Serial Sunday: The Renaissance Man and the Strange New World, Part XI
- 8 hours ago
- 6 min read
By Ryan Fleming.
The Renaissance were aboard their launch speeding towards the shore of the strange new world that had captivated the imaginations, and greed, of the entire world. They were two hundred yards out and closing.
Closing in upon them were the long, trunk-like tentacles of some unseen monstrosity.
Another fifty yards closer to the share, but still the tentacles closed upon them.
The colour had drained from Eileen Wong’s knuckles from how tightly she gripped the helm of the launch. Next to her, Annie Thomas cast glances over her shoulder at the tentacles, then back at the fast-approaching land, muttering “faster, faster”.
At the stern, Charles Chance and Benjamin Williams took pot shots at the tentacles. They knew it was useless, even the one bullet Williams had managed to land on one of the thick tentacles from the fast-moving boat did little to dissuade whatever manner of creature to which they were attached.
Alastair Eliott stared at the tentacles. He would be waiting to reload either of the rifles wielded by Chance and Williams, but their shots were so few and far between the need had not yet arisen. It was increasingly unlikely that particular service would be needed at all from how quickly the tentacles closed on them.
One hundred yards from the shore; fifty yards from the tentacles that matched their speed.
This was how it would end for them. They had each escaped more brushes with death than was believable, including fleeing a sinking ship not one hour ago, yet they were about to be dragged beneath the surf of their goal by some overgrown squid.
At least, Alastair hoped it was a squid, or an octopus, or anything halfway knowable.
Fifty yards from safety; five yards from death.
Chance and Williams now stood ready with axes, more effective than rifles at this range.
The nearest tentacle disappeared under the boat.
An almighty lurch threw the members of the Renaissance to the deck. Eileen kept her hands on the helm, but it had begun to pull away from her. The launch had begun to veer to the right too.
They had slowed down considerably too.
Gripping the bulwark, Alastair peered over it to at least look his demise in the eye.
A thick black liquid oozing out into the water from underneath the boat.
In a second, Alastair knew what must have happened.
“Eileen,” he called. “It’s caught in the propeller, put the throttle down and cut it up!”
Eileen had pushed the throttle down before Alastair had finished speaking.
The launch began to rock as the tentacle struggled to free itself.
A second tentacle joined the first underneath, and the launch lost all momentum. Instead, it simply swayed as the tentacles writhed back and forth.
“Swim for it!” Chance called suddenly.
“Toss the equipment,” Annie shouted. “This close tide should hopefully bring most of it in.”
The Renaissance threw half a dozen small crates over the bow of the launch.
The tentacles lifted themselves out of the water, taking the stern with them.
Five bodies hit the water.
***
For the first time in days, Harry Bell heard familiar noises beyond his own breathing. The hum of engines came first in the distance. Harry moved in that direction, cautiously but with the merest flicker of hope. Muffled crashes came next, Harry continued in their direction. He thought he heard the pop of firearms. After all that he had seen, the possible sound of gunfire only drew him there quicker. Finally, over the roar of the ocean, he could hear voices. Human voices!
He still moved cautiously, having been there long enough to know that something was hiding almost everywhere, but with exhilaration too as his salvation might lay at hand.
Harry did not care who they were, anyone human would be a sight for sore eyes.
When he emerged in the clearing, his eyes widened and his mouth broke into a massive smile.
Dozens of people went about their duties in the clearing, almost all of them armed. They removed equipment from a massive airship that sat moored in the centre of the clearing.
Rescue. Protection. Escape.
Harry had grown so desperate for any of them as he cowered in the mud. Here was all three of them.
“Identify yourself!”
The voice came to Harry’s right, a uniformed man with a rifle approached him, some sort of sentry Harry guessed.
“Please, sir,” the first words Harry had spoken in days. “I’ve been stranded here for days and I—”
“Never mind that, we’ll have to see the Boss.”
