GONDOS—Chapter 15!
The novelization of the major motion picture GONDOS. We are in a sprint to the end of the story this week, with daily installments concluding Friday. For more information and to get caught up, click here.
PREVIOUSLY…
Lopez rejected Millie’s ingenious idea for trapping the skeefs. Seething and powerless, desperate to protect ELAINE’s reputation and infrastructure, he held out hope that the authorities could be convinced to poison the creatures instead.
Nevertheless, our heroes managed to set their plan in motion themselves.
Theo sabotaged the AquaStop. And high above the city, Guy and Millie watched as hundreds upon hundreds of skeefs poured into the Grand Canal with the resulting flood…
“Theo, close the wall!” Millie shouted over the radio, as she and Guy Rondack rushed down the church’s stone spiral stairs, zipping up their flight suits as they ran.
Many kilometers to the east, beyond the city, where the lagoon met the sea, the AquaStop stirred to life, unfolding off the ocean floor and slowly rising.
Millie and Guy scrambled to the stubby waterway running behind the basillica, where they leapt onto their waiting gondos and powered them up.
The great majority of the skeefs they’d spotted from above had already dispersed up the Grand Canal. But forty or fifty animals still remained writhing in the water in front of the church, wheeling in deranged ellipses. They seemed to be gathering together, organizing themselves into a twisting murmuration: a violent ball, a pumping heart.
“Run the test,” Millie told Guy.
He raced forward, firing at them from long-range. There was so much motion in the water in front of him that the Grand Canal seemed to be boiling as he approached.
Within seconds, he was among them—and dodging the tentacle that had sprung up on his right and surprised him. Two other arms snapped at him from behind—then more, somewhat clumsily, as Guy looped through the herd and quickly returned.
“Well, I’m sure as fuck not invisible,” he told Millie, looking down at his striped flight suit and black gondo. “But it did seem like they weren’t able to track my movements as well. And remember: they’re definitely hearing me, even if they can’t see me so well. These machines make a lot more noise than a gondola.”
“And you were shooting at them,” Millie noted.
“Yeah. There’s that too.” Guy chuckled. “Just be careful and stick with the plan. Remember the meeting spots and lure as many of them there as you can.”
As Guy revved his engine and whipped away, Millie called after him: “Trust the gondoliers!”
There was no response. Then Millie’s earpiece crackled and Guy’s voice came over the radio. He sounded, once again, imperturbable, focused: “I do trust them… And I trust you too.”
She watched his gondo tear a hundred yards upstream, to the leading edge of the herd, then wrench into tight gyre. Spinning around to face the animals, Guy blanketed the canal with gunfire and screamed, “Hey, skeefs! Eat me!”
The creatures churned, easily letting his bullets slip between them. Then their fury regathered, and their bodies all snapped instantly in his direction, like a flag in a stiff wind.
Guy cranked his gondo into reverse, heaving at the throttle rod with the full weight of his body. The vehicle shot straight back with such velocity that he nearly lost his footing as he took off hurtling through the center of the Grand Canal—traveling backward, with the thick throng of skeefs giving chase.
In an instant, Millie lost sight of him in the darkness ahead. And when she hailed him on the radio, he said simply, “Can’t talk right now.”
Guy said this with complete stoicism, with no audible sign whatsoever that he was, at that moment, piloting his gondo blindly, backward, at breakneck speed, all while firing madly at the crush of creatures gaining on him from behind—which is to say, right in front of his face.
Soon, however, many of those rampaging animals began falling away and joining with stragglers who materialized out of nowhere. Guy watched those skeefs reform into smaller groups, which themselves clotted together with others that came into view. By the time Millie passed under the Academia Bridge, having blazed up the canal herself far behind him, one of these clusters came spiraling out of the shadows, ferociously rushing at her flank.
She pulled her rudder and skidded sideways on the edge of her hull, spraying water everywhere, like a skier at the bottom of a run. Shimmying and swerving, staying in perpetual, haywire motion, she skirted dozens of tentacles that were suddenly flogging the water inches from her tail. Then, as soon as she found enough open water, she straightened out and took off up the canal again.
