark as a snake might shed its skin, large broken pieces of it cluttered the ground, trampled the grasses. As always, each tree they found glowed from the luminescence created by their unique photosynthesis.

They stopped at the base of a smaller mountain that still dwarfed them as though they were ants, to take rock and soil samples. Raymond examined a piece of the mountain in the light of his torch, called to Elliot. She rose from the brush, closed the few steps to him.

He held out the sample he’d just collected, “Elliot, these are limestone mountains.”

“Shouldn’t they be?” She asked, dully.

“Yes, if they’re mountains,” he replied with emphasis. His face reflected a deep concern, uncharacteristically agitated. He explained, “The entire theory I’ve concocted in my head relies on these being stalagmite speleothems– in other words, enormous, natural stalagmites composed from calcium run-off of the ceiling above. I figured their size was simply attributed to the age of the cavern. But now? Age has nothing to do with it.”

Elliot shook her head, “I’m sorry Raymond, I just don’t understand.”

His tone was critical, “They’re mountains, Elliot. Mountains within a cavern, within a mountain. There’s tectonic activity here.” Her face blanked. Raymond voice grew more grave, “If there are plates here, it’s only a matter of time before they quake.”

“You’re telling me it’s only a matter of time before a massive quake hits this place?”

He grimaced,“Yes, and judging by the amount of activity lately, it’s could be catastrophic.”

For the first, she saw fear in Raymond’s eyes, his confidence shaken. Anthony called her name, pulled her attention away. He motioned for her to follow, led her beneath and around a tree, to an opening in the mountain. It was small, cramped, enough that they were forced to hunch to at the entrance. The faint, orange glow that had illuminated the valley through-out the day shimmered from the small cave’s entrance.

Anthony knelt at the wall, near a patch of the light, scraped some of it into Petri-dish, “It’s some kind of moss.”

“Moss?” She asked, alarmed.

He capped off the petri-dish. It filled with mist, exhaled in vapors from the moss to cloud out its light. He passed it over, the glass hot in her hand.

“It’s heating up?”

He nodded. The Petri dish warmed fast, burned her hand. She dropped it to ground. The glass shattered with a puff, like smoke released from burning room. Liana entered the cavern called for her. She stopped mid-turn as her wrist vibrated. She glanced down feared the inevitable; “SGSM READS EARTHQUAKE MAGNITUDE 8.0: EURASIAN-ARABIAN PLATE: SHOCKWAVE ETA 12-MINUTES TO CURRENT LAT-LONG: ADVISE APPROPRIATE MEASURES.”

“We’ve gotta’ move,” Elliot said, without further explanation.

Liana looked to Anthony, panted in a lean, her abdomen clutched, “SGSM?”

He shrugged, hurried past her and out of the cave. Elliot was helping Raymond pack his samples into his bag.

“Eight-oh,” she said.

“Then we need to get out of here,” he replied as he shouldered his pack.

“Any idea where were going to go?” Chad asked belligerently.

“Jungle?” Ellie asked.

Raymond winced, “If you think its best,”

“Do we really have a choice? We need whatever we can get from there, and the Jungle’s furthest from the fault, right?”

He started forward, “Theoretically but the fault’s probably a few miles wide. There might not be anywhere safe down here.”

They followed his lead. He’d neglected to say his thoughts aloud; even if they survived the quake, it could collapse any number of passages they’d taken from the surface. Elliot didn’t need him to say it though, it was at the forefront of her mind. The earthquake might produce several shock-waves; the first would be the most violent, but the subsequent shocks would be a danger for hours. She wanted to be gone from this place by then, have as much ground crossed as possible before the first wave hit.

They doubled their pace, Liana’s weight redistributed to compensate for the severity of her injuries. Even still, she lagged behind. They were only able to traverse half the kilometer to the jungle, when the quake hit.

They pushed themselves harder, fought opposing forces from the waves that built to a slow climax. Each step threatened to topple them. Shrieks and growls echoed from the jungle ahead, the creatures within awakened prematurely by the ground that rolled beneath them. The trees shook, fern-leaves rustled in a torrent of violence. Flashes of fast-movements sprang between the trees, gave only glimpses of tails and wings in profile.

The first climax came, knocked Liana to her knees. Elliot shout the others forward, doubled-back to retrieve her. She struggled to her feet. Her equilibrium failed from unstable ground. She slipped back down. Elliot pulled her up hard. They planted their feet against the pitch and roll of the grasses. She planted her feet on the ground, stepping forward one foot at a time. The unmistakable crack of trees sounded in the distance. The Earth gave a massive lurch.

The shock-wave had triggered a separate quake from the cavern’s fault. The treeline boucned through their vision, their steps thrown to and fro. A stomach-curdling vertigo overtook Elliot as the cavern’s quake fought against the opposite shock-waves. Dirt and roots snapped, ripped with the surge of Earth as it rose. Elliot risked a look back to see gigantic trees felled near the mountains.

She and Liana managed to make the jungle as the second quake climaxed, toppled limbs and trees over the path the other three had made. A scream sounded from one of the men, beneath the deafening shrieks and growls of the jungle’s residents. Elliot forced Liana forward through the foliage. Ferns and thorny shrubbery tore at their faces, arms, punctured their wet-suits, and shredded their bandages.

The quake’s waves began to low. Its rumbles quieter as it died out beneath them. They stopped short of the screams from the three men, stuck in the depths of a pit-fall trap. A thick, cloudy fluid stuck bubbled up from the bottom of the trap, began to fill it. Massive, thorn-like teeth on the sides of the walls folded in, like a Venus fly-trap that readied to enclose them.

In a flash, she had a climbing rope out, anchored to a tree. She lowered it to them, drug the rope up with it wrapped tortuously around her wounded arms. Anthony’s head became visible, he fell out of the hole, threw himself to the side, to scramble up and help. Raymond was pulled up next; he laid his weight into the rope, managed to slide Chad up and out of the hole just as the teeth snapped shut on the trap.

They fell about in various states of exhaustion. The suits at their ankles sizzled away, pocked their skin with smokey burns. The digestive acids seared their flesh.

“Vinegar,” Elliot shouted. “Then water.”

Luck was with them for once. The vinegar neutralized the chemicals, water washed away the severed bits of boot and neoprene. They readied to bandage Chad, when an ominous, low grumble sounded around them.

“Go,” Chad insisted. “I’ll just slow you down.”

“Don’t be a drama queen,” Elliot spat. She slipped his arms under one of his shoulders, called to the others, “Get him up!”

Anthony and Raymond helped to lift him. The growls sounded louder behind them. Anthony and Raymond bolted with Chad between them, left Elliot to un-sling Liana’s rifle from her back, pass it to her. Elliot readied the pistol.

“Firm grip,” Liana grunted, pained and fatigued.

Elliot nodded. She’d never fired a weapon before, never even held one; yet, here she was, ready to try. They backed up, around the trap, away form it. The growls were louder, more than before– at least five now. A sick scent of blood wafted up their nostrils. They back-stepped as red-eyes appeared through-out the darkness. Had Liana not seen its glowing eyes she would not have seen it at all. A flash of light glinted off a transparent body, a large dog, but with a boxed jaw. It prowled forward complete with spiked, sharp teeth and a chameleon-like stealth.

