GONDOS—Chapter 16!
The novelization of the major motion picture “Gondos.” For more information and to get caught up, click here.
PREVIOUSLY…
The plan appeared to be working—just barely. Herded into the flooded piazza, the skeefs raged chaotically but remained contained.
With the AquaStop reopened, the water started draining through the long piazzetta in the corner. That crucial exit was guarded by three lines of gondoliers, chained together.
With another full hour to go, however, ominous helicopters appeared, dropping white blocks of…something…into the water below…
The atmosphere had altered.
As soon as the noise of the helicopters receded, the skeefs began to tear at the floodwaters with even greater urgency. As the piazza slowly drained around them, the animals could feel that outgoing current on their skin. And instinctually, they began to converge on the entrance to the smaller piazzetta to follow it—only to be stopped short in front of the lines of singing gondolieri still blocking the exit there.
The operation was now unfolding exactly as Guy had predicted back in Lopez’s office: The skeefs had locked on to the piazzetta as their only escape route and were forcing a standoff there.
Waves reeled in all directions as the flailing animals amassed in front of the lines of gondolas, shaking the gondolieri standing at their sterns. Confronting this tempest of skeefs head-on, a few of the men suddenly seemed cowed, even terrified—for the first time all night, on the verge of losing their nerve.
“Hold the lines!” the others shouted, tugging the chains between them to rally their ranks. But one in the rear—the young, wispy gondolier Daniele—simply did not have enough body mass to withstand the turbulence in the water.
His gondola was jolted. His footing failed.
The chain around Daniele’s waist pulled at the gondoliers tied to him on either side as he teetered. Both men tried to plant themselves in their own boats and resist. But they were tugged at too sharply to keep the slack reigned in.
Daniele careened over the side. The top of his body plunged underwater while his legs were still held awkwardly aloft by the chains.
When his mouth resurfaced momentarily, the cry that came out of it was excruciating—and yet, there were no skeefs around Daniele; he was not being eaten alive.
“Brucia!” he screamed: It burns.
Then the chain slipped from his hips and all of him went in.
The neighboring gondolieri converged on the drowning boy, frantically probing the current with their oars. Millie watched them quickly fish him to the surface and recoil: the limp material they’d extracted from the water was almost unrecognizable. His skin had dissolved away from his muscle and bone.
Millie felt nauseous.
“Theo?” she said on the radio, working to slow down her breath. “Something’s happening. What did those helicopter just drop in the water?”
“He went rogue!” Theo answered in a panic. “He was watching you this whole time! When the AquaStop failed, he must have realized it was us—he knew you were going to bring them all to the piazza. He saw an opportunity. He took his shot!”
“What are you talking about?” Guy barked. “Who did what?”
“The Aspect H!” Theo shouted. “Russell used the Aspect H!”
Lopez had poisoned the water. Millie couldn’t believe it. The man had been backed into a corner—trapped like the skeefs—and apparently grown that desperate, that deranged.
It was clear now to Millie that the animals rioting in the piazza were severely distressed, responding to the toxin introduced into their environment with a final burst of reckless determination. It was fight and flight simultaneously: a drive to push through the blockade of gondoliers and escape back to sea.
Millie watched several skeefs regain just enough focus and willpower to start slashing wildly at the lines of singing rowers. Their arms kept missing—for now. But as those tentacles rose from under the surface and ripped indiscriminately through the air, flecks of water flew off them. And that water landed haphazardly on the gondoliers’ hands and noses and cheeks, searing their skin.
Millie suddenly realized: every drop of liquid around them had turned lethal.
Two more gondoliers fell in in quick succession. A third was snatched by a skeef that he never saw coming, having raised his arm to shield his eyes from the poisonous spray. The animal seized him around the chest and whipped him into the water so swiftly that, when the chain connecting him to the other gondoliers snagged, that resistance served merely to keep the his body in place while the animal ripped his head and shoulders away.
Watching from the interior of the piazza, Alessandro screamed in horror.
And yet, his gondoliers were still managing block out this carnage and sing—not nearly as vigorously, but the melodies kept coming: an endless repertoire of folk songs ingrained in their memories since they were boys.
“Fall back!” Guy shouted. “Tell them to fall back!
Alessandro called to the rowers through his megaphone. The men swiftly undid the chains from their waists. Those chains had been meant to buttress them against the accelerating current. But now they’d become shackles, imprisoning the gondoliers, threatening to drag them collectively to their deaths.
In the time it took the gondoliers to untether themselves from each other, three more men were struck by tentacles and knocked out of their boats.
They continued with one of the contingency plans they’d practiced that afternoon, letting their gondolas coast backward in the tide then scrambling to reassemble their lines deeper into the plaza. They were lined up right in front of the two marble pillars now, with the saint and the winged lion statues on top.
