Maelstrom (13 page)

Bradford sighed. “I suppose this is as good a place as any. The captain was adamant that we be back aboard before nightfall.” He glanced absently at his watch, but couldn’t see the numbers through his sweat-streaked glasses. He took them off and wiped them vainly on his sweat-soaked shirt.

Suddenly there was a violent commotion to the side of the trail, and something upright, about the size of a large crocodile, lunged from its hiding place and snatched one of the leading ’Cats by the arm. With a shriek of pain and terror, the Lemurian was dragged into the impenetrable gloom.

“Shit!” Silva bolted forward, even as the others backed away in fright. Several were bowled over by his rush. Another scream marked the place the ’Cat disappeared, and he knelt and fired at a dim shape in the darkness. He fired again and again, on semiautomatic, and his efforts were rewarded by a different type of shriek, and muffled, panicky jabbering. On his hands and knees in the damp mulch, he scurried into the tunnel of brush.

“Well, don’t just stand there, you useless sons of bitches!” roared the Bosun. He dashed forward, sweeping all the others, including the Mice and Courtney Bradford, along. More shots, muffled now, sounded from within the hole. Gray crouched at the opening as others fanned out behind him.

“Silva!” he shouted. “Silva, God damn it! Where are you?”

A moment passed, and a final shot reached their ears. “Here!” came a breathless shout, sounding much deeper in the tunnel than they could credit. “I’m comin’ out with the ’Cat, but some of you bastards need to come get my ‘trophy.’ He ain’t much, but I want a better look at him!”

“Is your, ah, ‘trophy’ quite dead?” Bradford inquired anxiously.

“Yep. But this ’Cat ain’t, so you’d better have some first aid ready.”

Several moments later Silva’s back appeared, and he dragged the moaning, bloodied Lemurian clear. He had him by the scruff of the neck and one arm. The other arm had been savagely mauled. Gray directed their two corpsmen to attend to the wounded ’Cat and then regarded Silva.

“What was it?”

“Not sure,” Silva panted. The exertion and excitement had caught up with him. “It’s dark in there.” He gestured at the ’Cat he’d saved. “Lucky I didn’t hit the little guy, but I had to shoot. It was draggin’ him down another trail back in all that shit. I don’t know, but it looked sort of like a midgety super lizard.”

“The method of attack would seem consistent,” Bradford agreed, with feeling, “but the size difference . . .”

They ceased speculating, knowing soon they’d see the creature for themselves. Several Marines had already ducked into the brushy tunnel. Soon they heard panting, and an occasional chittering curse. Whatever they had was heavier than they would have thought after their fleeting glance.

“My word!” Bradford exclaimed, when they finally dragged the dead creature clear. Once everyone could see it, the Marines backed away and acted eager to cleanse themselves. They quickly stooped and grabbed handfuls of moldy mulch, rubbing it between their palms and fingers.

“Lawsy,” muttered Isak Rueben, the first word any of the Mice had spoken since they came ashore. They had all, including Tabby, been too preoccupied with gloom over the prospect of at least one of them remaining on this miserable island. The creature before them, adding its blood to the damp soil, looked like nothing they’d seen before. Certainly there were similarities to several others, but taken as a whole, it was unique. Silva’s comparison to a small super lizard wasn’t without grounds; it had a long tail and coarse, crocodile-like skin, and its physique was similar, on a smaller scale. But its head was smaller in proportion to its body, and the tooth-bristling jaws were longer and slimmer. Its sightlessly glaring eyes were much bigger too, proportionately, and positioned closer to the top of its head—again like a croc—but it had long, powerful forearms with viciously clawed, grasping fingers. The arms were long enough for it to roam on all fours if it wished, but it could obviously use them for grasping or carrying prey. This last reminded them of the “aboriginal” Grik the destroyermen had encountered on Bali—the ones that got Mack Marvaney. Those creatures weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds. This one was closer to four hundred.

Thunder muttered indistinctly, and rain began pattering the canopy above. It would probably be a while before any made its way down to them.

“Raunchy-lookin’ booger,” Gilbert Yager agreed with his companion.