Liana fired in a burst, killed the first animal. Pairs of eyes began flickered open before the eerie light of the trees. The creatures stalked, ready to strike. Liana flicked a lever on the side of the weapon, firing single shots at them. Two fell. The others bounded forward.

Liana and Elliot fired together. Rhythmic blasts sounded with an erratic beat as they backed away in their crouch. The gun recoiled in hard in Elliot’s hands until her grip was firm enough. She managed to hit a creature as it jumped away. She attempted to aim, pulled back on the trigger, hit another. It bounded for her, unfazed.

Liana finished it off, shouted, “Move. I am behind you.”

Elliot didn’t question it. She turned, sprinted down the path the other three had created. Liana’s gunfire followed after her in cut-time. New shrieks and growls sound from the beasts that were slain behind her. Elliot tripped, fell forward smacked her head into something hard. Her face fell into the soft dirt, her mind dazed from the impact. She recovered, scrambled back on her hands and knees. She run smack into a lumbering creature as it crossed the path in front of her. It was as tall as her on four legs, its skin the color of pus, with large spikes on its back for protection. It glanced sideways with a prehistoric snout, gave a smelly grunt, then continued forward.

Her heart skipped a beat, but was spurred to speed by gunshots that drew closer. The trees rustled, parted as Liana appeared and the creature ambled past into the jungle’s depths. Liana pulled her up, shoved her along the path. An abrupt silence fell over the jungle while Elliot’s legs regained their speed, charged her through the brush to a small, circular clearing.

From the far, left-side, Raymond and Chad looked on in horror as a bipedal creature pulled its claws from Anthony’s gut. Four other bipeds had encircled them. Elliot froze. Liana stopped, confused, turned to see the scene that unfolded before them.

Anthony was on the ground, the lead biped hunched over his abdomen. Elliot screamed obscenities, raised the pistol. The beast rose, mad a slow turn. Anthony’s flesh hung from its clawed hands, blood dripped from its muzzle-like mouth onto large, armor-plated muscles across its torso. The muffled gurgle of blood signaled Anthony’s screams, forced the pistol to bark until it clicked empty. The animal stumbled backward, jolted by the force, but uninjured. The bullets fell to the ground, crushed by the impact.

The other creatures seemed confused, began a slow advance on the two women. Grunts and growls turned to roars in steps with their short gait. Liana flicked a lever on the rifle, its magazine fell free. Its impact with the ground startled the beasts for a moment, but they soon continued their slow advance.

In a blink Raymond and Chad sprinted off. Liana slapped in a new magazine, sprayed ammunition at the bipeds. They stumbled back in shock, gave the women enough time to make for Anthony. They each grabbed an arm, drug him away at top-speed. He spit up blood, tried to scream, writhed and shook. They forced their way to the path on the other side. The bipeds suddenly screamed with a deafening plethora of frequencies that rasped over the jungle. The biped’s feet pounded the soft ground, then charged after them. A low rumble sounded off in the distance; a second shock-wave had begun.

Ahead, the jungle opened onto the rock shore-line. Raymond and Chad beckoned them from the water’s edge, shouted for them.

“Help her,” Liana yelled, releasing Anthony.

The others rushed toward Elliot as the ground gave a violent lurch. In a flash, Liana’s hands produced the white, clay blocks, tossed them into the jungle.

She shouted, “Down!”

She dove against the throbs in her abdomen, landed with a glance back. Three of the bipeds were within steps of the white blocks. Her hands were ready with a small box and switch. She flicked the switch. An explosion light the darkness, rained fire on the tree-line, and propelled the bipeds into the air. Their bodies and limbs were torn asunder, cooked to a crisp as debris from the jungle expelled with them.

Beneath them, the ground rocked with a second violent tremor that Liana fought to crawl for the others as they gathered around Anthony. He clutched at Elliot’s arm. Tears dripped from her face. She sniffled hard, gripped his hand. A final gleam from his eyes rolled way, and the life left his body.

Elliot’s heart ripped in two, shattered by the quake of the Earth beneath her and her own guilt. Animals shrieked, cried from the jungle as the fire spread rapidly along the tree-line. Even so, she didn’t hear it, too numb to feel anything but the hands that clasped her shoulder, maneuvered her around to face Liana. She mouthed a word Elliot didn’t hear, but read, “Dive!”

They divided Anthony’s gear, as she kissed his forehead, and slid a bloody hand over his eyes to close them. A moment later, they dove into the water as the last of the quake trembled into nothingness beneath them. Elliot gave a final, last look at the fiery horizon, cursed her vanity and the “lost world,” and dove in.

Epilogue

The surviving members of the team reached the surface without difficulty, and on time for their departure. They said goodbye to Liana, whom promised to attend Anthony’s funeral, but said little else the rest of the trip. John was elated at their discovery, seemed to regard Anthony’s death as a sacrifice for science. Elliot felt otherwise.

Upon presenting the evidence to John, they learned that Anthony had taken up filming after Chad’s initial injury. He had managed to capture everything they had experienced during the final hours, including the bipedal creatures and sounds of his final breaths. Elliot released the tape to the public, warned of the dangers of a return expedition. There was a resounding silence before the media and the masses exploded, most with questions most directed at John and his museum’s ethics.

While the resulting recognition afforded Elliot and the others several, considerable research grants concerning the samples they had retrieved: The moss alone was considered as a replacement light and heat-source if the luminescent chemicals could be extracted, synthesized. Despite the academic community’s insistence that they spear-head the research, Elliot and her team refused, turned the work over to another team, and set about other avenues of work.

True to her word, Liana ventured to America for Anthony’s funeral; a small service that consisted of an empty casket, and hallowed earth watered with tears. In his honer, the National Science Foundation, established a substantial foundation to be awarded each year to select, graduate students in paleo-sciences for doctoral research. And though Liana had only ventured to America for a short time, with plans to return home, the worsening relations between Abkahzia and Georgia forced her to reconsider. She was soon offered, and accepted, a position as head of security at a newly established research facility headed by Elliot and her team.

Although the team vehemently protested each time, several new expeditions were outfitted to attempt to breach the cavern. Each team that left failed to return. When one finally did, they reported that the underwater passage Elliot had marked on the maps was blocked off, likely by the recent increase in tectonic activity registered by SGSM. The passage that had allowed them entry was, as Elliot hoped, now permanently sealed. While new species of marine life continued to appear within the Black Sea, requests for further search-efforts for entrances to the Lost world were futile; everyone, including Elliot and her team, knew the passage should remained sealed, the remaining secrets of Krubera forever concealed to man.

The Lost World had been found, and so far as most cared, that was all that mattered. Whatever had yet to be discovered there was little more than with man’s vain hope to understand what he ought not to. It was a realm where neither Humanity, nor its progeny, was welcome– one that should be allowed to forever carry out its curious machinations without them. Until, perhaps, it was once more lost to the annals of time that had so long ago buried it deep within the Earth, and hidden it from all who might seek it.

Short Story: The Plain and The Pretty

November 3, 2015January 6, 2018 ~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

The Plain and the Pretty

Sarah Morgan was a mostly normal girl. She brushed her teeth, combed her hair, and went to school. Day-in and day-out, she would sit in class at Bacatta High-School as dusty teachers lectured on about things as ancient or oxidized as themselves. These were things that would never affect her, that she’d never need in a million years. Despite the obvious trivialities that dribbled from their word-holes, sluiced across the other, assembled brains in class, Sarah took notes. Always. She dutifully copied every word of each subject, every single lecture, each day.

