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I crawled through the crunching snow on my belly, each handhold careful, each movement furtive.  I might as well have stood up and played an entire one-woman brass band: the calving was in full swing mere meters away and the roars and grumbles of the herd covered a multitude of sins, from my errant feet and odd curse to the thud-and-clunk of the rustlers setting up their gear not a stone’s-throw from me.  A stone thrown prone, from the ground. 

Really I was more than near enough.  Might as well just let them finish doing my job for me.  The mechanism clicked, their sapper stood and ducked, the ice shook, and all other noises were erased by the calving of a fresh bergie bit, peeled from the flank of my glacier like smoked meat from a rib rack.  A neat job, very tidy, very clear.  Maybe they’d been a professional before. 

In the ringing silence that followed, I stood clear up and pointed – one hand at my badge, one hand with my reelgun – and coughed politely. 

“Antipolar Berg Marshall Everard.  You’re under arrest.”

And that was the simple part done. 

***

The second-simplest part happened when one of them tried to run.  The sapper and the skipper – laden down with their gear and apparatuses – didn’t try it, but the climber made a dash for the freshly-calved cliff face.  I put the reelshot through their parka and let them dangle from the glacier while I disarmed the other two rustlers.  A large-bore for the big seals and some iceblades used as much as pitons as for weaponry; either these were real professionals or real amateurs to wander around so lightly armed.  The attempted escape suggested the latter, the careful timing of the bergrustle (just as the main herd was being calved and tagged on the other side of the bay) suggested the former.  Maybe they were just stupid and lucky. 

“Now what?” asked the sapper.  He was a younger one by his voice, all awkward and hesitant and half the age of his tools.  They were in good shape, mind – he knew his trade at least. 

“You brought these idiots into this without letting them know the consequences?” I asked the skipper. 

She didn’t even look at me, eyes on the waves and the skies and the ice.  I wasn’t her job. 

“We’re going to float this stolen ice of yours across the bay, to the rest of the harvest-ground,” I told the sapper.  “And then you folks are going to the jail, and then to a jury of your berg-harvesting peers, and then when you’re found guilty of bergrustling – which you will be, thanks to this armful of evidence – you will be sentenced.  And the sentence is being granted this berg you’ve chiseled and set adrift on it.  Without a steering apparatus.  Or weapons.   Or food.”

The sapper’s face fell a little bit farther with every word I spoke.  

“Now you two get over to your pal’s tether and hoist him up here.  I don’t want him to slip free of my line and land in the water before he faces justice.”

The skipper did as she was told.  The sapper stood around like a tool until I jiggled my reelgun at him meaningfully.  The climber wasn’t in much shape to do anything but shiver once she was pulled up, clothes wet from the wave-slapped face of the berg.  Her face was a mass of icescarring and when she rearranged her scarf I saw the tip of her nose had been lost to a frost snap. 

“So,” I asked as the skipper set up the bergdrive, “what brings a couple of old hands like you to this idiot pastime?”

The skipper didn’t flinch.   The sapper was one big flinch already.  But the climber glared at me, and ah, that was a crack.  Half this job is about spotting the cracks.  “You’re not novices; this setup was pretty cleanly executed, from summit to even the calving, really.  You’re not overloaded on weaponry, so you planned to avoid a fight and knew you wouldn’t  steer this thing into a big  seal or a teeth whale.  But your actual criminal bona fides?  Absolute shit.  I spotted your sadass excuse for a camouflage sheet across the damned bay without binoculars, and that’s AFTER I saw you setting it up in your boat, which you  hid very nicely until you  actually docked it.  I’m sure it was very well hidden from the ground, but from the glacierside?  Where the people you’re hiding from are standing?  Not very good.  I had to win a game of rock-paper-scissors to be the one to arrest you all, you know that?  A tournament game.”

“It’s not their-” began the sapper.

“Shut up,” said the climber through her teeth. 

“But it was my –”

“Yes, and them learning it won’t help, so shut up.  Don’t give the Marshalls more than they already have.  Ever.”

The bergie bit started rolling, not with the usual mule-kick force but a quiet slide into motion.  A proper skipper then, with some professional pride.  “Yeah,” I added.  “Don’t give me more details, kid.  Like what you must have paid these two idiots with to get them to sign onto your little project.  What was left for profit after you bribed them into this?  Five bits and a chunk?  I’d  hope they wouldn’t settle for less,  not for boosting a nice fat bergie from under the nose of the official Antipolar calving grounds, in the prime of the season.”

“It’s not about the money,” insisted the sapper.
“Shut UP, damnit!”
“No, no!  Maybe if she hears she’ll come around to-”

“Marshalls don’t care about anything but the bottom line, that’s how they are-”

“No, no, no,” I waved a hand, “we care about a good joke too.  This sounds funny.  You shut up yourself; I want to hear what the kid has to say.  Going to be a long trip too, the way captain cautious here is steering us.  Put some pepper in that old flank-steak of an engine, skipper!”

“Aye,” said the skipper – the first words or any sound at all I’d had out of her, and sounding torn and ragged.  Maybe a knife to the throat had been part of her career, but it gave me pause before the sapper honest-to-god cleared his throat. 

“So,” he began, “we actually weren’t going to sell this berg.”
“What, were you planning on donating it?”

“Well, kind of, we were going to give it out as directed by our organization, yes, that’s right.   Right.  Right – could you stop laughing?  I’m trying to tell you something you asked about.”

“Sorry, sorry,” I snorted.  “It’s just…giving away.  Giving away antipolar ice.  You got any idea how much this is worth?”
“Less than a nice green golf course and an overwatered crop of emerald onions and a rack of grain-fed large beef ribs?  This one bergie will meet essential water needs for half a city, and once we show them that, they’ll realize what they’re being robbed of, every time they see those icebergs towed into  the harbour.”

“Ah,” I said.  And snorted.  “Environmentalists.  Really.  You’re an environmentalist?  And you talked two lifelong berg-tenders into your idiot crusade?  Did you use up all your persuasion on them or was someone else doing the talking to get them onboard?”
“I barely had t-”

“SHUT UP!”

“Well anyways, that isn’t the point.  The point.  The point is… the point is that there’s not going to be any ice left.  Just a littlebit is left now, but soon?  Nothing.”
I shrugged.  “Plenty for now.”
“There was plenty of groundwater back in The Stuuk too, but that was fifty years ago and we ran dry just before I was born.  How long before this runs dry too?  What’s next?”
“Desalinzation.   And if my job’s still around by then – patrolling salt pans and running intruders off the water rigs sounds like a thing – I bet yours will be too, so quit worrying.”

“And the expense of that?  The water shortages?  The toll in mining, land repurposing, the destruction of coastal fisheries to feed more water in?”
“Oh please.  It won’t all be bad, just some of it.  The water’ll get to those who need it.”
“Like this bergie will, right?”
“Right.”

“Do you really believe a single bit of water from this ice will go anywhere near a person in actual need?”
“As long as they have the money, sure.”
“And if they don’t?  What’s left – left for them then?”
“Hey, there’s always room for more coworkers.”
“Right.  If they pass the background checks.”
“Tough luck, some of us didn’t shoplift in high school.”
“Some of us had no choice if we wanted lunch!  You can’t afford to plan that far ahead if-”
“For the love of all things that live and breathe SHUT UP,” the climber yelled in the sapper’s face, over the roar of the engine.  “SHUT YOUR BOUGIE LITTLE ASS UP OR I”LL BITE IT OFF AND PUT MY LEG THROUGH IT SIDEWAYS!  She’s PLAYING with you, you self-important little turd!”

“Not… not right.  Not right!  I was just trying to-”

The climber punched him, which was underselling that haymaker.  A big, slow, stupid roundhouse blow, the clumsiest explosion of rage I’d ever seen launch itself out of someone’s shoulder and into someone else’s stomach.  But it slammed into the boy’s brisket with a clang and sent him skittering across the ice towards the rear of the bergie, and damnit, damnit, damnit, there’s no bounty for bringing back a corpse for trial,  not since that one pontiff had his predecessor dug up and shoved into the stand, so I grabbed him with one  hand and levelled my reelgun at the climber with the other and with my mouth I said “no fighting.  Any head gets busted here, it’s my doing.”

The climber said something, but I couldn’t hear it over the screaming engine. 

“Speak up!”
“GET DOWN,” yelled the sapper in my ear, and instead of doing that I looked up, up, up at the Garhorss Glacier, the calving grounds for the finest  high-quality antipolar ice, which we were heading towards at such a pell-mell pace that there was an honest  to god bow wave athwart our bows. 

Dead ahead  was a small  chasm, the  kind I’d seen  a lot of in my training.  The kind that went way farther than you knew, and that if you disturbed, tended to shatter.  And I was so busy staring that that would’ve been that and then some if the skipper hadn’t thrown out her elbow as she slid  past me and knocked me flat out  on my ass by way of my chin, making something in my jaw pop and crack and my mouth yowl and the first bits of frozen  shrapnel whiz over my  head instead of  through it.  That woman’s bones were solid diamond, I swear, and she grabbed  me one-handed and dragged me down into the lea of the bergie and threw me into the back  of the boat (climber and sapper already present, my long-absent  tactical awareness helpfully  reported).  The boat was a pile of garbage but she sang into action like a racehorse and as we sped  away I could just  make out – through the spray and  the crash and the tears – the storage warehouse for the entire stock of calving tools  for the Garhorss Glacier sailing away into the ocean like a fleck of sea-spray in a whitecap.  A tiny crumb beside it could have been the headquarters of the Antipolar Berg Marshalls, or maybe not.  I blinked before I was sure, and they weren’t there anymore. 

