SHANNA AND THE MYSTERY OF THE IMPOSSIBLE DELIVERANCE

By Meriades Rai

“It’s magnificent,” said Madeleine Presley. “Simply… magnificent!”

And she was right.

Stepping out of the shadow of the short-haul transport plane that had airlifted her here, to the edge of a wild utopia that had no right to exist in the modern world, the elegant English woman with the blonde coiffure stared out across a vista of a hundred shades of green and gold and red, her smile broadening with every tread. From up high on the shallow plateau where the plane had landed she could observe the topography of the entire area below—the swathes of trees and ferns that clotted the valley floor, rising majestically into a canyon of sheer violet and ivory cliffs that formed a gigantic wall along the length of the visible horizon—and she almost swooned. But it wasn’t the view that beguiled her so, breathtaking as it was; it was the potential.

There would be flora down there unseen in the natural world—the real world, her world—for millions of years, specimens she and her peers in the botanical profession couldn’t even begin to imagine. Just the thought of the eco-cellular complexity of the cycads, conifers and club mosses heralding from the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous epochs, stirred in a melting pot and evolved over millennia in a controlled climate, untouched by exposure to the abundance of chlorofluorocarbons that saturated the atmosphere of—

“Is it everything you expected, Doc?”

Doctor Presley turned, startled from her reverie, and beamed at the man who’d spoken. Drewitt—Madeleine wasn’t aware if that was his first or last name, but it was all she knew him by either way—was a swarthy fellow in a red and black-checkered duster shirt and khaki shorts. Thick through the neck and upper body, dirty blond and bake-faced, a grizzled stump of an Australian Outbacker with a beer-and-belly-scratch voice, he wouldn’t have been the upper crust Madeleine’s first choice of traveling companion—or fiftieth choice, truth be told—be he was her contracted pilot, one of three men who’d made the voyage southwest from a Melbourne port by ship and then accompanied the doctor deeper into the ice floes of the Antarctic desert. Because that’s what this godforsaken continent was: the largest desert in the southern hemisphere, just scarred with frozen wastes instead of sand dunes. But this place where they’d made landing, this inner world hidden at the heart of a ring of volcanoes, this was no mirage.

The Savage Land existed. Impossibly, wonderfully so.

“Everything I expected and more,” Madeleine said. Then, primly, “Certainly worth the small fortune you charged to bring me out here.”

Drewitt cocked his head, shading his thresher shark eyes with the wide brim of his hat, and he chuckled, chewing restlessly on a stump of tobacco.

“Funny you should mention that, love,” he drawled. “Seeing as I’ve been considering our terms of contract. Wondering how we might… renegotiate?”

Madeleine frowned. And then she saw the gun in Drewitt’s hand, and witnessed the pilot’s two fellows move forward to flank him with their rifles slung casually but no less threateningly across their shoulders, and her present situation focused immediately. In her haste to undertake this journey she’d placed her trust a man whose full name she didn’t even know, and now that recklessness was coming back to haunt her. But what else could she have done at such short notice—and with a matter that was life or death?

Drewitt said, “Seems to me, Doc, this message of yours—the one you’ve come all the way from that hoity-toity London des-res of yours to deliver—must be important. Important enough to double our fee, I reckon.”

Madeleine’s eyes narrowed. “Double?” she cried, almost laughing with horror. “I assure you, I can’t—”

“Yeah,” Drewitt interjected, aiming his weapon at the woman’s face. “Actually, Doc, I assure you that you can. Because if you don’t…”

The bear of a man said nothing more. He didn’t need to.

No longer excited about her presence on the cusp of one the true great wonders of a world long shorn of mystery and marvel, Doctor Madeleine Presley had a pretty fair idea how this was all going to end.

