raised by wolves

“I was in the ballroom with all the hostages. I was stunning them one at a time, the ones I didn’t get in the first sweep, and then we heard that sound and the boat nearly flipped over. There were people flying in every direction it looked like, and furniture—tables and chairs and banquet tables and all of that stuff these people have stacked up around them, always counting on gravity to keep them stationary. I saw a man get his head crushed under a chandelier. I saw two women pinned beneath a roulette table. I was lucky that nothing landed on me. And then we sloshed back over and,” here she pauses to laugh. I have never seen Yolita laugh. “And everything was all stuck over on one side of the room. The only way to tell the live ones from the dead or unconscious ones was that they were screaming,”

“Spare us the morbidity, Yolita. We haven’t got time for this Edgar Allen Poe shit,” Weston chimes in supportively. She almost looks like she’s going to laugh again, but clears her throat and continues instead.

“So I left. What could I do, apply first aid? I am not a medic. They were doomed anyway. I went out into the hallway connecting the ballroom and the banquet room and I heard a strange noise. Like if you were to cut sheet metal with a chainsaw. It was coming from the ballroom, so I went back in. And there were…these…” her face twists with the recalling.
“These things,” is all she gets out before lapsing into total silence. She closes her eyes and begins to shiver. She doesn’t resume her story. All our further attempts to pry information out of her such as: what kinds of things? yield nothing. She must be in shock. Occasionally she breaks the silence with a muted sob, but that’s hardly what I’d call useful information.

“Well, shit,” I say after a few moments of this. “Now what?”

“I already told you ‘what,’” Weston snaps. “You open that damn safe and we wait for Verne and Dole. If they aren’t here in five, I’m gonna go find ‘em and you’re on babysitting duty for these two. I suggest you open that safe before they show up.” I go and sit by the toppled but miraculously still-functioning computer console and resume trying to open this fucking door.

“The Agency will have our cards for this,” Weston says eventually. Oh god, I don’t even want to think about The Agency right now, and it turns out I won’t have to.

Enter Verne. I shit you not, he’s still wearing all his gear. Gas mask, goggles, helmet, all of it. Except for—are you ready?—his left boot. If I hadn’t been sitting down already, I most definitely would have fallen over laughing. He glares at me from behind those red-tinted goggles, then glances between unconscious Goober, catatonic Yolita, and pissed off Weston.

“Heh, ah, where’d your boot go, Verne?” I stammer out between chuckles. “Leave it in somebody’s ass?”

He shakes his head like a teacher shakes their head at the lost-cause student flicking boogers at the ceiling in the back of the classroom.

“Where you been, Verne?” Weston asks.

“Found the captain,” he hisses.

“Come again?” says Weston. “I can’t hear you with the mask on,” he says, pointing at his face.

“Oh,” says Verne. “I forgot I was wearing it.”

So nonchalant. He pulls off his guy and, despite what you were probably expecting, is just a normal looking guy. No deformities, no scars. Just some guy. I think that’s why he likes keeping his gear on so much, especially masks. They make him forget that under all the bad-ass commando shit, he’s just some guy. Well, just some guy with a genuine passion for homicide and a definite candidate for electro-shock therapy, but still.

“I said I found the captain,” Verne repeats.

“And?” Weston prompts.

“And, he’s dead.”

“Well ain’t that swell,” Weston says, displaying his mastery of sarcasm. “What happened to him?”

Verne shrugs. “It wasn’t me. He was all torn up. Looked like he fell in a big paper shredder or something. Found his keys tho’,” he says and pulls a little ring of official-looking magnetic keycards from one of his pockets. He tosses them to me at the computer. “Maybe one’s for the vault,” he says as the bundle of cards lands with a flop in my hand.

“Well I sure hope so. Otherwise I’m gonna wring that little fucker’s neck,” I say and head over to start swiping keys in the big clear door separating us from the vault proper.

“Which little fucker?” Weston asks.

“The one told me about the keys,” I tell him. “The deck hand.”

“Which deck hand?” Weston asks.

“Our hostage,” I tell him, swiping the first card.

Weston looks to one side of the room and then the other. “I don’t see no deck hand, Parks.”