“Nice aim,” said the sapper two noisy, frightening miles later. 

“Good directions,” said the skipper from the depths of her throat. 

“Too many directions,” said the climber snidely from safely belowdeck, rattling amongst tins and cans.  “All those rights and lefts and god damnit just say go one way and then change your mind once it needs changing.”
“We needed a very hard right.”
“Mass murderers,” I attempted to say, instead saying ‘maaa mardaurrur’ and hurting my mouth very badly.

The sapper dug around inside his parka and pulled loose a plastic buoyancy-liner with a perfect knuckle-imprint in it, wincing as he inspected it.   “No, no.  I was watching over your shoulder, and they saw us coming well before you caught on.  Most of them should have gotten out, and forgive me if few will mourn the passing of anyone with business inside the Antipolar Justice Tribunal.   A lot of orphans and widows and widowers will sleep soft tonight.”

“uck uuu.”

“If you’d looked anywhere but at us when I started that fight you’d have had plenty of time to stop us,” said the climber peevishly, “so don’t go pointing the finger of blame at anyone else on the boat.  Maybe you know how to look for cracks, but you’re not the only one.  Speaking of looking…skipper?  Rightwards if you please.  I think I see a bergie bit.   Not the BEST, of course, but we put that one to good  use and I believe that this is an acceptable second place.”

It was a good day for fishing.  The sky was blue, the sea was blue, the boat was a sort of off-colour rusted grey, and the air wasn’t blue and didn’t taste so much of tin and boot as usual. 

It wasn’t a great day for fish, but that was normal. 

Bruce popped his beer and set out his line and dipped his net and to his great startlement found that there was a tug, then another, and he was so shocked he almost dropped the line instead of his beer.  But he dug in his heels and gritted his teeth and pulled and heaved and hauled and strained and swayed until his sweat ruined his shirt and at last he heaved in a tunny of all things, taller than he was and gasping for water through its gills, a real relic of the past and too tasty to be true. 

“Well THAT’S a big lunch,” said Bruce once he’d got his own breath back; he was scarcely less tuckered than the fish. 

“Please no,” said the tunny.  “Please don’t eat me.”
“A talking fish!” said Bruce.  “Two surprises in one day, that’s enough for me.”
“Not just a talking fish: a magical fish.  I am the very last of all tunas, and am imbued with the power that can only be invested in the last of one’s kind, the power to create a better future for another.”

“What if the better future for another is for me to have a very big lunch?” asked Bruce, cunningly. 

“Think bigger, please!” implored the tunny, “If you set me free, friend fisherman, I shall grant you any wish you desire.  And surely you can see the value in this, suffer as we both do from the pains and pollutions of the skies that have led to the warming of the waves and the deaths of all my kin?  I can give you a wish, and with that wish you can solve both our problems at a single stroke!”

Bruce was deeply impressed by this, and the prospect of more lunches to come.  But a tuna in the hand was worth two in the sea, surely, and he despaired at the thought of all this time spent fishing being wasted so he’d have to spend MORE time fishing later.  Then a brilliant thought came to him.

“I wish…” said Bruce.

“Yes!” said the tunny.

“…for two wishes,” he finished. 

“Oh no oh dear,” muttered the tunny. 

“What’s the problem?” demanded Bruce.  “I can use one wish for fixing the seas and skies again, and the other for myself.  Surely that’s not greedy, since I’m going to be the person saving the seas and skies.”
“But I am but a simple magical tuna, and cannot grant more than one wish,” said the tunny, which would be crying if it could.

“Well, shucks,” said Bruce.  “But are you SURE?”
“Wait!” said the tunny.  “I know of another magical fish, the last of her kind, who may be powerful enough to grant you two wishes!  Release me and I will find her for you!”
“And you’re SURE this isn’t all a ploy to not be my lunch?” asked Bruce. 

“I swear upon my blue fins,” said the tunny. 

Slowly, carefully, gently, begrudgingly, Bruce cut loose the line and removed the hook and released the fish into the sea, where it slipped away like mercury into groundwater.   Then he drove back home and went to the pub for a lunch of cricket brisket, grumbling at the expense all the while. 

“No fish, Bruce?” said the man on the stool next to him.   “No luck on such a fine day, Bruce?  Finally going to have to get a real job, Bruce?”

“Just you wait,” said Bruce, chuckling.  “Just you wait.”

***

The next day dawned cloudy and hazy, with light white fog over the water, but Bruce was impatient and puttered through it without slowing, casting a pale froth behind his boat that was only slightly tinted from the dying metal of its hull.  He cast over his line and cast out his net and pulled out his beer and dropped it. 

“That was unnecessary,” said the great white shark, in her breathy voice.  The net made a rather awkward hat on her big sleek head, and it didn’t quite cover her big black eyes, although the shiny hooks on it certainly accentuated her big sharp teeth. 

“Hello,” said Bruce, coherently.  The shark was only a little shorter in length than his boat, and he wondered at how well the tunny had played him for a fool.  “Are you magical?”
“Very,” said the great white shark.  “I am the last of my kind, and the last of all sharks besides, so my power is greater than that of the last of the tunas.  Two wishes I can grant you, for my freedom from this net (for appearance’s sake).  You will hold the power to mend the seas and clear the air and maybe even tend to the ravaged soil of the land with but a single generously-worded command, and still have one wish remaining as your reward beyond those wonderful fruits of renewal and salvation that you will partake in with all.”

“One wish,” said Bruce, rubbing his chin.  “One wish.”  He could get a new house.  He could get a new boat so he could afford a new house.  He could get lunch every day for the rest of his life with a new boat, so that was good too, but it’d be a lot of work.  He could live forever so he could do a lot of work and still have fun, but still.

“What if,” Bruce asked cleverly, “I wished for TWO wishes with my wish?”

The great white shark’s eyes rolled back in its head, from midnight dark to blinding white.  “Your needs are that great?”
“My life’s tough,” said Bruce. 

“My powers cannot be stretched further,” admitted the great white shark.  “But I may know of another, greater than I.  She can manage your three wishes, but no more.   I will go in search of her and bring her to you, so that you may save us all and be granted the reward that you claim as your due.”

“Thanks,” said Bruce, but before he could even cut the net the last of the great white sharks had sunk beneath the surface, snapping it as if it were made of nothing but strands of algae and muck.  He went back to shore fuming at the indignity of it, and the pub had raised prices on the bean burgers again and were serving them with smaller chips besides. 

“No fish, Bruce?” asked the man on the stool next to him, poking him insolently in the shin.  “And with such dedication too, to head out in the fog and murk instead of toiling in the fields with the rest of your pals!  You’re a hard worker for sure, Bruce!  You’re well missed out there!”
“Just you wait,” said Bruce, grumbling.  “Just you wait.”

***

The sky was thick and clotted with curdled grey brooding its way into dark thunderheads, and the waves were as surly and choppy as could be, but Bruce had a hunger in his soul that had nothing to do with lunch for once – at least, for one lunch – and he drove into the teeth of it with a wild grin and a beer already unshackled.  Out to his usual spot he rode, bouncing from peak to peak to point and cackling, until at last he was there. 

He couldn’t cast a line more than an inch in the wind’s teeth, but he didn’t need to.  She was already there. 

“Are you a fish?” he inquired of the whale. 

The whale’s eye was as big as his head.  “By honour, not by birth,” she sang softly to him through the hull of his boat and the waves of the sea and the air he breathed.  “Although by descent we are both tetrapods, and hence sarcopterygians, and thereby fish.”
Bruce nodded in a very professional way.  “Of course,” he said.  “Now, my three wishes?”
“I am the last of the humpbacks,” said the whale, whose great flukes beat the surface softly, churning the storm flat around them, “and the last of the whales, and the last thing in all the seas that is bigger than the great white shark who sent me here.  I have just enough power within me to grant you three wishes: to save the sea and skies and all that live within them and may live again, and two for yourself.”

Bruce thought of all this, and then he thought of himself, and then  he thought of himself and all this. 

“Suppose,” Bruce asked craftily, “I used my two wishes… to ask for two MORE wishes?  Each?”

The whale exhaled, and the spout towered over them both, swept away in the dark of day.  “What you ask is beyond me, fisherman.  You ask what is beyond any of us to give.  We have offered all we can, for our sake and yours, and it is all that will ever be.”

“What if,” theorized Bruce, “I waited for the last living thing in all the oceans?  Wouldn’t that have enough power to do that?”
The whale inhaled, and she dove. 

“Hello?” said Bruce. 

He went back to shore and to bed early without dinner.  His stomach was troubling him.  

***

It was beautiful out again.  The storm had scrubbed away the scum that had crept down from inland into the air and water, and was as close to true blue as could be.  The waves had tuckered themselves out.  Bruce’s boat had more dents than before, but fewer than it could have gotten. 

So Bruce took the last beer in the fridge, and he went out, far enough that the shore was a little dot, and he put out his line. 

He waited. 

And waited. 

And waited some more.

And then he went back to shore. 

The pub was out of fresh food for the week.  Bruce had pickled onions (without garlic). 

“No fish, Bruce?” asked the man on the stool next to him.  “A pity.  The harvest isn’t doing great; and it’d cheer us up some to see new foods on the table.  You reckon you’ll start pulling your weight soon, Bruce?

“Just you wait,” said Bruce.  His hand was tapping on the table; why was it doing that?  When had it started doing that?  “Just you wait.”

The alarm went off and wouldn’t shut up until Lady Duchess Baroness Countess Champion-Captain Magewarden Fist of the Southeast Jessica Dark’ness Damselblade got up and punched it in the nose, sending it scurrying and squeaking back to its house in a huff. 