The skeefs quickly coalesced into a mob behind her gondo. More glommed on and gave chase as she sped dead ahead.
“I’ve got tons on me now,” she radioed to Guy.
“Stay strong. You should almost be where you’re going by now.”
Millie began checking the city’s skyline for landmarks, struggling to read the buildings’ black silhouettes against the blue-black of night.
Eventually, something clicked: she knew where she was.
With a knowing smile, Millie made a hard right out of the Grand Canal and into the Rio di Ca’ Garzoni. Looking back, she watched several of the creatures’ bodies bang into each other as they all swung ninety degrees to stay right on her tail.
As she led them through a spindly labyrinth of canals, a song sparked in her head out of nowhere—one of the Phish songs her parents were always playing when she was little; one that had especially irritated Millie back then, but which she now found herself singing under her breath to calm her nerves.
She chanted the chorus louder and louder as she flew across the water, weaving through turn after turn at top speed. And soon, Millie was smiling as she sang it, almost enjoying herself, taunting the animals that were hurtling behind her—straight into her trap.
“You’ll never get out of this maze,” Millie sang. “You’ll never get out of this maze.”
She led the creatures into yet another slender waterway, but this time—just as a dead end came into view—two lines of gondoliers suddenly closed in behind them all from alleyways on either side.
The rowers formed a blockade across the canal—dozens of them, all dressed in their full regalia, with their oars held at their chests like staffs, standing with preternatural sturdiness at the sterns of their elegant black boats.
Front and center, gritting his teeth, was Alessandro—rattled by the sight of all those monsters again, but trying not to show it.
He lifted his hand.
The gondoliers behind him inhaled deeply, like the lungs of a single organism.
Then their voices burst into song.
They had fused into a wall—a wall of sound.
Echoes of the old Venetian folk song, “La Biondina in Gondoleta,” splattered off the walls of the slender canal and reverberated off the water itself. The gondoliers’ voices smeared together and intensified, rising above the downpour, above the thunder and the howling wind. And the skeefs, which had all been blazing recklessly after Millie, now gradually sputtered to a halt.
The school of animals writhed wildly in place. They thrashed against the disturbance, enraged. But it was like they’d suddenly found themselves tangled in an invisible net and were fighting, futilely, to shake their way free.
“Forza! Forza, ragazzi!” Alessandro hollered to his comrades. “We have them!”
Millie swiveled her gondo and wiped the rain from her eyes. Across the churning water, beyond the incapacitated swarm of creatures slashing fecklessly at the walls, she could see the gondoliers’ chests rise and flex in unison, forcing out as much sound as they could.
It was all true.
Millie tried to wrap her scientific mind around this black magic. She’d imagined the gondoliers’ voices taming or sedating the skeefs; but the singing did not seem to lull the creatures as much as afflict them. It scrambled their concentration, left them bridled and incensed—like a pack of dogs crazed by a high-pitched whistle. And though the animals continued to strain desperately against it, the sound was grinding down their wills. They could not break free.
Hesitantly, Millie coasted back toward the creatures. She came alongside one, shrieking and spasming at the edge of the herd. But the sound and motion of her gondo at such close range snapped the animal back into a kind of adrenalized attention. It was cognizant enough to lash at her with one of its shorter arms.
Millie ducked, retreated, then caught Alessandro’s eye—flashing a comical little oopsies, to laugh it off.
The gondolier did not smile back. He was already steeling himself for the next beat of their plan. His face communicating unmistakably, but with deep trepidation, Here goes nothing.
Alessandro cupped his hands and shouted at the creatures: “Oe’ Oe’!”
And, like a train lurching away from a station, the shuddering mass of animals began to move as one.
They swam forward very slowly, coiling over each other constantly as they traveled like frenzied worms in a pail.
