I wrote this while substitute-teaching a math class. When lacking ideas, just look about for any damn thing. This story was modestly published in the British zine Jupiter.

Asymptote
By Jens Rushing

Our course describes a diminishing gyre. The great bowl of the first curve swoops two hundred thousand miles wide – the next, one hundred fifty-seven thousand, give or take, and so doing, we spiral inward. The epicenter of this spiral is RUBY 34-2012, a dwarf planet suspected of titanium deposits. We will never touch the center. We chart an asymptote; our final course will hold us in orbit, each lap of the planet shaving a few millimeters from our orbit. A course approaching zero but never becoming zero – asymptote.

We’re the first to survey this little rock, and we need only photograph it. We come only to behold the thing, not to know the thing. Our craft isn’t even capable of landing. We’ll orbit for a few months, map the surface, and return home.

I use future tense when I should use the conditional: would, could, should. The condition in this exercise is that I, Terrence, am a colossal fuck-up, a mental abortion, a blind tongueless parasite unable to even push the right fucking buttons at the right fucking time, and in my utter incompetence I have graduated from dipshit to murderer.

Our crew is small: me, my brother Mike, and his wife Sara. This job was really a favor to me. I know jackshit about piloting, less about surveying, but they took me along. I needed the money, the direction, the company, et cetera, and they dropped this gig in my lap at just the right time. When I protested on grounds of ignorance, inexperience, and plain terror of spaceflight, Mike just slapped my back and said, “No worries, Terr. Piece of cake, if this monkey can do it,” jerking a thumb at Sara, who laughed and made monkey faces. That’s the kind of guy Mike is – kind, generous even if it kills him.

And Sara, the only soul that means half as much to me as Mike. After Mom died, Mike and I quit talking for a while. We just didn’t want to see each other, and we went our ways. He got into the private spaceflight sector, got so busy we couldn’t have seen each other even if we’d wanted to, and I figured it was all a lost cause. I was ready to drift off, disappear, maybe take everything in my stash at once and float off on a candy-colored cloud, when Mike called. He was in town and wanted to see me. We did Thai. He observed that I looked like hell, glossed over his work, and jabbed a chopstick through a piece of peanut chicken (cold).

Finally: “I’ve been seeing this girl.” And, on this subject, he started talking, really talking, and I knew that the only reason I was seeing Mike at all was because of this girl – that she loved him enough to learn all about him, including the dissipated little brother, the estrangement from whom was a constant source of regret, and that she loved him enough to kick his ass until he did something about it. Ergo: lunch.

Mike loved her, I could tell, more than he realized, and if I wanted to love Mike, I had to love her, too. I met her soon after, and my appreciation for her increased through the meeting. The reality lived up to the expectation. I don’t usually get along with women, or men, really, but Sara was exceptional. She was the most beautiful woman in the world, naturally, and (I can say this with a straight face) a fount of joy to all around her. She had a soothing presence. If flowers did not literally spring in her footsteps, if the lions and the lambs did not lie down together at her feet, it was only for a want of actual sorcery in the world, which I have always lamented anyway.

From the very first, she was determined to love and improve me, though I made it hard for her. But I was Mike’s brother, so I was her brother. She got me a job at their plant (which I lost) and introduced me to her attractive friends (whom I repelled), and she never gave up. And now I’ve killed her, glory be.

Things were good, even pastoral. Most weekends, we went to the garbage-strewn beach, had barbeques on their patio, drank Shiner and swatted mosquitoes and cursed the humidity. Mike unfroze. It was just like Mom had never died.

Through the glass I can see them exhale in slow-motion. The cryo cycle is deep, and the revivification process is damned complex. Their fault. Should’ve known better than to trust it to an unregenerate retard like me.

“Just follow the directions,” Mike said. “We practiced this a million times. You can’t screw this up, Terr. You’d have to be a genius to screw this up.”

When I worked at their avionics plant, I drove a forklift in the warehouse. Day two, still pretty stoned from the post-day one celebration, I ran the forklift into a stack of plastic drums filled with hydraulics fluid. The forks speared the drums, the fluid gushed out, the barrels up top tumbled down and broke with their great weight, and the warehouse was awash in the red-brown liquid. Everything happened so quick; the boss was screaming, someone hit an alarm, so I hid out in the bathroom for a while, then snuck out and never returned. How about that? I can’t even work a fucking forklift, and Mike thinks a hundred hours of training and a certificate will make a tech out of me, just because I’m clean these days. I kept telling him – it wasn’t the drugs that made me such a fuck-up.

So I was horrified, devastated, but not surprised when the klaxon shrieked during the warm-up stage, the crucial stage three that must not be interrupted, and the seals split and spewed ammonia-stinking cryo gasses everywhere. The EKGs went berserk – beepbeepbeepbeep – and I slapped at buttons. More alarms chimed in, and I did what I did in the warehouse: I freaked. I tore at my hair and curled up in the corner while my brother and sister-in-law suffered.

Christ, how they suffered. The cryo gasses dull your senses. In training, Mike numbed my hand with the gasses and ran a needle through my palm – no pain. Yet this agony cut through the drowsy numbness. Torment transformed their faces as a lightning bolt transforms a tree. They moaned, they bit their tongues until blood ran from the corners of their mouths. They choked, they gasped, but they did not wake. I could only watch.

In stage three, the level of oxygen in the mix is slowly increased and higher brain functions are coaxed awake. The mixture must be monitored carefully at this stage, as the autosensors are incapable of the precision required. But I missed something, had to have missed something, the mix swung too far the one way, too fast, and the adreno cocktail was injected before they were ready. They were caught at the brink of consciousness in half-thawed bodies, neurons dry-firing like corroded spark plugs. No wonder, their pain.

When the cryo booth malfunctioned, and I wildly slapped at the controls, hoping for something, a gasket popped, and adreno fluid sprayed across the chamber. We lost most of our supply before I got it under control. The fluid is essential to the reviv process. We have no additional doses.

They’re not dead yet, but it’s not a far trip.

We’re two years away from Earth, so returning is impossible. I don’t have the training. We’ve been taking turns running the ship all this time. Most of the time, it was all autopilot, so I only had to run on the treadmill and read book after book. The only remotely challenging part of my job was the reviv process, which I did a thousand thousand times in training, with great success.

Goddamn you, Mike. Goddamn you for doing this to me. Goddamn you, too, Sara, for trying to make something of me. Consider your lesson learned.

I tear through the tiny ship. I just need to run, to get away from them. Even in half-death, they’re saying, “You can fix it, Terr. We believe in you.” I kick the pilot’s chair and pound on the wall. I attack it, I just go nuts, kicking, screaming, pounding my forehead on it, hard, relishing the good pain. I strike my head again, too hard, and out I go.

When I wake, I’m staring through the port at RUBY. We’ve completed another lap of the planet. We’re a fraction closer to the goal we’ll never reach. I hear a new alarm from the cryo room.

The computer wants to know whether I want to continue revivification, which is strange, as the fluid levels are too low. Hope squeezes my gut, and, hands shaking, I check the fluids again, then fall back in my chair with a bitter laugh.

One. I can save one of them. The other will endure the reviv process without the aid of stimulants. In simulations, this is one hundred percent fatal.

I can’t deal with this right now. I refuse to. My veins itch ferociously: my brain swells and strains against my skull. I need a hit like I’ve never needed one before. I’ve been clean five years now. I owe that to Sara, too. She kicked my ass just like she’d kicked Mike’s. One day when they came over to my place, she surprised me in my room with a trash bag full of hoses, used hypos, spoons caked with dried blood. She dumped them in a heap on my bed. “What the fuck, Terr? What the fuck?” And I didn’t tell her to piss off, didn’t tell her to mind her own business, thank you, didn’t tell her off for snooping. I was only bitterly aware that I’d disappointed her.

Shame is a great tonic. Shame has a bad rap. It drove me through rehab, kept me clean, because I could not stand to disappoint that source of unreasoning and profound love that terrorized me so. Again – it was like having Mom back.

She healed me. I owe her my life.

And Mike – is my brother.

Their lives are in my hands. They put them there.

I watch RUBY for a while. Then I have an idea. A great idea. The substances for reviv are shot, yeah, but what about for cryo? I check. Mike and Sara can stay cold indefinitely. No ship will ever come this way, of course. We’re in the true anus galaxi out here, and this trip is a private venture, so no one is going to come looking for us.

After divorce, something like sixty percent of the newly created singles remarry within two years. They acquire stepchildren, and get to work procreating with their new spouses ASAP, when all logic dictates caution before re-entering the same snare.

If an elephant falls to poachers, the surviving herd will raise its young.

The cuckoo lays its egg in the nest of other birds, and they raise it as their own. My point is, every living creature instinctively seeks to rebuild its family.

So, orphaned, I rebuilt mine. We rebuilt it, with Sara the foundation, Mike the walls, and me – the curtains. Curtains you can do without, but a house without floor or walls is just stupid. Abomination.

I take off my shoes and socks. I set the timer for the freeze cycle. I climb into the cryo chamber between my brother and sister-mother and take their hands in mine. The lid clicks shut and the chamber floods with cryo gasses.

Through the glass, and through the porthole beyond that, I watch RUBY disappear as the gasses strangle my mind. We will sleep indefinitely. We will approach death in a descending curve, running almost but not quite parallel. A course drawing fractionally nearer and nearer to death but never reaching it – beholding the thing but never knowing it. Asymptote.

The End

Now I am sad. So are you. See you next time.

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Our heroes are captured by bestial savages. What’s next? Who knows? I do, and you could, too, if you but read a little further.

“But these croc-men can’t help their origin,” James protested. “They deserve an unbiased judgement. Remember: no one civilization is inherently superior to another. The idea of comparing a race or people to another and calling one ‘good’ and the other ‘bad’ is the imposition of race-hatred and anathema to science.”

Bellows’s eyes flickered from James to Avery. “What do you think, lad?” he asked, and Avery sensed that more than James’s opinion was at stake here.

Avery was quiet for a moment. “I stand by James,” he said at last.

Bellows was not to be deterred. “I say we exterminate the brutes.”

“What about educating and uplifting?” James interjected.

“When it’s possible. These are clearly unrepentant savages, beyond the help of white men. The best thing we can do for them is grind them under our heels.”

“Your logic dizzies me,” James said.

“Can you honestly say these degraded beasts are men?”

James rubbed his chin. “I agree that they exhibit some symptoms of isolated populations, such as overadaptation and inbreeding. I noted that many of them have the epicanthic folds indicative of the syndrome described by Doctor John Langdon Down – a common trait among so-called ‘degenerate’ peoples.”

“It’s like a Haggard story,” Avery said. “A lost peoples, fallen to barbarism…”

“Again, that is a scientific inaccuracy,” James said. “Barbarism and degeneracy are neither vices nor virtues. Mr. Bellows here seeks to assign moral values to the toss of genetic dice; dangerous, foolish, and scientifically absurd!”

“They’re monsters,” Bellow said bitterly.

Larsen spoke up, surprising them; they had forgotten the Swede’s presence. “I agree with Mr. Blankenship. I may not know much about ethno-anything, but I’ve traveled the world, and mixed with Kanakas, Venezuelans, Tahitians, the clean-limbed and able men of Vanuatu and Papao and Brisbane, stout men and true, Russians, Cubans, Chinese, Floridians by way of New York and Reykjavik, cutthroats from Sao Paulo, sinners from Madagascar, scoundrels and saints in skins of white, black, red, yellow, and every shade of brown, and I know one thing for sure. Folks can be reasonable once you learn how to talk to them. I learned a bit of Confucius from a Manchoo exile on a sealing schooner, and he told me the mark of a true gentleman: all within the four seas are his brothers.”

Silence hung over them for a moment. Avery broke it with a slow clap. “Well said, mate.”

The temple door crashed open and ten croc-men entered, led by a tall and powerful-looking specimen who wore a crown that, Avery realized with a shudder, was crafted of human bones and studded with human teeth. Around his neck he wore a small leather pouch on a string. They approached the cage, unlocked the door, flung it open, and grabbed Larsen, who happened to be closest, and pulled him from the cage while keeping the other men at bay with their spears. Avery would have rushed them and given his life if he thought it would free the others; perhaps the croc-men sensed this, and so most of the spears were directed his way. They closed the gate and left a youngling at guard.

Larsen struggled but made no cry, until he saw the knife. It was a single long piece of jagged flint, and the king wielded it viciously. The croc-men forced Larsen down on the altar and tore his shirt open. “They’ll kill him!” Avery said.

“We are witnessing some degradation of an eons-old Atlantean ritual,” James said. “I am fascinated even while I am mortified.”

