GONDOS—Chapter 7!
The novelization of the major motion picture GONDOS, serialized every Wednesday and Thursday. For more information and to get caught up, click here.
PREVIOUSLY…
A herd of the creatures killled several ELAINE operatives and laid waste to one of Venice’s most beloved landmarks. Guy escaped, but the company found no sign of him in the wreckage. ELAINE rigged a cover story into place.
Meanwhile, Millie had an epiphany about the Wonka, inspired by the tourists surging into Venice every day to voracioiusly eat and shop…
Millie didn’t know what kind of meeting she was interrupting—and she didn’t care.
After sprinting back to ELAINE from the wreckage of the Rialto Bridge, she’d quickly put the puzzle pieces together in her lab and rushed upstairs. Spotting Lopez in the conference room across from his office, she barged in. “This is urgent,” she announced. “I know what that thing is.”
She didn’t notice the sleep-deprived, sullen look of everyone around the table; even the relentlessly fashionable Kristen looked haggard, sitting cross-legged and texting, in sweats.
Lopez shrugged and waved Millie in. He was desperate for answers and too subsumed in his own stressed-out circular thinking to protest. He’d just started to grapple, for example, with the question of whom he was supposed to call if Rondack’s body eventually washed up. Was there a wife? And what was ELAINE’s liability? He’d offer the wife a payout, he decided—right upfront, as an end-run around any negotiation. If there was a wife. And if there was a body. Lord knows, Rondack could have been ingested completely.
Millie opened an image on her phone and handed the device to Theo, the technician who’d been manning the console in the command center the previous day. Soon, a graphic went up on the conference room’s flatscreen.
Wonka Concentration (milligrams per liter) the title of the slide read.
“Wonka is a nickname I gave one of the microorganisms in the canals that I’m monitoring as part of my study,” Millie began. “It’s one of many—maybe hundreds—of bacteria and algae whose growth is being boosted exponentially by increased oxygen and phosphorus levels in the water. That’s happening because the water is more stagnant and warmer. And it’s stagnant and warmer because the natural flow of water in and out of the lagoon has been disrupted. Your seawall is turning the whole ecosystem, basically, into a giant, putrid wading pool.”
She immediately regretted adding that last bit.
“Our seawall?” Lopez said. “You’re on the payroll here, yes?”
Millie apologized. She reminded herself to get through the information succinctly, to keep her resentments in check. She needed Lopez to listen.
She called attention to how crazy the graph looked: the red line kept rocketing up and plunging, again and again—a repeating cycle. This meant the Wonka was reproducing quickly, Millie explained: blooming everywhere in the canals, then abruptly dying off.
That had been the pattern for weeks, Millie told them—as long as she’d been in Venice taking samples, and presumably longer; she’d just spent the morning looking back through all her data, collating it onto this graph. But what struck her most was the suddenness of those population crashes. Often, the Wonka was vanishing overnight. That kind of dieback didn’t happen on its own, for no reason, she said: Something was actively clearing it out.
“This was eighteen days ago,” Millie went on, pointing to one of the plummets on the graph. “That was the night of the butcher boat accident—when that barge full of meat was found overturned…?” She pointed to another: “This was five days later—the night those French children disappeared.” It had been a tragedy: the same photo of their parents, disheveled and weeping, had ricocheted through the local tabloids and TV news. “And this one was six days after that. November 4.”
A heavy silence set in around the table. Everyone recognized the date.
“When the Zanetti palazzo collapsed,” Kristen said.
Without raising his eyes from his laptop, Theo now said, “A witness told police she’d heard thrashing in the water that night. And the butler reported their dogs went missing the night before.” He looked up: “I’m inside their computer network,” he added. “I’m looking at the police report.”
“You can do that?” Millie said.
