Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1 (15 page)

The news crew had resigned themselves to heading home substantially empty-handed, but they were suddenly greeted by more news than they bargained for. As they were packing up their equipment rather half-heartedly, one of the techs noticed a faint glow on the horizon. He tapped Selpla on the shoulder and pointed at the spot. As they watched, it lost much of its diffuse quality and sharpened into an increasingly intense blister of light.

Regarding this new development with interest, Selpla felt a faint prickling on the back of her neck. She reached quickly for the spot, to shoo away whatever noxious beastie was causing it, and discovered that no beastie, noxious or otherwise, was there. The sensation continued, and she recognized it as the kind you get from being too near a substantial source of static electricity. At this same moment the bright point of light began to elongate, sending fingers up toward the zenith like a hand grasping at the sky. The crew stared open-mouthed as the central digit of the hand passed right over them and stretched to about halfway towards the far horizon before halting abruptly. For a brief moment nothing happened, then a bolt of blindingly intense, brilliantly blue lightning leapt from the end of the finger. The point at which the bolt made contact with the ground melted in a blaze of pale blue flame and thick, oily, inky smoke.

Throughout the suddenly treacherous sky other fingers were discharging their bolts, and Selpla felt as though she were watching some eerie and nightmarish battle. She stood on a little hillock and looked out over the smoking marsh, which still reverberated with the occasional strikes and the hollow, cracking sound that accompanied them. Even the bickering chimeras had taken notice of the storm and were scattering like leaves in a gale.

The camera crew had recovered from their initial awe and were busily breaking out the gear again when Selpla felt the prickling sensation once more. This time it was much stronger, as if someone were vibrating the stiff scales on the back of her neck. She twisted around and saw a new finger soaring up towards them. She followed it as it raced across the sky, and felt a large, cold lump in the pit of her stomach when it stopped dead over their heads. She yelled a warning and dived awkwardly beneath the nearby pram. As her palms and knees skidded roughly on the chunky surface of the roadway, a mind-numbing flash of light and heat overwhelmed her and she found herself involuntarily curling up in a fetal position. Swamp gas and vegetation went up in flames all around her. Even the very soil, soggy though it was, seemed to be melting. Heavy black smoke belched up from the blasted ground and threatened to choke her.

Selpla coughed and gagged, and finally decided that she had to get out into the open to breathe, lightning be damned. She scrambled out and found a patch of ground relatively free of melted rocks and topsoil. The fingers seemed to have spent themselves, she noticed with some relief, but they were being replaced by huge, roiling clouds, apparently forming from nothing. In a matter of seconds the sky was overcast. The clouds were heavy, pendulous things, deep blue to deep green in color; they hung ominously low. The air suddenly became still and oppressive. Nothing moved, and she found herself poised for flight, though to where and from what, she wasn’t entirely certain.

Without warning the air around Selpla positively exploded with rain. It didn’t seem to fall from the sky so much as create itself spontaneously from the impossibly moisture-laden atmosphere. Certainly a lot of it seemed to be creating itself inside her undergarments. She shaded her eyes rather ineffectively from the torrential precipitation and sloshed about trying to find something resembling shelter. There really wasn’t any.

Seeing as how they were already on the edge of a marsh, it didn’t take long for the area to flood. Selpla’s news instincts were quickly inundated as well, but they were fighting an increasingly pitched battle with her sense of self-preservation and concern for her crew. She finally hustled everyone into the pram with her cameraman perched on top getting as much footage of the deluge as possible as they evacuated. Various chimerae clung to their vehicle as they struggled to escape the rising muck.

Along with the rise in water levels came an accompanying drastic increase in the disagreeable odor of the swamp itself. Deep pockets of stagnant scum not disturbed for decades were being roiled and churned to the surface by the diluvian turmoil. The stench threatened to overwhelm them as Selpla fought to get herself and her companions out of the flood plain and up to the comparative safety of the elevated roadway. The soil, already treacherously unstable from the water table only a few centimeters below its surface, was rapidly evolving into an immensely viscous and adhesive glop that pulled powerfully at the wheels of the pram. Even at full throttle their progress was excruciatingly slow. Despite the hit she knew she would take from management if she came back to the station without the expensive pram, Selpla was considering abandoning ship and making a run for it if conditions did not improve soon.