Although if she’d only been aware of the fact that she—and the unsavory events transpiring about her—were being observed from distance, she may have arrived at an altogether different conclusion…

Shanna O’Hara—sometimes known as Lady Plunder but more commonly as Shanna The She-Devil—awoke with the dawn, or at least what constituted dawn in this realm of intricately and flawlessly interwoven organic, technological and quasi-mystical ecology she’d called home for close to ten years. For much of the past ten months she’d followed a familiar routine—a mechanical schedule of eating, bathing and reconnaissance of the close environs of her jungle home to root out predators, all performed without spontaneity or joy—and in that sense this morning was no different. It was what would come after that would elicit a distinct break from the way of life she’d maintained in recent times… but she didn’t know that yet.

A concealed spectator would surely have considered Shanna beautiful if privileged to watch her wade, naked, out into the hot springs at the heart of a circle of mangrove trees. She was tall and robust, statuesque, with a ridge of muscle to her shoulders and spine, bowed like hard willow all the way down to a firm rump and angled hips, and similar strength in her limbs; but all this was melded with an exquisite delicacy of curve, a soft swell to her breasts, an elegant sweep to calf and thigh and throat, that suggested the sculpted touch of some artisan. It was her face that could steal away an unsuspecting heart most swiftly, however; refined features, with large, deep-set, cognac-amber eyes that darkened with melancholy, a gentle mouth with no cause for laughter, and that wild, witchfire of auburn hair that could catch red as sunset or glister gold as harvest depending upon how sunlight tangled in the threads and ringlets.

Shanna, of course, would disparage such observation as florid drivel, being a plain-speaking sort by nature. She’d reveled in her allure once, by turns brazen and coquettish and even feral—but no longer. These days she bathed her naked skin as if it were nothing more precious than cloth, her mind dulled as she scrubbed at the copper-tanned flesh that was so quick to heal yet remained faintly ridged with a lifetime of scars. She was a warrior, adept in the heat of battle but clumsy in these more personal ministrations. She missed a touch other than her own.

She missed… him.

Birds shrieked in the trees, insects whirred, and a gentle breeze stirred the canopy and the sultry tropical air. In the distance there came the lows and cries of other beasts, the sauropods and the mammals, thousands of remarkable species unknown to the outside world. The sky high above was liquid blue, the temperature humid. Shanna emerged from the waters of the pool and sat astride a flat, black rock, allowing the rising heat of the day to dry her skin and tousle the dampness of her hair. Wisps of steam curled from her bare shoulders and back like smoke. Her eyes were shadows, her expression haunted.

“Three hundred and eleven days gone,” she said, quietly. “But I can still feel you, all around me.”

She trailed a finger over the script engraved into the rock beneath her. Simple words, each letter painstakingly carved by her own hand. In memory of Lord Kevin Plunder, Ka-Zar, Son Of The Tiger. And then, a simple eulogy…

She felt the tears begin to well. She leaned forward, crushing her breasts and abdomen to the heat of the rock but pressing her turned cheek to the same with greater care.

“Forever yours,” she breathed, as if those words were carved into her soul rather than stone. “My lost love.”

She would have remained like that, unmoving and with the sun beating down mercilessly upon her unclad back for as long as she could bear it, if not for the sudden sound of a hurried approach through the grove and an accompanying holler of warning.

Astonished—and furious—Shanna rose instantly and slid from the rock where she’d lain. She snatched her customary robe of leopardskin, foxfur and ivory from where it hung on a nearby stake and wrapped it about her lithe body from breast to thigh, fastening it at the waist with a pair of tusked ivory clasps. She then grabbed a spear of iron strapped with bands of hide and tipped with a diamond point of sharpened ankylosaurus hornscale from where it was secreted, close at hand, in a strut of hollowed bamboo.

In this instant of action she was secure in herself once more: not Shanna O’Hara, but Shanna The She-Devil. One woman dwelt in pain, but the other? She existed to cause it.