Stupid thing wasn’t even necessary.  She’d woken up well before it, as usual. 

Three hours of sleep, six days in a row.  Her body hated it but now it demanded it, and she’d been up before dawn weeding her mandrakes and repairing the rents in the vegetable lamb’s pen where the neighborhood basilisk had tried to claw its way inside.  By the time she was done her gleaming +11 Platemail of Plentiful Shining was a muddy mess and the crackling power-gems that roared in her gauntlet were beginning to short out. 

Then the neighborhood basilisk had tried to claw its way inside just as she was finishing the repairs on the fence and all she’d had to hand was her Phillippe’s –head morningscrewdriver. 

Her eyes were burning red – and not from that nasty hellbat scratch last week – and it felt like there was a demented bellringer going bananas inside her brain with a spiked mallet. 

Oh.  That was her doorbell screaming. 

The doorknob was stiff – probably due to Jessica coating it in basilisk ichor on her way in.  She fixed the problem by removing it with her fist, then removing the door with her fist.

There was a peasant on the other side, regarding her fist with some alarm.  Of course.  First quest of the day was always a fucking peasant.  Little shits couldn’t even make it through the night without being imperilled six times over.

“What,” she grunted.

“My deepest, most profound apologies for disturbing you so early, oh Lady Duchess Baroness Countess Champion-Captain Magewarden and Fist of the Southeast,” mumbled the peasant at high speed, eyes downcast to the hem of her awful grubby little tunic, “but wolves have beset our shepherds overnight, and now-”

“You want me to kill twelve of them.”
“Yes please.”

“And?”
The peasant’s mud-brown common eyes stared blankly from her grit-grey common face.  “I’m sorry, Lady Duchess Baro-”

“There’s always something else.  And.  What.  Is.  It.”
“…sixty-three of the sheep have wandered away in the night’s chaos.  Please find them and bring them back from the depths of Armsaw Woods.”

“Aw piss,” said Lady Duchess Baroness Countess Champion-Captain Magewarden Fist of the Southeast Jessica Dark’ness Damselblade, and she slammed her door in the peasant’s face, downed a bag of coffee beans, and was halfway to Armsaw Woods before she remembered she didn’t have a door anymore. 

“Then what did I slam?” she wondered, as she pulled out Dragonsnipper, her third-favourite longblade.  “Aw hellworms.  I punched a hole in the wall again, didn’t I.”

***

At ten in the morning Jessica had a working brunch of raw wolf flank with charred wolf fur cooked over a roaring blaze of damp tinder and soggy branches, washed down with the few coffee crumbs she found and licked up from the very bottom of the bag of beans.   She barely chewed; since she was using her mouth to swear and both her arms and legs to shove sheep.  At last the dim woolly bastards had been ushered, bleating, towards the arms of her shepherds, and Jessica was  about to follow suite when she heard a faint and beautiful melody, woven of laughter and threaded with delight, redolent of dewdrops and starlight and gilded with golden lilies. 

“Oh FUCK,” she groaned.  “Fuck fuck fuck.  Is this more fae shit?  It’s more fae shit.”
“Indeed,” proclaimed a voice that would’ve made any mere mortal singer break down into sobs.  And lo, from the surface of a nearby pond arose a figure robed in petals and crowned in sunbeams, with ferns for lace, bracken for brocade, and lady slippers for lady’s slippers.  “I am Queen Morning-glory, daughter of Hibiscus, mother of Jack-in-the-pulpit, guardian of all that is green and good and great and grand.  Thy hath trespassed upon mine woods and slain mine creatures, and-”

“Weregild in gold or stabbing?”

“-thy DARE-”

“Gold or stabbing?” repeated Jessica, who was currently using Drakesplitter (her fifth-favourite polearm) as a sort of crutch for her entire body.   “Because if it’s gold I’ve got to go home and get it and if it’s stabbing I bet it’s out here in these shitty-ass woods.  Now tell me which it is and be done with this bullshit so I can go home and you can go back to naming your family after your flowerboxes or whatever the fuck.”

The perfect apple-red lips of the faerie queen tightened most firmly, and her forest-green eyes glittered just a little colder than midwinter.  “Annihilate the foul hag-witch of the foul Hagwitch Moor,” she said shortly. 

“What, kill one-tenth of her?”
“Your mother was a bitch-hound.”

And with those final mysterious words of parting and a gentle wind that smelled of honeysuckle and raspberries, the elf was gone. 

“Thirty miles if it’s an inch,” groaned Jessica.  She shoved the empty bag of coffee beans in her mouth and chewed it up, muffling many slurs against all the world and existence itself. 

***

At five-twenty-six pm Lady Duchess Baroness Countess Champion-Captain Magewarden Fist of the Southeast Jessica Dark’ness Damselblade’s eighth-favourite broadaxe, Oakfeller, swung in a perfect one-hundred-and-eighty-degree-arc and bowled off the head of the foul hag-witch of the foul Hagwitch Moor. 

“Fool!” croaked the head.  “Twice-fool you!  The spiteful faeries have caused a calamity for the smallfolk in sending you to be my doom!  Now mine spells of slumber have left the barrow-dwellings of this place, and the tombs of the wizard-lord Skullmageddon have been thrown wide!  He will drown the whole word in skeletal death-troops if he be not stopped with all  speed and great force!  Woe!   Woe!  Woe!  Woe!”
“Oh my god shut up.”
“Make me,” cackled the head.  “Woe!  Woe!  Woe woe woe woe woewoewoewoewoewoewoe-”

Jessica kicked the head out the door of the witch’s cottage into her spellbog, and it laughed all the way down. 

“Right,” she muttered, swaying on her feet.  “Right.  Just a Wizardmageddon.  And then home.   And bed.  Right.  No big deal, just like last Wednesday.”  Or was it Tuesday?  Did it matter?  Wait, was Tuesday real?  Maybe she was mixing it up with Thursday –  that was real.  Probably.
“Right!” said Jessica.  And she fell asleep. 

Ten minutes later she woke up in a blind panic and ran pell-mell across the Hagwitch Moor in  such a hurry to catch up with the army of death-troops that she forgot Oakfeller and had to go back for it. 

***

At eleven forty-six pm, with arrows sticking out of every other spot on her body, Jessica got home, opened her front door, staggered to the couch, and remembered she didn’t have a door.  She did, however, have three big holes in the wall. 

“Fucklebuckle,” she mumbled.  “Carpenter’zgonnaeatmealive.  Piratepricing.  Frrmp.”

Her eyes were too tired to close, so they just sort of sat there, pruning up, and it was pure lack of thought that let her ignore the  figure standing in  front of her until it  let out a polite cough. 

Jessica focused, much to her regret.  There was a peasant standing in front of her.  Again.  It  was the same peasant, probably.  Again.  

Of course.  The last quest of the  day is always another goddamned peasant. 

“Excuse my haste and pardon my insolence, oh LadyDuchessBaronessCountessChampion-CaptainMagewardenandFistoftheSoutheast,” rattled the peasant with alarming haste, “but there’s a dragon eating the town and we would be forever grateful if you could do something.”
Jessica stared through the peasant.  

“Lady Duchess Baroness Countess Champion-Captain Magewarden and Fist of the Southeast?”
Jessica sighed, and  it was the sound of someone exhaling their whole life through their mouth and out into the hereafter.  “Sure.  Yeah.  Do something.  Right.  Dragon.  Bye.”

She opened her door and picked up Giantsmasher (her tenth-favourite Warhammer) and opened her door and put on her boots and opened her door and missed and opened her door again and  walked down to the village and into the dragon by mistake and let it eat her on purpose. 

***

The feudal-adventurer system itself lasted only a few more decades, which was scarce a surprise to future historians, rendered dispassionate by distance.  Delegating tasks to dangerous individual heroes may have saved the nobility a lot of work, but the peasantry correctly realized that the best way to keep the home life quiet was to pile on tasks until their protectors were too tired to care about what they were doing, and the increasingly-copious bestowment of titles, gold, and magical weaponry bankrupted many crowns in search of reliable assistance.  In the end the adventurer supply ran out and the species became extinct, soon followed by the complex ecosystem of wizards, monsters, and magic that relied upon them to provide entertainment, handiman’s-work, and nutrition. 

Someone broke a seal. 

***

Far away and away and away, down below, a man was standing at an artillery emplacement.  He was not manning it.  He was talking to the OTHER man standing at the artillery emplacement. 

“-and that’s how the computer works,” he finished.  “Now will you PLEASE go away?”
“Yes, yes, yes, of course, of course,” muttered the other man.  He scratched at his long, sweaty bird and adjusted his tall, sweaty crown a hair.  “So it’s like a REALLY big bow then, right?  Right?”
The artilleryman sighed like his soul was being sucked out through his face. 

“Oops.  No more time!  I thank you for your efforts, bowperson.”  

And lo, he whistled to his white horse that had been standing there watching everything, hopped atop it, and rode away waving his bow overhead in excitement.

***

Someone broke a seal

***

All too close and yet distant, a man sat at a computer.  He hunched too low in his chair and he tucked his elbows too close in; everything about him screamed discomfort and inside him a barely-contained rage festered and rotted like the fattest grapes on the thickest vines.  Finally he sighed, stepped back, and looked at the fruits of the last fifteen minutes. 

ybo shuld klil  eechothar

Carefully, delicately, his finger hovered above the enter key, and just as he began to press it there was a DING and fifteen thousand more tweets filled his screen, explaining that nothing mattered and fighting anything done to anyone was pointless and everything was the same everywhere so who cared who did what. 