“Sucks to that! I’m getting us out of here,” Avery said, and he put words into action; his mighty arms shot between the bars of the cage and snared the guard around his thick throat. Avery choked his enemy’s alarum to a gurgle, squeezing him between granite-hard forearms and the sturdy cage. The croc-man kicked and struggled without weakening; Avery could not squeeze the half-human’s windpipe through the armored skin.

Bellows appeared at his side. “Here, lad,” he grunted, and, reaching past Avery, sawed at the croc-man’s throat with the penknife. It opened in an incarnadine spray, and the croc-man expired after a frantic thrash. Avery dropped the corpse after taking the knife and spear.

The remaining croc-men were absorbed in their ritual. Fortunately for Avery (unfortunately for Larsen), Avery had assaulted the guard at the precise moment the king sank his knife into Larsen’s abdomen; Larsen’s tortured screams and the Stygian cackling of the croc-men covered the sounds of the scuffle.

“They’re removing his liver,” James said. “You know, the Egyptians considered the liver, rather than the heart, the seat of emotion. That’s another point in favor of my theory of a prehistoric pan-Mediterranean culture.”

With his fallen foe’s flint knife, Avery hacked at the cage lashings. A bar loosened, and he knocked it from the cage, weakening the structure and allowing him to work more effectively.

Avery reduced the cage to poles, splinters, and shreds of ancient rope, and burst free. He took the dead croc-man’s spear, brandished it, and addressed the king and his company with a ferocious yell: “Now you will know the price of slaying a helpless man!”

He leapt among his enemies and laid to. Cold fury possessed him; he would see Larsen’s murderers slain and allow no weapon to touch him before that happened. He killed three or four before he had his next thought. Avery put his spear through the soft underbelly of the king, rammed the butt into an oncoming croc-man, and delivered a vicious sideways kick to Red Stripe. He pulled the spear from the king’s belly and plunged it into a croc-man’s eye, then withdrew it with a fatal twist. He noted Bellows holding a croc-man off with the flint knife; in one smooth movement, Avery scooped a broken chunk of marble from the floor and hurled it at Bellows’s opponent, knocking him to the ground. Bellows jumped on him, knife-first, and then Avery’s attention was occupied by Red Stripe, who slashed diagonally with his spear, the point nicking Avery’s square chin.

“Let’s settle this like men,” Avery said. He dropped his spear and put his fists up. The croc-man stood nonplussed for a moment, then, comprehending, relinquished his weapon and charged at Avery, claws outstretched. Avery sidestepped his charge, tripped him, put a knee on Red Stripe’s back as he rolled on the ground and wrapped his arms around Red Stripe’s huge jaws. He pushed down with his knee and jerked back. Bones crunched.

“Well done, lad!” Bellows cried.

Avery glowered at him. “I killed a man. I don’t want congratulations.”

“Aye, you killed him, and it was lovely. ‘Let’s settle this like men’ – what was that all about, then? Sometimes, you need to feel it – ” Avery had never noticed how yellow the whites of Bellows’s eyes were, as if they had become stained along with his teeth in a half-century of hard living.

Abruptly, Avery said, “Jim, what’re you doing?” James had his magnox in a hundred pieces and was tinkering furiously.

He looked up, his eyes refocusing as his mind came back from the realm of the purely technical. “I’m sorry – I wanted to be of some help, but – this infernal weapon!”

The temple door groaned open, revealing a dozen more warriors. “No time for that, Jim,” Avery said. “Better make peace with your Indifferent Providence!” The soldiers advanced, spears held high.

“The very idea is a paradox!” James said. “There!” He raised the magnox. “Anticipate antilepton annihilation!”

The torches snuffed out simultaneously, plunging the room into darkness. Blue-white lightning blazed from the magnox and struck the croc-men; in the blackness, Avery swore he saw their dancing skeletons for half a moment, and the electrified image lingered white-hot on his eyeballs after the croc-men fell. The torches burst back to life, revealing the croc-men, dead and steaming, at their feet.

After a few moments’ silence, James said, “I didn’t expect it to work so well. I must say I’m shocked.”

“Not half so bad as them, mate!” Bellows said, and Avery burst into laughter. James laughed, and Bellows joined in. They laughed until their sides hurt.

“To digress,” James said, wiping tears from his eyes, “we’re trapped deep underground, likely under the surface of the lake. We’re surrounded by hundreds of hostile beast-men, probably alert and bloodthirsty, and however many thralls they can set against us. We must evade them and find a way to reach the surface.”

“I say we exterminate the brutes!” Bellows said, slamming his fist into his palm. “Come on, lads. You saw what they did to Larsen. They are creatures without compassion, without conscience. You can’t call them humans anymore than you can call a gorilla a bicycle tire.”

Avery was doubtful. “I don’t know, sir. They walk on two legs, and, as Jim says, they’re descended from humans…”

“Bollocks!” Bellows said. “They’re monsters. I address your attention to poor Larsen.” Avery did not look. “What do you say, Jim?”

James scratched his temple with the magnox. “I withhold my opinion on their humanity. I do not enjoy the slaughter of animals, monsters, or men. But they have placed themselves between us and liberation, and we cannot be responsible for the consequences. That said, I would avoid shedding blood however we can.”

Avery shook his head. “I feel on the first step to something dark and unfathomable,” he said, “but I must agree. We’ll do what is needed, and we’ll breathe British air again!”

Bellows grinned and hefted his spear. “That’s the spirit, my son! Let’s skewer these bastards!”

#

The croc-men charged again, and, like the last wave, they fell twitching and smoking as bolts of electricity cooked their flesh and burst their eyeballs. James was the conductor, the magno-ray his baton, and the screams and snarls of their enemies the many-voiced requiem. The blue bolt cut a swath through the croc-men and their armed slaves, and where it touched it left smoking ruin.

“I say,” said Avery, “I haven’t seen so much scorched flesh since my last holiday on the seaside!”

James laughed and replied, “Fortunately for them, the magnox delivers a relatively swift death, though that death is terribly excruciating in recompense for its brevity. An unintentional quirk of its construction, I assure you.” He blasted a squadron of murderous croc-men as they lifted their spears to throw. Their blackened corpses crumpled to the ground.

Meanwhile Bellows and Avery worked with their spears, killing any croc-men who slipped past James’s electric web of death. Though the croc-men were stronger and tougher, they lacked skill; for years, they had fought nothing fiercer than an obstinate slave, and it told on their poor coordination and virtually nonexistent tactics. Avery had no difficulty turning their strength into clumsiness, and his superior agility allowed him to overcome multiple croc-men at once.

A croc-man of great size broke the ranks and ducked a magno-beam. His size bespoke many years, and his animal eyes gleamed cunningly. He beat his scaly chest and howled a tirade at them; Avery listened for a moment, fascinated, then ran his spear through the roof of the croc-man’s mouth, lifting him upward with the tip and ramming the flint head into his foe’s septum pellucidum, via the frontal lobe and gyrus cinguli.

“What was he saying?” Avery asked, as he struggled to withdraw his spear.

“That he remembered the golden days of Crocodopolis, when man lay with croc in peace and harmony, and learning was revered above all – a golden era, when philosopher-crocs walked with gods in the many-tiered gardens, and all was light and goodness, a civilization against which Athens was an anthill and Troy a pigpen.”

“A right shame, that,” Avery said. “Look sharp, Jim, there’s a whole troop of the buggers!”

The blue lightning crackled, and fifteen more of the croc-men fell dead. By the size of their jaws and number of teeth, Avery guessed that some of them were mere adolescents.

“I haven’t seen so many butchered reptiles since turtle soup night at the Savoy!” Avery said jovially.

#

“The problem of our escape remains,” Avery said, after the croc-men were scattered and fleeing. “We’re under more tons of stone than Samson in the temple, and under more fathoms of water than Sir Francis Drake. Can you rig us up a bathysphere? Or perhaps a bathyscaphe?”

James shook his head. “I have no salvage from which to work. The only post-Stone Age implement I’ve found amongst these sad degenerates is the king’s pouch, and it contains nothing more than… a whistle.” James piped it disconsolately.

As the shrill sonorations of the whistle faded away, Avery heard a low rumbling roar from the end of the chamber, the end through which they had entered a few hours ago. An alien sensation gripped him; a second later he realized that, for the first time in his life, he was experiencing fear – for the rumbling roar heralded the arrival of none other than Eustace, king of beasts!

The leviathan came rampaging into the room, jaws open. Avery’s heart skipped a beat at the sight of those teeth, measurable in handspans, and he braced himself to fight as best he could. Under normal circumstances, he would welcome this contest, but he was poorly armed, and, after personally dispatching almost a hundred mutant croc-men, slightly fatigued. Still, he would not go quietly. Eustace would work for his dinner.

The monster was almost upon him.

James blew the whistle again.

Eustace stopped inches before his saberlike fangs rammed into Avery’s skull. His jaws gaped. He seemed to be waiting for something.

“By Gad!” Avery crowed. “Jim, you’ve hypnotized him, like a Delhi snake charmer!”

“Impossible,” James said. “Reptiles have no true ears; they sense vibrations in the ground. It’s the waving motion of the charmer’s flute that hypnotizes, not the actual sound.”

“Yet we’re unchewed! After all, he’s trained to carry men to and from the surface. We’ll just step inside and away we go. By Gad, Jim, I knew you’d get us out of this somehow!”

“Yes, well… genius, you know.”

“I’m not chomping at the bit to do this, exactly.” Avery tentatively stepped onto Eustace’s slippery tongue. “But it seems our only escape. Gentlemen, kindly step inside the crocodile.”

Bellows shook his head. “I never thought I’d hear that again. All right, lads, old men first.” Bellows stepped into Eustace’s maw; a spasm of the enormous tongue, and he was gone.

“Take a deep breath and hold it,” Avery said. “I’ll see you topside, mate!” He threw himself into the pink throat.

#

Blinking and dripping, they emerged from Eustace’s gorge and into the bright sunlight on the Tanganyika lake shore. Avery patted the crocodile’s snout.

“Thanks, old boy. To think I wanted to shoot you, you magnificent animal. Jim, think how clever he must be to play the cabman! What training, and what brains behind this scaly skull! It just goes to show, even the roughest-looking creatures can be almost like people at times. So long, chum!” Eustace slid back into the water.

“You might have said ‘see you again,’” James said. “I intend on returning to this place, better prepared and better equipped, and wresting its secrets. We have much yet to learn from Crocodopolis.”

“And the Royal Geographic Society will be happy to help, lad,” Bellows said. He extended his hand. “Or should I say Fellow Blankenship?”

“I say,” James murmured, dumbfounded, as they shook hands. “Quite an honor, quite an honor.”

“Now,” Avery said, “just where are we? He didn’t deposit us at our camp, for sure. We must be a fair piece south.”

“Judging by the flora,” James said, studying a blade of grass on the bank, “I’d say we’re on the Congo shore.”

“Aye,” agreed Bellows. “And these corpses bear the paint and jewelry of the Bakongo. We must be on the Congo side.”

They followed his gesture; the grassy land stretching away from the shore was thick with fresh corpses, perhaps sixty of them. Blood covered the grass so thickly that the stalks bent with its weight. Judging by the screams and moans, not all the men, women, and children were quite dead yet. A few very tall men, whom Bellows identified as highland cannibals, walked among the Bakongo with machetes, hacking off hands and stuffing them in pouches.

“For currency,” Bellows explained. “They can give the severed hands to the Belgians instead of meeting their rubber or ivory quotas. A good system, practical and efficient.”

A white man approached them warily. He was dressed in khakis and carried a rifle. Bellows gave a cry of joy at seeing him. “Henry Morton Stanley, I presume?” he said, his hand outstretched.

“Why, yes,” said the fellow, in a Welsh accent. “Pleased as hell to see you, Bellows.” They made introductions. “But, pray tell, what are you doing in the Congo?”

“Oh, a little field work for the Royal Geographic Society. You?”

“Working for the Belgians now. His Majesty Leopold the Second owns all the lands between the lake and the western branch of the Congo River, where the Frogs are. Administration sent me out here to stop an uprising. They were turning violent, these Bakongo, and His Majesty won’t take any chances with the rubber quotas. So administration gave me a detachment of these cannibals to put them down before anyone was hurt.”

“And thank God for that,” Avery said.

Stanley glanced at Avery, then back to Bellows. “Nasty business, sometimes, but it’s all for their own good. The International African Association’s bringing money into the region, money, and doctors, teachers, and missionaries. They provide the rubber and ivory, and we’ll do our part to bring them into the nineteenth century.”

“God’s work,” Bellows said.

“This is a damned frightful country,” Avery said.