She would’ve stopped, but had no reason to. For that matter, she didn’t care to. It made her look busy and kept her hands at work. She scrawled pages with lightning speed, her eyes always down-turned at the back of every class, but her ears honed on each syllabic resonance and every phonetic clamor against her eardrum.

The only times Sarah wasn’t writing were lunch and dinner. Otherwise, when not recording lectures, it was creating magical fairy-lands, or dark, mysterious dungeons. All along the walls of her bedroom were stacks and stacks of notebooks, loose-leaf sheets of paper, even torn napkins. Each one was categorized, placed in a specific stack.

Where some teenage girls’ walls were splattered with friendly-faced photographs, budded artistic drawings, or the occasional half-nude pop-star, Sarah’s were empty. They were also impossible to find for all the towers of notebooks along them. And where most teenager’s rooms– whether girl or boy– were impassable from weeks-old piles of clothing, papers, and the general left-overs sloth-like youth, Sarah’s was impassable from used pens and nail-like pencil-stubs that created a fine layer of unstable floor above the carpet.

To enter Sarah’s room without agile feet was to take one’s own life in their hands– a fact that her mother and father loved to remark on. Whatever, it kept them out of the room, left her to work in peace. All she wanted to do was write, even skipped frequent meals when a particularly interesting passage flowed like a sieve from her thinker onto her pages.

While she wasn’t plain looking, Sarah didn’t have the bombshell-looks of the cheerleaders, or the brain-gasm smarts of the nerd-girls, or even the dexterous phalanges and sexual curiosities of the band and orchestra girls. In fact, whatever clique one could think to name, she wasn’t in. She was merely a hitch-hiker on the road of life, presently stuck on the far-side of the fast-lane that was high-school.

No-one bothered her, not even to pick on her. For that at least, she was grateful. She liked being alone, even if it was boring sometimes. So it was with extreme irritation to her inner-muse when, one day, she slammed notebook-first into someone in the hallway. Her notebook crumpled, fell. A pair of loud thumps signaled the collision of Sarah’s front-half with another’s. A catastrophic cascade of books tumbled to the floor. Opposite swears drowned the back-step and crouch of both Sarah and her new-found acquaintance.

The girl’s hands slipped beneath her pile of books and papers on the floor, while Sarah’s gathered the loose pages she’d added to certain, earlier sections of the notebook. Sarah’s eyes only captured her fellow victim of circumstance for a moment, but it was clear she was one of the “pretty girls;” a part of the clique that relied on genetics rather than talents– or anything else for that matter– to fit in. They held power over the boys, the prettiest of them alphas that dominated the other girls. Whether Alpha or not, this girl was certainly close to leading the pack.

“Sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

Sarah muttered something similar– more of a grumble than an apology. Even so, the message came across well enough that the girl continued with piercing, blue eyes. “I just moved here. Name’s Allison– most people just call me Ali.”

“Sarah,” she mumbled with less than a cave-man’s intelligence.

Allison gathered the last of her books, stood up, “Well, Sarah, sorry again. Maybe I’ll see you ’round.”

Sarah “mmm’ed” in reply, slid the last of her pages into her notebook, and continued on her way. The clack of Allison’s heels were distinct all the way down the hall, even over the din of lunch-time students in the halls. When the bell screamed through-out the school, it finally drowned the heels’ last reverberations, and ushered in a rise to the din as the students headed for class.

For the rest of the day, Sarah thought little of the collision, returned to her notebooks to record the geography lecture. The topic was long, as arduous as the formation of the lands that dictated the first part of the word. The teacher’s tongue and throat droned while his plump hands drug chalk across the board at an Earthly, slow pace. Sarah’s hands worked too fast for him. She had to drag out her other notebook just to keep moving. The jump between subjects and books made her eyes ache and her head spin, but even so, she managed to make it through the class.

The rest of the day was easy, mathematics formulas and theorems, and biology notes kept her busy. Both teachers were young, agile with their words, wasted no time between them. When the last of the two classes came to an end, Sarah had just enough time to stuff her notebooks in her backpack before the door uncluttered from the dismissal bell. By the time the mass of bodies formed the shapely, single-file line, she was up, headed for the hall.

She slipped out in the dissipation of students in divergent streams, floated out to the far-side of the hall to head for the stair-well. She dodged the few locker-clingers that blocked her path, her feet quick to juke sideways and back in-step without a missed beat. Near the end of the hall, a clamor sounded behind her like a band-geek’s tuba had just fallen and shattered on the tile floors. She smelled “fight” before the word was ever uttered. Her neck craned backward as her feet continued forward.

Indeed, a pair of the testosterone-fueled, genius-carriers of the Y-chromosome had begun to trounce one another. With what little Sarah could see, it was like one of those hockey-fights– sans the usual, impressive act of balancing on ice-skates while they pummel one another. It ended as quickly as it began, the two boy-children torn apart by a pair of teachers over shouts. Sarah rolled her eyes. The next moment came in actions that seemed to slow time. She lifted a foot, began to rotate her head back to her forward-path. As her eyes caught the view ahead, a locker door was flung open. Her foot came down just as the door’s edge bisected the bridge of her nose.

She was smacked by the door, fell to her ass. The locker-door made a thwanggg with the sound of cheap metal. Sarah was certain her tail-bone was broken– or maybe that was just the feeling of her fractured pride. The locker-door flung closed as Allison’s face appeared, her piercing-blue eyes wide as saucers.

A hand covered Allison’s slacked jaw, “Oh. My. God.” Sarah half-expected the pretty girl to laugh at the plain-girl’s misfortune, was doubly stunned when Allison extended a hand to pull her up. “Oh my god. I’m so sorry!”

Sarah took her hand, “S’ok.”

“Sarah, right? Are you alright?” She asked as her hand pulled a jacket from her locker.

Sarah’s wits returned slowly, “Uh, yeah. Allison, the new girl.” Allison nodded. “I remember– Ali, that’s what you said earlier.”

“Yeah, are you sure you’re alright? I totally wasn’t paying attention,” She asked while she fished an arm out of the jacket, stuck her arms into it.

Sarah shrugged, the interaction already belabored past her comfort-zone. She rubbed the bridge of her nose, “Yeah. Nothin’s broken. Was my fault anyhow.”

Sarah wanted to make a move away, but it was clear Ali’s guilt was beyond that of the other pretty girls. Her turned head and eye-contact made it all the more clear she wasn’t going to let Sarah go until they’d exchanged some pleasantries– at least there was some sign of life in that pack of wannabe-plastic people that called themselves rulers.

“Well, still, I’m sorry.” She fished out her backpack, shut the locker. Sarah sensed the dreaded walk-and-talk that people did as Ali started forward, “Those fights happen a lot here?”

Sarah had trouble matching the pace of Ali’s “don’t-quit” legs, but moved in-step beside her to the stairs, start down them. “Uh, I dunno’. I never see ’em, just usually hear ’em– and usually at lunch.”

Ali grimaced, “So they happen a lot then?”