The sentry took Harry to his superior, who took Harry to his superior, and so on. After five rounds of passing Harry Bell like the baton in a relay, someone in an officer’s uniform took Harry to the airship.
Another officer conferred with something in an even fancier uniform. The latter could only have been a few years older than Harry.
“Sir,’ the officer that brought Harry intoned. “This man says he has been stranded here and—”
“This man is a trespasser,” interrupted Maximilian Macmillan. “The sentence is death.”
Before Harry could register what was happening, the officer had removed his pistol and pointed it at Harry’s head.
Harry Bell did not hear the bang; felt nothing as he slumped to the ground.
His ordeal in the strange, terrible new world had come to an end.
***
Several miles away on the beach, the Renaissance worked to gather their equipment out of the surf and bring it ashore. All of them had swam with all the speed and strength they could muster after they had been thrown from the boat. Williams did so with one arm wrapped around one of their equipment crates. Four more crates followed them ashore with the tide, of the last there was no sign.
What mattered was that all of them had made ashore. Sopping wet, exhausted, and shaken up from their most recent brush with death, but alive and intact.
Eileen, Williams and Chance carried the equipment up the beach, whilst Annie and Alastair sorted through it. There was nowhere on the beach that was dry in the truest sense of the word, but they were at least out of the surf as they unpacked. Even there, anything placed on the ground sank slightly into the dark mud.
“We got the radio!”
“We got the surveying equipment!”
“We got some weapons!”
Eileen began testing the radio. Annie and Alastair laid out surveying equipment and specimen jars. Chance checked one of the two submachine guns that had made it ashore. Williams examined their surroundings.
The small beach where they had washed ashore was bounded at one end by an almost sheer wall of rocks. At the opposite end was a small outcropping that would be infinitely easier to scale but offered no idea of what lay beyond it. Facing the ocean was a dense thicket of what looked like mangrove trees, but their spindly roots rose to taller than the height of a person before they all met at the trunk. Almost as though they were used to growing unfettered.
The tops of the mangrove trunks rivalled that of the tallest oak, but their limbs hung limply down their sides, kelp hanging from them along with black, slimy leaves. Had those limbs been stood at attention, the trees would have been amongst the tallest Williams had seen in his life.
The tangle of tall roots, the hanging limbs, the leaves and the kelp all created a curtain of darkness beneath the mangroves.
Dark, but not dark enough for Williams to miss something clearly moving carefully within it.
“Chance,” he said softly.
Chance ceased inspecting the second submachine gun and followed Williams’ gaze. He soon made out the same movement within. Picking up both submachine guns, he joined Williams and handed him one of them.
They spread out, taking up positions at either end of the small space where the equipment was gathered.
The others had noticed Williams and Chance adopting sentry positions. Alastair sat bolt upright. Eileen took two pistols and a shotgun from the weapons crate, she handed the former to Annie and Alastair.
“Alastair,” Annie began. “Try to raise someone… anyone… on the radio. We might want to get out of here quick.”
Alastair immediately began testing frequencies and speaking softly into the microphone, broadcasting an SOS to anyone who could hear.
They all knew it was a long shot. They had broken records to be the first to arrive at the new world. They would have to wait for anyone that could rescue them from it.
The sound of gunfire from within the interior captured everyone’s attention. It came from everyone’s right, in the direction of the small outcropping, drawing their gazes that way.
“Who could have made it here first?”
“The ship that discovered it?”
“Contact was lost…”
“Could some of Curtis’ men have survived?”
“How’d they get so far inland…”
The confused debate, which latest mere seconds, was enough for one of the beings skulking in the mangroves to charge out and make for the Renaissance.
With one webbed, clawed hand it tore at the scientific equipment that had been prepared. It reared back and let loose a guttural roar. Stumbling forward, it raised that same terrible hand over Alastair, who had remained at the radio set.
It roared again, so close Alastair felt its spittle on his face.
Ryan Fleming is the author of SLP's Reid in Braid and various short stories for the anthologies, as well as editing The Scottish Anthology.
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