“Say what?” I say, dropping the ring of cards and starting to turn my head around. “Oh fuck me, I completely forgot about him…He musta run off when I wasn’t looking,”

“When you weren’t looking?” Weston demands. “What are you, an incompetent guard in some James Bond flick? This room’s fucking tiny, man! With one door!”

This last bit renders me silent while I puzzle over who the fuck James Bond is, but luckily it doesn’t take long for—whaddaya know—more crazy shit to go down and distract me. Suddenly out from under a precariously toppled bundle of papers and other office supply shit comes our friend the deck hand, with a bright red fire extinguisher that he’s swinging like Babe Ruth as he makes a mad dash for the door. For just a second, it’s so profoundly ridiculous a sight that I think he might actually get away.

Then he runs right smack into Dole, who catches him under the chin with a big gloved hand and sends him sprawling.

He comes the rest of the way in and looks at all of us, standing, sitting, conscious or un-, and his jaw drops open.

“What the hell is goin’ on? Why’re ya’ll just sittin’ there? We gotta get the fuck up outta here! Ain’t you seen them things runnin’ around?”

At the mention of things, that fucking emphasized pronoun that tells me absolutely nothing, Yolita starts laughing again. This time she can’t control herself and is soon rolling on the floor having a serious freak out.

I notice Dole’s not carrying his pistol, but his AK, his back-up without the stun-tranqs.

“You making a mess out there, Dole?” I ask.

“Mess? You wanna see a mess? Check out the infirmary. Check out the crew quarters. Check out all the fuckin’ decks between here and the hull!! We’re taking on water in multiple locations and there’s these fuckin’ things runnin’ around tryin’ to eat people! We gotta go! Right now!”

“Parks hasn’t opened the vault yet,” Weston says.

“Fuck the vault! Didn’t you hear what I just said?” Dole spits.

“Wait, did you say ‘trying to eat people?’” I ask.

“Yes I said trying to eat people! Things! Monsters, man, I don’t know what the fuck you wanna call ‘em, but they’re big and nasty and they’re eating everyone they come across, god damn it!”

If there were crickets on the simultaneously burning and sinking boat, you would have probably been able to hear them.

“That’s the most insane thing I’ve ever heard,” Weston is saying when suddenly a hideous, gnarled claw on the end of a pale blue tendril whips out from around the corner and through the back of Dole’s head and out where his nose is. And that’s the end of Dole.

“You see?” Yolita shouts jumping to her feet, suddenly energetic as a landmine after it’s tripwire’s been pulled. “You see?” she says again and goes for the shotgun on Goober’s back. She begins firing at the door. Weston, Verne and I hit the deck (as it were) and probably out of sheer habit start unloading our firearms in the direction of the door as well.

When the smoke finally clears, it’s like the tendril thing had never been there at all. And it’s as if the wall opposite the door had never been there at all, either. We can see clean into the next room, which looks like DINGDINGDINGDINGDING the radio room. And all the equipment is utterly shredded by the unholy hail of lead we just wasted on it.

“Did you see that?” I ask.

“WHAT?” Weston shouts. Verne socks him in the arm and points at his ears.

“Oh,” Weston says, only slightly less loud. “WHAT did you SAY?” he says.

“Nothing,” is my reply, but I doubt he heard that either. Holy shit my ears haven’t rung like this since I saw Robbery in ‘67.

I motion to Verne to help me get Goober up.

“WHAT are YOU DOING?” Weston is still half-shouting here, but we’re ignoring him.

“Har har guys, I KNOW you can HEAR me,” he continues. I nod towards the door and Verne nods in confirmation and, out we go. Yolita follows a little bit later, leaving deafened Weston alone to shout to himself while he wonders if we’re still there. I predict his pride will prevent him from looking out the door for at least a minute thirty. Let him find his own way out. This mission is over as far as I’m concerned. Worst case scenario we rent a sub and come back for the gold after the boat sinks.

“So, what is that thing?” I ask Verne as we go. We’ve got to head for the bridge, where ever that is. I figure they have a radio up there, right?

“What thing?” Verne replies dourly.

“That…That thing, man!” I spit out, exasperated that I had to clarify.

“Oh. I don’t know.”