“If you value the location of your internal organs as nature intended, you’ll have good reason for your intrusion,” Shanna barked, stepping forward to meet the encroaching stranger as he burst from the trees on the nearside of the pool. It was indeed a male; short and slight but with powerful hindquarters, a representative of the black-and-white-striped equ’quagga clan—or zebra-people, as they’d been unimaginatively yet appropriately christened by intruders from the outside world many years before. This quagga baulked as he became aware of the shining hornscale extended towards his throat, and he curved his long neck to one side and hastily rearranged his cloven feet to carry him clear of danger.

“Eisha, Eisha!” the creature brayed. “What I now, breakfast?”

Shanna scowled, hefting the not inconsiderable weight of the spear in one hand with ease and making no move to lower it. “Don’t snort your pagan god’s name at me, Martyllr’kaedr,” she retorted. “What do you expect, rushing out at me like that? You’re like a rabid barcode.”

Martyllr’kaedr the equ’quagga—Marty for short, mercifully—crooked his head. “What is pagan?” he asked. “And what is rabid? And what is—”

“Never mind.” Shanna’s eyes narrowed. She was getting a headache. Either that or an epileptic fit, brought on by Marty’s quavering stripes. “Were you spying on me bathing again, you filthy pervert? Do you remember what kind of death I promised you last time?”

“Much same as this? Sharp objects definitely involved…”

Shanna pushed the spearhead forward another inch. Marty’s mane, a thatched shag of black that spilled down about his neck from a Mohawk crest rooted in the crown of his pointed skull, now bristled further in alarm.

“I not spy! I not spy!” he whined. Then his deep brown eyes blinked, shiftily, and his spacious nostrils flared wider still. “Well, not spy on you.”

Shanna raised an eyebrow. “Meaning what?”

Marty was immediately agitated once more. “Plane come! I on canyon, hunt bird, see plane. I watch. See people. A woman. She in danger!”

Shanna’s scowl deepened. “People always come here in their planes, and they’re always in danger,” she said. “What do they expect? Reporters, explorers, politicians, opportunists… they blindly immerse themselves in a chronometrically displaced ecosystem and then cry foul when a passing tyrannosaurus bites them in half at the waist and spits out the pip.”

“Not in danger from lizardkind,” Marty persisted. “Men with guns! Woman scared.”

Shanna’s expression flickered. She lowered the spear but the iron threading of muscles in her remained corded.

Men with guns. Woman scared. Well, that was another constant, wasn’t it? She knew all about that kind of danger.

She hefted the spear over her shoulder and collected a set of five throwing knives with eight-inch serrated steel blades from another bamboo receptacle. Her hair caught fire in the sun and her scarred, tanned skin rippled like glass. In that moment, on the threshold of violence, she truly was as beautiful as she had ever been.

“Show me,” she said.

“Here’s how it’s going to work, love,” said Drewitt, crouching down to where Madeleine Presley was kneeling and then pressing a cell phone to her bleeding mouth. “You relay the details of your bank account, including all relevant authorization codes, and then you can proceed with your little walkabout as intended. Have we got an understanding, Doc?”

Madeleine wanted to turn her face away but she held herself in check. She’d done that the first time Drewitt had proffered the cell and she’d received the business end of his boot in her face for her trouble. That may not have been as drastic as the rifle barrel she knew was aimed at the back of her skull but these bastards didn’t want her dead – at least, not yet. Not until they’d got their money. After that, there’d be no ‘walkabouts’. One of Drewitt’s cronies would pull the trigger and that would be that; they’d be back on board the plane, heading out to the ship currently waiting their return out in the ice channels, and they wouldn’t spare her corpse a second thought. That was how men like this worked. She understood that now – now that it was too late. They’d never had any intention of allowing her to deliver the message that’d already seen her travel halfway across the world.

It was this realization that made up her mind for her. She raised her head and stared the shark-like Drewitt in the eye, as fearful as she was determined but stoical all the same. English gentry to the core.

