MEMP’IS
BOOK
SIX – “MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE”
(Sunday
{Venuday}, January 7, 2035, and After)
No wall of fire issues from the boats beyond the gate, and
the Veronica, in Reason and Mondretto's silver
casing, jabs Norlin again. He relinquishes his grasp on the petrified oakbranch and turns… dogpaddling… towards the shimmering
wraith of the dead King's abode.
The head of a phibe breaks the
surface of the waters - long, green fingers curl,
beckoning him onward.
He dogpaddles towards Graceland.
Something whines, zipping past Norlin's
ear, punching the dirty water. Just a
bullet, he thinks, conventional fire... nothing to be fexxed
over... and then there's another, another, then a whole swarm of angry, biting
shots. Norlin
closes his eyes, lowers his face back into the King's
slough and swims hurriedly underwater, with broad strokes... away from the
direction of the shots and towards, as he hopes, the ruin which holds,
somewhere, somehow, the answer to his dilemma.
More and more bullets snark past,
chirring like angry wasps, and then one creases the top of his left shoulder,
stinging fiercely. His resolute strokes
sputter into a painful floundering - Norlin raises
his head to take a gasping breath, dives, surfaces
again, smells his own blood trailing, flowering around him like guilty
footprints for unseen predators to follow.
A stink, a taunt, an invitation to...
More hostiles!
He hears the booming and clicking of phibes
closing in from all sides, tries to command his injured arm to dig into the
pocket again, dig out the Elvis-encrusted panties and wave the flag of
allegiance at his amphibian attackers.
But his fingers won't work, and the King's visage has certainly washed
out of Lisa Marie Klort's underthings
by now... Norlin closes his mouth and begins to sink
into a vast, submarine necropolis. The
bones of legions of the dead and defeated knights-errant gleam upwards with beckoning,
phosphorescal gravity…
The Corporal's mouth sags open - heavy water rushing into
his lungs as he drifts down towards their bones.
A batrachian shape approaches
from the left, another from the right...
An attack!... no...
An escort!
A phibe has grasped Norlin just under his bleeding shoulder, another on his
right, and they lift him up, back into the murky frieze of Memp'is
- head lolling, dreaming the drowning dreams of dying men; wasted love, missed
opportunities, deserted by friends and family.
Propped up between the iron-hard splints of Graceland oak, impaled on
stern, amphibian bone, Norlin feels a postmortem
stirring in his loins - the breath against his face that must be Smyrna, or…
even... Reason?
Has he been granted entry into Paradise by an extremely lenient
deity?... or... no, he coughs, the lissome dreams dissolving into horrors -
fish-cold lips at the tip of a smooth, tapered face against his own. Troosh? Peg?... or, no, what was the name Automatic Slim gave up in the
basement of the Trouble Factory, that from the mildewy
corridors of the Tulane to the vile pool of Mormentz...
Norlin is kissing... well, being
kissed by... a phibe!
Not being kissed, however, being resuscitated…
Heavy water explodes from his lungs like the spume from a
wrung-out sponge - Norlin coughing and flailing in
rancid water, pain shooting across his shoulder as a fresh swirl of blood
trails, cunningly, and the phibe's webbed fingers tug
away the remnants of the Corporal's old coat.
Cold, rubbery lips pressing to the wound. A tingling - not unpleasant - radiates
clavicle to elbow; a narcotic paste of phibe-saliva
coating Norlin's bruised flesh as he remembers,
numbly, that it is a characteristic of Arsenal creatures to paralyze their prey
before devouring it…
Through Graceland's fog, the taunts from Eric Ice resonate,
now… floating across a tidal wave of disputations from the other boat.
"That your blood on the water, Corpse? We be-comin'! Might not see us, might not even hear
us. You hear?"
"I said left... left,
you kebbin' clockpuncher."
Bister... no, Norlin's
head throbbed, Kruppe! Bister was, had
been... the ringed, finger appetizer - the Jatesaneum! Keb! And then, Sergeant Chester Aspid, voice lowering with fear and awe...
"It's an EastAmi national
monument, Lieutenant... a national treasure...
what you’re proposing, well it might lead to war…"
"Not our nation, and it's nobody’s treasure – just another k'ballin, k'balled-up shack. Not even a shack, a rusty old gate to a shack
and the jesk'baller out there... kebber's
goin’ down."
Sharp phibe teeth bite into an
ear and the weariness of pain, cold water and far too little sleep swirl away
like blood; Norlin can almost swear he's heard a
command. He stops treading water and
begins to swim towards the mirage ahead once more. A blast of heat and flying debris precedes
the shock and the noise – shards of hot iron sizzling as they plunge into the
water with, through the fog, Kruppe gloating and
waving the object in his fist…
"Got grenades!..."