Sarah shrugged, “Once or twice a week.”

Ali rolled her eyes with a huff as they rounded the first foyer, “God guys’re retarded. It’s like… they don’t even have half the brains they were given. Just drooling, slobbering, ogres with B-O and ape-brains.”

Sarah laughed. Genuinely. It surprised her too. It even started with one of those throaty-snort sounds people made when they were genuinely amused. It made Ali’s piercing-blues brighten, her lightly tanned face almost glowed as he cheeks dimpled.

Sarah nodded, “Yeah, they’re cave-people with less hair.”

“At least most’a the time,” Ali joked.

They giggled laughed all the way down to the main-floor, were at the hallway for the front doors before they could speak again. The doors ahead gleamed like a holy beacon– and indeed to some they were– as the autumn sun splayed late-afternoon rays across the floor before them. The buses had already begun to depart, the crowd of bodies thinned to only the last, few hangers-on that waited for rides from parents.

“Shiiit!” Sarah groaned as she watched her bus lumber away.

“What’s wrong?” Ali asked with a glance.

She threw her head back, her shoulders slumped, “Bus’s gone.”

Ali patted her back, “Ah, don’t worry. I can give you a lift.”

They stepped from the less-populated entrance, “It’s cool. I’ve walked before. No biggie.”

Ali sighed, “Oh come on, Sarah. I smacked you with that door. It’s the least I can do.”

Sarah contained the squirmy discomfort that wriggled within her. In truth, she didn’t much mind walking if the alternative was more intimate time with another person. Before she could protest further, Ali wrapped both her arms around Sarah’s right bicep.

“Come onnn, my car’s right around the corner.”

Sarah sighed, “Okay, okay.”

Ali half-drug her the length of the red and white brick school, her gait double that of Sarah’s. They rounded the corner to the insanity of the Junior-Senior class parking-lot. All manner of cars from all makes and years filled the horizon; from old, rust-bucket clinkers whose mufflers were only such in a theoretical sense, to brand-new, shiny BMWs and Mercedes bought with the greasy cash of wealthier mommies and daddies.

Ali drug Sarah clear across the parking-lot, all along the way the two were forced to dodge the erratic, imbecilic drivers they called peers. Ali even heated up, flipped one guy off after he shouted, “Nice ass, baby. Now, move it!” She finally stopped at the rear-end of a relatively new soft-top convertible, Camaro. The car said enough to tell Sarah that Ali had some money– or her parents did anyhow. While she doubted it was BMW or Mercedes money, for a plain-girl forced to ride the bus everyday, Ali was leaps and bounds beyond her own fiscal benefactors.

“Wow. Nice car,” Sarah said with admittedly more awe than she’d have liked.

Ali slipped into the driver’s seat, and the engine roared to life, “Yeah, it gets me where I need to go. Sucks in the winter though– too much power and not enough weight.”

Sarah buckled her belt, “Better than the bus, I bet.”

“Oh definitely,” she agreed as she backed out, followed the aisles to the line of cars that waited for the turn onto Orwell Avenue. “So where we headed?”

Sarah was still enamored with the plush interior. It smelled of something like dream-sicles tasted; creamy and orange with just a hint of cold.

“Sarah?”

“Huh? Oh, right. Up Orwell to Marigold, then a right on Beech,” Sarah said oblivious to her driver’s ignorance.

“Gonna’ need a play-by-play,” Ali replied through the right from the school onto Orwell.

“Just keep going forward. It’ll be on the left.”

The shopping mall gleamed in Ali’s rear-view mirror behind and to the side of other student drivers. Ahead to the left, Orwell branched off in city-blocks that gridded the northern section of town in a long rows of quaint boutiques, shops, and various, other establishments too small for the sky-scraping madness further North on the horizon.

All along Orwell Avenue, traffic made its start-stop procession through the three-way stop-lights that made up the bulk of the South-side of “downtown.” The cozy, beige brick and mortar shops that were sandwiched side-by-side, ended abruptly with the Y-fork of Orwell and Armistice. Sarah kept Ali on track past the police-department that hid the first sections of the southern neighborhoods. Then, well-manicured lawns rose and fell with the hilly topology of the middle-class side of town. The more expensive houses were even further South, undoubtedly where Ali lived.

The hilly rise of the police-station fell to Lotus Drive. After a few houses, Hyacinth passed with its sloped, Northern incline, and Marigold peered out at its re-leveled height to match Orwell. Ali’s left turn was greeted by a block of cookie-cutter houses one either side. The Camaro slowed to a stop at Willow and Marigold, kicked up into second before the next intersection and the turn on to Beech from the three-way stop. At the left, the river that ran from Grove Park to the center of town, was visible between the side yards of Elm Street’s houses. It marked the property lines of the homes on either side, twisted and turned beneath the small bridges on Orwell and Asimov– two of the main Avenues through town– to deposit in a pond far ahead.

Sarah pointed to a tall white house, its lawn as well-manicured as the rest on this side of town, save for the few weeds that grew through the cracked, cement driveway. As usual, it was empty in the early afternoon. Mom and Dad wouldn’t be home for another few hours.

Sarah readied to slip out of the car– in truth, readied to bolt like a deer in the headlights– and glanced to Ali, “Thanks for the ride.”

Ali smiled with perfect, white teeth that met one another at crisp angles, were obviously the product of expensive orthodontics; yet another testament to the pretty-versus-plain girl contrast between them.

“Anytime, Sarah,” Ali said. She hesitated as Sarah pulled on the door handle. She was almost to freedom when Ali spoke again, “Hey umm… Can I ask you something real quick?”

Now Sarah was a deer in the headlights. She had the vacant face of terror and confusion, the dumb stare into mysterious, fast-approaching glowey things that even Sarah couldn’t name in the moment. The question formed on Ali’s lips innocuously, much like the graceful automobile that went about its business as unwittingly as that most mentally-stunted of animals.

Ali drove on, completely oblivious, “Do you mind if I hang out here for a while? I mean, I don’t wanna’ be rude or anything but home kinda sucks this time’a day.”

With all the nimble majesty of an airborne deer in mid-collision, Sarah replied, “U-uh, s-sure, I guess.”

She would have said no, knew she should have, but something had compelled her not to. Terror might have been its source, or perhaps mere stupidity. In either case, a mental five-K began for Sarah the engine cut-off and Ali stepped out of the car. Sarah followed, even to the door, where the only indication that something was expected of her was the way Allison stepped aside to let her reach the knob. While she dug for her key, tried to produce it to unlock the door, the five-K turned to hurdles.
Why’d she accept the ride? Why’d Allison offer it? Was this some prank by the other pretty-girls? Was it mere chance, or even fate? Even then, what was the point? Sarah was a loner; a fact she knew and liked-well about herself. What good was companionship to her? What good was her companionship to another? More importantly, what would Allison think when she inevitably twisted her ankle stepping into Sarah’s room? Would her neurotic note-taking and ceaseless word-smithing become a new focus of taunts for the pretty-girls and their gimps? And why’d Allison’s house suck with her undeniable wealth?

All these questions sprinted through her mind in the micro-seconds it took for her to unlock the door and step into the foyer. She held the door politely, half-prepared to slam it shut on Ali’s face, but knew she couldn’t. As much as part of her wanted to kick Allison to the curb, the rest was intrigued at how things would play out– what exactly the answers to those questions would be.

