A Shrouded World | Book 8 | Asgard Read online

  He’d hired this kid, early twenties, I guess, to do the deck because he’d come in much lower than the nearest quote. And, true, it was a deck, not an entire building, so one would think anyone with a working knowledge of construction would be fine. Yeah, you’d think that. The kid showed up on time that first day; that, in and of itself, was a good sign, considering contractors’ penchants for doing things on their own timeline. He’d even rented an auger to dig out the holes for the footing, a smart move, considering shoveling ground in Maine was a rocky adventure. He dug four or five of them then said he was going to lunch.

  I didn’t hire him, but I thought it strange that his lunchtime started at ten, and why the hell was he packing up the auger? He still had another five or six holes to go, but, again, not my rodeo. Maybe it wasn’t working correctly and he wanted to get another. Seriously didn’t give it another thought as I drank a beer. (I was on vacation; you get a free pass to drink before lunch.) I’d gone into the house to grab another and was back outside with my hand on the cap, about to twist it off, when I caught a whiff of something…unpleasant. I looked around for Ron’s dog; he was nowhere in sight, and I hadn’t let anything slip through. I was hoping it wasn’t a bad case of b.o. and gave my pits the cursory sniff. I was good to go. I chalked it up to some errant odor. I had the bottle to my lips when I again caught a whiff of something seriously off-putting. I looked at the beer like maybe it had skunked.

  “What the hell?” I got up to track the origin and found myself rounding the house to get to the back, and there it was. Five auger holes and one was a muddy, bubbling, stinking brew, hastily filled back in. “Uh oh.” I went back into the house. “Um, Ron, I think you have a problem.”

  “Yeah, my brother has come to visit.” He thought he was being funny, I knew I was about to one up him.

  “Might want to head out back.”

  “Little busy, here. Some of us are still working, not all of us can drink right now. Jesus, Mike, what time is it? It’s not even eleven.”

  “Time is a manmade construct.”

  “That’s when I know you’re bullshitting—when you start diving into your rudimentary philosophical understandings.”

  “You can give me all the shit you want about day drinking, but it’ll still be less shit than what’s happening outside.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Dave fucked something up.”

  “He just started, he’s only digging holes.” Ron went past me. “How much could he mess up?”

  “Oh, you’d be amazed,” I said as I took another swig. I followed him out, partly for the spectacle that was about to erupt; maybe a little bit of gloat. It wasn’t that I was unsympathetic to his plight, but he’d asked me who I thought he should go with for the job, and I’d told him the company that is bonded and licensed, not the kid that was working out of his friend’s borrowed minivan.

  He was standing by the smelly bubbling hole, his phone to his ear. He left a message for Dave, who had decided not to answer that call. Or the next dozen, for that matter. Each one filled with more expletives and threats of legal action. Ron’s wife, Nancy, had the smarts to contact the septic company, who had sent out a representative in under an hour. Which, considering this was Maine, might have been a new record.

  “Ah yup, looks like he put a hole through your outlet pipe.” The worker, Barry, I think his name was, had on overalls and wader boots that came up well past his knees. If I had his job, I would have walked around in an entire rubber suit and diver’s helmet, but that was me. In one hand he was carrying a tuna fish sandwich which he would occasionally take bites from. I guess maybe you get used to the smell, but to eat around it? The beer in my belly was not settling as well as it should have been.

  “How long will it take to fix?” Ron asked, a very reasonable question. Barry looked at him like he’d asked how much to kill his wife.

  “Fix? Naw, I don’t fix. I just pump ‘em out.”

  “You’re a septic company—it says so right there on your truck!” Ron was losing his cool and quick; that happens when your pristine back yard is quickly becoming a sewer.

  “Read the slogan.” Barry pointed to the large red letters on the side of the bilge truck.

  “You dump, we pump,” Ron said aloud.

  “Ah yup, nowhere does it say repairs.”

  “You have got to be shitting me!” Ron yelled.

  I laughed at the irony of the words. Barry shrugged and got back into his truck but not before shoveling half of the sandwich in. I could not help thinking just how gross all of this was. Tuna was spewing out of Barry’s mouth as he turned. “Gonna have to call up a plumber.”

  He did that; must have called over fifty. Either they were too far away to come or were booked out for the next three weeks. My brother was losing his mind; in fairness, it might have been the smell burning away his cortex.

  “Fine, I’ll do it myself!” He slammed the phone down.

  “Fuck me,” I mumbled knowing where this was going. I grabbed a couple of beers and was heading out for an extended hike.

  “Mike!” he bellowed from the other side of the house. Suffice it to say I got roped into helping. Didn’t have an operating tractor at the time. He’d saved big money by buying an old, broken down piece of shit that needed more time, parts, and expertise than most master mechanics had access to. Thing was basically a metal tree, but he loved to talk about how he’d saved thousands over a new one. I never understood the mentality. He hadn’t saved anything. He’d spent money on a rust maker and now we were manually digging a hole made of sewage. The point of this fascinating anecdote is: what Bob was filtering out was worse than what I’d shoveled that day and I’d gagged a hundred times as we’d worked.