Millie coasted in front of the pack at a safe distance, backwards, while the gondoliers drove them from behind. This allowed her to keep her gondo’s weapons trained on the animals, her finger on the trigger, watching for any that seemed to overcome their bewilderment even slightly and regain their strength.
“Right turn coming!” she shouted to Alessandro.
“Oe’ premando’” Alessandro called over the gondoliers’ singing. The men paused their song just long enough to repeat the phrase in unison. And—astonishingly--the crush of bodies began to furrow and bend. The horde changed direction, wrapping around the corner, making the turn.
“Incredible,” Millie whispered.
“Gondolieri! Avanti! Dai!” Alessandro called to his men again in encouragement.
As the rowers ended one song and began another, he lifted his oar out of its forcola and raised it high in the air. He waved it theatrically, then tipped it forward like a lance to lead them ahead.
The plan progressed smoothly. Alessandro kept shouting his directions—forward, left, left, right—and the herd staggered through every turn. It was like he and the other gondoliers were cowboys on horseback, driving a flock of sheep. And Millie, in her gondo, was their vicious little dog, snapping at the heels of the animals which scampered too far out of line.
On the opposite side of the city, meanwhile, deep in a similarly intricate maze of canals, a second large battalion of gondoliers was driving another mass of animals behind Guy Rondack. And as the waterways they traveled intersected with smaller canals, more detachments of gondoliers would appear, pushing much smaller groups of skeefs that they’d chased down and corralled. Again and again, groups combined and forged ahead: a slow accumulation of skeefs, flushed from every corner of the city and funneled together.
The two main convoys were taking circuitous paths. Drawing on their intimate familiarity with the city, the gondoliers were pushing the animals through whatever rights and lefts felt do-able in the moment, working with the momentum of the herd. But all the while, each group pointed their animals toward the same destination—gradually converging on Piazza San Marco, trucking along.
The rain was letting up. But the canals were bloated; the paved fondamente running alongside them, erased by the tide. The city—blacked-out and flooded—had transformed into a wetland, punctured by church towers and the upper floors of buildings which sprouted out of the water like cattails, in clumps and crooked lines.
“Status check?” It was Theo. He was hunched at his terminal at ELAINE’s command center, whispering into his radio. The room was running on auxiliary power now, dimly lit with orange light.
Millie looked at her watch: 1:45 am—roughly an hour until they could open the wall again and let the city drain.
“We’re en route,” she said. “Pretty slowly, but…What’s happening there? Can we still count on you to reopen the AquaStop?”
“Affirmative,” Theo said. “But Russell’s MIA. He was so pissed—he just got up and walked out of the command center a half hour ago. No one knows where he is.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Guy said. “Stay focused.”
“Ok,” Millie said. And because she couldn’t help herself, she added: “It’s working, Guy! I can’t believe it—it’s working.”
“Don’t let your guard down,” was his only reply.
They arrived in Piazza San Marco at virtually the same time, from two different directions at the same corner of the square.
Guy had driven his skeefs along one of the most glamorous thoroughfares of Venice, straight down the flooded Merceria and into the piazza under the archway of the Torre dell’Orologio clock tower. Millie, meanwhile, had led her animals around the backside of the Basilica of San Marco, spilling into the piazza directly to his left.
They collided more than merged: two unruly, perpendicular parades.
The skeefs mewled and screeched as they knocked into one another uncoordinatedly, their black eyes widening, seeming to rouse. The two teams of gondoliers had arrived in the piazza singing two different songs, and in the resulting sonic muddle their hold over the animals appeared to be slackening. But recognizing this, Alessandro was already frantically producing a bullhorn from the interior of his boat.
“Ragazzi!” he screamed, lifting one arm like a conductor. “La Mula de Parenzo!”—the name of another old song. He counted them off and both divisions of gondoliers relaunched their voices in unison, doubly loud this time.
Alessandro waited as the men regained control. Then, satisfied, he hollered at the rowers again: “Gondolieri! Seal the exits.”