This would open space for Guy and Millie to sneak through on their gondos and attack—in theory.
But what happened next, instead, seemed to Millie to unfold in slow motion.
One by one, the skeefs’ arms withdrew, vanishing under the the choppy water. Then their bodies began sinking slackly until all of them—every single creature in the piazza—had disappeared from view.
It was eerie—the abruptness of it. The frenzy that had overtaken the floodwaters eased to a soft sloshing, until all that remained was the slow and orderly current, coasting out of the square.
It unnerved the gondoliers. Their singing trailed off. They whipped their heads back and forth, scanning for the shapes of the animals anywhere underwater. And finding nothing, they froze—breathing heavily, jittering like prey.
Several seconds passed. Guy and Millie kept their fingers locked on their triggers. Gradually, everyone began catching each other’s eyes: Were they poisoned? Was that it? Were they dead?
Then, right in front of Millie—in the flat expanse of water between her and the lines of rowers—a tiny eddy formed at the surface and began to whir.
Soon, in one slow, unbroken movement—as steadily as it had submerged—a huge, solitary creature surfaced from that spot with its back to her.
She watched the mantle of tentacles around its head begin to blossom open. Then bursts of milky white liquid pulsed from the tips of the creature’s arms.
Two rowers keeled over in their boats immediately. They were screaming, clutching their face and legs.
They were under attack.
Millie gasped. It was just like she’d speculated that afternoon in the conference room at ELAINE, when Lopez showed her that first blurry photograph of the creature’s arms and demanded she identify it: Those appendages weren’t actually tentacles. They were cerata, just like a nudibranch’s arms—extensions of the skeefs’ digestive tracts capable of absorbing the toxins they ingested, then weaponizing those compounds in self-defense.
That animal had metabolized the Aspect H in the water. It was firing the acid back.
“Take cover!” Millie screamed, shooting at the creature’s back, taking it down.
But by then, several other skeefs had already resurfaced and were shooting streams of the same fluid into the phalanx of gondoliers in the piazzetta ahead. They fired at the men indiscriminately—the pulsing seemed to be a reflex; it was not as though they could aim—and yet so many animals had gathered near the entryway to the piazzetta by now, and so many gondoliers were packed together in that plaza to defend it, that the bursts of liquid expelled by the skeefs landed on flesh, again and again.
One of the gondoliers clutched his eyes. Another buried his hand in the sleeve of his sweater and waved it like a wing, stashing the appendage out of sight, too afraid to see the damage.
“L'uselin de la comare / è volato sulla testa,” the gondoliers sang meekly as they scurried and ducked—a raunchy folk song about a naughty bird that flies up and down a woman’s body.
Near the center of the first line was Dino Simonetti, the capo of the gondolier guild and the oldest man on the water that night by far. The younger gondoliers had worried he wouldn’t be up to the challenge, but Dino had insisted on fighting alongside them and had, so far, acquitted himself exquisitely well.
Now—as the tracers of acid shot past him in his wildly rocking boat—Dino sang vigorously and loudly, with a kind of bawdy and indefatigable arrogance, his chest puffed up with stolid resolve.
But then he was struck.
A torrent expelled by a distant skeef hit Dino with such force that it momentarily sent him staggering backward. The fluid came in a thick, steady gush—an uninterrupted column rushing into the old man’s chest.
“No!” Alessandro wailed.
Millie turned away.
It lasted only two or three seconds, but those seconds contained enough tragedy and gallantry to fill a five-hundred-page epic.
As the poison ate through Dino’s striped sweater, as it flooded through the garment and onto his chest, he did not stop singing about that little bird. He sang and sang, even as the chemical dissolved his skin, even as it corroded his sternum, even as it melted the man’s body out from under his head.
Dino Simonetti never screamed or whimpered. He never voiced any expression of pain.
He simply sang. He sang until there was too little of him left to make a sound.
A short distance away, Guy Rondack raced in on his gondo to flush the skeefs away from the gondoliers. But he’d only just started hurtling toward the blockade when a long, stocky tentacle tore out of the water directly in front of him.
Guy shot at the base of the arm as it revealed itself, ripping up its flesh. But the tentacle, still intact, only waggled a little and continued reaching over him, toward the back of his boat.
The tip of it snatched blindly, reflexively, and ensnared Guy’s left wrist—coiling it up with the rudder rod he gripped behind him to steer. Guy howled in agony as the pressure increased, mashing the bones in his hand.
The long appendage thrashed, bending back Guy’s arm and shaking his gondo in the water. He dropped to his knees to keep his arm from snapping. The tentacle seemed to be weakened from its wound. The tip of it wriggled right in front of Guy’s eyes, as though struggling to keep its grip. Then suddenly, overcome with frustration, it released its acid high into the air behind him. He watched the end of the arm pulse desperately, spewing in a panic, until all its fluid had emptied.