When one of the uninvited chimera passengers slipped and fell into the muck only to disappear completely from sight a moment later, however, she wisely ruled out that course of action. Best to keep on sloggin’.

After a few more pram-lengths of progress various subsystems on board began to overheat and shut down, and Selpla realized that they were going to have to hike the rest of the way, good idea or not. Fortunately, it was no more than a dozen meters to the roadway, although it would be a dozen meters of leg-sucking deathpit.

“Everybody out,” she said, “we’ll have to hoof it to the road from here.”

“What, and leave the pram? Kurg’ll kill you. How will we get back to the studio?”

“Hang the pram, and hang Kurg. If we don’t get out of here right now, we might not make it back to the studio at all. The mud is rising and we’re stuck. If it rises much more we won’t have any chance of escaping this buggy before it becomes a death trap. Now
move
it.”

“Yo’ da boss.”

The pram had stalled on a slight downslope, which meant that the muck level was too high in the front for the passenger doors to open. They would have to evacuate via the cargo door in the rear. Scrambling over the seats with her equipment, Selpla struggled to stay calm and lead her troops through the crisis. Her sound tech was having trouble with the rear door.

“What’s the holdup, Drin?”

“Somethin’s jammed against the door on the outside. Look like one o’ them chimera thangs.”

“Oh, for the love of Hork. Push it off.”

“It don’t wanna budge.”

“Both of you work on it. Put your backs into it. We’re running out of time.”

The chimera was spread-eagled on the rear of the pram, balancing on the narrow bumper and holding on tightly to the gutters above the windows on both sides. He seemed frozen with fear, and was resisting fiercely the increasingly desperate attempts by the vehicle’s occupants to dislodge him. The watery mud was already lapping at his feet. Another minute or two and even the cargo door would be virtually impossible to open against the weight of the encroaching muck.

While the boys struggled with the blocked door, Selpla acted on a sudden mad impulse and started beating on the windshield with a tripod. She managed to cover it with a spider web of cracks, but no actual holes were appearing. She turned the tripod in her hands and used it as a battering ram, finally shattering a fist-sized opening. The glass was, unfortunately, of the new self-sealing variety (the studio got an insurance break for that); the hole knitted itself closed before she could reposition the tripod for another go.

Frustrated and now scared, Selpla felt herself on the verge of tears, which is not a place any goblin ever wants to be, gender notwithstanding. There was very little tolerance in goblin society for open admissions of weakness. The only way to mask her feelings was to get her mind on something else. She slipped between the boys, braced her legs against the cargo net brackets, and pushed for all she was worth.

For a minute it looked like they were winning, but then the chimera suddenly took a deep breath and fought back even harder. The muscles on his long arms stood out like chiseled stone as he renewed his efforts to maintain his perch. Finally the trapped crew could push no longer and took a breather.

“We all goin’ ta die, ain’t we?” asked Drin.

“No. Someone will save us. I don’t who, or how, or even precisely when, but it will happen.”

She didn’t believe a word of this, of course, but she felt obligated to play the stalwart optimist to the end.

“Whoever it is has about two minutes to get their ass here,” replied Lom, her lighting tech, dryly.

As fear and panic were being replaced by numb acceptance of what seemed their inevitable fate, they heard a bumping noise coming from the roof of the pram. It started near the front, but progressed in a series of thumps towards the rear. Suddenly there was a dull thud just above the rear door and the chimera slipped bonelessly into the churning muck. The door popped open and a head peered in at them from above.

“You guys probably ought to think about cruising out of there pretty soon, before the gunk gets too high.”

It was Prond, the cameraman, about whom they’d totally forgotten.