“I was not always convinced of the wisdom of interfering with foreign cultures,” James said. They strolled through the field of massacre as he pontificated. “But if the experience of the past two days has taught me anything, it’s that these savages will enslave, butcher, or sacrifice each other in weird liver-excising rituals. They need a guiding hand, and if it needs be European, it may as well be Belgian! I always liked the Belgians – smart, efficient fellows, hard workers and good organizers. I’m pleased to see the Congo in good hands, Mr. Stanley, and I daresay it augurs well for this country’s future, and other nations lucky enough to fall under European influence! I see nothing but good things to come for Africa!”

The End

Hahaha… oh, man. That’s rough. But, seriously, colonialism is one of the worst crimes perpetrated by man, and Leopold II’s Congo is the ugliest example. (Elucidation is a wiki search away, dear readers… oh, fine, I’ll do your work for you.)

Anyway, if you’d like to argue about this buggaroo of an ending, send me an email and we’ll talk about it. See you next week!

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A slightly shorter segment today, the better to whet your appetite - for murder!

Last time, our heroes uncovered strange and perplexing clues as to Crocodopolis’s origin; they confronted the dread reptilian menace known as Eustace, and now they appear to be dead. What’s next?

…

In the milky darkness, James heard the voice of the man who could only be Francis Bacon.

“Greetings, apostle.”

“Apostle?” James squinted. “I assure you, sir, while I may greatly admire your invention of the scientific method, I worship at no man’s altar.”

Bacon chuckled, rippling his lacy collar. “Your subconscious summoned me. It’s amusing how even the most steadfast nontheist will call on a greater force in time of distress.”

“Greater – greater force?” James stammered. “Listen, you foppish Elizabethan, I’ve invented more at the age of twenty-five than you had at sixty-five, when, I might add, you died from going out in the cold without a scarf! Some polymath you are!”

Bacon bristled. “You whelp! I perfected the process of inductive reasoning! I wrote three of Shakespeare’s plays!”

“Oh, Coriolanus, a triumph named in the same breath as Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet…”

“Fine! I won’t impart my dazzling insight from the afterlife! You’re on your own, you insouciant cur!” Bacon receded into the haze, and James snorted, glad to be rid of the intruder and able to devote his concentration to the difficulty at hand. He was dreaming – one needn’t be the Viscount of Saint Alban’s to know that – and his dreams were getting stranger by the second. Now, he dreamt that a muscular rhythm propelled him through a sticky passage toward a pool of light, almost as if he were being vomited forth; but his agile mind quickly rejected this possibility. He scraped across a row of teeth, which seemed surprisingly real and painful, and then he was floundering on a sandy floor. Strong hands lifted him.

“Avery!” James cried. “You just woke me from the most peculiar dream. If only I had my somnophone!”

Avery gave him a Dawesian grin. “No dream, mate. I’m dripping with croc spittle as well.” And it was so. James heard a terrific croaking belch, and a litany of fiery curses announced Bellows’s presence. Avery rushed to the old man, and James peered into the darkness beyond their ring of torchlight; that was definitely Eustace sliding into the water.

“By the flaming rings of Saturn!” James gasped. “Were we really transported via crocodile?” Avery shrugged. “And it’s still more comfortable than the Underground. Faster, too. There’s Larsen,” he said.

“Aye,” Larsen said, staggering to his feet and wiping mucus from his eyes.

“But where are we?” Avery said.

James cleaned his glasses, which had miraculously remained on his face through the ordeal. The torches illuminated a small chamber sealed at one end by a ponderous stone door, terminating at the other in the watery passage down which Eustace had vanished. Hieroglyphs covered the marble walls. “By the architecture – Crocodopolis.”

“Blimey!” Avery offered.

“I don’t care if we’re in bloody Shangri-la,” Bellows growled. “Nobody commandeers Archibald G. Bellows, F.G.S., Q.G.M., C.B.E., and gets away with it. You retain your firearm, lad?”

“No, sir,” Avery said. “I lost it somewhere between ingress and egress.”

They took stock. They had retained a penknife, James’s magnox, two cheroots, and Bellows’s flask. Larsen had a tin of pickled herring.

“I say we swim for it,” Avery said.

James checked him. “Not a chance. If we’re really in Crocodopolis, the water pressure must be tremendous. No doubt there’s a lock at the end of this passage to equalize the pressure, or else our skulls would be imploding at this very moment. If you could clear that lock – and I doubt the powers that opened it for Eustace would open it for you – then you would merely have the pleasure of instant death.”

“Then we go through that door.”

“How? It must weigh a ton.” James reviewed their supplies. “If I had a bit of manganese, I could fashion an ion cutter…”

“I’ll just put my shoulder to it,” Avery said, and did so. He strained until sweat beaded on his forehead, to no avail.

“Calm, Mr. Dawes,” James said. “Whoever brought us here will surely return soon enough – or else, between these torches and our own respiration, we’d exhaust the oxygen in this small room and suffocate within an hour!” He laughed. “That should comfort you.”

“You’re right, Jim. I feel better already!”

The door groaned and began to open; Avery tensed, and James recognized the tension. “Stand down, soldier,” he said. “We don’t stand a chance of overpowering them – let’s see what they want first, anyway.” James rubbed his hands. “I’m quite a bit excited to meet our ruthless captors. Imagine the secrets they might hold! Did my sketchbook survive the trip?” James began to pat his pockets, then froze in horror.

Their captors entered the room, nightmare shapes in the shadow of the doorway, and not much better in the torchlight. Avery remembered the impression that he had dismissed as fantasy or illusion – and here it was in the flesh. Bipedal in construction, with a large, saurian head, counterbalanced by a muscular, ridged tail – crocodiles with human ambitions, walking upright and speaking human speech!

“Where do they fit in your evolution theories, Jim?” Avery whispered.

“I sincerely doubt they are the product of natural design.” James was white-faced.

Only Bellows retained control of his nerve. “Ugly bastards, aren’t they?” he growled.

Four of the croc-men came in. They carried flint-headed spears. One of them, whom Avery assumed was a leader, had a red-tinted stripe on his back; he carried a rusty iron axe. He addressed the humans in a rolling, growly speech that, though distorted, sounded almost human.

“Jim?” Avery asked.

“It’s strange,” Jim said. “Similar to the proto-Greek of the hieroglyphs, but distorted with the passage of millennia and the inadequacy of their tongues and lips; a workable comparison is our English to Chaucer’s. But I think I can manage.” James replied, tentatively at first, then with growing confidence as his tongue and mind became accustomed to the strange language.

The leader registered surprise – the reptilian face was hardly expressive, but Avery read animals and people alike with ease – and grumbled a question to James. James laughed and replied.

“He wants to know how I can decipher their strange language. I told him I used to have a Cockney manservant, but I fear the reference is lost on him.” James doubled over as a croc-man drove the butt of his spear into James’s stomach. Avery tensed. The leader, whom Avery named Red Stripe, gurgled and growled into James’s ear.

“He reminds me that laughter is the privilege of the ruling class,” James gasped. “What an interesting taboo.”

The croc-men jabbed at the four humans with their crude weapons, prodding them through the door. Avery tolerated the jabs; now was not the moment. He was sure that he and Bellows could overpower at least one of the terrible beings, and Larsen looked like he could hold his own, but James might be killed before Avery could do anything. Best to bide his time.

James scanned the torchlit walls as they walked. “The architecture is the same as that above – marble construction in the Greek mode. Neither Corinthian, nor Athenian, yet a style that combines elements of both – and covered with these runes halfway between Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, describing proto-Greek. It seems, Dawes, that this culture is a synthesis of all Mediterranean and Fertile Crescent cultures of the ancient world!” He mused for a moment. “Yet populated by monsters.”

“You’re saying that they collected bits and pieces from two thousand years of history and combined them in the heart of Africa,” Avery said. “That’s a bit far-fetched, don’t you think?”

“But that means…” James pounded his fist into his palm, startling the guards, who jabbed him accordingly. “I’ve fallen into my characteristic error, Dawes, and applied too much brainpower to the problem. The blunt instrument of your brain has smashed the barrier which the incisive scalpel of my own mind could only slice to entangling shreds. Kudos, my good man. What you have suggested is that this culture is the common origin of the ancient world! Africa is the cradle of mankind, after all!” He rubbed his chin. “Yet why the monsters?”

“Perhaps it’s like your Darwin fellow says,” Avery suggested. “Evolution.”

“And those with crocodile-like features have a greater chance to reproduce? No, Avery, natural selection could never bridge this gap.”

“Thank God. I’d hate to think these beasties might have come from men.” Avery shuddered. “Or vice-versa.”

The tunnel opened to a large chamber, lit by hundreds of torches, the light magnified by shining mirrors. Hundreds of croc-men moved in their daily business. Some pulled slaves on leashes. Avery peered at them and uttered a cry of surprise. “Their slaves are human!”

“Just the little lake-dwelling niggers,” Bellows said.

“I suppose if Eustace has lived for hundreds of years, and has the training or intelligence to capture people as he captured us, then the many reported devourments were actually abductions!”

A few large buildings dominated the chamber. Avery had visited enough lost civilizations to recognize them as temples and palaces. Some of the croc-men lived in brick or mud houses around the foot of these buildings, but many simply slept in the mud. Their captors directed them to the grandest of the temples. They passed before a very worn statue of colossal proportions. It depicted a human form, and Avery, who had scrabbled around many ruins, put its age at – very, very old indeed. It stretched almost to the ceiling of the chamber forty feet above.

They entered the temple. Inside were a large, flat altar, the ubiquitous hieroglyphs, and two stone tablets on the far wall. Something about the altar warranted a second glance; Avery noted with disgust that dark dried blood caked its surface.

The croc-men herded them into a wooden pen at the rear of the temple, near the tablets. Red Stripe growled something. James’s face lit up and he bowed as the croc-men retreated.

“He says we’re to meet the king,” James said. “And receive, additionally, a very great honor, an honor beyond our comprehension.”

“Meaning, no doubt, that they’re going to sacrifice us to their heathen gods,” Bellows said.

James’s face fell. “Very interesting from an anthropological viewpoint,” he said. “Human sacrifice is astoundingly widespread in antiquity – the Aztec and Maya of the New World, of course, and, occasionally, in the classical world, though in extreme circumstances. Iphigenia, for example, perished at the mandate of the gods; however, in the Egyptian Old Kingdom, and even in the Hebrew culture…”

Avery tested the bars of the cage. They were lashed together with time-hardened leather thongs; they might as well have been iron.

“One thing I notice,” Avery said, “is these gents didn’t build Crocodopolis.”

“Of course not,” James said. “They are necessarily the descendants.”

“And however Crocodopolis was built, they lost the means. Did you notice? Most of them don’t even live in houses. They just wallow in the mud. They’ve lost civilization.”

“Well, if one equates standards of physical shelter with civilization, yes. I follow your point.”

“And Red Stripe has an iron weapon, but it’s older than he is by far. I’m thinking, if these chaps are a branch of the Atlantis family tree, it fell off and withered up.”

James frowned. “I hate to pass a qualitative sentence on an entire people like that, especially on so brief an acquaintance.”

“I agree with the lad,” Bellows said. “They’re a bunch of degenerate bastards.”

“That isn’t quite what I meant…” Avery said.

“They should never have crawled from their pit!” Bellows said. “These parodies of man – these grotesqueries! Walking on two legs, like humans!”

James studied the tablets. “I believe they may still have a claim to the species,” James said. “These tablets appear to be a creation story of some sort. See, the hieroglyphs have greater refinement than those of the temple; if I am correct (and I always am), they’re much older than the temple. Here is the word I translate as ‘Ensi-ka,’ and you want to call ‘Atlantis’. Here is the name for their people – again, the link to ‘Ensi-ka.’ It translates as those sent forth, to colonize and – hmm – uplift the savages of these lands. Yet distant ‘Ensi-ka’ was lost, and in the same cataclysm, this city, Erdu-kan, was submerged. Rather than abandon the uninhabitable city, they used – this translates as ‘magic,’ but undoubtedly they refer to some lost technology – to breed with the crocodiles.” James blinked. “I must have read that wrong.”

“Makes sense to me,” Bellows said. “A degenerate race born of bestiality and black magic. They’re as bad as the bloody French!”

Ha! Those French are the worst!
(Fun PowerReader™ fact: Eustace is based on a real-life killer crocodile named Gustave.)
Next, prepare for the thrilling conclusion of “Crocodopolis!”

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It was a beautiful sunset, and Randi had left me to my own devices, and our bungalow has a little refrigerator filled with beer, and pistachios make one thirsty, so I consumed bottles equaling 1.4 liters. Our porch faces the Gulf of Thailand, and the sun was melting into its golden and purple constituents over the horizon, one of those moments of breathtaking heartbreaking beauty that make you realize how insignificant you really are. I knew Randi would want to share that feeling, so I got the camera and captured it digitally. Then, because I left the camera on the exposed porch, it began to rain torrentially.

