Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer

The bus turned and ran along the second hilltop, giving them a last glimpse of the Coast Highway. It was covered with water. Waves were breaking against the brush-grown slopes.

Dal Davies, as negligently casual about it all as some poetic son of Poseidon in his father’s study, watched the broad gray Bristol Channel glinting steely here and there in the mist-filtered silver light of the setting sun as the water inched and footed up the briary slope to the other side of the road fronting the pub.

The last time he’d looked, there’d been two freighters and a liner battling down-channel against the flood. Now they were gone, leaving only a scattering of wreckage and distant small craft not worth his squinting at.

He’d turned on the wireless a while back and listened to the taut-throated reports of the monster tides; and chittering insistences that they were caused by the great muster of earthquakes that had tramped Terra’s crust the last half-day; and cries for boats and buses and trains to do this, that, and the impossible; and grim, hysterical, complex commands to all England, it seemed to Dai, to go somewhere else, preferably to the top of Mount Snowdon.

He’d decided it must have been earlier installments of these frantic warnings that had put all the cowardly Somersets to flight — locking their liquor up miserly behind them! — and then he’d gone Disney for a while and jigged about and sung loudly: “Who’s afraid of the big bad tide? Certainly not Dai!”

But then the lights had gone out with a greenish-white flaring and the wireless with them, and he’d hunted up candles for cheer and affixed seven of them with their own whitehot wax artistically atilt along the bar.

Now he turned back toward them, and they were all guttering beautifully, the flames swaying like seven silver-gold maidens, their radiance glittering softly back from all the beautiful green-and-amber, neatly labeled books beyond.

Let me see, he thought as he moved slowly past the maiden flames, its many a day since I’ve looked into Old Bushmills by Thomas Hardy, but I’m mightily tempted by some of the cantos of Vat 69, by Ezra Pound. Which should it be now? Or perhaps — yes! — for a foreign fillip, Kirchwasser by Heinrich Heine!

General Spike Stevens and Colonel Mab lay side by side a foot or so under the concrete ceiling on the cot-size top of a big steel cabinet. She’d lost her flashlamp, but he still had his strapped to his chest. It shone on a still surface of black water six inches below the top of the cabinet.

They lay very still themselves. Their heads roared from the pressure of the air, which was warm due to the same compression.

There was nothing to look at along the wall-top or on the ceiling, except the grille of a ventilator beyond Colonel Mab’s head.

The general said — and his voice was weirdly gruff yet distant — “I don’t understand why with this pressure the air doesn’t puff up through there—” he pointed toward the ventilator — “and then, finis. Must be a block — maybe some anti-fallout valve got triggered.”

Colonel Mab shook her head. She was lying on her back, looking up over her eyebrows. “It isn’t easy to see at first,” she said softly, “but the ventilator shaft is full of water. It bulges down just a little in the squares in the ventilator, like tiny black pillows or big black fingertips. The water pressure from above and below balance — for the moment, at any rate, and so long as the surfaces in the grille aren’t disturbed.”

“You’re seeing things,” the general told her. “That’s bad hydrostatics. The head of pressure on the water below us is bound to be greater. It’d still push the air out.”

“Maybe the elevator shaft hasn’t filled entirely yet,” Colonel Mab answered with a little shrug. “But I’m not seeing things.”

She reached up and poked a finger through the nearest hole in the ventilator, then snatched it quickly away as a stream of water as thick as a cigar spurted straight down and rattled loudly into the still water below, with the effect of an elephant relieving itself of fluid.

The general grabbed her by the shoulder. “You goddamn stupid bitch,” he snarled. Then he looked her in the face and he slid his fingers inside her collar, and took hold of it to tear it down. “Yes,” he said harshly, nodding once. “Whether you like it or not.”

He hesitated, then said apologetically but very stubbornly, “There’s nowhere else to escape to, is there, except into each other.”

She grinned with her teeth at him. “Let’s do this right, you big brass bastard,” she told him. Her eyes narrowed. “We’re finished,” she said thoughtfully, hitting each syllable as if she stepped on stones, “but if we could work so that we hit the climax just as we drowned…We’ll have to wait till the water’s over us — It mustn’t be too soon…”

“My Christ, you’ve got it, Mab!” the general said loudly, grinning down at her like a blocky death’s-head.

She frowned. “Not all of it,” she said, just loudly enough for him to hear her over the sizzling water-spurts — there were three of them now. “There’s something else. But it’s enough to start on, and I’ll think of the other thing after a while.”

She unbuttoned her soaking coat and shirt and unhooked her brassiere. The flashlamp strapped to his chest shone on her breasts. He entered her, and they got to work.

“Take it slow now, you old bastard,!” she told him.

When he clutched her to him, the flashlamp made a reddish square in her chest that shone out faintly through her breasts.

When the water was an inch from the top of the cabinet they paused for a while.

“Like rats in a trap,” she said to him fondly.

“You got quite a tail, Mrs. Rat,” he said to her. “I always thought you were a Lesbian.”

“I am,” she told him, “but that’s not all I am.”

He said, “About that black tiger we thought we saw—”

“We saw it,” she said. Then her face broke into a smile. “Strangling is a very quiet death,” she said. She dabbled her hand in the water, as if she were on her back in a canoe — and, for a moment, she was. “That’s from The Duchess of Malfi, General. Duke Ferdinand. Nice, don’t you think?” When he frowned speculatively, she said, still smiling tranquilly: “I’ve read in more than one place that a hanged man always has a climax — and strangling’s like hanging. I don’t know if it’s true of women, but it could be, and my sex always has to take the chances. At least it ought to help the water a little, and if we could make the three things come together…Enjoy killing a woman, General? I’m a Lesbian, General, and I’ve slept with girls you never got. Remember the little redhead in Statistics who used to twitch her left eye when you barked at her?”

Just then the water came rilling over the cabinet top, and the ventilator tore loose, and a great inorganic sobbing began as, alternately, a log of water shot down the hole and a log of air escaped up it, rhythmically. The cabinet shook.

The general and Colonel Mab got to work again.

“I won’t squeeze so hard right away, you goddamn girl-defiling bitch,” he shouted in her ear. “I’ll remember you’re the woman.”

“You think so?” she shouted back, and her long-fingered, strong-fingered strangler’s hands came up between his arms and closed around his neck.

Paul Hagbolt’s joints and muscles had begun to ache from his starfished posture, despite the easement of null gravity. He thought some modest complaints about it, to no effect.

After getting over his first terror of Tigerishka, he’d spoken his complaints and started to ask many questions, too. But she had said: “Monkey chatter,” and run a dry velvet paw across his lips, and a paralysis had gripped his throat and his face below the nose — somehow an invisible gag had been applied.