“I got some great footage. Um, sorry about bonking the passenger back there, but he was sort of blocking the door and I didn’t think he would listen to reason.”

“Prond, you magnificent bastard!” yelled Lom, “We owe you a pint of razzle. C’mon, let’s blow this heap.”

“Make that a case,” Selpla said, smiling, as she crawled out through the door and stepped gingerly into the swirling mud.

“Smek,” Prond replied, as he slung camera and tripod over one shoulder, “if I’d realized booze was involved, I’d have hung out on the roof more often.”

The muck was deep and treacherous and insistently upwardly mobile, but all four of them managed to reach the roadway with nothing worse than pulled ligaments from fighting the ridiculously viscous undertow. Selpla stumbled once along the way when her foot caught on something solid but oddly elastic. She forced herself not to speculate too long on what it might have been.

They found themselves on a narrow asphalt island in a sea of stinking slop. Oddly-shaped protrusions jutted out from the black mess at irregular intervals, but whether they were tree limbs, fragments of former dwellings, or something more macabre was hard to pin down. Drin grabbed at one as it slogged by. It grabbed back and he shook free of it violently.

“Not gonna do
that
again.”

“Wise decision. Anyone have a comm on ‘em? I think mine is still in the pram somewhere.” Selpla gestured toward their erstwhile conveyance, the only remaining evidence of which was a narrow band of silver with a luggage rack on it.

“I think there’s one in my camera case,” Prond answered, rummaging in the anodized metal container hanging around his neck by a thick strap. “Ah ha. Here it is.” He handed the palm-sized communications unit to Selpla.

She puzzled over his cryptic address-filing system for a few moments, but finally deciphered the code sufficiently to find the station manager’s entry.

“Bewl? Selpla. Is Kurg available? Yeah, I know the weather’s gotten very weird. That’s what I want to talk to Kurg about. He’s where? Well, can you get hold of him and ask him to send someone down to Dreadmost to pick us up? We’re having, uh, mechanical trouble with the news pram. Oh, and ask him to hurry. We’re sort of running out of solid ground here. Yeah, I know it takes half a day to get here. We’re holding on fine for now, but we can’t do it forever.”

By now the odiferous muck was lapping at the roadway, about ten centimeters of an asphalt/concrete mixture seven or eight meters across. It was dotted as far as the eye could see in either direction with clumps of refugees fleeing from the ongoing deluge. That was going to make their rescue an extremely protracted affair, so Selpla decided they could speed things up a bit by striking off in the direction of town while they waited.

Hefting their equipment, the ragged little news crew set off toward Dreadmost. The rain hadn’t slacked off any; the wind was picking up now, as well, just to make things a little more interesting. They sloshed their way through the growing tempest, dodging knots of chimeras and occasional members of other races who had gathered on the asphalt to escape the rising waters. Every so often one of them would recognize Selpla and gush. She would do her best to be as diplomatic and cordial as possible under the circumstances.

“Sheesh. Who knew they even
got
news broadcasts out here?” she remarked after they’d left one such fan excitedly telling anyone who’d listen that he’d just met
the
Selpla.

Lom chuckled. “Honey, I don’t think these people get a lot of celebrity visits. You’re probably the only show business personality any of them’ve ever seen. You’re a major star here. Enjoy it.”

“It’d be a little easier to enjoy it if I weren’t soaking wet and miserable.”

“Ah, but look on the bright side. You’re in such scintillating company,” Lom replied with a smirk.

“The best and the brightest,” agreed Prond.

“Whazzat?” added Drin.

“And the hits just keep on coming,” Lom said with a moist flourish.

“Shut up and trudge.”

Bewl finally tracked down Kurg. He was already far south of the city with a cameraman, getting footage of various wacky weather phenomena. “I tell ya, Bewlie, we got snowflakes the size of smekkin’ dinner plates, wind vortexes running every which way, and rain comin’ down so hard it’s put a concave indentation in the hood of the pram.” Kurg sounded so excited he was falling all over himself.