  The stuff coming out the other side of Bob was so thick it was impossible to call it a liquid. Had the consistency of semi-hardened cement, except the color, and that absolutely disgusting odor was way off. Bob did this for a good long while, had to have been a couple of minutes. I got queasy just watching, but I couldn’t turn away. It was obvious he was filtering the water, but who knew how good of a system it was. Seemingly better than Detroit’s had been, but was it as good as a Brita? And were they even the best at what they did? Who knew what kind of killing virus could escape the process? I wanted a drink of water in the worst way, but first, I didn’t have a built-in way to clean the water, and second, I didn’t want to die lying on the ground curled up in a ball, holding my stomach as it cramped and dissolved due to the poison ingested.

  Bob had seemingly got his fill, good for him, and, as of yet, had not succumbed to anything. But just when you think the world is as off-kilter as it can be, an earthquake strikes, this one in the form of Bob creating another valve. He had an intake in the cesspool, another sluicing off sludge, and still another that was attempting to mimic that of a garden hose, clear liquid dribbled out at first and then there was a steady stream.

  “No.” Said the word a half dozen, possibly a dozen times. Church had no such compunction. He got onto his back and let what I’m hoping and praying was straight water flow into his mouth. He was grunting in contentment.

  “Milk,” Bob urged.

  “I know what it is, Bob. This whole thing is, umm, this is just a little too graphic for me. The…connotations.” This was my hang up. Bob, as far as I knew, wasn’t any particular gender, could have been both or all or something entirely different. There was nothing—absolutely nothing—sexual about the act but, I mean, there it was. I could see some graphic artist somewhere creating this entire scenario and there would be some person somewhere getting their rocks off to this strange form of alien love making.

  “Ah!” Church stood up and rubbed his belly.

  “I absolutely cannot believe I’m doing this. Going to end up on Access Hollywood or some shit. Right now there’s an asshole paparazzi with some mega telephoto lens zooming in. How am I going to explain this to my wife? It was a one-time thing, honey, honest. It meant nothing
.” As fucking thirsty as I was, I couldn’t grab Bob’s hose and get my fill. I cupped my hands underneath to gather as much as I could. There was a fair amount of loss in the transfer but it was the way I was able to deal with my Freudian biases. I didn’t think I was being homophobic; I have never cared what anyone did in the privacy of their bedroom. Two consenting adults of any orientation that had found love were free to express it in any manner they chose. For me, personally, there was nothing about my own gender that elicited a sexual response. Men were generally all hard angles, and, although Bob was more or less one big womanly curve, it wasn’t in the right places. Then there was the obvious turn off of the giant proboscis.

  All of that hung up crap in my head swirled around even as I took my third and fourth handful of the life-giving water. In the end, I’d known all along I would succumb. Bob had allowed us to continue our mission in multiple ways I’d rejected at first, and not once had he left money on top of the dresser before leaving.

  “You’ve got problems, Talbot,” I said as I stood, “but being thirsty isn’t one of them. Thank you.”

  Bob seemed pretty happy with himself, though he didn’t move. The drinking hose retreated, yet Bob still kept pumping the sludge in and the waste product out; took me a few moments to realize what he was doing. He was becoming a giant canteen. I could see an expanding bubble of clear water forming a skirmish-ending water balloon down close to the ground. We were going to be fine for a while, at least in terms of water. Now that one base need had been satisfied, my body went on to the next. I could use a cheeseburger like no one’s business. The thing about this world was, I had yet to see any wildlife of any kind, not footprints, not droppings, not a far-off sighting of an animal scurrying away or even a call from the skies. The only thing living here seemed to be the whistlers and whatever they brought in.

  Was it possible they’d found a barren planet and set it up to be their evil lair? I mean, what would the moon look like if they’d somehow added an atmosphere? It would still be a lifeless rock. In between the grumblings of my stomach I could hear the water sloshing around. After the infusion of the H20, I’d been feeling more myself, and for a time I scanned the horizon looking for anything to break the monotony or eat. When neither of those things showed themselves, I let my head drop to the plodding. Watching where each foot was going to fall. It was Church that stopped first. He gently reached over to grab the material on my back. I pulled up short and looked at him.

  I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear anything. Then there was a slight glint up in the sky. It was far off, enough that without the reflection of the sun, it would not even have appeared as a period at the end of a sentence in a book held across a room. Another glint; it was low on the horizon but moving quickly. It was a ship. I didn’t think it was a hovercraft as those tended to stay lower to the ground, but really, I had no idea. I figured we’d finally been found; it had to only be a matter of time. Another glint; it was moving parallel to us. It was not approaching, and, in all likelihood, had not seen us. Bob had started moving again.

  “We’re going to where that ship is, aren’t we?” I already knew the answer before I asked the question.

  “Milk.”

  “The capital? This place has one of those? Then what, Bob?”

  “Kill,” Church answered ever so eloquently.

