MEMP’IS
BOOK
SIX – “MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE”
(Sunday
{Venuday}, January 7, 2035, and After)
There is an empty tomb in Memphis, a cavity that pulses,
miserably, beneath eleven feet of roiling river water, mud and overstanding silt and rubble...
Norlin plummets downward, as if
his ankles are encased in concrete blocks.
Only the uppermost six inches of the Mississippi are choked
with debris and riverslime... so, as he continues
sinking, blurry brown and gray vistas unfold.
Fish scatter - Arsenal carp, goggle-eyed and hideously malformed (and,
as the Baratarian newspeople
admonish, now and again, excruciatingly toxic).
Below the Corporal's flailing feet looms a vast junkyard of all of
civilization's ruined vanities - rusting appliances and automobiles, weapons
and bones. Human bones, animal bones and
dismembered skeletons that may be one or the other... or something betwixt... amphibio-reptilian bones, mammalian bones, luminescent
human skeletons. Norlin's
right foot comes to rest on the upright remains of a paddlewheel, probably
wrenched off of one of the gambling and whoring riverboats that once plied the
Mississippi before the K'ball. He stands astride the paddlewheel, a drowning
Colossus, tiny bubbles escaping from his lips.
Something jabs him in the liver. Reason's purse, battered but waterproof…
something within that is stiff, but warm, writhing, warning the Corporal...
Go up!
So Norlin kicks upwards through
bloodred liquid fog, insinuated into his vision from the flickering edges of
perception. His scalp tingles, trousers
and shoes... heavy with the toxin-saturated water... tug against his rising,
their sinuous pricklings appealing to despair,
surrender, sleep. He coughs,
involuntarily, a swarm of little, sparkling red bubbles manifesting like
lonely, ghost orphan-globes to veil the shadowy, dark sentinels that rise out
of this Styx - petrified trunks of the dead oaks of Graceland, preserved by the
government's secret chemicals, leached out of the Arsenal. The Corporal grasps a protruding branch -
although no wider than his wrist, it's hard as iron, and he pushes off against
it, struggling upwards, ever upwards, towards the murky light of Memp'is beneath its perpetually diffused riverfog.
The surface membrane of slime envelops his head, first; an
oily shroud of decay that stings his eyes, penetrates his ears and nostrils. Norlin trembles and gags as he breaks the surface of the
water, shaking and spitting, realizing, now, that… while the depths have been
warmed unnaturally, courtesy of the Arsenal, the surface of this toxic water is
cold, January cold. He senses Graceland at his back, perceives
its wall and gate only dimly, through the fog, and his pursuers on the other
side not at all.
But, he can hear them...
"We have heaters," Germany Smith's nasal drone
threatens through a rolled-up cone of cardboard, like an ancient vo-dee-oh megaphone.
"We have omnidirectional phylters..."
"Give it up, Corpse," answers Eric Ice, speaking
through a conventional, though staticky, bullhorn. "Nothing down n’out there but nasty
critters... phibes!... and, if they don't eat you,
that water will poison you."
"We have grenades!"
Germany boasts.
Norlin can hear the Trouble
Factory's conscripted powerboats rumbling in the distance, tethered like angry
dogs racing back and forth in their pen, nosing and nudging at the gates of
Graceland, noses neither cold nor hot, not really anything, at all.
From the water, behind, a helluva plop overrides the
background booming and clicking - he looks over his shoulder, sees only oily
ripples between the brooding, petrified treetrunks.
"Don't!" someone aboard one of the boats cries
out and there's an angry sputter - Kruppe, Norlin recognizes.
"Put that heater away," the critic coaxes (some low-level Factorian, Norlin decides,
trembling between his job and life), "…you just toss a lit cigarette
overboard and the whole, kebbin' river's likely to
explode!"
"Ain't supposed to have cigarettes out here, boy," is Kruppe's surly response.
"Against the law!"