“Mr. Drewitt,” she said, softly, “you’re a stinking, swaggering piece of flotsam. And you can kiss my—”

Chuk

Doctor Presley recoiled with a cry, her eyes wide and stunned as a streak of blood lashed her face. Not her own, though; it was Drewitt’s. The man was scrabbling backwards on his rear, his own face a mask of astonishment as he held up what was left of the hand that had been holding the cell phone. He was missing two full fingers and half of another, and the knife that had severed them clean was buried two-thirds of the way to the hilt along the cleft of his middle knuckles, splitting the hand almost to the wrist. It was a big knife.

“There’s got to be some critically souped-up transmission tech in this to get a reception out here,” Shanna The She-Devil murmured as she stepped forward and placed the heel of one bare foot on the bloodstained cell that Drewitt had dropped. “Must have cost a pretty penny. But then, we don’t have much use for the telecommunications industry around these parts…”

She trod down and the phone splintered. She ground her heel and reduced a good portion of it to powder as surely as if she’d pounded it with a sledgehammer. Then she glanced and Drewitt and smiled, her face framed by the burn of her golden-red mane like a fiery halo.

“You know, from all those nasty rumors I heard back before I abandoned civilization, it’s possible I just saved you from brain cancer,” she said. “But it’s okay. You can thank me later.”

Drewitt’s two accomplices moved forward at the same time, both having been momentarily dumbfounded by the unexpected—and violent—arrival of the strange woman clad in animal hides. Shanna had quite literally landed in their midst, vaulting down from an overhanging outcrop of rock directly above the plateau where they’d landed their plane, her sleek movement reminiscent of the predatory big cats whose pelts she wore. One of the two men was an aborigine, tall and wiry, whilst the other was a thicker set white man with sun-cooked flesh and meaty arms adorned with tattoos. The latter was swinging his rifle like a club but the former, evidently with more wits about him, was more inclined to aim his firearm as Smith & Wesson had intended. Shanna wasted no time in deciding which of her adversaries she should tackle first: she simply engaged them both at once.

She was that kind of girl.

Tucking her shoulder and shifting all her weight into her right hip, the She-Devil thrust her spear at a smooth, diagonal slant, piercing the tattooed man’s left leg at the precise junction of femur and patella and then pushing through and impaling the man’s other leg also, at a slightly lower point. The man’s kneecaps burst like fruits in quick succession, blood misting the air, and when the diamond tip of the spear emerged from out of the far side of his second limb it dragged a significant clutch of muscle and ligament with it.

The white man faltered, screaming, but as he attempted to twist free, his skewered knees locked upon the embedded shaft of the spear and he pitched sideways, losing his grip on his rifle. Already facing the aborigine up close, Shanna didn’t even glance aside to watch the first man fall.

The aborigine yanked on the trigger, but his aim was wild. Shanna, so lithe now in contrast to the brute strength she’d employed to cripple her other opponent, ghosted to one side and then the other before cutting upwards with another knife and sinking the blade deep into her enemy’s forearm. She flexed her wrist and slid the blade clean from hand to elbow, slicing open the aborigine’s gun arm as if filleting a trout, then withdrew the knife and whipped it back across the man’s chest, shredding the dark cloth of his shirt and the darker flesh beneath.

The rifle fell, and Shanna kicked it away even as it clattered against the rock underfoot. The aborigine, driven by pain and rage, was still standing despite his horrific injuries, and he grabbed at the She-Devil’s hair – but Shanna had been playing matador to giant reptiles for so long now that a mere man was a child’s doll in comparison; it took all her concentration not to rip the poor fellow asunder at the spine. As it was, when she feinted and twisted to free herself of the aborigine’s grasp, and then executed a savage backhand to the man’s face, he was fortunate that she only splintered both hinges of his jaw and fractured one eye socket rather then slamming his brain out the back of his skull.