“God-damned botfarms,” muttered the man.  Outside his window his big red horse grazed untroubled in the pasture on green grass and unmown weeds.  A giant sword made the breeze whistle softly around it, lodged to the hilt in a tree due to a particularly troubling troll. 

“DICKS,” shouted the horseman.  “Goat-begatters!  Well, to hades with it all!”  And he threw his computer out the window and marched to the field and jumped onto his horse and was bucked off his horse and yelled at his horse and jumped onto his horse again and rode away, fuming. 

Ten minutes later he came back for the sword.

***

Someone broke a seal.

***

The man stood by the edge of the fields and watched the crops grow. 

They were fat.  They were fine.  They were strong. 

They were also being fed by irreplaceable groundwater from an aquifer that had been so overdrawn it was turning into dry gravel far underneath his feet.   A thousand years of carefully-trickled rainwater undone every half-hour, gone to nourish a field of nut-trees growing ten thousand miles away from their optimum habitat.

The man scratched his beard.  Beneath him his black horse snorted and leaned closer to the trees, hoping for a snack. 

“So…if it’s a denarius for a quart of wheat…and the denarius is…about a hundred dollars?  Maybe?  …and it’s however-many nuts to the wheat grain…. And the cost of the water and the land is…”

The tiny set of scales in the man’s free hand wobbled like an arthritic drunk with inner ear damage. 

“And if the aquifer isn’t being recharged because of anthro-po-geenic climate…change?”
The scales exploded, one bowl bouncing off a tree and the other very much not bouncing as it smacked into the man’s forehead. 

“FUCK,” said the man, and by the time he’d pulled himself upright and finished swearing he knew the seal was broken and it was time. 

“Oh thank goodness,” he muttered, as he scraped bits of scale from the ground and peeled it from his forehead.  “You know,” he told his horse, “this used to be an art.”

The horse stared at him, then tried to eat the scales. 

He was delayed again. 

***

Someone broke a seal.

***

Death was busy, as he had been and was and would be forever.  But he paid attention, and the big pale horse whose legs never stopped moving changed course for a long-awaited appointment. 

***

They met up somewhere just before what passed for dawn around there.  It was the closest place, and it had coffee and a gas station and some of those little overpriced bags of chips. 

No grass though.  The horses were properly irritated.

“Maybe we could go to Megiddo?” asked the man on the white horse.  “I’m pretty sure this was all meant to go down near Megiddo.”

“They flattened it,” said the man on the red horse shortly.
“I thought they rebuilt it.”
“Oh they did.  Then they flattened it again.”
“I meant after that.”
“They flattened it again after that.”
“And-”

“And again after that too.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“If you two are quite finished,” said the man atop the black horse, “perhaps we could move on?  I doubt Armageddon is still happening near Megiddo.  There are more important places these days.”

“Armageddon is really less of a place and more of a mindset,” said Death philosophically.

“And it’s just arrived?” asked the man on the black horse.
“Oh no, it’s always been around.  It just doesn’t matter much.  I think some folks were expecting it a few years ago, and some a few decades back, and others centuries before that.  As long as folks want it it’ll be there for them.  Like a nice comfy blanket.”
“So shall we just… ride around then?” asked the man on the white horse.

“If you’d like.”
“If we’d LIKE?” demanded the man on the red horse.  “We’re meant to bring forth war!  And conquest!”

“And famine,” chimed in the man on the black horse.

“And famine, if that matters,” said the man on the red horse.
“Tell me, and tell me honest,” said Death, “does it seem like they need help with those sorts of things?”

There was a sad and very very honest silence.

“I didn’t think so.”
“I was trying,” muttered the man on the red horse.
“Me too!” said the man on the white horse.

“I was trying real hard.”

“Me too!”
“Shaddup.”
“Okay!”
“So what are we meant to do?” demanded the man on  the black horse.  “Just… stand here and let you go off and do all  our jobs for us?”
“I haven’t done anything in a thousand years,” said Death.  “It’s really just supervising these days.  You can do it too.”
“What, just WATCH?”
“It’s all a bit big for a single artisan now.  It’s all in the mass production.  And THAT means management.”
“Management.  Management.  Management.  Yes, I do like the sound of management.”  The man on the black horse twiddled his scales around his finger.  “Tell me, do they still not touch the wine and oil these days?”
“Oh yes, oh very much yes.  But the oil’s a bit different than what you remember.”
“I’m willing to learn.”
“Learn?” scoffed Death.  “We’re management, remember.  And I’d better not see you boys rushing this one.   This is their Apocalypse, we’re just living in it, and they want a nice long slow one.   Take it as it comes and appreciate the view.

“Oh absolutely!  You should see the size of the bows they have now.”
“Shaddup.”
“Okay!”

Outside there was a clink. 

The shuffle had been ignorable – a stirring of the breeze, perhaps.  The creak had been dismissible – a tree settling into its bed?  But the clink?  That was metal on metal.  That was something scrabbling.  Something moving.  Something searching. 

Moe gave herself three precious seconds to pretend it was her imagination, then the clink clanked again and she pulled herself upright; slowly, so as to allow the speculation time to marinate into the meat of fear. 

Maybe it was a burglar.  Maybe it was a drunk.  Maybe it was a drunk burglar and the drunk burglar was a serial killer rapist cannibal arsonist fly fisherman.  Maybe it was a ghost.  Maybe it was a killer clown.  Maybe it was the ghost of a killer clown and the killer clown was an anatomically incorrect giant Velociraptor.  Maybe it was Mrs. Wallace from grade 10 math hauled herself out of the grave to finally get her for cheating on her final exam and getting away with it.  Unfortunately, Moe’s body was acting without her and had already made its way to her front door, where it flicked on the porch lights. 

Dazzling brightness flashed, and the being perched atop her garbage froze, illuminated now by both the light of the full moon and the light of the LED.  It was not human.  It was not an animal.  It was naked, furry, man-shaped, torso sheathed in fuzzy white and little black flip-flaps of ears.  A long muzzle protruded, and its lips peeled back from a mouthful of so many pointed teeth that it seemed absurd to imagine them fitting in its jaws at all.  Baleful eyes glared at her above the fangs, and around the trash can a long, sinuous tail lashed, bare of hair. 

“Oh,” said Moe in great disgust.  “Oh.  It’s just Wally.  Fuck off, Wally.”

Wally gaped his mouth at her, silent and unmoved.  Moe pulled off her left slipper and threw it at him. 

***

Clive stood outside in the dying embers of the afternoon as a soft breeze played around his feet and the warm sun brushed its lips against his skin and he knew that all forty-three years of his life had been preparing him for this moment. 

It had been well worth waiting for. 

Above him an early moonrise sat low in the sky, surrounded by purple and red fire in the clouds.  Inside, condiments were waiting, toppings were being sliced and pan-fried and prepared.  In his left fist dangled a big paper bag of home-baked burger buns.  In his right hand the shining steel of his mother’s razor-edged meat spatula, older than he was and twice as strong as he’d ever been.  On the lawn his children ran and laughed and bickered and flirted with their friends. 

Time to get it started. 

Clive breathed deeply of air that tasted of flowers  and warm-growing trees, lifted the lid on the barbecue, and shouted “OH GOD FUCKING DAMNIT MOTHER SHIT COCK ASS.”

A gurgling snarl rattled from under the grill, crawling free of the sleepiest, groggiest face he’d ever encountered. 

“Wally!  GET YOUR ASS OUT OF THERE RIGHT THIS GODDAMNED SECOND!”

Wally hissed and coiled himself deeper, wrapping his tail around the propane tank and clinging to the stored barbeque cover with all four limbs. 

“Sweetheart?” Clive called indoors.  “Get me a bottle of bleach and the tongs.  The big tongs.”

***

The bells had rung, the buses had left, and the playground was not quite empty.  A faint whisper of the moon peered down from a pale blue cloudless sky. 

Sure, living next to school sucked for Toby in some ways, but it also meant free recess time whenever you wanted.  The seesaws were useless but the jungle gym was the best it’d ever get and there would never, ever, ever be a lineup on the slides.  Up and down and up and down until her lungs ached.  Her mother kept saying she’d be the first six-pack-year-old. 

She wanted a break, and as she sat there on the base of the slide, breathing heavily, the air felt funny.  Not thick or heavy or damp or breezy or anything else that might herald a storm; no, it felt…inhabited.  Someone was nearby.

Someone was watching her. 

Toby thought of her options: the fox that lived under her house; the raccoon family that lived on top of the gymnasium, a big snarling alien, a cannibal serial killer arsonist fly fisherman, or worst of all, Susan.  Susan was such a bitchface. 

The slide creaked under her, and something landed nearby with a thud.  Something much bigger than Susan. 

Uh-oh. 

“Shit,” said Toby, relishing the opportunity.  The swings rustled in the wind. 

Wait.  There was no wind. 

Cautiously, slowly, aware that this was precisely the sort of thing she’d seen in movies, Toby peered around the corner of the slide, and was (at a twenty-foot distance) eyeball-to-eyeball with a fuzzy, humanoid mess hanging upside-down from the swingset by its naked prehensile tail. 

“Wally!” she exclaimed in delight. 

Wally hissed and gurgled at her, waved his limbs too enthusiastically, lost his grip, fell to the ground, and played dead until she left.

***

It was a bright, beautiful July morning when Wally Fittons woke up naked and cold behind a dumpster.  Again.

“Piss,” he said irritably.  A good three-mile walk home starkers.  At least he had a full stomach, although he didn’t like to imagine what was in it. 

Well, he’d cut through the park and be home faster.  Down the lost trails where people’s eyes didn’t pry and nobody would phone the police for public indecency AGAIN.  A charge a month was costing him a fortune. 