She followed Ali up the stairs as she rubbernecked the white, tastefully decorated walls filled with typical, middle-class photo-frames, knick-knack shelves, various electronics and faux-wood furniture.

“Wow,” Ali said as she stepped aside to let Sarah up the stairs. “This place is nice.”

Sarah snorted, “Nah, it’s just home.”

Allison shrugged, followed her through the dry-walled archway and into the kitchen, “I like it. It’s cozy.”

Sarah set her pack on the table across the kitchen, “Uh… cool I guess. Well, you want somethin’ to drink?”

Sarah went about the tedious process of listing the house’s entire beverage repository before they settled on pop. They sat at the table in an awkward silence while Sarah’s leg made restless shakes underneath it.

Again the perfect teeth appeared as Allison broke the awkwardness with a smile, “I’m guessing you don’t have many friends.”

“Uh…”

She smacked her forehead, “Wow that sounded really insensitive.”

“No, it’s–”
“What I meant to say is; you seem nervous, like you don’t hang out much.”

Sarah opened her mouth to protest, but her mental faculties were tied up in the questions she’d asked. So much so that the lie-production machine in her brain had no room to cater to her already-minute ego.

She closed her mouth with a long sigh, sank back in her chair to open it again, “It wasn’t insensitive. I got what you meant. I’m not really easily offended anyhow. Stuff just sorta’ rolls off’a me.”

Ali chewed a corner of her lip, “You’re sweet, Sarah, but I’m an idiot.”

Sarah shrugged, attempted reassurance, “I can’t tell you for sure since we just met, but you don’t seem like one.”

“See what I mean,” Ali replied with a bigger smile than before. “You’re sweet.”

Again, Sara shrugged, “I dunno’ maybe. But you’re right anyhow. All I do’s hang around by myself. At home and at school.”

She frowned, “That must be lonely.”

Sarah slurped a sip from her can, “Sometimes, but not really. It’s just how I’ve always been. I mean, no one who doesn’t have mental problems wants to be alone all the time. For me, it’s just easier.”

Ali seemed intrigued, “Well, why don’t you make friends?”

“Just too busy, I guess.”

Her intrigue grew, “Busy how?”

Sarah was suddenly timid, quiet. Her mouth squirmed, her forehead hardened, angled closer together. Her face pointed downward at the floor, but Allison leaned to get a better look at it. Sarah was too scared to explain her utterly obsessive-compulsive writing habits. There was too much in her brain that didn’t want to come off like a freak. What little ego and pride she had was too delicate, fragile, to take the risk. All the same, Allison waited.

“Earth to Sarah. Come in Sarah,” Ali joked.

She shook off her petrified trance, “Uh, well, I um… uh… Mostly write.”

Ali’s eyes brightened, “Write? Like stories and stuff?”

Sarah was profoundly terrified– to the point that all the words she knew of to describe fear summed together still didn’t describe its depth.

Her words tumbled out like dice from an upturned cup, “Uh, well sh-yeah. I mean, um… most of the t-time anyhow.”

“Does anyone ever read ’em?”

Sarah shrugged. She knew the answer was no, but the ambiguity of a shrug seemed like it might keep the conversation from turning to its inevitable point. Eventually it would get there, no matter what, but Sarah hoped there would be time before then.

Ali was leaned forward, “Why not? You don’t want ’em to? I could read some if you want.”

Sarah sighed, “Ali, I don’t wanna’ sound like a jerk, but … it’s just not something I really wanna’ share with anyone.”

Allison’s pretty-face had that pinched frown and glisten that pretty-girls get when on the verge of tears from even a minor pin-prick on their feelings. Sara winced. Contrary to her expectations though, Allison blinked, and the gleam became depth-less intrigue.

“Well I get not wanting to be judged, but… d’you mind if I ask why you’re so worried about it?”

It was a fair enough question, and Sarah wasn’t rude enough to say “fuck-off” just quite yet, but even so, she wasn’t sure she had an answer. “It’s just not something I share with anyone. Just something I do ’cause I do it. I don’t really know why I do, but… well it’s like people who hang out with friends. That kinda’ takes the place of that.”

Allison grimaced, “Yeah, I get it, but… do you share anything with anyone? I mean, anything more than the air you breathe?”

Another fair question, granted more invasive than the last, and especially callous for two people who’d just met. But it was more than tame for a pretty-girl. Sarah was once more forced to run through the list of questions that had arisen at the door. She saw a clear pattern emerge from her knowledge of pretty-girl/plain-girl dynamics.

Sarah eeked out a grimace, “You’re gonna’ grill me about this ’til I let you read something aren’t you?”

Ever the more perceptive pretty girl, Ali giggled, “Most definitely.”

Sarah threw her head back, smacked it on the chair, “Blah.” She growled a throaty word that crescendoed in a whine, “Fiiine.” She stood with her shoulders limp, trudged forward, “C’mon.”

Ali followed her from the kitchen out to the right, down the long hallway that opened to the various rooms on either side. She stopped at the door to her room, only one arm limp now, the other with a hand on the knob.

“You light on your feet?”

Ali squinted confusion at her, “Huh? Oh. Well, I was in gymnastics for ten-years.”

“You’ll need it,” Sarah warned.

She shoved open the door. It only just cleared the height of the pens scattered at its threshold. In Allison’s view, the door gave way to stacks of notebooks, and the pen-covered floor. Her jaw fell open, her eyes nearly popped from her skull. Sarah stepped in– or rather-tip-toed– across the plastic and metal pens and wooden pencil-stubs. She slid sideways onto her bed as Alison planted one sure foot before the other to close the door behind her. Her eyes swept the room as she made a small circle inside the towers of notebooks and stacks of loose-leaf papers.
She almost came full-circle, but stopped on Sarah atop the bed, “Holy hell! I thought you were joking. But you aren’t. There’s gotta’ be five-tons of paper in here.”

Sarah shrugged, “Maybe. I’d have to do the math.”

Allison had the sudden urge to rush for a stack, begin tearing through it and soaking up the words inside. Instead, she stepped to Sarah’s side, almost slipped and fell, but managed to maneuver an upright sit from the near-fatal mishap.

Her jaw finally shut to wet her mouth, “Sarah, it’s really hard not to want read this stuff when you see it like this.”

Sarah was melancholic, “A lotta’ people’d probably disagree.”
“Yeah, but they’re not here.”

She had a point. “Dig in if you wanna’, I don’ really care.”

The bright-eyed intrigue returned to scan the room, “Wh-where should I start?”

“Doesn’t really matter I guess. You mind if I write?”

There was a slight shrug as Ali stood for a stack across the room. She walked for the stack like an acrobat; her hands flat, arms locked for balance across the strewn floor. She reached for a red-covered notebook, returned to Sarah’s side while she scrawled across a fresh piece of paper. The intermittent pauses between ink-scratches gave rhythm to Ali’s thoughts. In the span of a page and a-half, she was transported to a world where a king had sworn fealty to his subjects only to be back-stabbed by a traitor courtsmen whom viewed him as weak.