Without halting their song, without any further instruction, dozens of the men broke away from the crowd in the corner and dispersed throughout the square. They rowed hard, some taking up positions at small passageways at the opposite side of the piazza, while many more began assembling their gondolas into thick batallions at the two, wider entrances through which they’d all just come.
Another, even larger detachment of gondoliers made a beeline south to barricade the Piazzetta San Marco at the bottom of the square—the troublesome, corridor-shaped plaza that led straight into the Grand Canal and which Guy, Millie and Alessandro had agonized over on the map at Lopez’s desk.
Guy watched to make sure this last group reached the piazzetta, some 75 meters directly across the square. Once there, he saw them turning their gondolas around to face the action again and wait. They were lined up right below the winged lion sculpture, high on its pillar, watching over the square.
As gondoliers had scattered to take up their various positions, however, the tight, wrathful tangle of skeefs in the corner of Piazza San Marco began to loosen and drift as well. The animals slipped deeper into the piazza, slapping the floodwaters in front of the basilica, swimming in widening circles, lifting their heads above the surface to scream.
Millie opened fire at one that passed right in front of her, but the animal pulsed its arms to dodge the bullets, then bounded straight at her in a blundering lunge. She veered left, throwing her gondo into a spiral, then watched the animal dart underwater and twist away.
Behind it, another animal gathered just enough sense and strength to charge the line of gondoliers blockading one of the smaller entrances—it got pretty close before its body crumpled in bewilderment again.
“What’s happening? Are they coming to? Are you losing them?” she shouted to Alessandro.
“We will manage,” he called back. “It is just, in the piazza, we are not so loud!” He waved his megaphone, gesturing at the vastness of the empty square all around. Tucked inside the canals, the gondoliers’ voices had echoed lushly; here, they were warbling through all that open air.
Millie found Guy whizzing between the creatures congregated in front of the basilica, their arms windmilling high in the air. He’d discovered, like Millie, that shooting directly at them seemed to only risk snapping the skeefs out of their trance. He tried firing at the water in front of them, trying to keep them away from the facade.
“This isn’t going to be pretty,” Millie told him.
“It doesn’t have to be. We just have to hold them.” Guy checked his watch: 2:33 AM. “High tide is about to peak. We can open the wall as soon as everyone’s ready. And then we just wait for all this water to drain.”
Millie nodded nervously. “Yeah. So only one more measly hour to kill…”.
Guy lifted his finger off his trigger for a second. “I’m not worried. Killing has never been a problem for me.”
He raised his hand and signaled to Alessandro. The gondolier nodded; he understood the message. In fact, he was already rowing past both of them, heading for the long blockade of gondoliers across the piazzetta at the bottom of the square.
He raised his megaphone toward the singing men there and shouted: “Gondolieri! Ecco ci la corrente!”
Here comes the current!
There were ninety-nine gondoliers arrayed across the top of the piazzetta. They were packed in tightly, standing side-by-side in their boats, in three straight lines: a wall that was thirty-three gondoliers long and three-gondoliers deep. This formation stretched between the Doge’s Palace on one side of the piazetta and the Procuratie Nuovo apartment building on the other, sealing off the whole area behind them—the long corridor back to the sea. The gondoliers had transformed, collectively, into a thick and forbidding barrier, like the door on a vault.
Now, those men sprung into action, moving with well-rehearsed precision—and without ever ceasing to sing.
First, the gondolier at the very end of each line stepped off the back of his boat, knelt in the hull, and produced the end of a heavy steel chain. He wrapped the chain around his waist, then heaved it to the gondolier to his left—who looped the chain around his own waist and passed it to the next man.
It took two and a half minutes exactly—twenty-seconds faster than the gondoliers had managed while practicing that afternoon—for the three chains to be passed all the way across the piazetta, from the gondolier at one end of each line to the gondolier at the other. Those last men, in turn, produced drills and bolts from their boats and got to work, securing each chain to the marble of the buildings beside them. Then they lifted their oars over their heads to signal that the job was done.