Lopez gave the young scientist a withering look. The thing about smart people, he thought, is that they’re so damn naive. “Let’s just say, if we want the AquaStop to succeed, it’s proven easier for us to do a lot of the government’s work ourselves,” Lopez told her. “And don’t make that face.” (Millie was making a face.) “We’re not some greedy, diabolical cabal. And if we are, it’s only because we know we’ve built a truly valuable technology. That wall’s going to save this city. And walls just like it are going to save a lot of cities, once the world sees that this one works. The Italian government, like every other government, is asleep at the wheel, too inept or gridlocked or craven to protect its people from what’s coming. So we do what we have to move things forward.”
Millie went silent. She’d been put in her place. Lopez opened a fresh pack of nicotine gum. “Get to your point,” he said.
“Whatever that creature is, it’s feasting on the mutated algae that the AquaStop is creating,” Millie said. “And I don’t want to sound dramatic, or insane, but I think we’re seeing the animal branch out now. Maybe it’s also mutated—grown larger. And it needs to find other, more efficient food sources to satisfy its increased caloric needs. Because remember, the Wonka is just calories—proteins and carbohydrates which….”
“You’re suggesting this animal is…acquiring a taste for human flesh?” Lopez interrupted. He emphasized the words, smirking at the horror-movie cliche. “I don’t believe this.”
“Italian people are mostly carbohydrates too,” Theo quipped. “All the pasta. Makes sense.”
Lopez looked at his watch. “I have to brief London in fifteen minutes,” he said. “Tell me very concretely what you’re saying. Give me the science version, not the science-fiction one.”
“All I can say for sure…,” Millie began. She took a deep breath. It was hard not to unveil her conclusion with an undertone of vindictiveness, even spite. Because, for her, the glaring subtext was, I told you so—yet more proof that there were no real solutions available to humankind anymore, only elaborate ways to generate successively more unmanageable problems.
But when Millie spoke now, there was no scorn in her voice, only sadness: “Whatever is happening in Venice right now,” she told Lopez, “it’s our fault.”
And that was when the door to the conference room swung open again.
Guy Rondack was still alive.
After leaping away from the creatures, and bouldering across the remains of the Rialto last night, Guy had stood on the bank for quite a while, waiting for the world to resettle on its axis.
Soon, he heard the sound again—the rush of overlapping swishes—and all at once, saw motion in the water: the rest of the herd sprinting back downstream, to sea. They’d gotten whatever they came for.
Guy turned off his phone and started walking, disappearing into the night.
He was not ok. Something about his close encounter with that one animal especially had rattled him—the soullessness he’d perceived when he stared into its eye. Guy had lost something under that bridge and needed a moment to grieve it—not his innocence, certainly, but the opposite: his jadedness, his imperviousness to being overwhelmed or surprised.
In short, feeling so destabilized was destabilizing for Guy Rondack. It also pissed him off.
He wandered through Venice for a couple of hours, then slipped into one of the city’s countless, vacant vacation rentals at daybreak and helped himself to a shower. He knew ELAINE would have already given up scouring the canal for his body, not wanting to be spotted at the scene. And he knew Lopez would be panicked, standing at the head of a conference table, gnawing his nicotine gum like a cow with its cud, working hard to perpetuate the illusion that he was still in control.
Guy reminded himself there was nothing keeping him in Venice. Russell Lopez was just a client—one of many to whom he’d made himself indispensable over the years: private security for executives at Davos; investigating the death of a labor organizer at a lithium mine in Chile. And naturally, as soon as Lopez had landed in Venice, finding himself face-to-face with the titanic clusterfuck of threats and controversies attending the AquaStop’s completion, he’d tried to hire Guy as his all-purpose problem-solver there, too.
But Guy kept declining, even as the dollar amounts kept ratcheting higher—and leaned on Lopez to hire his friend Oscar instead. Oscar had just had a baby. Oscar needed a job.
Oscar. Jesus, Oscar. Guy knew what the monster that savaged him looked like now. Sitting in the back of a quiet café, nursing a first, then a second, espresso, Guy couldn’t stop picturing every detail of Oscar’s demise with atrocious, forensic precision.
He motioned to the barista for a third.