Off he scurried into the undergrowth, big pale buttcheeks jiggling like a drunken moon. 

***

“And you thought it was a rabbit?” asked Officer North to the sobbing third-grader.

Jeremy nodded his head.  “I just saw a flash of white and then…and then…”
“It’s alright,” said North.  Really, he shouldn’t be shooting at rabbits either, but given what the kid had seen happen he didn’t need the grief right now.  “It could’ve happened to anybody.”  He examined the little spud gun in his palm.  “We’ll have to take this as evidence, I’m sorry to say.  You’ll be reimbursed.”
“It was just a p-p-p-piece of p-potato,” whimpered Jeremy. 

“Yes, well, silver takes out a werewolf in one shot, and now it seems we’ve discovered what it is that kills a werepossum.  Some scientists may want to interview you someday.  But only if you want to.  Now let’s get you home.”

“Hello and welcome back to ‘Monster SALES of History TM,’ on the HISTORY channel!  We’ve got a fabulous line-up of freshly-cloned monsters for you in the supermarket, but their own crimes are NOTHING compared to the prices they’re going to get if they win this challenge!  Watch dictators, strongmen, warlords, generals, and tyrants struggler in the supermarket in history’s GREATEST food fight!  Here’s my co-host, Timothy Nutts!”

“Thanks Tiffany.  We’ve got all the cameras rigged up: this supermarket is under more surveillance than a Google campus!  We won’t have time to show you all the footage, but if you like share and subscribe and SMASH that donation button you can get the opportunity to buy sponsorship tiers that’ll get you access to uncut clips and slo-mo playbacks – heck, at ‘conqueror’ tier you can  even add your own custom effects to videos and meme while you stream!  Now back to Tiffany Tibbles.”

“Thanks Timothy.  Let’s cut back to the action: our shoppers are now ransacking the isles and plundering for prices!  How’s Andrew doing?”
“Not so hot, Tiffany.  At first we had high hopes for ol’ hickory but it seems ex-president Jackson has dropped out of the contest entirely!”

“Oh no!  What an upset, what an overturn.  What happened?”
“I’ve received word from the medical team that he was just passing aisle 8, read that it contained ‘Indian food,’ and burst into a screaming breakdown before every blood vessel in his brain exploded at once.”
“Aw, shucks.  Well, plenty more fish in the sea, and plenty more monsters looking for MONSTER DEALS!  Shall we check in on Josef?”

“The ‘man of steel’ himself!  After a commanding early lead, he seems to have gotten bogged down in the produce section.  It looks like a momentary stumble over explaining the price tags got his first translator purged by a carrot to the throat, and now we’re on number six, with each replacement afforded less and less time to prove their loyalty and worth!”
“Not a leadership style I’d recommend, Timothy.”
“True, but it worked for decades last time, so I can see why he’s bringing back the old favorites.  He’ll have to speed up his purge-pace if he wants to get moving again and overtake Henry!”
“Not so fast!  Kissinger’s been disqualified while we were on commercial break.”
“What?  Why?  How?  He was the crowd favourite – and as the most contemporary figure, he was statistically the most likely to understand the relative pricing of goods!”
“Seems he isn’t dead.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“He’s not dead?”
“Not yet.”
“Wow.  Looks like only the good die young indeed, eh Tiffany?”

“Well, some would dispute that – such as our next contestant, Mr. Edward Teach, who passed from this world well before his three score and ten were up!”
“Decapitation isn’t usually a natural end to a long life, you’re absolutely right.  The Big B-beard himself is still a little shaky on his feet – those land legs must be fresh – but he’s making his way through the fresh fish as we speak.  Sushi stumped him but he’s got a fine eye for a fresh catch and the deals are simply….MONSTROUS.”
“Nice title drop, Tim.  But that eye twitch I’m seeing on the camera suggests Eddie might have had more than enough fish in his life already.  Which will crack first: the competition or his nerves?  Let’s find out…. in ten commercial-free minutes!”

“Right you are, Tiff!  Maybe even sooner: yet another contestant might forfeit soon!  The Khan of Khans is STILL in the starting area making a speech to the cart attendants!  Not quite sure what the gameplan is there.”
“Well, Genghis was always good at the bigger picture.  What shops harder than one monster?  One monster and a horde!  But that’s against contest rules, so…”
“Yes, I’m thinking this isn’t looking good.  And I note Adolf has left the gate!”
“The wrong way, sadly.  He quit.”
“Yes, tragically the writing was on the wall the moment he started yelling on the set.  We’ve done our best, folks, but some monsters just won’t cooperate.  Especially when they’re convinced everyone around them is a member of a jewish conspiracy plotting against them personally.”

“We’ve actually got quite a diverse selection of beliefs here now that you mention it, Tim – everything from atheism to Christianity to Tengrism!  They may agree that the corpses of others are cheap and that no mountain of bodies is too small to fulfill your personal ambitions, but when it comes to matters of faith our monsters are a truly split crowd!”
“Speak of the split, it seems that Blackbeard’s cracked up a bit just now – looking a swordfish in the eye was a step too far from him and he laid about his handlers with the bill until the security team could be called in.  His run is over, and every other contestant has disqualified, forfeited, or died!  Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach is approaching the till and will soon be qualified as History’s Greatest MONSTER SHOPPER!”

“Yes indeed!  The card’s been swiped – no pieces of eight needed here, hahahaha.”
“Ha ha ha!”
“Ahaha!  He’s putting in his password!  Wonder if it’s just eight over and over!”
“Ha ha ha!  We already made that joke, Tiffany!  Ha ha ha!”
“Shut up it’s APPROVED, yes folks, it’s APPROVED!  Now here come the bags!”

“here they come!”
“The bags!”
“Any second now!”
“The bags!”
“They should be right there!”
“The bags!”
“They should’ve been there!”
“Where ARE the bags?”
“Wait wait wait the bags are there but where are the baggers?  Where’s the attendants?  The staff are gone!  Get me eyes on the floor, where are the staff?!”

***

And onward, outside the set, outside the supermarket, past the end of the parking lot, Temujin rolled at the head of a hundred shopping carts, astride each a rogue attendant, a wallet at every hip and ferocity in every heart. 

Why constrain yourself to just one store?

Bruce!  It’s been ages, how you been man?  Me, I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine and fit and fighting mad!  Yessir, life’s never been better!

Look at these delts!  These lats!  These quads!  This bod!

I got all this and a clean brain too!  Why nickles and spit, I’m a new man in every way, a better way, ever since I discovered Dr. Peter Dickenson’s much-meat diet!

Glad you asked!  It works like this:

You eat much meat.

And that’s it!  One rule, one thumb, one rule of thumb.  Simple and pure and perfect.  I love it dearly and it loves me, and I love meat and the meat loves me. 

You see, humans are carnivorous (male) creatures, and that’s at war with our herbivorous (female) selves, so it’s of material benefit to avoid vegetables in case you get cooties, which will sap and suck away your life essence and leave you feeling dead and drained inside.  That’s what gives you cooties: girl stuff.  Like vitamins. 

Yes, that’s the beauty of it!  By eating nothing but raw, filthy meat, all vitamins are avoided!  Nutrition is a scam propped up by the decadent elites to keep us all as mutton-brains, the so-called ‘sheeple’ (‘woolly thinking’ means more than it seems, you know)!  Scurvy isn’t overcome by cheating with feminine carrots and tawdry Sapphic eggplants; it’s triumphed over by red-toothed red-meat rip-and-tearing masculinity!  If your teeth fall out, it’s a sign you’re winning – that’s why I got these dentures.  See?  See?
No, look up.  There.  See?

Yes indeed indeed, those are made from REAL high-grade bear teeth!  I ordered them from an ad on Dr. Peter Dickenson’s website, and those are trusted providers who provide trustworthy provisions, trustily.  Would a doctor lie?  And not a wussy doctor who fiddle-faddles around in boring baby fields like ‘biology’ or ‘sociology’ or ‘psychology’ – he has a REAL doctorate: math!  Now that’s a MAN’S field.  So long as you aren’t counting or adding or subtracting something feminine like bananas or cucumbers.  And you aren’t doing algebra.  Mixing numbers and letters is witchery and counter-masculinatural.  You might as well eat something like….an onion.

I almost ate an onion with my raw liver yesterday: someone snuck it onto my plate.  But my keen man-senses detected its malodorous presence (the odour of pure and overwhelming doom and dread) before it reached my tongue – I quivered and drooled and gurgled and hissed manfully before I threw it to the ground and stomped on it.  Nobody’s going to use vitamins to confiscate my penis while I’M on the job!  I, and of course Dr. Peter Dickenson’s Much Meat diet (trademarked), the one tool guaranteed to order your brain by excising the vaginas from it. 

No of course the doctor isn’t sexist.  Sounds like you’ve been brainwashed by low-testosterone high-vitamin ‘slut media’ (‘slut media’ is a completely neutral term used to describe the mainstream establishment children’s cartoons encouraging women that it’s okay to be women, and if you think that’s anything other than objective fact you’re obviously projecting).  Sounds like you need real meat.  Raw meat.  Filth-ridden meat.

Of course the meat has to be filthy.  The more rancid, the better.  Meat from a plate or a box or a bin is pristine, purified.  Clean.  The REAL world is rotting and putrid, a fallen place of lies and offal, and the manliest thing you can do is chew that world up and spit it back out through your no-no place.  Simply choke down the bloodiest rags of meat you can scrape out of the forest, the fields, the office, and chase it with a shot of Dr. Peter Dickenson’s nutrinectar manessence.  I bought it on his website because he used math on it to destroy it with facts and logic. 