More short stories gave way to poems about love and death, beauty and pain. The words flowed with rhythmic rhymes and swelled with alliteration whose pace was ever-more kept by the tempo of Sarah’s pen. Every-few pages, detailed histories of worlds, cities, and people would arise with intriguing dichotomies, secrets, and flaws to put the greatest of literary contemporaries to shame. All of this, in only one notebook.

It could’ve been a fluke, Ali knew. She dove into another. Then another. The pattern held strong. All the while, Sarah’s pen worked. A pause a drum solo saw it tossed at the wall ’til it bounced, fell with the others on the floor, and was replaced with a new one.

Ali finished a fourth notebook, the sun already set in the sky. She looked sideways at Sarah, curiously absorbed in her work, as though the world in her mind was the only one that existed.

“Sarah?” It took a minute before her pen stopped, and her head rose from the page with a dull question on her face. Ali was hesitant, all the more emphatic for it, “I’ve read a lot of books and stories. But this is by far the greatest stuff I’ve ever read.”

Sarah’s brow furrowed in disbelief; partly from her self-consciousness, and partly from distrust that a pretty-girl like Allison would ever read, “You don’t have to flatter me, Ali.”

She was insistent, “Sarah, I’m not.” Sarah’s eyes narrowed skeptically. “I know I’m mostly eye-candy to people– like I haven’t got brains– but I know greatness when I see it. Apart from hanging out with friends, all I do is read– like you write. All these stacks of notebooks? That’s how my room looks, but with other people’s books. And I’m telling you this stuff is awesome!”

Sarah was suddenly dumbstruck by her own prejudice, as if Ali had heard her thoughts all along. She was also, admittedly, flattered by the idea that someone found her work so intriguing. At the same time though, she was profoundly embarrassed by the way she’d thought of Ali. Here was a girl not unlike herself, save a hyper-critical label Sarah had applied to them both, defying said label to befriend and show her admiration and interest.

“Uh… I-I’m sorry,” Sarah admitted suddenly. She put her pen and paper aside, sat forward to speak openly to Ali. It was a curious thing to her, she’d never opened up to anyone, let alone a stranger. “I judged you, Ali, I’m sorry. I’m an ass.”

It took her a moment to connect the subtext that had lingered between them all day, “Huh? Oh you mean ’cause of the pretty-girl stuff, right?”

“Uh… I wanna’ make sure we’re on the same page… what d’you mean by that?”

Ali explained, “I know you know. You’re what pretty-girls call a plain-girl, someone who’s not super-model gorgeous, or otherwise wrapped in plastic to their eye-lashes. Truth be told, I’m not really either. I just got lucky genetically. I hate those girls.”

“You hate them? But I thought–”
“That I was one?” Ali asked. Sarah nodded in acknowledgment. Ali chuckled, “I know I look it, but I’m not. It’s one’a those weird coincidences– like the ISS they people confuse for a UFO… it doesn’t quite look like a star, and you know it’s not a plane, so what else could it be? Most people go for UFO ’cause they’re not thinking that the space-station’s there.”

Sarah simplified it for her, “You mean Occam’s Razor, right?”

“Exactly,” Ali replied. She pulled her legs in to sit cross-legged on the bed. “I didn’t keep talking to you at school today ’cause I’m an airhead who’s got boundary issues. I like you. You seem interesting. You probably didn’t even notice it, because you’re always writing, but I have two morning classes with you.”

Sarah’s brow furrowed, “Man, I really got pay more attention.”

Ali laughed, smiled, “Point is, I knew I’d either end up being poached by the vapid pretty girls, or be alone. I saw some one that looked interesting, got curious. I was just lucky that I bumped into you at lunch.”

Sarah rubbed her nose, smiled, “I don’t know if the after-school thing was luck, but I get what you’re saying.”

Ali chuckled again, “I really am sorry about that, by the way.”

Sarah shrugged, adjusted herself to hug her knees, “It’s no big deal.”

Ali grimaced, “Actually, it kinda is. If you hadn’t hit that locker door, we wouldn’t be hanging out right now. And I wouldn’t know how awesome you are. And you wouldn’t have someone to tell you.”

For once, Sarah felt perfectly at-ease without her hands constantly working her pen across a page, “That’s… actually a pretty good point.”

They met each other’s eyes with giddy looks that transferred glee between them, and suddenly fell into a mysterious fit of giggles. The plain and the pretty together at last, both equally enamored with the other; one, for its unquenched thirst for friendship, the other for its insatiable hunger for mental stimulation. It was a freak-accident-caused friendship that they both knew would last ’til death. The first few weeks of hanging out only further proved it as Sarah and Ali returned daily from school to write and read respectively. Long evenings soon turned to long nights and weekend sleep-overs, and the latter pushed the former ever-nearer toward greatness with her unassailable support.

The precarious nature of their meeting alone would have given Rod Serling another one for the black-and-white picture-show. The plain and the pretty, Sarah and Ali, writer and reader, entwined in friendship forever over a simple, innocuous mishap.

Krubera: Part 6

October 30, 2015October 29, 2015 ~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

The Plains

The five set out across the plains with relative ease. The lakes that dotted the landscape here and there, sank through the haze the nearer they came. The tall grasses hid them beneath the gentle sway the wind imparted to them. Every few minutes, one of the group would stop to gather samples of the different foliage and soil. Raymond remarked on the odd composition of the latter, cited that the minute composition of limestone was inconsistent with the world’s place inside a mountain.

As they trudged forward through the knee-high grass, Raymond mused aloud to the others, “It’s possible that the peninsula has been here for millions of years in its entirety. Gagrinsky may have grown upward as the plates shifted, closed it off from everything but the Black Sea. It could have been only a small pond then, or even a lake– smaller than it is now.”

“How do you explain the ceiling then?” Chad asked, the camera at his eye as it captured the plains with a wide, slow pan.

“I can’t be sure until there’s a core drilling,” he admitted. “But I suppose one theory could be arches. If they had spanned the chasm from one side of the growing range to the other at its peak, it would have only been a matter of sediment, dust, or anything else settling over them for millions of years to create the ceiling.”

A ear shattering shriek split the air. Like that of an eagle but much in higher pitch. It dizzied them with a sine that spiraled downward into a growl. The group froze in its tracks, scanned the skies. The luminescent ceiling was all that cut through the thick mist, visibility reduced to little more than a few meters.

“The predators are out now,” Anthony said as he rubbernecked the mist. “Prey must be diurnal.”

Elliot’s voice was airy, quiet, “Probably why we haven’t seen anything yet.”

They waited, listened. When the next call came, it was further off, headed away from them.

Elliot sighed relief, “C’mon. We don’t know how long the day lasts here”

Liana readjusted the rifle in her hands, followed Elliot to match her pace.

To the right, a pond was half-shrouded by mist that seemed to sink further and further toward the ground. Elliot hoped it wouldn’t delay their trek– it was already getting harder to see the forested ridge, and she didn’t like the idea of climbing in the fog. While the day might last much longer here, as the laws of the surface need not apply, it might also be much shorter. Though it was certain the cavern’s light-source had curiously thickened the air. Her lungs were heavy, fatigued by the foreign oxygen.

“Wait, wait,” Elliot said with a flail of her hand.