The gondoliers had strapped themselves together, strapped themselves in.
“Okay, Theo,” Millie said on the radio. “Time to flush the toilet.”
Here and there around the piazza, the floodwaters puckered with tiny ripples—barely noticeable at first.
The ripples multiplied. They accelerated and swelled. Soon Millie watched with fascination as their motions converged and combined into wavelets. The water swished with increasing quickness in a single direction: toward the southeast corner of the square, where it could rush down the length of the piazzetta and return to the Grand Canal.
It truly was like a bath full of water being drawn down a drain.
“Forza, gondolieri!” Alessandro yelled, bucking up the lines of men guarding the piazzetta.
Little by little, the outgoing tide gathered force. It pushed into the prows of their gondolas, vibrating their boats.
Then men steadied themselves with their body weight and oars. The odd gondolier got nudged backward but quickly reassumed his stance, the chains connecting them all tautening slightly as they drifted.
The current continued to pick up. And as it did, the skeefs, sensing the change, began to bludgeon the water more violently in vexation. These movements sent more water sloshing through the square. The waves produced by one animal smashed into those from another, amplifying both, then collided with the great current of water draining away.
Some of the animals reared up and snarled. Some flared their shorter tentacles through the air like fireworks. A few scuttered their longer arms overhead, as though groping for a way out. They wound up scraping haphazardly at the Basilica’s façade. Their fleshy tentacles abraded the famous Byzantine mosaics over the church’s doorways, showering the water with shards of colored glass and gold.
Looking on, Millie said to herself, “They know they’re trapped.” And she knew that a trapped animal will fight twice as hard.
The gondos continued weaving between the skeefs, doing their best to patrol a loose perimeter, to barge between the animals and the architecture—all while constantly dodging the tentacles that shot forward, erratically pounding at the flood. Then, as soon as the gondos restabilized, they’d continue spraying bullets toward the tantrumming swarm.
Soon the three lines of gondoliers blocking piazzetta were being pushed around more forcefully by the current. The water picked up speed and strength as it streamed into the long, narrow plaza behind them.
As this tide surged, the singing men leaned forward in their gondolas to fight it. They clenched the chains around their waists to hold themselves up in their boats. They lowered their centers of gravity. They rowed to stand still.
And they sang, they sang, they sang.
“Guy,” Millie said, “is this going to work?”
“Don’t ask that,” he shot back. “Not yet. It’s chaotic, but we can hold them. Just keep flushing them away from the buildings—protect the buildings–and pick off the ones that break away.”
Millie wheeled around, her finger flexed over her trigger, suddenly sensing another dark tentacle in peripheral vision. But it was not a tentacle—it was a helicopter, flying low over the Doge’s Palace into the square.
Two more choppers appeared. All three hovered above the flooded piazza, directly above a wide concentration of skeefs. The downwash from the helicopters stirred the water around the animals, escalating the disarray. The noise threatened to blot out the gondoliers’ song.
The cargo doors on the helicopters opened. Countless white blocks, like massive sugar cubes, began tumbling out and crashing into the flood around the skeefs. It happened fast—one dropping in right after the other. A few bounded off the animals’ backs. One was batted away by a flailing tentacle and exploded into a cloud of shimmering white powder. Millie paused to watch it float softly through the air.
She spotted an ELAINE Corporation logo on one of the helicopter’s doors as it slid shut—just before all three aircraft glided quickly over the basilica and disappeared.
“Theo, what was that?” Millie radioed.
“Uh…” Theo said, then went quiet. He was scrambling to decipher and synthesize all the information coming at him on his screen.
“I’m not sure you want to hear this,” he said finally. “But I think this is very bad.”
…in Chapter 16!
“We are dying,” Alessandro said. “My brothers are dying!”
“I know, I’m thinking,” Guy snapped, cinching a tourniquet around his forearm with his teeth. “I just don’t see a way to break their momentum right now.”
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