Facts and logic are manly because they destroy, you see.  If they don’t destroy, they aren’t manly.  The world is, as we have established, rancid and rotten, so anyone creating things in it or adding to it or god forbid working to fix it can only become infested with ‘soul-maggots,’ which will wither up their testicles and make them low-t and vitamin-riddled.  But destruction!  Devastation!  Rampaging shredding crushing thrashing crashing snorting hacking slashing RIPPING EATING GNAWING excuse me sorry I get VERY excited.  It’s all this ‘tiger blood’ medicine I buy from Dr. Peter Dickenson’s website – no, no, it’s not a scam, that’s just a name.  It’s actually made from tiger scrotum, not blood.  Anyways I’m filled with manly vigor and power after I snort it but my thoughts sometimes run away without me AHAH HA HA HA HA HA HA ha. 

Speaking of which, I’m holding you up a bit here, sorry for that, I’m just sort of excited to see someone I knew because I need to tell EVERYONE about this it’s AMAZING the way things make sense when a REAL doctor tells you things.  For instance, did you know that most ‘domestic’ animals are actually normal ‘wild’ ‘masculine’ animals that have been ‘feminized’ by ‘vitamins’?  This is what awaits mankind if we continue to suffer ‘soul-maggots’!  Luckily, the solution is plain: we must eat each other until we feel better. 

Now stop gurgling now Bruce, you’ve been squirming around awfully hard during all this and I don’t know if you’re listening or just being a fussbudget but either way I’m pretty peeved off and cheesed up with you.  Your meat will be a wriggly bucket of twitchy worms just like you, which is good because GOD I’m hungry.  But I’ve got to keep eating meat!  I ejected forty-feet of ‘soul maggots’ from myself yesterday, which only look sort of like intestines shut up if you’re brainwashed by vitamins and even if shut up they WERE my intestines I ate them right back up so it’s fine shut up shut up shut UP. 

STOP GURGLING DAMNIT SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP FACTS AND LOGIC SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT

It is very hard to chew with real high-grade bear teeth.

Oh hey there Becky!  Haven’t seen you recently!  Wait, don’t run – I just HAVE to tell you about this new diet!

5/10/2021

Albrecht’s Drop stratigraphic record: location 3B

Layer 1: surface litter (5 cm)

Sticks and deciduous leaves.  Some owl pellets (contents: rodents, one skink). 

Three beer cans (age: ~4 years), one condom (unused), four lost pennies. 

Layer 2: soft-packed loam (19 cm)

Roots and decomposed leaf litter.  One mole hole (contents: an angry mole). 

One broken beer bottle and forty-three beer bottle fragments.   One beer bottle fragment contaminated by bleeding (bandaid provided: no stitches necessary).

Layer 3: hard-packed soil (37 cm)

One complete turtle shell.  An excessive amount of roots (largest diameter: 8 cm). 

Potsherds (late meadow period), reworked and worn tools (twelve scrapers, three damaged cores).  Midden layer. 

Layer 4: clay (58 cm)

Five ground and polished turtle-shell ‘mirrors.’  Fine and wispy roots. 

More potsherds (early meadow period).  An unprecedented find: a complete sphere made of solid obsidian glass, slightly chipped or cracked (long-distance trade item?).  Possible ritual site.  

Layer 5: compacted ash (28 cm)

Sudden intrusion of volcanic ash with no apparent source or cause.  Nearest active volcano is seven thousand km; nearest inactive three house six hundred km. 

One robust Homo erectus skull, no sign of other remains.  Sixteen classic Acheulean hand-axe blanks; four of which are embedded in the skull.  Possible murder, possible ritual. 

Layer 5: obsidian (1.87 m)

Massive intrusion of jumbled volcanic glass without apparent source or cause.  No past record of volcanism in area’s prehistory.  Unusual greenish tint to the obsidian with inner ‘sparkle’ that appears to be tiny flames (under 0.2 mm). 

Layer 6: lava flow (7.51 m)

Enormous magmatic intrusion.  Radiometric dating puts it ~500 mya, at least 300 my older than the surrounding limestone layers it appears to have cut through.  A geology specialist may be necessary. 

Giant spherical ‘wizard chamber’ appears to be buried under lava flow.  Top of chamber is breached by H. erectus skeleton, clutching Acheulian hand axe.  The legs of the skeleton has been burnt away by lava, the upper half appears to have been pulverized by a concussive force sufficient to reduce it to gravel while perfectly holding the original form of the bones. 

Layer 7: ‘wizard chamber’ (11.111… m [exactly])

Giant spherical room constructed entirely from interlocked basalt with two exits: a breach into layer 6 created by H. erectus skeleton and a spiral ‘stair’ leading downwards from the room’s center.  Radiometric dating proved impossible due to inexplicable failure of sampling tools to penetrate the structure.  Contact more materials specialists?  Interior of chamber is covered in faint lights that match present-day  star charts of Milky Way (contact astronomers to confirm).  Possible ritual. 

Three corpses belonging to unknown species from a unique phylum.  Basic proportions include three heads, three trunks, three legs, three long grasping appendages tipped with three eyes covered in three hardened keratinous membranes.  Corpses were outfitted in full regalia including ornaments carved from H. erectus bone, ‘wands’ of carved obsidian from layer 5, false teeth crafted from obsidian from layer 5.  Possibly ritual. 

Layer 8: ‘the murder pit’ (~100 m)

Yawning, cavernous abyss underneath the ‘wizard chamber’; exact dimensions of cavern are unknown without access to more powerful lighting equipment.  Air quality remains good due to constant screaming gale from below that sounds similar to agonized howls.  Creeping sensation of dread sinks in slowly within the hour; exposure beyond two hours is not recommended after assistant M. Townshend attempted to decapitate assistant J. Freeman with a trowel while chanting ‘justice delayed is denied.’  Behaviour persisted while restrained above-ground for another sixteen hours, after which M. Townshend apologized and asked to be set loose without further visible side effects. 

The bottom ~7 m of layer 8 are filled entirely with H. erectus remains.  Estimation of the number of individuals represented is unknown until the precise dimensions of layer 8 can be more accurately charted.  Every skull found was missing all of its teeth. 

Layer 9: ‘upside town’ (121.86 m)

Perfect 1:1 scale mirrored replica of this expedition’s dig site, including excavation and all previously described layers.  Layer 9’s ‘surface camp’ was empty and the air tasted like tinfoil after exposure for longer than ten minutes, followed by nausea. 

Forty-two hours of continuous observation in shifts showed no apparent inhabitants.

Layer 10: ‘the crevice’ (?)

During observation of layer 9, assistant P. Davison noticed a faint shimmer above the mess tent and proceeded to climb on top of it without authorization and stick her finger inside it, also without authorization.  P. Davison vanished from all observable senses for what she observed as less than a second and the rest of the expedition observed as more than a week before reappearing in midair above expedition’s mess tent during lunch. 

P. Davison reported seeing talking shapes that ‘didn’t exist’ but professes no memory of what they spoke about, or even if they spoke to her. 

Overall excavation report:

-Followup investigation strongly recommended using all institutional resources available. 

-Use caution. 

-Contact National Geographic. 

-Get more funding.

-Do not tell Professor Zebediah. 

The floor was scrubbed and grease-free; the walls were missing their usual spider-webs; that one lightbulb that outright refused to work had been bullied into submission and replaced; and there was a big broad beautiful weekend stretching out in front of the building unrolled all the way to Monday.

Sheila breathed in, tasted oil and salt, and breathed out with a smile.  Yes, it was a beautiful day in the garage. And not to be a lonely one either – down the way came the flash and shine and sheen of someone driving in a hurry because they weren’t quite sure if they’d be able to start again if they stopped. 

“Morning Ms. Palmridge!” she whistled out happily as her daughter’s fourth-grade teacher powerslid into the building on top of her battered old whitetip.  “Troubles?”
“Oh hello I’m so sorry, so sorry, so sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong but I was taking the turn on fifth street and it just started pulling to the right and wouldn’t stop and then it got worse and worse and then it started slamming into things all on its own and I think it lost some teeth down on Fenton!”

“Lemmesee,” said Sheila in her professional mumble, and she popped the whitetip on the nose gently.  “Open up, please.”

The oceanic whitetip tried to bite her.  She slid the jawjack into its mouth smooth as butter.  “Thank you, sir.  Nah, don’t worry about the teeth – you didn’t even lose the whole top row, see?  Those’ll grow back in no time.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.  Everyone always overthinks how much damage is being done when they see teeth everywhere: those practically fix themselves before you even know they’re gone.  Better they absorb the impact than something less replaceable, like the liver.”

“Oh dear.  Is that bad?”
“Yeah, practically a third of these things are liver.  You take a real bad hit there sometimes you just have to get a new shark.”
The jawjack creaked.

“Whoops, someone’s impatient up there.   Give me a second to…ah, I see your problem!  Blocked nostril on the left side!”
“Is that bad?”
“If you don’t like uncontrollable pull to the right it is!  See, the shark tracks prey long-distance by swinging its head from side to side and veering to the direction the smell is strongest – if one nostril’s blocked, then everything it smells seems like it’s coming from the other side, and it’ll start turning.  No wonder you were pulling to the right.”