She turned for the others, worried for the oxygen levels. Liana watched her step past with curious look, turned to follow her again. The shriek sounded high overhead. Elliot froze mid-step, her mind blank. Liana crouch-walked to her, pulled her downward. With a slow, calculated momentum, she shouldered her rifle, raised it to the skies, the mist too dense to see anything.

The shriek pierced their ears, forced hands over heads.

Liana swiveled, yelled, “Down!”

The team fell to the ground, covered their ears against another shriek. A shadow raced at Liana as she dropped; a massive gray blur that swooped down, skirted the air where Liana’s head had been. Air rushed as it passed, cried out with a vile high-pitch to their ears at such close range.

Liana yelled, “Up! Up!”

The group had just enough time to regroup in a single-file crouch, when the second run came. She waited, timed her words, caught sight of a spear-like beak, barbed at the lower end, attached to a swept back, horned head. Its appeared as a demonic crane that rocketed at them. She yelled.

They were on the ground before it passed, but Chad screamed. He lay on his back, a wolf-sized predator atop him. Liana took aim, fired her rifle in short, loud bursts. The bullets sprayed green blood from its lizard-like body. It thrashed in pain and anger, its long beak embedded in Chad’s shoulder. Forelimbs extended from its torso, forced Chad agaisnt the ground. The body gave a hard jerk, ripped its beak free. Blood dripped from the barbs as it yelped, shrieked. It reared up at Liana atop Chad’s chest. Her rifle rose. The creature’s feet balled up. It sprang toward Liana. She squeezed the trigger.

The creature animal was blasted backward mid-leap, fell with a twitch. It leaked, milky, green translucence from its body, bore no feathers, but forearm-thick muscular bulges beneath its leathery wings.

Chad screamed again. Elliot rushed over examined his wound; the beak had pierced straight through the left clavicle.

Liana shouted, “Get him quiet!”

Elliot opened her mouth to speak, her voice drowned in a high, rasping roar. This one was much closer, Terran in nature. Raymond and Anthony rushed to Chad, silenced him. Second and third roars came from opposite directions. Before Elliot could speak, Chad was silent, on his feet. Blood leaked from his shoulder, his face red from the pain, he moved fast. He hurried past her, then Liana, sprinted away from the sounds.

“Get him before he’s out of sight,” Liana commanded.

She took up aim once more as Elliot and the others sprinted past her. Her feet made slow, quiet back-steps, her eyes darted around the forward area. The roars came again, ahead of her this time.

Light thumps were all that was audible until a heavy breath emitted death and dried blood at her. The silhouette of a medium-sized animal sped across the path the team had made. Its spine was curved, like that of cat’s, but the muzzle was large, blunt. It bounded across, disappeared into the mist. Liana’s feet worked her backward at a slow, consistent pace, the distant team audible behind her.

The first Terran-creature rushed at her in a diagonal path. Two bursts spattered blood from its chest. Its legs gave out mid-bound. It tumbled forward, end-over-end, dead. Life faded from its yellow eyes, visible in deep sockets and framed above a heavy jaw-line. Sinew and wounds made the beast’s head appear as though its skin had been turned inside out. Its ears were absent, mere openings near the crown. The other beasts growled a heavy menace. Liana’s feet worked faster, were too slow.

The two beasts came into view. Their blunt snouts flared with razor-sharp teeth. A second set gave a violent oscillation from the back of the throat. They launched at her in unison. The rifle barked without aim. Liana was tackled, the rifle thrown from her hands. Heavy claws dug into her sides. She screamed in agony, felt blood drain from her sides. She grasped for the diving knife at her waist, managed to thrust it hard into the weight on her chest.

One of the beasts stumbled back with a high yelp. The second took its place, dug its claws deep into her chest. The stench of death overwhelmed her, the pain torturous. The beast made a sharp inhale as it sniffed, snorted at her, opened its mouth to reel back its head for a death-strike. Its head snapped forward, met her arm to block it. Teeth sank into her forearm, lashed it from side to side. She struggled to keep the beast’s teeth from her neck, tried to roll away, felt the SMG beneath her. She rolled back and forth. Her arm weakened. The weapon slipped out beside her.

With a forceful hand, struck the beast in the neck. It rasped, stumbled back. The SMG rose. The beast returned, readied to strike. The barrel pressed the neck, spewed ammunition from the barrel to shred its airways, and severe its spinal cord. Liana’s adrenaline kept the trigger down as she scurried backward, the creature dead. Her hand released only after it fell over dead.

She swallowed hard, bloody and sickened, turned for her rifle. Shouts and screams emitted from the direction the team had gone. She retrieved the rifle and her knife, sprinted with a limp after the sounds. Each breath was a knife in her side, but she dared not stop. Torn flesh burned and bled from beneath her shredded wet-suit. She stumbled down Chad and the others had created as their shouts grew louder, coherent.

Elliot yelled with desperation, “Your knives! Get your knives!”

Liana emerged from the mist into a small grove of trees, the other four bound up by thick vines, suspended a meter in the air.

Anthony’s neck was stretched upward, his voice a grunt, “It hurts!”

“Liana, No!” Elliot screamed.

She stopped with heavy pants, looked to the ground. More, long vines, thick as sea-rope criss-crossed the patchy soil with hundreds of small thorns and wet suckers in them like a squid.

“Don’t…. touch them,” Elliot shouted, her breath strained as the vine squeezed her.

Liana dodged the vines with nimble feet, watched the team rise slowly upward. Her eyes followed the vines upward and deep into the canopy of conifers. She found a bare spot where the vines had been triggered, stepped into it.

She called to the others, “Stay still.”

The rifle rose in her hands, grazed the torn flesh at her abdomen. The rifle cracked once. A bullet whizzed over Elliot’s head, split the vine that curled around and over her. She fell free, hit the grounded with a winding thud, coughed and choked for air. Liana shifted her aim, freed the others with more cracks of the rifle.

Elliot choked for air, pushed herself up. Her throat rasped for air as she tore thorns form her arms and sides, brushed off a viscous liquid that had begun to coat her. Raymond and Anthony did the same, hurried to Chad on the ground whom struggled to breathe.

Liana took careful steps over the vines, examined Chad’s wounds, “He’ll be fine. Get him up. Chad moaned, took a sharp breath. Liana neglected her own injuries, to help lift him, “We need to move.”

She checked the magazine in the rifle, cast it aside, for a new one. Elliot stepped to her, knelt to examine the jagged skin at her belly. It had been scalped to the dermal layer, the epidermal-layer like a flap that hung, still connected.

“Jesus, what the hell happened?” Elliot asked as she surveyed the puncture wounds.

The animal’s claws had stabbed her sides as though it had tried to grasp her. The motion necessary suggested digits that moved independent of the hand or foot connected, like fingers.

“You need to be bandaged,” she said, her voice grave.

“We need to move.” Liana protested.

“Damn right we do, but we’re not going anywhere with you like this,” she said, poking a finger into the wound. Liana fell to her knees, gasped and whimpered. “Ray, Tony; I need gauze, alcohol, and pain killers.”

Liana doubled-over, clenched her eyes shut and grit her teeth, “What are you going to do?”

Raymond passed over supplies to her, Anthony still at work on Chad, now propped upright. Raymond knelt to aid Elliot, poured alcohol onto a large swath of cotton-cloth.

“This is going to hurt,” he winced, sympathetic.

