White Hats

by Gustavo Bondoni

Wei’s workers turned around and ran, leaving him alone on the rocky path that led to the inspection shaft.  He cursed and wondered what had set them off this time. 

The villagers they hired to perform manual labor were a skittish bunch who didn’t believe that the army had cleared the area of eco-terrorists. He’d need to go back to the camp and gather another group.

Then Gonzalo, a hard-headed engineer trained in Lima, barreled past him as well. He froze. Not only the villagers were running.

As the man in charge, however, he would have to find out what had happened.  He turned the corner and felt his knees go weak.

“What the hell are you?” he half-shouted, half-screamed at the creature facing him.

The only answer he received was the impact of a black, rubbery arm slamming into his face.

Darkness overcame him.

Wei woke with his face in a puddle, somewhere pitch black.  His clothes were drenched and the air smelled of rotting fish.  He shuddered, trying to understand what had happened to him, until the pain of his bruised face reminded him of a black arm, a figure seven feet tall, hideous features.  That had been an impression, the glimpse of an instant before he’d been knocked unconscious.

Leather bonds pinned his arms to his sides, but his legs were free, so he knelt, and then tried to stand. 

Bad idea.  The roof was extremely low, and all he managed to do was to add to his collection of lumps.  He sat heavily and saw stars.

A noise off in the distance — he wasn’t certain if it was real or imaginary — caught his attention and he tried to make out what it might be, but all he heard was the dripping of water in the distance and ripples lapping against some shore.  Even the tiniest sounds echoed around him, each reverberating three or four times before it died.

He wondered how much of it was real echo, and how much was caused by the blow.  It wasn’t easy to knock a human unconscious with a blow to the head.  Not without serious risk of concussion. 

If he was concussed, he needed to receive medical attention as quickly as possible.

But he was in a cave or something similar.  Tied up.

There.  That was definitely something, a scratch, a rustle.

The scent of rotting fish intensified, and Wei felt claws close around his leg. Before he could react, he was pulled through the darkness.  He kicked out at whatever was dragging him along, but to no avail.  It was like kicking a rubber-coated wall.

Wei felt his skin abrade as he rubbed along the walls.  Then his head struck something and, for a time — he was unable to guess how long — he felt nothing at all, just the dazed sensation of moving through a warm darkness.

Finally, he landed in a deeper pool, colder.  The shock brought him back to full consciousness..

He knelt once more — the alternative was to drown — and tried to look around.  It should have been hopeless, but he thought he discerned some shadows.  Movement, deeper darkness flitting across his field of view.  He wasn’t alone in the darkness.

Which he already knew.  Wei shook his head, trying to see if he could clear it, but the movement only made his headache worse.  He stayed still and attempted to concentrate.  First, he breathed, ignoring the pain from his body until he could center himself.  He breathed again, the exercises he’d learned from his father, a man who still held the old traditions sacred.

The thought of his father broke Wei’s concentration.  The old man had been adamantly against his son leaving China.  Why, he’d wanted to know, waste his talents in a barbarian land and not stay home and build the China of the future?  There was no answer to that question that could ever have satisfied the ancestral mind.

He caught himself just as his head dropped.  He must have been in worse shape than he thought, thinking of things that weren’t directly related to his survival, drifting towards unconsciousness.  At least his ears weren’t ringing.

Wei concentrated on staying awake.  He remembered something about staying awake being important.  It was hard.  His entire body wanted to sleep.

Gradually — he couldn’t tell minutes from hours — the light improved.  He thought he must be imagining it, but soon he could see the surface of the water rippling when he moved. 

A low cave came into view.  It extended into the distance, maybe fifteen meters long and four or five wide.  The light came from the center of the cave, so he moved forward to see where it originated, advancing on his knees with his hands tied behind his back.

He reached the light and looked up.  A long circular chimney in the stone reached distant sky high above his head.  The smooth walls would have been impossible to climb even if his arms had been free.  The tiny circle of blue sky might have been on Mars for all the good it did him.

Or maybe not. 

“Help!” he screamed in Spanish.  “Help!  I’m stuck down here!”

It was unlikely that anyone could hear him.  The mountains between which the Marañon River — the river he was there to help dam — were sparsely populated at the best of times.  And these weren’t the best of times: controversy surrounding the dam’s construction had turned into armed conflict between the villagers — aided by violent ecological groups — and the construction crews.  Finally, the Peruvian military had intervened on the side of the builders.

Wei thought that had ended the conflict, but now he wasn’t sure.  Someone had assaulted him, kidnapped him, dragged him through flooded caves and left him to die here.  The eco-nuts were his best bet.  One of them must have dressed up to scare his men before attacking him.