The power went out and we waited in the dark for the taxi that would take us across the island to the famous Full Moon Party. When it arrived, I ran skidding and slipping through the darkness, and on the porch of our resort’s little eatery, I slid and lashed out to save myself, punching a statue squarely in the jaw. I yowled in pain, to the indescribable delight of the diners, and we loaded into the taxi. Taxis in Thailand are covered pickup trucks. You ride in the back with as many fellow passengers as the driver can find. They like to maximize their profits here. (Who doesn’t?) The necessarily harrowing passages do much to create a sense of camaraderie among the passengers. When we disembarked from our last drive (again, through torrential rain, up and down mountainous jungle roads), I gave my co-daredevils a bow and a grand wave: “Goodbye, everyone! Enjoy your journey, and good luck!” The response was enthusiastic and heart-warming.

On this jaunt, we journeyed with two Australasian girls, who were quite pleasant. Then we rolled our eyes as Mr. Fucking Females and his friends climbed in.

Let me tell you about this gentleman. On our first day on Koh Phangan, we were enjoying the blissful view from our porch hammocks, unwinding from the hectic pace of Koh Tao, letting our spirits dissolve as spirits dissolved us. It was another moment of stillness and utter beauty and quietude, one of those moments when you forget that our oceans are turning to acid, the economy is turning to shit, democracy is turning to fascism. The sea was perfectly flat and perfectly blue, and palm fronds moved gently in the wind.

Into this idyllic scene comes two young Norwegian fellows (I’ll go ahead and tell you they were Norwegian, though we didn’t learn this until later). They grasp Chang beers, they walk onto the beach, and one of them says loudly, in accented English, “Where’s the fuckin’ females?” Randi and I rolled our eyes at this crassness, which became inexplicable as they then conversed amongst themselves in Norwegian. Why would he say that one phrase in English? Then an older woman, presumably their mother, came up and spoke to them, and they spoke harshly to her, argued a bit, and she huffed away. My opinion sank lower. I can abide the Supreme Court selling our democracy, I can abide Turkey disavowing the Armenian genocide, but I cannot abide young men who disrespect their mother. The eccentricity of this character’s jackassery was only accentuated when he repeated the phrase at least twice more within my hearing. He was not even looking around for females when he said it. He said it once while walking down the beach, looking at the sand, and once while splashing in the water. I concluded that he had heard the line in a movie or TV show, loved it, and committed it to memory.

So. We rode with him and his two friends. They were actually quite pleasant, if enthusiastically vulgar. The subject turned to Bangkok, and, inevitably, live sex shows, on which subject their enthusiasm was only matched by their explicitness. At first I was determined to adopt Social Stance B, which is noncommittal affability masking subtle mockery and brutal judgement. But the beer had left my mind a-glow, and we had the bond engendered by facing death in a Thailand taxi, so after good-naturedly encouraging them to throw their empty bottles at passing cars for a while, I tapped Mr. Fucking Females on the knee and said, “You’re Mister - ” I was about to say “Fucking Females”, but he grabbed my hand, pumped it and said, “Paul. Pleasure!” with such open friendliness that I forgave him his faults. As, indeed, I would hope others would forgive me mine. Then we had several rounds of shouting, “Party party party!”, an old Norwegian custom.

Then with a festive sliding of tires in mud at high speed, we were there, at the biggest party in the world.

Today the wound is quite nasty. It is a trio of deep gouges backed by a purple-black bruise. Randi, in a mood of playful, experimental sadism, put tiger balm on it, causing miniature volcanoes of pain to fire ash-clouds of agony into my brain. But I have suffered worse than this, and I will suffer worse yet ere I die.

We were surprised to see the Norwegians in the cafe at an early hour, as we had assumed they would stay at the party much later than us, and rise consequently later. They had; Mr. FF came to our table and asked if we had enjoyed ourselves, and we responded noncommittally, having reverted to SS-B, but his inquiry was really an excuse to blurt his tragic story:

“Yeah, I was fine until some guy beat me down and took everything I had just walk up to me and BAM took my wallet took my smoke!”

We expressed our sympathies, and he made a gesture indicative of the lot of man: to suffer without knowing why; to be cursed with reason yet not with wisdom; to struggle to assert one’s identity and dignity in an unfeeling and merciless world; to be crushed in the winepress of society; to live, to live and then to die!

I was so despondent that I had another cup of tea.

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I think you’ll find today’s installment thrilling. Polish your monocles, swirl your brandy skeptically, prepare for intrigue.

James busied himself with directing the offloading of the fragile and complex equipment: a pair of diving suits of his own invention, capable of withstanding the great pressures of the lake’s fantastic depth; a pneumatic harpoon; instruments that could analyze the level of sediment accretion on an artifact or fossil and name its date of origin within two months; even a small camera, also of Blankenship’s invention, that captured images on a rubber-celluloid compound rather than on gelatine plates, and so could operate underwater. By concentrating on the proper care of these marvelous machines, James was able to ignore that the Bellerophon, his pride and joy, was now a very expensive part of the tropical scenery.

By morning their small crew had unloaded the ship and set up camp on a patch of level ground not far from the rocky beach. Avery shot a wild pig and they had a good breakfast. Thereafter, Bellows picked up his rifle and vanished into the brush without a word to anyone. Avery watched him.

“Let him make the acquaintance of the natives or whatever he intends,” James said. “We have work to do. Fortunately the steam launch was undamaged in the attack.”

“How will we ever find this sunken city of yours, Jim?” Avery wondered. “This lake must be a hundred miles long.”

“Closer to five hundred, actually, and forty miles across at its widest point. The second largest lake in the world, after Baikal in Russia. Though the climate here is far more agreeable, I’m sure. A thorough survey has yet to be conducted. Though Sir Burton estimated its depth at a third of a mile, his techniques were rather rudimentary. Ergo, our secondary objective will be to construct a rough map of the bottom of this great lake.”

“And to bag Eustace.”

“Of course. But to our greater purpose, I have constructed – this.” James opened a crate and brushed aside the straw packing, revealing a shiny metal sphere.

“It’s brilliant, Jim. What does it do?”

“When submerged in water, it emits a tone on the frequency of six to seven hundred Hertz, and detects echoes of the same. The frequency and trajectory of these echoes, when processed through a calculating machine of astounding power and alacrity, will tell us the shape of the lake floor, and – one hopes – enable us to find the lost city.”

“And where is this calculating machine?”

James smiled and tapped his temple.

Avery laughed. “You really have no need of praise, do you?”

“I enjoy it nonetheless.”

Avery, James, and Larsen set out in the launch. The lake stretched out of sight in all directions, blue as a lapis lazuli, bright as a bowl of sunlight. Fishing craft moved sedately on the water. “Criminy, it feels like we’re back on the Med,” Avery said.

“Forgive me saying so, sir, but only a non-sailor could say such a thing,” Larsen said.

“What do you mean by that?”

“After crossing the Atlantic, to a true sailor, the Mediterranean becomes a lake; after crossing the Pacific, the Atlantic becomes a lake and the Mediterranean a placid pond. This…” He gestured at the vast water. “While grand, it’s nothing. It’s calm and still as a parkland puddle. We might as well be in a paddle boat shaped like a swan.”

Avery grinned. “You mistake me for a landlubber, Larsen. I’ve sailed around the Cape – both of them – to India and back.”

“Sailed,” Larsen said, “or merely traveled by ship?”

“Ah, you’ve got me there,” Avery said. “Still, there’s no denying that Tanganyika is quite the puddle!”

Larsen shrugged.

James lowered his sonic emitter on a boom. From the globe snaked two wires that terminated in rubber cups. He placed these over his ears, and readied a pencil and a pad of paper. He nodded to Avery, who picked up a small wooden box connected to the globe by a thick bundle of wires. From the box protruded a crank, which Avery spun furiously. James listened for a moment, then scribbled madly on his paper, producing a lengthy list of numbers. After a few minutes, he nodded, and Avery stopped cranking.

“Did it work?” he asked.

“I may have Verdi’s Anvil Chorus ringing in my ears for the next few weeks,” Jame said, “but I think I have a set of data from which to work. Let’s try again. My good Larsen, take us a quarter-mile upstream, or uplake, or whatever it is. That direction.” Larsen complied, and they took another reading. By lunchtime James’s pad was full, and they had traveled perhaps fifty miles south. They waited for an hour while James tabulated his results and sketched a rough map. Avery fished, and brought up a half-dozen brown and white cichlids. “There it is,” James said. “It’s hardly beautiful, but I’ve had to adjust my expectations. It seems that this lake has a high degree of stratification, and the bottom layers are almost entirely anoxic, which interferes somewhat with the operation of the sonic emitter. However, I’ve found that while Burton’s guess as to the mean depth of this lake are correct, he could not have imagined the distribution; I have found at least one point where the depth exceeds a mile!”

Avery whistled. Larsen grunted.

“And what of our sunken city?”

“Nothing – yet. It’s a big lake. We have time for a few more readings, though. Let’s put a good distance behind us before we take another.” They steamed for the better part of an hour before James called a halt. “We’ll try it here.” They deployed the emitter, and James listened, his pencil poised over the pad. “There’s something different in the echoes here,” he said. “The water is less stratified, though the depth is consistent. Perhaps an underground stream or spring feeds into the lake here. And the echoes are slightly broken and baffled. The surface is less regular. Which may mean – Larsen, take us a hundred yards east.” They took another reading. Delight spread on James’s face. “Heureka! I am in a state of having found it!”

“Shall we don our suits?” Avery asked.

“Don away, my good chap, don away!”

Larsen helped them into the bulky suits, which were tethered by stout cables to the launch. Larsen would have to haul them up; it would be quite impossible to swim two thousand feet upwards in the heavy suits. James thrice-checked the seals and toggled his wireless voice-telegraph. “Avery?” His own voice was fuzzy and harsh in his helmet. “Can you hear me?”

Avery’s baritone came booming back at him: “The moon on the ocean was dimmed by a ripple…”

“Yes, we all adore that song. I think the voice-telegraph operates satisfactorily. Prepare for the plunge.”

Avery picked up the pneumatic harpoon.

“Oh,” said James, “I assure you we will be quite unmolested by aquafauna at our intended depth.”

“Never into the breach unarmed,” Avery said.

James shrugged. His comrade had some eccentricities. “Into the breach, then!” he said, and, holding his breath despite the suit’s oxygenerators, he closed his eyes and stepped into the water.

#

Avery sank like a stone, the suit’s weight pulling him quickly into the darkening depths, from the bright aquamarine near the surface to the lightless void below. He fell for minutes that seemed like hours, the waterproof torch of James’s suit the only visible thing in the blackness of the lake. It came as a shock when his feet finally touched solid earth; he had forgotten their destination in the sightless, soundless freefall. James landed nearby.

He ignited his chemical torch, and light blazed from the top of his helmet, showing mounds of stones. “Not much stirring,” he said.

“No.” James’s voice crackled in his ears. “Precious little can survive at this depth, and without much oxygen, there is little incentive to venture here.”

“Not even weeds,” Avery said. “Bloody difficult to move, too.”

“That’s the weight of a half-mile of water on you. Let the suit’s motors do the work; you have merely to suggest movements. Now, the ruins!”

They lumbered toward the toppled heaps of stone. Certainly a city had stood there long ago; the stones were large, some almost colossal in scale, and even centuries or millennia of immersion had not erased the work of human hands. “This was definitely a support column of some larger structure,” James said, shining his light the length of a fallen pillar that Avery had mistaken for a bump in the lake bed. James blasted grime from the surface with his wrist-mounted waterjets. “Marble!” he said, astonished. “It’s utterly impossible, but I recognize the fine grain and near-translucence of Parian marble, from the Island of Paros – in Greece. Avery, how did the most prized stone of the classical world come to Lake Tanganyika?”

“Not by the night train, that’s for sure.”

“I agree with the gist of your remark, if not the wording. Most curious. But you see here, we have definite spiral fluting. It looks almost Athenian – but not quite. This was carved by no instrument as crude as a chisel.” James photographed the pillar and they moved on.

Their lights revealed only discrete segments of the city, but Avery was able to outline a composite in his head. No structure remained standing; whatever time-swallowed cataclysm had formed the lake had also shattered the city, and so they had the difficulty of mentally recombining the tremendous slabs of stone and the shattered columns into an image of what might have been. Avery imagined a city perhaps a mile across, very grand in its day, with broad streets radiating like spokes from a central temple or government building. There probably had been hundreds or thousands of wood or mud or brick houses outside of the city proper, but they had not stood the test of time.

James gasped over every new discovery. “I really don’t know what to think of this, Avery. The materials are from the northern Mediterranean, and some of the architecture reflects the classical, as well – namely the columns, where we see a corkscrew fluting that might be the ancestor of the Solomonic design.” His camera flashed. “But there are constant arguments to the contrary, such as these inscriptions, which appear to be, insanely, cuneiform, and the bas-reliefs resemble hieroglyphs more than… Are you listening?”

