Koko the Mighty (7 page)

Water now seems to be leaking from everywhere, and it feels colder than Koko ever thought possible. Her fingers unsteady, she desperately claws at the knots of webbed lines holding Flynn in place. When did she tie him down? Was that two days ago? Three? It was just after they hit something and the submarine’s steering went straight to hell, right before they entered the outer bands of the massive storm.

Flynn’s weight keeps the lines taught, and no matter what Koko tries it’s impossible to work the knots free.

She needs a knife.

But their bug-out packs and the rest of the vessel’s maintenance tackle and tools are stowed in the lockers in the engine access area—now completely submerged under the mounting water. Koko can’t get to it in time. Another wave hits and the blow drives her beneath the rising water. She springs up and clings to Flynn’s bindings. Sparks snap and shower down.

There’s no time.

Koko tears at the knots with her teeth. If she can just loosen half of them she could wrestle Flynn out of the makeshift berth. But then what? Wrestle him out to where? Where are they?

About to drown, that’s where.

She stops biting and shakes Flynn’s shoulders.

“Flynn! Baby! Wake up! You have to wake up!”

A feeble mutter and then nothing.

Koko falls back into the water. She trudges forward toward the bridge and studies the consoles above her. Just behind the pilot’s seat, she sees a recessed rectangle with a scuffed patch outlining a set of emergency instructions. A red plastic lever is on the port side of the rectangle, and from flipping through an operational manual earlier, Koko knows the lever will trigger an explosive charge that’ll blow an escape hatch just behind the pilot’s seat. The escape hatch isn’t the way Flynn and Koko boarded this miserable, sinking coffin a week ago, but now that they’re upside down, it sure as hell is their only way out.

Koko braces herself against the starboard-side electronics. Clasping the handle with both hands, she takes a counterintuitive pull and releases the charge. When the bolts blow, in the sub’s tight confines, it is like a small cannon going off. Ears ringing, Koko tumbles back to the ceiling/deck again as a weir of water cascades down from above.

Koko splashes her way back to Flynn as the overwhelming finality of their predicament sinks in. Even if she does get Flynn free from where he’s tied in, he’s unconscious and there’s no way she can lift his body out of the submarine all by herself. Maybe with a strap or pulley, but it would take time to fashion such a measure even under the best of conditions.

Shit—this can’t be it.

It can’t.

I won’t leave you.

But then—a loud sound clanging from above and a shout.

“
YOU!
”

Spinning around, Koko loses her footing and again slips under the mounting water. She lunges upward, pawing at her eyes and questioning whether what she’s seeing is real. In a red poncho, half of a man reaches out to her through the newly blown hatch.

Before she can say anything the man throws a black snake at her, and then holds both of his hands to the sides of his mouth.

“Tie that off under his shoulders! Do it now or you’re both dead!”

Dumbfounded, Koko sees that the thrown snake is not a snake at all, but a thick length of line. Quickly she picks up the line and yells back.

“I can’t get him free!”

“What?!”

“His weight! The knots are too tight, and I can’t get him free! I need a knife!”

Another wave detonates on the hull and the swirling tangerine-tinted wash of light goes black. The man in the red poncho slithers out just as another huge torrent of seawater floods down into the sub’s cabin. A moment later he reappears, and on a hand-signal count of three, he tosses Koko a rod encased in black rubber. Koko catches the rod and looks at it with awe: a battery-powered ignition tool. She presses a button and a triangular-shaped prong slides out, glows yellow, then red, then hot white.

Eight minutes later Koko, a band of men, and a large blue dog are moving to higher, rocky ground away from the wreck and waves. With the incessant wind and driving rain, their progress is brutal, and they cover the ground mere meters at a time. Koko and the men share the load: Flynn’s body and the body of a young, dead girl.

Delirium.

Haptic pulsing gyres of fevered misery.

A seeping chilly wetness, mouthing Flynn’s clothes and flesh all over. And then hands on him.

Wait—hands? Whose hands?

A burn close to his skin and then the helpless sensation of a gallows drop. Next, a series of hard jerks and bindings across his chest and under his useless, limp arms.

Water.

So much water.

Cold, cold water and dragging.