That one had had a serious case of being too strong for his own good… or anyone else’s.

Wei sensed the movement rather than saw it.  In the depths of the cave, where the light couldn’t penetrate, shadows danced with shadows.  One of them inched closer until it resolved itself into…

Into the thing that had grabbed him.

It wasn’t walking now, but swimming, snakelike through the water, only occasionally using its arms to traverse a particularly shallow patch.  Thin, membranous fins helped push it along.

The thing — it was definitely not a disguised human — stopped a few meters away and cocked its head, giving Wei a clear look at its features.

The overarching sensation was piscine. The face was elongated and slimy, pitch black like the cave at night.  Two round orbs — also black, and set deep within low sockets — served the thing as eyes.  Thick lips surrounded a mouth obviously open to breathe air.

As he knelt there, too shocked to try to save himself, the thing spoke.

Or at least it moved its mouth and made a sound, but the result was pure sibilant gibberish.  It sounded like the speech of that tribe the construction company had taken him to visit.

“I can’t understand you,” Wei replied.  He replied in Spanish, as if that would make any difference.  These creatures wouldn’t understand Spanish any more than they’d understand Mandarin.

“I speak,” the being replied in halting Spanish.

“You can understand me?”  Wei couldn’t believe his ears.  A fish-thing built like a strongman who could speak Spanish was a marvel.  He could become famous.

If he could escape to tell the world about it.

“Yes.  These words.  New words.  Not like the old words of the people.”

“What people?” Wei couldn’t understand what the creature might mean.  He still wasn’t thinking straight.

“The old people.  Always here with us.  They know us.”

“The villagers?” Wei said.

The creature gave no sign that it understood.

“Not like you.  New people.”

“We’re here with the construction company.  Building the dam.” The thing just stared at him.  “On the river.”

“You change river?”

“Yes!” Wei said, exultant that he’d managed to get the creature to understand.  If they could talk, he could get the thing to release him.

“The river.  There is more now.  Yes.”

“Yes. It’s rising,” Wei replied, nodding.  He wondered if the thing knew what a nod was.  “How do you speak Spanish?”

No reply.

“The words.  How do you know the words?” he said.

The creature studied him.  “People teach us the old words.  Sometimes the new words.”

“You talk to people?  Humans like me?”

“No.  Old people who live here.  Not like you.”  A long pause ensued, but Wei sensed more was coming.  He thought how much this conversation was like speaking to one of his elders back home.  They thought about what they would say, long and hard, as if words could never be taken back.  “We have them here.”

“You take villagers?”

“Sometimes we need to learn.  Learn what is happening far from here,” the creature replied.  “They tell us.”

“And then?  Do they return to their home?”

“No.  The people hate us.  They hurt us when they see us.”

How many unexplained disappearances could be solved if only people knew?  But in this rugged country, most would simply ascribe a lost family member to a fall or the weather.

Finally, the import of what the thing was saying broke through the fog of confusion.  “You say ‘we’.  Are there more of you?”

The creature paused again.  Then it said. “The water.” It indicated the pool they were lying in.  “You make more of it?  Make it go up?”

Why would it care?  “Yes.  We make it.”

“All the new people.”

“Yes.  We’re building a dam.”

The thing grunted and left without a word.

Hours later — it couldn’t have been days, because even though Wei’s mind was scrambled, he would have noticed if the light from the sky above disappeared for the night — sound intruded on his wet and miserable cave.

He turned his head to see what was coming.  Were they coming to finish him off, convinced that he’d given all they could get from him?  He’d spent most of the time since his captor had left in a half-conscious daze, left studying the bottom of the pool in the cave.  Bones, covered in some kind of gunky seaweed, but still recognizable, littered the floor, sticking out from the mud.  They were human bones.  He’d spotted a couple of skulls staring emptily up at him, as if accusing him for being alive.

The creature that had spoken to him approached, accompanied by another.  This one seemed to be a half-deflated version of the same kind of thing.  Thinner, flaccid and grey where the other one was strong and black. 

Instead of kneeling to speak with Wei, this one seemed content to float in the water, barely pushing its head above the surface to converse.

The effect was that of decrepitude and illness.  Almost as if the two creatures were of different species.

No.  Wei suddenly understood that he was looking at an old example of the same species standing alongside one in its mighty prime.

“You say you are the one causing the water to rise?”  The new creature’s voice was little more than a wheeze, a whisper echoing through the cavern.

“Yes,” Wei replied.  He realized his own voice was little better.  To the aches and pain and probably concussion, he now added the fact that hunger made him weak.