Avery was paying heed not to any physical signal, but to that instinct that had saved him from a tiger’s lunge in the jungles of India, or from a pit viper’s strike in the Australian outback – the prickling of hair at the back of his neck that told him that here was danger.

He flashed his light in all directions, but saw only the silent stones. As James had said, nothing could possibly survive at that depth. Yet for a moment he glimpsed the figure of a man, silhouetted against a white stone, and then it was gone. His eyes were playing tricks on him, no doubt, distorting the form he had expected into a bent and misshapen creature, but the vision was chilling nonetheless: a man’s limbs and torso, but a saurian snout, a thrashing tail…

“Avery! Pay attention, man! We stand in the greatest archaeological find of the century! Karnak is a paltry pile of bricks beside this! Troy is an uninteresting jumble of shacks!” Avery noted a familiar manic excitement in James’s voice. “Let’s investigate the central temple.”

It was disappointing, at least in Avery’s opinion. The nexus of the great city ought to be more than a broad dais and a few broken pillars, he felt, but they found little more. James, however, evinced no disappointment. He bent over the dais and photographed busily.

“That strange cuneiform spirals from the center. I can read most languages written in the Sumerian system – Hittite, Hurrian, Akkadian, and, of course, Elamite – but this appears to depict no language even remotely related.” Avery detected wonder and consternation mixed in his voice. “In fact, it’s not even pictographic – it seems phonetic, an innovation that came rather late to the Sumerian languages. But the verb structure appears almost Hellenic. Neptune’s beard, Avery, it’s Greek!”

Avery tried to whistle, but it came out as a burst of static in the voice-telegraph. “And what does that mean?”

“It means my Fellowship is secured, for one thing. The Greek alphabet surfaced in the ninth century before Christ. This is a version of proto-Greek rendered phonetically in cuneiform, which first appeared four millennia back and two thousand miles away. This suggests a common origin of the two languages!”

“But can you read it?”

“Maybe. Wait a moment.” He cleared grime with the waterjets. “A recurring ‘word’ - I use ‘word’ loosely. It’s more of a concept that only gains definition when paired with other ‘words’. The language allows for a good degree of ambiguity, as you see here.” He tapped the dais.

“Right-o.”

“I think, in this usage, the ‘word’ may be pronounced ‘Ensi-ka.’ It seems like a place name, perhaps a city or kingship.”

“The name of this city?”

“Doubtful. It distinctly uses an honorific case, implying something greater than this city. Perhaps this is a settlement or colony of Ensi-ka. Strange.” James inspected the rim of the dais. “The rest of these ruins are encrusted in centuries of grime, but it’s been disturbed here.”

“Jim, old boy, I am thinking of the better part of valor right now.”

“I assure you that we are perfectly safe at this depth. But I’ve learned to trust your primordial cunning, and I have more data than I can process right now. So long as these ancient stones promise to remain where they are, I can force myself to adjourn for the night.” He signaled Larsen through the voice-telegraph, and a moment later the clinking chains pulled them the fathoms to the surface.

#

James chatted excitedly to Larsen about their discovery the length of the ride back to camp, and Larsen responded with characteristic grunts, finally saying, “Pardon, Mr. Blankenship, sir, I just pilot the boat. This archaeo-business doesn’t interest me much.” James blinked, mouth open, having totally forgotten that he was talking to an individual rather than his own imagination.

They beached the launch alongside the wreckage of the Bellerophon. “Let’s look up Bellows,” Avery suggested, “and have a drop of summat hot.”

James shuddered. “You mean ‘partake of an aperitif.’”

“Right.”

“He ought to know of our progress and discoveries, anyway, so he can begin preparing my Fellowship recommendation to the Society.”

“My thoughts exactly!” Avery scampered up the beach to Bellows’s tent, then stopped suddenly as someone slipped out at the sound of his approach. In the twilight he recognized the Sudanese maid, in a fluttered state of half-dress. She disappeared into the brush. Well, he thought, evidently Bellows wouldn’t share a cradle with these black bastards, as he called them, but other sorts of horizontal furniture proved suitable. Fine for him, but it might look queer if word got out. Avery willfully forgot what he had seen, waited forty seconds, and called, “Bellows! Bellows, rendezvous in the mess for a toast to accomplishment and the broadening of archaeological and anthropological knowledge!” At Bellows’s muffled assent, he retired to the mess tent, where James had already cracked open a case of Armagnac brandy and was sipping delicately.

“Thank indifferent Providence our snifters survived the crash! Take yon glassware, Avery, and I’ll pour you a – tipple?”

“Careful, Jim. You’re approaching conviviality.”

“I may even collapse into flagrant amity,” James said, sharing one of his rare smiles.

The smile vanished at the interruption of Bellows’s whiskey-voice: “Then pony up a glass for me, lad, and I’ll show you how tippling’s done.”

James filled his snifter, and Bellows warmed the glass in his palms, then raised it: “To the broadening of all human knowledge, and to the two gents before me who have done so much in its service!”

“Thank you,” James said, touched despite himself, and Avery reflected that the stomach was a dead end; vanity was the way to James’s heart. They clinked glasses. Avery drank; James tasted; Bellows guzzled and refilled the glasses.

“Now, tell me what I should put in my letter to the RGS.” Bellows seemed overly cheerful to Avery; was it to cover his embarrassment at being caught with a mistress? No, Avery thought, that suspicion doesn’t do justice to such a fine fellow. He just likes to drink, that’s all.

“I wish I could tell you more,” James said. “But I must spend some time with my photographs and my books. I discovered traces of a dozen languages down there – rather, an omni-tongue, a synthesis of all languages, and I must refresh myself on my Sumerian declensions before I can begin to decipher it.”

“So you can read it?” Bellows asked over his glass.

James sniffed. “Please. Merely understanding a language is the most elementary step. I seek rather to understand the culture that the language represents, and place it in the broader context of the Western world; videlicet, to know the parents through familiarity with the child. Language can tell us much more than mere words.”

“Well, kudos, no doubt. But what culture, exactly? If it has links to Sumerian, I assume we’re dealing with an early Moslem tribe. Perhaps a settlement from Abyssinia? Mohammedans came south from Persia as early as the ninth century and established colonies in Zanzibar and on the Tanzanian coast, one of which became Dar es Salaam.”

James shook his head. “Moslem architecture in east Africa favors local materials, especially mud bricks, which would not last under this lake. No. This may astound you, Mr. Bellows…”

Bellows theatrically gripped his seat.

“But I found and have photographic proof of traces of Greek architecture!”

Bellows looked from James to Avery, his eyes twinkling. “You’re putting me on.”

“No, sir,” James said gravely. “Avery can verify it.”

“I suppose,” Avery said. “I’m not up on my columns, but they were definitely twirly, and made of marble.”

“Blimey,” Bellows said quietly. “That toast was well-deserved! Let’s have another!”

They did. James told Bellows all about their discovery. The word “Ensi-ka” gave Bellows pause. “Scrawl out those symbols for me, boyo, if you remember them clearly.”

James obliged, a little sullen over the jibe at his memory. Bellows paid him no heed, and studied the cuneiform intently. “And you say it reads like Greek?”

“Yes.”

“Why not write it like Greek, then?”

“I can’t. There’s no exact analogue. You can’t just change from one alphabet to the other, this hardly being an alphabet in the first place… Results would not be verifiable.”

“Just give it a shot for old Bellows, eh?”

James rewrote the symbol in Greek. Bellows took the pencil and made a few adjustments where the vagaries of phonetic transcription allowed it. He tapped the new word. “I’m not up on my Sumerian, but I learned my Greek at Eton, and it’s still with me. What’s that word, my son?”

James reddened. “You must be joking. I present to you science, and you twist it into fairy-tale.”

“Just read the word, out loud, for the benefit of Avery here.”

“I will not. It is worse than a myth. It is a parable that teaches men to laugh in the face of ambition. A superstition that clouds the minds of men, the like against which I have sworn to fight.”

“I’ll say it, then,” Bellows said cheerfully.

His dislike for the man prompted James. “Hold your tongue, Bellows! Very well.” He pursed his lips and spat the word out: “Atlantis.”

“Described by Plato and Francis Bacon.” Bellows’s grin massed wrinkles on the sides of his face.

“And Mr. Jules Verne,” Avery interjected.

James shot him a scornful look. “Myth. What we have discovered today is fact.”

“And this word?” Bellows asked.

“An intentional mistranslation. Besides, the word doesn’t refer to our city as Atlantis; ‘Ensi-ka’ distinctly refers to another location. What we have here is a mere colony of a greater polis, which we can, for the sake of childish amusement, refer to as ‘Atlantis’ for the nonce. But our city is a stunning find in its own right.” James mused. “Which reminds me, it lacks a name.”

“Crocodopolis!” Avery shouted.

James and Bellows looked at him in surprise. “What?” Avery said. “I went to Eton, too.”

They drank to the new name, finished the bottle, and opened another one. “Of course,” Bellows said, his nose rosy, “the RGS will want physical artefacts in addition to your photographs and notes. But you look well on your way to a Fellowship, lad. Maybe one day you’ll even make Chartered Geographer, like myself.”

“Your explorations of Abyssinia are noteworthy,” James said. “What a country, back in the earlies!”

“Aye. Took a spear through the jaw and two arrows through the arm,” Bellows said. “I earned my Chartership. But it’s much harder for you boys. There are precious few dark corners left on this Earth. With your inventions, Mr. Blankenship, we’ll plumb the oceans, and then what will there be to discover?”

“I believe man will turn outward someday,” James said. “We will walk the surface of the moon and cold places beyond even that.”

“Nothing is safe,” Bellows said with a half-smile.

“What do you mean by that?” Avery asked.

Bellows turned a red-rimmed eye on him. “Nothing, boyo,” he said after a moment.

Screams interrupted their conversation. Avery was on his feet before the first cry faded, his Sharps in hand. “From the beach!”

He threw back the tent flap. Before him was a charnel scene. Crewmen, their own sailors and the hired Sudanese and Ethiopians alike, struggled with a huge reptile on the beach – Eustace. The croc had crawled from the water, and Avery could see how mammoth he really was. Avery had seen gunships smaller than Eustace. The crocodile shattered three tents with a sweep of his tail and knocked the gun-wielding men down like tenpins. Their rifles popped, flaring in the night, and sparks struck from his scales. Eustace croaked and lunged on a crewman; Avery recognized Larsen, leveling his rifle steadfastly even as the huge jaws came at him. He never fired the shot. Eustace’s jaws closed over him, clicked shut, and Larsen was gone.

“By Gad! He swallowed Larsen entire! Jim, have you any magic tricks up your sleeve? This beasty’s intent on gobbling us all!”

“I detest the word ‘magical’; it is anti-scientific and therefore anti-truth,” James grumbled. “Were we not just discussing the deleterious effects of superstition on the reasoning – ” He saw Eustace, and his eyes widened in fear. “By Herme’s perspiring buttocks! Run, Avery, that monster will devour us all!” James produced a gadget from his pocket, what looked like a fat pistol with copper wire coiled around the barrel. “Unless my magnox can check him. Prepare for positron perdition, Crocodylus niloticus ex!”

A blue bolt of electricity crawled along the coiling and sputtered out. James scowled at the useless weapon. “I am devising a theory concerning the operation of electrical equipment after prolonged submersion,” he said, quite calmly, and then Eustace was upon him.

“No!” Avery shouted, but the monstrous maw clacked shut. James was gone. “Now you’ve got a fight on your hands,” Avery growled, rolling up his sleeves. Eustace rushed at him; Avery saw a great black hole lined with white teeth, and he was in the cavernous mouth, then down the gullet, and he felt no more.

Great Jumping Jesus! Is he dead? What the hell’s going on? Come back next time to see!

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I am agog, aghast, astounded, appalled at the Supreme Court’s decision of last week. It seems that many are underestimating the damage this will do to our democracy; well, of the few who heard about this thing. I assume that the perception of most is “Supreme Court decides… BO-RING! Where’s the sports page?” But that illustration requires imagining that anyone reads newspapers these days, which we know is simply not true. More probably, Joe Methhead is watching his ten minutes of CNN to make himself feel smarter, and hears “Supreme Court decides…” and changes to “American Choppers” and yells for someone to bring him more meth.

You may sense rancor, and that is because we allowed this to happen. By our complacency, by our opting for mass entertainment over mass communication, by caring more about the goddamn American Idol than the American president, by sedating ourselves with cheeseburgers and lattes and pornography. We are trained to believe that politics are impolite or boring to discuss, all the easier to make us manipulable. It’s our parents’ fault, too, for preparing a nation where meaning is defined by buying and selling, but just as much our fault for accepting this parody of history.