“Amazing!” Bradford said. “I walk in the very footsteps of Mr. Darwin himself, except here, every land is a Galapagos!” He gestured at Silva’s “trophy,” its two-foot purple tongue lolling from between its jaws. “Don’t you see? This creature probably is the ‘super lizard’ of this island, filling the exact same ecological niche.” He pointed at the diminutive trail. “Smaller island, smaller prey, smaller predators! We’ve already theorized the hostile sea must prevent dissemination of species on this Earth to a much greater degree than our own, and we find truly similar fauna only on lands that must—quite recently, geologically speaking—have somehow been in contact. But this . . .” He paused in happy contemplation. “This proves lands with no ‘recent’ physical contact with others might have evolved even more unimaginable species! Just think what creatures might dwell in America or Europe . . . or Australia!”

“Keje’s been to Australia; the ’Cats have land Homes there. And yeah, he says they have some goofy-lookin’ critters runnin’ around,” said the Bosun curiously, “so there might be somethin’ to what you say. I never was a ‘Darwin man’ before, especially when it comes to monkeys and folks, but I’ve had to . . . adjust my thinkin’ a little since we came here. How do you get all that just by lookin’ at one dead lizard, though, and what difference does it make?”

“Yeah, and who cares?” grumped Isak.

“Look closely, gentlemen; that creature is clearly not an allosaurus gigantus,” Bradford said, insisting on his own term for super lizards. “Believe me,” he added with feeling, “I
know
!” There were a few chuckles. Even the wounded ’Cat managed a tight grin, while the corpsmen applied the antiseptic paste to his arm and began binding it up. He’d require much more care when they got him to the beach, but the paste was an analgesic as well as an antiseptic, so his pain was under control. “That being said,” Bradford continued, “I believe its distant ancestors were. They arrived on this island aeons ago—my ice age theory again!—and when it was separated from the mainland by water, they had to adapt or die. Can you imagine an island this size supporting even one creature as big as the one we took on the pipeline cut near Baalkpan? Of course not. In fact, those that came here must have been smaller to begin with. Over time, they got even smaller, but also evolved other differences to make them more efficient predators within their limited domain. I shouldn’t wonder if their metabolisms were slower as well. My point is, besides the scientific interest it inspires, we may not be stuck on a world ruled entirely by the descendants of dinosaurs! On other lands, with different or greater varieties of climates, entirely different creatures—perhaps even mammals—might have risen to the fore . . . and dare I say it? If Mr. Darwin’s theories and your own religious teachings are both correct, Mr. Gray, perhaps we might one day find other humans not simply stranded here as we were, but who are indigenous to this world!”

“All that from one dead lizard?” Gray inquired again, with an arched brow and a skeptical tone.

“Well . . . of course, it’s a stretch. But I feel quite reanimated by the possibility!”

Ever practical, Silva bit a chaw from a plug of local tobacco. He’d taken to compressing the stuff in the ship’s hydraulic press. He kicked the “lizard” in question. “Well, nothin’s gonna reanimate this booger!” He stooped to examine the bullet holes. “Took six shots to kill it,” he said with the objective air of a professional, “but none of ’em was particularly well aimed. One good shot’ll take down a Grik. I expect the same’s true with this ’un.” He looked at Gray. “They ain’t nothin’ your boys can’t handle. They’ll just need to be careful.” He glanced toward the sky he couldn’t see, then looked at Bradford. “We better reanimate our own asses and get back to the ship before the captain decides he’s better off without us after all. If it was just me, I bet he’d already be long gone.” He kicked the lizard again, spit on it, and turned back to Gray. “If you want to muck around out here awhile longer, that’s fine, but I gotta get Mr. Brain back to the ship. He’s gonna want to take his new lizard back to play with,” he added resignedly, “so you better give me a detail to drag the damn thing. That just leaves one final question.” An evil grin split Silva’s face, and he looked at the Mice. “Which one of these squirrely snipes are you gonna keep? You only get one; Spanky’s orders, and the captain said so too.” He shook his head. “I’d leave all three, except maybe Tabby, and hope they get ate. Tabby’s smart enough; we might still straighten her out.”

Gray looked at the Mice, standing dejectedly, eyes lowered. “What do you want to do? Flip a coin?”

“There’s three of us,” Isak objected, “only two sides on a coin. ’Sides”—he glanced fleetingly at his comrades—“we ain’t got a coin.”