“Will the water continue to rise?”  The old one’s Spanish seemed to be much better than that of the one that had grabbed him.

“Yes.  We’re building a dam.”

The old creature made a high-pitched squeak.  The other one responded in kind.

Wei was certain they were discussing him, probably deliberating over his fate.  Could they just kill him?

He interrupted them.  “You must let me go,” he said, trying to be as clear as possible.  “I am important. Others will come looking for me.”

The old one fixed its gaze on him, or tried to, its head trembled unsteadily.  Wei imagined these were aquatic creatures, and that their heads would be supported by the buoyancy of the water itself.  “In what way are you important?  There are differences among the new people?”

“Yes.  There are workers and engineers.  The engineers are important. They direct all the work.”

“The water will not continue to rise without these —” the creature stumbled over the new word, “engineers?”

“If all the engineers leave… I suppose work will stop until they can get new ones in here.  But right now, it’s pretty much moot.  We’re just testing the dam at this stage.  It’s already built.  You don’t need to be an engineer to close the tubes at the bottom and let the water rise.  The wall is complete, so it’s just a question of whether the generators are working right.”

The two creatures stared at him.  He had no clue whether they’d understood a single word he’d said.

Finally, the old one spoke again.  “Why are you doing this, making the waters rise?”

“To generate energy, clean energy.”

“We do not understand such things.  All we know is that the rising waters have destroyed our home.  Our old pools are too deep to dwell in now.  Many elders have perished under the weight.”

This sounded like one of the interminable meetings with the ecologists.  Wei went into automatic.  “That’s regrettable, of course, but this dam will help us move away from the fossil fuels that are destroying the environment.”  He realized that ‘environment’ wouldn’t be a word they knew, so he amended.  “This will help us stop destroying the world.”

The creatures pondered and exchanged chirps.  He let them talk this time, hoping he’d impressed them with his importance.

“You are destroying the world?” the older creature asked.

“Fossil fuels are destroying the world.”  Wei had no clue how he could possibly explain the concept of fossil fuels.  Even energy seemed alien to these creatures.

“But that is something you people, the new people brought?”

“You could say that.  Yes.”

“So you destroy the world, and your solution is to destroy more of it?”

Wei stayed silent.  The subject was too complex for creatures such as these.

The old one conversed with the other for a few moments.  Finally, they turned back to Wei.  “How are engineers different?” it asked.

“They wear white hats,” Wei replied.  Then he laughed, but how to explain to a couple of fishmen that it was an old joke?  He wondered if the concept of humor could possibly cross species.  By the time he had decided it would be impossible to explain, the old one had turned away with a final squeak to his compatriot.

The big one approached.

Wei flinched back, but to no avail.  The big creature grabbed the rubbery bands that held his arms tightly to his chest and pulled him along as if he weighed nothing.  It began to move through the pitch-black caves at a terrifying clip.

Wei felt the creature’s colossal strength and knew he wouldn’t have been able to get away even if his hands had been free.  He was completely at their mercy. 

Finally, they came to a larger pool, illuminated from above with a much larger hole in the ceiling.

A series of wooden poles emerged from the water.  The creature dragged Wei over to one of them and then, moving so quickly that he could do nothing, the being split his bonds and pulled his hands around the pole.  Then it vomited some kind of rubbery substance which it used to reform the bonds.

Wei found himself standing in waist-deep water with his hands tied behind his back.

The big, black creature tugged at his bonds once and then disappeared, leaving Wei alone with the water.  When night fell, he was alone with the stars.

Only the fact that it was summer, and that the walls protected him from the wind kept Wei alive that night.

The voice woke him.

“Wei!”

It was a woman’s voice, not the voice of a fish being. 

For a moment, while he gathered the strength to lift his head and open his eyes, Wei believed he was saved, that the project leaders or the government had found him. For a moment he felt the smug satisfaction of knowing those things that looked like a bad rubber suit from an old movie had been shot to pieces by the security forces working to protect the dam.

Good riddance, he thought.

But then his muscles obeyed.  His eyes opened and, in the light from the hold above he saw Gabriela, the lead engineer for the turbine team.

She occupied the pole next to him, her clothes torn and her face battered.  Her left eye was a violent shade of purple.  Unlike his, her hands were tied above her head.

“Where are we?” she said.

“I don’t know,” Wei replied.  “A cave.  There are things.”

“I saw them… well, one of them.”  She struggled against her bonds, but Wei already knew it was hopeless.  Whatever that material was, it would hold until the world ended, or until one of the creatures cut it.  It certainly wouldn’t break by rubbing it against the pole the way Gabriela was doing.