“Do it any–”

He swabbed the wound. She screamed through her teeth, tortured by fiery needles. Her voice resounded off the trees and the empty clearing. It was answered by a shriek.

“Son of a bitch!” Anthony cried backward. “Can’t we be off the menu just this once?”

“What do you expect, we’re wounded prey to them,” Elliot said over Liana’s cries.

She tried to silence herself, but Elliot’s knife was out. It sliced away the torn flesh, gave way to a hard pressure against her exposed dermis. Tears squeezed through her eyes, stuttered breaths inhaled with whimpers. Elliot wrapped her abdomen with a large roll of gauze, threw her hands back and forth fast.

“Done,” Elliot said to Raymond. “Get her up.”

They got beneath either of her shoulders, lifted her to her feet. She hung limp from the pain, the weapons at her back dangled, smack together. Her feet caught the ground, took off with Raymond at one-side. Elliot helped Anthony lift Chad, followed after the others. Their legs ached from the slope of the forest, the shrieks nearer behind them. Elliot glanced back to see a small animal scamper into view, devour the piece of Liana’s flesh she’d left behind.

The slope peaked a few moments later, the shrieks banked away, headed back for the scene of carnage Liana had left behind. The treeline opened ahead. A dirt clearing appeared with a river through one third of it. The mist was thinner here, the far-side of the river clearly stone as it would off and round to the right. Small crocodile-like creatures sat lazily on the far side of the bank, as if sunning themselves. The group slowed, quieted.

The creatures resembled their surface relatives in every way, save for their minute size. They were as large as a toy dog, with heavy jaws and short, squat snouts in place of a croc’s wide rounded one. Their claws were long, stiff, stuck out several inches from finger-like appendages. The crocodile creatures seemed to notice them, but paid them, no mind. Even so, the group passed by them nearer the trees, came to a downward slope.

Liana begged to stop, panted for water. Raymond set her upright against a rock, her face pale, covered in sweat. Elliot grabbed for a bottle, handed it over, set Chad beside Liana.

She checked his wounds, moved onto Liana, “How’re you doing?”

“Fine, just… tired,” she breathed, weak.

“Looks like blood-loss,” Chad said. “But I wouldn’t rule out poison.”

“No poison… just tired.” Liana wheezed.

“It could be both,” he siad with a look to Elliot. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

“Its blood loss,” Raymond said with certainty. “I’m exhausted, and I didn’t get attacked like she did. Plus her wounds were clean– there would have been some residual left over if it were poison. Discoloration of the wound, discharge, a reaction from the alcohol– something.”

Anthony fell back in a sit beside Chad, “I think we’re all exhausted, but we’ll need to keep moving. We’re going to have to set camp eventually.”

“Christ, I wish we’d just slept through the day,” Chad groaned.

Anthony was sarcastic, “Why? So we could be eaten in our sleep?” He shook his head. “Look the fact is, it will get dark again. When that happens we have to move, otherwise we will be eaten. The night will be our best time.”

“Then we need to find somewhere safe, out of the way and off the ground,” Elliot said, with a glance around.

The path ahead sloped down, but the river twisted off in the opposite direction. Both paths disappeared back into canopied forest. She was at a loss, if they stayed in place too long, they risked an attack, but if they headed back into the mist now, they risked having to set camp in the open grassland.

She sighed frustration, “Set camp here. We need to rest, and this seems like the safest place we’ve come across so far. When we do leave, we’ll head back down into the mist and the trees. Two tents. Pack it in.”

Raymond and Anthony acknowledged with a nod, broke open two tents and helped the others into them. Elliot sat watch for the first two hours the others slept until Raymond woke to relieve her. She handed over the pistol Liana had given her. He ushered her into a tent. Liana lay on the floor, deep in sleep, her breath labored from pain and morphine. Elliot settled beside her, fell fast into sleep.

She was awoken by Chad four hours later, sat up with a start. His arm was now placed in a make-shift sling, made from a torn remnant of his flannel over-shirt. He put his free finger to his lips, motioned for her to follow. She grabbed Liana’s SMG, crawled out. The area had changed since she had slept; now free of mist and with a receded river while daylight waned overhead.

Chad crouched at the rock they’d taken refuge at, pointed across the river with his uninjured arm and the video-recorder in his hand. There, by the water, were a dozen, long-necked animals. They bore features of deer, save that their skin was of hard, reptilian scales, and their bodies sported thick-veined muscles. They reached up into the low trees, chewed off large sections of the needles that crunched in their triangular muzzles. The smallest ones, juveniles Elliot guessed, sprinted at trees. They leapt up, suddenly began to climb like an arborist with spiked shoes. She took the camera from Chad to zoom in on the creatures’ feet. Where a normal hoof was rounded, adapted only for running, these also had large, heavy spikes in the front, no doubt for climbing.

They watched the animals in silence for a few minutes while they finished their meals and bounced off into the forest. Elliot was elated; for once they weren’t on the menu, and it was almost worth it. She was taken by the alien beauty of the scene, her mind on the creatures’ skin.

She mused at Chad beside the rock, barely above a whisper, “Everything here seems to have evolved from reptilian ancestors, or else adapted their distinguishing features; hardened skin or scales, long bodies, jointed feet, etcetera. All of their natural defenses are reptilian too; sharpened spins, or vestigial bones, barbs– I’ve yet to see a single feathered animal.”

Chad was silent for a moment, replied thoughtfully, “You think Ray’s right?”

“You mean about the rock bridges?”

“Yeah. You think its possible?”

“I’m not a geologist,” she admitted. “But I trust Ray. If he thinks that might be it, I agree.” Chad hesitated, then, “It does seem odd though. I wouldn’t have thought any number of arches could’ve formed this.”

An idea came to her, her voice hushed, “Of course! I can’t believe I didn’t see it before!” Chad’s brow furrowed in confusion. “That’s why everything here is so radically different.”

Chad’s confusion manifested words, “Elliot, what the hell are you talking about?”

“The Single-Impact Chad, that’s what did it.”

Chad still wasn’t following, but he knew what the “Single-Impact” was. Postulated by Luis and Walter Alvarez in 1980, the Single-Impact Theory stated the last, massive extinction event was most probably caused by a hundred-and-eighty kilometer wide asteroid. After it struck the Earth, the changes to the global atmosphere would have equaled that of thousands of atomic bombs. The result was extinction of some seventy-percent of Earth’s life at the time.

Chad had only begun to piece it together, when Elliot helped him along, “The bridges form right?” She illustrated long arches with her hands, “It takes thousands, maybe millions of years of water for the valley between sides to form, leaves the arches behind. The result is two, connected edges of a mountain range that frames the valley’s ceiling– like rafters of a roof.” Her hands hands made a quick slide sideways, “Then, the water recedes. Sediment and soil blow around for eons, end up sprinkled on top of the framing. Meanwhile, the water moves inland again as the mountains begin to rise. The combination blocks off what, at the time, could have been described as horseshoe valley. Finally, the impact event occurs, and the dust and fallout settles over the extensive “framing,” and finishes the roof. Over the eons, the mountains grow, shift, over take it.”

Chad understood at last, his eyes wild, “Do you know what this means?”

Elliot’s tone matched his eyes, “This world is the direct lineage of the world before the impact event. And it’s been totally preserved.”