And in this country where buying and selling is not a means to an end, but the end itself, it’s no surprise that politicians can now be bought and sold. It is almost impossible to overstate the harm that this decision will wreak on our democracy; it is almost impossible to imagine how it will not outright destroy it.

For example.
How could the health care bill have gone to shit? At one point, 80% of the American public wanted a public option. The Congress represents us, right? Google “health insurance political contributions”. How much did you donate to McCain or (for fellow Texans) John Cornyn? Something between zero and zero dollars, is my guess. Why the hell should they listen to you? And so our ostensible representatives vote against our interests. That’s how it happens. It’s as simple as that.

We know from Obama’s trouncing of Clinton and then McCain that the campaign with the most money can reach the most people most effectively; but Obama’s money came from the people, from folks who contributed for the first time ever to a candidate in whom they believed. And he knows it. These were people busting open their piggy banks and sending in ten dollars, fifty, a hundred. Corporations give millions, hundreds of millions, even billions. There is no way that our contributions - and therefore the importance of our interests - can compete with theirs.

These days, corporations split their donations pretty evenly - Coca-Cola may give as much to the Democrats as to the Republicans. All this means is that both parties will be equally in Coca-Cola’s pockets. But wait! Does the equal contribution they get from Pepsi-Cola mean that they will cancel each other out? Not at all. Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola have several mutual interests. Neither wants to be taxed. Neither wants to obey environmental regulations that cost money and time. Neither wants to spend the time and money to treat its workers humanely. These things transcend party lines and become a matter of us and them. You are not a corporation. You are a human, and your worth is not determined by your intelligence, or compassion, but by the money in your pocket. The currency of you is devalued. This is the triumph of our weird government-capitalism coition.

I notice that the webpage for emigrating to Canada is bogged down today.

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The follow-up to “Isle of Ignominy!” I love these characters. They are two things: an opportunity for me to pay homage to the great canon of 19th century adventure literature - Wells, Verne, Doyle, and, particularly in this story, H. Rider Haggard (and a bit of Kipling) - as well as a handy lens with which to deconstruct Victorian culture. For example, King Solomon’s Mines - helluva book, a great thrilling adventure, but, by our modern standards, fairly racist (and Haggard was one of the more enlightened writers of his time). We can try to reconcile or excuse these things, but wouldn’t it be more fun if the author himself had done that in the book itself? By means of inexplicable and shocking violence? I give you that and more, and ask you to let yourself enjoy it. Because reading is meant to be challenging, dammit.

I’ll publish this in four parts.

Blankenship & Dawes
in
Crocodopolis!
By Jens Rushing

“Sir Richard Burton asserts it as verifiable fact,” Bellows said, ashing his cigar in the cut-glass tray, adjusting his aim carefully to account for the slight pitch of the Bellerophon. “I don’t know how many papist missionaries have said the same over the past two-three hundred years, but my twenty years in old Afrique have led me to agree with them: it is simply impossible to navigate the Red Nile all the way to its source.”

“It’s amazing what you can do with money,” Avery Dawes replied.

Bellows grunted his assent. “And the Royal Geographic Society is honored to aid you, gentlemen. Pending your success, of course.”

“We’re most beholden,” James Blankenship said acidly. “This is how the hare must feel when the hawk deigns to notice him.”

Bellows laughed at length and sucked his cigar until the tip glowed in the half-light of the Bellerophon’s cabin. He puckered his thick, wrinkled lips and blew a perfect smoke ring. Avery whistled his admiration. Avery admired a good deal too much about the old bastard, James thought with a bit of irritation.

After boarding the amphibious ship at Khartoum, Archibald Bellows had thoroughly charmed the young Avery with his easy mastery of African customs and languages, his experience, his skill at firearms. A friendly shooting match from the boiler deck had established the old man as Avery’s superior – and Avery was no slouch. He came to respect, then revere the old man, annoying James with his prattle. Bellows spoke Arabic and a dozen other African tongues as naturally as if they were English. Bellows could split a toothpick with a thrown knife at twenty paces. Bellows could overpower an enraged alligator. Bellows – Bellows – Bellows.

James compared the two men. Bellows was weathered and tanned as a piece of bootstrap leather, and just about as savoury, with muscles like cables beneath his dark skin. Broken blood vessels stitched his hawk-nose, and James noticed that his hands shook if he went a day without a bit of “summat hot,” but there was still enough strength in those arms to break a man in half. He caught James studying him and croaked in his gin-thickened voice, “Care for a tipple, lad?” James declined.

Hard, dangerous living had corroded the old man; rather, the habits one forms as a result of hard, dangerous living had corroded him. Avery, on the other hand, was in the very blush of youth, the paragon of British manhood. Tall, broad-shouldered, strong-chinned, well-limbed, handsome enough in his way, James conceded, if you cared for that “Greek god” look. Avery could run a mile in four and a half minutes and hold his breath for three. He had demonstrated this, on several occasions, but not for vainglory; in addition to his other virtues, he was aggravatingly humble.

But beneath that craggy forehead slumbered an uncultivated mind, James reflected sadly. His friend sometimes exhibited a sort of animal cunning, but he had little predilection for the sciences, for the search for hard truths behind the gauzy enigmas of the banal. Not James. A restless drive possessed him to pierce that shroud and glimpse the naked profundity of the natural world. So, aside from Avery, his friends were Erlenmeyer flasks, test tubes, Bunsen burners, and the writings of Darwin, Newton, Pasteur, and Copernicus – though Copernicus was on thin ice.

“The Society expects a full return on their investment in this expedition,” Bellows said. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have funded the construction of this – tell me, Blankenship, why’d you give it such a mouthful of a name?”

“Bellerophon, the slayer of the Chimera, flew to Olympus and was struck down for his arrogance.”

“Is that your opinion of this little expedition?” Bellows said with a slanted smile. James reminded himself to be pleasant; Bellows was a Chartered Geographer in the RGS, and if James wanted to get his fellowship, and the attendant access to the coveted Foyle Reading Room, he needed to humor the man.

“No man of any color has sailed the Nile,” James said. “We’re attempting an upstream navigation along a fork only recently discovered – by myself – with no clear map of our path to Lake Tanganyika. We have braved crocodiles, bandits, mad monks and holy warriors of the Sudan, hippopotamuses…”

“And we’re almost there,” Avery interjected. “We should arrive tonight, in fact.”

“My point remaining,” James continued, “that our success aside, this is an extremely audacious undertaking. And we’re not half finished. Navigating the White Nile to its source is quite an accomplishment, but it is only a means to an end, the end being, of course, the search for Burton’s lost city.”

“And what do you think of that?” Bellows gestured with his cigar, now a stub.

“The source – ” James began. Bellows guffawed.

“The source,” he said, “is the most egregious liar, rake, muckrake, scoundrel, and fornicator in the Empire!”

James was perturbed. “If he were here, I’m sure Sir Burton would demand satisfaction for your words against him.”

“If he were here, I believe he’d take it as a compliment.”

“Regardless,” James said, “he claims to have learned of a pre-Moslem city beneath the waves. It could be true. Research leaves room for such a civilization, perhaps a fiefdom of the old Egyptian pharaohs, a vestigial appendage of their empire that outlived them and was deluged when the lake was created…” A grinding sound from below told him that the Bellerophon had left the river and was crawling uphill on its great treaded wheels. The smooth operation of the amphibious vessel satisfied him. It ought to; it was his own design.

“The lake appears in Ptolemy. Ptolemy was referencing Il Kha-Hati.” Bellows was smug. “I sincerely doubt the city predates Kha-Hati, who died in the sixth century before Christ. If it exists.”

James shrugged. “Maybe a Sumerian colony, traders from the Fertile Crescent. Or from the Indus valley. Pre-Ptolemaic ships could certainly cross from Baluchistan to Tanzania. Or a native civilization. Who knows? The possibilities are numerous. Africa is the cradle of mankind, after all.”

“Not any cradle of mine,” Bellows snorted, tilting his head at the Sudanese woman who was serving tea. “I wouldn’t share a cradle with these black bastards, eh?” He roared with laughter.

“Yes, well…” James said.

“How about you, Sonny Jim?” Bellows said to Avery. “Why’re you on this errand?”

“I just want a crack at Eustace, sir,” Avery enthused.

Eustace was a man-eating crocodile. Burton had named him, too, in his book on the Tanganyika expedition. The natives claimed that the giant reptile had devoured more than three hundred victims over the past four centuries. Avery was skeptical – if the victims were devoured, how could you tell how many there had been? – but if there was world-class game to be had, Avery and his Sharps buffalo rifle would be there.

“Aye, that’d be a prize, all right,” Bellows allowed. “Almost worth leaving what passes for civilization on this benighted continent and going back into the bush, among the dullest of the darkies. Now, you may think your average colored servant back in old England is stupid and lazy – God’s wounds! A backwoods Mulwesi could give him lessons on stupid and lazy! Thank God we’re here to lift them up with the hand of civilization.”

James bristled, and Bellows saw it. “I hope I haven’t offended you,” Bellows said.

“I subscribe to the emerging field of ethnology, sir, and the idea that one cannot judge another culture qualitatively; indeed, such would be a futile effort. Circumstance has rendered the European knowledgeable and ‘civilized,’ and circumstance has left these poor peoples subsistence-level farmers. It might have been otherwise – and was, fifteen hundred years ago, when the Italians ruled the degenerate rabble of Europe. No inherent virtue makes us superior.”

“Precisely,” Bellows said. “We are superior by Providence, and the virtue has followed as a result.”

“That’s not exactly what I meant,” James said.

“I know a little of that discipline of ethnology,” Bellows said. “It outlines five stages of the path to civilization: hunter-gatherer, agriculture, early civilization, feudalism, and, the apex of human achievement, modern liberal-capitalism. Only Europe has reached the last stage.”

The ride became smooth again. They were back on the river, the wheels retracting to allow the props to come out.

“What of cultures like China and Japan, which have great cities, huge noble classes, complex laws, and millennia of painting, sculpture, and poetry?”

Bellows dismissed them with a wave. “Static and corrupt. Well-painted corpses, but eaten up with worms on the inside. But, my son, you miss the benevolence of European superiority. We don’t hoard our wealth and knowledge, like the Manchoos of China or the brahmins of India. We build schools and make pygmy headhunters into little black Christians. We educate. We enlighten. We work great good on this Earth. Read your Kipling, my son.” Bellows’s tone was very gentle.

Before James could reply, a great crash echoed through the boat and they were thrown to the deck. Avery recovered with his customary alacrity and helped Bellows up, though the old man hardly needed help. He stomped out a fledgling fire where an oil lamp had fallen.

“A boulder – ” James gasped.

“A boulder!” Avery said. “Maybe you’ve never been whaling, old boy, but I’ve done a tour, just for fun, around the Horn – ”

“I sincerely doubt a whale has attacked us.”

“Not a whale, but some kind of beastie.” Avery snatched up his Sharps. “With me, sir?” he cried, and Avery and Bellows dashed from the cabin.

James staggered to his feet and followed them. They stood at the railing of the boiler deck, scanning the water over their rifle barrels. The river was a black swath with a lace of silver moonlight. “If it’s Eustace, may I have the first crack?” Avery asked.

“Take it if you can,” Bellows jibed.

James listened to the operation of the boat. A gurgle added to the swoosh of the props told him that they might be damaged, and he set off in that direction. The rifles boomed.

“Was that him?” Avery shouted.

“A mighty big croc, anyway!” Bellows said. James rolled his eyes. Leave them to their barbaric sport; he had the most advanced watercraft in existence to operate. The boat shuddered; another impact. James hurried through the trap that led to the boiler room, and beyond it the marvelous engine that converted steam to forward thrust. He opened the door to the engine room. Water washed his ankles. The twin drive shafts that terminated in the exterior props were submerged in water; the iron at the rear was torn and jagged; the Bellerophon, slowly but irrevocably, began to acquire a sternward slant as the river flowed into the hole. “Bloody – ” James said, but he didn’t get to finish that sentence.

The boat shook, and he sprawled on the floor, rolling into the watery end of the engine room. He grabbed a drive shaft and pulled himself up it. Rending metal screamed behind him and giant jaws clacked. A warm breath gusted over him, and James violated his most sacred rule of self-preservation; he looked back.

There was a flash of white teeth as big as Gurkha knives; a reptilian eye the size of a cricket ball; scaly armor that would make a legionnaire proud. Then the immortal Nile poured in to claim him.

#

Avery’s rifle was a part of his body. With the Sharps he had downed leviathan American buffalo, Swaziland bull elephants, Atlas bears, Bengal tigers, and Barbary lions. He leveled it at the river and waited for the slightest movement, his senses humming. Bellows was in the same state of a hunter’s readiness, and the old adventurer’s camaraderie warmed Avery.