In fact, he would love to get a sample of it back to China.  There could be no question that it was some kind of secretion of complex organic molecules generated by the beings that held them captive.  Perhaps it would reveal some unknown chemical properties.  That was one of the longtime benefits of wilderness areas.  The Amazon alone had yielded dozens of medicinal…

“Wei!  Wei! Are you listening?  Can you hear me?” Gabriela looked frightened.

“I’m sorry.  I got bumped in the head a few times.  I think I have a concussion.”  He shook his head, sending bolts of pain through it.  “It’s hard to concentrate.”

“We need to think about…”

Her voice trailed off as telltale splashes approached.

Two of their captors — big, young ones — dragged a bleeding, unconscious man between them.  The man’s head drooped, making it impossible to see the face, but Wei didn’t need to see the man’s face to recognize him: only one man was that big around here.  Gómez, the site foreman.

Another engineer.

The creatures ignored Gabriela’s yelled questions, affixed Gómez to the next pole over and left without a word.

They — or others like them — returned in a while dragging Felipe.

Then Yamil.

Carla.

Petersen, the Swede.  He wasn’t even an engineer, just an HR guy the teams sometimes took with him to solve disputes.  He wore a white hardhat because the workers automatically respected anyone wearing a white hat.

Soon, the nine poles in the semicircle were occupied.

Wei drifted in and out of consciousness, but he was lucid when the old creature returned.

“You are the engineers?” it said.

“Let us go!” Wei couldn’t tell who’d said it.

“Are there enough of you here that we will be able to stop the waters from rising?”

“No.” This time it was Gabriela.  “I gave the approval for my sector last night.  The crew will close the gates at… I don’t know what time it is.  They might already have done it.”

“Then the water will continue to rise?”

“Yes.  Let us go.”

“But we took all the engineers — the white hats — we found.”

“There are dozens more at the dam,” Gabriela said.

“And they will make the water rise?” the creature asked.

“Yes.  They need to flood this area for the dam to work.”

“Ah.”

The creature trilled and all the fish-men disappeared.

Wei turned his head to Gabriela.  “Is that true?”

“Of course.  We’re right on schedule.”

“Then they’ll close the gates today?”  He tried to think whether it could possibly be.  Was the closing scheduled for very soon or had he been in these caves several days? He couldn’t remember, couldn’t think straight at all.

“Yes,” she replied.

“Oh.  My father will be disappointed,” Wei observed, “but the knowledge that he was right will pull him through.”

“Why do you say that?”

Could she really not understand?  “Because we’re going to die.  This cave is open above and below.  It’s connected to the river.  When the water rises, it will come in here… and we die.”

She remained silent for a few moments.  “I have no intention of being killed by something that looks like that,” she replied. 

With that, she started rubbing her bonds against the pole with redoubled vigor.

And Wei drifted off again.

The next time he could think, the water was up at his chest, and Gabriela was trying to climb the pole by pushing herself up with the soles of her shoes.  Since her hands were tied behind her back, this implied bending her knees tightly and then pushing up.  But she could never take the second step, and Wei could see her getting frustrated.

“You need to rest,” he told her.

She just glared at him and tried again.  And again.  She began to cry, but then she managed to keep herself in place long enough to bend her legs a second time.  The second thrust took her nearly three quarters up the pole.

But then, with a desperate moan, Gabriella began to slide down, inexorably, until she reached the water.

Her exhausted legs didn’t hold her and she went under.  Only her hands, tied together, remained above the surface, motionless. 

Wei stared at her bound, bloody wrists, willing them to move, willing her to surface. “Gabriela!  Come on!  Can you hear me?”  All the others echoed his shouts.

Bubbles emerged beside her pole.  He strained at his bonds, desperate to save her.

His bonds held.

Wei hung his head, understanding that he was destined to die there.

A soft splash made him look up.  Gabriella was pushing herself upright again, panting, sobbing.

“I can’t do it,” she cried.  “Dammit.  I just can’t.”

“You are an inspiration,” he said.  “Don’t give up.”

Petersen spoke.  “There has to be a solution.”

“To the problem of the fish-men?” Wei asked.  Then he shook his head.  He knew Petersen meant their own problem, but he just couldn’t get their faces out of his sight for some reason.

“The fish-men are easy to solve,” Gabriela said.  “They can have their choice of places above the waterline or even in the stream below the dam.  They can’t be that hard to relocate.  But we’re not getting out of here to tell anyone about it.  We’re going to die.  I’d give it two hours.  Three at the outside.”