There was a rap on the window right next to him. Guy turned slowly, sensing no threat; he’d been aware of the man in his peripheral vision: a street artist at an easel (5’ 9”, 160 pounds, Middle Eastern descent.)
The artist had been drawing Guy through the window. Now, he held his work to the glass, hoping for a payment.
It was Guy, alright—expertly rendered in charcoal. But his brow was furrowed, his fingers pressed into his temple, his jaw crooked and clenched. He looked dismayed and defeated. He looked like…well, not unlike those pathetic screenwriters he’d scoffed at on set—like a man who can’t even and might not want to, ever again.
Guy winced. He didn’t like the version of himself that he saw. He drained the last espresso and slammed the little cup on the bar on his way out the door.
Of course, Guy Rondack would rejoin the fight. He would lead the fight. This had merely become a different kind of job.
Outside the café, Guy seized the drawing from the artist and tore it in two. Then he counted out 300 Euros, handed it to the man, and said: “Come with me.”
“There’s a lot of them,” Guy announced, bursting into the conference room at ELAINE, interrupting Millie’s presentation. “I counted twelve last night, at a minimum. Maybe as many as twenty.”
This left everyone at the table dumbstruck; until that very moment, they’d all been stretching their imaginations excruciatingly far simply to imagine one.
The artist from the cafe stepped meekly into the room behind Guy, pulling his easel on a cart. Guy motioned for him to set up in the corner and began to tell everyone what happened last night at the Rialto. When he got to the moment in his story when the animals revealed themselves, lifting his boat, he snapped his fingers at the artist, cuing him to draw.
“Wait, who’s he?” Lopez interjected. But he was hardly demanding to know. He said it half-heartedly; he’d lost control of the room.
“This is Hamza,” Rondack said.
“I am Hamza,” Hamza said.
“Hamza’s discreet,” Guy said and continued.
He spoke methodically, describing the animals with precision: their walrus-like frames, their crinkled gills, the horrible empty eye, the collar of tentacles under the head, and the pair of much longer dorsal tentacles streaming off of its back. Hamza sketched feverishly as Guy spoke, coaxing an image forth like a police sketch artist.
Finally, when Guy got to the end of his story—“And after it was all over, I heard the wave of them surge by again, leaving town. It sounded like freeway traffic,” he said—he walked behind Hamza and snatched the paper off the easel.
“Yes, Hamza!” he said, high-fiving the artist, pumping his fist. Then he signaled for Hamza to pack up his things and leave. “Wait outside. As soon as we’re done here, Mr. Lopez is going to talk to you about those visas for your family.”
Lopez’s eyes went wide, then rolled with aggravation, then dropped in defeat. “Of course,” he muttered. “Thank you, Hamza.”
Guy turned the illustration to show them. The likeness was exact—unthinkable, as it were. “This is the enemy,” Guy said, shaking the picture. “This old bruiser here.”
Kristen gasped. Millie felt the room momentarily spin.
The creature was ovular and bulbous, muscular and blubbery all at the same time. Its two large tentacles were wide at their base, like shark fins, then quickly tapered into thick cylinders, like the trunks of trees. Further up the body, packed tightly around its neck, were six other arms, half the length of the two on its back.
The face was hideous—again, somewhat walrus-like, but with an elongated snout and the teeth of a canine. And then there was the eye on the side of its head: a large flat circle—a dark world unto itself.
“Eight-feet, tip to tip. And those two big tentacles on the back are probably just as long as the body,” Guy explained. “They smell like absolute ass, too.”
Lopez had listened for long enough. “So what are they?” he barked, digging out another piece of his gum. “Give me a name. The name of a species. A Latin name, even. Give me something.”
Millie noticed that Lopez wasn’t looking at Guy when he said this. He was looking at her. And so was Guy—and Kristen and Theo, too.