A bitter taste of compounds in his mouth and an acrid, salted slurry funneling up his nose. A reflexive esophageal clamp and warm bile overflows.

More dragging.

Up. Up.

Over sharp shapes.

Up. Up.

The bindings tear at his body. Whatever or whoever has him won’t let go and now—
oh God
—it’s up again. Up into a realm of expansive air and roaring water. He drops once more and each hoist, each knock, each drag amplifies the countless dull aches in his bones.

Flynn wishes for the boundless, sleek nothingness of all things dreamless. To be nothing, to just take one last, deep heave of the lungs and give up. But the torment has no end.

His ears sing and memory cells fire. A line Flynn once read or heard somewhere, some place long, long ago comes to him. Something about bells.

The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling for you but not for me…

Shakespeare?

No. Something else. Soldiers? No, that’s not it.

Airmen. Yes, an airmen’s song. Something sang in some long-forgotten war.

I was an airman of sorts once, wasn’t I? Living in the sky?

But now there’re no bells, only the keening in his ears, the unremitting roar of water and air, the slow thumping pump of his heart denying him oblivion’s release.

Stupid heart.

More wracking tremors, and the air blowing against his face feels roomy and cold. Heavy rain rakes his body. Flynn hears people shouting, their words swirling and lost in the crashing wind.

Where am I?

Why oh why don’t they just let me be?

When Flynn’s spine twists in a way it was never designed to, his eyes fly open with pure anguish. Half awake, he realizes he’s no longer in the submarine and is now being battered around on the cold, slippery steel of the outer hull. Such powerful deluges of water, so ceaseless. Flynn closes his eyes again and lets the groping hands take him. Stubby fingers pulling his shivering meat away in foaming water. Fingers pry open one of his eyelids and a fluid sweep of a light like a comet’s trail scorches his retina and is gone.

A granule of brackish grit forces another vicious coughing jag, and Flynn perceives a face close to his own. For one last time, he dares a look and sees bright green irises, frazzled with exhaustion and worry. A perfect, sweet little nose…

Koko?

“Flynn, we made it!”

Koko… Kooookkkkk—

A smart smack across his cheek. Then another. And another.

“Don’t you die on me, you son of a bitch! Don’t you dare die on me! Hang on!”

Hang on? Hang on to what?

To this?

This sucks.

Propped up on his bed and stripped to the waist, Sébastien Maxx is listening to the raging winds outside his shuttered windows, when a series of quick knocks jerks him free of his thoughts.

The knocking is at the outer door of Sébastien
’s
adjoining office. Fastidiously arranged and painted stark white, the larger adjacent area connects to his darker and more masculine appointed bedroom through a set of French-styled glass doors. Sébastien gets up, plucks his pale-brown tunic from the foot of the bed, and hauls it on.

“Just a moment…”

Now that he’s answered, Sébastien takes his time arranging himself. It’s nice to know that whoever is at the door would gladly wait one minute, one hour, one day if he so requested, because such is his cachet as the Commonage’s alleged leader. After tossing back a mane of long, graying hair, he fastens the top button on his pants and crosses into his office in socked feet. With a finger swipe in the air, he kills the power feeding the blue projection screens at his desk and then switches on a floor lamp. Driven rain crackles against the room’s shuttered windows. As Sébastien opens the door with a brisk snap, he prays whoever is calling is delivering good news.

Stout and lean like a pair of Greco-Roman wrestlers, two identical men in red ponchos stand just outside the door. It’s Eirik and Bonn, colloquially referred to at the Commonage as “the twins.” Their ponchos drip and Eirik, always the more confident of the two, is the first to speak.

“Our apologies for disturbing you, Sébastien, but the search party returned ten minutes ago.”

Sébastien jogs his head once before turning around and moving toward his desk. After settling in a heavy wooden chair, he laces his fingers on his chest and sits back to absorb their report.

“I trust the search party was successful,” Sébastien says.

Eirik looks briefly at Bonn and then back at Sébastien.

“I’m sorry, but something terrible happened. It’s Kumari… She’s dead.”

The revelation is a nitrous-sharp shock. He sits forward, grasping the arms of his chair.