Ms. Palmridge eyed the oceanic whitetip as dubiously as it did her.  “I’ve never known much about these things.  My girlfriend handles the mechanical issues around the house and so on.”
“Oh?” said Sheila, putting down the nasal swab and giving the shark’s snout one last polish with her rag.  “Tell me: has she done any maintenance work on this lady recently?”
“I’m – well – I don’t know WHAT you’re-”

“The shark.”
“Oh.  I think so?  Last weekend, maybe.  Yes, last weekend.”
“Ahhh….I think we have our culprit.  I bet when your better half was cleaning off the hood here she inadvertently brushed some debris into the nostril.  Well, it’s less polished now but it’s clear as a whistle in there.  No more veering, the teeth’ll grow back soon.”
“Oh thank you, thank you!  How much does this-”

“Just call it a consultation; there’s plenty of time left for me to make money on the weekend.  Barely five minutes and the cost of a swab?  Nothing to bill for.  Didn’t even have to pull out any teeth shards.  Now let’s get this thing out of its mouth and you back on the road before it gets any angrier – you’ve both got places to be!”
“Yes, yes.  Thank you so much!”

The oceanic whitetip tried to take a chunk out of Sheila’s foot on its way out of the garage, but she was ready for it.  A reliable model, but they were crabby as hell.  Then it balked at the parking lot’s exit and she wondered if she’d missed something but oh.  Oh, that explained it. 

In through the exit cruised little Penny Westridge on her father’s great white, fins barely moving, each soft push of the tree-trunk-thick tail shoving the animal forwards like a lesser fish going at full throttle.  It softly lumbered up the hill and collapsed right in front of the door with a grunt. 

“Shit!”
“Don’t worry about it, we’ve got a tow cable if we need it.  Problem?”
“No fucking kidding!” said Penny, eyes twitching. 

“The problem in detail, please,” said Sheila patiently. 

“My mom’s gonna fucking ice me fucking fuck fuckity FUCK” elaborated Penny.  She made to kick at the great white’s side, then paused, foot wobbling, as its eye rolled back in its head to pure white.  “Oh god is it meant to do that FUUUUUC-”
“That’s normal,” soothed Sheila.  “Here, have a seat.  Have a drink.  Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Everything!  I just wanted to take one little ride to show Mandy I really could drive it and then we went down to the Greasy Bait to grab a drink and when I came back out it was twitching and by the time I dropped her off it was cramping at the gills and now it can barely move and it’s not even two years old mom is going to KILLLLLLLLL MEEEEEEE-”

Sheila gently prodded at the gills.  They twitched.  “Uh-huh.  Anything else happen while you were out?”
“No.  No!  I wrecked mom’s shark and I don’t even know what I did and she’s going to ki-”

“Nah.”
“Wha?”
“Nah, she won’t.  Mrs. Westrid – your mom, she keeps this baby in a nice garage, right?   Demagnetized, rubber flooring?”
“Yeah.  Oh god I borrowed her keys without her asking she’s going to KI-”

“Nah she won’t.  That makes sense.  Does the Greasy Bait have rubberized parking spaces?”
“Wha?  No.  They barely have ASPHALT.”

“Gotcha.  And are the hitching posts concrete?”
“No?  No.  No.  Metal, I think.”
Sheila chuckled and rubbed at the great white’s great nose.   It grunted at her.  “That’s it then.  She’ll be fine by the time she’s home.”
“How?  What’d I do?”
“You parked her outside her comfort zone.  These big babies, they’re a little more sensitive than they look, and they get used to their environment.  She’s used to resting in a nice stable environment with absolutely no stray electrical impulses at ALL, and you left her in the open with a bunch of strange sharks and attached to a metal pole.  She probably picked up on the ambient voltage through that and it’s just a tiny bit more than she’s used to, and if you and your girlfriend –”
“No no no she’s not my-“

“-your not-your-girlfriend took your time in there she worked herself into a tizzy over it.  This is all just aftermath of that.  She’ll be right once you get her back home and a bit of time to process it.  And tell your mom she might want to consider introducing metal elements into the garage: a shark that can’t be parked outside a sealed environment is a little bit of a sad vehicle, isn’t it?”
Penny slumped with the force of someone whose entire body had been kept upright by nervous tension.  “Ohmygod.  OHmygod.  Ohmy.  God.”
“Breathe, girl.  Breathe.”
“Thank you so much.”
“You’re welcome, we all do this shit at your age.  Stuff.  And don’t worry about money: that wasn’t even a consult.  You just get home now before your mom notices, eh?”

“She sleeps in on Saturdays,” said Penny weakly.  “Thank you.”
“No problem,” said Sheila.  And she watched the great white back gently out of her lot with affection.  Beautiful animal.  Pity they were so expensive these days. 

Well, there’d be time to make money over the rest of the weekend. 

Like right now, for instance.  ‘Right now’ was Lacey Newman on her shortfin mako for the sixth time in as many months, its big black eyes roiling and rattling in their sockets as it mouthed and fought against her steering. 

“Hey again, Lacey.”
“Heya Sheila.  It’s off its feed again and won’t stop fighting me when I turn it on.”
“Well, guess we’d better check the stomach first,” said Sheila as she pulled out her jawjack.  “Again.”
“Stupid thing thinks it’s a tiger shark.  This better not be another license plate it swallowed.”

“Well, could it be anything else?  These look like gastrointestinal symptoms.”

“Came home late last night and parked it on the street; could’ve been anything from that to a stray cat.”
“If it was that it’d be perfectly happy.  A little stray cat never hurt a shark.”
“Right.  Unless it was diseased.  Or a piece of metal that looked like a stray cat.  Or a tasty-looking rock.  Swear to FUCK I’m giving it the best fuel I can afford and it’s always on the lookout for more and more and MORE!”
“That’s the trouble with mackerals,” said Sheila conversationally, peering  past the long finger-like fangs and into the mako’s gullet.  “Fast cruising, great acceleration, amazing top speed, but the metabolism means they guzzle fuel.  Ah, I think I see the problem: looks like it swallowed a bit of chain-link fence and it can’t regurgitate it properly.  Gonna need to do a bit of fancy work here.  Mind passing me my long-handled pliers?  No, no, no.  The longer ones.  Longer than that.  Yes, perfect.”

“Oh these goddamned things,” hissed Lacey as Sheila worked.  “These things!  They’re such…such bullshit!  I don’t know why we put up with them like we do!”

“Can’t live without ‘em.”
“True.  And I guess it could be worse.  Just a little bit of a pain in the ass isn’t the end of the world, is it?  That’s not so bad.”

“Yes indeed,” said Sheila, staring directly at the reader, “it sure would be irresponsible to keep driving sharks around if they were directly and provably leading to some sort of vast disaster that would cause irreversible harm to us and every other living thing on the planet’s surface.”

The shortfin bit her hand.

“Ow!  Fuck!  ‘Scuse me.  That’s going to need stitches, won’t be a sec.”

“He’s coming back, you know.”
Jermaine didn’t look at his mother.  He was kneading dough, and with the amount of flour left in the house he wanted to make sure it had gone towards something worthwhile.  Attention could not be spared. 

“Just like I thought he would.  I know how he thinks, you see.  That’s why I was so important.  Necessary.  The only one that really could do that.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Jermaine risked.  The old tile counter thumped under his fists, muffled by soft dough and his own fists. 

His mother nodded vigorously, staring out over the long lake through the fog and drizzle and the horrible clouds of insects.  The mosquitos stayed away from her, even out on a deck whose screen had been gone since before Jermaine’s own children had been born.  Too tough, no juices left, who knew why. 

“He’s coming back,” she said.  “He can’t afford not to.”

“Yuh.”
“He IS, you know,” she said shortly, and stomped her foot.  The deck made a soggy sound, like a starfish trampled underfoot, and Jermaine winced at it. 

“Don’t DO that, mother.  You know about the scorpions.”
“They wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Only because they can’t reach it.  Don’t make such a ruckus out there.”

She harrumphed, but she didn’t stomp again. 

***

The bread had been good, despite Jermaine’s best efforts.  And that had been his day, such as it was.  Mother was fed, he was fed, he’d done at least one thing he could pretend was worthwhile after waking up, and the roof hadn’t collapsed on him.  Nothing left to do but see how many bug bites he could get in the course of one cigarette. 

Now if only he could persuade his head to stay quiet.  Because as he stood there, smouldering, he couldn’t stop thinking about the roof. 

And the floors. 

And the walls. 

All lovely, lovely, lovely old wood that hadn’t seen a day of repair in twenty years.  He was less scared of the scorpions underneath the porch than he was the things he couldn’t see in the walls.  Black mould?  Could be red and purple and green for all he knew. 

But mostly he’d bet it was the soft colourless mush of a creature eating itself from the inside out.  This place had been a lovely cottage, back then.  Lovely enough to pretend it was a mansion, which it did very well. 

“The president used to come here,” his mother told him.  “Your father and I used to invite him.”
“Yeah,” he said to himself.  Yeah, he knew. 

***

Jermaine had sat on the back stoop as the troopers stormed in through the pantry door, boots kicking through fancy wood panelling like cheap paper.  A stern look from the sergeant had frozen his behind to the stair, and now he was afraid that if he breathed someone would remember he was there and decide to shoot him. 

Shouts from inside had become fewer.  Whatever they were doing was finishing up. 

That was when the big car opened up, and out came the president. 

Jermaine had never seen the president before in person, but he’d seen coins and bills and a television and he knew the face when he saw it.  All jaw and jowl. 

“Hey,” said the president, and he was talking to him, Jermaine, of all people, at his house.  Maybe this was the sort of thing you were supposed to be excited about.  “Hey kid.”
Jermaine nodded, finding a compromise between obvious attentiveness and trying not to move.  “Your mother home, kid?”
Jermaine nodded before he could think about his answer.  The president laughed.  “Yes.  That’s good.  Hey, you know what she’s been up to?”
Jermaine shook his head. 

“Neither do I.  But I think that’s going to change.”
He walked into the cottage, and he ruffled Jermaine’s hair as he walked by.  Just a little harder than necessary, making his neck hurt. 