“Tabby’s going back to the ship,” Gray declared. “She didn’t start working with you two until you had the rig set up. Besides, if we have problems, I want one of you with real experience.”

“Ain’t fair,” Isak almost moaned.

“Yah!” Gilbert agreed, spearing Tabby with a suspicious glare, as if she’d somehow cheated. “That cuts our chances in half!”

Gray rolled his eyes and fished in his pocket, producing a tarnished silver dollar. He looked at it with a strange expression. “Only thing I keep it for,” he said softly. “Only thing it’s good for anymore.”

Parting company with
Felts
,
Walker
steamed east, northeast, then almost due north as the sun sank into the Borno jungle, beyond Tarakan, off the port quarter. Gilbert Yager sat on the gun platform atop the aft deckhouse near the auxiliary conn. Tabby was beside him, sitting in a similar fashion: legs crossed and elbows on her knees. Both stared glumly at the silhouetted island in the middle distance. Gilbert hadn’t seen many sunsets in the last few years; he was usually below when they occurred, and he was immune to any aesthetic appreciation of them in any case. The only significance they generally held for him was, after they took place, the firerooms gradually became a little cooler for a while. But this sunset was remarkable to Gilbert in several ways. It marked the close of a day that had seen a profound change in his everyday life, and change was always bad. For the first time, really, since he’d joined the Navy—since he could remember, in fact—Isak Rueben was not within earshot, and he felt an inexplicable . . . emptiness. He also became aware that he wasn’t sure he really even liked Isak very much, and that caused him to spend a moment or two engaged in an extremely uncharacteristic activity: introspection.

He was comfortable around Isak—they were brothers, after all—although nobody aboard had any idea. They shared physical similarities, and that was not unremarked upon, but they had different last names, and apparently no one ever came to the obvious conclusion that they had different fathers. He relied on Isak in many ways; he was the “smart” one who prodded him to join the Navy to escape the oil fields in the first place. He was someone to talk to in a world with few such individuals, except maybe Tabby, now. But did he like him? How would their lives have differed if they’d taken separate paths? Had they held each other back by their self-imposed seclusion? Maybe they’d taken Tabby on only as an experiment to see if they could even make friends. If that was the case, all they seemed to have done to her was create a copy of themselves. She’d become almost as acerbic and insular as they were. Maybe he should use this sunset as a break, a dividing line between his old life and a new one, somehow different. He could take his isolation from his brother, brief as it was supposed to be, and see if he could change himself, make a friend, “get out more,” as Spanky always suggested. He would try, he determined, without ever deciding whether he liked his brother or not. That realization would probably come when they saw each other again. Still, invigorating as his decision was, he couldn’t help feeling a sense of deep foreboding as he stared at the last light of the setting sun. Something was bound to happen; it always did. Change was never good.

“Let’s get sumpin’ ta eat,” he suggested, and Tabby nodded her head. He suddenly wondered what she’d been thinking. Were her thoughts similar to his? He hoped not. It was suddenly important that she, at least, like him. They climbed down the ladder to the main deck and worked their way forward past the covered holes where the numbers three and four torpedo mounts used to be, past the searchlight tower and the aft two funnels, until they stepped under the raised gun platform/roof over the amidships deckhouse and open-air galley.

A short line leaned on the stainless-steel counter under a window, waiting their turn to snatch a sandwich from a dwindling pile on a large tin platter. The group were mostly humans, since they generally preferred sandwiches to Earl Lanier’s cooking. The ’Cats were the other way around; they liked his stews and other concoctions. That was understandable, since he made them from animals and vegetables they were familiar with. The way he cooked them and the seasonings he used were still novel, and they enjoyed that too. Most of the humans liked things they were used to, though, and even if the sandwiches tasted a little strange, they were still sandwiches. As they approached the window, they heard Lanier heaping abuse on those he was serving.

“. . . wouldn’t have to build so many goddamn sammiches if you bastards’d eat real food!”

“You ain’t cooked real food since you was in the Navy!” retorted Paul Stites.

“Why don’t you fry me up one of your fishes?” taunted another man. Lanier was known to fish over the side when the occasion permitted, because he was deeply devoted to fish—and he couldn’t stand to eat the other stuff he cooked either. Some of his fishing exploits had become legendary, and a few of the creatures he’d brought from the depths had even provoked desperate gunfire.