Now, the animal jerked again, slamming the rudder rod to the deck of the gondo and wrenching Guy down along with it. He was flat on his chest now, his face inches away from the end of the creature’s arm. The tentacle was still coiled into a fist. Somewhere clenched inside it was Guy’s own mangled hand.
Gradually, the great animal’s head surfaced just a few feet away—titanic and repugnant, its snout twitching and dripping, the folds of its neck coated with grime and musk. And the moment its black eye flared open, Guy was overcome with a suffocating sense of stupefaction—an awareness of total, insensate evil staring him in the face. He’d felt this once before. And he knew, unequivocally, that this was the very same skeef he’d encountered under the Rialto Bridge.
Guy heard the bones in his wrist crack several more times as the creature shifted its grip. He was woozy with pain. And the atrocious stink of the tentacle, so close to his face, made him even woozier.
He could feel his gondo beginning to move, hauled slowly toward the injured creature’s mouth.
Guy Rondack had an idea. And though the idea repelled him—though he felt, deep in his being, an uncommonly strong aversion to this idea—he knew it was the only way.
Still prone, Guy lifted his head off the deck of the gondo, lunged forward and, with unfathomable fury, bit down on the turgid, moistened meat of the tentacle in front of him.
And when his mouth reemerged from the putrid corpulence into which he’d gnashed it, it was smeared all over with blood.
Hanging from Guy Rondack’s jaw was a pound of the monster’s flesh.
Immediately, the tentacle uncoiled from around his wrist and sprung back. The battered animal shivered and retreated into the flood.
Guy spit everything out. Then, scraping bits of tissue and gristle from between his teeth with his tongue, he staggered to his knees and threw his body at his gondo’s throttle to zoom off.
It was only after he’d retreated into the piazzetta, finding cover momentarily behind the panicked lines of gondoliers, that he saw that his left hand was missing.
Already torn out of joint by the skeef, it had apparently dragged through the toxic water by the tentacle as it withdrew—all but liquified by the Aspect H.
Scorched, severed sinews of muscle clung to the exposed bones at the end of his forearm—the whole mess of it speckled with deep red pith.
Guy looked down and spotted his watch on the deck of his gondo; it had dropped off the corroded remnant of his wrist. It had only nineteen minutes since they’d opened the AquaStop.
They would need to hold the creatures off for at least forty minutes more.
“What do we do?” Millie cried, sputtering in alongside Guy.
They stood side-by-side on their gondos, sheltered behind the base of one of the piazzeta’s marble pillars. Directly behind them, the floodwaters draining down the plaza met the Grand Canal—a great surge seaward, beckoning the skeefs. But in front of them, at the top of the plaza, the blockade of singing gondoliers still held.
Barely.
A few of the rowers were calling out ad-hoc strategies over the quavering chorus of the others. Some hopped onto their neighbors’ gondolas, then tipped up the vacant boats like shields.
Before Guy could formulate an answer to Millie’s question, Alessandro appeared in his gondola to regroup with them, too. He was ashen-faced, out of breath and gesturing feverishly with his arms. “The wall can not hold!” he shouted. “The schifoso will pick us off one by one.”
He and Millie both turned to Guy, but Guy said nothing. He couldn’t; he was cinching a tourniquet around his forearm with his teeth. But also, he didn’t know what to say.
After a moment, he groaned and said: “The more gondoliers we lose, the fewer voices we have singing up there—meaning, the weaker our defenses. And the weaker our defenses, the more gondoliers we lose. It’s a feedback loop.”
“We are dying,” Alessandro said. “My brothers are dying.”
“I know, I’m thinking,” Guy snapped. “I just don’t see a way to break their momentum right now. We have no other tools to deploy, no way to disrupt them.”
He seemed to be at the very brink of defeat. And for Millie, recognizing Guy’s mounting resignation was more demoralizing than anything she’d witnessed so far in the actual battle. This, she decided, was the lowest point. It had to be. Somehow, starting right now, they’d claw their way back.
She turned to Alessandro. “Don’t you see? It feels like the story you told us—the legend of that first, ancient battle in Piazza San Marco. It seems like we’re totally overpowered by the animals, totally outnumbered, but then…”
She wanted him to leap in to complete her sentence—for him to know what would turn this around. “What happens next?”
But Alessandro wasn’t even looking at Millie anymore. He was staring blankly up at the sky.
Was he phasing into shock?
In fact, he’d been mesmerized by something in the distance: a candle flickering in a second-story window, in one of the apartments overlooking the square.
Without looking away, the gondolier began to grin.
“What happens next,” he said, “will be a miracle.”
…in the stunning conclusion of Gondos: The Novelization of the Major Motion Picture Gondos!
“Carry the news. Boogaloo dudes…”
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