I cast a look over our shoulders, mine and unconscious Goober’s shoulders, and see that Yolita has caught up.

“So, what is that thing?” I try asking her.

“Not the worst,” she says plainly and gingerly steps in front of us. It’s clear that she’s got no intentions of waiting for us.

“Hey, where you goin’?”

“I’m getting off this boat,” she says, still farther ahead of us now. I motion towards her with my head to signal Verne to speed up, but he doesn’t pick up on it. She’s getting away.

“How you figure you’ll do that?” I call, practically shouting at this point.

“They’ve gotta have a radio on the bridge, right? I’m going to the bridge.”

“How do you know where it is?”

“I saw it on the way down,” she hollers back and ducks down another hallway. I look at Verne and tell him to step on it, or I’m leaving him to hold Goober on his own. He steps on it, “it” in this case being Goober’s foot, which gets one of it’s laces looped around Verne’s big toe, causing him to trip and push all of Goober’s heavy-ass, junk-food-eating, no-exercise-doing weight on me, causing me to fall over, and thus find myself pinned on my stomach under them both.

“Oh, dear Jesus, kill me now,” I grumble.

Verne gets up and makes an effort to pull Goober off of me. He won’t budge.

“No, no, just go. Leave me here to drown and or burn. Perhaps I’ll die of hunger. Just go, man, just go!”

Verne actually stops pulling and asks: “Are you serious?”

“Of course I’m not serious!” I say, demonstrating my not-seriousness by pounding my unpinned fist on the floor in front of me. “Get this lug off of me! Put your back into it, come on!”

This is when Weston shows up.

“Oh god. Put a group of men on a boat for an hour and they all go queer on ya,” is the only comment he cares to contribute. It’s the kind of comment Weston likes making the best: vaguely homophobic and nonsensical.

Luckily, the (have a nice trip, see you next) fall seems to have jostled Goober into the shallower depths of unconsciousness. He begins to stir and finally asks, in a manner suggesting he just woke from a long, restful nap:

“What the hell are ya’ll doin’ to me?”

“Molesting you while you sleep, what does it look like?”

“That’s not funny,” he says.

“Will you please get OFF OF ME?”

He does.

“Let’s get going,” I say when I’m finally back on my feet. “We’ve gotta be pressed for time. There’s no way the boat is gonna hold up to a fire, sinking and those things.”

“What things?” Weston asks. My life is a lot like a broken record.

“You didn’t see that thing? The thing that killed Dole!”

“You gotta be crazy. Someone shot him in the back of the head,” Weston says matter-of-factly.

I look at Verne for the assist, but he just shrugs.

“Are you kidding?” I ask. “Then why did you start shooting?” He just shrugs. “If someone shot him, where he was standing when it happened, they would’ve had to have been down the hall, not behind him in the doorway!”

“Well, why’d you start shooting then?”

“Cuz I saw the fucking thing Yolita was talking about and it popped out of Dole’s face on the end of a big nasty blue tentacle thing, man. Dole said there were things eating people on the boat, come on, you were there!”

I can’t believe I’m having this conversation. Maybe I am crazy.

“He’s lost it, Verne,” Weston says. “Time to go. We’ll just have to leave him behind.”

“Verne, come on, you saw it! You know you saw it, because if you hadn’t seen it you would’ve said, ‘I didn’t see anything,’ right?”

“I didn’t see anything. I wasn’t listening to Dole.”

This is a real mindfuck I’m having pulled on me right here. I decide to shut up for the time being.

“So, gentlemen,” Weston says. “Shall we proceed to catch up to our lady friend on the bridge?”

“How’d you know she’s going to the bridge?” I ask him.

“Gotta have a radio on the bridge, don’t they?”

I concede and I realize I should be paying more attention how to get back to the vault. While I’m concentrating on figuring out which deck we’re on after going up a strangely cramped flight of stairs, Goober slows his pace to match mine, and sure as the eruptions of Old Faithful, interrupts my concentration.

“You wanna try and get me caught up on what the hell is going on right now?” he says. It’s not a request.

As I’m recounting the whole ordeal, Goober’s expression changes from amused, to perplexed, to amused again.

“What about the gold?” he finally asks at the end.

What about the gold, indeed.