A ripple creased the water, just a moment’s interruption of the smooth surface, and Avery and Bellows fired together. “Criminy!” Avery said. “Missed the devil!”

“If a devil there was,” Bellows said. “I think we were duped by a fish or serpent.”

The Bellerophon pushed upstream slowly. Before them the broad Nile widened further, and further still, until Avery wondered if they had reversed their course and returned to the Mediterranean. But, no, there were cliffs and dark, dense African forests far to starboard. They had reached Lake Tanganyika.

A second impact threw Avery against the rail; Bellows went over. Avery caught him with one hand – the old man weighed as much as a corn husk – and swung him back on board. The bow lifted slightly and the boat began to list. “We’re taking on water,” Bellows said.

“I suppose I’ll pop belowdecks and investigate. I thought I saw Jim disappear that direction earlier…”

Below, metal shrieked under tremendous strain. “No time for that,” Bellows said. “Get to the pilot deck and run us aground before we sink.”

“Jim won’t like that.”

“Better than losing his precious kit. This lake’s known for its crocs, my son. A swim here would hardly be a dip at Brighton.”

Avery nodded and leapt up the stairs to the pilothouse. Larsen, the pilot, struggled with the wheel. “It’s no good, sir,” he said. “She won’t answer. Rudder’s shot, and we’ve got plenty of steam, but props don’t seem to be doing a blasted thing.”

“Don’t fret, Mr. Larsen. Just aim for that sandy patch.” Avery pointed at a stretch of beach perhaps two hundred yards to starboard. “Run her aground.”

“Yessir.” Larsen knew how to follow orders.

Avery patted him on the shoulder. “There’s a fellow,” and he jumped down the stairs, intent on the engine room. In the boiler room he met Blankenship, dripping wet and white as a sheet. “What happened? Jim, my friend, are you uninjured?”

“I have made the acquaintance of your Crocodylus niloticus. But I append the appellation: Crocodylus niloticus rex.”

“Ye gads! Point me at him!” Avery shook his rifle.

“In the engine room – but you can’t – ” But he had. Avery flung open the door and water rushed into the boiler room. The boat tilted upward as the river sucked it downward; Avery struggled to seal the door, and sprang backward as a pair of giant jaws thrashed in the great hole before him. The snout measured five feet across, and Avery was sure he could fit his fist inside the flaring nostrils.

“This is what I came for, I suppose,” Avery reflected as the monstrous crocodile rammed its great head into the wall, bending the steel bulkhead as if it were aluminum. Fortunately, it could not fit through the narrow door and into the boiler room; though, due to the rate at which the Bellerophon was taking on water, they would soon find themselves in the unusual position of having a rampaging forty-foot reptile as the least of their worries. “Larsen’s taking the boat aground,” he told James. “We must seal this door, or we’ll sink before we make the beach!”

Eustace rammed the door again, the impact jarring Avery to his bones. He raised his rifle and fired; the shot went wild and glanced off the crocodile’s armor. “If not for this deuced rough ride, I could pick my shot and put one through his eye.”

“Here.” James put a canister in his hands. Avery recognized the cylinder as one of James’s anti-fire devices. He pulled the pin from a spring-loaded catch; white foam spewed from the nozzle. Eustace lunged again, jaws open. The boat rocked with the great reptile’s thrashing weight. Avery pitched the cylinder down his throat.

The jaws crashed together a foot from Avery’s face. His pugilist instinct compelled him to ram his fist into the crocodile’s nose. He might as well have punched a brick wall. Eustace snorted. “You know how to take a punch!” Avery said. “That would’ve felled Jack Gull himself!” Eustace snorted again, and foam sprayed from his nostrils, then bubbled through the locked teeth. The huge maw opened, foam gushed out, Eustace groaned terribly, and retreated into the river. Avery scowled. “Next time you’ll not be so lucky!”

He sealed the door. “Sorry about the bang-up, old boy,” he said.

“No bother,” James said. “As long as the equipment is safe, our research can go on.”

“By Gad, if he wasn’t a big one!”

“I am somewhat disappointed. The local legends put his age at four centuries. From what I know of Nile crocodile growth rates, and can extrapolate in this heated moment, he could not be over two hundred and fifty years old.” The ship’s horn blasted a deep note. “Now what could that mean?” James wondered.

“It means wrap your fists around that railing, Jim, my chum, and don’t let go – we’re landward bound!”

“Confound that Nordic numskull at the helm!” James shouted, but the shout was lost amongst a cacophony from the end of creation as half a hundred tons of boat collided with the shore: a crash, a grinding that penetrated the bones, and a long squeal of taxed steel that raked the brain. The boilers rattled in their mountings, and bolts under high pressure shot off and ricocheted around the room. They hurried to the deck. The Bellerophon was ruined. The pilothouse was a heap of planks, flattened in the crash; Eustace had shredded the stern; the beach, which was composed less of sand than small boulders, had crumpled the bow. A muted explosion, followed by a brief tremor, told them that the boilers had at last given up. The scent of smoke reached their nostrils.

“We’ve made it!” Avery said happily.

Wasn’t that thrilling? Come back Thursday to see what happens next.

Do you know why the sea captain is named “Larsen”? Because I’d just read The Sea Wolf. My brain, she is transparent.

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Talented Friend Stephanie Scarborough has a story up, and one of her old ones got turned into a podcast; surprisingly, and delightfully, so did one of mine! You remember, “Socks and Banshees“, that charming slice of marital life and undeath.

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Christmas 2006, I was working holiday for UPS. I rode in the passenger seat of a UPS truck and jumped out to drop off the packages while the driver organized the next drop. It was okay work. It gave me lots of time to ponder the worth of a college degree. I was also trying to get into grad school, get an MFA so I would be qualified for a more expensive kind of uselessness. Well, you know those artsy types, those tea-drinking professors who scorn literature as a source of “fun” or “pleasure”, who honestly believe that poetry still has something to give humanity, they vomit in disgust if presented with a piece of science fiction or fantasy. This was my effort to write a realistic story, something that could happen in real life, but still felt “deep”. Everybody told me to take out the weird hallucination scene with the Burger King king, but I wouldn’t do it.

… I didn’t get into the program. For which I give thanks every day.

Dog Street
By Jens Rushing

With Christmas coming and the bank account empty, I went to work for UPS. It wasn’t so bad. I’ve never enjoyed physical labor. I know there are certain types that claim to find it calming – people who claim to enjoy simple, repetitive motions, to find solace while lifting boxes or filing papers or mowing lawns. These people are liars. I have never found anything in physical labor other than exhaustion and discomfort. I have my own meditation exercises. I can draw crude genitalia in the sand of my tiny rock garden. I can sit in the park and imagine myself suffocating on the barren surface of the moon.

UPS afforded me no time for thinking. I was a driver helper. I rode around on the folding bitch-seat and ran the packages out whenever we stopped. I moved constantly. It was hard work, and cold, too; we didn’t have time to open the door at every stop, so it hung open, and the wind shrieked in and peeled the frozen flesh from my bones. The trucks, clearly not intended for operation by human beings, had only one heating vent in the center of the dash. It bled hot air directly to the outdoors, doing a wonderful job of increasing our infrared profile, but a shitty job of actually keeping us alive. My hands were purple by the end of the day, and needles of pain perforated them when I finally got home and thrust them under warm water.

The first day passed easily enough. As instructed, I met the truck in the CVS parking lot. My driver was a friendly black guy, thirtyish, who said first and foremost: “Man! I like that hat!” I liked him right away.

“I’m Leo.”

“Deon.” We shook hands. “We got bullshit work today, Leo. Never work too hard, Leo, because then they fuck you. See this?” He waved at the back of the truck. Boxes filled it, floor to ceiling. “Yesterday I made two hundred stops in seven hours. So today I get five hundred goddamn packages. Can’t go home til we’re done.”

“Gotta keep standards low.”

“You said it.” Deon went in the back and tossed packages around and swore profusely, maintaining a rich and constant stream of profanity. The profanity seemed a byproduct of his work, the way a properly operating vehicle spews exhaust. He levered a package into place: “Fuckin shit.” He scanned a shipping label: “Hell ass yeah.”

I stood, not wanting to just sit while he worked. I wanted to earn my pay, so I asked if I could help. “You just sit your sweet ass down and wait,” he said. “Take a break.” I sat my sweet ass down and waited. I watched a slatternly woman carry one kid and drag another into the CVS. The dragged kid cried and screamed. The carried kid just cried.

“Got any kids?” I asked.

“Got a little girl,” he said.

“You married?”

“Hell no,” he said.

“I am,” I volunteered. “Six months now.” I looked at my ring. Six months in and it was scratched all to hell. On our honeymoon in China I had absently banged it all along a quarter mile of the Great Wall, humming “La Marseillaise” and marking time with the click of gold on timeless stone. Lexi had thrown a fit.

“Entropy is the way of all things,” I told her. “Mountains crumble into the sea. All the works of man are for naught.”

“I don’t care!” she shrieked. “Don’t destroy our things! Entropy doesn’t need your help!” I couldn’t say anything; she was absolutely right. Lexi shrieked in much the same way when she found me idly whittling the computer desk or holding an open flame to a plugged-in extension cord. I had no explanation for my actions.

We began our route. It took us through a hideous part of town – a new development of low-income housing, nice houses, but all new. Brick boxes stretching out of sight. No trees more than a year or two old. As we crested a little hill we could see the entire zip code – an unbroken stretch of grey suburban roofs rendered in ersatz Cubism, angles and planes and no perspective. Perfectly hideous.

Deon drove with a surprising lack of skill. He ran the truck over curbs several times, each time executing the action with studious concentration, his brow wrinkled and lips puckered like he was planning chess stratagems rather than driving on someone’s lawn. I came to appreciate his driving style, as I might appreciate a painter who eschews technical achievement in favor of personal expression. I told him so. He thumped his chest. “Yeah, I drive from the heart.”

My job mainly consisted of finding clever hiding spots for packages. We concealed them behind any of the usual crap with which homeowners bedeck their porches: enormous planters, ceramic frogs, benches, bikes, pillars, packages from competing parcel services. Any would do. We had one box that was way too big to hide on the porch. I held the package while Deon cracked the gate to the backyard and peeked through. He whistled a few times. He opened the gate and stepped in, creeping cautiously to the corner, giving me hand signals that made no sense, his every nerve alert like a soldier in Nam searching for a tripwire. He sprang around the corner and quickly leapt back. His whole body trembled. “It’s okay,” he said. “No dogs.”

We dropped the package and returned to the truck. “I was bit once,” he explained. “Hurt!”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah! It was a little dog, but a mean bastard. One of them little brown and white dogs.”

I nodded. I knew just what he meant.

After an hour or so I had the job down. It was a simple job, but I found some small satisfaction in it. We came to a stop. I picked up the box and thought: “I feel competent! How good it is to be competent!” Then I fell out of the truck. I missed the two steps completely and fell on the curb and sprawled face-first on the grass. The package went flying. Deon hooted with laughter. “You okay, man?”

“Yeah, just… stupid,” I said. My face burned with the distinct sensation that I had done a very idiotic thing. When I was in seventh grade, I went to the state level of the national spelling bee after a brilliant performance at the district level. In the first round, on statewide television, I spelled “scroll” without an “r”. Of course I knew how to spell “scroll,” I just chose to be a fuckup at exactly the wrong moment. This same feeling descended on me now. I tried not to think about being twenty-five, degreed, married, and falling down stairs that a chimpanzee could have navigated with grace and aplomb. This fucking – no suitable noun came to mind. Leo’s indignation had no object beyond Leo.

I refuse to be that sort of bastard on principle, so I brushed the grass off my very attractive UPS uniform and dropped the damn package. I climbed back into the truck, which was moving before I got into my seat. One of the hundred humiliations we must endure daily. The human organism has coordination problems; you miss steps and tumble from a truck. The mind, stapled to this marionette, must bear it with dignity. My organism wasn’t done with me yet. Later that day, while examining a bruised knuckle, I walked directly into the side of the truck, missing the door completely. Deon laughed again. I was frozen. My knees hurt from jumping in and out of the truck. My ass ached. I tore a long strip of skin from my index finger somehow. I was an aching, bleeding, frozen mess.

“Shit,” Deon said as we rounded a corner. I assumed he was cursing at the recycling bin he had just flattened or the tiny sparrow caught in the grille. I paid it no mind. Soon I realized that we were circling, driving down the same street again. “There’s a dog,” he said, “bastard doesn’t chase anyone but me. Here he comes.” He pointed, and sure enough a small brown and black beast bounded from a yard. It fell into place beside the truck, two or three feet from the wheels, barking ferociously. “We’ll go around and do the other drops and come back here later. Maybe he’ll be inside.” His voice quavered.

