He sailed toward me in stop-motion, every muzzle-flash bringing him closer, until he was upon me. Bullets chunked off bits of flesh, off-white amidst the black spray of blood. Spines gouged at my own flesh as he slapped away my gun — severing the leather strap around my wrists — and drove one finned hand into my throat. Breath whistled through my punctured trachea as I tipped backward, flailing. His jaw snapped shut again and again scant inches from the tender flesh of my face, his breath reeking of bait and rotting meat. It’s a good thing I was too scared to think of what that stench represented. Even money he hadn’t flossed since the last child he ate. I stiff-armed him, my fingers finding purchase between teeth three inches long as I tried desperately to keep Frank’s face intact. But he just kept on coming, and so we tipped backward. Suddenly, said boat was upside-down, and me and the fish-monster were a tangled, writhing mass of limbs in the water.
Ricou rolled me once, then twice, like a croc might a water buffalo. The water churned around us, my nose and mouth filling with water that tasted of my blood and his blood and mountain rock, all alkaline and bitter. I was certain I was going to drown. Hell, I halfway prayed for it. Least it’d mean I’d be out of Nevazut on the quick. But just as my lungs insisted they couldn’t go another moment without inhaling — water or air, they cared not which — Ricou released me, and glided off into the untold depths.
I don’t know how long he left me for. Minutes, I guess. Twenty, maybe more. It felt like a lifetime. The echoes of our struggle died down to nothing in the vast still hollow of the cavern, leaving no sound to fill the space but the ragged hitching of my frantic breaths, and the waterfall’s constant background roar. The water was achingly cold, and too deep for me to touch bottom. For a time, I splashed madly about; half to frighten him away, and half because I was sure the cave wall or the rowboat must be nearby, but it was clear soon enough Ricou had dragged me toward the middle when he rolled me, because no matter how much I flailed in the stifling dark, I encountered no landmark, no assistance. Eventually, I ceased my thrashing, instead electing to tread water as efficiently as I could manage, because my arms and legs already throbbed in protest, and I had no idea how long I might be stuck out here, waiting for him to come kill me.
When I heard the knock of wood on stone, I could scarcely contain my excitement. It was the upturned boat, bumping against the cavern wall.
It knocked again. I paddled toward it. Cautious, quiet, with neither hands nor feet breaking the plane of the water’s surface, for fear of summoning the Kraken. Or, at least, its feral Brethren fish-monster stand-in.
I needn’t have worried, because in this case, the Kraken was summoning me.
As I approached the boat, the knocking increased — not in periodicity, but in intensity. What at first sounded tentative, as if the water’s gentle lapping had incited it, became purposeful slams, like Neptune himself dashing the vessel against the rocks. And as soon as I realized there was some manner of intelligence behind the knocking, I began to reverse course, but too late. My feet kicked against soft, muscled fish-flesh just as the boat made its final voyage, slamming into the rock wall so hard it shattered.
Ricou had destroyed the boat.
That managed, he turned his attentions once more to me.
I broke into a full-bore freestyle away from him. No destination in mind but away. I made it five strokes before he grabbed my ankle and pulled me under.
The weight of the water pressed against my temples, my eyeballs, my ear canals. My punctured trachea was clotted, but not enough. Water seeped in and made me cough, which in turn caused me to take on more.
Still we descended.
How deep the cave was, I’ll never know. Because as I thrashed against Ricou’s grasp — he gliding with speed and purpose under the power of the three limbs not holding me — I somehow managed to break free. I clawed my way to the surface like a man possessed — which, it occurs to me, is precisely what I was — and upon breaking it, filled my lungs with blessed air.
Until Ricou pulled me under once more.
We plunged again. Again I struggled. And again, I managed to break free.
The third time we played our little game of down-and-back-again, I realized something, I hadn’t managed shit. That fucker kept letting me go, just to get my hopes up so he could dash them all over again, as surely as he’d dashed my boat against the rocks.
Well, fuck him. I was done playing his game.
Time to play one of my own.
The next time he pulled me under and let go, I shuddered and went limp.
And listened.
And waited.
My lungs burned. My limbs ached from cold and lack of oxygen. All I wanted was to kick my way up to the surface. But with a little help from Air Marshal Malmon’s peak physical condition and strict mental discipline I didn’t. I just floated, neutral-buoyant and lifeless. Like a drowned rat.
Like bait.
But Ricou was the cautious sort. I guess it’s how he’d spent so many centuries haunting the Amazon without winding up on the angler’s hook, the hunter’s blade. He didn’t come at me head-on. Not at first. Instead, from nowhere it seemed, he bumped me hard, at speed, and then disappeared once more into the cold black water.
The blow startled me. Knocked from my chest what little wind I had. I chewed at my cheeks and clenched my eyes and begged Frank’s body to hold onto consciousness for a little while longer, promising I’d reward such cooperation with getting it out of here alive. I didn’t know if I could keep that promise, but I knew for sure I’d try.
As with the boat, the second blow was harder. This time, he hit me full-on in the chest. I heard ribs snap. Felt sickly heat bloom at each break.
When he hit me again, I was ready. I’d studied up. I’d listened to his first two approaches, and I thought I could gauge the vector of his approach by his fin-strokes. Direction and velocity, enough for me. Vision dancing with phantom spots as my brain screamed out for oxygen, I struck, punching the cold nothing in front of me.
And feeling teeth.
Then cold, wet guts.
Ricou was built for power. Built for speed. And he was coming at me all lickety-split like, thinking he’d bust me up but good. Mouth open, chompers ready. Unfortunately for him, it wound up he swam mouth-open right onto my fist, plunging it so deep down his own throat that when he snapped his jaw shut on me, it left a semi-circular dotted line across one pectoral muscle, and another on my back. Which hurt like all get-out, but if his thrashing was any indication, not near as much as me clawing my way through his esophagus and into the soft-and-squishy that surrounded it.
We danced like that a while. He thrashing, me neck-deep in nasty fish guts and yanking away like a magician looking for the end of my rainbow handkerchief, both bleeding like crazy in an environment too lightless for us to see the water go all Kool-Aid. And then I found it, a small sphere, about the size of an acorn, the only thing chalk-dry in his whole mucusy body. I got a hold of it and squeezed.
It crumbled.
Ricou stilled, teeth still buried in my back and chest.
And as one, we sunk together into the depths.
THEN
Despite the vents at regular intervals through which faint, dilute wisps of spring cool sluiced downward, the air inside the bunker hall was warm and dry and still. It smelled of tobacco, pipe and cigarette, as well as people too long confined. Many of the doors that graced the hallway on either side were closed, and all were unmarked. Those that were open revealed a strange hodge-podge of seemingly unrelated rooms, as if they opened into different buildings altogether. To the right, a bare-concrete-walled war room, where dour, jackbooted men pushed what looked like children’s toy tanks and airplanes across a table at the center of the space, wholly occupied by a map of Europe, while headphoned others manned radios, reading codes to others still who clacked away on the odd, typewriter-y cipher devices of which the Nazis seemed so fond. Across from that to my left, posh living quarters hung with large gilt-framed Carravagios and three-quarters filled by a mahogany four-poster bed, which stood, draped with rich linens and multiply bepillowed, atop a plush Oriental rug of tan and green and red. Past that, a room piled high with rations, guns, and ornate trinkets — candelabras, tea services, jewelry — in gold and silver. And yet further down, there was a dark room bare but for ten cots, on top of two of which slept fitfully a pair of fully clothed soldiers.