The aborigine fell, unconscious before he struck the ground. The white man was still writhing and screaming. Shanna kicked him in the head and he fell silent. She then turned back to Drewitt, who had scrambled to his feet and who was swaying in the sun, his injured hand cradled to his gut.

“Going to carve you like a goose, missy,” Drewitt snarled, pulling Shanna’s own blade free from his wrist-stump and brandishing it in her face. The She-Devil merely stood her ground, her eyes dark.

“Do it,” she said, quietly, a strange inflexion in her voice. The tip of the bloodstained knife was no more then six inches from her eye.

Drewitt hesitated. Then, growling deep in his chest, he lunged. For a split second it seemed that Shanna wasn’t even going to try and dodge; but then, almost more swiftly than the gaze could follow, her forearm swept up and deflected Drewitt’s strike and her hand curled, and suddenly—impossibly—the weapon was back in her grasp and Drewitt was disarmed and staggering, his swarthy mouth gulping like an ugly fish.

“Not good enough,” Shanna breathed at his ear. “No one ever is.”

She sounded sad.

And then Drewitt was flat on his back on the ground once more and Shanna was standing over him, her sleek silhouette framed by the sun.

“I don’t like guns,” she said. “Never have. And I like the cowards who carry them and believe themselves untouchable because of them even less. You bring guns and violence into my world? I’ll take you out of it.”

Shanna stepped forward and lodged a bare foot lengthways beneath Drewitt’s chin. If she straightened her leg and applied a modicum of pressure she would crush the man’s throat inside a heartbeat. Instead she was distracted by the woman with the coiffured blonde hair who was now on her feet, unsteady but stubbornly upper class in adversity.

Madeleine Presley assessed the carnage about her with a nervous eye. “My God,” she muttered, as her gaze returned to rest on the savage woman with the fiery hair. “You’reher, aren’t you? And you’re everything he said you were.”

Shanna’s eyes widened. “He?”

“Your… husband.”

Astonished, Shanna stood clear of the sniveling Drewitt and strode forward to confront the other woman who, at a clear head shorter than her opposite, was forced to look up with a mixture of defiance and apprehension.

Shanna said, “You knew my husband?”

“Knew…?”

Shanna’s eyes flashed with pain. “He died,” she said, coldly. “I’m sorry if that comes as a shock, if he was a friend of yours in his life outside this world.”

Madeleine flinched. “A… friend. Yes.” Her expression was uncomfortable. “I think there’s been some mistake. Kevin… Lord Plunder…”

“Yes?”

“He’s not… dead.”

Shanna reached out a hand, and suddenly there was a flash of steel in the sunlight. Madeleine paled, less at the sight of the serrated blade at her neck than at the genuinely murderous countenance that the other woman now bore.

“My husband died in my arms,” the She-Devil said, slowly but forcefully, as if speaking to a recalcitrant child. “Three hundred and eleven days ago, after a nightmarish confrontation you couldn’t begin to imagine, I carried his lifeless body out to the steppes of Mount Kurj and cast him over the precipice into the white mists, as per his wishes… and in that moment my own heart stopped beating. Do you understand?”

Doctor Presley trembled.

“I’m sorry, but you are mistaken,” she whispered, aware that she was taking her life in her hands. “I know this because Kevin visited me at my home in Regent’s, London not four nights past—and he instructed me to bring a message here, to you. He said, Remember Prague. Neptune’s Ring. Matthew’s Day. I’ll be waiting.

“Does that mean anything to you, Shanna of the Savage Land?”

Madeleine Presley need not have asked that final question. Because it was entirely obvious by the stricken look on the She-Devil’s face—the look of a woman whose world, already broken, had now been shattered anew—that this message meant everything.

And that was how the story began…

NEXT: Be here next month as Shanna The She-Devil determines to discover the truth behind Doctor Presley’s mysterious message—and witness her in a battle to the death with a pack of savage beasts as she sets out to gain an audience with an old friend!