***

The pantry door had been fixed.  Come to think of it, that might have been the last part of the building to get replaced. 

Jermaine finished his cigarette in perfect harmony with the sunset; two little embers going out at once as he idled on the porch, swatting the mosquitos reflexively.  He sighed – a proper bellows of a thing, in and out and clear the lungs – and stepped back inside and almost walked into his father. 

He was eating a crude sort of sandwich over the kitchen sink, but when he saw Jermaine his eyes bulged and his food vanished into him like a magician’s scarves in reverse. 

“My boy,” he managed, and it wasn’t just the full mouth making him hoarse.  There was something wrong with his throat, something raw.  “My boy.  How are you?  Oh you’re big now.”

“No thanks to you,” said Jermaine, and it hadn’t needed any thought at all.  Of course it hadn’t; in the back of his mind he’d always been writing this moment. 

“Yes, yes I love you too my boy, my boy.”  A smile made its way out from under his moustache, shattering his face into a maze of wrinkles.  “Listen, it’s all coming together now, it’s all almost here.  I’m so proud of you, you know that?  I don’t know if I ever told you that.  Did I ever tell you that?”

“You haven’t told me anything since I was ten.”
This only stirred the old man to more vigorous agreement.  His head started jerking up and down like a drinking bird.  “Quite right.  Quite right.  Quite right.  Yes, that was cruel of me.  But listen, I’ve got it all working now.  I’ve finally gone and done it.  Get your mother.  Where’s your mother?”
“Sleeping.”
“Wake the silly bitch up, can’t she tell that we’re about to make it?”  He started to laugh now, and it sounded like someone choking a goose to death.  “I’ve gone and done it.  I’ve pulled it off, and pulled it off.  You both need to come with me before the heat is on.”

“We’re not interested,” said Jermaine, and he was telling the truth.  He was tired with all his soul now, tired just looking at the stained old thing and his manic energy and his pointless words.  He wanted to go to bed and never wake up.  “Go now.  Walk out the door and don’t come back for another forty years.”
“Are you deaf or an idiot or both, boy?  We’re rich now.  I took it, I took it from him.  It’s mine now.  I’m offering you both the chance of a lifetime, nonono I OFFERED you the chance of a lifetime and now it’s HERE, it’s DONE, it’s REAL.  I promised and I delivered.”  His hands were pawing at his sides now, feeling along his shapeless shirt and destroyed pants for something.  “I got it.  I finally got it.  I had it before and I had to put it away but I got out and got it, I got it for real.”  He shivered.  “But it’s not on me.  I put it down and it’s not on me.  Listen to me, I can –”

“Go.”  Jermaine had picked him up, when he wasn’t quite sure.  It was much easier than he’d have thought it would be, if he’d thought of it before doing it.  His father seemed to have a way of making him hasty.  “Go again, like you did before.  It should be easy.”
“No,” said the old man, his head shrinking into his neck like a turtle.  “No no no, not again!  I just got out!  I was locked up tight, you have to believe that, yes, locked up so very tight, and now you want me to go back?  You’re a cruel boy, a cruel boy from a cruel woman.  She called me mean!  She was mean!  It’s not fair!”

Jermaine threw him.  His arms weren’t as strong as they used to be and his back hurt and his tendons gave him these odd little twinges he couldn’t quite tell if he was imagining, but his father was no weightier than a cobweb so he didn’t so much as touch the stairs, floating across the marshy ground like a falling leaf.  He settled atop the vegetation with a whisper of a slosh, which was immediately buried by his shriek. 

“To hell with that!  To hell with you both!  See if I help you again!  It’s here and I’m going to get it!  I’ll get it now!  And I won’t show you!  I won’t share with you!  It was the plan but not anymore and I’ll…I’ll-”

It wasn’t a very solid door, but Jermaine slammed it anyways. 

***

“Who was that?”

Of course his mother had woken up.  She stood in the kitchen, feet bedecked in cobwebs, hair trying to escape her skull, eyes suspicious and all too alert. 

Jermaine didn’t like it when she was up this late.  She seemed smarter than he was. 

“Nobody,” he said. 
“That was your father.”

“Nobody.”
She considered this, and nodded.  “Yes.  Yes, that’s right.”

And she went back to bed, still shuffling but purposeful. 

***

There was still bread the next day, and no father.  But Jermaine needed to feel like he was doing something useful, so he took out his old line and sat on the deck casting lines through the old screen window, enjoying the closest thing to a breeze the lake could muster. 

“Your father never fished,” his mother told him.  She had taken out the least-mouldy armchair for some almost-sunlight.  “Hopeless with a rod and line, worse with a net.  But he was an archaeologist, so he was much better with a shovel.  Good for bait.”  She snickered.  “Not as good as me, though.  I did my part just fine, oh yes.  It was him that made the mess.  Got caught, sticky fingers, sticky fingers.  With fingers like that you’d think he could’ve been a better fisherman.”

Jermaine shrugged. 

“Did I ever tell you about the time we plotted against the president?  Regime change is the duty of the people, Hal told me, and since the people weren’t voting fast enough we might as well lend them a hand.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Of course that was all a lie, of course, of course.  He just wanted something shiny, selfish thing, greedy boy.”  She sighed.  “Always greedy.  Not like you, you know?  You raised your daughters to be like that, didn’t you?  Not like your father?  Yes?”
“Yeah.”
“Good boy,” she said, patting his arm.  “Good boy.  Now, the president’s here, so you’d better go greet him while I put on my shoes.”
“Sure,” said Jermaine.  Then Jermaine’s ears told him that they’d been hearing an engine approach for the past five minutes.

***

The president was different from how Jermaine remembered him, standing in the kitchen with a gun uncomfortable and damp in his hand.  He had always been thick, true, but now he was fat; the kind of sleek unwrinkled fat you found on a frog’s belly, stretched and smoothed and covered in veins from living life half-marinated.  The kitchen was practically overflowing with him. 

Jermaine supposed he was different from how the president remembered him too – in the old days his eyes had sparkled, everyone had said.  Now he was a man grown and they just sat there in his skull. 

The president’s gaze met them, ignored them, passed over him smoothly and entirely, without a blink.  Jermaine was part of the scenery, part of the background. 

His mother, however, wasn’t.  And she’d found her good shoes.

“Claire,” said the president. 

“Hello!”

“Where is it?”
She shrugged.  “Don’t know.  Never found it.  Hal lost it years back, silly thing.”
“Hal escaped prison three weeks ago, first place he’d have come was here.  Tell me.”

“He didn’t trust me, you know?  Never did.  Stashed it somewhere before you came over and lied where he’d kept it.  Haven’t bothered looking in years.”

“Tell me or I’ll shoot,” said the president. 

“Oh poo, shoot what?” said Jermaine’s mother, waspishly.  “I’m nothing but leather and flint now, and this place is such a swamp I’d be amazed if your gun can fire.  Humidity’s an awful thing, isn’t it?”
“Shut up!”
“You were never one for first-hand violence anyways.  Too much work.  I agree with that, but I don’t agree with how you got other people to do it for you.  Hypocrisy is an ugly thing.”
“Shut up!” said the president.  “Shut up!  I’m not here for this, I’m not here for you, I’m not even here to shoot anyone I just want my damned jewel back!  Forty years it’s missing, now the thief breaks out, now his trail leads here, now his old bat of a hook-up is sitting on it!  I’ve had enough!  Give it back!”

“Nobody cares,” said Jermaine. 

“I came here for answers,” snapped the president, “and I’ll have-”

“NOBODY CARES,” yelled Jermaine.  “NOBODY!  Mother’s senile and father’s a pathetic runaway and YOU haven’t been in power since my oldest daughter was born, and she isn’t even in the country anymore!  The thing stolen from you has been missing for half a century?  That’s half a century it hasn’t mattered.  Nobody.  Cares.”

The president looked more like a frog than ever, so puffed up like that.  He opened his mouth to croak, but all that came out was a hiss, and THAT was drowned out by his mother’s laughter.  She sounded half her age. 

“A bitch and a bitch’s son, both ill-bred,” said the president, at last.  “You match the old place like a set of chipped dishes.  Stay here, by all means – I’ll throw away the key.  Grow mouldy together, the three of you.”

Then he turned on his heel and stomped his way down the staircase, all eighteen stone of him, and on the third step down his heel came through the wood. 

There were no splinters, there was no sawdust.  Nothing but a soggy squish at first, until the first pair of big pale claws came racing up through the hole and seized the president’s pant-leg.  He didn’t even scream he was so surprised. 

Not right away, at least. 

“The old ditch,” his mother told him, when the noises had stopped.  All the noises, from everyone.  Even the mosquitos seemed placid.  Something in the air that had been bending for decades had finally snapped. 

“Hmm?”
“The old ditch,” she repeated.  “Best take the body there before they get too tucked into him.  Or, god forbid, someone comes around.  He WAS the president, you know.  And he used to come here, back in the day.”
“Yeah, mother.”
She patted his cheek fondly.  “You’re a good boy.  Go on then.  Scoot!”

And he did, although it was no picnic lugging that much president through that much underbrush.  Every root and every branch caught a new scrap of clothing or pound of flesh, and if the president had been smooth and featureless in life he was a ragged thing indeed by the time he made it to his final resting place. 

Jermaine dragged the body over the last hump and rolled it down the slope into the old, old ditch, where it refused to sink.  Caught on something. 

He swore filthily, reached down with a stick, shoved and shoved and the disturbance floated over right side up, neck side wrong, eyes all bulgy with leeches, and in one clutched fist something gleaming. 

His father. 

***

His mother liked the jewel well enough, but she lost it every week, so he put it on the high shelf.