“No,” Wei insisted.  “We won’t.  You can’t die after what you just did.”

He knew there was something.  Something he’d seen, but been too preoccupied to notice.  Thinking with his head ringing was like trying to do differential equations during a fire drill.

Then it hit him. 

“Turn away from me a second,” he said.

“What?”

“Just do it!”

She rotated around the post and he saw what he’d noticed before, but which hadn’t registered.  Gabriela’s bonds were torn and frayed into threads, not on the inside where she’d tried rubbing them against the post, but on the outside, where her ragged hands bled onto them.

“Blood,” Wei said.  “Something in human blood must weaken the bonds.”

“What are you saying?” Gabriella asked.

“Try to bleed on them,” he mumbled, suddenly having trouble forming words.

The effort of speaking had caught up to him and the darkness was trying to overcome him.  Wei knew he needed to explain, needed to make himself understood.  It was their one chance, the slim thread by which their hopes hung.

“We need…”

He slumped against his bonds.

Hands tugged on him.  “No,” he said, trying to struggle.  He knew it would be useless, remembered the strength of the dark assailant, but he didn’t care.  The least he could do was try to go down fighting.

Wei tried to raise his arms, but he was too weak.

“Relax,” a voice answered.

He knew that voice.  It wasn’t a creature.

“Gabriela?” he asked.

“Yes.  Can you walk?”

He opened his eyes and saw that Petersen was holding him upright.  Another engineer, a Colombian called Méndez was sawing through another man’s bonds.  The water was nearly up to their necks.

“I think so.”

Gabriela gave him a hard look.  “No heroics,” she said.  “If you’re having problems, I want you to speak up.  I’m not leaving anyone behind.  Especially not you.”

“I’m no one special,” he replied.

“You are the one who got us out of here.  If you hadn’t noticed the effect of blood, I would never have gotten free.”

“I…”. Wei tried to remember what she was talking about, but his head hurt too much.  “I got hit in the head.  I don’t know what I did.”

That got a laugh out of Petersen.  “Typical engineer,” he said.  “Always trying to find a technical solution to the world’s problems, even when you can’t see straight.”

Gabriella swatted him in the chest.  “You shouldn’t complain.  You’re going to live because of him.”

He grinned.  “Maybe.  If we make it out of here.”

Two of the engineers — Rico and Loyola — needed help to move.  Though unsteady, Wei got a shoulder under Loyola’s arm.  Gabriela took the other side and together they dragged the unconscious woman between them through the flooded caverns.

To his relief, they began heading upward.

To his dismay, the place seemed to smell more and more of the fish-people as they ascended.

“We’re going to be caught,” he said. 

“Shh,” Gabriela replied.  “This time, we’ll be ready for them.  We have a couple of knives, and we know they’re around here.  They won’t catch us by surprise again.”

But the showdown never came.  The fish people had abandoned their caves, and soon the small group came to a crevice in the side of a valley.

The water had risen almost to their level.

Petersen and another man who was still in good condition climbed up the side of the steep hill.  Wei rested his back against it.  He looked over to Gabriela.  “If they don’t arrive, we can just float up with the water.”

Gabriela shook her head.  “No.  I want to shut the dam down and find those people.”

“People?”

“The ones that captured us.”

“The fish things?” Wei asked.

“They’re people.  Scared people.”  She clenched her jaw in a way he knew too well. There was no arguing with her when she did that.  “We need to find them and we need to relocate them.”

He wanted to point out that the things had tried to kill them. 

But he remembered how desperate they’d been to try to understand what was happening, how they’d risked discovery by the wider world to avert the disaster they couldn’t quite understand.

“I’ll help,” he said.

“Why?” she seemed suspicious.  “I’m local.  I can work with the government.  This is a local matter.  It’s not like the dam.  We don’t need international aid.”

Wei smiled to himself, wondering if she was really that innocent.  The discovery of a new species would change everything, and the entire world would want access.  But that wasn’t his problem.

“I want to tell them I forgive them,” he told her.  “And to ask them to forgive me.”

She looked surprised, but before she could answer shouts from above called down to them, asking if they were all right.

Somewhere in the distance, a helicopter started up.

Gustovo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer, a member of Codex and a Full Member of SFWA.  His debut novel, Siege was published in 2016, and has since published two more science fiction novels, one comic fantasy, four monster novels and a thriller. On the short fiction side, he has over three hundred short stories published in fifteen countries.  They have been translated into eight languages.  His writing has appeared in Future Science Fiction Digest, The Grantville Gazette, DreamForge, Pearson’s Texas STAAR English Test cycle and many others.