“Like I said, because of the AquaStop, there’s a total upheaval of the ecosystem in motion right now,” she told them. “All kinds of novel life forms are likely finding a foothold in the lagoon, and that means, theoretically—and I’m only speaking on the level of theory, because honestly I’m sitting here freaking out a little; I can’t even believe what we’re talking about is real—but, theoretically, it makes perfect sense that something equally unusual would come along to capitalize on those new resources. It’s co-evolution,” Millie said. “If nature makes new food, something new will arise to eat it.”
“Life finds a way,” said Guy Rondack.
Theo nodded respectfully, recognizing the line: “Jurassic Park. Nice.”
Millie chortled. She couldn’t help herself.
Lopez picked up his laptop in a huff and made for the door. “I’ll be on with London for the next twenty-to-thirty. Veronica’s bringing in some lunch. Everyone eat. Eat and think.”
Attendants appeared with platters of spaghetti al nero di seppia—squid ink pasta with shellfish. Kristen went back to texting. Theo all but leapt across the table to grab the tongs and serve himself.
Guy walked to the picture window and stood watching the canals with his back to the room. “You should eat,” Millie told him. “You’ve been through…I can’t imagine.”
“I have an uncommonly strong aversion to seafood,” he said.
It was true. Fish disgusted him. They had all his life. Growing up on an island in Puget Sound, Guy had often found himself at friends’ houses or family functions staring down plates of salmon, steelhead or halibut—or worst of all, crabs. Crabs with their armored, multi-knuckled legs, all jutting hideously toward him like the shoulder blades of starving men.
Finally, when he was six, his father, a stern and efficient man, advised him to simply decline by saying: “No thank you. I have an uncommonly strong aversion to seafood.” And it worked—frictionlessly and without fail. Something about the line’s sophisticated syntax leant his position legitimacy and short-circuited further questions: an uncommonly strong aversion. Not just pickiness. Clinical, perhaps.
In truth, Guy Rondack could draw a line from that small feat of problem-solving through the rest of his life—an exemplary life underlain by faith that you could extricate yourself from any dilemma if you seized on, and mastered, the appropriate tool.
Though it was precisely this faith which had been shaken under the Rialto last night.
“It stared me down,” he now told Millie, finally turning from the window to face her. “Under the bridge, one of them stared me down. And I swear, there was wickedness in its eye—but also total senselessness, indifference. It was like the violence of nature itself.”
“It’s not a good idea to anthropomorphize.” It was all Millie could think to say.
Her instinct was to console him, to place a hand on his back. But the man had a way of making the space around him feel impenetrable.
They stared out the window in silence. Venice’s walkways and bridges were clogged with tourists, and traffic had picked up again on the canals. Long, boxy motorboats and metal dingies were snarled in impassible mobs.
“The people I sent out there last night didn’t stand a chance,” Guy said.
“It’s not your fault.”
“That’s not my point. I’m thinking tactically. Even those small skiffs would have felt like aircraft carriers, trying to evade them. The way those creatures moved…? I’ve never seen anything so fast, so dexterous—and I’ve seen classified military tech.”
Outside the window, far in a corner of the crowded cityscape, a single gondolier appeared. He was unmissable. Millie and Guy watched him ply the water between the other, larger boats with astounding quickness—even with a full load of tourists aboard. He moved with determination, weaving and swerving, getting exactly where he wanted to go.
“If we’re going to exterminate these things, we’ll need something smaller and nimbler,” Guy Rondack said. He pointed to the gondolier. “We need the warship version of that.”
An idea suddenly reared out of Millie’s subconscious, like a whale breaching the surface from the depths.
She called back to Theo, who was plunging a robust forkful of spaghetti into his mouth.
“Can you put that screen back on?” she asked, scrolling through her phone. “There’s something else I need to show everyone.”
“What is it?”
“A home movie.”
…in CHAPTER 8!
“These things are sick!” he shouted to Rondack. “And imagine when we get some guns on ‘em. You wanted a warship-style gondola? These are like Batmobile-style gondolas! These are fucking murder-dolas!”
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Not sure why, but Rondack is giving me strong Fred Ward circa 1990 vibes. Something about the uncommonly strong aversion line.
I guess that is an impossible casting option but there you have it.