I laughed. “It’s cool,” I said. “I’ll drop the package. I got a special way with dogs. They like me.” This was in no way true, but I hated to see that kind of fear in a grown man. I wanted to get the drop over with as soon as possible and put Deon’s fear out of my mind. It was embarrassing to behold.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, it’s no big deal,” I said. “He’s all bark.”

“Okay…” He slowed and I vaulted through the door. I hit the ground fast and stumbled, then found my footing and sprinted for the house. The vicious little hound streaked for me, snarling and howling. I dropped the package and doubled back. It wouldn’t bite me, it was all bark. But the thing leapt for me, fangs bare. I ducked to the side and it sailed past. Before it could recover and mount a new assault I was in the truck. Deon gave it gas and the truck roared away.

“Hoo-ha!” I crowed. Exultation filled me. One thrilling encounter with a savage beast per day would make me a happy man. We drove a few blocks away and Deon parked with one wheel cocked rakishly over the curb. He put his head on the wheel and his arms over his head. Then, to my utter astonishment, a sob shook him, and another. He cried, muffled by his arms, and I squirmed in profound awkwardness. He stopped soon enough and wiped his face.

“Last time I saw my little girl,” he said, staring straight ahead, “her mama threw me out. I walk through the door and give my baby a hug and her mama says, ‘Nuh-uh. Get on out, nigger. You worthless. No good.’ And she spit on me, Leo! Right here!” He indicated his cheek. “I had nothin to say. Couldn’t say nothin to that. Couldn’t spit back. Couldn’t hit her. My little girl, she looked at me like – I don’t know. But I had to go right then, and I ain’t seen her since.”

I didn’t know what to say. What can you say to that? No advice or expression of comfort would fail to sound idiotic and useless. So I just squeezed his shoulder in a vague gesture of manly support. “All right. That’s kind of random, Deon.”

“Every time I pick up the phone to call her, I think of that fuckin dog.”

“I see,” I said. I did not see. Something occurred to me. “Hey, if you run over that dog in the course of duty, are you liable, or is the company?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’d be worth finding out,” I said.

So ended my first day. I got home after dark and banged on the door. I wore my uniform and carried a box under my arm. My wife opened the door. “Yes?”

“I have a package for you, miss,” I said. “I also have this box.”

“Oh, my, UPS man, do come in. Let me fetch you a beer. You just sit down.” Lexi got a Shiner and sat on my lap. She put a finger to her lips and arched an eyebrow in speculation. “Hmm,” she said, “what can Brown do for me?”

I told her about my day. She told me about her day and what her mother had done now and why she was going crazy. We baked chicken and potatoes and ate while watching television; afterwards I kissed her and she said, “My head hurts,” so that was that. “I have a long day of falling out of trucks tomorrow,” I said, and we went to bed.

In the last ten minutes of sleep, a vision came to me, an idea of amazing perfection and focus. I dreamed out a rock musical with a complete score. It was called “Here Comes the King.” A sleepy seaside village is shocked one day to see a King rising from the waters. He is the Burger King mascot, with the full robes and the big plastic face. The King merrily informs them that their lives are now his; those who dissent are decapitated and those who comply are likewise decapitated (the King can’t trust them). He rounds up all the women for his harem and enslaves the men in the construction of an enormous statue, a colossal likeness of the King. They doubt his power, so he rockets into the sky and flies out over the ocean, then plunges beneath the waves. He reappears shortly thereafter, hauling a whale by a fin. The King slices the whale open from stem to stern, and there, in its belly, is his throne made of bones. The bones are made of gold. The throne is crowned with sharpened femurs. The King rocks out on a double-necked guitar, the villagers dance, and a redhead harem slave teaches him the true meaning of love.

I sprang out of bed, knowing that I must record this magnum opus before it evaporated from my brain, and scribbled fragments of the libretto on a legal pad, chuckling at their wit, astounded that my subconscious had come up with such a bizarre yet intriguing creation. Then the words came slower, the melodies grew vague, and I re-read what I had written. It was garbage. I crumpled the paper and bounced it off Lexi’s forehead. She went “hmm” in her sleep and rubbed her nose. Deep dissatisfaction settled over me. A tremendous creative impulse had burned in my brain and been frustrated, stifled like a roman candle firing in a plastic bottle. I climbed onto Lexi’s recumbent form. “How can I give you everything within me?” I whispered, and bit her ear. She whimpered and backhanded my left eyeball. I tried not to sound banal, but naked emotion always sounds banal. “I have many hundreds of ambitions and hopes, all frustrated,” I said, and licked her cheek. She elbowed my temple and said, “mmm.” I went to work, strange thoughts percolating through my brains all the way.

My meditation technique:

The park is windswept and barren in winter. All the trees are bare of leaves, all the grass is brown and dead. I sit on a bench and the wind howls around me. I close my eyes and use the cold to transport myself to the moon, where the vacuum rips the oxygen from my lungs molecule by molecule, like bubbles rising from champagne. The molecules effervesce through my skin. I am completely alone, of course, and as I die, I behold the entire world. It looms in the blackness before me and fills up the whole sky. Distance renders its affairs picayune; my perspective grants me perfect clarity. That I don’t know the content of this clarity doesn’t matter; I simply acknowledge this clarity, and that’s enough to grant me a comprehensive if vague understanding of the day-to-day. It always works. I always go home filled with beneficence and patience sufficient to annoy everyone around me.

I met Deon at the CVS again. He was excited. “I asked, man, and guess what? The company takes liability as long as damages aren’t over two hundred dollars. And that dog’s a mutt! Can’t be worth more than fifty. What you think?”

“Maybe fifty,” I said.

“Today’s my girl’s birthday,” he said. “She’s seven.”

“That’s great. D’you get her anything?”

“We got only four hundred packages today,” he said. “Should be able to get this knocked out by seven.”

“I don’t have anywhere to be,” I said. We got to work. My seatbelt was broken. I had to mash the button repeatedly and tug on the buckle every time. Policy required that I wear it whenever the truck was moving, so it slowed us down quite a bit. I quit wearing it. I quit using the seat, too. I just stood in the cab and held on tight as we careened around corners on two wheels. We came to a nice two-story house with white columns flanking the door. Very tasteful. “I can’t deliver this package,” I said. “I had sex with that man’s daughter, and he knows it.”

“Bullshit,” Deon said.

“Really!”

“Just do it! Ring the bell and shout ‘UPS!’ and you’re done!”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Man, you can’t let this sort of bullshit hang you up. You got to face your fears.”

“Says the guy who’s scared of a little brown mutt.” That was too far. I regretted it. But Deon just grinned and punched me in the shoulder.

“Is,” he looked at the package, “Mr. Worley gonna bite you?”

“He very well might.” This whole time, of course, we were parked on Worley’s front yard, with a string of Christmas lights crushed under the tires, so the man himself stepped out to receive us. He was a tall guy, and he had “Semper Fi” tattooed across one muscular bicep, and I admit I was very much afraid of him. I sprang out of the truck, thrust the package at him, mumbled “UPS”, and pivoted on my heel.

“Do I have to sign for it?” he said.

Shit. He did. I got the pad out and punched up the signature screen.

“Thanks,” he said, scrawling his name in big block letters, “Leo.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. Then, because I am an idiot, I added, “How’s Sally?”

“She’s doing well! She just started med school. Yep! That kid’s going places.”

“Oh, that’s great. That’s really great.”

“How long you been at UPS?”

“Uh, I’m just working here for the season. A little extra cash, ya know. Nothing permanent.” I waved, a gesture encompassing the magnificent career before me.

“What’s your degree?”

I winced. “Communications.”

“I see.” He crossed his arms and nodded. “Yeah, you might wanna consider staying on at UPS. I understand they got great benefits. You might not be able to get something that good in the field of… communications.”

“We got to get going. Great seeing ya, Mr. Worley.”

“Mmhmm. I think our pool guy has a communications degree. No, wait. He has a communications MA. Have you considered that field? What about landscaping?”

“Don’t think I could handle it. Talk to ya later, Mr. Worley!” I ran back to the truck. My ears burned and I took off my hat to let the cold assuage my embarrassment.

“Not so bad!” Deon laughed.

“Fuck off and die,” I said. Mr. Worley stood in the yard and watched the truck until we drove around the corner. I wadded my hat in my hands and thought, “I am on the surface of the moon. I am on the surface of the moon.”

That whole day I gleefully anticipated our delivery to Dog Street. The moment of adrenaline – the rush of the canine lunge – the snap of jaws on empty air! Exhilaration! We ate our bag lunches in the parking lot behind 7-11 and while we ate I told Deon of an article I had read that morning. Five years ago, some teenage hooligans hurled a chunk of concrete from an overpass. It smashed through a woman’s windshield and shattered her collarbone. It tore the skin from her shoulder, neck, and cheek. Stunned, she drove her car into a pylon. She was paralyzed from the waist down, disfigured from the waist up. The paper interviewed her. They wanted to know how she had coped with her crippling injuries for five years. She wanted her anonymous attackers to know that they had been forgiven.

“Someone did that to me, they wouldn’t be forgiven,” Deon said. “They’d be dead.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “How are you gonna extract bloody vengeance when you’re in a wheelchair? This lady can barely talk, she’s in so much pain.”

“Well,” he said, and continued eating. Deon was a very picky eater. He ate cucumbers, carrots, and yogurt every day for lunch. He was rail-thin. He ate circumspectly, nibbling his food and chewing it seventeen times before swallowing (I counted). The yogurt he ate in maddeningly small spoonfuls. Deon knew we were about to deliver to Dog Street. I could tell he was thinking about it. His spoon-hand shook and the yogurt rippled.

“Deon,” I said, “So what if it bites you? Won’t kill you. It’s a twenty-pound little bastard, Deon. No reason to be scared of it.”

“Shuddup,” he said.

“You got plans tonight?”

“Nope.”

“Not gonna see your little girl on her birthday?”

“Fuck you.”

“You could at least call her. My dad’s a total deadbeat. Only time I talk to him is on my birthday and Christmas. But he always calls. And it’s stupid, but I really appreciate that.”

“Her mama spit on me.”

“So what? You’re above that shit, Deon.”

He crumpled up his lunch bag and tossed it into the dumpster. He looked at me, and the sudden ferocity in his eyes startled me. “If I were that woman,” he said, his voice unsteady but fierce, “I’d find out who those bastards were. I’d go to all the gas stations nearby and get their security tapes, and put out an ad asking for information, and hire a private investigator, and all that shit, and get their names. And then I’d wait until they grew up, until maybe they had real jobs and wives and kids, and then I’d come after them. Wheelchair or not. I’d learn their schedules, and buy me a gun, and catch them alone, on a rainy street at night, and the last thing they’d hear would be my wheelchair, going squeak squeak, squeak squeak behind them.”

I didn’t say anything for a while. Deon had constructed a fiction, like my Burger King fantasy. I understood. “That’s pretty fucked up, Deon.”

“But you believe I’d do it.”

“I don’t know, Deon.”

“Just you wait.”

We headed for Dog Street. Deon hadn’t said a single word since we left the 7-11. I got the deliveries for Dog Street lined up and ready to go. I wanted to move fast. This time I would lead the bastard on a wild chase – first, a contest of maneuverability, where I’d jump over lawn furniture and duck under clotheslines and maybe vault a fence. Then a flat-out race for the truck, my speed matched against his. God! It was going to be great!

The mutt streaked out of the yard like he’d been fired from a cannon, barking, barking. He fell into step beside the truck, not three feet from me, lips curled back, fangs exposed, hate roiling in his carnivore eyes. I stood in the doorway, gripping the handles, muscles tensed, ready to leap –

I almost fell out of the truck. Deon swerved, hard, and the huge tires rolled right over the mutt. A half-yelp escaped it, but the wheels crunched down, bones and organs pulped under their weight; the truck rolled on, leaving a lumpy red smear on the road. I dropped onto the bitch-seat. “You did it,” I gasped. “You crazy bastard, you really did it!”

“Hoo-ha!” he cried. Tension broke on his face, a big insane grin pent up too long. His hands shook on the wheel as visible relief rattled him. “Hoo-ha!” He began to speak, but his relief was too great for words; he only sobbed with laughter. I laughed, too. It was great.

We laughed until we cried. Deon took another street and stopped the truck. We laughed and wiped the tears and mucus from our faces. We laughed until it hurt. The laughter subsided in long shuddering bursts of giggles. Still chuckling, I picked up the package for that stop. I shook my head as I ran it to the door. I was light and bouncy. When I got back to the truck Deon had his cell phone out.

The End

I love dogs. It is not remotely funny to kill one, though sometimes, sadly, it is dramatically necessary.
Next week we will begin the truly epic tale of Crocodopolis.

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