  2

  Mike Journal Entry 2

  We’d been walking for two revolutions of the second sun, no idea how that equated to an earth day, but suffice it to say it was a long time. We rested mostly during the day-day and walked in the mostly dusk-day; there always seemed to be sunlight. Thank god at least I wasn’t going to suffer any Vitamin D deficiency. It was early “evening” of the third night when I spotted the far-off sight. It was impossible from this distance to say exactly what I was looking at, but there was what looked like a gleaming sea. I salivated at the thought that it could be fresh water, and I might be able to quench that need in a more conventional manner. And if it was water, didn’t it stand to reason there would be some manner of aquatic beast I could eat? I had gone far past the marker of hunger. My brain knew I wasn’t starving quite yet, but my stomach was already making its burial arrangements. It wasn’t like I had great stores of fat to leech off, and the lack of food was beginning to make me lethargic. Wasn’t it bad enough we were trying to stop intergalactic monsters? Why the hell did I have to be so fucking hungry too?

  As daylight came my body was looking forward to the rest, but my mind said we should keep going, like if we just went a little farther we could stop at an In and Out and grab a burger. The glimmers I’d seen were beginning to take definition, and I could safely say at this point it was not an ocean or even a great lake. They were structures, made by creatures, not nature, I think. Bob made it a point to have us stop and rest. We were moving considerably slower now; it was likely he was tired as well, but he was also clearly being cautious. If this was the capital, that meant beings, and beings meant danger, simple as that. Saw more of the flying ships, most still far off in the distance. Even those that were relatively close were moving too fast and were too high up to notice an odd trio walking along.

  I had desert camouflage on, and Church was brown-greenish with the same color clothing. It would take a fair amount of scrutiny to notice us. Bob, of course, was a friggen beacon, fire engine red; he might as well have had a neon sign saying “HERE I AM” over his head. Now, I’m mostly sure Bob couldn’t read my thoughts, but I’d no sooner said that and his color began to fade, much like it had when we were both starving, though this was more controlled and not just his body letting him know just how perilous his situation was. Red became pink, pink became a light brown which quickly became a sandy yellow color that closely resembled the ground we were traversing. Bob was apparently part chameleon.

  “If you could give me a sheet listing all of your super-powers that would be great.”

  “Bob.” The word carried some levity.

  Whatever the whistlers had done to his home world, they had righteously screwed up. If one Bob could do this much damage and was this powerful, what could a bobbing of Bobs do? I was making up words; if you can have a murder of crows, or a congress of Ravens, a gaggle of geese, why not a bobbing of Bobs? Then I got to thinking. Bob had evolved all of these functions over thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years, and this would be in direct response to external threats on his world. What kind of hell planet did he live on where survival necessitated all the things he could do? I decided right then that, when this was all over and we had won, if Bob invited me to his home for dinner, I was going to graciously decline. His dog equivalent was likely to rip my arm off playing fetch.

  We again stopped for the day. My nap dreams consisted entirely of food, but it was always food running away from me. You’ve not lived until you’ve seen giant French fries sprout legs and haul ass or bacon snakes slithering away just out of reach. Even the mounds of peanut butter that called gently to me would sink back into the ground as I approached. I was sad for every morsel of food I had ever not finished or left to go bad in the fridge. I mean, just pounds of wasted produce, some I wouldn’t eat due to a bruise, some I just plain didn’t like. At this point, I’d eat moldy broccoli with no Velveeta.

  That night-ish I could finally see what we were headed towards: giant floating spheres that were made from something reflective; metal, glass, mirror, that I could not tell, but the giant balls hanging in space would have been tough to miss. It was like a massive baby was playing with soap bubbles and had created a field of them that now hung suspended. I had no illusions they would easily pop. There were so many of them, some as large as skyscrapers, others more like mansions. Most were circular, some were oblong. Ships were entering what I now knew was the city from every conceivable angle. It made sense that there would be something to eat there, but man, I dreaded the place. Wherever we were and whatever inhabited this place had been responsible for the majority of the misery the cosmos was experiencin
g. Suddenly, a plate of everything mashed potatoes didn’t sound so good—not with the company I was sure to be keeping. And most likely their mashed potatoes would be ground up banana worms or something equally as repulsive.

  And still we walked. I didn’t know if Bob had a plan or if we were just going to stand under an orb and yell until someone came and picked us up. Seemed to be the way of things. And just when you figure you’ve got the dance moves down, the playlist gets shuffled. The sun that never seemed to set had dipped below the horizon; the darkness that followed was welcome. It was like a trigger to my body, which suddenly decided it wanted to sleep. Bob had other designs. Now that we were this close, we pressed on. I wasn’t in that much of a rush, especially when we started seeing entities walking around in the distance. This because there was lighting—like stadium lighting, but like everything else on this friggen planet, they were floating high up in the sky.

  “Is that vegetation?” It looked like beings were hovering around in waist high bushes, could not tell the color from this distance, could’ve been green could’ve been purple. Could have been a rock wall.

  “Bob.”

  “It’s a farm? Seriously?” I wanted a cheese stuffed-crust pizza, but even boiled asparagus had an appeal at the moment. We picked up speed the closer we got, possibly the lure of being this close to food made us all subconsciously in a rush to get there. But the pace was driven by Bob, and I had the feeling he wanted to be under the lights before the sun came up. That to be outside that perimeter was dangerous. I was thinking exactly the opposite.