What? No—the search party had their instructions. They were supposed to subdue Kumari, bring her discreetly back to the Commonage… but dead? How could this be?

“Dear God, what the hell happened?”

“She fell.”

“Fell? From what? Where?”

“The cliffs along the ocean just beyond the ruins,” Eirik replies. “We were close, but something went wrong. We lost her before we could pull her to safety. I’m sorry.”

Laboring to assemble his thoughts, Sébastien drops his head into his hands.

“Where is she now?”

“Her body is downstairs in the infirmary. We woke Dr. Corella when we returned, and he has her. The doctor advised us to inform you immediately.”

Sébastien leans forward and places his hands flush on the desk. “Please tell me Kumari’s parents haven’t been notified.”

“No, Dr. Corella thought it best that you saw her first.”

Sébastien’s eyes ping back and forth. Drawing in a deep lungful of air, he stands and swallows the hot bulge building in his throat.

“Thank you,” he says quietly. “You two can go now. Tell Dr. Corella I need a few minutes. This, my God. I can’t believe it. Kumari is dead? I don’t want to believe it.”

Eirik takes a step. “There’s something else too. There’s been a shipwreck.”

“A shipwreck? Where? When?”

“Below the cliffs. The wreck occurred when we were trying to reach Kumari.”

“But out here? Impossible.”

“No, it’s true. We don’t know if it’s commercial or militarized, but it’s a fusion-powered submarine. It came in from the southwest.”

“Are there survivors?”

Eirik nods vigorously. “Just two,” he says. “A man and a woman, and the man is in bad shape. The female survivor, she attacked some people down in the infirmary when we returned. Dr. Corella has her sedated and Gammy is guarding her.”

“Did you say
attacked
?”

“There were injuries.”

Sébastien gets up and quickly moves around his desk. He steams toward his bedroom.

“Tell Dr. Corella I’m on my way. I want you two and anyone connected to the search party to assemble in the infirmary and wait there until I arrive. No exceptions. I want to debrief everyone. We need to figure out what happened and who these survivors are before the whole Commonage loses their heads.”

Sébastien returns from his bedroom with a pair of laceless black boots. He drops into his desk chair again and pulls the boots on one after the other and then lifts his eyes.

“What’re you waiting for?”

Eirik adjusts his posture. “Well, the search party also detected some unusual movement on their way out to find Kumari. It seems a band of de-civ migrants have taken up a position deep within the woods beyond the western edge of the Commonage.”

Boots now on, Sébastien sits back in his chair. “How many?”

“A few dozen, maybe more. It was hard to get an accurate read, but it might be a larger group. The encampment is set up about a kilometer from here.”

Sébastien waves a hand, indicating this additional information, while troubling, is not a priority.

“We’ve had de-civ transients cross through the area before. They’ve probably just been caught off guard and got disoriented by the storm. God, Kumari is dead, a shipwreck, and migrants? Let’s take one crisis at a time, shall we? What time is it?”

“A little after three
A.M.
”

Sébastien turns and listens to the wind outside again. “The models indicate the storm should be dying down soon. My bet is these de-civs will probably move on when the weather clears, but please keep me apprised if their status changes. I want a second search party ready to go back to this sub’s wreck within the hour. We need to see what’s what.”

The two brothers bow and leave, closing the door behind them.

Sébastien drags a finger through the air and activates his projection screens. He cues up his personal communication links, and with several additional hand motions enlarges four sub-screens on his arrays. With a clawed hand he expands several satellite charts, checking the storm’s present direction and rotation. His previous assessment of the weather’s ebbing strength is accurate. The extended front shows dissipation and the storm is heading inland. He checks the surrounding area’s offshore restriction measures, and is disturbed to discover that, because of the storm’s intensity, there was a minor fluctuation in offshore communication uplinks. The break jibes perfectly with the timing of the wreck. Furious, he addresses his systems out loud.

“Priority assimilation of all known submersible crafts worldwide: commercial, private, and militarized with complete breakdown of onboard schematics. Addendums: retrieve a listing of all distress transponder communications filtered for the northern Pacific region for the past seventy-two hours before storm manifestation to present. Realign all and confirm all offshore and air-space restrictions.”